Innehållsförteckning för June 2022 - Issue 82 från The Rake

While escapism is often seen as a coping mechanism, I look at it differently. Escapism to me is the ability to wholeheartedly lose oneself. To momentarily break free from the hegemonic oppression of reality by immersing one’s mind in a realm that provides for the soothing decoupling from the diabolical dissonance of daily life. The beauty about escapism is that you can travel many roads to this destination. From transcendental meditation to Burgundian appreciation, the pathways to escape are myriad. For me, escapism has often been horological in nature. For example, I can achieve that precious mental escape by looking at my incredible tourbillon created by my friend Denis Flageollet for his brand, De Bethune. The basis of a tourbillon is as follows. From the onset, watches were meant not…

Tis call’d the evil:A most miraculous work in this good king;Which often, since my here-remain in England,I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven,Himself best knows: but strangely-visited people,All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,The mere despair of surgery, he cures,Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,Put on with holy prayers: and ’tis spoken,To the succeeding royalty he leavesThe healing benediction. With this strange virtue,He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy,And sundry blessings hang about his throne,That speak him full of grace. These words are spoken by Malcolm in Act IV of Macbeth. The ‘good king’ in question is Edward the Confessor, one of the last of England’s Anglo-Saxon monarchs. The king’s touch capable of restoring those scrofulous wretches to health was a medieval belief that persisted into…

This interview was meant to take place more than two years ago. Fabrizio Buonamassa Stigliani, the Bulgari Product Creation Executive Director, and I had been in talks to feature him in The Rake because, frankly, his omission from the magazine in years gone by was scandalous considering he is the most stylish man in the Swiss watch industry (a crowd in need of some Neapolitan swagger). So we were ready to go, and then something happened that kept everyone apart for 24 months. Now, on attempt number two, we managed to speak. In a way I am delighted it didn’t happen in 2020, as Fabrizio has, since then, managed to push new boundaries and realise further his unnerving genius and innovative brilliance, crowned by the release of the Octo Finissimo…

Asprey & Bugatti 24k rose-gold La Voiture Noire sculpture They’ve held a royal warrant since 1862. They’ve helped bring Art Deco design values north of La Manche. They’re the official jewellery sponsors of the Baftas, their wares have appeared in endless box-office smashes, and they even made the Henri Delaunay trophy held aloft by Italy as winners of last summer’s European Championship. Oh, and Prince William has played for their polo team. If ever there has been a luxury brand that refuses to rest on its laurels, though, it is Asprey. Asprey have been a prolific collaborator for decades. The only known Patek Philippe watch to namecheck the retailer on the dial bears Asprey’s moniker, while a much more recent joint effort with Formula One saw the re-creation of silver…

For some time my happy place has been a tiny town called Bargemon, in France, where I got married and every year spend a few weeks doing very little. Editing a magazine is a noisy game, so the kind of quiet available in Bargemon feels like a revolutionary change — it provides a contentment and catharsis that perhaps other people get from yoga retreats or weekends in Ibiza. Bargemon is also far from the crowds south of the A8. The remote hills of the Var region, above the vineyards, are a retreat from sparklers attached to champagne as well as tourists who would otherwise be spending their way through Dubai were it not high summer in the desert. Not that I’m a snob or anything. Recently, however, I have reconnected…

In The Great, the court of Catherine II of Russia unfolds like a comic marionette show. The acclaimed television satire is a modern Hogarthian take on the period drama, setting the stage for Gwilym Lee’s suave Grigor as he survives the perils of court life. Or perhaps not. “We never know if we’re going to be killed off next,” he says with a laugh. With the third season of The Great announced, it seems we will be seeing more of Lee. His portrayal has made him a favourite among viewers and critics alike, garnering award nominations from the Screen Actors Guild. With its sweeping story and witty script, Lee is well positioned to pull off the tragic Grigor: Lee is an alumnus of Guildhall, a one-time player for the Royal…

Mixed-breed mutts running into burning houses and emerging through the flames carrying bawling infants in their jaws; Golden Retrievers who wouldn’t know Dr. Heimlich from Dr. Hook performing abdominal thrusts on owners choking on apples; and Beagles prodding 911 with their noses while their owners squint with tearful gratitude through diabetic-induced seizures… Dogs rescuing humans is now a well-established feel-good narrative meme, one that gets regular mawkish editorial treatment in the kind of women’s glossies whose epilepsy-inducing covers promise cash-prize crosswords, ferry discounts and tales of auto-asphyxiationbased ménages à trois on the pages within. My favourite mutt-saves-man yarn, though, is set not in modern-day suburbia but in late 13th-century Portugal. First told in a manuscript written by a Portuguese monk of that era, it involves a drowning sailor being saved…

