Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2018 - Issue 58 i The Rake

The issue of Life magazine that hit the newsstands on July 6, 1959 bore the image of an almost excruciatingly handsome man, then 27 years old, staring into the middle distance: dash-of-salt, tousled hair; lips puckered rakishly; and eyes fixed in a gentle squint towards some unseen object of conquest (a cricketing nemesis’s middle stump, one might assume, given the raised right arm and cream V-neck sweater, had the man in question hailed from the other side of the Atlantic). A strap at the bottom of the cover referred to this enigmatic Adonis as “actor, athlete, artist”, which now comes across as a rather cursory summary. Had the cover been published in the latter stages of Gardner McKay’s life, the magazine may have needed to accommodate other accomplishments, including sailor,…

Since the concept was created in the 1950s, the American dream has always contained some degree of false hope. Though that hasn’t prevented many millions feeling the warmth of its glow. Sixty years later, it’s fair to say Tom Payne has created his own luck, and accordingly he has made it on U.S. soil. Born in Chelmsford, in the English county of Essex, the actor uprooted to Los Angeles eight years ago to pursue a life he’d been told was unrealistic. He was labelled cocky on his home turf, and his positivity was derided. But his outlook was embraced on the other side of the Atlantic. Payne landed a role in HBO’s (ironically named) series Luck in 2010, and with that he moved to the sunny pastures of California. It…

If you know your Seinfeld, and you should, the name Dolores should raise a smile. It was, after all, the handle of a woman Jerry was dating whose name he couldn’t recall but knew rhymed with a body part. There was little unforgettable about Dolores Moran. The 17-year-old with more rack than a Colombian marching powder factory first caught the eye, so the story goes, at the annual picnic held by the Sacramento Elks Lodge community group in 1941, where a kindly Warner Brothers talent scout decided she looked like a kid who could do with an introduction. Unbeknown to him, she’d already amassed a sackful of tiaras from beauty pageants with unfortunate single entendres — Queen of the Butte County Fair, for one. It was a trend that would…

While they are all made for the practical purpose of wearing, there is equal justification for mounting them on your wall. Is there a hat for everyone? It’s one of life’s great mysteries. If walking around London has taught me anything, it is that the majority of commuters have given up on the search, left the question unanswered. Long gone are the days when city dress, or a commission in a household regiment, insisted on a bowler hat, or when a hat was as common or garden a part of outdoor attire as an overcoat. Even having spoken to the world’s august hatters, I was adamant that I do not suit hats. As much as I love pictures of Anthony Eden in his homburg, or Humphrey Bogart in his trilby,…

The Derby, the St. Leger, The Oaks, and, of course, the Royal meeting at Ascot were peaks of national excitement. The dandy, a silk scarf wound around his top hat and trailing like a pennant in the wind, lolling against a barouche, cigar dangling from his lips, a set of splendid seals hanging from the watch-chain on his snowy waistcoat front, casts a supercilious glance at the ragged, shoeless girl trying to interest him in her wares… while unseen, beneath the carriage wheels, another urchin is reaching out to steal a bottle of champagne. An infant acrobat, lost in dreamy contemplation of the pie and lobster being set out for a picnic lunch, forgets that he is to perform some feat of agility. The thimble rigger is busy practising his…

The first thing I notice as I’m going up Lexington Avenue towards Dapper Dan’s new atelier in Harlem is a billboard saying, ‘Gucci Dapper Dan. Made in Harlem.’ It is a sight that would have been hard to imagine even a couple of years ago. But many things in the industry have changed, largely because of Gucci and Alessandro Michele, who have been proving that there might be multiple exceptions to tried-and-tested marketing rules. Daniel Day (a.k.a. Dapper Dan) opens the door, a guard of N.B.A. proportions lurking behind him. Daniel is about 70 but he’s so energetic, lithe and slender you would never believe it. And he’s decked out in Gucci, from his loafers to the large smoky glasses with gilt logos on the frames. We go outside to…

I enjoy the juxtaposition of a crumpled linen shirt with the sharp crease in a pair of mohair trousers. The British do not have a good reputation for dressing well in warmer weather. The unpredictability of the English summer has always been our stock excuse, and we never seem to get it right. Either too stuffy and dressed-up or overly casual but without being comfortable. And we seem to be going backwards: in the days of the Empire, we successfully adapted our strict Victorian dress codes to create new conventions that were supremely elegant and are still relevant today. We added cummerbunds and khaki, madras checks and chukka boots. But not much since. The key to elegant summer dressing is picking the right cloths. Linen is the most comfortable warm-weather…

From a linguistic perspective, ‘Aussie’ is a markedly Australian way of shortening the word ‘Australian’, and people tend to be astounded when they hear that the breed to which this nickname is applied is about as Australian as Oreos and Jack Daniel’s. That’s right: while I’m not averse to a Tim Tam and a paw’s measure of Bundaberg Rum, and as much as I’d like to shotgun schooners of Tooheys with the chug-friendly Australian Margot Robbie in the spirit of kinship, I am actually NASCAR-loving, steel-guitar-twangingly American. The jury’s out when it comes to the reason for our appellation, but it’s possible that Basque people who lived fleetingly in Australia took us to the western United States around the time of the Gold Rush in the 1840s. Our more recent…

The town of Biella in northern Italy is famous for playing host to many of the finest cloth makers in the world. For Piacenza, this is doubly true: their history is inextricably woven into the fabric of the town itself. Although the company usually quotes 1733 as its conventional founding date, the Piacenza family has been working in the Biella region’s textile industry since as early as 1623, and perhaps even earlier. “We know because we have some documents from [the nearby township of] Pollone dating back to 1623 stating, ‘Piacenza family: merchants of wool’,” says Ettore Piacenza, who today stewards the company alongside his brother, Vasiliy. “That’s our first trace.” In the late 1800s, under the guidance of the brothers’ great-great-grandfather, the industrialist and philanthropist Felice Piacenza, the business…

