Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 - Issue 55 i The Rake

Publicists are an interesting breed. They are the gatekeepers of popular culture, guarding the people we want to get to know. Avaricious periodicals seek access to tell a good, saucy story, and the publicist is the alkaline to that acidic form of journalism. We at The Rake like to think our mould is different. We want to celebrate people rather than destroy their reputations, and the Rake-in- Progress feature was always intended to pick out younger men who personify the nuances of style and substance. A few months ago a publicist contacted me with an idea — to feature women in this column. Ah, I thought, this magazine was built on the notion of making certain men relevant, empowering the XY sex and giving the reader confidence that his classical…

Kim Novak never intended to be an actress, and her success surprised no one more than herself. “I never dreamed of it, never even thought about it,” she said. “It literally just happened, as if by magic.” It wasn’t until a cross-country tour modelling for a refrigerator company took her to Los Angeles (during which she was crowned ‘Miss Deep Freeze’) that Novak, born Marilyn Pauline Novak, was scouted by Columbia Pictures. She was visiting the Hollywood set of Howard Hughes’s production of The French Line when the film’s choreographer, Billy Daniels, noticed her pin-up features and insisted on a screen test. When Columbia took her on, the notoriously unpleasant president, Harry Cohn, told her, “No one’s going to want to see a girl with a Polack name”. This didn’t…

Edward Sexton is a legend of his own making. From a tailoring point of view there are few people able to claim the sort of influence he has on the way suits are perceived. In 1969, Sexton revolutionised the sartorial arts. He re-purposed and re-styled them in such a way that they were shorn of the pre-war snobbery of Savile Row’s aristocratic past, allowing Britain’s working class and counter-cultures to make them their own. Suits would never be the same again, and the fulcrum was Edward Sexton and Tommy Nutter. Today, Edward remains the most distinctive tailor on the planet. There are tailoring fanatics who can distinguish an Anderson & Sheppard shoulder, Huntsman drape or Cifonelli lapel. With Sexton, he has an innate ability to take every aspect of a…

It’s hard to think who else could pull off the devilish insouciance — the same effortless, imperious poise — of a three-pieced Withnail, ensconced in an armchair and holding a quadruple dram, but clutching an undersized coffee vessel instead. That’s the feat achieved on a regular basis in Tom Stubbs’s superb Espresso Stance series on his website, Style & Error (also seen regularly, along with his piquant video style stances, on Instagram). It’s a meme executed with more than a soupçon of Stubbs’s colourful vernacular — “Wheat/gold pinstripe Lionels [rhyming slang for flares, thanks to the former T.V. presenter and dancer Lionel Blair] which are as damn similar to Jagger’s wedding flares” — and humour that detracts precisely nothing from the seriousness with which he approaches the business of looking…

If there is a health benefit of smoking, becoming acquainted with Edward and Eddie Sahakian is it. Nothing bad has come from my getting to know these men. They are the personification of generosity, gentleness and generational bonding of father and son in business. As proprietors of Davidoff of London, on the corner of Jermyn and St. James’s streets, theirs is the most inviting shop in the area, whether because of the wares in the wide windows or the enticing aroma of cigar smoke. Personally, the journey I’ve taken from amateur to slight obsessive about cigars has been entirely down to Edward and Eddie, who have given freely of their time in the pursuit of my cigar education. This year, Edward was a recipient of an award that two fellow…

I remember taking a train with Ben Clymer, the founder of Hodinkee.com, after a visit to the Patek Philippe dial factory. We discussed the idea of e-retailing watches. After all, what was the point of emotionalising, in championing their aesthetic and technical values, and then not being able to offer them to the consumer? I applaud him because, within a year, he had implemented this exact ability to purchase a beautifully curated selection of vintage watches on Hodinkee. But let’s put this in context: Ben had by this point already created the preeminent web resource for watch-related content and the best repository for vintage-watch storytelling. Even more than that, Ben always knew what watch to write about and what story to tell, and that was due to his exceptional taste.…

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Alessandro Squarzi. It was in April this year at his go-to haunt when he’s in London, Blakes hotel, for a story for The Rake. One can’t help instantly warming to him. He’s unbelievably polite, has an infectious smile, is interesting and eager to show a genuine interest in you, which, in this day and age, can be a rare trait. It didn’t take long till I became mildly jealous of Alessandro, though. After all, he is, in my humble opinion, the most naturally stylish rake around today. Able to blend bespoke tailoring, vintage militarywear, decrepit but classic checkered Vans, and the coolest, most hyped sneakers in a nonchalant way, he’s constantly stretching the parameters and limitations of style. He’s convinced me that white denim…

