Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2018 - Issue 59 i The Rake

George Raft didn’t want to give the name. Interviewed in 1980, his final television appearance, the then 85-year-old actor, dressed stylishly in a charcoal peak-lapel suit over a black polo neck, was asked about his habit of giving money to those struggling to break into his fickle industry. The interviewer pushes him and he declines. He pushes again; again, Raft declines. The interviewer jokingly lets slip that the recipient in question went on to become the biggest name in television. Raft smiles. Still he won’t name her. Raft is, the interviewer says, too much of a gentleman. The interviewer takes another approach. How about all the famous women he’d dated? Would he name them? Raft smiles. “You can name them,” he says. “I’ll do what I do, and if my…

The collective noun for Sam Heughan’s fans are Heughligans, who number in the tens of thousands and act as a testament to his success: as an actor, philanthropist and, as you’ll probably agree, a rather stand-up guy. This affection is directed at one of Heughan’s characters in particular: Jamie Fraser, a soldier and the central protagonist of the cult T.V. series Outlander. Based on the books of Diana Gabaldon, the time-travelling show is set mainly in Scotland, but enjoyed most of its early success outside the U.K. — from America to Chile, Australia to Japan — despite Heughan himself hailing from Caledonia. While he’s been enveloped in this world for four seasons, Heughan will this year venture into more varied roles, including as a secret agent in the action-packed Bond…

If you have picked up this issue of The Rake on the day it comes out, may I firstly congratulate you on your eagerness and dedication to the rakish cause. More importantly, though, this issue is published the day after the nuptials of perhaps the most glamorous, kindest and convivial couple we know. There are a select few brands that have been close to The Rake throughout its lifetime, but few more rewarding than that of the august shoemaker G.J. Cleverley. Specifically, we refer to George Glasgow Jr., the C.E.O. Yes, on the one hand the shoes are ne plus ultra — they are the pinnacle of excellence, the height of elegance and the most authentic in craft, which is enough to hold our attention and desires. As well, however,…

The Santos De Cartier It’s deeply etched in the minds of the timepiece cognoscenti, but for those who came into the room late: at the dawn of the 20th century, the Brazilian celebrity pilot Alberto Santos-Dumont mentioned to his friend Louis Cartier that taking one hand off the controls of his plane, one of the earliest fixed-wing aircraft, in order to check his pocket-watch while flying was an infernal inconvenience. Cartier went off and designed what is widely accepted as being the first watch, from the moment pencil hit paper, specifically for the wrist. This quadrilateral gem, in partnership with Le Coultre (who created the tiny hand-wound movements), went on sale at Cartier’s flagship boutique in Paris a few years later (1911, to be exact — about half a decade…

We live in a society sick from diet-related diseases, with no decrease in obesity since 1980, and we are wondering why. While everyone was discussing whether or not to Brexit, I travelled to the European parliament with three of the biggest experts in British science and medicine to try to shed some light on how dietary guidelines are negatively impacting our population’s health. In our address, ‘Big Food and Big Pharma: Killing for Profit?’, we called for a complete overhaul of the current guidelines. I felt privileged to join forces with the top U.K. cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a leading figure in the campaign against sugar and too much medicine; Hanno Pijl, director of the Centre of Evidence Based Medicine, University of Oxford; and Sir Richard Thompson, the past president…

Emerging with a minor flesh wound from the 30-second shootout between lawmen and outlaws that occurred at the O.K. Corral livery in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 was a miracle akin to the “divine intervention” experienced by Vincent and Jules in Pulp Fiction. But that’s what happened to Doc Holliday, one of 19th-century America’s deadliest gunslingers. By the time of the incident, Doc had been desensitised to bloody violence by years of work as a dentist in an era when that profession’s idea of pain relief was a consciousness-impairing blow to the temples with a pair of rusty forceps. And yet — and this highlights what a free-for-all the Wild West was, thanks to a paucity of law enforcement officers spread over vast territories — Doc was supposedly one of the…

