Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2024 - Issue 94 i The Rake

Dear reader, I write to you from Paris, where I am deeply immersed in the upper echelon of sartorial kung fu. My fiancée and I have just attended our fittings for our matching Cifonelli white-silk suits, which are to be worn for the welcome cocktails at our wedding on the weekend of December 7. I will most likely pair mine with a pink Hawaiian shirt made from vintage rayon and crafted by Singapore’s Kevin Seah. The wedding, which takes place the following day, starts 90 minutes before the normal permissible start time of eveningwear, but with unabashed abandon I’ll break the golden rule by donning a black Cifonelli three-piece tuxedo. This will be a single-button peaklapel jacket with a voluptuously expressive lapel and just the barest hint of a concave…

August 1, 1936 was an unseasonably drizzly and overcast day in Berlin, but nothing could dampen the ardour of the 110,000 people crammed into the city’s newly built, dauntingly brutalist Olympiastadion — with Hitler’s favoured architect, Albert Speer, ensuring that the shock and awe factor was jacked up to 11 — for the opening ceremony of what had been billed, not least by the Nazis, as the Nazi Olympics. Trumpet fanfares hailed Hitler’s arrival; the massive Hindenburg blimp loomed over the onlookers, trailing the Olympic flag; a white-clad Richard Strauss conducted a choir of 3,000 in the singing of Deutschland über Alles; and Leni Riefenstahl’s cameras were dotted around the stadium, ready to immortalise Aryan heroics. It promised to be a huge propaganda coup for nazism — the firing of…

The Athlete is a team player. His attitude is competitive, sometimes to his detriment, but nevertheless he is insatiable in his desire to take a W in his daily affairs. Often these occur in his professional life, which he approaches with an analytical eye and with an enthusiasm for the creative that is the only natural impulse for a life in front of a spreadsheet. Where his attitude plays out most assertively, of course, is in sport. The Athlete is not someone to distinguish one kind of physical activity over another — winter or summer, land or water, up a tree or down a hill, all game is fair game. This is frustrating for all of us over 30 who can still remember the days when we could eat Tupperware…

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Viewed from the sky — notwithstanding the Marche region’s verdant, undulating patchwork terrain surrounding it — Santoni’s production facility, close to the rustic town of Corridonia, could easily be the H.Q. of a Silicon Valley megadisrupter. The commodities created within, though, are far more fundamental to human existence than the frippery of what flows between transistors and microprocessors. Here, in this sprawling, brilliant-white, three-storey edifice, footwear of unsurpassed quality and flair — shoes that are worthy of the most exclusive retail hotspots, from San Francisco to Sydney via Singapore, Milan, Paris, London and Dubai — are produced by a company that is not just a custodian of Made in Italy flair but is reshaping the concept’s future. “Quality is not just about the product. It’s about how you think, how…

I have two passions in life (don’t tell my wife): design and health and fitness. For many years I’ve spent my time writing about the former, so when the Editor-in-Chief of this magazine gave me the opportunity to indulge myself in the latter, I took it. Two of the great joys for me are travelling and training in new environments, which is why the opportunity to visit the facilities at WaterRower Nohrd in Germany was a welcome double whammy. I always find that a new atmosphere is a new challenge, and a new country and climate tend to bring huge rewards. It’s almost as if it’s a reset moment: everything is new, everything is fresh, and the vibrancy I feel after a session in a new place is magnitudes greater…

Must an epiphany, by its very nature, be spontaneous? What if a cognitive awakening comes by degrees, over a period of several years? And what if the episode that clefts a single life into two distinct chapters is heralded not by light breaking through clouds and spiritual euphoria but by a portentous moment of physical catastrophe? In September 2019, Pete Reed, a Seattle-born, Gloucestershirebred Royal Navy officer and highly decorated Olympic rower, felt the vitality drain from his legs. Then 38 years old, he’d been hospitalised three days before by an onset of chest pains and numbness in his lower limbs while tackling an assault course with the Royal Marines. But it was this second, more severe spinal stroke — a disruption of blood supply to the spinal cord —…

Every collection needs a time-only dress watch. And if we take the watch geekery a step further, every collection needs a baton-marker time-only dress watch, preferably thin and hand-wound. It is the equivalent of a wardrobe needing to contain certain staples, like a crisp white shirt, a navy blue suit, some grey flannel trousers and a polished pair of brogues. If you’re in the market for such a watch, you would have come across models such as the Patek Philippe Calatrava or Laurent Ferrier Galet, or even a Vacheron Constantin Patrimony. The Patrimony is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. It comes from makers who have been in business since 1755 (which in itself is quite remarkable), and its design is both subtle and distinct. The Patrimony collection was developed…

