Men's Fashion November – December, 2013
What Lies Beneath
Take Two
He sings, he dances, he acts, and he’s not afraid to get silly in selfmocking comedy shorts. Drawing a line from Frank Sinatra to Jay Z, Justin Timberlake has become this generation’s master of ceremonies. By Michael Hirschorn. Photographs by Hedi Slimane. Styled by Sarah Richardson.
The killer instincts of the model-turnedactor Jamie Dornan. Photographs by Karim Sadli. Styled by Joe McKenna. By Jesse Ashlock.
Azealia Banks and Katie Couric take on a car; makeup, luggage and more.
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New York Comic Con celebrates the dedicated writers and artists, passionate fans and, yes, the commerce of comics. By George Gene Gustines.
68 Out of This World
This season’s starkly powerful silhouettes hold their own against Iceland’s extreme landscape of jagged lava fields, mossy hills and shining white glaciers. Photographs by Craig McDean. Styled by Jane How. Text by Meghan O’Rourke.
Lookout Sign of the Times
The male hero, once in ample supply, has entered a period of steady decline, and today our most iconic men are more likely to inspire cynicism than reverence. By Joshua Ferris. 12
20 By the Numbers
24 The Moment
There’s a feeling of boyish waywardness to much of men’s dressing right now, from signet rings to rumpled collars and cowlicks. Photographs by David Armstrong. Styled by Jason Rider.
Lookout Qatar This and That
The advanced light weight fabric of the Burberry menswear; artistic collaborations with FrancoTunisian street artist El Seed, who was invited to participate in Louis Vuitton’s ‘Foulards d’Artistes’ project; Ferragamo’s new perfume launch in the Tuscan hills; the Damien Hirst and Prada bag; Chanel’s new collection and more.
Now Showing
The Museum of Islamic Art takes visitors on a religious journey to Hajj, through art. By Sindhu Nair. Portrait by Angel Mallari. 40 Letter Art
Enthusiasm for Islamic penmanship is being spread by a new mobile app. By N. Mani. 42
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clockwise from top: Athr Gallery, Saudi Arabia and the artist; hedi slimane; karim sadli.
Best in Show
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Clockwise from top: Magnetism by Ahmed Mater, magnets and iron fillings, an exhibit in Hajj: The Journey Through Art; Justin Timberlake in a Dolce & Gabbana sweater, QR7,625; the actor Jamie Dornan in a Bottega Veneta jacket, QR9,830, shirt, QR4,000, and coat (on table), QR11,300; Balenciaga pants, Dolce & Gabbana shoes, QR2,900.
On the Cover: Justin Timberlake in a Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane shirt, QR10,740, and T-shirt, QR930. Photographed by Hedi Slimane. Styled by Sarah Richardson. All prices are indicative
Table of Contents Publisher & Editor-In-Chief
Yousuf Jassem Al Darwish Chief Executive
Sandeep Sehgal Executive Vice President
Alpana Roy
Vice President
Ravi Raman
Editorial Editor
Sindhu Nair Chief Fashion Correspondent
Debrina Aliyah
Senior Correspondents
Abigail Mathias Ayswarya Murthy Ezdihar Ibrahim Ali Sub Editor
Sue Eedle
art
Quality
Arena
Arena Qatar
In Fashion
By Design
Culture Camp
To Accessorize
The best accessories for fall — soft briefcases, toneon-tone watches and dress boots — take their cues from classic banker style. Paired with an offbeat pinstripe suit, they’re anything but conformist. Photographs by Paul Wetherell. Styled by Jason Rider.
David Karp lives by the principle that the world doesn’t need more flashy gadgets and fancy software — which would be fine, had he not founded Tumblr. By Tim Wu. Photographs by Ben Hoffmann.
Both Qatar and the UAE are going through a cultural awakening of sorts. Does Qatar have a stronger agenda? By Sindhu Nair.
To discuss Delvaux is to discuss Belgium. Tracing the history of a brand that is intent to move beyond its shores. By Debrina Aliyah.
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On Heritage
Senior Art Director
Venkat Reddy
Turning Point
Antoine Arnault spent his youth enjoying the spoils of being the LVMH titan’s eldest son. But by successfully betting on high-end men’s wear as an ever-ripening luxury category, he’s quickly proving that nepotism only goes so far. By Dana Thomas. Portrait by Benoit Peverelli.
Hanan Abu Saiam
Assistant Art Director
Ayush Indrajith
Senior Graphic Designer
Maheshwar Reddy
Photography
Rob Altamirano
Marketing and Sales Senior Manager – Marketing
Zulfikar Jiffry
Assistant Manager – Marketing
Giovanna Ferragamo might be less involved in the designing process of the clothswear in her family business but that doesn’t moderate her passion. Following the growth of a family-owned business that basks in its “Made in Italy” heritage. By Sindhu Nair.
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Deputy Art Director
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Thomas Jose
Media Consultants
Hassan Rekkab Lydia Youssef
Marketing Research & Support Executive
Kanwal Baluch Accountant Pratap Chandran
Sr. Distribution Executive
Bikram Shrestha
Distribution Support
Arjun Timilsina Bhimal Rai Basanta P
T, The Style Magazine of The New York Times Editor in Chief
Deborah Needleman Creative Director
Patrick Li
Deputy Editor
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Whitney Vargas Fashion Director at Large
Joe McKenna
Managing Editor
George Gustines Photography Director
Nadia Vellam
News Services General Manager
The Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, top; Antoine Arnault in the entryway to his Paris home, right.
COPYRIGHT INFO
Michael Greenspon Vice President, Licensing and Syndication
Alice Ting
Vice President, Executive Editor The New York Times News Service & Syndicate
Published by
Nancy Lee
Licensed Editions T, The New York Times Style Magazine, and the T logo are trademarks of The New York Times Co., NY, NY, USA, and are used under license by Oryx Media, Qatar. Content reproduced from T, The New York Times Style Magazine, copyright The New York Times Co. and/or its contributors 2013 all rights reserved. The views and opinions expressed within T-Qatar are not necessarily those of The New York Times Company or those of its contributors.
Editorial Director
Josephine Schmidt Oryx Advertising Co WLL
P.O. Box 3272; Doha-Qatar Tel: (+974) 44672139, 44550983, 44671173, 44667584 Fax: (+974) 44550982 Email: tqatar@omsqatar.com website: www.omsqatar.com
Editor, T International Editions
George Gustines Coordinators
Gary Caesar Jessie Sandler
clockwise from top: shutterstock; Benoit Peverelli.
The New York Times
Lookou
the hero goes underground American’s male icons have tumbled from the national pedestal it once placed them on.
Sign of the Times
Let Us Now Praise Infamous Men The male hero, once in ample supply, has entered a period of steady decline, and today our most iconic men are more likely to inspire cynicism than reverence. By Joshua Ferris Photograph by dulce pinzÓn
If you were to take an inventory of prominent men today,
you might wonder what’s become of the male icon. Once minted in steady supply from the best of our statesmen, athletes and entertainers, the genuine icon has become a rare thing. And while the icon used to be bound up in heroism — real or perceived — current contenders to iconic status are now made from darker stuff. Consider Julian Assange, or Kanye West, or Mark Zuckerberg, or the problematic fictional men of cable TV. To be an iconic man was at one time less complicated. You had to be the president, or a movie star, or a rock star, or the heavyweight champion of the world. Admittedly, none of that was easy; as achievements go, they were among American life’s most difficult, requiring at least as much dumb luck as talent and hard work. But once the hurdles were cleared, divine worship was the reward. It might be James Dean, or Elvis, or John F. Kennedy. The world needed these charismatic men, these otherworldly achievers and 14
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transcendent beauties. What came next was the apotheosis: the iconic man delivered unto the heart of the country on the cover of Look, or Life, or Esquire. Of course, such men had their detractors. Elvis’s gyrations outraged some, and J.F.K.’s Catholicism offended others. The famous image of Muhammad Ali as Saint Sebastián, hands bound behind his back and body pierced by half a dozen bloody arrows, showed that not everyone was willing to worship in his church. But by and large, these figures had the nation’s heart, and a consensus prevailed that they were great men. And once they had begun doing great things, a centralized and highly structured tastemaking machine began curating and disseminating their divinity. Control over that dissemination was highly concentrated: it was a time of three network stations, a sovereign Madison Avenue, a stable literary canon. Ours was a dominant culture of suits and ties and a counterculture effectively contained. The machine knew what the
Sign of the Times
world liked and found acceptable. It had a lock on our fantasies and projections and longings. It told us, in the primal language of the photograph, what a man was, a great man, a godly man, and how we might emulate him. But the machine couldn’t keep its grip. Nixon fell, forever desacralizing high office, and memoirs by Kennedy’s mistresses brought news of a martyred saint’s all-too-human condition. The paparazzi, once lurking among the shadows, crept into the light, helping to narrow the gap between our view of paradise and reality. Privilege would never again be accorded privacy. Irony and cynicism slowly gained on reverence. As we got savvier and more skeptical, we turned against the machine. We began to understand that what made a man iconic was as much commercial manipulation as it was empyrean merit. The supermarket tabloids undercut the pageantry of glossy cover images. Around the time that rock stars began to sell out to car commercials, the male icon entered a permanent decline. Our more nuanced view of the powerful, the celebrated and the revered gave rise to a more compromised representative man. Ali fell to Tyson. Kennedy ceded to Clinton. Kurt Cobain was my generation’s Elvis. Then something truly radical happened: the machine’s hegemony was vanquished by actual machines, whose servers brought the last towering male monoliths down to JPEG size. Postwar America’s legacy as an established culture and
Lance Armstrong briefly gave us a hero, but in the end he was just Bernie Madoff in spandex.
