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CONTENTS

March – April 2020 Bulletin 057

The Royal Ballet’s Marcelino Sambé

072

The coolest clothes shop in Paris

060

Ercol furniture celebrates a century

075

Knives out at the Blenheim Forge

065

Fashion brands enter the space race

078

Artist Nicolas Party takes Los Angeles

070

Canine couture by Milan’s Temellini

081

Coconut rum from Guatemala

Ana Cuba | Chris Leah

057

085

083

Menswear is taking tips from gardening

091

Hot surf style made in Cape Town

085

Aston Martin’s head-turning DBX

094

Montblanc’s high-end MB H1 headphones

089

Longines recreates a heritage watch

096

The Esquire Edit — all your style essentials

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CONTENTS

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March – April 2020 Journal 099

Hot Right Now by Tim Lewis

103

Rude to Say No by Jeremy Langmead

100

Depot by Ed Caesar

104

Banana Skin by Will Self

102

The Net Rippled by Joe Dunthorne

105

Invasive Species by Miranda Collinge

134

120

Fashion & Style 108

Rami Malek — James Bond’s newest nemesis

134

Is it a bid? Superman’s cape goes to auction

120

Tate Modern’s 20 years of artful brilliance

142

New season’s suits take a turn for the radical

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CONTENTS

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March – April 2020 Fiction

168

Beneath the Branches by Dima Alzayat

Market

177

Running shoes, 5G phones, Harrington jackets, keyrings and more

Backstage

194

On the fashion shoot for our new suits special

ON THE COVER Rami Malek Wears: beige/orange print cotton jacket, £2,120; orange goldﬁsh-daisy print viscosejacquard shirt, £665; black silk-cady tie, £145; beige/orange print cotton trousers, £865; brown leather horsebit-detail loafers, £665, all by Gucci

142 Turquoise cotton suit, £POA; turquoise silk shirt, £POA, both by Boss

Jens Langkjaer | See Stockists page for details

Photographed by Dexter Navy

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MASTHEAD

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CONTRIBUTORS

ANA CUBA

JAMES SLEAFORD Former longtime fashion director at French GQ, Sleaford is among the most respected ﬁgures in menswear. Based between Paris and London and a regular contributor to Esquire, for this issue he dressed cover star Rami Malek in Gucci, Paul Smith, Giorgio Armani, Vivienne Westwood and Saint Laurent, as well as ballet dancer Marcelino Sambé in Louis Vuitton and Fendi.

Born in Barcelona, educated in Switzerland, resident in London, photographer Cuba shoots for The New York Times and AnOther magazine, among others. This issue, for the Bulletin section, she captures the extraordinary energy and elegance of the new star of The Royal Ballet, Marcelino Sambé.

DAN MCALISTER

JEREMY LANGMEAD

Keyrings. Biscuits. Pencils. Beanies. Cardholders. Loafers. Bomber jackets. Knives. Binoculars. Mustards. Cookbooks. Digestifs. Ski goggles. Face creams. Crockery. Suits. Swimming shorts. Diving watches. Tote bags. And next issue... the kitchen sink. London-based still life photographer McAlister is the talented man behind our shopping section, Market. He also shoots for our Big Watch Book.

A former editor of Esquire (as well as Wallpaper* and Sunday Times Style), and a lapsed style columnist for this magazine, the brand and content director of online menswear retailer Mr Porter has recently relocated to the Lake District. That’s not the most dramatic recent development in his life: his husband, Simon, is expecting a baby. The new one will be Langmead’s third child, a story he recounts in “Rude to Say No”, on page 103.

RICHARD BENSON

JOE DUNTHORNE

The award-winning author of a bestselling family memoir that is also a social history (The Farm) and a bestselling social history that is also a family memoir (The Valley), contributing editor Benson is an endlessly versatile reporter, as proved by his feature this month, on the 20th anniversary of perhaps the most inﬂuential British cultural institution of the century so far: the Tate Modern.

An award-winning poet and novelist — his debut, Submarine, was made into an acclaimed ﬁlm by Richard Ayoade — Dunthorne writes about a recent trip to Vienna with the England Writers’ Football Team, and the 90 minutes of pure, animal aggression that he played through there. His debut collection of poems, O Positive (Faber and Faber), is out now.

MIRANDA COLLINGE

Esquire’s superheroic features director owns this issue. As well as interviewing our cover star, the new Bond villain Rami Malek, Collinge reports on another blockbuster story, tracing the history of a cape worn by Christopher Reeve as the title character in Superman, from 1978 to now. She also turns in a short essay on a recent trip to Louisiana, with her sister; the Collinge twins turned 40 during the making of this magazine.

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CONTRIBUTORS

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DEXTER NAVY

London-based photographer for magazines including 10, i-D and Interview, and film-maker for clients including A$AP Rocky and Dior, Navy’s first commission for Esquire took him to New York to shoot James Bond’s new nemesis, Oscar-winner Rami Malek, with whom Navy shares an Egyptian ancestry. Navy is now in Egypt planning his first feature film.

DIMA ALZAYAT

TIM LEWIS A features writer for The Observer and former deputy editor of Esquire (as well as former editor of both the Observer Magazine and the Independent on Sunday Magazine), Lewis prefers to do his thinking — among many other things — in the bath, the subject of his column for this month’s Journal.

Born in Syria, raised in California and now based in Manchester, Dima Alzayat writes this issue’s short ﬁction, “Beneath the Branches”. She has won various prizes, most recently the 2019 ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award, and her debut short-story collection, Alligator and Other Stories, (Picador) is out in May.

JENS LANGKJAER

AMAH ROSE-ABRAMS

ED CAESAR

A native of Copenhagen now based in London, the photographer responsible for our fashion story on the new tailoring, Langkjaer’s list of clients includes Numero and V magazines, Net-a-Porter and Barneys New York.

An arts and culture writer for The New York Times’s T Magazine and The Art Newspaper, for our Bulletin section Abrams interviews Nicolas Party, the Swiss artist known for his colour-saturated paintings, who this month opens a solo show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles.

A contributing writer to The New Yorker, for whom he has reported on subjects including Brexit, money laundering, dodgy bankers and nefarious publicists, winning a Foreign Press Award along the way, Esquire’s Manchester correspondent this issue writes about his recently developed love of dance music — and dancing to it.

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EDITOR’S LETTER

How 007 stays Onatopp “BAD GUY” — THE RATHER GENERIC HEADLINE on Miranda Collinge’s interview with our cover star, the Oscar-winning actor Rami Malek — was no more than a working title (I was going to think of something better, honest I was) until a few days after Miranda filed her piece, when it was announced that the song for the new James Bond film, No Time to Die, in which Malek plays the bad guy, was to be written and performed by 2019’s goth-pop sensation, Billie Eilish. Suddenly the headline seemed more pertinent: Eilish’s most irresistible earworm to date, as tweenage readers and their parents will know, is “Bad Guy”, a song so pouty and muffled it sounds like it was recorded under a duvet in the bedroom of a 16-year-old with chipped green fingernails and blue-black hair — possibly because it was. (Eilish had turned 17 by the time it was released but you see my point.) At the time of writing, the new Bond song is still, like 007 himself, in hiding. (Is it nursing a broken heart at its beach house in Jamaica, staring moodily at the sunset while cradling a tumbler of El Dorado on ice? Of course it is.) There’s every chance Eilish has come up with a number as memorable as one of the classics: Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger”, Paul McCartney’s

Alex Bilmes EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

“Live and Let Die”, Madonna’s “Die Another Day”. OK, not Madonna’s “Die Another Day.” Help me out here. Oh, yes: Duran Duran, “A View to a Kill.” Tune! But even if she hasn’t quite hit those heights, unless Eilish is herself an operative of the evil Spectre organisation, hellbent on deliberately scuppering Daniel Craig’s send-off, in his fifth and final outing as the world’s least secret agent, her song will surely be an improvement on the previous Bond jingle, Sam Smith’s “Writing’s on the Wall”, from 2015. That song won an Oscar, which tells you more about the Oscars than perhaps the Academy would like you to know. Whatever she comes up with, the choice of Eilish is telling. Why might the Bond producers, seeking a performer to best represent their new movie, have approached a teenage girl celebrated for her outspoken support for socially liberal causes, and her baggy, anti-sexpot image, instead of a performer closer in vintage and spirit to 007 himself — like, I don’t know, Rod Stewart? As Eilish might say herself, after pausing for an exaggerated eye-roll, “Duh.” The Bond franchise, as we are obliged to call the venerable series of spy thrillers — the new one is officially number 25 — has now been running for 58 years. That’s precisely the age Roger Moore was in 1985, when Simon Le Bon was wailing about dancing into the fire. Since 1995’s GoldenEye, at least, when Pierce Brosnan took the role for the first time, the Bond producers have been seeking to redefine their hero’s character for a more politically correct era. Judi Dench’s spymaster, in that film, describes her most famous employee as a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” — a famous example of getting your retaliation in early, as well as of attempting to have your cake and eat it; the great Famke Janssen’s GoldenEye character was called Xenia Onatopp, a joke that I’m guessing might not have made it past the MGM Diversity and Inclusion Steering Committee in 2020. This aim, to make Ian Fleming’s emotionally repressed, sexually incontinent, dipsomaniac, imperialist, shagger-assassin acceptable to contemporary audiences — arguably Bond’s most difficult mission to date — defeated Brosnan, ultimately, so that by the end of his tenure the idea that 007 might ever again seem relevant, let alone hip, was as credible as the invisible car he was driving. Of course, Daniel Craig changed all that, at a stroke, with a masterful performance in Casino Royale, repurposing Ian Fleming’s “blunt instrument” as a man who bleeds and cries and loves and loses. But the →

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Rami Malek as the murderous Saﬁn in No Time to Die

world has turned and turned again since Craig became Bond, and, in the wake of #MeToo, and Time’s Up, we are all, are we not, hyperalert to any expression of toxic masculinity, in real life and in pop culture? Definitions of the phrase “toxic masculinity” differ, but I think travelling the world having sex with foreign women and then killing them counts, don’t you? (I take it MI6 offsets James’s carbon footprint these days, so at least we Bond fans can sleep easy on that score, and the compulsive frequent flying — “globetrotting” we used to call it, when such a thing seemed glamorous — can continue unabated.) “James Bond is the coolest film franchise ever to exist,” said Billie Eilish in January, announcing her participation in No Time to Die. This line was received, sorry to report, with a Roger Moore-style raised eyebrow in certain sections of the press. Is that really what Gen Z girls like Eilish think? Those of us who don’t know many of those might find it hard to imagine a sulky adolescent thinking of an ageing ladykiller — I use the word advisedly — as the coolest thing. Shouldn’t Eilish and her followers

be more taken by Greta Thunberg’s TikTok videos than the adventures of a homicidal Brit in a stuffy shirt and tie? I’d have thought so. But then over Christmas I went with my daughter, who is 10, to the cinema to see Little Women. (She took issue with the departures from the novel; I was too busy wiping away tears to notice.) Among the trailers was the one for No Time to Die. This was Penelope’s first exposure to James Bond; she’d never heard of him before. Having sat through the footage of a grim-faced, middle-aged guy donutting his sports car, making attention-seeking leaps off viaducts and flirting with his co-workers — it’s a lot like hanging out with Dad, watching James Bond, apart from the flirting with co-workers bit (I’m stupid but I’m not insane) — she turned to me, wide-eyed, and whispered the words that the makers of film trailers must dream of hearing: “That. Looks. Awesome.” It seems that, for all the producers’ concerns, Bond’s appeal is undiminished. You can love, as Penelope does, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, and be, as she is, a member of the Year Five eco-committee, and decline to eat meat,

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and deplore your parents’ use of plastics, and lobby for the family gas-guzzler to be traded in for an electric vehicle, and still be impressed by the sight of a man — rather campily, it must be said — whipping a dust cover off an Eighties Aston Martin. I have a date, then, for April. Just to be sure that they are hitting all the contemporary notes, though, for No Time to Die the Bond producers have not stopped at Eilish in their quest to future-proof the franchise. Having parted company with Danny Boyle, who was originally slated to direct, they drafted in a director, in Cary Joji Fukunaga, whose previous films (Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre, Beasts of No Nation) have been critically approved indies, rather than popcorn blockbusters. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, writer and star of the pungent, poignant Fleabag, contributed to the script. Alongside many familiar faces — Ralph Fiennes as M, Ben Whishaw as Q, Naomie Harris as Moneypenny — there is a new character, Nomi, a rival double-0 agent, played by Lashana Lynch, a black woman. “The world has moved on, Commander Bond,” Lynch says, in the trailer. Whether it’s moved on enough for the rumours suggesting that Nomi’s double-0 number is 7, and that Lynch is the replacement for Daniel Craig in the lead role, remains to be seen. But wouldn’t it be delicious to see the looks on certain florid, jowly faces if it were true? Perhaps No Time to Die’s biggest coup, though, is the casting of the bad guy, for which the producers hired the dude last seen recreating Freddie Mercury’s performance at Live Aid in the stadium-sized hit Bohemian Rhapsody. Malek, as Safin, about whom we know very little except that he’s a “nasty piece of work”, according to producer Barbara Broccoli, and that he’s partial to a Phantom of the Opera-style mask, joins an ignoble list of the facially disfigured to have tested their mettle against 007. We don’t know yet if Malek will prove to be a Donald Pleasence (the gold standard in Bond villains) or a Sean Bean (also had a scar), but Esquire’s money is on the former. From Miranda’s encounter with him in New York, and her subsequent discussions about him with Daniel Craig and with Sam Esmail, creator of Mr Robot, the TV show that made Malek a star, a portrait emerges of an actor who is complicated, intelligent and ferociously committed to the job. We might just be in for a classic Bond villain. Apparently, Malek’s a good egg in person, too. Not a bad guy, at all. I’m sticking with the headline. ○

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

Shape of the moment The Royal Balletâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new star is a Portuguese prodigy with a dark past and a dazzling future By Rachel Fellows Photographs by Ana Cuba / Styling by James Sleaford

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Marcelino Sambé sits on a podium and extends his right arm to the sky, his hand crunched into a ﬁst, in emulation of a cello’s scroll. Fellow Royal Ballet dancer Lauren Cuthbertson nuzzles her neck around this arm before plucking imaginary strings running the length of Sambé’s spine. Draping himself back over the plinth, he then, while lying down, lifts and rotates the ballerina above his head to pass her on to another dancer. Elgar’s Cello Concerto soars in the background. This is a rehearsal for Cathy Marston’s The Cellist, about Jacqueline du Pré, which debuts at The Royal Opera House in February. Sambé personiﬁes the music; Cuthbertson is du Pré, who we follow through her career, loves and illness. There is something mesmerising about the contortion, the muscle, the acrobatics, highlighting the blend of physical strength and dexterity that dancers today must achieve. But this also bows to ballet’s deepest esotericism, and as

soulful as Sambé manages to make his part, much of the excitement surrounding his promotion to principal last year owes to his vibrant personality. “A bad thing about the ballet world is that we try to always repeat what has been in the past, like a museum piece,” Sambé says backstage at The Royal Opera House. “I feel like my role in the future is to change that perception.” With charisma and a gleaming technique, the 25-year-old is just as capable of presenting a thoughtful Romeo as he is the cheekier roles (from Mercutio through to the Frog Footman in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). Often he gets picked to work on new choreography. “I think what really deﬁnes me and made me get here is my versatility,” he says. “I’m not a onetrick pony — I can do classic but I can as well do contemporary. I could never choose one or the other.” Now promoted to the company’s highest rank, Sambé gets to attempt that full

range of roles. This season alone he is debuting in three lead parts: The Cellist, Swan Lake and Prodigal Son. Sambé grew up in Alto da Loba, near Lisbon. His mother is Lisboan, his father from Guinea. As a child he attended an African dancing group at his local community centre where his talent was spotted and, at nine, he auditioned successfully for central Lisbon’s National Conservatory Dance School. “I always thought that dance was African hip-hop so I didn’t get prepared for the auditions. I went there in trainers and tracksuits.” Offstage, his childhood was troubled. After his biological father died, also when Sambé was nine, his mother was unable to care for him and he was taken into foster care. A friend at the school suggested he could stay with them and this is the family he considers his own to this day (the classmate was Maria Barroso, who now dances with the National Ballet of Portugal). With their support, he entered international competitions, ultimately earning his pick of scholarships and choosing The Royal Ballet’s Upper School in Covent Garden. He moved to London at 16 and graduated after only two of the usual three years in 2012. Sambé is only the second black principal in The Royal Ballet’s history. “I feel like me getting this promotion was a combination of all the work of all the people who gave me so much,” he says. “My victory was their victory. That’s what I keep saying to people, that to have diversity in the future, you need to support these children in a different way. You can’t compare someone who comes from a more poor background. They are most likely to quit early because they are outsiders, and I could have been one of those students that just didn’t make it but I had treatment that really allowed me to pursue this. It’s not preferential treatment, it’s just understanding what this kid needs.” Sambé’s interests outside ballet are varied. He is an eager photographer, posting on Instagram as @RoyalBalletbyMarci; he loves fashion, attending parties and shows worldwide; he and his partner James are such opera fans that they have a statue of Wagner in their north London ﬂat; he also has designs on acting and choreography. “I believe our generation is the one that’s going to start mashing up what ballet can be,” he says. “The next thing is ‘how are we going to step over into different art forms?’ I’m so lucky that I’m here because I feel like it’s about to happen.” ○ Marcelino Sambé performs in The Cellist from 17 February, and debuts in Swan Lake on 31 March; roh.org.uk

Previous page: blue cotton jumpsuit, £2,950, by Louis Vuitton. Brass-toned knit T-shirt, £660, by Ermenegildo Zegna. Above: light brown cashmere sweater, £1,350, by Fendi

Grooming: Ranelle Chapman using Nars and Bumble & Bumble | See Stockists page for details

Bulletin

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Bulletin

Family seat An Anglo-Italian furniture-maker celebrates 100 years of winning designs By Johnny Davis Photograph by Jamie McGregor Smith

Lucian Randolph Ercolani was born in May 1888 in the province of Le Marche near Urbino, close to the Tuscan border. His father joined the Salvation Army, became a lay preacher and would cycle around the district attempting to persuade others to join the Protestant faith. This went badly. After locals broke into his cabinetmaking and picture frame workshop and threw his equipment into the River Arno, the Ercolani family moved to London. It was 1894. Growing up in England, the young Ercolani established himself as something of a chip off the old block, attending a Shoreditch trade school for furniture-makers, spending hours in the library studying books on Thomas Chippendale, George Hepplewhite and Thomas Sheraton, and, by 1907, having sketches for a music cabinet published in Cabinet Maker magazine. Before long he was offered a job in High Wycombe, “the centre of the chair-making industry”, and in 1920 set up Furniture Industries, which he called his “great adventure”. As a boss, Ercolani proved inspirational. He worked seven days a week, built his first factory within a year, and reinvested all profits into the business and workforce. Selling often fell to him too; his car idled between furnishing stores in Knightsbridge and the West End and he insisted his chairs be sold for one price only and, despite dealing with the boss, preferential buyers’ treatment would not be forthcoming. During WWII, Ercolani was posted to India with the RAF, flying long-distance bombing raids over Burma, British Malaya and the South China Sea, and being decorated for bravery. (Back home, adapting to the wartime wood

shortage, he instructed his workers to switch to fashioning wooden army tent pegs out of tree tops — a charitable and proﬁtable decision.) In 1944, the newly-named Ercol company was contracted by the British Board of Trade for 100,000 Windsor chairs, mainly for canteens, at 10s 6d a piece (about £18 today). It was a tall order. Windsor chairs, whose origins are unclear but have been around since at least the 18th century, are distinguished by bentwood frames and arched, spindle-supporting backs. For the commission to be commercially viable, Ercolani perfected steam-bending wood in large quantities. His other innovation was to use English elm, a wood previously deemed unsuitable for bending. Constructed from 14 pre-made components, an Ercol Windsor chair could be produced every 20 seconds. Two years later, the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibited Ercol’s bentwood furniture at its Britain Can Make It exhibition. In 1947, the ﬁrst production-line Windsor chair, alongside other pieces from the same range — kitchen cabinets, dining and rocking chairs — went on sale. Ercol furniture was shown at the 1951 Festival of Britain, representing the height of British interior design and manufacture. Finding an eager market in post-war Britain, output doubled between 1955 and 1961, doubling again two years later. The factory became so efficient it produced 2,000 pieces of furniture a day; turning out a new chair every 10 seconds. In typically grandiose style, for a 1968 works outing, Ercolani chartered three trains to take his 2,000 staff to Bournemouth for a boat trip around Poole Harbour. They were entertained by The Ercol Silver Band, its in-house brass ensemble. →

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Previous pages: Ercol’s 14,865sq m furniture factory, which opened in 2002 in the heart of the traditional Chiltern Hills furniture-making area. Below, from top: three contemporary Ercol designs evolving from its classic mid-20th-century Windsor collection — the Stacking Chair (£390), Dining Armchair (£450) and All Purpose Chair (£415); ercol.com

“I had a feeling that, immediately after the war, and relieved of the constant dread and restraint brought about by it, the consumer would want to redecorate the house… and would be glad of the opportunity to buy joyous furniture,” Ercolani reflected in his firm’s 1966 catalogue. His Windsor range seemed to embody these values. Plenty of people assume that Ercol is Scandinavian: its furniture is simple and unfussy. In fact, Shaker furniture was an early inspiration for Ercolani, not just the purity of its design but the values of the makers. Over-complicating a chair or adding eye-catching flourishes that served no practical purpose seemed tantamount to cheating. A simple design should be good enough to stand the test of time. So it has proved. This year, Ercol celebrates its centenary, its products — the Butterfly Chair, Stacking Chair, Love Seat and Windsor Chair — are regarded as 20th-century design icons, with originals fetching high prices. The company was given an extra boost in 2002 when fashion designer Margaret Howell, a fan of British modernism whose shops showcase furniture by Ernest Race, Robert Welch and Anglepoise, commissioned a series of Ercol Windsor re-editions. “For me, what’s so appealing about its products is the renewal of interest in the post-war period of its production,” Howell tells Esquire. “The austerity of the time meant necessary restrictions that lead Ercol to simplify their furniture while maintaining the quality of wood and craftsmanship. Minimal yet functional in beautiful elm and beechwood, they have a lasting appeal.” “Ercol is a model of how British design and manufacturing ought to be, but seldom are,” says the design critic Alice Rawsthorn. “All of Ercol’s furniture exudes a quiet confidence and pride in its functionality, elegance and quality. The wood always looks gorgeous. The shapes are deceptively simple, making them timeless.” At the dawn of the space age, where others were experimenting with plastic, synthetics and orange, Ercolani doubled down on his belief in wood. Yet he was no technophobe; acumen lies at the heart of Ercol’s success. As Cabinet Maker marvelled in 1958: “It somehow seems completely contradictory that a firm whose furniture has about it so much traditional feeling is able to say it is probably the most mechanised in the country.” “The Old Man”, as everyone called him then, as they do today, died in 1976. But Lucian

Over-complicating a chair or adding flourishes was tantamount to cheating

Ercolani’s new-old paradox lives on. After 82 years on its original site in High Wycombe, the family-run company moved eight miles down the road to a state-of-the-art factory at Princes Risborough. Designed by architectural practice Horden Cherry Lee, the award-winning £11m HQ resembles a horizontal pavilion framed by the landscape and existing woodland. It looks more like a university campus than a business park. Heating is provided by a biomasss boiler fuelled by wood and sawdust produced as waste in the factory. Esquire is shown around by Henry Tadros, a fourth generation Ercolani: Lucian was his great-great-grandfather. Tadros heads up the international and design-led parts of the ﬁrm. As he takes me through the stages of production — timber store, CNC machines cutting chair seats, hand-lathing, sanding, assembling and lacquering — his pride is self-evident. “I could talk about Ercol all day,” he beams. There is, he believes, no other furniture company working in quite the integrated way Ercol continues to work. Modernisation is perpetual: it recently made the switch to ash from beech and elm, and it no longer converts its own timber, with much sourced from Italy. New designs and designers have ﬁtted in with the classics. A Treviso desk created by Matthew Hilton in 2010 is particularly handsome, its “1665” Originals bar stools from 2012 are the current best-seller, while a third of the business is now in beds, a category introduced in the last three years. Tadros has big plans, predicting 50 per cent growth in the next 10 years. America will play a huge part in this. “The whole domestication of the office has been great for us,” he says. “There’s this horrible term ‘resimercial’, which is how they make blue chip workspaces as comfortable as possible; fun places to work. So they invest in high-quality furniture. You’re not doing office desks. You’re doing breakout areas. There’s huge potential.” He says it’s why [traditional US office furniture companies] Herman Miller, Steelcase and Knoll have recently spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying trendy Scandinavian residential companies. Ercol, however, remains steadfastly not for sale. As for the centenary, Tadros is circumspect. Yes, there will be three new lines to honour the anniversary, along with a book, a party and an event. But his attention is forwards not backwards. “It’s the next 100 years I’m focused on.” ○

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Capsule collections Fashion’s final frontier: space

Spacesuits through the ages courtesy of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

By Johnny Davis

Given their boss’s propensity for hare-brained announcements, Elon Musk’s staff are presumably used to nosy questions from the outside world by now. Even so, this one might have caught them by surprise. When SpaceX staff came to work on 13 December last year, they drove past a billboard that had appeared opposite their HQ on Rocket Road in Hawthorne, California. In sharp, white text out of a bold, red background, the 48ft hoarding read: “Our jacket is ready. How is your rocket going?” It had been paid for by Vollebak, the experi-

mental British clothing company. The start-up had just launched its Deep Sleep Cocoon, a rigorously engineered jacket with a visor that drops over the head like a helmet, restricting light and turning it into a wearable isolation tank. It was more than a cool piece of outerwear. It was designed for outer space. “However advanced we become, the human body needs rest and sleep in order to function at a high level, and this will become even more critical as we travel off our planet,” Vollebak’s website offered. “But when you’re trapped in an →

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The astronauts are going to start in the desert in New Mexico. Then out in space it’s going to cool down quickly. You’re going to see temperature fluctuations of 70–80°F inside the ship.” Nasa’s photographs of its Sixties spacemen are among the most seen photographs ever. Under Armour is well aware of the potential commercial impact. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” says Dean. “We’ve created what we believe is the first commercial spacesuit.” Virgin Galactic’s astronauts will get to keep their suits, plus another practice suit and a bomber jacket — “a nice little goody bag”, as Dean says, and a reasonable perk for an outlay nudging £200k — while a limited line of “heavily influenced” Virgin Galactic-Under Armour gear will be available to Joe Public once the first flights lift off. None of this is intended for people colonising planets or going on spacewalks, though Under Armour isn’t ruling that out in the future.