Valentino and Nicola Ricci were not born into a tailoring dynasty. Instead, these two lifelong bespoke aficionados decided to pursue a future in the business alongside their other careers — it was spending time with their own tailor and learning about the craft that made them realise that not only did they love the act of making garments, but with their unique vision they had something meaningful to contribute as well. That background tells you a lot about why, in 2017, Sciamat feels more vital than ever. They continually find ways to take the classics and make them feel fresher, more relevant and more essentially wearable than ever before. Deeply reverential, aesthetically dynamic and technically adventurous, Sciamat is a tailor’s tailoring house. The brothers’ reverence for the greats is immediately…

One of the most exciting things The Rake discovered this year was that Michael Browne was setting up his own shop. Needing little introduction, Michael, a regular face in this magazine, is without doubt one of the most talented and promising creatives working in the sartorial world today, and his latest move has got many tailoring enthusiasts incredibly excited. Formally a disciple of Chittleborough & Morgan, progenitors of exemplary British structuralist tailoring, Michael is in some ways cut from an entirely different cloth compared to his peers. The leader of the next generation of artisans, his workshop on Berkeley Square in London is testament to his ambition for paving a new way. Monochromatic, minimalistic and contemporary, Michael’s domain couldn’t be further away from the steadfast, traditional workspaces of Savile Row.…

‘Humble’ is the first word that pops into my head when thinking of Davide Taub, the Head Cutter at Gieves & Hawkes. When we took his photograph there wasn’t an opportunity to talk openly, as it was busy on the cutting-room floor. Also, Davide didn’t want to make a spectacle of our visit among his friends and colleagues, whom he holds in the highest regard. While there is, of course, a hierarchy at No.1 Savile Row, it’s built upon a respect for equality. So we met again, and in private he waxed lyrical on tailoring, architecture, functional design, and his background — from growing up in a family of tailors to punk music — in a methodical and honest manner. Davide is at least the fifth generation in the Taub…

I was once staying in Scotland, at a pretty grand house — the kind in which a grand piano does not look out of place. Walking down the stairs to breakfast, I was greeted by the crystalline notes of what might have been Schumann (I am no expert) floating on the still morning air. It is one of those moments that sticks in the mind, a glimpse of perfection and tranquillity that demonstrates the power of music when interpreted by a virtuoso. It was not a recording but an extemporaneous breakfast time recital by a fellow guest, Sir David Tang. Celebrated Anglophile, Olympian socialite, entrepreneur, restaurateur, champion cigar smoker, man of taste, caustic wit, and, to my ears at least, concert-level pianist, David Tang, who died in August, became known…

Within the confines of the Library Bar at the Devonshire Club, Ludovic du Plessis is relaxed, making jokes and smiling. As the Global Executive Officer for Louis XIII, one of the most prestigious and enchanting wines and spirits in the world, du Plessis has a laid-back demeanour about him despite the role’s demanding criteria. Each month he spends at least three weeks travelling, and today he’s journeyed to London from Paris for this interview. Despite the sense of constant motion, he’s feeling at home, as 12 personalised glass cabinets fill the room with an amber glow from the Louis XIII bottles held inside. This is where members of the Devonshire Club venture for their drop of Louis, but it’s more like clockwork for du Plessis. “Every day at 7pm I…

Gangsters aside, pirates are perhaps the most romanticised outlaws of them all. And yet the annals of fiction are packed with larcenous sea dogs whose rakish flair is not so much heavily compromised as non-existent. Robert Louis Stevenson’s anti-hero Long John Silver accessorised with a wooden leg and a mouthy psittacine on the shoulder. Captain Hook — although a canny 1991 portrayal by Dustin Hoffman did something to salvage his reputation — was bullied by children to such a point of abject submission he ended up doing panto. Johnny Depp channelling Keith Richards (our Who Is the Rake? subject) should be about as rakish as it gets, but Captain Jack Sparrow’s chronic haplessness — the mutinies, maroonings, hangings and near misses with giant squids — make him too much of…

