AIR Magazine - DCA - November'20 by Hot Media

NOVEMBER 2020

LENNY KRAVITZ

CHRONOMAT

The Cinema Squad Charlize Theron Brad Pitt Adam Driver

Contents

AIR

NOVEMBER 2020: ISSUE 110

FEATURES Thirty Two

Thirty Eight

House Proud

Altered World

Forty Six

Fifty Two

As his memoir is published, Lenny Kravitz talks to Polly Vernon about love, fame and betrayal.

Chanel’s president of fashion, Bruno Pavlovsky, on Virginie Viard’s creativity, fashion shows, and challenges.

Savile Row has been the last word in bespoke suiting for centuries. Now it must face down an existential crisis.

Ahead of the V&A’s latest exhibition, curator Lucia Savi tells Hayley Kadrou about the power of an iconic accessory.

Love Rules

Carried Away

Contents

NOVEMBER 2020: ISSUE 110

Credit: © @neelioparis

REGULARS Fourteen

Radar

Sixteen

Critique Eighteen

Art & Design Twenty Four

Objects of Desire EDITORIAL

Twenty Six

Timepieces

Chief Creative Officer

Twenty Eight

john@hotmedia.me

John Thatcher

Jewellery

ART

Fifty Eight

Art Director

Motoring

Kerri Bennett

AIR

Sixty Six

Illustration

Journeys by Jet

Leona Beth

COMMERCIAL

Sixty Eight

Managing Director

What I Know Now

Victoria Thatcher General Manager

David Wade

david@hotmedia.me

PRODUCTION Digital Media Manager

Muthu Kumar Sixty Two

Gastronomy As L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon comes to Dubai, we talk mentors and inclusive menus with its Michelin-starred chef, Axel Manes.

Tel: 00971 4 364 2876 Fax: 00971 4 369 7494 Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from HOT Media is strictly prohibited. HOT Media does not accept liability for any omissions or errors in AIR.

2,849 FEELING ALIVE AGAIN

Our world-class experts from every medical specialty work together to give each patient exactly the care they need. Mayo Clinic is the No.1 hospital in the U.S. and the global destination for patients with serious and complex conditions who need certainty, options and hope. Learn more: mayoclinic.org/ar/hope-and-healing

Rochester, Minnesota U.S. News & World Report â&#x20AC;&#x153;Best Hospitals Honor Roll,â&#x20AC;? 2019-2020

DC Aviation Al-Futtaim NOVEMBER 2020: ISSUE 110

Welcome Onboard NOVEMBER 2020

Cover: Lenny Kravitz Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Photographed by David Sims

As a premium service provider in the Middle East serving the private and business jets of the region and beyond, we are truly committed to the standards of the DC Aviation Group of companies. We are striving to deliver the highest level of quality in all areas, driven by the know-how of our people and their dedication to the business. Be it for an aircraft owner, charter passenger, or even the flight and cabin crew, private and business jet travel revolves around time saving and maximum comfort. If you are travelling to and from Dubai, DC Aviation Al-Futtaim is your perfect choice. From our exclusive FBO and hangar facility at Al Maktoum International Airport, we are able to save you time and offer you a luxurious ambience, whether you’re departing or arriving in your aircraft. We operate the only integrated private and business jet facility within the Dubai World Central (DWC) district where slot and parking restrictions are a matter of the past. With Dubai International Airport becoming the world’s busiest airport, private and business jet flights are severely restricted. However, that is not the case at Dubai’s new hub for executive aviation. We welcome you onboard, and trust you’ll enjoy your flight experience – as well as our 100 percent satisfaction promise.

Holger Ostheimer Managing Director, DC Aviation Al-Futtaim

Contact Details: dc-aviation.ae T. +971 (0) 4 870 1800 9

DC Aviation Al-Futtaim NOVEMBER 2020: ISSUE 110

DC Aviation adapts successful Covid-19 testing strategy to meet ongoing changing travel requirements Rapid testing for all flights to meet ongoing changing travel requirements Earlier this year DC Aviation introduced a pioneering programme of rapid Covid-19 pre-flight virus testing for all crew and flight support personnel. The measure was introduced to ensure that passengers have the knowledge that they can travel safely with DC Aviation. However, with travel restrictions and requirements changing on a weekly basis, DC Aviation has taken the strategy a step further by adding rapid testing for all flights, in any country, at any time. This means that no matter where the aircraft and crew are, and how many stops are made, the passengers are secure in the knowledge that they are flying with zero risk of exposure to the virus. DC Aviation closely monitor and adapt to the travel regulations of each individual country allowing passengers to travel seamlessly between countries with differing restrictions and requirements. A key part of this pioneering strategy is that passengers safety is top priority at all times with gloves, masks and hand disinfectants being mandatory and available at every stage of the 10

flight, from arrival to disembarkation. All DC Aviation aircraft undergo an intensified cleaning and disinfection process after each flight. Commenting on the introduction of the Covid-19 test programme, Michael Kuhn, CEO of DC Aviation, said: "When we launched the rapid testing programme we were very pleased at the response from passengers, however as passenger numbers have increased, the demand for flights to and from a greater variety of countries has also risen. This has meant that we have had to deal with a larger and more varied number of restrictions and regulations. Therefore, we have introduced the rapid testing programme for any flight, from any departure point. The health and safety of our passengers and crew is of paramount importance and in order to maintain our standards we further refined the testing programme to ensure it is available for every flight .Yet again DC Aviation is proud to deliver the highest safety standards for our passengers and crews".

THE HOME OF PRIVATE AVIATION AT THE SPEED OF BUSINESS

Passion for excellence is our trademark. In everything we do, our goal is to meet and surpass your expectations. Our highly trained staff are always on hand to ensure your complete satisfaction, both on the ground and in the air. Our unrivalled facilities located at Dubai World Central guarantee your utmost discretion, comfort and convenience every time you fly.

DC Aviation Al-Futtaim NOVEMBER 2020: ISSUE 110

DC Aviation signs General Agreement with AeroVisto Group The general agreement will supply all aircraft interior services required by DC Aviation

DC Aviation has signed a general agreement with AeroVisto Group. AeroVisto is specialised in the field of certified interior refurbishment and technology solutions for business and commercial aircraft. AeroVisto will supply all aircraft interior services required by DC Aviation. The works will include cabin refurbishment, repairs, cabin modifications and upgrades with latest cabin technologies. Juergen Sehne, Vice President Maintenance & CAMO of DC Aviation said: “Our aim is to enable top quality work on 12

the interior of our managed fleet and to aircraft of third party customers. We are very pleased that with this agreement we are able to offer our clients the whole range of interior refurbishment and renovation services. With AeroVisto we have a very experienced and flexible partner at our side with large technical know-how and the highest level of craftmenship. The cooperation with AeroVisto underscores the high quality standard we apply to our business jets.” Hermann Bauer, Executive Director Operatorions of AeroVisto Group added:

“We feel very proud and honoured that DC Aviation has selected us as its strategic interior partner. To us, this is a consistent next step in our strategy to strengthen our market presence in the aviation interior refurbishment market in EMEA region. “With our new partner DC Aviation, we share common values in terms of quality, passion and innovation”. In the course of the year DC Aviation and AeroVisto have already successfully worked together on a number of projects.

AIR

Radar NOVEMBER 2020: ISSUE 110

Image: Rizzoli_DiorHats © Tierney Gearon

In Christian Dior’s hands, the hat became a major symbol of French haute couture and elegance. “It’s the best way to express your personality,” he wrote of his favourite accessory, which featured in every one of his twenty-two collections, from 1947 to 1957. The very best of them feature in a new book, Dior Hats, published by Rizzoli and compiled by Stephen Jones, Dior’s milliner since 1996, who has unearthed archival treasures, many of which are photographed for the very first time.

Critique NOVEMBER 2020 : ISSUE 110

Books he basis for the hit Netflix series Longmire, Craig Johnson’s tales of case-cracking Walt Longmire have birthed a new book, Next to Last Stand. “Johnson lightens the atmosphere in this complex, thought-provoking mystery that highlights art and Western history, emphasizing the contrast between Native accounts and white history,” says Lesa Holstine, writing for Library Journal. “The author’s poetic turns of phrase, witty dialog, and one of the funniest, most memorable chase scenes in a novel, combine to make this a winner.” Don Crinklaw for Booklist was equally riveted by the read: “The first half of the novel is an amiable ramble as the principals discourse on Wyoming history, General Custer, Michelangelo’s Libyan Sybil and Dickens’ Bleak House. It’s pedal to the metal in the second half as the murderous art fraudsters behind it all are revealed, and the action culminates in a riotous chase involving “a motorized motorcade” of ramped-up wheelchairs...Johnson knows it’s Walt his readers crave, and he delivers.” Publishers’ Weekly, meanwhile, consider the book “intriguing”, saying that at its climax “Walt coolly estimates the number of stitches

in his scalp he’s going to need after being shot by the surprising culprit he’s closing in on. Vietnam War vet Walt shows few signs of age in this consistently entertaining series.” In Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf, author Hayley Krischer examines the relationship between polar-opposite school friends after one witnesses an assault on the other by the school’s most popular boy. “A relentless expression of survival, facets of pain and how we carry and inflict violence toward ourselves and against each other. Daring in its complexity. A powerful debut,” recommends Courtney Summers in the New York Times. Fellow author Amber Smith, also writing in the New York Times, was equally impressed. “Necessary and timely, Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf takes us on a journey that is at once heartbreaking and hearthealing, as Hayley Krischer’s unique, refreshing voice skillfully navigates the realities of sexual assault with care, insight, and authenticity. Full of truth, hope, and empowerment, this story is one you’ll be thinking about long after you’ve finished reading it.”

Also hailing the book’s realism, Kirkus Reviews writes, “A realistically messy look at the power dynamics at play in a toxic school environment and into the shared painful experiences of Ali and Blythe. A harrowing read that tells a complicated story with nuance.” Penned by the co-creator of Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza, The Purpose of Power is the story of one woman’s lessons through years of bringing people together to create change. “Damn. The Purpose of Power changes everything. I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked at this book’s audacity, because it’s written by a young Black woman who literally changed everything. Very few books become national monuments. Even fewer help shape social movements. The Purpose of Power is that rare book that is a monumental movement. It is a liberatory offering. Damn,” praises author Kiese Laymon. Malkia Devich Cyril, lead founder of Media Justice, believes that the book, “reveals Garza as not only a superb strategist but a master storyteller. This layered book is for anyone that understands that surviving with dignity is a practice, but fighting for both dignity and survival is a skill.”

Credit: Penguin Random House

AIR

Critique NOVEMBER 2020 : ISSUE 110

Art

ead animals as art has become a signature of Damian Hirst, and you’ll see a whole lot of them on show at London’s Newport Street Gallery, showing until March 7, 2021. “Lest you don’t give your mortality much thought and Covid-19 is just something that’s happening to other people, Hirst’s classic art keeps screaming the fragility of all organic matter,” says Jonathan Jones, writing in The Guardian. “Here’s what the cow heads are for: food for flies. The daunting installation A Hundred Years is more or less identical to its better-known companion A Thousand Years. A big, black-framed, transparent tank is divided in two, with a small aperture between them. In the first, myriads of flies are born and buzz about. In the second, they can feast on a bloody cow’s head as it deliciously rots – but they risk being frazzled by an insect-o-cutor. Generations of flies will pass as world history is trapped in this enclosed allegory.

