04.08.17 OOH LA LA!
Inside the Paris plot to lure London money
SERIAL BUZZKILLERS The holiday bores to avoid
Plus
Red hot
Green fingers: sam mcknight’s glorious garden The politics of WORKWEAR and ELIZABETH hurley’s My London
summer Fashion to set the mercury soaring
CONTENTS
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5 Cara Delevingne reigns supreme in CAPITAL GAINS 7 Laura Craik on workwear woes in UPFRONT 9 Our MOST WANTED is Gucci’s jacquard Sylvie bag 11 Yana Peel’s a pretty big deal in FLASHBULB
DISCONTENTE CORDIALE: Paris vs the City 17 Get far from SUMMER’S MADDENING CROWD 21 The statuesque Liberty in MEN’S STYLE 22 DESERT STORM: summer’s billowing silhouettes 29 Pick your perfect floral scent in BEAUTY 33 GRACE & FLAVOUR eats sushi at Nobu Shoreditch 35 Chill out with TART’s cucumber gazpacho 37 See how SAM MCKNIGHT’s garden grows
ANJUNA bikini, £420, at net-aporter.com
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EDITOR Laura Weir
in Homework
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ESCAPE to Majorca’s Deià 42 Elizabeth Hurley’s MY LONDON 41
The ES team pick their top five women’s summer holiday must-haves
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FINEST SEVEN ‘These flamboyant frames are my stand-out shades in the summer sunshine.’ Wendy Tee, acting art director
FINERY ‘When you’re short, you need height on all occasions. These silver tie detail sliders are perfect for wearing on holiday to add length to your pins.’ Sophie Paxton, merchandise editor
FINERY slides, £69 (finerylondon.com)
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TALITHA dress, £395, at matches fashion.com
TALITHA ‘I’m obsessed with the kaftans at Kim Hersov’s new label, Talitha. Handcrafted in India, they’re perfect for long hot sunny days on the beach.’ Anna van Praagh, deputy editor
FINEST SEVEN sunglasses, £230 (finest seven.com)
Cover photograph by Camilla Armbrust. Styled by Jenny Kennedy. ELLERY dress, £4,595 (ellery.com)
ANJUNA ‘Ruffles, mismatched florals, crocheted trim… my idea of poolside heaven.’ Lily Worcester, deputy beauty and lifestyle editor
Visit us online: standard.co.uk/esmagazine • Follow us:
BOMBOM MOROCCO basket, £80 (bombommorocco.com)
@eveningstandardmagazine
BOMBOM MOROCCO ‘I love BomBom Morocco’s personalised beach bags and hats. The oversized pom-poms are so much fun.’ Natalie Salmon, social media editor
@ESmagofficial
@ESmagofficial
Editor Laura Weir Deputy editor Anna van Praagh Features director Alice-Azania Jarvis Acting art director Wendy Tee Fashion features director Katrina Israel Commissioning editor Dipal Acharya Associate features editor Hamish MacBain Features writer Frankie McCoy
Acting art editor Andy Taylor Art editor Jessica Landon Picture editor Helen Gibson Picture desk assistant Clara Dorrington
Merchandise editor Sophie Paxton Fashion editor Jenny Kennedy Fashion assistant Eniola Dare
Social media editor Natalie Salmon
Chief sub editor Matt Hryciw Deputy chief sub editor Nick Howells
Beauty editor Katie Service Deputy beauty and lifestyle editor Lily Worcester
Office administrator/editor’s PA Niamh O’Keeffe
Contributing editors Lucy Carr-Ellison, Tony Chambers, James Corden, Hermione Eyre, Richard Godwin, Daisy Hoppen, Jemima Jones, Anthony Kendal, David Lane, Mandi Lennard, Annabel Rivkin, Teo van den Broeke, Hikari Yokoyama Group client strategy director Deborah Rosenegk Head of magazines Christina Irvine
ES Magazine is published weekly and is available only with the London Evening Standard. ES Magazine is published by Evening Standard Ltd, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, Kensington, London W8 5TT. ES is printed web offset by Wyndeham Bicester. Paper supplied by Perlen Paper AG. Colour transparencies or any other material submitted to ES Magazine are sent at owner’s risk. Neither Evening Standard Ltd nor their agents accept any liability for loss or damage. © Evening Standard Ltd 2016. Reproduction in whole or part of any contents of ES Magazine without prior permission of the editor is strictly prohibited
04.08.17 ES MAGAZINE 3
capital gains What to do in London
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by FRANKIE M c COY
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precious petals
Chef ’s corner
It’s real MasterChef: The Professionals vibes at Angler, as four top London chefs (Phil Howard, Gary Foulkes, Lee Westcott and Ben Marks) cook a course each at a special dinner in aid of the Hospitality Action charity. Tickets £80. 7 August (anglerrestaurant.com)
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Spektor calls
Expect whispery melodies, soaring piano scales and tongue-in-cheek lyrics as Regina Spektor (left) — writer of the Orange is the New Black theme tune — hits the Apollo. From £46. 9 August (eventim apollo.com)
Illustration by Jonathan Calugi @ Machas; Shervin Lainez
J’adore Dior
Clear your coffee table for the monumental tome that is Alexander Fury’s Dior Catwalk: The Complete Collections, charting the house’s story with some properly stunning photos. The definition of a fashion bible. £48. Out now (thamesandhudson.com)
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last chance: Beg, borrow or steal the last tickets to Ink at the Almeida, James Graham’s gripping newspaper industry play, which closes on 5 August. (almeida.co.uk)
Wean yourself off Interflora and enrol at London Flower School, where you’ll learn to assemble bouquets so stunning, you’ll have friends and lovers weeping with awe. Try the fabulous Constance Spry-inspired intensive twoday course and prepare to bask in the admiration. £500. 10-11 August (londonflower school.com)
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Cara Chameleon
Star Wars, shmar wars: the epic sci-fi blockbuster of the summer you’ll be needing to have an opinion on is Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Why? Because of the insane special effects, intergalactic battles, gripping plot and that fact that it stars Cara Delevingne. Out now
Tinker tailor...
