Portfolio. | June 2016

ISSUE

126

ADVERTISING v TECH

A NEW AGE FOR ART

Ad agencies courting young talent

Growth of online auction houses

BANKRUPT BILLIONAIRE

INVENTOR OF THE ATM

His rise and fall in just 12 years

And why he got a pittance for it

Upper Class Lower Class

Middle Class

END OF THE AMERICAN DAYDREAM? What happens when Americans stop believing in middle-class aspirations?

Our quest for perfection.

Senator Cosmopolite

Senator Cosmopolite. An ideal companion for the world traveler: the Senator Cosmopolite brings all of the 37 world time zones to the wrist.

This mechanical masterpiece displays the time of day in two separate time zones at once, taking Daylight Savings and Standard Time into account.

Glashütte Original Boutique ”The Dubai Mall“ Financial Centre Street ⋅ 00971 04 3 39 87 62 ⋅ glashuttedm@rivoligroup.com

The world time zones, colour-coded to indicate their deviation from GMT, are represented by official IATA airport codes. This complex function is astonishingly easy to use – since every second counts, especially for time-travelers.

Glashütte Original Boutique ”The Burjuman Centre“ The Burjuman-Centre Dubai ⋅ 00971 04 3 86 74 06 ⋅ Glashutte.burjuman@rivoligroup.com

june issue 126

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 EDITOR maTTHew POmrOy matthew.pomroy@motivate.ae sENIOR ART DIRECTOR sara raFFaGHellO sarar@motivate.ae sENIOR DEsIGNER rOui FranciscO rom@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 GROUP sALEs DIRECTOR craiG waGsTaFF craig.wagstaff@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.

All dollar prices throughout the magazine refer to US dollars.

Published for Emirates by

06

Head Office Media One Tower, Dubai Media City, PO Box 2331, Dubai, UAE Tel +971 4 427 3000 Fax +971 4 428 2270 Dubai Media City Office 508, 5th Floor, Building 8, Dubai, UAE Tel: +971 4 390 3550 Fax: +971 4 390 4845 Abu Dhabi PO Box 43072, UAE Tel: +971 2 677 2005 Fax: +971 2 677 0124 London Acre House, 11/15 William Road, London NW1 3ER, UK Printed by Emirates Printing Press, Dubai

Portfolio.

Is THIs THE NExT bIG THING? P12

The world’s largest technology companies have spent the last five years searching in vain for a machine to succeed the smartphone as the next must-have gadget. Yet at the moment, the most promising candidate isn’t made by Apple, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Instead, it is the Echo, a screenless, voice-controlled household computer built by Amazon.

CALIBER RM 037

JUNE ISSUE 126

CONTENTS UPFRONT

17

DATA STORAGE

Where do we put all the info we’re sending?

21

IBM’S AI

Artificial intelligence is around the corner

24 LOTUS CARS

The cult brand is making a comeback

28

HOTEL TONIGHT

How you book a hotel room is changing

30

ROMAN TAXI

What do you learn from driving a taxi in Rome for 50 years?

32

STICKY IDEAS

The invention of a new glue from a woman with a plan

LIVING

68

GRAND TREMEZZO

The timeless residence on Italy’s Lake Como

70

HÔTEL HERMITAGE

Preserving the Riviera glamour in Monte Carlo

80

TURTLENECKS

Can the 1970s staple ever be cool again

89

INVESTMENT PIECE

Orlebar Brown shorts with your own image

90

COLUMN

Science says working long hours doesn’t help

09

33,388 copies July - December 2015

PORTFOLIO.

JUNE ISSUE 126

CONTENTS FEATURES

34 THE RICH YOUTH OF CHINA

Children of Chinese billionaires are moving to Canada and flaunting wealth

38 END OF MIDDLE CLASS ASPIRATION?

The American middle class no longer has social mobility and that leads to… Trump

44 FROM BILLIONARE TO BANKRUPT

How an Australian coal magnate became a billionaire and then lost it all in 12 years

48 COURTING YOUNG TALENT

The advertising industry is trying to compete with the tech industry

52 HE INVENTED THE ATM…

… and only got a pittance for a creation that changed how we access money

56 BUYING BANKSY ON YOUR PHONE

Online auction houses have transformed the art world, adding accessibility for all

10

INTERNATIONAL MEDIA REPRESENTATIVES AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND Samford Media; Tel + 618 9447 2734, okeeffekev@bigpond.com.au CHINA IMM International; Tel +852 2639 3635, j.bouron@ imm-international.com GERMANY IMV Internationale Medien Vermarktung GmbH; Tel +49 8151 550 8959, w.jaeger@imv-media.com GREECE Global Media; +30 210 69 85 981, c.fronimos@global-media.gr HONG KONG/MALAYSIA/INDONESIA Sonney Media Networks; Tel +852 2151 2351, hemant@sonneymedia. com INDIA Media Star; Tel +91 22 4220 2103, ravi@mediastar.co.in SWITZERLAND/FRANCE/ITALY/SPAIN IMM International; Tel +331 40 1300 30, n.devos@ imm-international.com JAPAN Tandem Inc.; Tel + 81 3 3541 4166, all@tandem-inc.com NETHERLANDS giO media; Tel +31 6 6 2223 8420, giovanni@giO-media.nl THAILAND Media Representation International; +66 8 6777 3417, Stephen@mediarepint.com TURKEY TTR Media Ltd; Tel +90 212 275 8433, tanbilge@medialtd. com.tr UK Spafax; Tel +44 207 906 1983, merle.stein@spafax.com USA WorldMedia Inc; Tel +1 212 244 5610, conoverbrown@worldmediaonline.com

PORTFOLIO.

BUY? Yes

No

upfront

portfolio.

upfront

12

Portfolio.

june issue 126 Toni Reid, left, director of Amazon’s Echo and Alexa, and Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president for devices at the Amazon offices in in Seattle

technology | global

Echo and the moneymen

Could Amazon have the next big thing? Words: Farhad Manjoo

M

any of the world’s largest technology companies have spent the last five years searching in vain for a machine to succeed the smartphone as the next must-have gadget.

They have made digital watches and fitness trackers, all manner of computerised glasses and goggles, and more things to plug into your TV than there are shows to watch on it.

Yet at the moment, the most promising candidate for the Next Great Gadget isn’t made by Apple, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Instead, it is the Echo, a screenless, voice-controlled household computer built by Amazon – a company whose last big foray into consumer electronics, the Fire Phone, was a flop.

This time it may be different. A bit more than a year after its release, the Echo has morphed from a gimmicky experiment into a device that brims with profound possibility. The longer I use it, the more regularly it inspires the same sense of promise I felt when I used the first iPhone – a sense this machine is opening up a vast new realm in personal computing, and gently expanding the role that computers will play in our future.

What is most interesting about the Echo is that it came out of nowhere.

It isn’t much to look at, and even describing its utility is difficult. Here

is a small, stationary machine that you set somewhere in your house, which you address as Alexa, which performs a variety of tasks – playing music, reading the news and weather, keeping a shopping list – that you can already do on your phone.

But the Echo has a way of sneaking into your routines. When Alexa reorders popcorn for you, or calls an Uber car for you, when your children start asking Alexa to add popsicles to the grocery list, you start to want pretty much everything else in life to be Alexa-enabled, too.

In this way, Amazon has found a surreptitious way to bypass Apple and Google – the reigning monarchs in the smartphone world – with a gadget that has the potential to become a dominant force in the most intimate of environments: our homes.

If all this sounds over-the-top, read some of the reviews. On Amazon’s site, the Echo has racked up more stars than an Oscars party. Amazon doesn’t release sales numbers, but the company is investing big in Echo. It ran Super Bowl ads to push the device and recently it unveiled two new versions of the machine. One is a portable version of the Echo and the other is meant to plug into existing speaker systems.

Scot Wingo, the chairman of ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce consulting firm, said the early signs Portfolio.

13

june issue 126

suggested that the Echo was on a path to become Amazon’s next $1 billion business.

“It’s one of the most sold-out things that I see on Amazon,” Wingo said. “It’s an unusual thing for Amazon to be out of something, but for the Echo, it’s usually in stock just for a couple weeks before it goes out of stock for a few days – so it feels like they’re having trouble making enough of the devices.” Wingo noted the Echo, which Amazon sells for $180 only through its own site, was selling for $200 to $300 on eBay. When the Echo was introduced in a goofy video in late 2014, on the heels of the failure of the Fire Phone, it was widely ridiculed. The Echo’s utility was not obvious, and in its earliest incarnation, it seemed a bit of a ditz. But there are a couple of reasons it has earned such raves from users.

First, it’s simple to learn, and its voicerecognition capabilities are more intuitive than those of many other vocal assistants (like Apple’s Siri or Google Now). More than that, it keeps gaining new powers.

During an interview at a media event recently, Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president for devices, said the company created the Echo because it had seen interesting possibilities arising out of advances in microphone technology, speech recognition and cloud connectivity.

Amazon’s engineers spent years perfecting the device’s unusual capabilities. Unlike competing assistants, the Echo can be activated hands-free from far across the room (Siri only works from about a metre away), and it can decipher your voice in noisy environments, even when it’s playing music.

Amazon also worked to make sure the device responded very quickly. “Early on in the product, to play music took eight or nine seconds, and it’s just unusable when it’s like that,” Limp said. “Now it’s often 1,000 milliseconds or 1,200 milliseconds.”

The speed makes a crucial difference.

Compared with the trudge of chatting with 14 Siri, speaking to Alexa feels natural, closer to speaking to a human than a machine – and even when it gets your request wrong, which in your early days with the device will happen often, it doesn’t feel like you have paid a huge penalty for trying.

Portfolio.

upfront / amazon echo

“Amazon seems on the verge of building something like Iron Man’s Jarvis, the artificial-intelligence brain at the centre of all your household activities”

More important, just like the early iPhone, Amazon has managed to turn the Echo into the centre of a new ecosystem. Developers are flocking to create voice-controlled apps for the device, or skills, as Amazon calls them.

There are now more than 300 skills for the Echo, from the trivial – there is one to make Alexa produce rude body sounds on command – to the pretty handy. It can tell you transit schedules, start a seven-minute workout, read recipes, do math and conversions, and walk you through adventure games, among other possibilities.

Makers of digital home devices like Nest are also rushing to make their products compatible with the Echo. Alexa can now control your internet-connected lights, home thermostats and a variety of other devices. Hardware makers can also add Alexa’s brain into their own devices,

so soon you won’t need an Echo to consult with Alexa – you could find it in your toaster, your refrigerator or your car.

The Echo is far from perfect. It still gets queries wrong and it still feels like it’s missing potentially useful features.

Limp concedes this. Amazon’s teams keep working to add new tricks to the Echo, he said. The device also faces limited retail distribution – it’s unusual enough that it would benefit from being displayed on shelves, but Amazon’s retail rivals are unlikely to stock it anytime soon.

Amazon would be wise to hurry up because while the Echo has no direct competitors, a few may be emerging.

Among them is SoundHound, a startup that has been working on voice-recognition for more than a decade, which is now offering hardware makers access to its service. Within the next year, according to the company, lots of gadgets will be using SoundHound’s software to talk to users.

Do you want that? The FBI’s battle with Apple over encryption should prompt deep questions about a future of internet-connected devices spread around our homes. Amazon has strong privacy protections in the Echo. It doesn’t stream anything without the wake word and it has a physical mute button that electrically disconnects the microphone but, as with all groundbreaking technology, there is no doubt we are entering new territory here.

Yet, the Echo is so useful it may be worth the gamble. Many in the industry have long looked to the smartphone as the remote control for your world. But the phone has limitations. A lot of times fiddling with a screen is just too much work. By perfecting an interface that is much better suited to home use – the determined yell! – Amazon seems on the verge of building something like Iron Man’s Jarvis, the artificial-intelligence brain at the centre of all your household activities. Who could say no to that?

www.louismoinet.com/leaders.pdf

Alfardan Jewellery Qatar

Bahrain J ewellery Centre W.L.L Bahrain

Behbehani Group Kuwait

Damas

UAE & Saudi Arabia

Louis Moinet, Switzerland at +41 32 753 68 14, info@louismoinet.com

june upfront / data

issue 126

The data deluge How companies are rethinking storage. Words: Quentin Hardy

J

ohn Hayes stood before his silent creation. Big as a slim refrigerator, it held 16 petabytes of data, roughly equal to 16 billion thick books.

“People are going to have to think about things to put into this,” he said amid the clutter of his office at a Silicon Valley company called Pure Storage. “But that won’t take long – there’s a demand for data that nobody was ready for.”

Each month, the world’s one billion mobile phones throw out 18 exabytes of data, equal to 1,100 of Hayes’ boxes.

There are also millions of sensors in things ranging from cars and appliances to personal fitness trackers and cameras.

IBM figures that by 2020 we will have 44 zettabytes – the thousandfold

number next up from exabytes – generated by all those devices. It is so much information that Big Blue is staking its future on so-called machine learning and artificial intelligence, two kinds of pattern-finding software built to cope with all that information.

Making storage products has long been a major part of the tech industry. It has also been one of the dullest, with little in the way of innovation. Now the surge in data is leading both startups and some of tech’s biggest companies to rethink how they approach the problem.

Pure, co-founded by Hayes, a 38-year-old former video karaoke engineer, is one of several companies trying new approaches.

Hayes’ box, unveiled recently, holds five times as much data as a conventional storage device, thanks to a combination of so-called “flash” storage technology and clever engineering. Sometime in 2017, he said, it will hold twice that much, as Pure tweaks the product. Power consumption, the company says, is four per cent of the current standard.

While traditional storage works much like a record player, with data stored on and fetched from spinning disks, flash storage gets data directly on and off a semi-conductor. Flash storage has become common in consumer tech products such as smartphones.

The new Pure system is also built in blades, which act like building blocks.

Portfolio.

17

june upfront / data

issue 126

Add a blade, and the overall system reconfigures to raise efficiency.

There is space on the device for additional processing, so a blade could easily be added.

“It’s not just about Google and Facebook,” said Joe Unsworth, an analyst with Gartner. “Health care, manufacturing and natural resources companies can all justify owning this much storage.

In 10 years, a big sanitation company with sensors on its Dumpsters to manage pickups could have tens of petabytes.”

Netflix, which offers streaming video to 75 million people in 190 countries, ships dozens of custombuilt appliances a week to hundreds of local internet service providers.

The newest, a mix of flash and traditional storage, can store five petabytes – enough, the company figures, to hold almost anything from its catalogue that anyone, anywhere would want to watch, for now.

The company analyses data to figure out both the kind of content it should offer next, and the internet’s capacity to stream all that entertainment. “We arguably have the most insight of anybody,” said Ken Florance, vice president of content delivery at Netflix.

“There are networks in Kenya that are better than some networks in the US.” Capturing and analysing masses of data already touches improbable corners, like championship auto racing. Mercedes AMG Petronas, the racing arm of the Daimler car company, is an early customer of the new Pure blades.

Mercedes AMG has about 300 sensors on each high-performance car. Much the way human athletes are regulated for substances, racing officials now limit the amount of computation cars can use, 18 including wind tunnel simulations between races, so it pays to move data quickly.

“They audit the amount of processing we use,” said Matt Harris, the head of information Portfolio.

18

Exabytes of data are generated by one billion mobile phones every month

technology for Mercedes AMG. “If we can cut a few seconds off each job with faster storage, that’s an extra simulation a month.”

Pure is in a race of its own.

The company went public last October, and since then its stock has fallen one-third from the highs reached soon after. The new flash blade product line will not be important for revenue this year, but the company’s chief executive, Scott Dietzen, is hoping it will calm disappointed investors.

“No one can look at all their data anymore; they need algorithms just to decide what to look at,” he said, adding that he planned to offer 10 times the performance of competing products, at a lower cost.

“This market is at least as large as our original storage business, and a lot bigger over time.”

Hayes didn’t set out to shake up a once-staid storage world. In 2006 he was a software engineer at a company that did online karaoke talent searches, when it was purchased by Yahoo.

When Yahoo killed the product, he became a promoter of Yahoo’s

social networks, quitting in 2009.

His old bosses at the karaoke company, backed by venture capitalists, were looking at a way to use flash, and needed a good coder.

The first Pure Storage product came out in 2012. By mid-2013 he was thinking about how he would build his product for a world of falling memory prices, and rapidly rising amounts of data inside cloud computing systems.

Working with Dietzen and investors, he set up a venture inside Pure but away from the rest of the company, hiring a team of experienced people from places like Oracle, Microsoft Research and Facebook. Dietzen is hoping investors will now see where some formerly unexplained research and development money has gone.

From an original group of five people, the quiet project inside Pure has grown to 80, and Hayes sees a need for many more.

“I’ve talked to companies planning for hundreds of petabytes,” he said. “Even a body camera on a cop adds up data pretty quickly.”

JUNE ISSUE 126

UPFRONT / TECHNOLOGY

AI investment is smart But artificial intelligence unfolds in small steps. Words: Steve Lohr

W

hen IBM’s Watson computer triumphed over human champions in the quiz show Jeopardy! it was a stunning achievement that suggested limitless horizons for artificial intelligence.