The tray under the glowing blue insect killer was already full.” Across London, at the city’s Tate Modern, is a Bruce Nauman retrospective. “The first room of the show is dedicated to the artist’s studio, a place where one might expect important revelations to occur. It’s akin to exhibiting the artist’s palette and brushes or a photograph of their hands, as though they held the key to understanding the creative process,” writes Sarah Kent for The Arts Desk. “Needless to say, those hoping for a manifestation of genius will be disappointed.” Things do improve, says Sarah, who left the exhibition still a confirmed fan. “I love Nauman’s work; his sardonic fatalism may be chilling, but his wicked humour still lifts the spirits. Take courage, it seems to say; all is not lost until the very last. We may be doomed, but we’’ll go down laughing.” Writing in The Guardian, Laura Cumming opines that, “This is a

somewhat reverent account of Nauman’s career, intent on all the art history highlights. I wish it had shown a little more of his humour and his melancholy later works, which are addressed to the heart more than the brain. Some of the installations need to be shown in far deeper darkness than these plague times permit; and the soundtracks often bleed too heavily from one room to the next.” Also reviewing for The Guardian, Adrian Searle writes, “However well I think I know Nauman’s art, and most of the works here, this pared-down survey of over 50 years of work continues to thrill and to disturb. I have no doubt at all of Nauman’s greatness, from his early, clunky black-and-white videos in which he is like a man trying to keep fit and to assert some agency in solitary, to a later sculptural installation, in which black marble cubes sit in the nasty pallor of yellow sodium lights, and in which minimalism is turned into a kind of authoritarian terminus.” 17

Art & Design NOVEMBER 2020:ISSUE 110

Top Rankin AIR

The photographer talks ‘selfie harm’ and what the Queen said to him in private at Buckingham Palace

‘I

’m just really nosy. I need to know what makes people tick,” says Rankin when asked for the secret of his enduring success. Although the portrait and fashion photographer is best known for his disarming angles on famous faces (as depicted in a new book, Rankin: PLAY, published this month by Rizzoli) Rankin is equally curious about the rest of us. He’s asked people to send him our own snapshots for a new television series, Rankin’s 2020. Speaking from his family home in London, the 54-year-old says he’s thrilled with the photographs he’s received. “People took powerful shots. I was moved by the image of a handprint on the outside of a care home window, taken by the son of a woman with dementia who doesn’t remember him unless she sees him. “People were obviously drawn to the water, because I was sent loads of photographs of the sea, waves, rivers. There’s a funny one of a guy with a classic British handlebar moustache in his swimming trunks. People had more fun than I’d imagined. And they were more experimental, particularly with their self-portraits. There’s a great one of a guy washing his face and a gorgeous shot of a woman’s hair falling into her camera.” As a long-term critic of what he calls “selfie harm”, and “all those stupid 18

face-changing apps that people have been conned into thinking make them look more attractive,” Rankin believes that the pandemic has forced people to dump the filters because they’ve wanted to see the real faces of those they’ve been separated from. “We’ve all had phone cameras in our pockets for over a decade now,” he says. “We were like toddlers when we first got them: crazy little narcissists. But we’re growing up.” Born in Paisley in 1966 and raised mostly in a “lower middle-class” street in Yorkshire, John Rankin Wadell tends, in self-portraits, to cross his arms and eyeball the camera like a bouncer. Studying one of these images before we spoke, I thought: there’s no way he’s letting me in. But the stocky Scot’s an engaging conversationalist. Within minutes of the Zoom window popping open, he’s teaching me how to get crisper shots of my unphotographable black dog. I realise what it must feel like to sit beyond his lens, the brief centre of his world. “I always fall a little in love with my subjects,” he says. “All the photographers I admire do. I do it by talking, empathising. David Bailey gets a stick and prods people in a brilliant and very funny way. Richard Avedon would seduce his subjects.” He pauses. “In my case, I’ve found that humans

AIR

– famous or not – have a deep need to be seen and understood. People tell me stuff you wouldn’t believe when I’m holding a camera. They tell me their innermost thoughts. It helps that I’ve never been overawed by celebrity.” Rankin attributes this particular trait to two key childhood moments, both involving his father (who died in 2005, within three weeks of Rankin’s mother). The first took place when he was around 12. “My dad got his education from the Reader’s Digest and I remember being at a party with him and telling him, ‘This is all a bit posh, isn’t it!’ He told me he made more money than the other parents there. I was impressed.” The second moment came when he witnessed his father cheating at golf. “It’s a very painful memory because it changed my whole perception of him. I couldn’t believe he swept aside all his values because winning was so important to him. I grew up five years in that moment. It also allowed me to break away from his expectations and do whatever I wanted. It enabled me to [leave] my accountancy degree to study photography, even though that made my dad so angry he didn’t speak to me for a year.” 20

Rankin met Jefferson Hack at his new college and they founded Dazed & Confused magazine together in the early Nineties. “I took the conceptual approach to photography I’d studied at college and applied it to fashion shoots,” he says. “People were turned upside down or set on fire or [photographed with] their backs to the camera. I didn’t care about fashion then and I don’t now. I’m always asked to name my favourite designer and I say ‘George from Asda’.” It was during this period that Rankin earned his reputation as the wild man of British photography. While other photographers kowtowed to the rich and famous, Rankin played around, poked fun and broke taboos. “I photographed a Michael Jackson lookalike for the cover,” he says. “When you opened the magazine it read “FAKE”. I was critiquing both Jackson and the cultural response to him during a period when he was making himself white. It seemed the less authentic he became the more we put him on a pedestal. One of my favourite moments of the 1990s was Jarvis Cocker mooning Jackson at the Brit Awards.” Other aspects of Rankin’s wildness were less admirable. He earned a reputation for throwing cameras and

‘ This virus has burst the bubble of celebrity worship’ 21

Credit: @Helen Brown/Telegraph Media Group Limited 2020

AIR

‘

’

I always fall a little in love with my subjects

Opening pages: Rankin Previous pages, from left to right: Ian Brown, Destroy, 2008; Debbie Harry, Dazed & Confused, 1998 These pages, from left to right De La Soul, Vanity Fair, 2002; cover of PLAY. All images (c) Rankin / Rizzoli New York, 2020

behaving badly at parties. “I didn’t really fit into that glamorous world,” he says “and it took me a long time to realise that didn’t matter.” He split up from his first wife, the actress Kate Hardie, while their son Lyle was very young. These days, he’s a more placid soul, 10 years into his marriage to the model Tuuli Shipster, with two therapists on the payroll to help him handle his “emotional Tourette’s”. “I’ve been to 10 Downing Street three times and Buckingham Palace once,” he says, “and I’ve learnt how different people can be from their media image. Gordon Brown was always portrayed as this dour, depressing guy, even in the Left-wing press. I found him to be the opposite: warm, funny, inquisitive. A delight. I had 20 minutes with Tony Blair and he didn’t say a word to me. Of course, I could have got Blair on a bad day and Brown on a good one.” The Queen refused to hold a sword in her portrait, telling Rankin, “I don’t really like my hands”. “It was a lovely moment,” he says. “I’m not a royalist but I’ve got so much respect for her as a person. Most of the people I photograph chose the spotlight. She didn’t, and

she’s made an incredible sacrifice.” Although Rankin’s all-time favourite subjects have been models and actors, the one photograph that continues to gnaw away at him is of an anonymous woman he shot for his 2009 project “Rankin Live!” “I just couldn’t take a picture she liked,” he says. “I tried so many things, but there was nothing I could do with that woman because she just didn’t like herself. That really haunts me.” One benefit of the pandemic, he says, is the way it has revealed the truth about certain famous people. “This virus has burst the bubble of celebrity worship. I’ve loved seeing some of them called out when they’ve complained about feeling ‘in prison’ or whatever when we know their prison is a mansion. Looking at where some people have been locked down, I feel guilty about having a garden. But listen. I hope this TV series helps us to see each other more clearly. People always say we read to know we’re not alone. We can look at photographs for the same reason.” Rankin: PLAY, published this month by Rizzoli; Rankin’s 2020 is on Sky Arts 23

OB JECTS OF DESIRE

OBJECTS OF DESIRE

Master craftsmanship, effortless style and timeless appeal; this monthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s must-haves and collectibles

OB JECTS OF DESIRE

RICHARD MILLE

R M 2 7- 0 4 T O U R B I L L I O N R A FA E L N A D A L Fresh from clinching a record-equalling Grand Slam title, Rafael Nadal’s indominable spirit is celebrated by Richard Mille with the launch of the RM 27-04. Suspended within the case, the tourbillon can resist accelerations of more than 12,000g’s, a record

for Richard Mille. Limited to just 50 pieces, with Nadal’s name engraved on the case band, the arrival of the new timepiece is perfectly timed to coincide with the opening of the brand’s inaugural boutique in Saudi Arabia, where it’s housed within the Kingdom Centre. 1

OB JECTS OF DESIRE

M O Y N AT

48H WEEKENDER Mirroring the shape of the OH! Tote Canvas, the 48H Weekender comes with its own credentials – the top corners can be buttoned down to give it much more of a sporty silhouette. Lined with cotton grosgrain canvas, the bag’s inner also houses two zipped

pockets – perfect for hiding away smaller objects – while its handles are long enough for it to be worn comfortably over the shoulder. You can also personalise the bag with your initials, individually painted by hand, as is the brand’s signature. 2

OB JECTS OF DESIRE

M A R I A TA S H

TRIPLE SILHOUET TE SPIKE DIAMOND ETERNIT Y An update of what’s become somewhat of a trademark Maria Tash design, this triple silhouette spike diamond eternity earring sees gold spikes replaced with diamonds, (specially elongated when cut to look like spikes) which are set in such a way as to appear as though

they’re suspended. “I wanted to create something I hadn’t seen before,” says Tash of the pieces in her Fall/Winter collection, her largest to date. Elsewhere in it are new chain charms, which can be worn to add a soft undertone to a sharp style. 3

OB JECTS OF DESIRE

CDLP X CUIXMALA

SWIMWEAR CAPSULE Exclusive to mrporter.com is a swimwear collaboration between CDLP, the Swedish design company, and Cuixmala, a stunning Mexican nature reserve on the Pacific Coast, which was once the family home of Sir James Goldsmith. Using future-orientated fibres,

which include lyocell, bamboo, recycled PES, and Econyl (an innovative Italian-sourced regenerated nylon fibre made from ocean waste), the limited-edition capsule collection is characterised by colour blocking and comprises swim brief, swim short, and throw. 4

OB JECTS OF DESIRE

BERLUTI

TA K E O F F P M To show off its new camel patina – a nice nod to the desert landscape of this region – Berluti has introduced the travel-inspired Odyssée line of accessories. Comprising three designs – a compact mini messenger bag, a globe-shaped coin purse, and this, the 5

Take Off PM, which is versatile enough to be used as a traditional briefcase and held by a leather handle, or worn across the shoulder using a removable leather strap – the trio are crafted from the brand’s signature Venezia leather.

OB JECTS OF DESIRE

M ERCEDE S-BENZ

1 96 0 3 0 0 S L R O A D S T E R predecessor, at least from a road-going perspective. It is universally acknowledged as one of the true ‘blue-chip’ collectibles in the automotive world, a potent blend of historical importance, advanced design, engineering integrity and dramatic looks.

