Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2017 - Issue 52 i The Rake

Developing a penchant for tattoos in middle age has decided advantages over precariously dabbling with this artistic medium in your early twenties. For one thing, it makes you less likely to get the left side of a Chinese menu tattooed on your tuckus under the misconception that it is an ancient Tibetan mantra for rebirth and spiritual enlightenment. You also learn, through the misfortune of others, that permanently engraving some fair maiden’s name on your epidermis will invariably lead to creative problem solving, such as altering ‘Winona Forever’ to ‘Wino Forever’, as was the case with Johnny Depp. As such, I tried to apply the same discernment I’ve utilised in seeking out my tailor to the task of finding an inspirational artist. First, I narrowed my focus to black-and-grey tattooing,…

In the spring of 1962, in a small bistro in Normandy, a momentous meeting took place: Jean Gabin sat down for a coffee with Jean-Paul Belmondo. You didn’t have to be a French cineaste — or even have a passing acquaintance with Gallic poetic realism or the nouvelle vague — to appreciate the baton-passing significance of this encounter. Gabin had been the most popular French matinee idol of the pre-war period and had honed his doomed romantic persona in classics such as 1937’s Pépé le Moko, in which he played a Parisian gangster on the lam in Algiers. Belmondo was two years on from his breakout role in Jean- Luc Godard’s Breathless, in which his performance as the charismatic cop-killer Michel Poiccard — hailed by L’Express as “a bit of…

There are big breaks in life, and then there are thunderbolt-from-the-blue, life-redefining, shower with blossom from Heaven’s most fruitful Tree of Opportunity kind of breaks. And two of those have just come the way, quite deservedly, of Tom Glynn-Carney, a north London-dwelling actor born and raised in Salford, to whose thoughtful and intense approach to the craft of acting the world is waking up. On the day The Rake catches up with him, Glynn-Carney is about to take the stage for the third evening in succession, thanks to a role in The Ferryman, an “unmissable new drama”, as The Daily Telegraph’s review put it, by Jez Butterworth, directed by Sam Mendes, and also starring Paddy Considine. Set in County Armagh during the height of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, the play became…

George Bamford is not exactly old; far from it. His business savvy, however, belies a childlike enthusiasm for the world’s opportunities and offerings. I don’t meant this in a bad way — quite the opposite, in fact. He is a thinker, he has imagination, he finds alternative routes that no one else thinks of and all of which are a product of a welcome sense of fun, adventure and joie de vivre that you see in people like Lorenzo Cifonelli, who is changing the way tailoring is made available to the wider market, and would have seen in Ettore Bugatti, when cars as a mode of transport just wasn’t enough. Bamford’s method isn’t based on proving anyone wrong or debunking the status quo, it’s about squeezing every ounce of joy…

The gift of a great man is that he is able to read the prevailing currents as if accessing a language the rest of us have only a passable comprehension of but in which he is totally and unequivocally articulate. Sensing the seismic shift, tapped into the heart of the zeitgeist, he is able to move decisively to align the fortunes of his nation and his company with the unstoppable momentum of the future. And, in so doing, he becomes inextricably linked with that future for ever Ermenegildo Zegna was one of these men. Placed behind a pane of glass in the Zegna museum, downstairs from its archives and adjacent to the factory and historic home of Ermenegildo Zegna in Trivero, northern Italy, is a seemingly innocuous restaurant menu. But…

Marol is the greatest Italian shirtmaker you’ve never heard of. O.K., maybe you have heard of them — you’re a Rake reader, so chances are you’re pretty clued up on the sartorially obscure, smarter than the average #menswear bear. Most casual observers, however, will not be au fait with this Bologna-based shirtmaking house, established in 1959 by Rosanna Saguatti and her husband, Luciano, and helmed by the couple’s daughter, Manuela Vignudelli, since the founders’ passing several years ago. Like her parents before her, Ms. Vignudelli has run Marol (its name an amalgamation of MA-nuela, RO-sanna and L-uciano) as a high-quality, small-scale atelier, employing a primarily female team of 30 crafting top-tier shirting sold wholesale to choice retailers internationally. The company is set to take the leap to fully fledged luxury…

Six kilos of caviar, 20 kilos of rice, and a tuxedo: that’s what Edward Sahakian was carrying when he arrived in London from Iran with his family in 1978. Four decades later, Sahakian is a cultural icon of London’s luxury scene. The world is sometimes an unjust place. The triumphs that people experience day by day so often go unrecognised, whereas the barrel-scraping exercise of reality television can make you a multi-millionaire with a vast multimedia platform. This year has, however, shown that the world can occasionally provide a sense of justice, and that righteousness can prevail. It happened in, of all places, Cuba, at the Festival del Habanos, when the coveted Premio Habanos Hombre del Año, or Havana Man of the Year award, was won by Sahakian, of Davidoff…