FACES OF CHANGE Top row: efforts to establish President Barack Obama as a hero soured once he took office. Middle row: the evolution of the teen idol. Bottom row: magazine covers depicting Muhammad Ali and Kanye West used religious allegory to very different ends.
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counterculture shattered into a multitude of subcultures full of shrill-voiced Web sites and viciously opposed narratives. The magazine cover article went into competition with a staggering number of competing stories in the online marketplace of bloggers and gossip sites, while the images on those covers lost their inherent power as a form of communication. They were captioned, manipulated, blemished. They became commodities, no more valuable than pictures on a Facebook page. The cover image now commands all of a second’s attention before it’s forgotten or absorbed via social media into the end user’s personal brand. We are no longer in thrall to the icon; the icon is in service to each and every one of us, and at our individual mercy. The male icon’s decline is bound up in the destruction of the machine and the impoverishment of the image, but it dovetails with a crisis among the ranks of men. The prospect of a president restoring the role suffered a fatal blow when George Bush took his Potemkin flight toward a ‘‘Mission Accomplished’’ banner. It was resuscitated briefly with a Shepard Fairey print of the candidate Barack Obama and the single word ‘‘Hope.’’ But in no time at all one congressman cried out, ‘‘You lie!’’ during a State of the Union address, and others throttled every prospect of bipartisanship. If Clinton was the icon of ambivalence, and Bush the icon of incompetence, the icon of hope has been transformed into the truly hopeless image of political gridlock and apocalyptic rancor. Shift to sports, or movies, or music, and the icon is equally as moribund. Lance Armstrong briefly gave us a hero, but in the end he was just Bernie Madoff in spandex. N.F.L. thugs compete with M.L.B. juicers to see who can disappoint us more. Dress Michael Vick or A-Rod up as Saint Sebastián and everyone would know that the arrows were self-inflicted. The homogenizing forces at play in Hollywood — its blockbuster business model, its jones for superheroes, its disdain for anything original — have made the mask, and not the man, the focus of our attention. Who experiences an intake of breath at another cover photo of Robert Downey Jr. or Christian Bale? In an epidemic of cynicism, it signals only another cycle of sequels. And these actors are, truly, among the best of their generation. By contrast, their counterparts in the comedy world are clown-boys who refuse to grow up over and over again, making any attempt to turn them into icons wholly silly. The male icon’s decline might not matter much. It’s never a bad idea to forge your own original power rather than ape the appeal of others. Still, we should recognize the void left behind. This is the only way to explain the presence of the accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on an August cover of Rolling Stone. Has any other magazine anointed more male icons in the past 40odd years? To see Tsarnaev in the pose of the sexy teen idol served to elevate an alleged mass murderer to the hallowed company of John Lennon and Jay Z. This explains the uproar that followed. Take the charitable view and say the decision was meant to complicate the face of terror. But the incongruity between the actions of the accused and the cachet of the masthead, the bloody footage of the carnage and the transcendent pose of the suspect, is not only a source of controversy. It’s a reinvigoration of the icon. It’s the final sundering of the heroic from the iconic. Call it misguided, crude, a craven ploy; whatever else, it represents the evolution of a very particular pictorial vocabulary — the terrorist as icon. Only 22 years ago, Don DeLillo had a character in ‘‘Mao II’’ postulate the following: ‘‘In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. . . . Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside.’’ The terrorist has been absorbed.
Left to right, from top: Obama Hope, Shepard Fairey, 2008 - Courtesy of OBEY GIANT ART; Obama Variant, Artist Unknown; Elvis Presley appears courtesy of Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.; MARK SELiger/Management Artists/courtesy of rolling stone; ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy; Courtesy of Esquire; David LaChapelle.
Lookout
Lookout
This and That now showing
Rauschenberg and Friends An exhibit explores the dynamic association between the iconic artist and his inner circle of fellow bricoleurs.
assembly required Clockwise from above: a 1962 Robert Rauschenberg selfportrait; “Untitled,“ a sculpture by Martial Raysse from 1962; ‘‘Dry Cell,’’ a soundtransmitting sculpture by Rauschenberg; a painted roller skate used in a 1962 performance by Niki de Saint Phalle.
To the restlessly inventive Robert Rauschenberg, an art material could be anything in sight. A stuffed goat, a torn shirt or tie, a wheelbarrow and even his own bed — all became fodder for paintings or sculptures, which would later incorporate sound and electronics as well. Rauschenberg had a counterpart in the Swiss-born Jean Tinguely, who had his debut at the Museum of Modern Art after arriving in New York in January 1960. The show consisted of a gigantic motorized sculpture assembled from bicycle wheels, a piano, a bathtub and other detritus, which was designed to self-destruct in flames before a live audience. Rauschenberg made an ad hoc contribution to the piece with a toaster that spit out silver dollars. That ‘‘collaboration’’ spurred a lifelong friendship that would embrace other bricoleurs of the French ‘‘New Realist’’ group then living in New York: Arman, Martial Raysse and Tinguely’s future wife, Niki de Saint Phalle — all artists who subscribed to Rauschenberg’s belief in closing the gap between art and life. Last month, the Sperone Westwater gallery brought the group together again with ‘‘Radio Waves: New York ‘Nouveau Réalisme’ and Rauschenberg,’’ an exhibition of 13 rarely seen scrap assemblages and drawings from the artist’s personal collection (speronewestwater.com). — LINDA YABLONSKY
THe SCENE
With a nod to the brand’s original name, the new J. P. Tod’s Sartorial Touch collection allows you to customize monk-straps, wingtip loafers, unstructured briefcases and even its iconic driving shoes in a choice of fine leathers and hand-burnished patinas.
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Neo-Nashville Nashville, in Tennessee, has spent the past few years slowly cultivating a more hipster-friendly identity, not unlike that of Austin, Tex., its spiritual compadre to the west. This fall, the city ups the ante in its bid to become the Williamsburg of the South. In the trendy Gulch neighborhood, the architect Nick Dryden has helped lead the transformation, designing hip spaces for clothing designer Billy Reid and for the denim mecca Imogene + Willie. Dryden’s latest endeavor, the 404 Hotel & Kitchen, which opened in October, is in an old garage next to a bluegrass landmark, the Station Inn, and preserves many of the original structure’s rustic charms: loftlike rooms with exposed
ceiling beams and concrete floors. Then there’s Benjamin and Max Goldberg, the brothers behind the much buzzed-about restaurant the Catbird Seat. Next month they’ll open Pinewood Social — part restaurant, part bar and part hipster country club, with vintage bowling lanes, an outdoor pool, bocce-ball courts and karaoke rooms (33 Peabody Street; pinewoodsocial.com). Chef Josh Habiger, who designed Pinewood’s menu, also cooked at Music City Eats, Nashville’s first food and music festival, the brainchild of the celebrity chef Jonathan Waxman and the local rockers Caleb and Nathan Followill of Kings of Leon (musiccityeats.com). — Katie Chang
Clockwise from Top left: Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York; 2013 Martial Raysse/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/licensed by VAGA, New York; 2013 Niki Charitable Art Foundation, all rights reserved. Illustrations by Konstantin Kakanias.
Happy Feet
Lookout
This and That
Second Act Since playing the sinister M.C. in Bob Fosse’s ‘‘Cabaret,’’ Joel Grey has kept busy: he acts, directs (currently a production of ‘‘On Borrowed Time,’’ the play in which he made his theatrical debut at age 9) and takes photographs, a hobby that has yielded four books and work in the Whitney’s permanent collection. His latest series — enigmatic images of peeling, weather-worn billboards — will be published in a Sam Shahid-designed monograph next month, and can be seen at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York. The twist? The photos were shot with an iPhone 5, demonstrating that Grey, 81, is quite adept at changing with the times. ‘‘The Billboard Papers,’’ Pointed Leaf Press; stevenkasher.com. — julia felsenthal
fashion memo
A Fine Mess The deliberately unkempt looks of the season recall quite vividly the style of an obscure French film character. It seems as if Boudu — the irrepressible tramp from Jean Renoir’s 1932 masterpiece, ‘‘Boudu Saved From Drowning’’ — must have made multiple appearances on designers’ mood boards this season, because his dishabille swagger could be seen all over the men’s runways. Dries Van Noten and Junya Watanabe channeled the disheveled drifter with a profusion of oversize tweed jackets, bathrobelike outerwear and patched-up suits. At Yohji Yamamoto, some models even wore fluffed-up Boudu-like beards. The character, played by Michel Simon, is an archetypal French clochard, a kind of Gallic version of Chaplin’s Little Tramp, who, mourning his lost dog,
tries to off himself by jumping in the Seine. Boudu is rescued by a liberal-minded bookseller who takes him in, only to see the hobo run roughshod over his home, bedding his wife and marrying his mistress. Sartorially, Boudu is equally unable to adapt: he insists on pairing a respectable jacket with his own tattered suspenders, and when given polish to clean up his shoes, he forgoes the cloth and applies it with his hands. Funny that this funky high-low mix is now something to aspire to. — STEPHEN HEYMAN In Jean Renoir’s ‘‘Boudu Saved From Drowning,’’ an impish hobo prefigured the threadbare look seen on the fall runways at Dries Van Noten, Junya Watanabe and Yohji Yamamoto.
Intelligent Forms
Street Style
From Les Nécessaires d’Hermès (clockwise from below): the Table à Cachette, QR16,800; Partition folding screen, QR103,000; Cheval- d’Arçons bench, QR50,600.