Offered as a private sale by RM Sotheby’s for $1,400.000, this papyrus white 300 SL Roadster is one of 1,858 produced. A convertible version of the celebrated 300 SL Gullwing coupe, the Roadster was deemed a more refined car than its winged 7

OB JECTS OB JECTS OF DESIRE OF DESIRE

C H O PA R D

ALPINE E AGLE XL CHRONO The latest addition to the high-flying family of Alpine Eagle sporty-chic timepieces, this flyback chronograph comes in a 44mm diameter case and is available in three versions â&#x20AC;&#x201C; lucent steel, with either an Aletsch blue or pitch-black dial, and a bi-material

version combining lucent steel and ethical rose gold with a pitch-black dial. The pitchblack dial is also new to the family, used as a reflection of night-time in the Alps. At its heart is the Chopard 03.05-C movement, the recipient of four patents. 8

OBJECTS OF DESIRE

Timepieces

NOVEMBER 2020: ISSUE 110

Top Gun With the latest Calatrava Pilot Travel Time, Patek Philippe has created a dressy aviator-style watch for both men and women

AIR

hen Patek Philippe unveiled its Calatrava Pilot Travel Time ref. 5524G in 2015, it proved to be one of the most divisive timepiece launches – as well as one of the most talked about – of the year. Fans of the new watch welcomed the big, bold aesthetic, while more puritanical critics accused the company of appropriating design cues from another major Swiss brand. If the look of the watch was a departure from the Patek norm, however, it was not without precedent. As supporters at the time pointed out, Patek Philippe, along with the majority of established Swiss watch brands, has a selection of military timepieces in its arsenal. Two such examples are currently on display at the brand’s Geneva museum in the form of a pair of 1930s aviator’s Hour-Angle watches – a navigational function designed to achieve precise positioning. A further prototype version from 1936 was sold by Christie’s New York in 2009 for CHF1,891,000 (approx. $2m). Rather than a facsimile of these early Patek designs though, the ref. 5524G looked like nothing that had come from the brand before, and this unfamiliarity was the source of much of the controversy. What the detractors failed to recognise, however, was that this watch signalled a new direction in a similar (although hugely less disruptive) way to the Golden Ellipse in 1968 and the Nautilus four years later. Whatever side of the fence people were on in 2015, the watch proved to be another runaway success for Patek Philippe, and has more than made its mark in the brand’s core collection. Now with a host of siblings alongside the original model, the pilot’s-style 26

design has also proved itself to be a firm favourite among collectors. Always dressier than its steel-cased rivals, the ref. 5524G was cased in 42mm of white gold and featured a dark navy dial – something that proved a step too far for the purists who insisted that a real pilot’s watch had to have a black face. However, as polarising as it initially was, the highly legible and easy-to-operate dual-time watch soon began to win over the majority. Encouraged by the popularity of the model, Patek set out to grow the family and, in 2018, the ref. 5524R-001 with rose-gold case and brown dial was launched. And alongside it, was a matching ref. 7234R Lady in a 37.5mm case. In 2019, an additional complication was added when the ref. 5520 Alarm Travel Time was launched and, for the Patek Philippe exhibitions in New York (2017) and Singapore (2019), special edition Pilot Travel Times were created to mark the events – refs.

5522A and 7234A respectively. And, demonstrating the power of a Patek Philippe piece unique, a titanium one-off was auctioned two years ago by Christie’s in aid of Children Action, raising CHF2.3m (approx. $2.5m). Now a new model joins the pilots’ collection with the ref. 7234G-001 Calatrava Pilot Travel Time, for the first time offering the white-gold option in the smaller case size. As the Lady version proved to be incredibly popular with men as well as women, this time round the 37.5mm is simply referred to as ‘medium-sized’. The blue-lacquered dial and applied, white-gold, Arabic numerals first seen five years ago return. The dual time-zone feature is still as simple to read and navigate as it has always been. Two hour hands from the centre represent home and local time, the cathedral-shaped local hand is filled with luminous material so that it is visible in all light conditions. Local time can be set in one-hour increments, moving backwards or forwards via two pushers on the left of the case. When the wearer is not travelling, the two hands sit one on top of the other. The date window at six o’clock is synchronised with local time, and two day/night indicators for home and local time sit at nine and three o’clock. The watch is powered by a self-winding movement and is equipped with a shiny navy blue calfskin strap, as well as a second calfskin strap in vintage brown. With this just the latest addition to what is an ever-growing family of pilot-style designs – a family birthed only a few years ago – it’s clear that Patek has positioned these models at the core of its offering as it looks to further enhance its sky high reputation.

Credit: © Tracey Llewellyn/ Telegraph Media Group Limited 2020

WORDS: TRACEY LLEWELLYN

Jewellery NOVEMBER 2020 : ISSUE 110

Shine On AIR

How London’s ‘Queen of Diamonds’ used the lockdown to conjure a long-mooted collection WORDS: JOHN THATCHER

hough unprecedented restrictions continue to be the curse of the global pandemic for many, one thing it hasn’t curtailed is creativity. That flame of ingenuity that refuses to be doused. Indeed, if we can speak at all of unlikely positives to emerge from this life-altering crisis, then for many of us it is that we have been afforded more time. Time to reflect. Time to plan. And, as in the case of New Zealand-born, London-based jewellery designer Jessica McCormack, time to work on a long-mooted collaboration with US artists the Haas Brothers. “It’s actually something we’ve been talking about doing for such a long time,” says Jessica. “We met years ago, through my business partner Michael – and I think straight away we felt there was a mutual connection. We had to wait until the timing felt right though, which I am so glad we did. The collection ended up coming together over lockdown, and it just feels like such an achievement to

launch this in what’s been a really difficult year for everyone.” First and foremost a fan of their work, Jessica’s collaboration with the Haas Brothers seemed destined. “We have a huge light of theirs that stands in the entrance way of our townhouse,” she reveals. “It makes me smile every day because it’s so strange and beautiful! My obsession with their art kind of grew from there. I have such a respect for what they do, and just loved the idea of our worlds colliding to create something new, and that my clients could enjoy.” Hailing from LA, the Haas Brothers (twins Nikolai and Simon) have built up something of a cult following, their works blurring the boundaries between art and design and winning fans from Tobey Maguire (who bought their first furniture collection) to Lady Gaga and Donatella Versace, for whom they designed masks and accessories respectively. They also have a reputation for infusing their work with gentle, pun-heavy humour –

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There’s a freedom in working in such a collaborative way like this because it takes your designs into new places there’s a ceramic object titled ‘Tail-or Swift Butt’, and a sheepskin and bronze seat named, ‘Drew Hairy-more.’ Such playful positioning is also evident in this collection, particularly their influence on McCormack’s trademark jewellery box, which also proved the most challenging piece to create. “I think we all feel incredibly proud of the jewellery box,” says Jessica. “It’s like a little living creature. And it’s such a perfect mix of Jessica McCormack signatures and Haas Brothers signatures. The brass legs that the box stands on top of are so weird and fun, and they’re unmistakably Haas. We wanted to create a box that was as special as the jewellery that sits inside it, and I think we’ve done that. You enter another world when you open it up – it becomes an experience within itself!” Despite the lockdown, the collaboration proved to be smooth sailing. “What’s nice is that our brains work in a similar way creatively, so it was just so easy. We would WhatsApp each other ideas and send pictures of pieces that were in progress. I think we’ve been quite excited about all the possibilities, as well as the capacity to have fun within this collection. There’s a freedom in working in such a collaborative way like this – because it takes your designs into new places. An idea can start somewhere and end up somewhere completely different – I love that”, enthuses Jessica. The collaboration follows hot on the heels of a collection Jessica created alongside fellow New Zealand-born, 30

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London-based fashion designer Emilia Wickstead. Does this point at a new direction for Jessica’s work? “I would love to do more,” she excitedly reveals. “2020 has been the year of collaboration for me, and I can’t think of a better moment for that as it’s kept me feeling connected to the industry and other creatives – in a way that I might not have had if working independently. To work closely with others, on something you’re mutually invested in, is really special.” The Haas Brothers tie-up is not the only positive to emerge from lockdown, reveals Jessica. “The majority of the team moved to work from home, but when I could come into the office I did (Jessica’s ‘office’ is a beautiful 19th century grand townhouse in Mayfair, which she describes as the brand’s ‘heart’). I was literally packing up jewellery and taking it to clients houses! It was quite ‘back to basics’ – but it was great. “We’ve developed really personal relationships with our clients, and so we’ve been able to keep a dialogue going throughout this year – even when it was tough to see people in person. Digital has obviously moved to the forefront of our business, as it has for so many others. We feel lucky to have a really engaged Instagram following, who we can speak directly to, sharing news and information on the brand.” As so many people across the globe have shifted to remote working – and may continue to do so postpandemic – fashion in particular has witnessed a shift in buying patterns, with people more relaxed about what

Opening pages, left to right: diamond splash ring; Jessica McCormack flanked by the Haas Brothers These pages, clockwise from above to right: Jewellery box; diamond ball ‘n’ chain pendant; diamond gypset hoop earrings; diamond stud earrings

they wear. Does Jessica think this will be reflected in jewellery design? “I think there’s a definite shift towards comfort – we’re going out less, and so clients want pieces they can wear with a sweatshirt and jeans. I’ve always wanted to provide a jewellery wardrobe for my clients, and I think this is where that comes in. You want a necklace that you can layer up with other things. You want pieces that are easy to wear. You want ‘day diamonds!’ So we’ll continue to keep wearability at the forefront of design here. That ‘every day’ quality to a piece has become more important than ever. “If a client has come to us for something bespoke, then what I care most about is hearing from them what they need in a piece of jewellery, what’s important to them about what we’re creating. Jewellery can be a highly emotional purchase, and so a client’s needs are always going to be our first priority.”

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As his memoir is published, Lenny Kravitz talks to Polly Vernon about love, fame and betrayal – from his Airstream in the Bahamas. (Have we said how cool he is already?)

enny Kravitz arrives insignificantly late to our Zoom, apologises and explains he’s trying to use his computer, as opposed to the phone from which he more usually zooms, because, “I was just on an hour-long bike ride in a rainstorm and my phone’s a little wet.” He pauses to brush traces of rainwater from his brow, more from his chest (he hasn’t buttoned his shirt), and he smiles. I don’t think it’s calculated. I don’t think Kravitz is performing the rainmopping, offering the insight into a private existence that incorporates thrilling manly quasi-spiritual ultra-romantic communing-with-your-environment type ventures such as riding motorbikes through Bahamian rainstorms (he’s calling from an Airstream trailer on the island of Eleuthera, which is where he lives when he’s not in his mansion in Paris), in a conscious attempt to reinforce all pre-existing ideas of him as the ultimate rock/sex god, an infinitely, casually glamorous proposition, with his talent and his looks and his gentle swagger and his voice and his brief, intense marriage to the actress Lisa Bonet, from whom he has been healthily, compassionately divorced since the early Nineties, with whom he has a daughter, Zoë, an accomplished actress whose role in HBO’s smash-hit Big

Little Lies has her cast alongside Nicole Kidman, to whom Kravitz was engaged in 2003… But if it is his intention? Bingo. Job done. It works. Lenny Kravitz is 56 – but very much in the style of 56-year-old Brad Pitt, say; not at all in the style of 56-year-old Nigel Farage. He’s been famous for more than 30 years – so long he’s ceased to care, although he says he never cared about fame anyway: “I never thought of it. I honestly didn’t. It wasn’t the driver.” His career as a musician has been consistent and accomplished. A youthful breakthrough in the earliest Nineties, founded on years of graft (and after circumnavigating an industry initially confused by him, because, he has said, his music – rock – was too white, and he himself too black, for pigeon-holing), was followed by decades of almost nonstop touring including with the Rolling Stones. His fanbase has never wavered in its devotion. But the rest of the celebrity that Kravitz never sought is based on more complicated factors. Kravitz’s greater public myth depends on how he looks, the two highly amorphous qualities of ‘sexiness’ and ‘cool’ repeatedly ascribed to him, and the extravagant fashion statements for which he’s either celebrated or derided (an oversized scarf that became a meme,

a recurring punchline on an internetperpetuated joke; the shirts, which, like today’s, are perpetually worn open; the silver skintight zip-up suits; the tinted shades; the hats…). And then there are the women he has been connected with. From Bonet – who, when they married, was far more famous than Kravitz, as Denise Huxtable, fictional daughter to Bill Cosby in the Eighties sitcom The Cosby Show – to Vanessa Paradis (whom he dated after his split from Bonet, before she met Johnny Depp), the Australian singer Natalie Imbruglia, the supermodel Naomi Campbell, the supermodel Devon Aoki, the supermodel Adriana Lima and then Kidman. There’s a lot to Kravitz, a lot of layers and a lot of life; more than enough for a book, in fact, which is fortunate, because he’s written one. Let Love Rule is a memoir, named after his 1989 breakthrough album, but also after Kravitz’s world view, his overarching approach, the non-denominational Christianity that has informed him ever since he says he was visited by the spirit of God at a choir camp as a teenager, and the hippie-esque love-will-conquer-all conviction, the old-school pre-woke liberalism that tinges his perspective, all of which would be ripe for some sneering at by a cynical, irreligious hack like me – only Kravitz

lockwise From Left: XXXX Next Page: XXXX

As the final season of HBO’s medieval saga roars to life, Games of Thrones star Emilia Clarke bids farewell to her empowering, dragon-blooded character – but not to the experience INTERVIEW: PETE CARROLL ADDITIONAL WORDS: CHRIS UJMA