It would be churlish to arrive in Paris poorly dressed, so thank goodness Ted Baker has opened at St Pancras station to dress you in last-minute summer clobber while you wait for the Eurostar. Just don’t miss your train… Now open (tedbaker.com)
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sweat for your supper Get a post-office glow without the pub at The Detox Kitchen’s Sunset Sweats sessions, where 45 minutes of trampolining, HIIT or barre with super-fit Instabloggers wins you a healthy detox dinner. Who needs Pimm’s, eh? £15. Every Wednesday (detoxkitchen.com)
look ahead: Music, shopping discounts, cocktails,
food… the Seven Dials Spotlight Festival on 19 August will meet all your summer needs. Just pray for sun. (sevendials.co.uk)
04.08.17 es magazine
upfront Laura Craik on office dressing, Vetements’ new T-shirt and ‘ladydrinks’
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Josh Shinner, Alamy, Instagram
he first time I met one former boss, I was wearing pink trousers, a yellow jumper and white lace-up brogues. I looked like a kids’ TV presenter. Which is a shame, because I was a fashion editor. The second time I met him, I was wearing pool slides. I never did get the hang of dressing for the office. I know how they’d like me to look — Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary mixed with Melanie Griffith in Working Girl minus the perm — but it’s just not me. Faced with constructing a coordinated office look or eating an extra slice of toast, I choose toast. According to a new study, one in four women have been cautioned about their appearance in the office. ‘Why aren’t you at home batch-cooking chicken for your husband while dressed in a sexy maid’s outfit?’ was the main complaint. I’m kidding. The main complaint was make-up. Which is less sexist, but only just. When it comes to make-up, women are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Sometimes, it feels like make-up exists purely to fuel studies about makeup, designed to undermine us. Another study claims that female undergraduates who wear make-up perform 20 per cent better in exams. Boosting your attractiveness makes you better at handling stress, it seems. No word on how you handle the stress of being reprimanded for wearing it. When Nicola Thorp made headlines last summer after being sent home from her receptionist job for refusing to wear high heels, the government pledged to publish new dress-code guidelines. Given that the other complaints against women listed in this study include slogan T-shirts and ‘outfit flamboyance’, these can’t come soon enough. Outfit flamboyance? Does that mean a unicorn onesie, or a yellow shoe? And unless your T-shirt says “I Hate My F*cking Job”, what’s the problem? Here’s a guideline: quit nitpicking over women’s appearance and let them get on with their jobs. Feeling shirty Has Vetements reached Peak Irony? ‘Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money,’ runs the copy on a new Demna Gvasalia-designed T-shirt, credited as being a Cree First Nation proverb. Instagram wasn’t slow to call it out. ‘Cultural appropriation for profit,’ said one user, and indeed, there can surely be no finer example of eating money than spending £300 on a T-shirt. When some took issue with Dior’s ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ T-shirt costing £490 (pointing out that most women were still paid too little to afford it), Dior donated a percentage of its sales to Rihanna’s non-
Left, Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada and, below, Melanie Griffith in Working Girl
Above, Julia Roberts, whose character Erin Brockovich was reprimanded for her choice of office attire
“Faced with constructing a co-ordinated office look or eating an extra slice of toast, I choose toast”
profit organisation, The Clara Lionel Foundation. The Vetements T-shirt isn’t for sale yet: maybe Demna will follow suit, and give back to the estimated 200,000 Cree living in Canada. Or maybe he won’t. trouble brewing Few things are more embarrassing than going to the bar and asking for a Slow, Comfortable Screw. In the Nineties, rare was the cocktail that didn’t have an asshat name, which is partly why I stuck to drinking beer. ‘Pint, please’ is nicely devoid of innuendo. In these brave new days of gender neutrality, you’d think we’d have evolved past the idea of Ladydrinks and Mandrinks, but no: here comes Aurosa, with its ‘unique, unmistakeably strong taste adapted to the elegance of women’ (nope, me neither), in a bleurgh bottle that makes it look like cheap champagne. In fact, it’s beer, though why beer needs to be feminised (or cost £9 for 330ml), I do not know. This summer, let men drink cocktails with little umbrellas on top and let women drink vast tankards of ale. FFS, let everyone drink what they want to drink.
HOT Traci Lords In the new Helmut Lang ads. Not as random as you might think: the exporn star wore Lang in the Nineties, so there.
NOT Getting engaged Robert Pattinson says he’s ‘kind of engaged’ to FKA twigs, which sounds more modern
04.08.17 es magazine
THE most WANTED EASTERN PROMISE: Gucci’s jacquard Sylvie bag offers a sleek spin on the season’s chinoiserie trend
GUCCI medium Sylvie bag, £1,940 (gucci.com)
PHOTOGRAPH BY lUKE & nIK STYLED BY SOPHIE PAXTON
04.08.17 es magazine
FLASHBULB! Party pictures from around town by FRANKIE M c COY photographs by james peltekian
Forever Dior Mayfair
Antony Price
Susie Lau
To New Bond Street for the champagnefuelled launch of fashion journalist Alexander Fury’s megalithic tome Dior Catwalk, where the host practically got RSI after signing books for all 80 of his Christian disciple guests, including Stephen Jones, Justine Picardie and Nick and Charlotte Knight. How the fashion world suffers for its art.
Richard Gray
Additional photographs by Darren Gerrish
Steven Phillip
Justine Picardie
Stephen Jones and Valerie von Sobel
Fran Hickman
Mary Katrantzou
Ruth Chapman
Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis
Nick Knight
FLOWER POWER Mayfair
Yana Peel
A riot of gorgeous flowers were outshone only by the gorgeous guests as Flowerbx founder Whitney Bromberg Hawkings and designer Emilia Wickstead hosted a summer supper for 13 at the Connaught. Chef JeanGeorges Vongerichten gave a sneak peek of his debut menu — caviar and truffle pizza galore — while Charlotte Olympia pinched the table decorations for her hair.
Charlotte Knight
Nasiba Adilova Vanina Sorrenti
Geoffrey Finch
Fan mail Kensington
Kim Hersov
Martha Ward
Kyle De’Volle
Taz Fustock and Laura Bailey
Elizabeth von der Goltz
Erin O’Connor
Alexander Fury
Sabine Getty
Emilia Wickstead and Whitney Bromberg Hawkings Bella Freud
GO TO eveningstandard.co.uk / ESMAGAZINE FOR MORE PARTY PICTURES
Bay Garnett and Kira Jolliffe’s Fanpages 2 launched with much, er, fanfare at Blakes Below, where glamorous pals including Laura Bailey, Bella Freud and Jasmine Guinness raised a cool Peroni to the new book. We’re all fan girls now.