Amid the glut of New York designers reinterpreting 1990s urban wear, Max Vanderwoude Gross, the 26-year-old behind Proper Gang, stands out, with a new line of hiphop-influenced baggy T-shirts, athletic jerseys and Dickies-like pants that have a boxy, abbreviated cut. openingceremony.us
For its latest collection of furniture, Hermès has teamed with the up-and-coming French designer Philippe Nigro. Les Nécessaires d’Hermès consists of eight versatile pieces, rendered in Canaletto walnut and leather, and incorporates the elegance and whimsy — what Nigro calls ‘‘the refined humor’’ — for which the French luxury brand is known. For instance, the delicate Table à Cachette has a hidden tray that pivots out from under its top, while the Cheval-d’Arcons bench, which is based on the form of a pommel horse, has concealed drawers at each end as well as at its center. ‘‘The point was to design really functional objects,’’ Nigro said, ‘‘but the function shouldn’t be so obvious.’’ hermes.com — PILAR VILADAS
All prices are indicative
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Clockwise from top: AFP Images; Dries Van Noten; Courtesy of Comme des Garçons; MONICA FEUDI; Joel Grey; Philippe Lacombe (3); Silja Magg.
a new line
Take Two
A dual review of what’s new. Azealia Banks
Katie Couric
Newly minted queen of Harlem hip-hop and controversial Twitter shade-thrower whose incendiary mixtape set the blogosphere abuzz last year. Her debut album, ‘‘Broke With Expensive Taste,’’ is due out in January.
The longtime ‘‘Today’’ host and former ‘‘CBS Evening News’’ anchor is just as capable of taking down puffed-up politicos as she is of living up to her sunny reputation. Her syndicated daytime talk show, ‘‘Katie,’’ just entered its second season.
I like it. I think the monogram print is a little feminine, so it should be smaller. If it were the Damier print, that size could be fun. It rolls well. The wheels are sturdy. I usually travel with large suitcases, though — at least three.
I really liked that lipstick. It’s really smooth. It covered well. I liked the packaging. It’s not, like, a yellow kind of green. I feel like it’s more brown. More neutral. I don’t really need an excuse to wear green lipstick. I just need to be in the mood.
I didn’t even know that aioli was garlic mayonnaise. I thought it was, like, olive oil. I thought it was garlic oil or something. I do tons of cooking. The other night I made some lobsters. I put them on my Instagram.
I’ve actually never been camping in my life. I’ve never even slept outdoors. None of that. The closest I’ve come to a woodsy experience would be my festival shows. I’m such a city girl, it’s crazy. Maybe I’ll take it on a plane one day.
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Car The Mini Cooper S Paceman All4 (starting at QR103,700; miniusa.com).
Luggage Louis Vuitton’s Zéphyr 55 Monogram suitcase, with four swiveling wheels and an extra-durable case (QR12,500, or QR15,500 for the larger Zéphyr 70; louisvuitton.com).
Makeup Dolce & Gabbana’s limited-edition Sicilian Jewels Classic Cream lipstick in Emerald (QR127; saksfifthavenue.com).
Recipe The beloved garlic aioli recipe from Alice Waters’s new book, ‘‘The Art of Simple Food II’’ (QR127; Clarkson Potter).
Sleeping Bag Nemo Equipment’s Rhythm 25 Primaloft sleeping bag, designed to accommodate side sleepers (QR800; nemoequipment.com).
I thought it was really fun. I love the retro dashboard, and I love the cheeky comments of the people with their British accents, who say things like ‘‘You’re really feeling it’’ when you speed up. They’re much more entertaining than my GPS woman.
I took it to California for a weekend, and it was easy to maneuver and roll. But I’m a serial overpacker, so I think it would be more practical for me if it were a bigger size — I’d rather just throw things in a duffel bag.
I would never be hip enough to pull this off. Ever. And I’m not sure I’d want to be. I put it on in a hotel bathroom and immediately took it off. What’s that girl’s name from ‘‘Twilight’’? I looked like Bella’s grandmother on steroids.
It was relatively easy to make, and I thought I was going to love it. Maybe I had particularly pungent garlic when I made it. It was just too intense. I felt like a vampire will not get near me for decades.
I’m not a big camper, but I do favor the fetal position at night, so if I were to perhaps go to a slumber party, I think this would be a very nice addition. It was warm. It’s water-resistant. I loved the pocket for my iPhone. I tried it out in my office and fortunately I did not fall asleep.
Banks: shutterstock. Couric: Disney ABC Domestic Television. From top: MINI USA; Courtesy of Louis Vuitton; Courtesy of Dolce & Gabbana; 2013 by Alice Waters/Illustrations 2013 by Patricia Curtan; NEMO Equipment, Inc.
It’s like a toy. You know what I mean? It’s kind of like a go-kart. I don’t feel really safe in there. I think it’s definitely a car for London — like for those little roads.
Lookout
On Beauty
Let It Grow After years of manicured arches, eyebrows are making a thicker, fuller, more discreetly groomed return to their natural state. By AMANDA fortini Photograph by ben hassett
notice them unless they are exquisitely right or disastrously wrong. As someone who has spent many years in an intense relationship with her own dark, willful Italian brows, I’ve come to realize that they are not trivial, frivolous or merely incidental. Eyebrows matter. They matter a lot. And this season they matter even more than usual: makeup artists are returning to the strong, pronounced lines of Audrey Hepburn in her early-’60s heyday. Although natural-looking brows have been the thing for a while (see the actresses Jennifer Connelly and Rachel Weisz), in this new incarnation, they are fuller, heavier and more precisely sculptured. Unless a woman has Brooke Shields’s natural assets, and maybe even then, she may find herself filling in with pencil or shadow. The point of all this fuss, of course, is that thick, full eyebrows signify youth and vitality — eyebrows thin with age — and that some semblance of a midpoint arch can make eyes look more alert and cheekbones more angular and defined. But the importance of eyebrows goes beyond aesthetics. Brows are generally the darkest, highest-contrast element on the face, and, along with the eyes, the most important feature for telegraphing feelings and thoughts. Eyebrows, you might say, are the rhythm track of the face, keeping its expressive beat, providing emphasis and punctuation. Without them, the face is an inscrutable platter. (People who lack eyebrows, or who have very light ones, tend to look extraterrestrial — think Tilda Swinton or the Mona Lisa.) In a sense, eyebrows serve the face’s highest function — that of communication, even seduction. Eyebrows show interest, engagement and understanding. Raising, furrowing or shifting them ever so slightly registers and reciprocates attention. Why, then, do so many women still insist on
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paring theirs down to skinny crescents, the sort of barely-there lines popularized by film stars in the 1930s and again by waifish models in the 1990s? When I see such brows, I can’t help but think of poor ‘‘Mrs. B,’’ my junior-high music teacher, whose penciled-in half-moons made her look perpetually, relentlessly cheerful, even as she sang melancholy folk songs like ‘‘One Tin Soldier.’’ These days, such incongruities are all too common. If plastic surgery and excessive injections have taught us anything, it’s that narrowing one’s expressive range is a perilous endeavor. But great eyebrows are not easy to come by, and it’s not just a matter of leaving them alone. Even ‘‘natural’’ brows require a fair amount of backstage grooming. My advice, as with hair color or therapy, is to see a professional, who can not only work some alchemy with tweezers or
T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine
wax but can also instruct on the artistic wielding of pencils and brushes — thereby preventing a stenciled Kabuki-like effect that’s striking on the runways but shocking on the street. Like gently trimmed hedgerows, which are more pleasing to the eye when left slightly wild, rather than manicured so severely they look maimed, eyebrows deserve a restrained but sure hand. Recently, I insisted a young friend tag along with me to an appointment with the Beverly Hills brow expert I have seen for more than a decade. The drive took the better part of the morning. My friend was skeptical: could eyebrows possibly be worth all this trouble, all this traffic? But the results — brows that magically lifted my eyelids and excavated my jawline — made her a believer. Never mind the hedgerows. I’d spruced up the entire yard.
model: jenna earle/next ny. hair by yannick d’is at Management artists. makeup by violette at management artists. manicure by alicia torello at the wall group.
Eyebrows are like shoes: you don’t
Lookout By the Numbers
Costume Party Comic-book fans nearly cracked the Internet in half with reactions to the news that Ben Affleck would play the masked crusader in a forthcoming Superman/Batman film. Many of the impassioned, no matter their favorite Dark Knight (West, Keaton, Kilmer, Clooney or Bale), can be found at New York Comic Con. The four-day festival, which ran Oct. 10-13 in the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, celebrated the dedicated writers and artists, passionate fans and, yes, the commerce of comics. The showroom gets densely packed and the lines for events extremely long, but the vibe remains upbeat and nerdily earnest, with double-takes from passers-by as Supermen, Captain Americas and Doctor Whos roam the nearby streets. — George gene gustines
$3.8 billion
33%
of attendees are between 25 and 34 years old
4
Estimated economic impact on New York City
The box office returns, worldwide, for ‘‘The Avengers,’’ ‘‘Iron Man 3’’ and ‘‘The Dark Knight Returns,’’ which are among the 10 highest-grossing movies ever
$70 million
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miles of aisles for giddy fans to roam
Hours spent camping out on the sidewalk by the first fan to line up for last year’s show
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700
proposals of marriage have been popped at the convention
Number of exhibitors who present their wares
116,000
Total 2012 attendees, many of them dressed as their favorite hero or villain Pounds of freight moved into the building for the 2012 convention
167,000 756,066 hot dogs sold last year
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countries are represented at the show
10 years of ‘‘Walking Dead’’ The comic has spawned video games, novels and an AMC television series. There will be an advance look at Season 4 of the TV show at the convention.
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$20 million
Amount of money spent at the show
The auction amount for the cover of ‘‘The Amazing Spider-Man’’ No. 328, illustrated by Todd McFarlane, in 2012
$657,000
Sales of print and digital comics and graphic novels for 2012
$750 million
$2.16 million
What a copy of the first issue of ‘‘Action Comics,’’ from 1938 and featuring the first appearance of Superman, was sold for in 2011. The character will be the subject of a panel celebrating his 75 years.
