Portfolio | January 2017

ISSUE

133

BARCELONA REBRANDED

FRANK + OAK

How smart marketing remade a city

The Montreal menswear brand

PARANOID ANDROIDS

STOIC REBIRTH

Can we trust data-driven polls?

The business-friendly mindset

CHINA’S NEXT BIG THING WeChat is China’s biggest tech firm.

Can it take over the West as well?

JANUARY ISSUE 133

The business of life & living

Exclusive to Emirates First Class and Business Class

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OBAID HUMAID AL TAYER MANAGING PARTNER & GROUP EDITOR IAN FAIRSERVICE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR GINA JOHNSON GROUP EDITOR MARK EVANS marke@motivate.ae SENIOR ART DIRECTOR SARA RAFFAGHELLO sarar@motivate.ae DESIGNER RALPH MANCAO ralph@motivate.ae SUB-EDITOR SALIL KUMAR salil@motivate.ae EDITORIAL ASSISTANT LONDRESA FLORES londresa@motivate.ae GENERAL MANAGER – PRODUCTION SUNIL KUMAR sunil@motivate.ae PRODUCTION MANAGER R. MURALI KRISHNAN muralik@motivate.ae PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR VENITA PINTO venita@motivate.ae CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER ANTHONY MILNE anthony@motivate.ae PUBLISHER JAYA BALAKRISHNAN jaya@motivate.ae GROUP SALES MANAGER PORTFOLIO & INTERNATIONAL MICHAEL UNDERDOWN michael@motivate.ae

Emirates takes care to ensure that all facts published herein are correct. In the event of any inaccuracy please contact the editor. Any opinion expressed is the honest belief of the author based on all available facts. Comments and facts should not be relied upon by the reader in taking commercial, legal, financial or other decisions. Articles are by their nature general and specialist advice should always be consulted before any actions are taken.

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JANUARY ISSUE 133

CONTENTS UPFRONT

12

TECH POLLING

After the election of Trump, can we trust data-driven polls?

LIVING

78

WHAT TO PACK

16

SHOP THE FUTURE

Amazon’s new stores may herald a new way to shop

18

MOST WANTED

The gear, gadgets and glam accessories

27

THE BUSINESS

We meet the Montreal retail brand that is shaking up the menswear market

From Cape Town to Vienna, we’ve got you covered

82

INVESTMENT

Are stamps a smart investment in the current market?

84

FOOD & DRINK

From duckweed to spiked water, we track the coming year’s culinary trends

88

CONSUME

Works by Keith Haring and Guy De Rougemont are among the big names under the hammer in Hong Kong

90

COLUMN

Why entrepreneurs should embrace change

09

34,932 copies January - June 2016

JANUARY ISSUE 133

CONTENTS FEATURES

34

SELLING STOICISM AS A LIFE HACK

Meet the man selling an ancient Greek philosophy to a new generation of entrepreneurs, athletes and rappers

40

CHINA’S NEXT BIG THING

WeChat has come from nowhere to dominate the Chinese market – but can it do the same in the West?

48

THE MARKETING MAKEOVER

From a forgotten city on the Mediterranean to one of the world’s biggest success stories, we examine how Barcelona rebranded itself

58

THE CONNECTOR

Author Parag Khanna on why cities such as Dubai are the future of globalisation

66

SCREEN SAVERS

How to save cinema in the age of streaming

10

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800 DAMAS (within UAE) | damasjewellery.com

UPFRONT

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JANUARY / TECHNOLOGY

ISSUE 133

Poll positions Sarah Griffiths investigates why data-driven polls failed to predict the US election result

I

t was as seismic shock as any produced by mainstream American politics in living memory. President Trump – two words most switched on political observers never thought they would utter. It wasn’t just the commentators who were caught flat footed – some polls put Clinton’s chances of wining of up to 99 per cent and predicted she would win critical swing states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, which were ultimately taken by Trump.

The Princeton Election Consortium (PEC) was the most confident about a Clinton win, rating her chances at 99 per cent, while Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website was less bullish at 66.9 per cent. Now, in the wake of an outcome largely unforeseen, many are questioning the accuracy and validity of polls and the survey and mathematical methods used, with commentator Piers Morgan declaring all pollsters “dead”.

While an investigation is underway to uncover the reasons for the inaccuracies, most experts agree the polls underestimated support for Trump, irrespective whether they were traditional telephone polls, online probability and non-probability sample surveys, aggregators or even prediction markets. So why did they fail?

Some experts believe pollsters made sampling errors, which are hard to detect and the most likely to skew poll results. People are less willing to respond to surveys than in previous years and screen their phone calls, making the data

collection process more difficult.

Non-response bias: when certain groups of the electorate do not respond to surveys, masking their possible voting behaviour is another factor. The Pew Research Center said it’s possible that many of these voters backed Trump, whose antiestablishment campaign appealed to them, making it also unlikely they would be willing to respond to polls.

“Big data looks likely to play a bigger role in future elections” Leighton Vaughan Williams, director of the Political Forecasting Unit at Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, said: “The reason for the underperformance of the polls, especially at state level, is that they [the pollsters] didn’t talk to enough less educated white voters relative to the numbers who turned out to vote. This demographic people broke heavily for Trump.”

It’s also possible that people responding to telephone and online surveys were not honest about whom they intended to vote for and that educated Trump supporters were reluctant to back their candidate openly. Social scientists describe this as the social desirability bias. However, Morning Consult found this ‘shy Trumper’ effect to be overstated and other experts have said the suggestion people are less

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likely to lie online than on the phone is difficult to prove.

Of course, the reason for all this may have been much simpler: a last-minute switch of allegiance to Trump, a phenomenon which, by its very nature, is almost impossible to capture in the polls.

Methods of interpretation may also have played a role in ‘inaccurate’ polls. Weighting or stratification is commonly used to compensate for biases in sampling in a bid to match the demographics, but how this is done varies and it can easily fall short.

Renowned pollster Nate Silver successfully forecasted the results of the 2008 and 2012 elections on the FiveThirtyEight website. He used a model based on the historical accuracy of polls since 1972 and made a trend line adjustment, collecting, weighting and averaging polls and adjusting them to come up with the FiveThirtyEight aggregate poll. Despite these efforts, which The Huffington Post described as “monkeying around with the numbers”, Silver’s model failed to predict a Trump win, but did factor in the most uncertainty.

Some experts warn that herding behaviour may also have obscured the accuracy of polls. They think some pollsters may have readjusted their models to bring their results into line with that of the majority, overlooking Trump’s chances of winning. However, this was not the case with the USC Dornsife/USC ‘Daybreak’ poll, which notably put Trump ahead in the race at times.

Few polls succeeded in forecasting a win for Trump, but some last minute polls were accurate in predicting Clinton’s vote. As Vaughan Williams notes: “The national polls in the US election were on average not that far out.

They showed Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by between three and four per cent. She has indeed won the popular vote, by about two per cent.”

Some experts argue that

UPFRONT / TECHNOLOGY

A woman enters a voting booth during the 2016 election

nothing went wrong with the polls themselves; it was how they were used that was flawed, with commentators paying little notice to margins of error and uncertainty. This has arguably resulted in some people having unrealistic expectations of polls’ powers of prediction.

“If anything, the problem of unrealistic expectations has been something suffered more by the experts who interpret the polls, than the public,” says Vaughan Williams.

“In the US election they underestimated just how strongly polling error in one state were correlated with polling error in another state, so that the failure was compounded by rippling across a number of states.

“This happened particularly in states with a relatively proportion of white, educationally disadvantaged voters. In other words, there was a systematic misfire across a number of key battleground states in the same direction.

“This effect was badly underestimated by a number of polling experts, who gave Clinton in a number of cases upward of a 95 per cent chance of victory.”

While Vaughan Williams said the current voting system is not broken, he believes there is room for improvement, adding “after all, the main purpose of polling is to identify the likely winner of the actual poll”.

“Recent results demonstrate that opinion pollsters have often failed this most basic test. Lessons will

be learned, however, and if suitable action is taken to implement changes based upon these lessons, we can hope to look forward to better performance going forward.”

Vaughan Williams considers education will play a more important role in weighting in the future, but the best forecasts will be those that take an average of the most sophisticated polls.

While some experts believe person-to-person polling will continue to be important to pollsters and produce the best results, others think more accurate polls will be conducted online and use even more complex models and big data. It’s possible that pollsters could analyse voters’ internet usage alongside other survey data and demographic information to better predict if or how they will vote.

Nathan Snyder, executive director of Brickendon Consulting, suggested unstructured datasets available online could be used by pollsters to great effect.

“Why ask someone’s opinion directly when their web presence will give a much more nuanced view of their political state of mind?” he asked. “Correct collation and analysis of the data would remove much of the guesswork from predictions.”

Snyder said that use of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) techniques and machine learning could give a much more accurate picture too. “In a race where the candidate with the smallest campaign investment won the day, pollsters and Democrats alike need to wake up to the use and interpretation of fifth estate data sets,” he added.

So, the future of Presidential predictions might not be telephone calls from pollsters but algorithms scraping your web history to figure out whom you are most likely to vote for. It might lead to more predictable polls, but it also might bring us back to the argument about the ethics of big data. Either way, future years will see the microscope on the US election pollsters like never before.

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UPFRONT

The future of shopping Sarah Butler invesigates the world of drones, digital mannequins and leaving without paying telecommunications and retail services to food and drink services and even pet food.

The retailer claims the Amazon Go store is “the world’s most advanced shopping technology” but other businesses are also trialling shop-assistant-free concepts. The Näraffär convenience store based in an isolated village in Sweden, for example, relies on a mobile app that lets residents access the store, scan their shopping and then pay via a monthly invoice. They’re part of a wave of new gadgetry that could dramatically change the way we shop.

ROBOT ASSISTANTS Some may argue that many stores have these already, but retailers are moving on, with a view to replacing

90%

of Amazon sales consist of small parcels

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staff with sophisticated software.

The American DIY chain Lowe’s is testing LoweBot, a customer service robot that speaks several languages, helps shoppers find items and provides information on products. First trialled as OSHbot two years ago, it is currently being tested in 11 Lowe’s stores.

US electricals retailer Best Buy has Chloe, a robot that is a glorified grabber arm for CDs and DVDs, while Aldebaran Robotics, part of the Japanese telecoms firm Softbank, has created Pepper, a humanoid robot which has been deployed in some Nescafé stores in Japan.

Some US shopping centres are even adopting robotic security guards – a cross between a CCTV

Illustrations: Ralph Mancao

A

mazon may be set to bring its hi-tech till-free stores to Europe after registering the Amazon Go brand name in the UK last month. At the test store near Amazon’s HQ in Seattle, an app tracks customers as they walk about, recording the items they pick up and take away. The store is currently only available to company staff, but will open to shoppers signed up to the Amazon Prime service from next year. The cost of purchases will be automatically billed to their account.

The company has registered the Amazon Go trademark in the UK for an extensive list of potential uses, from technology,

JANUARY / RETAIL

that creates an accurate 3D model of the shopper, meaning it is possible to “try on” clothes.

Cambridge-based startup Metail, which has raised $20 million to date and is backed by Hong Kong clothing giant Tal, is setting the pace. The company’s technology can be plugged into retailers’ websites so customers can create what it calls “Me Models” as well as 3D images of the products on sale. Shoppers can then find out if a pair of tight jeans will give them a muffin top. Retailers will also be able to use customer data to suggest outfits, creating a “Netflix style” shopping experience.

DIGITAL BUTLERS Doing the shopping may soon require nothing other than a shiny little box. Nearly all the major tech firms, including Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook, are developing digital home assistants that respond to voice commands. As an online retailer, it’s not surprising that Amazon has ensured its Echo device is easy to shop with – thanks to the Alexa app, which lets you shout out a shopping list, to add to a virtual trolley, as you walk around the house. camera and a Dalek that can detect people who may be loitering in the wrong place and read car number plates in car parks. But it’s not all been straightforward: a robot guarding a shopping centre in California recently ran over a toddler after its navigational scanning systems failed to detect the small boy.

A VIRTUAL YOU For many shoppers, buying clothes online is a very hit-and-miss affair.

Sizes vary between outlets and getting the right fit means many clothing items are returned – which is bad for both the shopper and the shopkeeper. That could change thanks to new software

ISSUE 133

This coming wave of new gadgetry will change the way we shop forever Eventually these assistants should learn what you want and when you want it without commands. But these devices may be very shortlived – because home appliances like fridges, coffee machines and printers have already been developed that are linked to the internet so they can automatically replenish themselves without any interaction with their owner.

As retail sales increasingly transfer from the high street to the internet, one of the biggest problems for retailers is making deliveries. In busy cities where traffic congestion is a problem, one solution already being tested is using drones. In the summer, Amazon started working with the UK government to test the viability of delivering small parcels – which make up 90 per cent of Amazon’s sales – by drone.

In the US, Mercedes-Benz is collaborating with drone startup Matternet on the “Vision Van”, where a vehicle’s roof doubles as a launch pad for drones capable of sorties of up to 12 miles. Google has also shown off a fixed-wing drone capable of carrying packages.

However, beyond the special testing privileges granted to Amazon, current UK legislation – replicated in a number of other countries – bans drones from being flown within 50 metres of a building or a person, or within 150 metres of a built-up area. Aircraft pilots have also expressed concern about the dangers posed by drones after a number of near-misses in London and Manchester.