Kira Jolliffe
Bay Garnett
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o c e t n e t n E Soirées at the embassy. New international schools. Talk of tax cuts. With Brexit on the horizon, Paris is rolling out the red, white and blue carpet to tempt business from the City of London. But will it work? Rosamund Urwin investigates the great Channel tussle
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t was an intimate dinner. The wine — a white Burgundy and a Bordeaux — flowed. The food was the ‘best of France’: three courses — ‘worthy of two Michelin stars’, a guest said — with turbot for the main and chocolate petit fours to finish. The setting was the French ambassador’s residence in Kensington 10 days ago — and the diners included the big guns of European finance. Before the meal, the former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg spoke in the ballroom at a reception of College of Europe alumni. He heralded Emmanuel Macron’s optimism as ‘a true hallmark of European liberalism’ while the Tricolore and the flag of the European Union hung beside him. With Brexit approaching, Sylvie Bermann, France’s charismatic lady in London, isn’t alone in schmoozing the money men. At a meeting last month in Paris, the French Prime Minister, Édouard Philippe, stayed for lunch after his speech to chat to banking CEOs. ‘He went all guns blazing trying to convince them that Paris is the place,’ says one attendee. ‘This government is blunt: they want Paris to become the No 1 European finance centre.’ President Macron — eyeing up the £71.4 billion in taxes that the UK financial services sector generates — is said to be out to maim London as a financial capital. A fear among financiers is that the City could lose its euro clearing role (where clearing houses such as the London Stock Exchange’s LCH play middleman to buyers and sellers of financial contracts). London dominates — the volume of business can be more than a notional €900 billion daily. ‘The French sniff blood in the water and they’re going for a land grab,’ says Manoj Ladwa, head of private clients at the TJM Partnership. In a leaked memo, Jeremy Browne, the former Liberal Democrat MP who is now the City’s envoy to the EU, wrote that the French objective is the ‘degradation of the City’. Not that French diplomats will put it like that. A
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source close to the ambassador instead spoke of improving France’s attractivité (appeal to businesses) and said it could be a ‘win, win’ situation in which companies might open French satellite offices but keep UK headquarters. Nonetheless, mere hours after the UK voted ‘leave’, ads appeared on The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times websites proclaiming ‘Welcome to the Paris region’. Now, with Article 50 triggered, the Square Mile rumour mill is in overdrive with tales of French sweeteners offered to firms to move. ‘The deal I’ve heard is that you only pay tax on half your revenues,’ says one hedge fund manager. This Parisian charm offensive is wide ranging. Macron plans financial measures to lower taxes and reduce red tape, including scrapping the highest bracket of payroll tax on financial sector staff and making it cheaper to sack employees. Three new international lyceés — teaching in French and English — will open in Paris by 2022. The French are also setting up a relocation service, offering
Above, Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron at a press conference in Paris in June
Getty Images
Picture credit
? e l a i d r co
help to buy a home and find schools, and high-profile officials — such as Christian Noyer, France’s Brexit envoy for finance, and Valérie Pécresse, the head of the Paris region — are hosting receptions in London to woo business leaders. French officials have met with Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. Paris’s appeal is obvious. It has a well-educated workforce, cheaper office space than London and a decent financial base to build on. Like London, it has the Michelin-starred restaurants and designer shops to appeal to the Jordan Belforts of banking, with a vibrant nightlife and food scene that, thanks to an influx of young chefs from around the world, has
become more adventurous than the clichéd bistro fare. Lately, Londoners have been causing a stir, with fashionable restaurants such as Le Grand Bain and Restaurant Albion offering English delicacies such as ‘le Sunday roast’. The art and design scene is similarly dynamic — and one in which British talent is prized, with Londoners such as Clare Waight Keller and Kim Jones heading up French fashion houses Givenchy and Louis Vuitton menswear, and David Hockney providing the summer’s must-see exhibition at the Pompidou. However, David Blanc, partner at wealthmanagement firm LGT Vestra and vice-president of Union des Français de l’Etranger, believes the French approach, in emphasising this, often has the wrong focus: ‘It’s too much “Paris is lovely” — it should be about business.’ Blanc says it will help that Macron is an ex-banker, winning the nickname ‘The Mozart of Finance’ for his M&A work, though a former colleague
Édouard Philippe
Valérie Pécresse
04.08.17 es magazine 13
told the Financial Times that he was ‘the guy who would constantly say “thank you” [but] he didn’t know what EBITDA [earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation] was.’ To make France bank-friendly, Macron must address a series of problems. The first is a perception illustrated by an email much forwarded in the Square Mile during Société Générale’s rogue trading scandal in 2008. ‘Friends of Jérôme Kerviel last night blamed his $7bn losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30-hour week,’ it began. This view — that the French loaf rather than toil — is unfair, Blanc says: ‘French productivity is higher than British. It’s about quality not quantity of hours.’ France is still perceived as a bureaucratic nation with high taxes for staff hire and too-strict labour laws. ‘When you employ people, there’s a gigantic tax,’ explains another hedge fund manager. ‘And you can’t fire people in France. That’s not attractive to investment banks, who fire 10 per cent of their staff every year. You need flexible labour laws for a financial services business, so you can increase staff in the boom times and cut in downturns.’
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he City’s defences are battered. Its position has been weakened by Theresa May’s political coronation — she has scarcely met business leaders and insulted moneymakers as ‘citizens of nowhere’. A number of big-hitters have applied for French banking licences and HSBC has warned it could move around 1,000 staff to Paris. The City’s challenge is to ensure that passporting rights continue. These rights mean financial services firms that are allowed to sell something here, can sell it in Europe, in a similar vein to how the UK driving licence enables citizens to drive on the continent. However, a Deutsche Bank briefing leaked to the website Business Insider argued London would lose the passport, sparking a rush to the exits for investment banks to gain ‘first mover advantage’. But in the days after the ‘Leave’ vote, investment banking bosses including those from JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs released a statement saying they would strive to ensure London remained a global financial centre. Wells Fargo recently agreed to move into a £300m HQ near London Bridge next year. The capital has a list of advantages, from the language to our legal system and more flexible labour laws. Due to the falling pound, Brexit has made it cheaper to make hires, and staff — especially those with families — won’t want to move. ‘People are sticky,’ says Ladwa. ‘It’s not easy to uproot them. Banks could move part of their team and feed business back into London. Building the City as a financial hub has taken decades — it’ll take more than a couple of terms of Macron for brokers and traders to relocate.’ Some City-watchers predict it won’t be a Brexodus of the banks, so much as the flight of Harry Hedge Fund. ‘Investment banks can’t move every few years — whereas a hedge fund can if a country reneges on an offer after five years,’ says one fund
Clockwise from left, the Centre Pompidou; Roxanne Varza and Emmanuel Macron; Galeries Lafayette in Paris
manager. ‘Hedge funds are about intellectual capital — and have a mobile workforce where everyone speaks lots of languages.’ Paris has competition there, he adds: ‘Spain and Portugal are offering golden visa tax deals where you sign on for five or seven years.’ It’s not just banks and hedge funds Macron is keen to lure. He is chasing tech entrepreneurs and film-makers (once Britain leaves, EU subsidies for making movies in the UK are likely to dry up). He wants France to be a startup hub, launching a new facility in a converted railway depot — Station F — in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, which opened with 3,000 spaces for fledgling firms and is being run by Silicon Valley escapee Roxanne Varza of Microsoft. Macron proclaimed to the crowd at its opening: ‘What you have in common here is the spirit of this word “entrepreneur”. Never forget it’s a French word, truly French, that the Anglo-Saxons stole from us.’ London has the advantage here, though. The UK is an easier place to start a business thanks to generous grants and research and development tax credits. In fact, the hedge fund manager believes that it may be another spectre on the horizon that causes companies to up sticks. ‘Corbyn would be what would make me move on, not Brexit. You’d have a sudden exit of high-earning people.’ His firm is drawing up contingency plans: ‘If you get massive tax rises, the take will fall — and more and more people will leave. London in the late Seventies wasn’t a great place to be. On the trading desk at Goldman Sachs there are a lot of French bankers, Germans, Americans — they won’t stay if Corbyn’s in power. These are people who’d vote for a Macron or a Blair but they don’t like extremes.’ They might vote for Macron, but they would also acknowledge the enormous challenge he faces to make France attractive to finance — and that the City of London has come up trumps in the past. ‘Over the centuries the City has always been able to reinvent itself,’ Blanc notes. ‘It will fight back again.’