Soon after, IBM’s leaders moved to convert Watson from a celebrated science project into a moneymaking business, starting with health care.

Yet the next few years after its game show win proved humbling for Watson. Today, IBM executives candidly admit that medicine proved far more difficult than they anticipated. Costs and frustration mounted on Watson’s early projects. They were scaled back, refocused and occasionally shelved.

IBM’s early struggles with Watson point to the sobering fact that commercialising new technology, however promising,

typically comes in short steps rather than giant leaps.

Despite IBM’s own challenges, Watson’s TV victory five years ago has helped fuel interest in AI from the public and the rest of the tech industry. Venture capital investors have poured money into AI startups, and large corporations like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple have been buying fledgling AI companies. That investment reached $8.5 billion last year, more than three-and-a-half times the level in 2010, according to Quid, a data analysis firm.

And software engineers with AI skills are treated like star athletes, prompting bidding wars for their services. “We’re definitely at a peak of excitement now,” said Jerry Kaplan, a computer scientist, entrepreneur and author, who was a co-founder of a long-forgotten AI startup in the 1980s. “Expectations are way ahead of reality.”

$8.5

Billions invested in AI in 2015

The term AI has long been a staple of science fiction – as machines that think for themselves and help humankind or as ungrateful creations that try to wipe us out. Or so the thinking at the movies goes.

The reality, however, is a little less dramatic. The automated voice on your smartphone that tries to answer your questions? That is a type of AI. So are features of Google’s search engine. The technology is also being applied to complex business problems like finding trends in cancer research.

The field of artificial intelligence goes back to the beginning of the computer age, and it has rolled through cycles 21 of optimism and disillusion ever since, encouraged by a few movie robots and one very successful game show contestant.

Predictions made in the ‘90s about how the new World Wide PORTFOLIO.

june issue 126

Portfolio.

ambition similar to IBM’s. “But that’s a 25-year project,” he said.

Enlitic is concentrating first on radiology. Medical images are nearly all in digital form, Howard notes, and the tireless scanning for tell-tale signs of abnormal tissue is a task for which deep-learning image recognition technology is well suited. Enlitic has tested its software against a database of 6,000 lung cancer diagnoses, both positive and negative, made by professional radiologists. In research, its algorithm was 50 per cent more accurate than human radiologists, Enlitic said.

“You have to take technology that works and apply it to a known problem,” Howard said.

“Innovation alone is a mistake.”

No company has made as big a bid to commercialise its AI technology as IBM. It set up Watson as its own business in 2014, and invested billions to accelerate the development and adoption of the technology, including buying several companies. The Watson unit now has 7,000 employees.

Jeremy Howard, founder and chief executive of Enlitic

The Watson technology has been totally revamped. In its Jeopardy! days, Watson was a room-size computer. Today, it is cloud software, delivered over the Internet from remote data centres.

The software has been carved up into dozens of separate AI components including a language classifier, text-to-speech translation and image recognition. IBM is trying to position Watson as the equivalent of an AI software platform others use to build applications. Nearly 80,000 developers have downloaded and tried out the software. IBM now has more than 500 industry partners, from big companies to startups, in industries including health care, financial services, retailing, consumer products and legal services.

The history of tech tells AI backers to hang in there. Silicon Valley veterans argue that people routinely overestimate what can be done with new technology in three years, yet underestimate what can be done in 10 years. We’re on the brink of a new era.

Photo: Jason Henry

Web would shake the foundations of the media, advertising and retailing industries did prove to be true, for example. But it happened a decade later.

Today’s AI, even optimists say, is early in that cycle. “I think future generations are going to look back on the AI revolution and compare its impact to the steam engine or electricity,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Initiative On The Digital Economy at Massachusetts Institute Of Technology’s Sloan School Of Management. “But, of course, it is going to take decades for this technology to really come to fruition.”

There are reasons for enthusiasm. Computers continue to get cheaper even as they get more powerful, making it easier to crunch vast amounts of data in an instant. Also, sensors, smartphones and other tech devices are all over the place, feeding more and more information into computers that are learning more and more about us.

Just in the last year or two, researchers have made rapid gains using a machine-learning technique called deep learning to improve the performance of software that recognises images, translates languages and understands speech. That work has been done at startups and big companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft, as well as at universities and private research centres like the Allen Institute For Artificial Intelligence.

“There’s been surprising progress in the problems of perception, seeing, hearing and language,” said Peter Lee, corporate vice president for Microsoft Research.

22 At Enlitic, a startup in San Francisco, Jeremy Howard, the founder and chief executive, believes that AI can transform the huge industry of health care, saving lives and money – an

upfront / technology

upfront

Remaking Lotus Selling a British icon to America. Words: Jamie Lincoln Kitman

L

otus Cars will sell fewer than 100 cars in the United States and Canada this year, a long way from the 2,711 the company, based in 24 Britain, sold at its peak in 2005.

But its chief executive, Jean-Marc Gales, appears unfazed.

“On cars, in 60 years the company never really made money,” Gales said, beginning Portfolio.

an interview in his office with a touch of hand-wringing amazement. It’s a shortcoming that he intends to change.

A former president of the French Peugeot and Citröen brands and onetime worldwide head of sales for MercedesBenz, Gales arrived in Hethel, Lotus’ longtime home, in May 2014. Dropped into the Lotus

compound – factory, executive offices and test track, all pitched among the farms and fields of rural Norfolk – Gales, a slender 53-year-old Luxembourger, is tasked with changing the underdog company’s business.

The big idea, he explained, is that the company should make money on car production, rather than relying on cyclical design

june /Lotus

issue 126

The Tesla Roadster, Elon Musk’s first electric car, built under contract by Lotus from 2008 to 2012, was a rare example of the Lotus company building cars profitably

54%

and engineering consultancies for profits. The Tesla Roadster, Elon Musk’s first electric car, built under contract by Lotus from 2008 to 2012, was, he said, a rare example of the company building cars profitably.

Now, Gales wants to return Lotus to its roots as a boutique maker of lightweight British sports cars. He sees his experience with major manufacturers as providing cost-saving insights on the process side of Lotus’ car-building business.

Upon arriving, Gales had every part of the company’s three models – Elise, Exige and Evora – laid out in a large, brightly lit room, where the executive scrutinised each one

with engineers to see if it could be made cheaper or lighter or both. The result, he said, has been significant weight loss – lightness being an important Lotus value – and a more than $1,500 reduction in manufacturing cost per car.

Gales says he also “brought into the company many large-company processes” – like using analytics, holding meetings, having regular follow-up – “basically, what you do when you’re in a large company.”

He added: “Lotus has a huge amount of potential. It always had.

What was lacking was the stability of planning to move ahead and the discipline to just see things through – to make sure that what

Increase in global car sales for 2015 compared to 2014

we plan, we also do it and don’t change it.”

Gales could have been making a veiled reference to the neverrealised plans of his predecessor, Dany Bahar. A former Red Bull and Ferrari marketer who assumed the top job at Lotus in 2010, Bahar made headlines quickly, announcing an ambitious, if unrealistic, road map for the struggling company that included five new upmarket models in four years, with an all-new engine family. Most of them would weigh close to 1,814 kilograms, or double the weight of an Elise. At the time, Lotus was owned by the Malaysian government through its state car company, Proton.

In the eyes of loyalists, Bahar had taken decades of Lotus history, rooted in the vaunted lightness of the nimble cars and their relative affordability, and set out to squash it.

Portfolio.

25

june issue 126

“Aside from reeking of hubris, Bahar’s plan would have killed the beloved Elise,” said Tony Quiroga, a senior editor at Car And Driver, whose enthusiasm was such that he once owned an example of what he termed “the feathery sports car that saved the brand”.

By the time Gales arrived, Lotus, now owned by a private equity firm, was in full retreat, troubled by withering sales, a shrunken workforce and a stagnant lineup.

“Any carmaker launching five cars at the same time is a lot, but for a small carmaker it’s just impossible,” Gales said. “And then they weren’t Lotuses. They were big, heavy cars, as far away from the Lotus DNA as you can get.”

Founded 67 years ago by the engineer and racecar driver Colin Chapman, Lotus is an unlikely survivor in the cutthroat automobile business and no stranger to hard times.

Serially undercapitalised, it built race cars before road cars 26 (its F1 racing team was sold in recent years) and while several of its models have done well enough to keep the company out of bankruptcy, financial challenges have long dogged Lotus.

Portfolio.

upfront / lotus

Above: JeanMark Gales, chief executive of Lotus

Today, Gales professes that with better controls Lotus can survive and profit by sticking to its traditional formula, embodied in the Elise, Exige and Evora.

“We have a niche – light sports cars that are a lot of fun to drive,” Gales said. “Why should we abandon it?”

So costs have been cut. More dealers have been signed up, as American deliveries of a new Evora model, the 400, with a supercharged Toyota Camry motor capable of 400-horsepower and more, began in February.

There are already 200 orders from the United States, and Gales says the first Evora droptop is expected next fall. A new Elise will come, too, he says, but not until 2018 or 2019. So the bigvolume comeback, if it happens, won’t be soon.

“In the US, Lotus faces a market largely unfamiliar with its brand or product, much like Fiat faced five years ago,” Karl Brauer, senior analyst at Kelley Blue Book, said. “That doesn’t mean it can’t succeed, but it will need both a product plan that caters to US buyers as well as a marketing plan that rises above the automotive cacophony already assaulting American drivers.”

George Peterson, president of AutoPacific, an automotive market research and consulting firm based in California, suspects Gales has his work cut out for him.

“It will be very difficult for Lotus to re-establish a solid position in the USA because of their historic stops-starts,” he said.

Elevated London living built on a reputation of excellence The Penthouse Collection, Prices on Application

Chelsea Creek Show Apartments and Marketing Suite 9 Park Street, Chelsea Creek, London SW6 2FS +44 (0)20 3411 8573 sales@chelseacreek.co.uk | www.chelseacreek.co.uk Proud to be a member of the Berkeley Group of companies

Computer generated image is indicative only.

upfront

Serious reservations Why hotel bookings are becoming more complicated.

Words: Amy Zipkin

T

he deal on the website of Hilton Hotels & Resorts seemed like a good one to Jeffrey Buszkiewicz: a 72-hour online sale after Thanksgiving showed a $129 room at a Hilton Garden Inn in New York City. Two subsequent nights cost more.

But there was a hitch. After he talked about it with his wife and was ready to book, the rate had increased by $40 a night when he logged on again the next day.

“I assumed if the sale was on for 72 hours, the rate would be good for 72 hours,” said Buszkiewicz, fiscal officer for the Indiana University School Of Education.

Making hotel reservations used to be straightforward. Guests booked a room and could generally cancel without penalty until the day of arrival.

Now, as hotel chains consolidate, last-minute booking apps proliferate, and shortterm rental sites like Airbnb and HomeAway grow, experts say the reservations landscape is undergoing an upheaval with new and higher fees and new restrictions on reservations that are driving new sources of revenue.

In January 2014, Marriott 28 International and Hilton began requiring cancellation the day before arrival, rather than 6pm the day of arrival. Guests forfeit the amount of the first night stay if they miss the deadline.

Portfolio.

“Hotel reservations have long been way too flexible,” Christopher K Anderson, a faculty member at the Cornell University School Of Hotel Administration, wrote in an e-mail. They have been slow to become more restrictive because of competition, he added.

Still, with the increasing presence of online travel agents like Expedia and Priceline, and the prevalence of day-of-stay deals delivered to mobile devices, hotel cancellations are becoming more commonplace.

“The traveller wants to be flexible, and needs to be flexible,” said Sam Shank, chief executive of Hotel Tonight, a mobile booking app started in 2011. In 2014, it began allowing users to book a room seven days before check-in.

Guests can book a stay of up to five nights.

Shank said his plans change frequently, and the hassle of travelling and calling before the cut-off time for a cancellation is just one more task to remember.

In mid-November, Hilton embarked on a pilot programme that imposes a $50 cancellation penalty anytime after a reservation is booked. The test is scheduled to run 60 days in 24 Hilton-managed hotels. Hilton Honours loyalty members are exempt.

Chris Silcock, an executive vice president at Hilton Worldwide, said the company was taking a

$2.47 Billion in fees and surcharges in US hotels for 2015

measure of cancellation rates. Still, no doubt that the fees are helping the hotel industry’s bottom line.

In a study released in August, Bjorn Hanson, a professor at the Tisch Center For Hospitality And Tourism at New York University, reported that a record level of fees and surcharges at hotels in the US alone was anticipated reaching $2.47 billion, up from $2.35 billion a year earlier.

june issue 126

The reservations landscape is undergoing an upheaval with higher fees and new restrictions that are driving new sources of revenue

“With occupancy high, hotels are looking for other ways to increase revenue,” Hanson said.

Guests may be more accustomed to non-refundable fees than they used to be because Airbnb charges them.

It currently charges a guest service fee of six to 12 per cent of the total booking. The website says the fee covers the cost of running the company.

HomeAway said it expects to add a “traveller’s fee” averaging about six per cent of the cost of a booking in 2016. Some guests are beginning to push back.

Andrew Mitchell, the owner of a tutoring service in Los Angeles, is one. In trying to book a holiday rental on Airbnb, the room rental rates appeared to be competitive to hotels, but after selecting one in his price range,

Sam Shank, chief executive of booking app Hotel Tonight

“I was hit with fees at the end”, he said.

When the host did not respond to his request to book a reservation, he said Airbnb told him there would be a delay in receiving a refund after his credit card was charged.

Mitchell decided to book a hotel room instead.

“I had originally liked Airbnb because it was a transparent, quick and easy way to find local places to stay,” he wrote in an e-mail. “It is now not transparent, and it’s definitely not quick or easy.”

Airbnb may be trying to change that perception, at least among business travellers. In midNovember it initiated a separate hosting category designated the Business Travel Ready Badge.

These accommodations will be an entire home or apartment and have Wi-Fi, a laptop-friendly workspace, 24-hour check-in and other business amenities.

Jon Liebtag, a business development lead at Airbnb, said he hoped the change would lead to more consistent booking for hosts throughout the year. Business travellers generally stay during the week, while leisure travellers stay on weekends.

While it may seem like the new cancellation penalties are making hotels less accommodating to 29 guests, they are really protecting themselves against no-shows, according to Henry Harteveldt, founder of Atmosphere Research Group. “You don’t want to tell a guest you are sold out,” he said.

Portfolio.

upfront

After 50 years in a taxi…

A long, winding trip for one driver, and his city.

Words: Elisabetta Povoledo

F

rom his front-seat perch, Alberto Tomassi, a Roman taxi driver for 50 years, has been both eavesdropper and confessor.

He has played impromptu guide, thwarted muggings and rushed countless clients to the emergency room.

He has consoled abandoned wives with a dose of homespun wisdom. “I told one woman whose husband had left her for someone much younger: ‘As we say in Rome, when one pope dies, you make another.’”

Expertly navigating Rome’s narrow, potholed streets – many conceived centuries before the internal combustion engine – he has developed the unflappable calm of a Zen monk.

“If you can get through the first 15 years without getting really

30

Portfolio.

angry, you can do it forever,” Tomassi said. “I just take things as they come.”

Only a handful of taxi drivers have managed to navigate Rome’s notorious traffic – a mix of bad roads and drivers’ aversion to rules that is a national characteristic – for five decades.

“It’s a tough job – alternating night and day shifts, dealing with the smog, the traffic, the stress, the unruly drivers,” said Loreno Bittarelli, president of Tomassi’s radio taxi cooperative. “After 50 years you don’t get a great pension,” Bittarelli said. “You can risk dying of hunger if you retire early.”

In Italy, taxi drivers contribute as self-employed workers to the national social security system, which allocates pensions based on those contributions. Bittarelli was

Tomassi, who has been a taxi driver in Rome for 50 years, with his eighth cab, in front of the Colosseum

also upset that Roman taxi drivers are often maligned as a privileged lobby that fights things like the liberalisation of licences.

“I don’t know how many public services work as well as we do,” he said. “Alberto sacrificed a lot to keep working, it’s humiliating that anyone would consider his work as privileged.”

For his part, Tomassi was disappointed that his achievement wasn’t officially recognised this year – no party, no gold watch, no tribute – so he decided to place a round silver sticker emblazoned with ‘50 years of taxi’ on the rear window of his cab.

Tomassi began driving on February 5, 1966, after he bought a taxi licence for five million Italian lire. “It was an awful lot of money,” he said, about the same as the cost to buy a midsize apartment.

june issue 126

Rome in the mid-1960s was experiencing a giddy moment.

Amid the long postwar economic boom, the capital was a crossroad of starlets and celebrity chasers, cardinals and cafe society, decaying aristocracy and growing entrepreneurship.

Then as now, celebrities were fodder for the gossip-hungry public, and paparazzi buzzed the streets on scooters scouting nightclubs – like Milleluci and the Grotte del Piccione, long since closed – for their prey. “Those were the days before the selfies,” Tomassi said.

