Tabla de contenidos para December 2019 - Issue 67 en The Rake

At my peril I paraphrase Queen Elizabeth II in her speech to Guildhall on the 40th anniversary of her accession to the throne. “2019 is not a year I shall look back on with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has been an annus horribilis.” As far as I’m concerned, 2019 truly sucked ass. It has sucked big fat donkey balls. To put it metaphorically, 2019 was like being an agoraphobic living downhill from a waste processing plant when the main tank blows and you are stuck helplessly as an endless tsunami of the most repugnant faecal matter washes over you with seeming ceaselessness. Why did 2019 blow so damnably much? Why shall it be indelibly inked besides the word ass-suckitude in the…

There is a park that is known for the faces it attracts. The smile on their faces, it speaks of profound inner peace. They’ve taken a lifetime lease on Paley Park… Paley Park is nestled in the heart of Midtown Manhattan — on the site of the former Stork Club, no less — and was dedicated to the city of New York by William S. Paley, the former chairman of CBS, in 1967. The original ‘vest-pocket park’, its tenth of an acre is dominated by a 20-foot-high wall of water at the rear, while a shade-friendly grid of honey locust trees and two ‘vertical lawns’ of English ivy add to the city-bolthole feel. When New York’s public park smoking ban went into effect in May 2011, the private space of…

The Rake meets Gala Gordon at the distinctly unrakish hour of 9am, a positively American time for an interview. What’s more, it’s in darkest Streatham, where a family home has been requisitioned temporarily for our photoshoot. The house’s calm suburban exterior conceals a feast of curiosities. In a room just off the hallway stands a stuffed ostrich, several birds in specimen jars and, in the fireplace, a model zebra. The walls are lined with anatomical drawings of eye-opening detail. None of it seems to faze our subject in the slightest. She sallies in, grabs a coffee, and sets about the questions, dressed for the encroaching autumn in a black roll-neck, black trousers and white Stan Smiths. She is half-Argentinian, and you can see it in her large dark eyes and…

The New Rolex Oyster Perpetual Day-Date 36 Range A product endorsement by the POTUS could have lost some of its lustre of late, but just a decade ago, Barack Obama declaring his fondness for his BlackBerry amounted to, advertising experts said, free publicity worth up to £33m. Days later, on the day of his election to the role of most powerful man on Earth, Obama greeted crowds looking about as presidential as any man ever has in a Canali suit, prompting Elisabetta Canali, the granddaughter of the company’s founder, to say: “It was incredible for us.” In the post-war decades, when the office of the presidency was regarded with unequivocal awe, a commendation from the incumbent of the White House was a very big deal. And it was no surprise…

Remember when you were at school there was that one item of clothing you just had to own? It would appear in daydreams when you were supposed to be focusing on classwork or avoiding rogue paper planes. In these dreams, a markedly more chiselled version of yourself (in whatever it was you fantasised wearing) would be surrounded by a league of admirers. “Who is he?” they would ask, “and where can I get one of those polyester-blend parkas?” This might be something of an exaggeration, but the release of Lardini’s LIKNIT collection — an amalgamation of ‘like’ and ‘knit’ — has sparked memories of one such experience, when playing truant from school with a pal at a London department store. Filling an imaginary shopping basket — worth a banker’s annual…

special thanks to 11 Cadogan Gardens hotel There is something about Auro Montanari — otherwise known by his watch-collecting, self-publishing nom de plume John Goldberger — that immediately tells you that you are in the presence of greatness. His books on vintage watches, such as his seminal tome on steel Patek Philippes, are not only the most significant in the pantheon but have shaped the culture of vintage watch collecting. Indeed, in horological circles he is considered something of a demigod, descended from Mount Olympus to guide mankind to vintage-watch-collecting enlightenment. Among the many unicorns in his personal collection are a Patek 3449 (one of only three in the world), for which he amusingly horse-traded one of three existing 1967 Rolex 6239 Yacht Masters one summer in Capri. Upon noticing…

