Innehållsförteckning för June 2020 - Issue 70 från The Rake

In a recent conversation with a man I admire a lot, Jean-Claude Biver, he highlighted something that really resonated with me. He said: “The problem today is that we are in the third millennium. But the third millennium is still being run by old men who grew up in the 20th century and are applying 20th century rules to the world.” What does he mean by that? The best example probably comes from Oliver Stone’s 1987 film, Wall Street. Even though this is meant to be a cautionary tale about the seduction of easy wealth and the moral bankruptcy of eighties yuppie culture, an interesting thing happened when the film was released. Instead of most viewers identifying with the protagonist, Bud Fox — played by Charlie Sheen, many years before…

“The best-known American in the world” was how Paul Robeson was described without irony or argument by a journalist in 1964. Yet today, among the Instagram generation, his name is mostly forgotten. That is set to change, as the Academy Award-winning director Steve McQueen has announced plans to bring Robeson’s story to the screen. It is perhaps fitting that cinema, a medium in which Robeson excelled, will restore his renown as a cultural monolith and social justice campaigner. Paul Leroy Robeson was born in April 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey — a town known more for its redbrick university than the realities of its stark income divide. His father, William Drew Robeson, was an escaped slave who became a Presbyterian minister, while his mother, Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson, was a…

To watch the television series Game of Thrones, one might all too easily believe that the interbreeding — or, indeed, the incestuous inbreeding — of noble bloodlines results in offspring of rare beauty. However, in real life, the great and good maintaining too pure a gene pool has proven rather unsuccessful. My mistress, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God Queen of this Realm and of Her Other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith — I call her ma’am (rhymes with ham, not harm) — possesses within her art collection a splendid 17th-century Velázquez depicting King Philip IV of Spain. It’s a magnificent picture. But its subject… Well, he’s not a handsome man, not by any stretch of the imagination. The unfortunate…

Put yourself in the shoes of Wei Koh and me for a second. There is a global pandemic, and the pressure is on to create a magazine that reflects the reality of the times while also providing some much-needed escapism. The desire to feel uplifted and inspired has never been more profound, and we needed to encapsulate this on the cover with a man who not only embodies our values but who was also putting his energy and creativity into helping others as the world reached out for heroes. Well, if you put yourself in our position, you’d be feeling rather relaxed, as this man was not, we must admit, hard to find. Paul Feig, the Hollywood director, producer, writer, actor and dandy of the first order, was really the…

I’ve never been someone to invite change. When I was little, a few things happened that scrambled my comprehension that life was reliable and happy, and that things would follow a linear, if not uneventful, path until I perhaps fell in love, got married, had children, and offered my children the same love and security I was shown by my parents. Things like family bereavement and life-changing injuries. I never regarded the accusation of living a sheltered existence as much of an insult. Amid the changes wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, there is at least one silver lining that eases my discomfort at losing simple pleasures, such as spending time with colleagues, and more important matters, such as hobnobbing around Mayfair, where The Rake’s office is situated (a postcode chock-a-block…

This is something of a landmark for The Rake — actually, it could be an avant-garde moment for modern magazine-ing. The image opposite, ladies and gents, is the first image shot for The Rake by the subjects in the image, on a timer. Yes, i-D magazine made a front cover using Zoom, but at the very least the model knew what she was looking at. The Spanish husband and wife modelling duo of Oriol Elcacho and Davinia Pelegri are pros, of course; in fact, it is a bit like Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf playing doubles together. But why this format? Well, like the rest of us, Oriol and Davinia (who are expecting a baby soon) have been in isolation in Spain, secluded in a hamlet of 70 people in…

YouTube has seen sensations come and go. From Logan Paul to Ninja, we watch as they crest the wave of public interest and reap the rewards thereof. They have never felt too much under threat… until recently, when a triumvirate of documentary makers came onto the scene, fighting the coronavirus one corona at a time. Nick Foulkes and his sons, Max and Freddie, have taken the internet by storm with their rapier wit, impeccable taste in clothes, and well-seasoned palate for fermented tobacco. The premise is simple: they get up at the crack of dawn at the family seat in Shepherd’s Bush in west London and review a selected cigar, offering historical and often unrelated anecdotes to keep the pace moving. What makes this such compelling watching is to see…

Intriguingly, the word we use for a shoe that was invented for la dolce vita derives from a verb relating to the Italian phrase il dolce far niente (‘for pleasantly doing nothing’). For the earliest iteration of what we today call the loafer was created by the London shoemaker Wildsmith in response to a 1926 request from King George VI for a soft, comfortable shoe he could wear when ‘loafing’ around his rural properties. Another common ancestor to the modern loafer was the slip-on created by the shoemaker Nils Gregoriusson Tveranger, inspired by the lace-less footwear worn by fishermen in Tveranger’s Norway, and similar to those he’d seen on Native American people’s feet when studying in the continent where the loafer would first become a dapper staple. (That ‘penny’ prefix…