“Richard and the team have long-term goals, and we would love to be the first consideration when they choose the next challenge. Just like the original Nasa programme to the moon, there were a lot of things learned,” says Dean. A successful spacesuit — there’s really no room for any other kind — needs to combine internal pressure, temperature regulation, radiation protection, oxygen supply and the elimination of carbon dioxide, with maximum mobility. “The spacesuit really is the greatest example of a piece of design,” Marc Newson, arguably the world’s foremost industrial designer, recently told Esquire. “It’s the ultimate expression of what designers do.” Newson had returned from Baikonur, in Kazakhstan, where the Russian Agency do their launches. (Yuri Gagarin took off from there.) He’d set himself the task of procuring a spacesuit on behalf of the Design Museum, an undertaking even harder than it sounds. Spacesuits are government property. (You won’t see →

Top: a Chanel catwalk show in Paris with a replica rocket centrepiece, March 2017. Right: Paco Rabanne completing an actress’s space-age costume on the set of 007 spoof Casino Royale, Elstree Studios, England, July 1966. Left: a rain poncho in ‘papery metallic calfskin’, £5,500, by Louis Vuitton, from 2019 Getty

environment you can’t control, sleeping can be hard. Long-haul flights, the International Space Station and the first flights bound for Mars are not designed for sleep.” Every day on the International Space Station, for example, residents witness 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets. Their circadian rhythm is in bits. Space tourism really is happening. Having been announced in 2008 then delayed in 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014 (twice), 2015 and 2017, Virgin Galactic is due to blast off this spring. Six hundred people in 60 counties have put down £62m to get on the reservation list, paying £195,000 for a suborbital flight that will give them four minutes of weightlessness. (Virgin’s backlog alone would double the number of people who have ever gone into space). Paddy Power has Branson 1/5 odds-on to beat Musk (6/1) and Jeff Bezos (12/1) in the new space race. As well as a strong stomach, the intrepid explorers will need something to wear. The job of kitting out Branson and his passengers has fallen to Under Amour, the American sports company noted for innovations like HeatGear and Recovery Sleepwear. Its spacesuit includes a “base layer” built of a compression fabric that regulates moisture and temperature with cushioning and padding that hugs the body, and multi-laminated footwear made of foam that moves and morphs with feet. With its “deep space” blue colourway, flashes of gold, Virgin Galactic decals and Sir Isaac Newton reference — “On the shoulders of giants” — it has more of the whiff of Galaxy Quest about it. Fair, given Branson’s Boys’ Own tendencies. “There was a look that the team wanted that gave a future vibe, a sense of aspiration and a sense of professionalism,” says Clay Dean, Under Armour’s chief innovations officer. “Even though we already had a lot of the technologies, we had to work out a way to configure them.

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A mash-up of a wrestling boot and a running shoe, it uses a fire-resistant shell and a mesh that locks when the spacesuit inflates. Reebok is pitching it as “the first evolution in space footwear in 50 years”. It was made with the David Clark Company, involved first in aerospace, then spacesuit tech since the Thirties. “One of the things we wanted to address was weight,” says Bill McInnis, head of future at Reebok. “There’s an estimated $10,000 per pound when it comes to moving things from Earth into space. When you replace a 5lb pair of boots with a 2lb booted sneaker, you’re taking off $30,000 per astronaut, per flight.” Berlin-based luggage brand Horizn Studios has collaborated with the world’s youngest astronaut, Alyssa Carson, to develop a smart, carbon fibre suitcase for space tourism: an inbuilt screen will connect travellers to their families on Earth. Companies like Final Frontier Design, a start-up co-founded by a former Victoria’s Secret designer, have entered the fray to kit out passengers queueing up for lower-cost access to space promised by SpaceX, Blue Origin and XCOR Aerospace. One of its suits has adjustable metal parts made by 3D printing and custom-made gloves with moulded fingertips to operate touchscreens. Dr Nathan Smith, a research associate in psychology and security at the University of Manchester, who has worked with the European Space Agency and Nasa, envisages clothing with an extra role. “Objective stuff like radiation and microgravity, Nasa can already mitigate,” he says. “But the psychological and social aspect of being isolated and confined and then separated is really hard. One of the things we’re

Above: Under Armour’s spacesuit designed for passengers on Virgin Galactic missions. Below: Reebok’s Floatride space boot for ISS crew. Bottom: Vollebak’s Mars-bound jacket/deep sleep cocoon

toying with is: can you create sensory clothing that replicates something back on Earth? If you wore a favourite shirt to a memorable event, can you recreate it to give people that connection?” “Clothes are going to be asked to do far more in the future,” Tidball says. “They’re going to become your doctor, your source of comfort, food and air systems. Traditionally on Earth, we haven’t asked clothes to do an awful lot. They give us status and warmth. But the human body isn’t supposed to be in space. It’s the most lethal environment known to man. Status, and whether something is red or blue, are going to play almost no part whatsoever. If we stick the human body in a metal box and send it on a mission for 500 days, 2,000 days, what’s going to happen? The really interesting question is: can clothes help it adapt?” ○

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a Nasa spacesuit for sale.) For a time, Newson’s eventually successful Soviet acquisition sat in Terence Conran’s private collection at the museum, before he and Apple’s Jony Ive jointly auctioned it off for charity at Sotheby’s. The reserve price was $75,000. It fetched $305,000. Spacesuits may be exemplars of technical engineering, but that’s not their main appeal. They sum up everything exciting about the great beyond: adventure, exploration, futurism, exclusivity, progress, danger. “The spacesuit is one of the coolest things ever built, but no one started out saying, ‘Let’s build the coolest thing we can build’,” says Vollebak co-founder Steve Tidball. “It was, ‘Let’s keep people alive when they’re 90,000 miles above Earth, and maybe doing a Space Station walk’. It just happened to look cool as shit because it’s made of Beta Cloth, which is a 12layered material made out of glass and Kevlar.” The fashion industry has had the hots for space since forever. In the Sixties, designers André Courrèges, Pierre Cardin and Paco Rabanne inspired Jane Fonda’s Barbarella costume with their penchant for unnatural materials (plastic, metal). In 2017, Karl Lagerfeld docked a rocket ship under the Grand Palais in Paris for his Chanel show — it “blasted off ” at the finale. Last year, Virgil Abloh closed his first Louis Vuitton collection with a model in a space poncho, silvery tote at hip height, the way astronauts carry helmets in slow-mo in the movies. Elsewhere, Reebok has developed its Floatride Space Boot SB-01 for astronauts aboard the Boeing CST-100 Starliner, which took off (unmanned) last December, its primary purpose to transport crew to the International Space Station.

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Pet-à-porter The Milanese designer putting canines on the catwalk

Designer doggy gear is not new: Ralph Lauren, Moschino, Moncler, Barbour and Marc Jacobs (with it’s unofficial tribute Bark Jacobs) have dabbled in four-legged fashions for years. But none has done it with the panache of Temellini, which makes seasonal collections of cashmere and merino wool dog coats and romper suits, cut around breed-specific mannequins, costing up to €550. Pooches can come in for personal fittings. Their owners may select an outfit to match. Perhaps a Big Sherlock Coat (€375) in dove grey for Fido, and some matching track pants (€210) for sir? Temellini is based, naturally, in Milan. Founded by Giovanna Temellini, formerly of Armani and Bottega Veneta, the project started when Temellini’s daughter, Nadia, telephoned concerning her half-Labrador, half-Akita. “Mummy,” she said, “the rain keeps getting in Willy’s ears.” Temellini immediately set to work on a bespoke hooded coat, designing it to match her daughter’s jacket. Temellini Milano Dog-à-Porter was born. Temellini is at pains to point out that this is in no way pampering. “Greyhounds are often cold because they have a lot of muscles but not much fat,” she says. “Dogs have particular needs. I come from the luxury world so it was a natural transition to apply this aspect. If I wear cashmere myself, I don’t see why not put it on the dog?” What’s more, breeds that originated in colder climes now live in heated houses, and vice versa. “They need a level of comfort,” Temellini says. Difficult customers are rare: no breed harder than another. “We have 40 [off-the-peg] sizes,” she says. “From the chihuahua to the Dobermann pinscher, I have devised a very comprehensive system.” As for the issue of outfitting owners to match their pets, Temellini says, “It is not intended to make the dogs seem like dolls, or kids.” Quite right. Though the old adage of dogs looking like their owners can never have rung more true. ○

Right: Labrador-Akita crossbreed Willy, whose owner is the daughter of designer Giovanna Temellini, models a coat from the brand’s AW ’19 collection

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The coolest shop in Paris lies on a sleepy corner in Le Marais, next to a primary school. When I visited, fashion pilgrims in oversized coats and billowing trousers were sitting at outside tables, sipping espressos from the in-house café. A window display featured work from US artist-turned-fashion designer Sterling Ruby, a hypebeast favourite whose clothes can sell for thousands of euros. There is no sign bearing the shop’s name, but if you crouch and squint you might make out the words “The Broken Arm” stamped in black in a neat font on the shopfront’s polished glass.

The Broken Arm is owned by married couple Anaïs Lafarge and Romain Joste with their friend Guillaume Steinmetz. They borrowed the name, for reasons that remain obscure, from a work by Marcel Duchamp, in which the French conceptual artist hung a snow shovel from a ceiling and called it “In Advance of the Broken Arm”. “It just made sense to us,” Steinmetz says, over a glass of chilled Evian. Explanation over. It doesn’t lack for snooty Parisian pretension, then. But neither does it lack for desirable clothes: The Broken Arm stocks brands you’ll

Les Tastemakers Seven years in, a highbrow Paris concept store is still way ahead of the game Words and photograph by Finlay Renwick

know, including Prada, Raf Simons and Nike with plenty you likely won’t, from Collapsing Market and GR10K to Hospital Production. Since opening in 2012, its owners have gained a reputation for correctly predicting what, exactly, will be hot very soon in the increasingly difficult-to-predict world of what, exactly, will be hot very soon. “Raf [Simons] was the first brand we approached and he said yes very quickly,” says Steinmetz. “Prada, Comme Des Garçons, Phoebe [Philo] — when she was still at Céline — they all came onboard quickly. We found [French sensation, Simon Porte] Jacquemus on his first season and [Russian sportswear savant] Gosha Rubchinskiy when he was just making T-shirts. “It’s like when you cook, it’s a mix of things,” he says, making a whisking motion with his hand, leaning closer to emphasise the importance of maintaining an eclectic collection of designers. “If you have the best foie gras, the best caviar, that’s a good start, but it’s not just about the ingredients.” “They are definitely one of, if not the, most credible and influential retailer on the scene right now,” says Alvaro Moreno de la Cruz, senior sales manager at Asics, whose trainers are stocked in the shop. “There’s a thought process behind everything in the store. It’s not only about highend stuff. It has up and coming and unexpected brands that are totally unique to them.” Inside the shop, the feeling is of a fancy, independent gallery colonised by a bohemian aunt. Highly-desirable trainers are tucked under old wooden benches. There are green velvet sofas, vintage lamps, creaky floorboards, obscure art books and new-season Prada items sitting alongside technical hiking trainers by Salomon. Many other shops now stock that brand’s zip-lock mountain runners, but The Broken Arm set the trend and it now works with Salomon on an exclusive design each season. “What makes the partnership so successful,” says Salomon fashion programme manager JeanPhilippe Lalonde, “is that The Broken Arm’s team is able to re-contextualise our products, all the while retaining the true essence of what makes it Salomon.” “We don’t know how to make clothes,” Steinmetz shrugs, “but we do know how to sell them.” ○ the-broken-arm.com

Left: chunky knitwear and jackets by Sterling Ruby at The Broken Arm, 12 Rue Perrée, 75003 Paris, France

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“This is 5,000-year-old oak that’s been in a swamp in Cambridgeshire,” explains James Ross-Harris, co-founder of South London knifemaker Blenheim Forge. He’s brandishing a dusty plank of wood. “It’s been petrified by all the minerals and salts. We use that for handles, it comes out really nicely.” Blenheim Forge, where Ross-Harris and his bladesmiths meld raw metals via brute force and extreme heat, is nestled in an arch beneath the track running into Peckham Rye train station. It’s just how you imagine a forge to smell, sound and look. Viking-like men in weathered boots and jeans hammer and grind in the dark space, which has the odour of a working garage. Their work is punctuated by the occasional flare of hot metal or the spark of a blade on a spinning stone. “Dickensian” is doubtless the word. The company, founded five years ago, produces between 30 and 40 knives monthly in

Cutting edge In south London, a cult is forged By Charlie Teasdale

traditional Japanese shapes. Everything is made by hand, and the resulting knives have a grizzled, ornate toughness that speaks to their time in the crucible. The wavy layers of metal are polished to the surface for an extra burly aesthetic. There are seven kitchen knives in the core range, which starts at £170, and all serve a slightly different purpose, such as a Nakiri vegetable knife, or a Gyuto slicer. There are also limited editions, which run close to £1,000 and sell out in minutes. Blenheim Forge is now a cult brand with fans in the US and Norway, and its sales have doubled in the past year. “When we started, it was us and a company called Blok, up in Derby,” says Ross-Harris. “We started around the same time, but since then it’s a much more familiar concept. When we started, people were like, ‘What do you mean you made the knife?’. That wasn’t a thing.” Now there are others, such as Savernake in Wiltshire and Ferraby in Sheffield, but few are as “vertical” as Blenheim Forge. It even makes its own motor-driven sharpening wheels. (Most bladesmiths use belt sanders, but the stone method, copied from the Japanese, is more efficient. It’s especially badass, too.) Ross-Harris foresees the company “chilling out a bit” in 2020. “It’s just about making sure the quality stays where it is,” he explains. “We get hundreds of requests from people to work for us, but it’s hard to train people up. A lot of people think they’re just going to walk in, pick up a hammer and start pounding some steel. But it doesn’t really work like that.” ○ Santoku Knife, £300, by Blenheim Forge; blenheimforge.com

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Painting the town The hottest ticket at Frieze Los Angeles, Nicolas Party has multiple reasons to celebrate By Amah-Rose Abrams Portrait by Jef Claes

Above: Nicolas Party photographed for Esquire at Hauser & Wirth art gallery, Los Angeles, California, November 2019

At the risk of ignoring the opportunity for an obvious gag, life is going very well for Swiss artist Nicolas Party right now. Not yet 40, Party and his art are making headlines at auctions, he has been picked up by one of the world’s most powerful galleries and he has moved into a stunning studio space in New York in which to prepare for a show certain to be one of the most talked about during the Frieze Los Angeles art fair this month.

“Before… I’d get a little review here and there,” says Party, down-to-earth and friendly, as light pours in through the studio windows of his Brooklyn workspace. “Then with the prices it becomes interesting for a wider audience.” The phenomenon to which Party modestly refers is that, despite having been a successful and well-liked presence on the global art scene for a few years, in the last 12 months the value of his work has rocketed.

This year it fetched a collective total of $1.6m (£1.22m) at auction, forcing market experts and collectors to take note. It’s easy to see why his output has attracted attention. Party favours vibrant colours and painted landscapes populated with otherworldly ﬁgures and plants, as visitors to his recent show at the Brussels gallery Xavier Hufkens could attest. There, the walls — which he often builds himself, and paints in intense hues — were covered

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‘It won’t be very LA’: Party’s debut show for Hauser & Wirth, his ﬁrst Los Angeles solo exhibition, combines vivid hues with installations, murals and sculpture

in fleshy forms decorated with butterflies and other insects. The effect was irresistible. Party grew up and studied in Lausanne, Switzerland, and dabbled in graffiti as a teenager, but it was during his MA in Glasgow that his interest in playing with “volumes and flatness” started to develop. “I did a lot of 3D animation and rendering on the computer,” he says. “I was used to drawing and all that kind of classic stuff, so it was totally new for me and I have a great amount of fun doing it.” Plus, he says, it’s what portraits have become in the modern age: “It’s how we see faces and humans, through all the apps.” Artforum magazine recently described Party as moving “through the genres of portraiture, landscape and still life, keeping each categorically distinct, and keeping it all contemporary by borrowing art-historical styles with postinternet abandon.” The “post-internet” tag has followed him but, he points out, it’s a somewhat broad term. “Basically, the way I’m consuming an image or an artwork is through the internet,” he says. “Whatever you do now, even if it’s the most classical pastiche of an 18th-century painting, it’s post-internet.” On a more traditional note, the Belgian Surrealists, including René Magritte, are an obvious source of inspiration to Party, who had been based in Brussels before his recent move to New York; so, too, is the Belgian Symbolist painter Léon Spilliaert. But there are other influences as well: “I’m a big fan of Tintin,” he says. “In Belgium, there’s definitely a sense of seeing the world with a little twist of humour — a shift in what is real and what is not.” Lately, Party says, he’s been inspired by the lesser-known Dutch masters including Otto Marseus van Schrieck, who kept a space filled with snakes, insects and plants. “It won’t be very LA,” he said, wryly, of his upcoming debut show for super-gallery Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. As for the fuss currently surrounding him, Party pays as little attention as he can. “What gives me a thrill is trying to go to new territories,” he says. “When you go into the studio you want to have that moment when you don’t really know where you’re going and it’s extremely exciting.” Also, he’s got plenty to do. “Basically,” he admits, “I don’t have much headspace for anything else.” ○ Nicolas Party, 13 February to 12 April, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, CA 90013, USA; hauserwirth.com

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Meet the new Ron Not the same as the old Rons By Alex Bilmes Photograph by Sam Hofman

The tiny, mountainous, Central American republic of Guatemala has long been known, among serious drinkers, as one of the world’s most fertile sources of rum, most famously Ron Zacapa, as well as a number of other Rons. (It means “rum”, in Spanish. It’s not the Christian name of a third division football manager.) Traditionally distilled from fermented virgin sugarcane syrup, rather than molasses, Guatemalan rum is stored in upright

barrels, at high altitude, so the ageing process is slow, and the result dangerously moreish. Lately, a new name in rons has begun to be whispered among aficionados. Aluna Coconut blends Guatemalan rum with classic Caribbean examples for an exceptionally elegant, well balanced finish. The Guatemala rum is made with first-press sugarcane fermented with yeast from the pineapple plant, creating a light, floral, clean spirit. Aluna uses sustainably

sourced coconut water and all-natural toasted coconut ﬂavours. Better yet, it is strikingly low in sugar. (The very sweet-toothed might add a squeeze of agave syrup to their glasses.) Aluna works in cocktails — coladas, mojitos — but, unusually for a white rum, at Esquire we take ours on its own, and on the rocks (frozen coconut water optional). And no need to go to Central America to fetch it. It’s sold in Waitrose. ○ £24.95/70cl; alunacoconut.com

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83 A growing trend: horticultureinspired menswear by Fendi, Louis Vuitton and Alexander McQueen

Spring greens This season, menswear labels get back to the garden By Charlie Teasdale

In June last year, in the gardens of Milan’s Villa Reale, Silvia Venturini Fendi, of the fabled Roman fashion house, made gardening cool. Wholesome types might argue that it has always been cool — but Ms Fendi made an audience beyond that for Gardeners’ Question Time want to spend big on duck boots and pruning gloves. Her spring/summer 2020 collection took men “out of the virtual space and of the overwhelming immateriality that is so pervasive in the life of today”, according to the press release, and locked them instead in the potting shed. Alongside the gloves and boots there were boxy seed bags, dungarees, raffia sacks, ﬂoppy sun hats with beekeeper netting and even a watering-can bag. A graphic motif that runs through the collection has been created by director and friend of the brand, Luca Guadagnino, who at the time was

— and still is — basking in the critical afterglow of Call Me by Your Name. That film brought verdant abundance, flora, fauna and the sexual potential of ripe fruit to the front of stylish minds, and Ms Fendi capitalised on it. Though she may have pushed the seed packet further than the rest, countless other designers have also dabbled. Simon Porte Jacquemus set his show in a lavender field in Provence, and even gave some models visible “farmer” tans (although they may have been actual farmers). There were flowers in abundance at the men’s shows of Louis Vuitton, Versace and Givenchy, while Dries Van Noten, Dolce & Gabbana and Alexander McQueen all garlanded petals across their respective collections. As a fashion foil to the age of toxic masculinity, florals, it transpires, are groundbreaking. Last year, green fingers were further green-lit

by Adidas, when it unveiled its “Gardening Pack”. Inspired by “lawn-based activities”, the capsule collection featured pocket-heavy tabards, zip-off trousers and chunky sandals. In a stroke of genius, Alan Titchmarsh fronted the campaign. Presumably Monty Don was unavailable. Recently, Bruton, the town in Somerset which has emerged as the epicentre of wholesome luxury, welcomed an outpost of Shoreditch institution Labour And Wait, the one-stop shop for all things tactile: Bronze Age pails, enamel overcoats, hobnail cutlery. Dalston in northeast London is now home to Prick, the city’s ﬁrst cacti and succulent-only shop. And that’s all the key demographics covered — fashionistas, hypebeasts, hipsters and bohemian gentry — so best just give in now and put your name down for an allotment. ○

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Holy grille Has Aston Martin done the miraculous and made a good-looking SUV? By Will Hersey Photographs by Chris Leah

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Is it possible to make an SUV beautiful? On the evidence so far that’s quite a simple question to answer. Nearly all of the world’s most glamorous car makers have entered the fray, producing shapes that in a good mood and with a fair wind might be called muscular or imposing, but more accurately have been compared to a London taxi. So we’d started to question if it was a pipe dream. They’re big and high and need all that space for dogs, children and hand-crafted picnic hampers after all, so maybe expecting them to look nice as well was being churlish. And anyway, where was the incentive? They still sell in eye-watering numbers — 29m globally in 2018 — so who cares what they look like? But with Aston Martin — maker, arguably, of the best-looking cars on the road — still to play its hand, there was hope. And for the marque, following a torrid share-price drop since going public, there was opportunity. An open aluminium door in fact. And, thank god, they have waltzed right through it. →

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It turns out Aston hallmarks like those broad haunches and dominant grille translate naturally into an SUV So how has its chief creative officer, Marek Reichman, done it? Normally, if you ask a car designer this question you’ll soon run out of ﬁngers for how many times they use the words “lines” and “silhouette”. Reichman, however, is keen to give the engineers the credit. “From the early stages, I was insistent that we create our own platform,” he says. “There are always opportunities to look at shared platforms, but it was about creating our own language and our own platform, and that generates the beauty.” Every other premium SUV on the market currently shares its platform with other cars in its group — BMW with Rolls-Royce, Volkswagen with Audi and Porsche et cetera — so this

makes Aston the ﬁrst luxury marque to build a bespoke engineering base on which to design its perfect SUV. Anything else is compromise. “I always talk about beauty coming through proportion: the length of the hood versus the length of the cabin, the height of the glass versus the height of the door, the wheelbase versus the overall length of the car, so [having our own platform] was really important,” says Reichman. With this in place, and moving on from the word “platform” once and for all, Reichman says the DBX was a relatively straightforward car to design; the ﬁnished product not veering too far from his initial sketches. It turns out Aston hallmarks like those broad haunches and

dominant grille translate naturally into an SUV. It’s fair to say that the one area in which Aston needed to up its game was the cabin interior, where the bar in this ﬁeld has become dauntingly high. But then the advantage to being late to the SUV party is knowing what customers want and expect in every market, and Aston did its groundwork, including the formation of a women’s consulting board and strategically announcing the car in China and Los Angeles simultaneously. It’s a grown-up project that has produced a car that scores heavily in the want stakes. That it has best-in-class headroom and rear luggage space is a surprise. That it looks as good as it does feels like a miracle. ○

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Turning back time Forties’ elegance chimes with contemporary style By Johnny Davis Photograph by Sebastian Lager

For a business whose whole raison d’être is time, the watch world can take an age to clock what its customers want. As brands go bigger and ﬂashier, the mood among men (certainly at Esquire) is for smaller, classier, more elegant watches that look great and tell the time simply and clearly. (Is it a coincidence the vintage watch market, largely devoid of whistles and bells, is doing so well? We’re going to say no, it is not.) Three cheers then for Longines and its Heritage Classic line, introduced last year. A smart, vintage-inspired, time-only model in brushed steel, the original Heritage Classic had a silver-tone dial, black indices and blued steel hands. There was no self-conscious attempt at looking “old” — it looked classic. In March, Longines revisits its Heritage Classic Chronograph 1946, a watch it made in the Forties. It adds two chronograph counters (cutting-edge back then) and italic “dolphin”style numerals, but otherwise continues down the road of understatement and elegance. Other styles of watch are available. But for now, Longines has our attention. ○

Stainless steel 40mm Heritage Classic Chronograph 1946, £2,490, by Longines; ernestjones.co.uk

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Right and below: clothing and accessories by South African surfwear label Mami Wata

Talk of the Cape Town A trio of new brands is increasing the South African city’s style credentials By Charlie Teasdale