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UPFRONT 1

3

LINN SERIES 5 SPEAKERS

DRIFTWOOD SURFBOARDS

High-end speaker manufacturer Linn teamed up with design icons Timorous Beasties to create a range of speakers that look as good as they sound. There’s a choice of 10 to choose from, each of which can be customised to order.

By creating its surfboards from driftwood, local cedar or recycling everything from church pews to floorboards, Cornwall-based Driftwood manage to create something beautiful and ecofriendly. Each board is a work of art and can be customised as required.

Linn, from $12,215, linn.co.uk

driftwoodsurfboards.co.uk

Driftwood, from $1,500,

2

MONSIEUR DE CHANEL WATCH Chanel’s first men’s watch took five years to design and build, and the results are impressive to say the least. A jumping hour watch with a transparent rear face, this is an incredible piece of horology.

Chanel, $29,583, chanel.com

4

SILHOUETTE COLLECTION

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Starkly beautiful, these blacksoap sculptural perfume bottles can be used as a fragrancecum-art piece or they can be used as soap. The brainchild of Lisa Witte, an Amsterdambased product designer, these are beautiful in their bleakness.

Liza Witte, from $85, lizawitte.com

JANUARY / SPEND

ISSUE 133 5

PORSCHE 917 LONG TAIL SCULPTURE Handcrafted by the artist Stephane Dufour, this sculpture is a 1/18 scale artistic rendering of the classic Porsche 917 Long Tail. Simple, elegant and striking, it’s the perfect gift for the car lover in your life.

Stephane Dufour, $550, shop.petrolicious.com

6

KODAK SUPER 8 Kodak’s first Super 8 cine camera in more than 30 years combines analogue and digital functionality in a reassuringly simple design. You will be able to shoot Hollywood-quality films, as well as pay homage to the classics of the 1980s.

Kodak, from $400

8 7

LAUTEM HANDBAG

KITSUNE WASHBAG

The Spanish luxury brand has created waves with this architecturally inspired handbag, as seen on the arm of Solange Knowles and Emma Watson. Chunky yet classic, these are arm candy of the highest order.

Maison Kitsune combines a classic camouflage print with the label’s signature Mt Fuji motif. A mix of hard-wearing cotton-canvas and black leather, this will style up your morning routine no end.

Linn, from $657, lautemshop.com/en/shop

Kitsune, $257, shop.kitsune.fr

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UPFRONT

Parisian bolthole

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JANUARY / PROPERTY

ISSUE 133

French flair with a view to cherish in the heart of Paris’ 7th Arrondissement

Paris

PRICE From $3.93m

christiesrealestate. com

P

aris has always been a bolthole for the global elite – the city has everything any major capital has, as well as a magic all of its own. And when it comes to Parisian neighbourhoods, there is nowhere more exclusive than the 7th Arrondissement. This is an area with an almost villagelike feel, packed with charming bistros, small boutiques and beautiful apartment buildings. It’s also expensive – you will be lucky to get anything here for under $1 million, and most properties don’t stay on the market for too long.

We are sure that this stunning top-floor apartment won’t be around too long either – at 130 square metres, and bathed in natural light, it features a workshop-style living/reception room boasting six-metre-high ceilings and a skylight designed to offer a remarkable view of the capital’s most iconic landmark.

The building was finished in 1914 and while the apartment is

extremely modern in its fit-out, a number of stunning period touches remain.

It also includes a very spacious kitchen with dining facilities, three bedrooms (all en-suite) and a magnificent master suite that offers a stunning view of the Eiffel Tower, a mezzanine study and fitted dressing rooms.

As impressive as the interior is the neighbourhood – around the corner is the Champ de Mars Gardens, one of Europe’s most beautiful city parks and a focus of the neighbourhood. Equally iconic is the Seine, which winds its way through the centre of Paris, seconds walk from the front door.

The main attraction, of course, is that view, with the 324metre Eiffel Tower probably the world’s most iconic landmark.

Whether as a primary residence or a pied-à-terre, this is one of the finest apartments on the French market right now. $3,856,600 – on the market with Christie’s International Real Estate +33 660 34 14 62

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UPFRONT

Preserving the artisans Elizabeth Paton meets the luxury magnate aiming to showcase Europe’s artisan heritage

J

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ohann Rupert, the 66-year-old South African billionaire, chairman and controlling shareholder of the luxury goods group Richemont, owner of brands such as Cartier, Montblanc and Van Cleef & Arpels, was in full rant behind a gleaming mahogany meeting table in his London Mayfair office late last year. But instead of just talking about his issues, he is actually doing something about them.

In October, quietly and without much fanfare, he co-founded the Michelangelo Foundation.

A Geneva-based nonprofit organisation, it aims to champion master craftsmanship (initially focusing on Europe) by building networks of like-minded artisans and their supporting institutions, facilitating apprenticeships and nurturing global recognition for the Continent’s applied arts culture, hoping to bolster its future.

Franco Cologni, an Italian author and former Richemont business executive, is the other founder; so far, the foundation has a full-time staff of four.

“Over the last 15 years, I’ve repeatedly had discussions on what had been happening to the cultural heritage of Europe, but it had got to a point where we basically realised we had to start this right now or let it go completely,” Rupert said as he puffed on a cigar. “And with it, the decline and disappearance of a generational handover of precious skills and disciplines. I simply wasn’t about to let that happen.

“It will be fun, that’s for sure.

But boy, it’s also going to take a hell of a lot of time, and a lot of patience to boot.”

Magnates of the luxury world taking charitable steps into the arts and opening the world to new audiences is hardly new.

Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton and France’s richest man,

Luxury titans are increasingly helping artists and small artisans unveiled the 11,706-square-metre glass and steel contemporary art museum and performance space Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2014 on the outskirts of Paris, attracting 1.2 million visitors last year. François Pinault, founder of the holding group that became Kering, owner of brands such as Gucci, Alexander McQueen and Christie’s, announced plans in April to create a private museum in Paris to display his vast collection of contemporary art.

Rupert has something a little different in mind, however. His focus is not art but artisanship, not the already famous, but the little known. One key objective of the Michelangelo Foundation is to build a digital platform that would showcase all the applied artistry that Europe has to offer; exactly what form that might take is still being decided.

JANUARY / LUXURY

ISSUE 133

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In five years, Rupert said, the site might have a TripAdvisor-style recommendation system, where people could leave comments and critiques on a database, as well as verification of history and provenance related to a specific business.

Cologni, 82, a close friend of Rupert’s whose work on Fondazione Cologni provided much of the inspiration for the new foundation, added via e-mail that other proposals included underwriting collaborations between designers and artisans; developing a title and recognition at the national level for master craftsmen; and creating an apprenticeship programme.

“Look, we’ve been very lucky and made more money than we ever thought possible out of luxury goods.

But uncovering the raw or enduring talent – for me, that’s the best part,” Rupert said. “What’s not fun anymore is going to Bond Street or Fifth Avenue or Via Montenapoleone where the shops and product all look the same and have done now for the last 30 years because all the smaller, independent artisans have been pushed out by the retail rentals. We have to protect their livelihoods.”

“This will not be a moneymaking thing,” he said. “It is going to be an open platform, a place where people can explore unique products in the one area where Europe is still better than America or Asia.”

There will be no direct relationship between the Michelangelo Foundation and Richemont or any of its portfolio brands. Rupert said an effort such as this one is made because it is “the right thing to do”, not to sell products. “I hate that corporate and social responsibility stuff — people telling me how happy I must be because I’m green,” he said. “Of course we are going green. You can’t destroy the environment anymore; otherwise, that will eventually destroy you.”

“In order for our foundation to be seen as neutral, it has got

UPFRONT / LUXURY

A Louis Vuitton store in Shanghai

to be truly neutral,” Rupert stressed, noting that to reassure business rivals that they could place products on Yoox and Neta-Porter, he deliberately has never visited the head office of the luxury e-commerce site in which Richemont controls 50 per cent of shares. “Artists need to know that whoever they worked for in the past, or even who they work for now, that they can still come to us and get a fair shot.”

With a nickname of “Rupert the Bear” because of his predictions before the 2008 financial collapse, Rupert emphasises that the most important issue for the luxury industry and global economy is the unemployment that will be caused by the expanded use of robots, artificial intelligence and the new machine age. Millions of jobs will be lost, he believes, while social inequalities on which the luxury industry thrives will be reinforced.

JANUARY UPFRONT / LUXURY

“There is rising unemployment across the western world, and it is going to take a generation to re-skill people. Capitalising on the discontent that has arisen from that is a large part of the Donald’s success,” he said not long before Donald Trump won the American presidential election.

Rupert warned of the deep unrest that could stem from a gulf between the haves and have-nots – a disconnect that many of his

brands already heed.

“Luxury has got to be more discreet; the day of bling is gone; forget it. The hatred of the rich is going to expand, and people will not want to show their wealth off and put it in people’s faces, like they have in the past. Designers need to start understanding that,” Rupert said, adding that he told his watch houses five years ago to steer clear of “great big hamburger watches” and instead “go slim,

ISSUE 133

white gold and platinum”.

“Ultimately, luxury is not something made by a machine in a repetitive fashion,” he said.

“It needs a human element – that is what makes it unique and different. That will always pique curiosity. And we need to protect that talent at its source, while teaching customers that it is always worth paying 20 per cent more for something that will last three times as long.”

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JANUARY UPFRONT / THE BUSINESS

ISSUE 133

Frank + Oak Tracey Lindeman discovers how a Canadian clothing brand has refined – and redefined – the shopping experience.

T

he past six years have been a whirlwind for Ethan Song and Hicham Ratnani, the founders of popular Canadian clothing brand Frank + Oak. What began in 2010 as an online made-to-measure customised shirt maker, then pivoted two years later to become an online menswear brand, has now become a clothing company

with a technology edge that sells both men’s and women’s clothing online and in-store.

Song and Ratnani’s efforts culminated last year when Frank + Oak was ranked as the fastest-growing Canadian technology company in 2015 – with an 18,480 per cent revenuegrowth rate over four years – by multinational business-consulting firm Deloitte.

Song isn’t phased by the company’s success to date – “I don’t personally care about that number,” he says. Rather, he’s kept his head down, working on deepening Frank + Oak’s customer relationships and expanding its global reach. A major part of that is reaching out to women – the company launched its women’s department in September 2016 after two years of preparation.

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UPFRONT / THE BUSINESS

For its efforts, Frank + Oak has been rewarded. The company has raised $21 million to date and its app has been downloaded more than 600,000 times. It has three million community members and a deeply loyal customer base.

Investor Roger Chabra, a partner with Rho Canada Ventures, jumped on board when Song and Ratnani went to him with their first iterations on Frank + Oak. It terms of timing, the investment opportunity aligned well with anecdotal observations he’d made on the shift in how young men – particularly those in the sprawling startup universe – perceived and dressed themselves.

He visited the company’s Montreal office early on, and while browsing through a rack of clothing hanging in the corner thought to himself, “I would proudly wear most of the items on this rack.”

Rho contributed toward Frank + Oak’s $15 million Series B round raised in 2014; Chabra, for his part, sits on the company’s board and has assisted with fundraising, corporate strategy and recruitment.

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Song says he and Ratnani set the wheels in motion after observing a large number of customers were already women, albeit mostly women shopping with, and for, men. That kind of brand awareness among a population the company didn’t even cater to at the time has been powerful.

Frank + Oak’s clothing is a favourite of the young entrepreneurial class. December’s True North women’s collection is minimalistic and almost monochromatic, with a splash here and there of soft browns and wine-coloured tunics, pants and tees. The clothing is largely conservative and geared toward young professionals – no plunging necklines or too-tight dresses here. “A lot of our female fans are looking for even more progressive clothes – gender-neutral and more fashion-forward,” says Song.

UNCONVENTIONAL JOURNEY

Ethan Song (top) and a barber at work in the Toronto store

Song and Ratnani did not arrive in the fashion business through any conventional route.

The two men, friends since adolescence, were academically trained in engineering; Song in computer software, and Ratnani in electrical. As Montreal natives, the pair witnessed the growth of the city’s rapidly expanding technology startup scene from its earliest conception.

Leveraging technology to better serve its customers is at the heart of the Frank + Oak’s success and ethos. Although it has 16 brick-andmortar stores to date, the company describes itself as online-first. For Song, however, that’s not an either/ or proposition. Rather, it speaks of an integration that will be a guiding light as legacy retailers in and

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outside of fashion seek to modernise the in-store experience. “The physical retail experience is the biggest innovation we’ll see in the next 10 years,” Song says.

He points out that a vast majority of customers still prefer shopping in physical stores instead of online, and studies back up that assertion. Even Amazon has been opening brick-and-mortar stores of late, including a new breed of grocery store called Amazon Go that allows customers to leave without passing by the

“The brand combines lifestyle with a tech-driven customer support”

The Vancouver store (above) and the Montreal outlet (top)

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checkout counter. “The trend also reflects the broader industry imperative around ‘omni-channel’ retailing, where merchants aim to provide customers with a seamless experience whether shopping online via desktop or mobile device or at a traditional retail store,” The Guardian wrote in early 2016.