Clockwise from top: new york comic con; ComicConnect; Courtesy of Heritage Auctions; Gene Page/AMC; John E. Kelly/FoodPix/Getty images; The ESCAPIST magazine (2); Julio de Oliveira/Rotten Tomatoes (3); The ESCAPIST magazine; Julio de Oliveira/Rotten Tomatoes.
including action figures, original art, magnets, tumblers, masks, whips, capes, temporary tattoos and more
Lookout
The Moment
Youth Uprising There’s a feeling of boyish waywardness to much of men’s dressing right now, from signet rings to rumpled collars and cowlicks. Photographs by David Armstrong styled by jason rider
Signet rings Eddie Borgo ring (on ring finger), QR1300; the Shop at the Standard. Tiffany & Company ring, QR9,100; Prada jacket, QR6,000, and sweater, QR1,700.
All prices are indicative
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Lookout
The Moment
Nubbly socks and suits Gucci jacket, QR7,645, and pants, QR3,000; T by Alexander Wang sweater, QR1,000; Cole Haan loafers, QR830; Marwood socks, QR218.
All prices are indicative
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A rogue cowlick Hermès turtleneck sweater, QR5,200; Marni sweater, QR2,600.
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Lookout Qatar
This and That
A Stitch in Time The arrival of a new type of tailoring within the Burberry menswear collection may have Barney Stinson, from How I Met Your Mother, in suit heaven. Advanced lightweight fabric and an innovative internal system, work together to create a suit that is perfectly aligned with the movement of the body. The suits are tailored from an innovative 100% wool cloth developed in Biella, Italy, an area renowned for its heritage in luxury fabric development. The yarn is a fine merino wool, particularly long to withstand the effects of torsion. ABIGAIL MATHIAS
Playful Superstition Chanel’s Autumn 2013 Collection, reinterprets the notion of superstition with a playful and surrealist spirit. Mixing sumptuous tones of bronze, taupe and khaki with the magic of a golden beige, intense pink or burgundy palette — the make up collection hints on Gabrielle Chanel’s affinity to good luck charms. The French fashion designer’s apartment on the Rue Cambon in Paris was decorated with talismans, bronze and alabaster lions, bundles of ears of wheat besides the number ‘five’ hidden in a crystal chandelier. ABIGAIL MATHIAS
Building upon the layers of cultural communication between the artists and Louis Vuitton, Franco-Tunisian street artist El Seed was invited to participate in Louis Vuitton’s “Foulards d’Artistes” project this March along with other international street artists. He designed a scarf for the maison, recreating the classic silk Louis Vuitton scarf in his own inimitable Arabic “calligraffiti” style. As an added dimension to the collaboration, Seed custom-created an exceptional window installation using the iconic Alzer hard-sided luggage. The artist then left his unique mark on a stack of three trunks, sharing the same poetic and fluid “calligraffiti” messages that have made him renowned in the world of urban art. The unique products mark a significant moment
in history as the first products created by a regional artist for the maison. These exceptional Alzer pieces were later auctioned for the benefit of Start (a Middle East-based educational charity for children with special needs) at the Christie’s fall sale of Modern and Contemporary Arab, Iranian and Turkish art in Dubai. “I wanted to find something that would connect the story of Louis Vuitton to the story of the Arabs and Muslims and their influence in the world, a story that I enjoy telling every one. I came across a poem on Venice and felt that this was the inspiration I was looking for an ode to a city that embraced difference,” says the artist. The trunks sold for a combined total of approximately QR40,5016. ABIGAIL MATHIAS All prices are indicative
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IMAGES COURTESY, burbery; LOUIS VUITTON; Chanel. Model: Monica Jagaciak (JAC) BY Solve Sundsbo.
Treasure Trunks
A Tuscan Evening
Salvatore Ferragamo has a penchant for the extraordinary. Its perfume launches also do not disappoint.
GRAND SETTING From top clockwise, Nicoli Sculpture Studios; one of the offerings from Tuscan Soul; the collection is displayed at the marble studio
The latest launch was at one of the most dazzling venues, quite literally, in the heart of the Apuan Alps, surrounded by the breathtaking scenery of the caves where Michelangelo chose the marble for his masterpieces, a 30-minutes drive from the sleepy town of Forte dei Marmi, near Florence. Long before the small group of journalists reached the mountains, a white, eerie, unreal glow seemed to spread from them. There was nothing unreal about it, we soon realized; it was the shiny glow of pure, beautiful marble. The site, the organizer said, was picked months before and had since evolved, as the marble is constantly being quarried out for various construction needs. As we stood, stunned, looking at this work of wonder, the brand presented the new fragrances collection — Tuscan Soul Quintessential Collection. The collection was inspired by a “Made in Italy” tradition and was represented by the two members of the family: Ferruccio Ferragamo and Giovanna Gentile Ferragamo. The collection, said to be inspired by the Tuscany surrounding creates a luxury perfume anthology: Bianco di Carrara, an ode to the most precious natural Tuscan Carrara stone; Vendemmia, scent of a millenary tradition, the harvesting of grape; Viola Essenziale, a tribute to Florence’s iconic flower, violet: the Iris and Convivio, a blend of grapefruit with the delicacy of the jasmine flower as well as the intensity of cypress wood. Also welcoming the guests were Michele Norsa, CEO of the group, Luciano Bertinelli, CEO of Ferragamo Parfums and Massimiliano Giornetti, Creative Director. The evening continued at the Nicoli Sculpture Studios, where the great sculpting tradition has been practiced for six generations, with a gala dinner created by the chef of Il Borro Relais & Châteaux. SINDHU NAIR
image S COURTESY Ferragamo; Boucheron
Boucheron Finds a New Home The luxury arm of Darwish Holding and the House of Boucheron, the 153-year-old French jeweler, announced the opening of a new 15-squaremeter pop-up store at Fifty One East, Al Maha Center, Doha. Following the opening of its boutique in Fifty One East at Doha’s Lagoona Mall in September 2011, Boucheron is said to be strengthening its presence with a brand new Parisian-inspired store. The store is designed to reflect the contemporary Hotel Particulier of the Maison Boucheron. A white and champagne-colored setting celebrates the exceptional luminosity of the flagship at 26 Place Vendome. “We invite customers to delve into the graceful setting at the new Boucheron pop-up store,” said a Darwish Luxury representative. The store also features iconic jewelry collections such as the graphic Quatre and the delicate Ava, as well as the Serpent Boheme collection, a tribute to the love story between Frederic Boucheron and his wife Gabrielle. ABIGAIL MATHIAS
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Lookout Qatar
This and That
Holiday Fever The Banana Republic Holiday Collection was recently unveiled at a glittering affair at Studio F in Emirates Towers, Dubai. Models took to the catwalk and showcased key pieces from the new collection, including luxe structured coats, tailored trousers and soft knit sweaters, while soulful singer Kerrie-Anne entertained guests in perfect pitch. ABIGAIL MATHIAS
Luxury hand-crafted mobile phone manufacturer Vertu has opened its first stand-alone store at Villagio Mall in Doha. “We are not a mobile phone company. We are a luxury company that happens to do mobile phones,” says Massimiliano Pogliani, Chief Executive Officer at Vertu. That is putting it lightly. Retailing at EUR6,000 (QR30,000) to EUR100,000 (QR500,000)–historically, their most expensive phone has been the Signature Cobra at GBP213,000) QR1,237000 Vertu embodies exclusivity and pizzazz. “Each phone is handmade in England by a single craftsman at Vertu’s state-of-the-art headquarters in Hampshire with the most tactile materials,” he says. Constellation, for example, boasts a 5.1-inch, 100 carat, sapphire screen that is resistant to scratching by anything other than diamond; the titanium casing is two and a half times stronger than stainless steel and only half its weight, and the leather cover is sourced from a tannery in the Alps. Technical specifications include Android 4.2 Jelly Bean OS, 13-MP rear-facing camera with full HD video, a front-facing Skype-compliant 1.3-MP camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and NFC. Ayswarya Murthy
Convergence of Art, Style and Insects A meeting of two great minds took place in the alluring desert of Qatar on the opening night of Damien Hirst’s exhibition “Relics” at AlRiwaq, Doha. A collaboration between Hirst and Miuccia Prada, a limited-production range of bags, was presented in the Prada Oasis, a pop-up Prada store built inside a traditional tent. The bags, named Entomology, were inspired by Kafka’s Metamorphosis. After this private event the “Prada Oasis and Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy Juice Bar” was open to the public in MIA Park from November 3-13, 2013. A reinterpretation of his famous “Pharmacy Restaurant”, this installation draws upon the traditions of a Bedouin tent in the style of a modern-day pharmacy. Made in a limited edition of twenty pieces, the bags were to be sold through a silent
auction over the ten days of the installation. Proceeds from the sale of the “Entomology” bags were donated to Reach Out to Asia, a non-profit organisation aiming to promote education across Asia. No details of the sale were shared. Made in nine different colours, the bag is a clear Plexiglas shell in which are immersed a variety of insects chosen by Hirst. Embellished with a 1-micron goldplated rigid frame insect-shaped embroidery in sequins, crystals and feathers and details in three different colors, each bag is named for a different insect species. This is a further tribute the artist pays to the animal world, an endless source of inspiration and an artistic medium for his exploration of the passions and fears of human beings. DEBRINA ALIYAH All prices are indicative
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IMAGES COURTESY BANANA REPUBLIC, VERTU AND PRADA.
