Innehållsförteckning för October 2023 - Issue 90 från The Rake

Growing up with an extraordinary father is a unique experience. It is something that Wyatt Russell — one of the most interesting actors of his generation, and pictured beside his father, Kurt Russell, on the cover of this issue — can relate to. In my case, my father, who graduated at the top of his class at every school he attended, became the first Singaporean to attend Harvard Law School through something of an accident. He was being grilled during his graduation exam by an external examiner from Harvard. Singapore had traditionally brought in examiners from Oxford or Cambridge, but for whatever reason that year it was someone from Harvard. When the professor asked his final question, my father, instead of answering it, proceeded to analyse why the question was…

In his memoir, Making Movies, Sidney Lumet, the director of Serpico, tells a lovely story about a conversation with the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Why had he chosen to frame a shot in his film Ran in a particular way? Kurosawa replied that if he’d panned the camera one inch to the left, the Sony factory was visible, and if he’d panned an inch to the right, we would see the airport — neither of which belonged in a period movie. Lumet also called Kurosawa “the Beethoven of movie directors” — maximalist, effervescent and exacting. A visionary bridge-builder between western and Japanese cultures, Kurosawa’s films have been revered by directors as varied and eminent as Bergman, Fellini, Kubrick, Scorsese, George Lucas and Wes Anderson. His New York Times obituary…

There are many people in menswear who take themselves too seriously. Manish Puri is not one of them. Puri, a columnist for Permanent Style, has made a name for himself in sartorial circles. His Instagram account, The Daily Mirror, documents his day-to-day fits, ranging from Cuban-collared shirts and pleated shorts by Scott Fraser Collection to razor-sharp Anthology suits. But you won’t see any thousand-yard stares or ‘candid’ smiles. Instead, Puri edits each photo with a cartoon chicken head replacing his own. “It signifies that I’m not taking myself very seriously”, he says. “I try to keep things pretty light. I think that’s why it’s got a little bit of a following. It was just like, ‘Yeah, you made me laugh, you’re relatable’, and that’s kind of all I want to…

Audemars Piguet-Matthew Williams Royal Oak In horolog y circles, the phrase ‘grail watch’ refers to a highly coveted piece that an individual, for all their contacts and means, has not managed to acquire — thus far. Not so for Matthew Williams. For the Chicago-born designer and founder of 1017 ALYX 9SM (and the Creative Director of Givenchy women’s and men’s collections), a grail watch always simply meant his next watch. Then the next one. And so on, and so on, until he’d completed a journey that began with his father gifting him a $1,000 piece on his completion of high school, right up to his acquisition of the holiest of grails: an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. So it’s difficult to express how big an honour – and a deserved one…

“I ’ve seen Mayfair go through many different evolutions. My favourite was nearly 40 years ago, Mark Birley’s time. Mayfair was a place that seemed to celebrate quality, rigour and excellence. It’s a little different now. You look around Mayfair… I’m not going to mention names, but there is a Disneyfication of dining.” Had this been said by anyone else, you might be wrinkling your nose at the smell of sour grapes. But this is Tim Jefferies talking — the proprietor of Hamilton’s gallery, the man who taught plutocrats how to spend seven-figure sums on a single photograph, the man whom 1990s and noughties supermodels were almost contractually obliged to date. Like the Colossus of Rhodes or the Pharos of Ptolemaic Alexandria, he is a towering monument to modern Mayfair,…

I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was in the changing room of the Surf Snowdonia centre in Wales, nervously gearing up for my session. I was wearing nothing but a wetsuit and a watch. The fact the watch was a Fifty Fathoms by Blancpain made me smile: it was beautiful. The Fifty Fathoms has all the history of the Rolex Submariner, which came out alongside it in the early 1950s. It has a distinctive look, with oversized bezel and elegant, considered typography. To me, it was the more interesting choice of dive watch from the era. And while my surfing that day left a lot to be desired (you can, I believe, still see the film on YouTube, which was shot for Revolution magazine), the joy the…