“with Article 50 triggered, the Square Mile rumour mill is in overdrive, with tales of French sweeteners offered to firms to move”
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Far from the
maddening crowd If only. As the temperature rises, a host of familiar characters comes out to play in the capital. From the Holiday Martyr to the Wedding Warrior, Phoebe Luckhurst offers a spotter’s guide illustrationS BY Lauren Radley
The Freelancer
Your freelance friend is always pretty annoying on account of a shapeless schedule that permits them time to go to the gym four times a week — and yet mystifyingly, do enough work to afford a nicer flat than yours. In the summer, they become unbearable. Every morning, you peel yourself from your duvet at 6.45am and throw yourself into the clammy throng, watching beads of condensation roll down the windows on the Central line for entertainment. Just as you arrive at your desk, the Freelancer sends a picture to your group WhatsApp chat of the ‘home office for the day’ (sunglasses emoji, #riseandgrind): that small, wrought iron table on their bijou balcony in Dalston, a MacBook next to an open Moleskine (why both?) alongside their artisan coldpress coffee. Their shellacked toes are just in shot, edging out of metallic silver Birkenstocks. Your ersatz version of this scene is this morning’s Leon takeaway cup positioned next to your prehistoric keyboard, gathering skin cells on your desk. When you take your mid-morning Instagram break — small solace during your otherwise relentless morning in a stifling office — you see that your friend has shared the photo, where it has collected almost 100 l i ke s i n 3 0 minutes. Your last post barely hit 50 in a week.
The Inbetweener
Through s av v y manipulation of the holiday calendar, this colleague will not be working another five-
day week until September. Mostly it’s long weekends — Lisbon, Cornwall, Barcelona — and then one proper holiday (Tuscany in August), which they have managed to time over the bank holiday, so they’re away for 10 days off the back of five days of leave allowance. Naturally, you are incensed that you didn’t think of it yourself. The Inbetweener’s disposition is detached: if they bother to speak in a meeting, they have the faraway tone of someone who knows that this will never, ever be their problem. Meanwhile, you’re spending at least half a day every week fielding the emails now rerouted to your inbox by their evasive out-of-office in which they call holiday ‘annual leave’ — a passive aggressive turn of phrase that has the faint whiff of contractual entitlement, unlike ‘holiday’, which just sounds like fun. When the Inbetweener is (physically) in the office, they perform at a glacial pace, spend a lot of time on the Mr & Mrs Smith website, and invariably book a train or flight that leaves at 5pm on a Friday, meaning they’re ‘shooting out’ of the office at around 2pm. They never book the afternoon off as ‘annual leave’. It bothers you that this bothers you.
The Glastonbore
More than a month later, they still won’t talk of anything other than the Pyramid Stage and have already clicked ‘attending’ to ‘Glastonbury 2019’ on Facebook — an event that is literally taking place in two years’ time. In the weeks following their return, they endured a very public state of mourning. ‘Take me back’ is a regular refrain;
04.08.17 es magazine 17
while later, a GlastHUNbury album — a title so visionary and singular that four people on your newsfeed also thought of it — is uploaded. They were there for Corbyn, obviously; it felt like a cultural water-cooler moment, definitely. It was better than Radiohead, no question. They’re still wearing the copper bangle they wrought, by their own hand, at a small stall in Green Futures; months after the sun set on the Pyramid Stage, they’re still talking about Stormzy’s Other Stage set (‘seminal’). Just ask them to name one of his songs.
The Full-Throttler
It’s 3.30pm on a Friday and the Full-Throttler is, quite literally, twitching. This — otherwise known as their contracted working hours — is eating into drinking time. They are, clearly, on Facebook instead of Outlook (you can see their screen) and every few minutes they pick up their phone and start tapping at high velocity, and laughing. They look up to ensure that everyone on the desk bank has heard them. In summer, every evening’s fair game: a licence for full throttle hedonism that starts with frosé on a rooftop somewhere in the City and migrates to a more grimy terraced bar in Peckham until the wee hours. You imagine that being one of their mates is probably a laugh, but being one of their colleagues is like living in an unremitting Groundhog Day, where the pedestrian plot centres on the symptoms of a white wine hangover. Once you actually saw them wearing sunglasses at their desk. They also take an hour and a half for lunch every day and by the end of the summer, you want to throttle them. Worse, you’re also a little bit jealous. A little.
The Wedding Warrior
Somehow, this colleag ue is attending a wedding or hen/stag do every weekend of the summer. You have been to a wedding once. ‘Just wait a few years,’ the Wedding Wa r r ior is say i ng, hushe d , cautionary, their eyes narrowed. ‘This will be you in a few years.’ On Wednesday afternoons, as the weekend moves into sight, they start talking about this
weekend’s planned rigmarole. Hen dos inevitably involve a trip to Amsterdam: it’s costing more than £500 and they’re sharing a room with a girl they’ve never met but who was BFFs with the bride at boarding school. After listening to the Wedding Warrior grouse about everything from the hotel’s booking system to the departure airport (‘Stansted is all the way in Essex’), you feel very sorry for the bride in question. The actual wedding usually involves an English county outside London’s orbit — which means renting a car and driving down on Friday afternoon after work. They’ll hit the traffic going out of London and probably won’t arrive at the B&B until after 1am, and then they have to be up at 8.30 to start getting ready for the wedding breakfast. And it’s not cheap, you know. Though you note they have managed to muster a new outfit for every single Facebook album that inevitably appears the week after the event. At the end of the season, they announce that they are getting married next summer. Revenge.
“It’s 3.30pm on a Friday and the FullThrottler is twitching. This — otherwise known as their contracted working hours — is eating into drinking time” The Holiday Martyr
They’re not going away this year. No, not this summer. Maybe a little long weekend in October in a drizzly part of Scotland — if they can get a Friday off. But not a proper summer holiday. You know this because the Holiday Martyr has been talking about it, most weeks, since April. They wear the wounded moue of the perennial victim: when you offer condolences, they manage a stoic smile. It’s okay, they say; the whole team can’t be away at once. At least it’s quiet in here over the summer, as everyone else is off enjoying themselves. Tired of their exaggerated suffering, you examine the holiday calendar and discover that there are two wide open weeks in July.