It’s Not Just a Phone, It’s a Statement
Lookout Qatar
Market Watch
Time Bound A watch is regarded as a vital accessory that evokes a distinct character and prestige. Legendary watchmakers have stood the test of time, creating a legacy and a timepiece to suit every mood. From sturdy sports watches to those encrusted with precious stones, this is a selection of the finest timepieces in a fiercely competitive industry where precision is key. COMPILED by ABIGAIL MATHIAS
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1. Al Jaber Watches celebrates 55 years in the business and recently launched the GF Ferré selection of ladies and gents watches in Qatar. The watches are named after Italian designer Gianfranco Ferré, who designed the accessories in 1970. GF Ferré Black leather strap, price on request. 2. Sharing a heritage of more than 120 years, jewelry and diamond manufacturer Mouawad just launched an exquisite Swiss watch line in Qatar along with a collection of distinctive men’s choronographs, The Grande Ellipse, and and a collection of ladies’ Swiss quartz watches. Prices range from QR36,400 to QR182,000 for the Grand Ellipse collection.
IMAGES courtesy gf ferrÉ, mouawad
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3. The La Griffe collection is a dedicated line of ladies watches from the house of Mouawad. The prices range from QR 14,198 to QR 86,466. All prices are indicative
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1. Over three million precious stones have passed the expert hands of the Piaget gemsetters. In 1957, the company presented one of the thinnest timepieces of all time, a Caliber 9P measuring just 2 mm thin. With its mastery of gold and diamonds, an in-house gemology department and a high jewelry workshop, Piaget has created a timepiece that is a piece of jewelry. The High Jewelry Machette in 18-carat white gold with 194 brilliant-cut diamonds (13 carats) and silverdail Piaget 56P quartz movement. Price on request.
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2. The Harry Winston Glacier embodies elegance and style. The elegant watch is fully set with 386 baguette-cut diamonds. Price on request.
IMAGES courtesy piaget, harry wilson, al fARDAN
3. Shimmering with over 38-carats of exceptional diamonds, the Signature 7 jeweled timepiece by Harry Winston is an embodiment of beauty. Price on request. 4. The Admiral’s Cup Legend 46 Minute Repeater Acoustica is a unique piece from the house of Corum. With just 10 timepieces of its kind, the watch (from the Al Fardan group) features four gongs and four hammers, simultaneously striking in pairs. Price on request.
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Lookout Qatar
Market Watch
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1. Hermès prefers to use straw in a geometric pattern used in miniature marquetry. It adorns the dial of the Arceau H Cube watch with an iconic motif in bright colors.
image courtesy hermes, omega
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2. To meet a long-standing request from Seamaster Bullhead enthusiasts, Omega has reissued a limited-edition version of the iconic chronograph. While the new model, with its characteristic symmetrical case and bezel, has all of the charm of the original, there are a few modifications that give the new Bullhead its own personality. The water-resistant chronograph has been produced in an edition limited to 669 pieces. Price on request. 3. The Flying Tourbillon by Hermès with brown alligator strap. Price on request.
All prices are indicative
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Lookout Qatar
Time Quotient
From Rubble to Riches Sometimes even luxury brands and their customers can look back on hard times. BY ARR REEM
regular patrons of the glittering annual Doha Jewelry and Watches Exhibition. But less familiar will be the story of a venerable firm founded in 1845, bombed to destruction in the Second World War, taken over by the communist authorities in 1948 and finally revived in 1990 — by the founder’s great-grandson. In 1945 A. Lange & Söhne was a century-old manufacturing firm in Saxony, east Germany, specializing in quality pocket watches with signature German silver three-quarter plates and high complications such as minute repeaters and perpetual calendars. (Qatar, by comparison, had a population of just 25,000 and as yet no official schools — the oil production that brought wealth and modernity did not take off until after World War II.) On May 8, 1945, as the final hours of the war approached, the payloads from Russian fighter-bombers dropped on Glashütte, Lange’s hometown, destroying most of the hamlet, including the brand’s watchmaking facilities. “We had to dig the machines out of the rubble,” remembers 89-year-old Walter Lange, the great-grandson of Ferdinand Adolph Lange, who established the Glashütte watch industry in 1845. The firm’s operations restarted shortly afterwards, only to suffer another blow at the hands of the Soviet occupiers, who expropriated the firm in 1948. “The little that was left after the war was taken away. I myself helped pack machines into boxes to be shipped to Russia,” Lange recalls. The new regional authority seized the factory and all its assets, meaning the business that had been founded and operated by the Lange family since 1845 was now in the hands of the East German government. The Lange brand ceased to exist.
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IMAGE COURTESY A. Lange & Söhne
The attractions of high-end manufacturer A. Lange & Söhne’s classic timepieces will be familiar to
high complications Clockwise from left: Walter Lange revived the family's watchmaking legacy; the encasing; the perpetual movements of the watch; the precision of the watch-making trade; the Lange's building in Glashütte; the historic headquarters of A. Lange & Söhne in 1920.
The firm’s operations restarted shortly after a 1945 Russian bombing that destroyed its watchmaking facilities, only to suffer another blow at the hands of the Soviet occupiers, who expropriated the firm in 1948.
The company was merged in 1951 with several other institutions in the area to form a conglomerate that continued to make high-quality mechanical watches until the quartz revolution hit East Germany in the early 1980s. But “by then the family name was no longer used, and fortunately it had never been misused, for which I shall remain eternally grateful,” says Lange. The rebirth of A. Lange & Söhne is a story of bold opportunism. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the communist East German government collapsed, Lange saw some hope of reviving his family’s watchmaking legacy. He secured financial backing with the help of watch industry veteran Günther Blümlein, then returned to Glashütte, brought together a core group of watchmakers, some of whom still had boxes of vintage Lange movements and parts, and set about reestablishing the company. On December 7, 1990, 145 years to the day after his great-grandfather Ferdinand Adolph Lange founded the
original A. Lange & Söhne, Walter Lange registered the resurrected brand. Not long after, he bought back his family’s buildings, including the original A. Lange & Söhne headquarters, where the company is once again based. “We were starting from nothing, and it was a real risk,” says Lange. “I didn’t know at all how it would turn out. In any case, I started something new, and Glashütte again became a center of fine watchmaking. “In 1994, when the first watches were ready, we invited 12 of the largest retailers from German-speaking markets, to present Lange watches of the new age. I was really tense about their reaction and wondering how they would react,” he shares. “When they started to applaud, it seemed as if a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders.” Lange and the rest of the team around the world are committed to keeping the tradition alive and well. “Lange stands for something and people buy them because they are Lange watches,” he believes. Collectors are said to value the brand’s characteristic old-style movements — mechanical rather than quartz — including a plate in the shape of a three-quarters full moon invented by Ferdinand Lange in 1864 to add stability, and screwed gold sockets known as “chatons” that today serve only decorative purposes. The company is now part of the Swiss-based Richemont Group. A. Lange & Söhne watches are sold in Qatar through Al Majed Jewelry
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Now Showing
An Experience of Faith The Museum of Islamic Art takes visitors on a religious journey, the Hajj, through art. By Sindhu Nair Portrait by Angel Mallari
When Venetia Porter, curator of the Islamic and contemporary Middle East department at the British Museum (BM), took journalists from the Middle East through glimpses of Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam (held last year), one could sense her passion for the subject. It was not unexpected, as the exhibition she had curated was one of the first museum shows anywhere in the world to focus on the pilgrimage, and in less than seven weeks of opening the exhibition had exceeded the museum’s target of 80,000 visitors. By the end of the show more than 125,000 adult tickets had been sold at £12 each (under-16s go in free) , with all advance tickets sold out and the museum opening for longer hours to accommodate the extra demand. For Porter, the beauty of the religious pilgrimage took on a mysterious edge too, adding to its allure; it was one journey she could never hope to make. “The Hajj is the fifth pillar of Islam, and the only one which nonMuslims are not welcomed to observe or share,” says Venetia. “The purpose of the British Museum when it was founded was to enable visitors to understand the world better.” And this exhibition did clearly meet that objective, though the majority of the visitors were Muslims, some of them commenting that there was nothing new that they could take away regarding the pilgrimage. In that sense, to bring a similar exhibition to Qatar was quite a bold decision, with the large percentage of the population following the religion, and assuming that most of them are aware of the rituals that precede this religious pilgrimage. But Dr Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya, Curator of Manuscripts at the Museum of Islamic Arts (MIA) and also the curator of Hajj: The Journey Through Art, is sure that the exhibition will serve its purpose. And the purpose is to “explore the art revolving around the Hajj pilgrimage.” Petite and soft-spoken, Chekhab-Abudaya enamors listeners with her earnest simplicity when she says quite categorically: “We are not bringing the same exhibition from BM, we are just using the same theme and building it in a way that is unique to Qatar.” While the Hajj exhibition in Doha is the result of the Emir’s sister, Sheikha Al-Mayassa’s, discussions with the BM after she heard about the success of its Hajj exhibition, Chekhab-Abudaya’s contribution began in April 2012, the closing day of the BM exhibition, just after she joined MIA. This is her very first project since she arrived in Doha, so her passion for this particular exhibit is quite natural. “I met Venetia in September 2012 and started discussing the project,” she says. To use her curatorial skills and the country’s exclusive stamp on this religious journey was a decision that Chekhab-Abudaya took. “I wanted to make it more interesting to
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ON FIRM FOOTING Above: Dr Mounia ChekhabAbudaya, curator of Hajj: The Journey Through Art; right, a view of Mecca, ‘Golden Hour ‘by Ahmed Mater
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‘We are not bringing the same exhibition from the British Museum,’ says Chekhab-Abudaya. ‘We are just using the same theme and building it in a way that is unique to Qatar.’ the people here by adding collections from Qatar,” she says. Most of the objects in the exhibition were sourced from the MIA and from some private collectors in Qatar like Sheikh Hassan bin Ali Al Thani (who is vice-chairman of the Qatar Museums Authority, or QMA), Sheikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani and Abdullah Al-Sulaiti (Head of Research at the Qatar National Museum). “There was a lot of excitement from the private collectors,” she says. What Qatar did differently was also to gather exhibits from people who are not necessarily collectors. Though there was a call for souvenirs collected during the pilgrimage, the present exhibition has just two exhibits from this drive to get local inputs. What some would consider a disappointing response might not be true for Qatar. “It is not something that the people here are accustomed to; they are not used to sharing their exhibits publically,” says Chekhab-Abudaya. The Hajj exhibit at MIA has been intelligently curated and displayed. There is a juxtaposition of old and new in all of the exhibits that tends to play on the curiosity of the visitor, who moves closer to study the contrast in textures and media of exhibits. Close to the certificate that was initially issued by the religious authorities from the 16th and 17th centuries CE after someone completed the
Hajj (at about 60m long, this could be the longest such certificate. The practice of awarding these certificates, however, is no longer followed) is the Perfect Formation installation by Walid Siti, a modern interpretation of the Hajj. Beautiful manuscripts, curtains that covered the Kaaba, a book of prayer, and Kaaba keys from the 14th century CE are historic objects from the MIA collection in the exhibition that are rare and precious to the Islamic world. Though Chekhab-Abudaya cannot pick her favorites (“all are equally important”), she does leans toward two of the most important pieces in the exhibit: the green “mahmal” (literally “that which is carried”) or palanquin, a 19th-century CE exhibit from Damascus; and Magnetism by Ahmed Mater, a modern installation that depicts the mysterious pull of the Kaaba. A miscellany of objects that depict how people are inspired by the Hajj, now juxtaposed with oral stories and historical objects, form a curious mix within the exhibition. The exhibition space has a virtuous feel that makes you forget the surroundings for a moment and immerse yourself in sights and sounds that must be familiar to a devout Muslim, but are entirely alien to someone not following the religion. Though unfamiliar, the play on senses evoked by the background recording from the Hajj during the holy month, the murmur of prayers interrupted by louder religious chanting, the historic stories that each object stirs, the cultural richness of an era past and the respect that this religious site evokes even in today’s world does touch a chord of reverence in the non-Muslim too. While Chekhab-Abudaya hasn’t been to Hajj, she sometimes feels that she has seen it all. But then after a few moments she corrects herself and says: “But nothing can replace the real experience.” Hajj: The Journey Through Art will be showing at the MIA till January 5, 2014.
