Tabla de contenidos para February 2024 - Issue 92 en The Rake

On November 8 in the year of our Lord 2023, on a stunning, clear-blue day, on the roof of the legendary Gritti Palace in Venice — and at what was meant to be 11 o’clock in the morning — I got down on one knee and proposed to my now fiancée, Beatrice ‘Bebe’ Ding. I say, “at what was meant to be 11”, as I’d arranged with Paolo Lorenzoni, the Gritti’s inimitable General Manager and La Serenissima’s unofficial mayor, to have a toast overlooking the Grand Canal and the Santa Maria Della Salute at exactly that time. Instead of the traditional champagne toast, we’d gone with a bottle of Bebe’s favourite tequila. But of course, as the hour approached, she resisted my every effort to persuade her to go upstairs,…

Towards the end of her life, Ava Gardner attempted to sum it up, in characteristically pithy, from-the-hip fashion: “She made movies, she made out, and she made a fucking mess of her life, but she never made jam.” Let’s consider the evidence. The movies? Yes, she made approximately 60 of them, the majority in the 1940s and fifties, and, with certain notable exceptions, her startling, sloe-eyed, sultry, sensual, whiff-of-danger presence — she was dubbed ‘the original femme fatale’ — was the most memorable thing about them. The making out? Can’t argue with her there, with a tally of three husbands — Mickey Rooney, the bandleader Artie Shaw, and finally and most enduringly (at least for Ava) Frank Sinatra, along with a bevy of lovers, including David Niven, John F. Kennedy,…

“She is by far the most popular thing about me,” Nick Foulkes, The Rake’s Contributing Editor, said of his wife, Alexandra, during his 50th birthday speech. It was a pithy dedication that had everyone chuckling but no one disagreeing, and for someone with famously perfect taste, there is no greater evidence of it than in his spouse. But enough about him. Alexandra, a former Press Attaché at Cartier and a onetime budding fashion designer, has always had her finger on the style industry’s pulse, and while she claims that her now distinctive sense of style “came about in the last 10 years”, she has forever been fascinated by the trade. “I always thought I was going to be a fashion designer when I was growing up,” she says. She came…

Not long ago, Jeremy King received a letter. The writer wanted to tell him about his experience at The Wolseley, the Piccadilly grand café run by King and his business partner, Chris Corbin, that had become a byword for polished, buzzy all-day dining. “I steeled myself,” King says, “because your immediate assumption is, here comes a complaint.” They were really well looked after, the writer continued; the food was great, and they had a wonderful time. But he wanted to talk about what happened after they left. While they were waiting for their coats in the lobby, his companion spotted some cakes in the salon off to the side and went to investigate. Her eye had been drawn to a marzipan-clad Battenberg, one of her favourites and a rare old-school…

Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, was panned by critics because the art intelligentsia of the day weren’t ready for a cubism work informed by Greek, African, Iberian and Egyptian influences. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, now considered to be at the pinnacle of modern horror cinema, was his only film to be nominated at the Razzie Awards — and a stamp of disapproval from the much-idolised author of the novel on which it is based, Stephen King, is generally recognised as the major force behind contemporary pundits’ initial disdain. Abbey Road, the Beatles’ 11th studio album, was torn apart by many in the music press because there comes a time when you have to yank wildly successful artists off their pedestal to justify your position as a critic. And the…

As unthinkable as this may sound, there was a time when sartorial matters were not really on my mind. I was in my early teens and on the hunt for a way to fit in, which at a British boarding school is not guaranteed. For our overseas readers, the U.K. has a rather fascinating quirk whereby parents absent full responsibility for their children between the ages of eight and 18 by sending them to a countryside manor house to be educated and to grow up. The original idea behind these kinds of schools was not about preparing for the workforce an annual legion of the academically gifted; it was to instil something far less tangible: character. And the motivation for strengthening character was largely to prepare young men to head…