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MEN’S STYLE What to buy now
Big Ben’s bit on the side
by TEO VAN DEN BROEKE, style director OF esquire UK
Spinning around
Jonny Cochrane; Josh Shinner
Sales of vinyl are on the up. In one week at the end of 2016 vinyl made £2.4m in comparison to a paltry £2.2m for digital downloads. The best way to play all those shiny new LPs? On this heavyweight Runwell Turntable from American brand Shinola. Handmade in its Detroit factory, the turntable features solid steel and aluminium machined components and is available to pre-order now in either all black or rose gold.
Ben Machell is trying (and failing) to have a football-free summer
I Shinola Runwell Turntable, £1,935 (shinola.co.uk)
Newly liberated
There’s something special about Liberty. Perhaps it’s the rickety old staircase that feels like something out of Wolf Hall or the carefully curated brands sold within. Either way, each visit to the store reveals something new. On 1 August Liberty unveils an entirely revamped menswear department on the lower ground floor. Featuring old favourites such as Dries Van Noten and Balenciaga in addition to some 20 new brands, from Marni to Matthew Miller, it’s a veritable menswear hub. Liberty, Great Marlborough Street, W1 (libertylondon.com)
Ami’s got your back
Known as the nicest man in menswear, Alexandre Mattiussi’s collections for his brand Ami are among the most anticipated of Paris Fashion Week. So it’s clever of backpack brand Eastpak to team up with Mattiussi to create a capsule collection of rucksacks. With four styles (including a zip front and, my personal favourite, a leather rope top), each black backpack is finished with a rainbow of brightly coloured zips, pulls and eyelets. AMI X EASTPAK backpack, £165; bum bag, £125 (amiparis.com)
’ve been doing my best to not think about football over the summer. Doing my best to purge my tiny mind of anything to do with it. Given that for most of the year at least 90 per cent of my psychological bandwidth is devoted to niggly little Twitter beefs about team formations and low-level anxiety about Leeds United, it seemed like a good idea to step away and focus on other things. Like, I dunno, regularly washing myself. Or caring for my children. It’s been hard, though. For one thing, I’ve been taking my son to a football class on Saturday mornings. And I’ve realised that what I want more than anything else in life is to win the respect of the two guys who run it, Dee and Amon. They’re obviously both really good at football — bandy-legged and lean — and every dad in attendance obviously feels the same way. Some of them attempt ostentatious bits of skill in the hope of catching their eye, which is risky, particularly when they end up accidentally booting their own child in the head. Which has happened.
“Are you the mystery Huddersfield fly-poster of Hackney?” Other dads sidle up and try to chat football tactics, as if they’re somehow going to arrange a dozen demented toddlers into a fluid counter-attacking system. No. I’m going to bide my time and wait for an opportunity to impress them. Easier said than done, though, when you spend half the session chasing your cackling child with a potty. Also, and this is kind of bizarre, somebody has been plastering Huddersfield Town stickers in and around my street in Hackney. I can’t leave the house without seeing one on a street sign or wall. Arsenal? Spurs? I could understand that. But Huddersfield? It makes no sense. How am I meant to clear my mind of football when confronted with this? Are you the mystery Huddersfield fly-poster of Hackney? I’m going to crack this. Tip-offs appreciated. Finally, only the other day I was walking through the park when a group of lads playing in a football cage called out, asking me to kick their ball back to them. Normally, I hate these moments — the pressure, the ironic applause when you totally spoon it — but on this occasion, I just returned it beautifully. There was a chorus of angels as it landed, with a soft smack, at the lads’ feet. I keep thinking about it. Obsessing. I couldn’t stop if I tried.
04.08.17 es magazine 21
AV ROBERTSON top, made to order (avrobertson.com). VICTORIA BECKHAM bra, POA (victoria beckham.com)
BLAZE A TRAIL
Supersized silhouettes in saturated shades offer a fierce take on high summer dressing. Go big, go bold — do not go home PhotographS BY Camilla Armbrust stylED BY JENNY KENNEDY
JOSEPH jacket, £595; skirt, £1,495 (joseph-fashion. com). UGG X preen sandals, £260 (ugg.com)
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ROSETTA GETTY dress, £2,810, at farfetch.com. ELLERY sandals, £858 (ellery.com)
24 es magazine 04.08.17
EMILIA WICKSTEAD top, £522 (020 7235 1104). JACQUEMUS trousers, £264 (jacquemus.com)
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MARNI top, £750; skirt, £660 (marni.com). REJINA PYO X YUUL YIE shoes, £420 (rejinapyo.com)
ELLERY trousers, £800; sandals, £858 (ellery.com) Make-up and hair by Karo Kangas from Opus Beauty using Tom Ford Beauty and Oribe. Model: Laura Hanson Sims at Next Models Thanks to Virgin Atlantic, which flies up to three times daily from London Heathrow to Los Angeles from £461 (virginatlantic.com). Many thanks to the Beverly Wilshire hotel (fourseasons. com/beverlywilshire). Production by OUI Productions
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beauty by katie service
bloom time
Paint in phthalo green 199 and tivoli 206 (littlegreene.com). With thanks to Ikea
Cut grass, hand-picked peonies and meadow flowers blossom in summer’s freshest floral scents
KENZO ‘Flower by Kenzo’ eau de toilette, £53, at debenhams.com
GUCCI Bloom eau de parfum, £99, at harrods.com
PHOTOGRAPH BY William Bunce STYLED BY lily worcester
MITCHELL AND PEACH Floral No 1 Fine Edition, £75, at roullierwhite.com
ATKINSONs Californian Poppy eau de toilette, £100, at selfridges.com
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beauty
You beauty!
ON THE SOAPBOX
Sienna Miller’s favourite facialist, Teresa Tarmey, sets the record straight on lasers
T
he landscape is changing so rapidly in advanced facials. There are exciting new technologies but it’s easy to get confused by the different treatments, especially those using lasers. The main two that people tend to mix up are fractional radio frequency and fractional laser, which sound similar but are very different. Fractional Fresh radio frequency uses tiny pins to faced: Sienna create channels in the skin to Miller deliver radio frequency to the dermal layers. This then reaches the collagen layers to stimulate and rejuvenate the skin, helping pigmentation, scarring and fine lines. I describe it to clients as giving your skin a wake up. If you slightly damage the skin, it then has to heal, repair and create new collagen, leaving it healthy, growing and significantly fresher, younger-looking and tighter. The recovery time (or ‘downtime’ in industry speak) for this is three to five days. Meanwhile, a fractional laser — which can deliver great results in lessening scarring and deep pigmentation — is an actual laser, meaning that you have to be more careful. It cannot be used on tanned skin and should be used more cautiously on darker skin types. When used incorrectly, a fractional laser can burn the skin or cause hyper/hypo pigmentation, whereas fractional radio frequency would be difficult to use incorrectly. Confusingly, Fraxel is the brand name for a type of fractional laser and the downtime for this treatment is seven to 10 days.
