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SEP TEMBER — O CTOBER 2019

S T Y L E & FA S H I O N

E V E R Y B O D Y WA N T S A P I E C E O F L A K E I T H / G I O R G I O A R M A N I I N J A PA N / N E W S E A S O N M E N S W E A R / F I C T I O N B Y R I C H A R D F O R D / T H E G E N I U S O F J A C K I E C H A N / H O U S E P L A N T S / M A R K L E C K E Y : B R I D G E - B U I L D E R / R A S M U S M U N K ’ S M A D M E N U / A LT- F O O T B A L L S H I R T S / L U C Y P R E B B L E TA K E S O N T H E R U S S I A N S / Z I M B A B W E / A N T O N I O B A N D E R A S ’ G L O R I O U S R E T U R N / L O A F E R S / T H E F I R S T WAT C H O N T H E M O O N / W I L D H O R S E S / S O A P

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CONTENTS

September – October 2019 Bulletin 057

Antonio Banderas and Pain and Glory

072

Polestar leads the electric car charge

062

Fantasy football shirts

078

Double down with bi-metal watches

065

The Standard Hotel in London

081

Rasmus Munk: chef with a conscience

070

Luxury soap comes clean

084

The Serie Up chair’s anniversary edition

→

057

Alessandro Furchino Capria

084

088

Crockett and Jones’ 140 years of shoemaking

101

The blinged-up world of Trotters jewellers

092

The bamboo audio system from iFi

104

Tracking new safari routes in Zimbabwe

095

Poison pen: Lucy Prebble’s Russian play

110

Exotic fragrances for car interiors

098

Acqua di Parma’s Signatures of the Sun range

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CONTENTS

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September – October 2019 The First Watch on the Moon

115

Journal

Style and Fashion

131

Apocalypse Soon by Sanjiv Bhattacharya

140

Eight sartorial trends for the new season

132

Horsedrawn by Ed Caesar

148

Mark Leckey re-engineers Tate Britain

134

Drunken Boxing by Max Olesker

156

The pick of the Autumn/Winter collections

135

A Boat With a View by Nell Freudenberger

186

Giorgio Armani in Japan

137

A Decision of Principle by Mick Brown

196

LaKeith Stanﬁeld: the hard times are over

148

156

Richard Dowkar | Thomas Cooksey

The history of Omega’s Speedmaster ‘Moonwatch’

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CONTENTS

ESQUIRE

September – October 2019 Fiction

208

Jimmy Green, 1992 by Richard Ford

Market

219

Esquire’s experts hand-pick the best house plants, loafers, espresso cups and claret

Backstage

234

Behind the scenes on our men’s collections River Thames odyssey

On the Cover LaKeith Stanﬁeld, Studio City, Los Angeles Photographed by Micaiah Carter Styled by Matthew Henson

Giorgio Armani, Ginza, Tokyo 196

Black/white striped leather jacket, £3,980; taupe striped ﬁne jersey vest, £250; black wool striped trousers, £850; black leather derby shoes, £560, all by Saint Laurent

Limited edition UK cover Photograph courtesy of Giorgio Armani

Micaiah Carter | See Stockists page for details

Multicoloured printed muslin oversized bowling shirt, £750; sky blue striped cotton shirt, £490, both by Gucci

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MASTHEAD

Alex Bilmes Editor-in-Chief

Alun Williams Managing Director

Deputy Editor Johnny Davis

Creative Director Nick Millington

Managing Director Luxury & Fashion Jacqueline Euwe

Managing Director Beauty Jacqui Cave

Features Director Miranda Collinge

Fashion Director Catherine Hayward

Associate Publisher & Client Director Men’s Fashion Miles Dunbar

Director of Watches & Jewellery Anna O’Sullivan

Entertainment Director / Associate Editor Tom Macklin

Photo Director / Managing Editor Henny Manley

Watch & Jewellery Manager Olivia Horrocks-Burns

Watch & Jewellery Manager Emily Mills

Content Director Will Hersey

Chief Copy Editor Brendan Fitzgerald

Brand Development Director Jane Shackleton

Business Manager Jessica Day

Deputy Style Editor Finlay Renwick

Copy Editor Josh Bolton

Client Director of Finance Peter Cammidge

Director of Travel Denise Degroot

Fashion & Luxury Account Executive Rosie Cave

Art Director Lisa Barlow

Senior Designer Lauren Jones

Group Agency Director Sarah Tsirkas

Luxury Agency Heads Lee Bailey; Sharon Davies-Ridgeway; Charlotte Hollands

Director of Motors Jim Chaudry

Head of Classiﬁed Lee Rimmer

Head of Project Management Hayley Jackson

Head of Digital Marketing Seema Kumari

Editors-at-Large Sanjiv Bhattacharya (US Correspondent), Giles Coren, Andrew O’Hagan, Tom Parker Bowles, Will Self

Head of Consumer Sales & Marketing James Hill

Production Director John Hughes

Production Manager Steve Osborne

Photographers-at-Large Tom Craig, Simon Emmett

Managing Director, Events and Sponsorship, Hearst Live Victoria Archbold

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Marketing Manager Vicky Chandler

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Advertisement Production Controller Paul Taylor

Director of PR & Communications Effie Kanyua

Deputy Head of PR & Communications Ben Bolton

Assistant Commissioning Editor / Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief Rachel Fellows

Style Director Charlie Teasdale

Designer Drew Burns

Fashion Assistant Dan Choppen

esquire.com/uk Deputy Digital Editor Nick Pope

Senior Digital Writer Olivia Ovenden

Digital Style Editor Murray Clark

Junior Digital Writer Tom Nicholson

Social Media Editor Hannah Enderby

Head of International Fashion & Luxury Lee Brown

Italian & Swiss Agent (+39 02 66 19 3142) Alessandro Caracciolo

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Contributing Editors Tim Adams / Olie Arnold / Tom Barber / Richard Benson / Kevin Braddock / Peter Bradshaw

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Ben Mitchell / Philip Norman / Russell Norman / Max Olesker / Alexis Petridis / James Sleaford Stephen Smith / Will Storr / David Thomson / Paul Wilson Hearst Magazines UK, House of Hearst, 30 Panton Street, London SW1Y 4AJ

Contributing Photographers

Editorial +44 20 7439 5000 / Advertising +44 20 7297 3480; visit: esquire.com/uk

Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott / Gregoire Alexandre / Carin Backoff / Cass Bird / Michael Bodiam Chris Brooks / Dan Burn-Forti / Pelle Crepin / Ana Cuba / Matthew Donaldson / Phil Dunlop Chris Floyd / Alexander Guirkinger / Jon Gorrigan / Charlotte Hadden / Frederike Helwig / Nadav Kander Virginie Khateeb / Luke Kirwan / Jesse Laitinen / Chris Leah / Alexi Lubomirski / Dan McAlister Angela Moore / Josh Olins / Terry O’Neill / Martin Parr / Ash Reynolds / Kourtney Roy / Christoffer Rudquist Martin Schoeller / Steve Schoﬁeld / Philip Sinden / Peggy Sirota / David Slijper / Juergen Teller David Vintiner / Ellen von Unwerth / Lukas Wassman / Jooney Woodward / Greg Williams / Paul Zak

Esquire International Editions Editors: Vladimir Konstantinov, Bulgaria / Liang Zhaohui, China / Alberto Sanchez Montiel, Colombia Jiri Roth, Czech Republic / Kosta N Tsitsas, Greece / Kwong Lung Kit, Hong Kong / Yurij Serebryansky, Kazakhstan Kiju Shin, Korea / Alberto Sanchez Montiel, Latin America / Malaysia / Matthew Baxter-Priest, Middle East Arno Kantelberg, Netherlands / Andrzej Chojnowski, Poland / Sergey Minaev, Russia / Milan Nikolic, Serbia Norman Tan, Singapore / Jorge Alcalde, Spain / Taiwan / Satiya Siripojanakorn, Thailand / Togan Noyan, Turkey Michael Sebastian, United States / Senior International Editions Editor: Luis Veronese

Access Hearst Magazines UK website at hearst.co.uk © A publication of Hearst Magazines UK. Issue: September – October 2019 | Published: 15 August 2019 | ESQUIRE, ISSN 0960-5150 is published six times per year by Hearst Magazines UK. By permission of Hearst Communication Inc c/o USACAN Media Corp at 123A Distribution Way, Building H-1, Suite 104, Plattsburgh, NY 12901. Periodicals postage paid at Plattsburgh, NY. POSTMASTER: send address changes to Esquire c/o Express Mag, PO box 2769, Plattsburgh, NY 12901-0239. Magazine printed by Wyndham Roche, Victoria Business Park, Roche, St Austell, PL26 8LX. Cover printed by The Westdale Press Limited, 70 Portmanmoor Industrial Estate, East Moors, Cardiff CF24 5HB. Magazine distributed by Frontline Ltd, Peterborough, tel: 01733 555161. Conditions of sale and supply: ESQUIRE shall not, without the written consent of the publishers first given, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade except at the full retail price of £6 and shall not be lent, hired out, or otherwise disposed of in a mutilated condition or in any unauthorised cover, by way of trade, or affixed to or as part of any publication or advertising, literary or pictorial matter whatsoever. Manuscripts and illustrations are accepted on the understanding that no liability is incurred for safe custody, but ESQUIRE cannot consider unsolicited material for publication. All characters in any fictional story are purely imaginary and no reference or allusion is intended to apply to any living person or persons. ESQUIRE is fully protected by copyright and nothing may be printed wholly or in part without permission. ESQUIRE is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation. We abide by the Editors’ Code of Practice and are committed to upholding the highest standards of journalism. If you think we have not met those standards and wish to make a complaint please contact complaints@hearst.co.uk or visit hearst.co.uk/hearst-magazines-uk-complaints-procedure. If we are unable to resolve your complaint, or if you would like more information about IPSO or the Editors’ Code, contact IPSO at ipso.co.uk. Subscriptions and back issues: the standard subscription price (BAR) is £42 for six issues of ESQUIRE plus THE BIG WATCH BOOK annual, based on the standard cover price of £6. For new and renewal orders, ring 01858 438 770* or visit hearstmagazines.co.uk. | For existing subscription enquiries, change of address and back-issue orders for ESQUIRE email esquire@ subscription.co.uk, or ring 01858 438 770*, or write to ESQUIRE, Hearst Magazines UK, Tower House, Sovereign Park, Lathkill Street, Market Harborough, Leicestershire LE16 9EF. Please quote your subscription number in all correspondence | We regret that free gifts, supplements, books and other items included with the magazine when it is sold in the UK are not available with copies of the magazine purchased outside the UK | *Lines open weekdays, 8am–9.30pm; Saturdays, 8am–4pm. Calls are charged at your standard network rate. Please check with your network provider for more details.

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CONTRIBUTORS

RICHARD FORD

A giant of American ﬁction, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Frank Bascombe books — The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank With You — is equally celebrated for his novels and his short stories. In this issue of Esquire, Ford publishes a brand new story: “Jimmy Green, 1992”. Ford’s most recent book is a memoir, Between Them: Remembering My Parents (Bloomsbury). His novel Wildlife was last year adapted into a ﬁlm by actor Paul Dano.

MATTHEW HENSON

LISA BARLOW

For his second Esquire cover story, following his memorable work with the rapper A$AP Rocky last year, New York-based stylist Henson crossed the continental US to California, and the home of actor LaKeith Stanfield. A highly influential figure in contemporary men’s style, and former fashion editor at Complex magazine, Henson has also worked with The Weeknd, Nike and Stampd.

As second-in-command on the hectic Esquire art desk, the steady hand and cultivated eye of Esquire’s art director can be seen and felt on every page. This month, in addition to conceiving, commissioning and designing numerous shoots and sections, we allowed Barlow out of the ofﬁce to oversee a fashion shoot on the River Thames. (Won’t happen again — Ed.)

MICAIAH CARTER

Among the most in-demand commercial and editorial photographers currently working, Carter makes his Esquire debut with a show-stopping cover story: LaKeith Stanﬁeld, photographed at the Atlanta star’s new home in Los Angeles. Born in California but now based in Brooklyn, Carter’s work has appeared in magazines including Vanity Fair, American Vogue, i-D and Time, and he has shot campaigns for Nike, Converse and Thom Browne. All that and he’s not yet turned 25.

Andrew Morales

MICK BROWN

Mick Brown is a consummate journalist. Author, reporter, interviewer — most proliﬁcally for The Daily Telegraph, where his work for the Magazine puts the rest of us to shame — and Esquire contributing editor, for the Journal he remembers an assignment from 1993 that he has never been able to forget. Brown is the writer of books including Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector (Bloomsbury).

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CONTRIBUTORS

CATHERINE HAYWARD

THOMAS COOKSEY

After months of globetrotting adventures for the magazine, Esquire’s fashion director stayed closer to home for her epic story in this issue, taking her team and photographer Thomas Cooksey on a magical mystery tour of greenest Gloucestershire and South East England, as they traced the route of the River Thames from source to sea, stopping off along the way to photograph the key looks from the new Autumn/Winter menswear collections from the international fashion and luxury houses.

Previous photographic assignments for Esquire have included a fashion shoot at the Eden Project in Cornwall, so Cooksey is no stranger to working in the great British outdoors. His story in this issue was more ambitious by far: over two days in July, he shot 33 separate “looks” (fashion-speak for outﬁts) at various locations — rural and urban — along the length of the River Thames. Elsewhere, Cooksey’s work has appeared in Vogue Hommes International and he has shot advertising campaigns for brands including Burberry and Mr Porter.

NELL FREUDENBERGER

ED CAESAR

An award-winning novelist and contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times, Freudenberger makes her Esquire debut with an account of a family holiday/literary pilgrimage to Egypt — frazzled husband and nonplussed children along for the ride — for our Journal section. Her most recent book, Lost and Wanted (Viking) was published earlier this year.

Last seen in these pages with an explosive proﬁle of George Osborne, Caesar is among the leading long-form investigative reporters in the business, a contributing writer to The New Yorker, as well as a contributing editor to Esquire. For our Journal section this issue, he offers a searching story in miniature, an account of the power of music to move us through space and time. He is the author of Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon (Viking).

SANJIV BHATTACHARYA

Esquire’s long-time man in Los Angeles works a double shift for the magazine this issue, interviewing LaKeith Stanfield, the gifted, complicated actor whose movie career is taking off, following his eye-catching work on the TV show Atlanta, as well as filing a resonant essay for the Journal section, on the California wildfires, and what it feels like to live through them. Bhattacharya’s journalism has also appeared in The Observer and The Daily Telegraph. He is the author of the book, Secrets and Wives: The Hidden World of Mormon Polygamy (Soft Skull).

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Unfashionably late AS AN EXPERIMENT DESIGNED to test the limits of human endurance — or human amiability, at least — asking a person to take notes at a press conference when they’re feeling a bit hot and bothered hardly qualifies. It’s nothing compared to trying to eat spaghetti while spinning in a tumble dryer, or being made to play football while wearing binoculars: two of the fiendish punishments devised for contestants on those Japanese game shows that Clive James used to make fun of on TV, when I was a boy. Still, I was struggling. It was 10am on a steamy Thursday morning in Ginza, Tokyo. My flight had landed three hours earlier. I hadn’t slept, or showered. Bleary-eyed, lank-haired, I caught sight of myself in a mirror and was surprised to see that, rather than a pork dumpling drowning in a bowl of warm broth, which is what I felt I looked like, what I actually resembled was something far less interesting: a jet-lagged media executive in a crumpled suit, huffing and, for good measure, puffing as well. So, while the man I had crossed continents to interview, all 85 years of him, stood straight as a chopstick and chilled as a can of cold green tea in a stifling conference room above his flagship

Alex Bilmes EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Japanese boutique, talking extempore to serried ranks of well-drilled journalists, immaculate in their personal grooming, this reporter slowly slid down the wall he’d been leaning against, balanced momentarily on the corner of a trestle table, and ultimately pooled in a corner, a small puddle of melted magazine editor. It might have not been such a bad look, it might have gone unnoticed, had I not been so late, in the first place, for this, the first appointment on my two-day assignment shadowing Giorgio Armani as he prepared to stage a fashion show in Tokyo’s National Museum. In my defence, the timing of Mr Armani’s press conference had changed while I was in the air. A note, passed to me as I attempted to check into my hotel, informed me that I was expected promptly, across town. Pausing to admire, even through my rising panic, the beautiful calligraphy of the hotel’s message-taker, I deposited my bags with the concierge, jumped into a taxi (much overenunciating of the words “Ginzah!” and “Towah!” and feverish pointing at Google Maps) and, when I jumped out at the other end, into the soupy morning, I discovered that there is more than one Ginza Tower in Ginza, and the building I was standing outside, in what was now approaching despair, was not the one I was looking for. I hailed another cab (more overenunciating of the words “Ginzah!” and “Towah!”, this time with added “Arrrmarrrnee!” and more feverish pointing at Google Maps) to the correct Ginza Tower, which I stood outside, making frantic phone calls to people who were inside, trying to get them to come out and let me in. For the editor of a men’s style magazine to be late for one meeting with Giorgio Armani may be regarded as a misfortune; to be late for a second meeting looks like carelessness. To be dishevelled, and perspiring, and hyperventilating on both occasions… let’s just say the optics aren’t great. My first full week in this job was the first week of January 2011. Rather than heading home on the Friday evening, perhaps stopping off at the pub for a pint or 17 to decompress, I took a taxi to Heathrow and boarded a flight to Milan, for my first exposure to that city’s men’s fashion week. At that time, the person with the contract for selling advertising space in Esquire to the Italian fashion houses was a prototypical Milanese smoothie in a camel cashmere overcoat, all salt and pepper hair and wolfish grin: Luciano Bernardini, a high priest of the fashion conclave. →

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Luciano had been on the phone to me already, on my first day in fact, to introduce himself and to pass on some good news: he had arranged a welcoming drink for me, to celebrate my elevation to my new post, to be hosted by no less a figure than the Godfather of Italian fashion, Giorgio Armani. This Champagne anointment would occur at 7pm on Friday, at Mr Armani’s own home in the city. I made appreciative noises and signed off with what I felt was a confident, even ballsy, “Ciao, grazie!” But there was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The 7pm thing bothered me. Actually, all of it bothered me. I didn’t feel ready. I didn’t know what to wear. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know where to stand. I worried I would not be able to force my face into the correct expression. (What is the correct expression?) I had hoped to have some time to get my bearings, find my feet, before I was presented to the key players in the fashion industry. All of that bothered me, but it was the 7pm thing that bothered me most. My flight landed at 5.30pm. How could there possibly be time to get through arrivals, find my driver, and make it through the Friday evening traffic to the Armani residence? The flight was delayed. Of course it was. There was fog over Linate Airport. (There is, I have subsequently learned, always fog over Linate Airport.) I called Luciano from Heathrow. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There’s always fog over Linate,” he said. “It will be OK,” he said. “Mr Armani is looking forward to meeting you,” he lied. After three or four weeks sitting on the tarmac, we took off. I spent the flight in a panic, looking at my watch. By the time we’d

disembarked, decanted into minibuses for the drive (200 or 300 miles?) to the queue for passport control, I was already 20 minutes late for my drink with Mr A. I called Luciano. Don’t worry, he said. The car is waiting, he said. You’ll make it, he said. It was closer to 8pm than 7 when I spotted the driver holding a board with my name on it. He had obviously been apprised of the situation because he took my bag from me and began to run, at some speed, through the arrivals hall and out into the car park, me chugging along behind, breathless, checking my phone for updates from Luciano. Senior operatives were scrambled from across Milan to run interference for me, as they say in America. The most senior of the senior operatives — the then editor-in-chief of American Esquire, David Granger — was, in fact, American himself, so running interference came naturally to him. It fell to David to make small talk with Mr Armani and his consiglieres while everyone pretended my lateness was not embarrassing, or unprofessional, or plain rude. The drive from the airport lasted the lifetimes of several ancient civilisations. The door of the car was opened by a strikingly handsome young man in a sober black suit, beautifully tailored to accentuate his already classical proportions. He looked at me pityingly, as well he might. I was led through a spotless courtyard into a modernist interior, where other men in dark suits, each more gorgeous than the last, nodded at me seriously as I loped past, redfaced, tucking in my shirt and sweating for Britain, for Italy, for Europe and the world.

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Finally, I came into a large reception room. There I was confronted by a group of dapper middle-aged men, all in a row, each exuding taste, elegance, success. Only their tight smiles gave them away. At the end of this row of stylish gentlemen stood the most instantly recognisable fashion designer in the world, the then septuagenarian billionaire Giorgio Armani. He was holding a Champagne flute, which he handed to me. For a second it seemed like he might always have been there, forever holding that glass, waiting for me. Possibly it felt to him that he had. Luciano Bernardini, leonine in his self-possession, padded forward to make the introductions. I offered an unctuous sort of half-bow to my host. And nodded and said, “Thank you.” And Mr Armani nodded back and made a gracious gesture with his arm, taking in the room and the people in it, as if to say, “Welcome to our world.” David Granger made the toast, wishing me luck in my new job, and remarking, somewhat mischievously, on the good start I’d already made. Everyone raised his glass. And then it was over. Back at the hotel, Granger bought me a Negroni and clapped me on the back (quite hard) as if to say, not to worry, kid, it’s all gravy from here. Since then I have had a number of occasions to meet Mr Armani, but always briefly, and always in busy rooms surrounded by other people. In Japan, having recovered myself after that first press conference, I got to meet him properly, and to talk to him about his life and career. I put in my first request for an interview with Mr A shortly after that bungled Champagne baptism. He made me wait for it. Quite right, too. ○

Also in this issue: Sanjiv Bhattacharya interviews cover star LaKeith Stanﬁeld, photographed in Los Angeles by Micaiah Carter. And Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Ford publishes a brand new short story, “Jimmy Green, 1992”

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BULLETIN PEOPLE TO WATCH, PLACES TO BE, PRODUCTS TO BUY

There is a storm coming As he prepares to turn 60, Antonio Banderas delivers the performance of his life By Paul Wilson Portrait by Alessandro Furchino Capria

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Bulletin

As a reason for keeping an interview on schedule, Antonio Banderas’ is, at the very least, original. “There is a storm coming,” he says, “and I want to get ahead of it.” Above us, the sun streaming through the atrium of Munich’s Hotel Bayerische Hof suggests otherwise, but the Spaniard has a look as ominous as the dark clouds he foresees. “The rain comes down from the Alps and then the airport closes. Always happens here.” Three decades of international movie stardom and the air miles that come with that may have given him a sixth sense for travel-disrupting weather, but even Banderas could not have predicted that, in 2019, turning 60 next year, he would be in the prime of his acting life. This August, following its rapturous reception at the Cannes Film Festival, where Banderas was named Best Actor, he appears in Pain and Glory, director Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, in which the actor plays a ﬁlm director modelled closely on the great auteur himself. (Banderas

is in Munich to present the movie at the city’s film festival and also to receive an award for his body of work.) Much has been made of exactly how much of Almodóvar is in Salvador, Banderas’ character — is this fiction or straight autobiography? — and to what extent one of the storylines reflects their own shared history: the story of a director reconnecting with a former star years after shunning him at the height of their early success. Between 1982 and 1989, Banderas and Almodóvar made five films together, establishing themselves individually and as a pair, as a Spanish Scorsese and De Niro. They then didn’t work together again for 22 years, until 2011’s The Skin I Live In. This long separation was attributed to Almodóvar’s supposed disapproval of Banderas having gone to work, and then live, in Hollywood. “Between us, it wasn’t so dramatic [as it is in the film],” Banderas says, clapping his hands dramatically. “We have always been friends and →

Previous page: Antonio Banderas photographed for Esquire in Munich, Germany, June 2019 Above: co-star Asier Etxeandia with Banderas in Pain and Glory

‘There is a big element of trust in acting, and I lacked that with Almodóvar, but I was wrong. We are so in rhythm now’

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Bulletin

in this, the 22nd year in which they have been available. “I sell more bottles of cologne in Russia than any other brand,” he says, and it’s not hard to imagine young thrusters from Saint Petersburg to Vladivostok spraying one of his fragrances, perhaps Secret Temptation, in a little three-spritz Zorro “Z” on their freshly scrubbed necks. Which one is he wearing today? “Power,” he says, shortening Power of Seduction in the way that its regular wearers would. He then tugs the neck of his duck-egg blue, short-sleeved shirt, a polo with a grandad collar. “This is mine too.” He is working with Ecoalf, an ethical fashion brand, on a sustainable clothing line yet to be launched. For his previous clothing line, with Danish firm Selected Homme, he took modules in menswear at Central Saint Martins, alma mater of Alexander McQueen. “I don’t just want to give my name and image to something,” he says. “I like to put the work in. I go to the perfumists and they have taught me; they are artists. It’s so interesting. I like to learn, and to do. Especially since my heart attack [January 2017; three stents]. It made me realise that there really is only one life.” He pauses, sips his rooibos tea and stares across the hotel lobby for a long moment. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but I really have to catch my plane home.” He is flying into Farnborough airport and then heading into leafiest Surrey, where he has lived for the last four years,

Top: director Pedro Almodóvar with Banderas on the set of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Madrid, 1988. Above: the pair together in Spain shooting Pain and Glory in summer 2018

[not working together] was more a game than anything else. He was playing with me a little bit, maybe a little bit jealous of certain things I did in America. There is a big element of trust in acting, in the people who you are with, and I lacked that trust with him, but I was wrong. We have confronted each other in the work, and we are so in rhythm now. Working on Pain and Glory was very emotional.” Banderas’ current moment in the sun — he was an excellent Pablo Picasso on TV last year in Genius — is something of a turnaround from recent years. He has worked steadily since his heyday as a Hollywood heartthrob in the Nineties — Zorro, Puss In Boots in the Shrek films, as well as starring for Woody Allen, Steven Soderbergh and Brian de Palma — but his recent CV does not contain many films that have troubled festival juries. In 2017 alone, he played in five actionthrillers, three shot in Bulgaria and none coming

to a cinema near you (unless you live in Lithuania). Prior to these roles, he had turns in Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, The Expendables 3 and The 33, as the head of the Chilean miners who spent 69 days trapped underground. “Let me explain about the concept of ‘a career’,” he says, leaning in and putting his hand on Esquire’s knee. “When I went to America, and my ﬁrst movies were successful, my agents, everybody, told me not to get away from what the audience wants. ‘You have to take care of your career.’ But I said, ‘I don’t want to have “a career”’. I really enjoy doing many different things. But I paid a price, of sorts, because I didn’t follow the path I was supposed to follow. I am an actor, and that’s it, period.” Well, an actor and an accomplished salesman, too. He has the longest-running celebrity fragrance deal of anyone except for Elizabeth Taylor. There are 22 Banderas fragrances on the market, 13 for men and nine for women,

just outside the village of Cobham, with his girlfriend, a Dutch investment banker. They wanted somewhere good for Spain and New York, with lots of theatre, and after living in West London for a while, they found the stockbroker belt. It’s an unexpected and incongruous image, the Spanish stallion roaming genteel Cobham High Street. But Banderas says it works for him. “No one there cares about who I am, really. I go to the shops, in Horsham or wherever, and nobody bothers me. Sometimes someone nice will say, ‘Hey, Banderas!’” he says, in a decent plummy accent, “‘happy to have you hair-air!’” Then he bursts out laughing. You would forgive him chuckling to himself again a few hours later, in his aeroplane seat, thinking of the rest of us back at Munich airport, watching the delays mount up and the rain lash the massive departure lounge windows. ○ Pain and Glory is released on 23 August

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These colours don’t run (or pass, or shoot) No stylish man would wear an official replica kit. But a new breed of bootlegger is changing the game, with stylish shirts for fantasy footballers By Charlie Teasdale Photograph by Grégoire Alexandre

Football is having what the fashion world might refer to as “a moment”. It’s not about the big, shiny, important stuff, like Ronaldo’s delts or Pogba’s hair, but instead a nostalgia for the football of our youths, as played by humble journeymen and home-grown boy wonders. The Class of ’92. Gary Lineker’s Leicester kit. Steve Bruce’s nose. Gale-force Thursday nights in Wolverhampton. And so, for the ﬁrst time in a long time, football shirts are cool again. But not in the way you might imagine. You might have noticed that when England’s brave lads were swashbuckling

their way through the World Cup last year, scores of fans chose to wear kits from decades gone by, rather than the latest, official, Nike edition. Most were from the Nineties. The grey one Gareth Southgate wore to miss that penalty at Euro ’96, for example. Block colours, big stripes, geometric magic-eye patterns, surplice collars and voluminous sleeves. Technically speaking, they pale in comparison to the featherweight, wicking pomp of modern football shirts. But boy, are the latest strips dull (a third of the shirts at last year’s World Cup were plain red.)

“Recently, I think kit design has become a little stale,” says Scott McRory, who manufactures unofficial football shirts under the brand name Killa Villa. “If you look through Neal Heard’s book A Lovers Guide to Football Shirts, you can see just how unique some of the kits were back in the day. That is something I’d really like to bring back.” McRory takes a blank stock kit from a big sports brand and turns it into a ﬁctional team strip based on a hip-hop reference. His latest design is an homage to Raekwon of Wu-Tang Clan,

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Playing homage, from left: ‘EU Team’, £50, by Acid FC; ‘Totti’, £80, by Fokohaela; ‘Argentina Pearl Jam’, £60, by Copa; ‘Vatreni’, £80, by Fokohaela; ‘Ice Cream 95 Away’, £55, by Killa Villa; ‘Pharmaradona’ scarf, £20, by Acid FC; ‘Mbappe Immortal’, £80; ‘La Vie En Bleu Zizou’, £80, both by Fokohaela

but in the past he has nodded to Biggie Smalls, The Dead Presidents and The Streets. The latter was a skew on a 1998 Birmingham City strip. In Germany, as founder and creative director of Fokohaela, Jason Lee (no relation to the pineapple-haired former Nottingham Forest striker) works from a different perspective. His shirts are super-graphic love letters to the teams and players they salute. He makes a psychedelic take on an Arsenal shirt in dedication to the “Iceman” Dennis Bergkamp; above the Emirates sponsor logo it says “Don’t ﬂy”,

in honour of the Dutchman’s refusal to board a plane. He creates not-for-sale one-of-ones, too, which deeply frustrates his fans on Instagram. The Eric Cantona/Enfant Terrible/Manchester United/Boy Scout shirt is a thing of arcane footballing beauty. The movement — or perhaps we should more correctly call it a league as it features such brands as Romance FC, Nowhere FC and Insurgent Ballers Club — has a wry eye. Londonbased Acid FC imagined a shirt for the EU national team (just think of the squad!), and they are

selling a scarf with an “excited” Maradona motif. “Football shirts are the most democratic clothing garment on the planet,” says Dan Sandison, founder of Mundial magazine. “They break down barriers of nationality, language, politics. It’s such an easy form of self-expression.” To that end, it’s perhaps not surprising that so many people view the football shirt as a canvas for pop art. And what better culture to mine than one that offers decades of sorrow, ecstasy, skulduggery, romance, retribution and famous men in badly ﬁtting shorts? ○

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A new Standard The hip hotel brand lands in London By Alex Bilmes

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The sign outside reads The Standard, but only if you’re standing on your head. This upsidedown positioning, on a corner of the Euston Road, in London’s King’s Cross, is not some contractor’s mistake. All Standard hotels have a topsy-turvy sign out front, just as all offer an oblique take on mid-century Americana, with interiors that strive to be louche and ironic at the same time, like a Ron Jeremy wink. The Standard is the boutique chain with the Boogie Nights aesthetic: low-slung, funky furniture; clashing prints; carpet on the walls; oversized pot plants; comfort food; service that is friendly to the point of pornographic. The ﬁrst time I stayed at a Standard was also the ﬁrst time I went to Los Angeles. It was 1999, The Standard Hollywood had been open for six months or so, and it felt like an epicentre of Y2K cool. If it had been an erogenous zone — and in some very real ways, it was — it would have been an exposed midriff. Hairstyle: mullet. TV show: Jackass. Drink: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Formerly a run-down retirement home

on the Sunset Strip, the first Standard was launched as a budget hotel for fashionconscious visitors to LA (hipsters, as they were becoming known) who were more interested in the after-hours lobby action — noseringed DJ playing Duran Duran’s “Union of the Snake”, as I recall it — than in the thread count of the bedsheets, or any of the other customary signifiers of “quality”. Early investors included Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz and Benicio Del Toro. And yes, the sign outside was upside down, just because. Founded by André Balazs, the squarejawed hospitality savant who a decade earlier had revived the Chateau Marmont, the notorious celebrity bolthole just around the next bend, the décor of that first Standard was retro motel. The rooms had moulded plastic fittings in orange, silver beanbags, Warhol-print curtains, sliding screen doors opening on to balconies from which one could spy on one’s fellow hard-partying guests. There was an on-site diner, with fixtures and fittings straight out of

a Fifties noir, and an in-house barber shop/tattoo parlour, Rudy’s. The fascination with white trash kitsch went beyond the Kid Rock soundtrack. The matchbooks had fake ads for bail bondsmen on them. The soap smelled of grapefruit. On the sundeck, its pool overlooking the sprawl of the city, mini-skirted waitresses in thigh boots crisscrossed the blue AstroTurf, emptying ashtrays ﬁlled with American Spirit butts. Celeb spots might — and, indeed, did — include Eminem and the kids from American Pie. Plenty of people think of sex when they think of hotel rooms; The Standard made the connection explicit. It was a pleasure palace for voyeurs and exhibitionists. Each night, in a glass box behind the reception desk, a pretty blonde girl in white hot pants and halter-neck top, climbed in, closed her eyes and listened to her iPod: a living exhibit, like one of those working girls in Amsterdam. No one blinked a bloodshot eyeball. I went frequently to LA in the Noughties. Inevitably, I fetched up at The Standard. But the dudes with the trucker hats and The New York Dolls T-shirts, and the indie-rock girls with the alt-fringes, fairly quickly gave way to boorish Fred Durst wannabes and vacant hotties in Juicy Couture, and the whole thing started to look a bit like a discarded Terry Richardson Polaroid. I took my business down the Strip to the Sunset Marquis, where faded English rockers and the journalists who venerate them sit Buddha-like under palm trees, staring at the koi carp and willingly observing the smoking ban. But I still carry a torch for The Standard, the original and its offshoots: The Standard Downtown LA, where you might, as I did in — ooh — 2002, sit by the rooftop pool sipping →

The Standard is the boutique chain with the Boogie Nights aesthetic, both louche and ironic, like a Ron Jeremy wink

Previous page: the retro-plush Double Standard bar. Left: formerly a faded brutalist London landmark, what was once the Camden Town Hall Annexe in King’s Cross has been remade as the ﬁrst Standard Hotel to open outside the US

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From left: the ground ﬂoor Library Lounge alludes to the building’s history; interior of one of the 266 rooms at The Standard London

Sea Breezes and making the obligatory references to Blade Runner, before hurtling home, Deckard-style, in your floating car; and The Standard Spa, Miami Beach, where I drank brewskis with broskis one Superbowl weekend; and The Standard High Line, in New York, a hotel so trendy that its own paying guests weren’t allowed into its bar, the “Boom Boom Room”. When that opened, in 2008, I had to call my friend Euan, a prince of Manhattan and wizard of the velvet rope, to get me in. In 2011, a fifth Standard opened, in New York’s East Village, and in 2013 Balazs sold 80 per cent of his stake to the newly formed Standard International, which also owns Bunkhouse, another chain of cheap-ish crash pads, mostly in the sunbaked American Southwest. An aggressive plan of world domination is now in place with properties planned for Paris, Milan, Lisbon, Mexico City, Bangkok, Jakarta and the Maldives. But the first Standard outside America is closer to home, and in a location that, at first glance, is altogether less glamorous.