special thanks to Annabel’s For almost 50 years the name Lucan has meant one thing: Lord Lucan, who was a dashing figure, gambler, sportsman and doting father. The disappearance of Lord Lucan, and the ensuing manhunt, has, for some reason, gripped the British imagination for almost half a century, so it is perhaps unsurprising that it has taken a foreigner to change the perception of the name. The Danish-born Anne-Sofie Foghsgaard — now the 8th Countess of Lucan, having married Lord Lucan’s son, George Bingham — would have made a superb Bond heroine in the Connery days: not one of the supine sirens that the gender stereotyping of the era dictated, but a strong, sexy heroine in the Tilly Masterson mould — she who took a shot at 007 early…

special thanks to Kent, Haste & Lachter Boardroom bluster, cocktail-lounge class, Pitti Box panache: Jonathan Alexander Edwards, the founder of the razor-sharp menswear forum MilanStyle.com, can nail it all. It’s a talent that was instilled, by osmosis, from an early age. “My late mother was a hobbyist dressmaker and knitter, so I was always around people who make things,” he tells The Rake. “That’s why I have a deep respect for, and familiarity with, those bespoke tailors/shirtmakers who make for me today.” ‘Sunday best’, he says, was a high-octane concept in the Edwards household. “My mum would take us to church on Sundays, and I would wear bespoke suits made by my uncle, a now-retired tailor. We’d go to the fabric store and pick the Made in Yorkshire wool, end-of-roll…

special thanks to Chelsea Barracks If you had been driving the 30-minute stretch from the Cheshire town of Frodsham to Connah’s Quay Labour Club on a Saturday night in 1987, you would almost certainly have chanced upon a blond-haired boy banging out songs in the passenger seat of his father’s car. Tuning up for another night in a room fog-thick with cigarette smoke in front of an almost exclusively male working-class audience, the young boy was nevertheless unperturbed by the reaction (or lack thereof) his performance would provoke. It certainly wasn’t the £18 a night he was turning up for, although that was more than enough to keep him in hair gel and Smash Hits magazines for another month (he’d use one to read about his idols Depeche Mode and…

Special thanks to the Connaught Hotel…

Describing what sounds like some kind of sartorial superhero who’d rather fight crime in a pair of neatly pressed trousers than latex tights, Antonio Sanna is discussing ‘Zegna Man’ at Ermenegildo Zegna’s central London store. In front of us is a single plinth, on which rest five black cubed bottles of some of the most luxurious parfums released in the past year: Zegna’s highly anticipated Essenze collection, which celebrates nearly 110 years of heritage. The plinth resembles something a museum might use to display Aeneas leading his Trojans, and so the question is posed: who did Zegna’s fragrance team have in mind while producing these scents? “His essence is understatement,” says Sanna. “For over a century the Zegna Man continues to enjoy being subtle and modern, but masculine, perfectly aware…

“Twelve years, 350 pages, 315 photos, 150,000 words…” Alan Flusser describes his latest book, an illustrated biography of Ralph Lauren, as “the most difficult and challenging project I’ve ever undertaken”. And yet he makes it pretty clear that it was also the most rewarding: “Perhaps the most salient thing about my creative process, and how this 12-year marathon impacted, was that the more I delved and the more I dug, the more I found. It was amazing to find just how much of [Lauren’s] work passed the ultimate litmus test — that of time.” From his very first book, Making the Man, Flusser has been expounding on Lauren and his ability to distil every positive connotation of the word ‘lifestyle’ into apparel. In fact, there has been a strong bond…

ADRIANO MENEGHETTI – www.adrianomeneghetti.com ALBERT THURSTON – www.albertthurston.com ALEXANDER MCQUEEN – www.alexandermcqueen.com ALICE MADE THIS – www.alicemadethis.com AMI – www.amiparis.fr AMOUR LUX – www.armorlux.com ANDERSON & SHEPPARD – www.anderson-sheppard.co.uk ANDREA POMPILIO – www.andreapompilio.it AQUASCUTUM – www.aquascutum.com AQUAZZURA – www.aquazzura.com ASPREY – www.asprey.com AUDEMARS PIGUET – www.audemarspiguet.com AUDI – www.audi.co.uk BALLY – www.bally.com BAMFORD – www.bamfordwatchdepartment.com BARBANERA – www.barbanerastyle.com BASELWORLD – www.baselworld.com BATES – www.bates-hats.com BEGG & CO. – www.beggandcompany.com BELL & ROSS – www.bellross.com BELSTAFF – www.belstaff.co.uk BERLUTI – www.berluti.com BERRY BROS. & RUDD – www.bbr.com BLACKHORSE LANE ATELIERS – www.blackhorselane.com BLANCPAIN – www.blancpain.com BORSALINO – www.borsalino.com BREGUET – www.breguet.com BRIONI – www.brioni.com BROOKS BROTHERS – www.brooksbrothers.com BRUNELLO CUCINELLI – www.brunellocucinelli.com BULGARI HOTEL – www.bulgarihotels.com BUDD SHIRTMAKERS – www.buddshirts.co.uk BULGARI – www.bulgari.com CALABRESE 1924 – www.calabrese1924.com CAMOSHITA UNITED ARROWS –…