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wears it lightly, with little concern for whether I’m convinced or converted or even care, and I can only admire him for it. He had no desire to write a book, he tells me, because, “It’s my life, and… I’m not saying my life is not exciting, but it’s my life. When I read about my heroes, [theirs] always seems far more exciting than my life. You find their story to be so colourful.” But he’d ended up at a dinner with David Ritz – a serial ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs, whose name Kravitz invokes early on to make it clear Let Love Rule is not his work alone – and Ritz had said, “Believe me, you have a colourful story…” So he decided to write a book after all. Let Love Rule covers the early years of Kravitz’s life – “I didn’t want it to be about rock stardom or fame” – beginning with a recurring nightmare he had, aged five or six, of being buried alive, ending with him trembling on the brink of fame, aged 25. It’s a fascinating and intense ride through Sixties New York at its most creative and dirty and fancy and glamorous, and Seventies/Eighties Los Angeles – where Kravitz’s family relocated when his adored mother, the actress Roxie Roker, was cast in the sitcom The Jeffersons – a sunny stoner playground for Kravitz’s burgeoning creativity. Kravitz was raised – the mixed-race only child of a woman who is both black and famous, with the attendant, contradictory disadvantages and privileges those things bring, and a white Jewish father so authoritarian that it takes your breath away – somewhere between the upscale Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he lived with his parents at the weekends, and edgy, pre-gentrified Brooklyn, where he lived with his maternal grandparents, so he could attend a specific primary school. “I am deeply two-sided,” says Kravitz, who had different names for his Brooklyn life and his Manhattan life: in Brooklyn, he was Eddie; in Manhattan, Lennie. “Black and white, Jewish and Christian, Manhattanite and Brooklynite. My young life was all about opposites and extremes.” His parents kept the company of celebrities and black activists and gangsters. The writer Toni Morrison was a close family friend and the model and actress Cicely Tyson was his godmother. Roker and Sy Kravitz gave their son the only bedroom in the Upper East Side apartment and slept in the sitting room, so they could throw absurdly glamorous parties while he slept. They took him with 34

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I never thought of fame. I honestly didn’t. It wasn’t the driver

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them to Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle while they had cocktails (he liked it – the waiters called him Master Leonard). He had no real conception of race in general, and his mixed race in particular, he tells me. “Because we were around everybody, and it was never discussed, this thing of differences, where you should think differently about this person or that person because they are whatever they are. There was none of that. I thought that was life.” But on his first day at school, on seeing that Kravitz’s mother was black and his father white, “This kid just stopped and pointed his finger and yelled out… My father was white and my mother was black. I didn’t get it.” After another child called him “zebra”, Roker explained to Kravitz that he had two heritages, and that he should be proud of both, but that, Kravitz writes, “The world was always going to see me as only black. To the world, my skin would be my first and only identification. I accepted her explanation and didn’t object. If that’s how the world saw me, fine.” But he would never really understand, he tells me. “I see us all as human beings. That’s the way it is.” It’s not difficult to understand how Kravitz the musical icon was forged in this heady childhood of multiple cultural influences. How an early obsession with music merged with an understanding of the art of performance as presented by his mother, godmother, the Jackson 5 (by whom the young Kravitz was entranced) and the extensive cast of actors and musicians who attended his parents’ parties. How they demystified fame for him, distinguished its pursuit from the pursuit of creativity, but also gave him a taste for extravagant costume and sartorial pomp (as a young teenager, he’d hijack his mother’s hair and make-up artist on The Jeffersons and convince him to style him and his bandmates). It’s not as easy to see how he navigated a complicated relationship with his father. Sy Kravitz was a news producer and ex-military – “A Green Beret. He went there very early to escape the life he had

at home with his father, whom he didn’t like… He was 17. I mean, that’s young,” Kravitz says. Sy was tough on his young son. Military tough. In 1969, when Kravitz was five, Sy went to Vietnam as a war journalist. “Part of me was relieved that he was gone,” Kravitz writes. “The heaviness lifted. Dad ruled the roost … Mom was no pushover … But unlike Dad, she enforced with love. Dad enforced with fear.” Let Love Rule details the tension Kravitz’s father perpetuated in the house, how badly and explosively the two of them rowed, how carefully his mother had to manage her fame, ensuring it never made her husband feel overshadowed. Kravitz also writes that, at 16, he caught his father on an illicit phone call to a girlfriend, discussing giving her money he’d stolen from Roker. When his mother kicked Sy out of their LA home, Sy turned to his son and said, “You’ll do it too.” Sy’s father had cheated habitually on Kravitz’s grandmother; Sy loathed him for it, but seemed to consider infidelity some kind of legacy. At the same time it was Sy who surprised Kravitz, aged six, with tickets to see the Jackson 5 perform at Madison Square Garden, a night that would “define who I would ultimately become”. He came to Kravitz’s early gigs and was very supportive of his son’s creative ambitions. Sy Kravitz died in 2005. Kravitz moved him into his home and nursed him through the last months of his life. “Before he died, we made peace,” Kravitz tells me. “We did get to that place.” I’m glad, I say, but there were times when his behaviour towards you struck me as abusive. “Abusive? No. Maybe mentally? A bit? But he exposed me to so many great things. Regardless of what went on between my father and my mother, and how he let her down, the man always worked, the man always took care of the family. I wouldn’t call it abuse. He was very proud of what I accomplished. He was the exact father I needed, to get me to where I needed to go. I needed that fire under my ass. He didn’t push me out in the street; I chose to leave.” When Lenny Kravitz was 15, following yet another fight with Sy, he left the LA home he shared with his parents for good. He lived on other people’s sofas and in recording studios. One evening, he overheard a conversation between the singer David Lasley, who’d become a

mentor to Kravitz, and Luther Vandross, when Vandross told Lasley how lonely he felt because of his hidden sexuality, how painful it was when, in concerts, “The ladies were screaming, ‘Luther! Luther!’ And all I wanted to do was yell back, ‘Where’s your brother? Your brother?’ ” My God, you were young to leave home, and had nowhere to go, I say. Kravitz laughs. “When Zoë was 15-16, I looked at her, and I thought, ‘What if she told me she was leaving?’ I wouldn’t even [contemplate it]. She was a baby! And so was I, essentially. I was so lucky I never got hurt. I always found the right people to look after me, to help me. I could have gone along with some shady people. I had these guardian angels that really looked after me. I was in some dodgy situations.” Ten years later, having sofa-surfed and studio-squatted and moved in with wealthy girlfriends, having worked tirelessly on his music, his performance,

his look, having (almost unthinkably) turned down several offers of record deals, because he didn’t feel their terms would allow him to make the music he wanted to make, having styled himself “Romeo Blue” because “Lennie Kravitz sounded more like an accountant than a rock musician”, switching back (with the “y”) when he met and fell in love with Lisa Bonet, because she made him want to be nothing but authentic, Kravitz wrote Let Love Rule, released it on the deal he had accepted from Virgin Records and became famous, quite despite himself. How aware is Kravitz of being universally considered sexy? How deliberate – how cultivated – is it? Is it lovely to be so perceived? Or irritating? Reductive? Possibly even offensive: a sexualising and fetishising of his blackness? It’s uncomfortable ground, because I myself am a fully signed-up admirer of his… shall we call it “aura”? My

experience of zooming Kravitz is doing little to diminish my sense of him as a sexy man. I make him laugh a couple of times; he roars, silently, throwing back his head, showing his beautiful teeth… Each time I feel ridiculously validated. (I made Lenny Kravitz laugh!) He tells me the shirt he’s wearing for the call is “my fancy shirt. I put on my fancy shirt!” and I feel more validated yet. Yet Kravitz insists he was not successful with girls as a younger man. As a teenager, he had very close friendships with a lot of girls, but they all fell into “the brothersister category. Girls didn’t look at me romantically. They were turned on by jocks or players, and I was neither. I was the nice guy who patiently listened to their problems.” It wasn’t until he performed his first showcase at 16, with a band called Wave – painstakingly put together by Kravitz, who persuaded a talented friend from his New York childhood to 35

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CREDIT: The Times\News Licensing. Images on opening page and left courtesy of Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Photographed by David Sims

was so lucky I never got hurt. ‘I Iwas in some dodgy situations ’

abandon his amateur boxing ambitions, fly to LA, sleep in secret in Kravitz’s old bedroom in his parents’ house (Kravitz himself having already moved out), so that he could sing lead vocals. There are times when I’m struck by how incredibly bossy Kravitz is – that girls begin to see him in the light in which I now see him. “During a slow baby-making bedroom ballad,” Kravitz writes, “I fell to my knees. The girls in the front row reached out to touch my hands, and I reached back to touch them. They screamed.” After this, the floodgates opened for Kravitz, romantically speaking. I wonder if this disappointed him. I have a theory that a certain kind of famous man despairs of the attention he gets from women, because he didn’t get it before he was famous. This perpetuates the impression that women are unbearably shallow, that female desire is purely transactional, not founded on genuine appreciation, a deeper connection. Was this Kravitz’s experience? “Ha. No. I’m sure I enjoyed it. I mean, yeah, it’s like, ‘Well, I’m the same guy I was yesterday.’ But I guess they didn’t know what I was about, that I had that. I guess they thought, ‘Wow, that quiet guy? OK!’ It surprised them.” A kind interpretation of the motives of all concerned, then. Anyway, girls were not Kravitz’s main concern. “A lot of musicians that I love will say, ‘Oh yeah, I got into this for the girls.’ But I just had this crazy focus on finding this music within me.” The girls came, nonetheless. In his book, Kravitz describes a series of heartfelt affairs with beautiful girls, an engagement in his early twenties to Ming See Lau – Mitzi – the daughter of a wealthy Chinese-British businessman. He loved Mitzi, who “became somewhat of a benefactor”, helping him with living and studio expenses, taking him to high-end boutiques, where “she sweetly clothed me in the latest fashions”. While still engaged to Mitzi, Kravitz met Lisa Bonet in a lift. He’d spotted her a year or two earlier on the cover of the TV Guide and told his friend, “I’m gonna marry that girl.” He and Bonet began a friendship that would eventually – inevitably, as he writes it – become a love affair. Kravitz ended the engagement to Mitzi, paying