& OTHER STORIES – www.stories.com 7 FOR ALL MANKIND – www.7forallmankind.com 3.1 PHILIP LIM – www.31philliplim.com A.CARACENI – www.a-caraceni.it A.P.C – www.apc.fr A. SAUVAGE – www.asauvage.com ABBEYHORN – www.abbeyhorn.co.uk ACNE STUDIOS – www.acnestudios.com ADIDAS – www.adidas.co.uk AL BAZAR – www.albazarmilano.it ALBERT THURSTON – www.albertthurston.com AGENT PROVOCATEUR – www.agentprovocateur.com ALEXANDER MCQUEEN – www.alexandermcqueen.com AMI – www.amiparis.fr ANCIENT GREEK SANDALS – www.ancient-greek-sandals.com ANDERSON & SHEPPARD – www.anderson-sheppard.co.uk ANDREA POMPILIO – www.andreapompilio.it AQUASCUTUM – www.aquascutum.com AQUAZZURA – www.aquazzura.com ASPREY – www.asprey.com ASSOULINE – www.assouline.com AUDEMARS PIGUET – www.audemarspiguet.com BALLY – www.bally.com BASELWORLD – www.baselworld.com BATES – www.bates-hats.com BEGG & CO. – www.beggandcompany.com BELL & ROSS – www.bellross.com BELSTAFF – www.belstaff.co.uk BENSON AND CLEGG – www.bensonandclegg.com BERLUTI – www.berluti.com BERRY BROS. & RUDD – www.bbr.com BLANCPAIN – www.blancpain.com BLK DNM – www.blkdnm.com BOGLIOLI –…

All things considered, we are not enjoying the sort of settled times that 100 years of suffrage, growing liberty and freedom, medical advancements, and relaxed attitudes to increasingly risqué sexual activity might bring. Fortunately, humour, especially when things are murky, isn’t infra dig. Remember, for example, how Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother used to sign off her letters during the second world war. “Tinkety tonk, old fruit, and down with the Nazis,” she’d say. It is a wholesome sentiment indeed, and one that was typical of the levity of Blitzed Britain, a flippant, polite alternative to ‘fuck you’. We live in different times. There are those who expend a lot of energy trying to convince themselves and those around them that the west is inherently evil. But in truth, we…

If there is another breed of dog my size — roughly that of a Pembroke Welsh Corgi — with as menacing a moniker as the ‘Vikingarnas Hund’, I’ve yet to meet it. It is a name surely meant to be emblazoned, in some imposing Gothic font, across sweat-soaked, faded black T-shirts in the world’s most violent mosh pits by wiry hoons pogoing and jostling to the kind of thrash metal that resembles a hurricane being amplified through a distortion pedal. And, as recently as 1,000 years ago, in our native land of Västergötland — a province in the south-west of Sweden, these days a northern nirvana patch-worked by regal hunting grounds and dotted with swanky manor houses and silvery lakes frequented by migrating cranes — my breed’s official name was…

Dame Diana Rigg is the doyenne of amused gravitas, a tough, imperiously stylish, post-imperial stateswoman of stage and screen. Like Julie Christie, the subject of The Rake’s previous Cherchez La Femme column, she had a traditional English education while her parents were based in India. Born in Doncaster in 1938, Rigg overcame the disorientation of her Yorkshire boarding school to get into RADA and then the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she played Cordelia to Paul Scofield’s Lear. Before too long she was spotted for the role of Emma Peel in The Avengers, the English sixties television series that meshed action, fashion and surrealism — Bond as if directed by Magritte. Rigg’s brilliance in the show, especially her deftness for comedy, became a mixed blessing. For a while, the sex kitten…

Even though it is not on street level, and not, therefore, easily accessible to passers-by, Mad Lords has become in less than five years one of the most coveted places in Paris to go and chill, fulfilling exactly the desire of Serge Muller, its founder. But what is it precisely? Mad Lords is not just a boutique or a concept store, it is a universe built around tribal luxury that shares a belief that all humans are members of tribes, whether spiritual, religious or aesthetic. Aside from a tattoo or an aroma, a person’s background can be defined by the pieces of jewellery he or she is wearing. For centuries, jewellery has become the strongest aesthetic claim of all. In the end, the Mad Lords concept should be understood in…

Sunglasses have always been, and will always be, achingly cool — a phrase I tend to avoid in written form but that I will employ with joyful abandon when writing on this subject. It’s fair to assume that the first time an Inuit tribesman fashioned a slitted mask from walrus ivory to protect against snow blindness two millennia ago, his companions looked aghast at each other and said, “Is Adlartok not one groovy motherfucker?” And everyone since — from Emperor Nero watching gladiator fights through gemstones, to 12th-century Chinese judges wearing quartz over their eyes to give off expressionless dispassion, to 1930s movie stars using them to combat the bright lights of movie sets and camera flashes — has had their hip factor ramped up several notches when sporting tinted…

I still keep a suitcase in Berlin,” the magnificent Ms. Marlene Dietrich once said. And once one has visited this crazy cool city, one cannot contend with that choice. Berlin buzzes on a one-of-a-kind kinetic frequency. The history, the significance, the culture, the sociopolitical cauldron, the diversity… it all adds up to a creative, exhilarating and mesmerising mise-en-scène. And, of course, the people. Oh, the people. Please allow me to backtrack. Our first night in Berlin was an après-Baselworld one. On the off chance you’ve yet to encounter the battle-scarred from this most gruelling of tournaments, let’s just say they will be tapering down from an adrenaline-fuelled high — also known as crashing — for at least 48 hours thereafter. Arriving in Berlin, I received the most intriguing of text…

