Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2017 - Issue 54 i The Rake

When I’m asked why it is that the Swiss are so damnably good at making watches but so hopeless at communicating about them, I explain that it has to do with the fundamental difference between the Catholic and Protestant religions. O.K., close your eyes and imagine a Catholic church — take St. Peter’s or Notre-Dame or even Basilica di San Marco in Venice. Walk inside, what do you see? Some of the most magnificent art ever created: Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Titian. Listen to the music and hear some of the greatest compositions ever rendered by man. The incense, the choir, the pageantry and ceremony — it is breathtaking in its adulation of the incredible relationship between man and God. Now go inside a Protestant church, like St. Pierre’s in…

November 30, 1895 was a hot day in Cuba. Arroyo Blanco, a small village in south central Cuba, was the scene of fighting between Spanish troops and rebel Cuban forces. It was Winston Churchill’s 21st birthday, and a birthday present was to come in the form of gunfire. “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result,” he would later say. How Churchill got to Cuba is an interesting story. Recently commissioned in the army, Winston was bored. In 1895 there was very little action in which a young officer could shine. Churchill, above all, wanted a reputation for bravery. Looking around the map, it seemed that only in Cuba was there any fighting taking place. The young cavalry officer used his influence to get himself…

The idea of the family business is an evocative notion, and one that holds plenty of kudos in the luxury goods industry. Hefty price tags imply that handiwork and great care has gone into a product’s creation, yet this is not necessarily the case with large corporations who may boast prestigious names yet proffer massproduced wares that rarely live up to customers’ expectations. Familyrun businesses tend to be the antithesis of this. In the best ones, the focus is often less on the bottom line and more on quality and integrity. And then there’s the romance of the family business, how the company is passed through the generations, each time evolving subtly when a more youthful member steps in. Ettinger is one such brand, and, well into its eighth decade,…

Jane Seymour has always presented the thinking man with a rosy-cheeked dilemma. You see, there is something eternally virginal, ethereally pure, perpetually prim about the actress. So what the hell is she doing in your filthy little spank-bank? Relax, you’re not alone in thinking you had a swelling Dr. Quinn could attend to. Behind the hauteur, there’s always been hotness. Born Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg — a name more akin to minor royalty than Bond-girl-to-be — in 1951, the 5’4” actress originally had her heart set on becoming a dancer. That was until 1973, when her different coloured eyes caught those of the producers of the upcoming 007 adventure Live and Let Die. She was cast as Solitaire, a psychic tarot reader with a talent for both divining the future…

Since ancient times, silk has been inextricably linked with society’s upper echelons. In Europe, the home of silk has been in and around Lyon, in France, primarily because of Louis XI’s decision in 1563 to take advantage of the area’s trade routes with the Rhône, the Mediterranean and, by road, to Italy. And if silk were an empire, there would be one dynasty with true dominion over it: Hermès. While Lyon has been home to Hermès’ silk operations since 1937, the house’s sericultural partner is in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná. An eco-friendly farming co-operative, it produces silk of the highest quality. The biological development of silk is remarkable, too. A female butterfly of the Bombyx mori species produces roughly 300 to 500 eggs, and their microscopic offspring eat…

The problem with translating The Great Gatsby from print to screen is that they always get the casting wrong. You don’t select a genetically overindulged golden god-Adonis like Robert Redford to play Gatsby. He should have played Tom Buchanan — rich, privileged and, like DJ Khaled, always on the side that wins. But if you read Fitzgerald’s description, Gatsby should be dark, possibly even Semitic, at once haunted, at once hopeful, at once corrupt, at once idealistic — a devotee of the great orgiastic light eternally burning across the shore. So when, in 1966, Mike Nichols was casting The Graduate, from a script written by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham from the 1963 novel by Charles Webb, his stroke of genius was to eschew Robert Redford (who was the original…

What’s the fuss about carbohydrates? When low carbohydrate diets became popular, they seemed to be a breath of fresh air after the low-fat diet with hidden sugars that preceded them. Suddenly we were told to load up on meat and throw away the bun. Robert Atkins, M.D., who was responsible for the Atkins diet in 1972, published one of the first extreme low-carb diets, cutting out grains, starchy vegetables and fruit. The ketogenic diet, another extreme low-carb diet, is based on less than 20 grams of carbohydrates a day, cheating our bodies into running entirely on fat rather than glucose, which makes it easier to access and burn fat stores. With many low-carb diets, drastic and quick weight loss results were seen, alongside added health benefits of lower blood pressure…