It’s immediately clear, on meeting Jasper Eales on an overcast November day in London, that the co-founder of accessories brand Sealand spends most of his time in a far sunnier place. The South African is buoyant, eager and optimistic, mirroring the vibe emanating from his burgeoning company: Sealand makes bags (messengers, holdalls, totes, pouches etc) from materials that are given a second life, having served their original purpose. Advertising banners, for example, or yacht sails, or even “Bedouin stretch tents”, which you’ll normally find in the earthier corners of music festivals. It means the interior of a bag could be printed with a sailing sponsor, or an ad for house paint, making each bag’s innards unique. It’s not just because the super-tough, weather-resistant materials are perfect (way overqualified, actually) for making bags, and not just because it upcycles waste products that would otherwise be thrown away, but because it is helping to re-energise a dwindling community of skilled makers in Cape Town. “South Africa, and specifically Cape Town, was a massive global hub for CMT (cut, make and trim) work,” Eales says, “but with the rise of Chinese manufacture, that industry completely died. So, there was a huge group of people that were →

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really skilled but were unemployed.” Sealand bags are handmade by one person from start to ﬁnish and each is labelled with the name of its maker. Now stocked by Mr Porter, END and Liberty, the young brand’s accessories have come to market at the right time, as demand grows for products with ethics, integrity and a transparent production process. Further local disenfranchised CMT workers may well have ended up at Mami Wata. This surf clothing company, which looks to wrest some of the bodacious mystique from Hawaii, Australia and California, designs and manufactures everything it makes in Cape Town. Creative director and artist Peet Pienaar is known for his exploded typography and rich, high-contrast colour, so beyond the short-sleeved shirts, board shorts and playful jersey sweats, there are surfboards and prints with multicoloured chequerboard or chevron motifs. A trio of well-intentioned Cape Town menswear brands is completed with the pleasingly named Good Good Good. Streetwear, of sorts, in the same oversized, functional, ﬂoaty vein as Craig Green and YMC, the SS ’20 collection features patchwork Bengal-stripe shirts and matching printed jacket and trousers combos, the best of which are those in a three-part capsule collection made in partnership with local skate collective, Faux Pas, and adorned with Larry David, Alan Partridge and David Brent heads. Some things you don’t know you want until you see them on Instagram, eh? “Cape Town is a very creative place,” Eales says. “It’s a very small place, as well. I would say there’s not a big fashion scene, but there are brands doing cool things. There’s very much a focus on building business for good.” ○

Clockwise from top left: one of Sealand’s skilled workers with its ecoconscious bags made from upcycled waste; inside the brand’s De Waterkant store in Cape Town; a look from Good Good Good’s SS ’20 collection featuring fabric from South African textile mill Mungo; the Alan Partridge print shirt, also by Good Good Good

Lucky If Sharp | See Stockists page for details

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A signature sound Montblanc unwraps luxury headphones By Johnny Davis Photograph by Benjamin Vigliotta

There’s nothing wrong with luxury brands having broad appeal. The best manage to pull off the trick of attracting a hip new customer base without frightening off established clients. The hypebeasts queue for the latest trainer launch; elder statesmen await the delivery of monogrammed luggage in well-heeled quietude. In this way, our most storied brands evolve and survive. Still, there may be few luxury brands producing high-end products that appeal to as wide a sector of the luxury market as Montblanc. It is, and will continue to be, best known for

pens. Its stylised, snowcapped writing instruments with rounded edges speak of history, of taste and of success. They’re also really nice to write with. Not long ago, Montblanc expanded its focus from selling pens to selling elegance. It started producing watches, leather goods and jewellery, working closely with expert craftspeople and suppliers in those ﬁelds. In 2014, it introduced a digital screen writer. In 2016 came Augmented Paper, an ingenious gadget that allowed you to swap notes and sketches from

your Montblanc notebook onto your phone. For 2020, it unveils its MB H1 headphones: wireless, noise-cancelling, lightweight, foldable leather cans that cry out to be stroked, foldedup and carried. Designed in collaboration with Niklas Galler, co-founder of Berlin-based agency nr21 Design, Alex Rosson, co-founder of fancy audiophile brand Audeze, and Google, they are a serious piece of kit. As a symbol of elegance and ﬁne craftsmanship, they are completely new — and unambiguously Montblanc. ○ $600; montblanc.com

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Jeans by Esquire x Hawksmill, £145

Socks by Esquire x The Workers Club, £20

The Esquire Edit 2019

Trainers by Esquire x Grenson, £195

Beanie by Esquire x Lock & Co, £195

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Designed in partnership with the Esquire team, the Esquire Edit is a capsule collection of special-edition wardrobe staples, made in collaboration with 10 of the best brands in menswear. For more information and to purchase, visit esquire.co.uk

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Holdall by Esquire x Bennett Winch, £650

Cufflinks by Esquire x Alice Made This, £190

Shirt by Esquire x Turnbull & Asser, £195

Jacket by Esquire x Belstaff, £450

Cardholder by Esquire x William & Son, £80

Shoes by Esquire x Crockett & Jones, £420

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NOTES, ESSAYS AND PROVOCATIONS

JOURNAL CONTEMPLATION

HOT RIGHT NOW Tim Lewis

efore you meet Tom Ford, it’s hard not to fritz just a little over everything you’ve heard about Tom Ford. That you have to address him only and always as “Mr Ford”, for example. Or that he has two states of dress: naked (his preference at home) or immaculately turned out, habitually in a black, two-piece suit. That he is repelled by hot drinks, the smell of food in his office, and that he once sent home an employee for wearing three-quarter-length trousers, which if it’s not true certainly should be. But the story about Ford that really confused and unsettled me was that he took five baths every day. That last one had to be apocryphal, right? Even if you had nothing else to do, the logistical headache of taking five baths in one day is an absurd, indulgent, Bertie Woosterian endeavour. And Ford very much doesn’t have nothing to do. When I met him, in 2016, he had just finished

Samuel Goldwyn Films/LMK

Hollywood scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo produced his ﬁnest work in the bath

→

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directing Nocturnal Animals, his brilliantly creepy psychological thriller. He combines film work with overseeing multiple men’s and women’s collections every year. He has a youngish son he’s clearly besotted with. I couldn’t see how five baths fitted into that schedule. “Oh, I can explain that,” Ford replied breezily, his Texan drawl languid and honeyed. And he did. Five does happen — when he’s really frazzled or overwhelmed — but the standard is three. He doesn’t sleep well, so he’s already in and out of the tub before anyone else in the Ford household wakes up. He has another bath at the end of the working day: “Because I can’t be good at a dinner — meaning be interesting and charming and be interested and listen to someone — unless I wash away the day.” Then there’s always a deep soak at the day’s end. “That’s meditation for me,” Ford said. “You have to give yourself space to think, otherwise you’re just busy saying, ‘Oh God, what movie should we see tonight?’ ‘I’ve got to go to a party, what the hell am I going to wear?’ ‘Oh shit, did I pay that bill?’ So for me, those baths are the times to back up and say, ‘Hang on… what am I worrying about that for?’” Ford being Ford, he went further: why would you needlessly self-sabotage your life, your career, your relationships, even your sanity, by not taking at least one bath a day? Certainly, this was my takeaway from our exchange, though I can’t lie, I did have some reasons of my own for wanting to hear that message. I’m not in Ford’s league, but my girlfriend certainly would regard me as obsessive about bathing. The normal stuff that couples do — watching Line of Duty, arguing about whether they have to go out with their friends — are impossible because at around 9:30pm I’ll slink off to have a bath. On nights where I have to go out for whatever reason, even if I’m having an OK time, I know I’d prefer to fire up a Diptyque and lie in a psychotically, scaldingly hot bath with a glass of elderflower and Perrier, schvitzing away the annoyances of my children and slights from editors. Baths, and certainly multiple baths every day, are obviously a preposterous pastime. But there are clearly a lot of people who feel the same way. Gwyneth Paltrow has a nightly bath in pharmaceutical-standard Epsom salt: the classic, fizzy, scientifically nebulous magnesium mix. Mariah Carey considers the bath “my place of serenity”. There’s a legend that she only uses French mineral water, but she clarified recently that this was not true. Actually, her preference is cold milk. Certifiable genius Lin-Manuel Miranda, the

JOURNAL

Hamilton creator, has something close to a power bath: timer set for 15 minutes, podcast on, mostly warm with Epsom salt, but twice a week ice-cold. The comedian Joe Lycett was asked once if he’d ever consider going into politics and he replied, “No, I like baths too much.” I know what he means. Every so often, someone (out of admirable politeness) will enquire about whether I’m working on another book, perhaps a follow-up to the highest-selling book ever written on the Rwandan cycling team. And I always think, “No, I like baths too much.” Baths, though, are not just about relaxation: there is a strong, millennia-old link between bathing and creativity or problem-solving. The original eureka moment came in the third century BC when renowned scientist Archimedes of Syracuse solved a riddle posed to him by King Hiero II — about whether his gold crown had been cut with silver by a fraudulent goldsmith — while in the tub (gold, Archimedes figured, as he lowered himself into the water, would be denser). Agatha Christie came up with her most devilish plot twists in the bath, while Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter famed for Roman Holiday and Spartacus, was such a compulsive super-soaker that he set up his desk in the bath. He had his typewriter, a cushion for his upper back, tape and scissors for editing, a cup of coffee and the unfiltered cigarettes of which he smoked six packs a day. There’s actually some science here. Baths are meditative, solitary, the perfect environment for an uninterrupted stream of thought. They are places where your ego and internal critic don’t dominate. Alpha waves rip through your brain making unlikely associations that don’t occur to you when you are thinking more analytically (it’s called “fixation forgetting”). One study compared the ideas that emerged from a 90-minute office session versus an hour spent in the silence and darkness of a flotation chamber. The subjects rated themselves as less angry and more creative when they were suspended in a warm saline solution. I can’t claim I’ve ever had an especially good idea in the bath. I did think of the pitch for this article while in the tub, but that seems a stretch of both “idea” and “good”. Still, I’ve since learned that baths are clearly hot right now, boosted by both water-resistant technology and a culture that enshrines wellness and self-pampering. The new iPhone 11 can withstand 30 minutes underwater, the Kindle Paperwhite an hour. The New Yorker recently reported on “the rise of bathfluencers” on Instagram. These are gurus who concoct and share bath treatments for

whatever mood you want to inspire. Probably the leader in the ﬁeld, Deborah Hanekamp from Brooklyn, has even detailed a recipe for rescue dogs: a dash of sea salt, smokey quartz, purple rose petals, amethyst and rose quartz crystals. I have mixed feelings about baths becoming a thing. I’m certainly dubious about bespoke, candlelit soaks for dogs gaining traction. But really, ultimately, baths are fairly democratic and harmless as trends go: you just need a tub, water (still, sparkling or tap) and some time. It probably won’t lead to a life-changing brainwave, but maybe it will. As Tom Ford told me: “I don’t smoke. Some people go out and have a cigarette. I don’t drink, some people drink. I lie in a bath full of hot water.” And then he exhaled deeply, closed his eyes, and even the contemplation of a bath sent him to a happy place that I know well. ○

NIGHTLIFE

DEPOT Ed Caesar

party in a vast, disused railway depot in Manchester. Heavy rain outside. Nearly 10,000 people within. Light shows piercing pools of darkness. Legions of security guards watching for trouble that never comes. The music beating slower than many racing hearts. Young women in cycling shorts of every shade and skinny young men with their shirts off. Drops of sweat falling onto the crowd from the ceiling girders. And, standing in the middle of the throng, rapt: me. I wasn’t at a rave, exactly. The night was organised by The Warehouse Project, Mancunian club promoters who have been throwing huge and ambitious parties in the city’s post-industrial caverns since 2006. But the event was deﬁnitely rave-like. Whatever you want to call it, you might wonder what business I had spending my Friday night in a railway depot surrounded by kids half my age. I’ve asked myself the same question. I am a man approaching 40 with two small children, a serious

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Bill Bernstein courtesy The David Hill Gallery, London

‘Like an evangelical church: some ﬁre and brimstone, some joyful praise’

job, and an onerous mortgage. The short answer is I have fallen hard for house music, and that if you were to describe this period as a midlife crisis, you might not be entirely wrong. But a crisis betokening what, exactly? That’s the puzzle. Three summers ago, with my life in some turmoil, I went to Ibiza with my wife and friends. It was my ﬁrst time to the island. I was enamoured. We ate late, delicious, inordinately expensive lunches, which doubled as breakfast, and pedalled through swift hours in hot nightclubs, writhing among armies of the buff and the nearly naked. Our hangovers were addressed by laying horizontal under green-fringed parasols on the world’s most beautiful beaches, and by eating ice cream. It was bliss. Just before that trip, my taste in music had expanded exponentially. I’d long dismissed any music that you danced to as inherently boring. If the only purpose of the stuff was to make you move, I thought, how interesting could it be? There was something monstrous about those

people you sometimes met — often Dutch guys, I found — who talked excitedly about beats per minute, as if you could engineer emotions by grinding the tempo up or down a notch or two, like you were fixing the transmission on a car. But now? I wonder why I wasted so much of my life in ignorance. The problem is one of description. “Dance” or “electronic” or “techno” or “house” are about as useful generic catchalls as “classical”: they contain multitudes. And while there’s plenty of dance music I still find boring, there are large swathes I find as addictive and moving as any music I’ve ever listened to. (There’s a Cuban-American DJ and producer called Maceo Plex, for instance, who I believe might be a genius to rival Miles Davis.) Among the attractions of the music is a conflict at its heart. It’s made in studios, but it’s best experienced live, preferably with some enthusiastic and sweaty strangers. So that’s why I was in the railway depot. Or, at least, it’s one of the reasons. Headlining the night

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was Camelphat: a pair of Scousers, Dave Whelan and Mike Di Scala, who have been making music together since 2004, but recently experienced two years of vertiginous success. Their biggest hit has been “Cola”, which sounds like a kind of dissonant version of a Chicago house number from the Eighties. Its lyrics, which were written by Alexander “Elderbrook” Kotz, are unnerving. They appear to be about a girl whose drink has been spiked. “She sips the Coca Cola, she can’t tell the difference yet,” runs the refrain. Millions of people have thrown their hands in the air to “Cola”. The last time I checked, it had been played more than 150m times on Spotify. Something intriguing, and unsettling, is happening when a track like “Cola” breaks out of clubland and into the mainstream. What’s more, “Cola” sounds like “Hello Sunshine” compared to another of Camelphat’s best-known tracks, a re-mix of Au/Ra’s “Panic Room”. At the warehouse, the crowd’s reception to the opening chords of “Panic Room” was euphoric. The lyrics are terrifying: “Hell-raising, hair-raising, I’m ready for the worst, So frightening, face-whitening, fear that you can’t reverse, My phone has no signal, it’s making my skin crawl, the silence is so loud, The lights spark and ﬂicker with monsters much bigger than I can control now, Welcome to the panic room, where all your darkest fears are gonna come for you.” “Panic Room” is not a track that only wants to make you move, although it also does that. It is pitch black. I’m at a loss to understand its popularity, except to say that I like it very much too. The clash of the words and the roiling, propulsive arrangement, seems like an appropriate response to the complications of our current moment. We get the music we need. In the depot, such angst was more than balanced by many moments of uncomplicated and giddy fun. You will make many friends in Manchester if you play “Fools Gold” by The Stone Roses in the middle of your set, as Camelphat did. The attraction of the music, and these nights, is in the mixture of emotional colours. It’s like going to an evangelical church: some ﬁre and brimstone, some joyful praise. This, I recently realised, is the answer the music provides, the crisis it solves — for me, at least. It’s involving, and consuming. It offers you the chance to get outside of yourself. For a few elastic hours, you are released from the roles you spend the rest of your life playing: earner, colleague, husband, father. You become simply a celebrant in a strange ministry. ○ →

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JOURNAL

SPORT

THE NET RIPPLED Joe Dunthorne

lbert Camus was a goalkeeper, semi-pro. Agatha Christie was among the ﬁrst foreigners to surf Waikiki, cruising in on a 10ft board. Jack Kerouac, a running back, got into Columbia University on an American football scholarship. Virginia Woolf played cricket. So did Samuel Beckett. He was county level, known for his gritty defence. Norman Mailer had a tasty left hook and a boxing ring built in his barn. Ken Kesey was Oregon’s

most promising middleweight wrestler. It’s hard not to be amused by the thought of these great writers playing sport. As a culture, we still lean on the cliché that literary people should be pale, indoorsy, scribbling by candlelight as the infection spreads to our lungs. And similarly, there’s the understanding that anyone who can curl a 30-yard free kick into the top right corner must, by deﬁnition, be unable to write a poem. It’s not surprising, then, that young boys in particular — for whom football is the highest social currency — often turn away from reading and writing. This is part of the reason that, 15 years ago, a league of writers’ footballs teams was created. The idea was to show that you don’t have to choose between the mind and the body. You can be, all at once, a writer, a striker, a reader, a keeper. Which is a beautiful idea in theory. But there does remain the problem of ﬁnding writers who can actually play. A few weeks ago, I travelled to Vienna with the England Writers’ Football Team. Or it would be more accurate to say that I tried to travel to Vienna. Myself and two fellow writers had shown ourselves resolutely unable to transcend another common stereotype: that creative people lack basic skills of navigation and planning. We got on the wrong tube train

Albert Camus, front row left, goalkeeper for Racing Universitaire Algerios juniors, circa 1929

then we changed to the right one but missed our stop and then, when we did get to the airport, I didn’t have my passport. I was both an idiot and a cliché. I booked a replacement flight and arrived 12 hours later. I had missed dinner and drinks at a place called Centimeter, a bar themed around the metric system. I learned that the team had drunk two metres of beer, eaten two metres of curly blood sausage and two metres of lentil stew. There is probably a compound German word for the way I felt as they held out their phones and scrolled through the pictures. What’s the opposite of Fomo? Ramo: relief at missing out. The next morning, we were guided through Vienna by one of the Austrian team, a kind and witty novelist called Stefan Soder. He joked and smiled as he herded us on to the tram, helped us buy tickets. He smiled and joked as he showed us to our changing rooms. He put his arms round our shoulders and grinned for the joint team photo. And then, just as we were saying what a lovely man he was and how we would like to read his novel about four generations of one Alpine farming family, he pulled on his Austria shirt, wrapped a blue bandana around his head and became — at the exact moment that the referee blew his whistle — a monster. He spent the next 90 minutes screaming at us, hating us, his eyes burning holes in whoever dared to tackle him. “Get your hands off me!” he hissed, with genuine disgust, when I accidentally touched his shirt. To be fair to Stefan, he wasn’t the only player who had switched personality, Incredible Hulk-style. Our captain, Andrew Keatley, playwright and actor — known for his complex, delicate portrayals of modern men under pressure — was soon screaming: “You are the worst fucking referee I’ve ever seen.” This was when we were winning 5–1 and the game was basically over. Luckily for Andrew, the referee spoke no English. The best way to forgive the behaviour of Stefan and Andrew is to think they were working hard to undermine the stereotype of the quiet, sensitive writer. With their flamboyant obnoxiousness, they were fighting the good fight against cliché. They weren’t the only ones who transformed. All over the pitch, we were rapidly growing less likeable. One of the most interesting changes was in our goalkeeper, and football writer, Tomasz Mortimer. While listening to Andrew yell at the referee, Tom had wanted to say, “Calm down. We’re winning. What does it matter?” But then when Tom considered that question

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JOURNAL

more closely, he started to think that, really, what did any of this matter? Winning and losing were irrelevant once you realised that the white markings of a football pitch were pitiful attempts to force meaning upon a universe completely beyond our control or understanding. These kinds of thoughts can take hold of a goalkeeper who has no shots to save. Albert Camus probably came up with his best, bleakest ideas while standing alone between the sticks. As the game approached its ﬁnal minutes, there remained one key stereotype unchallenged. We had yet to prove that any of us were elite athletes. There had been cheap goals, clumsy tackles, pulled hamstrings, but no moments of transcendence. Step forward PJ, Liverpudlian writer of pitch-black short stories. He smashed in a screamer from 30 yards, the ball arrowing into the top right corner. It was an unprecedented moment of genuine grace. More importantly, his goal had been seen by the Under-17s squad from Wiener-Sport-Club, a third-tier Austrian football team who were waiting to use the pitch after us. I don’t want to stereotype those boys and say that none of them were already poets and novelists. Maybe some were. But by the time the net rippled, they must have been wondering what they could do to hit a ball so sweetly. The answer, of course: start writing. ○

EQUALITY

RUDE TO SAY NO Jeremy Langmead

arlier this year, aged 26 and 23 years respectively, both my sons ﬁnally entered full-time employment. Hallelujah. No more school fees, student rent or Nike sneakers to pay for. Gone were the days when I’d have to worry about them travelling on a bus alone or collect them from birthday parties; no more sitting at parent-teacher meetings where someone half my age would tell me

off for letting them come to school without regulation socks on; no more pretending I liked football. For the rest of my life I could focus on being (even more) extraordinarily selfish. Twenty-two years ago, when my wife and I separated, quite amicably, after six years of marriage and the two aforementioned children, we were still, at 32, relatively young. We had quite cleverly managed to marry, procreate and separate while most of our friends were still dropping Es in King’s Cross warehouses. I moved around the corner to a little flat of my own and was blissfully happy. The flat was always tidy and everything was always where I could find it. When the kids came to stay the night, I would stand next to them while they ate their supper, mini-Hoover in hand, ready to catch any crumbs they might drop onto the new, rather impractical, chocolate-brown sisal. It was around then that I decided to be gay. It wasn’t just the clean and tidy flat that led to my new life as a gay — there was the little fact that I liked sleeping with men, of course — but there was also the added bonus that I would never have to remarry or have more children. The two I had were just perfect; no more required, thank you. My new life as a gay would, I realised, protect me from all sorts of domestic inconveniences and emotional conundrums. It meant, for example, that I didn’t need to bother with a divorce unless my ex-wife wanted one, and she didn’t seem in a hurry. And so I found myself both married and gay; the perfect combination for a commitment-phobe. I dated a few blokes over the years and enjoyed their company. Fortunately, the size of my bachelor pad — I moved a few times but always made sure the square footage remained tight — stopped any of them imagining it could ever comfortably accommodate two for longer than a weekend (sometimes ideally not even past breakfast). But then, after 10 carefree years, I unintentionally met someone I liked more than the others, and it soon morphed into a proper relationship. I even said, “Yes” when, after 12 months, Simon suggested he move into my tiny flat. With a dog. My new-found generosity of spirit knew no bounds. In preparation for his arrival, I cleared a shelf of sweaters in the wardrobe, emptied a drawer of socks, and removed eight jackets from coat hangers so that he could use them instead. Not only that, I removed some wedding photographs from the bookshelf next to the bed so that he could put some pictures of his family on display. The day he actually moved in was an

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uncomfortable one. Simon had more stuff than I’d imagined. His clothes didn’t all ﬁt on one shelf and he’d brought a few pieces of furniture with him. I waited 24 hours and quietly removed those to the safety of the underpavement storage unit next to the bins outside the front door. After a bit of argy-bargy, life together settled into a happy, if squashy, routine. In fact, all was good until that fateful day in July 2013 when legislation was passed to allow samesex marriage in England and Wales. Initially, I welcomed the fact that gay men and women would be treated equally; it had been a long time coming and many had fought hard to see this day happen. But then slowly it dawned on me, and alarmingly I could see it was dawning on Simon, that these wonderful and enlightened times meant there was no reason why we shouldn’t marry, too. I kept quiet. One New Year’s Eve, when a group of us renting a house in the Cotswolds started throwing Chinese lanterns into the clear night sky, Simon gave me one to release. “No, you’re all right,” I said, “you do it.” He insisted I took hold of it. I did so and quickly threw it up in the air so that I could go and get another drink. “Didn’t you see the message on it?” he asked. “No,” I replied. “It said, ‘Will you marry me?’” It seemed rude to say no, especially with the rest of the party all watching, and so I unexpectedly found myself engaged to a man. Simon wanted to plan a big wedding with all our friends and relatives in attendance. Funnily enough, I didn’t. I’d had one of those already and still needed to ﬁnalise my divorce from my ex-wife. She and I were both a little put-out by this unplanned inconvenience. Eventually, after he’d met some of my family, he agreed to have a small, low-key wedding for only 15 close relatives instead. But there were more surprises in store. It wasn’t long before gay equality dealt me another cruel blow. A number of Simon’s gay friends started having children through surrogates, adoption, or IVF with single female friends. And one weekend, Simon predictably mentioned that he, too, craved his own child. Apparently he always had. “You can have one of mine,” I offered, helpfully. But he wanted one of his own. It’s a hard issue to compromise on: you can’t really have half a baby. After months of negotiating, I suggested we adopt a Chinese baby. I already knew from research that it was nigh impossible if you were a) gay, and b) a recent divorcee. This strategy would at least buy me some time before Simon found out, too. →

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When he eventually discovered that a Chinese baby was a non-starter, I expressed immense disappointment and we left it at that. Or so I thought. Except Simon doesn’t like to give up... and so in April, despite my best efforts, he will become a father to his own child. He managed to ﬁnd a friend of his who, single and in her early forties, was desperate for a child, too. After two bouts of IVF treatment, it all fell into (her) place. To be fair, the plan they came up with took my feelings on the matter into account. The mother will be the primary carer, while Simon will have the baby for occasional weekends and holidays (Christmas and Instagram, I suggested). We all agreed I don’t have to be a second daddy; instead, I’ll just be “the grumpy man who lives with Daddy”. Obviously, we’ll have to see how this all works out in practice. So while it’s wondrous that this decade draws to a close with men and women, whatever their sexuality, being able to choose who they marry, even choose what gender they are, or become a parent by myriad different means, spare a thought for people like me. The innocent men and women who, through no fault of their own, ﬁnd themselves unintentionally having experienced marriage to women and to men. And even more surprisingly, having had children with both of them. Gay rights have set my own personal cause back by decades. ○

REGRETS

BANANA SKIN Will Self

he ﬁrst tattoo I had done was a puma’s head — and it was inscribed on my right shoulder. This simple statement hides a complex social reality: it was 1976, and although the punk revolution was about to rock British society to its crumbling foundations, the body modiﬁcations it would

