Tabla de contenidos para December 2020 - Issue 73 en The Rake

The refrain from one of my favourite songs, Where Eagles Dare, by the iconic Misfits, goes, “I ain’t no goddamn son of a bitch, you better think about it, baby”. Increasingly, I think it would be a fitting epithet on my tombstone. I’m joking, of course — I have no intention of being buried, but rather immolated on a Viking pyre with my Patek Philippe 5970 on my wrist, clad in Cifonelli and alligator cowboy boots, Cazal MC Hammer shades clamped to my lifeless eyes, a Negroni in one hand, a pair of nunchakus in the other, a Behike 56 wedged into my jaw, and my Les Baer 1911 tucked in my waistband. In which case, I’ll leave instructions for my progeny to blast this anthem in time to the…

In Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel, V, published in 1963, the anti-hero, a discharged and feckless U.S. navy sailor named Benny Profane, is watching an unspecified Randolph Scott western and comparing himself unfavourably to its square-jawed, morally righteous hero: “He was cool, imperturbable, keeping his trap shut and only talking when he had to — and then saying the right things and not running off haphazard and inefficient at the mouth.” Profane’s admiring analysis was shared by a generation of postsecond- world-war moviegoers: though Scott never won an Oscar, his lanky, laconic cowboy archetypes — reticent but resolute, diffident but dauntless, potent but private — made him one of the top box-office stars of the late 1940s and early fifties. In the 39 westerns in which he starred, from 1946’s Badman’s…

“A dog,” as the charity slogan goes, “is for life, not just for Christmas.” But for anyone who’s watched An All Dogs Christmas Carol — the 1998 anthropomorphic spin on Charles Dickens’ much adapted novella, and the last instalment in the admittedly mawkish All Dogs Go to Heaven film series — it’s tricky not to associate the Irish Setter with the decking of halls and the smell of spicy mulled wine. For the poor uninitiated among you, the character of Sasha, voiced with some gusto by Sheena Easton — and this is a neat stroke of meta-meta-fiction — becomes the Ghost of Christmas Present, the spectre whose nocturnal task set by Jacob Marley (in the Dickens original) is to demonstrate to Scrooge, here represented by the franchise’s stock antagonist, Carface,…

If destiny has a poster child, there’s a fair chance her name is Bebe Buell. As far as conservative towns go, the naval enclave of Portsmouth, Virginia is as starched as they come. As far as conservative eras go, the early 1950s was one of buttoned-down traditionalism not long out of war. And as far as conservative parents go, the navy pilot commander Harold Buell chose as his happily-ever-after Dorothea Johnson, a woman so steeped in niceties and tradition that she would go on to establish the etiquette-based Protocol School of Washington. From the get-go, their baby Beverle was something of a firecracker. Her rather matronly appellation certainly didn’t fit, and the nickname ‘Bebe’ stuck. It’s unclear when she heard her first rock chords, but what’s certain is that they…

All the people selected as Rakes of the Year for 2020 were chosen for their extraordinary efforts during this most difficult of times. Paul Feig has contributed in spades. By the time you read this, he will have performed — and, make no mistake, they are all masterful and herculean performances — 110 times on Instagram Live with the purpose of lifting our spirits, reminding us of worthwhile charities, and spotlighting how to help those most in need. Through his heady, intoxicating blend of dance, humour, sartorial splendour and libation concoction known as Quarantine Cocktail Time, he’s created a social media phenomenon that has kept us laughing our way through the pandemic. It began nine months ago, when his instinct amid the bleakness of our first global lockdown was to…

There are three things I admire about Daisy Knatchbull. The first is her work ethic, which I came to admire when she was the head of communications at Huntsman, where she would invariably be the first person to arrive and the last person to leave, equally committed to being the consummate host but never above picking things up off the floor once the guests had gone home. I’ve learned that you can’t teach that to someone — they are either stoked by an internal fire unseen by the world, or they aren’t. The second thing I admire is her style, which is something fearless and perhaps best expressed by her status as the first woman to appear in morning dress in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Apparently she had an…