Champagne is one of the most successful marketing stories in history. “Champagne has always been well regarded, fashionable and expensive,” the critic Michael Broadbent writes in his 2002 book, Vintage Wine. “Christie’s archives uniquely demonstrate the extraordinarily high regard for it; champagne first appeared in James Christie’s catalogues in 1768, two years after the start of his auction house, and customarily commanded prices twice that of the finest claret.” This is where it gets really interesting. Broadbent adds: “The real explosion of demand started in the second half of the 19th century, the trade press reporting an unhealthy pressure on prices culminating with the 1874 vintage, the most renowned of that period, which reached record prices at Christie’s. The fin de siècle is associated with extravagant lifestyles in both France…

This issue marks The Rake’s 15th birthday, and the party balloons are up. Milestones are always a satisfactory thing, yet the whispering in various corridors over the past decade and a half is that print is suffering from a terminal illness. However, I have never accepted that prognosis. Sure, there are analogies I’d accept: for example, the print publishing industry these days is akin to raising a child in the pre-Victorian world — all manner of hazards and uncontrollable variables. That scenario, though, also presents opportunities. The key is whether, as content creators, you can foster a world that people want to enter. We have all been finding our tribes of late, we have been given opportunities to search outside our friendship groups and families to seek out others whose…

To quote Elon Musk, with ample tongue in cheek, for it is the epitome of stating the obvious: “You have to make stuff, otherwise nothing gets made.” As far as the tech sector of the United States is concerned, we all take full advantage of whoever binds themselves to this tenet. The technology with which this magazine is written, designed and printed has always relied on the ingenuity of those guys. But what of creativity? I cite the magazine, but what about the creators who don’t just make the ‘next thing’ but something truly original, everlasting and fulfilling? It is only these people on whom the moniker of ‘founder’ can be bestowed. The Founder is an unquenchably curious sort, a seeker of knowledge and inspiration, and a passionate reader —…

Let’s start with the unavoidable: a mention for the 1989 American comedy Turner and Hooch, in which a Dogue de Bordeaux played one of the title characters (and stole the show from his fellow lead, a youthful Tom Hanks). But more on this later. In the meantime, think of humans with the most elegantly wrinkled faces — from Keith Richards and Clint Eastwood to Dame Judy Dench — and ask why they have such deep facial crevasses (which, to our delight, they wear so proudly)? It is because of the rich narrative of the lives they have lived. In the case of the Dogue de Bordeaux, this syndrome — whereby rich life experiences etch a cryptic biographical map on the features — has been passed down generations (many hundreds of…

Sigmund Freud explained our personalities as comprising three distinct parts. The id is the impulsive pleasure seeker, luxuriating in beauty and repulsed by pain. This was the part that the inhabitants of the wealthy Greek-populated city of Sybaris gave themselves over to as they became the most devoted hedonists in human history and forged the paradigm for modern-day rakes and playboys, from Oscar Wilde to Taki Theodoracopulos. Then there’s the super-ego, the judgmental and moral part of ourselves — the repository of our ethics. Finally there is the ego, which mediates between these two polarities as they invariably vie with themselves. But if Freud were in attendance at either Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda show in Alberobello in Puglia or the Alta Sartoria show in the stunning all-white city of…

Translating from Spanish to ‘race’, ‘career’ and ‘thoroughfare’, the word carrera is an emotionally juiced homonym, especially for those whose love of horological folklore intersects with a fondness for motorsport and a penchant for existential philosophy. The twigs on its connotational family tree, after all, range from ‘speed’ to ‘competition’ and ‘adrenalin’ via ‘achievement’, ‘path’, ‘journey’ and ‘narrative’. It’s an apposite choice of moniker, then, for a genre-defining timepiece that celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. The Carrera’s story begins the year before its launch, in 1962, thanks to a deal struck by the fourth-generation family member then helming the business. “That year, Jack Heuer had agreed to provide timing equipment to the Sports Car Club of America,” Nicholas Biebuyck, TAG Heuer’s Heritage Director, tells The Rake. “So he went…