Scottish tattoo artist John Liddel aka ‘Tattoo Jock’ (1920–’95)

bring with it were, as yet, rare as hens’ dental implants. I had my left ear pierced — and I knew a few other boys who’d also submitted to the stapler gun; but to have your right ear pierced was taboo, being a semi-covert sign of homosexual inclinations (it was less than a decade since same-sex relationships for men had been decriminalised), while to have both punctured looked like… opportunism. As for tattoos, there wasn’t a single one of my middle-class teenage friends who had one. Tattoos were déclassé — and tattoo parlours were seedy clip joints, hidden away in the scuzzy parts of town. To have a tattoo done would be, I thought, to take an irrevocable step away from the tedious, privet-lined precincts of my suburban childhood. After all, the hole in my ear would simply heal up if I took out the gold sleeper, whereas once the needle had injected the ink beneath my goose-pimpled dermis, there could be no going back: the puma’s head blazoned on my shoulder would be conﬁrmation that I held a rank in the war against tedious bourgeois conformity. At least that’s how I saw it at the time, aged 16, standing in Jock’s Tattoo Shop on Pentonville Road, while the traffic rumbled past the blacked-out shop front, and Jock himself stared belligerently at me from behind a rough wooden table covered with little pots of ink. I’d come

into King’s Cross with my mate John — we both had a fiver to spend, but the puma cost £6, and John being rather better-natured than me, he had two little stars done in outline, for £3, and lent me the balance I needed. Of course, I spent hours waiting for the thick scab to crumble and Jock’s masterwork to be revealed — and then I spent hours more, staring into the bathroom mirror while flexing my puny bicep. But I wasn’t satisfied: the puma’s head looked — in the idiom of the time — naff. It was obvious it had been done from a mass-produced stencil, rather than being the work of some virtuoso of the skin canvas, or — better still — a defiant design of my own. So, within the year, I was back at Jock’s, this time I asked him to do two crossed black flags on my right forearm — a much bigger and more prominent tattoo, and one that would clearly state my anarchist convictions, making it yet harder for me to revert to conventional type. Jock duly obliged, but once again, after the scab came off, I wasn’t happy with the results. The flags’ execution was a little wonky; and who can credibly advocate the overthrow of all governments when he has a cack-handed tattoo? I waited a couple of more years before my next tattoo. By then I was studying at Oxford: an anarchist majoring in hypocrisy. I went to a little tattoo parlour near the celebrated Magdalen

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Bridge and had the outline of a banana skin tattooed on my left wrist — I’d wanted it on the skin webbing between my thumb and forefinger, but this needle-wielder was legit enough to refuse such jailhouse locations. The idea behind the banana skin was twofold: firstly to mimic the little tattoos of swallows that had originally been favoured by sailors but which by the Seventies had become de rigueur in the British criminal classes; and secondly to remind myself, every time I looked at it, that people slip up in life. Not least when getting tattoo artists to do off-piste designs. It was Clement Greenberg who developed the art-critical view that works should be about the medium in which they’re executed; thus, paintings should be about paint, drawings about graphite, and so forth. My banana skin tattoo conformed to this paradigm by being more about bad tattooing than the role of the goddess Fortuna in human lives. It was so wonky it looked more like a stylised marijuana leaf — and now, some 40 years on, it resembles nothing so much as a clutch of shed human hair, loitering by a plughole. Still, at least it’s done its job all these years: reminding me of my many, many screw-ups, and now signalling that the end of them is considerably nigher. You might have thought that would’ve been the end for me and tattooing as well, but then haven’t I just told you about my propensity for repeating my mistakes? In the mid-Eighties, when I was beginning to work as a freelance journalist, I was offered a commission writing the text for a book of photographs of work by the emerging “new tribalist” school of tattooing and body-modification. I started hanging round one of these soi-disante artists and watching him inscribe large, monotone tattoos like armlets onto flesh gave me a bright little idea: I could have those unsatisfactory anarchist black flags finally covered up. I sketched a bold, constructivist-looking design on my right forearm in red and black, and the tattooist set to work with his thickest needle. For the past 30 years, I’ve been telling people that this angular, black-and-red glyph is “a detail of a Malevich” — but it’s nothing of the sort, just a rearguard action against the teenage naffness ever threatening to engulf me. Oh, and I got shot of the puma’s head as well, having it covered up by a tattooist in Notting Hill, with a parallelogram-shaped design intended to match the pseudo-Malevich on the same arm. This really was the end, though. I felt there was something iffy even as the needle was chomping its way through my flesh, and a day or so later the tattoo was badly infected. Instead of looking like a clean abstract shape, my

outer-right shoulder resembles a bit of decaying meat. Which I suppose it is, in a way. I blame myself for my own bad tattoos — and actually, I also blame myself for the great plethora of them I see nowadays everywhere I go. If I — together with a few others — hadn’t normalised tattooing and made it acceptable, all that beautiful young skin wouldn’t have been subjected to such aesthetic vandalism: the body-modifying equivalent of a tagger spraypainting a tube train. Do I regret my own tattoos? Yes, a bit — and whenever one of my four children has made “I-think-I-might-get-a-tattoo” noises, I always say this to them: “No one — repeat, no one — has ever woken up at the age of 40 and regretted that they don’t have a tattoo.” ○

ADVENTURE

INVASIVE SPECIES Miranda Collinge

here were eight of us signed up for the 10:30 Manchac Magic tour, “an awesome kayak and canoe tour through the historic Manchac swamp”, and we sat expectantly on our orange plastic, two-seater kayaks, bobbing like giant bath toys. It was a cold autumn day in Louisiana, though the sun was strong and the sky was, there’s no other word for it, blue. There was Spanish moss — tick! — draped over the limbs of the twisty cypress trees — tick! — and also over the branches of the stock-straight tupelos — tick! — and deﬁnitely no alligators — no tick! — as it was too cold for them, plus this was one of those tasteful, considerate tours which do not, unlike the airboats that do a brisk trade on other swamps that are also a comfortable drive’s distance from New Orleans, throw marshmallows into the water to make it worth the alligators’ while. A pecking order quickly emerged. Bringing up the rear: the wholesome couple from Denver,

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Colorado, who’d flown in for a wedding, their speed or lack thereof due largely to the guy-half of the couple spending a lot of time fiddling with complicated camera lenses and reducing their paddling power by (at least) 50 per cent. Next, Rachel, a twentysomething biologist from Tucson, Arizona, and our guide and minibus driver for the day, trying to gently chivvy the Denver couple along. Vying for middle spot: an attractive Dutch couple with whizzy jobs who’d flown in from New York for the weekend and were “practising intermittent fasting”, the lady-half told us while snacking on a muffin. Also in contention: my sister and me, who had found ourselves, for various reasons, with a spare weekend in New Orleans and a jones for the great Southern American outdoors, in which we were demonstrating irregular bursts of kayaking excellence swiftly followed by lapses of concentration that left us wedged in the sawgrass banks. Up ahead, way ahead, the two shaven-headed brothers in high-performance thermals with perfectly synchronised paddle technique from I’m not sure where because the primordial rules of group dynamics had dictated that they would be the pair that no one talked to. We stopped under a large cypress with a craggy stump of a branch sticking out at near90° from its side, maybe the result of a hurricane or a lightning strike, or both, said Rachel, and all that stopped that particular large cypress from being cut down by the European loggers who, in the 18th century, widened the bayou so they could float the trunks all the way to the Mississippi. Apparently, it was the Bayagoula Indians who first showed Europeans this secret route out to the Gulf of Mexico. In timehonoured tradition, the Europeans gave them smallpox in return and the Bayagoula were all but wiped out. And it was true there were no other large cypress trees either. With her kayak parked between the cypress’s stalagmite-like root formations, which stuck up, a little rudely, from the water, Rachel told us about the native vegetation and about the “knees”, which is apparently what those tree-stalagmites are called, and pointed out the edible plants — the heart of palm, something called “bull’s tongue” — which we could eat if we were desperate and not returning to New Orleans in a matter of hours to feast on tourist gumbo. She pointed out the plants that have come more recently: the bobbing water lettuces of South America and northern Africa which are now rife in the Gulf Coast and really do look like little lettuces, the fancy kind; salvinia minima, a small floating fern that →

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is crowding out the duckweed that is the staple diet of their namesakes (“Though, I don’t know,” said Rachel, “maybe in 200 years they’ll learn to eat it”); and the water hyacinth from Brazil, brought over for the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair because of its beautiful blossom, now carpeting the bayou with a tangle of meaty green leaves that block off the waterways completely in places so that we have to hack with our paddles and not so much glide between them as heave ourselves over.

Though Bayou Manchac is 18 miles long and reached out as far as our eyes could see, this particular stretch was unusually congested with other tourists on other kayaks, on other tours with other companies. Every half-hour we passed a returning group — sweaty men in shiny, synthetic shorts; couples in ﬂeeces clutching bags of trail mix; po-faced adolescent girls with centre-parted hair — and despite us being the only human beings anywhere around, and the fact that we were so close we could

‘Every half-hour we passed a returning group without acknowledgement. It was almost like being at home’

easily perform a paddle high-five, we behaved like commuters on a suburban railway platform and passed each other without acknowledgement. It was almost like being at home. Rachel stopped our group again to give us some key swamp trivia — did we know that Spanish moss is not, in fact, a moss but a bromeliad, and that it was used by Henry Ford to stuff the seat cushions of the Model T? (We did not!) — and she asked us to note the silvery colour of the bare tupelos, which, once she’d drawn our attention to it, was clearly closer to grey. “It’s winter,” she conceded, with a light laugh, “but they’re not doing too good!” Climate change has brought more hurricanes, she said, which cause the water to surge from the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, the Mississippi has been leveed once again, the flood defences that came down in Hurricane Katrina rebuilt, though it means the bayou gets no fresh water in the spring flooding. The salinity of the water has increased, she said, and the tupelos can’t cope. (I read later that the US Army Engineering Corps has said that the unprecedented speed of the rising sea levels could mean these new flood defences, completed to great fanfare, will be insufficient in four years.) It was time to go back to the minibus, our gumbo awaited, and we paddled back the way we had come, casting sideways glances at what we now understood to be dying tupelos — or perhaps they were already dead? — pulling over into the clumps of rampant water hyacinths to let the outbound tour groups pass. Soon we could hear the drone of the I-55 highway, which runs above the bayou on concrete pillars built right into the water. Rachel told us that she’s worked out she could take the 1-10, which also passes close by, from her place in New Orleans to her parents in Tucson, a 20hour drive, and only make seven turns. My sister pointed at the silent, shaven-headed brothers up ahead in a let’s-take-those-fuckers-down kind of way, but after a few paddle strokes the brothers, who were as ruthlessly efficient as ever and had no idea they were in a contest, were already out the other side of the I-55. We gave up and let ourselves drift into the shadow of the highway. It was clear we never stood a chance. ○

In next issue’s Journal: Max Olesker schvitzes, Mick Brown listens to YouTube, and Ed Caesar has a kebab.

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BAD Rami Malek won an Oscar for his Freddie Mercury. Now he’s taking on an even greater challenge, as James Bond’s mysterious nemesis in the forthcoming No Time to Die By Miranda Collinge Photographs by Dexter Navy Styling by James Sleaford

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Black micro-studded silk-satin shirt, Â£1,315, by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO

GUY

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Dark blue cupro trench coat, £1,800; grey geometric-print silk-blend double-breasted shirt, £1,250, both by GIORGIO ARMANI

IF THERE’S ONE THING WE KNOW ABOUT 007, it’s that he always gets his man. His target this time: Rami Malek, the 38-year-old star of longrunning Amazon Prime series Mr Robot, who knocked the entertainment industry’s socks off with his extraordinarily committed — and uncanny — performance as the late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in the 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. “Even before Bohemian Rhapsody he had a very, very good reputation,” says Daniel Craig, veteran of five Bond films including the forthcoming No Time to Die, which will be released in April. Along with the other Bond powers that be, including long-time producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, and No Time to Die director Cary Joji Fukunaga, Craig was on the hunt for a new villain to take on in his final outing as the world’s most high-profile secret agent. “When it came down to casting this part, you have a wish-list of people you want to play it, and he was at the top of the list,” Craig tells me. “We lucked out. He was free.” Malek himself wasn’t exactly under the radar — “He’d just won an Oscar,” as Craig points out — and it is easy to see the villainous potential in him. Apart from his reputation as a captivating actor, he has a remarkably versatile face: when he lowers his eyelids, his large, blue eyes look sleepy and cold; if he hollows his cheeks, his jaw juts and his cheekbones pop; he has a low, sonorous voice that he can flatten to a sinister monotone. (The cheekbones and jawline combo comes in handy at other times, too: Malek is currently the face of Saint Laurent’s SS ’20 menswear campaign.) But nor was he, in fact, free: he was shooting the fourth and final season of Mr Robot in New York. Dates were jiggled, then re-jiggled, then re-jiggled again, until finally a couple of weeks were found right at the end of the Bond production schedule during which Malek could come to Pinewood Studios, just west of London, and film the bulk of his scenes. “When someone tells me something’s a possibility, I just start to think, ‘Let’s make it work’,” says Malek, who is engaging and cheery in person, his eyes widening boyishly (because — whaddyaknow! — they can do that too). “I kind of just get laser-focused on it, especially when it excites me.” It’s late December, and Malek and I are sitting in the lounge of a tastefully expensive hotel in Tribeca, New York, as inconsequential flurries of snow fall outside. (Well, to be precise, we sit in the lounge until about an hour into our interview, when a mysterious blonde with a beret and a small dog comes and sits opposite us, uncomfortably close. A hotel guest? An avid fan? An agent of Spectre? We relocate to a table in the conservatory, just in case.) Dressed in what he describes as his staple outfit — neat navy sweater over a white shirt plus dark trousers and black boots — Malek is talking about the logistics of doing the new Bond film because, although his presence in No Time to Die is a significant reason for the timing of our interview, he also can’t really talk about it very much. So huge is the franchise — to give an idea of how huge, in October last year, The Telegraph described “James Bond and the UK’s booming film industry” as appearing to have “rescued the economy from a pre-Brexit recession” — and so well controlled its machinations, that it’s not worth any participant’s while to spill more details than they should. “I have to be extremely careful,” says Malek, on his turn as the so-farso-mysterious Safin. “I can’t really talk about the character.” He also can’t confirm whether he’s signed on for two films, as has been rumoured, or →

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‘Even before Bohemian Rhapsody he had a very, very good reputation,’ says Daniel Craig, Malek’s co-star in No Time to Die. ‘He’s a very complex human being. He played a very complex part. And it was just fabulous to watch’

Opposite: black lambskin leather jacket, £3,335; black cotton poplin shirt, £330; black waxed lambskin leather cropped trousers, £1,755; white patent leather shoes, £480, all by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO

what it was that he came up with during a read-through that prompted Daniel Craig to kiss him — an anecdote that the pair have been testing out on American talk shows. Nor can he describe the outcome of the discussions with Fleabag writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge, brought in to help with the script and work out how an enlightened, “21st-century Bond” might react to certain plot predicaments. “You’ll end up seeing that in the film,” he’ll say with a not unapologetic shrug. The week before we meet, there had been a press junket for the cast here in New York, including Malek, Craig, the French actress Léa Seydoux who reprises her role as Madeleine Swann, and British Bond newcomer Lashana Lynch, who plays Nomi, a rival “00” spy. A whole junket dedicated to not talking about the thing you’re there to talk about. It sounds taxing. Malek came up with a parrying strategy. “I often asked the journalists, ‘Do you really want to know? It will spoil the film for you, and it’s such an extraordinary event, in it being the 25th instalment and Daniel’s final one.’ I said, ‘Do you really want me to ruin this for you?’” Well, no. But also, maybe a little bit yes. So we’ll return to Bond later. But first, a little on Malek.

FOR STARTERS, IT’S PRONOUNCED “RAH-MI”, NOT “RAMMY”, though confusingly he has an identical twin brother, Sami, now a teacher, whose name is pronounced “Sammy”, not “Sah-mi”. They grew up in California, in the San Fernando Valley, with Hollywood far from their spiritual, if not quite their physical, horizons. His parents, father Said, who sold insurance, and mother Nelly, an accountant, were born in Egypt and had “very, very humble upbringings”, according to Malek; they moved to California in the Seventies, just after the twins’ older sister, Jasmine, who is now a doctor, was born. There wasn’t a history of performing in the family, but Said, who died in 2006, was “one of the best storytellers,” says Malek. “After dinner you’d almost gravitate towards him because you knew something good was coming, especially if he had at least two of us there, and if it was all three kids… he was gifted to say the least.” Said also furnished the children with an education in classic movies and literature, from (conveniently enough) the novels of Ian Fleming to the plays of Arthur Miller: “I don’t know, maybe it was this idea of the American life that I was adjusting to that was so profoundly rooted in those Miller plays,” says Malek. It sounds, I say, like a highbrow household. “Now let’s not forget,” he replies, “that I’ve probably seen every episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” Malek describes himself at school as “extremely shy” but also something of “a hustler”. Like the time in elementary school when a new reading initiative was announced: “If you read a book you got a gift certiﬁcate to Pizza Hut or something. My brother and I got our dad’s tape recorder and we would read the books on tape and sell them to the other kids so they could not only get the scores they needed but also cash in on some free pizza.” So they… invented audiobooks? He laughs. “We saw an opportunity and we took it,” he says. “I was a pretty resourceful kid.” He went on to study theatre at the University of Evansville in Indiana, which his parents only permitted him to do after some mild deception: “I had to convince them that it was a liberal arts school and I would be getting a serious collegiate education with a bit of a focus on acting. It was →

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quite the opposite.” As part of his course he even spent a term at Harlaxton College in Grantham, Lincolnshire. “Birthplace of Margaret Thatcher and where Isaac Newton went to school,” he leans into my Dictaphone to note, though when he landed in London and explained where he’d be living, he remembers the passport control official telling him, “Welcome to the armpit of England”. It did, perhaps, kickstart a recurring interest in the quirks of Englishness. He now divides his time between New York and London. His girlfriend Lucy Boynton, whom he met on Bohemian Rhapsody — she played Freddie Mercury’s girlfriend and confidante, Mary Austin — is from south London. He speaks of his fondness for Sunday roasts (“the gathering of all your friends, not specifically the meat and the gravy”); he demurs from using the American term “wife-beater” when describing Mercury’s Live Aid get-up (“That’s horrid. I prefer ‘singlet’”); he points at his thigh: “I don’t call these ‘pants’ anymore. It sounds ridiculous after being in London. They’re trousers. I’ve been re-tuned.” He did a stint of theatre in New York after college. Back in LA, he got some decent TV work alongside little parts in big, fun movies (the Night at the Museum trilogy), little parts in big, interesting movies (Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son-in-law in The Master), little parts in little, interesting movies (the acclaimed indie Short Term 12), and little parts in notso-good-but-still-huge movies (an Egyptian vampire in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2). Another example of a Rami Malek hustle: when he was auditioning for Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master, he realised that, despite his rapport with lead actor Joaquin Phoenix, the director was still unsure. As he remembers it, Anderson told him, “I just don’t know if this is going to work out. Maybe on the next one.” To which Malek replied, “Paul, you make a movie every seven years. I can’t wait for the next one.” Anderson laughed and gave him the part. In 2014, he got a call about a new TV series, Mr Robot, that would decisively shift him out of the “little parts” bracket. The show’s central character was Elliot Alderson, a brilliant computer engineer with complicated mental health problems and a drug dependency whose sideline as a vigilante hacker gets him pulled into a world of twisted corporate conspiracy. A plum part that, it turned out, was not easy to fill. “I think that we’d had over a month of auditioning people,” says Sam Esmail, creator of Mr Robot. “We probably did over 100. Rami came in at the tail-end. I could tell he was a little nervous, and we had him audition with this monologue that was essentially a two-page rant about society. Up until then I was ready to rewrite the script because the rant always came off to me very obnoxious; I started to feel a bit unsympathetic towards the character. Somehow when Rami performed it, it came from this incredibly vulnerable, painful place. Even though he was angry and ranting, he was able to show the layer of pain underneath that the anger was covering up for, and that was when I really started to see the character come alive.” Esmail describes Malek as “incredibly meticulous; he loves detail, which I think is the crux of a great performance”. (Sure enough, Malek’s turn as Alderson saw him declared “Outstanding Lead Actor” at the 2016 Emmy Awards.) “His work ethic is undeniable,” Esmail continues. “He’s constantly full of energy and looking for that one other little thing that could add more intrigue or depth to what we’re doing.”

Is that always welcome on set? Esmail laughs: “The problem is he and I are very much alike, we get too giddy for our own good when we’re really driving on a scene and we want to keep going and going. But I wouldn’t necessarily consider that a flaw. We’re not there to be the realistic pragmatists; we have other people for that.” It was, perhaps surprisingly, Mr Robot that led the producers of Bohemian Rhapsody to get in touch with Malek about playing Freddie Mercury. The biopic had first been announced in 2010 with Sacha Baron Cohen in the lead role, but he left the project in 2013 over creative differences with the surviving members of Queen. Elliot and Freddie, I point out, somewhat stupidly, are such different characters. “Oh, I’m very aware!” says Malek. “What they were thinking was beyond me, but they’d been searching over the course of eight to 10 years and I had possibly honed in on what wasn’t working. I think there’s a sensitivity that they might have seen. A vulnerability that they were aware of in Freddie’s nature. I don’t know, at a base level, I think they were thinking that if he can act, maybe he has a shot.” Malek went to great lengths to secure the part and get the film off the ground, flying himself to London to get physical and vocal training, practising nightly with a set of protruding false teeth to mimic Mercury’s distinctive overbite, making tapes of himself in character to circulate among the studio executives to encourage them to cough up. Such thoroughness is a typical trait of his, “to my detriment”, he admits. “I’m a firm believer in leaving no stone unturned. I find it very difficult to leave things in other people’s hands if I feel like anyone may be asleep at the wheel.” An earlier example of Malek’s thoroughness: when he received a note from Tom Hanks, whose HBO miniseries The Pacific he had appeared in, written on one of the typewriters of which Hanks is a dedicated collector, Malek bought himself a typewriter of his own in order to respond. A current example: while interviewing him, Malek makes it clear that he’s read several recent pieces I’d written because, he says, “I want to know who I’m talking to”. This, I can assure you, basically never happens. Even when it was finally green-lit, Bohemian Rhapsody turned out to be a notoriously troubled production. Director Bryan Singer was fired while the film was still shooting, in December 2017. Dexter Fletcher was brought in to finish directing it. After Singer’s departure, Malek found himself in an unexpected position as de facto figurehead of the potentially foundering ship. To a certain extent, it was up to him to right it. “There is something in me that I marshalled in those moments that I’m extremely proud of,” he says. “I wish I could have that same type of courage and confidence in every aspect of my life, but when the shit hits the fan, to be able to find some part of you that you had hoped existed was profoundly moving and hopeful. I think a lot of us had that, and it made me quite proud of the nature of humans I was working with.” For all its problems, Bohemian Rhapsody went on to be a huge success, grossing $904m (£695m) worldwide and becoming the most successful music biopic ever. Malek’s extraordinary performance — “all glitter and muscle and nerve endings”, as Time magazine described it — earned him the Best Actor Oscar at the 2019 Academy Awards. He is the first actor of Arab heritage to win that award. Immediately afterwards, he got a hug from previous winner Gary Oldman. “I remember him being surprised →

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Allstar

From top: Rami Malek starring opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in The Master (2012); with Christian Slater in TV series Mr Robot (2015–’19); Malek’s Oscar-winning lead actor performance as Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018); playing the mysterious new Bond villain Saﬁn in No Time to Die

‘He’s incredibly meticulous,’ says Sam Esmail, creator of Mr Robot. ‘He loves detail, which is the crux of a great performance. That one little thing that could add more intrigue or depth’

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I was American. That was quite satisfying. Someone you’d watched your whole life give the most iconic, perfect performances.” When we meet he’s a month away from the 2020 Golden Globe Awards, for which he’s been nominated for Mr Robot for the third time, though he says he’s equanimous about winning: “In terms of accolades, I’m quite happy. I’d consider myself a prick if I wanted anything more.” (Which is just as well: Best Actor in a Television Series gong goes to Brian Cox for Succession.) Malek’s experience on Bohemian Rhapsody, something he went into “with what I would call a maximum amount of trepidation”, and from which he emerged triumphant, was helpful for the ﬁlm that was about to come. “In a way that armoured me for something like this, and gave me a certain amount of conﬁdence that I felt could protect me throughout the shoot. I think it removed the anxiety that one would have in taking on something so grand.” Which brings us back to Bond. Who, of course, we’ve been expecting.

Black calf leather jacket, £1,550; black cotton shirt, £285; black wool trousers, £430, all by PAUL SMITH

THE 25TH OFFICIAL JAMES BOND MOVIE, and the final one to star Daniel Craig — arguably the most successful of the six men to have played the part, certainly the most successful in terms of box office receipts — No Time to Die has not had quite as fraught a production process as Bohemian Rhapsody. But it has, along the way, also lost a director — Danny Boyle, who left the project after six months in August 2018 — and suffered more than its share of mishaps. Shooting was delayed in May 2019 because Daniel Craig needed ankle surgery after an accident during filming in Jamaica, and then again in June when a controlled explosion at Pinewood Studios proved to be less controlled than planned. The pressure, not least on Craig himself, is intense to produce a film that not only measures up to earlier successes, but exceeds them. It’s five years since the previous movie, Spectre, and eight since Skyfall, which is to date the most successful of all time, earning more than $1bn (£768m). Both of those were directed by Sam Mendes, a tough act to follow. The casting of the baddie is crucial, of course, and Malek joins a long line of mostly terrific actors — recently Javier Bardem and Christoph Waltz — competing to out-evil the magnificent Donald Pleasence as the MI6 man’s greatest ever, and most fun to parody, nemesis. Because Malek joined so late into the production of No Time to Die, there was no time for rehearsal. Malek had to head straight to set. “They were under time pressure,” he remembers. “I don’t know how much they loved the idea of fresh Rami coming in… Well, not so fresh, I was just finished on Mr Robot, but at the same time I’d been thinking about this all along.” Craig, for one, seems to have been impressed. “I have a responsibility on these films,” he says. “All I want to do is make him feel as comfortable as it’s possible to be, for him to feel like he’s welcome, because it’s a huge machine and I don’t want it to feel overwhelming. There aren’t many films bigger than Bond, so I want to make sure that when someone like Rami walks onto set, he can hit the ground running. But he was ready. He was ready to go.” Of his interactions with Craig, Malek says, “I pushed as much as possible without being too much of a nuisance to ensure that we were doing as best as we possibly could to make it a real fierce one-on-one between

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Of speculation that his character in No Time to Die is actually Dr No, the villain in the ﬁrst James Bond movie, Malek says: ‘I heard that. Am I? Isn’t that an exciting thing to consider all the way up to the release?’