The phrase ‘gravity-defying inventions’, for many, will conjure up images of the Wright brothers’ biomimetic escapades at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina; others may think of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketched-out ‘fancy-of-flight’ (to invert a popular phrase), which he called the ‘aerial screw’, and which pre-dated helicopters by half a millennium. Those whose understanding of gravity goes beyond Newton’s apple into actual equations will no doubt highlight the invention of the wheel. But devotees to all things horological would sooner point to a breakthrough achieved by Abraham-Louis Breguet around 1795, when watches were still worn in the pocket. Observing how gravity meddled with the performance of parts such as a watch’s pallet fork, balance wheel and hairspring — particularly when the timepiece had been laid on a flat surface — he had…

Even for the casual observer, a loom weaving an intricately designed fabric is a hypnotic sight. For those who adhere to the tenets of this magazine, witnessing weft interlace with warp — based on complex mathematical sequences that, like the chalk equations on a physicist’s blackboard, reflect the intellectual efforts of the very finest in their discipline — is a life-enriching experience. It’s a process that happens at a rate of around 10 million metres per year, using three million kilograms of wool, at Vitale Barberis Canonico (VBC), the three-and-a-half-century-old establishment based 50 miles north of Turin in the Biella region of Italy. VBC not only farm wool in Australia but also comb, dye, spin, design, weave and finish stunning fabrics for the most prestigious bespoke workshops in the world,…

ADRIANO MENEGHETTI – www.adrianomeneghetti.com ALBERT THURSTON – www.albertthurston.com ALFRED RIFUGIO – www.alfredrifugio.it ALICE MADE THIS – www.alicemadethis.com AMOUR LUX – www.armorlux.com ANDERSON & SHEPPARD – www.anderson-sheppard.co.uk ANDREA POMPILIO – www.andreapompilio.it 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 – www.united-arrows.jp CANALI – www.canali.com CARMINA SHOEMAKER – www.carminashoemaker.com CARUSO…

Mahler said that tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire. The holiday spirit comes in different styles and strengths, but its destination is invariable. Mankind rallies to the hearth and table. Knives flash, corkscrews clear for action, assuagement reigns, and the wassailing of carols is synchronised the world over in glad tidings harkening all, both rich and poor. In the U.K., plum-pudding country, Christmas brings a craze of arson, both rum and brandy being set alight. Presumptuously enough, we have also appropriated the Americans’ bird, the turkey. He gobbles with a British accent in Shropshire and Sussex, only then to be gobbled up as the centrepiece of the Christmas table-top tradition — and in Britain, the heftier the tradition, the stronger the hold it lays…

He was an ordinary second-generation British kid of Kenyan descent, growing up in a modest street in an anonymous town around 20 miles north of central London. Then one day, Abubakar Salim picked up a games console controller, and a love of narrative — the more phantasmagorical and outlandish the better — gripped his imagination. Fondness for fiction became fondness for acting in his teens, and small parts in British T.V. shows soon arrived — 24: Live Another Day in 2014; Charlie Brooker’s disarmingly intelligent dystopian drama Black Mirror in 2016; Jamestown, a period drama about English settlers in America, in 2017; and voice work in gaming (namely, releases in the Assassin’s Creed and World of Warcraft franchises). Most recently, a bolt from the blue: the chance of a leading…

For a company that puts family and community first, 2020 has proven to be a rollercoaster of a year for Brunello Cucinelli. Not only did Signor Cucinelli’s youngest daughter, Carolina, and her husband, Alessio Piastrelli, welcome their son, Brando, into the world, but the family business supported a huge number of artisans in Umbria during Italy’s extended Covid-19 lockdown. “We have a significant network of small workshops, suppliers and staff that rely on us for work,” Carolina says. “So we’ve managed to maintain work for 5,000 or so craftspeople right the way through this year. The company guaranteed work for all because we felt huge responsibility for the artisans who have helped us to grow.” It raises the question, how have Carolina and Alessio managed to juggle a newborn with…

Code 11.59 by Audemars Piguet Grande Sonnerie Carillon Supersonnerie A common interpretation of the Audemars Piguet Code 11.59 collection, unveiled at SIHH in 2019, is that it epitomises, in beautiful harmony, two distinct eras in the brand’s history: pre- 1972 traditionalism and post-1972 avant-gardism. Few readers of this publication will need the significance of that date explained, but, as a clue, it involves a certain Gérald Genta piece named after eight British Royal Navy ships, themselves named after a tree in which Charles II hid following the battle of Worcester in 1651. Later last year, Audemars Piguet — which is the manufacture that came up with the world’s first minute repeater wristwatch (1892), the first skeletonised pocket-watch (1934), the thinnest ever, at the time, wristwatch (1946), and the world’s thinnest…