Frank + Oak has dedicated a lot of effort into a similarly seamless experience. Its stores are focused on bringing together two elements: A lifestyle component where customers can congregate – a coffee shop, juice bar or barber, for example – as well as a less tangible, tech-driven form of customer support. That support is multidimensional, from allowing customers’ preferences, payment information and personalised

3 million Size of Frank + Oak’s community and customer base

shopping suggestions to be securely shared across all sales platforms, to enabling in-store orders for online-only and out-of-stock items. Customers’ style profiles, rendered through past purchases and favourites as well as a questionnaire, offer a personalised element. “Maybe you see only one product a month, but it’s the perfect product for you,” Song says.

In that, the future of commerce is not exclusively online or in-store; it lives at the bridge between artificial intelligence and the customer, says Song, and that path designed to simplify and organise the shopping experience.

Customers, in turn, benefit from personalised styling and participate in the community that surrounds the brand, inspiring more loyalty.

The community aspect is further deepened and expanded by Frank + Oak’s social-media presence which, likes its stores, it curates with great care. From photos to videos to blog posts, the brand’s content-creation efforts are meant to invite customers from around the world into the fold.

“Social media has no geographical barriers. People from the Middle East or Europe can now have access to the same content as we [Canadians] do,” says Song. “Social media has broken the traditional barriers of commerce.”

Growing its international clientele will be a priority in the year to come. Frank + Oak began shipping outside of North America in March 2016, and with an English-only site has gained traction in Scandinavia, Japan and a number of English-speaking countries.

Being a big brand in today’s world, Song says, is not about inundating customers with many options in efforts to maximise revenue; instead, it’s about narrowing the focus and reaching customers globally.

“I would consider ourselves a global boutique brand,” Song says.

Frank + Oak, 160 Rue Saint Viateur E #105, and 1420 Rue Stanley Montreal frankandoak.com

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UPFRONT / CLASSIC READ

Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room

By Bethany McClean and Peter Elkind (2004)

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n a Guardian review of the 2006 documentary about the Enron scandal, the writer suggested there should be a gold statue of Bethany McClean outside every journalism school in the world. Mclean, a writer for Fortune Magazine, was the person who blew the whistle on Enron, up to then a poster boy for American capitalism.

McClean did what all good journalists should do: she followed the numbers, ignored the spin and deduced that Enron were a company in big trouble. The book’s title comes from the company’s founder and CEO, Kenneth Lay, and his successor Jeffrey Skilling, both of whom believed they were the smartest guys in the room – any room.

Enron was founded in 1985 by Kenneth Lay, based on the hope that the deregulation of the natural gas

market would result in gargantuan profits. Lay, the son of a povertystricken preacher, was right, and the company he created would soon be generating tens of millions of dollars a year in profits. It was when Jeffrey Skilling joined Enron that those numbers would shoot up even more.

Skilling, a Harvard graduate with a giant ego, was all about the big ideas, and this idea, that Enron would become a sort of stock market of natural gas, buying and selling it as a commodity, without having to worry about running actual pipelines, was a brilliant one.

Another Skilling idea – and one that ultimately led to the company’s collapse – was the introduction of ‘mark-to-market accounting’, which let Enron put potential future profits on its balance sheets on the day a deal was signed, no matter how little cash actually came in –

something rife for abuse; Enron’s profits could be whatever they said they were. For a while things were good – the profits rolled in, and Lay, Skilling and the company’s top executives were lionized as titans of industry. However, a series of bad decisions, from investing in infrastructure projects in India to trying to set up an internet video company, saw hundreds of millions in profits lost. Enron’s executives, realising the roof was about to cave in, sold their stock in the company, leaving Enron employees and shareholders high and dry.

Worse, they set up numerous shell companies to bury the debt they were accumulating, and it was this that landed its executives jail time. Enron’s fall, when it came, was incredible – a company worth $70 billion was worth nothing in a matter of weeks. The most shocking aspect of the book is not the speed of the bankruptcy, but the fact the company was allowed to conduct business the way it did and for so long. In total, 20,000 employees lost their jobs and more than $2 billion in pensions and retirement funds disappeared. It was a company build on mythical future earnings, and one that eventually collapsed in on itself.

Of course, the real scandal here is how companies like Enron were able to do what they did – none of it would have been possible without weak government oversight, and in the case of the Bush (both father and son), questionable practices.

We should be thankful then for journalists like Bethany McClean and books like this – books that pull back the curtain and expose the dark side of capitalism.

Ken Lay Once voted the third worst CEO of all time, Lay’s death of a heart attack while on holiday in Aspen, meant he never spent a night in jail. Once the highest paid CEO in America (with a package worth $42 million), he is remembered for his closeness to the Republican party (George Bush Senior attended his funeral), as well as his ineptness.

Jeffrey Skilling Somewhat of a caricature of a business leader, he had a Darwinian view of the world, claiming the only things that motivate people are money and fear. Skilling is still in prison, and he is expected to be released in 2019, having served 14 years of a 24-year prison term.

SELLING STOICISM AS A LIFE HACK,

Author Ryan Holiday has morphed from a media manipulator to someone who believes in the transformative power of pessimism. And some of the biggest names in sport and business are listening Alexandra Alter

WITHOUT APOLOGY

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n an underground gymnasium in New York City, last October, author Ryan Holiday spoke to nearly 350 people about the transformative power of pessimism and self-doubt. It was hardly the sort of inspirational message one would expect from a charismatic public-relations strategist turned self-help sage, who is now a sought-after guru to NFL coaches, Olympians, hip-hop stars and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.Yet it seemed to resonate with the quiet, reflective crowd at Stoicon, an annual conference for academics and practitioners of Stoicism, the ancient Greek and Roman philosophy that counsels self-effacement and detachment from the vicissitudes of success and failure.

During his talk, Holiday was self-deprecating – “I will start with the question many of you are probably asking, which is, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’” – and casually profane, drawing a few titters from the crowd when he urged them to question their sense of self-importance. “You might think that you’re hot,” he said, adding a noun that is better left unprinted. “The reality, and the Stoics say it over and over, is that’s not the case.”

When an audience member asked Holiday if Stoicism “is becoming too trendy”, he answered by defending his part in popularising it as a selfhelp strategy.

“We’ve only captured a very small fraction of the potential market,” he said, sounding more entrepreneurial than philosophic. “Stoicism is a philosophy designed for the masses, and if it has to be simplified a bit to reach the masses, so be it.”

If Stoicism is becoming trendy, you can credit, or blame, Holiday. Through his popular books, lectures and viral articles, he translates Stoicism, which had counted emperors and statesmen among its adherents during antiquity, into pithy catchphrases and digestible anecdotes for ambitious, 21st-century life hackers. He boils down the philosophy’s central tenets to inspirational tales from successful people’s lives (Steve Jobs? Bill Bradley? Model stoics!) and recasts its ancient maxims about the pitfalls of pride into breathless clickbait (“25 Ways To Kill The Toxic Ego That Will Ruin Your Life”). On Twitter, he blasts out uplifting quotations from ancient philosophers like Cleanthes, Diogenes of Sinope, Plato and Zeno to his more than 80,000 followers.

His 2014 book, The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art Of Turning Trials Into Triumph, which draws on the teachings of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and other Stoics, sold more than 230,000 copies in the United States and has been translated into 19 languages. It has drawn highprofile acolytes, including professional athletes, federal judges, Hollywood celebrities and venture capitalists. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a fan.

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So is LL Cool J, who sent Holiday a message on Twitter after reading Obstacle.

Holiday, 29, is an unlikely poster boy for Stoicism. He is a college dropout and a former public-relations strategist for American Apparel, where he did damage control during the company’s ouster of its controversial founder, Dov Charney. He runs his own marketing firm, Brass Check, and has written boastfully of the depraved publicity tactics he deployed on behalf of his clients, including forging and leaking documents, creating fake Twitter accounts and buying web traffic for blog posts he generated. He hatched a viral publicity stunt for the unabashedly lecherous author Tucker Max (I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell), which involved vandalizing billboards for a movie based on the book and e-mailing photos of the defaced ads to blogs in an attempt to stir up a feminist boycott of the movie on college campuses.

Now, he is harnessing his considerable marketing prowess to sell Stoicism. He is like a snake-oil salesman who swears he has abandoned snake oil but not the highly effective sales tactics.

“If you’re shameless enough, you can sell anything,” he said of his marketing abilities.

Some modern-day followers of Stoicism say Holiday’s hipster-hustler persona is at odds with the philosophy’s core principles. “There was some scepticism about the personal trajectory of the author since some of the things in his first book don’t seem to be aligned with the ideals of Stoicism,” said Gabriele Galluzzo, a professor of ancient philosophy at the University Of Exeter in Britain, who attended Stoicon.

But Holiday maintains that his being a good salesman doesn’t clash with his identity as a Stoic.

Holiday discovered Stoicism by reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations when he was a 19-year-old sophomore at the University Of California, Riverside.

He read it four times in a row and taped passages to his dorm room wall, over his bed. “The essential idea of Stoicism in my interpretation is, you don’t control the world around you; you control how you respond,” he said. “At 19, that’s very empowering.”

That summer, Holiday got an internship at a Hollywood talent agency, the Collective. They offered him a job, with a starting salary of $30,000, and he dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles. “I was the kid who was going places,” he said.

A year later, he went to work for American Apparel, where he handled public relations as the company faced sexual harassment allegations against Charney. He grew disillusioned with his work as a hype man and decided to write a selfindicting exposé.

Holiday at home with one of his favourite books, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations

“I was disgusted with how it all worked,” he said.

“The idea of the book was, I’m going to put all these things in a giant pile and light them on fire.”

Holiday says he got a $250,000 advance for a book from his publisher – far less than the rumoured $500,000 sum reported by gossip blogs after Holiday had helped plant that nugget himself.

When Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions Of A Media Manipulator, was published in 2012, Holiday was called a “scumbag” in Amazon reviews.

The Financial Times called Holiday’s revelations “disturbing” and “chilling”. Business Insider published a list of his most galling acts, with the headline, “The 10 Biggest Lies Told By American Apparel’s Top PR Man.”

It’s hard to fathom that the same person who wrote Trust Me, I’m Lying, a bombastic treatise on the art of self-promotion through media manipulation, went on to write a meditation on the perils of self-absorption and pride. But Holiday doesn’t have any trouble reconciling the Jekyll and Hyde-like phases of his career. Marketing is what he does, he said; Stoicism is who he is.

Still, there’s an obvious convergence of the two. Some of his biggest boosters – including best-selling authors James Altucher, Marc Ecko, Tim Ferriss and Robert Greene, who are all enthusiastic boosters for his books on Stoicism – are also his clients at Brass Check.

In the past few months, he has given talks

Holiday has no trouble reconciling the rather Jekyll and Hyde-like phases of his career

to the Texas Rangers baseball team, a Seattle accounting firm, a telecommunications company in Austin, Texas, and at HSBC Bank in London and Google’s offices in London, New York and Mountain View, California. The military has invited him to speak to elite fighters with the US Special Operations Command.

He is revered in some circles of professional sports. At the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this summer, his books were read by athletes on the US women’s soccer and volleyball teams and the men’s wrestling and gymnastics teams. “I didn’t realise I was a Stoic until I read it,” said Christopher Sommer, a former US national team gymnastics coach.

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CAN WECHAT TAKE OVER THE WORLD? Jamie Fullerton

The Chinese tech giant has taken over the lives of hundreds of millions of smartphone users. With the company now looking to replicate its dominance abroad, should western tech giants be worried?

WECHAT

A jobseeker uses WeChat to scan his resume and apply for jobs at a job fair in Shanxi

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xplaining the incredibly impressive, enormously lucrative, and perhaps rather scary dominance of WeChat in the Chinese social media field to anyone who hasn’t visited the country is tough.

The app, run by the Chinese communications giant Tencent, has almost complete market dominance and its ubiquity throughout public life is unparalleled in any other country.

Spend time in China, though, and it quickly becomes clear how firmly heat-branded WeChat is into the lives of most of the estimated 570 million smartphone users (out of a total population of 1.35 billion).

It has been described as “China’s Swiss Army social media knife” due to the varied functions within the app – from messaging to broadcasting to paying to taxi hailing. Pretty much everyone with an active social and business life in the country is tooled up.

On a recent Monday in Beijing a Chinese contact I met through WeChat’s group messaging function – which operates similarly to WhatsApp – picked me up for a meeting in a taxi ordered on

WeChat. During the journey a photographer sent me samples from a recent shoot to download via WeChat. After my meeting I popped into a 7-11 shop and stood in a long queue; everyone paid by displaying their QR code for WeChat Pay: the function that links directly to users’ bank accounts.

Later, I sent a friend an interactive map with a meeting place marked via WeChat’s location service so we could meet for a drink. While I waited I read a live music WeChat mailout I subscribe to, planned my weekend’s gigging, then played Rival Fire: a blast-‘emup game hosted within the app.

“I don’t carry cash anymore due to WeChat,” my Chinese friend said after our cocktails as she scanned a QR card to pay the bill.

I sent her my half via WeChat’s Red Packet gifting function, along with a mildly amusing gif of a dog counting out 100 yuan notes.

WeChat was launched by Tencent – which had previously concentrated on gaming and desktopbased social networks – in January 2011. It was the firm’s first mobile-only messaging service and was released under the Chinese name Weixin,

WeChat is branded into the lives of most of the 570 million smartphone users

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A man delivers food ordered by users through WeChat in the city of Jinhua

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which translates as ‘micro letters’ (the English name came in 2012). By January 2013, as China’s smartphone ownership rates boomed, WeChat had 300 million users and was poised to surpass Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, in popularity.