Unfolding a plastic bag, he gingerly lifted a faded newspaper clipping mounted in a simple frame: a memento from those long-gone days when Rome was known as Hollywood on the Tiber. A photo showed Tomassi as he squired actors Ursula Andress and Jean-Paul

Belmondo around Rome. “I had my full head of hair,” he said, laughing and looking skyward. He recalled that in that summer of 1967 (“or thereabouts”) the two actors “were very much in love”.

His fares included neorealist director Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves) and actors Ugo Tognazzi (La Cage Aux Folles) and Alberto Sordi (An American In Rome).

Director Federico Fellini had a regular route, between his home near the Piazza del Popolo and the Cafe de Paris in Via Veneto. Tomassi knew the private address of actress Sophia Loren, and actor Marcello Mastroianni once invited him for a coffee, he said.

Back then, he could wheel his Fiat 600 Multipla – the first of eight taxis – around the Arch Of Constantine next to the Colosseum, drive straight across Tiber Island, around Piazza Navona or drive into St Peter’s Square, areas that have since been made pedestrianonly zones. “It was a time when people laughed, living the bella vita,” he recalled fondly. “They were beautiful years.”

When Tomassi began driving, the city extended only a few tendrils toward the ring road that encircles it. Today, new developments spill into the surrounding countryside.

Despite not using a GPS device, he said he could find any address in the city, from the historic centre – a warren of one-way streets one must navigate to get near the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain or the Spanish

“He has a few parties interested in buying his licence, which these days is worth about $150,000”

Steps – to the outlying areas. “I can bet you a coffee I’ll know where any street is,” he said.

He also said he thought traffic in Rome had actually improved. Years ago, he said, there were fewer roads, so drivers stuck to known routes, clogging main arteries. For example, there was no highway linking the city to Fiumicino Airport, which is on the coast between Fregene and Ostia, two popular beach spots.

On Sundays, when Roman families would pack lunch and head to the beach, those hoping to catch a plane were out of luck. “Just one long traffic jam,” he recalled.

Tomassi, who turns 75 in September, has decided it is time to retire. He has a few parties interested in buying his licence, which is worth about 130,000 euros (about $150,000) these days.

“You don’t get rich doing this job, but it’s honest work,” he said.

“You can raise a family, put your kids through school.” His eldest daughter is a traffic police officer in Rome. “My colleagues joke that I can do what I want because I’ll never be fined,” he said. “Instead I go out of my way not to break laws.”

He admits to one early infraction. He got fined for forgetting to wear the yellow smock and cap that Rome taxi drivers once had to wear. For now, he’s just enjoying his last fares, and proudly 31 acknowledges his silver sticker to clients who ask.

“Some say, ‘Poor you, 50 years in Rome traffic,’” he said. “Others seem pleased, because it means that they can put up with it, too.”

Portfolio.

upfront

Sticky ideas From clever repairs to social media hit.

Words: Janet Morrissey

I

t can fix a broken statue, repair a frayed iPhone cable, add a rubbery grip to a kitchen knife, make those Bose earbuds fit better, repair a leaky boat – and even create a prosthetic leg for a chicken. So, what is this product? It is Sugru, and it is being heralded as the product you never knew you needed – until you did.

Sugru is a moldable glue. It looks like Play-Doh, can be shaped around any object, sticks to almost any material, is waterproof, is heat 32 resistant and dries to a silicone rubbery finish in 24 hours. Its ability to bond to virtually any surface – wood, glass, metals and ceramics among others – and its moldable nature make it unusual Portfolio.

in the world of adhesives, sealants and glues.

“I wanted to design something that was so easy and so fun to use that more people would consider fixing things again,” said Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh, the Irish entrepreneur behind Sugru. Even the name is taken from the Irish word “sugradh”, which means “play”.

Bridget Grunst, a buyer for Target Corp stores, admits she was sceptical before meeting Sugru’s team in the fall of 2014. After all, Target already carried more than 40 glue products in its home improvement section alone.

“Did I roll my eyes? Yes,” she said, laughing. “I mean, glue is not the most innovative category

out there.” But all of that changed when Grunst met the Sugru team and watched in amazement at the myriad ways, both practical and creative, that the glue could be used. The iPhone charger repair was the clincher.

“I have frayed cords at home, and it’s a unique way to fix it versus having to go buy another charger for $50,” Grunst said. Sugru’s rubbery flexible finish allowed it to repair charger cords, which super glues, with their rock-hard finishes, cannot do, she said.

Grunst also liked Sugru’s moldable nature, with its ability to fill gaps, replace broken appliance parts or rebuild a broken handle on a kitchen faucet. Other glues, which are often liquids and

june issue 126

sprays, cannot, she said. That Ni Dhulchaointigh would develop a product like Sugru would not have been easy to predict.

Born in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1979, Ni Dhulchaointigh grew up on a farm, where her father, John, worked as a farmer, and her mother, Eilis, was a teacher. As a youngster, she had an artistic bent, making paintings and sculptures.

She received a degree in fine art from the National College Of Art And Design in Dublin in 2001 and a master’s degree in product design from the Royal College Of Art in London in 2004.

It was at college where she first started experimenting with clay, silicone sealants and other materials for sculpting. She would bring them home and soon started using them around the house – wrapping the putty around knife handles to get a better grip, using it to fix a leaky kitchen sink stopper, adding it as rubber “feet” to the bottom of a laptop and repairing a mug handle. Her boyfriend, James Carrigan, who is now her husband, noticed her clever repairs and suggested she try to market it.

When she showcased the prototype at a student product design exhibition in 2004, the response was overwhelming, she said. “The top two questions were: ‘How much is it?’ and ‘Where can I get it?’” she said. She knew she had a potential hit.

With a $50,000 grant from Nesta, a British research firm, in 2005, and a $500,000 equity investment from Lacomp, a venture fund, in 2006, she dove in. Ni Dhulchaointigh brought in a business partner, Roger Ashby, and hired two former Dow Corning scientists as consultants to help build the prototype. It took five years, 5,000 experiments and 8,000 lab hours to perfect and patent the formula.

At this point, the recession had hit and financing was almost nonexistent to market the product to retailers. “We pitched to almost 100 investors” without luck, she said. A private investor finally provided $150,000, far short of what was needed.

So, in 2009, she took the social media route, sending samples to dozens of technology bloggers, in the belief that if they saw its potential role in repairing information technology equipment, they’d promote it. The strategy worked. “It went viral,” Ni Dhulchaointigh said. When the company introduced its website in December 2009, all 1,000 packages, which took two months to make by hand, sold out within six hours. An additional 2,000 were sold on back order. “It was incredible; it changed everything.”

Suddenly, “investors were reading about us all over the Internet, and they started coming to us asking how they could help”, she said.

Sales topped $5.5 million in 2015, up from $3.4 million in 2014 and $250,000 in its first year in 2010. Ni Dhulchaointigh

It took five years, 5,000 experiments and 8,000 lab hours to perfect and patent the formula

expects sales to exceed $10 million this year and $60 million by 2020.

It is now sold online to more than 160 countries and through 19 brick-and-mortar retailers in 6,050 stores in four countries.

Still, Sugru has its limitations: Its shelf life is 13 months, and once a packet is opened, it must be used within 24 hours. It cannot compete with products that promote their sticking power, where ads show a man dangling in a helmet glued to a steel beam. Sugru holds up to about 1.8 kilogrammes.

And then there’s the chicken.

When a fox attacked a pet hen at a family’s home in Cork, Ireland, the hen lost a leg. So, the owner, a retired engineer, built a fiberglass prosthetic leg and used Sugru to add chicken feet to the prosthetic.

The chicken now walks on two feet.

33

Portfolio.

features

portfolio.

Young, rich and

34

portfolio.

Chinese Teens go west with diamond watches and Lamborghinis

Andy Guo, centre, and his twin brother, Anky Guo, with the red Lamborghini Huracán they co-own

Dan Levin Ruth Fremson

A

ndy Guo, an 18-year-old Chinese immigrant, loves driving his red Lamborghini Huracán. He does not love having to share the car with his twin brother, Anky.

“There’s a lot of conflict,” Andy said, as a crowd of admirers gazed at the vehicle and its vanity licence plate, CTGRY 5, short for the most catastrophic type of hurricane.

The nearly $281,000 car was a gift last year from their father, who travels back and forth between Vancouver and China’s northern Shanxi province and made his fortune in coal, said Andy, an economics major at the University Of British Columbia.

The car is more fashion than function. “I have a backpack, textbooks and laundry, but I can’t fit everything inside,” he lamented. And that is not the worst of it. “A cop once pulled me over just to look at the car,” he said.

China’s rapid economic rise has turned peasants into billionaires. Many wealthy Chinese are increasingly eager to stow their families – and their riches – in the West, where rule of law, clean air and good schools offer peace of mind, especially for those looking to escape scrutiny from the Communist Party and an anti-corruption campaign that has sent hundreds of the rich and powerful to jail.

With its relatively weak currency and welcoming immigration policies, Canada has become a top destination for China’s one-percenters. According to government figures, from 2005 to 2012, at least 37,000 Chinese millionaires took advantage of a now-defunct immigrant investor programme to become permanent residents of British Columbia, the province that 35 includes Vancouver. The metropolitan area of 2.3 million is home to increasing numbers of ethnic Chinese residents, who made up more than 18 per cent of the population in 2011, up from less than seven per cent in 1981, according to government figures. portfolio.

young, rich and chinese

Many residents say the flood of Chinese capital has caused an affordable-housing crisis. Vancouver is the most expensive city in Canada to buy a home, according to a 2016 survey by the consulting firm Demographia. The average price of a detached house in greater Vancouver more than doubled from 2005 to 2015, to about $1.2 million, according to the Real Estate Board Of Greater Vancouver.

Residents angry about the rise of rich foreign real estate buyers and absentee owners, particularly from China, have begun protests on social media, including a #DontHave1Million Twitter campaign. The provincial government agreed this year to begin tracking foreign ownership of real estate in response to demands from local politicians. The anger has had little effect on the gilded lives of Vancouver’s wealthy Chinese.

Indeed, to the newcomers for whom money is no object, the next purchase after a house is usually a car, and then a few more.

A large number of luxury car dealerships here employ Chinese staff, a testament to the spending power of the city’s newest residents. In 2015, there were 2,500 cars worth more than $150,000 registered in metropolitan Vancouver, up from 1,300 in 2009, according to the Insurance Corp of British Columbia.

Many of Vancouver’s young supercar owners are known as fuerdai, a Mandarin expression, akin to trust-fund kids, that means “rich second generation”.

In China, where the superrich are widely criticised as being corrupt and materialistic, the term provokes a mix of scorn and envy. The fuerdai have brought their passion for extravagance to Vancouver. White Lamborghinis are popular among young Chinese women; the men often turn in their leased supercars after a few months for a newer, cooler status symbol.

36 Hundreds of young Chinese immigrants, along with a handful of Canadian-born Chinese, have started supercar clubs whose members come together to drive, modify and photograph their flashy vehicles, providing alluring eye candy for their followers on social media. portfolio.

A teenage Chinese girl sits in a car while attending a reception at a Lamborghini dealership

T

he Vancouver Dynamic Auto Club has 440 members, 90 per cent of whom are from China, said the group’s 27-year-old founder, David Dai. To join, a member must have a car that costs more than $77,000.

“They don’t work,” Dai said of Vancouver’s fuerdai.

“They just spend their parents’ money.”

Occasionally, the need for speed hits a roadblock. In 2011, the police impounded a squadron of 13 Lamborghinis, Maseratis and other luxury cars, worth $2 million, for racing on a metropolitan Vancouver highway at over 200kph. The drivers were members of a Chinese supercar club, and none were older than 21, according to news reports at the time.

The police impounded Lamborghinis, Maseratis and other luxury cars, worth $2 million, for racing at over 200kph.

Drivers were members of a Chinese supercar club and none were older than 21 On a recent evening, an overwhelmingly Chinese crowd of young adults had gathered at an invitationonly Rolls-Royce event to see a new black-and-red Dawn convertible, base price $402,000. It is the only such car in North America.

Among the curious was Jin Qiao, 20, a babyfaced art student who moved to Vancouver from Beijing six years ago with his mother. During the week, Jin drives one of two Mercedes-Benz SUVs, which he said were better suited for the rigors of daily life.

But his most prized possession is a $600,000 Lamborghini Aventador Roadster Galaxy, its exterior custom wrapped to resemble outer space. Jin, a lanky design major who favours Fendi clothing and

gold sneakers, extolled the virtues of exotic cars and was quick to dismiss those who criticised supercar aficionados as ostentatious.

“There are so many rich people in Vancouver, so what’s the point of showing off?” he said.

Asked what his parents did for a living, Jin said his father was a successful businessman back in China but declined to provide details. “I can’t say,” he stammered with evident discomfort.

Because of high import and luxury taxes in China, supercars are often 50 per cent cheaper in Canada.

And in Canada, Chinese immigrants said, people are far less likely to question how they obtained their wealth.

“In Vancouver, there are lots of kids of corrupt Chinese officials,” said Shi Yi, 27, the owner of Luxury Motor, a car dealership that caters to affluent Chinese. “Here, they can flaunt their money.”

Some Chinese immigrants think a supercar is a poor investment, because its value decreases over time. “Better to spend half a million dollars on two expensive watches or some diamonds,” said Diana Wang, 23, a University Of British Columbia graduate student who said she owned more than 30 Chanel bags and a $200,000 diamond-encrusted Richard Mille watch.

Wang, a star on the online reality show Ultra Rich Asian Girls Of Vancouver, normally drives her parents’ Ferrari or Mercedes-Maybach when she visits them in Shanghai. But in Canada, her parents gave her a strict car budget of $115,000, so she drives the less-flashy 37 Audi RS5.

“I could be in danger if people saw me in a supercar,” she said, her Breguet watch, worth more than a BMW, glinting in the sunlight as she drove the Audi through town. portfolio.

cover story

The end of The AmericAn dAydreAm 38

Charles Homans portfolio.

Middle-class aspirations have shaped the country for decades. What happens when Americans stop believing in them?

39

PORTFOLIO.

middle-class america

O

n April 12 last year, Hillary Clinton formally announced her run for the presidency by posting a two-minute video on YouTube. For the first minute and a half, Clinton was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the video showed a montage of a dozen or so Clinton supporters: a middle-aged white woman tending to her garden; two Hispanic brothers starting a business; a pregnant young black woman and her husband unpacking boxes in a sun-dappled suburban living room; a burly, bullet-headed white man surveying an American flag draped warehouse.

It was a carefully constructed portrait of the American middle class, or the parts of it that tend to vote Democratic – like the patchwork of Carhartt and Ann Taylor that Barack Obama gathered around himself for a speech in Cincinnati early in the 2012 campaign, when he proclaimed himself a “warrior for the middle class”. American politicians genuflect towards the middle class so reflexively that failing to do so in a speech or a statement about the economy seems almost heretical – which it turned out was the most remarkable thing about Clinton’s video.

When the candidate materialised, she instead said this: “Everyday Americans need a champion – and I want to be that champion.” Her omission of “middle class” was intentional. Amy Chozick of The New York Times wrote that the campaign planned to “shy away from the characterisation ‘middle class’ – because, her advisers say, the term no longer connotes a stable life – and instead use the term ‘everyday Americans’. ” Joel Benenson, Clinton’s chief strategist and Obama’s lead pollster, has thought a great deal about issues of class. In 2011, he embarked on an extensive project in which researchers conducted repeated interviews with about 100 middle-income, middle-aged swing voters in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio; Denver; and Orlando, Florida “It’s been valuable,” he told me recently, “because it’s important to know what kind of conventional assumptions about the middle class hold up and which don’t. There’s no question that there was a massive recalibration after the financial crash. People felt very strongly that the foundations – what they had believed they would achieve by working hard, doing things right – were not the same as they had been before.” Publicopinion surveys, too, show that something has shifted, sharply, in the American self-definition.

Last spring, a Gallup poll found that the percentage of respondents who identified as middle

40

portfolio.

class or upper middle class dropped 12 per cent since the 2008 financial crisis; nearly half of those polled identified as either working or lower class.

But Clinton’s use of “everyday Americans” proved to be short-lived, perhaps because of its undeniably leaden ring. Has anyone but Sly Stone ever self-identified as “everyday”? By September, Clinton had dropped the phrase entirely. Campaign officials conceded that it was confusing and, maybe, a bit too close to Walmart’s “Everyday Low Prices”.

The whole episode revealed a fundamental tension underlying this year’s anomalous presidential contest. America’s self-image as a middle-class nation is so deeply ingrained in the country’s politics that we don’t often stop to think what, precisely, that means: whether it defines a concrete socioeconomic identity – a country where most people are neither very rich nor very poor – or an aspiration, the notion that if you “work hard and play by the rules”, as Clinton put it the first time she ran for president, you’re entitled to at least a modest prosperity. “Everyday Americans” was an attempt to acknowledge that the gap between these two ideas has widened to the point that ignoring it seems out of touch. Yet in its reversal, the campaign inadvertently revealed just how illequipped American politics is for a post-middleclass nation – how deeply the way the country speaks of itself is tied up with these aspirations, even as more and more of its citizens come to see them as out of reach.

