Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 - Issue 101 i The Rake

Each issue of The Rake is a valentine of one form or another. After all, we are here to express love and admiration for something — from pleats to Pauillac, Partagás to Porfirio Rubirosa. This makes the magazine mainly subjective, and long may that remain. This issue is no different, though the circumstances that inspired it are not routine. We all watched in horror earlier this year as destructive wildfires swept through western and northern Los Angeles, a town with which I have developed an interesting relationship. This, the 101st edition of The Rake, is our love letter to the City of Angels — both the fantasy of it and the reality. Before the pandemic I used to go to L.A. once a year to meet publicists and book our…

I love L.A. But I didn’t always. I moved to the city in 1981, to be a tour guide at Universal Studios at the tender age of 17, hellbent on becoming a movie star. When my best friend and I pulled into the heart of Hollywood after driving for 48 hours from Michigan, I expected to see the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard teeming with movie stars. Instead, a drugged-out party girl jumped on the hood of my car at a stop light and started screaming profanities at me through my windshield. Welcome to L.A. Los Angeles is a difficult town to figure out, and an even more difficult town to tame. Not that it is tameable. L.A. tames you. It trains you how to deal with it. And through its…

There are certain quotes that in their pithiness tell you everything you need to know about their subject. Fitzgerald’s description of Gatsby’s smile is one: “It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” In this esteemed echelon of description also sits the country icon and long-time marijuana enthusiast Willie Nelson, who once noted that “there are two kinds of men in this world: those who have a crush on Linda Ronstadt and those who have never heard of her”. This writer’s Linda awakening came in 1977, with the release of the song Blue Bayou. I didn’t…

As a child in the 1980s, Christoph Grainger-Herr was taken by his father to a watch boutique in Bern, close to the family holiday home in Switzerland. There, while his father pored over the latest options for a Nautilus in steel, the young Grainger-Herr examined the pieces around him, unwittingly forging an emotional bond with horology that would become his life calling. Forty years (and a degree in interior design and career stints in architecture and marketing) later, Grainger-Herr is the Chief Executive of IWC Schaffhausen, a position he has held since 2016. In the past nine years he has kept IWC’s time-honoured lines fresh with thoughtful evolutionary steps; overseen the design and construction of a state-of-the-art 13,500 m² production facility in the brand’s native Schaffhausen; nurtured the maison’s relationship…

There aren’t enough pages in this magazine to contain the hidden joys and delights of Los Angeles. So much of the pleasure of moving through this city comes from discovery, from turning right on a road where you were supposed to turn left, and stumbling across something so singular and wonderful you forget whatever it was you were looking for in the first place. The city stretches for countless miles in every direction, divided up into neighbourhoods and communities that take on lives of their own as soon as you pass the next intersection. Like a great many Los Angeles transplants, what drew me to the city was the sense there would always be more to discover. No matter how long you’ve been here, the city will find a way…

andrew maness Andrew Maness has spent more than a decade working in lifestyle media, driving some of the most interesting vehicles in the world and travelling widely while doing so. Through writing about all types of vehicles and motorcycles for outlets such as Gear Patrol, Cool Hunting and Jalopnik, he developed a sharp eye for great products that has been applied to pieces on hotels, spirits, menswear and watches. His passion for print magazines culminated in The Motoring Journal, a premium quarterly that produced seven issues under his stewardship and still maintains a cult following. Andrew recently relocated from Los Angeles to Nashville to oversee brand direction for One Garage, a social club and lounge where auto-moto culture underpins the community. Here, Andrew immerses himself in a motoring community of a…

The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown did many things well, not least the casting of Timothée Chalamet, but one of the best was its title. The phrase comes from Dylan’s 1965 song Like a Rolling Stone, but it’s also the best available description of its writer. Whatever your degree of devotion, Dylan remains unknowable — frustratingly and tantalisingly but, ultimately, gloriously so. As he sang in 2020, he contains multitudes, and that is, against stiff competition, the greatest thing about him. However much water you draw, he is a well that never runs dry. That quality — mystique — is one of the three essential ingredients of popular music, and he has preserved it for 65 years and counting. The other ingredients are talent and showmanship, both of which…

Breitling Superocean Heritage Kelly Slater edition A six-foot wave can hit any hapless human with a force of 1,700 pounds per square metre — roughly the weight of a polar bear. The breakers thundering into the north shore of Maui, Hawaii, often swell to at least 10 times that size. When they do — with all other variables deferring to averages — the energy they pack is akin to that which a typical thunderstorm releases over the course of a few minutes. Surfing may seem like a serene activity to us landlubbers gazing from the beach, but it is as hardcore an adventure sport as they come, and as valid an assertion of a watch’s technical credibility as diving, the sport more commonly associated with Breitling since its first Superocean…