her back all the money she’d spent on him when he signed his Virgin deal. The real miracle of Kravitz’s relationship with Bonet is not how he set his cap at her, or how they met, or how pleasing the union of two such beautiful, beautifully dressed celebrities proved to their endlessly admiring public, but rather how well they conducted themselves after they divorced, in 1993, following six years of marriage and the birth of Zoë. Kravitz and Bonet’s divorce is generally regarded as the epitome of civilised splitting; pictures of Kravitz spending quality time with Bonet’s new husband – Aquaman and Game of Thrones star Jason Momoa – have only served to reinforce this idea. Are they truly as functional as they seem? “Oh, absolutely,” Kravitz says. He lights up at the mention of Momoa – like a schoolkid discussing his mate. He suggests that Bonet’s nose was put out of joint when she first introduced her ex to her future husband, because, “Genuinely, in five minutes, we left her and ran off, started playing guitars, he was showing me his stuff and… Because I live in an Airstream trailer in the Bahamas; he was living in an Airstream trailer, and he likes motorcycles, and I like them. We like the same stuff! The day we met, all of a sudden, she [Lisa] was sitting there like [he pantomimes a bemused semisulk], ‘These two guys just, like, ran off!’” He tells me it was never his intention to give divorcing people hope for a future relationship utterly untainted by bitterness and sexual jealousy. “I never thought of it as an example. It’s interesting to see how people have reacted. But I’m glad.” That Kravitz has not remarried or had more children – despite those relationships with beautiful, eligible famous women – has fed a perception that his love affair with Bonet was somehow definitive, for him at least. He has said that he’s hopeful of another great love, another marriage; now, when I ask him if he’s in a relationship, he says, “No.” I push for more information. “I’m in quarantine, you know,” he says. “I’ve been [in the trailer] for six months.” I ask him if he’s been celibate through that time. This is not quite as invasive an inquiry as it may seem. In 2008 Kravitz

told Details magazine that he would remain celibate until he was married again (he would later say that quote had been blown out of proportion). This time, he either doesn’t hear my question, or chooses to pretend he hasn’t, instead launching into an explanation of how he’d only stopped by the trailer in late February – en route from an Saint Laurent campaign shoot in Paris to Los Angeles, before the Australian leg of a tour – when lockdown was announced. He only had one bag with him – this is when he tells me he’s wearing his “fancy shirt”. No further talk of romantic love will be entertained. Instead we talk about escalating racial aggressions in the US. “It’s unbelievable to me. I mean, these people were always there, obviously, but they felt that they had to conduct themselves differently: ‘We can be racist, but we have to… blend in as best [we can]’. But now they feel they have this platform, and they can be their true selves, just let loose.” We talk about the times the police stopped him as he drove (as a young man, but also, on one occasion, when he was famous), the occasions he had guns held to his head (“Twice, when I was in junior high”), and we talk about antisemitism And he tells me his sexiness is “an illusion”. I don’t have the nerve to tell Lenny Kravitz that, on this point, he’s quite wrong. We say goodbye, we Leave Meeting. It’s all gone terribly quickly – possibly because I was bedazzled by the bike-ride-througha-rainstorm opening parry – without my having time to ask Kravitz how he feels about his childhood idol Michael Jackson, and also Bill Cosby, given the subsequent revelations about both men, and Cosby’s incarceration. Nor have I had time to ask him about the grief he experienced when his mother died of breast cancer in 1995; his veganism; the workout schedule that allows him to wear shirts open to the waist as casually and appropriately as he does, or the rumour he once employed a man in his entourage for the sole purpose of rolling his joints. Most of all, I regret not asking him how prophetic his father’s curse of infidelity – “You’ll do it too” – had proved. Oh well. Next time. Let Love Rule is out now, from Sphere. 37

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WORDS: LISA ARMSTRONG

Chanel’s president of fashion, Bruno Pavlovsky, talks Virginie Viard’s creativity, the importance of fashion shows, and how the storied maison has handled the current challenges

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f you had to bet the bank on one fashion brand surviving whatever 2020 - and beyond - threw at it, you’d think very carefully for about three seconds before concluding it would surely be Chanel. Still in the ownership of the uber-private Wertheimer family, this 110-year-old maison seems just about fireproof. It kept Karl Lagerfeld, arguably the world’s most famous fashion name, on board for nearly 40 years. It’s had the same president of fashion for 30. Steady is Chanel’s other name, which might be a sound policy for a pensions investor but can prove lethally boring in a fashion context. Yet this label creates more ‘moments’ with its fashion spectaculars and more runs on novelty fashion musthaves than just about any other. It is gravity-defying to an uncanny degree. Even before the miseries of this year, Chanel, and its aforementioned president of fashion, Bruno Pavlovsky, had already faced down one existential threat - the death in early 2019 of Lagerfeld, its inimitable, omni-talented creative director - with a typical, businessas-usual response. As speculation surrounding Lagerfeld’s replacement reached peak fervour (the gig is surely the shiniest trophy in town), Chanel calmly announced it would be replacing him with the profoundly unshowy Virginie Viard, Karl’s happy-in-the-shadows right hand. Chanel’s response to the global pandemic and an unprecedented downturn in demand was to inch up the prices of its insatiably desired bags. The fires that engulfed other brands accused of ‘black-washing’ during the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer largely passed it by. Its reaction to industry projections of a thinned-down show calendar postlockdown? To double down and declare it would mount at least as many, just as lavishly, as before. You have to be spectacularly confident to react in any, let alone all of these ways. To meet him, there is nothing remotely flashy or even fashion-y about 57-year-old Bruno Pavlovsky’s greying hair and discreet suits - and yet, here is a genuine swashbuckler. But is he more strategist or mobiliser? At the start of 2020, it seemed mainly the former. Under his watch, for 40

instance, Chanel has slowly but steadily acquired 31 artisanal businesses, some dating back to the 19th century - among them, Lesage embroiderers, Eres swimwear, Barrie Knitwear in Scotland and Maison Michel millinery. Many of these feather, pearl, pleat and glove specialists are key suppliers to Chanel, particularly for its Métiers d’art collection, which was launched expressly to showcase these once-dying arts. Last autumn Pavlovksy unveiled 19M, a futuristic-looking building in the north-east of Paris that will house all these small-to-middling ateliers in one place. It’s a handcrafted feather in Chanel’s tweed cap, burnishing its reputation as a fairy godmother of endangered national treasures. But the move also cannily gathered its suppliers within easy reach. If Pavlovsky’s main responsibility is to create the commercial environments that allowed Karl Lagerfeld’s and now Virginie Viard’s creativity to flourish, then it’s hard to think of

any other business brain who does a better job. The day after our interview, Chanel officially announced it has just bought another treasure: Vimar, the tweed specialist, with whom it has worked for two decades, and whose future it has now assured. And note that it was Pavlovsky who was there to face the journalists and local politicians at the launch of the 19M HQ. Not any of the Wertheimers or Virginie Viard. In the penumbra of their reticence, Pavlovksy finds himself in the spotlight. It doesn’t seem to irk him. Or not yet. “One day I think Virginie will come out,” he replies when I ask him about his additional new role as brand ambassador. “But when you come after Karl you need time to think about how to express yourself.” He’s in Paris, speaking to me from his office, and it’s early July, the day before the digital couture show. Because nothing’s ever perfect, however adroitly a brand manages its affairs, you don’t have to prick your ears too energetically

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Our job at Chanel is not just about numbers but emotion

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Opening pages, from left: Look 10 from Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2020/21, by Mikael Jansson; show decor from SS2021 by Olivier Saillant These pages, clockwise from lef: Look 30, Look 4, Look 29, Look 13, Look 19, all from Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2020/21, by Mikael Jansson

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These pages: All images from Cruise 2020/21, by Julien Martinez Leclerc

to hear voices of dissent where Chanel’s holy grail - its actual design - is concerned. Reaction to Viard’s collections so far has been mixed, particularly when it comes to her digital efforts. Chanel’s online resort presentation left some underwhelmed. “This year has been unpredictable to say the least,” says the unflappable Pavlovsky. He’s talking about the pandemic, but could equally be referring to critics’ reviews. The truth is that Viard is doing a discreetly effective job of refining and polishing the Chanel wardrobe: there’s less emphasis on kitsch accessories and kooky silhouettes and more on luxurious, versatile, timeless clothes that work season to season. Whether that’s the right balance remains to be seen. He and Viard are in close contact. “Every day I am more surprised by Virginie’s talent. She has such an understanding of what Chanel represents but also how to give the clients a new image that fits with the times.” There is one point at which Chanel and Dior intersect: both now have female creative directors; Dior for

the first time in its 70-year history, Chanel for the first time since its founder died on the job in 1971. It’s no coincidence that both Viard and Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior’s creative director, have been accused of being ‘too commercial’ and not sufficiently creative. This is surely a notion based on the assumption that the two concerns are automatically incompatible, and only holds if you subscribe to a specifically male perception of how fashion should look and never actually wear the clothes. “I think for sure Virginie’s suffering because she’s not a showman,” says Pavlovsky. “It’s maybe misogynistic. But the clients are really positive. If you’re criticised today I think it means you’re doing something well. She’s the best one for the job.” As far as that digital resort collection goes, there are two aspects, he suggests. “The figures are important. We had 264 million hits, which is more or less the same as the year before, when we did a physical show. And what’s interesting is that the engagement was even better. So if I were a statistician, I would be

has such an understanding ‘ Virginie of what Chanel represents ’

quite happy. But I don’t want to just be a statistician. Our job at Chanel is not just about numbers but emotion - and even if Virginie did an amazing job in trying to capture emotion in that collection, I would probably conclude that it was not the best [medium] for us. It’s all about the live show, Every story we tell as a brand begins with that.” That’s certainly been the case in the past. Chanel’s spectacular, extravagant mises en scène have created some of fashion’s biggest stories of the decade, from its rodeo in Dallas to its nownotorious Chanel supermarket set in Paris’s Grand Palais. There, the cornflakes and washing-up liquid adorned with Coco’s profile proved catnip to showgoers, who couldn’t resist stripping the set once the show was over with a thoroughness that could teach your average looter a thing or two. But isn’t the era of overblown events like these, with their stonkingly large carbon footprints, let alone their excessive message, over? A faint, avuncular chuckle rolls down the phone line. The sort you hear from a kindly tutor when an idealistic student has just posited a ridiculous idea. “Planes are still flying. Business still has to be done. Fashion week is still of the utmost importance to the economy.” For those hoping the pandemic would be fashion’s great opportunity to reset, this all seems anti-climactic. What about the profligacy of all those shows? It’s not that Chanel doesn’t care about the environment, argues Pavlovsky. No brand these days can afford not to. They’re offsetting like crazy, he points out. While there is endless debate about the efficacy and ethics of that, there are some meaningful steps the house has taken. “Fourteen out of 50 looks in Cruise were done with sustainable fabrics,” he says. “It’s the first time we have had this level of transparency and we want to do more and more of that.” As for the reason Chanel has raised the prices of its bags, it isn’t to exploit a global health crisis, he explains patiently, but because the costs of manufacturing and materials have gone up. “It’s more and more difficult to get the best-quality leather and to protect those sources. We care about animal welfare and ensuring that we maintain that too.” Chanel no longer sells exotic skins because it 43

But reopening in China taught him that speed would be far less of an issue than ambience. How do you maintain an aura of luxury with masks, surgical gloves and social distancing? “It’s not the same experience, of course. You can’t touch the clothes or try them on. At the moment we’re operating an appointment situation. That’s what the clients feel comfortable with.” There is an uncharacteristic pause in his flow as we both contemplate a future where such isolationism might become normalised. But he swings gently to another tack. “On the other hand, having fewer people creates an

amazing bespoke experience... My hope is that as a brand we emerge from all this stronger than before.” There speaks a measured optimist. When I ask him what the best thing about his job is, he immediately replies that it’s “seeing people around me motivated and energetic. When you feel that synergy working, it’s incredible.” There speaks a general. And the worst thing? “When people don’t understand the world is changing and it’s difficult to convince them to follow the transformation.” There speaks aw philosopher.