The role of dogs in warfare — like that of mathematics, tobacco and women — is blithely overlooked. Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Sarmatians, Slavs and Britons have all enlisted four-legged talent to their military ranks. Canines from the Molossia region of Epirus were trained for battle by the Romans and later used by Attila the Hun (we’re a dab hand at dragging men off horses and chariots); Frederick the Great — who is credited with coining the phrase ‘man’s best friend’ — used dogs as messengers during the Seven Years War with Russia, and eventually was interred with his favourite pooches; and Napoleon used dogs as sentries at the gates of Alexandria. While ‘dogs of war’ remains a phrase with literal resonance — United States Navy SEALs used a Belgian Malinois…

Loro Piana Vicuña / Storm System trench coat “In any industry,” Pier Luigi Loro Piana told The Rake some years ago, “the materials you use are the starting point for how your production philosophy is going to unfold in the future. It’s like being in a kitchen — if you have the very best raw ingredients, you have to be a pretty bad chef to ruin the end product… ” Loro Piana, it’s fair to say, take materials very seriously indeed. Hailing from Italy’s textile production heartland of Trivero, the Loro Piana family started out as wool fabric merchants at the beginning of the 19th century, and the label these days is engaged in a dogged pursuit not just of new materials — such as the rare fibre hand-made from…

The Outer Hebrides, a chain of islands off the northwest coast of mainland Scotland, is a remote and barren stretch of land. It’s devoid of many of the fripperies of modern civilisation, and the result is a charmingly simple place of escapism. Life has existed there since the Stone Age, as evidenced by the Callanish Stones, Scotland’s answer to Stonehenge. The population of the Outer Hebrides is minuscule, too. The 2011 census put it at 27,684, and that figure has been falling for decades. However, the speed of its decline is slowing, thanks largely to the work of Harris Tweed Hebrides. Harris Tweed Hebrides (HTH) was formed in 2007 in a bid to protect and promote Harris Tweed, which is the only textile in the world that has an act…

Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl hits you like a concussive hollow-point double-tap to the soul. This is his paean and plea, his discourse and dogma cry out for insurrection and revolution, and it is set — and could only be set — in the greatest of all cities, the churning crucible of music, art, film and literature known as New York. Like Ginsberg, who commemorates this ultimate collision between high and low with, “angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night”, a slew of literary greats have selected the throbbing concrete metropolis as their muse. From Fitzgerald to Anne Ryan to Salinger, Hubert Selby, Jr. to Mario Puzo, from Mark Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale to McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City,…

The camel is an ungainly beast. ‘A horse designed by a committee,’ as one proverb goes, it compares to its distant equine cousin as one of The Beatles’ satin Sgt. Pepper suits does to a close-cut, single-breasted in sober graphite from a topnotch Milanese sartoria. When it comes to parents in Windowlicker, Alabama wanting their children to be taught intelligent design in school, lawyers acting for the scientific community should just shelve all paleontological, genetic and zoological evidence, and instead lead an aging Bactrian before the judge. So it’s richly ironic that the camel hair, and especially its pale, sandy hue, has given so much to the world of menswear design. “All male costume in the west,” the prominent American style commentator G. Bruce Boyer once said, “derives either from…

There’s a certain type of person who can recall what the weather was like in two specific months of the year more than two decades ago. Someone whose livelihood could be devastated by an uncharacteristically cold July or a wet September; a person who cares about soil quality and tasting notes in equal measure. “If I remember correctly,” says Alexandre Cattier, inhaling deeply from a glass, “it was a good year — quite warm and cloudy during July and August.” He’s holding a pour of 1995 Cuvée Renaissance Cattier Premier Cru, which benefitted greatly from those temperate conditions, resulting in a balanced and toasty drop. The aforementioned wine expert must have at least a small amount of champagne in his blood, given that he’s the 11th generation Cattier to run…

Kwasi Kwarteng has been the Conservative Member of Parliament for Spelthorne since 2010. Born in London in 1975, Kwasi was educated at Eton College, where he was a King’s Scholar, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. in Classics and History. After a year as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University, Kwasi returned to Cambridge to complete his Ph.D in History. Prior to entering parliament, he worked as a financial analyst and author. Since being elected, Kwasi has served on a number of select committees and, having served as Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the Leader of the House of Lords, Kwasi is currently PPS to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In addition to his political career, Kwasi is also a widely known historian. His first book,…

