Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2016 - Issue 46 i The Rake

It started, as so many of the best things do, with a Ford Thunderbird. The purple car rose up out of the floor at Wembley Arena and circled the in-the-round stage to a martial drumbeat. Then the door flew open and Prince stepped out, dressed for a harlequinade in a white polka-dot suit with absurdly oversized buttons. Upstage, Cat, the formidably toned rapper and Prince’s latest protégé, and Sheila E, his powerhouse drummer, were marching in lockstep, dressed for a burlesque rodeo in sports bras and Stetsons; Prince joined them for a frenetic routine that seemed to sprint through most of the major Kama Sutra positions in around two minutes. Finally, he approached the microphone, and, pausing only for a trademark lascivious lip-lick, drawled the opening lines of Erotic City:…

Iwan Rheon has an unnerving quality that is rare for men in his profession: he carries himself without the self-consciousness of someone out to impress, which is very impressive. Many people in acting and the media want to come across as fun, as decent and as charismatic as they appear to be on screen — the insecure bearing of someone desperate to be seen. Few actors are in the spotlight as much as those cast in the HBO phenomenon Game of Thrones. Iwan plays the ghastly Ramsay Bolton. In a show with no shortage of characters to hate, his is by far the most disagreeable. And yet he seems to give a certain amount of credit to the people he meets in real life: he knows they probably won’t think…

The 1960s came to be associated with several seminal images — sexual liberation; forests of pubic hair; black music being shamelessly co-opted by long-haired whiteys from Kent; peace signs; and grade-A recreational drugs. It was also a time when the genius of fashion designers, singers and film directors was sparked by the flint of a specific woman. For Hubert De Givenchy it was Audrey Hepburn. For John it was Yoko. For Clapton it was cocaine and for Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni it was Monica Vitti. The muse/artist dynamic is as fragile as it is fecund, a tango where both parties sacrifice a part of themselves for a greater good that neither can quite get a handle on. It is the stuff of quicksilver through the fingers and calls to mind…

At the turn of the 19th century, Switzerland’s most pioneering watchmakers were making history not in the picturesque Jura Mountains towns of Geneva and Neuchâtel, but farther afield — in the uncharted, exotic lands of China. Bovet, Piguet & Meylan, and Vacheron Constantin, among them, were seduced by the land-of-a-billion, both professionally and personally: for example, after a 12-year stint in Canton, Édouard Bovet returned home in 1830 flush with cash, success and a four-year-old, half-Chinese son. Yet few can lay claim to having had the ear of the Chinese emperor himself — quite literally. That honour goes to Jaquet Droz, whose genius, musical automatons and mechanical timepieces so enthralled the Qianlong emperor in the 1770s that the ruler set up his own national office to import and trade in…

In his groundbreaking 1938 book Homo Ludens, the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga posited that the innate human capacity for play is an essential counterweight to the humdrum requisites of everyday life, such as discipline, ambition and common sense. It’s a wonderfully humane contribution to the philosophical canon, and had it never been written (a close thing, given that Huizinga died seven years after its publication, having spent his final three years incarcerated as a Nazi hostage), one of history’s most acute personifications of the term ‘playboy’, Gunter Sachs, may well have led a slightly — O.K., fractionally — more ascetic existence. A scholar of Huizinga’s work (as well as mathematics, economics, several languages, astrology, art, photography, and his specialist discipline, weapons-grade hedonism), Sachs deemed himself the ultimate ‘homo ludens’…

It was trade winds and the equally puissant forces of spiritual braggadocio that first saw Chinese art, crafts and motifs pored over in Europe, thanks to books featuring woodcuts and illustrations brought back from Macau by Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century. By the middle of the following century, expanded trade with East Asia had piqued the west’s taste for artefacts and symbolism from this rich, ancient, alien culture, and its visual cues began to appear all over European art, furniture and architecture. Thanks to a serendipitous harmony with tenets of the Rococo movement, monarchs such as Louis XV soon began to favour it, despite many commentators deeming it inauthentic and gauche (the prominent 18th-century architecture commentator Robert Morris said that it “consisted of mere whims and chimera, without rules…

Whether he is investigating the role of Barbie in contemporary society in his capacity as the Chairman of France’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, or illuminating how beauty is one of the most potent remedies against the melancholia brought on by thoughts of our own mortality, Pierre-Alexis Dumas is a man with an expressive and communicative ability that is unrivalled. His fierce brilliance, which has seen him lead Hermès to its biggest period of growth in decades, with sales in excess of €4bn in 2014, has nothing to do with expansionism or commercial avarice but everything to do with his capacity to be instinctively protective of Hermès’ core values while allowing his potent artistic and intellectual curiosity to roam free. And while our conversation began with Dumas taking us through the…

At the end of last year, the announcement that Thomas Kochs would step down as General Manager of Claridge’s, the Maybourne Hotel Group’s flagship, shocked the luxury world. But shock soon turned to curiosity and anticipation as we waited to hear what he would do next. Britons hoped he would remain in London, and the rest of the world wondered if he might visit their shores, bringing with him his near-ostentatious levels of professionalism and charisma. The former won out, I am thrilled to say, and he is now ensconced as Managing Director at one of the foremost heritage sites of London entertainment and hospitality, Hotel Café Royal. Between 1865 and 2008, Café Royal was a hive of conviviality, hedonism, scandal and social climbing. Now, in its new lease of…