Admittedly, the red braces and yellow, long-sleeve T-shirt combo wouldn’t cut it at Pitti Uomo. The lemon curd-coloured tux he and the other Griffins wear in the opening song sequence might have some of the more credulous Pitti peacocks jealously assuming he was on to a trend they’d not heard about, but won’t be drawing admiring gazes from Karl Lagerfeld (who famously mused he could “recognise a Cifonelli shoulder from a distance of 100 metres”) any time soon. And, while our Rake-in-Progress series features fresherfaced au courant males, putting our editorial spotlight on a baby — and a baby in a permanent state of arrested development — is another matter all together, and needs some justification. After all, many would suggest that Brian the anthropomorphic hound would be the Family…

As well as The Rake, Nick — a historian and author and surely London’s most prominent luxury commentator — writes for periodicals including How To Spend It, Financial Times, The Independent, Vanity Fair and The Daily Telegraph. Among his many published tomes to date are the Count d’Orsay biography Last of the Dandies (2005), Dunhill by Design (2006), TAG Heuer (2009), Cigar Style (2008), Gentlemen and Blackguards: Gambling Mania and the Plot to Steal the Derby of 1844 (2010), and Swans, Legends of the Jet Society (2013). Last year, Bernard Buffet: The Invention of the Modern Mega-Artist was released to great critical acclaim. In this issue, Nick examines the life of the unfathomably rakish Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe, the founder of the Marbella Club (page 40). Raised in the Parisian…

I was very much in with high society, what one would call the ‘jet set’, although I have never owned a jet — but I did have three aeroplanes for cargo. I also had an interest in aviation and had three pilot’s licences: Spanish, Austrian and Mexican.” The other day I came across a sheaf of transcripts of interviews I conducted with the fabled founder of the Marbella Club, Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe, in late 2001. The lines above were picked from these yellowing typed sheets almost at random. I could have chosen the anecdote about a 16-hour journey on a special train to Portsmouth with Churchill during the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, at which — naturally — he enjoyed special treatment as a favoured guest because the head…

There are few men who grace the digital devices we use for a style fix more inspirational than Alessandro Squarzi. Transcending the roles of menswear designer, entrepreneur, talent scout, style icon and collector of vintage cars, motorcycles and watches, the salt-and-pepper-haired Italian has developed a cult following and has acquired an understanding of the varying modes of dress. Whether he’s sporting bespoke Edward Green and a bespoke Fortela double-breasted jacket and waistcoat made from Vitale Barberis Canonico cloth (pictured), or a Vietnam War utility shirt with white denim jeans and checkered slip-on Vans sneakers, Squarzi consistently does justice to his adaptable style, and pairs it with a friendly smile. Unsurprisingly, this 21st-century fashionindustry polymath is constantly on the move. We shot him when he was staying at the contemporary but…

The GJ Cleverley Riviera The problem with most luxury casual shoes is that — much like a magnum of Clos du Mesnil, a tin of Almas, a pre-revolutionary Cuban, or the company of a Monaco-based courtesan — the pleasure is fleeting. You may have outlaid a stupendous sum, but before you know it the bottle’s run dry, the caviar’s consumed, the cigar’s turned to ash, and the fragrant Anastasia has disappeared into the night. Likewise, expensive casual footwear will often wear out within months of purchase. George Cleverley’s supple yet remarkably robust, entirely British-made ‘Riviera’ slip-on, meanwhile, is anything but a short-lived luxury. “We wanted it to be the grown-up’s casual shoe, the connoisseur’s casual shoe,” says Cleverley’s Chief Executive, George Glasgow, Jr. It was vital, according to Glasgow, that…

There is a particular kind of prestige one feels when entering Turnbull & Asser’s flagship store on Jermyn Street in London. The kind that can only be achieved by possessing a trading history that stretches back more than a century and a heritage that most luxury clothing brands dream of acquiring. Turnbull & Asser is the shirtmaker, the benchmark against which all others, in Britain and beyond, have been measured for most of the 20th century until today. It’s easy to become charmed by the eccentricity of the brand upon opening the doors of the store. The plush red carpets, mahogany-wood-panelled walls, and burnished Chesterfield sofas are quintessentially British, and herein lies half the appeal. Visiting this place is like stepping into Edwardian London. Some of the beautiful fixtures can…

History can be a harsh judge. This is particularly so when it is considering — or rather, ignoring — the effects of privilege, and rarely more than when examining the lives of famous women. The phrase ‘behind every great man is a great woman’ exists only because, for centuries, that great woman was forced to the back. Some, however, were bold enough to push their way forward. Most would deny this, conscious of the judgment of the present, let alone history. But if their avenue to wealth and status was restricted to little more than a ‘good marriage’, who is to say that a woman’s attraction to wealth and influence is any more shallow than a man’s to beauty or sexual allure? It would be easy, for example, to dismiss…