A municipal office block known locally as “the egg box”, on the corner of Argyle Street and the traffic-clogged Euston Road, the former Camden Town Hall Annexe, until recently a faded concrete monument to Seventies’ brutalism, is now The Standard London. Outside, a bright red lift scurries up and down its scrubbed façade, like a helium balloon accidentally released by a child. Inside, the ethos is in keeping with the US hotels, albeit with post-modern design flourishes — Memphis-style chairs and lamps — to complement the mid-century furniture. What was once the public St Pancras Library is now the Library Lounge, shelves filled with a thoughtful selection of books. That is adjacent to the excellent restaurant Isla, where chef Adam Rawson, previously of Balazs’s Chiltern Firehouse, serves seasonal British coastal cuisine. Opening in the autumn will be a further restaurant, on the tobe-completed tenth floor. Rooms are bright and uncluttered, many with views looking across to George Gilbert Scott’s

monolithic St Pancras Hotel, a number with outdoor baths, so guests can get sudsy while, in the grimy city below, those less fortunate slog their way into work. Alongside the obligatory complimentary style magazines, my room’s coffee table offered a copy of Simon Reynolds’ terriﬁc Energy Flash, his history of rave culture. A nice touch, I thought, as I stuffed it in my overnight bag. (Some hotels you nick the soap to re-gift, in The Standard you pinch a countercultural classic.) For all that The Standard is in the process of becoming a global mega-chain, still there is an appealing, anything-goes feel to the place. And on a ﬁne day you can sit on the terrace outside the Double Standard bar — open to non-guests — drinking a Standard Lager and, in a way I never could have imagined would be possible in King’s Cross, almost convince yourself you’re in LA, and it’s 1999, and history has ended, and all is well with the world. Almost. ○ The Standard, London, 10 Argyle Street, WC1H; standardhotels.com

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Cleaning up its act Soap is washing away past sins to embody modern luxury Photograph by Andy Barter

When did soap become a thing? In the Seventies and Eighties, it was the only cleaning option we had: Lux for the home (“beauty soap” aimed at mums, Raquel Welch in the ads) and Lifebuoy at school (“deodorant soap” aimed at PE teachers, the initialism “BO” misattributed to the company). Unhygienic, forever mulching up the side of the sink accompanied by hairs of unknown origin(s), the soap bar’s qualifications as an agent of cleanliness seemed to extend to being overpoweringly scented, albeit as natural as a selection bag of Swizzels Matlow. It certainly didn’t clean your teeth: take it from someone who had his mouth “washed out with soap” by his mum — for saying “bugger” in the garden. I still retch at pulling chunks of Lux’s “rich creamy lather” from my teeth. Bugger. Bugger. Bugger. Then squirty shower gels, purifying scrubs and foaming cleansers came and washed soap away. Now soap’s back. With sales up for the first time in decades, it’s a luxury item. Pick from designer brands (Tom Ford, Hermès), reinvigorated apothecaries (Floris, Penhaligon’s) or groovy organic start-ups (Haeckels, Dr Squatch). These new bars won’t dry out your skin, chime with the backlash against plastic, look good and represent a rootsier return to grooming (see also: the rise of “honestly-priced” shaving start-ups). “Baxter of California and Buly 1803 are specifically developing soaps with men’s skincare in mind,” says Mr Porter’s Mackenzie Robertson. “We’ve seen a considerable lift in sales in the last 12 months. They offer superior ingredients and benefits in an easy, albeit nostalgic option.” “Soap is easy to make,” says Dom Bridges founder of Haeckels, which uses natural products such as hand-harvested Margate seaweed. “Its origin is in 1550BC Egypt, where they mixed animal and vegetable oils with alkaline salts. It’s a little harder to make naturally, to create a great product with no chemicals or animal derivatives, and people warm to that. We’ve become focused on the idea that relaxation can only take place on the beaches of Thailand. I wanted to change that and make a more educated, sustainable product.” Raising the bar, in more ways than one. ○ Right: Fauborg perfumed soap bar, £22, by Hermès

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By Johnny Davis

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Polestar 1

Engines

2.0-litre 4-cylinder petrol / 2 electric

Power

600hp

0–62mph

4secs

Top speed

155mph

Price

From £135,000

polestar.com

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Electric dreams Designed in Sweden, built in China, Polestar aims to be the premium car brand of the future By Will Hersey

Photographs by Greg White

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If you wanted to start a forward-thinking global technology brand from scratch, you might picture a site on the outskirts of a city like Gothenburg, Sweden’s second and most liveable city, where a minimalist and monochrome, cube-like global headquarters could be built for a youthful international workforce to studiously problem-solve at hot-desks and hang-outs. So far, so good. In fact, so perfect is the picture that greets new arrivals to the Polestar Cube, there’s a Black Mirror-like quality to the scene that suggests this could be some undetermined moment in the near future. Which in the context of the car industry, it kind of is. Because inside this glass-fronted building, Polestar is very busily and determinedly rethinking the model of a car company, in the manner of a tech start-up. “It’s not just a marketing slogan,” Thomas Ingenlath, Polestar’s well-presented 54-year-old German CEO, tells me in a very sparse, very white boardroom. “If you have a much smaller company where things are so much more direct you can actually move so much faster.” That almost every gleaming company car in the car park is a Volvo is explained by this particular start-up having the added advantage of being part-owned and

backed by Gothenburg’s biggest employer (alongside Volvo’s own parent company, the Chinese car manufacturer Geely) whose own HQ is only a short stroll away. Ingenlath, who in conversation occasionally gives off flashes of a central-European Tom Cruise, is still officially the design chief at Volvo too, and the man responsible for making its recent cars look implausibly good. That a designer has been made CEO certainly works with Polestar’s overall disruptor storyline. He also notes that managing a design studio isn’t a bad grounding for leading this kind of modern and — more buzzword bingo — agile company. “The other thing is that we have a very high focus on aesthetics and brand,” says Ingenlath, who is famous for making sure every detail fits this overall vision, from the car to the office carpets. And it’s very hard to argue with the looks of the Polestar 1, which is parked menacingly in the ground floor reception. Much of the initial excitement around the brand stems from its killer combination of crisp sci-fi styling and muscle car attitude. It looks like something Mad Max might drive if life ever turned out nice in the post-apocalypse. →

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Previous pages and right: the Polestar 1, photographed for Esquire at the company’s Cube HQ in Gothenburg, Sweden

Polestar 1 started life as the one-off Volvo Concept Coupé at the 2013 Frankfurt Motor Show; just another concept car that would never see the light of day. But reaction to it was such that it has become the launch model for a standalone electric performance brand. “It became this hi-tech thing that didn’t fit into Volvo anymore,” explains Ingenlath. Volvo CEO Håkan Samuelsson asked Ingenlath, who was already “emotionally attached”, to lead the charge. Polestar, previously a race team and a tuning division, would become a car marque in its own right. If predictions are to be believed, the potential prize is a big one. The global electric car market is set to move from around two million units annually to 25m in the next five years. China will make up over half of this on its own, driven by government incentives and an ambitious domestic car industry motivated to seize this new epochchanging opportunity, and so make up ground on the car industry’s traditional big players. All Polestar cars will be made at a purposebuilt plant in Chengdu, China, that has been designed to be the most sustainable in the country — by a cool Norwegian architect’s practice, naturally. And as a marker of China’s no-nonsense ambition and industrial chutzpah, it will be 13 months from the first spade in the ground at the factory to the first Polestar 1 coming off the production line. A plugin hybrid super GT made from carbon fibre, producing 600bhp and capable of 0–60mph in around four seconds, only 500 per year will be made and the first cars will be with customers by the end of this year, retailing at a pulsequickening £135,000. Driving an early prototype through city streets is not the perfect setting, but it is enough to appreciate the engineering work and testing that has gone into making this a very serious machine; testing which has taken place in the wilds of the Arctic Circle and the potholes of Britain’s B roads. As we drive, pedestrians pull out their cameras and scan for the badge with slightly confused expressions. With the furthest all-electric range of any hybrid car at 100 miles, it could legitimately be

‘If you have a much smaller company where things are so much more direct you can actually move so much faster’ — Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath

run as an electric daily driver you can charge at home, with the ﬂexibility to switch into a continent-crossing GT. “What I have experienced with hybrids,” Ingenlath says, “is that they really help people to get into it — to say, ‘Wow, actually what I like about it is the electric part.’” It’s with the second car — cunningly named Polestar 2, in a continuation of the brand’s anticomplicated approach — where the pure, allelectric story really begins. With a range of 311 miles, a vegan interior, producing 402bhp and costing £49,000, it will be produced in far greater numbers. “It’s a body which I like a lot,” Ingenlath says, while leading a tour around his own handiwork. “People always like to ask if it’s a hatchback or a fastback or a sedan or an SUV, and I think that is exactly the charm of it. It’s a little bit of a thing of its own.” The aggressive, gridded grille continues as a design cue, despite being less important practically for a pure electric car, so its function will →

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change accordingly. “We don’t need that much air anymore, which is why it will become the smart zone,” he says. “Bit by bit, we will put the sensors, the cameras, the radars, the bits you normally painfully try to hide somewhere. In this way, the car still has a very characterful and proud face.” During our conversation, examples from Apple come up more than once. When you’re buying an Apple laptop, he says, the options are deliberately limited. Yet car companies tend to give customers more and more choices in how your car is conﬁgured. Polestar will not. Given his way, the car might only be available in white. As it is, there are six colour choices.

In the cabin, Polestar will be the ﬁrst to work with Google on an open source, app-based interface which can adapt to both new developments and your own preferences. So if you want Waze one day and Google Maps the next, it’s yours. “That really is a complete shift in how you approach software in a car,” he says. “Basically admitting that the car industry doing everything themselves is the wrong way.” He also sees a market for a new wave of specialist in-car apps and games that can be added as soon as they’re ready and encourages third party developers “to use their brains and their creativity to come up with stuff that we can do in a car”.

Polestar 2

Motors

Two electric (one per axle)

Power

408hp

0–62mph

4.7secs

Price

From £49,000

Range

311 miles (est)

The all-electric Polestar 2 is due to go onsale in 2020

Inevitably, the Tesla analogy is never far away. Indeed “Tesla-killer” is a term Ingenlath hears a lot. What has he learned from its example? “Tesla brought to the table for everyone how great an electric car can be. And, of course, not being hindered by all the voices warning you, telling you this is too risky, that this is not how we do it and how we did it. Of course, we see other things that we try to do differently or better.” One of these being how the cars are sold. At a time when Tesla appears to be tweaking its online/offline sales strategy, Polestar aims to open around 60 Polestar Spaces around the world by the end of 2020. Across the campus in a large warehouse, a working mock-up of what these Spaces will look like is being experimented on in minute detail. Instead of being traditional showrooms, these will be more like city centre shops. “We want to be where people are. We don’t want to force them out to the industrial suburbs,” says Polestar’s head of brand, Pär Heyden. It’s easy to say it feels like a mini-Apple store but you get the drift. Other than the cars, there is little on display. A wall of brushed metallic drawers will allow customers to view different parts and get hands-on with the technology, while a work bench allows them to configure their car digitally. The first Polestar Space will open this October in Oslo, where almost one-third of new cars is electric, incentivised by the Norwegian Government. A London store will follow. And in a final flurry of convention-bashing, staff at the Spaces will be product specialists rather than commission-hungry sales people, so hoping to change an age-old motor industry conflict between dealers, manufacturers and customers. Polestar buyers will be able to buy on subscription, choosing an all-inclusive-style contract with a concierge model which features having their car picked up for a service or ordering a bike rack for the weekend via their phone. Launching new car brands is notoriously tough. Will brand loyalty, so long a reliable factor in the car business, be less relevant as we move into the electric era? “You know what I hope?” asks Ingenlath. “People will still love brands, but this dogma that, ‘I am a BMW driver and would never drive anything else’ — I hope that is something that in the future people just become more educated and cool about it. Right now, it’s definitely about bringing more cars into the EV market so that people have a choice.” On Valentine’s Day this year, Polestar released an animated break-up letter to the car industry, opening with “we need to talk” and culminating with the sentiment that “it’s time to move on”. They will be hoping that consumers are themselves ready to start a new relationship. ○

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Doing the double Bi-metal watches make twice the impact By Charlie Teasdale

Photograph by Ivona Chrzastek

Set design by Johanne Mills

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Octo L’Originale, 41mm sandblasted stainless steel/rose gold, black rubber strap, £10,100, by BULGARI

Mille Miglia 2019 Race Edition, 44m rose gold/ stainless steel, cognac calf leather strap, £8,730, by CHOPARD

Navitimer 1 B01 Chronograph, 46mm stainless steel/red gold, stainless steel bracelet, £8,830, by BREITLING

Black Bay Chrono S&G, 41mm stainless steel/gold, stainless steel/gold bracelet, £4,890, by TUDOR

Co-Axial Master Chronometer Moonphase Chronograph, 44.25mm steel-gold, navy leather strap, £9,850, by OMEGA

Divers Sixty-Five Chronograph, 43mm steel-bronze, brown leather strap, £3,100, by ORIS

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The molecular millennial At his new restaurant, Rasmus Munk creates food that asks questions and blows minds Interview by Miranda Collinge Portrait by Charlotte Ea

Clockwise, from top left: ‘Food for Thought’ featuring sautéed foie gras in a Madeira casing; ‘The Omelet’ stuffed with cheese foam; ‘The Toast’ is aerated vegetable cellulose topped with crème fraîche and caviar; the frozen ‘Snowball’, made from fermented tomatoes

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If one dish sums up the ethos of Danish chef Rasmus Munk’s Copenhagen restaurant, Alchemist, it’s one he calls “Food for Thought”. Instead of on a plate, “Food for Thought” arrives in a silicon replica of a human head, from which the skull cap is lifted off at the table revealing a square of pâté de foie gras in a Madeira casing, topped with a square of pale, aerated foie gras that has the texture of dried lichen. The foie gras is from Spain, “ethically” produced from geese that are not force-fed. It is thought-provoking, it tastes like nothing you’ve ever had before, and it’s also completely, delightfully, batshit. “What’s in fashion in the culinary world I would say is to cook less courses, more family sharing things, and only focus on good ingredients and seasonality,” says the 28-year-old Munk, a few hours before the evening’s service begins. He’s sitting on a velour sofa in the lounge area of Alchemist, which is inside a gigantic shipbuilding warehouse once used as a backdrops store by the Danish National Theatre. To Munk’s right is a three-storey wine cellar that holds 10,000 bottles which he designed himself. Facing him is a glass window through which chefs can be seen going about their prep in the test kitchen. One of them appears to be using a drill. Alchemist opened in July to considerable fanfare: in a city whose culinary scene is dominated by the likes of Relæ, Geranium, Amass and, of course, René Redzepi’s Noma, Alchemist is unashamedly molecular and maximalist. This is dinner as promenade theatre, with guests invited to move around the building for different stages of their meal, which is divided into “acts”. Most of the courses are served in a dining room with a domed ceiling onto which a series of slowly changing images is projected — of tree tops, falling stars, jellyﬁsh, plastic bags — to a background of slow, surging synth chords. Most mind-bending — and waistlineexpanding — of all, the menu runs to 50 snacksized courses, or to use Munk’s terminology, “impressions” (only 46 are actually edible; a further four are experiences). Dinner lasts around six hours. “It should be like a ﬁlmic experience to be here,” says Munk. “You should forget about time and space when you walk into this restaurant.” Given that a meal with the entry-level wine pairing costs around £500 a person, you might want to forget about your bank balance, too. For all the theatrics of his venture, Munk is surprisingly understated: softly spoken, red hair, black jeans and a black T-shirt revealing arms covered in tattoos. On his left forearm he has trees typical of the woods near where he grew up in Randers, Jutland; on his right he has edible herbs and a quote from chef Thomas Keller, of California’s The French Laundry: “Respect →

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Rasmus Munk photographed for Esquire at his Alchemist restaurant, Copenhagen, July 2019

for food is respect for life”. When we meet, Alchemist has been open for a week, during which Munk has been pulling 20-hour shifts. “I’ve slept here once,” he admits, though he doesn’t feel too exhausted. “More nervous I think. We’ve had some good reviews already, but I’m still a little bit anxious about the future.” (He needn’t be overly worried: at the time of writing, the restaurant is fully booked until the end of September, with an estimated 5,000 people on the waiting list.) Even though Munk has been cooking since he was 14, it was not an obvious career for him; perverse, even, given that his family, he says, has a tradition of culinary ineptitude. “My mother is a terrible chef, my grandmother is a terrible chef,” he says. The family’s priorities were “a nice roof on the house and a nice car in the garage”; they went to McDonald’s every Friday. Munk himself was “a really lazy young guy that was only doing bicycles and scooters”, but he followed a friend to culinary school “because you could get some money from the government” and found it transformative. “I remember it very clearly: we should make a dish with carrots and chicken. There was around 20 students, and I just thought this teacher must have the most horrible job in the world to get 20 times overcooked carrots and boiled chicken, without any salt or butter. I just thought there’s so many things I don’t

‘Chefs right now have a responsibility to do something more than just cooking a great meal’

know about it, and that turned me on a lot.” His sharp learning curve took him from a catering company to stages at various restaurants including Noma and The Fat Duck in Bray, to head chef at an upmarket Danish hotel. Not surprisingly, he cites Heston Blumenthal and El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià as influences. “Their version of molecular cuisine showcased that you can do something more than just great food on a plate: you can also tell a story behind it, and that’s been a huge inspiration for me. I think chefs right now have so much attention in what they’re doing, so you have a responsibility to do something more than just cooking a great meal.” In 2015, when Munk was only 24, he opened the first iteration of Alchemist: a 15-seat restaurant in northeast Copenhagen. It earned him a reputation for attention-grabbing, message-serving dishes — one was a bowl of live woodlice to be doused in tom yum broth and transformed into tiny crustacean croutons, to highlight the use of insects as a viable food; another looked like an overflowing ashtray but was actually made from bacon, onion and potatoes — a tribute to Munk’s grandmother, who died of lung cancer. One evening, a couple of months after opening, he was visited by Lars Seier Christensen, cofounder of Saxo Bank, who liked what he saw and ate and offered to invest. “I was like, ‘No, I don’t want anybody to invest now, things are fine for me’,” says Munk. But Christensen, who also owns the three-Michelin-starred Geranium, persisted. “He was like, ‘OK, tell me your dream’,” remembers Munk. “I did a lot of sketches, and I was like, ‘This he will never buy because it will cost millions to build’. Surprisingly enough he said it sounded amazing and it didn’t scare him.” While the original Alchemist, which closed in 2017, occupied 100sq m and employed six staff, the new Alchemist has 2,000sq m and nearly 50 staff. Even when costs spiralled — hitting £15m, 10 times the original budget — Christensen coughed up. “But it’s been tough! You can mention that,” says Munk. “He has some very sharp lawyers and accountants and I’ve been struggling a lot, but it’s part of the game. It was probably lucky because if I came in with the end budget to Lars back then he would have said, ‘No no no!’” With the new site came an entirely new menu, “because we didn’t want this feeling of, ‘OK, this is just some new furniture and the dishes are the same’,” Munk says. He realised the attention his food was getting wasn’t always the right kind. “A lot of people also thought it was a restaurant

that just wanted to provoke. It should not be ‘the restaurant with the live woodlice’, or whatever. It should be something more than that.” As for the seemingly excessive 50 courses, he has a rationale. “When you have a set menu for five or six dishes and you have two meat dishes, you can’t serve woodlice or cow’s udder, because you will disappoint too many people. With 50 impressions, when we have maybe five meat dishes, we can allow ourselves to do things where some people will think, ‘This is disgusting, or not my style,’ and still think, ‘Well, there are still 40 other dishes that were great’.” At dinner later that evening there was no cow’s udder, but there was a ball of puffed gluten that, when I bit into it, released a plume of wood smoke. There were ants preserved in “amber” that was actually a ginger and honey candy. There was a crisp, sweet, tomatoflavoured snowball which I was instructed to dip into olive oil while wearing special ski gloves (ski gloves!). There were lambs’ brains covered in cherry sauce and poached in walnut oil. There was a strawberry and rhubarb broth which I was invited to lick from a silicon human tongue (reader, I married him etc). It was new and exciting and befuddling, and 90 per cent delicious (the unspeakable softness of the lambs’ brains, however, still haunts my dreams). Even though there are nods to his homeland — relax, sea buckthorn juice does feature on the menu — Alchemist feels like a move away from the Nordic ethos of simplicity and locality that has shaped food trends for the last decade or so. No diner at Noma just down the road is being proffered, as I was, a seahorse-shaped lollipop made out of sherbet flying saucers by a dancer in a corridor of zig-zagging neon lights intended, apparently, to raise awareness of LGBTQ+ issues. And very tasty it was, too. Before dinner, I had asked Munk about relations between Alchemist and the other destination restaurants in Copenhagen. “I think there is friendly competition,” he said, before adding, “I also think a lot of them think this is stupid, because it’s so different from what they are doing. We go against what is the hot thing to do right now, and that’s a chance to take, but for me it makes sense. If I should do the other things it would not be me and my kind of cooking. I think it’s important that you need to stay true to yourself and your own thing.” ○ Alchemist, Refshalevej 173, Copenhagen, Denmark; restaurant-alchemist.dk

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Equality begins at home A ‘feminist’ armchair turns 50 By Johnny Davis Photograph by Alessandro Furchino Capria

Times have changed: in 1969 you could get away with claiming that your voluptuous pop-up armchair, inspired by the female form in recline and nicknamed “Big Mama”, was a bold feminist statement. In 2019, you’d struggle — rightly — to do the same. But Gaetano Pesce, the designer of the Serie Up chair, whose amorphous shape (UP5) and spherical ottoman (UP6) are instantly recognisable, is having a good go, remarking that his furniture highlights women’s position as “global prisoners of prejudice”. The spherical ottoman attached to the curvy chair is apparently intended to symbolise a ball and chain. First, though, there was the sponge. “I realised when I was taking a shower, that when I pressed the sponge in my hand, the volume reduced, a lot,” the Italian design pioneer tells Esquire, from his New York studio. “So, I thought if I did a chair without structure inside, only foam, I can sell the chair like a disk, and people can go home, open the envelope and see the chair going up by the mechanical force of the foam coming back to the original volume.” Then came the women. When Pesce was seven or eight, he was transferred, either by accident or design, to a girl’s school. There, Pesce says, he developed a deep appreciation for the female brain. “It is very elastic, it is very composite, it is not monolithic,” he explains. Really, the opposite of men. Pesce’s design, known as “Donna” and “Blow Up”, as well as “Big Mama”, has gone through plenty of iterations since 1969. For its 50th anniversary, it is released in beige and petrol green stripes, referencing its original colour palate and something deployed to full, optical, Sixties effect in B&B Italia’s Milan showroom recently, where Pesce oversaw an installation with stripes

The petrol green/beige striped 50th Anniversary Special Edition shot for Esquire in B&B Italia’s Milan showroom

running across ﬂoors and up walls, chairs liberally scattered around. Proof of Up’s legacy as an object of superior comfort was underlined by a shop full of people, feet up, reading, messaging, listening to music or lost in their own thoughts. “It is very comfortable!” the 79-yearold Pesce agrees. “But I believe design has to be very comfortable, very practical.” Serie Up is in the permanent collection of MoMa in New York, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Vitra Design Museum in Rhein. But its anniversary is bittersweet. “In some countries, the situation for women is worse than it was 50 years ago,” Pesce says. “I hope this is something people can recognise. At this moment, design becomes a kind of art.” ○ £4,450; bebitalia.com

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Best feet forwards Crockett & Jones celebrates 140 years of ﬁne shoemaking By Charlie Teasdale Photographs by Tom Cockram

Above the Dickensian clank and rattle of the factory below, a crack team of shoemakers sits quietly. In this room, daylight pushes through the heavy industrial air and the gentle mumble of local radio is punctuated by soft chatter and the occasional thwack of time-worn metal on new leather. Here is what I’m calling Crockett & Jones’s salvation department. The shoemaker produces thousands of pairs of shoes each week but a small percentage don’t pass muster. Maybe there’s a slight scratch on the upper or a nearinvisible scuff on the heel. A dab of polish that simply hasn’t been polished enough. The quality control team catch it and send the shoes upstairs to the calm of the room that overlooks the factory’s serrated roof. Imperfections are perfected, kinks ironed and swerves set straight. Brothers-in-law Charles Jones and James Crockett — shoemaker and businessman respectively — founded the company in a workshop in Northampton in 1879. Within 11 years, they had built and moved to a factory in the north of the town that the company still calls home. As Sheffield is to steel and Glasgow is, or at least was, to shipbuilding, so Northampton is to ﬁne shoes: the spiritual and actual home of an industry. Northampton-made shoes were worn in the American War of Independence in the late 18th century. But the modern industry is built upon the Goodyear welt, an 1869 invention which allowed the upper of a leather shoe to be interchangeable from its sole, which in turn allowed the shoe to be broken down and repaired over →

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Lucky if Sharp

and over again. There are international variations on the theme but the phrase “Goodyear welted” tends to be the prefix for the world’s finest shoes. Today, Crockett & Jones has 12 shops worldwide (six in London, two of which are on Jermyn Street), a very healthy export business and a reputation most companies would envy. Its name is a byword for quality and classic English style. But business hasn’t always been so healthy. In the middle of the 20th century, traditional shoe manufacture slowly slipped into decline, replaced by mass-produced shoes. Companies diversified, outsourced and compromised to stay afloat. In 1977, incoming managing director Jonathan Jones (fourth generation) decided the best way forward would be to focus only on the top of the market. “We had all the machinery and skills to make high-end shoes,” remembers Jones, who is still MD today, “so I thought the only future would be to specialise. Let the other constructions go, concentrate the factory on more topend making only, and build our exports.” The top-end making begins in the leather store. The room is jammed with floor-to-ceiling shelves that house great reams of calfskin, suede and grain leather. Depending on the order of the day, a sheaf is hauled into the “clicking” room where the constituent pieces of a shoe’s upper are cut out by hand. “This stuff is as good as you can get,” explains James Fox, head of marketing and my tour guide for the day. “This is your Bugatti Veyron, if you like. No matter what anybody tells you, there are no better calf skins available than these.” Pieces are then sent to the closing room where they are stitched together on a sewing machine and detailing is added: shoes can be “skived”, “gimped” or given a “fancy stitch”, among other things. Fox describes the massive room stuffed with work stations overflowing with off-cuts and sewing machine parts and the odd saucy calendar as a factory within a factory. In the Twenties, there were 300 hand-stitchers. Today there is just one: Ned Fox. He sits on the edge of the melee, stitching a pair every twoand-a-half hours. In the basement, past the corner that served as an air raid shelter in WWII, is the last room. Here, 40,000 pairs of lasts — the foot-shaped moulds around which a shoe is made — are housed in long, terraced cubby holes, like caged hens. Some are almost a century old, kept for reference or for when aged shoes come in

for repair. Roughly eight per cent of Crockett & Jones shoes will be sent back for repair at some point during their lifetime, as indeed they are designed to be. Fox points out that the Coniston boots he is wearing have just been repaired after eight years of wear, and are not new, as I had assumed. Despite the abundance of options, Crockett & Jones recently developed a new last shape with a “hollowed-out neck, narrow waist, soft outside wall and an elegantly English roundtoe profile” for a capsule collection celebrating the company’s 140th anniversary. Featuring a Twenties-inspired black Oxford, a slip-on in antique calf skin and a very dandyish tan demiboot, the trio represents all of the company’s expertise and élan rolled into three. Back upstairs in the heat and noise of the factory, uppers are gently heated before being wrenched down over their lasts by a machine that hisses and pops as the recognisable shape of a shoe grows into the leather. From here, the shoe is fitted with a Goodyear welt and a sole. A layer of cork is inserted between the two for extra stability and comfort. David Marshall, one of the men manning a welting machine, has been doing so for 45 years and explains that the contraption is essentially the same as it was when he first started in the job. In the next room — the finishing room, where everything is polished and painted and cleaned and tweaked and checked — Fox introduces me to Charlie McKenzie, who has been working at the factory for 48 years. He sands and trims the edges of soles and heels on a machine that powers a terrifying spinning blade. As with almost all of the 200 to 250 operations that go into one pair of Crockett & Jones’ shoes, a mechanism does the leg work. But a mechanism is useless without the eyes and experience of the staff. Crockett & Jones faces obvious challenges. The demand for fine handmade shoes is not what it was a century ago. Sourcing the best leather is getting harder. And it isn’t easy to entice young people into a factory career, no matter how skilful or rewarding the work might be. But the company has made a habit of keeping its head above water. Beyond that, there is a quiet covenant among the staff to make the shoes as good as they possibly can be. For proof, one need only wander through the factory, or pay a visit to the quiet room on the top floor. ○ crockettandjones.com

Previous pages: inside Crockett & Jones’ Northampton factory, where it has made high-quality shoes since 1890. Right: the brand’s new last shape can be found in the 140th anniversary capsule collection, which comprises a tan demi-boot, a calf skin slip-on and a black Oxford