Gstaad is a small ski-resort town nestled in the Swiss Alps that — alongside St. Moritz, Courchevel and Zermatt — has long been regarded as the epitome of idyllic Alpine chic, and favoured by the jet-set both historic and contemporary. The great thing about Gstaad is the ease with which you can reach it — it is a two-hour drive or train journey from Geneva, making it an ideal location even for a long weekend. The charm of Gstaad lies in the fact that it caters to a range of skiers and non-skiers alike. The skiing is good though not great, due to its relatively low altitude, yet it makes up for this by providing the ardent après-skier like myself with a fabulous choice of options for entertainment — with…

Ask the man in the street to name a ‘beast of burden’ — or, perhaps, forget the street and ask one of those loud-shirted intellectual neophytes squeezing all of his Reader’s Digest-crammed general knowledge into two minutes of fame on a daytime T.V. quiz show — and he’ll no doubt nominate the camel. He’d have a point, for none other than Friedrich Nietzsche described the wretched creature as such in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his treatise on the three metamorphoses that make up the human condition. Indeed, those ungainly quadrupeds have been the donkeys of the desert, hauling heavy loads across a vast, inhospitable landscape, for millennia. But camels, with their measly herbivorous appetites, sand-swatting long eyelashes and valve-like nostrils, have adapted to the cause over billions of years. Now imagine…

There is a time-honoured adage — indeed, one of the oldest in the English language, dating back to the mid- 16th century — that insists you can’t teach an ageing canine neoteric methodologies. Try telling that, though, to the trio of young, dashing entrepreneurs — brothers Sergio and Sebastiano Guardì, plus Alessandro Pagliacci — who in 2011 founded Barbanera as a start-up (and upstart) shoemaker rooted in Italian artisanal tradition that is open to external influences and possesses a healthy soupçon of youthful ‘attitude’. Since then Barbanera have been plundering the cultural high seas for inspiration (‘Barbanera’ is Italian for ‘blackbeard’, aptly enough), and not always sartorial ones — the brothers’ father and his love of art and antiques is one; rock and psychedelic music is another (Sergio has trodden…

A love affair with shoes is not just for women — let’s get that out of the way. And men, not women, are to blame for the existence of the stereotype. For decades we have poked fun at our partners’ fascination with footwear, refusing to employ any nuance in understanding the dynamic between practicality and art. This relationship — that of practicality versus art; not of men being rude to women — is, as far as I am concerned, the beating heart of luxury. I know that, to some, luxury can be the pleasure of peace and quiet amid a household of hormonal children. It can be the privilege of a flat bed on an airplane, replete with a shower that won’t admit ‘more than two people at a time’,…

special thanks to Mark’s Club Having lived in Los Angeles, plugged into the central nervous system of the Hollywood film industry in my capacity as the assistant to Kathryn Bigelow, I can state with absolute certainty that Paul Feig should not exist. Because, having spent the better part of five decades there, I have witnessed first-hand how globally banal Los Angeles is and how universally superficial, mercenary and amoral its denizens are. I can state that I have never met anyone successful in the business who on some level is not a bit of a dick. So my question is: how is it that a man who is the paradigm of classic elegance, the apogee of largesse, and a man whose every instinct it is to perpetuate charm in those…