Opposite: grey/white tartan wool jacket, £1,035; grey/ white tartan wool trousers, £545; black leather loafers, £490, all by VIVIENNE WESTWOOD. Grey leather shirt, £1,330, by PAUL SMITH. Grey cotton socks, £13, by PANTHERELLA Photographer’s assistants: Tyrell Hampton; Justin Mulroy; John Temones | Styling assistant: Rachel Clark Hair and makeup: Kumi Craig | See Stockists page for details

the two of us.” He describes their work together as “mutually respectful” and also “philosophically aggressive”. I ask Craig if he knows what Malek means by that. He laughs and says, “No!” (I think I have a rough idea: when, for example, I asked Craig for his first impressions of Malek as a human being he replied, amused and incredulous, “What, as opposed to a goat?”) Viewers of the film’s official trailer — 12.5m and counting — will notice that Malek’s character, who first appears from an aerial view, prowling through a snowy Norwegian woodland wielding a Czech vz.58 assault rifle, has an indeterminate accent, considerable scarring on his face (very Donald Pleasence, that), and a penchant for Japanese masks. Keen beans have noted that his hands are not visible at any point in the trailer, almost as though they had been, say, cut off by the leaders of a Chinese tong and replaced with metal ones. Those masks, by the way, are called Noh masks. And the film, just to remind you, is called No Time to Die. I figure I may as well ask him, even though we both know what he’s going to say. Is he actually Dr No, the villain played by Joseph Wiseman in the very first James Bond movie, from 1962? “I heard that,” he says, perfectly pleasantly. “Am I? I mean, isn’t that an exciting thing to consider all the way up to the release?” He does, however, acknowledge that “there is a resurgence of an Ian Fleming influence on this film”. Craig will go only so far as to say of Malek’s turn, “He’s a very complex human being, he played a very complex part, and it was just fabulous to watch.” (For my money, if Malek doesn’t turn out to be Dr No, I’ll eat Oddjob’s hat.) Sam Esmail, with whom Malek has a couple of feature films in development — the final episode of Mr Robot aired in December — is excited to see what Malek brings to Bond. “Watching the trailer, I’ve got my own expectations of what his part is going to be and how he’s going to perform it,” Esmail says. “But this is the one thing I definitely know going into it: all of those expectations are going to be subverted. He’s going to surprise me in a very interesting and compelling way. I know it’s going to be really special.” Malek hasn’t seen No Time to Die yet and is toying with the idea of waiting until it premieres in London at the Royal Albert Hall. He plans to take the next two months off — off-off — and finish a writing project he’s been working on. “I quite like the idea of sitting with everyone else and watching their reactions for the first time and having my own.” He hesitates, “Having said that, it would be a little too late to weigh in on anything.” Then he smiles as, for once, he gives himself up to the higher powers: “With something of this scale and scope, I don’t know how much you have in the first place.” Before he heads back into the not-so-snowy streets of New York to meet his girlfriend for dinner, I ask Malek if, given the significance of this being not only a Bond film, but an end-of-era Bond film, he felt under pressure to make sure he was giving Craig the very best of send-offs. “I mean, of course,” he says, “but I’m going into this…” He pauses. “It’s Bond! I’m going to do my absolute best.” And he looks at me with those large, blue eyes, struggling to compute how he could ever do anything else. ○ No Time to Die is in cinemas from 2 April

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BLOCKBUSTER

TATE MODERN AT 20

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By RICHARD BENSON

Hits such as 2003’s ‘The Weather Project’, by Olafur Eliasson, have made Tate Modern the most popular modern art museum in the world

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TATE MODERN MAY BE AN INTERNATIONAL superstar art museum today, but when it opened in May 2000, the critics hated it. “The triteness of these concepts and the arbitrariness with which they are applied can be irritating, and the juxtapositions are often visually jarring,” sniffed an editorial in The Burlington Magazine, the revered, long-running arts journal. “The overall lack of continuity is disorienting… [and] we are not reoriented, or offered a fresh vision: the themed rooms tend to encourage an aimless wandering through a curatorial playground.” Reviewers didn’t like the location (a grotty bit of the Thames’ South Bank), criticised the building’s design (a converted power station with much of the original interior left intact), and they lost it completely over the first temporary exhibition, Century City, which showcased art scenes from different cities of the world (“the section devoted to Lagos is so weak, you feel like a racist, imperialist, colonialist swine for daring to say it,” said, er, The Guardian). The strongest objections were to the grouping of the art by theme rather than period and to the amount of work from outside Europe and America. In truth, Tate Modern’s curators had expected a backlash but believed their way to be fairer and more interesting. Frances Morris, the current director of Tate Modern, was there at the outset and remembers, “We genuinely thought it would be amazing but we didn’t feel at all confident that the press or the public would side with us. And, of course, the press hated it. They eventually came round, but it took them 15 years.” The public, on the other hand, took to it immediately, with 5.25m visitors in the first year, making Tate Modern the most popular modern art museum in the world. “That,” says Ekow Eshun, director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the Noughties and now an independent curator, “then attracted new galleries to London, and drove the expansion of the London art market, which was a backwater even into the Nineties. You could say the story of Tate Modern is that it took some Seventies art theory and turned it into a $10bn market.” IN MAY, IT WILL BE 20 YEARS SINCE Tate Modern opened its large, glass, admission-free doors. Last year, as if to mark the impending anniversary, it displaced the British Museum as the UK’s most popular visitor attraction with almost 5.9m visitors. It also became the fifth most-visited art museum on the planet, tucked in just behind the Vatican in fourth, and easily the most popular venue dedicated to contemporary art. (The Louvre in Paris is world number one.) Less quantifiably, it has influence. In the art world, it can be difficult for a museum to attract

big numbers while still breaking interesting, influential new ideas. Such ideas are important because the best artists and collectors want to show their work in interesting, influential institutions; as well as satisfying intellectual hunger, being seen in the right places makes art more valuable. Tate Modern has pulled that off. It is now, says Tania Bruguera, the Cuban artist and academic, “the institution that sets the tone internationally for many discussions and conversations among artists and others”. On a weekday afternoon this spring, you can sense a bit of that in the low, calm hum of the high, polished-concrete galleries around the famous Turbine Hall. It’s also there in the staff offices where preparations are underway for the season’s forthcoming blockbuster: a stereotype-busting Andy Warhol show. In truth, these rooms are fairly ordinary and were it not for the piles of prints, books and magazines lying around, from many angles you could mistake them for the offices of an upmarket leisure centre. The reception area walls are better presented, though; modishly minimalist bar a white poster bearing the following words, stencilled in red ink: How to work better 1. Do one thing at a time 2. Know the problem 3. Learn to listen 4. Learn to ask questions 5. Distinguish sense from nonsense 6. Accept change as inevitable 7. Admit mistakes 8. Say it simple 9. Be calm 10. Smile These days, Tate Modern anniversaries are usually accompanied by newspaper think pieces about how it has “changed Britain” since 2000. There’s no doubt it has altered things, but to really understand what and how, you need to go back much further than the turn of the millennium. The first Tate Gallery, funded by an £80,000 donation from the sugar magnate and art collector Henry Tate, opened in London’s Pimlico in 1897. It housed a collection of mostly modern (ie, Victorian) British art, but began collecting foreign artists after 1915, and so developed a sort of dual collection of British and international modern work. By the Seventies, it was clear the Tate needed more room to house its growing collection. Extensions were added in 1979 and 1987, and an outpost in Liverpool opened in 1988, followed by another in St Ives, Cornwall, in 1993. They relieved a bit of pressure on space, but the problem was that, by then, the ambitions of the Tate staff and directors were not really about where to put all the old pictures and statues. Until the Sixties, the basic idea of art museums and galleries was that artists made art that represented something — a portrait, say, or a sculpture evoking a bird in flight — and curators stuck it on a wall or a plinth. Middle-aged, middle-class visitors came to look at it, then went away again having been enriched in some way. Come the Sixties, some artists and curators began to wonder if there could be a bit more fun in making and looking at art than that; couldn’t its appeal stretch beyond the middle-aged middle class? And couldn’t they interact with it a bit more? The radical artists and curators began making and showing objects that people could walk around or touch, and began staging performances. Many artists were interested in encouraging people to think about what the art might mean for them personally, rather than a more didactic approach. True, some of that art was really terrible, but a lot of it wasn’t: a generation of young people were inspired by it. They remembered it when they went away to study art, and later take up jobs such as, for example,

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Peter Marlow/Magnum | Getty

Right: Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate from 1988 to 2017, used £50m of National Lottery money to buy the former Bankside Power Station on the south side of the River Thames, in 1994. The ‘Swiss Light’ on its peak, below, was removed in 2008 after weather damage

a curator at the Tate Gallery. Frances Morris, a state-school girl from south London, studied history of art at Cambridge in the Seventies and became a curator of the Modern Collection at the Tate in 1987, when “the model of an art institution that has an authoritative view it teaches, and then everybody else challenges it, was just collapsing. “There was a build-up of pressure to rethink the model of an art museum, with the younger generation of curators who thought something had to happen. At the Tate in the Eighties, there was already a notion that there just wasn’t enough size for a growing collection, nor for the kind of ambitions we were beginning to develop around learning and the audience experience. There was a masterplan drawn up that reflected the idea you couldn’t have everything concentrated in your capital city, and that the audience was more than just a passive receiver of works of art.” Language like “passive receiver of works of art” sounds drier than Morris is in person. The interaction with art she wanted was human and emotional. Sitting in a large, book-and-print-filled meeting room, she says she was “incredibly excited” by making a museum that felt open enough to welcome families who would normally dismiss art. “I find it incredibly exciting to think of a family crossing the threshold for the first time, because it can be really momentous. That family doesn’t necessarily have to engage at that moment in time with an artist’s philosophy of engagement.” In this atmosphere, a new, like-minded director joined the Tate in 1988. The slim, austere Nick Serota was another Seventies humanities veteran, and a London liberal whose mother served as minister of state for health in Harold Wilson’s government. Serota had been successful at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, where he pushed avant-garde contemporary art and oversaw an extension. In 1969, in his early twenties, Serota became chairman of the new Young Friends of the Tate organisation with a membership of 750, and ran the group’s takeover of a south London building in which they put on lectures, painting classes and their own art shows, until the Tate Trustees intervened and told them to stop. After lengthy discussions, Serota and the trustees decided that the expansion should be on a different site, where there would be more room and the collections divided into British and international components. He wanted the project to be not just about finding space for the art, but about experimenting with ways of presenting the art that would change how the public thought about it. To do that properly they would need a far bigger building. In separating out the international, the trustees sensed an opportunity to express an openness to the world, something that felt quite appealing in a city suffering a hangover from the insular-seeming Britpop years. Soon after came a stroke of luck: the National Lottery, launched in 1993, was accompanied by a programme of new building for the millennium, with organisations able to apply for funding for landmark public projects. Sensing an opportunity, Serota and his trustees went looking for a site. They found Bankside Power Station, designed in the Forties by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and left silent and rusting on the south bank of the Thames since its decommission in 1981. Artists, as Serota knew, like putting work in old industrial buildings because the spaces look more interesting and the authenticity is reassuring. (“Artists are workers and artists’ work is work,” says Miroslaw Balka, the Pole who created “How It Is”: deep, pitch-black metal caves in the Turbine Hall in 2009. “People forget that. It was one reason Tate Modern’s industrial roots were important.”) →

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Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture ‘Embankment’ in the Turbine Hall, 2005

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The Tate bought Bankside in 1994, using £50m of lottery cash and raising another £83m needed to complete the conversion from private donations. The architects — the then littleknown Swiss company Herzog & de Meuron — left much of the industrial interior intact, which was significant. The vision of the Blair government, elected in 1997, was of a new, ideas-based “creative economy” rising from the ashes of the industrial era, which nicely segued old and New Labour. The Tate Modern team also talk explicitly in those terms. “It had been a power station creating power for people’s homes,” recalls Donald Hyslop, head of regeneration and community partnerships at Tate. “Now it was going to be a museum creating ideas to drive the city.” “Which was the point,” says Eshun, “of that industrial, bare-brick-and-exposed-girder-andScandi-furniture-style decor which Tate Modern helped to cross over into the mainstream. It was all about the evolution to a future based on creativity, inventiveness… and really great chairs.” The trustees recruited a project director (Dawn Austwick from accounting firm KPMG) and three curators (Morris, education specialist Caro Howell, and Iwona Blazwick, who’d recently discovered then staged the first solo show by a young British artist called Damien Hirst), and installed them in an office on John Islip Street behind Tate Britain. In art terms, it was a different city to today’s. London was the biggest capital in the world without a modern art museum, and with only a few commercial galleries. Frieze Art Fair hadn’t yet happened; the YBAs like Hirst and Tracey Emin had begun to draw attention to London but the idea its art market might compete with Paris or New York was laughable. “Very parochial really,” recalls the former deputy editor of Frieze magazine, Dan Fox. “London’s art scene was getting a bit more international prominence, but many of that generation of artists were trading off a certain kind of Britpop-era provincialism, which began to feel tired very quickly.” Achim Borchardt-Hume, Tate’s director of exhibitions, previously curator of modern and contemporary art at Tate Modern from 2005–’09, points out it was “a predominantly literary, not a visual culture”, where novelists not artists represented highbrow culture, and “contemporary art” was mostly seen as the outrageous stuff that caused tabloid controversy via the Turner Prize. The first thing the team did was to begin working with artists in the Bankside area, so they would have genuine links with the location when the museum opened. The second was to figure out the first few temporary exhibitions. The third was how they could best display the Tate’s Modern Collection; their solution would

Right: the 10.2m tall, 3,658kg steel and marble giant spider sculpture ‘Maman’ by Louise Bourgeois on display at Tate Modern in 1999

ultimately make the museum’s reputation and change the way modern art was seen around the world. ART OF ALL KINDS IS OFTEN DISCUSSED as if it were all about timeless meanings and truths, but in reality our opinions tend to be shaped by the way this art is presented to us. In the Thirties, public opinion of modern art was shaped by a curator called Alfred H Barr, who was employed by the wealthy socialite and collector Abby Rockefeller as founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the time, most critics and collectors didn’t take modern art by the likes of Pablo Picasso or Vincent van Gogh very seriously; it looked weird and the style was always changing, so how was one to know what was timeless and what was fashion? Barr changed that with a now-famous diagram showing art evolving from 19th-century realism to modern, abstract art through various schools such as Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism. No matter that artists didn’t really think or work like that: suddenly the whole thing made sense and could be summed up in a couple of sentences at a dinner party. The diagram, printed on the cover of the catalogue for MoMA’s 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, flattered both the present and America, because it made it look as if the entire history of art had been leading up to that time and place. (Eventually, even the CIA would become fans, channelling money into Modernism and abstract art as a propaganda exercise during the Cold War.) It also created value for dealers and collectors because it meant paintings and sculptures could be seen in terms of new, easily-understood categories. Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” might have looked odd when it was painted, but who cared about that once Barr dubbed it “The painting that started Cubism”? By the time he retired in 1967, Barr had made MoMA the most influential modern art museum in the world. He changed museums from simply being buildings where important art was preserved to places where audiences learned. Art museums around the world followed MoMA’s lead, hanging collections to suggest smooth, chronological evolutions of one style to another: for most of us the idea of modern art as a chain of “-isms” became so ingrained it influenced how we thought about other culture, like music and design. It wasn’t ingrained in the office on John Islip Street in the Nineties, though. Even if you believed that some art developed like that, you couldn’t escape the fact that Barr had told only one story limited to white, Western blokes. Since the end of the WWII, there had been a growing recognition that a lot of important, interesting art had been made by people who didn’t fit any of those categories, and now, says Morris, “we knew that we were going to open a museum for the 21st century and had an opportunity to rethink the model. We took it as a sort of fundamental principle that at the beginning of the 21st century it was no longer desirable, necessary or possible to tell a single art history. It was very mission-focused.” The mission was to overturn the Barr model. After a year of blue-sky thinking, they presented Serota with ideas for a new kind of hang, in which works from different eras would be grouped into four themes: Nude/Action/ Bodies; Still Life/Object/Real Life; History/Memory/Society; Landscape/ Matter/Environment. With a few small tweaks, Serota approved it. The approach may have helped cover chronological gaps in the collection. The building’s architecture also naturally dictated four main areas, and as most →

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The Seagram Murals, part of the museum’s exhibition of the later paintings of Mark Rothko, 2008–’09

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gallery visitors spend 15 minutes to an hour looking at art before taking a break, four areas take up about a half a day. It took another year to bring in all the curators and decide which pieces should be with which, but even so, although the opening night was a success — Dan Fox still recalls the amazed Frieze team in the office the next day “talking about the Jeremy Deller Acid Brass performance and the size of the Turbine Hall” — there was critical disapproval for the thematic hang and, later, for the diversity of Century City. The public, however, took a different view. “People enjoyed discussing the way things were put together,” says Morris. “They enjoyed the experience of taking it apart then putting it together, and enjoyed being horrified by the juxtaposition of Claude Monet and Richard Long. They liked the feeling of discovering old friends and new things at the same time.” And so, having hoped for two million visitors in the first year, Tate Modern pulled in more than double that. The entire organisation was taken aback; emergency work had to be done on staircases that were being worn out, while there were issues with supplies. A toilet paper contract had to be renegotiated, a year’s supply used up in a few months. The real surprise came in the next two years when the numbers didn’t fall away as predicted. “There was a joke here,” says Hyslop. “We used to ask each other when the honeymoon would end, meaning, ‘When will the crowds get smaller?’. They never did.” “In the beginning, we knew people would come for the building,” Morris says. “There were great views from the roof and it felt as if a new area of London was being opened up. But then it became clear they were spending time in the galleries and we had a very profound realisation that actually, the British public was really interested in contemporary modern art.” ALMOST 20 YEARS LATER IN 2019, the hang would enjoy the ultimate vindication when MoMA rehung its collection thematically, also showing more work by non-white, Western blokes. “When you’re dealing with an institution,” says Miroslaw Balka, “it is good to know what it’s heart is. And the heart of Tate Modern is the Turbine Hall. A space that belongs to the workers.” The Turbine Hall, Tate Modern’s huge, cavernous entrance/exhibition space, has become its best-known area, famous for the huge, sitespecific commissions installed in it over the years: Balka’s steel boxes, Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond’s trumpet-shaped “Marsyas”, and Carsten Höller’s “Test Site” slides. It wasn’t really intended for artwork, more as a roadway allowing people to walk through the building.

The museum did begin commissioning artists to create work for it early on, but no one was expecting the moment in 2003 when Olafur Eliasson’s “The Weather Project” became a bona-fide happening and crystallised what Tate Modern would become. That work comprised a mirror on the ceiling and a semi-circular yellow light, attached to said ceiling, creating the effect of a spherical sun. Eliasson added a foggy mist and that was that; on opening night, staff were initially worried it was all rather boring. Then people began mucking about on the floor, making shapes in the mirror overhead. Eliasson was taken aback by how visitors became very physically explicit: “I pictured them looking up with their eyes but they were lying down, rolling around and waving. One person brought an inflatable canoe. There were yoga classes that came and weird poetry cults doing doomsday events. When US President George Bush visited London, some people arranged themselves on the floor to spell ‘Bush Go Home’ — to do that in reverse so it read in the mirror is pretty difficult. I liked how the whole thing became about connecting your brain and body. That I did not foresee.” “The Weather Project” became a must-see installation. People sat and chatted to strangers from all over the world; the BBC set up a studio and did weather forecasts from the building for a week; a Bulgarian couple named their baby girl Tate after visiting. As Lionel Barber, recently retired Financial Times editor and chairman of the Tate Trustees, says, after “The Weather Project”, the Turbine Hall created “a new kind of living civic space. I worked in the area on and off for 35 years, because the FT is based there, and I saw how it transformed the area. It has been something quite new.” THE SCALE OF THE TURBINE HALL AND ITS POPULARITY WITH VISITORS is part of the reason why, Barber says, Tate Modern appealed to business investors; upon entering, it immediately “feels like something adventurous that they want to be involved in”. Besides that, modern CEOs are interested in associating with organisations with big ideas about complex issues because CEOs have to deal with complex issues themselves: “Technology is disruptive. The environment has shot up the agenda. They’re under pressure to think about diversity, inclusion and inequality. If a museum can open up new vistas and ideas, business will want to be connected to that. Tate Modern manages to be international in outlook but stay very connected to its local area, which is something else they’re very interested in.” This might partly explain why the Tate organisation had success with its various memberships and international acquisition committees, set up so the collections could keep growing. Because art prices have been so inflated over the past two decades, it has become increasingly difficult for museums to make the sort of purchases they need. The various members’ areas, evenings and trips abroad, as well as the gift shops, are all a part of Tate Modern’s response. As, of course, are the huge donations from philanthropists like Ukrainian billionaire Leonard Blavatnik, who gave £50m, the largest financial donation to a UK museum, to help fund an extension in 2016. Other businesses attracted in numbers were big commercial art galleries. It’s true they were beginning to arrive in London in the Nineties, encouraged also by the success of the Frieze Art Fair launching in 2003, but there is little doubt Tate Modern helped bring to London both collectors and international galleries like Gagosian (2000), Hauser & Wirth (2003) and David Zwirner (2012). That in turn boosted the auction houses, who only began selling living artists’ work in earnest in the late Nineties. “As well as prestige, what Tate Modern added from a gallerist and collector’s point of view was scholarship,” says Eshun. “Commercial galleries want to be in cities where collectors are coming to shop in a sophisticated market, but they also like cities where there’s knowledge and scholarship because that increases the potential of someone saying credible, complimentary things about the work you show. That can boost its reputation and value. Tate Modern put down, on behalf of the city, a marker in terms of

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Right: the unique perforated façade of the Tate Modern extension built between August 2014 and February 2016 used 336,000 bricks of 212 different types. Bottom: Frances Morris, current director of Tate Modern, is a native south Londoner who joined the organisation in 1987

ambition, ethos and aesthetics. Because it was so international and contemporary, it was seen as open to the world.” After being a negligible player in the early Nineties, with a handful of commercial galleries in Mayfair and Shoreditch, London now boasts the world’s second-most valuable art market after New York, with annual sales around £10bn. You can’t attribute it all to a single institution, but Tate Modern certainly played a part. “It made London look like a city of open, knowledgeable, wealthy people,” says Eshun. “Which happens to be exactly the sort of city collectors and blue-chip galleries want to be seen in. And the effect it had on the art market and its local area is a key reason we’ve seen the creation of other contemporary art galleries like the Baltic [Centre for Contemporary Art] in Newcastle or the Turner [Contemporary] in Margate.” IF THE MUSEUM HAD AN OVERLOOKED CHALLENGE, it was getting the big temporary exhibitions right. Large museums tend to need blockbuster shows for their audience ﬁgures and proﬁle. But if they want to be seen as creative, agenda-setting places, they need new angles and new ways of displaying works. That way the critics stay happy and the collectors and museums loaning works will remain well disposed on the grounds said works are gaining some desirable exposure. Having set out to be a new kind of museum, Tate Modern had to be particularly careful to avoid boring retrospectives of big names. Looking back, Borchardt-Hume thinks they cracked a new approach with the hit 2008–’09 Rothko show, which concentrated on Mark Rothko’s late work rather than his more popular earlier paintings. Borchardt-Hume’s team hung the pictures in large, stark, white rooms rather than in the dark, intimate spaces some were displayed in at Tate Britain, and it made them look as they may have done in Rothko’s own studio. It made visitors see them with fresh eyes and, according to Borchardt-Hume, “established a new way of thinking about exhibitions that wasn’t just people looking at the work, but about people being in a space with the work. You were there to experience it, not just to learn something”. Tate Modern is occasionally criticised for its reliance on big-name shows, but Borchardt-Hume hasn’t much time for such snarks. After all, it’s partly the money they generate that keeps the general admission free, through ticket sales. “If you have a theatre,” he says, “would you stop showing Shakespeare? Or would you interpret and revise his plays for your moment? The point is, great work is multifaceted and can be reexplored and re-represented. When we do Warhol, it will look at him as an outsider and the queer son of a migrant, and at the dark undertow of American consumerism. It will ask what makes him appealing and interesting to people at our particular moment in time.” Tate Modern was also criticised early last decade for being, in the words of one art critic, “Alton Towers for grown-ups”. Some people thought the Turbine Hall commissions too spectacular, the hall itself more a place for tourists to come to grab a picture for Instagram than anything else. Some art critics complained that Tate Modern was making it too easy for visitors or, in art-speak, “legitimising an emotional response”. Morris was hurt by this because “at the same time we were doing incredibly serious work around building a more international collection and bringing artists to the fore who’d been completely overlooked by history. →