Now WeChat has more than 700 million users – a spectacular rise. However, the uniqueness of its success is intertwined with the uniqueness of China’s social media environment. The government blocks western sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram.

Although competition for WeChat has come from western apps that have not been blocked – such as WhatsApp – the result has been a largely clear run to total market dominance.

WeChat’s rise is interwined with the nature of government restrictions on other apps

“It’s important to remember that the Chinese online sphere functions more like a closed intranet than the open source we’re used to in the West,” says Benji Lamb of Shanghai-based Gentlemen Marketing Agency. “WeChat has developed within the unique conditions of the Chinese digital market. And while perfectly adapted to cater for that, when expanding out of the mainland they are fish out of water, unable to compete with [the likes of] Facebook on their territory simply because they’ve never had to compete.”

They’ve given it a shot, though. In late 2012 WeChat’s director of international operations Justin Sun declared that the app had “great potential to be popular internationally”. Tencent

WECHAT

WECHAT TIMELINE January 2011 Launches mobile messaging app as Weixin in China

April 2012 Adds English name WeChat for Weixin, suggesting global ambitions

Summer 2012 Allows brand accounts on Weixin

August 2013 Adds mobile payments: start of Weixin Wallet

January 2014 Adds taxi booking with Didi, sign of platform emerging WeChat employees take naps at the company’s Guangzhou HQ

had already fruitlessly launched WeChat in India with expensive adverts on Facebook, and had allowed the app to be linked to Twitter and Facebook, suggesting that it had eyes on the West.

The following year Lionel Messi was signed up for a global WeChat advertising campaign.

Videos in English and Spanish showed the striker chatting to his grandma on the app’s voice messaging function while doing keepie uppies.

High street voucher deals were offered in the US to encourage signups, but by August 2013 WeChat had only 100 million users outside China. At the same time, WhatsApp had 300 million users worldwide, while Facebook had 1.23 billion.

February 2014 Starts ‘red packets’ at Chinese New Year

September 2014 Launches in-store cashless payments

January 2015 Monetisation gathers pace: ads appear in Moments feed and games take off

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eChat was smashing it in China but falling off a cliff once it left its native market. In April 2016 the respected Asia tech website Tech In Asia ran an article titled Three Reasons Why WeChat Failed Internationally, pointing to late market entry, the app’s China-first approach and poor localisation; meaning that many of its best functions didn’t work abroad.

“I don’t think the international version of WeChat will ever catch up [with its success in China],” Charles Custer, a China-focused editor for Tech In Asia, says. “For any company expanding it’s difficult to split your attention like that, and China is such a gigantic market.”

WeChat’s lack of success abroad is no reflection of its quality. It is a fantastic, life-enhancing app that, within China, oils social and business interactions and transactions effortlessly. This is largely due to how deeply embedded Tencent – which has an 18-year history in the country – is in China. The company has built an enormous network of retailers, restaurants and services that operate through the app. It would take years, enormous effort and the deposing of market leaders absent in China to replicate this abroad.

“Tencent have got a billion connections in China and anything they want to do with WeChat they can do,” says Custer. “But there are serious

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issues with localising in other markets. They just don’t have those connections in any other country.”

Brian Buchwald, CEO of China-focused data analysis company Bomoda, concurs. “All the value you get from WeChat, all of the different things being in one app, are lost outside of China,” he says. “For example, in my office in New York most of my team members use WeChat to communicate but they don’t use the added value services that they would do in Beijing. They just don’t work as well.”

The analysts I spoke to for this article agreed that even if WeChat were to somehow properly localise abroad, there would be no guarantee of success. In most western countries, social media users habitually use multiple apps tailored to one or two specific functions, such as Instagram for sharing photos, Facebook for friend networking, Twitter for link sharing and WhatsApp as a text message replacement. Funneling all their social media through one app, WeChat style, would require a behavioural overhaul.

For WeChat to dominate in the West, it would require a total behavioural overhaul of how consumers interact with the mobile apps on their smartphones

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William Bao Bean, a partner in SOSV, a capital venture fund that focuses on digital companies, highlights another cultural difference. “They went to the West and tried to market WeChat Chinese style,” he says. “Hiring Messi and giving out restaurant vouchers if you invited friends to use the app – people would just invite the friends, get the voucher then not use the app. That’s how you get users in China, but not in America.”

WeChat’s relative failure to gain traction outside China shouldn’t tarnish the enormity of its success. One further mark of the brilliance of the product has been its influence on other social media outlets. Facebook’s Messenger feature, for example, is influenced by WeChat’s format, as was its introduction of fun animated gifs known as stickers.

Ted Livingstone, founder of Canadian messaging app Kik, has said that he wants his app to be “the WeChat of the West” and is optimistic that if young users who are yet to form rigid app habits are targeted it can be successful. In a 2014 blog he wrote that to achieve that, “You have to

A Beijing McDonald’s vending machine that allows for automated WeChat payments WeWeChat

have a mobile-first chat and a chat-first platform, and you have to get the youth on your side.”

WeChat’s payments system, though, is seen as the real golden goose. Reuters estimated that $556 billion worth of transactions will have been made on WeChat in 2016. Tencent taking fees worth 0.1 per cent, as the chief executive told reporter the company does, means that $556 million would have been raised through this method.

“WeChat is one of the most advanced social media in terms of the range of functionalities it offers to businesses and consumers, and monetisation efforts,” says Sandy Shen, research director with business technology research firm Gartner. “Western counterparts are taking a page out of its book to enrich the offering and monetise their service. For example, they start to allow businesses to offer customer service and commerce using bots, and offer payment APIs for various transactions.”

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arning such huge sums from payments through the app relies on a mass willingness to link the app to bank accounts and other personal data. In China, where citizens have to carry ID cards, people are largely used to this kind of deep data garnering. In countries such as the UK and the US users tend to be far more sensitive about it, as Facebook’s struggles with payment systems have shown.

WeChat’s acceptance of snooping and censorship by the Chinese government is likely to be another reason why it hasn’t taken off abroad.

WECHAT

WeChat censors content that could be seen as anti-government and, it was recently revealed, it even censors messages sent outside of China if, like most accounts are, the sender registered using a mainland China mobile number.

Human rights groups have revealed that some Chinese nationals have been jailed in recent years for simply posting photos deemed anti-Chinese on social media. Rules about registering on social media under real names rather than pseudonyms have also been introduced. Many believe they were designed to make it easier for authorities to hunt down those who deviate from Communist party lines.

This does not tally with the free speech, connected world mentality that most western social media outlets trumpet. “Every Chinese company has the issue of being a Chinese company, ie the brand poison that association with the Chinese government can be,” says Custer.

The censorship issue is the one big hurdle that has stopped Mark Zuckerberg realising his own China dream: to access the 1.35 billion potential new users in the country.

WeChat director Allen Zhang in the firm’s Guangzhou office

Facebook has been blocked in China since 2007, but breaking into the country appears to be top of the mogul’s to-do list, having already met President Xi Jinping and China’s government internet chief. Facebook already censors its content in some countries and information about the company working on a Chinese censorship method has leaked from the firm’s Silicon Valley HQ. Could Facebook take on WeChat in China if launched there? With WeChat so firmly established, it would be a diamond-tough nut to crack. “There are no foreign tech companies that have been truly successful in China,” says Bao Bean. “The track record is zero.” Custer adds: “If Facebook did launch in China, WeChat would be exactly where it is, and Facebook would just be some weird western social network that nobody really uses.”

In the light of its troubles abroad, notwithstanding an unlikely Great Firewall takedown from Facebook, WeChat’s focus seems likely to fall on further monetising its enormous and ever-expanding Chinese user base. Of WeChat’s 700 million users, around 400 million use WeChat Pay. Alipay, its Alibaba-run main rival, has 300 million users.

“Tencent’s vision is, ‘Let’s get to a point where you could use WeChat to pay for pretty much everything,’” says Custer. “The revenues from that would be absurd, but they’re not far from that now.” Lamb adds: “Without a WeChat presence brands are essentially invisible in China.

Having an official WeChat account is arguably more important than having a website.”

Bao Bean, meanwhile, says he has invested in 35 companies whose future success is reliant on WeChat shifting its money making focus further from advertising (it introduced ads on its Twitterlike Moments function in January 2015) to payments. “There’s a war within WeChat between the advertising team and the payments team,” he says. “But which would you rather do: sell ads or take a cut of transactions? The latter is the superior revenue model.”

China, if not anywhere else, continues to become WeChat’s world. Another small indicator of its ubiquity came the morning after my day of meetings and night of cocktail drinking, when I received a WeChat message from a friend: “You’re in charge of cheese and biscuits for the party.”

I brought up the official account of a WeChatonly cheese delivery service and began ordering.

“No problem,” I replied, and sent my friend a gif of a cartoon teddy bear chomping on a slab of cheddar.

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THE REBRANDING OF BARCELONA

Barcelona went from a rough and ready industrial city to Europe’s biggest tourism success story. But recent years have seen a backlash against the commodification of the city – so what next for the Catalan capital?

The rebranding

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of Barcelona

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Ben Cardew

THE REBRANDING OF BARCELONA

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hen Paralympic archer Antonio Rebollo fired a flaming arrow into the Olympic cauldron to mark the start of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, he could little have guessed the impact that the Summer Games would have on the Catalan capital in the 24 years that followed.

In truth, no one really did. Local authorities may have pumped billions of pesetas into hosting the event, transforming the city’s infrastructure and opening up new green areas and beaches in the hope of shedding Barcelona’s dour industrial image. But the Olympic-led rebranding of Barcelona proved more effective than anyone might have reasonably expected, to the extent that even two decades later Barcelona 1992 is held up as a paragon of Olympicled development.

A Japanese diver performs during the 1992 Olympics

No one could have guessed the profound impact the 1992 Olympics had on the city of Barcelona

“For me and for the London Organising Committee it [Barcelona] is a city that is a reference point,” Sebastian Coe, leader of London’s Olympic bid, said at the Global Sports Forum in Barcelona in March 2012. “The Olympic Barcelona is an example for all of us.”

Perhaps the most obvious sign of Barcelona’s turnaround is to be found in the ever-increasing number of tourists that visit the city, from 1.73 million in 1990 to 8.99 million in 2015, with this number expected to rise again in 2016. This is, by any standards, a jaw-dropping rise and it is one that is mirrored by an increasing number of business travellers to the city, which now hosts world-class events like Mobile World Congress and ibtm World. It is a transformation that has brought – and continues to bring – billions of euros into Barcelona.

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And yet recently there have been signs that all is not well in the Catalan capital’s relationship with these visitors; anti-tourist graffiti has become commonplace, while Mayor Ada Colau has spoken of the need to restrain Barcelona’s tourist industry. When three Italian tourists walked naked through Barcelona’s popular Barceloneta district in August 2014, these feelings came to a head, prompting demonstrators to demand that local authorities do more to protect their city. Increasingly, there is a feeling among locals that the Olympic rebrand, as well as subsequent efforts to promote Barcelona’s new public image,

Chinese tourists (above) and top right, in the Basilica of ‘La Sagrada Familia. Bottom right, the Port Vell neighbourhood in the 1980s

might have unleashed unintended consequences that are starting to be felt some two decades on.

To understand why Barcelona’s rebrand proved so effective, we need to go back to 1981, when the city announced its intention to bid for the Games. It was a time of incredible change for Spain, which had held its first free elections in four decades in 1977 following the death of Franco two years previously.

Barcelona, which had lived through years of neglect under Franco’s rule, was known as a grimy – and sometimes scary – industrial hub.

“After Franco died Barcelona was grey,” says Juan Carlos Belloso, founder of specialised place

THE REBRANDING OF BARCELONA

strategy consultancy Future Places and project manager of international marketing at the 1992 Games. “Franco had abandoned Barcelona.

Something had to be done.”

There was, in fact, already a plan in place to transform the city. But local authorities – led by mayor Pasqual Maragall – saw the Olympics as an opportunity to dramatically speed up this transformation. “If the Games were used properly it would change the city,” Belloso explains. “That’s the difference between Barcelona and other cities that have hosted the Olympics: Barcelona already had a plan to transform the city. The Olympics was the

“Franco had abandoned Barcelona and after his death someething had to be done”

perfect excuse to bring in money and energy to the city and to show the city to the rest of the world.”

To do that, they needed a suitably attractive image of Barcelona to sell. And while the Catalan capital may benefit from a rich gastronomic and cultural history, plus an attractive natural setting on the Mediterranean coast, the pre-Olympic city didn’t make the most of these assets. The seafront, now home to miles of sandy beaches, was used for industry and cheap housing, and the city was bereft of green spaces.

Hosting the Olympics has never been cheap – the 1976 Olympic Games were estimated to

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have left Montreal with a crippling C$ 1.6 billion debt – and Barcelona is said to have spent around $11.4 billion in 2009 dollars on the 1992 Games.

But the vast majority of the money for the Barcelona Games was spent on infrastructure, rather than expensive White Elephants, with 83 per cent of the budget dedicated to urban improvements.

Barcelona’s metro system was expanded, the coastal railway rerouted, the airport was redesigned and the city created two miles of beachfront and marina by demolishing industrial buildings.

Even the sewage system was improved, as Ferran Brunet of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, explains in his report on the economic impact of the 1992 Olympics. “[New] roads represented an increase of 15 per cent over those existing in 1986; new sewage systems, 17 per cent, and new green areas and beaches, 78 per cent,” he writes.