During Donald Trump’s ascent in the polls last autumn, the most confounding question in politics was who, exactly, his supporters were. A couple of weeks before the New Hampshire primary in February, Byron York, a journalist well sourced among Republican operatives, crisscrossed the state asking party grandees: “Do you know anyone who supports Donald Trump?” “In more cases than not,” he wrote in The Washington Examiner, “actually, in nearly all the cases, the answer was no.”

As the first election results and exit polls came in, Trump’s voters seemed to be mostly highschool-educated white men, mostly making less than $50,000 a year. Perhaps more surprising, this description also fits, with some tailoring, the voters who have propelled the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. In mostly white New Hampshire, Sanders beat Clinton among voters making less than $50,000 a year by a staggering 33 percentage points – twice as big as his margin with voters who made more than that – and by 36 percentage points among voters without college degrees.

In Michigan, whose suburban voters are one of

the most-watched barometers in American politics, the margins were narrower but still notable: Sanders won white voters without a college degree by 15 percentage points, and voters making less than $50,000 by three percentage points.

These insurgent candidates are capturing one of the two demographic groups that converged in the great middle-class experiment that began seven decades ago. When people spoke of the middle class in the years immediately after the Second World War, they were typically talking about the group identified by the sociologist C Wright Mills in his 1951 book, White Collar: the usually collegeeducated, deskbound employees of a newly technocratic, corporate economy. It was only a few years later that the definition was extended to include skilled blue-collar workers, who were now earning solid incomes on account of a booming post-war industrial economy and of unions that made sure their members got an equitable piece of it.

The confluence of these two groups – a vision of insurance salesmen and machine operators, mowing the lawns of adjoining split-level ranches and talking about Sunday’s game – felt extraordinary even in its own time, seemingly incontrovertible proof that American capitalism worked. “The fact is that America’s booming new middle-income class consists of groups hitherto identified as proletarians,” Fortune reported in 1954. Instead of overthrowing the bourgeoisie, the proletariat had joined it.

The new middle-class utopia did, of course, exclude most non-white Americans. Although

The aspirational idea of the middle class spoke to the notion that even if Americans were in various stages of prosperity, they were all heading in the same direction

average incomes for non-whites increased at about the same rate as incomes for whites in the postwar years, in 1959 the black poverty rate was still 56 per cent, and blacks on average earned 53 per cent what whites did. What could be said for the mid-century middle class, though, is that it generally worked astonishingly well for those who were lucky enough to be part of it – particularly for bluecollar workers. Probably no one in American history has achieved prosperity with the velocity of the men who grew up destitute in the Depression and by their ’30s, had factory jobs that paid (in 2016 dollars) upward of $50,000 a year.

The white- and blue-collar middle classes each tended to vote Democratic, which made sense: The new middle class’ good fortune was the combined product of the New Deal, post-war Keynesian economic policy, the GI Bill, organised labour and government-backed mortgages.

But in retrospect, the Democrats’ hold on the white middle class was balanced precariously on the racial status quo – which, by the mid-1960s, was breaking apart. George Wallace, the segregationist Democratic governor of Alabama who ran for president in 1964 in protest of Lyndon B Johnson’s turn toward civil rights, performed well not just in the South but also in white blue-collar enclaves in the few Northern states where he was on the primary ballot. When he ran again as an independent in 1968, the members of the United Auto Workers Union local at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, voted to endorse him.

Share of US income held by the middle class has plunged

1970

2015 29% 49%

Upper class Middle class 62%

Lower class

41

43% 10%

9%

Percentage of US aggregate household income portfolio.

The wealth gap widens $650,100 Upper class $323,400 $98,100 Middle class $95,900 $9,500 Lower class

2013

B

$11,500 1983

y 1984, the extent of the damage to the Democrats’ post-war coalition had become clear. That spring, Ronald Reagan’s campaign aired its ‘Morning In America’ ad, a Vaseline-lensed montage of overwhelmingly white suburban prosperity. Walter Mondale – the son of a small-town Minnesota minister whose politics radiated an austere, Scandinavian morality – spent the last days of his campaign unfurling increasingly dire pictures of urban and rural poverty and beseeching people to vote for an “America of fairness”. Speaking bitterly of Reagan’s commercial, he told a crowd at a church in Cleveland: “It’s all picket fences and puppy dogs. No one’s hurting. No one’s alone.

No one’s hungry. No one’s unemployed. No one gets old. Everybody’s happy.” But Americans liked the picket fences and puppy dogs. Reagan swept every state in the country save Minnesota and the District Of Columbia.

Not long afterward, Stanley Greenberg, a 40-year-old Yale political scientist who moonlighted as a political pollster, was contacted by a group of Democratic Party and union officials in Michigan. They asked him to help explain what had happened that November in Macomb County outside Detroit. In 1960, Macomb voted for John F Kennedy by a larger margin than any suburban county in the country. In 1984, it voted for Reagan by a margin of 33 percentage points. “The sense was that if we could figure out what happened in Macomb County, Democrats would go a long way toward righting the ship,” Rick Wiener, 42 the chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party at the time, told me recently.

In one sense, what had happened was obvious. The post-war suburbs in general had been a racial fortress, their homogeneity enforced by a web of government policies and unofportfolio.

ficial restrictions making it difficult for nonwhites to own property in them, and few more so than Detroit’s. The white ex-Democrats whom Greenberg’s team interviewed, he later wrote, “expressed a profound distaste for black Americans, a sentiment that pervaded almost everything they thought about government and politics. Blacks constituted the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that had gone wrong in their lives; not being black was what constituted being middle class”.

Still, Greenberg noted, Macomb voters had not defected en masse from the Democratic Party until after years of worsening economic circumstances – and until they perceived the Democrats as not only having taken up the banner of the urban poor and non-whites but also having abandoned the white middle class. “These voters wondered why they weren’t the central drama of the Democratic Party,” Greenberg wrote. Greenberg suggested that Democrats offer a kind of grand bargain to the white middle-class voters he called “Reagan Democrats”: Democrats reinstated the middle class as the centre of the party’s economic policy if voters accepted an expanded definition of who was included in the middle class.

Among the Democrats who took Greenberg’s advice was Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, who used the Macomb study as the playbook for his 1992 presidential campaign, which he built around the theme of “the forgotten middle class”. Speaking to voters in Macomb County in March 1992, he offered a near-verbatim recitation of Greenberg’s proposal: “The one thing that it’s going to take to bring this country together is somebody’s got to come back to the so-called Reagan Democratic area and say: ‘Look, I’ll give you your values back. I’ll restore the economic leadership, I’ll help you build the middle class back.’ But you’ve got to say, ‘OK, let’s do it with everybody in this country.’ ” You can see, in Clinton’s 1992 campaign, the architecture of how many Americans talk about the middle class today – not just the more diverse picture of American prosperity that politicians of both parties must at least pay lip service to, but also a more expansive economic definition of what the middle class is. In the first year of his presidency, Clinton created a new top income-tax bracket, starting at $250,000 (nearly $420,000 in today’s dollars). This is as close as we have to a concrete upper bound for what counts, in political discourse, as the middle class; the “middle class” tax policies of Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders all apply to earners with incomes of $250,000 or less.

middle-class america

Bill Clinton was acknowledging, presciently, a skewing of the American economy that has only worsened since his presidency, the steady pulling away of the superrich from everyone else – the division between the 99 per cent and the one per cent. But the more politically meaningful divergence may be one happening further down the economic spectrum. Richard V Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, argues that the most significant dividing line in recent American experience isn’t between the 99 per cent and the one per cent, but between the 80 per cent and the 20 per cent – a group that includes not just the very rich but also people most Americans would identify as upper middle class. This is where you draw the line if you’re interested not in absolute wealth but in the trajectory of wealth — not whether you have a yacht docked in St Bart’s, but whether you’re doing better than you were five years ago.

If the phrase “everyday Americans” tried to preserve a sense of common identity while acknowledging the fragmented economic realities of the 21st-century middle class, it also demonstrated just how difficult that is to do.

Consider the different experiences of two groups that sit within what the Democrats’ tax policies, at least, define as the middle class: The top 20 per cent saw its average real household income rise to $185,000 in 2013 from about $109,000 a year in 1967. The middle 40 per cent saw their

The most significant dividing line isn’t between the 99 per cent and the one per cent, but between the 80 per cent and the 20 per cent direction

real incomes rise, too, but to only $68,000 from $52,000 – the equivalent of a $348-a-year raise.

The top 20 per cent is also more likely than the middle 40 per cent to believe that hard work gets you ahead in life.

Fissures have also deepened between the two halves of the post-war middle class: between college educated, mostly white-collar workers and high school-educated, mostly blue-collar workers. According to a Brookings study released last year, men and women with bachelor’s degrees earned a median of seven per cent and 16 per cent more in 2013 than they did in 1990. Women who either didn’t attend college or attended but didn’t graduate made just three per cent more – up to a meagre $29,500 – and those men made 13 per cent less: a median of $40,700 a year, down from $47,100 a year.

The aspirational idea of the middle class spoke to the notion that even if Americans were in various stages of prosperity, they were all understood to be heading in the same general direction. But what happens when that’s no longer true?

On one end of the “middle class” spectrum is a dream inexorably receding from view; on the other is a pair of socioeconomic blinders obscuring the harsher economic realities of those further down the scale. “The upper middle class are surprised by the rise of Trump,” Reeves told me. “The actual middle class are surprised we’re surprised.”

The US middle class lags behind much of the world The median American’s wealth is less than one-quarter of the median Australian

$200,000

$150,000

$100,000

$50,000

USa

greece

germany

Sweden

aUSTria

Taiwan

Spain

ireland

new zealand

norway

finland

neTherlandS

canada

SwiTzerland

Singapore

japan

UniTed kingdom

france

iTaly

belgiUm

aUSTralia

43

portfolio.

portfolio.

of Nathan Tinkler

The rise and fall

44

nathan tinkler

The prickly Australian tycoon’s fortunes were closely tied to the massive boom – and now bust – in coal and commoditiess Keith Bradsher

V

ast mining companies have been battered by the global slowdown, especially in China, and have written off billions from the value of their assets. In recent weeks mining shares have recovered a little, but BHP Billiton is still down from A$47 in 2011 to A$17 today and Anglo American has tumbled from $49 a share to just $8.10 over the same period.

And there have also been casualties among mining entrepreneurs – like Nathan Tinkler, who made a vast fortune from bold plays on two coal projects he kickstarted with just A $1 million ($722,000) of his own money.

It was a fortune built entirely on speculation on the value of coal in the ground, and Tinkler squandered much of it on ill-fated million debt on a Dassault Falcon private jet that a forays into racehorses, sports teams former employee once said he “loved like a child”. and day trading, as well as the obliga- That bill was among a string of debts, which range tory extravagances of the super-rich, from a $233,000 credit card bill to $6.85 million such as private jets and luxury homes said to be owed to Harvey, $8.3 million to the taxman – and $237 million to global financiers. in three countries.

Tinkler has swapped his luxury Singapore resiHis prickly reputation among associates and jour nalists, how- dence for a return to the Brisbane mansion owned ever, robbed him of any working- by his ex-wife Rebecca, from whom he has borclass-hero status he might other- rowed $36,000. His marriage was still intact when wise have enjoyed. He was dubbed he paid $3.7 million for the mansion in 2007, which “the boganaire” – bogan being the he acquired in his wife’s name. He is now living pejorative Australian ter m for a behind a locked gate and a sign warning of 24-hour blue-collar character. More recent- security surveillance.

Tinkler’s first lucky play came in 2006 when he ly, Tinkler’s billionaire horseracing buddy, Gerry Harvey, said Tinkler borrowed against everything he owned – includwas invariably loathed by those who ing the couple’s more modest former abode – to met him because he behaved like an pull together a $722,000 million deposit to buy the Middlemount coal deposit in central Queensland. “a*******”.

Tinkler, who ran a mining recruitment agency, Tinkler now claims to have just A$2,000 ( $1,444) to his name, and had a less-than-promising record with money. He was recently bankrupted over a A$2.8 had previously lost the family home over missed

45

portfolio.

nathan tinkler

mortgage payments, and a council he owed $1,010 had once Phil Stubbins and Nathan obtained a seizure order for Tinkler’s clothes dryer and TV. Tinkler of the But he sealed the Middlemount deal by bringing in investors, Jets talk during including Asia’s Noble Group, and just a year later Tinkler sold an A-League his Middlemount stake for $198 million to Macarthur Coal, with match the payment made largely in shares.

Macarthur was run by self-described “humble coal miner” Ken Talbot, an earthy Brisbane character who became Tinkler’s mentor. In May 2008, Talbot played a guiding role in the timing of Tinkler’s sale of his Macarthur stake to Indian steelmaker Arcelor Mittal. That deal netted Tinkler $319 million – an unimaginable return on his $722,000 million punt two years earlier. his payments to a former Queensland government Tinkler wasted no time in plunging minister, Gordon Nuttall, who was subsequently his money into planes, mansions, cars jailed. But Talbot, who privately told an associate and a racehorse enterprise, Patinack he expected to go to jail, died in a plane crash in Farms, on which he spent an estimated Congo in 2010, two months before he was due to $108 million in its first year. Then came face trial. the global financial crisis and Tinkler’s Tinkler publicly spoke of his sadness after multimillion-dollar gambles on mining Talbot’s death, calling him “a great Australian”. stocks were wiped out. By the time of Ever the late payer, though, Tinkler did not repay his second big coal venture – the pur- the $10.8 million loan until he was threatened with chase of the Maules Creek coal depos- legal action by Talbot’s estate.

Buoyed by rising coal prices, Tinkler’s new vehiit in New South Wales for $346 million from Rio Tinto in 2009 – he could cle for the Maules Creek deposit, Aston Resources, muster only $6.5 million of a $17.3 floated with a valuation of $870 million, later mergmillion deposit. ing to form the $3.6 billion Whitehaven Coal.

In 2011, aged just 35, Tinkler was named Talbot rode to the rescue, lending him $15 million that would put him Australia’s youngest billionaire. He bought the 46 on track to a billion-dollar fortune. Newcastle Jets A-League football club and the But before he could join Talbot on Newcastle Knights rugby league team. But just the rich list, Tinkler lost his mentor in two years later, with the coal industry on the extraordinary circumstances. Talbot slide and Maules Creek beset by delays, the cashhad been committed to stand trial starved, highly leveraged coal baron had blown his over a corruption scandal involving paper fortune. portfolio.

nathan tinkler

In the years since, the trappings of wealth have gradually dropped away in forced sales: the teams, the racehorses, the jets, the helicopter, Patinack Farm. The inevitable unwinding of a once-in-alifetime boom, along with Tinkler’s habit of testing his debtors’ patience, made his journey to bankruptcy seem like a slow-motion car crash. He told the Australian newspaper: “The [anti-coal] activists are winning: I’m just one more coal miner out of work.”

His bankruptcy prevents him from acting as a company director with his latest venture, Australian Pacific Coal, another highly leveraged bet on coal prices for which he raised a $30 million deposit in January and was paid $700,000 a year as managing director.

The outlook for what was often referred to last decade in the Australian business press as “black gold”, in the view of some analysts, means stories like Tinkler’s will become far rarer.

Goldman Sachs recently heralded a permanent “structural decline” for thermal coal, forecasting a long term average price of $42.50 a tonne – a far cry from the $140 it fetched around the peak of the boom in 2009 and its postfinancial-crisis rally in 2011. Tinkler’s plays were in coking coal, which has sunk from $300 to $81 a tonne.

Noble Group, Tinkler’s first backer, just wrote off $1.2 billion on flagging coal investments, primarily in Australia.

Former Citibank analyst Tim Buckley says coal’s flat outlook, in line with waning demand in China and India, as well as a growing reluctance among 47 banks to lend on commodity projects, make the emergence of another billionaire gambler a remote prospect. “You can only do what Nathan Tinkler did if the banks are onside,” said Buckley, adding: “I don’t think the banks are that stupid.”

“In 2011, aged just 35, he was named Australia’s youngest billionaire.

Two years later, the coal baron had blown his fortune”

portfolio.

48

portfolio.

Courting youth Ad agencies need young talent.

Cue the bean-bag chairs Sydney Ember Cole Wilson

A

t the headquarters of the McCann agency in New York City, the battle for the future of the advertising industry is being waged with piped-in electronic music and employee-brewed beer.

Young professionals, balancing Apple laptops on their knees, drape themselves over space-age chairs near a cafe that sells fresh juice and subsidised snacks.

On one floor, walls are covered by plants, making the office look more like a jungle. Elsewhere is a pingpong table.

The young and the creative have been the engine that drove the advertising industry for decades. But those who once flocked to the business with dreams of making the next standout television commercial are no longer drawn to the industry in the same way.

Some view advertising as stodgy – who wants to make a 30-second TV commercial when everyone they know is cutting the cord? – and some are lured by the riches and prestige of the technology industry.