Between 200 to 250 operations go into making one pair of Crockett & Jones’ shoes

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Aurora wireless speaker, £1,300, by iFi; iﬁ-audio.com

Loud and proud Let your bamboo speaker make a noise By Johnny Davis Photograph by Philippe Fragnière

Most speakers are designed to disappear into your home, looking as utilitarian as they can. The Aurora, a wireless music system from UK brand iFi, makes a bid for pride of place in the living room. An eyepopping clash of bamboo ﬁns and aluminium girders with a touchsensitive trapezium OLED display, it makes a statement. Inspired by the architecture of Tokyo’s Omotesando district and French product designer Julian Haziza’s experience of working in home furnishings, it deploys the opposite strategy of curved edges/grey mesh exterior used by Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s HomePod. (It is named for the aurora borealis; as that ﬁlls the sky with dazzling light, this uses sound to… you get the idea.) “We wanted to create a system that stands out,” says Haziza, who grew up in Paris in the Nineties, watching Leiji Matsumoto anime, listening to French house and electro, and with a poster of a Lamborghini Countach on his wall. “Its form perfectly mirrors its function. Bamboo is not just attractive, it’s also highly effective acoustically. These days, lots of people just listen to music on their phones and computers. The decline of physical audio formats has led to the evanescence of stylish systems of the kind considered design classics, like vintage Brionvega and Bang & Olufsen products. Owning an audio system used to be a statement about what music means to you.” As well as streaming music, Aurora will connect to Apple devices and use Amazon Echo, plus there’s outputs for TV, CD and DVD drives. ○

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Eyes wide open From Enron to Alexander Litvinenko, Lucy Prebble’s plays have an unblinking clarity of purpose Interview by Miranda Collinge Portrait by Charlotte Hadden

In January last year, while introducing a radio version of her 2012 stage play The Effect on BBC Radio Three, playwright Lucy Prebble made an ominous pronouncement. “Sometimes I think I might never write a play again,” she said. “The optimist in me thinks it’s because I expressed everything I have to say in The Effect. The pessimist in me thinks it’s because I have nothing left to say. I’m not entirely sure which I am yet.” This was bad news for British theatre, given Prebble has been one of its most original voices since her 2009 play Enron, which she began writing when she was 25, became a runaway success. It also didn’t bode well for Prebble herself, given that The Effect, about a man and a woman taking part in a clinical drugs trial, was a moving and, at times, distressing exploration of depression and heartache. (It was inspired by a trial in London in 2006 after which six participants experienced near-fatal multiple organ failure.) Today, Prebble admits The Effect was the culmination of a “weird mental time” for her in her life, but that the process of writing the play was cathartic: “I felt less alone — almost literally because you’re paying actors to come and be in a room with you — but also in the sense that if you represent something that other people can really relate to, sometimes they go, ‘Oh yes, I’ve felt like that but I’ve never heard anyone express it before.’ That’s what drives me, that moment.” To get a spoiler out of the way, we are sitting in a rehearsal room at the Old Vic where, as

you are reading this, Prebble’s new play, A Very Expensive Poison, will soon open. It is a clammy, close June day, and Prebble is armed with coffee; she was up until 2am reading scripts for the second series of Succession, the HBO drama for which she serves as a producer and writer. Even so, her eyes are bright, her speech direct. “I’m lucky enough that after a few years of not having everything together in lots of ways, it feels like I’m able to come back to the party,” she says. Prebble’s ﬁrst play for seven years is about the murder of the Russian political dissident Alexander Litvinenko, who died in 2006 after being poisoned in a London hotel when he drank tea laced

with the isotope polonium-210. The play is based on a book of the same name by The Guardian foreign correspondent Luke Harding, and the title comes from a comment made by one of the two Russian poisoners, who didn’t seem to understand exactly what they were administering: after placing some of the polonium in a teapot, they poured the rest down a hotel room sink. “I think the real shock of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko was not that it happened, sadly, but where it happened. The audacity of doing it in another country, particularly a country like the UK,” says Prebble. “As soon as I started reading Luke’s book, I thought, ‘Gosh, this is such a good →

Lucy Prebble photographed for Esquire at The Old Vic Theatre, London, June 2019

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management consultancy (her older brother had just done exactly that) — got more attention by virtue of being an original production going up against “19-year-old King Lears”, but that the award “felt like quite an important moment of somebody saying, ‘You have some facility for this.’” She laughs again. “Which is literally what they said.” She abandoned plans to train as a human rights or criminal lawyer shortly after. Prebble’s earliest inﬂuences in the leafy commuter-belt town of Haslemere, Surrey, where she grew up the youngest of three siblings, were not Shakespeare, Chekhov and Ibsen, but Kirk and Norm and Blanche. “I was majorly into science ﬁction, particularly Star Trek,” she says, “and because we didn’t have a video recorder at that time I would record episodes of Star Trek on a cassette tape and play them to myself in bed. And also American sitcoms, weirdly. Cheers and Golden Girls. Anything that felt quite warm. But not in an, ‘Ooh, how’s the writing?’ way — maybe that happened subconsciously — but just that there’s other people in the room and they’re happy.” It may seem a leap from the Starship Enterprise to the perils of free enterprise, but Prebble says that an exploration of the corporate environment “has been quite recurrent in things that I’ve worked on,” and acknowledges, “I’m sure it’s probably also family stuff.” Prebble’s father was an executive at a software company, about which she later realised she had known little as a child, and sought to understand better; by contrast her

mother worked mostly in education, “and that was very clear to me because obviously you’ve come out of school and you know what that is.” Succession was a natural fit for Prebble given it is about the intricate loyalties and jealousies within a media magnate’s family, but when she was first approached about joining the writers’ room overseen by British showrunner Jesse Armstrong (Peep Show, The Thick of It), she was reluctant. “Then I read the first episode and it was a little bit like a joke how right I was for the show. It was very corporate America, which I’d done a lot of research on, and also the family dynamics were hugely familiar to me. It was like, ‘Oh, you’re not going to work on this thing that’s perfectly designed for you?’” (For those who watch the show, Prebble admits she “writes a good Shiv”.) Succession is also typical of a Lucy Prebble project in another way: it asks us to question the networks of power and money by which we allow our societies to be influenced, or organised, or even corrupted. A Very Expensive Poison, she says, is an attempt to embody the ethos of Alexander Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, who “pursued the inquiry [into her husband’s death] for years and years and years, even when the government really didn’t want it. I tried very hard to carry a memory and a sense of that.” Marina has given her blessing to the play, but there is the small matter of how certain other Russians might react: the order for Litvinenko’s assassination seems to have come from very high up the political chain of command; perhaps even the top. Harding, who became The Guardian’s Russian correspondent in 2007, experienced multiple home invasions while he was living in Moscow (he was deported in 2011) and advised Prebble not to visit Russia after the play had been announced. “I did speak to Luke quite a lot about that at the beginning, but never from the perspective of I might not do it, but from a perspective of what might realistically happen,” she says. So far, Prebble says, she has noticed an upsurge in trolling from Russian bots. “And you can tell immediately,” she says. “The tone is actually quite similar to trolls who are doing it from a personal place, so as a writer I’m looking at the trolls like, ‘Interesting! Who are you? You may be a young Russian guy that is really angry with women, but you’re also just being paid by the FSB to do it…’” Her eyes widen, not in fear, but in awe. “The layers!” ○ A Very Expensive Poison opens on 20 August at the Old Vic, London SE1; oldvictheatre.com

KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, whose poisoning is the subject of Prebble’s latest play, in the intensive care unit at London’s University College Hospital on 20 November 2006, three days before his death

Getty

allegory for right now,’ which is something that always attracts me to a piece of work. There’s a separation because it’s different people, different characters, but it is a story that could apply to now, given all the continuing Russian interference, except that it has a third act.” Prebble’s breakthrough play Enron also gained allegorical resonance thanks to its inauspicious timing (or auspicious, depending on how cynical you were with your investments). Prebble turned the 2001 scandal that engulfed the Texas energy giant and led to the biggest bankruptcy in American corporate history (at the time) into a searing, absurdist musical complete with lightsabres and raptors in suits. The production opened at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2009 just as the 2008 ﬁnancial crisis fall-out was in full swing. “That sounds like I’m saying I’m Paul Krugman or something,” says Prebble, with a laugh, “but if you speak to enough people and you read enough stuff around a subject, it ends with everybody saying that nothing’s changed. All the books about Enron, all the reporting about Enron, all ended with the same thought, which was that it’s the same now, if not worse. That’s the emotional feeling that makes me drawn to something.” When she was studying English at the University of Sheffield, Prebble won a “most promising playwright” award on the strength of a play she had written for the 2002 National Student Drama Festival. She says now that she suspects Liquid — about students selling their souls into

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Sunshine, bottled Acqua di Parma sticks to what it does best By Johnny Davis Photographs by Rebecca Scheinberg

We’re told that scents tap into our emotional centres, the oldest, most powerful parts of our brains. Whole companies exist whose job it is to develop smells to attract new customers into shops, heighten value perception and hike up sales. Harder is the business of selling scent itself. How do advertisers convey the “brand values” of a fragrance? (What are the “brand values” of a fragrance, exactly, beyond smelling nice?) It’s why so many scents are sold using a Hollywood himbo, a provocatively sexual strap line, or a bafﬂing black-and-white TV ad campaign. Acqua di Parma does none of these things. It has pretty much stuck to the same “Parma yellow” design, bottle-stop glass container, handﬁnished packaging and folksy sans serif typeface to sell itself for 103 years. It is associated with the Riviera, and with timeless Italian style.

A triumph of branding where little branding exists. (Those Art Deco bottles can be hard to throw away, even if empty.) When it does release a new product it does so without noise, in a way that is understated and chic. Which brings us to Signatures of the Sun, a new collection “ﬁltered through the prism” of Acqua di Parma’s classic Colonia scent, that comes in 10 choices: from Osmanthus (heady) to Camelia (spicy) to Yuzu (citrusy) to Leather (leathery). Unlike some of its shoutier neighbours, Acqua di Parma doesn’t promise to make you a leading man or bewilder you into submission with arthouse imagery. It exists to be a handsome, and handsome-smelling, object in its own right. The rest is up to you. ○ acquadiparma.com

Some of the 10 new fragrances in the Signatures of the Sun collection by Acqua di Parma

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An unlikely nexus of bling Inside Trotters, the ‘people’s jeweller’ of Bethnal Green Words and photographs by Finlay Renwick

The phone doesn’t stop ringing. That’s what I ﬁrst notice after walking into Trotters, having been buzzed through two heavy security doors covered in thick steel mesh, past a framed picture of a winking Rich Uncle Pennybags, the phrase “Time is Money” printed in bold underneath the jaunty Monopoly man. As soon as one call ends another begins, the sound of wheeling, as well as dealing, and onthe-spot quotes colliding with the steel drums and autotune of Afropop, ringing out from a wall-mounted TV. Fingers mash ﬁgures into well-worn calculators, knowingly gliding over each digit. “That’ll be £3,600 cash, does that

‘We’re not interested in formal and boring,’ says Kallum Brewer, manager at high-end watch customisers Trotters in London

work for you?” a staff member says, scurrying about behind a protective screen. The glare of spotlights reﬂects off a thousand gold and diamond chains, sparkling like the unbroken surface of a lake. Rolexes of every shape and size line the back wall: Datejusts, Oyster Perpetuals, GMT Master IIs and Daytonas placed in neat rows of stainless steel and Everose gold. It’s a lot to absorb for a Tuesday morning. Sandwiched in between the Jannah Indian Grill cafe and takeaway and a clothes shop called Seasons Emporium on Bethnal Green Road, East London, Trotters, with its Kelly green façade and signage that declares it a “Small

shop with a BIG name”, opened 28 years ago as a pawn shop and jewellers that mostly dealt with mid-range engagement rings and the odd nice watch. It has since evolved into an unlikely nexus of bling. A tiny cubbyhole of polarising luxury that now deals with diamond-encrusted Swiss Franken-watches and rapper-grade jewellery that can set a willing client back six ﬁgures if he or — less often — she is looking to get “iced-out”. “It’s crazy in here!” says Judd Green, prepping his camera to shoot watches that will be posted to the shop’s Instagram page, which has 209,000 followers. “The most of any jeweller in the UK!” he declares. “It’s a shame you’re only here for today because it’s non-stop, you never know who’s going to walk through the door. We’ve had billionaires! It’s unbelievable.” →

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At 26, Green is the director of the shop, named after a certain comically illegitimate business from Only Fools and Horses, that his father founded in 1991. (Green’s dad likes to be referred to only as “Trotter” and remains behind the scenes, with Judd running the dayto-day operation.) With cropped sandy hair and a slight inflection of Essex in his accent, Green and his shop managers Kallum Brewer and Alex Osborn cater to a sparkling list of clients including Premier League footballers, professional boxers and a revolving cast of flash Harrys who discovered them through the grapevine or, most commonly, Instagram. A documentary series has just wrapped, set to air this autumn on Channel 4. “Without sounding big-headed,” chimes Brewer, a childhood friend of Green’s, “we try to do everything first, we’re not interested in uploading something formal and boring. We try to take that approach of… ‘Let’s ice this watch up!’ ‘Let’s take a photo on the roof!’ ‘Let’s make it entertaining!’ It’s entertainment, Instagram, isn’t it?” “Don’t get me wrong,” adds Green. “We know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. We know there are going to be some people who don’t understand it, who think it’s flash and will say we ruined that luxury piece. We’re just trying to keep up with the trends.” “Have a look at this,” says Brewer, disappearing behind a door before returning with a tray stacked full of glistening Audemars Piguets. “This is a million pounds’ worth of watches!” he cackles, fastening two to his wrist before thrusting them up to the light, thousands of stones sparkling beneath the high voltage beam. There’s also a Patek Phillipe 5719 in white gold with a full diamond set, priced at £320,000, waiting for the right, deep-pocketed buyer. Despite the wariness shown by the famously steadfast Swiss watch industry (your warranty is void as soon as you alter any luxury watch, so Trotters provides its own for customers), there is a growing taste for customisation and ostentation, both in luxury fashion and watches. A 2017 Deloitte study on luxury goods found that, increasingly, “personalisation of products is an opportunity for premium pricing”. Even original watches from the big boys of horology are coming with more flash than their predecessors. Arguably the hottest piece of last year was the Rolex Daytona Rainbow Everose Gold, its bezel set with 36 baguette-cut sapphires in a rainbow gradation of all naturally occurring stones. It became a cult classic the moment it debuted and is now worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. “A lot of the big trends start in the New York

Below: some ‘iced-out’ watches for sale at Trotters can feature up to 3,500 individual diamonds in ‘honeycomb’ sets

Diamond District, they’ve got so much money they’ll put diamonds on anything!” says Brewer. Increasingly, so will Trotters. The jewels for some watches are set in-house, but the more complex jobs will go to experts in Antwerp and Hong Kong, who specialise in “honeycomb” sets, smaller stones packed tightly together. Some pieces can feature up to 3,500 individual diamonds. “We’re the people’s jeweller!” Brewer jokes. “If you want it, we can do it! Kids come in and want to try the pieces on, to show off on social media. I bring out the trays and let them go at it. It’s all free publicity for us.” Recently, a woman wanted to have her breasts gold-plated but was eventually put off by the cost such a venture would incur, while a gentleman from Ghana ﬂew over speciﬁcally to buy from the shop. He spent £49,000 on an 18-carat gold, diamond-encrusted, Cuban link necklace and

matching bracelet. He threw £15,000 in cash at Brewer as a deposit. Business with footballers is growing, too. Green and Brewer will travel to training grounds across the country, handdelivering watches dripping in diamonds to the rising stars of the Premier League. “A few years ago, footballers tried to keep it a bit more low-key,” says Green. “But the younger guys, the England Under-21 players, are deﬁnitely following the trends from America. What do you do when you win a trophy? You treat yourself, you ice yourself out.” The phone rings again. “It’s only 9.30am and it will be like this all day,” he says. “Like I said, this place is crazy.” With that, Green disappears through a door into the back of the shop, where there’s a price to be haggled over, a new deal to be struck. ○ trottersjewellers.com

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Wild style Zimbabwe offers a spectacular alternative to moreÂ established African safari destinations By Alex Bilmes

Bulletin

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It was as if a plug had been pulled on the world: suddenly, everything went quiet. Our orders were issued in a frenzied whisper. Sit down! Don’t move! No talking! Jaws were clenched. Eyes were narrowed. Our driver, previously genial and easy-going, had become, in a shot, stern and commanding. I’m sure we were never remotely in danger but I’m also certain I detected, just for a moment, a ﬂicker of genuine concern cross his face. We watched our tracker leap from his seat on the bonnet of the Land Cruiser, hardly touching the ground as, in one swift movement, he unshouldered his riﬂe and vaulted up and into the passenger seat. Breaking the silence, we reversed backwards at speed, lurching up an incline, crashing through vegetation, sending up clods of red earth.

It was dusk in Zimbabwe, the second night of our safari. I was on the back bench of the opensided 4×4, white-knuckling a handrail. Beside me, unflustered as a leopard, was my daughter, aged nine, binoculars around her neck, pad and pencil in her hand, poised to record sightings of Attenborough-worthy flora and fauna. Her younger brother was in front of us, next to his mother. I’ve never seen him look so serious, or sit so straight. Ignoring the directive to keep still, I reached over and squeezed his shoulder. He ignored me, staring straight ahead, holding his breath. Scared stiff. The engine was switched off. And then we heard something, a noise I can’t remember ever hearing before. It was the sound, it turned out, of bones being crushed by jaws, of huge teeth ripping flesh, claws tearing at hide. The situation →

Tracking lions in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe

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Inside the Matetsi River Lodge family suite

was explained: in a minute or two we would move slowly forward again and when we looked to our right we would see lion. Five lions, actually, three adult females and two cubs, magnificent in the fading light. They were gathered around a freshly killed buffalo, their muzzles and paws red with its blood. From time to time one would break off from chewing to reposition herself, wagging her long tail, shaking her huge head, grunting warnings at her companions. It’s a cliché older than civilisation to comment on the majesty of the lion, but, my word, theirs is a ﬁerce beauty, even more so when seen in the wild, on home turf, at supper time. Back on the veranda of our cabin at Matetsi River Lodge, upriver from Victoria Falls, at Zimbabwe’s north-western tip, we toasted our luck with sundowners while our own cubs wallowed in the plunge pool. We were serenaded to our beds by the foghorn blasts of our near neighbours, a mother hippo and her young. Another sound I can’t remember ever having heard before. Next morning, at dawn, we were up and at it again. Nine-year-old Penelope, as I’ve mentioned, was keeping a record, assiduously noting down the names of everything she spotted. As a consequence my notebook is full of neatly inscribed lists of creatures, in hotel pencil. A brief selection, from a page headlined “Sunday morning”: Elephant x lots; Steenbok x 1; Giraffe x 4; Gemsbok x lots; Ostrich x 2; Waterbok x 4; Zebra x 3; Impala x 1; Buffalo x lots; Baboon x lots; Wildebeest x 1; Kudu x 2; Male lion x 1; Side-striped jackal x 1; Hyena x 2. Oscar, her brother, was geeking out in his own way, reading aloud to us all from our guide’s trail-hardened encyclopedias — he had a number stacked on his knee — of the birds and

mammals and trees and ﬂowers and reptiles and bugs of Southern Africa, making sure we were fully briefed on the sizes and markings and habitats and diets of each animal we met. We saw secretary birds, vultures, hornbills, bustards, eagles, marabou storks. Beetles, bugs and butterﬂies. Lizards and snakes. We sheltered under baobab trees and mopane trees and acacias. On foot — on foot in the African bush! — we tracked leopard across the savannah. We washed our hands by rubbing together the leaves of devil’s thorn, brushed our teeth on sticks. We inhaled the incomparable aroma of months-old elephant carcass. Every so often, we stopped in the forest and had a G&T and some cashews. (Fanta for the junior trackers.) In the middle of the day, when the

heat shimmered, we sat in the shade or dipped in the pool and read our books and drank the local lager and the kids played Jenga with the Austrian kids from the next cabin over and we edited our photos and the American honeymooners kept politely — and understandably — to themselves. Some young men from the camp rode out into the bush on bicycles to serve us ice cream. We walked across grasslands and repeated the collective nouns for each group of animals we came across. A tower of giraffes. A cackle of hyenas. A parliament of owls. A zeal of zebras. An obstinacy of buffalo. To which I added my own: An entitlement of tourists? A presumption of Brits? A smart-arse of liggers? Landlocked Zimbabwe is not, typically, ﬁrst on the list of marquee safaris. It’s probably not seventh or eighth on the list. Of Africa’s starriest destinations, there is the Okavango, in neighbouring Botswana. There’s the Masai Mara, in Kenya. There’s Kruger in South Africa, and the Serengeti in Tanzania. There’s the extraordinary salt pan of Etosha in Namibia. Zimbabwe’s reputation for violence, poverty, and corruption, well-earned over generations, has long overshadowed accounts of its natural attractions. The ugly legacy of the British colonialists, who named the country Southern Rhodesia; the brutality of the white supremacist rulers who kicked them (us) out; the horror of the repressive authoritarian regime that followed the new nation’s founding, in 1980… all of these eclipse, in most Western imaginations, the marvels of Zimbabwe’s wilderness, its remarkably diverse plants and animals and its widescreen landscapes, the soaring hills and sweeping savannahs. For many Zimbabweans, the situation remains →

Guests staying at the River Lodge have access to a private plunge pool overlooking the Zambezi

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At Somalisa Acacia, spacious verandas provide views of Hwange National Park

dire. The veteran despot Robert Mugabe was ﬁnally forced into retirement in 2017, but all the locals I spoke to — a number brought it up unbidden — felt that the present government, under Mugabe’s ZANU-PF ally Emmerson Mnangagwa, aka “The Crocodile”, was not any better. There was trouble in Harare, the capital, in the weeks leading up to our holiday. Angry mobs were rioting because of a steep hike in fuel prices. You could have said the same, at that time, about Paris. But still. The optics, if you’ll forgive me, aren’t great. Naturally, one feels a sense of responsibility when embarking on a holiday to a country where human rights abuses are a regular feature of life. By going, is one tacitly endorsing the government, even helping to prop it up? Do any of the dollars we Westerners spend in the smart hotels and on the game reserves reach the people who need them most, or do they line the pockets of corrupt officials? You must make your own decisions on all that. My calculation is that in choosing not to go for ethical reasons, one only compounds the impoverishment of the country and its people — and its animals. If Zimbabwe is to ever have a thriving economy, tourism will be key. Efforts to conserve the environment will not succeed

without the money earned from safaris. Those lions will not survive without us. Their habitats will be used for agriculture. As for any suggestions that Westerners are tolerated rather than embraced — not as farfetched as you might think, given the history of European intervention in Africa — I have to say that apart from one moment when a zebra gave me the side-eye, I met nothing but smiles and handshakes. Granted, almost everyone I encountered was being paid to be nice to me. But the seasoned air miles collector can, I hope, discern when a people are generally well disposed towards visitors, and when they are not. The Zimbabweans we came across were unfailingly warm and welcoming. Our trip was organised by the excellent, perhaps uniquely experienced Mavros Safaris, a family business, owned and run by fifthgeneration white Zimbabweans who offer trips across Southern and East Africa, but call Zimbabwe home. We flew with Virgin Atlantic to Victoria Falls from Heathrow, via Johannesburg, and spent our first nights at Matetsi. There we had a bungalow to ourselves, with plunge pool and outdoor rainforest shower and the Zambezi right there, at the bottom of the garden, where crocodile bask on the banks. We toured Victoria

Falls, took a boat trip on the Zambezi, and game drives twice a day. From there we took a pulse-quickening four-seater Cessna ﬂight, 40 minutes southeast, crossing spectacular wilderness, to Hwange National Park, and Somalisa Acacia, a tented camp in the bush, where our bedroom looked onto a watering hole visited by elephant and lion and more breeds of deer than I knew existed. By day ﬁve, I was so unusually relaxed that I even accepted the loss of my iPhone with equanimity. I’d left it on the back bench of the Land Cruiser and it must have slipped off into the long grass. Somewhere, deep in the bush of Zimbabwe, there’s a baboon playing Candy Crush. Don’t say I never do anything for the locals. ○ Definitive Zimbabwean travel specialists, Mavros Safaris (mavrossafaris.com; +44 20 3824 6000,) offers this family safari from £16,125 for a family of four (two adults and two children). The itinerary includes three nights at Matetsi Victoria Falls and three nights at Somalisa Acacia on a full-board basis including all activities (game drives, boat cruises and a Victoria Falls tour), conservation fees and road transfers. This price also includes return charter flights from Victoria Falls to Hwange National Park, plus return international flights from London to Victoria Falls

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Inside job Fill your car’s interior with exotic scents of the world By Johnny Davis Photograph by Nick Millington

Good things come from awful clients. That’s one lesson Barbara Behan and Carrie Hindmarsh took from their time at M&C Saatchi. En route to one particularly tricky customer, they would mentally prepare by spritzing essential oils inside their car: sure, that may not improve the outcome of a meeting, but at least they’d arrive in a lessharried mental state. From this was born their startup, Charabanc: a line of luxury car fragrances. They have been designed to hark back to the halcyon days of motoring (a “char-à-banc” being an open-topped, horse-drawn vehicle, later with an engine), evoke “the atmosphere of adventure”, and be beautiful objects in their own right, comprised of a hand-crafted, stencilled-steel pomander encased in London leather.

Harrods loved the idea, green-lighting the duo’s plans without proof of concept, and 18 “incredibly tough” months later, Charabanc was born. Scent names include Across Pennine Fells (pine, freshly-cut grass, mint), Along the Plain of Castelluccio (lavender, sage, Calabrian bergamot) and The Golden Road to Samarqand (pink pepper, green coffee, cedar wood). Each is also infused with “a different note of leather and wood to evoke the old-fashioned microcosm of a vintage car,” says Behan. “Not just some awful blunt note of pine, something to hang off your rear-view mirror laced with hideous chemicals.” With people willing to spend small fortunes at Jo Malone and Diptyque to make their homes

smell like boutique hotels, why shouldn’t there be something for cars, too? “I remember the days of ‘Do the Shake n’ Vac, and put the freshness back’,” notes Behan. Both keen racing fans — they’ve just entered a rally with a 1968 Alfa Romeo Duetto — they take pleasure in “being two females working in a traditionally male area”. Though they’ve already had offers to expand the line into non-motoring arenas, for the moment they have their lane and they’re staying in it. “It won’t be long before others have a go,” says Behan, “but it’s a really, really difficult thing to copy.” Instead: expect more scents, inspired by more classic drives and vintage cars. “There’s plenty of mileage in that one,” she says. ○ Across Pennine Fells, £145; charabanc.com

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SUBSCRIBE TO ES UIRE — ONLY £28 FOR A YEAR + RECEIVE THE BIG WATCH BOOK

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hearstmagazines.co.uk/eq-magazine or call 01858 438 770 and quote offer code 1E 11684 Offer valid for new UK subscriptions by Direct Debit. After your first year, your subscription will continue at £28 a year unless you are notified otherwise. The standard subscription price is £42 for six issues of ESQUIRE plus THE BIG WATCH BOOK, based on the standard cover price of £6. Subscriptions may not include promotional items packaged with the magazine. All orders will be acknowledged and you will be advised of the start issue within 14 days. Subscriptions may be cancelled by providing 28 days’ notice. This offer cannot be used in conjunction with any other subscription offer and closes on 31 December 2019. For UK subscription enquiries, please call 01858 438 770. All information is correct at time of going to press. For our data policy, visit hearst.co.uk/privacy-notice

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THE FIRST WAT C H ON THE MOON T H E S T O R Y O F O M E G Aâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; S ICONIC SPEEDMASTER EDITED BY JOHNNY DAVIS

INTERVIEWS BY MAX OLESKER

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KE Y: RA

R AYNALD AESCHLIMANN President and CEO of Omega Ltd 2016–present

BUZ Z ALDRIN Nasa astronaut From 1963–’72

AUREL BACS Senior Consultant at Phillips Auctioneers 2015–present

R-JB

ROBERT-JAN BROER

ON 16 JULY 1969, Nasa’s Apollo 11 Saturn V rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida. It was the culmination of a wildly ambitious dream — for man to land on the moon, walk on its surface, and return successfully to Earth. The journey of Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins transﬁxed the world. Each astronaut had been issued with an Omega Speedmaster, the chronograph now known as “The Moonwatch”. The success of the Apollo 11 mission cemented the enduring relationship between Omega and Nasa, one which continues to this day. Now, for the 50th anniversary of the historic lunar landing, we celebrate over half a century of pioneering space travel and chronographic excellence.

Fratello magazine founder and editor 2004–present

THE BEGINNING JEAN-FR ANÇOIS CLERVOY CNES and ESA astronaut From 1985–2018

SAM COSSMAN Tech explorer 2014–present

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CHARLIE DUKE Nasa astronaut

“I went to work for Nasa at the beginning of the Gemini programme. I was classiﬁed as an aerospace engineer. I went to Texas A&M University-Kingsville. Got a major in physics. And I just happened to know somebody at Nasa that was able to get me in an interview. It was with Deke Slayton, who was one of the original seven astronauts. And when I got there, the ﬁrst thing he said was, ‘Well, now we need some watches’.” JIM R AGAN:

AN OR AL HISTORY OF THE OMEGA SPEEDMASTER

J-FC

From 1966–’75

PATRICK GILBERT

GENESIS OF THE SPEEDMASTER

Eyewitness to the Apollo 11 lift-off

“It was quite an incredible project at that time. When the Speedmaster was launched in 1957, it was part of what many people called ‘the Holy Trinity’.” PETROS PROTOPAPAS: “Omega was the ﬁrst to offer a professional family of watches. Because most other brands focused on developing one single piece; so either a perfect diver’s watch, or the perfect chronograph, or what have you. But instead we said, OK, let’s try to offer a complete package.” RA: “One was the Seamaster 300, the second was the Railmaster and the third was the Speedmaster. The Speedmaster was our chronograph, that was very important. The whole aim with the Speedmaster was to be very robust, very precise.” PP: “This is how the Speedmaster was born, within this family you have this chronograph. And at ﬁrst it was designed for drivers, hence the moniker.”

PETROS PROTOPAPAS Head of Brand Heritage at Omega Ltd 2012–present

JIM R AGAN Nasa Aerospace Engineer From 1963–’99

TPS

THOMAS P STAFFORD Nasa astronaut From 1962–’75

NICOLE STOT T Nasa astronaut From 1988–2015

TERRY W VIRTS Nasa astronaut

RAYNALD AESCHLIMANN:

From 2000–’16

@VINTAGEWATCHZILL A Rare watch collector 2012–present

Opposite: the Omega Speedmaster Apollo 11 50th Anniversary

Limited Edition, 42mm stainless steel with 18k Moonshine gold bezel on a steel bracelet, limited to 6,969 pieces

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THE APOLLO 11 COMMEMORATIVE EDITION SPEEDMASTER

After the moon landing, each Speedmaster Professional case back was engraved: “The First Watch Worn On The Moon”. Omega also celebrated the lunar landing by creating 28 numbered Apollo 11 Commemorative Edition Speedmasters — an 18-carat solid gold timepiece complete with a gold dial and onyx markers. Numbers

NASA’S NEED FOR A SPACE WATCH

“I interviewed the astronauts to see what they really wanted from a watch. They said they’d like to have one that could time events. And I said you need a chronograph, that’s the only thing that’s gonna fit the bill. And so, typical government, you put out a requirement and you have people bid on it. So we put out the requirement for what we needed and four companies bid on it.” PP: “If I’m not mistaken, there were 10 brands contacted, out of which only four responded. And out of the four, one was disqualified, because they didn’t stick to the specification sheet; instead of offering a wristwatch chronograph they offered a pocketwatch chronograph.” JR: “I had to put it through a series of 10 qualification tests.” PP: “Most were single tests — like you’d freeze the watch to death, or heat it up to death, or vibrate it to death, or whatever. Then you’d have combinations of tests; so first you’d heat it up, then you’d vibrate it and then you’d cool it down, all in one test. These combination tests obviously were the worst, and one of the very first tests was such a combination. And this is where are our honourable competition didn’t make it through.” JR: “It was rough. The thermal vacuum got most of ’em.” R A: “The Speedmaster watch went through all those certification processes at Nasa — and it was selected.” PP: “I can see why the Calibre 321 survived it. But honestly, I wouldn’t repeat it with my watch!” JR: “I think Omega is the only supplier that started far back in the Gemini days and is still supplying watches for Nasa.” PP: “The first Speedmaster to go into space officially, as part of the equipment list, was on Gemini 3 with Gus Grissom and John Young. More famous was the next one, Gemini 4, because you had Ed White performing America’s first spacewalk. He wore two Speedmasters actually, on his wrist, and if you look at some JR:

three to 28 were presented to every active Nasa astronaut during a gala dinner at the Warwick Hotel in Houston on 25 November 1969. Each watch was also inscribed with the recipient’s name, rank and missions ﬂown. (The lower numbers were reserved for those who had served Nasa the longest.) Each bore this inscription on the case

back: “To mark man’s conquest of space with time, through time, on time.” Two of these commemorative Speedmasters were to be received by American President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew. As elected ofﬁcials, protocol forbade them from accepting the gifts. Today, these watches are in the Omega Museum in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland.

of the Life magazine pictures you can make them out. And this is how the fact that Nasa was issuing Speedmasters came to our attention! The story goes that our distributor in the US tried to call Nasa and then at some point, he landed at the desk of Jim Ragan…” JR: “He said, ‘Was it our watch?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I didn’t think you’d ever call and find out what was going on!’ And that’s the first time they knew we were flying out with those watches.”