Gary Barlow wears his cultural importance as if a loose garment. His significance has sustained now for nearly three decades, and in truth he has converted his celebrity status into something meaningful, an achievement others would do well to emulate. As much as his musical successes with Take That and in his solo career will appear first in any career retrospective, it should be noted that Gary has played a role in several moments of national import. For example, in 2012 he organised the concert that celebrated Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee, an event that featured the world’s greatest musical talents honouring Her Majesty’s 60 years on the throne. Gary is a man of consummate generosity, raising tens of millions of pounds for charity. When Blackpool needed a late replacement to…

A few weeks ago, I spent several hours in a car with Nick Foulkes going to and returning from the countryside. For those of you who like to keep track of such things, we smoked a noughties Cohiba Lanceros each, and, on the way back, we settled for some Behike 54s, in the spirit of keeping the numbers low and the prices high. Nick and I had plenty to discuss: the impending U.S. election, a revelatory common appreciation for Schitt’s Creek, the ins and outs of Terry Haste’s button stances, and the origins of the Christmas carol service (see my letter on page 16). While all these were covered, the majority of the time was spent talking about our favourite subject, our children. This wasn’t a huge surprise to me,…

One of my favourite discoveries of 2020 has been Holthinrichs Watches. Michiel Holthinrichs, who is based in Delft, a town about 50km from Amsterdam, has created precisely the type of watch that I feel the collecting community has been searching for. Why? Well, firstly, he has created an all-new design that is simultaneously different and intriguing but somehow familiar and comforting. Part of what makes his perfectly sized 38mm case so unique is his use of 3D printing, which allows for a remarkable level of complexity, particularly in the amazing architectural voids he creates along the caseband and through his signature lugs, which are skeletonised along two axes and are, to me, reminiscent of the flying buttresses of France’s iconic Nantes Cathedral. I think it will come as no surprise…

It is difficult to pin down what exactly it is about cars that elicits such passion and devotion from those who love them. For those on the outside, spending tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of your particular currency on a car seems ridiculous. But for petrolheads it makes perfect sense. The joy of car ownership knows no bounds, whether you prefer to indulge in cross-country road trips or you’re like the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who has a bespoke suit to match each of his cars, which he enjoys not by driving (he doesn’t have a licence) but by sitting stationary in his garage listening to the engines rumble. For many, part of the joy of cars is connecting with others. But how does one go about that…

Ruthlessly indifferent bounder? Or a man who wisely affords sovereignty to his natural passions rather than culturally enforced principles? What is eternally compelling about the Moscow aristocrat Prince Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky (‘Stiva’ to his highsociety friends) — the first character we encounter in Leo Tolstoy’s 1878 novel, Anna Karenina — is that he makes men ask this question, and not just of the fictional cove but of ourselves, too. Anna Karenina, being as replete with turgid passages about Russian agricultural policy as Melville’s Moby-Dick is with studies of the pursuit of placental marine mammals, is no literary walk in the park. Its opening chapters are truly captivating, though, since they are a character study of Stiva. We first encounter him waking up on a Moroccan sofa in his study, a…

Kathryn Boyd Brolin is a photographer, designer and business owner based in Los Angeles and Atlanta, Georgia. She studied photojournalism at the University of Georgia’s prestigious Grady College of Journalism in Athens, Georgia, and photography at the Santa Reparata School of Art in Florence before graduating in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from UGA. Shortly thereafter, she began working in Atlanta’s growing film industry before moving permanently to L.A., where her creative talents would eventually collide, resulting in the genesis of her business, Midheaven Denim, for which she serves as founder, head designer and photographer. While running her business, she continues to pursue her photography. She lives with her husband, Josh, whom she shot for this issue’s cover, and their baby girl, Westlyn. They are expecting another girl…