The result is that even storied agencies like McCann, which has produced campaigns such as the 1971 ‘Hilltop’ ad for Coca-Cola, now find themselves desperate for young people at the moment when the traditional advertising industry is struggling as never before to adapt to a changing media landscape that these same young people are shaping.

“The biggest threat – and one of the biggest things that we talk a lot about – is not only attracting but 49 retaining young talent because there are so many more options,” said David Droga, the creative chairman and founder of the agency Droga5. “We’ve lost people to Facebook. We’ve lost people to Google; we’ve lost people to Apple.” portfolio.

ad agencies

To enhance their appeal, many agencies are trying to make themselves look less like Madison Avenue and more like the startups and tech companies that are now dipping into the same talent pool. Cue the employee happy hours, table tennis and free snacks.

But the advertising industry faces much deeper issues that cannot be fixed with cosmetic changes.

Cool new technologies like virtual reality have endangered the art of the television commercial, which is still, in many ways, the bread and butter of advertising agencies. The proliferation of online ads has made advertising anathema. And money provides little incentive: last year, the average salary for entry-level employees at agencies was about $35,500, according to the 4A’s, an industry trade group. About 25 per cent of the industry makes less than $50,400 a year.

“Beanbags and softball matches and a Twitter handle doesn’t make young people want to work at your office,” Droga said. To attract young people, he added, advertising agencies need to produce exciting work again, which many have stopped doing.

Perhaps just as important, the advertising industry seems unable to shake the perception that it is stuck in the past. In a recent lawsuit that has shaken up the business, a woman accused the chief executive of J Walter Thompson, one of the oldest agencies in the world, of rampant racist and sexist behaviour, describing comments and scenes that seemed straight out of the 1960s Mad Men era. The lawsuit has raised questions about gender and racial diversity and has prompted the industry to acknowledge long-standing problems with its culture.

Even as many agency executives insist that their companies are still the best place for creative minds to shine, they are finding it more difficult to maintain their ranks. Turnover at advertising agencies is higher than in competitive industries like technology and management consulting, and the gap increased 10 per cent in the last year, according to a study from LinkedIn and the 4A’s.

A lot is at stake: if agencies do not figure out how to not only recruit but also retain top young talent, the craft of traditional advertising – an important part of culture for better or worse – could disappear.

“We have to fill the pipeline with young talent,” said Tony Weisman, chief executive in North America for the agency DigitasLBi. If agencies fail to recruit and keep top young employees, he said, “We’re going 50 to become archaic”.

Losing young talent is a problem other industries face as well. Established news organisations are losing people to relatively new outfits like Vice and BuzzFeed. Investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Bank Of America have made sweeping changes portfolio.

to their junior-banker programmes in part because ambitious college graduates were turning to Silicon Valley. But while Wall Street can match the pay at places like Google and Facebook, advertising agencies cannot. So instead, they are trying to match some of the perks.

The creative agency Deutsch offers free snacks and a barista at its New York office and free lunch at its Los Angeles office, moves that Mike Sheldon, the agency’s chief executive in North America, said were modelled after Google. The agency also provides yoga classes, boot camp workout classes and wine tastings. The agency Ogilvy & Mather has beers on the first Friday of every month. McCann has gone one step further and allows employees to brew their own beer that is then named after clients. One, named for the military contractor Lockheed Martin, is called Stealth Stout.

Some agencies are also revamping their offices to look more like startups, with open seating plans and plush chairs. The agency BBDO has created a separate space in its New York office, called Xlab, where restless minds can experiment with virtual reality and drones. (In a bit of a twist, BBDO also happens to be behind the General Electric campaign whose aim is to get young

While Wall Street can match the pay at places like Google and Facebook, ad agencies can’t. So instead, they’re trying to match the perks

ad agencies

people to work for the company.) To reinforce that advertising is an actual career rather than a consolation prize or a steppingstone to something better, agencies like Ogilvy & Mather, Deutsch, Droga5 and DigitasLBi are also bolstering their training and mentorship programmes.

The changes are geared toward attracting and retaining people like Allan Holmes, 29, who joined the agency Leo Burnett in Chicago after graduating in 2011 from the Savannah College Of Art And Design in Georgia, but now works at Facebook’s Creative

Barnaby Bright performs in an area at Initiative’s offices called The Grandstand – “it’s a day club,” said one executive

Shop, the company’s in-house agency. He said he was attracted to Facebook, which he joined roughly two years ago, because it had the “same sort of energy” as a startup. And what got him most excited initially, he said, was his personal connection to the company – he met his girlfriend and best friend on social media.

“The platforms mean everything,” he said. “They’re extremely important.”

In the end, perks may do little to combat the advertising industry’s loss of cachet.

“People no longer have that innate desire and that instinctive desire to be in our business,” said Jay Haines, a founder of Grace Blue, a search firm that works with the advertising industry.

But that doesn’t mean the advertising agencies are going to stop trying.

At IPG Mediabrands – like McCann, a part of Interpublic Group, one of the biggest ad holding companies – the pop hits were already cranked way up on a recent morning. Young employees waited at a coffee bar for lattes and gluten-free pastries. A sign indicated a beer garden. Another, in blue tiles, spelled out ‘Initiative’.

“We’ve gone out of our way to make it really com- 51 fortable, really cool,” said Henry Tajer, the agency’s global chief executive, as he considered the scene from a conference room. “It’s a day club.”

The advertising industry can only hope it’s not too late to the party. portfolio.

Who invented the cash machine? I did – and all I earned was $15 James Goodfellow patented the first ATM and created the first pin code but, unlike those in the financial industry who command vast salaries, he effectively earned nothing for his all-conquering contribution Rupert Jones Murdo MacLeod

S

52

ometimes life just isn’t fair. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook and is now worth an estimated $48 billion. James Goodfellow also invented something used by millions of people around the world every day – the cash machine – but it didn’t make him rich. In fact, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his invention, the 79-year-old said that he earned just $15 from the patent, and has not made a penny more from it since.

“You can imagine how I feel when I see bankers getting £1 million bonuses. I wonder what they contributed to the banking industry more than I did to merit a £1 million bonus. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but that’s the way of the world,” Goodfellow says.

It also irks him that he’s not viewed as a good role model for inventors and engineers. He came up with a groundbreaking invention that spawned several industries and generated billions of pounds, “and I got nothing, so who’s going to want to follow portfolio.

in James Goodfellow’s footsteps and get $15 if they have a fantastic success?”

While Zuckerberg has secured a place on the Forbes list of billionaires and a multimillion-dollar portfolio of property and land in California, New York and Hawaii, Goodfellow has had to settle for a threebed house in the Scottish town of Paisley. However, more important than any money is recognition.

There have been arguments for years over who should officially go down in history as “the inventor of the ATM”, and in 2005 a man called John Shepherd-Barron received an OBE in the New Year honours list for services to banking as the “inventor of the automatic cash dispenser”.

The UK government is now unequivocally saying it was Goodfellow who invented the ATM – so it would seem that after all the squabbling his place in history is now assured.

Back in the mid-1960s Goodfellow was working as a development engineer for Glasgow firm Kelvin

53

portfolio.

Hughes, part of Smiths Industries, and had been charged with devising a way to enable customers to withdraw cash from banks when Saturday opening ended. “Most people working during the week couldn’t get to the bank. They wanted a solution. The solution was a machine which would issue cash on demand to a recognised customer,” he recalls. “I set out to develop a cash-issuing machine, and to make this a reality I invented the pin [personal identification number] and an associated coded token.”

This token took the form of a plastic card with holes punched in it. The patent documents proposed a system incorporating a card reader and buttons mounted in an external wall of the bank, and stated: “When the customer wishes to withdraw a pack of banknotes from the system he simply inserts his punched card in the card reader of the system, and operates the set of 10 push-buttons in accordance with his personal identification number.” Aside from the cards with punched holes, that pretty much describes today’s ATM. After Goodfellow successfully demonstrated the methodology by producing a model, the go-ahead was given for prototypes to be built, and the first Chubb-branded machines were installed at branches of Westminster Bank (later to become NatWest) in 1967.

At around the same time, Shepherd-Barron, who worked for banknote manufacturer De La Rue, was developing a rival cash-dispensing device.

His machine didn’t use plastic cards – instead it used cheques impregnated with carbon-14, a mildly radioactive substance. The machine detected the carbon-14, matched the cheque against a pin and paid out the cash.

Three years before he died in 2010, ShepherdBarron gave an interview to BBC News – headlined “The man who invented the cash machine” – in which he revealed that Barclays was quick to say yes to the idea: over a pink gin, the bank’s then chief executive signed on the dotted line.

It is widely accepted that the Shepherd-Barron ATM was the “world’s first” when it comes to being installed and used by the public; the first one, at a Barclays branch in Enfield, north London, was ceremonially opened by Reg Varney, star of the sitcom On the Buses, on June 27, 1967 – a month 54 before Goodfellow’s ATM made its public debut.

However, the patent for Goodfellow’s machine was lodged on May 2, 1966, 14 months before the Enfield ATM machine came into service. By contrast, De La Rue decided not to patent ShepherdBarron’s device. portfolio.

English actor Reg Varney (1916 - 2008) makes the first withdrawal from a Barclaycash machine, at the Enfield branch of Barclays Bank, 27th June 1967

Many people couldn’t get to the bank.

They wanted a solution.

The solution was this machine, which would issue cash on demand

The rivalry between the two men bubbled up when Shepherd-Barron was feted for his achievement. Goodfellow says: “My one big regret is that I never broke cover. I never said anything about it until John Shepherd-Barron received the OBE in 2005. This honour was granted on the basis that he was the inventor of the automatic cash dispenser.

That really stuck in my throat and I kicked up a bit of a fuss. From 1966 to 2005 I never said anything, which was a big mistake.”

E

ventually in 2006 Goodfellow received an OBE for services to banking as “patentor of the personal identification number”.

Shepherd-Barron is no longer alive to put his case, but in a 2005 Guardian interview he was fairly withering about his rival: “I don’t know him, so good luck to the fellow, but it’s clear that the difference between Goodfellow and us was that we thought through the whole system concept, and that was important to the banks who bought it. His invention reminds me of the hovercraft, an elegant failure.”

ATM

The cash machine has become a world-conquering piece of technology, and nothing – the contactless revolution, bitcoin, wearable technology, etc – seems to be slowing the pace of roll-out: there are now three million ATMs worldwide, with the number forecast to hit four million by 2020, according to specialist research and consulting firm RBR. Goodfellow accepts he didn’t invent the concept of a cash-issuing machine, “but I did invent a way of doing it. When people talk about the Wright brothers, they didn’t invent the concept of flying, everyone was trying to do it – but they did it and got the credit for inventing the aeroplane, so I think I should get the credit for inventing the cash dispenser.”

The good news for Goodfellow is that this is now starting to happen. The website ATMInventor.com rounds up all the various candidates for the title and concludes: “Who invented the idea of an ATM? We believe it was [Armenian-American inventor] Luther George Simjian. Who invented the ATM as we know it? We have to think it was James Goodfellow in Scotland for holding a patent date of 1966. Who invented the free-standing ATM design we recognise today? We think it was John D White for Docutel in the US.” Even better for the married father-of-one, the Home Office has now officially recognised Goodfellow’s achievement in the latest edition of a 180-page guidebook called Life In The United Kingdom,, aimed at those seeking UK citizenship. In the section about “great British inventions of the 20th century” it states: “In the 1960s, James Goodfellow (1937-) invented the cash-dispensing automatic teller machine (ATM) or ‘cashpoint’.”

So after all these years, Goodfellow finally finds himself being talked about in the same breath as John Logie Baird (the television), Alan Turing (the Turing machine), Sir Frank Whittle (the jet engine) and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the world wide web).

What about that paltry sum he received back in the 1960s? “The remuneration was $15. I had to make patent applications for 15 countries, and the standard fee for a patent signature was $1,” says Goodfellow.

He was no longer an employee of Kelvin Hughes at that time, as he had taken redundancy after a decision was taken to relocate the project. “I was invited to go and manage it down south but I wasn’t up for it, so I took redundancy and went to work for IBM.” He stayed with the computer giant for 26 years.

Asked what he did with the $15, Goodfellow says he thinks he blew it on a wild night out, adding: “It didn’t change my life.” But, he concludes, it’s been a good working life: “I was very happy doing the job I was doing.”

FIVE OTHER INVENTORS WHO MADE LITTLE OR NO MONEY Shane Chen, the hoverboard

Chen developed and patented the hoverboard design in his lab in the US four years ago. He marketed his design under the brand name Hovertrax, but cheap imitations made in Chinese factories have flooded the market. Asked in January 2016 whether he had got rich on the back of his creation, he replied: “No, no. If you look at history, inventors are usually poor.

Other people make money. By the time we did the Hovertrax I was kind of used to it because there are about six of my inventions that have been copied over the past 10 years.”

Doug Engelbart, the computer mouse

Engelbart, who died in 2013, was on a mission to make computers more intuitive to use. One of the biggest advances was the mouse, which he developed in the 1960s and patented in 1970. At the time it was a wooden shell covering two metal wheels. Engelbart conceived the mouse so early in the evolution of computers that he and his colleagues didn’t profit much from it. The mouse patent had a 17-year lifespan, allowing the technology to pass into the public domain in 1987. That prevented Engelbart from collecting royalties on the device when it was in its widest use.

Trevor Baylis, the wind-up radio

It was in the early 1990s that Baylis set about developing the wind-up radio. His first working prototype ran for 14 minutes. The following year BayGen Power Industries was set up in South Africa, employing disabled workers to manufacture the Freeplay wind-up radio, and in 1997 a smaller and lighter version rolled off the production lines.

But in 2013 Baylis was broke and living in poverty.

Despite the success of his inventions, Baylis said he had received almost none of the profits. “We are brilliant at inventing but appalling in the way we treat inventors. I was very foolish. I didn’t protect my product properly and allowed other people to take my product away,” he said.

Marie Killick, the sapphire stylus

Killick invented the sapphire stylus for playing

gramophone records. She patented her creation in 1945 but didn’t end up making much money from it.

During the 1950s she embarked on a lengthy court battle against electronics company Pye, whom she had accused of infringing her patent. She eventually won her case in 1958, but was declared bankrupt in 1959, preventing her from profiting from the outcome.

Alexey Pajitnov, the computer game Tetris Released in June 1984, he made the game while working for a Soviet-funded company. Because of this he didn’t receive royalties until 1996, despite the game being sold with every Nintendo Game Boy console around the world. It was one of the first pieces of software exported by the Soviet Union.

PORTFOLIO.

55

The new age for art All grown up and flush with wealth, the globally-minded millennial generation is transforming the art market Sandra Tinari

H

aving come of age, the tech-savvy millennial generation is embracing art and design with its new found financial freedom and in the process is transforming the market by breaking down barriers and creating opportunities for world. Paddle8 created an access point, where anyone could feel comfortable building a collecentrepreneurial startups.

Buying a Banksy before breakfast or a Tracey tion,” Osman says.

As a result, the entrepreneurs have tapped Emin on the daily commute is as second nature as ordering the weekly groceries for this new art into a new generation of digitally-savvy buyers, loving generation. As a result online arts sales who crave the ease of 24/7 access, the ability to growth soared 24 per cent to $3.27 billion in 2015 purchase art across multiple categories at varied (Hiscox). Art-tech entrepreneurs, who are capi- price points and the transparency of information talising on millennials’ penchant for digital shop- and pricing.

For the founders of the aggregated design ping and sense of alienation in traditional art circles, are increasingly dominating this new online platform, WorkOf, Charlie Miner and Isaac Friedman-Heiman, this thirst for knowledge by art world.

One such start-up is Paddle8, an online auction millennials and their expectation for increased house, which was launched by its young founders transparency is challenging art’s traditional model Alexander Gilkes, Aditya Julka and Osman Khan and seeing fast-adapting companies such as theirs after identifying 21st-century art collectors as a disrupt the market.

Charile says: “As the next generation grows up powerful group not being effectively served by the and increasingly has access to more money and brick and mortar auction houses.

“Because of the confluence of art with indus- resources there’s going to be greater digital adoptries like fashion, music and film, whole new tion on the consumer side and from designers, groups of people are interested in art but didn’t who all grew up with the internet and feel comsee an entry point via the existing, exclusive art fortable with buying and selling online.

56

portfolio.

buy?

Yes

No

57

portfolio.

art

What surprised us was how much the members of the traditional art world were also eager for the ease and efficiency of an online auction house

“We’ve been chipping away at the smokescreen created by the industry, providing information about the designers and the design process, as well as pricing transparency. Previously, galleries wouldn’t even reveal what their mark-ups were.”

WorkOf aims to create a collaborative design ecosystem, breaking down the barriers between designers and their information hungry, digital buyers. Its carefully vetted roster of designers and makers on its online marketplace are independent vertical businesses, whose entrepreneurial spirit sees them work across the entire product cycle.

Initially WorkOf aimed to offer designers more exposure and another channel to market – 365 days a year rather than the once or twice a year opportunities that are provided by the trade shows – but as it grew, Charlie and Isaac saw the opportunities for buyers in having access to a simplified buying process.

