Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2024 - Issue 93 i The Rake

There’s something to be said for persistence and consistency. They are qualities personified by this issue’s cover star, the extraordinary Bill Nighy, who made his London debut at the National Theatre in 1977 and since then has forged a career for himself with such persistence and consistency that he has been recognised with awards from the Baftas and the Golden Globes. Then there is the consistency of his elegance. My friend Hani Farsi would often dine at The Wolseley and invariably see Nighy there, eating quietly, with impeccable manners, reading a novel and dressed with understated sartorial elan. Over the past two and a half years I’ve also had to apply a degree of persistence and consistency to a significant pursuit, that of gaining acceptance from my fiancée’s parents. This…

There’s a scene in the 1993 movie Addams Family Values — the antic sequel to the earlier smash hit showcasing the ghoulish clan who reside at 001 Cemetery Lane — in which Gomez, played by Raul Julia, twirls Anjelica Houston’s Morticia around in a tango so intense that it literally catches fire. To say that Julia is attacking the role would be something of an understatement: his eyes pop, his legs skitter, he catches a knife in his teeth, and he even works in a bit of dervish-style paso doble business with a scarlet cape. He looks like he’s living out the Addams credo, Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc — ‘We gladly feast on those who would subdue us’. “Gomez gives me the opportunity to be as theatrical as I…

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Timing is everything. A marriage proposal, a punchline, a cover drive all require its mastery. Two of the above I’m not bad at. My timing with tailoring, on the other hand, needs work. Given my profession as a hoary theatrical, I’ve got three different wardrobes, role-dependent. I’d class them as follows: Starving, Cruiserweight and Leisurely. The Leisurely wardrobe is for when my characters keep their bosoms under wraps. It’s when I’ll be playing the funny best friend of the lead or an epicurean ruddy lord. The clothes in this wardrobe might not be the most elegant, but it means I’m enjoying life. And crisps. Two of my favourite things. The Cruiserweight wardrobe is really where I should be — in decent condition, mostly laying off the Monster Munch. That’s for…

Sometimes things just work out. They align, often looking and feeling effortless. No, I’m not talking about me on the dancefloor aged 16; rather, Piaget as a global brand and watchmaker in 2024. No maker has enjoyed such incredible momentum, which, in Piaget’s case, has been driven primarily by the collectors’ market shifting down in size, searching for value as well as elegant shapes and dials. Piaget have these in abundance, often in their back catalogue but increasingly in their new models, too. I think most people aren’t aware of the incredible history of ultra-thin watchmaking and the wild personal stories behind the fusion of pop culture, high society and friendships. Piaget turn 150 this year, and they have some big launches to come. The piece ripe for an update,…

It is hard to fully express the madness involved in founding a magazine dedicated to craftsmanship during a global financial crisis. There was not a number-crunching financier or even a money launderer anywhere in the world who would have backed it, however much they might have wanted to read it. If it were going to be attempted, the passion behind it had to outweigh good sense — a conviction based on the notion of, ‘Build it and they will come’. Well, nearly 16 years later, and with Wei Koh’s original vision having negotiated the choppy waters of the luxury market, The Rake’s flag is still aloft as we sail a thousand tributaries to find interesting stories to tell and wonderful people to profile. Wherever we have gone, craft has been…

Dónal Finn is incredibly generous with his time when I chat to him at the Soho Hotel in central London. Interviewees are often quick to the point, with pre-planned answers they know will tick the journalist’s boxes. But Finn is thoughtful with every response, and gives his full attention to our 90-minute conversation over a coffee and a red-berry smoothie. It’s especially generous as his vocal cords will need as much rest as possible over the next nine months. He’s just landed the lead role in the award-winning musical Hadestown, in which he’s required to sing throughout the entirety of each performance — and there are eight shows a week. Hadestown makes its London debut at the Lyric theatre after an electric run on Broadway. It won eight Tony awards…

The Bespeaker is captivated to the point of obsession by beautiful, entrancing and wonderful things. Nothing is too authentic to this man: his eye is drawn to beauty and imperfection alike, so his is a discerning and exacting custom. If a craftsman relishes a challenge, consider our man to be the ultimate setter. The Bespeaker has an existentialist outlook, understanding that the afterlife is necessarily worth worrying about more than the minutes he fills in this life. He is therefore careful to fill the space and time around him with that from which he derives joy — from the children he has and the wife he loves dearly to the job to which he dedicates himself and, of course, the items he collects. The clothes are an expression of his…

To quote the savant that is Will & Grace’s Karen Walker: “Coulda, shoulda, Prada.” It’s always a fanciful exercise to wonder what would have happened if certain actors had not turned down parts that later became celluloid legend. Before we tell you which role the Italian actress Virna Lisi said a frustrated No, grazie to in 1968, let’s understand where the 31-year-old’s career was then. She’d been on Hollywood’s radar for at least five years, having also refused the role of Tatiana Romanova in From Russia with Love. In 1965, however, she appeared as Mrs. Ford opposite Jack Lemmon in How To Murder Your Wife, which included a scene in which she ascended from a cake in a bikini that was made of strategically placed daubs of icing. Marilyn had…