Alongside these sweeping urban improvements, the 1992 Games also brought jobs to Barcelona.

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Tourists crowd into La Boqueria green market and (next page), the Ramblas around 1900

Brunet says unemployment in Barcelona dropped from an all-time high of 127,774 in November 1986 to a low of 60,885 in July 1992, while the infrastructure created for the Games is said to have provided more than 20,000 permanent jobs.

The Olympic Games also offered a unique opportunity to showcase Barcelona to the world, thanks to a global television audience in the billions.

183 countries were represented at the 1992 Games and the resulting global audience was treated to images of the newly spruced up Catalan capital, with the opening ceremony including a travelogue of the city sound-tracked by Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé’s ode to Barcelona.

The effect on Barcelona was unmistakeable. In a 2002 report to mark the 10th anniversary of the Games, The Guardian reported some astonishing statistics: Barcelona’s airport handled 21 million passengers in 2002, up from 2.9 million in 1991; tourism accounted for 12.5 per cent of the city’s

THE REBRANDING OF BARCELONA

GDP in 2002, compared to less than two per cent pre-Olympics; and the increase in hotel beds as a result of the Olympics generated 12,500 new jobs.

But it is the rise in tourist numbers to Barcelona that probably gives the truest account of the Games’ impact, leaping from 1.73 million in 1990, to 3.04 million in 2000, 7.62 million in 2010 and a staggering 8.99 million in 2015. 2016 looks like it will be another record year: Jordi Baiget, Catalan minister of business and knowledge, told the B-Travel tourism expo in April 2016 that he expected a record 18 million foreign tourists to visit Catalonia in 2016, spending €16 billion.

At the same time, post-Olympics Barcelona has seen a massive increase in business travellers. In 2015, 35.7 per cent of the 8.99 million visitors to Barcelona were in the city for professional reasons,

More than 86 per cent of the flats bought in the Gothic Quarter were bought by investors

with the number of delegates attending congresses in the city increasing from 72,000 in 1990 to 320,000 in 2015. Mobile World Congress, the leading exhibition for the mobile industry which has been held in Barcelona since 2006, attracted almost 101,000 delegates alone in 2016. It is said to have contributed €460 million to the local economy and contributed to the creation of 13,000 jobs in 2016.

Barcelona has also made a concerted effort to attract business investment. Belloso calls the 22@ district, created in the early 2000s in an attempt to turn the former industrial area of Poblenou into a centre for technological innovation, “the second major transformation” of modern Barcelona, with Mobile World Congress the third. From these leads have sprung up new initiatives like Mobile World Capital and Barcelona Smart City.

Barcelona remains justifiably proud of the 1992 Olympics and the city’s transformation. And yet the incredible rise in tourist numbers over the last decade has led many locals to question whether the Barcelona rebrand might, in fact, have been too successful. Tourism may have brought wealth and employment to many in Barcelona. But it has also led certain areas of the city – the Rambla and La Boqueria market, for example – to become almost no-go areas for locals, who have seen their spaces crowded out by tourists, their houses give way to hotels and their local shops transformed into spaces selling tourist tat.

Eight out of ten people on the Rambla, for example, are said to be tourists, while Ciutat Vella, the heart of the old city, has lost 13,000 residents in eight years. A report from Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra university in September 2016 found that investors bought 40 per cent of all flats sold in Barcelona in the first half of the year, rising to an incredible 86 per cent in the city’s historic Gothic Quarter. The success of Bye Bye Barcelona, a documentary released in 2014 about mass tourism in the city, says a lot about current feeling in the city.

“There is this process of gentrification that has happened in Ciutat Vella,” says Alexandra Sans Massó, a Catalan who has lived in Ciutat Vella for 10 years. “It makes house prices go very high and encourages speculation and foreign investment, that makes it impossible for the locals to buy a flat or open a business in the area. It also changes the personality of the neighbourhood because everything becomes very tourist-oriented. In the long run, the area could end up like a theatre for tourists instead of a Catalan neighbourhood.”

The problem is not just with the number of tourists in Barcelona but with the way tourism is evolving. Barcelona is the Mediterranean cruise capital, with around 2.5 million people

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THE REBRANDING OF BARCELONA

disembarking from cruise ships every year, creating human bottlenecks at some of Barcelona’s tourist spots. To add insult to injury, many of these tourists spend next to nothing in Barcelona before being whisked off to their next cruise destination.

“In the summer you can have 80,000 cruisers just walking around, all of them in the same places, in the city centre, around Sagrada Família and Parc Güell. But specifically in the city centre, in the Gothic Quarter,” says Eduardo Chibás, director of Bye Bye Barcelona. “In the city centre there are 100,000 people, more or less. It is really, really densely

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populated and on top of that you have 80,000 people more. It’s just absolutely insane.”

Then there’s the rise of the tourist apartments, which bring noisy tourist groups into residential blocks, a big gripe for many locals. In 2010 91,531 visitors stayed in tourist apartments in Barcelona; by 2015 this had risen to 209,591. And a vast number of these are illegal: Ciutat Vella had 619 registered tourist flats in 2014, compared to 8,0000 illegal apartments, according to Bye Bye Barcelona.

“Barcelona is suffering but I think it is not a problem of success but a problem of proper

THE REBRANDING OF BARCELONA

planning,” says Belloso. “It is easy to say when you see the results and it is not easy to do it in advance.”

Belloso believes that the Barcelona city council didn’t plan sufficiently for sustainable tourism in Barcelona but is now aware of the problem and is trying to address it. Barcelona mayor Ada Colau has, for example, stopped granting licences for new tourist accommodation in the city, while the Parc Güell introduced an entrance fee in 2013.

“At least right now in Barcelona there is an awareness that something should be done,” says Chibás.” Not only by the new mayor but also by

Tourists pose for pictures at Gaudi’s Park Guell (left) and below, Barcelona’s port

other political parties. This is on the table. This is an issue that has to be dealt with. That gives me a little bit of hope.”

“You have to make Barcelona into a city where people don’t just want to go to once, but return to,” adds Santiago Tejedor, co-director of Masters In Travel Journalism at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. “We have to promote alternative tourist routes, innovate and above all be creative.”

Whether these efforts will be enough to offset the potential damage caused by every increasing number of tourists, who see Barcelona as a safe place to visit in these turbulent times, remains to be seen. But Belloso is convinced – and it is hard to disagree – that Barcelona remains a model of modern rebranding, one that other cities can learn from. The big challenge now, he adds, lies in making sure that Barcelona remains competitive in the global tourism industry without losing its identity or sliding into neglect.

“Barcelona is a success story,” Belloso concludes.

“But when you create a success, people start to relax.

And that is very dangerous. Because when you relax you don’t really think about what’s next, how you can create, innovate and improve.”

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The Map And

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Paulo Alfonso Gonzales

THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY

Frank Kane meets Parag Khanna, an international relations expert and best-selling author who believes that geography and the resulting connectivity will map the next generation of global affairs

The Territory

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Frank Kane

THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY

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ou could be forgiven for thinking that Parag Khanna was born with a boarding pass in his hand. Some 39 years ago, his heavily pregnant mother was keen to have her child delivered in her native India, but was living at the time in the UAE, where her husband was based as an executive in the export division of Tata, the industrial giant.

“She really should not have been flying at all, but back then the Indian Airline did not enforce those restrictions. So she flew, and I was born in Kanpur, India. But I really should have been born in Dubai,” says Khanna.

That little vignette, part of what he calls “the family legend”, pulls together many of the elements that Khanna subsequently made his life’s work: travel, trade, connectivity, urban hubs, and their capacity to empower human beings even in the face of the rule-makers and governments.

Khanna took those themes, blended them with several others – notably a belief in the transformational power of modern technology – and honed them in some of the most prestigious academic establishments in the world. The result was an integrated theory of the world, and a road map for the future of mankind.

He is one of a new generation of thinkers in the tradition of the late Alvin Toffler, the American academic whose 1970 work Future Shock set him up as the father of futurist writers.

“If you ‘get’ Dubai, you get the mindset of four billion people in the world”

He is also an adviser to governments and businesses keen to incorporate his insights into their strategic policies. This political context is vital: in addition to Toffler, the other work that has influenced Khanna’s core thinking is The White House Years by Henry Kissinger.

Khanna’s four books caught the wave of globalisation, analysing world events in a bid to answer the question: what is really going on in the increasingly confused, complicated and conflictridden world in which we live?

They have brought him global recognition as a regular member of power lists, and as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.

His latest work – Connectography: Mapping The Global Network Revolution – was published last year to positive reviews.

It is being made into a series by National Geographic fronted by the author, who is already an experienced broadcaster through his role as a “global contributor” for CNN. The series will, he says, “show the butterfly effect linking the Amazon with the Arctic, Detroit with Dongguan China”.

The UAE and Dubai will feature prominently in the TV series, as they do in the book. New York, London and Paris are great global cities, he admits, but the Gulf emirate is “the capital of the rest of the world”, and a paradigm for global development.

“If you ‘get’ Dubai, you get the mindset of four billion people in the world. You will understand them, and they you. If you hate Dubai, you fail to understand the majority of people on the planet, who look on Dubai as their North Star.

It represents what they want – security, stability, prosperity and connectivity – all achieved in a single generation,” he says.

Along with Singapore, where he currently lives with wife Ayesha – herself a scholar of

Alvin Toffler, whose seminal 1970 book Futureshock influenced a generation of thinkers

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urbanisation and technology – and children Zara, seven, and Zubin, five, Dubai is set to become the leading urban centre of the eastern hemisphere, propelled by demographic and developmental forces into global status, he believes.

“My field is the dynamics of an urbanised and connected world and Dubai is the perfect place to study that. Would anybody have thought, looking at this country in 1972, that it would be so advanced, connected and sophisticated in 2016,” he asks.

There is no precedent in history for what the UAE is doing, Khanna believes. “What it is doing is making a viable country from a small number of Emiratis and a small number of foreigners.”

“How would Emiratis feel if a lot of foreigners became citizens or had greater ownership rights? I have a lot of sympathy for the UAE’s conservative and cautious approach when it comes to balancing those different factors, despite my progressive beliefs,” he says.

There are economic challenges too. “Tax is a big issue. There are all kinds of government levies in the UAE already, of course, and in return you get security and the rule of law. But if there was

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a bigger, more formal tax structure I think the government would have to consider some kind of permanent residency arrangement for non-Emiratis. Singapore has such a system and it has been successful,” Khanna says.

But, although taxation is an issue looming over the future path of UAE development, and a burning question especially for the 80 per cent or so of non-Emiratis who make up the majority of the workforce, it should not distract attention from the main goal: economic development.

“People, especially in the West, talk about tax as if it’s the Holy Grail, but there are other ways for a country to finance its development. Smart countries choose investment rather than tax – that’s an iron law,” he says.

The UAE has become a magnet for foreign direct investment for a number of reasons – stability, infrastructure, the rule of law, quality of life – but all are dependent on

continuing flows of global capital, which itself is part of the phenomenon of globalisation.

That concept – fundamental to Khanna’s view of the world – is under threat. The global financial crisis of 2008 saw a big decline in world trade and in cross-border financial flows.

The election of protectionist politicians in the United States and Europe could be read as an expression of popular disenchantment with globalisation, and as a sign that further barriers will be erected in the future.

Khanna is having none of this. He believes the decline in container ship-bound physical trade will be replaced by fast-growing digital trade, and that the financial drought is largely down to a lack of lending in the crisis-torn European banking system.

“It’s typical of a Euro-centric view of the world to see the end of globalisation, but in fact mercantile trade and foreign direct investment in emerging markets had rebounded,” he says.

He believes the old cycle of great powers – of one country passing on the baton of global supremacy to another – is dead. “The fundamental reality of geopolitics now is the diffusion of power in a world that is permanently multi-polar and is a marketplace organised in a spider web network of commercial and economic relationships involving all continents and regions,” he says.

Not everyone agrees. Some analysts claim Khanna is simply restating old arguments – arguments that were not very persuasive the first time around. Indeed their have been scathing counter-arguments to Khanna’s work published in Foreign Policy and The New Republic. Yet despite the recent tremors in world affairs (Brexit and the election of Trump), the world is getting ever closer and as Khanna points out, infrastructure, not politics will surely drive changes in the coming decades.

As for Donald Trump, the protectionist wall-builder elected the 45th US president, he is dismissive. “I’ve got maps that show Trump is just plain wrong about the labour migration,” he says, pointing out that, while walls might be going up in America and Europe, they are being torn down in Africa and Asia, the continents of the future.

Maps and info graphic charts are a passion of his and a feature of his work, supporting his thesis that the future will be decided by the

“People in the West talk about tax as if it’s the Holy Grail, but there are other ways for a country to finance its investment”

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THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY

KHANNA’S FOUR BOOKS The Second World (2008) – From Azerbaijan to Venezuala, a fascinating tour of the countries of the Second World

How To Run The World (2011) – A call to action for the new century, Khanna charts a course for ‘megadiplomacy’

Connectography Mapping The Future Of Global Civilization (2016) – A look at how the world is connected and which routes will matter

Technocracy In America And The Rise Of The Info-State (2017) – How America can learn lessons from the likes of Singapore and the Swiss

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economic and demographic power of a small number of urban conurbations: London, New York, Tokyo, Shangai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo – and now Dubai.