Travelling from London to Los Angeles for 48 hours takes some justification. It has to be worth it, especially if you’ve been to L.A. before and the bungalow neighbourhoods make you feel very far from the warm embrace of London’s multistorey comforts. L.A. is many things, but it is not cosy. It might surprise you to hear that my reluctance to travel halfway around the world submitted to a little-known watch brand called Urban Jürgensen. This Danish heritage maker was being relaunched after quietus and speculation over the past few years, and the announcement of the relaunch was accompanied by the kind of fanfare you do not expect from an independent brand: journalists flown in from all over the world, campaign imagery shot by Ellen von Unwerth, and a vast…

17.06.2025 The Rake teamed up with Bonhams and London Watch Week to celebrate the magazine’s 100th issue and London’s horological prestige.…

In 1968 Burt Lancaster starred in a film called The Swimmer. It’s the story of Ned Merrill, a Connecticut suburbanite who embarks on the quixotic quest to make his way home, one hot afternoon, via a procession of his neighbours’ backyard pools. Lancaster spends the entire film clad in Speedos, thus not only keeping wardrobe costs down but also ostensibly doing nothing to dampen the esteemed critic Pauline Kael’s assessment of him as “a prime specimen of hunkus Americanus”. But, as the dives and lengths accumulate, it transpires that all is not hunky-dory in NedWorld: he’s hiding a dark secret, and the atmosphere, along with the martini-swigging peers he hails along the way, gets colder and less cocktail-hour benign until, at the film’s climax, he’s hugging his wracked body in…

Stuart Martin is all dressed up when I meet him on the set of his photoshoot in Covent Garden. His T-shirt is tucked into a pair of high-waisted, pleated trousers, giving him a classic Hollywood look that would make him the best-dressed man on any red carpet today. Fresh off completing two new projects, both released later this year, and priming himself for another production, I catch him in a moment of relative quiet. Martin was born in Scotland and studied drama at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. Best known for Medici (in which he played a young Lorenzo opposite Dustin Hoffman as his father) as well as Jamestown and Miss Scarlet and the Duke, he’s had his fair share of historical roles. But now he’s shaking it…

“Nobody knows what happened,” the Los Angeles Times reported this year, “during the two years that a French Bulldog named Havoc went missing.” Nobody, that is, except the canine at the centre of the story: me. The media stories are all about my beloved owner, Yasmine: about how, over the 791 days I was missing, she took six months off work to try to find me. How she fell out with her mom (who was holding the leash when I bolted), and how she launched a social media campaign that had California’s fibre-optic cables bulging like the belly of the rattlesnake devouring me in her most vivid nightmares. The other imagined scenarios that gave Yasmine the nocturnal sweats had my guts spread over six metres of asphalt on the Lankershim…

If I’m being profligate with life’s limited supply of superlatives by proclaiming this, so be it: Disney’s 1967 interpretation of The Jungle Book is undoubtedly the most uplifting animated movie of all time. Seventy-eight minutes of nectareous anthropomorphism, taking the viewer on a vicarious journey along the gamut of human emotions towards a bittersweet denouement, it was a panacea during this writer’s post-adolescent college years for what Churchill called his ‘black dog’. Yet it was nearly a very different movie. Early versions of both the script and the musical score had far more in common with the Rudyard Kipling novel on which the film is based — a rather foreboding story of abandonment and alienation tinged with violence, moral ambiguity and austere Victorian-era didacticism. Walt Disney, who died early on…

Anthony Bourdain once said, “I need the anaesthetic qualities of the local firewater”. He wasn’t referring only to whisky; he was referring to local alcohol in general, the sort of stuff that puts hairs on your chest. The term ‘firewater’ originates from the Gaelic uisge beatha, meaning ‘water of life’, which was later anglicised to ‘whisky’. Whether it originated from the burning sensation when drinking or the flammable effects, no one is sure. This relationship between fire and water is the essence of whisky; there’s an old Scottish saying that “today’s rain is tomorrow’s whisky”. It’s all very poetic — no water, no whisky. Fire plays a crucial role in whisky production, too. Firstly, in drying the barley or, in bourbon, the corn and rye. Then there is flavour development…

Spiritual homes for this publication are manifold. London’s Mayfair is perhaps our centre of gravity, but Milan’s Quadrilatero della Moda and Paris’s 7th arrondissement are orbiting bodies. Marbella, Montenegro and Shanghai can’t be visited too frequently; Como, Mykonos and the Amalfi Coast offer a huge draw when the word ‘summer’ is used as a verb, and wintry equivalents include Courchevel and St. Moritz. Across the Pond we have Saint Barthélemy, New York’s Upper East Side, and — given our bond with the movies — Tinseltown, in the city to which this issue is devoted. But a soul sanctuary that ticks more boxes than most for The Rake is the Côte d’Azur. Its focal point, Monaco — a constitutional monarchy ruled by the Grimaldi family since 1297, and the second-smallest country…