AN OR AL HISTORY OF THE OMEGA SPEEDMASTER

TR AINING AT NASA

“I grew up reading about Apollo and those early Sixties astronauts. When I was a kid, there was the Space Shuttle — and that’s what I wanted to do.” NICOLE STOT T: “I watched the moon landing when I was a kid, I have fond memories of that, and I think that certainly inspired me.” JEAN-FR ANÇOIS CLERVOY: “I was a skydiver, and I had probably a sense of adventure somewhere, even if I was not so conscious of it. And when the French Space Agency [CNES] launched the call for the second group of French astronauts, I was 25 and I thought, ‘This is for me’, and they selected me.” T V: “I read the book The Right Stuff when I was in high school. First of all it was very motivating and exciting, but it also showed me how to become an astronaut. Those guys were all test pilots, fighter pilots at Edwards Air Force Base, so I went that route. I went to the Air Force Academy, became an F-16 pilot, and eventually became a test pilot, and flew with Nasa that way.” NS: “There was a really long time before I considered that ‘astronaut’ could be a job because for somebody else it was so special. It just seemed like one of those jobs that other people get.” THOMAS P STAFFORD: “My good friend Neil Armstrong told me if I hadn’t done Apollo 10, he couldn’t have done 11. My lunar module was too heavy to land, otherwise we might have had a shot at being the first lunar landing. Neil had to TERRY W VIRTS:

Opposite: Ed White became the ﬁrst American astronaut to walk in space on 3 June 1965, during the Gemini 4 mission. He wore

an Omega Speedmaster Ref 105.003, predecessor to the Ref 145.012 later selected by Nasa for the moon landing programme

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The moon photographed by astronaut Mike Collins as Apollo 11 began its return ďŹ&#x201A;ight to Earth. The isolated dark marking visible near the centre is Mare Crisium (the Sea of Crisis)

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calve off every ounce he could. Apollo 10 holds the record for the fastest speed achieved by a human being — 24,791mph, or Mach 36, 0.0037 per cent of the speed of light. We jettisoned the Command Module. So we came back in 42 hours. Normally that would take 120, 130 hours.”

MAN L ANDS ON THE MOON

“Earth looked so good. Between the size of a basketball and a soccer ball. And you see it there — all beautiful. The first day I said, ‘Call Mission Control in Houston. You can call the President of The British Flat Earth Society in London and tell him he’s wrong. The Earth is completely round. You can see it right here, live, on colour TV!’ We put up the aluminium shades on the window and went to sleep. Next morning, they read us the news and the second item was the President of The Flat Earth Society to Colonel Stafford. He said how much he appreciated the beautiful colour view of Earth and, ‘Yes, it was round. But it was a flat disc’.” AUREL BACS: “You can’t talk about the Speedmaster without mentioning the moon, it is burned in everyone’s mind. I don’t think that was the original plan, but it’s become an iconic pairing that cannot be disassociated.” CHARLIE DUKE: “What was it like, the journey to the moon and being on there? Well, it was one big adventure.” BUZ Z ALDRIN: “The launch was so smooth compared to Gemini launches that we did not know the instant of leaving the ground. We only knew it from the instruments and voice communications which confirmed lift-off.” PATRICK GILBERT: “I was 11-and-a-half. It was a thing that all the kids in class were interested in. We gathered up our stuff and took a short drive over there. You had the radio on, and then there’s the countdown for the launch. And you kind of wait because there was a delay, because lift-off was several miles away, and you’d look at the distance and you’d see something and then you hear the sound. It was all a real carnival atmosphere. And then the rocket took off, and we watched it go up in the sky.” BA: “We saw our rate of climb… altitude… changing, but we were comfortable in our seats. We sort of looked at each other and thought, ‘We must be on our way… what’s next?’” NS: “My first flight was on a relay shuttle and I was flying up to the International Space Station on the Space Shuttle, the Discovery, and spent a little over three months on the space station with my Expedition 20 and 21 crewmates. And I can tell you, nothing prepares you.” TPS:

THE EVOLUTION OF THE OMEGA SPEEDMASTER

AN OR AL HISTORY OF THE OMEGA SPEEDMASTER

→

First Generation, 1957: the ﬁrst time in watch history the tachymeter scale was placed on the bezel, instead of on the dial

Second Generation, 1959: the ﬁrst Speedmaster worn in space after being privately purchased by Mercury astronauts Walter ‘Wally’ M Schirra and Leroy G ‘Gordo’ Cooper in 1962

Third Generation, 1963–’64: the Speedmaster of Eugene ‘Gene’ Andrew Cernan, and the last watch to be worn on the moon

Third Generation, 1963-’64: the model delivered to and tested by Nasa and ofﬁcially certiﬁed for its subsequent manned space programme

Fourth Generation, 1964: provided perfect timing during all six lunar landings up to Apollo 17; shown is an ofﬁcial model for the Automóvil Club Peruano

Fourth Generation, ‘Ultraman’, 1967-’68: a very uncommon variation seen in Japanese sci-ﬁ TV show ‘The Return of Ultraman’

Mark II, 1969: the model that marked the ﬁrst redesign of the classic Speedmaster ‘Moonwatch’ case

Apollo 11 Commemorative Edition, 1969: presented to every active Nasa astronaut and the US President and Vice-President

Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Limited Edition 2019 in steel and 18k Moonshine gold

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‘EYES ON THE STARS’: THE ‘PEANUTS’ COLLABORATION

On 5 October 1970, astronaut Thomas P Stafford handed the Snoopy Award to Omega’s technical manager, Hans Widmer. Nasa had chosen the cartoon beagle to act as a “watchdog” over its missions in 1968, gifting employees and contractors a sterling silver “astronaut Snoopy” pin, a commendation letter and

“We were focussed on mission control, and they were the people we had to think about most.” T V: “I felt like I was on the clock more than I’ve ever felt on the clock before, because there’s so much work to do and it’s really dangerous being outside. You know you’re in the spacesuit, you’ve got a millimetre of plastic in your helmet visor between you and instant death.” BA: “As Neil [Armstrong] descended, we heard mission control saying, ‘Getting an image, but upside down.’ They could see he was on the ladder. I could see the top of his head from where I stood, then he said he was going to step off the LEM [Lunar Excursion Module]. I then got in position to come down. I came down the ladder, and jumped off, being careful not to lock the door behind me. When I got off and looked around, and it was easy to balance, I said, ‘Magnificent desolation’.” CD: “I guess I was overwhelmed with the beauty — Buzz Aldrin called it ‘magnificent desolation’ — and that is certainly true. But you’re always in wonder, you know, ‘I’m on the moon, and nobody’s ever been here before’. So you’re excited. Adventurous, in awe and wonder, and thrilled with the beauty of it all.” NS: “Looking out of the window of the Space Station… it’s like meditating, almost.” T V: “Ninety-nine per cent of what you’re doing is work. You’re in this bulky suit, it’s difficult and mentally demanding. And then for one per cent of it I would stop and look out on the universe… It was like I was seeing creation from God’s view, like I was hearing from Him. I felt like I was seeing things humans shouldn’t see — and then I had to get back to work. Plug in a cable. So it was really extreme — sublime to mundane.” R A: “I think all the astronauts that were on the moon were very emotional about that moment. Think of Charlie Duke and his famous picture.” CD: “We decided to take a family photo to the moon, because I was training in Florida, the family lived in Houston, and Dad was never home. So I try to get the boys excited; they were five and seven. ‘You guys wanna go to the moon with BA:

a signed, framed certiﬁcate, under the slogan “Eyes on the Stars”. (Peanuts cartoonist Charles M Schulz was a supporter of the Nasa Apollo missions, drawing “astronaut Snoopy” and then creating the pin.) The association began because of Apollo 10: that mission’s lunar module was required to check the moon’s surface and “snoop around”

to reconnoitre a landing site for Apollo 11. The Apollo 10 crew thus nicknamed the mobile module “Snoopy” and their command module “Charlie Brown”. In 2003, Omega subsequently produced the Snoopy Award Speedmaster, limited to 5,441 pieces in reference to the Apollo 13 mission having lasted 142 hours, 54 minutes and 41 seconds.

AN OR AL HISTORY OF THE OMEGA SPEEDMASTER

Dad?’ They thought that would be a neat deal, so I said, ‘Well, of course you can’t get into the spacecraft, but why don’t we take a picture of the family?’ And so I got permission to do it and drop it on the moon, and on the back of the picture we had written: ‘This is the family of astronaut Charlie Duke from planet Earth who landed on the moon on 20 April 1972.’ And we all signed it. And so we dropped it onto the surface.” SAM COSSMAN: “They’re all American heroes, really. Global heroes.” CD: “I’d like to go back and see it one day, but I don’t think I’m going to get the chance.”

THE SPEEDMASTER SK Y WALKER X-33

“I was in Russia for a mission; I was in charge of designing the cockpit of the ISS. It was a long mission and I started dreaming of the ideal watch for space flight. After I wrote the specification, the European Space Agency said to me, ‘Now find a watchmaker’. So I visited the lot of the Swiss watch manufacturers, but they expected that I was going to propose a cosmetic change to an existing watch. But no. We had to reinvent the time functions and reinvent the way to display them. And that took investment. So finally, in 2011, Omega called me back and told me, ‘Jean-François, we would like to make your theoretical, ideal watch for space flight’.” T V: “In space we have this watch called X-33 that’s amazing. It has different alarms, it has a mission elapsed time feature, it has universal time, countdown timers.” @VINTAGEWATCHZILL A: “Design-wise, it’s an absolutely iconic watch because it’s super clean, no nonsense. It fulfils the needs of astronauts — from the visibility, from the readability, from how you can handle it. And this is something not every chronograph can do.” NS: “When you become an astronaut, there’s something iconic about Omega. There’s something about having an Omega in space with you. There’s the tradition of it — and it’s a really great watch. When I was in space, I used the X-33 as my alarm for the entire time I was on the Space J-FC:

Opposite: Nasa staff watch from windows at the Launch Control Center at Cape Canaveral as the Saturn V rocket lifts off its launchpad at 8.32am CDT, 16 July 1969

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→

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There have been dozens of Speedmaster variants launched over the years, including special and limited series. There’s an entire space series (Apollo-Soyuz, 1975; Mir-90 Days, 1991; Alaska Project, 2008); an Omega commemorative series (40th Anniversary of the Speedmaster, 1997; 50th Anniversary of the Speedmaster “Seahorse”, 2007;

150th Anniversary of Omega, 1998); and a country speciﬁc series (Italy Special, 1986; Japan Special “The Golden Panda”, 1997; Japan Special “Mitsukoshi”, 2003). All excite today’s sizeable number of Speedmaster collectors and enthusiasts. Then there are those exceptional pieces, such as a skeleton version of the 25th Anniversary of Apollo 11 (1994),

Station. It has the best alarm. I’ll tell you what, you need an alarm in space, you need a loud one. And that thing will wake you up in the morning.”

DAWN OF SPEEDY TUESDAY

“In 2012, I posted a picture of my Speedmaster on my wrist. And I posted it [first] on Facebook. And in the comments I wrote ‘Speedy Tuesday’, because Speedmaster fans refer to the watch as a ‘Speedy’, and, well, it was a Tuesday. Simple as that!” R A: “Speedy Tuesday has helped create this incredible community on Instagram. The fact that people are linked together because they share the same passion for Speedmasters is, for me, an incredible source of pride.” R-JB: “And what we’ve noticed is our community is often not only about the Speedmasters, but also the whole moon programme. The space programme is also part of the fun of the collective. In 2012 or 2013, we did one of the first get-togethers for Speedy Tuesday fans.” R A: “The pride of knowing that these people are collectors, are interested, are celebrating and continuing the legacy of this legendary watch is very positive.” R-JB: “And right before the end of 2016, I spoke with Raynald Aeschilmann. And I told him, basically, that Speedy Tuesday will be celebrating its fifth anniversary in 2017 and would it be possible to do something cool together? Not a T-shirt or a cap or a pen, but a watch. And he said, ‘Yeah, let’s try and do so and come up with some ideas’. We started brainstorming and came up with a Speedy Tuesday watch in 2017. And it was a huge success. For us it was 2,012 pieces; the number corresponds with the first year of Speedy Tuesday when we started it. And they were reserved within four-and-a-half hours. And there were like 10,000 people on the waiting list.” RA: “It was incredible, not only because there were more than 12,000 people willing to buy the watch, but there were 12,000 people in the community with whom we were able to celebrate the Speedmaster. So Speedy Tuesday is more ROBERT-JAN BROER:

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numbered and limited to 50, and a Moonphase skeleton (2003) in a run of 57. But the rarest and most valuable Speedmaster of them all will, of course, remain Buzz Aldrin’s — famously, the ﬁrst watch on the moon. That one’s been missing ever since he landed back on Earth; it was lost (or “lost”) en route to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

than selling watches within four hours. It’s about giving, and showing the community that we care about their passion for our brand.” R-JB: “Then in 2018 we did another one, and it was based on a vintage model from the Sixties.” @V: “Yes, the [original] 145.012 — the ‘Ultraman’. It’s a special model with an orange hand.” R-JB: “We decided to only do a limited edition or special edition when we really have a cool idea, and come up with something nice. And this year, we started doing a world tour. We did Europe — Milan, Frankfurt and Switzerland. Next, we will do Singapore, Hong Kong and in September, New York and in October, Japan. So we’re really doing these events worldwide now. I think it’s also part of the fun. It’s not only about the publication [Fratello Watches] or to put it on Instagram, just to use the hashtag ‘#speedytuesday’, but also to get to meet Speedmaster fans and bring them together.”

THE FUTURE: ON TO MARS

“We’re all willing to go further. And to go back to the moon would be one of these steps. Any recent astronaut of space exploration would tell you. And also I think it’s still an incredible dream, an incredible inspiration to make it to another planet.” BA: “All in all, it was a privilege to have been able to undertake the ﬁrst manned mission to the lunar surface, an honour to have worked with so many good and dedicated people, and to have left our footprints there. Even now, sometimes, I marvel that we went to the moon. But now, I think, it is time for the next generation to buckle up and get on to Mars.” R A: “It’s a great target, a great dream. If it’s in our lifetime or not, history will show. But what I know very well, from an emotional point of view, for all the people looking up, with a smile, with shining eyes: Mars is next.” JR: “Oh, I think they’ll be wearing an Omega watch when they land there, for sure.” TPS: “The Omega Professional Speedmaster is still the only watch qualiﬁed today to go out for a spacewalk.” ○ R A:

Opposite: Buzz Aldrin inspecting the cabin of the Lunar Module, photographed on day three of the Apollo 11 mission by Neil Armstrong. Note the Speedmaster ﬁtted with a long Velcro watchband to ﬁt over spacesuit sleeves

AN OR AL HISTORY OF THE OMEGA SPEEDMASTER

THE MISSING ‘MOONWATCH’

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Charlie Duke, pilot of the Lunar Module on the April 1972 moon mission, collecting geological samples at Plum Crater; the Nasa ‘moon rover’ vehicle is visible in the background

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A Speedmaster undergoes the ‘Final Control’ stage of Nasa’s extreme testing, 1964. A year later, the watch would become the ﬁrst to be certiﬁed by the space agency for all manned missions

Photographs: Patrik Fuchs | Getty | Lucky if Sharp | Nasa

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The Elements

APOCALYPSE SOON

Sanjiv Bhattacharya

Getty

hen the wildﬁres tore through Southern California last year, the worst in a century to do so, I was on my back deck in Los Angeles, shitting my pants. I live in Highland Park, on the east side of the city, with a gorgeous view of the Angeles National Forest, all hills and green stretching back for 50 miles. But that day, all I could see was thick black sky. The freeways had been blocked, the ﬁres were inching closer. If those →

A resident ﬁghts the Woolsey Fire, Malibu, California, 2018

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hills went up, the ash would have rained fire on my home and there was nothing me and my garden hose could have done about it. We were lucky — we didn’t burn, unlike thousands of others. But we did feel the deep limbic terror that life as we knew it could be snatched away in an afternoon. So, once the skies cleared, I resolved to do something, anything to feel less helpless: I put together a disaster kit. For 18 years in this city, I hadn’t got around to it, despite living on a fault line. Now, I decided, the time had come. It’s a daunting process, at first. The scenarios you have to imagine: tsunamis and blackouts and marauding gangs going from house to house, like in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Granted, that’s not the picture they paint on the website of the Federal Emergency Management Administration. But start googling “disaster kit” and you’ll end up like I did, down the nutjob rabbit hole of doomsday preppers and survivalists. I quickly realised I wasn’t cut out for a proper apocalypse. I couldn’t leave town because you need a motorbike for that and I’ve never ridden one before, much less with my wife and dog on the back — I’d kill us all just pulling out of the drive. And to hunker down would entail some guns and bunkers situation that just wasn’t me. I like to moisturise. I wasn’t about to suddenly transform into a Bear Grylls-slash-Rambotype. No, the only apocalypse for which I could meaningfully prepare was an altogether milder affair, more mid-range and manageable. A terrible event, no doubt, but also temporary, something one could survive with a small generator, some decent insurance and a load of Clif bars. My expectations adjusted, I got to work. And it was fun. I got a wrench for the gas pipe, a bunch of flashlights and duct tape, a first aid kit, bug spray, a cool, multi-tool pocket knife and a big drum that I filled with filtered water. I felt responsible and clever, one step ahead of the pack. I’d be the guy on our street with 10 days of clean water and a hand-crank radio with a smartphone charger. Everyone loves that guy. But something happened mid-prep. I noticed that my prepper lists were a bit limited, a bit stark. Every list recommended tinned beans and nuts in vast quantities, probably because they last and have high nutritional content. But surely beans means chilli, right? A big steaming pot of it. So let’s get some pasilla chillies, do it properly. And that smoked paprika from Whole Foods, maybe a nice Zinfandel from Santa Barbara. And while we’re at it, why slather ourselves in bug spray when Pottery Barn have those lovely citronella candles…

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I went from The Purge to glamping, from The Road to Sideways. Because that’s what happens in LA. The lifestyle is so wonderful, with the beach, the hills, the weather and the legal cannabis, it’s easy to forget what a precipice we’re on. The Big One’s due any day now, a fact we all know in theory. But, oh look, it’s golden hour, so let’s fire up the barbecue and sit poolside in the breeze. With every clink of a wine glass, the thought of actually being shaken to pieces recedes. Los Angeles has always carried the whiff of apocalypse about it. Both paradise and hellfire in one; it’s the key to the city’s noirish fascination. We think of noir through a Hollywood lens, the darkness beneath the glitz, but it begins with the land itself, as Mike Davis argues in his brilliant book, Ecolo of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. First LA lulls and seduces us, then she unleashes catastrophe — the city as femme fatale. And according to Davis, the lulling has gone on for too long; in fact, we’re living through an aberration, what he calls “one of the most unusual episodes of climatic and seismic benignity.” How much longer can it last? If the fires have shown us anything, it is that things are getting worse, as they do for the hero in most every

Hollywood plot. We’re in for more shaking and burning, no doubt; all the graphs point in that direction — the wrong one. But LA’s not alone in this, it’s just the most extreme example of a much broader phenomenon. Because all of us, humanity itself, is skating on the same thin ice. Globally, we consume without end while the planet dies around us, but we’re so blinded by the good life we can’t see the looming disaster. Or perhaps we can’t fathom it, so we stop trying; instead, we make bougie earthquake kits and carry on. In that way, we’re all LA. One of the upshots of living in a city where leisure and oblivion sit cheek by jowl, is that you’re reminded, in so many ways, just how precarious life is. It makes you grateful; that’s the lesson of the wildfires. Grateful to have been spared the litany of disasters that California can dole out, from earthquakes and wildfires to mudslides and floods. And grateful for the gorgeous California lifestyle in between. Once the smoke has cleared, the wildflowers smell just a little sweeter. You know what, I’m going to go with that chilli recipe after all, and the citronella candles too. If the Big One hits, and we’re still standing, come over. We’ll be out back, firing up the grill, like always. ○

In Transit

HORSEDRAWN Ed Caesar

t was New Year’s Eve 2018. I was in Dubai International Airport, to make a connection. Layover time works differently to everyday time. The only measurement that matters to the traveller in transit is how many hours and minutes exist before the next ﬂight. The time of day ceases to register. It is never the evening, or morning, or lunch. It always feels like the right time for a drink. One is both exhausted and strangely alert — like a gambler on an allnight streak, or the parent of a colicky baby. There is something especially unmooring about a long journey made in the dying days of December, when the world suspends its normal

rhythms to celebrate the movement of a second hand. I had left home on 30 December. I wouldn’t be back until the end of January. My ﬂight took me almost exactly halfway around the planet — from Manchester to the island of Guadalcanal, where I was preparing to report a story about a shipwreck. Because I was moving east, Earth spun with me. In the air, I devoured minutes at double tempo. The solid ground of an international airport felt like a minim rest in a fugue. In Dubai, with some time to stretch, I found a café and tried to read. But I was directly beneath a speaker. The music it was playing was execrable: bland muzak covers of already-bland pop

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Dominique Tarlé

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at Villa Nellcôte, Villefranchesur-Mer, France, 1971

songs. I tried to tune it out. My noise-cancelling headphones were recharging at the worst possible moment. This was a soundscape designed to be ignored, but some music is so bad as to be unignorable. I began to wonder about what kind of sadist re-imagined Elton John for synth. The unhappy thought crossed my mind that the producer in question was probably contracted to all the airport cafés in the world, and that he or she might be richer than Warren Buffett. A cover version of The Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” began. I felt a pinch of anger. In my sleep-deprived and homesick brain, a line had been crossed. The Dubai café cover was instrumental. It smoothed all the edges from the original; excised its jingle-jangle 12-string. It also contained none of the Stones’ strange, fretful lyrics: “Graceless lady, you know who I am / You know I can’t let you, slide through my hands.” There was no sense, in the bastardised version, that “Wild Horses” was even a song, let alone a song about yearning. It was simply a somewhat recognisable chord sequence to be passed through before the next chord sequence began: digestive-tract music. But then, the chorus kicked in, and my mood changed. The café cover remained an aesthetic crime, but there was just enough life in the

movement from verse to refrain — the progress of D major to A minor — to transport me. Suddenly, I was more than eight years away, standing next to the editor of this magazine at a memorial service in the journalists’ church, St Bride’s on Fleet Street. The choir was singing the most delicate and poignant arrangement of “Wild Horses”. All the keening of the lyrics flooded out. The memorial service was for a man named Robert Sandall, who was, among his manifold talents, a fine writer and talker, an aficionado of many genres of music, and a handsome devil. He died of cancer, too young. I didn’t know Robert well, but he had shown real kindness to me when I was starting my career in journalism, and I liked him immensely. His emails were funny and warm. He was great at a lunch. In St Bride’s, the choir sang Verdi and Duruflé and Vivaldi before they sang Jagger and Richards. It was an appropriate mix for a man with such catholic tastes. In the airport, I reconnected with the moment in the choir’s performance that had bitten me years before: “…Let’s do some living, after we die.” It relates a capsule of the Christian message, sure. But it’s also a reflection on loss and memory. I remember, during my childhood, how my mum would constantly tell stories about my dad, who had died in a flying

accident when I was two years old, and of whom I carried the most fleeting recollections. When I met my wife, 20 years later, she noticed my mum’s habit of telling anecdotes about Big Ben, and said, “I love that she keeps him alive.” In the café, after the song had finished, I realised that the same shitty, subpanpipe cover, which had irked me so much, had also been the catalyst for an unexpectedly profound experience. Music possesses this superpower, to move us through time. My flight was called. On my way to the gate, I remembered to download the Stones’ track onto my phone while I still had Wi-Fi. I had a feeling I would need it. It was 14 hours from Dubai to Brisbane, where another layover awaited me. I eventually celebrated the final moment of New Year’s Eve, such as it was, nine or maybe 10 hours before my family at home did. I was sitting in economy class, somewhere over Western Australia, with an empty seat next to me, drinking a can of Tiger Beer and eating a Twix. I only knew we were entering 2019 because one of the air hostesses briefly and joylessly donned a party hat. I put my headphones on, played the song at the top of my Spotify list, then drank a toast to everybody I loved and missed. “Childhood living,” sang the thick-lipped man, “is easy to do.” ○ →

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Celluloid

DRUNKEN BOXING Max Olesker

n his 1983 classic Project A, Jackie Chan dangles precariously from the hands of a clock tower, 60ft in the air, his legs swinging wildly and his face contorted in cartoonish panic. It’s far, far too high for a human body to fall from. And then, because he’s Jackie Chan, he falls. The camera follows his body as he tumbles earthwards, ripping through two flimsy fabric canopies, before landing on the unforgiving floor. The ordeal is made needlessly more difficult than it already would be. Chan has his hands handcuffed together; the fall is shamelessly intercut with another take of the same fall, revealing that Chan put himself through this inhuman experience twice; and finally, once Chan has landed, a group of guards run and pick him up, allowing him, in the same take, to deliver a completely unnecessary punchline: “I proved there really is such a thing as gravity!” It’s a sequence which sums him up: eye-popping bravery, unswerving dedication to getting the shot, and perhaps the greatest example of over-commitment to a throwaway joke ever captured on screen. I was 13 when I discovered Jackie Chan. The film was Drunken Master, in which the young JC spends most of the film being taught the unpredictable art of “drunken boxing” by an irascible old pisshead, undergoing torturous, Rocky-style training montages before using his new skills to defeat an evil assassin called Thunderleg. Drunken Master acted on me as an intoxicant, as well as a welcome slap around the chops. Like Jackie Chan in Project A, I fell, and I fell hard. Immediately, I dived into his back catalogue. I had grown up with both a love of comedy and of swashbuckling action movies and now, suddenly, here was a series of films which combined the two; a world of heroism and slapstick, of epic chases, daring fights and joyous silliness. In writing this piece, I came to realise that Jackie Chan has shaped the trajectory of my life. At the age of 15, I became a professional wrestler. And then I became a comedian. And then, at the Edinburgh Festival, beginning in 2011, I combined the two practices in an event called The Wrestling, in which comics are transformed into pro-wrestlers and step into the ring. It’s a show full of heroism and slapstick, of epic chases, daring fights and joyous silliness. I wonder what gave me that idea?