“We’ve created a platform where there is information on the designers, the products and processes. There’s a clarity, reliability and standardisation to the information provided so there’s real value-add for consumers. We make sure that it is a smooth process; they can come to one place that is a trusted brand and discover stories behind the products, be it the technical aspects of a design or more information about the studio, a-Porter or a first-class airline ticket online meant Isaac says. that there was not a massive psychological leap “The best part of this business to bidding on a $10,000 Damien Hirst print,” model in comparison to tradition- Osman says. al outlets is that we don’t have the “The arts sector is historically resistant to operational overheads that they do.” change, and in many ways the traditional auction The team at Paddle8 agrees with houses had not innovated in literally hundreds of the efficiency of the digital model, years. Paddle8 saw an opportunity to introduce successfully targeting the ‘middle- the ease and efficiency of e-commerce, as well as market’, having identified latent to break the ‘rules’ that had governed the tradidemand in the $1,000-to-$100,000 tional art world.” art sales segment, which could also In creating accessible online destinations, the be well-ser ved by the scalability likes of Paddle8 and WorkOf have attracted not and automation that technology just new but also seasoned collectors and profes58 provides. sional buyers, building a customer base that rang“We benefited tremendously es across age and occupation. from the industries that went online “What surprised us was how much the membefore the art world. The fact that bers of the traditional art world were also eager our generation already felt comforta- for the ease and efficiency of an online auction ble buying a $5,000 dress from Net- house,” says Paddle8’s Khan. portfolio.

Paddle8 team.

Left to right: Alexander Gilkes, Aditya Julka and Osman Khan

art

“Today, our collector base is a mix of novice collectors, who had previously felt excluded from the ivory tower art world, and long-time collectors, who value the speed and access to extraordinary property that Paddle8 provides.”

Having launched only in 2011 and 2014, Paddle7 and WorkOf have already attracted significant interest and investment to aid in their fastpaced expansion, including prominent New York gallerist David Zwirner and the artist Damian Hirst, who both invested in Paddle8.

Zwirner says: “We are truly interested in how Paddle8 uses technology to bring innovation in the art world – which has historically been resistant to change – through smart digital platforms.

Paddle8 is a solid brand that has already established itself as a trusted source within the art community. I am impressed by its founders’ creativity and analytical abilities, and they certainly

know their business. We look forward to partnering with them and playing a role in their continued growth and success.”

Such are the opportunities provided by the internet and the globally minded tech generation that art and design businesses can now transcend traditional boundaries, says Georgie Hutchinson of Australia’s National Association For The Visual Arts.

She adds: “The key shift is the unprecedented international communities of artists drawn together not by geographic ties but rather through their taste and common creative pursuits… In terms of the impact of the internet on galleries 59 and organisations within the art and design sector, there is a slower adoption more broadly but those with insight and capital to invest are doing remarkably well engaging international audiences and markets.” portfolio.

60

portfolio.

india yoga

Yogi stretches out an empire Baba Ramdev, an Indian yoga master, has built a multimillion-dollar empire selling everything from soap to medicine under the umbrella of Ayurveda.

Geeta Anana Kuni Takahashi

S

itting on an orange sofa set over a Persian carpet, in a gated office park in Haridwar, India, full of freshly painted tan buildings and manicured lawns, Baba Ramdev is surrounded by the trappings of any major corporate leader almost anywhere in the world.

But Ramdev is also an Indian swami, having renounced all worldly pleasures and possessions, and he sits cross-legged on the couch, his face fringed by an untamed beard, his body draped in the saffron cloth of a Hindu holy man.

Famous for bringing yoga to the Indian masses, Ramdev, 50, is also the leader of what has become known as the “Baba Cool Movement” – a group of spiritual men, known here as “babas”, who are marketing health-based consumer items based on the ancient Indian medicinal system of herbal treatments, known as Ayurveda. His rapidly expanding business empire of packaged food, cosmetics and home-care products is eating into the sales of both multinational and Indian corporations.

The babas’ message about the value of traditional Indian ingredients is particularly resonant in the current environment in India, where a prime minister and his political party have built a narrative around the value of ancient Hindu practices, from yoga to reverence for cows. Ramdev is the most prominent of a growing group of brand-building babas, whose

ranks include Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the founder of Art Of Living, an Indian spiritual practice, who promotes a line of creams, soaps and shampoos also called Ayurveda.

“There is truly a tectonic shift in the consumer products business in India”, said Harish Bijoor, a brand strategy specialist and former head of marketing at a subsidiary of the big Indian conglomerate Tata Group.

Ramdev and his friend and business partner, Acharya Balakrishna, 44, run Patanjali Ayurved Limited from a corporate headquarters in Haridwar, an ancient Indian city on the banks of the Ganges River in Uttarakhand state. Ramdev says he is the creative force and public face of Patanjali, even though, as a swami, he does not have an official title or hold any shares of the privately held company.

Rising at 3.30am each day to drink the juice of the amla fruit, an Indian berry rich in vitamin C and considered the top immunity booster in Ayurveda medicine, he unleashes a torrent of new product ideas – an herbal energy bar, an herbal hair dye, a sugar-free immune booster – that he records in large Hindi script in a spiral bound notebook.

Then he plunges into three hours of yoga, followed by a 12-hour day that is split between Patanjali business and the public meetings of a spiritual and political leader.

Balakrishna, as the managing director, runs dayto-day operations. “Without him, nothing would be possible,” Ramdev said of his partner, who paced in the office as the interview with the loquacious swami spilled over its one-hour allotment.

CHINA

Haridwar PAKISTAN

NEPAL

New Delhi UTTAR PRADESH

61

Kolkata WEST BENGAL

Mumbai Hyderabad Arabian Sea

INDIA

Bay of Bengal 200 MILES

portfolio.

india yoga

The two men met in the 1990s, when they studied at the same gurukul, a residential school that was the norm for Indian Hindus before the British arrived. Both the sons of farmers, they went on together to study in the Himalayas, Ramdev focusing on yoga and Balakrishna on Ayurveda.

In 1994, they founded the first of three charitable trusts, to run a hospital and a university dealing in Ayurvedic medicine, and an ashram. There, they held yoga camps and free health check-ups at which they dispensed Ayurveda treatments, which are largely herbal. Before long, they had set up a manufacturing plant for Ayurveda products.

Around the same time, Ramdev began his televised yoga classes. Lean and muscular, Ramdev proved to be a telegenic tour de force, bringing yoga to India’s poor and the growing middle class.

He gradually ventured beyond yoga to become a public critic of government corruption, leading a mass protest in New Delhi in 2011 and later endorsing prime minister Narendra Modi during the election in 2014.

Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party swept to power soon after, unleashing a strong Hindu nationalist sentiment that Ramdev says has created “an ideal ecosystem” to support his business. Modi pushed the United Nations to create International Yoga Day, and he inaugurated it last year, with Ramdev by his side, in a nationally televised ceremony involving 35,000 people.

Ramdev, given to raucous laughter and bouts of giggles that make him seem disarmingly humble, can just as suddenly overflow with bravado, as he did when asked about the source of Patanjali’s popularity and power.

“People buy our products because they believe I will only sell them good things,” he said.

Beyond Ramdev’s appeal, Patanjali products are attractive because they are high-quality and prices

62 Soaps at a shop of Patanjali Ayurved Ltd, a company run by Baba Ramdev, in Haridwar, India portfolio.

Workers inspect soaps at Patanjali Ayurved Ltd

Big Business, little evidence.

are about 20 per cent lower than the competition, analysts said.

It is not clear how Patanjali is able to charge such low prices, given that its profit margin of 13 per cent is within the industry range of 13 to 16 per cent.

Ramdev ventured that, with his fame, his advertising costs are much lower than those of his competitors, who spend as much as 15 per cent of their revenue promoting their products.

The faces of Ramdev and Balakrishna adorn most every building, billboard and truck connected to the company, which is expanding so fast it is striking fear into its current and potential competitors. The company expects to report revenue of $750 million in the fiscal year that ended in March, more than double the previous year’s $ 300 million, the two men said.

Experts say that, for the foreseeable future, the only danger signs for Patanjali are the enthusiasms of its founder, Ramdev.

If he takes it “a bit too far, he’ll lose new customers”, said Sunil Alagh, a business consultant and formerly chief executive of Britannia Industries Ltd, an Indian company famous for packaged cookies.

In the past, Ramdev has dived into controversial conservative causes without hesitation. Last year, for example, he claimed that he could cure homosexuality by treating a person with yoga.

Ramdev was also outspoken in his condemnation of a student at a New Delhi university who faced sedition charges after the authorities accused him of participating in a pro-Pakistan campus rally.

“The traitors,” Ramdev said, “must be arrested.”

Controversy aside, Bijoor has predicted that the Baba Cool Movement would eventually outsell both multinationals and top Indian companies alike. “It’s about a good connect,” he said. “It’s about becoming the umbilical cord connecting the past to the present.”

“People buy our products because they believe I will only sell them good things”

Patanjali Ayurved Limited is valued at $1.9 billion and estimated to make around $740 million for the 2015-16 financial year.

Among the many products it makes – from soaps to rice – are around 300 “medicines” for treating a range of ailments and body conditions, from common cold to chronic paralysis.

However, effectiveness of Ayurvedic medicine has no basis in science.

As Cancer Research UK point out, “There is no scientific evidence to prove that Ayurvedic medicine can treat or cure cancer or any other disease.”

Ayurvedic medicine is considered pseudoscientific on account of its confusion between reality and metaphysical concepts.

The public, however, are not being dissuaded from buying the products.

63

portfolio.

The Cairo mural seT aCross

64

portfolio.

50 buildings

Kareem Fahim David Degner 65

portfolio.

egypt art

T

he intricate mural took shape over a few weeks, little noticed at first, spreading across a harried quarter of Cairo where Egypt’s rubbish collectors live, amid overflowing bundles of this city’s trash.

By the time the painting was finished three weeks later, it stretched across more than 50 buildings, making it the largest public work of art in Cairo anyone can recall. The mural, a circle of orange, white and blue in Arabic calligraphy, quotes a third-century bishop who said, “If one wants to see the light of the sun, he must wipe his eyes.”

When the first photographs of the mural circulated, reactions ranged from astonished delight to disbelief.

Some people, struck by its seemingly impossible scale, seemed convinced the images had been digitally altered, according to the man behind the project, a TunisianFrench artist known as eL Seed.

But what seemed most surprising was that Seed and several friends who worked with him had been able to complete the project at all, without being harassed or arrested.

Egypt’s government has shown little tolerance for artists, sending agents to raid cultural centres and recently 66 prosecuting a novelist on charges that he had harmed public morality. Street artists who made the city their canvas in the heady days after Egypt’s uprising in 2011 have been forced to work hastily or in secret, carrying out projects “as you would a heist”, said Soraya Morayef, who has documented street art over the past five years on her blog. portfolio.

But Seed chose a forsaken corner of the city, called Manshiyat Naser, away from the gaze of government officials, the kind of place where artists have had more space to work, Morayef said.

Seed said he intended to change popular perceptions of the district, too narrowly associated with squalor, and to celebrate decades of unsung work by its residents who sort and recycle tons of the city’s waste. He has painted large works of distinctive calligraphy in other countries over the past few years, including in Brazil, France and Tunisia, but he said the experience in Egypt, and the reaction, was “overwhelming”.

He chalked up the success of the project, which was entirely self-funded, to his decision to work quietly, with the cooperation of residents, but also to a visitor’s naiveté. That meant ignoring the arguments that seem to attend many public expressions in a testy Egypt these days.

“Sometimes when you come from outside, you don’t see all the problems that might happen,” he said in a recent interview. “I was trying not to look at the political situation, the economic struggles, and just focus on the art project,” he said.

The praise came from the neighbourhood, young antigovernment activists and other artists. A well-known Egyptian graffiti artist, Ammar Abo Bakr, writing on Facebook, called the mural “the first of its kind” in Egypt.

“Just imagine if our artists who sell their art for thousands of pounds decide to contribute and suggested some solutions to beautify or enrich Egypt’s facades,” he wrote.

egypt art

More than 5,000 people shared a post of Seed’s mission statement on Facebook, and there were hundreds of mostly positive comments that suggested that he had accomplished his goals. “Beautiful and honest words,” one woman in Egypt wrote. The rubbish collectors, she added, “deserve our gratitude”.

Officials seemed taken by surprise.

The Egyptian embassy in Washington promoted the project on its Twitter feed, and said it was “totally amazed’.

As Seed planned the mural over the past year, he was aided by a local priest, the Reverend Samaan Ibrahim, who is considered a leader of the mainly Coptic rubbish collectors in the neighbourhood. The priest’s approval and participation in the project in turn brought residents on board, Seed said.

The neighbourhood was established more than four decades ago, with its striking location in the shadow of cliffs and fetid streets making it the most recognisable of several settlements where the garbage collectors live.

The neighbourhood has also received frequent attention over the years from international aid organisations and journalists, making it one of the most prosperous settlements, said Gaétan du Roy, a Belgian researcher who studies the lives of the collectors.

But many of its residents are impoverished and continue to be regarded as second-class citizens because of their association with the trash, he said.

Their relations with the government have also been strained. Officials have tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to replace the collectors and their extensive family networks with more-modernised private companies. In one of the most enduring shocks to the area, Hosni Mubarak’s government, reacting to fears of a swine influenza epidemic in 2009, decided to kill all of Egypt’s pigs, including thousands kept by the rubbish collectors, who used them to consume organic waste and who would also sell their meat.

From the streets of the neighbourhood, the painting appears in fragments: above a courtyard where members of one family carefully search for recycling in bags of trash, or looming over a rooftop occupied by a handful of sheep. The bracing scale of the mural is fully visible only from the Mokattam Hill on the edge of the district, near a famous cathedral carved inside a cave.

“Imagine if our artists who sell their art for thousands of pounds decide to contribute some solutions to beautify or enrich Egypt’s facades”

Viewed from there, the colours interrupt the monotonous red brick facades below, distinguishing these buildings from the thousands that have sprung up across the city over decades, with little oversight, to contain Cairo’s population.

In the days after the mural was completed, the residents of Manshiyat Naser seemed not to focus too closely on its message: many people had yet to trek up the hill for a viewing, and few had any idea what

the calligraphy said.

Instead, people seemed moved that Seed and his friends had bothered to travel to Cairo and immersed themselves in the neighbourhood defying the various calamities that have driven away many visitors to Egypt in the past few years. The only complaint was that the artists had not painted more of the houses.

“They used to play with the kids here, and talk to the people,” said Boutros Ghali, a 24-year-old shopkeeper who placed a photograph of himself with one of the visitors, a young Algerian, on the wall of his store.

“People loved them, and got used to them. And when they left, people were upset.”

67

portfolio.

lake como

Price $558

rooms 90

grandhoteltremezzo. com

ďƒą

living

portfolio.

mil

june issue 126

Grand Hotel Tremezzo The great hotel on Lake Como reopens after an upgrade

T

he classic art nouveau hotel has been sat on the edge of Lake Como since 1910. Its century-old park and gardens, grand facade and famous water-on-water floating pool in front of the private beach have made it a landmark. Now, having just re-opened for the 2016 summer season, the hotel has added some new touches to the place. It has partnered with ESPA in a new-look Spa and a brand new “hidden” T Spa Suite for those looking for a private-spa experience. Also, the 25,000 square metre park and gardens have been redesigned, including newly created pool with Travertino Silver from a marble quarry in Tuscany. Ultimately, though, the Tremezzo is the perennial summer place to stay on Lake Como. It was the best hotel when it opened more than 100 years ago and it’s remained unsurpassed going into its second century.

69

Portfolio.

living / hotels

Hôtel Hermitage monte-carlo

Where to stay

Square Beaumarchais, 98000 Monaco

Price From $337 per night

hotelhermitage montecarlo.com

 nce

70

Portfolio.

S

ince its creation 150 years ago, the group Monte-Carlo Société des Bains de Mer – this hotel is one of their properties – has been the guardian of that classic glamour and elegance that is almost uniquely Monaco.

And while their sister property, Hotel De Paris (currently under renovation), is the famous place to stay, there’s a more refined elegance to their other property around the corner, Hotel Hermitage.

Built in 1890, the Belle Époque style palace-hotel was originally sat among the orange and olive trees, facing out over the Mediterranean Sea. These days, Monaco has grown up around it to become the most densely populated country in the world, but the Hermitage manages to retain that air of elegant prewar charm, even though 90 per cent of the hotel was renovated and modernised between 2003 and 2011.

The façade is one of the most elegant in the country, while key interior features have also been preserved. The Jardin Winter Garden (pictured above) with its grand glass conservatory was created

the Winter garden with its grand glass conservatory was created by gustave eiffel

by Gustave Eiffel and is one of the most charming entrances to a hotel anywhere.

It’s a rare example of an old property retaining its charm amid modernisation.