In January 1977, the Los Angeles Times dispatched a reporter to Almería in southern Spain, where an actor whose career was threatening to make an indentation in the U.S. market was shooting a Foreign Legion drama called March or Die. After spending some time on set, the reporter noted his subject’s good looks and easy charm. “This dashing rogue,” he wrote, “is a former watersports champion who keeps a complete gymnastics unit in the barn next to his home in the Massachusetts Berkshires and insists on doing all his own stunts.” On the question of personality, though, the Times — ironically or otherwise — decided to hedge its bets. “If he is going to be a big American star,” the story read, “he will have to stop fraternising with the…

Dukes Bar in London is renowned for its martinis, but equally so, we imagine, for the man behind them. Alessandro Palazzi has been in the hospitality industry since the 1970s, and his unwavering determination to make each of his guests feel like royalty is just one of his many charms. Another is his perennial sense of style, which he describes as diplomatic, acrobatic and charismatic. We met him on one of his rare days off duty, and after he had regaled us with stories of his time at the Ritz Paris, and later Dukes Bar, the conversation turned to the struggles of the hospitality industry in the midst of the Covid pandemic. Even on a note as sombre as this, there was a sense of optimism in Palazzi’s voice. “I’ve…

Japan’s first moniker for ‘suit’ — sabiro — may have been named for Britain’s Savile Row, but it was in Italy that the nation’s early tailoring apprentices began to train, and from where they brought back the soft-shoulder silhouettes and rolled lapels taught by their (mostly) Neapolitan senseis. But what happens when Italian designers look to Japan instead? Or when the cultural yin-yang between the two meet in the middle, uniting Italian creation and Japan’s meditative order? You get Lardini’s upcoming spring-summer ’21 collection, the ‘Art of Silence’. As Luigi Lardini, the founder and Creative Director, puts it, “There’s always been a mutual appreciation of Japanese and Italian craft, and this has long inspired me”. The Marche-based brand, which he founded as a teenager in 1978, is renowned for its…

Raynald Aeschlimann is already something of a legend in the watch business. Among a long list of accomplishments, he became the first chief executive in the Swiss watch industry to harness the power of social media by creating a limited-edition timepiece that celebrated the hashtag speedytuesday, one of the most powerful online community symbols in the ethersphere. But like everyone else on our Rakes of the Year roll, his inclusion is based on the edifying effect he has had on us during a year fraught with challenges. Specifically, he and his team at Omega created what is possibly the most uplifting watch of all time at a moment when it was most needed. Already the Omega Speedmaster is synonymous with man’s conquest of space, as the only official timepiece to…

The story I wrote about Kidane Cousland and Solomon Golding in August seemed to lift a lot of people’s moods. One explanation was that the photoshoot was spectacular, and they are naturals to shoot. But primarily it was because their story is one of hope and potential realised. No one can deny that the brothers are inspirational: people of all stripes, backgrounds, colours and creeds have mentioned the story to me since it came out. To those of you who didn’t read it, let me help you catch up. Kidane, the older of the brothers, joined the army at 16 and rose through the ranks to become the first black recipient of the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst. This was made all the more impressive by the fact he was…

François Moreau has always had a fascination with gauges. It is something that becomes abundantly clear at our first meeting, in Mexico City, during the 2019 El Salón Internacional Alta Relojería — an event that now appears to have taken place a lifetime ago, considering the seismic changes of the past 10 months. Immediately François and I discuss the beautiful pragmatism of gauges such as the Smith speedometer and tachymeter mounted to my 1972 Norton Commando, as well as the VDO gauges that presided over the stripped-out spartan cabin of my 1979 Porsche 930 Turbo, a car that used to try to kill me on a daily basis as a young man living in Los Angeles. We joke, in particular, about the turbo boost gauge that remained motionless even when…

If the beatification of timepieces could be deemed a globally recognised creed — Organised Horologism, if you will — what buildings might qualify as holy sites? Any number of architecturally eclectic constructions dotted around the Jura mountains would claim to occupy consecrated ground, not least Bjarke Ingels’ spiralling Musée Atelier museum designed for Audemars Piguet. Until 2020, for a few days each year, exhibition centres in Basel and Geneva became watch worshippers’ equivalent of the Vatican, Kaaba, Akal Takht Sahib and Mahabodhi Temple. Glashütte and Besançon draw plenty of pilgrims, and horological faith tourists would never visit London without a reverential saunter around Clerkenwell. Europe, in other words, is replete with potential. Though if you’re the kind of worshipper who achieves spiritual enlightenment through the tactile experience of trying out…