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IMAGES COURTESY, MIA, Acciona Producciones y DiseŮo and Photographer: Niccolo Guasti
HISTORY LIVES Clockwise from left: Perfect Formation by Walid Siti, a modern installation from the exhibit; view of the exhibits that speak about the stories of travel from the region; the green mahmal can be seen behind; the juxtaposition of old and new within the exhibition; the book of prayer; the 60-meterlong certificate from the 16th century CE, called Timurid pilgrimage certificate.
Lookout Qatar
Letter Art
Arabic Calligraphy Enters the Digital Age Enthusiasm for Islamic penmanship is being spread by a new mobile app. BY N. MANI
The old Islamic tradition of encouraging believers to write and speak Arabic turned calligraphy into one of the divine practices of the faith and hence made it a permanent feature in the Middle East’s cultural panorama. Its graphic beauty has attracted people from all cultures and made it a worldwide trend, with global pen brands like Sailor, Sheaffer and Montblanc all attracting an international audience for their special calligraphy pens. Even then, there are some art enthusiasts constantly thinking out of the box about taking it to another level in their own distinctive styles. Soraya Syed, a professional calligrapher from London, has come up with a smart app called “Nuqta” (“Dot”), a mobile web app and the first of its kind to help spread the wonders of this fine art. It is an open invitation to all designers, artists, calligraphers, researchers and enthusiasts alike to express their love for Arabic writing in their unique way. Users from every nook and corner of the globe can easily capture the splendor of calligraphy with their mobile devices and then post their shots online with captions. Standing with Syed all along in the lead-up to this project was her husband Mukhtar Sanders, an influential graphic designer. He owns the award-winning company Inspiral Design, specializing in Islamic art and multilingual design, that took care of the technical part of designing Nuqta. “The application is simple. You take a photo of a piece of Arabic writing or calligraphy, give it a name and description, drop a pin on the map indicating where you are located, and share your image with the rest of the world,” Sanders explains.
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“The thought of Nuqta bubbled up while we were working on a special project handed over to us by a Middle Eastern firm,” says Syed. “The task involved designing a calendar using Arabic calligraphy in various styles. As we were doing research on it, we were astonished to discover that there is hardly anything available on this subject that we could use,” she relates. Syed and Sanders can be seen as goodwill ambassadors trying to preserve this art and bring it to the world’s attention. “Stunning artwork can speak to people of all cultures. I can use Nuqta as a platform engaging individuals who normally might not have access to Arabic culture or who have a limited view of the Middle East as portrayed by the media. Arabic as a language is beautiful without a doubt. In some countries in the Middle East the younger generation speak English as a first language. Nuqta can help renew an interest in Arabic both as an art form and as a language,” Syed says. Her interest in this art form arose while she was studying at university. “In 1996 I went to spend the second year of my degree in Arabic and History of Art and Archaeology in Alexandria, Egypt. I had a compelling wish to find a calligraphy teacher there, and within a week of arriving started to take lessons,” she recalls. Syed eventually succeeded in obtaining a prestigious icazet-name (an official Islamic calligraphy licence) from Istanbul. “I chose Istanbul because Turkey continues to be the main center for learning the traditional art of Islamic calligraphy. The Ottomans were the last major Islamic empire and were great patrons of Islamic art in general. Their legacy continues today through the masterapprenticeship system. All over the city there are classes taking place, some at universities and others at wakfs (religious endowments/charitable trusts) or renovated medreses (teaching institutions),” she says. The now fully-certified calligrapher continued her studies of Arabic and History of Art and Archaeology at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and in 2001 received a master’s degree in Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts from The Prince’s School, London. I ask her what she likes about this art form, and she tells
Photograph Olivia Woodhouse
FINE PRINT Soraya Syed, a professional calligrapher at work.
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me: “When you write, it gets lost in space and time. You totally focus, or at least try to, and become aware of the endless nuances the reed pen can make.” Talking about the relevance of the Nuqta project - funded by the Khatt Foundation, Design Days Dubai, the Crossway Foundation and the Shubbak Festival — she says: “It means ‘point’ or ‘dot’ in Arabic. The app aspires to benefit anyone anywhere in the world with a love for Arabic typography and calligraphy. It is a long-term project that plans to evolve and advance largely based on user feedback. We hope that Nuqta will become a useful tool. The idea is to learn, share and educate, so that the user is learning from the content online as well as educating others through what they post.
‘Words pervade our society,’ says Syed. ‘We are surrounded by words, in calligraphy and typography, wherever we look.’ We aim to observe how these art forms are changing through your eyes and with your contributions, to turn Nuqta into the ‘wiki’ of Arabic calligraphy and typography.” Does she ever sense that this tradition is slowly getting near extinction? She shakes her head. “No, not all. When I first went to Istanbul to study, I could feel that I was on the cusp of a wave of something new to happen in the art society. I was fortunate enough to study with some of the greatest calligraphers today, " she says. "Words pervade our society. We are surrounded by words, by writing expressed in calligraphy and typography, wherever we look: in advertising, art and publishing, on the streets, in movies and television, in graffiti and across the Internet,” says Syed. Not surprisingly, her prolific work, which has been exhibited around the world, is today sought after by the British Museum, the Saudi Royal Family and the film industry, as well as private individuals wanting something personal written for them. Shedding light on her own calligraphy style, she says: “My approach is different; my layouts tend to be quite simple. That reflects in the paper, borders I choose too.” To excel at anything, one needs to keep practicing. As she says, when asked whether it’s a time-consuming exercise, “It is a lifelong process of continually striving to improve and refine one’s own practice.” Syed was born in London in 1979 to immigrant parents. Her father was born in Kenya but his family originated from Pakistan and came to live in the UK in the 1960s. Her French mother, on the other hand, moved in the 1970s from Paris to London, where she and her future husband met. Syed’s upbringing was liberal and straddled two different religions and cultures. So what was it like for her growing up in London? “I am a Londoner,” she says, “which means I grew up alongside many different languages, religions and viewpoints. This also meant that I could be free to become who I wanted to be, although it hasn’t always been rosy, like facing a lot of racial abuse when I was very young in the ’80s and the Thatcher years. London can be a tough place to live if you are not affluent. From a very young age I went to all the major museums, parks, cinemas and places of cultural interest. As an adult, I can now see how that had an impact on me growing up.” In the past, calligraphy has generally been dominated by men. However, that is changing now. Women are also good at it and willing to come out in public. “It is still very much a male-dominated art. We still have a long way to go to be on par with our male counterparts. It would be great to see female judges on major
The Letter Soraya Syed surrounded by words.
calligraphy competitions,” she says. Syed runs a company called The Art of Islamic Penmanship, whose sole purpose is to bridge the gap between the spiritual and the material, the visual and the verbal. It is a living tradition that has the capacity for self-renewal, enabling her to adopt a contemporary approach while remaining true to her artistic heritage and the many years of study that link her to the calligraphy masters of the past. As an artist well versed in calligraphy, she feels it has changed her life significantly. “It has had an impact on my day-to-day life in the way that it has sharpened my awareness of the details around me. That was a feature I noticed in my teacher Efdaluddin Kilic — he could spot the most minute things that anybody else would just pass by,” she says. Not so long ago, she won everybody’s hearts with her majestic solo show “Hurriyah” (“Freedom”), organized at Leighton House Museum, London. “It explored the concept of freedom through animation and dance — a first for me to collaborate with high-profile artists such as Nitin Sawhney, the British-born Indian musician, producer and composer.