He was believed to have single-handedly bagged a large percentage of his country’s tigers. Last May, Phillips auctioneers announced that it had set a world record for the highest price achieved at auction for a Rolex wristwatch. Naturally, the timepiece it sold — for $5,060,427, and after an eight-minute bidding war between 10 enthusiasts at the Hotel La Réserve in Geneva — was extraordinary even by the standards of the storied Swiss watchmaker. It was a Reference 6062, a triple calendar with moonphase indication, crafted in 18-carat yellow-gold, and is one of only three black-dial models known to exist. Furthermore, it was the only one featuring diamond markers at the even hours, making it a unique piece. One other fact elevated it to holy grail status for horologists: it was…

If The Rake were to create a Hublot watch, it would have to embrace two eras simultaneously — that of the ancient world and that of the modern world. It started on a clear, unseasonably warm and hospitable evening in Milan in February last year. Little did I know I was about to embark on a horological journey that would last the better part of a year and a half. But the end result, I think, is worth the peripatetic, highly international, and at times amusingly circuitous journey that has yielded one of my favourite timepiece collaborations for The Rake. The gentlemen who gathered together in the historic stone courtyard of Il Salumaio di Montenapoleone were familiar figures to readers of this magazine: Lapo Elkann, the grandson of Gianni Agnelli;…

MICHAEL SCHWARTZ Michael Schwartz is a Floridian turned New Yorker, and a photographer. He began his career in the fashion industry as an agent for models. While developing and maintaining the careers of some leading models, Michael had a desire to get back to his lifelong goal of capturing still and moving images. Since changing career he has not looked back, having shot for several iconic brands, including Hugo Boss, Victoria’s Secret, Vogue and GQ. Michael lives in New York with his girlfriend and his badass Pomeranian called Biggie. In this issue Michael photographed Ed Harris for the cover and accompanying story (page 82). CHRISTOPHER MODOO Christopher Modoo is our Sartorial Guru. He has more than 25 years’ experience in classic menswear, and has designed collections for contemporary Savile Row…

“The Child,” Wordsworth wrote, “is father of the Man.” This apparently oxymoronic truth explains much about Taki Theodoracopulos. As a schoolchild in America after the war, and while his fellow pupils were preparing for life at university, Taki was reading for the university of life, learning Tender Is the Night and A Moveable Feast by heart. “As soon as school was over, I headed for Paris, the south of France and the Alps in hot pursuit of Dick Diver and Papa Hemingway,” he says. Thus it was at an American prep school that he plotted the coordinates of one of the most colourful voyages through life of the last 60 or so years, during which time he has become both Hemingway and Fitzgerald while remaining very much himself: war correspondent,…

Karl Matthews was raised in Yorkshire, and spent his teens listening to rock ’n roll, growing dreadlocks, and getting tattoos. He always knew he was going to do something creative later in life; his earliest memory of men’s clothing is of styling looks in his uncle’s store aged 15. By the time he was in his early twenties, the discovery that the late Alexander McQueen underwent an apprenticeship on Savile Row inspired Matthews to move south. He then knocked on the door of every notable institution on the Row asking for training, before being accepted by Anderson & Sheppard in 1998. He said goodbye to the dreadlocks and studied as a coat maker before switching to the cutting room floor. He honed his craft at Anderson & Sheppard for 12…

Turnbull & Asser have consistently been purveyors of elegance and dynamism. The journey they have made over the past five years has riffed on the idea that style, suiting, sartorialism needn’t be boring and uninventive despite so many brands seemingly trying to prove otherwise. Making a brand shine brighter requires a knack of capitalising on an unrivalled heritage and maintaining the inherent quality without being afraid to evolve, to try something new. It is a hard trick to pull off when you have a 100-year-old flagship on Jermyn Street with all the trappings that a P.G. Wodehouse novel might describe. Turnbull & Asser have not been found wanting since coming under the ownership of James Fayed, the tuning fork at the centre of the operation, and of modern sartorialism. Stylish,…

“It wasn’t scary but it was challenging. That was the moment when I got a first real connection to the business.” Wandering around Trivero’s Casa Zegna, it’s easy to imagine a moment when — between a kickabout on the lawn, or climbing one of the trees on this vast estate — Gildo Zegna realised that, whatever his predilections, he was destined to enter the family firm. After all, this was the one his grandfather had established in 1910, first as a textiles mill (in a way common to Italian industrialists of the period, the giant factory is set next to the family home) and, half a century ago this year, as a brand of ready-to-wear menswear. His sister Anna would later be called away from her life of hard partying…

It’s apposite that ‘swordsman’ has become a phallic synonym for philanderer, given the dashing elegance of the weapon and the virile elegance that results when one is employed in fiction. Bourne and Bond may exude lethal masculinity when bearing a Walther P5 Compact and a SIG-Sauer P226R respectively, but they’ll never match the physical lyricism of those protagonists who, bearing rapiers, cutlasses and katanas, perform something more like a blend of chess and ballet than a scene from Grand Theft Auto. The Spaniard taking the Rake Incarnate podium in this issue is so adept at the gladiatorial arts he routinely duels with a self-imposed handicap (the use of only his left hand) despite the filial piety of his motivation throughout The Princess Bride’s narrative (“My name is Inigo Montoya,” goes…