“Paint every door in a completely white house the colour of a different flower.” “Have an elk-hide trunk for the back of your car: Hermès of Paris will make this.” “Rinse your blond child’s hair in dead champagne, to keep its gold, as they do in France.” “Have a yellow satin bed entirely quilted in butterflies.” These pearls of advice — flights of fancy, really — were dispensed in Diana Vreeland’s ‘Why Don’t You?’ columns in Harper’s Bazaar from the late 1930s, offering wealthy readers whimsical ways to make life even more charming, and more down-at-heel folk — this was the Great Depression era — brief windows of respite from the drudgery of day-to-day life. Were they meant to be taken seriously? Yes. Ostensibly. Possibly. Were they? Yes and no,…

‘Designer dogs.’ It’s one of those phrases — like ‘neurodiversity’ and ‘climate crisis’ — that reactionary bar-room bores like to disparage by accompanying each utterance with air-quotes, formed using their Stella-stained fingers. I would argue, though, that we blessed creatures spawned of two purebred dogs — from Puggles and Pugzus to Jackhuahuas and Chiweenies — are invaluable additions to the canine canon: animal husbandry at its most discerning. My own breed, admittedly, has a somewhat cumbersome name: ‘Poodle’ does not, phonetically, suffix itself to ‘Golden Retriever’ quite as mellifluously as it does ‘Labrador’. What we lack in poetic nomenclature, though, we make up for with an arsenal of psychological and physiological traits that see the very best of our larger parent breed (intuition, human-like empathy) join forces with those of…

When the cultural fixation with Harry and Meghan reached its nadir — I think one can arguably assign this moment to either their untimely departure to the grand-old colony of Canada, or to that tiresome display of interviews, book releases and Netflix-sponsored tears — I found myself, during a rare day-job (relaxation) lull, tapping the words ‘most maligned women in history’ into Google. I did this more out of anger than sympathy — I knew there was a danger that the spin machine at Harvey Weinstein’s old publicists, whom she retained once in Tinseltown, might want to lead on this message. Perhaps inevitably, Cleopatra was high on the list that topped Google’s results. The entry beneath her name referred to Roman writers portraying her “as a harlot who used her…

Jewel-studded brooches that double as denim patches; necklaces created using algorithms; pendants made of the lightest material on Earth; gold and lacquer hoodie drawstrings; A.I. technology recreating the biological splendour of botanicals in sparkling form; the enlisting of brand ambassadors such as Alexa Chung, Mila Al Zahrani, Han So-hee… To call Boucheron innovative doesn’t do justice to a jewellery house — founded in Paris’s Place Vendôme in 1893, which remains its home — that has become a veritable mecca for discerning jewellery connoisseurs. With Boucheron’s New York boutique scheduled to open this summer, these are exciting times for a maison that can claim to be a game-changer in a realm where that phrase is often, let’s be honest, used indiscriminately. Catching up with Hélène, and delving into Boucheron’s principles (and…

For this Women’s Issue of The Rake, I wanted to focus on something that hits close to home. I talk a lot about property prices, as well as statistics, in my videos on social media. But at the crux is this question: who owns all of this real estate? Undoubtedly, ownership of land and property can empower women by providing income and security. There are 15 countries in which women do not have equal ownership rights to property, and 34 countries in which daughters do not have equal inheritance rights — and England is on that list. According to the U.N. Women organisation, women have a limited say in household decision making when they do not have land rights. Additionally, they do not have recourse to such assets during crises…

stephen wood Stephen — The Rake’s Chief Subeditor and a news editor at The Guardian — has worked as a journalist and writer for nearly 30 years in London, New York and Sydney, and seldom in that time (or sweep of longitude) has he come across a bona fide ‘star’ with as much humility and congeniality as he found in Jodie Foster when the pair spent 75 minutes talking for this issue’s cover story. Foster, a child prodigy and the youngest double Oscar winner in history, insists she has had her time, though we — and, probably more to the point, the Academy — would disagree. She has returned to acting with a flourish, appearing in Nyad and True Detective: Night Country, and her performance alongside Annette Bening in the…