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Lookout Qatar
Downtown Design
Art and Design: The Thin Red Line The visionary team behind Art Dubai and Design Days Dubai has launched the first edition of a unique trade fair, Downtown Design, to showcase how trenchant design is evolving in the region.
Fair Director Cristina Romelli Gervasoni is excited about the prospect of
bringing together people who are passionate about quality, materials and design under one common roof in Dubai. In Poltrona Frau’s showroom at The Pearl-Qatar, where she presented Downtown Design to the Doha audience and invited local stakeholders to Dubai to experience the event, she talks about throwing the spotlight on quality-driven companies — whether they are involved in furniture, decor, textiles, lighting or flooring — that are changing the way we think about design. “We have invited about 40 companies from all over the world — Italy, France, United States, Turkey, Iran, Czech Republic, Denmark and more – to exhibit their products and concepts and tell people the behind-the-scenes story of their company and their design philosophy,” she says. The companies participating were carefully handpicked by Cristina herself and had to meet some stringent specifications. “Quality was the focus, obviously. But aside from there we were keen to invite companies that own the rights of what they produce, who invest in product development, who are the sole producers (i.e they have no suppliers) of whatever they make and, most importantly, those who are the first movers in the market. Whether it is today or fifty years ago, we are looking at companies that introduced a style or a philosophy for the very first time in the market and started a trend,” she says. A tough set of criteria, and only the best of the best were given the opportunity to be part of this “rare occasion”. The companies that made the cut include Cassina, Cappellini, De Castelli, Turkish brand Gaia&Gino, Vitra, Preciosa Lighting and Poltrona Frau, a 100-year-old company with a rich heritage that even today still handproduces every single piece of furniture.
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“The company opened its own museum in Italy this year. Some of its products are so iconic, and they are still in production today, 50 years after they were first introduced. So that’s the kind of caliber we are dealing with,” Romelli Gervasoni points out. But it isn’t just about pedigree. At the other end of the spectrum we find companies like Atelier AK, a new Dubaibased venture that was looking forward to being launched at the fair. “Though they are young, their vision and designs are very international. They will be launching a line of furniture and home decor products made from high-quality camel leather. Similarly, another new company we invited, Discipline, was launched only last year, and is already being distributed by the likes of Harrods.” Romelli Gervasoni is particularly proud about hosting the Temporary Museum of Milan, the most important furniture fair in the world, which was exhibiting outside of Milan for the first time in years and also brought with it eight companies showcasing their products. “Three Danish companies — Republic of Fritz Hansen, Carl Hansen & Son and Louis Poulsen — handmake a chair from scratch over the four days in one of our more exciting live installations,” she says. Talks by the likes of eclectic designer Ora Ito and CEO of Emaar Properties Robert D Booth were some of the other highlights of the fair. There are similar exhibitions on a larger
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scale in Milan, New York, London and Paris, but Cristina says they had decided to invite only an exclusive few for a good reason. “If we had 200 companies all bringing down their products, the fair wouldn’t have the same impact. The customers wouldn’t have time to appreciate the designs and the companies wouldn’t get to understand the market and the customers better,” she says. For her Doha and Dubai are not in competition with each other but complement each other and help companies to be much more present in the region. “The opportunities in the region are exploding, and these companies are looking for big projects like office buildings, airports, hotels, auditoriums and the like,” she says. For architects, interior designers, contractors and the whole chain of professionals in the design industry, this was a great opportunity to see what’s going on and to get a feel for the market. She also hopes that the event will give local design-oriented companies a boost. “Unfortunately there aren’t many big companies here currently who are at the cutting edge of design. It’s going to be a challenge to nurture companies that produce products with brilliant design with great value and quality and are also inspirational to other talented people in the region,” she says. Downtown Design was held from October 29 to 31 in Dubai.
IMAGES COURTSEY, CRISTINA ROMELLI GERVASONI; CAPPELLINI; POLTRONA FRAU; DE CASTELLI
a NEW thought Clockwise from left: Fair Director Cristina Romelli; The Proust Geometrica armchair from Cappellini; Regina II, designed by Paolo Rizzatto for Poltrona Frau; Celato by De Castelli.
by ayswarya murthy
In Fashion
Anti-Establishment
The best accessories for fall — soft briefcases, tone-on-tone watches and dress boots — take their cues from classic banker style. Paired with an offbeat pinstripe suit, they’re anything but conformist. Photographs by Paul wetherell styled by jason rider
Louis Vuitton bag, QR14,400; Gucci boots, QR3,400; Harry Winston watch, QR81,200; Tommy Hilfiger jacket, QR2,000; Marc Jacobs shirt, QR,4,700; Zegna pants, QR3,600; All prices are indicative
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Quality
In Fashion
Prada bag, QR7,300; Tod’s boots, QR2,700. Baume & Mercier watch, QR23,500; Louis Vuitton suit, QR12,400. Dries Van Noten shirt, QR2,000. All prices are indicative
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model: ian sharp/aim model management. Hair by Yukiko Tajima using bumble and bumble. grooming by Souhi at jed root, inc. Fashion assistants: Alex Tudela and pia rahman.
Salvatore Ferragamo bag, QR5,500; Santoni boots, QR3,500; Girard-Perregaux watch, QR119,800; J. W. Anderson coat, about QR5,400; Jil Sander top, $660; Giorgio Armani pants, QR2,400 (for suit); Maximum Henry belt, QR236.
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Quality
lucky guy Antoine Arnault in the Paris apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement that he shares with his girlfriend, the model Natalia Vodianova, and her three children from a previous marriage.
Turning Point
Business Before Pleasure
His project is the renovation of one of LVMH’s smallest holdings, Berluti: the luxury men’s shoe company founded in 1895 and acquired by the group in 1993 that Antoine calls ‘‘a little jewel in our portfolio.’’ The idea is to transform it into a luxury men’s wear brand to compete directly with the likes of Tom Ford, Hermès and Brioni. ‘‘Men’s wear is the new women’s wear,’’ Toby Bateman, the buying director for Mr Porter, the men’s wear arm of Net-a-Porter, said over cocktails at Berluti’s spring presentation held at the 17th-century Hôtel de Sully mansion in Paris this past June. ‘‘Before, some men looked at fashion askance. But now it has become more gentrified; it’s about cut, tailoring. It’s contemporary, chic and stylish rather than glitzy, trendy and logo driven.’’ Several luxury brands have picked up on this trend: Dolce & Gabbana, Lanvin and Ralph Lauren have all recently opened emporiums dedicated solely to men in international capitals, and Tom Ford’s brand, which is primarily driven by men’s wear, is flourishing. In its eight-year existence, despite the economic crisis, it has grown to $200 million in annual apparel sales, with several licensing deals and nearly 100 stores worldwide. Berluti was Antoine’s way in, and so far, the overhaul has been a success. Under his guidance, in three years business has grown from around $45 million to approximately $130 million a year in sales. The company has opened several new stores and remodeled
Antoine Arnault spent his youth enjoying the spoils of being the LVMH titan’s eldest son. But by successfully betting on high-end men’s wear as an ever-ripening luxury category, he’s quickly proving that nepotism only goes so far. By dana thomas portrait by benoit peverelli
It’s not so easy to be a ‘‘son of.’’
Take Antoine Arnault, the 36-year-old son of Bernard Arnault, the chairman and C.E.O. of the luxury brand group LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and the 10th richest man in the world, according to Forbes. For years, Antoine was regarded as a Euro playboy who summered in Saint-Tropez, played in Vegas poker tournaments and landed the cushy-sounding job of communications director for Louis Vuitton. The fact that he used to date the French actress Hélène de Fougerolles and his live-in girlfriend of two years is the top model Natalia Vodianova only furthered that reputation. But recently, Antoine has set out to change that image, and he plans to do it the same way his father did: by running a company extremely well.
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existing ones, most notably its longtime location on Conduit Street in London, which is now a ‘‘maison’’ (or flagship) replete with a made-to-measure suiting department. Antoine has more openings planned in the next few months, including stores in Tokyo; Hong Kong; Beijing; Shanghai; Milan; Paris; Costa Mesa, Calif.; and two in New York. He hopes to double Berluti’s sales and retail outlets to 70 by 2016. One strength, it seems, is Antoine’s frankness and his openness. Unlike his father, who is more of an autocrat with ‘‘a court . . . an entourage,’’ as Antoine describes it, he is outspoken and democratic.
‘Men’s wear is the new women’s wear,’ says Toby Batemen, buying director for Mr Porter. ‘Before, some men looked at fashion askance. But now it has become more gentrified.’