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Right: ‘Marsyas’, Turner Prize-winning sculptor Anish Kapoor’s enormous conceptual installation for the Turbine Hall, 2002–’03

or “relational art”. This, the most talked-about art movement of the moment, is artwork that may have no physical appearance at all, but is based on social interactions organised by the artist. (Part of 2019 Turner Prizewinner Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s work, for example, has been interviewing former detainees of the Syrian regime’s Sednaya military prison.) For her most recent Tate Modern commission, Bruguera put together a group of people who live close to the museum, undertaking various projects with them; she had one of the museum buildings named after Natalie Bell, a local activist and volunteer. The question of how you record and archive work like this is still open and ongoing; it’s one of the things that makes it interesting. (Bruguera now tries to make work that can’t be photographed so it can’t be put on Instagram, because she thinks “art should be about gesture, not image”.) TATE MODERN PEOPLE CAN BE VERY INTELLECTUAL and contemporary art very theoretical and complicated, but what’s really striking is how often the curators and artists talk about the local community and the small details of running the museum. Lionel Barber makes mention of Stanhope, the project management company that oversaw the building of the extension: “Have you seen how complicated that brickwork is? Can you imagine the work that went into getting it right?”. Nick Serota talks about the pocket parks and seating areas they installed around the local area. For the opening night in May 2000, they sent invites to 300 London black cab drivers so the cabbies would know where to come to drop off visitors. Both Balka and Bruguera say the competence of the technical staff is a major reason so many artists want Tate Modern commissions. “You never have to have a Plan B with them because they always try to make Plan A happen,” Bruguera says. “No matter how crazy your project is they will sit down with you and the lawyers, the producers, the security staff and try to make it work. When I was working on ‘Tatlin’s Whisper #5’ [a 2008 piece that involved mounted “police officers” crowd-controlling visitors] I had the idea of using horses, but I thought it was such a dream that I didn’t dare tell anybody. But then I went to Tate Modern and said, ‘Look, this isn’t going to happen, it’s kind of a dream idea, but…’ They listened and said, ‘OK,’ and disappeared. I assumed they’d eventually say ‘no’. In fact, they came back and said, ‘OK, we solved it. You can have the horses’. It’s always, ‘Let’s ﬁnd out’ ﬁrst. They respect the artist. They really care about relationships with people.” Morris, the daughter of a teacher mum and architect dad, grew up in Greenwich with the National Maritime Museum at the end of her street. The quickest way to get to the shops on Greenwich High Street was to cut through the museum. Using it as a pathway, she began to notice its artefacts and art, and on rainy days would go back and look at them. She became fascinated by an 1807 painting by Arthur William Devis, “The Death of Nelson, 21 October 1805”, with no idea it was a famous work. Throughout her childhood, whenever she felt sad, she would go by herself to the museum and look at Devis’s painting, and it would make her cry. “I hate the idea of any child from the [museum’s] neighbourhood not feeling they can just walk into the building and come to stand in front of something they don’t understand, and enjoy it,” Morris says. “I really believe that art is useful, you see.” ○

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It was saying you can’t be serious and popular.” That school of criticism was negated by the new directions of Tate Modern projects and commissions, particularly the importance it placed on the new wave of performance art last decade. Catherine Wood, senior curator of international performance art, was originally hired in 2001 to develop collaborations between artists and musicians, but began to notice “a young generation of artists, including Mark Leckey, Monster Chetwynd and others turning to a new wave of performance or event as a way of sharing work made in their mediums of video, sound or painting. I felt strongly that we needed space to share this kind of work and that it didn’t yet exist in the museum.” Nick Serota and chief curator Sheena Wagstaff supported Wood, which led to the 2012 opening of The Tanks — performance spaces using Bankside’s old oil tanks — which made the museum the first in the world to have a gallery permanently dedicated to film and video, interactive and performance art. (If, incidentally, you’re feeling that this new movement has passed you by, remember that last December performance art gave us the biggest mainstream art-news story of the last few months when the New York-based performance artist David Datuna took and ate Maurizio Cattelan’s $120,000 banana at Art Basel in Miami.) The Tanks underpinned the programme of performance art which, in 2015, gave us another “The Weather Project” moment. At the outset, it could be hard to make some performances work as she wanted them to, Wood says, but she remembers a sense of transformation when she saw “hundreds of people taking part in a dance workshop in the Turbine Hall and then gathering the same day for a ‘nightclub’ session under a giant disco ball, which transformed the Turbine Hall into a warehouse rave. “They ended up gathered in circles around a profound piece of choreography titled ‘Manger’ — some of them cried — as part of [French choreographer] Boris Charmatz’s If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? It was an extraordinary moment in which I felt that the public, our visitors, became part of the museum,” she says. Tania Bruguera thinks that “at some point Tate Modern did generate an ‘art of the spectacle’, because it was coming out of a response to the question: ‘How do we please everybody?’. But they made changes and it became the first big institution that I know of to take performance into its programming, treating it as seriously as painting and sculpture. It changed the art world and it put them in the leading position.” She now sees Morris moving Tate Modern towards what is known as “socially-engaged”

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HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN ONE SUPERHERO’S CAPE AND FOUR MEN WHO WORE IT By Miranda Collinge

‘SOMETIMES SUPERMAN WOULD LIKE TO BE CLARK KENT, JUST A NORMAL PERSON WITH NORMAL RESPONSIBILITIES’ — Christopher Reeve in The Making of Superman the Movie by David Michael Petrou (Warner Books, 1978)

1. DARVIN THE CATALOGUE FOR THE “ICONS AND IDOLS: HOLLYWOOD” AUCTION, held at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills, California, on 16 December 2019, boasted several notable items for sale. Lot 149: a felt hat made by Lock & Co Hatters of London and worn by Charlie Chaplin in his 1947 ﬁlm, Monsieur Verdoux. Lot 355: a white T-shirt emblazoned with a Nike Swoosh, dirtied with “studio soiling” and worn by Tom Hanks in 1994’s Forrest Gump, visible in a sequence when Gump spends three years running across America. Lot 298: a 1968 Husqvarna Viking 360 motorcycle once purchased by the actor Steve McQueen. Lot 358: a “pipe-weed” pipe, used by Sir Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins in 2001’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of →

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the Ring. But there was one item that was set to be the centrepiece of the event, and to which two double-page spreads of the glossy catalogue were devoted. Lot 385: a blood-red cape, emblazoned on the back with a stylised “S” picked out in blue stitching. It had been worn in Superman: The Movie by Christopher Reeve, a handsome, athletic and relatively unknown actor who had just turned 26 when the film came out in 1978 and would become forever associated with the superhero he played — the “Man of Steel” with his unmatchable strength, speed and moral fibre — and also his alter-ego, the bumbling, bespectacled reporter, Clark Kent. The cape was a remnant of the outfit created by costume designer Yvonne Blake for the film, adapted from the drawings of Joe Shuster, who invented Superman in the Thirties with his high-school friend Jerry Siegel. Boots, tights, cape and torso-hugging shirt with an “S” on the chest. Also, overshorts: although according to David Michael Petrou’s 1978 book, The Making of Superman the Movie, when Reeve wore them, Blake had to insert a “large swimmer’s cup” as “some obvious protuberances” were creating continuity problems as they were “not always in exactly the same place”. Because of the cape’s dimensions, it was understood to be a “walking” cape; as opposed to the “flying” capes, which were wider and had slits cut into them through which the harnesses that would make Reeve appear to take to the skies could be attached. It was thought to be one of six, as suggested by a note, handwritten close to the hem, which read: “(was turned up) No 5/6 relined 1/3/78”. The cape appeared to be made from some type of cotton, and was still bright, with little evidence of fraying, unlike costumes made from synthetic fabrics which, while looking more futuristic, often proved quicker to degrade. But it was not the condition that made the cape such an important item. Included in the lot was a letter, written in 1979 by the editor and publisher of DC Comics, Jack C Harris, to a teenage boy in Utah. “Dear Darvin,” it began. “Congratulations! Your expertise in SUPERMAN lore… has won you first prize in the SECOND SUPERMAN THE MOVIE CONTEST, the actual cape worn by actor Christopher Reeve.” The letter confirmed the results of a competition promoted in issue #331 of Superman, a copy of which was included in the auction lot. The rules had been deceptively simple: correctly answer 25 trivia questions about the world of Superman and send them, on a postcard, to DC Comics in New York. But, reported Harris in his letter, the questions were so difficult that only 21 contestants managed to get them

INCLUDED IN THE LOT WAS A 1979 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR AND PUBLISHER OF DC COMICS: ‘CONGRATULATIONS! YOUR EXPERTISE IN SUPERMAN LORE… HAS WON YOU FIRST PRIZE IN THE SECOND SUPERMAN THE MOVIE CONTEST, THE ACTUAL CAPE WORN BY ACTOR CHRISTOPHER REEVE’ Previous pages: Christopher Reeve wears the cape in a promotional photograph for Superman: The Movie, 1978. Above: Reeve ﬁlms a ﬂying scene in a studio with director Richard Donner in the foreground, 1978

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Alamy | Burt Glinn/Magnum

all correct, and, as luck would have it, Christopher Reeve was in town when they needed to pick a winner. It was he who had selected Darvin’s card. “We’re proud to have fans such as you,” Harris concluded, “who are so wellversed in the legends of the American myths we’re creating every day. Our very best wishes to you, and again we offer our congratulations! Wear your cape in the best of health!”

DARVIN METZGER GREW UP IN BOUNTIFUL, UTAH, a town, like many others in the area, with a predominantly Mormon population (and also the town from which, in 1974, Ted Bundy abducted his twelfth murder victim, 17-year-old Debra Kent). Darvin and his family were not Mormons and he felt somewhat isolated as a child, until he discovered comic books. It gave him a thing of his own and, after he started working in a comic book store as a teenager, several of his customers, other young men who shared his interests, became his friends. Superman was never his favourite. He leaned more towards Spider-Man or Batman: characters who were more realistic, in relative terms at least. A teenager who acquires powers, and a human who invents incredible things to ﬁght crime. With Superman there was too much power involved — the same thing that put him off Hulk or Thor — the so-called “Man of Tomorrow” didn’t have to use his brains to solve problems, or at least so it seemed to Darvin at the time. When they saw the announcement of the cape competition in Superman #331, Darvin and his friends decided to give it a shot. Here was something in which they were specialists; they actually stood a chance. They pooled their knowledge and took advantage of the archive of Superman books at Cosmic Aeroplane Bookstore in Salt Lake City, where Darvin, now 17 years old, was working. The questions were undeniably hard: what colour is super-villain Lex Luthor’s hair? But he was bald! Until one boy remembered an early appearance of Superman’s nemesis in which — eureka! — he was depicted with red hair. Despite the rules stipulating against it, the boys entered multiple entries under fake names to increase their chances of winning. Darvin was working at the comic book store when he received a call from his father telling him to come home right away. Assuming there was an emergency, he jumped in his car and drove the 20 or so miles to Bountiful. When he found no obvious cause for the summons he got upset with his dad, but just then the phone rang. “It’s for you,” his father said. It was a representative of DC Comics, telling Darvin his

name had been drawn and he had won first prize: the Superman cape. It felt great to have won, and Darvin was excited, though a small part of him felt sad that he hadn’t won DC Comic’s first Superman: The Movie competition, for which the prize was a part in the film itself (the two winners appeared as members of Clark Kent’s high-school football team). Also, the strategy that he and his friends had devised had worked: of the successful 21 entries, six others were from Salt Lake City; even Darvin’s dog, Duke, won a third-tier prize, a two-year subscription to a DC title of his choice, though Darvin was too sheepish to claim it. His story appeared in the Davis County Clipper, with a photograph of Darvin outside his house wearing the cape, smiling, arms raised, which the paper transposed over a picture of his street in Bountiful so that he appeared to be flying over the rooftops. Because Darvin worked in the field, he understood the importance of what he had. He had already amassed a collection of 10,000 comics — often exchanging his wages at Cosmic Aeroplane for store credit — which he kept in his bedroom in Mylar bags. He stored the cape carefully at his parents’ house in Bountiful for the next few years while he worked somewhat aimless jobs, wondering what to do with his life, until, one day, he made a spur-of-themoment decision: he would join the US Navy. It was a change of heart that surprised not only Darvin but his father, with whom he had fought when the time had come for him, like all 18-year-old American males, to register for Selective Service. When Darvin had received his paperwork he had thrown it in the fire. Now he would be based at Moffett Federal Airfield in Northern California, and specialise in aviation electronics (“Statistically speaking, of course,” as Reeve’s Superman reminds Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane, whom he has just rescued from a helicopter teetering on the roof of a skyscraper, flying is “still the safest way to travel”). By 1988, Darvin was in his late twenties and married, with a young son and baby daughter. He and his wife liked California, but soon the family’s finances started to feel stretched: Darvin’s wages did not go far enough, and they had never been the best at budgeting. He had sold his comic book collection in 1981, before he’d joined the military, to pay back a friend who’d lent him money for a truck; it was time to part with the cape too. He gave it to an acquaintance who ran a comic book store, Dick Swan, to display behind the counter — it seemed a shame for him to keep it at home in a box — until Dick mentioned that he knew someone who might be interested in

buying it. Darvin had some qualms: he well knew that the value of the cape might go up in years to come. But Christmas was approaching and he needed the money now. When Dick told him the buyer had offered $600, he took it.

THE APPEAL OF CELEBRITY MEMORABILIA is both hard to deny and, at times, to fathom. Clothes that musicians and movie stars have worn, gifts they have given and received, letters they have written, tissues they have blown their noses in — a Kleenex used by Scarlett Johansson during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno was sold for charity in 2008 and raised £3,600 — are bought and sold like antiques and worshipped like relics. Today, a piece of toast with a bite mark from a pop star can get the attention once afforded to a cruciﬁx touched by an apostle (the toast was bitten by One Direction’s Niall Horan and put on eBay by an Australian TV company in 2012, where it reportedly attracted a top bid of almost $(AU)$100,000, equivalent to £65,000). Such items, it seems, offer a chance to own a piece of collective pop history and be close to a star who seems out of reach, particularly if they have come to the end of their (ordinary, human) lifespan. It is a way to feel their residual energy, perhaps, or at least a few dead skin cells. Celebrity memorabilia sales also make for easy news stories. In October last year, an acrylic and mohair cardigan worn by Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain during the band’s 1993 MTV Unplugged performance, complete with stains and cigarette burns, sold for $334,000 making it — in a possibly not terribly strong ﬁeld — the most expensive item of knitwear ever bought at auction. In December 2019, reality star Kim Kardashian West spent $65,625 on a velvet jacket worn by Michael Jackson, and a further $56,250 on a white fedora he wore to perform his song “Smooth Criminal”: both Christmas presents, she announced on Instagram, for her six-year-old daughter, North. Another Instagram user mocked up a fake post purporting to be from Kardashian West, announcing that she had also purchased for North the bloodied white shirt in which President John F Kennedy was assassinated; at least one website reported the purchase as fact, until Kardashian West highlighted the error. (And perhaps it wasn’t even so far-fetched: at the time of writing, the website Moments in Time is selling, for $125,000, a “bullet dented” medallion that rapper Tupac Shakur was apparently wearing when he was shot and wounded in 1994.) The market in movie memorabilia alone is estimated to have grown from an estimated £27m 10 years ago to between £155m and £310m today, and the overall global celebrity →

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memorabilia market has been estimated at beyond a billion. There are numerous auction houses specialising in this area: Heritage Auctions in Houston, Profiles in History in Calabasas and Prop Store in the UK, to name just three, as well as Julien’s Auctions in Los Angeles, which sold the Michael Jackson jacket and hat and the Cobain cardigan, and were also overseeing the sale of the cape. Most of the major international auctioneers — Bonhams, Sotheby’s, Christie’s — have departments dedicated to pop culture, entertainment memorabilia or “private and iconic collections”. Expert analysis and authenticating documentation are of particularly vital importance in this industry: an FBI operation in 2000 posited that over half of the items on the sports and celebrity memorabilia market were likely to be counterfeit. “There’s so much serious money coming into this world,” says Martin Nolan, co-owner and executive director of Julien’s Auctions. Originally from County Roscommon in Ireland, Nolan worked on Wall Street for 13 years before joining Julien’s in 2005 and has been surprised to find it is an industry that seems to invert economic trends. “We find that in a recession we tend to do better,” he said. “That sounds crazy I know, but the people who have the stuff need money so they’re consigning it to auction, and we’re not selling anything that anybody needs, clearly: we’re selling to people that have sufficient disposable income that they are not impacted.” Music, Nolan says, is particularly strong right now, and Julien’s has learned to host its rock ’n’ roll auctions in New York, “because the Wall Street guys who are making serious amounts of money and getting huge bonuses, they love their toys, and there’s nothing more cool than to have a John Lennon guitar on the wall, or Ringo’s drum kit in the conference room.” The clash of corporate capitalism and rock rebellion is not lost on him: “You think about Nirvana, Kurt Cobain was so anti all of this world. He probably bought that cardigan for five bucks in a thrift shop. It sort of goes against everything he was singing about.” But, says Nolan, the people who buy such things are in fact trying — like Superman reversing the Earth’s rotation in order to prevent an earthquake that will kill Lois Lane — to turn back time. “It’s 26 years since Cobain passed away, and the people that loved Nirvana then have gone on to lead successful lives, they’re professionals now, and 26 years later, they’re buying a memory. They’re buying their youth.”

2. STEFAN FOR CLOSE TO A DECADE AFTER DARVIN HAD sold it, the Superman cape went dark, its whereabouts a mystery. In those same years, Christopher Reeve, who had gone on to star in a further three Superman films, fell from a horse and was left paralysed from the neck down and unable to breathe without a portable ventilator. A year after his accident, in March 1996, he made a surprise appearance at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, greeted with a minute-long standing ovation. “What you probably don’t know is I left New York last September and I just arrived here this morning,” he said from his wheelchair, to both laughter and tears. In 1997, the Superman cape reappeared in a “Collectors’ Carousel” sale of “Dolls, Toys, Hollywood and Rock ’n’ Roll Memorabilia” at Sotheby’s in Manhattan. How it travelled the breadth of America, from California to New York, and who brought it there, is difficult to determine: two representatives of Sotheby’s told me records from the time were not sufficient to identify and contact the consigner on my behalf; Dick Swan, who sold the cape for Darvin, could not remember who had bought it, only that it was an “irregular customer, not someone I knew well”. On the morning of 19 December 1997, Stefan Park, then 28, was having breakfast with a friend in the dining room of their Manhattan hotel. They were on the final leg of a monthlong trip that had taken them to Asia, Australia and the United States; New York was to be their last stop before returning home to Sweden. Stefan had grown up in Gothenburg, in a family of modest means and little academic expectation, but his natural abilities in physics, chemistry and mathematics had seen him hurtle into professional life at startling speed: university studies alongside high school at 15, a job in the research department of Volvo at 17, setting up his first company at 24 and becoming one of the first people in Europe to work with artificial intelligence and virtual reality. By his late twenties, he had worked hard, earned well, and was ready for a vacation. As they ate their breakfast, the friend — a professional footballer whom Stefan prefers not to name — noticed an item on the news.

Right, from top: Reeve choosing Darvin Metzger’s winning entry in Superman magazine’s competition to own the superhero’s cape, 1979; news cuttings from Metzger’s local paper, the Davis County Clipper, about his win; the original contest announcement in Superman magazine; the letter from DC Comics telling Metzger he’d won the cape

It was about a jacket that had been worn by William Shatner as Captain Kirk in Star Trek; one of the iconic, maroon ones from the second, superior, movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that came out in 1982. It was for sale in New York that very day. In fact, the auction had already started. As a self-confessed nerdy scientist, Star Trek was Stefan’s ultimate sci-fi passion. They ran outside and hailed a cab. Stefan’s collecting interests had started small. As a child he was fascinated by space exploration; one day he thought he would love to have an autograph from an astronaut. You could buy one for not much: as little as $15 maybe. Then, he thought he’d like to have one from a cosmonaut too. And what about seeing if he could get an item of some kind from every living astronaut? There were only 270 or so; it couldn’t be too hard. Or what about a signed letter from Neil Armstrong that had actually been carried into space and back? Before long, Stefan had them all, and more. When they arrived at Sotheby’s they were fast-tracked through the registration process, despite being two young guys in their twenties and perhaps not the most convincing of customers. They entered the sale room just before the jacket came up, and despite a bidding war, Stefan came away victorious. He was ecstatic from the win but there was still one auction lot to go. (He learned later that the item had also been featured on the breakfast news show, but he’d got in the taxi so fast he missed it.) He remembers some kind of a veil coming down, and a spotlight, and the shiny Superman logo, and realising that, for everyone else in the room, this was the reason they had come. Stålman, as Superman was known in Swedish — a literal translation of “Man of Steel” — had been the comic that Stefan had grown up with. He’d read it since he was six. He’d seen the film at the cinema, sitting in the front row, second seat from the left: he’d always had a good memory for spatial settings and for dates. Reeve, he remembered, really looked like Superman. It was one of the few films where you could believe the actor and the character were one and the same. Still revved up from buying the Captain Kirk jacket, Stefan raised his auction paddle up and didn’t take it down. Stefan bought the cape for $23,000. Back at the hotel that night, he and his friend had dinner. His friend wore the Captain Kirk jacket, he wore the cape. They ordered room service instead of eating in the hotel’s restaurant because, despite their giddiness, there were some limits to how nerdy they were prepared to be. The next day, he packed the jacket and the cape in his hand luggage and boarded a →

Julien’s Auctions

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Concorde — faster than the speed of sound, though not a speeding bullet — to take him back across the Atlantic. Over the years, Stefan kept his collection in a secure, climate-controlled storage facility in Gothenburg, away from humidity, sunshine and animals. When he got married and had children, one of the few items he would bring home from time to time was the cape. He would put it on his kids and let them fly around the house. He tried to interest them in science and space exploration with little success, yet despite never having read the comics, they knew who Superman was. He wasn’t sure what caught their attention: the fact that he could fly? His dualistic identity? His invulnerability? (On 10 October 2004, Christopher Reeve, who had devoted himself to promoting research into spinal cord injuries, and had set up a prominent foundation to improve the quality of life of people with disabilities, died from sepsis. He was 52.) As Stefan approached his fifties, the logistics of collecting started to get to him. The storage facility was expensive, and he realised there was an upper limit to how much stuff he could have. His wife would make occasional jokes about the A&E TV show Hoarders, a reality series about people with compulsive hoarding disorder, and while he wasn’t stockpiling old newspapers, he could see her point. Finally, last year, he decided the time had come. He contacted Julien’s Auctions, and selected some items he thought might attract interest. It was an emotional decision, but he knew the cape was one of them.

JOE LET THE EARLY BIDS GET OUT OF THE WAY: $85,000… $100,000… $110,000. HE CAME IN AT $120,000 AND IT QUICKLY CAME DOWN TO HIM AND AN INTERNET BIDDER IN CHINA. THE CHINESE BIDDER OFFERED $130,000. JOE CAME BACK WITH $140,000. THE CHINESE BIDDER WENT TO $150,000 Above: Reeve’s Superman cape as seen in the Sotheby’s catalogue for the memorabilia auction in 1997 at which Stefan Park bought the iconic costume piece, designed for the ﬁlm by Yvonne Blake

Shutterstock

“WHEN I MEET A CONSIGNER coming in to sell, I always say, ‘When is the time to start letting go?’” says Martin Nolan of Julien’s. “Because it’s a burden. Especially because now these items have become so valuable.” For many artefacts, the window of opportunity is specific and not necessarily very long. “We did an auction for Bob Hope,” says Nolan, “who would have been 103 if he’d been alive when we did his first auction, and maybe 110 when we did his second. As big as he was — he hosted the Academy Awards for 19 years — we found the fanbase that loved him were not acquiring any more. They’re trying to get rid of their own stuff. That’s a thing we look at and encourage: to think of people when they’re still relevant, and remembered.” Superman: The Movie came out in 1978. Those who saw it as children, for whom it may have been a formative cultural experience, are now in their late forties and fifties. They might be buying now, but for how much longer? Perhaps Superman had risen as far as he could go?

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Nolan was cautiously optimistic. “What I always say is, ‘Don’t buy it thinking it’s going to be an investment. Buy it because you love it, because of the emotional attachment, the history, the storyline’. But it’s very likely if you’re buying something iconic, it will continue to appreciate in value,” he said. Not surprisingly, given his line of work, he felt the cape would be one of those rare exceptions. “Superman will be one of those movies that will stay the course.”

3. JOE ON 16 DECEMBER 2019, the sale room at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills, where the “Icons & Idols: Hollywood” auction was being held, was a little quiet. That was fine, it was a Monday after all, and there were enough online and phone bidders pre-registered to suggest some excitement over what was about to take place. Nevertheless it started slowly. A series of model locomotives from the collection of Neil Young failed to get much interest, though things perked up when Charlie Chaplin’s hat went for $7,680. They leapt again when two paintings by Frank Sinatra — a stormy Hawaiian seascape, and a surprisingly competent black, white and red abstract that called to mind playing cards and poker chips — soared above their estimates to sell for $21,250 and $75,000. As the lots ticked by, a Captain Jean-Luc Picard uniform worn by Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: The Next Generation went for an unexpectedly high $28,800, as did, selling at $19,200, a Fender Stratocaster featuring Hugh Hefner’s signature and a naked Marilyn Monroe. The Nike T-shirt from Forrest Gump went for just over its estimate to sell for $2,560, though neither the Bilbo Baggins pipe nor the Steve McQueen motorbike met their reserve price, and they were removed from sale (too early? Too late? Only the market knows). When Joe Ingold’s phone rang it caught him off guard. It was Mitchell Kaba, director of fine art at Julien’s, ready to field his phone bids for the cape, which was just a few lots away. Joe had registered as a bidder a week before but was working in New York and had miscalculated the time difference: he wasn’t expecting the lot to come up for another hour or so. He quickly took himself to the office he keeps at one of his client sites, a hospital — he works as a financial consultant for healthcare companies — so he could focus fully on the call. Though he occasionally uses online bidding, with an item of this importance he wasn’t willing to risk a patchy internet connection. Joe started collecting sport memorabilia 20

years ago, with a football signed by legendary NFL running back Walter Payton. Soon he branched into film and has now accrued some eye-catching artefacts, though he limits himself to key pieces from movies that mean something to him. His collection includes one of the Wicked Witch of the West’s hats from The Wizard of Oz (there are four); a helmet from Saving Private Ryan, worn and autographed by Tom Hanks; and the heavily weathered letters spelling “Orca” once nailed to Quint’s boat in Jaws. As a kid in Chicago, he had played a lot of baseball, and was a trombonist in the school band, though he’d also read Batman and Superman comics, like any kid his age, and watched Superman: The Movie many times. Something about Superman as an iconic American figure — truth, justice and the American way — just resonated with people, and it resonated with him; the values that he stood for were important. Joe had seen Superman items come up for sale before, but he was wary, because he knew there were a lot of false pieces on the market. He’d even come close to buying a cape before, one he’d seen for sale in Las Vegas 10 or so years ago, but felt the documentation wasn’t up to scratch. This cape, though, was the holy grail. It was the kind he’d been waiting for. The DC Comics contest gave it the provenance that Joe needed, and the Christopher Reeve connection was important as well: the fact he’d not only worn it in the film but had handpicked the competition winner. Like everyone, Joe could appreciate what Reeve had been through. The misfortunes he’d suffered, so soon after portraying Superman, enabled people to reflect that we’re all human. Reeve’s story made the character of Superman seem more human too. Joe let the early bids get out of the way: $85,000… $100,000… $110,000. He came in at $120,000 — he thinks so anyway, it’s still a blur — and it quickly came down to him and an internet bidder in China (in recent decades the influence of buyers from Asia, China in particular, coupled with the reach of the internet, has had a transformative effect on the auction market, as it has on more or less all forms of commerce). The Chinese bidder offered $130,000. Joe came back with $140,000. The Chinese bidder went to $150,000. Joe needed to catch his breath: $150,000 had been the notional limit he had set himself, though looking back now, he’s not sure he ever meant to stick to it. But there was no time to think, things were moving too fast, and this was his one chance in a lifetime. “Do you want to do 155?” asked Kaba. “All right,” said Joe. “155.” Four minutes after the lot was introduced,

the hammer fell. “Sold, sold, sold!” shouted the auctioneer. Martin Nolan, sitting next to Kaba, could hear the shrieks coming down the phone.

