Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2016 - Issue 44 i The Rake

Paulus Bolten for The Rake patinaed sneakers To take a white sneaker and paint, ink and polish it into an exquisite expression of the patina-artist’s work is quite a feat. Yet this is what the Parisian patina artist Paulus Bolten specialises in, creating iridescent hand-painted sneakers that represent a more futuristic vision of men’s footwear than anything F.T. Marinetti could have imagined. What’s more, Paulus has created four patinas exclusively for The Rake’s online atelier: gorgeous Yves Klein Blue, Spearmint Green, Cognac and Camouflage, each of which elevates the humble sneaker into rakish territory. Put simply, these sneakers are the ultimate in artisanal, contemporary footwear, perfect for modern, fast-paced living. AC Edward Sexton 9k gold collar pin If there’s one thing The Rake deplores, it’s a shirt with no perspective;…

Blancpain Calibre 5939A Blancpain has been busy of late. It recently joined March of the Penguins director Luc Jacquet on a trip to Antarctica, to collect awareness-raising images of climate change damage, and furthered its eco credentials thereafter by debuting its Ocean Commitment Exhibition at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. And the Swiss watchmaker still finds the time and effort for its motorsport programmes, including the Blancpain Endurance Series and Blancpain Sprint Series. But impressive as these initiatives are, The Rake continually struggles to take its eyes off the company’s seemingly inexhaustible capacity to develop exciting new in-house movements. The most dazzling among its recent endeavours is the new perpetual calendar movement endowed with an eight-day power reserve. Comprised of 379 parts, the 7.25mm-thick, 32mm-diameter self-winding Calibre 5939A keeps tabs…

ANDERS OVERGAARD Danish-born photographer Anders Overgaard comes from Helsingør, the home of Hamlet. Anders’s interest in photography was piqued at the age of 10, when he began by snapping pictures of what he knew — his skateboarder and windsurfing friends. His love of the outdoors and the water continues to fuel the energetic quality of his current work. In 1990 he moved to New York to work with the world-renowned photographer Bruce Weber, and then spent the next five years travelling with him. Ultimately, Anders put down roots in New York, where he has worked as a photographer for the past 15 years. He currently divides his time between New York, London and Copenhagen, with his wife and two sons. In this issue, Anders photographed Chiwetel Ejiofor for our cover…

Paul Simonon’s place in cultural history was assured by a single out-of-focus photograph taken in New York on either September 20 or 21 (opinions vary) of 1979. The Clash, three years old and about to release their third album, were playing at the Palladium, a bigger venue than they were used to. They were too far from the audience, the sound was poor, and for the final song Simonon decided to vent his frustration on his bass guitar. “It was a tool, that’s how I saw it, and I got a bit moody, as was my nature in those days,” he recalled 25 years later of smashing it, axe-like, into the stage. The resulting picture was the cover of that third album, London Calling, one of three shots grabbed by…

Edward Holcroft is, to his credit, one of the few young British actors who managed to avoid appearing in 2014’s The Riot Club, a film guilty of stereotyping a group of posh adolescents supposedly hell-bent on ruining the reputation of any well-spoken Englishman. While his looks are undoubtedly knockout, and he backs them up with a soothing baritone timbre, Holcroft laughs and smiles more than he doesn’t, and seems to enjoy keeping people around him at ease. His career is only just beginning, but he can boast of roles in the rakish Kingsman: The Secret Service, the widely acclaimed Wolf Hall, and the hyper-noir B.B.C. drama London Spy. He has also just finished a stage version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Donmar Warehouse in London, where he starred alongside…

Quentin Tarantino was robbed in 1995, when, despite having unleashed the true scope of his unique mélange of high-low culture and fractured timelines in what has become popular culture’s most quotable and re-watched film — Pulp Fiction — the director and his movie were overshadowed at the Academy Awards by, of all things, Forrest Gump. But as a test of time, ask yourself the following: since it came out, how many times have you watched Forrest Gump and how many times have you watched Pulp Fiction? Personally, each and every time I’m channel-surfing and inadvertently land on Pulp Fiction, I am compelled by a force greater than me to watch the rest of it in its entirety. I cannot turn it off. Samuel L. Jackson delights that members of each…

As wedding photographs go, it’s beyond premier league. It’s February 1968, and the French model and Yves Saint Laurent muse Betty Saint is posing with her new husband, the French interior decorator extraordinaire François Catroux. They’re leaning against a railing in Cap Ferret while boats bob in a marina behind them; the Côte d’Azur is going through one of its periodic hippest-place-on-the-planet moments, thanks to the patronage of Brigitte Bardot and various luminaries of the nouvelle vague. The bride interrogates the camera with her smoky eyes, her angular face framed by a mane of blonde hair; she’s skipped the white dress in favour of a black-and-white-striped fur coat by Pierre Cardin, teamed with black tights and patent leather boots. The groom’s tousled fringe gives him a Serge Gainsbourg-in-the-Small Faces kind…