Comfort and joy wouldn’t be the nouns we’d associate with the current tidings. To paraphrase Tiny Tim, “Will we have Christmas after all?” On the whole, by the time I reach Christmas, my mood is lifted by the melodrama of chestnuts on an open fire, St. Coca-Cola and his reindeer, Three Kings, one Queen (and her Christmas speech), carollers, and rested merry gentlemen. So why am I so upbeat when the world seems intent on being miserable? Perhaps the anticipation of the holiday season Christmas, which gives me good cause to be hopeful, lies in the annual rustling up of our Rakes of the Year awards, which we have produced in association with Bell & Ross, a brand we have long admired, and we are excited to reveal their latest…

Goulash, embroidery, paprika, thermal baths, non- Euclidean geometry: it’s not exactly a collection to have thrill-seeking tourists boarding the next boat to Budapest. So it’s lucky that the Vizsla exists to sex up the list of things that emanate from Hungary. Sex it up we do, and in a classier way than the lusty damsels from my nation so often found performing carnal impropriety in back-street Californian film studios. Regal in profile and ambereyed, our rich, rust-yellow coats have a L’Oréal-model, velvetshiny appearance that calls to mind Women’s Health cover models, or perhaps those corn-fed, yoga-obsessed, pencil-skirted beauties who populate corporate life in New York. There’s a reason for our coat’s alluring lustre: like cats, we’re self-cleaning, which means we — and, therefore, your home — are devoid of that…

There is an intimacy in menswear that doesn’t exist in womenswear. The number of style magazines for men is inconsequential next to the vast array of women’s titles. So it is down to a select few editors, journalists and visionaries to preach the gospel and report on, and determine, the direction in which menswear is heading. The trends this magazine covers, from travelwear to fabric innovation and classic style in a modern man, are niche, which well suits The Rake’s premise. We accept that luxury is limited in its reach. When, however, you take the wider market and audience into account, the truth is there are two people who are the most authoritative and influential drivers of what men wear and how we empower ourselves through clothing. And they are…

In developing this list you can’t be shy in acknowledging that fine work in one particular field can be so consistently commendable over the years that the same person appears more than once. Which explains the return here of the great Jemma Freeman, Managing Director of Hunters & Frankau. Jemma featured in our Rake of the Year awards two years ago, as the first Most Rakish Man of the Year who was, in fact, a woman. Once again, she is impossible to omit from our roster, as this year marks another rounded success for the cigar industry, most notably with younger smokers. To explain: social media has allowed cigars to have more airtime, from teenaged boys with diamond-studded Dupont lighters in this beach resort or that fast car to experts…

The beauty of Neapolitan tailoring is that it represents elegance that yearns to be worn; to be lived in. And there is not a more prominent example of the form than the name that has been inextricably tied to its creation: Rubinacci The house is synonymous with soft, unconstructed tailoring that merges the best of Italian and British codes and gamely balances subtle drape and dramatic structure. Today, it’s a style that has never been more globally admired, nor more influential. It’s not an exaggeration to lay much of the credit for that at the feet of the house’s scion, Luca Rubinacci. Luca embodies something of a watershed moment in the trade, for here is a man who represents the potential of a new generation of tailors, one whose dedication…

Scott Schuman, the individual who created the modern genre of street-style photography, describes going to his first Pitti Uomo, more than a decade ago, with the idea of democratising style and demonstrating that elegance could be exhibited by anyone. “At the time people weren’t dressed up in the way they are today,” he says. “It was a trade show, and being predominantly Italian there was great casual formal style, great details. But no one was fully dressed and accessorised to the nines.” He pauses to chuckle. “Except for Lino.” And in this day and age, when social media proliferation has brought with it innumerable collectively anointed and often self-appointed sartorial luminaries, and when the phrase ‘style icon’ has been bandied about so wantonly as to have lost any meaning, Ieluzzi,…

It is hard to be impartial when writing about friends; in fact, I find it hard to be impartial on pretty much anything, so I have largely given up trying. But just because I am not impartial does not necessarily mean that Terry Haste isn’t among a tiny handful of cutters who are the very best in the world, perhaps even in the history of men’s tailoring. The man is a genius. I still enjoy the first tweed sports jacket he made me in an old Hunters of Brora 21oz Cheviot with a sky-and-white overcheck on a mustard ground. In the past 25 years or so I have had it re-lined, altered, and the buttonholes re-sewn… but it keeps getting better. Having one’s own old bespoke clothing is one of…