Jackie Chan hanging out in Rush Hour (1998)

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Despite his countless films (at least 170), plentiful awards (at least 41, including an honorary Oscar) and vast fortune (he’s reportedly the fifth highest-paid actor in the world and worth at least $370m), I believe that Jackie Chan is underrated. Against some stiff competition, he is the greatest physical comedian the movies have ever seen. He’s not, as people who haven’t watched his films often assume, the successor to Bruce Lee. He’s a synthesis of Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Gene Kelly — and he might be better than all of them. Unlike the invincible Bruce Lee, Chan is perpetually vulnerable. Project A provides the quintessential Chan moment: in the midst of a wild barroom brawl, Jackie and his nemesis both smash wooden chairs over one another’s backs. They stare each other out, macho and unflinching, then retreat behind pillars to briefly writhe in agony, before catching one another’s eyes and returning, puff-chested, to battle. Chan has the physicality of Keaton, without the deadpan. Witness him hanging from a speeding bus using only an umbrella in Police Story, or swinging inches above an oncoming steam-train on a rope ladder attached to a helicopter in Police Story 3: Super Cop. His on-screen persona is every bit as immediate and timeless as Charlie Chaplin’s, and not too dissimilar. Like Chaplin in The Little Tramp, Jackie is an eternal underdog: mischievous and fallible yet forever a force for good, always taking on powers greater than himself and eventually succeeding — but only after immense struggle. With his broad, warm face, athletic frame, and seemingly effortless control of his body, Chan is a modern day Gene Kelly. He’s a man of the people writ large, somehow an average Joe, despite being clearly superhuman. And as for the daredevil “thrill sequences” of Harold Lloyd, the Project A clock tower fall was a tribute to Lloyd’s iconic climbing sequence in Safety Last!, from 1923. Chan’s stunts are extraordinary when they come off, and are put to equally brilliant use when they fail — which is often. (Chan, now 65 and a veteran of five decades on screen, has broken more or less every bone imaginable, and dislocated numerous parts of his body, including his pelvis, sternum and cheekbones.) Since 1982’s Dragon Lord, his films have ended with the mother of all blooper reels. It’s a genius move; the failed stunts are by turns hilarious and life-threateningly dangerous, and they pull back the curtain and give an insight into Chan’s work with his stunt team. After the agony comes the impish grin, the warm hugs, the collective

schoolboy delight — “We got away with it! Just!” — and the insane certainty that he’s going to try it again. And again. And again. And again. There’s a reason that “Jackie Chan” is not just the name of an actor but a genre of film in its own right. Due to his rigorously formal training — he was one of the last graduates of the brutal Peking Opera School — Chan is a perfectionist. And, thanks to the sympathetic backing of the Hong Kong film studios who produce his work, he is able to exercise an intense attention to detail that wouldn’t be possible on a traditional film set. Dragon Lord’s Jianzi sequence, in which a weighted shuttlecock is kicked between teammates, took an apocryphal 2,900 takes. No one but Chan could possibly have created the Chinese hand-fan fight in The Young Master,

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a back-and-forth of such elegance and simplicity that it elicits a childlike joy, in this viewer at least. And the naked fight in The Accidental Spy, in which Chan uses large plates both as weapons and to cover his modesty. And the slide down the side of a skyscraper in Who Am I?, bouncing down the steeply inclined glass, sliding on his back, knees, his stomach, then coming to a stop on a tiny ledge lethally high above the ground. And the finale to Police Story — a maniacal leap from the top floor of a shopping centre, sliding down an electrified pole and smashing a series of lightbulbs, resulting in third degree burns on his hands. And, of course, the fall from the clock tower. Which, as the outtakes at the end of Project A reveal, is a stunt he actually, inconceivably, somehow, filmed three times. Why? Because he’s Jackie Chan, that’s why. ○

Overseas

A BOAT WITH A VIEW Nell Freudenberger

n Egypt, our seven-year-old fell in love with a clock. It was sitting next to his bed on a Nile houseboat: a round, Forties-era analogue clock capped with a brass ring, which, for some reason, he named “Augley”. It must have looked old-fashioned to him, like something from a picture book. I could understand his fascination. One of the admittedly frivolous reasons I’d cajoled my family into a trip to Egypt was a picture I’d seen on the houseboat company’s website: a table covered with an embroidered cloth, supporting an oil lamp and a copy of the Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace of Desire. I discovered Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilo as a teenager and devoured it; when I stepped into the dining room on our houseboat, a lowceilinged room below the main deck crammed with ornate wooden furniture, I thought I’d walked into Palace of Desire. The book opens as the family’s patriarch, al-Sayyid Ahmad, is being led by his best friend onto a pleasure boat, where he will fall completely and disastrously

for a sexy, young musician named Zanuba. My husband, whose suitcase had gone missing somewhere between New York and Cairo, was wearing the same clothes he’d travelled in overnight, and was having a less romantic experience. While I marvelled at the boat’s furnishings — high-gloss white louvered windows propped open with brass pins, and inlaid mahogany couches on which I could almost see Zanuba reclining with her lute, batting her kohllined lids — he made repeated calls over terrible reception to understaffed EgyptAir offices in Luxor and Aswan. We ﬁnally gave up and visited a hot and dusty covered market in Esna, where he drew the line at the traditional loose Egyptian garment called a jellabiya. I bargained instead for the souvenir T-shirt with the least garish hieroglyphics — “pure Egyptian cotton!”, no doubt manufactured in Guangzhou — which he gamely wore for the next week. I’ve always had the uncomfortable feeling that I might one day turn into Eleanor Lavish; in place of poor Charlotte, I’d be tugging my longsuffering husband and children along behind →

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me, trilling, “A smell!… Every city has its own smell.” The kids were happy enough to visit the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where they saw the unwrapped and mummiﬁed body of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, complete with reddish hair and blackened teeth, and the golden face-mask of Tutankhamun — one of those iconic objects that actually manages to transcend all of its popular representations. Resistance came when we decided to walk from the museum to the Café Riche, a century-old Art Deco establishment with globular ceiling lamps, red tablecloths and a black-and-white photo of Mahfouz on the wall. While an enthusiastic waiter introduced me to his elderly Arabic-speaking colleague — who had actually served the great writer, but with

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whom I admittedly couldn’t communicate — my 11-year-old daughter whispered to her father, “Do you know that there’s a water park in the Bahamas called Atlantis that, like, everyone has been to except for me?” My grandfather had a passion for foreign travel, and my grandmother had a degree in classics, and so my father was also dragged to Cairo aged 11, in 1956. He says that he remembers being terriﬁed of the nighttime city he glimpsed

‘What were we doing in Egypt, after all?’: The Pyramids at Giza

out the window of the TWA shuttle bus. The purpose for his parents was to give their son a tour of the progress of “Western civilisation”: from Cairo, they went on to Athens, Rome and London. Our own 11-year-old had just ﬁnished a unit on Egyptian history and culture, in which she read that contemporary Egyptian boys and girls generally play sports separately, with girls more often exercising inside or in secluded areas. She was so appalled by this inequity that I decided not to share any of the alarming statistics about women in Egypt: that they are 65 per cent literate, that only 26 per cent work outside the home, that 92 per cent of married women have undergone female genital mutilation. My husband and I weren’t ignorant of these facts

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JOURNAL

when we took our children to Egypt, nor did we have any illusions about the progress of Western civilisation, which seemed to be careening faster than ever toward unmitigated disaster. What were we doing in Egypt, after all? I knew that I didn’t want our children to come away with a binary conception of “developed” versus “developing” countries. As when we took them to India and Morocco, though, there was no escaping the fact that children their age and younger were selling snacks and souvenirs in the street. Amitav Ghosh discusses this “ladder of development” in his non-fiction account, In an Antique Land, about the time he spent in an Egyptian village in 1988, pursuing a doctorate in social anthropology. In one of the book’s most memorable scenes, Ghosh finds himself in a room full of middle-aged wedding guests, villagers who start peppering him with questions about India, his native country; they are skeptical, and then flatly refuse to believe that some Indians lived poorer and less modern lives than their own. “I had an inkling then of the real and desperate seriousness of their engagement with modernism,” Ghosh writes, “because I realised that the fellaheen saw the material circumstances of their lives in exactly the same way that a university economist would: as a situation that was shamefully anachronistic, a warp upon time... It was thus that I had my first suspicion of what it might mean to belong to an ‘historical civilisation’, and it left me bewildered because, for my own part, it was precisely the absoluteness of time and the discreteness of epochs that I always had trouble in imagining.” Ghosh’s imaginative trouble might be common to novelists, who are almost always less interested in historical categories than in the ways people depart from them. I thought that if Egypt was an “historical civilisation”, my family belonged to one that could be called “ahistoric” — a young country that has reeled dangerously between disinterest and wilful blindness toward its own past. In taking my American kids to Egypt, I wanted them to see the world like Ghosh did: not as a competition between more or less successful civilisations, but as a collection of individuals, each with a particular story. One evening, our houseboat docked by a rocky seawall a few miles north of Aswan. We disembarked and followed our guide, walking underneath squat, thick-trunked palms, next to a field of tall, green barley. We stopped at a concrete canal, the bottom just covered in brackish water, and watched a man in a turban and jellabiya ride a donkey loaded down with freshly harvested sugar cane in the other direction. We hadn’t understood where our guide

was taking us until we came to a village, where small children were playing under the mango trees. With the mysterious disregard for language barriers common to the very young, our seven-year-old joined them, speaking English to their Arabic and taking his turn as they chased one another around a whitewashed brick wall. When the Dutch couple from our houseboat started kicking a football with some older boys, our daughter at ﬁrst hung back, but her interest was clear from the Barçelona shirt she was wearing. Two of the boys had on Liverpool red in honour of Mo Salah, and soon they were all passing to each other in a circle, whooping and showing off their footwork. While they played, I chatted with a young mother in a hijab

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whose hands were painted with henna, and who spoke excellent English. After we said goodbye, she came running after us with a gift, bracelets made of neon string that she braided onto each child’s wrist. Later, our daughter conﬁrmed that the visit to the village was her favourite part of the trip. When she remarked that there weren’t any girls her age in the game, I asked whether the boys seemed happy to play with her. “Yeah, they didn’t care,” she said. “It wasn’t like what I read in school.” Our son was disappointed that Augley couldn’t come home with us, but is still wearing the string bracelet three months later; it gets clean every night in the shower, and remains as uncannily bright as the day he got it. ○

Memoir

A DECISION OF PRINCIPLE Mick Brown

even-feet two-inches tall and desperate, Bill Simpson was one of the bravest people I’ve ever met. It was 1993, in a city in East Texas called Vidor. A city of some 10,000 people, Vidor had been founded in the 19th century by a man named C S Vidor — the father of King Vidor, the Hollywood film director — a rough and tumble logging town, little more than a row of bars beside a railway track, that had earned the name “Bloody Vidor” because of the fistfights, until a campaign by the Baptist Church turned it dry. It was also, historically, a “sundown town” — a term to describe places throughout the American South where racial exclusion was enforced by local legislation or, more commonly, threats of violence. There had once been a sign on the road into town warning “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in Vidor”. As late as the Seventies, the Ku Klux Klan had run a bookshop on Main Street; members openly drove around the town in pick-up trucks, dressed in hoods and robes, and the “Grand Dragon” of the Texas Klan, AW Harvey, had lived there until his death a few years previously. For as long as anyone could remember, no black person had

lived in Vidor. No black person, that is, until Bill Simpson moved in. What had brought Bill to Vidor was a class action suit ruling that all federal housing projects in East Texas should be desegregated. Vidor was chosen as the ﬁrst town where the new law was to be tested. It was a decision of principle, that a town that had once been a centre of Ku Klux Klan activity would have a black resident — whether it liked it or not. The new law had served as a rallying call to KKK factions throughout eastern Texas. Robed and hooded members had gathered on the steps of the county seat, Orange, vowing to keep Vidor white, and a cross had been burned on private land. Bill had been living on the streets of the nearby city of Beaumont when a local church group had arranged a home for him in Vidor. In fact, he was not the ﬁrst black man to be moved into the town. John DecQuir, an elderly diabetic, had arrived a few weeks earlier, announcing his intention to spend his last days peacefully watching TV wildlife programmes and reading the Bible. His arrival had been preceded by the Klan posting leaflets through the doors of every house on the project, a collection of some 70 modest bungalows →

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situated on a site at the edge of town, ringed by a link-wire fence, warning of dire consequences for anyone who made their new neighbour feel welcome. DecQuir spent only one night in his new home before moving out. Bill Simpson was made of sterner stuff. I arrived in Vidor the day after Simpson moved in, and found him in his new home, sitting on a battered old reclining armchair, smoking and watching television. A police car was parked outside the bungalow — not to intimidate, but to protect him. And there it would stay, dutifully trailing Bill whenever he walked off the project and down the street to a nearby grocery store. There and back. There and back. An odd, dispiriting ritual. “I’m just another man trying to better himself,” Bill told me. He didn’t want to make enemies. He just wanted a chance to get back on his feet. “I’ve had this racial bullshit shoved down my throat everywhere I’ve been, but I’m not afraid of anything. The only thing I’m afraid of is the Lord Jesus Christ.” It would be wrong to think that everybody in Vidor was hostile or unwelcoming. Over the next few days, some neighbours on the project, defying the threats of the Klan, went out of their way to welcome Bill, inviting him into their homes. (But not the woman who lived opposite, who when I suggested she might at least say “Hello” to him told me, “The only way I’d say hello to a nigger is with a baseball bat.”) The proprietor of a Mexican restaurant had organised a rally called “Thumbs Up” to promote pride, spirit and unity in the city, which without explicitly mentioning Bill Simpson was committed to promoting a positive attitude that, its organiser told me, “would make colour irrelevant”. Around 1,500 people had turned up to show their support. But one didn’t have to scrape far beneath the surface to find bigotry and hatred. One man I spoke to boasted that he planned putting up a new sign on the road into town, “‘Support Sickle Cell Anaemia’ — because that’s the disease blacks get, y’see...?” The KKK was no longer the presence in Vidor it had once been. In the Seventies, a new mayor passed an ordinance forbidding lighting fires inside city limits and sacked a policeman who had been attending Klan rallies in his police car. (The Klan responded by burning an effigy of the mayor on Main Street.) But you didn’t need to look far to find them. In the local diner each day, a group of men took their regular seats at the back, drinking coffee, smoking and looking up whenever a stranger walked in. In another context you might have called them “good ol’ boys”, but with their leathery faces and sour expressions

JOURNAL

they looked like the kind of men you would see on newsreels from the Sixties in the Deep South, punching and kicking any black person with the temerity to enter segregated restaurants or cross school picket lines. When I asked after the Klan, a man sidled over to my table, produced a membership card and launched into a diatribe about blacks, liberals and homosexuals and how America should be a “separatist” nation — “like Britain was during the war”. He evidently had a particular affection for Britain: he had been born, he told me, on the same day that an RAF fighter pilot had been shot down, “and I kind of took that personally”. Personally? Did I know anything about reincarnation, he asked. Did he mean, did he think...? He nodded his head slowly. “Yup...” The following day, a man came into the diner dressed in a crisp uniform shirt, emblazoned with a cross embroidered with drops of blood — the insignia of the KKK. This was Michael Lowe, the leader of a faction called Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based 250 miles away in Waco. He worked the room like a TV evangelist, with a Pepsodent smile and a talcum powder handshake, passing out leaflets and glad-handing the good ol’ boys. The Klan, he told me, had a bad reputation, “because of the media”, but the days of cross burnings, threats and whippings were passed; the Texas Knights of the KKK were “lawabidin’ citizens”, a political party in the making, “respectable” — at least, it appeared, if “respectability” meant eschewing the “n” word and instead referring to “negroes”. Another faction, the White Camelia Knights, based in Cleveland, Texas, 74 miles away, had been the most vociferous, and the most threatening group in opposing the Vidor desegregation project. When I telephoned Charles Lee, the group’s Grand Dragon, to arrange a meeting, the first question he asked was whether I was working with a photographer and whether I wanted him to bring his robe. He suggested meeting at a filling station on Main Street. “You’ll recognise us.” It was a Saturday. The “Thumbs Up” campaign had organised an auto rally. A stage had been set up on a square outside the town bank; a band was playing country music and the streets were thronged with people. An old International Harvester school bus painted gunmetal grey, and with metal grilles at the window, turned into the filling station where I was waiting. The words “White Camelia Knights” were stencilled on the side. Some 30 people got out of the bus, cloaked in hoods and robes, among them a hooded woman holding a baby. Others were dressed in combat fatigues and black berets. They swaggered

around the forecourt, waving at traffic. Some motorists honked their horns. One wound down his window and shouted “Go home!” A hooded figure shouted back. “We are home.” Charles Lee was a small, ginger-haired man dressed in a “White Power” T-shirt. He told me to follow the bus to a nearby park, where we sat at a picnic table, Lee flanked by a hulking thug in combat fatigues. I already knew what he would say: separate housing, separate education, the “awakening” of “white, Christian America”, the threat — or promise — of a race war. He handed me a Klan newspaper with the headline “Slavery Benefited Negroes: Did Great Harm to Whites”. Did we have “a ‘nigger problem’ in Britain,” he wanted to know. The thug laughed. “Racist” is a word that is bandied around so casually now, an all purpose epithet in the tiresome and acrimonious game of identity politics. But here was racism in its most undiluted, rancid and poisonous form. Racism that threatened Bill Simpson every day. Bill wasn’t in town to see the White Camelia Knights strutting outside the filling station in their hoods and robes. He only left the project when he needed to. He wasn’t in Vidor trying to make a statement, he told me; he just wanted to get himself together financially, spiritually and physically. “I’m just looking for a home.” I left Vidor after a week. When I passed by to say goodbye for the last time and wish him luck I found him sitting in his chair, smoking and watching the television — just as he had been on the first day I’d met him. It was a couple of months later that I read the news report. Bill, it said, had “just got tired” of wondering what abuse he would hear next from a passing car as he walked down the street — wondering when it might be something worse than just abuse — and had asked to be rehoused, back in Beaumont. On his second night in the city he had been held up at gunpoint, robbed of the few dollars in his pocket, and shot dead. His killer was black. I’ve thought about this a lot over the years and I’m still no clearer in my mind about how to make sense of it — if you can make sense of it. So don’t ask me what the trials, the bravery and the death of Bill Simpson say about America or race, or God, or cruel irony, or how karma doesn’t always play out the way you expect it to. Don’t ask me to explain, because I can’t. It’s just what happened. ○

In next issue’s Journal: Andrew O’Hagan is tired of your complaining, Tom Parker Bowles loses it at the video shop, and Philip Norman takes to the high seas.

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Trending Eight signs of the times, from the new season’s collections

Photographs by Benjamin Swanson

NYLON

In 1984, Miuccia Prada took the kind of heavy-duty synthetic fabric more often used to make parachutes and repurposed it for a range of handbags bearing her family’s name, in the process writing her own into fashion history. Today, nylon — developed by DuPont in 1938 as a successor to rayon — is a luxury super-material. Future-facing collections from Dunhill, Stella McCartney and Lanvin have all used the once-maligned

material to great and varied effect of late. Hardy, water-resistant and sculptural, as well as increasingly recyclable, nylon’s new era is a world away from the horror of Nineties tracksuits. This parka is made almost entirely from nylon off-cuts: clever and forward thinking. Finlay Renwick Notte black recycled quilted polyester parka, £3,800, by ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA COUTURE

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NEON

Not since the go-go Eighties, when it decorated slogan T-shirts, sweatbands, scrunchies, even, lamentably, odd socks, has neon been so visible. For Autumn/Winter 2019, designers including Craig Green and Kris Van Assche at Berluti employ neon and fluoro tones in entire looks, while others use them as accents on more subdued outfits. Donatella Versace offsets grey tailoring with electric pink and uses an especially

livid green for her trainers. At Louis Vuitton, Virgil Abloh demonstrates how the iconic house monogram can be translated into the most zeitgeisty aesthetic with this doctor’s bag in retina-melting neon yellow, as well as a pink holdall with matching gloves, for a collection spiked, as Allen Ginsberg once had it, with searing colour. Charlie Teasdale Yellow monogram PVC keepall, £2,500, by LOUIS VUITTON

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THE BLACK SUIT

There has long been a gothic drama to black tailoring, from the monochromatic conservatism of the Victorians to the shady, subdued uniform of US G-Men. It’s also long been a foundation of men’s style, guaranteed to flatter and intimidate if done right (Johnny Cash, Reservoir Dogs, Italian men). After a decade or so usurped by sportswear and more ebullient tailoring, it’s back. At his first men’s show at Celine, Hedi Slimane leant heavily on razor-sharp,

Fashion

black tailoring. Other brands including Dries Van Noten, Prada and Valentino are also choosing to illustrate its dramatic power. “The black suit is conformist and rebellious at the same time,” says Christoffer Lundman, creative director at Tiger of Sweden. “It is timeless, instills conﬁdence. You look sharp. It’s sexy.” CT Black 1903 wool blazer, £500; black Cone wool trousers, £230; white Octagon cotton shirt, £230, all by TIGER OF SWEDEN

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THE PAINTED SHIRT

Raf Simons and Robert Mapplethorpe, Yves Saint Laurent and Piet Mondrian, Alexander McQueen and Damien Hirst — art and fashion have long found a way to co-exist on fine fabric, an intersection that has been blurred further of late with the dress shirt being used as a canvas, an idea originally championed by the likes of Rei Kawakubo of Commes des Garçons and Martin Margiela. At Dior, artistic director Kim Jones has

taken to collaborating with a new artist each season — this shirt was made with Raymond Pettibon, the American artist known best for his album artwork for the likes of Eighties punk rockers Black Flag and Sonic Youth — while the Alexander McQueen collection is punctuated with shirting (and tailoring) delicately adorned with graphic flower motifs. FR Multicoloured Raymond Pettibon print silk-twill shirt, £1,500, by DIOR

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LEATHER TROUSERS

They may have been part of the rock ’n’ roll uniform ever since man first took to the stage to thrust and yelp, but leather trousers are also among the most ridiculed items in menswear. And unless you’re Iggy Pop, they are notoriously hard to pull off. (Literally, they are very difficult to remove, especially when one has been gyrating.) Now they are back in the spotlight thanks to luxury upgrades from Berluti, Bottega Veneta and

Fashion

Givenchy, among others. While versions past played strictly to the 28-inch waist crowd, the updated leather silhouette owes more to the motorcycle than it does to ageing heavy metallers, with a more flattering shape, as well as zips, patches, panels and a colour palette that ranges from racing green to rich navy. And black, of course. FR Dark green leather trousers, £790, by BERLUTI

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THE CARDIGAN

This season, designers have taken inspiration from our grandparents: Gucci’s big on florals and carpet prints, while Loewe presents eiderdown patches and loose knits. The fortunes of the cardigan have fluctuated since it was named after the seventh Earl of Cardigan who wore a knitted jacket leading the charge of The Light Brigade in 1854. In the Sixties, cool men wore them on the weekend instead of blazers, in the Seventies

they were chunky and belted, and by the early Noughties they had been adopted by indie kids in skinny jeans and Converse. Today, the cardigan is best as a layer — over something simple for contrast, or over a suit, to unnerve. French label Ami layers them between neck-tied shirts and dramatic overcoats, while Miuccia Prada styles hers over classic tailoring. CT Red mohair-wool cardigan, £585, by PRADA

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TIE-DYE

Forever associated with Summer of Love-era San Francisco, tie-dye has been resurrected in recent years by small-batch operations like Online Ceramics in Los Angeles and Story MFG in East London. Now established designers in Paris, Milan and, in the case of this Dries Van Noten suit, Antwerp, are embracing it too; we’ve clearly come a long way from Haight-Ashbury in 1967. You can, of course, still buy a cheap T-shirt with

Fashion

a cheerful skeleton on it (or even an expensive one from Dover Street Market if you like), but there are also beautiful, grown-up, double-breasted suits with artfully placed kaleidoscopes woven throughout. Think Silicon Valley microdoser rather than Altamont acid casualty. FR Petrol-pattern wool jacket, £1,200; petrol-pattern wool trousers, £255, both by DRIES VAN NOTEN

See Stockists page for details

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CHELSEA BOOTS

Invented in 1851 as a “paddock boot” using vulcanised rubber patented in the 1840s, and adopted by Queen Victoria who liked the lace-free ease of slipping on and off in the royal tack room, the Chelsea boot, characterised by its elongated shape, low profile and elasticated side panels, is most commonly associated with pop stars from the Swinging Sixties. For Autumn/Winter 2019, however, designers Stella McCartney

and Ermenegildo Zegna have pumped up their Chelsea boots to steroidal proportions, giving them chunky rubber soles, swollen toes and layers of leather detailing. The most gargantuan are by Bottega Veneta, who have taken biker heft to a new level. These chunky Chelseas are best worn with slim trousers and an oversized coat, for full gothic effect. CT Black calfskin boots, £970, by HERMÈS

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THE CHANGELING The Turner-Prize-winning British artist Mark Leckey has made art about acid house, smart-fridges and Felix the Cat. Next, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s building a motorway bridge inside Tate Britain. Then again, he always was away with the fairies

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Mark Leckey photographed for Esquire, under a motorway bridge, but not ‘The Bridge’, June 2019

BY MIRANDA COLLINGE PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD DOWKER

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IN JULY OF THIS YEAR, I stood under a concrete bridge, somewhere near the town of Eastham on the Wirral. A small road ran underneath it next to a huge concrete ramp. Overhead, the M53 thundered towards Wallasey in one direction and Chester in the other, the high pillars on which it rested giving the space beneath the loftiness of a cathedral. I trudged over flattened bottles and cans, between mounds of wet mud. There was a scuffle to my left: a cat, frozen for a few seconds with its claws embedded in the trunk of a tree. A little further on, the rustle of a dry-cleaning bag draped over branches. I took pictures on my phone of the graffiti scrawled on the concrete columns: a face with two sets of eyes stacked one above the other; the words “Eastham Über Ales” [sic]. I was looking for I didn’t know what. A sign perhaps. A feeling. Maybe, if I got really lucky — and no, not in that way — a someone. If I’d just kept my powder, and more to the point, my feet, dry for another couple of months, I could have found an almost full-sized replica of a section of this very bridge in Tate Britain in London, where it is being recreated by the British artist Mark Leckey, who spent some of the early years of his life in Eastham, for his solo show that opens there in September. The bridge segment — which will consist of a metal skeleton covered in plywood sheets painted to resemble concrete — will run diagonally across the gallery space, a floor above the one in which the 2008 Turner Prize exhibition was displayed, which Leckey would go on to win. Incorporated into the walls of the bridge will be a 16-channel surround-sound system that will play a recording of a new audio play Leckey has made with teenage actors from Manchester and Liverpool. The bridge will have screens built into it too, onto which he’ll project an accompanying film which will look like CCTV and camera-phone footage and include snippets of young adult gymnasts scuttling around in poses that make them resemble bridges. At some point a Pepper’s ghost will appear — an illusionist’s trick made famous by the English scientist John Henry Pepper in the late 19th century. Leckey describes the play, which runs to around 18 minutes, as “an urban drama meets folklore”. In the narrative, one of the teenagers is taken away and replaced with a changeling — a recurring idea in European folk stories in which a human child is stolen away by elves or fairies and substituted by one of their own. “I don’t want it to be menacing,” says Leckey, who is now 55 and hasn’t lived in the north-west of England for many years, though he still speaks with the warm, regional uptalk that makes it seem as though he’s not telling you his thoughts

‘Winning the Turner Prize was really joyous. I went on a two-day bender. I lived in Fitzrovia and I knew everyone, so in the newsagents, people would be like, “Hey! You’re in the papers!” It was lovely’

so much as inviting you to participate in them. “I want it to be sort of magical. But it is going to be a bit scary. The bit where he gets taken by the fairies is a bit scary.” He pauses to consider. “And at the end it gets a little bit scary as well.” Leckey outlines his vision for the Tate show — fast approaching when we meet — in a chain coffee shop on the Caledonian Road in North London, between the red brick housing estate in which he lives with his wife, Lizzie CareyThomas, head of programmes at London’s Serpentine Gallery, and their two young children, and the small studio in a big office complex he has hired in the run-up to the show, which is crammed with tape decks and a sodium street light and a scaled-down model of the room in the Tate that will have the bridge in it. The exhibition will be called O’ Magic Power of Bleakness, a title borrowed from a lyric in an early version of the proto-punk song “Roadrunner” by The Modern Lovers, though Leckey added the “O’” (“I like slightly archaic titles”). There is still the odd hiccup to iron out. “There always is,” he says, “because basically it’s theatre I’m

Mark Blower

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Left: ‘Affect Bridge Age Regression’, Cubitt Gallery, London, 2017

doing, so that means a lot of electronics, a lot of devices that can go wrong.” Before I met Leckey, a friend who’d worked with him told me he was “very nice”, and “dresses like a street pirate”. She was about right. He is not terribly tall and has a kind face and longish blond-brown hair that he scrapes back from his face with his ﬁngers when he’s lost in thought. When I met him he had on a pale T-shirt and trousers, a couple of thin gold chains around his neck, and the dangling pearl earring that he has worn in recent years since deciding, accurately, that his beard and moustache give him the look of an Elizabethan miniature, albeit one who wears Reeboks. The piece at Tate Britain, he explains, which is called “Under Under In” is based on something that happened to him when young, which was in turn based on something that happened to him when he was even younger. One day, when he was eight or so, he was hanging around with friends on the concrete slope under that motorway bridge near Eastham, the village in which he lived with his younger sister and their parents,

who both worked for Littlewood’s department store. Suddenly a feeling came over him. He sensed someone else. “I remember this presence,” he says. “It had a ridiculous costume, a pixie costume, with bells on its shoes and all the rest of it. It was small, but it was aware of its own ludicrousness. There was a sort of mocking. It was like, ‘I’m a pixie. In this ridiculous pixie costume’. And that’s what was disturbing about it.” Leckey didn’t give the pixie incident much thought for the next decade; as a kid he was always away with the fairies anyway, he says. “It wasn’t like I was super-bright. I wasn’t having Blakean moments under trees. It was more I just couldn’t engage with the world as it was.” He left school at 15 with only one Olevel — though it was, presciently, in art — and spent the next four years “getting into trouble and on the dole”. He’d go to the football with his mates; he discovered dance music and, later, raves. At 19, by which time his family had moved a few miles south and east of Eastham to Ellesmere Port, he began to wonder what else

he might do, so he enrolled at a technical college. For one of his assignments he was asked to write an essay about a childhood memory. “I thought, ‘I will write about the time when I saw a pixie under this motorway bridge’. Because up till that point these were the events in my life. I went to school. I had a sister. I saw a pixie. These are the things I carried around with me as experiences. So I started to write this story. I realised its… I don’t know, implausibility. The spell was broken. I remember being very affected by it. It was like when the veil falls from your eyes: ‘I’ve lived my life in a delusion’.” Why, I ask, did that upset him? He might have found it funny. “I think because I was invested in it,” he says. “And see now I’m finding a parallel in that I feel like I’ve been invested in something that maybe has turned out to be an illusion.” I wonder how big he’s going with that statement. He laughs. “Let’s start at art, maybe? And then expand outwards. It’s questioning your own experience. That it’s not as concrete as you thought it was.” The new play, then, is something of an allegory. It is also, like much of Leckey’s most celebrated work, semi-autobiographical, or perhaps quasi-autobiographical would be more accurate. “In my head, the idea is that the changeling in the play is, like, me getting taken to fairyland — ie London — and, you know, a career in the art world and all the benefits,” he says. “And then there’s this crude version of me that stays behind. Under the bridge. Kind of stuck.” LECKEY MAKES ART THAT IS ABOUT TIME, and memory, and experience, and also the intangibility — and, increasingly, the untrustworthiness — of all three. His practice is so wide-ranging that it’s hard to make any grand generalisations, but here are a few. His work often borrows from popular culture: his recurring “Felix the Cat” sculpture has seen a 33ft inflatable cartoon Felix wedged into galleries from Nottingham to New York. Sometimes he co-opts other people’s artworks: his 2004 video “Made in ’Eaven” featured a computer-generated image of Jeff Koons’ metallic bunny inside a computer-generated rendering of the flat in Windmill Street, central London, that he lived in at the time. →

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A still from Leckey’s 1999 video work ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’

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It is often loud: for his BigBoxStatueAction series (2003–’11), he placed sound systems of equivalent physical volume next to British modernist sculptures through which he serenaded them in the hope, he has said, of eliciting a response. He is interested in technology: for GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010–’16) he imagined the inner existential turmoil of a Samsung smart-fridge which, for certain live performances, he voiced himself after first inhaling coolant gases. Sometimes it is gently absurd: see all of the above. When he won the 2008 Turner Prize, a somewhat controversial decision at the time given that on the shortlist of four artists he was the only man, the jury praised “the intelligent, energetic and seductive nature” of his work. Stephen Deuchar, former director of Tate Britain who chaired the jury that year and is now director of Art Fund, says today of the decision: “We saw him as a kind of alchemist, but focussed and sincere — convinced by the centrality of certain bits of popular culture you might easily dismiss as superficial. We liked the breeziness and audacity and lack of pretension.” Leckey, who was 44 and signing on when he won, says the £25,000 prize money made “a massive difference” to the trajectory of his career. “It was really joyous. I went on a twoday bender. I lived in Fitzrovia and I knew everyone, so in the newsagents, people would be like, ‘Hey! You’re in the papers!’ It was lovely.” He has also had his detractors: reviewing Leckey’s 2011 show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones called it “terrible”; Jones pinpointed GreenScreen RefrigeratorAction for specific condemnation, describing it as “one of the worst works of art I have ever seen in a serious gallery. It means nothing; it just makes noise to create the fiction of meaning. It is pompous and clumsy and utterly miserable for no good reason.” But there is one work that almost everybody agrees is a work of genius: Leckey’s 1999 film, “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore”. The 15-minute video was also the first proper work Leckey ever made. “It kind of ruined it for me, ‘Fiorucci’, ’cos it had such an amazing response,” he says. Ruined what? I ask. “Just… life!” He laughs. “Everyone was blown away, and then I put the next one out and everyone went, ‘Eh’. And it’s

been like that ever since.” “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore” came about more or less by accident. After studying art at Newcastle Polytechnic, Leckey upped sticks for America, eventually winding up in New York, where he crashed on and off for a couple of years with a friend from Newcastle and her then-husband, the gallerist Gavin Brown. It was the mid-Nineties, when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s crackdown was starting to kick in but New York was “still kind of a messed-up place, still fun”, when Blur and Oasis were huge and Leckey’s own Britishness was still a novelty. “It was like being a prince,” he says. Though he was moving with an artsy crowd, hanging out with the drag queens at Florent in the Meatpacking District in the early hours of the morning, he hadn’t made any art of note. Or any art at all, to be precise. Meanwhile, the

so-called Young British Artists who were the same age as him — Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman et al — were causing a riot in the contemporary art world. Leckey, in New York, was well out of it. “I once saw a lot of them when I was in New York at a party, and I’ve never seen people having so much fun as that lot. They were quite debauched,” he says. What he lacked in artistic output, however, he made up for with sartorial verve. “I had a lot of ‘looks’. That was my thing,” he says. “My favourite look at that time was head-to-toe red. I used to wear a red cape. I was drinking a lot and I had this kind of fantasy about being a kind of crap superhero.” (In 2015, Gavin Brown, describing his ﬁrst impressions of Leckey, told The Guardian: “I’ll never forget the way he dressed, the way he walked… It was clear to me that he was an artist.”)

Pablo Enriquez courtesy of MoMA PS1

Leckey’s ‘Felix the Cat’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016

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In 1996, he moved back to the UK where Brown introduced him to a curator at the ICA in London who was putting together a show about music videos. “We met and she said she liked the cut of my jib or whatever, and she said, ‘Right, come up with a proposal for something.’” His first idea was for a film piece called “Moments in Love”, made of fragments of clips of musicians in moments of ecstasy on stage. “And then I started making it, and I thought, ‘This has got nothing to do with me,’” he says. “I had come back [from the States] and the Britpop thing was around, and it just seemed to be ignoring dance culture. Everything was about rock and how great rock was; people at that time thought rave was just silly and I thought it was great. I wanted to make this thing that celebrated those things.” He decided to make a new film that spliced together footage that captured the youth cultures that he’d been a part of or had only narrowly missed in the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties: Northern soul dancers bobbing like marionettes; casuals skulking around city centres with perms and paisley shirts; ravers in baggy T-shirts and Kangol hats, all arms, arms, arms. The soundtrack he devised was spare but evocative: a whistle here, a cowbell there; a snatch of speech, vocals dubbed at frenetic speed, Leckey’s own voice slowed to a monastic chant as he recites the pertinent brand names of his youth: “Pringle, Fila, Kappa, Sergio Tacchini, Cerutti, Aquascutum...” In the days before YouTube, sourcing the footage was an achievement in itself. “I’d write a letter to someone saying, ‘I’ve heard that you’ve got a tape of Wigan Casino; if so, could I get a copy?’” says Leckey. “I’d have to send them a postal order and they’d send me back a VHS tape. I’d take it down to Stanley’s, do you remember Stanley’s [a tape and disc sales and duplication service then on Wardour Street in London’s Soho]? They’d digitise it for me. So yeah, it was like this long process.” It’s hard to explain the effect of “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore”. Really, you should just watch it, and you can, easily enough: Leckey has uploaded it on YouTube. Certainly it has an uncanny ability to illicit strong feelings among those who remember those sub-cultures, and also those who don’t; Jamie xx sampled various sound clips from “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore” for his 2014 track “All Under One Roof Raving”. (He was born in 1988.) “Nostalgia” is a word that crops up again and again when people describe Leckey’s autobiographical video work. It is a difficult word to pin down, though Milan Kundera’s version, in Ignorance, is this: “The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos.