He spends most of his time in those places, or in transit between them. “I seem to be at an airport virtually every day,” he says, explaining how his family lifestyle is designed around a series of working metropolitan “sabbaticals”. He jokes: “I guess ‘logistics’ has become my middle name.”

Travel has always been a part of his life, even before it became a way of life. While growing up and being educated in the UAE, New York, Germany, London and Singappre, he travelled

overland from Britain to Mongolia, and from Ukraine to the Caspian via the Balkans.

In contrast, in Singapore, he does not own a car, and his parking space has been turned into a games area. But he will soon be on the road again.

He is planning to take Zara on the longest rail trip in the world, from Scotland to Singapore. “We will cross about two dozen cities in a little over three months. I’ve long been arguing that Eurasia’s transport infrastructure is getting more integrated, propelling commerce across the landmass that contains most of the world’s population.

His belief in the power of connectivity and technology is paramount. “We have to move to a

“We have to move to a sharing economy given the challenges we face”

THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY

more sharing or circular economy, as Toffler said ages ago. It’s even more important now given dense urbanization, resource constraints, and accelerating climate change.

“Many people believe these factors combined will lead to resource wars, but if we deploy smart technology more rapidly to change social behaviour, we can achieve a win-win world: greater growth, reduced resource exploitation and less geopolitical stress,” he says.

A lot is riding on it. “There is nothing I hate more than being wrong,” he says. The future of mankind depends on Khanna’s analysis being correct.

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UK TheCINEMA 21st century

has seen a revolution in how we consume cinema, from streaming a movie the day it’s released to forking out for a plush boutique experience. How did we get here – and how do we navigate the new landscape?

Tom Lamont Tom Jay

Full stream ahead?

The brave new world of cinema-going 66

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n a recent visit to a Curzon cinema in London I sat (lay, really) on a steeply pitched chair that had been upholstered in red fur. Outside in the lobby, the snacks for sale included prosecco-laced ice lollies and popcorn flavoured with specific French cheeses; I chose a wedge of iced sponge cake that was on display under a cloche. Inside the screening room, I wasn’t the only one clacking tableware while we waited for the feature, Woody Allen’s Café Society, to start.

A pre-film advert played, promoting the Curzon’s app. Audiences were advised that, next time, they could simply stay at home and use their phones to stream selected newly released films direct to their TVs. Café Society had a 1930s setting, a jazz soundtrack, Allen’s usual Windsor font in the credits.

But the preamble to it had been powerfully, pungently modern, illustrating the lavishing-up of many cinemas and the spread of home-streaming services, developments that have come to characterise movie-watching in 2016.

As Allen’s film played I lay on the near-horizontal, watching it down my nose and trying not to fall asleep during the slow bits like an old man in front of the snooker, asking myself how we’d got here. To cinema seats resembling pool loungers. To phones that with the right software could call up hundreds of thousands of feature films. Just under a third of the UK population now streams films and this year sales of digitally streamed or downloaded movies outstripped sales of DVDs for the first time.

As traditional behaviour has changed, so has tradition: that well-grooved route for a movie, for instance, from cinema to DVD to telly, is now crisscrossed and complicated by internet-enabled detours. Last autumn, the independent British film 45 Years was made available to stream on the same day it premiered in cinemas. And in this way it took a robust £1 million at the UK box office.

Dozing in the screening of Café Society, expensively sugared and with a preposterous little garden of legroom to unfurl into, and now clued up to the option to skip the cinema entirely next

The indie British film 45 Years was available to stream the same day it hit the cinemas

time in favour of a stream, I thought about how that term “box office” and how it was more unhelpful, more figurative, than ever. How had we come to watch the way we watched?

I went to see my first Woody Allen on the big screen in the summer of 2000. That was a real rite-of-passage outing – to see Sweet And Lowdown, the director’s eccentric ode to Prohibition-era jazz musicians, starring Sean Penn and Samantha Morton. The choice was a friend’s: I had to be persuaded. I was 18 at the time but by no means finished negotiating the borderland between teenage and adult tastes and I still favoured films with bangs and airborne car crashes and orchestrascored baddie kills. I could be persuaded to go outside the action genre, but drama usually had to mean time travel and comedy a steady rate of off-colour jokes. Sweet and Lowdown, about a virtuoso guitarist called Emmet (Penn) and his laundress wife, Hattie (Morton), seemed a terrible prospect.

Inside the screening room, people were drinking wine. Wine! We went, not to one of our usual city-size multiplexes in the retail parks of north London, or to the rundown three-screen Odeon in near-ish Muswell Hill, but to a cinema I’d never visited before – the Barbican in the City.

I remember noting with alarm, taking in the Barbican’s lifts and cloakrooms, its muted, theatrelike best-behaviour crowd waiting in the lobby. I complained to my friend. Why didn’t the Barbican have nachos? Or the tarry yellow cheese liquid that went on the nachos? Coke came in a glass and in what seemed a comically small measure. Inside the screening room, people were drinking wine. Wine!

Even to the regular Barbican crowd, back then, some of this must have seemed like outlier stuff, an unconventionally grown-up cinema experience, at least when compared with the bolshier, brighter nights out offered by the Odeons, ABCs and UCIs that then dominated. As Edward Humphrey, digital director at the British Film Institute, explained to me recently, the retail-park multiplexes haven’t really declined. (At the end of 2015 the UK had

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4,046 screens in 751 cinemas, a figure that was up, slightly, on the year before.) What has changed in the last decade or so is that the smaller, urban cinemas, in tandem with the public’s idea “of what constitutes a cinema”, have evolved. These cinemas, said Humphrey, had started explicitly selling “an evening out experience”.

Catharine Des Forges, director of the Independent Cinema Office, said this move towards “the boutique-y” was really a matter of survival. By the middle of the 00s, new forms of media were competing for people’s attention; cinema attendance began to dip. Certain venues, and in particular the smaller independent chains, could not reduce ticket prices and still turn a profit so they tried to work the opposite strategy – go grander and increase the frills. “These cinemas had to become more of a destination, like going to the theatre,” said Des Forges. “They became treat-y.”

The cinema-going public, or at least that part of it willing or able to pay for tickets in the £15-£20 range, seemed to approve. In its end-ofyear accounts for 2015, the Everyman chain, selfconsciously sleek, a major player in the new age of boutique film-showing, reported an annual rise in revenue of 44 per cent, from £14 million to £20.3 million. For a bunch of Britons, the experience of going to see a movie was coming to be associated less with the nacho and its cheese liquid, more about waiter-serviced sofas, fancier upholstery – and emptier wallets, most likely, as the credits rolled. My cruddy local Odeon in Muswell Hill, renowned for its frayed and caved-in chairs, its carpeting of old popcorn kernels and Opal Fruit wrappers, became one of the growing number of Everymans. These days, there are five kinds of red available at the bar and puddings served in jam jars. Terence Rattigan plays sometimes get beamed in from the National Theatre.

But all this change was still to come in 2000.

When I left the screening room at the Barbican, I was a filmgoer transformed. Sweet And Lowdown – bloody loved it! And for no obvious reason I could make out. It was twinkly, twee, strangely paced,

The cinema is more about waiterserviced sofas, fancy upholstery and emptier wallets

without gags or car chases and with only one sustained burst of cinematic action, when Penn smashed his antique guitar against a lamp post.

But I loved it inexplicably as great art will make you love it inexplicably and all at once realised that films outside the narrow conditions I’d allowed for could be charming. In the days after the screening, I hit Our Price or Virgin Megastores to buy a few older Woody Allens on VHS. Then I settled in for the standard six months to wait to be able to buy Sweet And Lowdown on VHS too.

This was how it was: a film had a theatrical release, then everything went terribly quiet for a full six months before it showed up on the high street on video or (marvel!) DVD. Another year of patient Radio Timesscouring and it might appear on Sky. Another year and it might come on terrestrial TV. At the time, this felt like a pretty luxurious set-up, particularly as anyone a generation or two older would always remind you, as you tended your movie collection, how much harder it was to see movies before the revolution of VHS. Actually, something was brewing, that summer in 2000, which would usher in the next movie-watching revolution. In June, the rental chain Blockbuster announced an ambitious partnership with a broadband provider to offer 500 movies over the internet by the end of the year. Blockbuster was about a decade away from filing for bankruptcy protection (in the US) at the time; closer to its own famous demise was the company Blockbuster had entered into partnership with – Enron, the too-big-to-fail firm that failed so spectacularly in 2001. The two companies’ fantastic notion to stream movies online came to nothing.

But the idea was sound, and revolutionary, soon to be chased into reality by others.

The launch and popularity-explosion of YouTube, in 2005, familiarised the public with the idea of streaming short videos on their computers.

Later, in the UK, the 2007 introduction of the BBC’s iPlayer service accustomed people to watching longer programming in the same way. “Video on demand”, or VOD, became the industry’s accepted term for streaming

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movies. Efe Cakarel, who founded the VOD service Mubi in 2007, told me the technology that enabled it had been around for while; what changed was “audience behaviour… [People] needed to get used to their idea of watching feature-length media on their computers”.

Netflix, then a rent-by-post subscription service that traded in tangible DVDs, joined the streaming market in 2007. Amazon bought a rival service, LoveFilm, and rebranded it Amazon Prime. (Both Netflix and Amazon have since moved into the production of their own films and TV programmes.

Last year, while filming Café Society, Woody Allen was also working on a TV series for Amazon called Crisis In Six Scenes.

In the UK, Sky developed its own VOD service, as did the Curzon group, which launched Curzon Home Cinema in 2010. In 2013, the BFI unveiled the BFI Player; the institute was openly concerned, Edward Humphrey said, that “if we didn’t embrace that change [towards streaming], we’d be left disconnected from an audience that was evolving in their tastes, their expectations, their use of technology”.

At the Curzon, as Café Society wound towards its conclusion, I decided to conduct an experiment.

When I got home I’d stream as many Woody Allen films as I could, via as many different platforms as were available.

Maybe I’d learn something large and profound about our consumption of film in 2016. Maybe I’d only finally get some value out of a dormant Netflix account I’d signed up for, years earlier, in order to watch the first season of House Of Cards.

And why wait to get home? Outside the cinema, I hopped on to the No 19 bus and sat down on the empty upstairs deck. I downloaded the Netflix app using the phone’s 4G connection and browsed the choice of Allens to watch.

There were plenty. Annie Hall (1977), The Purple Rose Of Cairo (1985), Radio Days (1987), Match Point (2005).

I chose the most recent film available, To Rome With Love (2012), which I’d missed when it came out. I had no headphones with me, so I let the sound play through the phone’s small speakers. The connection held steady as we drove into London’s West End and for a good while the bus made

What needed to change was audience behaviour.

People needed to get used to the idea of watching feature-length media on their computers a pretty decent mobile cinema, at least until some subtitled scenes in Italian, which required some serious squinting at the four-inch screen. In Knightsbridge, I met a character played by Jesse Eisenberg; at Piccadilly Circus his love interest, Ellen Page. In Charing Cross Road, a group of

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passengers came to sit upstairs and I felt selfconscious playing the film aloud. When Page delivered a risqué line of dialogue to Eisenberg, I panicked and pocketed the phone.

At home, I signed up to more services, subscribing to ones I already knew about, including Amazon Prime, Mubi, the BFI and Curzon, and downloading apps and software for all the competing firms I could find: Wuaki.tv, Now TV (a budget service run by Sky), TalkTalk TV and Chili Cinema. I bought a little gadget called a Chromecast, made by Google, which allows me to redirect streamed content from my phone or laptop to my TV. I typed “Woody Allen” into a lot of search bars and usually found lots of options – Blue Jasmine (2013) on iTunes and Wuaki and Chilli, Bananas (1971) on Netflix and iTunes and Amazon. Everyone had 2004’s Melinda And Melinda, but only Now TV and Sky Go were streaming 2015’s Irrational Man. I spoke to Philip Mordecai, director of Curzon Home Cinema, and Efe Cakarel at Mubi, who explained that the reason the choice of films splattered across the various platforms is uneven and inconsistent is the inconsistent nature of the deals done between distributors and VOD operators. Sometimes, the VOD people would negotiate rights to single films, sometimes for access to catalogues. Sometimes, a movie would go to one platform exclusively and sometimes its rights holder might try to spread it about as thinly as it would go, to get as many eyes on it as possible. I opted to watch Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), on Amazon Prime.

It took quite a lot of time, a lot of trackpadwrangling, to work out how to access Amazon’s hoard of movies. Unlike the reasonably intuitive Netflix homepage, Amazon seemed to bury movies on demand among other products. A Spanish novelisation of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a secondhand DVD, an autographed 8x12 of the movie’s star Scarlett Johansson… By all means stream Vicky Cristina Barcelona if you want to,

Amazon seemed to be saying to me, but why not buy a very best of Spanish guitar CD too?

Humphrey at the BFI explained why this might be. “As a standalone, streaming services are very difficult to make profitable and sustainable,” he said.

“That’s why most of the big ones are connected to another business. iTunes works as part of a wider Apple products universe, Sky’s supports the wider customer offer and Amazon Prime Video is deeply connected with Amazon’s retail business.”

As I delved further into my streaming options, I was asked to pay for my Allens in different ways.

Netflix and Amazon took a monthly subscription fee (both £5.99) while the majority of other services asked a one-off payment to “rent” – as in to buy temporary access to a stream, usually for a period of about 48 hours. Streaming Woody Allen movies was an activity that rewarded bargainhunting. Google wanted £2.49 for Celebrity (1998), Curzon Home Cinema £2.20 and iTunes and Amazon just 99p.