Contrariness can be a wonderful innovator. The greatest romantic novels — Shelley’s Frankenstein, Austen’s best-known bouts of barbed gentility, the Sunday-night screen adaptation fare of Hugo and Tolstoy — always raised a middle finger to the formal austerity of Enlightenment ideals; impressionism was a tetchily daubed reaction to the craven verisimilitude of realism; punk was a rebellion against, well, everything except youthful nihilism. ‘Épater la bourgeoisie’ would have been a pretty insipid rallying cry without bourgeois values for those French Decadent poets to rail against. When childhood friends Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet united to form a company that, by the time of its 150th anniversary next year, will have become the most decorated by the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève of horology’s Holy Trinity (which includes Rolex…

When this issue’s assignment was presented to me, I wanted to shift my gaze from the U.K. and immerse myself in other cultures and architecture. What I discovered was that the most attractive places to live manage to harmonise architecture with the natural landscape. Identify this environmental wavelength, and your living experience will soar… Chefchaouen, Morocco Nestled in the enchanting landscape of the Rif Mountains is Chefchaouen, known as the ‘Blue Pearl’, a charming town of cobalt-hued dwellings that help create a picturesque and tranquil atmosphere. And nestled within Chefchaouen is my recommendation for its finest street: Rue Outiwi. Chefchaouen’s rich cultural tapestry — it is influenced by Berber, Arab and Andalusian traditions — makes for a vibrant community life. The medina’s narrow, winding streets reveal hidden gems of local…

rafe spall Rafe is an English actor who was born and raised in London. He has enjoyed a varied career spanning more than 20 years. Recently he opened Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird in the West End, playing Atticus Finch, for which he garnered the latest of three Olivier nominations. He has also played Jerry in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal on Broadway, directed by Mike Nichols and alongside Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, and he starred in the acclaimed one-man show Death of England at the National Theatre. In film he has worked for Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Ang Lee, Cameron Crowe and Adam McKay. Most recently in television he appeared as a syphilitic cockney cowboy in Hugo Blick’s The English, and will soon be starring as the…

Posthumous reputations are seldom unequivocally fair. Some take an embarrassment of achievements to the grave and are then recognised for a single contribution to posterity (Nicolaus Copernicus enriched our understanding of the cosmos in uncountable ways, but is remembered solely for the heliocentric model of the solar system); others achieve next to nothing but enjoy eternal recognition for a single act (in some cases a single act they didn’t even carry out: Amerigo Vespucci — the obscure navigator after whom, by many accounts due to a blunder by an early cartographer, the most powerful nation in the world is named — springs to mind). Still more have manifold achievements overshadowed by a single transgression or foible: during Bill Clinton’s tenure in the White House, 1,700 Soviet nuclear warheads were dismantled…

The Enlightenment-era sage Immanuel Kant asserted that revolution was an inevitable step towards a higher ethical foundation for society. It was an erudite socio-historical interpretation — at the risk of dragging bathos into darkly flippant realms — of the making-an-omelette/breaking-eggs conundrum. The omelette in question, though, is not always one of tasty egalitarianism — China’s Cultural Revolution led to a decade of turmoil, violence and starvation — and even when the eventual outcome is palatable, the quality of the eggs broken in pursuit of fairness and parity has, over the centuries, been truly lamentable. Feudalism and the monarchy were not the only victims of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, for example: medieval literary texts and works of art and architecture from all over France — anything with subjects pertaining…

Tag Heuer Carrera Chronograph The phrase ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ springs to mind when it comes to the nicknames the watch community applies to iconic timepieces. One would think the marketing bods at Rolex would shy away from anything that conflicts with the house’s messaging, such as ‘the Pepsi’ (the GMT-Master with red and blue bezels) or ‘the Hulk’ (the Submariner in green), and one doubts that Patek are overly enamoured of ‘Disco Volante’ — Italian for ‘flying saucer’ — as an appellation for certain Calatravas. And yet: so affectionately are they meant, and such is the contribution these monikers make to horological folklore, the major of manufactures tend to embrace them. This has certainly been the case since, in the late 1960s, a new version of…

Grail seekers of a horological persuasion are rather more spoiled for choice than anyone doggedly holding out hope of unearthing from a Cornish allotment the chalice that once held our saviour’s blood. The Patek Philippe 2499 seen on the wrist of John Lennon months before his murder; Miles Davis’s Breitling Navitimer; the Omega Speedmaster that Buzz Aldrin wore on the moon — all of these are a life-changing auction lot waiting to happen for the propitious individual upon whom serendipity smiles. These missing pieces have a spellbinding effect on the watchcollecting community, so it was epic news when, in 2022, the Breitling Cosmonaute specially commissioned by Scott Carpenter for the United States’ second orbital spaceflight — the first Swiss timepiece to reach the realms of space, let alone circle the…