special thanks to Mark’s Club For a couple of dapper gents about town, the circumstance in which Christopher Modoo met Richard Wheat was a little incongruous. “It was at Hampton Court train station,” Wheat says. “We were going to the football — an Arsenal game.” They were guests of a mutual acquaintance that day, but another of their shared passions — men’s style — soon helped them establish a close friendship. “I seem to remember Chris wanting to show me the jacket he was wearing,” Wheat says, chuckling. “It had a bespoke pocket made specially to fit the dimensions of an Arsenal programme.” Does that tally with what we know of Modoo’s love of tailoring and exquisite attention to detail? Rhetorical question. Fifteen years later, Modoo (the Arsenal fan) and…

special thanks to The Polo Bar, New York When it comes to men’s dress codes, “the times” — as a Minnesotan folk singer of no little repute once rasped — “they are a-changin’”. In fact, we stand at “the precipice of a new era”, according to the sartorial polymath Alan Flusser. For those late in the room, Flusser is a designer, stylist and tailor and the proprietor of New York City’s finest custom clothing outlet. He’s also the author of Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion (and four other erudite, accessible and edifying books), and a permanent fixture on Vanity Fair’s international best-dressed list for the past two decades. In short, the winner of our Lifetime Achievement Award is a man whose view on the subject of…

The Crosby Street Hotel will forever be connected to one of my most vivid, seminal and beloved memories of the greatest city on the planet, New York fucking City. As someone who was born there (Mount Sinai hospital), raised there (U.N., Anglo-American, and Trinity schools), and who has a Proustian palimpsest full of halcyon New York memories (Studio 54, CBGBs, Nell’s), I have given myself special dispensation to call Manhattan by this affectionate sobriquet. Anyway, the story goes like this. Many years ago, upon my wife’s first sojourn to New York, we were traipsing up Lafayette Street towards Cosme, our intended dinner destination. Now, despite the November chill, and its effect of shrinking the diameter of her fingers — and despite my specific warning about this — my wife, who…

If you are an haute couture client — in other words, if you take your place at the table of the top one per cent of the top one per cent — you can look forward to certain privileges when it comes to shopping for clothes, chief among them the guarantee that nobody else will ever have the same item as you. But when you’re a Dolce & Gabbana haute couture client, you’re given the world, or at least — as evidenced by the Italian duo’s most recent Alta Moda extravaganza in Sicily — the last 3,000 years of it, wrapped up in a Grecian odyssey of lavishly handmade dresses, unbelievably ornate suiting, and jewellery outrageous enough to have Elizabeth Taylor rising from the grave. This summer, amid Greek gods,…

Chilean-born photographer and director Nino Muñoz got his start as a photography assistant at the age of 18 in 1990s New York City; in the two decades since he has earned acclaim for a signature style that is at once grounded in fashion and steeped in the intimacy and ephemeral moments of classic celebrity portraiture. His body of work reflects his versatility, ranging from fashion brand advertising and major T.V. networks to intimate editorials with Hollywood’s most noteworthy celebrities. His work also includes an ongoing personal project that has been shot along the beaches of Chile, Brazil, Costa Rica and California. Nino lives in Los Angeles with his husband and three dogs — but pulled himself away to photograph our cover star, Jon Hamm (page 98). Simon Crompton is a…

It’s fortunate that Stavros Niarchos didn’t live to see the headline printed in The Washington Post on April 17, 1996. “Greek tycoon, Onassis rival Stavros Niarchos dies at 86,” it read, proof positive of the whimsical cruelty of history. Despite huge success and extravagant wealth, an alpha personality twinned with charisma, and a taste for risk that was just one failure away from recklessness, this hero of the Age of Oil lives on only as the ultimate loser in a giant game of oneupmanship. But for that marriage to a presidential widow (give or take an opera star), it would be Niarchos we picture when we hear the still-redolent phrase ‘Greek shipping magnate’. Pretty much anything Aristotle Onassis did, Niarchos could do better — and did first. With a name…

Consider, for a moment, life in Scandinavia in the fifties and sixties. We can’t say for sure, but it was probably about as jolly as a Jeremy Corbyn speech on renationalisation. And it might, therefore, account for the mid-century wave of beautiful Nordic women who left frost-licked homes to roll the dice on their cheekbones and icy allure in the British film industry. Julie Ege was once such example. In fact, Ege was so prototypical that in 1969’s James Bond vehicle On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, she is credited only as ‘the Scandinavian girl’. Her story began in the Norwegian town of Sandnes in 1943 under the less-than-glamorous name Julie Dzuli (which sounds like an old man’s go-to expression of amazement: ‘Julie Dzuli, will you have a look at that!’).…