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couldn’t guarantee traceability to its own satisfaction. It’s investing in its tanneries to make them cleaner and greener. And what’s noteworthy is that it’s doing this not under duress from the market, but because the house feels it’s the right thing to do. “To be very frank, I don’t know if all of our customers are that concerned about where their skins come from. But the next generation is, and so are we.” There are other, more pragmatic, arguments for the price hike of course. For years, queues of Chinese customers had become a common sight outside European flagship stores for the simple reason that things were cheaper there. “We needed to harmonise prices across the world. Four years ago, we reduced them by 20 per cent in Asia and increased them by 20 per cent in Europe, which accounted for the first discernible rise. Then we had inflation...” It’s not so much that Pavlovsky sees Chanel as an agent for moral change, as other fashion brands clearly view themselves. But he does seem to view Chanel as a kind of extended family. That’s evident when he talks about his initial reaction to Covid-19. “The first thing was to protect our employees. When you have children who were not at school, how do you help the employees? (The answer was to conduct a survey, then give them as much flexitime as they need and pay their full salary for the first two months of part-time work.) “Now all the safety measures look obvious, but when you’re at the start and you’re talking about thousands of employees, it’s complicated. Some of our manufactures could continue to work with social distancing but not everyone. So what does that mean?” What it meant was that 80 per cent of Chanel’s boutiques across the globe had to close - an immense hit to a brand that doesn’t sell its clothes online. Not that business shuddered to a complete halt. “We had many loyal local customers staying in contact and ordering. WhatsApp and videos came into their own.” It would have been unseemly to have shouted this from the mansards of the Rue Cambon salon, however. Another chuckle. “No. We were discreet. The main message was that Chanel is here for you if you want us.”

These pages: All images from SS21

The worst thing? When people don’t ‘understand the world is changing and it’s difficult to convince them to follow ’ 45

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Savile Row has been the last word in bespoke suiting for centuries, but now faces an existential crisis thanks to Covid-19 and premium rents. Mick Brown spoke to the streetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tailors about the road ahead

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hen, in those gloomy days of March, the lockdown first gripped Britain, Savile Row became a hive of feverish activity. At Dege & Skinner, Henry Poole and Anderson & Sheppard - tailoring establishments that between them can count more than 300 years of Savile Row history - the story was the same: as the doors to the street’s august establishments slammed shut, vans and taxis were commandeered to deliver irons, sewing machines and boards for the tailors and makers, usually labouring in the basements and back rooms of the Row, to continue working from home. At Anderson & Sheppard, the light in the shop was kept burning by one of the firm’s senior cutters, Leon Powell, who would come in each day to keep things ticking over. The Row, he says, was dead. ‘Once or twice you might see a figure lurking in the back of a shop, but it was very eerie, the entire area.’ In the brighter days of July, shortly after the UK government announcement that shops could open again, I took a walk down Savile Row, past the immaculate shopfronts, with their elegant twisted metal railings, the tailored suits and jackets on dummies standing to attention behind windows embossed with gold lettering. Like the entirety of London’s West End, it was all but deserted. The tailors of Savile Row do not depend on walk-in business. Few people strolling down the street feel seized with the compulsion suddenly to order a bespoke suit; but any street needs people, a sense of busy-ness, to come alive. One could only wonder when, if, they would return. Gieves & Hawkes, at number one Savile Row, can trace its roots back to 1771, when Thomas Hawkes set up a tailor’s shop in nearby Brewer Street; it moved to Savile Row in 1912. Henry Poole & Co, at number 15, was established in 1846, when Henry took over the business from his father James, who had been a volunteer soldier in the Napoleonic wars and, like all volunteers, was expected to make his own uniform, so became a tailor. Dege & Skinner, at number 10, was founded in 1865. But the Covid crisis has hit Savile Row in all manner of ways, presenting a threat to its very survival. How can the best bespoke tailoring in the world - everybody agrees on that -

survive in a world where people have less money to spend, are unable to travel, and where the very meaning of bespoke is challenged by the new conventions of social distancing? The relationship between a tailor and his or her client is as familiar as that between a lady and her hairdresser. “You can’t do bespoke tailoring by Zoom,” says Colin Heywood, the managing director of Anderson & Sheppard. “The customer has to come in and engage, eye to eye, and see the processes and have a dialogue.” And, of course, be measured up - although that is the least of the problems. Tailors now come dressed with masks, visors and gloves. “You still need to get inside that twometre distance,” Heywood says, “but the idea is to minimise the frequency and the duration.” A lot of measuring - sleeve lengths, shoulders, across the back, coat length (Savile Row does not talk about ‘jackets’) - is done from the back. For fittings, the customer puts on the coat and trousers. “It’s observed from a distance,” Heywood says. “When you need to pin or mark you do it at arm’s length, and quickly.” The bigger problems facing Savile Row are economic ones. With premises shut, firms have been able partly to fulfil existing orders, but new ones have been few. The lockdown happened at exactly the period when people would normally be ordering suits for Ascot, weddings and their summer wardrobe. Then there is the foreign trade. A large proportion of revenue on

All images: Anderson & Sheppard

Savile Row - more than 60 per cent in the case of some firms - comes from foreign customers, and most tailors do ‘trunk shows’, travelling to America and the Far East for sales and fittings, which restrictions on travel have made impossible. In a normal year, the salesmen and cutters of Anderson & Sheppard make four trips to America. “We’d come back with 80 orders from our first trip, and another 40 from Asia and a second US trip. Those have gone,” says Anda Rowland, who owns the firm. Founded in 1906, Anderson & Sheppard arrived on Savile Row in 1915, catering to customers including Fred Astaire, Cole Porter, Noël Coward, countless crown princes, millionaires, film moguls, the Prince of Wales - and Marlene Dietrich. Anda’s father was the late businessman and newspaper proprietor Tiny Rowland, a long-time customer of Anderson & Sheppard, who liked its suits so much he invested in it, eventually acquiring 80 per cent of the company. Tiny Rowland died in 1998, and in 2004 Anda took over the running of the business on behalf of the family. The following year the firm moved around the corner to new premises in Old Burlington Street, but its gentlemen’s club ambiance (wood panelling, buttoned leather sofa, shelves and cabinets stocked with bolts of cloth, ties, silks, braces and buttons) - the default Savile Row mode - is timeless. The average price for a Savile Row suit is £5,000 ($6,500). For this, you are not just buying a suit but a heritage – “the epitome of British tailoring”, as William Skinner puts it. He is the managing director of Dege & Skinner, renowned for its ceremonial and military tailoring and hunting uniforms, which account for between 15 and 20 per cent of the firm’s business. It made the frock coat of the Blues and Royals worn by Prince Harry when he married Meghan Markle. A full-dress ceremonial uniform of the Household Division costs £5,000 ($6,500); a frock coat for a Master of the hunt, £3,850 ($5,000). These specialities are impervious to changing fashions. Young officers will always need regimental dress. Masters of hunts will always wear pink (so-called - it’s actually red). But what is the future of the suit postCovid? And working from home, as many will continue to do, will anyone want to?

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You can’t do bespoke tailoring by Zoom

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The current crisis has merely accelerated what was already a long-term trend, and one the denizens of Savile Row were already adapting to. “Over the last 20 to 25 years the wearing of the suit has gradually declined,” William Skinner says. “Life has become less formal.” Like every tailor I spoke with, Dege & Skinner makes many more sports coats, blazers and casual jackets than it once did. “But there will always be a requirement for suits in certain parts of society; there are people who want to follow tradition, and want to do it properly.” Simon Cundey, the managing director of Henry Poole, agrees. Typically, he says, an ‘everyday’ customer at Poole will order two suits a year - one for the spring, one for the autumn, “and then come back next year and have the same thing again. That’s a lovely, easy customer who we love to see all the time. “And then we have customers who suddenly have a binge; we haven’t seen them for a few years and they’ll order six or seven suits and perhaps some sports jackets and a dinner suit.” (Good business, then, though a little less extravagant than the princes, emperors and shahs who patronised Henry Poole in the late 19th and early 20th century: Naser al-Din, the Shah of Persia from 1848 until his assassination in 1896, managed to rack 49

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up a bill of £884,910 ($1.15 million) - a mere bagatelle compared to the £1.8 million ($2.34 million) spent by His Highness the Khedive of Egypt.) These people, Cundey believes, will not go away. Anda Rowland thinks that harder times may even provide a silver lining. “We saw this in 2008. People say, I’m going to buy less, but buy better, and I’ll buy something from people I know, that I can have repaired, that’s made ethically; we appeal to a modern audience.” In his role as chairman of the Savile Row Bespoke Association, William Skinner estimates that the Row contributes about £30 million ($39 million) of direct turnover to the British economy, with an unquantifiable amount from all the supply industries associated with it - the button and trim-makers, the Yorkshire wool mills whose overseas sales are considerably boosted by the selling point that their wares are recognised as the very best by the tailors of Savile Row. The Row is an integral part of what might be called the London luxury experience: the overseas customers who come to order a suit also frequent the best hotels, eat at the smartest restaurants, buy theatre tickets; it is one part of a fragile ecosystem, all of which is now under threat. But central to the crisis threatening Savile Row is a question that has preoccupied the bespoke trade since long before the coronavirus: rents. The narrow margins on which most firms operate, and the rent reviews that go only one way - upwards - lead one tailor to describe his business as “basically, working for the landlord”. And it is a situation, one hears it said, that must change if Savile Row is to survive. “When we stop with furlough support and rate relief, and when the reality of cash flow from not being able to travel hits us at the end of the year, I think there’s going to have to be a completely different arrangement with the landlord,” says Rowland. The majority of properties on the Row are owned by the Pollen Estate, which is itself owned by a combination of private family trusts and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (the latter acquired a 64.2 per cent stake in 2014), and which, since the 18th century, has owned a large tranche of east Mayfair, 50

including much of the property on neighbouring Cork Street, long the preserve of upmarket art galleries. The day-to-day affairs of the Estate are managed by Julian Stocks at Knight Frank. He says that the Estate has made efforts to help alleviate the immediate crisis for its Savile Row tenants, working on “a case-by-case basis”, and offering a mixture of rentfree periods, rent deferments into next year and beyond, and the option of monthly rather than quarterly rents. “My objective as the property director is to make sure that all our stakeholders, including the tailors, the galleries in Cork Street, the restaurants and cafés, can make it through this crisis and beyond. We want to do everything we can to protect the brand that is Savile Row.” But here’s the question: how to reconcile preserving the unique character of Savile Row - ‘the brand’ in Stocks’ words - with the Estate’s requirement to make a profit by charging rents that are not necessarily what the businesses that give the street its unique character can afford to pay? Stocks acknowledges there is “a

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People say, I’m going to buy less, but buy better, and I’ll buy something from people I know... that’s made ethically