There can be fewer richly comedic seams to mine than the vain pretensions of the irredeemably boorish. Just look at Basil Fawlty. Just look at Del Boy Trotter. Look, if you must, at Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian. The prototype for the pompous popinjay must surely have been Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, the hapless hero of the comédieballet written by Molière and first unveiled in 1670 before the court of Louis XIV. The title itself points up the oxymoronic nature of its protagonist: in Molière’s France, a ‘gentleman’ was by definition nobly born, and thus there could be no such thing as a bourgeois gentleman, or a middle-class aristocrat, or a nouveau-riche noble. Such a figure, however, is what M. Jourdain, the moneyed son of a cloth merchant, strives to be.…

Non-locals who, with touching naivety, enter one of the eastern Home Counties’ less salubrious pubs — the type of hostelry in which leopardskin blouses and come-to-bus-stop eyes are a requisite for employment; that shows live football even when hosting a wake; and whose walls remain tobacco-stained nine years after the smoking ban — will likely notice Rottweilers crouched in every corner, playing four-legged bodyguards to the kind of Stella-bloated suburban nomads for whom a half-masticated betting slip constitutes a bar snack. My breed’s spiritual home is actually not Canvey, Thurrock or Stanford-le-Hope, though, but the picture-book town located between the Black Forest and the Swabian Alps that provides us with the first two syllables of our appellation. It was here that we were given our full name of Rottweiler Metzgerhund…

Some time during the heat of battle in the summer of 1815, an eager artillery officer is said to have rushed to the side of the Duke of Wellington, to tell him that Napoleon was within range and to request permission to fire. The laconic Wellington supposedly turned a baleful eye upon the eager soldier and informed him that, “It is not the business of commanders to be firing upon one another”. It would, one assumes, have been ungentlemanly to attempt to bump off one’s opponent. Far better to win the battle by straightforward means, even if it meant tens of thousands of men losing their lives. If history is to be believed, Wellington seems to have spent much of his life talking in pithy one-liners. So it would have…

As someone who has always been a staunch defender of natural fibres in their purest form, this feels like rather an odd thing to be writing. I’ve always gravitated towards the puritanical belief that it’s much better to be braving the baking heat of mid-summer dressed in a pair of lightweight fresco trousers and wool-linen-silk hopsack jacket than a plastic super-cool hyper-breathe blazer and revolutionary sun-reflective trousers. More fool me. When, last spring, Europe’s glamorous catwalks revealed a sea of technical nylon, polyamide and treated synthetic fabrics for spring/summer ’16, at first I scoffed beneath my two-ply worsted, elbow-patched sport coat. However, such a reaction is distinctly reactionary, and it doesn’t do to be narrow-minded. The amount of research, innovation and intelligent design work that goes into the creation of…

As briefs go, it was an odd set of instructions: ‘Discuss the history of chronographs and why they’re O.K. to wear with the sort of attire championed by The Rake.’ The latter point suggests an apology: chronographs are inherently ‘tool’ or ‘sport’ watches with the specific purpose of timing events. But their aptness for wearing with suits? A chronograph is a watch with a stopwatch function in addition to telling real time. Such devices have been around for two centuries, first attributed to Nicolas Rieussec in 1821, who was then revealed to have been trumped by Louis Moinet by five years (hence the celebratory nature of chronographs made in 2016). For Rieussec, the inspiration was to record the times of horse races for the nobility, which helps explain their early…

SIMON EMMETT London-born Simon Emmett is renowned for his celebrity portraits, beauty imagery and editorials. Recently he has also focused on his personal and film projects. Currently in production is a documentary about the British band The Darkness, in collaboration with Spring69, following the ups and downs of the rockers’ return to the charts. His previous documentary, Underhill, is set around the move of Barnet F.C. from their spiritual home stadium, and has brought a tear to the eyes of diehard fans and non-supporters alike. Simon makes a return to The Rake by photographing not only this issue’s cover star, Daniel Brühl, but also the beautiful game’s most rakish, Eric Cantona (page 106). MING LIU Ming Liu regularly contributes to the Financial Times, How To Spend It magazine and The…

The actor Oliver Reed was a gentleman bruiser, a Rabelaisian belly under a field-marshal accent. Ted Hughes could have invented him: the ferocious clowncrow, or the ruptured peacock with the bomblit eyes, rainbowed, aboriginal, acrid, brassy, genital, ejected, pre-devastated. Of the vintage hellraisers he was the lead Englishman, and, beside the Celtic quartet of Burton, Harris, Hopkins and O’Toole, the least fulfilled. He became a victim of his own humour, soulful, free of false quantities, a Falstaffian surface cooled by inner ironies. At the very least, he was the best James Bond we never had. Born in Wimbledon in 1938, Reed went to 13 different schools where his dyslexia was dismissed as poor concentration, so he focused on his physical development (one sports day he went home with 11 cups,…