Why is Italy so inextricably linked with stylishness? Does it go back to the Apennine Peninsula’s role as the cradle of the Renaissance? To elite Florentine families such as the Medicis, whose appearance, identity and status were part of the same package? Or does the story begin more recently, in the post-war years, with Giovanni Battista Giorgini, the aristo-entrepreneur who, realising the potential that quality apparel exuded in Italy’s war-ravaged economy, curated designs from tailors and dressmakers such as Pucci, the Fontana sisters and Capucci — and then staged the first catwalk for foreign buyers at his home in Florence? “Our fabric selection criteria are very strict and based on a single concept: quality.” Luigi Cordone Jr., who today runs the company his grandfather founded in 1956 with his sister,…

shot on the terrace of the Royal Penthouse at Corinthia London There are very few people who could convince the United Kingdom’s national broadcaster that a similar programme should be made about them twice. Thomas Kochs is one such man: the BBC documentary on the Corinthia London hotel, over which Kochs presides, followed a fly-on-the-wall look at life at venerable Claridge’s, where Kochs was previously general manager. The message from each documentary came across loud and clear: that luxury is not something he can define for anyone other than himself. Instead, it is up to him to understand what it represents to each and every one of the guests staying at his hotel, and to fit himself and his team around it. The Corinthia is to the established Mayfair hotels…

special thanks to the Grand Havana Room, Beverly Hills When Edward Sahakian, the proprietor of Davidoff of London, suggests there is someone you should meet, you pay attention and assume the best. So it was one day on a casual drop-in at his St. James’s Street establishment, when Edward took my arm and pointed to one of two armchairs on which you can plonk yourself and sample the delights of the walk-in humidor. On the chair opposite was a man of imposing disposition. He wore Onassis-framed spectacles, smart as a pin, and took up most of the large chair with his broad frame. He was smoking something with a formidable ring gauge that was in turn dwarfed by his mighty hands; he looked like he owned the room. Edward introduced…

“The great majority of tourists visit Switzerland between the middle of July and the end of September,” observed Baedeker’s Guide to Switzerland in 1895, adding that if one were of a botanical bent and wished to “see the scenery, the vegetation, and particularly the Alpine flowers in perfection, June is recommended as the most charming month in the year”. The quaint tone of voice evokes the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton, men in tweed knickerbockers and Norfolk jackets, and women sensibly attired in bonnets and walking skirts, their corseted waists in inverse proportion to their billowing leg o’ mutton sleeves, striding across sunlit Alpine meadows taking lungfuls of crisp Swiss air and surveying distant snow-capped peaks. Baedeker’s 1895 guide to Switzerland ran to 500 densely printed pages of…

Men need trousers. This simple statement was key to the formation of Kit Blake, the tailoring brand I created with Richard Wheat that does not sell suits. When I looked at my own wardrobe one day and realised I had 10 blue blazers but only two pairs of grey flannels, I was forced to question the imbalance. The answer lay in the fact that I had become overly reliant on jeans. I adopted the smart-casual, jeans-and-blazer look in the late 1980s and had not really updated it since. Sure, I had refined it, and the blazer was often worsted spun cashmere and the shoes were from Crockett & Jones, but it was looking tired. I needed some new trousers. Thoughts turned to the 1997 gangster movie Donnie Brasco, and specifically…

Germany is a place of great fascination for me. The beautiful countryside, the exquisite music, the — unpopular opinion alert — fabulous language, and the glaring juxtaposition of the rural and urban cultures of, say, Bavaria and Berlin… Recently I noticed that this contrast manages to manifest itself in terms of style, and spending a day with A. Lange & Söhne taught me about so much more than watches. This I will come back to. The Concours d’Elegance concept is pretty clever: get smart, classic cars with smart owners and let petrolheads gawk at them in smart settings. Some locations feel like the perfect combination of concept and geography, like Lake Como (you can find our review of the Como edition of Concours d’Elegance in issue 65 of The Rake).…