‘T Annabel Rivkin on her lips’ one and only
Josh Shinner; Getty
Headspace
Feeling wound up yet also flat, tense and in need of a good sleep? Sign up for a workshop with body-mind healer Matthew Cohen (above), aka the energy whisperer, at Camden’s Triyoga this September. The LA export fuses yoga, qigong, meditation and martial arts into a unique low-impact class to open your body and deepen your breath. (triyoga.co.uk)
hat,’ said my friend Emilie, ‘is the only lipstick I have ever liked on you.’ She looked at me more closely (unnerving) and continued, slightly annoyingly, ‘You know how I don’t like you in lipstick?’ Yes, Emilie, I know. You have never said it but your silence spoke volumes as I bravely experimented with peaches and reds and berries. ‘Yes,’ she concluded (enough already), ‘that one I like. I like it a lot.’ It wasn’t exactly a lipstick, to tell the truth; it was Dior Addict Lip Tattoo which, to my mind, is more of a stain, delivered with Dior’s customary elan. I have always had an awkward relationship with lipstick; we just don’t really like each other. You know when you are left alone in a room with someone that all your friends adore but you get a heart-plummeting sinking feeling and have nothing to say to each other? That’s me and lipstick. Bad chemistry. Gloss? Bring it on; the stickier and pornier the better. But lipstick always makes me feel like a newsreader. From the Nineties. Dior’s Lip Tattoo goes on liquid and weightless, bonds with your lips instantly and gives wonderful, highly pigmented coverage. The natural shades add an air of polish, the slightly more robust colours look genuinely elegant and the playful hues are… just that. Fun. Joy. High-summer (fake) tanned faces all contoured with bronzer and highlighter and eyes wide with mascara need only a coat of Lip Tattoo to take them from fine to… well… I’d go so far as to say fabulous. Is it just me or is that word staging a comeback? Dior Addict Lip Tattoo in natural rosewood, £25 (dior.com)
Read your stars by Shelley von Strunckel at standard.co.uk / horoscopes /today
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feast
grace & flavour Grace Dent breaks the bank but goes hungry at the opulent new Nobu in Shoreditch
“I loved Nobu Shoreditch. But in all fairness I’d have been better fed if I’d been kidnapped”
Ambience food
Jonny Cochrane; illustration by Jonathan Calugi @ Machas
O
ne of my special skills, learned via Grace & Flavour, is the ability to whip through an absolute stack of money and leave a restaurant actually hungry; my credit card violated hard from behind, my gastric lining barely skimmed. Think of me as the polar opposite to food campaigner Jack Monroe, for whom 18p spells a kilo of split lentils, half a Knorr stock cube and a family sated for a week. I, on the other hand, can enter the allnew Nobu Shoreditch Hotel and, in under two hours, blow £278 on things like the £17 plate of raw spinach, then be back at home, horizontal on the sofa, removing eye-kohl and thinking of breakfast. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. My work requires me to kick about in places where anyone with a remotely sane attitude to the cost of living would develop stress eczema moments after sitting down. Park Chinois is one of these places. Sosharu, much as I adore it, I class very much as an OPM joint (that’s ‘other people’s money’ in Grace Dent Polari). Bo London, long since put out of its misery, thank God, was so disgustingly expensive that grown bankers snivelled like children when the bill arrived. I spent £500 at Bo on dishes including one singular, tormented cherry tomato, delivered with an obsequious flourish and several minutes of tomato-related Vogon poetry from the server. After Bo, nothing felt truly expensive and my world felt more askew than ever. Some restaurants, I often think, are simply bad for one’s mental health. I thought this again at Nobu Shoreditch on a Saturday night, surrounded by extended families of affluent tourists eating a casual dinner;
nobu SHOREDITCH 10-50 Willow Street, Shoreditch, EC2 (nobuhotelshoreditch.com)
1
Fiji water
2
Glasses of Veuve Cliquot
£26
2
Tuna jalapeño salsa tacos
£10
2
Salmon avocado tacos
£10
1
Shrimp tempura
£12
1
Crispy rice tuna
£19
1
Spinach salad
£17
1
Avocado
1
Black cod butter lettuce
£22
1
Kushiyaki chicken
£16
1
Toban beef
£25
6
Glasses of wine
Total
£6.50
£4
£80 £247.50
all the toddlers and pre-teens gazing at iPhones, all the adults deep in chat, oblivious to both their offspring and the serving staff, who were piling hundreds — no —thousands of pounds’ worth of decent shrimp tempura and black cod on to the table. Fiji water here costs £6.50, without service. The black cod I ordered at £22 was ‘more of a finger food’, the waitress said, and she was right as it was some small, non-troublesome mini goujons swamped in full butter lettuce leaves. Nobu Shoreditch, the hotel, is built for tourists, and west London types who’ve always meant to come to London’s famous hip Shoreditch but never did — possibly because it was terrifying. But now it’s here in an understandable, accessible package. Just like the other Nobus! Folk like Cheryl and Liam can whisk out of limos on Willow Street, be greeted by bowing doormen, slink past the DJ down into Nobu’s sublime cavernous basement, order a tiny platter of the signature Toban beef and then do peace signs on Insta, hitchhiking on the longdeparted edginess of a slightly passé postcode. The Kardashians would love Nobu Shoreditch, particularly as they’re fans of a crop top and a skin-tight bodysuit and, quite frankly, one couldn’t get a pot belly here for trying. This is a carb-free world; no bowls of steamed rice, no fat udon, no starchy veg or dumplings — nothing that makes one think, ‘Gosh, that was actually dinner.’ Fools may hope for sustenance in the ‘crispy rice’ with tuna, which turned out to be six tiny hashbrown-style cubes of rice on skewers with something sweetly fishy to prod them towards. Delicious, yes, as were the teensy likkle salmon and avocado tacos at five pounds a shot. I loved Nobu Shoreditch, loved the sleek opulence, the chipper serving staff, the open kitchen full of hot chefs and the DJ playing Nineties club classics (anywhere that plays Wamdue Project’s ‘King of My Castle’ would get a Michelin star from me). But in all fairness I’d have been better fed if I’d been kidnapped, kept in a cellar tomb and consumed only passing earwigs that crawled past my mouth. I know how the other half live and most of the time, it’s quite silly.