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contradiction” between tenant and landlord in that respect. “But our approach is to make sure that what we charge is sustainable so that businesses can afford the rents. The more profitable I can make the tailors by helping them, then we can grow the rents sustainably over time. That’s the balance to strike.” Savile Row is not a long street, but there are presently 10 empty units - all predating the pandemic. This is more, Simon Cundey told me, than he could remember in the 30 years he has been at Henry Poole. For all the tailors I spoke to, an essential part of that balance is ensuring that Savile Row retains its character as the Mecca of bespoke tailoring, and that only a certain kind of shop should be welcomed. The Row is one of five historic London addresses designated as ‘special policy areas’ by Westminster City Council (the others are Harley Street, Mayfair, St James’s and Portland Place), which theoretically makes it harder for landlords to dilute each area’s distinctive character by changes of use and allowing chain stores to force out smaller independent businesses. The arrival in 2014 of an Abercrombie & Fitch childrenswear shop at number 3 Savile Row caused collective apoplexy, and sighs of relief when it recently closed down. Stocks agrees Abercrombie was

hardly appropriate (number 3 is not one of the buildings owned by the Pollen Estate), but says the figure of 10 empty units is misleading. Four of those units, which do not belong to Pollen, have only recently been emptied for refurbishment. Of the three owned by the Estate, Stocks says, one is under offer to a new tailoring operation. For the second, the Estate is in discussions with two Savile Row-trained cutters to rent the unit on a “preferential basis to get them going.” And the third has been offered to an accessories brand that is, he says, “symbiotic with the street. We need to think about fresh entrants that are accreted to Savile Row in the shop units that tailors don’t like operating out of - a really great watch brand, shoe brand or hat brand that works on Savile Row. There is no point as the building owner having a series of empty shops.” Certainly, there are a number of young tailors wanting to continue the Savile Row tradition. Kathryn Sargent, who trained at Gieves & Hawkes, and for the past eight years has had her own atelier on nearby Brook Street, says she would love to be the first business with a woman’s name above the door on Savile Row. ‘But the current rent situation makes that prohibitive. That said, I am part of the Savile Row community, which is more than just a location; it is a network of like-minded passionate tailors who are determined to see our trade survive, evolve and adapt.” Savile Row has survived world wars, recessions and changing fashions, but Cundey believes there has never been a more critical moment in the street’s history than now. The threat, he says, is existential. Henry Poole employs 35 full-time and 15 self-employed staff - the largest number on the Row. “We are already way off revenues this year to last, and it’s very worrying. The first thing we really need to do is get back to some normality where people can travel.” Seventy per cent of Poole’s custom is from overseas. “Without this business,” Cundey warns, “we will have to downsize drastically. “Customers,” he continues, “are eager to return. We’ve had calls from America, Japan, Switzerland, saying how upsetting it’s been for them to lose coming for Wimbledon, Ascot, the shooting parties in the shires. The question we always ask is, when are you coming back to see us?” 51

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A WA Y Ahead of the V&Aâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s latest exhibition, Bags: Inside Out, its curator Lucia Savi tells Hayley Kadrou about the power of the iconic accessory

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Mentally browsing your drawers or dresser, it’s unlikely that there is a garment or accessory that delivers so strongly on both style and functionality quite like the historic bag. While the word ‘bag’ might generate images of a feminine, high-fashion design – think distinctive logos over soft dark leather with a gold chain strap – the vehicle of transportation covers wider grounds, with much deeper roots. Throughout history, around the world, between genders and social classes, the ultimate accessory has been present as an item of function, status and political power. This is something Lucia Savi, curator of Bags: Inside Out at the V&A has fascinated over. “I wanted to analyse bags because they are littleresearched accessories but are also so important in the lives of both men and women around the world,” Savi tells AIR. Alongside the fashion and textile team at the V&A – the Londonlocated institution that opened in 1852 and now serves as the largest museum of applied and decorative arts and design – Savi searched high

and low for items of significance that also tell a story. “One of the most interesting and rewarding aspects of this project has been the challenge of selecting the final objects of around 300 bags from such a wide space of time and place.” Talking through just some of the items that feature in the mammoth collection (which is split into craftsmanship, function, and the status symbol), Savi unpacks exactly why the iconic accessory deserves to be explored, studied and celebrated. Today, you don’t need to be fashionsavvy to be familiar with the term ‘It’ bag. As the seasons move from Spring/ Summer into Autumn/Winter, fashion houses channel their creative energy into designing the next must-have, celebrity-approved handbag that’ll set their sales soaring. Yet the term became mainstream in the 1990s at the height of celebrity culture, 24-hour media, and supermodel stardom, and it all started with actor Sarah Jessica Parker. During a scene from Sex and the City, which first aired in 1997, character Carrie Bradshaw is robbed of her Fendi

bag. She screamed: “It’s a Baguette!” Launched by the Italian fashion house that year, the Fendi Baguette bag quickly became the very first ‘It’ bag. The small and compact design went on to sell approximately 600,000 units in the decade that followed. Of the purple sequinned number, Savi beams: “We are delighted to have this bag on display in the exhibition.” The moment marked a milestone in the history of the accessory. Thanks to “the power of celebrity endorsement,” handbags became “the ultimate symbols of conspicuous consumption,” says Savi. From using them as muses and models, high fashion quickly cashed in on the power of celebrity. Because when famous faces give their seal of approval, aspiring fashion fans keen to emulate will follow. “Imbued with symbolic meanings, bags can signify who we are and who we aspire to be.” Bags: Inside Out also shines a light on how royal and political figures have been both immortalised by, and become synonymous with, their

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The power of celebrity endorsement exploded with the ‘It’ bag phenomenon when certain handbags became the ultimate symbols of conspicuous consumption

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Opening pages: Chatelaine, 1863-85, probably England, cut steel (c) Victoria and Albert Museum, London These pages, clockwise from far left: Rhinestone encrusted metal ‘Faberge Egg’ evening bag, Judith Leiber; Gianni Versace, Safety-pin handbag, SpringSummer 1994, Italy; Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, Speedy handbag, Autumn-Winter 2006, Paris; Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel Lait de Coco evening bag Autumn-Winter 2014, Paris. All (c) Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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I believe what makes bags such fascinating objects in their double nature; they can be very personal items carrying our most personal possessions

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Opposite: Grace Kelly’s departure from Hollywood (Photo By Allan Grant/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/ Getty Images) 56

chosen accessories. “The ‘Lady Dior’ has been one of Christian Dior’s most recognised products since it was launched in 1995,” Savi tells us. Originally named ‘Chouchou’, meaning favourite, the bag underwent a moniker change when France’s then first lady, Bernadette Cricas, gifted the bag to Princess Diana. It was later renamed in her honour after her death in 1997. “It has remained one of the brand’s most coveted pieces ever since.” Margaret Thatcher’s iconic Asprey bag also takes its worthy place in the exhibition. The grey leather bag was often dubbed her secret weapon, and even inspired the term; “handbagged”, meaning to verbally and psychologically beat your opponents. Elsewhere among the 300-something artefacts is the Despatch Box once donned by Winston Churchill. Since the 1800s, the carrier has been used to securely transport sensitive documents. But the political power of the bag isn’t just about the so-called powerful who carry them. “Bags are both a private possession and a public statement,” details Savi. The accessories can be, explicitly or not, an outward reflection of who we are, what we believe and what we stand for – something brought to light by Savi’s curation, which shows the way in which bags have been used as a form of protest. In 1825, the Female Society of Birmingham used the accessory as a form of antislavery campaigning. In 2007, Anna Hindmarch launched the ‘I am NOT a Plastic Bag’ tote. While in 2016, activist and artist Michele Pred adorned a bag with the words, ‘My Body My Business’. An outward accessory on display to the world, the bag can serve as a vessel for protest, a coding signifier, or as a reflection of our ethics. And that goes beyond catchy slogans and overt imagery, as the ethics we buy into are fostered behind the scenes in the fashion industry. With a decrease in plastic use and a rise in veganism in a bid to reverse environmental damage, it’s also how bags are made that say something about consumers that buy them. Or, at the very least, what they want to signify to the world. On the subject of environmental

awareness, Savi tells us: “In the exhibition, we explore the ways in which bags have been made with sustainable material, often from everyday waste.” As plastic pollution continues to be an issue of global concern, more and more brands are looking at ways they can make sustainable options and align themselves with a certain vision. “Swiss brand Freitag has been making messenger bags from recycled truck tarpaulin, used seat-belts, and old bicycle-tire inner tubes since 1993. Two British companies, Elvis & Kresse and Bottletop, pledge to reinvest a portion of their profits into charitable projects in addition to their sustainable choice of materials,” says Savi. Mainstream fashion has taken note, too. Using ocean plastic, British fashion designer Stella McCartney recently created a limited-edition backpack with all proceeds going towards Sea Shepherd, an organisation launched in 1977 to protect aquatic life. Many brands, as the exhibition details, have turned to vegan alternatives in the method of making, too. And from new innovations to historic methods, discovering the realities of the design process was a particular takeaway for the curator of Bags: Inside Out. “During the research for this exhibition, I had the privilege to visit workshops, ateliers and handbag factories in the UK and abroad. Bag making is a complex process. From creative sketches to precise technical drawings, from prototype to catwalk, every stage requires careful thought. Whether made from natural, synthetic or recycled materials, bags have one thing in common; each model usually comes in just one standard size, unlike clothing which is produced in multiple sizes. This trait has been heralded as a key factor in the economic success of bags,” says Savi. While eco and sustainable may one day replace fast fashion, one thing we do know is that the bag’s appeal will not wane. Because, as Savi has discovered throughout her project: “By juxtaposing bags from different times and places, we’ve highlighted how certain attitudes and values are universal.”

Motoring NOVEMBER 2020: ISSUE 110

He’s Electric It was while watching Harry and Meghan drive off from their wedding in an electric Jaguar that Justin Lunny had an idea – if it works for a Jaguar, why not for other classic motors?

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WORDS: ANDY MARTIN

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We’re aiming at thought-leaders who have an eye for beauty

kind of passionate nostalgia another man might reserve for his former girlfriends. But what he really wanted to know was: could he buy an electric one? The answer was either “No” or “Yes, but…”. “There are converters out there who will cobble one together for you,” says Lunny. “But it’s not an engineered solution.” They simply stick in a Tesla motor and carve up the car to make it fit. Lunny decided it had to be done properly. Everrati refuses to ‘cut’ either the body of the car or even the engine space. “We don’t want to vandalise or deface,” he says. It has to be the original car, fully restored, in perfect order. But with the addition of an electric drivetrain. The engineering has to fit the car rather than the other way around. “We’re giving them a heart transplant.”

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It’s the ultimate in upcycling. What Lunny has done for the Porsche 964 he is now doing for the Mercedes 280 SL Pagoda, a convertible, which should be on the road later this year. “Our cars have to be beautiful,” he says. By the spring of 2021 they will have a fleet of vehicles already engineered and ready to paint. Always providing you can cough up the requisite £250-300k ($325-375k), you can pick out your own colour and even specify a vegan leather interior, if that is your preference – which looks and feels just like leather. “We can even make it smell like leather, if you want that,” says Lunny. The next contender for the Everrati treatment is a Land Rover, Series 2a, from 1970. Lunny is an admirer of the Morris Minor, both in terms of form

Credit: The Independent/The Interview People

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The marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle has had many farreaching consequences. The career of Justin Lunny is one of them. Lunny once lived in Windsor, right across the street from the Castle where the couple swapped vows. He used to watch Prince Philip driving a four-horse-powered carriage through town. But what really inspired him was the 250-odd horsepowered vehicle Harry and Meghan were driving on the day of their wedding: a sky blue Jaguar E-type convertible. A design classic. But also, crucially, fully electric. As it turned out, Jaguar weren’t quite ready for mass production and this prototype, the ‘E-type Zero’, was shelved. But a seed had been planted in Justin Lunny’s brain: if you could do that with an E-type, why not other similarly eye-catching classic cars? So it was that the wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle was also the day that Everrati was first conceived. Lunny’s grandfather, Reginald Tredwell, was a fearless motorbike despatch rider in the Second World War. The young Lunny fancied following in his tracks, but his mother steered him away from bikes towards four wheels. He became an automotive prodigy: by the age of five he could identify and correctly name cars in the distance, even in the dark (from the shape of their headlamps). “I was probably an irritating kid,” says Lunny, “but at least it wasn’t ‘are we there yet?’” He passed his test at 17 and his first car was a Renault 5. He and his father used to buy and sell Renault 5s and do them up in the garage. “My Dad had a love of French cars. They were real works of art back in the day. Look at the Citroen DS – they had curves for the sake of curves. It wasn’t all about streamlining.” After his A-levels he went to Hewlett Packard as an A-level intern. He ended up staying there for nine years. After HP he went on to a couple of software companies and set up, and finally sold, a couple more to do with fintech. But his heart wasn’t really in it. It was only a means to an end. His dream was still to do something with cars. And then Harry and Meghan and their E-type put him on the right road. Lunny has spent the last two and a half years working on the concept and making it work. “I’ve had many Porsches in my life,” says Lunny, with the same

and colour, but alas it’s not sufficiently high-end to work in business terms. For him a car is first of all a work of art (or it isn’t). “That’s why we don’t cut them up,” he says. “Would you cut up a Picasso or a Renoir?” He regrets that contemporary cars tend to be rather lookalike and functional on account of stringent rules to do with safety and crash protection. “You don’t want all cars looking the same, do you?” he asks, plaintively. “You couldn’t design a Pagoda now. So we want to keep the old ones.” The restored and electrified cars should last another 30 or 40 years. Everrati is aiming at a similar customer base to Tesla, but “We’re aiming at thought-leaders who have an eye for beauty,” says Lunny. “They’ll be driving their Teslas, but you and I, we’ll be driving our Porsches and Mercedes.” I get kind of choked up being included, if only for a moment, in that “we”.