For onsite dining, Le Vistamar, their one-Michelin-Star rated restaurant, is run by chef Joël Garault who operates under the basic premise of “a fish, a vegetable, judicious cooking” to create Mediterranean cuisine with fish sourced from a local fishery. The terrace (open in summer) has great views out over the harbour, as do most of the rooms.

june issue 126

in the hotel

Directly connected to the hotel is the huge and lavish Thermes Marins Monte-Carlo Spa, with their “Zen, luxury, technology and performance” mantra and complete range of facilities.

It’s common to see guests padding about the corridors of the hotel in white bathrobes on their way to or from there, and the outdoor Jacuzzi overlooking the bay is a fine way to relax. The more adventurous may like to try some cryotherapy (see below).

As part of the SBM group, you get free shuttles to their other properties, including access to the legendary Monte Carlo Beach Club for some pool cabana loafing, while for shopping you’re 10 minutes from The Pavillons Monte Carlo (see below) or for the very walk-

shy – and very wealthy – there are Prada and Ferragamo stores adjacent to the hotel. When Prada wants to cosy up next door you know this is where the money stays.

If you did fancy a walk then, as the hotel is central, it’s no more than a 30-minute walk to anywhere in the country, from Monaco’s Stade Louis II football stadium in one direction and Monte Carlo Bay resort the other, from where can look down the coast and see Monaco, France and Italy in one view.

Hôtel Hermitage though, preserves and perpetuates that old elegance of the French Riviera, from the pre-Second World War era, through the 1960s and ’70s heydays, right up to now. It’s still elegant luxury at its finest.

eat

Le Vistamar is Michelin-starred and specialises in beautifully presented south Med cuisine.

It has a fantastic allround menu and in the summer you can dine on the terrace overlooking the Monaco port.

spa

The hotel adjoins the Thermes Marins Monte-Carlo spa, which spans four storeys and includes everything from a barber and gym to saunas and cryotherapy suite – see below.

extra touch

Staying here gives you a ‘Cercle MonteCarlo’ card that gets you benefits, from 50 per cent off green fees at the golf club to free admission to the beach club. It also lets you charge bills from many other places in to your hotel room

places of interest in the area eat

shop

chill

golf

The Michelin-starred Elsa (at the Monte Carlo Beach Club hotel) is not only one of the best restaurants in Monaco, it’s also 100 per cent certified organic. Go for lunch, sit in the sun and eat alfresco.

The Pavillons Monte Carlo, just off Casino Square, is an ode to high-end shopping. The futuristic structures house the likes of Maison Balenciaga, Lanvin, Bottega Veneta and Miu Miu.

Thermes Marins spa (next to the hotel) offers cryotherapy, with two cold chambers set at -60°C and -110°C. A short blast tackles jet lag symptoms, reduces stress and helps muscle recovery.

Monte-Carlo golf club is a full 18-hole course, up on the hills on the edge of the mountains and overlooking the town and sea. It’s a 20-minute drive from the hotel and there’s a restaurant onsite.

71

Portfolio.

living / food

In Copenhagen, restaurants stray from Nordic cuisine

N

Portfolio.

Left: Pizza with creamy burrata and leeks at Baest Below left: Grilled cheese taco at Hija de Sanchez, a taqueria run by Rosio Sanchez, the former pastry chef at Noma Main: Baest, a pizzeria opened

by Christian Puglisi, a former sous chef at Noma

It wasn’t long before some of those who worked under René Redzepi at Noma branched out on their own explain his restaurant’s laidback vibe. Dinner often ends with patrons gathered outside around a bonfire. Tasting menu starts at 595 kroner (about $93).

There are no bonfires at Studio, which is all about refinement.

Located in an old customs house, its sleek dining room juts out over Copenhagen’s harbour. At the

helm is Torsten Vildgaard, who worked for many years as Noma’s research chef, developing many of the restaurant’s dishes.

On his own, he’s allowed some of his French proclivities to slip into lovely dishes strewn with Nordic-style flowers and foraged herbs. A small heap of shaved truffles tops a perfectly poached

Words: Lisa Abend

ot long ago, Copenhagen was a culinary wasteland of pickled herring and gloppy salads on rye bread. That began to change in 2003, when the restaurant Noma introduced a cuisine that made creative use of the Nordic region’s edible landscape and transformed the Danish capital into the objective of a culinary pilgrimage.

It wasn’t long before some of those who worked under René Redzepi branched out on their own – Christian Puglisi, a former sous chef, for instance, recently celebrated his restaurant Relae’s fifth birthday. Now, while Redzepi is taking Noma in new directions – including reopening his restaurant as an urban farm – those who trained under him are no longer simply riffing on Nordic themes, but expanding or even discarding the New Nordic label altogether.

Best of all, they’re doing so at all price levels.

On the expensive side are Amass and Studio. Graffiti runs along a concrete wall in Amass’ dining room, a clue that the chef, Matt Orlando, does not adhere entirely to the Nordic playbook.

Although the restrained artistry of his dishes – they often look as if they were recovered from some extraordinarily beautiful forest floor – reflects the influence of his stint as head chef at Noma, 72 the flavors here, in, say, St John’s wort leaves stuffed with a creamy pea purée, are less acidic than the typical Nordic ones.

That makes sense: Orlando is from California, which may

JuNe issue 126

quail egg, served wittily in a carton of untouched ones; brown butter adds caramelised flavours to what may be the world’s best monkfish.

Tasting menu for dinner starts at 900 ($139) kroner, although there is a lunch menu for 450 ($70).

On the affordable end of the scale is Hija de Sánchez.

Passers-by at the Torvehallerne food market often marvel at the hand-cranked machine that turns out perfect tortillas at this stand.

There is reason for them to marvel even more: until recently, Rosio Sánchez was Noma’s pastry chef.

Now she has opened the kind of place dear to her MexicanAmerican heart: a taquería. But these are hardly ordinary tacos: the sweetly savoury mole sauce gets its depth from some 28 ingredients, the queso fresco is handmade from Danish milk, and those astonishingly good tortillas

are made of Oaxacan corn that Sánchez mills herself. Three-taco combo plate, 100 kroner ($15).

Christian Puglisi also honours his roots – he’s half-Sicilian – with his newest enterprise, Baest. A rollicking pizzeria, it too pays obsessive attention to its ingredients: the salumi is made and cured in-house from local organic meat, and the mozzarella, made from Danish milk, is pulled by hand. The pizzas, like one with creamy burrata and leeks, are cooked in the open kitchen’s woodburning oven, and are as good as any you’ll find in Italy. Dinner for one, not counting drinks or tip, about 200 kroner ($30).

There are other noteworthy additions to the “former chef of Noma” list, including, at the high end, Taller, which specialises in a refined version of Karlos Ponte’s native Venezuelan cuisine;

Torsten Vildgaard, who developed many of the dishes at Noma, prepares quail eggs at Studio

and, at the other, the cozy Café Lillebror, where whiskey porridge at breakfast and excellent sandwiches at lunch give way to a creative, accomplished tasting menu at dinner. Is it Nordic? In Copenhagen, at least, it no longer seems to matter.

Portfolio.

73

living / style

what to pack

W

...for warm weather in London, and beyond

Average temp

16°c

16 °C 17 °C 23 °C 20 °C Paris Sydney Rome Barcelona

also wear in...

june

london

Chance of rain: 50%

additional info Wimbledon More than just the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament, Wimbledon fortnight is a social event.

Tickets are not easy to come by, but if money is no object then sites like getmein.com offer Debenture seats on centre court, at inflated prices.

74

Portfolio.

Otherwise Ticketmaster releases several hundred Centre Court and Court 3 tickets at 9am the day before play. And if you’re looking for somewhere very English to stay, The Dog & Fox pub has 17 boutique-style hotel rooms and does some of the best pub food in the whole of London.

june issue 126

1

2

4

3

5

accessories

1. Thom Browne blazer $1,200 2. Brooks Brothers chinos $110 3. Fred Perry polo shirt $86 4. Richard James leather cardholder $162 5. Hackett weekender bag $252

Asher trainers by Bally $488

75 Mr Burberry EDT 100ml $106

Alexander McQueen silver ring $228

Aesop orange rind concentrate balm $35

Portfolio.

living / style

W

what to pack ...for warm weather in Barcelona, and beyond

Average temp

20°c Sea temp

16 °C 17 °C 23 °C 20 °C Paris Sydney Rome Venice

also wear in...

barcelona june

21°c

additional info

76

Portfolio.

Sónar While the big music festival this month is Glastonbury, the unreliable English weather often makes the weekend something of an endurance rather than a pleasure. Sónar, however, has the near-

perfect Spanish weather and the advantage of being in one of the best cities in Europe, rather than a field in the countryside. This is the smart way for people who aren’t 18 anymore to enjoy a music festival. sonar.es

JuNe issue 126

accessories

1. LK Bennett Japanese flower dress $520 2. Paul Smith herringbone stripe scarf $154 3. Gucci pleated gabardine dress $1,385 4. Hermès scarf $1,073 5. Rosantica tasseled gold-tone necklace $605 6. Lacoste Karoly shoes $169

1

2

3

Hermès faubourg malachite watch $15,231

Longchamp purse $455

4

5

6

Balenciaga canvas shoulder bag $1,055

77 Blue mirrored RayBan sunglasses $200

Portfolio.

living / style

T

he most profound recent development in men’s clothing concerns the millimetric adjustment of a garment first sold in 1900. In January, Brooks Brothers issued a redesign of its oxford-cloth button-down, the shirt known commonly, 78 and not quite insufferably, as an OCBD. The upgrade to mother-of-pearl buttons, the addition of side gussets to the shirttails, even the disappearance of the breast pocket – these tweaks are no big deal, unless you are an emeritus professor Portfolio.

wondering where now to stick your reading glasses. The removal of the collar’s interior lining, however, constitutes a major moment in the history of minutiae, as it reinstates a first-rate collar roll.

With its points buttoned down, the unlined collar spreads and bends at its front edges to form an elegant bell curve, or maybe to slither a bit asymmetrically – a casually dashing soft contour among the strict lines of traditional menswear.

This is the sort of detail in which God is said to exist. Philosophers of the Ivy

League Look liken particularly dramatic collar rolls to the silhouettes of angels’ wings.

In 1896, John E. Brooks admired the hidden buttons that secured the collars of English polo players and began engineering his sportswear classic, with its incidentally spiffy arc to the collar.

“The distinctive roll was prized for its nonchalance going back to the 1920s,” said Christian Chensvold, the founder and editor-in-chief of the trad-fashion website Ivy Style. That Chensvold broke

Words Troy Patterson

Brooks Brothers revives the preppiest shirt collar

june issue 126

traffic records with his coverage of the new button-down suggests the peculiar gravity of the quintessential American clothier’s reworking of its quintessential product.

It also indicates the richly complicated feelings of Brooks Brothers’ most passionate customers, who double as its least patient critics, vexed that its emergence as a global brand complicates sober stewardship of its establishment legacy. “For basic menswear, Brooks Brothers is the source; it’s the prehistoric mud,” said Lisa Birnbach, editor of The Official Preppy Handbook and a co-author of True Prep. “Because of that, people get very proprietary.”

Chensvold said, “What they did with this shirt is symbolic of what’s going wrong with the whole company.”

Oh, he appreciates the new shirt, which he bought at the Madison Avenue flagship, where he is a regular, he said. But he would have appreciated the company’s acknowledgment that it had grievously erred when it added the lining about 1989. “There was no mea culpa,” he said, adding: “Don’t make me sound too censorious. I’m always afraid they’ll take away my third-floor golf-simulator privileges.”

According to Guy Voglino, the Brooks Brothers vice president charged with managing menswear, the company decided that its oxford-cloth button-down “needed to be refreshed” last year. “We looked back and softened it up,” he said.

The reference points were the button-downs of the 1940s and ’50s, when the Brooks Brothers shirt was firmly established as a crucial element of insouciant collegiate style, the more frayed the better. In his memoir, Out Of Place, Edward Said wrote of watching two Princeton classmates apply “sandpaper to a pair of new blue button-down shirts, trying in a matter

of minutes to produce the effect of the worn-out aristocratic shirt”.

After pausing to note that Brooks Brothers’ return to tradition has involved discontinuing the “traditional fit” buttondown – the baggiest cut, sized to skim the torso of Jack Haley’s Tin Man – we see that the company is reaping considerable rewards by re-engaging with this heritage.

“We are probably selling 15 to 20 per cent more units,” Voglino said.

Some who expressed mixed feelings about the throwback shirt included hardcore traditionalists: men who embrace sack suits and rep ties as a shelter from the shifting winds of fashion, people harbouring informed opinions about the collar rolls worn by William F Buckley on Firing Line and Miles Davis on the cover of Milestones, holdouts disdainful of Uniqlo’s of-the-moment Oxford, with its paltry button-down collar.

The cost of the Brooks Brothers shirt – $140, from $92 – is their chief complaint: A shirt often treated as a workhorse is now valued like a thoroughbred, which is particularly scandalous to members of a sartorial subculture that makes a virtue of frugality, accruing social capital by finding Cordovan loafers at thrift stores.

On the other hand, a certain resentment of the merchants on which they rely (a state of perpetual laments that things aren’t as good as they used to be) seems to be a feature of the new trad worldview.

And the ready availability of the oldis-new shirt saves a lot of trouble for collar-roll connoisseurs who have been relying for decades on tiny mail-order shops with long waiting lists or troubling tailors to move their collar-point buttons by an eighth of an inch. It’s both lovely and risible at once, all this fussing over a collar prized for its unfussy appearance.

“Nonchalance is everything to a preppy,” Birnbach said. “It’s a virtue, a value, a trope and an aesthetic. As far as studied nonchalance is concerned, that’s how you learn.”

Reference points were the button-downs of the 1940s and ’50s, when the Brooks Brothers shirt was firmly established as a crucial element of collegiate style

Also goes with...

AMI cotton chinos $220

Anderson’s woven belt $205

79

Brooks Brothers trainers $517

Portfolio.

living / style

Can the turtleneck ever be cool again?

An asssesment of an iconic piece of clothing

I

t was knit from gray lamb’s wool. It defined a gray area. On a stark set, amid the playback of a plaintive address to an ex, the hip-hop star Drake danced to the beat of his own drum machine in the video for Hotline Bling while bundled in a roomy sweater with a collar that rose to touch his resolute jaw.

Designers have often praised the turtleneck for the way that it moves with the body, and that was its job here, to envelop and underline Drake’s dancing – dancing that was objectively uncool, a choreography of private pleasure.

Hotline Bling is a song about placing booty calls, and this turtleneck, with its forgiving dadwear cut, seemed an invocation of an afghan that lovers might have snuggled under. Yet a fan wouldn’t have wanted it to be any more body-hugging, which would have given Drake’s jerks, knee bends and swivels the unfortunate effect of Mike Myers’s turtlenecked character, Dieter, in the old Sprockets sketch. Instead, Drake was giving the public a performance of masculinity that it hadn’t known it wanted.

One evening in London in 1924, when the playwright Noël Coward was recently famous, he opened 80 his newspaper to learn that he had originated a fashion for colourful high-necked sweaters. The turtleneck, which had long been humbly insulating longshoremen and sea dogs against the salty air, Portfolio.

suddenly achieved symbolic value.

In his memoir Present Indicative, Coward claims that he turned to turtlenecks “more for comfort than for effect”, blithely sliding past the fact that the simple show of privileging comfort invariably creates its own effect. He noticed “more and more of our seedier West End chorus boys” slithering into these sweaters over the months that followed, and he seemed pleased to have had a hand in investing the turtleneck with new social standing.

There was a current of exoticism to it and more than a whiff of moral laxity, sharing a certain flamboyant ease with a more famous, less versatile sartorial statement of Coward’s – the dressing gown. Loitering around Oxford that November, Evelyn Waugh marvelled at the popularity of the new highnecked sweater on the party scene, judging it “most convenient for lechery because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like studs and ties”. Further, the garment offered cosmetic benefits: “It also hides the boils with which most of the young men seem to have encrusted their necks.” That these two aspects of the turtleneck – easy access, convenient

concealment – are mutually useful has forever since been appreciated by teenagers whose dates have been so rash as to raise hickeys.

If the foundational premise of the turtleneck as a style is opposition, its patron saint is Juliette Gréco, the French singer who was a muse and mascot of Left Bank intellectuals in the 1950s. When the face of this existentialist ‘It’ girl, eyes contoured in kohl, was photographed popping from a black turtleneck sweater, she supplied the enduring template for Bohemian black. The idea that a few inches of fabric might not only indicate a lifestyle but also incarnate an approach

the austere, informal and yet ceremonious black turtleneck entered the iconography of nonconformism

june issue 126

Richard Rowndtree as Shaft

81

Portfolio.

June living / style

to the universe was an absurdity too delicious to resist, so no one did, and the austere, informal and yet ceremonious black turtleneck entered the iconography of nonconformism.

Its simplicity ensured its success as an international export, a marker of the willfully artistic and the media clichés thereof. This was the model for the gamine glamour of Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face and the ascetic elegance of a modern dancer in her all-business leotard. This was, with bongo drums and beret, both the fact and the parody of the basic Beatniks.