I was helped in this messy search process – of finding Manhattans and finding them cheapest – by a nifty website called JustWatch. Run by a German tech firm (its business built on collecting data about people’s viewing habits), JustWatch’s website functions roughly like a VOD-era Time Out or Radio Times. It sorted through the 34 Allen films that were available to stream on a dozen platforms and told me how much each would cost to watch.

When I got in touch with JustWatch’s chief executive, David Croyé, he said the site existed in part because of “a big oversupply of [streamable] content and a really fragmented market of where to watch it”. When I asked Croyé if there was a risk of a surfeit when it came to VOD – the consumer choked by consumables – he said: “Big time.”

Everyone I spoke to in the industry expressed some version of this concern. Mubi’s Cakarel said that VOD firms had to consider “an issue of drowning” and pointed out that his own service presented its subscribers with a neat choice of

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just 30 movies at any one time. “These films are chosen not by algorithms,” Cakarel said, “but by our programmers, who are out in the world, attending festivals, meeting film-makers.”

Mordecai at Curzon Home Cinema said his service limited its cache of streamable titles to a plumper 650, but added: “We have themed collections that help customers navigate those films. We also get respected directors and actors to curate collections for us. If you and your partner can’t agree on what to pick, then trusting a Palme d’Or winner saves an argument.”

Des Forges at the Independent Cinema Office said that, from the viewer’s perspective, the boom in streaming services had to be a good thing. At a time when a night out at the multiplex, let alone the grander cinemas, can cost £30 for two, the option to stream movies at home “lowers the barrier for entry”, she said. She thought that audiences might be more

Distributors are buying films in larger numbers than they used to, some to be sold to cinemas, some to TV, some to VOD

inclined to choose riskier, more unusual films at home-streaming prices too.

Technology has revolutionised movie watching but it has revolutionised movie-making too, and in a digital world, with production methods becoming ever cheaper, more films now arrive on the marketplace than in the past: somewhere between 18 and 22 a week, Des Forges said, as opposed to about half that number at the end of the 1990s. In a flooded market, it was increasingly difficult to give every film a worthy showing.

Unless we were talking about one of the other big directors, most film-makers just want their films to be seen. Des Forges described a process whereby distributors bought up films in larger numbers than they used to, earmarking them for different destinations: some to be sold to cinemas, some to TV, some to VOD platforms. Des Forges called this speculating or hedging. Independent films have been prominent in the VOD revolution

UK CINEMA

because, unlike their more expensive and oomphier studio equivalents, indie films are not so tightly bound to the traditional agreement between cinema operators and distributors that a new movie will get an unchallenged 17-week theatrical run before it is made available for home viewing.

I asked Des Forges about film-makers. What do they tend to think about their loving creations appearing not on the big screen but, perhaps, on the rather less grand Sony Bravia in my living room?

Unless we were talking about Christopher Nolan or one of the other big directors, Des Forges said, “most film-makers just want their films to be seen”.

Could there come a time when all films become available for home viewing at the same time as their release in cinemas? Last month, about a year after the success of 45 Years, Louis Theroux’s My Scientology Movie was given the same treatment – £13 for a ticket at Everyman Leeds, £4.50 for a stream on BFI Player. It made more than £600,000 inside a month. Distributors around the country will have paid attention to this. Meanwhile in America, in March, Napster founder Sean Parker announced plans for a start-up called the Screening Room, intending to make more big-

A new start-up will make big budget films available to watch at home the same time as they are released in cinemas

budget studio films available to watch at home at the same time as they are released in cinemas.

Parker’s proposed price for this – $50 a pop – raised eyebrows, until people started calculating how much they spent getting a whole family along to the new Star Wars last Christmas.

Mordecai at Curzon thought the idea of walking into our living rooms “to find the latest instalment of Star Wars or X-Men available to stream the weekend of release is still a distant reality”. But Parker’s scheme had some prominent backers, at least back in March, including Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. So who knows.

Towards the end of my Woody Allen streambinge I needed a break. One Friday evening, I browsed the choice of newer films on Curzon Home Cinema, looking through streamable titles that were also out in cinemas that week. After consulting my wife, we chose a documentary called The First Monday In May, which is about the staging of the lavish Met Gala in New York every spring. Telling as it did of neurotic and fragile Manhattanites, I thought it just about fitted the Woody theme.

Simultaneously, that night, there were people watching the same film at Curzons and other cinemas around the country. Tickets at about £15 each, plus extra for the prosecco icepoles or whatever. My wife and I watched the film in the living room for a cool tenner, all in. I wouldn’t have called the experience “boutique-y”. That afternoon, I’d streamed Antz, the animated feature featuring voice work by Woody Allen for my three-year-old and the couch still had the damp, biscuit-crumby sheen that tends to be left behind by the toddler at rest. Still, it was a cosy Friday night in, easy to arrange – nice. When I’d asked people in the VOD industry what they thought the future held for home streaming and the cinema, they spoke of virtualreality goggles, of “smart contact lenses”.

But maybe this was a more likely vision of the future, for better or worse: a further domestication of movie watching. Premieres in our pyjamas.

The new Star Wars on the sofa. Maybe we’d stop noticing the means of a film’s delivery entirely and get as much out of a feature played on a 4in screen as on a 40ft one.

When the fashion doc had finished, I thought I’d top off the evening with one last Allen film – Sweet and Lowdown, which I hadn’t watched for years. I’d once waited six months to get a hold of a copy of it on VHS. Now perhaps 90 seconds went by after the whim to see it struck before I had Sweet And Lowdown up and streaming on my laptop.

Still wonderful, of course, whatever the format, however the means.

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JANUARY ISSUE 133

Central Reservation In the heart of Buenos Aires’ chic Recoleta District is a reimagined period residence that mixes European charm with Latin flair

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LIVING / HOTEL

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uenos Aires gets under the skin of anyone who visits – maybe it’s the alluring mix of Europe and Latin America, maybe it’s the people, or maybe it’s the striking architecture. One part Paris, one part Vienna, but always beating with a South American heart, BA has a charm all of its own.

Nowhere in the city is more sumptuous than the Recoleta neighbourhood, a place of wide streets, chic cafes and wonderful stately homes.

The Algodon Mansion sums up the Belle Epoque feel of this part of the city. Built in 1912, it’s a stunning example of period architecture. Formerly a private residence, then the home of the Dutch ambassador, it fell into disrepair for 25 years before it was restored to its former glory.

It’s a story that has played out across the city in recent years, with a glut of boutique hotels opening in former private residences. Few have managed a fit-out as wonderful as the Algodon, however, set over 10 suites, each one a mix of period details and modern comfort. The Royal Suite, for instance, comes with a personal butler, a fireplace and a sauna.

One of the mansion’s highlights is the rooftop bar, in a city with very few.

It comprises an open-air cigar bar, well stocked with premium cigars, not to mention a raft of quality cognacs.

Words: Conor Purcell

ALGODON MANSION, BUENOS AIRES

WHERE TO STAY

JANUARY ISSUE 133

FROM THE CONCIERGE

SEE

The Recoleta Cemetery is the resting place of Argentina’s elite (including Eva Peron), and is one of the city’s most enduring – and most interesting – tourist attractions.

La Recoleta Cemetery, Junin 1760, 1113, CABA

SHOP

One of the most popular upscale malls in the city, Patio Bullrich is a favourite of locals looking for some retail therapy.

Everyone from Calvin Klein to Swarovski is present and correct, as well as a number of local brand.

Patio Bullrich, Comuna 1, Retiro Tel: 0054 11 48147400

EAT

A favourite of well-heeled locals and expatriates, Fervor does the classic Argentinian steak better than anywhere else in town. The interior is unassuming, the service superb, and the seafood grill (ask for the parillada de mar) incredible.

Fervor, 1519 Posados, Recolete Tel: 0054 11 48044944

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LIVING / STYLE

What to pack ...for summer weather in Cape Town and beyond

Average temp

22°c

Melbourne Bangkok Rio De Janeiro Brisbane

ALSO WEAR IN...

26 °C 27 °C 27 °C 23 °C

JANUARY

CAPE TOWN

Chance of rain: 10%

WHAT TO SEE

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SEAL ISLAND South Africa is teeming with wildlife, and Seal Island is one of the easiest of the country’s natural wonders to reach from Cape Town. A small granite outpost in False Bay, it’s home to hundreds of cape fur seals. At certain times of the year it’s also home to great white sharks who feast on the

unlucky seals. Year-round boat tours are the best way to see the island.

Back on dry land and Cape Town has a huge array of restaurants, cafes and bars to whet the appetite of even the most sea-sick traveller. Check out the City Bowl area for the best eateries, chic watering holes and restaurants with a (sea) view.

JANUARY ISSUE 133

1. Visvim Albacore denim shirt $538 2. Elder Statesman printed cashmere and silk-blend T-shirt $538 3. Vilebrequin Mistral slim-fit shorts $448 4. Common Projects Original Achilles leather sneakers $326 5. Hartford slim-fit drawstring linen shorts $110. All products available at mrporter.com

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ACCESSORIES

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79 Farer Frobisher II Stainless Steel And Leather Watch Watch $427

Bottega Veneta Sunglasses $437

Tom Ford Oud Wood Eau De Parfum fragrance $227

LIVING / STYLE

What to pack ...for winter weather in Vienna and beyond

Average temp

-5°c

Budapest Moscow Seoul Dublin

ALSO WEAR IN...

0 °C -9 °C -3 °C 9 °C

JANUARY

VIENNA

Chance of rain: 5%

WHAT TO SEE

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AUSTRIAN NATIONAL LIBRARY One of the world’s largest and most impressive libraries, this former court library to the Hapsburgs is an example of baroque architecture at its finest, and a bibliophile’s delight (with more than 2.5 million books in situ). There’s a range of special collections visitors can view, but the

real draw is wandering around and soaking up the atmosphere. A real highlight is the two Venetian globes – one for the earth and one for the sky – that measure more than a metre each. The library is located right in the centre of the city, with plenty more culture only minutes’ walk away.

JANUARY ISSUE 133

ACCESSORIES

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Isabel Marant Izia fringed two-tone mohairblend scarf $569

Anya Hindmarch Kawaii embossed leather cardholder $216

81 1. Burberry Kensington trench coat $1,600 2. J.Crew Jasper pompom-embellished chunky-knit beanie $48 3. Helmut Lang oversized shearling coat $2,548 4. The Elder Statesman Intarsia cashmere mittens $151.

All products available at net-a-porter.com

LIVING / INVESTMENT

Philatelic Fortunes

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t may seem surprising, but stamps have outperformed shares, property and gold in recent months. An index of the 250 most valuable British stamps, compiled by stamp expert Stanley Gibbons, returned 1.2 per cent in the 12 months to June 2016, beating the FTSE 100, which lost 11 per cent during the same period.

Today, by weight, rare stamps are the world’s most valuable commodity.

Witness the 1885 British Guiana onecent stamp, which holds the record for the world’s most expensive single stamp, fetching £5.6 million at Sotheby’s in New York in 2014.

Last year the best performer in the Stanley Gibbons index was a rare 1841

Penny Red stamp, issued during Queen Victoria’s reign. One unused ‘1d redbrown plate 2’ is now worth $31,000, up from $28,000 a year ago. It has generated a 355 per cent return over the past decade.

So it’s no surprise that at a time of global uncertainty, investors are taking a renewed interest in alternative investments.

Words: Marianne Curphey

Marianne Curphey examines why stamps are increasingly seen as a safe-haven investment in troubled global markets.

JANUARY ISSUE 133

Lloyds Private Banking has found that one in six UK investors holds collectible investments in their portfolios, with seven per cent investing in stamps.

Over the past decade, stamps have seen their value increase by nearly 295 per cent, according to specialist Stanley Gibbons, which tracked values between 2005 and 2015. What’s more, over the next ten years Stanley Gibbons forecasts that stamp investments will yield a return of 27.5 per cent.

It’s important to differentiate between people who collect stamps for a hobby or who are interested in philately (the study of stamps and postal history). These collectors are not particularly interested in the monetary value of stamps, but are in it for the joy of collecting.

Then there are those people who invest in stamps because they are interested in the return on their capital investment and for them only a tiny percentage of stamps are valuable enough for them to consider investing in.

The Lloyds Private Banking study found that investors are willing to part with large sums of money to invest in what they love. On average, $25,700 is the most spent on a single stamp investment, with one in five spending more than $63,000 on an individual item.

It’s not uncommon for investors to begin collecting stamps as an investment and a personal passion. The Lloyds study showed that 43 per cent of owners linked their investment to personal sentiment, while 14 per cent say they choose to invest for purely financial reasons, and 27 per cent to build a personal collection.

There are a number of reasons that stamps are increasingly being seen as a smart investment. Firstly, they are largely unrelated to other investments and are not correlated with common assets classes such as shares. Stamps are largely unaffected by the economy and can retain their value even when other investments such as equities and property are performing less well. They are seen as a safe haven in choppy markets.

Another driver is the fact that investment grade stamps have consistently grown in value. During the 2008 financial crash the value of stamps actually rose (as

did a number of collectibles such as fine art and antiques).

Stamps also reward investors with little stomach for instability. They are a steady, long-term investment – unlike shares they are not volatile and so are suitable for a retirement portfolio or legacy.