Lunny appreciates that it’s a lot of money but he reckons there are plenty of people investing half a million in classic cars that are still petrol-driven. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense because within a few years you won’t even be able to drive them in some places. So what’s the point?” Lunny’s vision puts the emphasis on romance and glamour. He harks back to the golden age of the Michelin Guide. “You have to dress well just to get in the car,” he says. “Then you have the pleasure of driving a beautiful car to some Michelin-starred restaurant for lunch. You can enjoy motoring again. And you have the knowledge that you’re doing it in a way that is sustainable.” Lunny junior is aged five. The apple, in this case, has not fallen far from the tree. He was recently heard to say: “Daddy, let’s travel in style today – let’s take the Pagoda.”

Gastronomy

NOVEMBER 2020 : ISSUE 110

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The Protégé As one of the youngest chefs to have been awarded a Michelin star, Axel Manes excelled under the tutelage of the late, great Joël Robuchon. Now he’s arrived in Dubai to continue his master’s work WORDS: JOHN THATCHER

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ome things are just worth waiting for. Ten years ago, Joël Robuchon, by some distance the most decorated chef of them all, was in Dubai to check out the proposed premises for a branch of his globalspanning L’Atelier concept. The spot in DIFC was ultimately rejected by Robuchon, on the basis that the kitchen could only be housed in a place that would negatively affect how he intended the food to be served to the guest (it’s now home to Cipriani). But a decade on, which sadly saw Robuchon’s passing in 2018, and L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon now has its place in the city’s financial hub, just around the corner from that vetoed site. Manning its impressive (and, one assumes, perfectly placed) open kitchen is French chef Axel Manes who, when aged only 20, was selected by Robuchon to partner with him for L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon SaintGermain – now a gastronomic landmark in a city that isn’t exactly

short of stiff competition for that billing – and its Dubai cousin. That the tender-aged Manes was handpicked by a man he still refers to as a ‘god’ goes some way to telling you just how talented this sill fresh-faced chef is. After all, aged only 19, Manes came to Robuchon’s attention by winning a Michelin star while working in Lyon. Two more have since followed for the Saint-Germain restaurant. Yet despite his own unequivocal talent, it’s telling that Manes speaks not of himself when we sit down for a pre-lunch-crowd chat in his beautifully designed Dubai restaurant, but immediately of Robuchon. “He was like a spiritual father. We had a very close relationship,” he says, before I’ve even asked my first question. Heralded by industry bible Gault Millau as ‘cook of the century’, more than a decade before the century closed out, it’s no surprise that Robuchon’s influence continues to be felt so keenly. This was a man whose restaurants

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It’s not like any other restaurant. It’s totally different

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Credit: Images of Axel Manes @neelioparis

tallied an astonishing 32 Michelin stars, putting him way ahead of the next best (Alain Ducasse; 20). A man for whom not only Manes but other celebrated chefs worked and learned from – the likes of Ferran Adrià, Gordon Ramsey, and Éric Ripert. What Manes learned very quickly is that his own achievements clad in chef whites would never match those of Robuchon. “At that age it was important to me,” says Manes of his first Michelin star. “Having a three-star restaurant was my motivation. But when I met Joël I knew immediately that nobody can be born tomorrow and have his success. He won all the accolades and titles you can earn. I knew I could never change that.” Manes’ most valuable lesson learned, however, relates to food. “Joël was very keen to pass on his knowledge, to ensure everything is done how it should be and the principles of cooking – how something is made - are adhered to. But he would always talk about simplicity on a plate. This is very, very difficult because you are focusing on very small things – the taste, the seasoning, how the meat is cooked. As Joël said, you have moods in cooking; Molecular was a mood for five to seven years. The beef tartare at El Bulli was experimental, the taste of tartare encapsulated in foam only. But this is not how people would continue to eat. People always come back to the traditional way of cooking French gastronomy. Always. Perfect meat, perfectly done, with a good sauce.” That, in a nutshell, is what L’Atelier is famed for. Though menus may have changed in the near two decades since L’Atelier debuted (with dishes added seasonally), the bases for them has been a constant, and shall remain so, insists Manes. “It is strongly rooted in French gastronomy. That means the jus’ are done correctly, the mash potato is done correctly. If the basics aren’t executed to exacting standards you don’t have strong foundations and the whole thing falls apart.” Manes recounts a story that Robuchon once told him at a Christmas dinner, of how when he started out on the road to superstardom he would have to cycle 100km everyday to work. He had to arrive by 6am to light the fire in the kitchen, which was how the food

was cooked. But if he was ever late for any reason – even heavy snow - he was punched and beaten to the floor by the chef and would cry. It did not harden him. “Joël had a very good heart,’ says Manes. It was that good heart which inferred Robuchon’s desire to create L’Atelier , to almost democratise fine dining so that the many, rather than just the few, could enjoy his food. Drawing inspiration from the informality of sushi counters and tapas bars - and the warmth of their service, where guests would sit aside an open-kitchen, interacting with the chefs – the first L’Atelier opened in 2003 and now has branches everywhere from New York to Hong Kong. “When Joël created the L’Atelier concept it was a revolution in dining. In France you either had fine dining restaurants or you had brasseries, two very distinct concepts,” details Manes. L’Atelier merged the two, offering the type of high style, high quality food common to fine-dining restaurants, but delivered in a casual way, right the way

down to how staff interact with guests. “Joël was always very proud of this,” says Manes, smiling. “In the design of the restaurant you see the colour red is prominent – that’s a reference to the French Revolution. That’s what Joël did to dining.” Robuchon could not have selected a better man than Manes to continue his legacy, as he eagerly points to dishes on the menu to emphasise the range of suit-all prices. “L’Atelier is very particular,” he adds, when I ask what gap his restaurant will fill in Dubai’s dining scene. “It’s not like any other restaurant; it’s not a brasserie restaurant, it’s not a traditional French restaurant, and the way we do things are very particular to us. Totally different.” It’s also different in another sense. Though restaurants bearing the names of heralded chefs are common in Dubai, those chefs are rarely, if ever, in their kitchens. At L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon Dubai, Michelin-starred Axel Manes will be, cooking food approved by the ‘god’ of gastronomy. 65

JOURNEYS BY JET

One&Only Mandarina

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Mexico

Travel NOVEMBER 2020:ISSUE 110

pening an ultra-luxury hotel when still in the midst of a global pandemic that continues to impose unprecedented restrictions on travel may seem, at first, a foolhardy move. But the latest addition to One&Only’s increasingly impressive portfolio of refined resorts isn’t somewhere you can keep under wraps. Located on a spectacular cliffside overlooking the Pacific Ocean, with dramatic vistas and a lush rainforest setting, One&Only Mandarina, which opens this month, grants its guests splendid isolation on an undeveloped stretch of coastline along the Riviera Nayarit in Mexico. Allowing nature to take centre stage, the resort has been designed to blend with its verdant setting free-standing villas seem to float above the treetops, each with their own discreet plunge pools; the spa is comprised of six isolated treatment rooms, cocooned beneath the jungle canopy among centuries-old trees; while an outdoor yoga palapa and gym have been carved from the surrounding landscape. With the great outdoors spread invitingly beneath it, Mother Nature’s playground is ripe for adventure. The Jetty is where guests can moor their own yachts or cast off from for sailing, fishing and whale watching excursions along the coast, while adjacent to the resort, The Flatlands offers

up miles of lush nature trails and horseback riding at the Mandarina Polo & Equestrian Club. It is those aforementioned villas that define this resort, however. Bestowing spellbinding ocean or rainforest views from their clifftop vantage point and expansive terraces that put you among the treetops, they range in size and features. Four of them are unique, with Villa Jaguar able to accommodate seven guests, and Villa Tortuga, Villa Pacifico, and Villa One set up to house as many as eight. And it’s the latter, spread over what’s close to 19,000sqft, that’s the resort’s finest. Positioned on a hilltop at the centre of the resort, but shrouded in greenery to afford seclusion, it’s set over two storeys, ceding enough space indoor and out to house an infinity pool, al fresco terrace, full-screen cinema, Jacuzzi, wine cellar, spa, gym, living room and dining room. You’ll like it so much you may wish to buy one, which was no doubt what the resort’s owners had in mind when drawing up plans for 54 Mandarina Private Homes, among the first One&Only residences in the world, which are available to own. You can land your jet at Puerto Vallarta International Airport, before taking a private transfer to the resort

What I Know Now NOVEMBER 2020:ISSUE 110

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Yiqing Yin HAUTE COUTURE DESIGNER The best piece of advice I’ve ever received was to cultivate my instincts to the point where they would speak louder and clearer than any outside point of view. I learned that there was no right or wrong way to get somewhere, only a more or less direct path. Trust yourself and commit to be your best and truest when you take action, as selfdoubt is the worst enemy of success. It makes you overthink and takes power away from your initial dreams. One thing I do every day is spare a moment in time and space to be with my daughter, truly just to be ‘with’ her and dive into her big wide eyes and innocent smile. To feel the joy and miracle of holding her tiny hands in mine, allowing myself to be healed from all the doubts of the world. I live this moment of true connection and conscious gratitude each day, like it was the last. A lesson I learned the hard way was that there is no such thing as a fair world. You create your own luck, your own entourage. However you decide to define yourself, as a victim or as a survivor, will define the rest 68

of your life. We are the masters of our own transformations. Travelling is oxygen for me. Confronting myself to different cultures, languages and colours. Falling in love with places and people that surprise me into new emotions. I am nomadic at heart, and stepping outside of my comfort zone is the heart of inspiration. I am also often inspired by the people I meet through my work, such as the Vacheron Constantin artisans. While visiting the Vacheron Constantin workshop, I found the same passion and spirit of experimentation I have always endeavored in my own creative process, and which allows us to push back aesthetic and technical frontiers and to open paths towards the unexpected. Being free. To dream, to lose time, to think independently and have the power to act upon it. That would be my definition of personal success. If I could tell my younger self one thing it would be don’t feel small, powerless,

or ashamed of being different. Your uniqueness is your creativity and your innocence is your potential to change the world, and even those tiny hands can make a huge difference. Don’t try to grow up too fast, as it takes years to grow back into that childlike capacity of wonder and transformation. Chin up. I have had the chance to make my idols my friends, to accomplish a trajectory that many deemed impossible, from the start. But, most importantly, to transform every challenge into a learning experience. Reaching milestones is not of interest to me; true wealth resides in the process. Ambition has often led to disappointment and is not a good motivator for me. Every piece of success came my way because I was passionate and did something for the right reasons.

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