Street-style photography is a nomadic, sometimes isolated, art form. You travel all over the world following the annual calendar of fashion weeks and get-togethers, where the international fashion cognoscenti descend in their finery. There is no dress code for these kinds of things, so people use them for experimentation, expression and, of course, to get snapped by the 30 or so photographers who hover outside and wait for the arrival of someone demure and iconic (see Sarah Harris) or colourful and outrageous, like GQ Style’s Gary Armstrong. The payoff for the photographer is unclear, but they can find themselves with a pretty impressive social media following. Take Thousand Yard Style, for example. It is the pseudonym of a great man, Robert Spangle, a former U.S. marine and one of the…

Umberto Angeloni is a proud citizen of the nation of Flux. If you are unable to find this unique principality on a map, it’s because you need to cast your eyes skywards. Because Flux lives in the air. It is borne on clouds. Its geographical boundaries are defined by the interior of the plane’s cabin. From 1990 to 2007, Angeloni served as the president of Brioni and multiplied the brand’s revenues tenfold. He did this by winning over hearts and minds the world over; he did this through constant, unabated travel. As he puts it: “Italy gave me my cultural imprint, Africa my strongest emotions, North America my professional bearing, and Flux my self-awareness.” Angeloni’s current occupation is C.E.O. of a company called Caruso. Even if you’ve never heard of…

It’s not exactly news that The Carlyle was a joy to stay at. Most readers of this magazine I speak to wouldn’t stay anywhere else when in the Big Apple. The old New York charm slap-bang in the middle of the post-war social scene of the Upper East Side gives it cachet from the get-go. Luxury to them can be both exquisite personalisation (like monogrammed pillows on arrival) as well as the unbearable satisfaction of ordering a drink in Bemelmans Bar; the charming cadre of men who operate the lifts; and the sense of ease at any and all requests. It has a homely feel, albeit stately homely, but that’s a good thing. Any accusation of the hotel being an analog organisation in a digital city is for the birds…

A former staffer at both U.K. Esquire and GQ Australia, Nick was Editorin- Chief of The Rake for three years before leaving the role to pursue a number of creative projects in the summer of 2014. His work has appeared in the FT’s How To Spend It, The Guardian, Sky Magazine, Radio Times and Women’s Health, while past interviewees include Kings of Leon, Elle Macpherson, Ozzy Osbourne, Jessica Alba, Dave Grohl, Hugh Jackman, Duran Duran, Martin Freeman and Eric Cantona. Away from lifestyle editorial, he’s a budding stand-up comic and is working on his debut novel on the rare occasions that time permits. For this issue, Nick talked to Nicolas Cage for our cover story (page 92) and travelled to Biella in Italy to go behind the scenes at the…

For his autumn/winter 2017 menswear collection for Balenciaga, the designer Demna Gvasalia, who’d elevated the oversized hoodie to haute status at Vetements, vowed to “make tailoring sexy again”. His method? To cut a roomy jacket, dispense with the shirt all together, and lower the skinny trousers to a point just above the pubic bone while encasing the feet in a pair of expansive — and conspicuously branded — biker boots. This wasn’t so much casual Friday as steam-punk Saturday. What would the venerable couture house’s creator have made of all this? Hard, if not impossible, to say, as, during his long and illustrious tenure as “fashion’s Picasso” (Cecil Beaton) and “the master of us all” (Christian Dior), Cristóbal Balenciaga made J.D. Salinger look like a blabbermouth. “He is seldom to…

William Gilchrist moves in a very unique and nonchalant manner, with slow, graceful strides that exude confidence. He is the man behind the Rolling Stones’ aesthetic of the last 15 years, and personal stylist to Jude Law. Wonderfully rakish and with a carefree, bohemian and intellectual candour, he’s someone you’d want to hit the town with, exemplified by the contents of his hip flask: tequila. When asked if the flask has an interesting provenance, he says, “No, it’s just always good to be prepared…” Often seen around Mayfair on his Brompton bike, which underlines his penchant for functional products, William is never in a rush. He prefers louche, unstructured tailoring to dress his slender frame, and he bespeaks Richard Anderson “for all the grown-up stuff”, including the double-breasted jacket featured…

One of the most famous passages in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the book that first espoused his now widely accepted theory of evolution, was quickly removed by him because of the public ridicule it received. In this passage he explained how he could imagine a land-based mammal like the North American black bear transforming through millennia of evolution into an aquatic creature like a whale. His exact words were: “I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.” It led to expressions of outrage by the already scornful creationists that viewed his writing and scientific research as satanic. And not…