Growing up in the eighties, in a suburban carbuncle on the rump of London — a place where the women had come-to-bus-stop eyes and men without Rottweilers got their heads nailed to fruit machines — jewellery on males was anything but de rigueur. In fact, the only things Brentwood men got away with wearing were wedding bands, ear studs (left lobe, lest he wanted to draw the gnarly attentions of barfly homophobes), tie bars, and those vile, chunky, football-crest signet rings, which, placed on four fingers of the same hand, would double as a knuckleduster on match days. We’re talking about an era when ‘Medallion Man’ — a stereotype who displayed chunky trinkets nestling within his exposed pectoral thatch — expressed society’s disdain for mid-life existential squalor (unless we’re talking…

A couple of years ago, a new character made his debut on Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy, a surreal British sketch show from the former star of The Mighty Boosh. ‘Joey Ramone’, a stop-motion plasticine version of the punk icon with freakishly long legs, blue hair and no arms, stars in a series of skits parodying the cosily patrician children’s television shows of the 1960s and seventies: his legs are sliced off and redeployed as golf clubs, and he mistakenly dons his mother’s frilly swimming costume at the beach, yet he maintains a perverse, plasticised dignity throughout. “It wasn’t that great a leap of faith to make,” Fielding has said of the sketches. “To me, Joey Ramone was always a cartoon character.” If so, he occupied the anarchic Looney Tunes end…

Imagine if every major sport were to benefit from husbandry. Premier League strikers, instead of feigning cardiac seizure every time a boot stud comes within an inch of their toothpick-brittle metatarsals, would majestically stride through two-footed tackles and romp towards the goal with fearless majesty. Basketball players, their shins elongated by genetic interference, would force the N.B.A. to raise the net by a foot or two. Injury-prone geniuses such as Rafael Nadal would be lighting up the courts in every grand slam rather than passing agonising months recuperating from elaborate stem-cell treatment. But there is one sport — if we take countryside pursuits to befit the word, as indeed we should — in which the creation of genetically bespoke, designed-for-purpose lifeforms raises the bar considerably: the controversial sport of hunting.…

She rose like a curious wind off the Hudson, more biting than a zephyr yet still delicious on the hot skin of a Manhattan summer. Debbie Harry — Blondie was the band — reigned over the mid seventies and early eighties like a sylph with apotty mouth and a penchant for clothing skimpier than a Kardashian poetry volume. She was fomented in the same roiling punk scene that gave birth to the Ramones, Patti Smith, the Heartbreakers and The Fleshtones at the notorious CBGB club. But while her male contemporaries sneered, spat and leered at what they saw as the anodyne, sanitised and cheesy world of commercial music — remember, this was the age of disco — Harry followed a different path. In short, she took more piss than a…

Of all the subcultures that have permeated the core of British youth, from New Romanticism to punk, there are a few that stand out symbolically and sartorially. From the teddy boys of the 1950s to the mods of the sixties and skinheads of the seventies, these tribes are intrinsically linked, proving to be some of the most fastidious and aspirational social movements of the 20th century. Members of these distinct clans, almost exclusively young working-class kids, attempted to differentiate themselves from the rest of society in a still recovering postwar Britain through the music they listened to, the attitude they adopted, and the clothes they worshipped. These movements’ attention to detail and dedication to clothing is something The Rake can relate to, and this is reason enough to delve deeper…

For those of a superstitious nature, the year 2012 must have been a period of constant foreboding and dread. An assortment of cataclysmic events were predicted, both by those wrongly interpreting the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar as well as pseudo-scientists suggesting Earth’s demise via astronomical collisions, causing many to believe the planet would be forever changed. Still, despite a series of unfortunate natural disasters that occurred throughout the year, our fair world survived threats of mass destruction. An equally apocalyptic event was promised in the world of hip-hop 10 years earlier, yet similarly, it has not come to pass. It has flexed its muscles on a few occasions, causing rumours to ripple through the industry during the decade, yet despite the chatter and the predictions, Dr. Dre’s much-hyped solo album,…

Churchill, Picasso and an embarrassment of Bonds and presidents, not to mention Charlies Windsor and Chaplain, have all frequented its Jermyn Street home in pursuitof appropriate attire to accompany suits stitched half a mile to thenorth on Savile Row. Now, 130 years after its founding, Turnbull & Asser has a head designer — the first in its history — stewarding the company into ever more flamboyant pastures. Not an advocate of the word ‘casual’ (“It implies a casual attitude to clothing, for me,” he says, “whereas I know our customers take what they wear at the weekend just as seriously as during the week”), Dean Gomilsek-Cole describes the overall effect of his work as ‘informalist’. And more than ever before, T&A’s shelves are teeming with foils to formalwear, which, when…

In July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in defiance of severe storm warnings, cast off into the Gulf of Spezia in his boat, the Don Juan, which had been dangerously over-rigged in order to out-pace Lord Byron’s vessel, the Bolivar. Ten days later Shelley’s body, unrecognisable but for his clothes and the Keats volume in his pocket, was found. Given Shelley’s unfathomable refusal of another boat’s aid, and the apparent fixation with drowning that peppers his work (in one early poem he describes a young woman who “shrinks from the yawning watery grave”), it seems the Prometheus Unbound author’s death — while doing something he loved, at the behest of hostile seas — was, at least in part, voluntary. Now, this might have serious academics chewing on their elbow patches, but…