For more than 50 years, Vilebrequin have been celebrating the spirit of summer with their famed European-style swim short. The secrets to the brand’s longevity? Perhaps the joy, freedom and confidence one feels when wearing a pair of Vilebrequin swim shorts. That, and a fierce obsession with durable, high-quality tailoring you can holiday in for a lifetime. Tailored for the waters and inspired by the seductive charm of Saint-Tropez, this French swimwear label has made style paramount in all of its designs since 1971. Nevertheless, this summer’s dress code is set to look a little different to previous years: enter a summer-first swim short that is both sartorial and sustainable. In collaboration with the Woolmark Company, Vilebrequin have launched their first Merino boardshort for the spring-summer ’22 season. Certified by…

What do the adventures of Vasco da Gama, the Chinese year of the dog, and a paper-and-silk hot air balloon that glided over Paris in 1783 have in common? They — and their topical kith and kin — have all been depicted as part of Vacheron Constantin’s Métiers d’Art programme, which invites watch lovers to journey through time via the almost unfathomable creative brio of its master artisans. Now, as part of a partnership with the Louvre instigated in 2019, and inspired by the artefacts contained within that institution’s hallowed walls, one of just a handful of stilloperational manufactures that lived through the French revolution is adding four new pieces, all with pink-gold cases and limited to five units each, to the Métiers d’Art canon, each dedicated to one of…

06.04.22 THE RAKE wishes to congratulate our friend Paul Feig for the successful and convivial launch of his own gin.…

CHARLIE GRAY Charlie is a British international fashion and portrait photographer based in London. His playful vision and dedication to the art of narrative grew out of his love of theatre and early documentary photographic projects. Charlie has captured some of the most famous faces of our time; equally, he often shoots poetic fashion stories with film and theatre’s faces of tomorrow. In this issue, Charlie flew to New York to shoot our cover star, Ethan Hawke. Such is Charlie’s professionalism, the fact there was a live bird of prey on set was no major hurdle. See the results of his shoot with Hawke (and hawk) on page 74. KIM LANG The Luxembourg-born photographer Kim Lang had his first taste of the medium at an early age, as he travelled…

To describe a writer who sold 40m copies of his books in his lifetime — inaugurating one of the most profitable franchises in history — as underrated would seem counterintuitive, but Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, has always seemed to provoke the ‘yes, but’ response (‘Yes, but Le Carré was the real deal’; ‘Yes, but he was too sybaritic to be serious’ — as if the two were mutually exclusive). To be fair, Fleming himself was often foremost among the non-cheerleaders. He described the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, as “an oafish opus”, and further downplayed expectations in a 1963 BBC radio interview: “I’m not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.” Perhaps it was simply politic to hide your light under a bushel if you found…

If you had grown up in Sweden in the late 1960s and early seventies, you would have known the name Paulina Porizkova. It was a byword for a type of natural liberty denied a human being due to forces that Porizkova, specifically, was too young to oppose, let alone understand. For it was to Sweden that her anti-Soviet dissident parents fled from Czechoslovakia on a motorbike after the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. Paulina was left with a grandmother, and Czech authorities refused a family reunification with such blockheaded vehemence that it caused two significant events. The first was that her mother felt she had no option but to make a kidnap attempt of her seven-year-old child. The second was that it failed but fomented such a cause célèbre that…

New & Lingwood possess a gravitas that most companies can only dream of. The heritage brand has been around since 1865, survived the first world war, had its flagship destroyed during the second, and has dressed the scholars of Eton for more than 150 years. It remains a classic outfitter that offers a broad range, from English-made socks and the finest silk dressing gowns to eveningwear, unstructured casual tailoring and an unrivalled selection of casualwear. In short, it’s one of the most respected names in the world of classic style. Draw up a list of the oldest, most cherished brands in Britain, though, and it likely won’t be the first name that comes to mind. Its customers like it like that, often referring to it as “their best-kept secret”, as…

People following my quixotic, often bumbling video exploits in the realm of high watchmaking have noticed that I like to use the colloquialism ‘dope’ — as in, ‘Dude, this watch is dope’ — when assigning praise to my favourite timepieces. Which inspired me to study the etymology of the term. The results are, shall we say, misleading, as previous usages of the term skewed towards negativity, i.e. ‘That guy’s a dope’. So I was perplexed how, in the context of eighties rapper parlance, ‘dope’ came to express all things that are good and beneficent to humanity, until I realised that the first three letters are the same as those of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is responsible for flooding our nervous systems with the sensation of pleasure — a feeling that…

It is one of life’s exquisite ironies that the story behind a work deemed the first novel in English, a work of the strictest Puritan spiritualism, begins with indecent behaviour on consecrated grounds. We don’t know exactly what Alexander Selkirk — a young scallywag born in Fife in 1676 to a shoemaker and tanner — got up to under his or other churchgoers’ cassocks that day, but we do know that he failed to appear in an ecclesiastical court and instead went off buccaneering on the high seas with the privateer and explorer William Dampier. Several tussles with Spanish vessels in the Atlantic later, the ship Selkirk was aboard moored in the uninhabited Juan Fernández Islands, 400 miles from the coast of Chile, to restock. By now, months at sea…