We set the scene in July 2023. There was naturally an optimistic feel about the property market in Paris. The Olympic Games have, in the past, brought economic and infrastructure benefits to host cities, most notably via investment in transportation networks and urban regeneration projects, and in such circumstances property prices are going to go in only one direction. The influx of athletes, sponsors, officials, spectators and media descending on the host city also creates a spike in hotel prices and the market for short-term rentals. As far as Paris’s urban redevelopment hopes are concerned, the French government has focused on new areas in Greater Paris, notably for the Olympic and Paralympic village in Seine- Saint-Denis as well as Yvelines, Seine-et-Marne and Hautsde Seine. This has included a new ‘super…

I used to hate the first half of the Olympics. I always felt the swimming and gymnastics were holding up the excitement of track and field. This is almost certainly the fault of the British private school system. The day in the annual calendar that attracted the most fanfare was sports day. It fell just before the half-term break in the summer term, and so every parent would descend on my prep school, Ludgrove, park on the grounds in an infantry square, or ‘hollow square’, and open up the boots of their cars (or ‘trunks’, to our American cousins) for a picnic. My mother would put together the Eton Mess, and my father would ask me to demonstrate my honed forward defensive stroke as he pitched a tennis ball too…

It’s been a big few years for Aston Martin. Their Formula One team is hitting its stride, and has recently re-signed two-time champion Fernando Alonso. As a road-car company, the marque has launched a series of important models. Its first SUV, the DBX, arrived in 2020, eventually accounting for half of all sales the following year. The DB12 dropped in 2023 — the luxurious grand tourer with roots that date back to James Bond’s steed of choice, the DB5. This year is their biggest yet. “2024 is a year of immense product transformation at Aston Martin, with the introduction of four new models to the market before the end of the year,” says Lawrence Stroll, the executive chairman and part owner. The first launch is the all-new Vantage, the brand’s…

Welcome to Cocktail Time! Yes, thanks to Tom Chamberlin and the good folks at The Rake, I, Paul Feig, your favourite Drunk Funcle, have ill-advisedly been given my own regular column to discuss all things cocktails and the art of drinking. We all have strong opinions about what we drink and how we drink it, and I’m no different. I have some pretty immovable views about things you might not agree with — for instance, vodkamartinis are not real martinis, and gin and soda is way better than gin and tonic (please address your angry letters to Wei Koh at The Rake). But the one thing we can agree on is that a great cocktail in a great glass in a great setting with great friends is the very stuff…

You know you have speed to burn when even your name can’t keep up. She was born Florence Delorez Griffith four days before Christmas in 1959, but the world would come to know her — all too fleetingly, as it would turn out — as ‘Flo-Jo’. And she would change athletics the way Elvis changed music and then culture itself. Bruce Springsteen rhapsodised about the King in 2012, but he may well have been lauding the woman who first brought the hood to the track, the swagger to the starter’s pistol, and daylight to her competitors. “Elvis gave us full access to a new language, a new form of communication, a new way of being, a new way of looking, a new way of thinking — about sex, about race,…

Whisper it around TikTok’s facial attractiveness algorithms (they can probably hear us these days), but asymmetry can be confoundingly beautiful. This is especially the case in horology, a realm in which Rolex’s King Midas, a plethora of Cartier models (notably the Crash) and plenty of mostly ultra-rare Patek pieces have paid zero heed to the diktats of invisible axes — not just in terms of how components within the dial are positioned but when it comes to the dial’s shape. In fact, it’s hard to think of examples that aren’t eye-catching in all the right ways. The piece’s modern doppelgänger looks just as compelling as its forebear did almost 65 years ago. Given Audemars Piguet’s swashbuckling attitude to geometry over the years — this is a brand whose most famous…

The Good, the Bad & the Rugby was not always guaranteed to be a success. It was launched at an inauspicious time — 2018 — when a show about rugby was not really an itch that needed scratching, even though the sport was the third biggest in the world. And this was pre-Covid, of course, when the usual rhythms of life — commuting, socialising — meant that our collective headspace was well occupied, and the podcasting phenomenon was still in its infancy. The three presenters — Alex Payne, James Haskell and Mike Tindall — were able to cut their teeth in the medium at what Payne (I think he is the ‘Good’) refers to as the “start of the hockey stick” in podcasting’s remarkable growth. Payne had 20 years’ experience…

When the Olympic flame reaches Paris and the cauldron in the Olympic stadium is lit on July 26, the host of this year’s Games will join London as the only two cities in the world to have staged the summer event three times. That distinction, however, will be a transitory one. Come 2028, the City of Angels, Los Angeles, will also stage its third iteration of the Olympics. There are many reasons why more conurbations are not clamouring to play host, and unsurprisingly it comes down to economics: despite the explosion of international sponsorship deals and global media rights, it takes years to pay off (if not recoup) the billions in infrastructure investment, which, invariably, ends up being either forgotten, abandoned or mothballed once the elite athletes have left town.…