I was paid a rather neat compliment the other day. A style expert who moonlights as a popular left-wing commentator in Britain, whom we will call Bowen Thrones, publicly referred to The Rake as an “obscure clothing magazine for bored aristocrats”. There are certain pejorative phrases up with which I will not put, but in this instance, considering the authority behind the opinion, I feel I can rest easy. The Rake is open to all, and the articles are supposed to educate, entertain and reminisce (perhaps flatteringly) about the past. When Mr. Thrones indicates a conviction in the Croesian riches that come with Britain’s loftier families, I can only assume he has been sucked into the narrative with perhaps little hope of rescue. Long gone are the days of high-society…

Although they share a commonality in being well dressed, Palmer Mutandwa and Marvin Holder, the duo behind the Australiabased tailoring service Button Brothers, have different points of reference. “My style stems from the 1920s and thirties Harlem Renaissance,” says Marvin. “It’s more colourful and more experimental than Palmer’s. I like to push boundaries.” Palmer, on the other hand, describes his as Afro-sartorialist, drawing on classic tailoring while injecting references to his heritage. “My style was cultivated from a very young age through church and school,” Palmer says. The pair grew up on different continents — Palmer in Zimbabwe and Marvin in Trinidad and Tobago — and met in Melbourne after a mutual friend introduced them at a party. They quickly realised that their values were well aligned, and parlayed an…

As evocative quips go, my favourite among them is, “I don’t know nothing ’bout birthing no babies”, uttered by Scarlett O’Hara’s servant Prissy when commanded to aid in the impending arrival of her progeny. My go-to comeback has always been “I ain’t got no morning suit” each time my dear friend Ahmed ‘Shary’ Rahman, a man whose largesse overflows like the sweet goblets of wine in Valhalla, has invited me to Royal Ascot, the most fabled horse-racing occasion in all of Christendom. O.K., so here’s the deal. It is ironic that as the individual that started a magazine about style, to my greatest shame I am not so secretly something of a slob. The comedic value of this was made abundantly clear to me at the previous Pitti Uomo, when…

Winston Churchill had to be provided with a donkey to cart him from drive to drive while shooting at Eaton Hall. When you think of the aristocracy, what sports spring to mind? Hunting? Possibly, except that’s changed in recent years, since the 2004 ban, and now those on horseback chase a trail laid by quad bikes, which is fairer on the foxes but red-faced sorts splutter that it’s less romantic. Polo? Princes William and Harry play, but then so do dodgy oligarchs and gas tycoons. Croquet would have been a good answer, had the Beckhams not instructed the landscape gardener to map out a croquet lawn at their house in Oxfordshire last year. And I wouldn’t exactly call charades a sport. So by my reckoning that leaves only one option…

The luxury of a separate jacket for off-duty wear was a sign of affluence and sophistication. One of the few compensations for the end of summer is the opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with our winter wardrobes. Despite the industry trying to sell us the benefit of perennial suiting, the sophisticated dresser will always have a good amount of seasonal clothing to call upon. For the cooler months, this should include a healthy amount of flannel and tweed. Tweed is a wonderful fabric that allows even the most conservative gentleman to have a little colour in their clothing. The home of tweed is Scotland, and the name itself derives from a misreading of the word ‘tweel’ (the Gaelic word for twill) by a clerk at a London cloth merchant on a…

ELLEN VON UNWERTH Ellen von Unwerth, born in 1954 in Germany, gained attention with her sensual Guess campaign in the early 1990s, followed by campaigns for Absolut, Agent Provocateur, Aston Martin, Belvedere, Chanel, Dior, Ferragamo, G-Star, Guerlain, H&M, Jimmy Choo, Lacoste, L’Oréal, Mercedes-Benz, Rolex, Shiseido, Tommy Hilfiger, Veuve Cliquot, Victoria’s Secret, and many more. She is a regular contributor to magazines all over the world, such as Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Glamour, i-D, Interview, Playboy, The Face, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and many international Vogue editions. She also directed short films for clients including Dior, Guess and Katharine Hamnett, as well as a range of commercials and music videos. Her book projects are an important part of her career. Her first book, Snaps, was published in 1994, followed by Wicked…