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feast
tart london Jemima Jones and Lucy Carr-Ellison take advantage of the season and whizz up a cucumber gazpacho
Vive la résistance: the Tart girls work up an appetite with their personal trainer
Jemima Jones (left) and Lucy Carr-Ellison
Josh Shinner
C
old soups make us think of skipping off to Mediterranean soil: mornings spent lazing by the water sipping chilled wine, before a lunch of refreshing gazpacho under a parasol. Bliss. Luckily, we’re now in that short summery window when chilled soups are appetising in England, too, so it’s time to get creative with the blender. They’re so easy to make. Just chuck all your ingredients in and blitz with plenty of seasoning, then chill for a good few hours. There are lots of great recipes for gazpacho, an Andalusian peasant dish designed to stretch cheap ingredients to the limit. Some are blended with bread, some without. Some are fine and light, others are hearty main courses. Here we’re keeping it light, the perfect dish to whet the appetite. In early July we took a much needed holiday to Lucy’s house in Spain: a beautiful 16thcentury monastery. We intended to work for a few hours each day, but in the baking sunshine, relaxation ended up taking priority. One thing we did do was visit local markets to buy fresh produce to cook. It was just what we needed: outdoor cooking, clean air and flowing rosé. We created this soup there and since we got back we’ve made it for numerous events, both in little cups as canapés and as plated starters. It’s perfect for those seriously hot London summer days.
Serves 4
Cucumber gazpacho
3 spring onions, roughly chopped 1 garlic clove 2 cucumbers, roughly chopped 1 long green pepper, de-seeded and roughly chopped 200g Greek yoghurt 2 jalapeños, de-seeded 1 bunch of coriander 1 bunch of mint, stalks removed Juice of 1 lime 1 tsp sherry vinegar 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil Salt and pepper
Whizz everything together in the blender until smooth, pour into a bowl and refrigerate for 2 hours until thoroughly chilled. Give it a quick stir then pour into bowls with a couple of ice cubes and a sprinkling of almonds, mint and spring onion.
To serve Handful of toasted almonds, chopped Small bunch of mint, chopped 2 spring onions, thinly sliced
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HOMEWORK
WILD THINg
Hairstylist to the stars, BFF to Kate Moss — and hardcore gardener. Sam McKnight shows Katie Law his urban idyll and explains why he’s swapped parties for peonies PHOTOGRAPHs BY chris tubbs
S
am McKnight has just come home f rom Paris, where he has been styling hair for the Chanel couture look book, and he’s already tuttutting about the blousy white peonies in a vase on his kitchen table that have dried up and died in his ab s enc e . The sup er crimper-to-the-stars, who is 62 and has teased the locks of every famous bonce, from Princess Diana to Kate Moss to Gigi Hadid, has only been gone for a day, but being a passionate gardener he worries about watering and weeding, not to mention slugs. ‘Oi you, get off,’ he says, pulling a snail off one of his favourite sweet peas as we walk out across the terrace of his north-west London home. ‘The slugs got all my chocolate cosmos too — they just demolished them overnight,’ he adds wistfully. McKnight, often described as the master of ‘artfully dishevelled’ hair, discovered his inner gardener after a visit to Queen Mary’s rose garden in Regent’s Park some years ago. ‘One summer I spent a few evenings reading a book in a deckchair there and then visited
McKnight in front of his crocosmia. ‘I put in the arch (left) to create a tunnel around which we planted three different pastel roses and two red clematis,’ he explains.
Great Dixter [Christopher L l o y d ’s famously flamboyant garden in East Sussex], which really was the inspiration for wanting to have my own,’ he says, tweaking a stray dahlia as if it were a wayward tress. He splashed out on a six-bedroom, double -f ronted Victor ia n v i lla i n Brondesbury six years ago for its secluded, west-facing 120x40ft garden — despite the fact that it was ‘way too big for me’, since he lives ‘very happily’ on his own. The garden was, he says, ‘a football pitch, with a leylandii hedgerow down one side’. Garden designer Jo Thompson created a scheme of two circular lawns surrounded by deep, curving herbaceous borders, with fruit and vegetables in raised beds and a greenhouse at the end.
‘I rushed in and planted loads of things, making it up as I went along as usual, just seeing what thrived and what didn’t. I had no idea that you had to check what kind of soil you have and things like that, so I’ve gradually learned on the job.’ Today it’s an explosion of flowers and foliage. Borders are brimming with tall-stemmed, fiery red crocosmia next to pots that are crammed together cheek by jowl, and are packed with spires of orange and yellow lilies bursting up through clumps of purple and pink geraniums. The lawn barely gets a look in. ‘I’ve got too many pots and there’s too much yellow and orange. I need to add some pinks,’ he admits. The roses are another source of frustration. ‘I was given a lot for my 60th birthday, and the
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“I always send Kate Moss a bunch of bulbs. She’s not going to go out and buy them herself ” McKnight regularly bestows bulbs and tubers on friends. ‘I always send Kate [Moss] a bunch of bulbs — tulips and dahlias twice a year — because she’s got a big garden. She’s not going to go out and buy them herself, she doesn’t know anything about them, but she likes quite subtle and chic. And I gave Lucinda [Chambers, the exVogue fashion stylist] some dahlias last year, which she said the slugs had eaten. I’ve given her twice as many this year, so the slugs can eat half and still leave some for her.’ His favourite tools are his bare hands, he says, holding them out. ‘I got to work with fi lthy nails yesterday because I can’t bear wearing gloves. I like to feel the earth.’ The connection between plants and hair is obvious, he says. ‘It grows, you cut it down,
38 ES MAGAZINE 04.08.17
A flick through Hair — McKnight’s lavishly illustrated guide to 40 years of famous photo shoots published to accompany his recent exhibition at Somerset House — gives a flavour of those hedonistic times. From the early ‘big hair’ magazine covers in the early 1980s to Lineisy Montero sporting three stitched-together wigs for British Vogue last year, it’s easy to see why Karl Fruit, flowers and pots jostle Lagerfeld called him ‘a hard worker who for space in McKnight’s only admits perfection’. garden. ‘The gold rabbit was ‘In my job I’m surrounded by huge egos a 60th birthday present and lots of them, all day, all week,’ says from brilliant set designer McKnight. ‘Long hours and having the Gary Card,’ he says. ‘And it’s garden has become a great foil for that.’ He not a rabbit, it’s a hare. Do has also found time to develop his first you see what he did there?’ haircare range with parfumier Lyn Harris, who visited his garden and has created a it comes back — it’s form, bespoke fragrance with ‘notes of juniper colour and texture.’ He wood, cedar wood, pepper, green stems, loves spending an galbanum and angelica’. hour watering in the evenings His garden is a ‘celebrity-free’ and can lose entire days to zone, he says. ‘Karlie [Kloss] gardening, which is a came round here after work disaster for his back, once and missed the Eurostar McKnight with since he suffers from to Paris because she fell asleep Kate Moss and Charlotte sciatica. ‘Oh yes. I’m an in the garden — and Patrick Tilbury addict,’ he laughs. ‘I’m [Demarchelier] has been, but an obsessive addict, he’s a really old friend. addicted to whatever I Here, it’s me on my own, do that I find myself solitary, and it’s very, enjoying. I just want to do it very meditative.’ all the time and can’t get Hair by Sam enough of it. I guess in my McKnight products youth it was nightclubs are available at and the garden has replaced Liberty (liberty With the nightclubs.’ london.com) Bella Freud
Getty Images
gardener took the labels off them and just shoved them in, so I’m only just now discovering which ones are climbers.’ Last Saturday, a rare day off work, he visited David Austin’s rose nursery in Wolverhampton. ‘I said, “I’m not going to buy anything,” but then I heard the man at the garden centre say that this one — desdemona — is the best white rose they’ve ever bred, so I had to have it,’ he continues, showing me six more pots of roses.