There may be tax advantages, depending on where you pay tax. For example, if you are a UK taxpayer you’ll pay capital gains tax not income tax on any gains, and because stamps are classed as ‘chattels’ for capital gains tax purposes, you’ll only pay tax if you have made a gain of $7,500 or more.

There are some caveats and considerations that you need to bear in mind if you are thinking of treating stamps as an investment.

“Stamps are largely unaffected by the economy and can retain their value even when the likes of property are performing badly” If you are UK-based, stamps are not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority so you’re not covered if you lose money on your investment.

Stamp investing should only form a small part of your investment portfolio.

Stanley Gibbons recommends it should account for no more than 10 per cent of your portfolio.

You need to factor in the cost of acquisition, of buying and selling, and of storage and insurance. Philip Pearson, of P&P Invest, an independent financial adviser based in England, points out you will need to think about how you will store and display your investments. Another consideration is how easy it is to buy and sell stamps. “Alternative investments tend to be illiquid,” Pearson says. “They are not always easy to buy and sell.”

According to Manuela Sorani, stamps auctioneer at Catawiki, a Europe-wide online auction house, there are a number of ways the first-time investor can buy – via stamp dealers, both locally and

internationally, at stamp fairs, and via online auctions. He has some useful advice for new investors.

“Stamps should be without defects.

They should have original gum and wide margins on all four sides,” he says. When it comes to envelopes, even more care should be taken. “It is important to have the entire item with all its franking. If you focus on quality, this will help in selling the collection in the future and obtaining a better price,” he says.

Valuable stamps should always have a certificate of originality and quality, issued by a qualified and well-known philatelic expert. Pearson says the best option is to buy and hold for the long term. “Currently, stamps offer relatively good value as a result of Europeans selling their collections.

Philately in the coming years will have good opportunities to grow, therefore those interested in investing in philately should see an interesting performance in their assets in the future,” he says.

In order to find out what’s available, the best bet is to get the various catalogues the dealers produce. Amongst the most important global catalogues are: Stanley Gibbons (UK), Scott (USA), Michel (Germany), Yvert&Tellier (France), Sassone (Italy) and Zumstein (Switzerland).

Committed investors combine knowledge of the catalogues with monitoring auctions and visiting stamp fairs – the only way to see how prices are changing.

While this might all seem like a lot of work, the big advantage of stamps as an investment is that their value tends not to be eroded by inflation. Markus Stadlmann, the CIO of Lloyds Private Banking, says: “Over the long term, these types of assets do not closely correlate with more traditional equity and bond markets, and therefore offer diversification opportunities. However, it is vital to remember that you are dealing with predominately private markets.”

So if you are looking for an investment to add some interest and diversification to your portfolio, then stamps might be worth a look. As the Knight Frank Wealth Report 2016 Luxury Index shows, stamps have performed relatively well compared with other alternative investments over the past 10 years.

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LIVING / FOOD

A Foodie’s Guide to 2017 James Brennan walks us through the trends that will dominate the coming culinary year.

Last year’s World’s Best Restaurant award winner, Massimo Bottura

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W

hile 2016 was a tough year to swallow, 2017 looks set to be a lot more palatable, especially when it comes to food. Over the next twelve months we’re going to see one of the world’s most famous chefs relocate to a small coastal town in Latin America. Aussie cuisine will finally shake off its ‘tinnies round the barbie’ image.

Carbonated water will regain its sparkle.

And some lucky people will be eating weeds from a pond. Here’s a roundup of what’s on the table for the coming year.

HOLA NOMA After successful stints in Tokyo (2015) and Sydney (2016), Danish chef René Redzepi will open his final Noma popup in Mexico next year. The 2-Michelin star Scandi restaurant will relocate to the resort of Tulum on the Caribbean coast in April, serving dishes inspired

by centuries of Mexican cuisine, with particular focus on the food of the Yucatán peninsula. Traditional delicacies such as cochinita pibil – suckling pig, slow-roasted in citrus juice - will get the New Nordic treatment, but while most will have to pay $600 to try it, culinary students can apply to eat for free. Expect chefs around the world to go loco for Mexican cuisine in 2017 as a result.

SUPER BOWLS As bowls became the receptacle of choice for cutting-edge gastronomes in 2016, the food that goes in them will flourish over the coming year.

Apparently, as well as being handy things to put food in, bowls make food taste better. Also, presenting food in a bowl keeps portions sensible and makes us more mindful of what we eat.

Expect more ‘Buddha bowls’ of whole grains, lean proteins and vegetables,

and ‘smoothie bowls’ with fruit, nut and seed toppings to challenge old bowl favourites like soup and ramen noodles.

Famous bowl backers include Gwyneth Paltrow and Nigella Lawson, who couldn’t possibly be wrong. Could they?

THE DEATH OF THE TASTING MENU 2016 was a merciless year, but it still couldn’t finish off the tasting menu.

Maybe 2017 can? We’ve all been there, sat at a table for two hours, stuffed to the gills having lost count of the dishes we’ve had. But we’re only halfway through the tasting menu, and

“This year will see Aussie cuisine finally shake off its ‘tinnies around the barbie’ image”

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Noma continues its globetrotting in 2017

LIVING / FOOD

Charcoal ice-cream is set to be big in 2017

Bottura’s Osteria Francescana restaurant took the No.1 spot. The awards will coincide with the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and a host of other events showcasing the best of Aussie food.

Sharing the limelight will be the likes of Ben Shewry (Attica, Melbourne) and Jock Zonfrillo (Orana, Adelaide), who have both made great strides in highlighting native Australian ingredients and indigenous food cultures.

THE RISE OF THE ONE-STAR Michelin stars have rediscovered their sparkle, thanks to the rise of the one star restaurant. In recent years the famous Red Guide has bestowed solitary stars upon British pubs, Tokyo ramen restaurants and even two hawker stalls in Singapore, as Michelin shakes off its stuffy image and celebrates accessibility and diversity in the world of gastronomy. Expect this trend to continue in 2017, as more and more onestar restaurants appear in capital as well as provincial cities around the world.

EATS ROOTS AND LEAVES

we still haven’t tasted anything we really like. Chefs love them as showcases for their dazzling range of skills, but in an on-demand world of Spotify, Netflix and the boundless choice of the Internet, surely the tasting menu has had its day?

FROM SEAWEED TO DUCKWEED

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Perennially popular in Japan, China and Korea, seaweed has been threatening to make it big in the west for years. But as we search for more sustainable sources of protein, even more aquatic plants are set to surface. Duckweed thrives in ponds and is known to the French as ‘water lentils’. The green leaves are high in amino acids, omega 3 oil, fibre and vitamins, and have a fresh, grassy flavour. They can be ground into a powder called ‘lentein’ which can be used to make all kinds of food, from energy bars to bread. And it’ll be in a health food store near you in 2017.

EAU CRIKEY Just when you thought fizzy water couldn’t get any more interesting - now it’s alcoholic. Spiked carbonated water is set to really take off in 2017, as a low calorie, low-carb, gluten free ‘healthy’ alternative to sparkling wine, beer and spiked soda. Even the people who brought you Samuel Adam’s lager, the Boston Beer Company, have launched their own version. Called Truly Spiked & Sparkling, it comes in three flavours (Colima Lime, Pomegranate, and Grapefruit and Pomelo) and is set to put a natural spring in your step in the coming year.

ON THE UP DOWN UNDER The World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards will be held in Australia for the first time in April 2017. The biggest names in gastronomy will convene at Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building after last year’s New York event, in which Massimo

Food waste is something we’re all aware of, especially when it’s time to clean out the fridge. Nose-to-tail dining has enjoyed a comeback in recent years, but 2017 is set to be the year of root-to-leaf. Take broccoli, for instance. Its leaves are full of potassium, folate and vitamins, and they taste earthy and surprisingly sweet.

Instead of throwing away the leaves of celery, carrots, radish and beetroot, chefs will be looking for more creative and tasty ways to add them to their menus.

BACK TO BLACK Anybody with an Instagram account will have noted an upsurge in images of dark delicacies – black macaroons, inky brioche burgers and charcoal ice cream. Following on from the rise of burnt, blistered and charred food – from scorched whole corn on the cob, to heat-blasted meat – we’re seeing more food made with black sesame, squid ink, seaweed and black treacle. You can even get black bottled water, infused with fulvic trace minerals, in the form of blk.

It’s a trend that looks likely to continue in 2017, as more of us will be tempted to cross over to the dark side.

Massachusetts General Hospital named among America’s Top Hospitals To request an appointment, visit massgeneral.org/international Ranked as one of the top three hospitals by U.S. News & World Report, Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston, Massachusetts, USA) is the only hospital in America to be ranked across all 16 specialties.

LIVING / CONSUME

Boundless: Contemporary Art A Hong Kong auction featuring some legendary art world names.

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ong Kong has become the centre of the Asian art scene in recent years and this exhibition, hosted

by Sotheby’s Hong Kong will attract the region’s big collectors.

With pieces on offer from the likes of Keith Haring, George Condo and

Zao Wou-Ki, this offers a rare chance to bid on world-class work from across the artistic spectrum.

The sale will also offer a selection of western and Asian photographs and rare artist-designed jewellery.

French designer Guy de Rougemont will be introduced at auction in Asia

for the first time with a selection of recent and vintage design pieces. With the June auction resulting in sales of nearly $7 million, this is a must for contemporary art collectors around the world.

Sotheby’s Hong Kong, January 19, sothebys.com

Words: Conor Purcell

Zao Wou-Ki’s Les Bateaux

JANUARY ISSUE 133

Guy de Rougemont – Red Cloud Table (1970) 42cm x 110cm x 55cm Estimate: $34,000 to $41,000 De Rougemont is a renowned French painter and sculptor who uses bright colours and patterns in his work to remarkable effect.

Keith Haring – Untitled (1998) 100.5cm x 75cm Estimate: $232,000 to $361,000 US artist Haring was heavily influenced by 1980s New York street culture and his work often had a social bent. Political, iconoclastic and extraordinarly talented, his work has become one of the most recognised visual forms of the late 20th century.

George Condo – Late Night in St Moritz (1990) 160cm x 150 cm Estimate: $128,000 to $256,000 One of the most interesting artists working today, Condo made his name fusing the techniques of the traditional Old Masters with contemporary pop culture.

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LIVING / COLUMN

Adapt or die

By Eamonn Carey

T

o death and taxes, add uncertainty.

The inevitability of unpredictability was perhaps one of the most memorable things about the last 12 months. I’m sure for many, it felt like the multiverse theory had taken hold, and we were all in some weird adjacent world.

Yet here we are. The morning after Brexit, planes kept flying, trades were made, business happened. As Trump’s election unfolded, many were predicting the end of the world, and then the next day, and week and month people kept getting out of bed, having coffee, taking the subway to the office and living their lives. At a macro level it seemed like the world was tilting on its axis, but at a micro level, you still had to eat breakfast, reply to e-mails, sign contracts and do your job. You’re going to have to keep doing that.

There’s a lazy cliche about the Chinese word for crisis being the same as the word for opportunity. That’s not technically true, but the underlying sentiment has merit. It would be easy to hide under a pile of coats and hope that problems are going to go away, and that the things you’re unhappy about will just disappear. That’s wishful thinking. Turbulent times have the potential to yield huge returns. You just have to be willing to go for them.

We are entering an era that already is and will continue to be unprecedented in terms of the pace of change. Huge industries are being disrupted on an ongoing basis, and that’s not going to stop. At Techstars, we invest in hundreds of companies around the world every year, and see many tens of thousands of pitches – and I can tell you that we’re only scratching the surface when it comes to the impact tech will have on our day to day lives. The Silicon Valley VC, Marc Andreessen, summed it up best: “Software is eating the world.”

The risk for many companies is that they get left behind. The pace at which a small, startup team can iterate, innovate, pivot and scale can be terrifying for larger corporates. Some companies view startups as a joke, some view them as an existential threat. The smart ones see them as partners. If software’s eating the world – or at the very least starting to nibble on your lunch – then isn’t it better to work with them?

The companies that don’t innovate and adapt to their customers and users’ needs will be the ones that suffer. You can already see multinationals adapting to changing worlds. Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club.

AB InBev have been buying craft breweries around the world. Companies are establishing skunkworks, investing in startups and starting to open their eyes to how collaboration can be more beneficial than confrontation.

Getting started is simple.

Want to see interesting things that people are working on and get inspired – go to Slush, SXSW, Pioneers, Tech Open Air, Web Summit and other events where great people congregate.

Check out a Startup Weekend or find a pitching competition that you can attend. Identify opportunities to collaborate with people – and do it in a meaningful way. Create pilot and proof of concept schemes where companies can help you solve real, clearly defined problems and use those to figure out who you want to work with in more depth.

Make it easy for companies to work with you – don’t have nine-week procurement processes and 180-day payment terms. Have discretionary budgets that you can use to sign off on pilots quickly and easily. Give feedback on what’s working and what’s not.

Tell companies your problems and marvel at how quickly they can help you solve them.

Embrace uncertainty – pretty soon you won’t have any choice.

Eamonn Carey is the managing director at Techstars Connection in partnership with AB InBev.

Some companies view startups as a joke, some view them as an existential threat. The smart ones see them as partners

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A skunkworks project is a project developed by a small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of radical innovation.

The terms originated with Lockheed’s World War II Skunk Works project.

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