AT THE TIME OF WRITING, Joe hasn’t received the cape though he has paid for it: with the auction fees the final bill was $193,750 (£148,000), at the top of the pre-sale estimate of $100,000 to $200,000. He and the auctioneers are still working out the shipping details, but he hopes it will arrive at his home in South Barrington, Illinois, in a few weeks (perhaps even in time for Superman’s leap-year birthday on 29 February). Even though it all happened at lightning speed, and Joe is financially comfortable, the cape is still a purchase to be taken seriously. In the regular run of things, if he were buying something for, say, $10,000, he would think about it, ponder it, research it; the idea that he spent almost $200,000 in a few minutes still feels incredible. When he first started collecting, he’d thought about his purchases as investment diversification, but lately that has fallen by the wayside. Now it’s about building up the best collection that he can have, because, as he’s gotten older, he’s had to think, “What is it that I enjoy in life?” Joe is 55, so has some working years left, though retirement is already on his horizons. Because he and his wife do not have children, he knows he’ll eventually need to decide what the fate of the cape should be. It might get sold onto another collector when he dies, or go to a museum, such as the much-delayed Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in LA (he has already agreed to loan it the Wicked Witch’s hat). Or perhaps, he’ll sell it in his lifetime, to save his wife from having to untangle the complicated details of his estate. But those are questions for the future. In the meantime, once he has the cape, he’ll start working out how to display it. He might design an elegant, wood and glass cabinet for it and place it somewhere around his house, as he’s done with the Wicked Witch’s hat and Tom Hanks’ helmet. Or he might think of a more unusual treatment, such as the Orca letters, which he has arranged on a specially designed wooden plaque hanging over a fireplace. The important thing is to preserve it. Joe sees himself not as the owner of the cape, but as its temporary custodian, with a duty to make sure it suffers no damage while under his care. But before he seals the cape away to protect it for generations to come, he will enjoy the time when it is only his: when he can see it and touch it and try it on; when he can feel, if only briefly, what it is like to be Superman. ○

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THE SUIT IS DEAD. This season, designers take radical approaches to menswearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most formal ensemble

LONG LIVE THE SUIT

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Photographs by JENS LANGKJAER

Fashion by CATHERINE HAYWARD

Opposite: brown viscose-satin jacket, £2,470; blue/white striped silk shirt, £735; black silk-cady tie, £145; green viscose-satin trousers, £665; black leather-horsebit detail boots, £1,230, all by GUCCI Black wool-rhinestones jacket, £8,350; black transparent silk-rhinestones shirt, £1,640; black wool-rhinestones trousers, £5,680, all by VERSACE

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Black/white gingham-mohair-technical fabric-blend parka, £2,190; black/ white gingham-mohair-blend doublebreasted blazer, £1,590; white cotton oversized T-shirt, £320; black/white gingham-mohair-blend tailored trousers, £550; black/white gingham appliqué logo hat, £350; black/white leather trainers, £450, all by BURBERRY Opposite: white wool jacket, £1,930; black cotton shirt, £700; black satin tie, £220; white wool trousers, £750, all by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO

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Opposite: black/white/red checkedpatterned cotton jacket, £955; white poplin shirt, £270; black/white/red checked-patterned cotton trousers, £455; black leather shoes, £500, all by VIVIENNE WESTWOOD. White cotton socks, £13, by PANTHERELLA Sage leather double-breasted blazer, £2,000; sage nylon cagoule, £630; sage nylon trousers, £370; sage leather boots, £550, all by PAUL SMITH

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Opposite: white/black striped stretch-cotton double-breasted jacket, £945; black silk tie, £POA; black pinstripe cotton pleated trousers, £695 White/black striped silk cropped jacket, £1,150; white/black silk vest, £465; black/white checked stretchcotton pleated trousers, £695, all by DOLCE & GABBANA

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Opposite: brown/pale blue pinstripe mohair-virgin wool jacket, £2,005; brown/pale blue pinstripe mohairvirgin wool trousers, £590; cream canvas espadrilles, £525, all by SALVATORE FERRAGAMO Brown silk one-and-a-half-breasted suit, £2,035; black/white knitted ﬂax T-shirt, £320; white leather trainers, £415, all by CORNELIANI. White cotton socks, £13, by PANTHERELLA

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Dark grey leather trench coat, £19,100; blue cotton-poplin double-breasted jacket, £2,500; blue cotton shirt, £490; blue cotton-poplin shorts, £950; white leather boots, £1,200 Opposite: grey wool jacket, £3,300; grey cotton shirt, £490, all by LOUIS VUITTON

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Opposite: black gabardine jacket, £1,900; light blue cotton Oxford shirt, £545; khaki chino shorts, £415; black leathernylon boots, £740; pink/black cotton socks, £140; black Saffiano leather brooch, £135 Black/grey checked wool doublebreasted jacket, £1,810; black grey poplin shirt, £545; black/grey checked wool shorts, £790; black leather sandals, £705, all by PRADA

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Opposite: pale blue gabardinetechnical fabric jacket, £1,755; black viscose-poplin shirt, £620; pale blue gabardine-technical fabric shorts, £465, all by BOTTEGA VENETA White/yellow print cotton-twill jacket, £1,840, by LANVIN

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Brown washed linen shawl-collar deconstructed jacket, £1,800; brown washed linen double-breasted gilet, £860; navy linen zip-front shirt, £450; brown washed linen trousers, £680; chocolate brown nappa leather tasselled moccasins, £720 Opposite: grey/blue suede-goatskinwoven fabric striped jacket, £3,100; navy denim-linen-blend trousers, £630, both by GIORGIO ARMANI

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Opposite: turquoise cotton suit, £POA; turquoise silk shirt, £POA, both by BOSS Multicoloured patterned minknylon cape, £POA; beige silk-cotton jacket, £1,550; black botanic print nylon short-sleeved shirt, £550; beige silk-cotton shorts, £430; sage calf leather sandals, £590, all by FENDI

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Opposite: grey wool-twill coat, £2,250; white/blue handpainted motif silkcanvas short-sleeved jumpsuit, £5,000; off-white rubber boots, £510 Greige/pale blue wool-twill silk-satin technical fabric jacket, £2,600; white/ blue striped cotton-technical fabric shirt, £410; greige wool-twill silk-satin technical fabric trousers, £690, all by DIOR

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Opposite: brown linen jacket, £1,950; blue navy sweater-jacket, £2,650; brown cotton-linen trousers, £445, all by LORO PIANA White/blue/pale blue plaid cotton-technical fabric blazer, £1,150; white ribbed cotton polo shirt, £270, both by CANALI

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Opposite: corn brown gingham jacket, £2,210; corn brown gingham windbreaker, £1,850 Multicoloured patchwork silk shirtjacket, £4,800; white/blue striped cotton-poplin-ﬂannel trousers, £465; black calf leather sandals, £640, all by HERMÈS

Photographer’s assistant: Bradley Polkinghorne | Fashion assistant: Dan Choppen | Digital assistant: Tom Frimley | Grooming: Mark Francome Painter | Models: Xu Meen @ IMG Models; Elias De Poot @ Rebel Management See Stockists page for details

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PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON

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BENEATH THE BRANCHES Dima Alzayat

A STORM HAS BLOWN THE LEAVES AWAY and the cypress trees stand naked against the sky. Her face scrunches and flattens, his mother, the muscles contracting and expanding beneath skin as thin and pale as parchment paper. He watches his father’s arm wrapped around her and knows that were the father to make the smallest of moves, she would plunge towards the earth at his feet and stay there. The wide brim of his father’s hat keeps his eyes hidden but he can see the chin tremble. His grandmother, her narrow body wrapped in a grey shawl, is the only one crying, hushed heaves that rise and fall in whispers. A man he does not know pulls a lever he cannot see and he watches him lower his brother in a box of wood into the ground. They get the mother home and he puts her to bed. Still she does not speak. Between her lips he presses a pill and holds a glass to her mouth, watches her neck ripple as she swallows. When at last her eyes close and her head rests flat against the pillow, he wants to touch her face but doesn’t, afraid she will disintegrate like a pair of moth wings beneath his fingertips. Outside, the clouds hover low and heavy, pressed towards the land by an invisible palm. His father sits in an old rocking chair on the deck, his jaw deliberately working a wad of tobacco. He nods and sends a spray of amber-coloured spittle into an empty coffee can at his side. “How long you staying?” he asks. Through the gaunt trees and hedges that frame the yard, the son sees the lights of other homes turn on one by one. “A few days.” “She refused to come back to the house ’til you got here, you know. We stayed at your grandmother’s.” They watch a squirrel scamper across the grass and lunge headfirst into a juniper bush and disappear. A few branches rustle in its wake but soon they too become still. “Maybe it’s good you left.” The son looks to him but he is still staring at the bush. “I know I was against it then, but maybe Mazen oughta have left too.” “He did, for a bit.” →

FICTION

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on the trash, paper cups and Styrofoam containers, plastic wrappers and wadded tissues. “She’ll wake soon,” he says and then says it again and at last the father steps inside the room and begins to gather the clothes, placing them one by one into a hamper, and to the son the father’s movements are too slow and too purposed, and he says, “I’ll clean the bathroom.” In there, a mixture of shit and vomit float in the toilet and cause his throat to swell. He shuts the lid and flushes and works quickly. Throws away another empty red-label, gathers towels that smell of spoiled meat, sprays the counter with bleach. He stops only to track a few spilled pills to a translucent orange container on the floor, to try and read the label, but it too has been picked at and he gets down on hands and knees in search of the missing bits of paper and grows hotter and dizzier from the bleach. He tries to piece them back together, to match the tops and bottoms of words ripped apart and begins to laugh, a scraping, dry sound unfamiliar to his ears. There are too many missing. He stands and again scrubs everything in sight, the tub and the sink, each wall and its corners. He steps onto the closed toilet and wipes the ceiling using a sponge so soaked that drops of soap and water fall and sting his face. Back in the room, the father sits at the desk and makes his way through folders and notebooks and inspects each one. The son gathers the full bags and carries them to the doorway, gets new ones ready and walks back to the closet. When he opens its doors, he can do nothing but stand, his hands still and useless as dozens of plastic bottles tumble out and surround him. As they fall he notices the identical red labels of them all, sees the traces of fingers that touched, picked at them all. The father starts to rise but instead leans forward, cradles his head in his palms and begins to sway to and fro as if he were still sitting in the rocker on the patio. THAT EVENING, THE GRANDMOTHER SITS in an armchair beside the mother’s bed. Her fingers move along the wooden beads of her rosary and her eyes watch the mother as she sleeps. The grandmother’s thick silver hair is pulled into a bun and the skin of her face is taut around her temples and stretches over the sharp tip of her nose and sags around her chin. Her fingers slide over each bead in turn as her lips move in quiet recitations from Arabic to English and back again: Ya, Maryam. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Through the window she watches the purple clouds drift south. The cypresses are darker now, reduced to silhouettes by the setting sun. HE SLEEPS AND RISES BEFORE THEM, takes the father’s keys and leaves. In the truck it takes him a minute to recall where the clutch is, how to shift between gears. He drives down the narrow road lined with barren trees and there is no movement but for a single chicken hawk circling in the sky ahead, its tail long and red. The clouds gather in

BENEATH THE BR ANCHES

Magnum Photos

“Well, he should’ve stayed away then.” He does not like the way his father looks sitting in the chair, its varnish long gone, its curved legs creaking under the pressure of his body as he rocks. He wants to yank him right out of it, make him stand beside him and look at the cypresses. Were they always so bare this time of year? he wants to ask. Instead he says, “She’s asleep.” “Alright then.” The father struggles to lift himself out of the chair, and when his son holds out a hand to help him, he brushes it aside. Again the son reaches for him and this time the father nods and clasps his elbow. Through the cotton of his shirtsleeve, the son can feel the fingers shake. They pass the mother’s room in silence and descend the stairs at the end of the hallway. Hung photographs of two young boys, on baseball fields, with ice cream cones, kneedeep in water at a river’s edge, pass them by. At the bottom of the stairs they stand in front of a closed door and the father’s fingers graze the cracked wood. His hat is off and with no more than a few silver strands to frame his face, his eyes recede further into his head as if he is to be swallowed by his skull. “Can’t tell you the last time I went in there,” he says. “He never did like anyone down here.” The son opens the door and a sharp, sour odour, of rusted metal and ammonia, of rot and vomit, fills him. His eyes adjust to the dark as he makes his way around the foot of the bed to get to the window. The room is a converted basement partially submerged below ground and the window is high and wide. When he reaches up and pulls the pane open, cold air strikes his face and the sudden light burns his eyes and forces him to turn, to see the father still in the doorway and staring at the bed. He refuses to follow his father’s gaze and takes in the rest of the room instead. A pile of books leans against the wall. Scattered magazines with covers bearing grand landscapes and half-naked women cover the floor. Open notebooks scribbled on in handwriting small and precise, crumpled pants and stained shirts, food containers with abandoned remains. An ashtray heaped with cigarette butts sits on the desk, another overflows on the nightstand. A few half-gallon bottles, plastic and empty, their identical red labels picked at with restless fingers, are strewn about. Filtered with charcoal, they say. Authentic Russian taste. Again he looks to the father who does not blink and he follows the stare to the bed and sees where the smallest of indents lingers on the pillow, and to him it looks too small, as if it had cradled the head of an infant and not that of a full-grown man. The sheets are rumpled and stained with what looks like sweat and piss, with blood that once coursed through a child’s veins. A child that ran with him in the shade of the cypress trees outside. He forces his eyes to move, lifts his hands and begins. Empties an ashtray into a bag and then another. He focuses

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the distance, overlap and coalesce into one shifting mass. He knows everyone is praying for rain. Soon, houses appear, and his eyes measure the spaces between them, miles of grass as long as football fields, laid down to separate one house from the next, and it makes his tongue and throat feel parched. The road widens and the houses give way to office buildings, brown stucco and tinted glass, and he slows down as he nears the high school, rolls down the window to look at the baseball fields and the aluminium bleachers with corners blanched a powdery white from summers unrelenting in their heat. Summers when the sun delivers rays that scorch and ravage, wither and devour. He pulls into the main lot, parks and gets out, looks at the two-storey stucco buildings and tries to remember what it felt like to walk their halls, to sit in their classrooms. Though the paint is new, the buildings seem older or smaller and he can’t tell which. He walks through the courtyard between the buildings and through a window he spots the classroom where he met his friends and at the end of the hallway the locker room where they changed into baseball uniforms, gold-horned blue devils sewn onto the backs of their shirts. He lights a cigarette and makes his way behind the buildings and toward the baseball fields. In the dugout, he runs his fingers across the rusted metal of the chain-link fence and tries to picture what his friends looked like in their bluestriped jerseys, too-big caps and worn-out mitts. He tries to picture himself with them and can’t. In the outfield, a group of teenagers still out from the night before take turns batting as music blasts from a car parked behind the bleachers, its doors and windows left open to let out the sound. They cheer each other on and laugh and he watches as they throw and hit and catch and run and open can after can after can. The marquee above them drowns them in shadows. IF GOD IS FOR US, WHO CAN BE AGAINST US? When his palm catches on a broken link in the fencing he sees the blood before he feels the pain. Watery and quick it runs from a narrow cut and he is fast to move his hand but two, three drops land on his clothes. The rest drip onto the ground and disappear. With his good hand, he reaches into his pocket and finds a tissue, pulls it out and dabs at the blood but it is too much and soon the tissue is soaked red. He takes off his jacket and uses it to wrap his hand and watches the blood darken.

IN THE HOUSE, HE FINDS HIS GRANDMOTHER ASLEEP on the sofa with the Bible open on her lap. Her small body slumps into the cushions and her hands are clasped atop her stomach. The beads of the rosary intertwine with her ﬁngers, wood that weaves around skin and bone. He passes the kitchen and it is dark and empty and in the mother’s room he ﬁnds her sitting upright in bed. Her head is turned to the window but he knows that from that angle she cannot see outside. He stands in between her and the window

and she looks up at him but her eyes do not focus. They glide back and forth as if he is a pendulum swinging closer to and farther from her in turn, though he is still and unmoving. He sits on the edge of the bed and watches her. She is skinny and her long and narrow neck now turned back toward the window should be too slight, too insubstantial, to balance her head and he wonders how it has managed to for so many years. “Do you want some water?” he asks. She nods and he fills a glass from a pitcher on the dresser and starts to put it to her mouth but she takes it from him with unsteady fingers and drinks. On the nightstand, the grandmother has built a miniature shrine. A Virgin carved of wood and chipped of paint, a copper crucifix leaning against it, and candles of different heights and colours and among them a photograph of Mazen when he was no more than five, six years old. His lips stretch into a smile but the lips are pressed together tight and his hair is long enough to cover his ears completely. He wears a red and white striped shirt, a shirt the son remembers being handed down and wearing and he can feel now what the cotton of that shirt, well-worn and washed so many times, felt like against his skin and there is no air whole or complete enough to fill his lungs. His breaths come close together, then closer still and he knows he must slow them down, do with less air if he needs to, but it is too late because she hears him and follows his eyes to the photograph and her pupils stop gliding and stare. He reaches for the picture and he wants to move it or throw it but he feels her hand on his arm and stops. She pulls his head onto her lap and he inhales the scent of sickly-sweet lavender and aspirin and sweat as she strokes his hair with fingers shaking. For a while he does not look up at her, and when he does, her eyes are closed and he watches as a tear, thin and alone, rolls down her cheek and drops onto his. When she falls asleep, he wipes his face and gets up slow and silent, so she does not stir, and leaves. He peers into the guest room but the father is not there and when he looks out the window, he can see the truck still there. In the garage, he switches on the light, a single bulb that hangs above the mother’s black sedan. His eyes move to shelves that line the walls and the boxes stacked above and next to one another, all numbered by year. He climbs a stepladder and brings down one box, then another and then two more. Sitting on the floor, he opens their lids one by one and the dust lifts and fills his nostrils and scratches his throat and he tries to cough without sound until he remembers it is only his mother and grandmother in the house and that even if he were to scream they would not hear him, that even if they did they would not come. The first box holds mostly receipts and bills stamped “Paid”, papers yellow and filled with numbers faded. Report cards and school notices, half-used notebooks and graded homework are layered without order in the next box. He →

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looks through sheets of paper torn from workbooks, his name and his brother’s name written on the top corners, their answers marked and circled and darkened. His eyes seek Mazen’s name written over and over on pages covered with multiplication problems and chemistry formulas and physics theorems, on essays about the geography of Mexico and the history of California and the themes in Hamlet and the virtues of democracy. So many lessons completed and replicated and proven and demonstrated, and his name written so many times on sheet after sheet to be submitted and assessed and weighed and graded. In his room, he lies awake on the twin bed, its mattress old beneath new sheets, the metal coils digging into his back and sides and though he is tired and his body weak he cannot sleep. The curtains are sheer and let in a light, colourless and flat, and on the walls he can make out the tape marks and the small corners of posters and pictures once put up and now gone. He tries to remember their layout but cannot. Framed drawings now take their place, of ducks and lakes and places no one has ever seen because they were imagined, and he stares at the ceiling instead. THE NEXT MORNING, HE FINDS HIS MOTHER out of bed and standing at the window overlooking the yard. The sunlight shines around her and, through her thin nightgown, her body, lank and pale, is exposed. She turns for an instant when he enters and holds his eyes in hers but they are weightless and reveal nothing. She turns her head away and then back and he cannot tell by the movement of her eyes if they are there or elsewhere, if she sees him as he is, and he tries not to breathe in her direction so she cannot smell the drink gone stale in his mouth. “Where’s grandma?” he asks. She sucks in her breath and parts her lips as if about to speak but she does not. She looks to him but does not reach for him, does not touch him, and instead turns back to the window, her eyes watching the trees. They are shaped like columns, the cypresses, with branches that sweep upward, and in the spring will carry leaves like scales pressed against each twig. Leaves that look soft and feathery from a distance but are coarse and prickly to the touch. In the fall, they are among the first trees to lose their leaves. They are bare now, the cypresses — all of them. He stands with her for a while, and when she turns to go back to bed, she lets him help her. The skin of her arms feels cold and damp and when he releases her, the moisture lingers on his fingers. She pulls the covers high, above her chin, and shuts her eyes. On the nightstand the shrine is gone. The Virgin and the crucifix are pushed behind the lamp, the candles have been removed and Mazen’s photograph stands alone. He imagines his brother watching them, looking on as the mother shivers beneath the covers, as the son stands over her, then sits on the floor at her side, as he leans his head against the mattress.

When her breaths become shallow and he is certain she is asleep, he leaves. He takes a shower and lets the water roll over his head, down his shoulders, turns the knob until steam fills the bathroom and his skin scalds and glows red. Still it does not feel hot enough, the water, cannot penetrate deep enough or at all, and washes away nothing but dirt and sweat and tears. His legs give way until he is sitting in the bathtub, the water dribbling down from the spout above. With eyes closed, he tries to picture his apartment thousands of miles away, empty and waiting but cannot. He tries to imagine the drive from apartment to work, from work to bar, and bar to bar, but as he begins to outline each street sign and signal, to shade in each building and tree he knows to fill the route, he is certain he will not glimpse himself among them, will not be able to create his own image in their midst. Wrapped in a towel, he lies on his bed and listens to the first sound of thunder, the cracks coming closer together until they become a rolling rumble. The sun has long set and a thick darkness covers even the shadows. Through the window, lightning fills the sky like fire and sets the world ablaze for two, three seconds at a time. He dreams that he is dressed in waders and standing kneedeep in water with Mazen to his left and his father to his right. A river, wide and rocky, stretches out on either side of them, its current placid and ripples shallow. Both Mazen and the father dangle their rods above the water and he watches the string on Mazen’s rod grow taught, watches as Mazen leans back and begins to crank the handle and reel in the line. The way Mazen bends, using all of his weight against the pull, suggests that whatever hangs on the end of the line is substantial, and he and his father come closer and wait in anticipation. Back Mazen leans, his hand cranking the reel over and over until out of the water he pulls a trout. But it is small and sickly and he helps Mazen unhook it and throw it back. When they are out of bait the father sends them to shore for more. They are careful to step only on rocks stable in their beds and avoid ones thick with algae. On the sand, they open the bait box and find worms and caterpillars loose and crawling and realise they had forgotten to put lids on the plastic containers meant to hold them. Sensing air and light the insects begin to move toward the top edges of the box. He grabs at them, manages to get a few back in, but as a whole they are too quick and his hands too small. A few escape but with Mazen’s help he is able to shove the rest back into a container which, as soon as he stands, slips through his fingers and opens. Mazen grunts and rolls his eyes, bends down and tries to collect the escaped bait. His father looks over his shoulder and yells something they cannot hear and he is gesturing, his free arm circling like a windmill, beckoning them to hurry. He watches as Mazen walks ahead, carrying the

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container with crawlers holding on to its sides and bottom, and watches a worm fall and get crushed beneath his brother’s boot. As they move deeper into the water, Mazen leads and he tries to follow but steps onto a rock covered in slick moss and feels his rubber sole slip as the rock tilts. He yells for Mazen, who turns, drops the bait box into the water and reaches out his arm and he wakes up. For a moment he keeps his eyes closed in some effort to hang on to the dream, to grasp at its images, but they are quick to dissolve. Only a feeling remains and in it he cannot see his brother but can feel him, swirling inside of him, around and around. He opens his eyes and rubs the sleep from them. The room is darker now, a grey that can pass for either twilight or dusk but he can still feel the drink working its way through him and knows that one day has not yet moved to the next. In the kitchen, he looks through the fridge and then the cupboards and spots a bottle of sherry on a high shelf and brings it down. He pours its remainder into a glass but there is only enough to fill it halfway. He drinks it in one gulp and looks for more, but if the cabinets and pantry contain anything, they do not betray it, and after searching behind and beneath each box and can, every bottle and canister, he stops. Down the hallway, the bedroom doors are shut and he wonders if they are asleep, his father and mother, his grandmother, or if separately they are lying still and quiet in the dark. He feels a sudden and urgent need to wake them all, to gather them in the same room so they can sit together even in silence until the sun comes up, but he does not. Instead, he finds himself at the end of the hallway looking down at the stairs that descend into blackness and this time makes sure to keep his head straight and his eyes away from the walls as he goes down. At the bottom, the heavy door has been left ajar and he pushes wide and looks. Inside, the moonlight seeps through the window and it no longer smells like piss and vomit but is cold and bare and for a long time he stands there then sinks to his feet. In the doorway, he folds his legs toward his chest and holds them there, and the weight of his eyelids force them shut and leave him in a darkness between sleeping and waking and he feels the sherry travel through him but knows it is not enough. He does not know how long he sits. Long enough for the thirst to grow and multiply and for him to believe that no drink will ever be enough. When he does move it is on hands and knees to the pile of books he had left bagged in the room’s centre and he takes them out and looks through them page by page and reads the words written in their margins. The handwriting is small and careful in its strokes, and with his fingers he touches the marks underlining sentences, the notes made and crossed out, and imagines the hand that held the pen and moved.