It’s easy to hate Sid Vicious. He is, after all, to blame for embodying one of the 20th century’s most exciting art movements in the form of a drooling, talentless junkie in a swastika T-shirt. Beyond the ferret-faced, sneery urchin cartoon, though, there’s another Sid, not much more real but closer to something celebratory, romantic and even meaningful. Like the Marquis de Sade or Francis Bacon or Quentin Tarantino, he took ugliness and nihilism to their extremes, and found beauty in them. He said it best in an interview filmed in December 1978, close to the end of his brutishly short life. “What would you like to happen over the next year or so?” asks the interviewer, to which Vicious replies, “I’d like to have fun… That’s my object in…

The phrase ‘endangered species’, I’m reliably informed, puts the willies up the giant pandas of Gansu province, the handful of snow leopards lurking in the Himalayas, and the whooping cranes that stalk the Gulf Coast of Texas. Not so us Sussex Spaniels, despite our numbers dropping so dramatically after the second world war that a mere 55 of us were registered with the British Kennel Club in 2013. For does not such rarity elevate us to the status of gold over glass, californium over calcium, platinum over petrol-station award-points ornament? At the risk of sounding a little haughty, I’m widely deemed a rare specimen within a rare breed, not least thanks to my atypically lengthy legs, which lend an elegance to my demeanour that has always translated beautifully via the…

There are worse ways to go than being fucked to death by Britt Ekland. On your wedding night. This was almost the fate of the British comic genius Peter Sellers, one third of The Goon Show and creator of Inspector — sorry, Chief Inspector — Clouseau in the Pink Panther film franchise. It turned out to be a garden variety non-fatal heart attack. But if the world didn’t know the name of his bride — whom he’d met just 10 days earlier — it sure as hell was familiar with Britt Ekland by the end of 1964. The 22-year-old actress, who was born in Stockholm, had blink-and-you’ll-miss-her walk-on roles in films like Elvis Presley’s G.I. Blues before she was scouted in an Italian coffee shop and promptly sent to England.…

If Jeremy Hackett did not exist, the Japanese would have to invent him. In the land of the Chrysanthemum Throne, they have a habit of taking things to serious extremes; after all, they used to revere their emperor as a living god, and when it comes to clothes, Jeremy enjoys a similar level of celebrity, his every sartorial foible slavishly copied. If Jeremy were to be spotted sitting on a deckchair with rolled-up trousers and a knotted handkerchief on his head, the smart young men of Tokyo would present themselves at their places of work thus attired the next morning. The only reason I can imagine that the Roppongi Hills shopping centre has not been renamed the Hackett San Traditional Shopping Village is because Jeremy Hackett is too modest. Pay…

Tequila has been given a bad rap, claimed by patrons of dive bars who consume it en masse late into the night. Francisco Alcaraz speaks with a deep, raspy voice, carefully considering every word before uttering it. His hair, still as thick as a teenager’s, forms neat waves across his face, his dark eyes hidden behind a generous flick of fringe. His manner and the way he commands respect call to mind the infamous Don Corleone — and, in many ways, he is the Godfather of tequila. In his role as Master Distiller of Patrón, he was responsible for developing the brand’s winning recipe close to 30 years ago, and, thanks to his intricate knowledge of the production process, has helped turn it into one of the most successful tequila…

They don’t make them like they used to, they say. This maxim chimes with the radical obsession with modernising everything, which even a casual glance at older cars, clothes and magazines shows is a vain pursuit. Supposedly technology is a conduit to making our lives simpler, but let me put it to you this way: how many of you get away from work on leaving the office? Your phone is a portable computer, which means you are contactable from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep. Do you ever get time to yourself? In high-intensity lives, is there a place any more for privacy, independent thought or self-improvement? How about the gym? Perhaps it is the perfect place for this sort of thing. Your self-discipline will determine…