Gianni Bulgari has lived an extraordinary life. Scion of the Bulgari family, businessman, international socialite, confidant of Elizabeth Taylor and Gina Lollobrigida, kidnap survivor, pilot, racing driver, industrial designer, collector — and the creator of Bulgari Time. Mr. Gianni, the eldest grandson of Bulgari’s Greek founder, Sotirios Voulgaris (he Italianised his name to Sotirio Bulgari), does not give many interviews. It’s an unseasonably warm January day when we meet in Rome. Mr. Gianni has invited me into his vast apartment in the hills above the Eternal City, and we’re sitting in a sort of receiving area, which feels more like the wing of a museum or gallery than a conventional sitting room. Among the columns and floor-to-ceiling windows is an eclectic mix of books, paintings, sculptures, marbles, bronzes, ceramics, vases…

Justin is an editorial, entertainment and advertising photographer based in Los Angeles. After studying at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, he has, in a career spanning 20 years, established himself as a master of revealing his subjects’ simple essence. When he’s not behind the lens he enjoys travelling, and is always in search of the perfect Old Fashioned. His clients include Amazon Prime, AppleTV+, HBO, Entertainment Weekly and Disney, to name just a few. This is the first time we have collaborated with Justin, and it was a challenging assignment: to capture our joint cover stars, the veteran Hollywood star Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt Russell. Read the story and see more of Justin’s photographs on page 80. By day, Ed develops T.V. drama for…

The soul of the American playwright Arthur Miller is more tangible than ever. Seventy years after the first performance of his incendiary play The Crucible, there was recently a new production at London’s National Theatre, starring House of the Dragon’s Milly Alcock. Adrien Brody played Miller with elegant mystique in Blonde, last year’s unflinching biopic about his wife Marilyn Monroe. Arthur Miller: Writer, the 2017 HBO documentary made by Miller’s daughter Rebecca, revealed new depths and complexities to a figure who, by his own definition, wrote about what was “in the air”, though often from a lateral or allegorical perspective that gave his work an extra prescience. Arthur Asher Miller was born in October 1915 in Harlem, New York into a family of Jewish-Polish descent. His father, Isidore, owned a…

Ask any man to name the most sizzling celluloid sex kitten of the 20th century, and the chances are that the nominations will be influenced by each respondent’s age. For those who came of age in the 1950s, it’ll be Monroe. In the 1960s, perhaps Bardot, and so on. Spool to the era of acid wash and purple rain, and she wasn’t even real… In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the 1988 lettre d’amour to detective noir, we were introduced to an uber-vamp the likes of which we had not seen before. Her name was Jessica Rabbit, and she emerged from a limousine in a cascade of legs, furs, locks of fire, and disdain for every pulse she raised. “I’m not bad,” she purred in the film. “I’m just drawn that…

For readers of this periodical, the increasing ubiquity, and hence the dilution — actually, let’s make that flagrant abuse — of the word ‘bespoke’ is a lamentable blight to what is arguably the most expressive, most nuanced language on the planet. Originating, of course, in the tailoring realm (when a client chose a piece of cloth, it was said to have ‘been spoken for’), the word, in its pure form, refers to a commodity created from start to finish in accordance with a person’s or group’s specific requirements and purposes. Its morphing into a purse-string-loosening preface for anything from burgers to haircuts via goat’s milk Pecorino is an act of linguistic vandalism for which the marketing sector is bang to rights. So a deafening round of applause, please, for a…

Any physicist will tell you that speed equals distance over time. But what of a lesser-known, equally immutable law that states that desirability equals quality over scarcity? It’s a principle that provides an unlikely link between gold, white truffles, vintage cars and the work of Franz Kafka and Jimi Hendrix* — both geniuses in their fields whose pool of work is all the more cherished, and studied, for how regrettably shallow it is. It’s a tenet that has underpinned Nicolas Baretzki’s tenure at the helm of Montblanc, which began when the Richemont Group appointed the brand’s then Executive Vice President of Sales — a former stalwart member of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s senior management team — in April 2017. It’s also just one of the manifold ways in which Baretzki — whose fondness…