He stands and walks to the bed and looks, and even though the pillows and sheets are gone, the stains remain and they are deep and brown and he lies on top of them and shuts his eyes and inhales the smell of rot and sick and tries to picture him in this place, his brother, this house, this bed, so alone when he was not. But instead he can only see him as a child, running outside, his arms extended, his eyes hazel and burning, and he is quiet, so quiet, even as he runs. He tries to reach for the root of that quiet, the birthplace of silence, and wonders when going quiet and pretending everything was OK had become the only thing they knew, the only thing to bind them all, even now. THE LIGHT SEEPS THROUGH HIS CLOSED LIDS, pushing through skin and membrane and filling his eyes with whiteness. He tries to remain perfectly still and fall back asleep but the sound of shuffling feet, small and soft, is impossible to ignore and he opens his eyes. It takes a few seconds for the white to darken and for his grandmother’s face to fill in the space. “Why are the drapes open?” he asks without moving. His eyes strain against the glow. She opens his suitcase and unpacks it one item at a time and collects the dirty clothes in one stack at her feet. She looks to him for an instant but does not pause, lifts a shirt to her nose and sniffs it before letting it drop onto the pile. “You’ve been asleep all day. You should try sleeping at night instead.” He lifts himself until he is sitting at the edge of the bed and watches her. Her movements are slow and deliberate. With her palms she flattens the creases of a pair of jeans and slides them onto a hanger, adds more shirts to the others at her feet. She picks up and deposits boxers and socks, undershirts and shorts. “You don’t have to do that,” he says. Though his body aches and his temples pulse, he gets out of bed and begins to draw the curtains shut. When they are halfway closed, she says: “That’s plenty,” and he stops. The throbbing in his head does not cease even in the dimmed light and he knows he must lie down or be sick. He leans back against the pillows on the bed and watches her, as with fingers pale and wrinkled she continues to sort through the clothes. She stops only once and looks at him, gathers him with her eyes, and he has to look away. “She’ll get better,” she says. He lies back deeper among the pillows and pulls one over his face and shuts his eyes, but the sun still fills the room and there is no darkness. “When Amer died,” she says, “I just wanted to crawl right under that dirt with him and hold him in that coffin.” He opens his eyes and props himself up enough to watch her but she is no longer looking at him. She continues to lift clothes and fold them, to smell and drop them onto the →

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ground. Her words circle in his mind, conjuring up not memories but photographs of a black-bearded man dressed as Santa Claus. He does not remember his uncle, only that he was four when his uncle died and Mazen was six and that every Christmas before that he played Santa and bounced them on his knee on Christmas Eve. “For months, I woke up, convinced he was still alive. That he was breathing and screaming beneath grass and mud and that I just had to get him out.” She looks at the shirt in her hands and stops folding it. “Many nights your father found me wandering the cemetery, searching for Amer’s grave in the darkness, digging at the dirt until the skin beneath my nails split and bled.” She resumes folding the shirt and sets it down on the bed. Picks up another and starts to fold again. “But I got better,” she says. “Everyone gets better but the dead.” Her face remains expressionless as she speaks but her fingers shake. She sits down on the bed next to him and he reaches out and touches her hand if only to still the movement. She looks at him, her eyes fixed until his relent and meet hers. “This kind of loss you will have with you for the rest of your days, and most days you will have to bear its weight on your head and feel it press and push your shoulders toward the earth. I don’t need to tell you that, I know. But some days, some days it will hover beside you as you walk, never leaving you but carrying its own weight as it goes, and those will be the days you call life.” She squeezes his hand and he tries not to picture her wandering over bodies newly dead and long decayed, shakes his head to be rid of the image, but it lingers, and he knows it will remain with him even when all others fade. He follows her to the kitchen and watches as she wipes down the counters and cleans out the fridge. One by one she takes out casserole after casserole, brought over by neighbours and acquaintances and now gone rancid, and empties their contents into the trash can. “You can’t think with these in the house,” she says and he nods. He helps her wash and dry the dishes, pack them in bags to be returned to those who brought them. When he takes out the garbage, he sees that his father’s truck is not there. He is gone and he knows that again, it will be for hours. He stays outside a while and smokes a cigarette in the hot air, the sun settling on his skin and warming his bones. Back inside the house, his grandmother hands him a sandwich but he does not want to eat it. Again she holds out the plate and keeps her arm extended until he takes it from her and sits down. She watches him as he bites and chews, waits until he swallows the first bite and the next. “When Amer died, for a long time I thought it was my fault.” He does not look at her as she speaks and he wants to tell her that he knows what she is trying to say, that he has

heard the same words rearranged since he arrived, that he will nod to them if it will mean she will not speak them. It’s no one’s fault, he wants to say so that she will not, but she shakes her head anticipating his words. “No, no. It’s everyone’s fault,” she says. “It’s everyone’s fault.” He looks to her, at eyes older and more tired than his and tries to understand them, to read them in some way as her words pass through him, their meaning tangled and lucid and infinite and meagre. IN THE KITCHEN, HIS FATHER SITS AT THE TABLE and lifts his face to look at him as he enters. He shuffles his feet against the floor as if he will move but he remains seated, fingering a glass that he now picks up and sips from. Red surrounds his eyes and his lips are pallid, the cracks that line them deep. The son shrugs and moves to the cupboards, opens one and takes out a glass. One by one he opens the rest of the cupboards, inspects every fridge shelf and drawer before he turns to his father, who moves his shoulders forward toward the table and keeps his head down. His glass is empty now but still he traces its rim with his fingers. “Where is it?” he asks. He stares at his father long enough to know that he will not answer then moves back to the cupboards and again opens and slams them, over and over and harder each time, until the hinges loosen and the glasses and dishes rattle on the shelves. Still his father remains silent, moves the empty glass to his lips and drinks the drops. His grandmother now stands in the doorway and looks first at the father and then at him, runs her hand across her forehead and pulls her shawl tighter across her chest. “Please be quiet.” Again her voice pleads and still he grows hotter, can feel each heartbeat grow stronger, the spaces between them shrinking with each pulse. He curls his fingers until nails dig into the flesh of his palms and break skin and he can feel the small trickle of blood. “You’re already drunk anyway,” the father says, still not looking up. “Sure. And he’s dead anyway,” he hears himself say, his voice rising and thickening with each word, forcing his grandmother to lean against the door frame and grip it with her hand. The father motions as if to stand but the grandmother shakes her head at him and, again, he stops moving and remains in the chair. It’s only when the son throws the glass in his hand towards the sink and when it shatters against the steel and scatters chips of glass across the countertop, that his father stands. With one step he moves to meet him, stares directly into his eyes, into red lines like cobwebs sprouting from his pupils and ending at lids loose and folding. “He’s dead anyway,” he says again. “Whether I scream or whisper or sit here mute like you, he is dead anyway and always will be.” He spits the words and his father does not

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move. Only his eyes glide and return to him and glide away again. “He was close enough for you to touch and still you let him die.” The father begins to sway, his legs bending and tilting towards the table as he reaches out for the chair. The son steps away from him and looks towards his grandmother in the doorway, her hands pulling at the shawl, her fingers tearing into its woven yarn. Behind her his mother stands in her nightgown, her eyes focused and looking directly at him, and he feels himself grow dizzy but he does not break her gaze. He watches her as she watches him and does not blink. When he looks to his father, now sitting down and again holding his glass though still it remains empty, his eyes fixed on the table, and he realises now that his father cannot look at his mother, nor she at him, that he has not been once to see her, has slept in the guest room or not at all. Though husband and wife, father and mother, they have not spoken to one another since the funeral, have not been in the same room of the house where their first-born son lived his first days and his last. His eyes move from his father to his mother in some effort to connect her eyes with his, and he feels his legs give as he leans back against the fridge, slides down and further down until he is on the floor. Only then does his mother move her eyes from him. She lets the grandmother grip her arm and lead her away, and he can hear their feet climbing the stairs. As soon as they are gone, his father stands up, puts his hat on, and leaves the kitchen, closing the front door quietly as he goes. He follows him outside and from the deck he watches as his father’s truck curves with the road and disappears. The stars are faint and he knows that soon they will hover invisible in the sky, that again it is another day. He walks to the cypresses in the yard, heads to the one that faces his mother’s window and looks up. The curtain is drawn shut and remains that way. With his fingers he traces bark like scales, runs his hand up and down the ridges as high as his arm can reach. He circles the tree once, then two, three times until his eyes make out a small carving near its base. Squatting, he wipes at the bark and inspects the initials chiselled into the trunk. They are not his or his brother’s and he does not know to whom they belong and he moves to another tree and then another, inspecting them all, for what, he does not know. Proof that he was here, that my brother had once walked on land and earth before floating only in my mind. For what seems like hours he walks, across other yards that look like his, with trees that look like the cypresses in his yard, until his eyelids grow heavy and at last he has to sit, allow them to relent against the weight, come together and shut. One final time he tries to force them open, tries to urge himself to stand, but he is dizzy and tired and the drink he has had day after day, alone and at night, when no one was watching, or watched and said nothing, circles and speeds, whirls and swirls, moves from head to ears to

arms and stomach and legs and all he can do is wrap his coat around himself and go to sleep. WHEN HE WAKES, THE SUN FILLS THE SKY, its centre Herculean and blinding. It is only when he is halfway down his street that he notices that people, families, are gathered on each deck and patio, from house to house, each one looking down the road and towards his yard. He quickens his pace, his stomach growing tighter as he draws closer, close enough to make out the shapes and their movements. In the distance, his mother stands, her skinny arms and legs visible through her thin nightgown, an axe handle clutched between her hands. It is heavy, the axe, and he can see how her muscles strain and pull as she lifts it and swings with all her might against the tree. The grandmother stands on the deck and he watches her lips move but he is too far to hear what she says or to make out if they only move without words. The father comes out of the house and takes the steps two at a time and he is halfway to the mother when the son begins to run in their direction. Patio after patio of people stand and watch and he wants them all to disappear, to sink into their lawns and be swallowed by mud and leaves and worms. Everything, even his legs, seem to move in a motion slow and leaden, and he knows that it is the weight of the stares that slows him down, and that one by one he must shed them so he can move, lift his arms and legs and run. He turns his eyes to her, his mother, and to his father who is now behind her, one hand gripping the axe while the other holds her around the waist. But it is as if he is made of air as she pushes his body off hers and again lifts the axe and strikes. A scream, loud and wretched, breaks through the stillness and she falls to the ground as his father pulls the axe and frees it from her hold. At last the son reaches her, as she bends towards the ground and another wail leaves her, her entire body heaving in surges. He falls beside her, holds her shoulders in his arms and pulls her to him. His ears ﬁll with nothing but the sounds of her and he holds her tighter as her wails turn to sobs. He cries with her, as people begin to return to their homes, to pull their children back inside. As they do, the father falls beside them, circles his arms around them both, the mother’s cries breaking through the hushed silence of the street, ﬁlling every crack in the pavement, burrowing between rocks and grass. Only the sound of metal again striking wood rises above her cries. The son looks up as his grandmother swings the axe against the tree, sending scraps of bark raining to the ground. With her entire weight she tugs at the handle until the lodged bit loosens, her arms taut and slightly shaking. Without speaking she again swings and strikes the trunk in the same place, deepening the groove now visible and wide. ○

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAN MCALISTER

MARKET LOUIS VUITTON

SPACEMAN KEYRING, Â£275

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5G PHONES

2 3

1. XIAOMI MI MIX 3, £300 2. HUAWEI MATE 20 X, £760 3. LG V50 THINQ, £1,000 4. SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE 10+, £830 5. SAMSUNG GALAXY S10, £1,100 6. ONEPLUS 7 PRO, £700 7. OPPO RENO, £700

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182

HARRINGTON JACKETS

8 9

1. HACKETT, £275 2. SUNSPEL, £295 3. ALBAM, £180 4. GANT, £280 5. LEVI’S VINTAGE CLOTHING, £310 6. GRENFELL, £295 7. TIGER OF SWEDEN, £450 8. BERLUTI, £2,690 9. EMPORIO ARMANI, £390

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183

KEYRINGS

3 1

5 4

1. RAF SIMONS, £130 2. MAISON KITSUNÉ, £115 3. MOYNAT, £305 4. PAUL SMITH, £65 5. ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, £155 6. 1017 ALYX 9SM, £195 7. AMI, £60 8. GRENSON, £25 9. DUNHILL, £180 10. CONNOLLY, £165 11. GUCCI, £135

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184

RUNNING SHOES

2 1

1. NEW BALANCE FRESH FOAM 1080V10, £135 2. ADIDAS ULTRABOOST 20, £160 3. ON RUNNING CLOUD X MESH, £130 4. APL TECHLOOM WAVE, £175 5. PUMA LQDCELL TENSION RAVE, £80 6. SALOMON S/LAB SPEEDCROSS BLACK LTD , £165 7. NIKE ZOOM FLY 3 PREMIUM, £140 8. HOKA ONE ONE SPEEDGOAT 4 GORE-TEX, £135

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185

COOKBOOKS

1 2

1. THE QUALITY CHOP HOUSE: MODERN RECIPES AND STORIES FROM A LONDON CLASSIC (QUADRILLE), £30 2. SOUR / THE MAGICAL ELEMENT THAT WILL TRANSFORM YOUR COOKING BY MARK DIACONO (QUADRILLE), £30 3. EAST BY MEERA SODHA (FIG TREE), £20 4. TARTINE: A CLASSIC REVISITED BY ELISABETH PRUEITT AND CHAD ROBERTSON (CHRONICLE BOOKS), £30 5. THE WHOLE FISH COOKBOOK BY JOSH NILAND (HARDIE GRANT BOOKS), £25 6. BIG MAMMA CUCINA POPOLARE: CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN RECIPES (PHAIDON), £30 7. BLACK AXE MANGAL BY LEE TIERNAN (PHAIDON), £25 8. THE BOOK OF ST JOHN BY FERGUS HENDERSON AND TREVOR GULLIVER (EBURY PRESS), £30

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186

CABIN LUGGAGE

1. CRASH BAGGAGE, £260 2. GUCCI, £1,880 3. AWAY, £445 4. DIOR X RIMOWA, £3,000 5. PRADA, £2,620 6. MONTBLANC X PIRELLI, £615 7. LOUIS VUITTON, £1,770

See Stockists page for details

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187

CRAFT BEERS

1 2

3 5

6 7

1. ST AUSTELL TRIBUTE CORNISH PALE ALE, £1.15 2. ADNAMS EARL GREY LAGER, £1.60 3. BEAVERTOWN BLOODY ’ELL BLOOD ORANGE IPA, £2.99 4. LOST AND GROUNDED SAISON D’AVON BELGIAN-STYLE ALE, £4.50 5. MAGIC ROCK BREWING SALTY KISS GOOSEBERRY GOSE, £2.20 6. NORTH BREWING COMPANY KÖLSCH, £2.70 7. FOURPURE BREWING COMPANY SHAPESHIFTER WEST COAST IPA, £2.20 8. CAMDEN TOWN BREWERY OFF MENU IPA, £1.80

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188

ADVERTISING/FEATURE

ESQUIRE

Lifestyle essentials

Chiccheria Brand

See the truth

Chiccheria Brand is a premium streetwear company with a focus on luxury menswear. The casual style of West Coast metropolis Los Angeles and the Southern California beach communities is combined with traditional Milanese craftsmanship. That means, for example, that streetwear classics such as bandanas or long scarves are converted into statement pieces by using the ﬁnest Italian silk. Italian-cut T-shirts and polos, handmade leather accessories or velvet baseball caps always ensure a glamorous look and can be combined in many ways. The Spring/Summer 2020 collection is available online and at select retailers.

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.

chiccheriabrand.com IG: @Chiccheriabrand

Visit cwdixeyandson.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.

S-Force™ Ltd The iconic design of S-Force™ LTD timepieces brings a bold look to statement watches. “Strength Overcomes” is found on every watch produced by S-Force, reminding us that no challenge is too great to conquer. From bezel to buckle, every feature of an S-Force watch is built with style and strength. Engineered with some of the strongest materials on earth like marine-grade stainless steel, authentic carbon ﬁbre, even titanium, S-Force watches are designed to withstand harsh conditions with style and class. sforcewatches.com

rockfordcollection.com

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Lifestyle essentials

Custom professional timepieces Micro Milspec was founded by appointment to the military to develop timepieces that are validated in extreme real life conditions. Each line is crafted uniquely, are custom constructed and carry the Swiss Made seal of outstanding quality. Go behind the scenes of custom watchmaking at micromilspec.com Available by appointment only.

189

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190

ADVERTISING/FEATURE

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Lifestyle essentials

Oasis Construction London We’re passionate about the philosophy and practice of Passivhaus design. With years of experience and expertise building smart, lowenergy homes and commercial properties, we guarantee luxury living. Call us now for a free consultation and realise your dream to live in a healthier, greener home.

+44 20 3844 2208 oasisconstructionlondon.co.uk

Ambr Eyewear

Beautiful essentials – superior Italian craftsmanship, made accessible

Irish brand Ambr Eyewear create glasses designed to protect wearers from harmful blue light emitted by digital screens. By blocking this blue light, the glasses provide relief from issues like eye strain, headaches, disrupted sleep and long-term damage. As an added bonus, they look great. They come with or without prescription, so can also be worn by people with perfect eyesight.

Made in Italy by the most sought-after Italian artisans of luxury and produced in limited batches, Artisan Lab create truly handmade products, beautifully designed and made to last and age gracefully. Having developed a completely new approach to production and retail they can offer superior quality at an incredible price. Sign up to their community mailing list and get priority access to their monthly drops and 20 per cent on their new releases. Their lists are open for a limited time only. artisan-lab.com IG: @artisanlab_ofﬁcial

ambreyewear.com

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191

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.

billyrufﬁan.co.uk

Josh Fano – Studio Collection British eyewear studio-inspired by timeless architectural movements. This sunglass collection incorporates subtle design inﬂuences from iconic contemporary architecture in London. The collection is produced from high-grade titanium in Sabae, Japan, and each frame is inscribed with the name of the artisan who crafted them. Available in four colours with a variety of lenses.

joshfano.com Use code ‘JF2020’ for 30 per cent off.

Merci Maman Say something special with the new Personalised Hammered Open Bangle by Merci Maman. Each piece of its jewellery is hand-engraved with the name, dates or short message of your choice and delivered to you in a signature gift box. Handmade in London and available in sterling silver, 18k gold-plated or rose gold.

mercimamanboutique.com

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192

ADVERTISING/FEATURE

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Lifestyle essentials

What the world needs now: a sustainable fashion brand Is it possible to have a sustainable, ethicallyfocused fashion label without it beige-ing your look or breaking the bank? Well, yes. Say hello to TOBEFRANK, designed for people who want to know exactly what they’re wearing and who love fashion. Denim, T-shirts and leather are developed from creatively sourced, sustainable fabrics such as recycled ﬁbre, weed-dyed cotton, vegetable leather, zero-water technology washing and compressed apple juice waste. As well as creating clothing from plastic bottles and landﬁll, TOBEFRANK also runs a charity, the TOBEFRANK FOUNDATION, founded to help those in the supply chain and their surrounding communities. TOBEFRANK pays the living wage, implements training for personal and professional development, and supports projects including women’s empowerment in the workplace and gender equality initiatives. For TOBEFRANK, sustainability is about creating a stable way of living and working which doesn’t limit our goals of development and progression, and looks after the world for future generations. So when fashion is done properly, then it’s sustainable — it doesn’t mean banning all clothes and living in a cave. We’re not perfect, but we’re learning every day how to make the world a better place through fashion. tbfuk.com @tobefrankuk

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193

STOCKISTS

DIOR X RIMOWA 1017 ALYX 9SM

dior.com

LANVIN

RAF SIMONS

alyxstudio.com

DOLCE & GABBANA

lanvin.com

rafsimons.com

A-COLD-WALL*

dolcegabbana.com

LEVI’S VINTAGE CLOTHING

RALPH LAUREN

available at matchesfashion.com

DRIES VAN NOTEN

levi.com

available at matchesfashion.com

ACE & TATE

driesvannoten.com

REEBOK

aceandtate.com

DUNHILL

lg.com

reebok.co.uk

ACNE STUDIOS

dunhill.com

LOCK & CO

available at mrporter.com

lockhatters.co.uk

ACQUA DI PARMA acquadiparma.com

LONGINES

ADIDAS

available at ernestjones.co.uk LORO PIANA

SAINT LAURENT BY

adidas.co.uk

EB MEYROWITZ

loropiana.com

ANTHONY VACCARELLO

AESOP

ebmeyrowitz.co.uk

LOUIS VUITTON

ysl.com

available at mrporter.com

EMPORIO ARMANI

louisvuitton.com

SALOMON

ALBAM

armani.com

albamclothing.com

ERCOL

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN

ercol.com

alexandermcqueen.com

ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA

ALICE MADE THIS

zegna.co.uk

alicemadethis.com AMI amiparis.com

ANTHONY

salomon.com SALVATORE FERRAGAMO

ferragamo.com SAMSUNG

MAISON KITSUNÉ

samsung.com

maisonkitsune.com

SEALAND

MALIN + GOETZ

sealandgear.com

malinandgoetz.co.uk

JACQUEMUS

MAMI WATA

jacquemus.com

available at mrporter.com

FENDI

mamiwatasurf.com

SISLEY

APL

fendi.com

MONTBLANC

sisley-paris.com

athleticpropulsionlabs.com

FINLAY & CO

montblanc.com

SUNSPEL

AWAY

ﬁnlayandco.com

MONTBLANC X PIRELLI

sunspel.com

montblanc.com

awaytravel.com

MOSCOT

G B

moscot.com

MOYNAT GANT

moynat.com

TEMELLINI

BELSTAFF

gant.co.uk

belstaff.co.uk

GIORGIO ARMANI

BENNETT WINCH

armani.com

bennettwinch.com

GIVENCHY

BERLUTI

givenchy.com

NEW BALANCE

tigerofsweden.com

berluti.com

GOOD GOOD GOOD

newbalance.co.uk

TURNBULL & ASSER

BLENHEIM FORGE

goodgoodgood.co.za

NIKE

turnbullandasser.co.uk

blenheimforge.com

GRENFELL

nike.com

BOSS

grenfell.com

NOAH

hugoboss.com

GRENSON

available at mrporter.com

BOTTEGA VENETA

grenson.com

bottegaveneta.com

GROWN ALCHEMIST

BRIONI

grownalchemist.com

brioni.com

GUCCI

BURBERRY

gucci.com

ON RUNNING

burberry.com

GUCCI

on-running.com

available at mrporter.com

ONEPLUS

C H

temellinimilano.com THE WORKERS CLUB

theworkersclub.co.uk TIGER OF SWEDEN

U UNDER ARMOUR

underarmour.co.uk

oneplus.com

VERSACE

OPPO

versace.com

oppo.com

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

CANALI

viviennewestwood.com

canali.com

HACKETT

CONNOLLY

hackett.com

connollyengland.com

HAECKELS

CORNELIANI

haeckels.co.uk

PANTHERELLA

corneliani.com

HAWKSMILL

pantherella.com

CRASH BAGGAGE

hawksmill.com

PATRICKS

available at mrporter.com

HERMÈS

available at mrporter.com

WILLIAM & SON

CROCKETT & JONES

hermes.com

PAUL SMITH

williamandson.com

crockettandjones.com

HERON PRESTON

paulsmith.com

available at matchesfashion.com

PRADA

HOKA ONE ONE

prada.com

hokaoneone.eu

PUMA

HUAWEI

puma.com

D DIOR dior.com

huawei.com

VOLLEBAK

vollebak.com

X XIAOMI mi.com

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194

Backstage

Yellow cotton-silk blend suit, £POA; white cotton shirt, £250; yellow cotton tie, £POA; white leather trainers, £POA, all by Boss

For the past few years, the big story in men’s fashion — in women’s fashion, too, for that matter, and just in fashion fashion, as gender boundaries have continued to blur, on the catwalk as elsewhere — has been the rise to prominence of streetwear, for want of a better term (athleisure being a worse one), and the concurrent fall from favour of tailoring, which is the industry term for what you and we call shirts and trousers and jackets and proper shoes rather than trainers. But fashion is cyclical, as we know. And for a season or two now, the news from London, Milan, Paris and New York has been of a return to splendour, a resurgence of the most traditional, most hidebound, most formal item in a man’s wardrobe: the suit (business, rather than track). Only these business suits are different: bolder, brighter, more daring. Unconventional takes on the conventional. Suits as provocation, rather than equivocation.

In fact, they’re not really business suits at all, at least not as we have understood the term. Hence “The Suit is Dead, Long Live the Suit”, the headline on the big fashion story in this issue, which features the best clothes from the new season’s collections, spotlighting 26 different ways in which designers are redeﬁning the suit for a new decade. They’re suits, essentially, that won’t make you look like a Suit. The one you can see here, the 27th, is a lemon yellow concoction by Boss, as worn by model Xu Meen, photographed by Jens Langkjaer and styled by Catherine Hayward, in north London, in November. It might look a little outré to you, compared to a traditional navy blue number. But check out some of the others on offer, which take a much more radical line, and reﬂect that, until the world turns again and we’re all back in sportswear, the act of wearing a suit is suddenly one of nonconformism, instead of the reverse. ○

Words by Alex Bilmes | Jens Langkjaer | See Stockists page for details

Excerpts and outtakes from the pages of Esquire

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