A few issues ago, Nick Foulkes wrote a piece on the late, great Mark Birley, kicking off the feature with a quote that read, “I am afraid that Mr. Birley cannot come to the phone because he is busy relaxing”. It was a true story, and if there is anyone who could be the bearer of such an excuse now that Mr. Birley is no longer with us, and pull it off with equal aplomb, it is Nick Foulkes. There is a problem, though: Nick seems to have gone only halfway, and is just too busy without much sign of the relaxation. When not staying up past midnight beating everyone at backgammon, the multi-award-winning (and by that I mean appearing in this list no fewer than three times) author and…

It was a year into developing The Rake, and things were not going well. Despite my decision to focus on bespoke tailoring and shoemaking, my initial forays into both had left me bereft of confidence in these most artisanal of arts. In suiting, the issue was that no jacket had yet lived up to my inchoate aesthetic ambitions, while in shoemaking it was as much a struggle with comfort as it was with style. In tailoring, I was rescued by the amazing Marc de Luca of Paris’s Camps de Luca. In shoemaking, my faith was restored by one of the greatest men I would meet in the course of my sartorial adventures: George Glasgow Sr. After an edifying visit to his storied premises, G. J. Cleverley, in the Royal Arcade…

Though she may be unaware of it, I first met Sarah Ann Macklin a decade ago. It was at a photoshoot in the first year of The Rake’s existence, a shoot dedicated to the sartorially seminal film Get Carter, and styled by the British tailoring stalwart Timothy Everest. One specific shot required Sarah Ann to dress in what I will diplomatically put as not a great deal of clothing, posing in the East London streets next to a model styled as Michael Caine holding a shotgun. It was the middle of winter and the temperature had plummeted to near freezing. And throughout the staging of the shot, though she was barely out of her teens, she never once complained. She happily got on with the job, smiled gracefully, and was…

Making fine, handcrafted shoes is hard. It’s a craft that can take decades to master. It is a trade that is steeped in tradition, in refinement, and in the search for perfection over a form that has barely changed in the last century. It’s a trade that attracts formalists and perfectionists, those who interpret the gospel but rarely deviate from it. And it’s this very nature of shoemaking culture that makes it fascinating to watch the stratospheric ascent of the enfants terribles behind 2017’s most talked-about shoemakers, Barbanera: Sergio and Sebastiano Guardì. It’s easy to see how the immaculately coiffed, roguishly dressed brothers, who formed Barbanera in 2011 along with another pair of siblings, Alessandro and Filippo Pagliacci, might rile a certain stripe of formalist. They have a strident passion…

In 1981, Joe Morgan and Roy Chittleborough founded their esteemed eponymous tailoring house, which is one of the few establishments on Savile Row that still strictly embodies and practises bespoke-only work. Not long ago I dropped in to say hello, and Joe, as friendly as ever, showed me a jacket he was working on. The stitching in the chest pad he was sewing had the outline of a cat in a colourful array of thread-splendour for a client with a feline penchant. One could argue that it’s an unnecessary detail, but it reminded me that it’s the little things that no one knows about that make bespoke tailoring such a wonderful craft. Furthermore, it proved that Joe’s passion and dedication has only increased in his years practising as a master…

“Can the shoot highlight the family element of the two of them? Don’t make it too serious, it’s not like them, let them be playful with one another and juxtapose what they are wearing.” This was (more or less) the brief I gave Karl- Edwin Guerre (or just ‘Guerre’), our man in New York for all things photographic, when he shot George Glasgow Sr. and Jr., Guerre’s fellow Rakes of the Year. Cut to a few days later and I see a video on Instagram of Guerre and the Glasgows standing in the middle of Park Avenue with traffic racing past them, getting the shot. And it was fabulous. That is Guerre’s gift: he is an explorer who exudes the values and enthusiasm contained in the style he represents. He…

I kid you not. At 100mph (or 160km/h in the metric system) the GTR version of the McLaren F1 — the 25-year-old game-changing sports car designed by the iconoclast Gordon Murray — generates so much downforce that it could drive upside down across your ceiling. It is also incredibly light, due to McLaren’s pioneering use of carbon fibre, and has a raceready central driving seat and a naturally aspirated BMW V12 nestled in an engine bay lined with gold foil to help expel heat. All of this enabled the street-legal version to clock 240.1mph (388km/h), the highest speed ever recorded by a production car, in the 1990s. A fleet of racing F1s entered the 1995 Le Mans 24 Hours and set an incredible record on the car’s debut, with the…