Algos means ‘suffering’. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” Leckey’s other major video piece, “Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD” (2015), a 23-minute ﬁlm in which he tried to piece together key cultural events from his life through found footage (it also uses the Eastham motorway bridge as a visual motif) has a similar effect. Pain, but also pleasure. It’s an emotion Leckey has been happy to connect with his work in the past, though today he uses it with caution. “I think that nostalgia now is politically framed. Brexit is nostalgic, and I think now it’s a question of whose nostalgia, and what you are nostalgic for. It becomes very loaded,” he says. “There’s a childish element to it, isn’t there. That you want to reclaim that uncomplicated part of your life experience because you can’t bear the complexity of being alive, right? So it’s a kind of retreat and it’s irresponsible.” He laughs. “You

‘I get entranced by things. Fixated or whatever. These things call to me, and then I invest in them wholly’

can be quite harsh on nostalgia. You can really beat it up if you want to.” “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore” and “Dream English Kid” will be shown in succession at Tate Britain on the screens under the bridge, after the changeling play. They will form a triptych of sorts, or a trilogy (though Leckey says he’s showing the two older works “in case this new one is shit!”). Nevertheless, he acknowledges that there is a connection between them: a sense of trying to pin down an experience, only for it to dissolve in the act of capturing. “I get entranced by things. Fixated or whatever. These things call to me, and then I invest in them wholly. Even just to go back to “Fiorucci” and that whole idea of being lost in dance, part of “Fiorucci”, for me, is you look back and they’re just spectres. There’s no substance there. And was there ever? ’Cos I want it to be this

magical thing, the same way with the pixies, I want that to have happened. It’s when something that you held dear… is just smoke. It’s that feeling. I think all three are to do with memories, ghosts, I guess. They’re all to do with being slightly haunted. And that’s what the bridge is. It’s a haunted space.” And who is the ghost? He laughs. “I’m always the ghost.” A COUPLE OF WEEKS AFTER WE MET, I emailed Leckey to tell him I was thinking of going to the Wirral to visit his bridge. Did he think that was a good idea? “The bridge — or ‘The Bridge’ — is just a device,” he replied. “It’s fantastical and supernatural but also grounded in (some kind of) reality.” Yes, yes, I thought. But I wanted to go there anyway, the next day in fact. Just to see if I felt anything. And I might get a paragraph out of it. Could he tell me where exactly it is? By the next morning he hadn’t written back. So I went to Eastham, and while I was poking around under that bridge, which looked a bit like the model I’d seen in Leckey’s studio, I noticed another concrete ramp, although this one was on the far side of a railway track which Leckey hadn’t mentioned, along which local trains hurtled at regular intervals. Was this even the right bridge? I followed the small road back out and round to what looked, on my phone, to be the other side of the tracks, taking a long, tunnelled footpath from a quiet residential cul-de-sac, and following the noise of the M53 somewhere overhead into a meadow of chest-high grasses and bullrushes and ox-eye daisies. There was no proper track, only an almost imperceptible line of crushed grass indicating that someone had walked that way before. I followed it as far as I could. I could hear the trains close by, but the brambles got too thick and a metal fence blocked my way. I turned back. Later, on the train back to London, inspecting the scratches on my ankles, I sat down to write my paragraph, which turned into a few. I hadn’t seen any pixies, though I had felt I was intruding on something, that I’d made a misstep: trying to turn something chimerical into something literal, invading some kind of psychogeographical ﬁeld that I had been politely requested not to enter. Or it may just have been the signs on the side of the road announcing the presence of CCTV. And I didn’t see any pixies at the time, but as I started typing on the train there he was, under the bridge and, would you believe it, he was laughing. ○ O’ Magic Power of Bleakness, 24 September–5 January 2020, Tate Britain, London SW1P; tate.org.uk

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A ROD OF RIPPLED JADE FOLLOWING THE RIVER THAMES FROM SOURCE TO SEA IN CLOTHES FROM THEÂ AUTUMN/WINTER COLLECTIONS

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Brown checked wool jacket and waistcoat, £1,080; white cotton vest, £POA; brown checked wool trousers, £1,495; oxblood leather loafers, £475, all by VIVIENNE WESTWOOD. White cotton socks, £15, by PANTHERELLA Black/grey chalk stripe wool jacket, £930; black/grey chalk stripe wool trousers, £520; black leather grafﬁti shoes, £420, all by VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

PHOTOGRAPHS BY THOMAS COOKSEY

FASHION BY CATHERINE HAYWARD

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Above Brown leather blouson, £4,300; tan wool roll-neck, £725; grey checked alpacawool-mix trousers, £775 Black leather jacket, £3,800; green wool roll-neck, £625; grey checked wool trousers, £775; black leather belt, £265, all by DOLCE & GABBANA

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See Stockists page for details

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Green/black “Frankenstein and Rose” print cotton shirt, £790; grey mohair jumper, £455; grey wool trousers, £640; black leather belt, £350; black leather metal stud shoes, £890; black cotton socks, £75 Black/pink “Thunder” print cotton shirt, £1,205; black mohair cardigan, £585; grey wool trousers, £640; black leather belt, £350; white cotton socks, £75, all by PRADA Photographer’s assistant: Fraser Thorne | Fashion assistant: Dan Choppen | Digital technician: Thomas Gosnard | Grooming: John Mullan using Mr Mullan’s Apothecary Products | Models: Rendy Giorgini @ Premier Model Management; Abe Paymans @ Rebel Model Management See Stockists page for details

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Photographs by Christoffer Rudquist ‘Good location. Good models. Clothes? Not bad’: Giorgio Armani surrounded by models from his Spring/Summer 2020 cruise collection, at the Tokyo National Museum, May 2019

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Soft Power GIORGIO ARMANI IN JAPAN By Alex Bilmes

SINCE THE LATE 19TH CENTURY, the five buildings that make up the Tokyo National Museum have been located in the city’s Ueno Park, a peaceful setting for a world-class collection of art and antiquities, and a place equally celebrated as a site of pilgrimage for the performing of hanami: the ritualistic viewing of the cherry blossoms that burst into view each spring, and then are gone. On a balmy Friday afternoon in late May, elegant ladies and gentlemen of a certain age perambulate the park’s footpaths, as generations of them must have done, toting parasols to protect them from the hot sun. A crocodile of schoolkids in crisp, white uniforms shuffles by — just as they, too, must have done here for a century and more. A less congruous, more fleeting presence is supplied by a flutter of skinny young men and women, manoeuvring their crane-like frames around the entrance to the Hyokeikan

building. This structure was erected in 1909 to celebrate an imperial wedding — its name means “to express congratulations” — and is representative of the Western-style architecture of the Meiji era, during which Japan began to open up to Occidental inﬂuences. Something old, something new. Shepherded by security guards in stern black suits, the skinny people slouch, and vape, and stare at their phones. Kohl-eyed, their hair slicked down, many are wearing white lab coats, giving them the appearance of unusually willowy trainee chemists or perhaps impressively carb-dodging junior bakers. In fact, these are the models preparing to walk in the Giorgio Armani cruise collection, Spring/Summer 2020. The lab coats protect their modesty, and keep their catwalk outﬁts unseen until showtime. Inside the Hyokeikan, at the foot of a grand circular staircase, is a high-ceilinged room, not →

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‘There’s a certain type of media that believes that everything that is new is nice. It would be easy to follow that. But it’s not right’

unlike a spruced-up church hall. Today it serves as the backstage area for the show. Here are still more models, in various states of dress, having their makeup applied, their shoes fitted, their hair styled. Here too are the production people, the sound and light people, the video people, the photographers, the stylists, the groomers, the marketing people, the PRs, the caterers, and assorted interlopers, such as myself. Hidden from view, on the other side of a floor-to-ceiling screen, is the show space. The museum’s interior has been transformed into a large white room, empty save for rows of soft-cushioned bench seats either side of a catwalk. These benches await the pressure of the bottoms of select members of the world’s fashion press, who have been invited to Tokyo to witness and record the event, as well as the very important behinds (VIBs?) of international retailers, local dignitaries, and Uma Thurman. But none of those VIBs has yet arrived. Right now the room is empty but for a few set dressers, as well as the designer, chief executive, chairman and sole shareholder in Giorgio Armani SpA. He stands alone in the middle of his catwalk, arms folded, mouth pursed, his famous face a mask of concentration, blue eyes behind business-like steel-rimmed spectacles. Mr Armani — everyone calls him Mr Armani, even behind his back — is wearing a black velvet suit, white shirt, dark tie, shiny black shoes. It is not necessary to ask him where he got them. He takes a seat on the front row to watch a dress rehearsal of the beginning of the show. The music strikes up, the lights dim. The model who will open proceedings, Agnese Zogla, a Modigliani made flesh, appears at the top of the catwalk, strikes a pose, her body an arrangement of triangles, and strides forwards, leading with her hips. She is wearing a flowing, draped dress of grey pleated silk over grey trousers, as well as a hat that gives her the appearance of a Central Asian aristocrat. Mr Armani, his chin resting on his fist, asks her to take a more sophisticated stance. “Don’t be afraid,” he tells her, in Italian. She goes again. To me, she looks faultlessly poised and regal. Mr Armani is keen to make further adjustments. From what I can gather, it’s an alteration in attitude he’s aiming at, rather than anything technical. He wants her to project a sort of quiet confidence, a soft power.

She obliges for a third time. He nods approval. “The first girl who comes out gives the feel of the whole show,” he tells her. No pressure, Agnese. Mr Armani returns backstage. While he’s been gone, all 96 models — 62 women, 34 men — have been arranged in a line that snakes around the room, up the stairs and out the door, like a school holidays departures-desk queue. Mr Armani moves along the line, one model at a time, scrutinising each in turn, making tiny, meticulous adjustments to their clothes. He takes a hanky out of a pocket and refolds it. Straightens a collar. Smooths a lapel. Closes a button. Knots a scarf. Tightens a waistcoat. Some outfits get restyled on the hoof: a girl in heels doesn’t look quite comfortable or commanding, in the Armani style. Her heels are swapped for flats. A boy’s beret is removed, reshaped, placed back on his head, removed again, discarded, recovered, folded and placed in the boy’s hand, to be carried rather than worn. Mr Armani is never alone throughout this process, but he makes all these decisions without consultation. He knows exactly what he’s after. Delegation has its place and time, but not here or now. “It’s easier for me to do than to have done,” he tells me later, when I ask him about this tendency to micromanage. “I know everybody says you can’t do everything yourself, but I want to, and until I can’t, I will try to.” As the models are sent out from the dark of the backstage corridor, the last person they see before they pass into the light of the catwalk is Giorgio Armani. I’ve no idea if this is reassuring or terrifying for them. Perhaps a bit of both. When the show’s over, I ask Mr Armani if he is pleased with how it went? He shrugs. “Good location,” he says. “Good models. Clothes? Not bad.” Then he grins. It’s a mischievous grin. Not what one expects, perhaps, from a famously inscrutable perfectionist. Mr Armani has a sense of humour. He raises his eyebrows, rolls his eyes, mugs a little for his staff. At a press conference, during an interminable Japanese translation of a short statement he has made in Italian, he gives me a comradely, WTF wink. On another occasion, as he is introducing me to various members of his senior team, he guides me towards a distinguished-looking, silver-haired man in a suit. “This is Mr Bertelli,” he explains, as we

shake hands, and I nod respectfully. It takes me a beat to realise I am being had. Patrizio Bertelli is the CEO of Prada, and husband of Miuccia Prada, perhaps Mr Armani’s greatest rival. He might be the last person one would expect to ﬁnd backstage at a Giorgio Armani show. We all laugh. (My laugh is a little sheepish.) Make no mistake, though. Mr Armani knows how to lighten a mood, but there is an intense seriousness of purpose to him. “My life has been about my work,” he says, simply, when I wonder what he enjoys doing when not running his company. Tonight, while the rest of us drink and dine and dance at his expense, he will board a ﬂight for home, to continue work on the two men’s ready-to-wear collections — Giorgio Armani and Emporio Armani — that he will show in Milan, three weeks hence. From there it will be straight to Paris for the Armani Privé collection, during the couture shows in July. After which he will turn his attention to the women’s readyto-wear collection, back in Milan in September. In July, somewhere in the middle of all that travel, and work, and meetings, and interviews, and decisions, Mr Armani turned 85. LONG BEFORE IT WAS SPLASHED ACROSS billboards and buildings, and stitched into the linings of silk suits and red carpet gowns, and jeans and shoes and handbags, and printed on T-shirts and etched on to bottles of fragrance and cosmetics and sunglasses, and watches and jewellery, and furniture and homeware, and painted above the doors of hotels and restaurants and cafés and nightclubs, long before it was a brand name recognised wherever in the world people wear clothes, and desire to live a life of style and sophistication, a life more glamorous and carefree than the one they actually live, Giorgio Armani was the name of a boy born in the summer of 1934 in Piacenza, in northern Italy, 40 miles from Milan. He was the middle child — older brother Sergio, younger sister Rosanna — of Ugo and Maria Armani, his father an accountant for a transport company, his mother a housewife →

‘The ﬁrst girl who comes out gives the feel of the whole show’: models wait their turn on the grand staircase inside the Hyokeikan building, Tokyo, May 2019

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who also managed children’s summer camps. His childhood was marked by poverty and war. Italy, under the Fascists, marched out of the Depression and into WWII, when Giorgio was six. Piacenza was heavily bombed by the Allies. At nine, Giorgio was badly burned by unexploded gunpowder. He was blinded for 20 days, with no idea if he would see again. That detail is related in matter-of-fact style, almost breezily, in Mr Armani’s handsome, illustrated autobiography, published in 2015. It is a story of self-invention so incredible it requires no hyperbole, a story of humble origins not merely transcended but trounced. On the cover is a photo of the infant Giorgio. It is reproduced in black and white except for the boy’s eyes, which are cornflower blue — Armani blue — and already fixed on some far-off prize. Originally, he wanted to be a doctor. He studied medicine in Milan for two years, but in 1955 was called up for national service, first to Siena, then Riva del Garda, finally to a military hospital in Verona. Medicine wasn’t for him. In 1957, he found a job as window dresser at La Rinascente, the famous Milan department store. (It’s still there, 10 minutes’ walk from Armani’s principal home and headquarters, on Via Borgonuovo.) By the mid-Sixties he was designing clothes for Nino Cerruti, a crucial figure in Italian men’s fashion, though not nearly as crucial as his then-employee was to become. In the late Sixties he met Sergio Galeotti, an architectural draftsman, who became his partner in life and business, and who eventually persuaded him to set up on his own. In 1975, they founded Giorgio Armani SpA, in Milan. In October that year, a late starter at 40, he showed his first men’s and women’s collections. Fashion designers who make a decisive break with the past, who change forever the way we dress, are few in number. Coco Chanel and Christian Dior, certainly. Yves Saint Laurent, probably. Giorgio Armani, indisputably. In the late Seventies and early Eighties, he brought a new, liberated spirit to dressing for work, and a new elegance and sexiness to dressing for fun. “It was a game at the time,” he told me in Japan. “Formal that was more casual, casual that was more formal. That’s the area a designer can play in, without going too much to an extreme.” Extremes have never been Mr Armani’s thing. Unlike many fashion designers, he is concerned less with the spectacular statement,

with fashion as fantasy — all those headlinegrabbing catwalk creations that will never, most likely, make it out of the studio and onto the street — than he is with obsessively refining, reworking and reinventing a series of silhouettes he sketched many years ago, for clothes that can — and have been, and continue to be — worn by anyone with an interest in looking stylish and attractive. Mr Armani’s flash of inspiration in the midSeventies was to understand, in a way no designer before him had, that the way men and women lived and worked had altered; that the distinctions between work and leisure, masculine and feminine roles, were blurring, and that a rigid uniform for the office and a different one for the home was no longer practical or desirable. He removed linings, he softened shoulders, he wrapped and folded and draped the fabrics of his clothes around their wearers. “I think I was quite ahead of my time,” he says to me, in his plain-speaking, unadorned way. In menswear, Mr Armani’s contribution has been as significant as anyone’s. He didn’t invent the modern men’s suit, but he transformed it conclusively: ripping the stuffing out of the jacket to create a garment that was lighter, looser, more relaxed. Now suits could be lived in, moved in. Now stylish professional men need no longer feel stiffly buttoned-up, and stylish working women, especially those in the corporate world, could dress in a way that was appealing without drawing unwanted attention to their femininity. “My purpose in fashion,” Mr Armani writes in his memoir, “is to offer a less severe, less rigid allure to the male figure, and a less mannered style to the female figure — all the while preserving elegance and distinction and the idea that others should notice you for your mind and your self-esteem.” In the public consciousness, the defining moment for Armani was 1980, when Richard Gere appeared, beautifully dressed in Armani tailoring, in Paul Schrader’s film American Gigolo. Those who saw that film in the cinema were witnessing the birth of what would later be called the metrosexual, of mediated masculinity, and the beginning, too, of a boom in men’s fashion and style, with which Giorgio Armani was and remains synonymous. Shortly thereafter, Mr Armani began to produce fragrances, in partnership with L’Oréal. He

launched Armani Jeans, the younger, sportier Emporio Armani, and, in the US, A/X Armani Exchange. He also opened his first standalone shops, in Milan. Soon he was selling accessories, eyewear, sportswear, watches, cosmetics. In 1985, Galeotti died, aged just 40, of heart failure. By all accounts his loss is the great sadness of Mr Armani’s life. On the evening I talked to him, he was wearing a dazzling diamond pin in his lapel, a gift, he told me when I asked about it, from Galeotti. Mr Armani has said he was unsure, in 1985, whether he could go on alone. He went on. Today, Mr Armani is a billionaire eight times over. He has hotels in Milan and Dubai; restaurants in Bologna, Hong Kong, Paris, Cannes, New York, Tokyo and more. He employs more than 7,000 people. His labels include Giorgio Armani; Emporio Armani; Armani Privé; Armani/Casa for the home; Armani/Dolci for the sweet of tooth; Giorgio Armani Beauty; Armani/Fiori (flowers); Emporio Armani for kids; EA7, his sportswear line. The clothes on the catwalk in Tokyo have many of the hallmarks of Armani. For women, an elegant, elongated silhouette, flowing tailoring hanging from strong shoulders; long silk gowns; leather; prints. On men, softly tailored double-breasted suits in a quiet riot of browns, beige, chocolate, coffee. Sweeping dusters, shawl-collar peacoats, leather bomber jackets. Mr Armani was keen to point out this collection was not designed specifically for the Japanese market. When conceived, it was not even with the idea of showing it in Japan. That said, he accepted that all Armani collections have an affinity with Japanese design and culture: “A certain simplicity with rigour”, is how he put it. Of his original conception of the Armani look, he has said, “I chose to subtract instead of add, to react against style that served as an end in itself.” To me he says that the clothes he seeks to design are “those that give freedom, those that don’t put men and women in a cliché”. Fashion, by name and nature, requires novelty. At the same time there’s a requirement for a designer to stay true to himself, to his values and aesthetic. Those impulses appear to me to be in conflict, I say. How does one resolve that? “It’s very difficult,” he says. “There’s a certain type of media that believes everything that is new is nice. It would be easy to do, to follow that. But it’s not right. I know there are

‘I never made a plan. Day after day it happened. I just followed my feelings, did what I thought was right. I stuck to my position’

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191 than Armani’: Giorgio Armani and his ‘More Armani Japanese translator at the newly refurbished Armani/Ginza Tower, Tokyo, May 2019

lots of people who don’t like my fashion. But there are people who are the opposite, who are too possessed by the Armani style. They don’t want me to change. That’s difficult too. If I followed that I would always do the same thing. It’s a balance.” Elegance is a word he uses a lot. What does he mean by it? “Elegance doesn’t mean to have to wear a jacket or a suit or to have a pocket square. It means the way you wear something. The way you hold yourself. Your gestures. This is where you can see someone’s character. It’s how you wear something. Not how it wears you.” He has made his mark on industries outside fashion. The name Giorgio Armani is associated with music (he’s dressed stars from Clapton to Gaga), sport (he has dressed football teams including Chelsea and Inter Milan; the Italian Olympic team will wear EA7 to Tokyo 2020), and especially cinema. Name a major movie star of the past three decades, from De Niro to DiCaprio, and they’ve worn Armani on the red carpet. They’ve worn Armani in character too, from The Untouchables to The Wolf of Wall Street. Asked to survey his empire now, from the vantage point of 45 years in business, he seems suitably appreciative of his success, but hardly overwhelmed by it. “I never made a plan,” he says. “Day after

day it happened. I just followed my feelings, did what I thought was right. I stuck to my position.” ON THE MORNING OF THE DAY BEFORE THE DAY of the Giorgio Armani cruise show, Mr Armani appears at a press conference for members of the Japanese fashion and business media, in a packed room on the ninth floor of the newly renovated Armani/Ginza Tower, in Tokyo’s swankiest shopping district. Five banks of smartly dressed Japanese journalists are arranged on folding chairs. For the rest of us, it’s standing room only. If it feels hot outside, on the street — and it does — then it’s stifling in here. Even more so where Mr Armani is standing, under lights. While a number of us, your correspondent included, are noticeably wilting, not a bead of sweat appears on Mr Armani’s brow. He is wearing a soft-shouldered navy blue blazer over a navy blue cashmere T-shirt and flowing navy trousers. A scarf is knotted at his neck, peasant-style. It is navy blue. His tennis shoes are Arctic white. They match his hair, and his perfect teeth. His skin is deeply tanned. His most marked characteristic are his eyes, the eyes of a much younger man, penetrating eyes. He opens with an extempore monologue in Italian, explaining the genesis of the collection he will shortly unveil. His words are

translated into Japanese, at some length, by a smiling middle-aged woman standing next to him. Then, after much polite bowing and many expressions of respect, questions are asked in Japanese, translated into Italian for Mr Armani, answered in Italian by him, and then translated back into Japanese. A separate English translation (of the Italian, not the Japanese) is whispered into my ear by Anoushka Borghesi, Mr Armani’s global head of PR and media. Mr Armani talks of his own aesthetic, and how it dovetails with the Japanese aesthetic. “An elegance that is never ostentatious,” is one thing I scrawl in my notebook. “Casual but still quite reserved.” “More Armani than Armani,” is his summary of the Japanese. He uses words like “wearability”, “commercial” and “practical”. This is Armani’s first time holding a catwalk show for a cruise collection. Also known as resort collections, cruise collections are the less flashy, harder working clothes that exist outside the traditional fashion calendar of the biannual prêt-à-porter shows. Less heralded, perhaps, because less showy, they make up, as a result, a much larger proportion of sales; most people don’t want to wear clothes that draw too much attention to themselves, or what they’re wearing. They hope to fit in rather than stand out. Increasingly, the famous fashion and luxury houses — Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent →

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— use the occasions of their cruise shows to stage spectacular events in exotic locations, competing with each other for attention in the press and, especially, on social media. It’s safe to say Mr Armani takes a dimmish view of this trend. “What’s the point of fashion shows?” he says. “Once there was a good reason. Now it’s just a spectacle for the media. All that glamour and extravagance just to have coverage on social media, forgetting what the reason for it is. It needs to be a product you can sell.” The questions from the floor are, to say the least, wide ranging. When are you happy? “When I see beautiful people wearing my clothes, that makes me happy.” Which outfits, one fiftysomething Japanese woman wants to know, does he recommend for the fiftysomething Japanese woman? “I don’t design with age in mind. Fashion is about giving freedom to women, not constricting them.” What is his favourite place? “Japan,” he says. “It fits my personality and values.” Pressed to say more on the Japanese, he praises the people’s good manners. “You don’t find that in the West anymore,” he says. “It doesn’t exist.” A young man in a Burberry T-shirt (brave) takes the microphone and announces he has a two-part question. The first part seems to me reasonable enough: why navy blue? The second part is more ambitious for 10am on a sweltering Thursday morning, or indeed any temperature at any time. What, the man in the Burberry T-shirt wants to know, is the meaning of life? It’s possible the Japanese translator has misheard the question, or my translator has misheard the Japanese translator’s translation of the question, or I have misheard my translator’s translation of the Japanese translator’s translation of the question. Mr Armani is unfazed. He takes the first part first, as anyone would. Navy blue, he says, is flattering. It is slimming. And it imposes a certain distance. There is a reserve to it. Unlike, say, red. When a person wears red, it says a lot about his or her character. Navy blue: not so much. And the meaning of life? The room is all ears. “That’s very difficult,” he says, with commendable understatement. “It’s a mystery.” Only later, as is the way with these things, does it occur to me that of course the meaning of life might as well be navy blue. And that the young questioner, wise beyond his years, already knew that, and so did Mr Armani, but both were far too polite to say so. →

‘What’s the point of fashion shows? Once there was a good reason. Now it’s just a spectacle for the media’: Giorgio Armani directs proceedings in Tokyo

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The press conference ends with a round of applause, more bowing, and multiple requests for selfies, all of which he accommodates with grace and good humour. If this trip is primarily a charm offensive, it’s working like a dream. That evening, back at the Ginza Tower, after we’ve had a tour of the floors, marvelled at the marble and run our hands over the sumptuous cloth of the clothes, Mr Armani conducts a second conference, this time for the international press. I had expected this might be a tougher audience than the local reporters supplied. Not today. Our subject enters to a round of applause. Three comfortably upholstered ladies, of the major Italian newspapers, sit together in the front row, as if ready to receive the sacrament, and address questions of increasingly outlandish special interest to their hero, apparently seeking to outdo each other in their displays of Armani arcana. All these enquiries Armani receives with his customary public equanimity, though even he looks slightly nonplussed at a question about a collection of his from 1981. When I take my turn, wondering when Mr Armani first came to Tokyo, hoping to elicit some anecdotes about the maestro’s first exposure to the nation that continues to provide inspiration for his work, the Italian ladies help him remember the details. He first came here in 1982, he says, to accept a prize alongside fellow designers then making their bones in the business. There was Karl Lagerfeld, and Perry Ellis… “Zandra Rhodes!” points out one of the wayward sisters. Zandra Rhodes, agrees Mr Armani. “Karl was my mentor,” he continues. “And John Fairchild [the fashion media magnate]. They taught me to use chopsticks. I was quite embarrassed. But I somehow knew this country would mean something for me in the future.” Godfrey Deeny, a genial Irishman who writes about fashion from Paris, wonders what it is about Japan that has held such a fascination for Mr Armani for so long. He talks about the “simplicity and refinement” of Japanese tradition. He speaks of the “cleanness and rigour” of Japanese design. He begins to talk about the cruise collection, how and why it is divided into sections, colour coded from conservative blues, beiges and browns to more daring reds. He talks about how it is modern but also rooted in tradition: “I think the secret to my success is balance. Try to do something different, maybe eccentric even, but then to restrain that. Never too much. He is asked about his hopes and fears for Europe. “Europe needs to rediscover its values,” he says. “People are vulgar.”