Contentment. I’m 24 and I’ve never known it. I’m forever in pursuit and I don’t even know what it is I’m chasing. Aubrey, old chap, I’m scared.” A masseuse’s table — that belonging to the esteemed athletics coach Sam Mussabini, as he gives his charge a pre-race rub-down — acts as a shrink’s couch in a scene in the inspirational 1981 drama Chariots of Fire that distils the movie’s philosophical matter. The patient is Harold Abrahams, baring his soul over the existential doubts that plague him to a fellow athlete friend sitting close by. “Now, in one hour’s time, I’ll be out there again. I’ll raise my eyes and look down that corridor, four feet wide, with 10 lonely seconds to justify my whole existence. But will I? Aubrey, I’ve…

paul feig Paul is a film and television director with credits including the groundbreaking Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy, Last Christmas and the remarkably rakish A Simple Favour, the sequel for which has been greenlit and will be shooting soon. He has also emerged as a gin mogul, with the release of his Artingstall’s brand proving to be a triumph and a must-have for any reputable watering hole. On his return to The Rake, Paul brings his Cocktail Time idea, which was such a hit on YouTube during those Covid-enforced lockdowns, to the page. In a new regular column, he will feature a cocktail of his choice in each issue of the magazine — starting with the ‘Palace Water’, a Feig special, on page 54 — and take the chance to…

Orchestra-pit-shaking vibratos, deity-kissed vocal cords, hearts touched via the vagus nerve: the tributes upon his death for a colossus of a man who’d flung open the doors to the arcane realm of classical music weren’t exactly devoid of poetic flounce and furbelow. The soprano Katia Ricciarelli referred to his “voice of platinum”; erstwhile rival Plácido Domingo spoke of “his divine voice, with its unmistakable timbre and complete vocal range”; the late American conductor and pianist James Levine described a knack for “delivery so natural and direct that his singing spoke right to the hearts of listeners whether they knew anything about opera or not”. He made a pact: should God spare him, he declared to himself, “I will enjoy life. I will enjoy everything.” Tellingly, though, the eulogies illuminated the…

On cold days, the average man feels a sense of relief, for seasonal clothing favours autumn and winter, with its layers of garments and fabrics allowing you to dress as a professional, or at least with appropriate bearing. It’s much harder in summer. Tailors prefer the former, too, for tweed is a more forgiving fabric and is perfect for England’s inclement weather. They are — tailors, that is — descendants of a vocational class whose output steered towards thick and austere fabrics and colours. The Victorian era ushered in the modern-day suit, but it wasn’t until after the second world war that fabric and weaving technology could make the cloths considerably lighter and more bearable in the heat. ‘Il boom’ in 1960s Italy played its part. The industrialists churned out…

David Lauren has taken watch on the bridge of his father’s eponymous brand since he joined in 2000. His ‘merchantainment’ idea for the website, in which storytelling and commerce were seamlessly blended, outpaced everyone else on the market, and even in 2024 other brands are still to catch up. One aspect of Ralph Lauren’s story that David was present to witness was the invitation by the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee for the company to dress Team USA for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Since then, Ralph Lauren have dressed every American team for the summer and winter Olympics and Paralympics, an honour not lost on the Lauren family. “When I was a child, I remember watching the Olympics on television,” David says. “It was back in the late seventies…

The setting for my interview with Giulio Bergamaschi was palatable, to say the least. The terrace of Harry’s Bar is a haven of Mayfair peacefulness after a bright, convivial luncheon with a host of curious journalists and design leaders, who, on this day, had wanted to learn about the new Chapeau! candle by Acqua di Parma, LVMH’s flagship fragrance house. (The Chapeau! is a rather smart, witty and irreverent take on Acqua di Parma’s candles, with its two-in-one/little ’n’ large design.) Bergamaschi is still relatively new to the brand, having come from Loro Piana and, before that, 18 years at L’Oréal — it has been quite the apprenticeship. Articulate and unedited, Giulio was quick to apologise (unnecessarily) for his Italian nature, which means he talks a lot. But how refreshing!…

I recently read a wonderful book called The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker. It is a reimagining of Homer’s Iliad, told from the perspective of the Trojan women captured by the Greeks. It is the era of Achilles, paranoia for the gods is at its highest, and crucially, through all the gory battles, hydration comes in the form of watered-down wine. “Whenever a man is tired, wine is a great restorer of strength,” says Homer. The Iliad was written some time between 725 and 675 BC, according to the British Museum. The birth of the Olympic Games is thought to have been around 776 BC — and do you know what they were drinking back then? Watered-down wine. Plus, they were competing in the nude. Wine and nudity…