escape
Pool with a view: La Residencia in Deià
WHERE TO STAY
For the truly luxurious five-star experience, check in to La Residencia in Deià. Part of the upscale Belmond hotel group, the property is actually on the site of twin 17th-century manor houses and has the nicest tennis courts on the island, hemmed in by the spectacular Tramuntana mountains. Classic double rooms from £356 per person, including breakfast. (0845 077 2222; belmond.com)
EDITED by dipal acharya
WHERE TO EAT
Alamy
• Hidden up a flight of stone steps, Sa Fonda (top) is where locals and visitors enjoy stiff G&Ts after dinner. It’s also the only place in town open late. Carrer Arxiduc Luís Salvador • Sa Foradada is only reachable by boat or via a gruelling mountain trek, but the restaurant is famous for its classic rice and locally caught seafood paella. Rent a boat for the day and stop off for a late lunch and cold cerveza. Prices start from around €150, plus lunch and drinks. Diseminado Sa Foradada, 2 • Thanks to a cameo in The Night Manager, the lovely fish restaurant Ca’s Patro March (above right) is often booked up. To beat the queue, take a late lunch around 4pm and watch the swimmers in the rocky bay Cala Deià below. • Cooking at home? Buy bags of fresh padron peppers (below) to fry in hot oil sprinkled with salt from the local market, and plenty of ensaïmada, a traditional Majorcan pastry covered in sugary flour and apricots.
perfect deiÀ
There’s so much more to Majorca than the Love Island villa. Once the home of novelist Robert Graves — his house is now a museum — Deià has become the preferred retreat of fashion’s cognoscenti, where lush citrus groves thrive and traditional houses, or fincas, are framed by bougainvillea in full bloom. Daisy Hoppen uncovers the best of this charming corner of the island
WHAT TO DO
Take a hike: the hills of Fornalutx
• The island is a paradise for cyclists. If you’re feeling fit then try the Snake route — up narrow corners and windy roads to the top of the Serra de Tramuntana range. It’s not for the faint-hearted but offers incredible views. There are plenty of local bike shops that rent out bikes for around €30 a day. • Hiking is also popular with the locals. One of the best hikes is through the hills from Fornalutx (voted Majorca’s most beautiful village) to Biniaraix — the views over the valley are spectacular. Start out no earlier than 6pm in the summer and end the round trip in either village for a much-deserved ice-cold drink.
WHERE TO SHOP
• Sóller (left) has beautiful streets filled with local artisan shops. Visit the city’s main food market — The Municipal Market of Sóller — for the most incredible display of local produce as well as small bars where you can enjoy a beer and some charcuterie. • The island is espadrille and straw bag heaven, so stock up on both in a range of colours and styles. • Many markets and local shops sell beautiful wooden fans; in the summer months every respectable Majorcan woman will carry one to combat the heat. • Majorca has a thriving ceramics and crockery industry; look out for traditional hand-painted plates and jugs (above) to bring home.
GETTING THERE
BA flies from City Airport and there are regular flights from Stansted, Heathrow, Luton and Gatwick. All flights fly to Palma. Hire a car for the 40-minute drive from Palma either through the mountains or via the new tunnel.
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my london
elizabeth hurley as told to lily worcester
Home is… I live in Herefordshire but have a house in west London on a very pretty street lined with cherry trees. The blossom in April is out of this world.
If you could buy any London building, which would it be? I would love to live at The In & Out club on Piccadilly. A lovely building that looks deserted now. Failing that, Clarence House (above) would do. What do you collect? Lonely hearts. I normally have a couple of friends sobbing around my kitchen table at any given moment.
Last play you saw? I saw the musical An American in Paris (above) last week. I was blown away by it — the dancing was spectacular.
What shop do you rely on? Luigi’s Delicatessen (right) on Fulham Road for when I’m too lazy to cook. Best meal you’ve had in the city? I was introduced to Riva, in Barnes, by the wonderful AA Gill. It is the best Italian food in London; suckling pig, pasta, vegetables to die for and superb crescentshaped gnocchi with honey. If you had to be locked in a building overnight, which would it be? Buckingham Palace. I would eat breakfast on the throne.
42 es magazine 04.08.17
Favourite club? 5 Hertford Street (above). Rifat Ozbek has made it into a sexy haven — all my friends go there.
The actress and swimwear designer loves the suckling pig at Riva, would live at The In & Out club and parties at 5 Hertford Street Favourite discoveries? Driving daily to the sound stage at 3 Mills Studios, where we shoot The Royals, has shown me a completely different part of London. We wind our way down the Embankment, past the Tower of London and all through the East End. It’s charming and I’m usually being driven at some ungodly hour, so it’s deserted. Best thing a cabbie has ever said to you? That I look like Liz Hurley, but am better looking.
Have you ever had a run-in with a policeman? Only good run-ins, as I’m very well behaved. I’m a huge fan of London policemen; they do a terrific job. It was actually down to me that they can now eat in public places in their uniforms. I suggested it and, having initially been blasted for stupidity by David Blunkett (the Home Secretary at the time), he then did a U-turn and changed the law. And publicly apologised. Tee hee.
Best advice you’ve been given? ‘A wise woman has two ears and one mouth, so she hears twice as much as she speaks.’ My great uncle taught me that and it’s stood me in very good stead my whole life. Who’s your hero? I’ve currently got a crush on Sam Heughan, who stars in my favourite TV series, Outlander. He’s a big, sexy Scot but, sadly, much too young for me. Who do you call when you want to have fun? My constant partner in crime is Patrick Cox (left, with Hurley). He comes round to me first and zips up my dress and chooses my shoes. (elizabethhurley.com)
Rex; Getty; Alamy
Most romantic thing anyone’s done for you? A long time ago, one of my exes taught me the song ‘Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner’, which we still warble to each other in mock cockney accents.