Does Instagram change the way that he designs? “No.” Is he an optimist or a pessimist? “Neither.” His advice to those seeking to dress elegantly: “Look in the mirror. Be self-critical. Know your own limits.” More applause, more selfies, and he’s gone again. We repair to the Armani Ristorante on the 10th floor, where we are given a fancy dinner. The menu is in Italian, rather than Japanese, and as a result requires little, or even no translation. SHORTLY AFTER MY RETURN TO LONDON from Japan, Anoushka Borghesi emails me a link to a documentary she’d mentioned in Japan, over a spectacular sushi lunch. This is clever of her. Not just because I am someone who enjoys food, and indeed documentaries, but for reasons that become clear to me as I watch. Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a 2011 film about Jiro Ono, widely regarded as the best sushi chef in the world. His tiny restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, in Ginza, the recipient of three Michelin stars, is the raw-fish-and-rice aficionado’s Mecca. Jiro, 85 years old at the time of the filming — just as Mr Armani is now — is a singleminded man of humble stock who has reached the pinnacle of his profession by skill and talent, and also by the application of rigorous self-discipline. He has a focus and an attention to detail so ruthless and obsessive it can seem to border on the pathological. He is a purist, a minimalist, but also a man who laughs a lot, who has a wicked sense of humour. He takes his work extremely seriously, but not himself. He is a tough taskmaster, fierce and unbending when he needs to be, but still somehow self-effacing. It’s not about him, it’s about the work. “I fell in love with my work, and I gave my life to it,” says Jiro, when asked why, in his senescence, he doesn’t put his feet up and enjoy the fruits of his labours. “I don’t feel like retiring.” He also says, “There’s always room for improvement.” The perfect slice of fish has not yet been served, just as the perfect dress has not yet been designed, the perfect suit cut. “Nobody in their eighties is working day and night like Jiro,” says a sushi expert at one point. But someone is. And he’s not retiring either. The central drama of the Jiro movie, the narrative that gives it propulsion, makes it more than a hagiography, is the question of succession: Jiro has two sons, both worldclass sushi chefs in their own right, both now middle-aged, with a lifetime’s study under their belts. The elder son is Jiro’s right-hand man. When the old man finally hangs up his knives, number one son will inherit the restau-

rant. The second son has been permitted to set up an outpost of Sukiyabashi Jiro in nearby Roppongi Hills, albeit one that charges less and accepts unquestioningly its status as junior partner. At the time of writing, Jiro Ono is 93 — and still working. A story of succession is front page news in Japan during our visit. In May, shortly before the Armani cruise show, a new Emperor of Japan, Naruhito, acceded to the Chrysanthemum throne, following the abdication of his father, Emperor Akihito, at the age of... 85. (I have resisted using the last emperor analogy in this piece, chiefly because the title of the famous film refers to a Chinese dynasty, rather than a Japanese one. But the struggle has been real…) Questions of succession bubble around Mr Armani as if he were a prawn dipped in frying batter. Unlike with Jiro, or Akihito, there is no obvious successor. He does not have children. His niece, Roberta Armani, has an important role at the company, working with VIP clients and celebrities, but she is not a designer. Like Roberta, there are powerful figures in the company, but none, so far as the world is aware, has been seriously suggested as a replacement for the boss. It is inconceivable that any single figure could fill all of Mr Armani’s roles. What the fashion industry is keen to learn is: who will replace him as designer, and who will be CEO? Does he even accept that such appointments will one day need to be made? Shortly before the show in Tokyo, Giorgio Armani and I and Anoushka Borghesi — back on translation duties — find a private room backstage, low lit, with a coffee table and comfy chairs. I turn on my voice recorder and ask a few questions. He’s an octogenarian billionaire. Surely he has nothing left to prove. Why doesn’t he call it a day, take some time to indulge other interests? He laughs. “What should I do? Tell me. At my age it’s difficult to start a new life. If I was 40, maybe yes. But I’m 85. I hold on tight to what I know.” Will Giorgio Armani continue without Giorgio Armani? Should it even try? “Of course it has to continue,” he says. “I’ve worked for 45 years for this. I don’t want it to end. And I’m very curious to see what’s going to happen.” This is his line, and he’s not deviating from it. He knows that there will be a future he won’t see, and he is very curious to see it. How, I ask, would he like to be remembered after he’s gone? “As an honest person,” he says. “In good and in bad ways.” Back at the press conference, someone had asked a more interesting question: given the choice, what superpower would he have? He didn’t hesitate: “To be immortal.” ○

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‘Elegance is the way you hold yourself, your gestures. It’s how you wear something. Not how it wears you’: Giorgio Armani at the Armani/Ginza Tower, Tokyo

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BY SANJIV BHATTACHARYA

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICAIAH CARTER

STYLING BY MATTHEW HENSON

His freewheeling, scene-stealing performances in the hit TV show Atlanta have led to a series of high-profile movies and made LaKeith Stanfield a star. But the actor grew up poor, in a California backwater, far from the glamour of Hollywood. His new life is thrilling, but the adjustment has not been easy

Multicoloured printed muslin oversized bowling shirt, £750; sky blue striped cotton shirt, £490; Malbec/beige wool shorts, £880, all by Gucci

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STREET SMART

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BEFORE HE WAS DARIUS, THE TRIPPY ONE IN Atlanta, or Cassius Green, the telesales whizz with the “white voice” in Sorry To Bother You, LaKeith Stanfield was the kid, there’s usually one, standing outside Stater Bros, a Southern California grocery chain, in Victorville, San Bernardino County. It’s one of a cluster of sunbaked towns about an hour-and-a-half northeast of Los Angeles, a region known as the Inland Empire, a name that doth protest. Because life can be tough in Victorville. You could find yourself, at 17, standing in some parking lot, begging for change as people come out with their trolleys. Or collecting cans for the recycling. Or buying candy from the store and selling it at a mark-up. “The candy worked best,” Stanfield tells me. “People weren’t that sympathetic to someone just fucking panhandling, they wanted to see some agency. I never made much, but I got enough for gas money to get down to LA. My mom would take me. And when she couldn’t, I’d save for the train fare.” He was going to LA for the same reason

lead. This year, he’s in Knives Out, a rollicking whodunnit with Daniel Craig and Chris Evans; later, he’ll play a jewel thief in the much anticipated Safdie brothers movie Uncut Gems, with Adam Sandler; and next year, we’ll see Stanﬁeld as Fred Hampton, the iconic Black Panther leader who was killed by the Chicago police and the FBI, in Jesus is My Homeboy. This house is proof of how far he’s come. Part-sanctuary, part-playpen, there’s a koi pond out front, and a studio in the back where he’s working on a rap album. We’re sitting at his kitchen table, surrounded by boxes; he’s been too busy to properly unpack. His assistant tends to his baby daughter in the next room, where some of his paintings hang on the walls: one of a black Marilyn, another of his daughter’s mother, his ex-girlfriend, smoking a large blunt. “I think the design is Japanese-inﬂuenced,” he says, indicating the beamed roof and the plant life all around the perimeter. “I love Japanese culture. I got a bunch of Buddhas in my bedroom. And nature, man. It heals all.”

upbringing, it seems so singular, but he’s reticent. It’s a touchy subject, it seems. He won’t say what his parents did for a living, for instance, or where he lived, or with whom, or even how many siblings he has. “I don’t want to give details,” he says. “We just moved around a lot, mostly between San Bernardino and Victorville [both cities in the Inland Empire] because I had family all over. I just kinda ran around, like a wolf-child. I didn’t have much guidance.” There was trouble with the cops, “but nothing serious, just childhood mischief ”. An old interview mentioned stealing sandwiches from Subway, but he won’t elaborate. “It was mostly just hanging out where I wasn’t supposed to be at. Running around an abandoned building and getting chased by police and thinking it was fun. But I wasn’t punching cops. I was never violent.” Violence was a part of growing up, though. “We would always ﬁght,” he says of his friends. “People get fucked up, they’re always drunk, it’s nothing new. Right before I came out, I was

’I used to be out on the corner every day with a bottle of vodka. But now, I’m all about self-care. Living clean and eating right’

a chicken crosses the road in this part of the world — to go to auditions. “I didn’t have any training or anything, I just really wanted to do this,” he says. “But when I got there, I was always so terrified, I’d fuck it up. Like all the time. And I’d end up back outside the store again, the next day, selling candy.” We’re talking at Stanfield’s home in Studio City, a decade later. He bought it last year for a million-six, according to Zillow (the Zoopla equivalent in the US). Whatever his other achievements, just this alone, this rags to riches story will forever stand him apart from his peers. It’s a story about hope, luck, tenacity, dreams. A story fit for the movies. He’s a star now, at 28. Though he’s only been acting for seven years, his career trajectory was skyward from the start. He played Snoop Dogg in Straight Outta Compton (2015), and he was the character who actually said “Get out” in Get Out. Then came Atlanta, Donald Glover’s award-winning series about a group of friends trying to make their way in the hip-hop business — shooting begins for season three this autumn. So now, he’s everywhere, often as the

Stanﬁeld developed a special reverence for plants when he worked at a marijuana growhouse before becoming an actor. He raves about them for a while, how they “indicate life and growth”, and how they taste good, most of them. Salads, that’s what he’s into these days. He’s quit the cigarettes. He has a trainer. He wants me to understand that the plants, the house, the Buddhas, the Pall Mall 100s that he leaves on the table just as a reminder — no more! — it’s all part of his new direction in life, a break from his old ways. Because he didn’t come up like this. He came up rough. “I used to be out on the corner every day with a bottle of Taaka vodka,” he says, citing the cheapest brand on the shelves. “But now, I’m all about self-care. That’s what my album’s going to be about. Living clean and eating right and just trying to be an example to my baby.” HE LOOKS OLD FOR HIS AGE — the lines around his doleful eyes, the set of his face, as though the rigours of his early years put more miles on the clock, and now the process has begun to slow things down. I try to ask more about his

involved in a little tussle. It’s nothing, we fight every day, no big deal.” He saw cops throw his friends to the ground, face first. He saw his little sister get peppersprayed aged seven. “We was just caught in the crossfire,” he says. “I had guns and tasers pointed at me because I said I knew my rights. They said, ‘Shut the fuck up, you don’t know nothing.’” But he’s not telling me this to complain, not at all. That’s just how it was where he grew up. His was a poor, black family in a rough neighbourhood, where relations with law enforcement were “botched and difficult.” “Yeah, it was hard times. We did have some hungry days,” he says. Then he corrects himself, almost indignant. “But it wasn’t that bad! I had the bare necessities! When I was eight, I wanted a pogo stick for Christmas. And I got one! It might have been from Walmart and broke after two jumps, but I got my fucking pogo stick!” He describes himself as a little performer at home. He’d wear his aunt’s wigs and play-act around the house, doing puppet shows. At dinner, his family would say, “Hey LaKeith, do your British accent!” and he’d perform lines from →

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101 Dalmatians (his favourite movie), pretending to drink tea, his pinkie aloft. “We viewed British people as very high class,” he says, “the exact opposite of what we were.” Now that Stanfield is successful, he’s the high-class one in his family. And relatives are coming out of the woodwork to seek him out; cousins he’s never seen. “Not just cousins, but brothers and sisters too,” he says. “They’re like, I’m a Stanfield too! It’s a trip. So I’m trying to be an example to them. Like, I invite them over to eat sushi, because it’s completely different to what they’re used to. But they’re like, ‘What the fuck is this fish and shit?’” He laughs. “I get it. I was like that when I moved out here too. Like at a restaurant when they show you the wine, I would just grab it.” He grabs a bottle of water on the table and takes a swig. “I didn’t know you’re supposed to see if you like the brand before they pour it.” STAKES. THAT’S WHY HE FAILED his early auditions. It didn’t help that he had no formal acting

back then!” And when the law shut down the operation, he went to stay with an uncle in Sacramento, and sold cable door-to-door for AT&T. Life was foreshadowing art; he’d go on to satirise the sales floor in Sorry To Bother You. It was a period of limbo in which he almost slipped off the radar altogether as an actor. The reason Stanfield’s sitting in front of me today and not living some blue-collar life in the Inland Empire, is because he signed up to a film board in Sacramento, an online community for film-makers, on the off chance there were any parts he could audition for. He’d never given up on his ambition. His life was chaotic: he didn’t have a phone, he’d changed his email address, his home address, and he’d stayed in touch with precisely none of his old industry contacts. But that film board, that one tenuous connection to the film world, proved enough. Because when AT&T fired him — “I still had some stuff in the courts” — his early director Cretton found him through that forum. He’d been trying to reach Stanfield for months, to tell him he

maybe because he was tired that day, or he’d just failed so many times already, he’d stopped caring. They offered him the job before he’d even got home. His eyes light up as he tells me the story. This was a profound lesson, one of several, as he sees it. One: “don’t worry about the outcome so much”. Two: “don’t give up, because a lot of it is drive and intention, and never fucking stopping. I knew I was going to do this, because it was this or bust.” Three: “learn from the women who raised you”. “Because that’s where I got my confidence,” he says. “From my mom and from my aunt — she was this Christian lady. They gave me space to be myself and didn’t judge me for it. As a kid it can be hard to feel judged, but I never felt that way. And I saw how these women moved through judgement, too, like when we went to church and people be like, ‘Look what she’s wearing,’ and they’d always navigate it in a confident way. That gave me confidence.” The challenge for Stanfield was never the

’I got my confidence from my mom and my aunt. They gave me space to be myself and didn’t judge me for it. As a kid, it can be hard to feel judged, but I never felt that way’

training to speak of, but the real issue was the stakes were just too high. He’d go from his feral street life in Victorville to a room full of genteel showbusiness types trying to cast a project. And his mind would start to whir: “Like, ‘If I get this my mom will be able to eat and I’ll be able to change her life. Everybody’s life…’ I’d get all in my head about it, and yeah, it would go wrong. And then I’d beat myself up all the way home.” He never lost faith, though. Stanﬁeld’s selfbelief is a thing to behold. “I knew that if they let me swing the bat, I was going to hit eventually,” he says. And he did — eventually. He found a commercial and a modelling agent and even though he never did much modelling, or booked a single commercial, he did land an audition for a short ﬁlm, Short Term 12, by a young Hawaiian director, Destin Daniel Cretton. It went to Sundance and won the 2009 Grand Jury Prize. And his career might have started at that point. It certainly felt like a break. But nothing happened. So he went to work at a cannabis growhouse for a couple of years, tending the plants: “That’s why I don’t smoke anymore, I got my fair share

was about to shoot the feature version of Short Term 12, and he wanted Stanﬁeld to audition. This time it happened; his career began in earnest. Short Term 12 received rave reviews, the young actor’s performance in particular. Hoping to capitalise, Stanﬁeld moved to Echo Park in LA, where he slept on people’s couches for a while, Cretton’s regularly. Ultimately, he ended up sleeping in his mother’s car, “a janky old Chrysler with no door handles” that he’d park on the street outside Cretton’s apartment. “I remember one night I woke up in that car because it was so hot — it must have been summer. And I thought, really clearly, ‘One day, I’m not going to be here. I’m going to be in my own house, with my own things, and I’m going to have a new car.’ And here I am, talking to you. I got my house. I got a Tesla right outside.” He shakes his head. “It’s so surreal that it actually happened.” It was The Purge: Anarchy that turned the tide. Until that point he’d been struggling at auditions; the stakes again, the pressure, it was too much. But that audition was different for some reason. He walked out thinking, “Eh, whatever”,

actual acting; he’s always had the talent for that, the drive, and soon, the experience as well. He went from The Purge to Selma to Straight Outta Compton to Get Out in what has been an amazing run. His struggle has rather been to reconcile his past life with his new one. It has come up a few times over the years, sometimes with such force that it makes him cry just thinking about it. He’s crying now at his kitchen table, remembering the day in 2014 when he was shooting an LSD scene in Memoria, a James Franco-led also-ran. They were just about to roll when his mom called to say his best friend from back home had been killed in a drunken fight. He wouldn’t believe it at first, and hung up the phone. But she called back, in tears herself, and it’s the memory of that sound that has set him off today. “It took me a few days to realise it was real,” he says, wiping the tears with his sleeve. “Then I spiralled out, like, really drinking crazy.” He’d been fighting with his friends from back home. They weren’t impressed by his burgeoning career in LA. “They were like, ‘Come back home, fuck Hollywood, those motherfuckers don’t give a fuck about you, it’s all white people and woop de woop.’ And I’d be offended because not only was it →

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WHEN LAKEITH STANFIELD GETS RECOGNISED on the street, the name they shout out is Darius, his character in Atlanta. It’s his best-loved role, and it would seem, superﬁcially at least, that Stanﬁeld and Darius are similar. Of the three leads in Atlanta — Darius; the weed-dealing rapper Paper Boi (Bryan Tyree Henry); and the sensible manager Earn (Donald Glover) — Darius is the oddball. Quirky, lovable and perpetually stoned,

phone on me.” Except he posted a jokey video on Instagram that evening which he quickly deleted. He deletes a lot of posts, Stanﬁeld; they reveal his inner conﬂict. In June of last year, he posted a now-deleted homophobic rap on Twitter: “Take that choke chain back, that’s some gay shit / Fag, I don’t really want to brag but I’m straight rich.” He later apologised, insisting he was just playing a character. But recently, that “character” seemed to recur, in an angry complaint about being obliged to tip in California. After a swell of comments saying, “This ain’t it”, he replaced it with a shot of him wearing a Buddha pendant. When was the moment, I ask him, when you realised you’d made it? When did it really hit home you weren’t in Victorville anymore, you were a movie star, literally living your dream? He tilts back in his chair and thinks. “Oh I know exactly,” he says, grinning. “It was War Machine with Brad Pitt. That movie was really important for me, actually.” It was 2016, and he was in Abu Dhabi,

“Up until that point we were all trying to act macho — as macho as actors can act, anyway, ‘Whoop whoop!’ and all that. And there I am in tears, and niggas are coming around me saying, ‘It’s all good, let it out, that’s some real shit!’ Then they say, ‘Action!’ and I’m wiping the tears, and putting mud on my face and we went straight into the scene.” Which was? “Oh, we had to do an insurgency. I was on a rampage, basically. So anybody that I see I’m popping them.” FROM PANHANDLING TO BRAD PITT MOVIES IN SIX years is nothing to sniff at. LaKeith Stanﬁeld’s story will always stand apart from his peers for sheer grit and will and personal transformation. And he’s only 28. The changes he’s wrought in his life have been epic, and change is still very much underway. You can feel it in person; there’s something crackling and kinetic about him that makes him hard to predict, and at times hard to love. But he’s compelling to watch, both on screen and

’There’s not a person you can meet who hasn’t had some struggle to deal with. But we’re still here, aren’t we? No matter what’

he’s given to strange behaviour and sometimes sage pronouncements. He cites Nick Bostrom, the philosopher. He plays chess with himself. And Stanﬁeld can often seem similarly eccentric. He’s appeared on red carpets wearing, on different occasions, a balaclava, a chain mail shirt, an enormous wig. He once tweeted out his phone number, saying, “I wanna say Hi to some of you guys.” (Minutes later, he again tweeted: “Whoa. That was really a bad idea”.) He says Donald Glover offered him the role at a club called No Vacancy in Hollywood where he was drunk and dancing with himself, “as if I was having a romantic dance with someone else”. All very charming, all very Darius. And yet, there’s a gentleness to Darius that Stanﬁeld lacks. He seems caught between two versions of himself — the clean-living Buddhist artist in LA and the surly street kid from Victorville who keeps surging to the surface. At one point, he cuts our interview short because he wants to work out; we can reconvene on Saturday, he says. But come Saturday he doesn’t show up, or answer his phone. “It was a family situation,” he tells me later. “I didn’t even have my

playing a soldier in David Michôd’s satire about the war in Afghanistan. From the start, it had been an experience like no other. “We was on the other side of the world, a place I had never gone to before, with sand dunes and a whole different culture, there’s people with burqas on, they got different ethics there. And I’m training to be a marine, so my body’s going through a transformation. The sun is hot, I’m blacker than I’ve ever been, flyer than I’ve ever been, feeling better than ever, and here I am with an M5, in a movie with Brad Pitt, and they talking about ‘rolling’. And I just started crying. Tears of happiness. Because I’m like, damn, this shit just hit me! I’m in a movie for real!” All those days selling candy, all the train rides to LA, all the blown auditions and selfflagellating walks around Echo Park lake, his late friend, his weeping mother… And now look — he was doing it. There was Brad Pitt right there. This was as real as it got. His fellow actors had been acting all tough, the way marines are supposed to be, but then Stanfield started crying, and they all reverted to being sensitive actors again.

off, if only to see him wrestle with his old self. “I think the things I experienced that are positive have been passed down, like the unflinching love from my mother,” he says. “But the negative things I experienced are nonexistent in my life. I don’t allow for them in my space. I don’t even like being loud — it triggers me. I don’t like arguments, none of that stuff.” As a parent, he thinks a lot about the environment he’s creating here, in his home. “I want her to experience life in a way I wasn’t able to. But I also want her to understand challenges. I don’t want to be that Joe Jackson dad that hits his kids, but there ain’t no free rides in life. You got to work hard for everything. I remember when baby first came out I was like, ‘Don’t just give her the bottle. Make her crawl to it.’” He laughs and slaps the table. “That’s what life’s about, right? Struggle. There’s not a person you can meet who hasn’t had some struggle to deal with. But we’re still here, aren’t we?” He looks to me with a smile. “No matter what, we’re still able to somehow stride into life’s consequences unflinchingly.” ○ Knives Out is released on 29 November

ignorant, but it was like my dreams didn’t matter,” he says. You can see the anger’s still in him. “So I’d be like, ‘Fuck you’, and hang up the phone.” Now, of course, he regrets leaving things that way. “I try to see his death as a source of energy, whether it be something I can tap into for a scene or as a springboard to really go for it, you know? I kept hearing his voice saying, ‘Go for it, do it for me, you’re alive now, enjoy that shit.’ So like most things in life, it was positive and negative.” He sits back and breathes. “Whoo! These life lessons keep coming don’t they?”

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JIMMY GREEN, 1992

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BY RICHARD FORD

ILLUSTRATION BY SETH ARMSTRONG

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THEY WERE IN A TAXI, ON THEIR WAY TO THE AMERICAN BAR on Général-Leclerc to watch the election returns. Rain had begun blowing sideways, three minutes past midnight. The little Fiat, its windshield dimpled and furred with water, all at once began sliding, then veered left, up and (almost) into the Denfert-Rochereau lion, but swerved again, wheels spinning, then sped up all the way around the rotary and half again, and stopped — facing up Boulevard Raspail the wrong way. “Ooo-laaaa,” the driver said, exultant. “Maximum machine-gun racket effect.” The French woman, Nelli, had squeezed Green’s hand extremely hard. In alarm. “We’re almost there,” Jimmy Green said. “He just wants to make this interesting.” “Well,” the French woman said, touching her hair and glancing out the taxi’s window. Cars went pounding by, honking. “Such an asshole.” The tiny, red-eared driver (a Turk, of course) beamed at her in the rear-view, a look of delight and rebuke, then juiced it, spun the wheels in the slick and shot away. Smallscale near-catastrophes apparently pleased him. Green had several times gone past where she worked, on his walk to and from his good little lunch place in Rue Soufflot. She was the proprietress, he thought — of the little photo gallery in Rue Racine — or else she was the clerk. It didn’t matter. He wanted to see her closer up. The gallery sold famous, unauthorised, unsigned prints for a great deal of money. To tourists. The faceless couple waltzing on a Paris street (which everyone knew to be staged). Two clochards drinking on the quay. The famous Lartigue of an upside-down man in a skullcap, diving (so it appeared) into a shallow, shining pond. If you bought one, Jimmy Green thought, you were happy. Each afternoon, the woman could be seen staring out the shop window at the street, her face mingled in the glass with the well-known Capa image showing Japanese officers in jodhpurs having a joke and a cigarette, while 100 Chinese, trussed and on their knees waited patiently for what was soon to come. This time, he stepped inside with a made-up question about the Capa. The camera? The film? Where it was published first? The woman smiled at him with her violet eyes. She was older, he now could see, the flesh under her eyes slightly wrinkled, shadowed, her face longish, eyelids heavy. Thin lips, a small mouth, not perfect teeth. The parts weren’t so attractive. But she was — the smooth skin of her hands, ankles, her bland

expression pronouncing an expectation of being looked at. She wore a flimsy silk shift with blue and pink flowers and stylish cherry pumps. Her hair was the red they all did, with bangs. A look, Green thought, that didn’t bother about age. She was Jewish, he somehow guessed, like him — though the French were French first. He’d decided he would ask her to go to the American Bar, where he’d never been. It wouldn’t matter what she said. He didn’t want to sleep with her, just go someplace. He cared little about the election at home. He’d walked around the gallery, affecting to look at this and that, speaking pointlessly to no one, making himself plausible. Safe. She’d known nothing about the Capa, which meant she was the clerk. She stepped again to the front window, peering at the lycée students coming home wearing backpacks and giggling. It was the view she had of the world. In what he imagined to be anticipated, from the middle of the shop he asked if she would come with him tonight to watch the American election on TV. She half turned and smiled as if he’d said something else. “What?” she asked. He said those words again and smiled back, as if it was a joke. She tapped her red toe lightly on the polished floor, breathed audibly in and out. She was bored. He went on smiling, nodded, felt himself extremely American. She shook her head no. “All right,” she said. “Yes. I have nothing to do else.” “Nothing else to do,” he said. He hadn’t said his name. But he did now. “I’m Jimmy Green. From Cadmus, Louisiana.” “Nelli,” she said, and that was enough. CADMUS WAS A NICE SOUTHERN TOWN WHERE JEWS WERE allowed to be part of most things except the country club. It was in the northwest part of the state. Oil, gas and timber. Conservative, but not antediluvian. It hadn’t seceded when other towns had. Cotton stopped farther east. Jimmy Green had been liked — widely — and was admired, successful. He’d even been the progressive mayor for a time, had friends on all sides. His wife was a lawyer, his daughter was off at Dartmouth, bound for medical school. His father, dead for years, had started a company that serviced cotton gins. Jimmy had been vice-president of the bank his father also started to finance the gin business, and before the mayoralty had been offered. He’d gone to Yale, where he’d studied diverse and widening subjects which eventually came down to interdisciplinary. He was sociable, played golf at the club

JIMMY GREEN, 1992

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where he couldn’t be a member, got along, possessed talents. And then. It had all blown up — fast, and faster, and in spectacular (predictable) fashion. A bank colleague’s young daughter. Some errant travel receipts. Sums of money unreported (though repaid). A shocking, needless restraining order. He was, of course, required to resign as mayor and at the bank. Being a Jew was mentioned. “How did you suppose this would all turn out, Jimmy?” his wife had said, on her way out the divorce door. “I don’t know,” he said, trying to smile. “Maybe I didn’t think about it.” That had been five years ago. Not that long. He’d moved from Cadmus to New York, where he rented for a time and tried to like it (his father had left him money he’d held on to). Then on to Maine for no particular reason except that he knew some people in Camden, and a house by the water had come up. Maine seemed a very good place from which to begin again, go outward into the world, which he felt he should do. He was only 51. His daughter came up to see him and cried and was angry. His wife had married again quickly, downstate, but stayed bitter. He was in touch with a few people who liked and trusted him. A college chum or two. Nothing, of course, suggested life had worked out well or, for that matter, that he’d been treated unfairly. Life was still trying to work out. Someone (his dead father), might say he was a weak man, but not necessarily a bad, weak man. His sister in Cincinnati, who taught at the seminary and had married a rabbi, tended to hold less flexible views. He, though, believed he had good qualities. He was lacking in cruelty. Did not pity himself. Was loyal, in his own terms. Wasn’t easily disheartened. Could be patient. Many other people were in his same unwieldy situation. There simply wasn’t a term coined for it — people who understood their fate and circumstances to be not altogether who they were. However, he had no wish ever to go to work again — that was clear — and no reason to. And not at all, he’d found, did he miss Cadmus, Louisiana. Too small. In Paris, he had made few acquaintances; mostly men in his French class at the American Library. From the back of a magazine, he’d found a small flat, only for the fall. “Partial rooftop view with geraniums.” He took meals out. Practised the new language on waiters and cab drivers, who preferred English. He liked Paris, where he’d been twice as a student and once with Ann, his wife. Somewhere he’d read a great sage had said that in Paris you felt more foreign than anywhere,

“…the thin, quick feminine” something or other. He didn’t have it right. But that didn’t seem true. He didn’t feel very foreign here. What did seem true was that it didn’t matter much where one was anymore. Not as much as before. Paris was perfectly fine. Though if someone had asked him why he was here now, in the fall, rather than in Berlin or Cairo or Istanbul — anywhere — he didn’t think he could say. Those other, ordinary people — who’d had similar life experiences to his recent ones — you never knew what happened to them. They faded away. Though they went on with life, only outside the world’s blinding glare. NELLI HAD SAID TO COME TO HER FLAT ON THE AVENUE DE Lowendal. She had her daughter who would need delivering to the father, who lived not far. The daughter would be asleep, which made things easy. Her apartment was close to the École Militaire, where the Metro emerged from underground, and you saw the Invalides, and afterward the Tower and the river. His was not far either. A large, curved Beaux-Arts gate with a vacant guardien’s box opened off the avenue to a wide court, like an interior park with four-storey, connected brick buildings around three sides. Large leafless trees stood in the dark. Decorative benches were established for when the weather turned and flowers came back. It was almost midnight, lights were on in many of the windows. Cold rain had begun on the walk up, the sky milky with a swarming light from the city. He had his coat and wore jeans and his rubber shoes from Maine. Nelli’s flat was up two flights, a door left ajar as if things were busy inside — people possibly departing and arriving. She greeted him without ceremony, seated on a cushioned hassock, putting on her shoes to go. The flat was spacious; high ceilings, brass fixtures, curtain-less windows giving onto the garden, heavy floor lamps casting golden light onto large leather furnishings. All the carpets were Eastern. Rich, Jimmy understood. Many surfaces held artefacts, small human shapes in wood, urns, pottery shards, spears, authentic-looking things. Not a shop-girl’s flat. He sat himself on the edge of a leather couch and watched her conduct her last, small, intimate act of dressing. He hadn’t said anything. Only hello, though he was glad to be here now. “My father has been an ar-key-o-lo-zheest,” Nelli said, as if she was noticing him noticing. “He kept what he wanted where he went.” →

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She was in a short red dress now, with different pumps with little straps that flattered her ankles, oblivious to the rain. She was more attractive in the shadowy light. She began collecting scattered things into a child’s pink plastic suitcase. His presence hadn’t changed anything. Whatever they were doing now she’d done with someone else. The sensation — of firsts, of things new — it was fine. You began not even to want that. “I’d probably do the same,” he said, almost too long after the subject of her father’s thefts had been mentioned. He heard the South in his voice, which he didn’t normally. It meant he was at ease. He’d been in few people’s apartments in Paris. The French didn’t invite you. They met you in public places and kept you at arm’s length. Here, though, was good. He liked watching her finish dressing, packing her child’s clothes. His silence, he believed, expressed that. “I was conceived to this flat,” Nelli said. She pointed to a white door which was closed. “In zhat room.” “I was conceived in a car in a cotton field,” Jimmy Green said. “Following a football game.” She produced a quick little intake of breath, as if this was shocking. A brass menorah hung among an arrangement of African masks. He’d been right, there. She said she spoke English well because she’d lived in Los Angeles in the Seventies with her first husband, who’d aspired to make films but hadn’t made any. Her speech came from that time. “No way” meaning “no”; “sup-er” signifying good. “Far out”, as in “my father removed far out antiquities from a country that became Chad.” He hadn’t used those words in Cadmus. Her saying them, though, made her seem sweet, unguarded, a way he guessed she wasn’t. In addition to stolen treasure, the flat contained a large rattan cage with two tiny, silent birds inside. There was a map of the London Underground on the little Arabic-looking table. A post-menopausal sexuality seminar circular which was bilingual. And a postcard that showed a teenage Nelli, wearing glasses, sternly facing the camera’s eye. It wasn’t very flattering. Nelli as a frowning schoolgirl, in a grey, pleated uniform skirt with knee socks and a white blouse, her hair in stiff pigtails. She seemed happier now. Nelli re-entered the room through the white door she’d exited. She was now wearing a black raincoat and what his mother called a “head scarf”, and was carrying a sleeping child cradled in a pink blanket, the child’s body draped across both her arms. In the room she’d departed, a dim light revealed a bed with a white duvet, a wall with framed photographs. A black

dog walked into the doorway. Its fur had been shaved, leaving its head and face large and woolly. Like a gargoyle. It stood looking, as if it expected Jimmy to do something surprising. Nelli glanced at the postcard, balancing her daughter on an arm. A little girl who might be four. “Do you like thees card?” “I like your picture,” Jimmy said. “Can you take this?” She handed him the pink suitcase she’d packed with the child’s clothes. It had no weight. “My first husband has made this,” Nelli said, arranging the blanket around the little girl’s sleeping face. The child’s hair was dark and curly-thick, her face everted into her mother’s shoulder. Rain was now clattering. Nelli made a dismissive noise with her lips. “Do you like the dog’s coiffure? What is it? Haircut?” “Not so much. He looks sad.” “No. Of course. But she insists on this way.” The little girl she was referring to was a well-wrapped bundle. “She thinks he wishes to look bee-zahr. She thinks he feels in-ter-resting. He is her puppet.” IN THE TAXI TO THE HUSBAND’S, WHICH WAS BEHIND THE Trocadero — an expensive quarter — he began thinking that in Maine, where his house was, now was fall, everyone’s longed-for season. Things finished and stored, the free time of wool-gathering before winter, the clock fallen back. His house was empty. Once this Paris time was finished, he’d move back, he believed. Begin something new. White-frozen mornings, sunny middays, short evenings, nights when the moon slid along as in liquid. His daughter entered his mind. He’d thought to fly her to Paris, though she was in Minnesota now, and wouldn’t come, owing to a loyalty to her mother. Nelli began to speak about apartments, her daughter limp in her arms, a soft, sour aroma rising from the blanket. The child’s tiny, ordinary face was composed in sleep. Nelli had yet to speak the child’s name or his. The river, which they passed over, was swollen by rain, the sky hazy-white and shining from the Concorde. “I would like to have a new place. You know?” Nelli said softly. “Maybe some country. To have animals. Une ferme.” She was leaning against his shoulder and the pink suitcase. “Is true that in America there are enormous houses beside each other on tiny — what is the word? Little terrains?” “Yes,” he said. “Tiny lots.” His bank had financed many of these.