The rakishness of Coward’s turtleneck combined with the intellectual credentials of Gréco’s to make this the go-to costume announcing disciplined resistance.

Britain’s “angry young men” (with their corduroy pants and full-body brooding) and the Black Panthers (with their slick leather jackets and steely affect) were each armored to the chin, the high collar throwing forceful faces into high relief.

This revolution was televised to impressive ratings. The gesture of refusal went pop. The trimly militant turtleneck made an apt sheath for a sleuth like Steve McQueen in Bullitt (1968) or Richard Roundtree in Shaft (1971). Each hero had a silhouette that seemed, like his name, built for speed. For two years, men tried to treat the turtleneck as a substitute for the shirt and tie, extending its social politics into the dining room, much to the consternation of the headwaiter.

Johnny Carson could carry this off, but the average guy risked seeming like a square straining to get his mouth around the vogue words of hepcat slang.

The very persistence of the shirt and tie points to the ticklish

issue 126

problem of the neck as a charged and vulnerable space pleading for special attention from the male wardrobe. The widespread disruption of the traditional scheme seemed an opportunistic decadence, a bit like the ethos of free love curdling into a key party. The 1969 playscript for Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite describes a movie producer “dressed in ‘Hollywood Mod’, with a tan turtleneck sweater and tight blue suede pants.” That way lay disco and its disgraces.

Women wore the rebellious turtleneck longer. Then as now, there was a certain sophistication in the overwhelming rejection of décolletage; this sweater said that

“For two years, men tried to treat the turtleneck as a substitute for the shirt and tie”

her eyes were up here. There is no turtleneck specified on that famous Joan Didion packing list, but doesn’t it seem that there should be? The aura of 1970s Didion, with her cigarettes and her migraines, is decidedly turtlenecked. But the photo record suggests it was more a Susan Sontag item, a jet-set cerebral uniform for forging ideas beneath a dramatic hairdo.

Six decades after Juliette Gréco, there came along a Frenchman named Grégoire Bouillier, who sounded the depths of the turtleneck’s degradation in a memoir titled The Mystery Guest. Dumped by a girlfriend, Bouillier develops a strange case of what he terms “sartorial neurosis”: “I started wearing hideous turtlenecks as undershirts the moment she left.” To him,

Johnny Carson wears a turtleneck shirt and bolo tie as he walks with his third wife Joanna Holland, May 1972

83

June

these combined the features of an emotional bandage and a psychologic hair shirt, for he had always “despised the men who wore them as the lowest kind of pseudosportsmen” and supposed that women were correct to share his abhorrence.

Like many creatures first spotted in the wild, the turtleneck re-emerged in the 1980s in captivity, heralded as a staple – occasionally embellished with tiny whimsical prints – in The Preppy Handbook. Rehabilitated, it entered the terrain of later-stage Nora Ephron and her self-deprecating riffs on feeling bad about her neck, destined to camouflage wattles and represent complacency.

The sensible, newly conservative turtleneck was figured as ideal gear for a wholesome weekend frolic with your golden retriever and your catalogue-model spouse.

Ballooning in shape, it lost its inherent tension – a dynamic most embarrassingly illustrated by a promotional photo for the 1990s sitcom Mad About You in which the co-stars, Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt, pull the necks of their matching sweaters over their mouths as if they’ve taken a fatal fall into the Gap. It is an image not so much androgynous as sexless and a vision of the turtleneck as a towel that has been thrown in.

The apotheosis of the deliberately boring normcore turtleneck was found on Steve Jobs, who arrived at his stark trademark look after striking up a friendship with the designer Issey Miyake, who gave him 100 or so of them. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography, Jobs “came to like the idea of having 84 a uniform for himself, because of both its daily convenience… and its ability to convey a signature style”. If the Bohemian turtleneck indicated, as Anne Hollander wrote in Seeing Through Clothes, Portfolio.

“the kind of freedom from sartorial convention demanded by deep thought”, Jobs’s turtleneck was its techno-corporate mutation, firmly utilitarian and faintly utopian, giving the impression of being ahead of a time that had yet to arrive. It is no coincidence that the turtleneck turns up frequently in science fiction, seen in Lost In Space and Logan’s Run and lending a close-fitted bit of Starfleet chic.

Top: Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt in Mad About You. Top right: David Hasselhoff in Knight Rider Above: Steve Jobs in his signature style

There is a touch of this retrofuturism – the promise of a world evolved beyond fussy buttons – in the turtleneck that the peacocks are now flocking toward. Every Sunday evening that an NFL quarterback emerges from the locker room wearing a jacket with peaked lapels over a sweater that swaddles his throat, a skirmish erupts on the sideline of the spectacle. For every approving observer, another bystander will cringe at having witnessed a revival of the vibe of Joe Namath’s bachelor pad.

The Drakean refusal to be hemmed down and tucked in constitutes a kind of counterrebellion. In contrast to the eager chic of the GQ QBs, it is scaled to suit a sweatshirt aesthetic, rendering this turtleneck perfectly contemporary. The sign of the times reads, “No jacket required.”

The maître d’ is wearing a hoodie.

Pseudo-sportsmanship is widely recognized as an international pastime. The reclamation of the turtleneck sweater as low-key athletic gear – a simple, slouchy pleasure that pretends to be nothing else – feels right, even if it looks off.

And in the end, looks matter only so much when something is worn to dance as if no one were watching.

Words: Troy Patterson

living / style

issue 126

Island for all the senses Founded on the vision of a “beyond luxury” hideaway, Velaa Private Island is truly an ultimate escape, a destination unto itself.

Indulge in a therapy at the spa, including a snow room, conquer the climbing wall, or sip from the highly curated wine selection available in the tower wine cellar. Velaa’s kids club is the biggest aqua park in Maldives.

Take a tour of the pristine Indian Ocean with Velaa’s own miniature submarine, or improve your golf strokes at the only golf academy in Maldives designed by Jose Maria Olazabal.

T: +960 6565 000 reservations@velaaisland.com www.velaaprivateisland.com facebook.com/velaaisland velaaprivateisland

living / watches

Reinventing the watch

C

hristoph Behling is a Swiss designer working for a Swiss watchmaker, but it is fair to say he goes against the grain of this traditional industry.

For a start, Behling, TAG Heuer’s lead designer for more than 10 years, is based in London but regularly commutes to Geneva to confer with the company’s management and technical experts on its latest innovations.

Just back in his West London studio after a visit to Frieze London, the annual contemporary art fair, he credits 86 this dual focus – Swiss watchmaking traditions and craftsmanship as well as the cosmopolitan creativity of London – as key to his long-term success.

In contrast with the insular watchmaking world of Geneva, he is Portfolio.

surrounded in London by designers of many disciplines, from furniture to shoes to high-fashion events, and he said, “That kind of atmosphere of creative exchange is very inspiring.”

Born in Geneva, Behling, 45, caught the watch bug at an early age yet took an unconventional route to becoming a timepiece designer. After completing his diploma in industrial design from the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design in 1995, he worked as a product designer and came to TAG Heuer in 2002 to work on an eyewear collection.

He soon wanted to move on to creating watches, but it was some time before he was let loose on the company’s core product. He described his early attempts as laughably bad, but still TAG’s engineers, prototypers and project

managers considered his designs and offered their advice.

His saving grace, he said, was his enthusiasm and willingness to learn. “I also think they liked my approach, which was slightly less focused on following tradition, and maybe more on asking questions and innovating,” he said.

Eventually, Behling progressed to working on TAG’s early concept watches, an haute horlogerie category that is de rigueur these days, but which, he said, did not really exist until that point.

The Monaco V4 concept watch, which TAG unveiled at the Baselworld watch fair in 2002, grabbed the attention of the watchmaking industry and elevated TAG’s reputation. The V4’s groundbreaking movement, designed

by Jean-Francois Ruchonnet of TAG,

Words: Rachel Garrahan

Why time can’t stand still at TAG Heuer

june issue 126

Monaco V4 concept watch

Monaco V4 Phantom

was inspired by racecar engines, and it became the first timepiece to be powered by micro belts rather than gears.

Behling, who designed a case for the V4 that was as forward looking as the movement it contained, said the watch was a much-needed breath of fresh air in the industry. “If you look at car engines from the 1950s, they are totally different from car engines today,” he said. “But when you compared the watch movements of the 1950s and early 2000s, they were completely identical.”

Following the V4, Behling began designing TAG’s commercial watch collection as well. Describing his responsibilities, he said that “it is all the surfaces you see: the dial and its protective sapphire dial, the hands, the case, the strap, the reverse of the case”.

Where a movement is partly visible, he has a certain influence on that, too, although he is respectful of the Geneva workshop’s technical expertise.

“When it comes to the inner workings, the functionality, the technology of a thousandth of a second precision piece, I have absolutely no idea how they do it,” Behling said with a laugh.

But he added, he enjoys the challenge of working with them to marry the latest technological developments with the watchmaker’s long heritage. The 2012 Mikrogirder, for example, was inspired

by Heuer’s Mikrograph of 1916, the world’s first stopwatch to measure 1/100th of a second.

TAG’s engineers were able to improve it by creating a revolutionary watch that could measure time to 5/10,000ths of a second. Behling’s design matched that innovation, by maximising readability, echoing the stopwatch inspiration with a pusher on top rather than on the side, and angling the case for ease of use.

Behling’s years at TAG have also given him a renewed respect for the larger watchmaking industry. Initially, he wanted to rip up the rulebook

“Watchmaking is not a dinosaur of the past. Its values are relevant now, and they will be in 20 years’ time” and reject an industry governed by sentiment and tradition. “The longer I was in the bubble, though, I realised it not only has some amazing wisdom but in its resourcefulness is incredibly modern,” he said.

In a world of disposable goods, the Swiss watch is, in fact, one of the most sustainable products available.

“It’s virtually all locally produced, it’s powered not by batteries but by the movement of your wrist,” Behling said.

“And you can keep it in your drawer for 10 years and not only does it still work, but you still like it.”

This idea of sustainability is one that is close to the designer’s heart. He also runs SolarLab Research & Design, an awardwinning company that has been creating solar-powered boats since 2006.

Given haute horlogerie’s lengthy lead times, Behling already is working on designs for 2017, as well as more substantial research and development projects for 2018. He said he is excited by the possibilities of new materials such as the lightweight carbon matrix composite being used in this year’s Monaco V4 Phantom, and for TAG’s future under the helm of Jean-Claude Biver, the chief executive of TAG Heuer since last year and president of the watch division at its owner, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

“Mr Biver wants TAG Heuer to be 87 aware of its traditions but also solidly excited by what is possible in the future,” Behling said. “Watchmaking is not a dinosaur of the past. Its values are relevant now, and they will be in 20 years’ time.”

Portfolio.

The new suites at Bupa Cromwell Hospital (Just what the doctor ordered)

The Royal Suite Patients from over 144 countries visit Bupa Cromwell Hospital for a range of treatments covering health checks and cosmetic surgery through to complex surgery and live organ transplantation.

Our patients expect a high level of service and comfort in every aspect of their life, and there’s no reason to compromise when they need it most.

The new Royal and Presidential suites are amongst the most luxurious in the world, and offer the ultimate healthcare experience. Patients will have access to a team of dedicated VIP coordinators and 24 hour private nursing, amongst many other services.

For enquiries please ring +44 (0)7809 316 205 or email thesuites@cromwellhospital.com.

Expect the exceptional.

june living / investment

investment piece

issue 126

Bespoke Orlebar Brown shorts The famous bulldog swim shorts, now printed with your own image

2 1

Double fused, non-elasticated four-part shaped waistband

3

Zip fly and metal snap closure

Mesh net lining

4

Signature side fasteners to adjust

5

Two side-angle front pockets and one zip back pocket

6

Chlorine, salt water, light and rub tested to prevent fading

Based in London, Orlebar Brown launched in March 2007 as a more tailored approach to men’s beach and swim shorts, and already its OB classic bulldog swim-shorts have become a style classic. The all-over prints use old images from the Hulton Getty archive, usually depicting the beach and poolside glamour of the 1960s and ’70s. Now though, as well as the curated collection you can also send Orlebar Brown your own prints and it will make a bespoke pair of swim shorts for you. Just upload a high-res image via their website and you can have a one-off design depicting anything you want, from holiday snaps to – if you insist – your pets. Bespoke designs cost $571 while shorts from the released range are around $325.

Portfolio.

89

june issue 126

living / Column

Work smarter, not longer, for success

By Bryan Gaensler In the late 1990s, I landed a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the storied Massachusetts Institute Of Technology.

At first, I would turn up to work around 9am, and would head home around 5pm. But before too long, I noticed that many of the other scientists were already in at work by 9, and that the same people were still in the lab at 5.

“Hmm,” I thought. “I’m at MIT now. I need to lift my game.”

I began arriving an hour earlier, and staying an hour later. But at 8am, the same people were already in working. And at 6pm, they showed no signs of going home.

I’m the competitive sort, so I rose to the challenge. I cranked it up to 12-hour days, 7am to 7pm. But the same people were still in there before me and stayed after me. This silent arms race escalated for another six months, at great personal strain.

But then I came to a realisation.

The additional hours were not translating into extra progress, but rather only into extra exhaustion. So I went back to working eight-hour days, before moving on to a faculty position at Harvard.

Almost 20 years later, I’m now an institute director at the University Of Toronto. A big focus of my efforts is to boost the careers, well-being and success of my institute’s students and postdocs.

It was thus with some surprise and disappointment that I read some questionable career advice from another University Of Toronto department head. My colleague argues that to reach his current senior position, he worked 16 to 17 hours per day as an early career scientist. He notes that his children spent weekends playing in the lobby, and that his wife (also a PhD scientist) did most of the parenting.

This presents misleading and incorrect advice on how to succeed in academia, and in careers and life in general. Here are the actual facts.

Working longer hours leads to poorer productivity. If you’re trying to impress people and move up the ranks, the solution isn’t to work longer, but to work smarter. Learn to manage your

time, to limit the endless spiral of e-mails and meetings, and to improve your efficiency.

The sustained schedule of 80- to 100-hour working weeks, which the macho male academic claims has got him where he is today, is a myth.

Men exaggerate or misjudge the number of hours they work. There are simple apps and tools to track your productive working hours and working patterns: the answers may surprise you.

While it might be mathematically possible to work 17-hour days for extended periods, there are then huge compromises on diet, fitness and rest. However, poor nutrition, lack of exercise and bad sleep hygiene are all major contributing factors to depression and general ill-health.

Indeed, academics face big challenges around mental health. An attempt to raise productivity by sustained long hours is a Faustian bargain that can ultimately take its toll on you and those around you.

Science has a problem with women. While the fraction of female students in undergraduate science classes can sometimes be quite large, the numbers drop off sharply at each higher rung of the career ladder. This “leaky pipeline” already has many causes. The reality is parenting and caregiving roles are not evenly split by gender, even more so for scientists. Thus, if the scientific community follows the advice on working hours and parenting offered by my colleague, we are then even further fostering a culture that directly holds back talented women from successful scientific careers. And that limits the quality and breadth of ideas and discoveries.

Instead, senior figures in science should be putting their energy into flexible career tracks, better part-time opportunities and extra support for those returning to the lab after parental leave.

Scientists of any gender, whether parents or not, should be able to make choices around their investments in career and family, rather than be forced to compete with or accommodate outdated workaholic male stereotypes.

Science demands a lot, so scientists should take control, not be controlled.

“There are simple apps and tools to track your productive working hours and working patterns”

90

Bryan Gaensler is the director of the Dunlap Institute For Astronomy And Astrophysics, University Of Toronto Portfolio.

**PENTHOUSE ROOFTOP TERRACE

E xclus ive Re s id enti a l & Spa Devel opment Parc du C ap, C ap d’ A nti bes, French Ri vi era

**PENTHOUSE

FRENCH RIVIERA

Lu x u r y a p a r tm e nts f rom € 5 9 9 , 9 50* Seavi ew penthouses from €4,500,000* *Subject to Availability

Marketing Suite & Show Apartments 33 Avenue George Gallice, 06160 Cap d’Antibes Savills Riviera Office +33 (0) 4 97 06 06 91 London Office +44 (0) 20 7877 4702 w w w . pa r c d u c a p . c o m **COMPUTER GENERATED IMAGES OF THE APARTMENTS ARE FOR INDICATIVE PURPOSES ONLY

cartier.com

DRIVE DE CARTIER MANUFACTURE MOVEMENT 1904 MC THE DRIVE DE CARTIER COLLECTION IS ELEGANCE REDEFINED. THE SLEEK LINES OF THIS CUSHION-SHAPED WATCH CREATE A TRULY STYLISH PIECE, BROUGHT TO LIFE BY THE MAISON MANUFACTURE MOVEMENT 1904 MC. ESTABLISHED IN 1847, CARTIER CREATES EXCEPTIONAL WATCHES THAT COMBINE DARING DESIGN AND WATCHMAKING SAVOIR-FAIRE. # W H AT D R I V E S YO U

From UAE: 800 Cartier (800-227 8437) Outside UAE: +971 4 236 8345