NICK SCOTT A former Editor-in-Chief of The Rake, Nick spent several years as a staffer at U.K. Esquire and GQ Australia, and is now the Editor of the U.K. edition of Robb Report, as well as a regular contributor to The Rake, the FT’s How To Spend It, Hole & Corner, and Director, the Institute of Directors’ magazine. His writing has also appeared in a range of titles including The Observer, Radio Times and Women’s Health, as well as branded content titles for Hackett, Bentley, Lexus, Toyota and Richard Mille. An ardent believer in old-fashioned journalism, he frequently dreams of a mass public burning of rehashed press releases posing as editorial. His sartorial philosophy is summarised by a self-coined axiom: “Style and fashion are like love and infatuation.” For this…

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives”; the film producer Robert Evans would beg to differ. The life of Evans, who died aged 89 in October last year, had a pristine Hollywood three-act structure, full of twists and tragic flaws. As head of Paramount, he produced some of the most admired American films ever, married seven times, and was a hypnotic raconteur with a unique sense of style. But he was also ostracised from the film business for a catalogue of terrible decisions. Evans had elements of both Fitzgerald and Gatsby: addictive, charming, contradictory, prodigious and tantalisingly unfulfilled. Born in Manhattan in 1930 to Jewish parents on the Upper West Side — his father was a dentist in Harlem — the young Evans…

The real names of some celebrities were always going to need a makeover. For clanging no-brainers with all the glamour and savoir faire of an impacted molar, Frances Ethel Gumm (Judy Garland), Olivia Cockburn (Olivia Wilde), and Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston (Audrey Hepburn) spring to mind. Slotting well into that category was Barbel Goutscherola. Which sounds like an expensive piece of gym equipment. A young Barbel was forced to leave her native Czechoslovakia after the second world war. She was now known as Barbara Gutscher, and her family was placed in a settlement camp in what was the American occupation zone in Germany before settling in San Francisco in 1956. Her father, Fritz, was a war photographer and, it can almost logically be said, therefore knew moments of rare and…

When The Rake asked me if I wanted to write a guide to Milanese tailoring, I didn’t think twice before agreeing — and not only because I’ve been a faithful reader of the magazine for years and a passionate observer of classic men’s style. No, my chief motivation was something else: it seemed like the perfect opportunity to delve deeper into a question that has often played on my mind — is there such a thing as the Milanese jacket? Or is it merely a variation on the theme of the Caraceni jacket? One thing is certain, the Milanese tailoring of jackets — compared with the rest of Italy — is the closest it gets to an English style. This resemblance is most apparent in the extensive use of liner…

There is a story about a man stuck down a hole, unable to get out. A priest walks by, and the man asks the priest for help: the priest dutifully throws down a prayer and walks on. Then a doctor walks by, and responds to the call for help by throwing down a prescription. Then another guy walks by, sees the waylaid protagonist, and jumps into the hole. “Are you crazy, why did you jump down?” the first man says. “Now we’re both stuck.” The second man says, “Well, I’ve been down this hole before and I know the way out”. The parable is pretty good for most contexts. For editors, a vocation in which plenty of time is spent down various crevasses, the guy you want to see walking…

It’s a brand that has spent more than a century and a half responding to and shaping the zeitgeist of British style: from the fabled Blitz spirit (it rose from the ashes six years after being decimated by the Luftwaffe in 1940) and the literal old-school-tie syndrome (it’s been the official school uniform outfitters for Eton for the past five generations) to its role now as a branch of a very modern form of Britishness — eclectic, cosmopolitan and exhibiting a thoughtfully executed stylistic derring-do. Today, with a young C.E.O. at the helm — the London Business School alumnus Freddie Briance — a fresh chapter is beginning for New & Lingwood, who have provided apparel for royalty (princes William, Harry, and Michael of Kent), political royalty (David Cameron, Boris Johnson)…

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 –…

It was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite television series. It won consecutive best comedy series awards at the Baftas in the first three years of its run, from 1980. And so obsessive were its writers, Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, in exposing the secret machinations of British politics, they showed scripts to secret sources gleaned from Harold Wilson’s and James Callaghan’s governments; the sources would sprinkle the fictional plots with verisimilitude-bolstering nuggets of reality. Yet few people born after the decade in which it dominated BBC Two’s weekday primetime slots had heard of Yes Minister until March of this year, when a 20-second clip portending with chilling accuracy the U.K. government’s response to the coronavirus crisis went viral. In the brief dialogue in question, two civil servants describe the procedure for advising…