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“And where you’re living? In Paris, I mean.” “In Rue Cassette,” he said. “Near the Sulpice. I rent a place.” “Nice to be there,” she said. “Very expensive. Americans like to live where they are not born.” With her head on his shoulder, she yawned, holding her daughter across her lap in the blanket. “My daughter,” she said, “would dig une ferme. She loves animals. Do you have animals where you are living in America?” “I did,” Jimmy said. “At one time.” He’d fallen into her rhythms of speaking English. THE HUSBAND WAS A SMALL, CHEERFUL, BALD, CAFÉ-AU-LAIT West Indian who opened his door wearing a white silk kaftan and a gold earring. He seemed pleased to see them. He smiled, shook Jimmy’s hand and accepted the child’s suitcase. A young, blonde black woman in a leopard leotard was in the apartment and came to the door. Nelli and the husband and the woman talked softly in French and laughed and seemed friends — the way it should be, Jimmy thought. His wife hated him. Sammy was the husband’s name. He was not the husband who’d made the postcard. They all stayed at the door. No one acted like it was odd to bring the daughter at midnight. The child did not wake up, though Sammy kissed her on the forehead and talked to her as if she were awake. He said her name. Lana. Nelli said Jimmy’s name in a partial English way — Jeemy Green — and lowered her eyes. Then for moments they all four spoke English. “It’s nice to meet you,” Sammy said as if it interested him who his wife would bring here. “Me, too,” Jimmy said. The daughter didn’t look anything like this man. Nelli then spoke more in French, fast business-y phrases that included the words “demain” and “quinze” and (he thought) “diner”. So many of their words were the same, and everyone spoke too fast. Then it was ﬁnished, and they left down the dark stairs. OUTSIDE ON THE RAIN-SPATTERED SIDEWALK WHERE WATER wAS standing, the cab they’d asked to wait had gone. Nelli unexpectedly grasped his arm above his elbow and kissed him hard on the mouth, and pulled close. He put his hands on her hips which were bony, felt her ribs through her raincoat,

her stiff brassiere, held her clumsily. Sammy would be watching from above. He thought of Nelli — the schoolgirl on the postcard — brazen in her drab school uniform. His own life, for this moment, felt very far away from him. Which was good. “I always feel this way when I go away from her,” Nelli said softly into his shoulder, her scarf getting wet. “How?” he whispered. “Free,” she said. “As if my life was new. It’s wonderful.” “It’s not what I thought you’d say.” He was holding her, breathing in her hair. “I know. But. Is the truth. I don’t ask so often for him to take care of her. I wanted very much to go. With you.” He felt so glad. That she would say such a thing, that she wanted to go with him, and whatever it entailed. He looked up the street for a second taxi’s light and saw one. THE LONG, GILT-EDGED WINDOWS OF THE AMERICAN BAR blazed onto Général-Leclerc. Taxis were arriving and departing in the rain. A few ridiculously young prostitutes waited in the warming light in skimpy skirts and knee-high patent-leather boots, praying someone would invite them inside. Magee, the Irishman he knew from the library, had told him all the prostitutes were Polish now, and had colourful diseases, only they were so splendid-looking you forgot. It was Magee who’d told him about here. Americans came on election night and got drunk. It was the tradition. A hoot. No one cared who won. Least of all Magee. Inside, the American Bar was enormous and intensely noisy and smoky and full of men, the light brassy and harsh. The ﬂoor was tiny red, white and blue tiles, which made everything louder. Waiters in long aprons circulated with bottles of Champagne. Televisions were on all the walls, and gangs of young business-types in shirt sleeves and suspenders were smoking cigars, watching American channels, laughing and shouting and drinking. An American newsman everyone knew was on all the large screens, seated at a desk, with election totes behind him. It was impossible to hear. Somewhere, a barbershop quartet was singing, and there was, for some reason, Irish music as well as the continuous ringing and chatter of the tills. It was meant to be thrilling but was oppressive and dizzying. All the businessmen in suspenders and shirt sleeves were Republicans — their haircuts and smooth faces so well caredfor. All were waiting for their candidate to be declared so they →

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could start braying, and running to their offices as the light came up, ready to print money. A waiter offered Champagne, which was free but warm and vinegary. There was really nothing to do. He and Nelli were pressed against a wall that was all mirrors with gold fittings. Though he was happy to be here, to be with her. She stood stiffly in her red dress, her chin raised as if someone were watching. Her eyes were almost black and caught the light, her thin lips very red and smooth. Red was her colour. Her face and its length was her best feature. Unusual. In someone else it wouldn’t be.. “Which one do you love to win?” Nelli said through the din. She was staring at a TV where the face of the Democrat and the smiling, older face of the Republican were on a screen together. The results in New York were going to be announced shortly. The cigar-chomping businessmen were already beginning to boo at what they expected to be the wrong choice. “I used to like the Democrats,” Jimmy Green said. “Oh my God,” Nelli said, and looked shocked, her hand over her half-open mouth. She then jauntily raised her chin to reproach him. “You’re a wacko.” “Sure,” he said. He didn’t care. Why did he have to care? “Neexon,” she said. “I loffed heem.” The big, trustless, sagging Nixon face and lightless eyes formulated for a moment in his mind. His father had detested Nixon. “A born Jew-hater,” he’d said. It was the only time he’d said such a thing. They’d all watched the funeral on TV and felt justified. “Neexon wass so fonny,” Nelli said. “He wass like a French politician, you know?” She expanded her cheeks and made a grotesque face. How old could she have been when Nixon was president? Living in LA with a husband. Twenty years ago. Holding his glass and finding it difficult to be heard, he started to say how wrong it was to love Nixon. But stopped. “Eees not so different now,” she said. “You think so, but it’s not.” He didn’t understand what she could be talking about. She thought he’d said something he hadn’t. He watched the square, handsome, Technicolor face of the Democrat consume the TV above the flashing word “Winner”. The Republicans staring from below all booed and cursed louder and threw their cigars at the screen. IN A WHILE, NELLI PICKED OUT SOMEONE SHE KNEW, A YOUNG, fat-cheeked, pink-fleshed man with a balding, round head and wire glasses. Like the others, he was smoking a cigar

and wearing suspenders over a starched white shirt his belly urged against. She went to speak to him at the bar, and the man became animated, though he glanced around as he hugged her. She patted his round cheek and laughed. She knew people here. Jimmy scanned around for the Irishman Magee, who was a lawyer for Texaco, but couldn’t find him. He could barely see 10 feet in the crowd. No one was speaking French, not even the waiters. It was after one, and he realised he felt dizzy again and not entirely well. In a moment, Nelli brought over the fat, pink-cheeked, young man, who pronounced his name to be Willard B Burton of St Johnsbury, Vermont. The name seemed too old for him, like a name he’d made up. Willard B Burton said he worked “down at Lowndes, Rancliffe in the First.” He was a growth fund something or other. His chief claim tonight though, was to be head of the Young Republicans. He was everybody’s host, and soon, he said, when the southern and western states closed, there’d be a reckoning. A “different song’ll be playing then” was how he put it. Willard B Burton had the palest blue eyes with irritatedlooking flesh around them, and a fleshy mouth. He looked boiled. He also possessed enormously long feet, encased in shining black wingtips. He was drinking whiskey and weaving slightly. “Who are we supporting, Mr White,” Willard B Burton asked Jimmy and smiled as if he already knew. Nelli piped up annoyingly. “He likes the pretty one.” Burton narrowed his pale eyes. People were swarming all around. More booing was commencing. More unhappy news. “Seriously?” “It doesn’t matter,” Jimmy said. “Well, it does matter. I oughta order you out of here. And don’t I hear old Dixie in your voice? You should be ashamed.” Willard B Burton lowered his fleshy chin in theatrical displeasure. His plenteous lips had become damp. “I’m not ashamed. But you can order me out,” Jimmy said. “It’s all right. We’ll go.” “No. Really,” Willard B Burton said. “We have to get you into a clinic. You’re very deranged.” He weaved a bit more, fisting his drink, his cigar in his other hand. His lower lip rode up onto his upper one to express resolve about the clinic idea. This was the expression everybody at Lowndes, Rancliffe laughed about when he wasn’t present.

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“Go, go, go now, Burty,” Nelli said. “You’re boring. You’re bothering me.” Willard B Burton’s eyes caught Jimmy’s and grew cold with buffoonish fury. “You really have to get treatment for your mental disease, Mr French,” he said. “You don’t know much of anything.” “Please go away someplace else now, Burty,” Nelli said and let her eyes wander around, as if looking for someone new. “We’ll have to ﬁx you. And we will.” Burton was doing his best to be ominous. Jimmy thought someone should slap him and he’d be better. “It’s nothing to get upset about,” Jimmy said and smiled. “Is that so?” Burton said. “Of course.” “Well, we’ll just see.” Nelli had Willard B Burton’s arm where it would’ve been soft up under his starched shirt. “We’ll just see about that,” he said then lurched around with her still holding him, and careened into the crowd toward the bar. FOR A BRIEF TIME, THEN, THEY STOOD AND DIDN’T SPEAK, their backs to the shiny mirrors, which in places revealed worn, black backing. They were at the beginning of the little hallway leading to the toilets. People bumped clumsily by. When the doors opened there were the damp smells. Nelli made no further mention of Willard B Burton. By tomorrow, Jimmy thought, he’d have forgotten much of this, possibly all. When a waiter passed he’d asked for a gin. “What makes you like to go in Paris?” she said. Parees. “It makes me feel like I could be something good if I wanted to,” he said. Which he believed was true. “Reelly?” She was not quite listening, looking around, wrinkling her nose, being a spectator. “I wass born to Parees. Do you think this is the good I can be?” “You’re wonderful,” Jimmy said. “And you’re very nice.” This was the thing he said to women he liked when he was drunk. That they were wonderful. And that they were very nice. He pulled her closer, his back against the mirror. She seemed to want to be kissed again. Though no one else was kissing. He kissed her on the mouth and tasted the chalk of her lipstick, smelled a hint of sour baby blanket. Her face was soft, not like a girl’s taut, resilient skin. He felt the boniness again, her slightness. Her dry hair smelled of smoke and perfume. He took a grip under her bare arm, into her armpit.

“How old are you?” she spoke into his ear. “Fifty,” he said and felt drunk, as if the intense noise was the cause. “Fifty,” she said. Some businessmen were now singing to compete with the barbershop quartet. “Beantown, oh Beantown, what a mean, mean town, Ultimately a rather sad and obscene town, Not at all a serene or a clean town…” What did it mean, he wondered. Something from Harvard, where they’d all gone. “We should leave here, do you think?” Nelli said. What had being 50 meant to her? Possibly she was 40. “Of course,” he said, then wasn’t sure he’d said that. She kissed his ear, sent a shock to his thighs. The word “Winner” was again announced on the TV, followed by great shouting. “I think your friend’s candidate didn’t win,” he said. “He’s not my friend.” She was looking around the room. He peered into the large room for Willard B Burton — to determine what he might be doing at this moment of abject loss. The round, unhappy face wasn’t to be found. ON THE WAY OUT, HE SAW MAGEE AT THE COPPER BAR LOOKING drunk and perspiring. A tall blonde girl was beside him in a skimpy silver skirt. Magee was wearing a ludicrous Western suit with pockets in the shape of arrows. He’d sweated through his shirt, and his trousers were half unzipped, his eyes red and unfocused. “It’s become a bleedin’ wake, in here,” Magee allowed. “Just as well,” Jimmy said. “You should stay. A prat from your embassy’s givin’ a speech about American democracy. It’ll incite a fuckin’ riot.” “We’re leaving,” Jimmy said. He had Nelli’s hand behind him. He smiled at Magee, who touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Good man,” he said. “Qui est notre cocotte?” The tall blonde girl turned away. Jimmy didn’t understand the last word, something Magee had got wrong. He moved Nelli toward the heavy doors and the street. As they stepped out onto the sidewalk, where raining had ceased and a ﬁle of taxis was at the curb, their drivers standing outside their vehicles, chatting up the whores, he became conscious of footsteps — behind him — the sound of the bar’s doors opening, warm air brushing his neck. Some →

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instinct said move, stand out of the way. He gripped Nelli’s hand more tightly to pull her to the side. “You’re the silly fuck who needs to have a lesson taught to him.” A male voice. An American. Jimmy turned to see a man not larger than himself, but dressed as they all were, white shirt sleeves, bright suspenders, dark hair tousled, but with his fists balled, shoulders squared, small turbulent eyes. “Could be you’ve...” Jimmy said. The man hit him then, in the face. Two times. First in the right temple, then on the side of his other eye, almost in the same place. The blows made hollow, socking noises in his ears, and didn’t particularly hurt. Though they were stunning blows and made his knees watery, while the young man who’d hit him — there were stars and stripes on his suspender bands — began instantly to recede, suggesting to Jimmy he himself might be falling, hands reaching behind, fingers out toward the pavement. Like being on a see-saw. What he fell against was not pavement, but the yielding side of a taxi, painted to portray zebra stripes. His fall was further cushioned by the hard ass of one of the prostitutes, who was in the way. “Incroyable,” he heard someone say, as he sat onto the wet sidewalk more than fell, not feeling hurt, only very, very dizzy. He did not want to get up right away. The man who’d hit him was already walking back into the crowded bar. People were looking out through the open doorway. He heard music, the noise of bottles clinking, the barbershop quartet singing “Auld Lang Syne,” people laughing. At him, he supposed. It was really not so bad. Nelli was kneeling beside him, they were all — the prostitute, another prostitute, a female taxi driver — helping him up. The seat of his trousers was wet through. His head was booming. His knees were uncertain. He seemed to have twisted his little finger on the taxi door. “Cocksucker,” Nelli said. “It’s fine,” he said. He felt drunk, more than hurt. The prostitutes had already begun drifting away up Général-Leclerc, looking back warily, their patent boots shining in the car headlights. He could smell the woman driver — mealy, sweaty hotness. To vomit seemed inevitable. Other men were now leaving the bar in business suits, striding into the early dark. They looked at him and smiled. Though the night was now in jeopardy of becoming sad. Not what he’d wanted. His gaze roamed the misty, yellow-black

sky. Pigeons wheeled above then disappeared beyond the building tops. LIGHTS SWAM ACROSS THE TAXI CEILING LIKE FILM FRAMES. Jimmy let his head loll against the plastic seatback. This particular taxi smell was apples. Pommes. Getting busted up really felt not so bad, almost relaxing. His jaw, though, was swelling on both sides, the flesh tight across the bones. His skull throbbed. Possibly his finger was broken. It could all be tolerated. He only needed to go home. The driver, as she drove, spoke French softly to Nelli, who was directing them to a place she liked. Brasserie Grenelle. Nelli was hungry. “I’ll just go home,” Jimmy said. She sat beside him, staring out at the streets at 1am, busy and attractively bright. She was not eager to touch him or address him. Some not good quality in him had become apparent. Something disappointing. Distance from him was called for. Their brief closeness, when he’d kissed her in the bar, had been extinguished by being knocked down. “But if you want to eat something…” he said. She looked over, her crisp, tinted bangs making her face heavy and serious. “I don’t want your whole night to be spoiled.” He smiled in a way that made the bones in his face ache. She seemed not to want to pay attention. Outside the taxi door, in front of the Brasserie Grenelle, which was closed, he vomited into the kerb gutter, hands against the taxi’s side, while the driver explained to Nelli through the window that they were no longer privileged to be her passengers. “Desolé, madame, mais non, non.” Jimmy wished to speak, to take command. But when he stood the taxi departed, its roof light fast growing dim. Nelli watched it without speaking. “I really should go home.” He was very sorry to have drunk gin, sorry to be sick for her to see, sorry she was no longer glad to be with him as earlier she had been. “Where you are living?” She’d put on her scarf and was irritated. She’d forgotten he’d said already. Waiters were putting chairs onto tables inside the brasserie. No one was walking on the block. It had begun to be colder now that the rain had finished. Across the street a small truck with lawn mowers in the back had paused at the curb. A man in green coveralls climbed into the truck bed to rearrange things.

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“By the Sulpice. I’ll walk.” He could smell his terrible breath. In the dream of fighting, you didn’t lose, couldn’t possibly. You were hit, but you felt nothing. You rained blows. “You are stinking,” she said, beginning to walk away down the boulevard, much as she’d done in the gallery the same afternoon. It was the thing she did. “But come on. I am close to here.” “No. I’ll walk home,” he said. “Yes,” she said, departing. “Maybe someone won’t rob you in one minute.” Her pumps made little detonations on the pavement. He thought again of her kissing him in front of her ex-husband’s building, in the rain, before any of this had gone the sad little way it had. As if he’d dreamed it. THE FLAT ON AVENUE DE LOWENDAL WAS LIGHTLESS AND SILENT. Heat had come on, the air close and stuffy. Out the windows, the sky was still yellow with mist, the little park dripping. Only two lights were on in other flats. Earlier, there must’ve been noises — voices behind walls, water falling through pipes, music, floating sounds from elsewhere. The tiny birds fluttered in their wicker cage. The dog who believed he looked interesting stood in the bedroom doorway, sniffing. Nelli became businesslike. She would be going to work soon. As she moved about in the glow of a table lamp, she began to disrobe, as if no one was in the room with her. She made a call to hear messages, then entered the bedroom. He could hear her shoes drop, the scrape of hangers, the sound of talking softly to herself. He was wet to his skin, hair slick, his body stiffening, as if there’d been a car wreck. The flat had a smell it hadn’t had. Something in a sink or a pail, not completely disposed of. Nelli re-entered barefoot, wearing only white underpants and a black brassiere. She was pinning her hair back for a shower, wearing glasses, as she had in the postcard picture of herself as a girl. Her body didn’t attract light, but he could see how slender and elongated were her hips, thighs, shoulders, arms — younger-appearing than he’d imagined. Nothing of childbirth. “Could you take the dog to do a pee, please?” she said, hairpins in her mouth. She opened a coat closet and produced a leash. “When my daughter is no here…” She started to say more then stopped. The black dog began wagging its

tail and looking up at Nelli. It had assumed a position beside the door. Nelli put the leash on the table. “You can bath when you come back. I’ll put a bed for you on the canapé.” Her face looked puzzled. “I don’t know. Canapé? What is it?” Canapé meant something else. “OK,” he said. His feet were numb, his back and shoulders and jaw seizing. The dog produced a sigh. Nelli went back to the bedroom, turned on the light and shut the door. IN THE GARDEN THE AIR WAS FRIGID. HIS CLOTHES HAD WARMED indoors, but now were awful again. He couldn’t stop shivering in his damp coat. The dog nosed the wet grass, unhurried. In a window opposite, a man stood beside a blue-lit aquarium, peering down as if Jimmy were an intruder. Rain always demarked the season’s change. Now the famous Paris winter was commencing. He should stay longer, he thought. Perhaps he would see this woman. All didn’t have to stay ruined. Good was possible. They were celebrating in America now. Willard B Burton of St-J would be in his bed, doubtless alone. He, Jimmy Green, could rightfully say he’d now paid the price of victory on a foreign shore. Though being here, in the freezing night, in this bit of misery, he could never have imagined. Here, of course, was never the point you attained (a view he often reminded himself of) but the point you’d already passed and didn’t realise. That was what optimism meant. Seeing where you found yourself to be inevitable. It made him recollect his partner’s young daughter, someone he hadn’t thought of recently. In California, or had been. Working in TV. Patricia. None of it should’ve caused what it caused — all the calamity. The embittering loss, the disassembling of things. Though that had been inevitable, also. He’d thought it at the time. It had happened before it happened. Above, in the cold plane trees, unseen wings fluttered. The dog didn’t look up. His hurt finger was throbbing now. Another light opened in the flat he was soon to return to, as though a door had been pulled back. Nelli stood with this light behind her, wearing a white bathrobe and making a beckoning gesture. Her lips were moving. How long had he been in the garden? He’d lost the time. It was the moment to go in. Behind the low clouds, sky was lightening. He turned. ○

RICHARD FORD

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219

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAN MCALISTER

CALATHEA ‘JULIETTE’, FROM £20; PATCH PLANTS

MARKET THE SHOPPING PAGES

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ESPRESSO CUPS 3

1. LE CREUSET, £12

2. HERMÈS, £230/TWO 3. WILLIAM & SON, £60 4. LUISA BECCARIA, £210/TWO 5. RALPH LAUREN HOME, £65 6. FELDSPAR, £22 7. DE’LONGHI, £35/SIX 8. SOHO HOME, £15 9. WEDGWOOD, £185/FOUR

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SUEDE LOAFERS

4 3

1. RUSSELL & BROMLEY, £225 2. GRENSON, £225 3. MANOLO BLAHNIK, £550 4. JOHN LOBB, £1,050 5. CROCKETT & JONES, £360 6. TRICKER’S, £395 7. CHURCH’S, £450

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222

TENNIS SOCKS

9 8

1. PRADA, £140 2. PAUL SMITH, £18 3. VERSACE, £70 4. KAPITAL, £30 5. DIOR, £175 6. THE WORKERS CLUB, £20 7. ADIDAS, £13/THREE PAIRS 8. ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, £65 9. GUCCI, £90

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223

OUD FRAGRANCES

1 4

7 8

1. CREED, £265/100ML 5. LOUIS VUITTON, £250/100ML

2. GUCCI, £240/100ML 6. LE LABO, £127/50ML

3. BYREDO, £110/50ML 4. DS & DURGA, £220/100ML 7. TOM DAXON, £105/50ML 8. MOLTON BROWN, £110/100ML

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224

HOUSE PLANTS

1. BEGONIA REX ‘MELLIE’, FROM £8 2. HANGING CACTUS ‘MILLIGAN’, FROM £25

3. SANSEVIERIA ‘SUSIE’, (20–40CM) FROM £10; (50–60CM) FROM £20 4. ASPARAGUS SETACEUS ‘GUS’, FROM £10 5. CACTUS ‘SPIKE’, FROM £3 6. ALOCASIA AMAZONICA ‘CHARLIE’, FROM £16 7. SCHEFFLERA NORA ‘BALI’, FROM £30

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9 8

8. BROMELIAD ‘GARY’, FROM £8.50 9. PILEA ‘PENNY’, (10–20CM) FROM £3; (15–25CM) FROM £14 10. TILLANDSIA XEROGRAPHICA ‘TALIA’, FROM £25 11. TRADESCANTIA SPATHACEA ‘GABY’, £8 12. ADIANTUM ‘VENUS’, £10 13. SANSEVIERIA MIKADO ‘MIKEY’, FROM £12; PATCH PLANTS

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226

BLUE SHIRTS

3 6

7 8

1. HARVIE AND HUDSON, £POA 2. LEVI’S VINTAGE, £150 3. DOLCE & GABBANA, £775 4. GIORGIO ARMANI, £590 5. BELSTAFF, £160 6. HACKETT, £125 7. BRUNELLO CUCINELLI, £410 8. GANT, £90

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227

FOOTBALL BOOTS

1. DIADORA BRASIL, £230 2. MIZUNO MORELIA NEO 2, £260 3. NEW BALANCE FURON 4.0 PRO, £190 4. NIKE TIEMPO LEGEND 8 ELITE, £190 5. PUMA KING PLATINUM, £180 6. ADIDAS PREDATOR 19+, £230 7. UMBRO UX ACCURO III PRO, £150

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CLARET

1. ANNONCE DE BÉLAIR-MONANGE SAINT-ÉMILION GRAND CRU 2015, £64.80; HEDONISM WINES 2. CHÂTEAU ANGLUDET MARGAUX 2014, £52; TANNERS WINES 3. CUVÉE APANAGE CHÂTEAU PUYBARBE CÔTES-DE-BOURG 2015, £12.95; LEA & SANDEMAN 4. CHÂTEAU BATAILLEY PAUILLAC 2003, £50; BERRY BROS & RUDD 5. CHÂTEAU DE PEZ SAINT-ESTÈPHE 2013, £45.80; HEDONISM WINES 6. GOOD ORDINARY CLARET, £10.95; BERRY BROS & RUDD 7. CHÂTEAU TEYSSIER SAINT-ÉMILION GRAND CRU 2016, £19.95; TANNERS WINES

See Stockists page for details

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229

BROWN WATCHES

3 6

1. HAMILTON AMERICAN CLASSIC INTRA-MATIC 42MM, £925 2. ROLEX DAY-DATE EVEROSE GOLD 36MM, £28,700 3. GUCCI G-TIMELESS 38MM, £12,500 4. LOUIS VUITTON TAMBOUR SLIM MONOGRAM MACASSAR 39, £2,145 5. SEIKO PRESAGE SSA392J1 40.5MM, £650 6. TAG HEUER AUTAVIA ISOGRAPH 42MM, £3,500 7. RADO TRUE THINLINE LES COULEURS LE CORBUSIER 39MM, £1,750 8. MONTBLANC HERITAGE HOUR-MINUTE 40MM, £7,000

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ADVERTISING/FEATURE

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Lifestyle essentials

See the truth C W Dixey & Son of London has been creating elegant eyewear for a discerning, sophisticated clientele since 1777. Choose CW Dixey & Son frames and you’ll join an elite group of iconic clients including Sir Winston Churchill, Napoleon Bonaparte and Emperor Qianlong of China. It’s quite a story. Be part of our next chapter.

Visit cwdixeyandson.com

Skincare by Virginia Stone The eponymous brand Virginia Stone has smashed the mould and exceeded expectations with the release of its innovative and cutting-edge concept “The Tone Factor”. Its coveted, multi-award winning “Eyes” collection now available internationally, is a feast for the senses. The founder’s disruptive and inspired approach to skincare has turned the industry on its head. As she stated: “The skincare industry adheres to a broken and outdated model. The ‘dry/normal/oily’ classiﬁcation system is incomplete and does not address the differences found within varying skin tones or the need to approach and treat each skin tone independently. The most important factor to consider when designing skincare is tone. Your tone determines your ‘skin personality’, which inherently deﬁnes unique characteristics like skin density, sensitivity, SPF requirements, and potency tolerance levels.” This unique and innovative approach has been recognised the world over, and the brand, just in its infancy, now carries the title of “Best New Sustainable Brand” as well as “Best New Design & Packaging” with more than 21 international awards and acknowledgements. virginiastone.com

Casual Fitters London Made-to-measure, produced with an ethical, sustainable and responsible consciousness, we strive for timeless wear that remains functional, and is made accessible, affordable, and durable. Shirts: £120; trousers: £120; blazers: £400; suiting: £600.

77 Commercial Street, Spitalﬁelds, London E1 casualﬁtters.co.uk

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Lifestyle essentials

Richmond Boot by Billy Ruffian The Billy Ruffian Richmond Boot, made on our wider last, using polished calf, full leather lining and a double sole, is not only extremely versatile but also wonderfully comfortable. Available in chestnut, the Richmond Boot can be worn with multiple trouser styles. From £149.95.

billyrufﬁan.co.uk

Urban Jack High-performance skincare products that will reinvigorate your grooming regime. Urban Jack’s Shave Serum is formulated to help deliver a smooth, hydrated shave with minimal redness. The anti-pollution Face Wash and Moisturiser acts as your defence against urban pollution; the Shower Oil designed to rebalance your skin’s microbiome. And let the Beard Oil help tame your mane.

urbanjack.com

Rockford Collection NYC Rockford Collection NYC is anything but boring! This brand is out to change the image of wedding bands. Creator of the Anti Wedding Band, working together rose, yellow, and black gold with diamonds, Rockford has brought a completely new aesthetic to the market.

rockfordcollection.com

Allex+Sannder Allex+Sannder is a Nordic fashion label set on a foundation of creating a powerful yet minimalist design. Handcrafted ready-to-wear built with modern functionality in mind for the global community.

Instagram: @allexsannderclothing Website: allexsannder.com

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STOCKISTS

ACID FC

DE’LONGHI

KAPITAL

RADO

acidfc.com

delonghi.com

kapital.jp

rado.com

ADIDAS

DIADORA

KILLA VILLA

RAF SIMONS

adidas.co.uk

diadora.com

fckillavilla.com

rafsimons.com

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN

DIOR

alexandermcqueen.com

dior.com DOLCE & GABBANA

RALPH LAUREN X BURLEIGH ralphlauren.co.uk

dolcegabbana.com

ROLEX rolex.com

DRIES VAN NOTEN

LANVIN

RUSSELL & BROMLEY

driesvannoten.be

lanvin.com

russellandbromley.co.uk

B&B ITALIA

DS & DURGA

LE CREUSET

bebitalia.com

dsanddurga.com

lecreuset.co.uk

BELSTAFF

LE LABO

belstaff.co.uk BERLUTI

lelabofragrances.com

berluti.com

LEA & SANDEMAN

SAINT LAURENT BY

leaandsandeman.co.uk

ANTHONY VACCARELLO

BERRY BROS & RUDD

ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA COUTURE

LEVI’S VINTAGE

ysl.com

bbr.com

zegna.co.uk

levi.com

SALVATORE FERRAGAMO

BOSS

LORO PIANA

ferragamo.com

boss.com

loropiana.com

SEIKO

LOUIS VUITTON

seiko.com

louisvuitton.com

SOHO HOME

BOTTEGA VENETA

bottegaveneta.com BREITLING

FELDSPAR

breitling.com

available at twentytwentyone.com

BRUNELLO CUCINELLI

FENDI

brunellocucinelli.com

fendi.com

BULGARI

FOKOHAELA

2 MONCLER 1952

bulgari.com

fokohaela.com

moncler.com

sohohome.com SUNSPEL

sunspel.com

BURBERRY

MANOLO BLAHNIK

burberry.com

manoloblahnik.com

TAG HEUER

MIZUNO

tagheuer.com

mizuno.com

TANNERS WINES

GANT

MOLTON BROWN

tanners-wines.co.uk

gant.co.uk

moltonbrown.co.uk

THE WORKERS CLUB

GIORGIO ARMANI

MONTBLANC

theworkersclub.co.uk

BYREDO

byredo.com

armani.com

montblanc.com

TIGER OF SWEDEN

CANALI

GRENSON

MR PORTER

tigerofsweden.com

canali.com

grenson.com

mrporter.com

TOM DAXON

CHOPARD

GUCCI

tomdaxon.com

chopard.com

gucci.com

TRICKER’S

CHURCH’S church-footwear.com COPA

trickers.com TUDOR

copafootball.com

NEW BALANCE

tudorwatch.com

newbalance.co.uk

CORNELIANI

HACKETT

NIKE

corneliani.com

hackett.com

nike.com

CREED

HAMILTON

creedfragrances.co.uk

hamiltonwatch.com

CROCKETT & JONES

HARVIE AND HUDSON

crockettandjones.com

harvieandhudson.com

U UMBRO

HEDONISM WINES

OMEGA

hedonism.co.uk

omegawatches.com

HERMÈS

ORIS

hermes.com

oris.ch

umbro.co.uk

V VERSACE versace.com VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

JOHN LOBB

PANTHERELLA

johnlobb.com

pantherella.com

JOHN SMEDLEY

PATCH PLANTS

johnsmedley.com

patchplants.com

WEDGWOOD

PAUL SMITH

available at selfridges.com

paulsmith.com

WILLIAM & SON

PRADA

williamandson.com

prada.com

viviennewestwood.com

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ESQUIRE

Enter the dragon Sky-high style at Phnom Penh’s leading hotel By Catherine Hayward

Tom Craig

Rising powerfully above the bustle of the Cambodian capital, the Vattanac Capital Tower is, at 39 storeys and 188m high, the tallest building in the country. Designed by TFP Farrells, the Hong Kong-based office of British architect Sir Terry Farrell, the distinctive structure is inspired by the curvature of a dragon’s back. Fittingly, sited at the top of the tower and arranged over its highest 14 floors, is a new hotel from the Rosewood group — a temporary home, recently, to the luckiest members of the Esquire team, who travelled to Cambodia earlier this year for a fashion shoot. The hotel ticks all the Rosewood essentials: elegant wood interiors, double-height proportions, subdued lighting. The spa and gym on the 33rd floor are open 24/7, with access to a 20m pool (with a view). Dining areas are spacious, service is discreet but attentive. Brasserie Louis serves European and Cambodian breakfasts; steaks and fine wines are offered at Cuts; there’s a Japanese-style robata-yaki grill in Iza; and all-day brasserie fare in The Living Room. But the jewel in this particular crown has to be Sora on the 37th floor: the sky bar is on a cantilevered terrace offering stunning views across the city — taking in the Royal Palace, the Vann Molyvann-designed Olympic Stadium, the Mekong River and beyond. ○ Rosewood Phnom Penh, Vattanac Capital Tower, 66 Monivong Boulevard, Phnom Penh, Cambodia; rooms from £200 per night; +855 23 936 888; rosewoodhotels.com

From top: the hotel is a commanding presence on the Phnom Penh skyline; the reﬁned decor of Sora on level 37; Esquire’s model scans the spectacular city view from the bar

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Backstage

Brown checked wool jacket and waistcoat, £1,080; brown checked wool trousers, £1,495; black/grey chalk stripe wool trousers, £520, all by Vivienne Westwood

The source of the River Thames (disputed) is in a ﬁeld, Trewsbury Mead, just off the A433 — the Tetbury Road — near a place called Kemble, outside Cirencester, in the county of Gloucestershire. There’s a stone there, to mark the spot. It’s about knee high, misshapen and unprepossessing, though set off nicely by a barbed wire fence. There’s plenty to do (disputed). It’s a short walk to the Thames Head Inn, which offers a large garden and a skittle alley. Kids can unwind at the local soft play centre, Rugrats and Halfpints. Those hoping to leave in a hurry will ﬁnd Cotswold Airport conveniently situated, on Haresdown Hill. What they didn’t have, in Kemble, when Esquire visited in July, was an unlimited supply of clothes rails. No matter, tree branches are just as sturdy — and so much more appealing for showcasing the Autumn/ Winter men’s collections. Our creative director Nick Millington’s inspired idea for the fashion shoot in this issue was for photographer Thomas Cooksey, fashion

director Catherine Hayward, and their teams, to trace the Thames from source to sea, pausing at scenic points along the way to change clothes and take pictures. They started here, then, and travelled on, through Oxford and Henley and Royal Windsor, to Teddington Lock, where the river becomes tidal, then on through the centre of the great metropolis, the river widening, past iconic buildings and industrial estates, under famous bridges, past dockyards, dodging ﬂoating traffic, out into the Tideway, past the towers of the City, on to Greenwich and Canary Wharf, as fresh water mixes with salt, to the mouth of the Thames Estuary, where the river meets the North Sea, Essex on one side, Kent on the other, marshland on both. All went swimmingly, even though no one fell in. We called the resulting story “A Rod of Rippled Jade”, after Oscar Wilde: “The yellow leaves begin to fade / And ﬂutter from the Temple elms / And at my feet the pale green Thames / Lies like a rod of rippled jade.” ○

Words by Alex Bilmes | Photograph by Lisa Barlow | See Stockists page for details

Excerpts and outtakes from the pages of Esquire

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