Carving out a career in the film industry is no easy feat, and when taking into account the amount of work Douglas Booth does on the side, the ground he is covering is remarkable. Booth’s career began when he was 16, with a small part in Julian Fellowes’s From Time to Time. He describes his debut as “a baptism of fire” — as well he might, given that the cast included stellar performers such as Dame Maggie Smith, Timothy Spall and Hugh Bonneville. Booth is also an ambassador to the U.N. refugee agency, visiting war-torn and humanitarian crisis zones — “it sounds stupid, but it was life changing” — to try to do his bit. A charming, polite, fiendishly handsome and down-to-earth young man, occupying the limelight is not his…

Halfway through my conversation with Daisy Knatchbull, in which we discuss her sense of style, her genetic predisposition for rebellion and her fascination with tailoring, a gentleman seated next to us leans over to interrupt. “This is the most interesting conversation I’ve eavesdropped on in a long time. Who are you?” he asks her. Daisy is Huntsman’s P.R. and Marketing Manager, creating ripples in an industry dominated by men. “All the women in my family have liked breaking with tradition in some small way,” she tells The Rake. Indeed, Daisy’s grandmother Patricia wore underwear made from silk R.A.F. maps, her aunt turned down a marriage proposal from a prince, and earlier this year Daisy was the first woman to wear morning dress to Ascot’s Royal Enclosure. “Most people thought it…

Limitation is a damnable thing. We Homo sapiens are adventurers by nature and instinctively try to discover the new or adapt the old. This psychological restlessness is evident in the clothes we wear as much as in the speed we run the 100 metres, or the various means by which people have reached the North Pole. Though you wouldn’t know it from my wardrobe, which is accused of being somewhat antediluvian, I understand the relevance of adapting the traditional suit to conform to contemporary needs. While the tailors I have used in the past embody the pinnacle of excellence, the clothes I have used to work with them, through no fault of their own, are not appropriate for everyday wear. So the time has come to fill that particular void,…

Special thanks to Mark’s Club It takes a Brit to play America’s most wholesome, handsome and superhuman superhero. Superman is to the comic world what Winston Churchill is to politics: not necessarily everyone’s favourite but widely acknowledged as the primus inter pares. Umberto Eco said of Superman that he can “be seen as the representative of all his similars”. He is the embodiment of good versus evil, an immigrant bringing light to a new world, the grey man demonstrating that we are more than what’s on the surface, and that we all, no matter how strong, have weaknesses. His is a nifty allegory for everything from the story of Moses to a characterisation of the American Way. His incarnations on screen can be seen as a commercialisation of legend or…

“It is the unstable nature of denim — the fact that it fades, shows signs of age and wear, tells the story of your interaction with it, and becomes a physical repository of your memories — that makes it so fascinating as a material,” says Dean Gomilsek-Cole, Turnbull & Asser’s Head of Design. And what you should know is that, although he heads the single-most fabled British shirtmaker, holder of a Royal Warrant and outfitter to ever iconic British men, from Winston Churchill to the Prince of Wales, Gomilsek-Cole and the other denizens of Turnbull & Asser are rooted in the prevailing aesthetics of the modern world and in possession of that one elusive quality: genuine, unadulterated and irrefutable coolness. So when the idea of collaborating with one of Britain’s…

In The Fountainhead — the novel The New York Times referred to as her “hymn in praise of the individual” — Ayn Rand used the parsimony of natural selection to illustrate the beauty of stark functionality. “Why wouldn’t you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end?” asks the architect-protagonist Howard Roark, in defence of a starkly utilitarian building design he’s made, “and with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle that doesn’t serve a purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a…

The pages in this issue, until now, have been filled with stirring yarns of selfless valour and poignant accounts of the horrors of war, all peppered with liberal quivering of usually stiff upper lips. So shifting the mood to comedy here skirts dangerously close to bathos as jarring as that which bounds into our living rooms when dogs on surfboards round off an otherwise bleak newscast. But it would be remiss of us to close the issue without a devout toast to a war hero — in the kindest, most inclusive sense of that phrase — who surely counts among the most sublimely memorable sitcom characters of all time: General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett, VC, KCB, DSO, as played with indomitable bluster by Stephen Fry, in Blackadder Goes Forth,…