Maestro Lorenzo Cifonelli has tailoring coursing through his veins. Not only was he born into, and bred by, a tailoring dynasty, with both Italian and French heritage, but he has grown the Cifonelli brand into one of the most coveted houses in the world. So bursting at the seams was the demand for the Cifonelli label to appear in the wardrobes of the well-heeled, he launched a ready-towear collection and store on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. It is no surprise that Lorenzo himself possesses the swag and rakishness of a man befitting his role.…

Orlebar Brown was created by the menswear designer Adam Brown to transpose the codes and details of fine British tailoring and values of timeless style onto charmingly evocative resort- and swimwear. In so doing, the nine-year-old brand has carved out a unique niche for itself as the most innovative resortwear creators in the contemporary sartorial scene. Says Brown: “One thing we’ve realised is that the comfort and adaptability of our uniquely tailored resortwear, and romantic spirit of travel and play encoded in these garments, have found its way into even streetwear and workwear. How men were dressing for the weekend has come to inform how they dress during the week.” This has motivated Brown to launch a new collection of hybrid-tailored sportswear with Savile Row legend Gieves & Hawkes that…

There is no time or place in history that is as lacking in colour and vibrancy as postwar Berlin. East Germany as a whole was worse: the incongruously named German Democratic Republic, or G.D.R., was part of the Eastern bloc, and therefore a victim of communist regimentation, corruption, exploitation and suppression. It was a place where words such as creativity, art and freedom were replaced by darker vocabulary such as Stasi and schießbefehl. On the eve of the collapse of the Berlin wall, a cultural reinvigoration of central Europe began. The emergence of music, art, theatre and film helped consummate the expression the German people had been crying out for. The power of this regarnishing of the German artistic landscape today is pertinent in the evaluation of Germany’s international reputation.…

“When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.” Eric Cantona Settling his six-foot-two-inch frame into a sofa, in a suite on the first floor of Le Bristol hotel in Paris — claustrophobia prevents him taking lifts — Éric Daniel Pierre Cantona wants to talk about the French philosopher Edgar Morin. “He writes a lot about metamorphosis, and that’s my vision of life,” Cantona says. “It applies to everything. You’re in love with somebody, you’re not in love with somebody, you use this experience to keep growing… This vision and philosophy takes in life in a very positive way and helps me a lot with everything. I really believe in it.” Cantona’s philosophical leanings became common knowledge in 1995, when he…

Last year was a special year for Hublot. The brand, which under the flawless stewardship of Chairman Jean-Claude Biver and C.E.O. Ricardo Guadalupe has become one of the most powerful watch brands in the business, marked the 10-year anniversary of the Big Bang. To the uninitiated, watches (in lieu of cigarette advertising) have now created campaigns that define and contextualise the notion of what it is to own something miraculous. No one has managed to absorb the impact of the recession and turn it into an opportunity like Hublot did. The secret ingredients to their success have been a mix of what Biver refers to as “a fusion of tradition and future”. People may have been a bit confused as to what on Earth this meant, but questions were answered…

The letter V holds a strange effect on the human psyche. For most people it represents much more than the 22nd letter of the alphabet. The ancient Romans and Greeks seconded it for the letter ‘u’; legend says that longbowmen of Henry V’s army taunted the French by declaring their bowfingers were still in working order; and in the second world war it became the symbol of defiance against fascism and Nazism. Churchill, the man who is responsible for that, can barely be found on a mug or tourist trinket without sporting his ‘V for Victory’ sign. It was also a symbol of peace during the postwar period of nuclear testing and Vietnam. All eighties children will remember the ‘Flying V’ manoeuvre in The Mighty Ducks, and millennials saw their…

The boy stood with his back to the car, arms steadfastly crossed, a child’s unspoken universal stance for communicating how he felt about the impending road trip. He had just spent the most glorious summer holiday in his family’s beautiful home in the Côte-d’Or, soaking up the perfect weather, playing with his friends in the rambling grounds of the estate. His father, an army officer, ordered him in no uncertain terms to get in the car, for the family was due back in Baden-Baden, where he was posted. Baden-Baden may be one of Europe’s most restful spa resort towns, famed for its rejuvenating thermal baths and tranquil surrounds. But as far as a playful eight-year-old was concerned, it was the most boring place on Earth. The retiree demographic to which…

The world just doesn’t seem to agree. From the European Union to the U.S. presidential elections to nuclear deterrents and the treatment of refugees, you are regarded either as a bleeding-heart lefty who doesn’t live in the real world, or a right-wing, immigrant-hating fascist hellbent on inequality and post-imperialist belligerence. Though it may be nicer to agree, diversity and debate is far healthier for intellectual development and better governance. So why oh why is there a new generation of academics who want to park free speech and debate and create offence-free, safe-space utopias on college campuses? When something as innocent as a ‘God bless you’ after someone sneezes is seen by students at Occidental College in Los Angeles as microaggression; when there are threats of violence against men for arguing…