Man power Berluti’s luxurious fall collection, including (from top) a navy windowpane-check wool double-breasted suit; a gray single-breasted wool and silk three-piece suit; the Deux Jours leather briefcase; leather loafers.
town on his bike. He was completely fluent in English in six months. Looking back, he sees that his American education was ‘‘more about self-fulfillment and sports and being happy,’’ unlike a traditional French education, which is about ‘‘working hard.’’ He smiles broadly and his blue eyes twinkle: ‘‘It was just kind of an ideal childhood.’’ When Antoine was 9, the Arnault family moved back to France; Mitterrand had reversed some of his more radical economic policies, and a possible new business deal was on the horizon. The French government was selling Agache-Willot, a bankrupt holding company, which was relatively worthless except for one dusty old jewel: the Christian Dior fashion company. With the help of
November-December 2013
courtesy of Berluti (4)
Antoine is the one who speaks up: ‘‘They will tell my father: ‘This wall is blue, and yes, what a beautiful blue!’ ’’ he says. ‘‘And I will tap his shoulder and say, ‘It was white, just so you know.’ ’’ His forthright and less formal approach to business has won over those who work with him at Berluti. Though his core business is shoes, Antoine often walks around the Berluti headquarters — which he designed — in his stocking feet, which explains the office’s thick carpeting. He rarely wears a tie, saving them for major meetings with his father. Though Antoine physically resembles Bernard — they have the same clear blue eyes, thick wiry hair and 6-foot-3 stoop — and can come across as ‘‘almost imperial’’ like his father, he is not at all like him in personality, according to his friend, the shoe designer Christian Louboutin. ‘‘Antoine is nicer than you would expect. He listens well. He is interested in people. He is not obsessive with work, he doesn’t rattle off numbers. . . . He doesn’t have his cell on the table; he isn’t checking e-mails and texts. He’s there with you.’’ Antoine attributes his free spirit to a period in his childhood that he sees as deeply formative: the four years his family spent in the United States. In the early 1980s, after France’s newly elected Socialist president François Mitterrand instituted a series of anti-capitalist policies like nationalizing banks and major companies, many French executives, including Bernard, fled to more business-friendly countries. The Arnaults settled in the tony New York suburb of Larchmont, a favorite outpost for French expats, and Antoine, then 5, and his sister, Delphine, then 7, attended the French-American School of New York. Antoine remembers his years in Larchmont as his ‘‘madeleine of Proust’’ moment: ‘‘a blessed time.’’ He was on the swim team and the soccer team. He spent weekends sailing. He tooled around
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Turning Point
the investment bank Lazard Frères, Bernard, then 35, raised the $80 million purchase price and took control of the holding company. Through the ensuing years, with one major boardroom battle and several straightforward acquisitions, Bernard built up what Antoine describes as ‘‘the empire.’’ As that was going on, Antoine and Delphine were attending the right schools in Paris, hanging out with fellow scions and shuttling between the homes of their divorced parents. (Their father remarried in 1991 and has three more sons: Alexandre, a 21-yearold part-time D.J. known as Double A, and two teenagers, Frédéric and Jean.) Antoine played keyboard in a rock band, hitchhiked from his father’s summer villa in Saint-Tropez to the nightclubs in town, watched ‘‘Seinfeld’’ on French cable and spent a lot of time at the movies. He was also being groomed to eventually join
Unlike Bernard Arnault, who is more of an autocrat with ‘a court . . . an entourage,’ as Antoine describes it, his son is outspoken and democratic. LVMH. He interned at La Tribune, a business newspaper then owned by the company, and worked at the Louis Vuitton store in Paris. On Saturdays, his father would bring him and Delphine — who is now executive vice president of Louis Vuitton and also on the LVMH board — on tours of his brands’ boutiques to see if everything was well run and customers were happy. ‘‘It was clear that my father wanted us to work with him,’’ Antoine says. ‘‘I mean, it is a family company.’’ When it came time to choose where to go to college, the Arnaults urged Antoine to study abroad. He enrolled at HEC Montréal to study business management. It was a bit of a shock at first: ‘‘I was no one there, which was off-putting,’’ he admits. ‘‘But it was good. I was out of my comfort zone, and I guess I learned a lot.’’ When Antoine returned to France, he and a couple of buddies started an Internet company called Domainoo that registered celebrity domains. ‘‘To be clear, we were cybersquatting,’’ he says. After they sold it, he recalls, ‘‘My father called me and said, ‘Listen, you had your fun. Now you can come work with us.’ ’’ He joined Louis Vuitton the next day as head of marketing. He was 25. It was actually just the right job for him. Since childhood, extraordinary people Below: Delphine and Antoine attend the group general meeting on May 15, 2008 in Paris. Right: with Vodianova, his girlfriend of two years.
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he had been obsessed with advertising. ‘‘I’m a visual person, a conceptual person,’’ he says. (When Antoine was 11, he won an ad-campaign contest for pull-up diapers.) ‘‘Advertising,’’ he says quite matter-of-factly, ‘‘has always been something I kind of understood.’’ Bernard saw this and decided to make the most of it. At the time, Antoine says, Bernard was not completely satisfied with Vuitton’s advertising, but he didn’t know how best to convey this to Marc Jacobs, the company’s creative director. Antoine’s job was to be ‘‘a link’’ or ‘‘a kind of a filter’’ between his father and Jacobs, he says, and to speak his mind when he thought something wasn’t working — a rarity at Vuitton at the time, from what he could see. When Antoine first arrived, Jacobs says, ‘‘It was like, ‘Oh wow, it’s the boss’s son.’ But he isn’t like that at all. He is interested in business but the aesthetic part of it, and offers his opinions and is open to suggestions of others.’’ During his six years at Vuitton — he was eventually elevated to communications director and given a seat on the LVMH board — Antoine proved that he did indeed understand advertising. Among his projects was the wildly successful Core Values campaign: a series of photos by the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz of international icons like Keith Richards, Mikhail Gorbachev, Angelina Jolie and Muhammad Ali posing in scenic locales with Vuitton bags. Antoine also took a year to earn his M.B.A. at Insead, a business school outside of Paris. When Antoine first became interested in Berluti, he turned to Pietro Beccari, Vuitton’s executive vice president of marketing and communications: together, they drew up a business plan and presented it to Bernard. He liked the idea, and named his son C.E.O. Beccari has since been named C.E.O. of Fendi. Antoine, in turn, hired a delightful Italian designer named Alessandro Sartori away from Z Zegna to serve as the brand’s creative director. The pair came up with the Berluti look: something, Sartori explains, that focuses on craftsmanship and quality, and is ‘‘French, eclectic, personal but with an Italian soul.’’ Their customer, Antoine says, would be ‘‘someone who works. Someone who travels. Someone who’s curious about things and about others. If he works, he doesn’t stay in his office, cloistered. Someone who’s interested in art, in health, in wine, in everything. The modern man who’s connected and maybe a little overconnected . . . the Twitter life almost. But at the same time is a little vain.’’ Father and son speak by phone at least once a day. They see each other most workdays too, and lunch en famille almost every Saturday. It is probably safe to say that few LVMH C.E.O.’s get quite as much attention from the chairman as Antoine does. And he seems fine with it. ‘‘When you’re as privileged as we are,’’ he says, speaking of himself as well as Delphine, ‘‘when you have these incredible names that you have the responsibility of, and when you actually have a little bit of a head start on everybody else because we started so young and we have a sense of this business, you know, we were born in it basically. . . . I don’t want to be arrogant or anything, but it’s like if you told a very good tennis player, ‘Why do you continue playing tennis? Wouldn’t you want to have an art gallery?’ Of course I have other passions . . . but my real investment obviously without a second thought is LVMH and what my father created.’’
From left: AFP PHOTO THOMAS COEX, AFP PHOTO MARTIN BUREAU
Quality
new School David Karp at the kitchen island of his Williamsburg, Brooklyn, loft, designed by John Gachot.
By Design
The Reluctant Technologist David Karp lives by the principle that the world doesn’t need more flashy gadgets and fancy software — which would be fine, had he not founded Tumblr. By tim wu Photographs by ben hoffmann
‘‘I don’t like screens very much,’’ says David Karp, founder and chief executive officer of Tumblr, the popular microblogging platform. ‘‘Big bright monitors drive me nuts’’; screens in the bedroom are ‘‘gross.’’ He takes his rule seriously, for in Karp’s newly renovated loft, in south Williamsburg, Brooklyn, screens are scarce, as is, for that matter, anything particularly shiny or smooth. It is, instead, a dedication to all that is aged, rough or both: ancient bricks, weathered concrete, blackened steel and reclaimed oak. While Karp designs the future, his personal aesthetic is worlds apart from the Star Trek
flight deck or the Google campus that form our usual idea of what is to come. Karp doesn’t believe, he says, that the next century is necessarily about ‘‘more screens covering more surface area.’’ He is an apparent paradox: a high-tech design leader with a home and possessions that display little affection for anything postwar; frankly, most of the 20th century seems suspect to him. Nothing in his home looks particularly futuristic, or technological, at least as we’ve usually understood those terms. A house may be a machine for living, but Karp says, ‘‘I don’t want our house doing very November-December 2013
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By Design less is more Clockwise from far left: Karp’s ‘‘mildly steampunk’’ living room, with a Niels Bendtsen for Bensen sofa, Poul Kjaerholm leather chairs (all from Modernlink) and a Jason Miller for Roll & Hill ceiling light; a German factory clock; family photos and an early Beatles poster.
much.’’ It’s a quiet space, with few distractions; one feels that stone tablets might not be entirely out of place. The newest-looking machine in the house is the metal carcass of a classic 1969 Honda CB160 motorcycle, apparently in the midst of a living-room repair job. The apartment is built with ‘‘analog technology,’’ says John Gachot, the principal designer, who worked with Karp on the renovation. Gachot specializes in solid, oldschool design; working with his wife, Christine, their recent projects include the Acme restaurant in NoHo, the West Village home of Marc Jacobs and a shuffleboard club now being built in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Gachot compares Karp’s loft to a submarine, where everything is made of tested, reliable materials that are designed to work together perfectly. ‘‘It’s mildly steampunk,’’ he adds, pointing out a few of the details, like tin ceilings and brass screws, at least ‘‘in the sense of looking backward.’’ The materials and methods are genuinely old: the reclaimed oak that dominates the living room comes from an old dairy farm in Pennsylvania, and the brick and concrete have aged with the building. ‘‘It’s very open and honest,’’ he says of the design. ‘‘Everything is exposed, and you can see all the connections.’’ Switching metaphors, he compares the home to the design of classic motorcycles, one of Karp’s obsessions, which are naked machines, all working parts exposed. Above all, Karp’s home is about as different as it is possible to be, style-wise, from the tech palaces of the West, or the smart homes of the 1990s that were once supposed to be the future. In the popular imagination, tech leaders don’t live this way. They inhabit some kind of indistinct place, defined less geographically than temporally, for the technologist is meant to live slightly ahead of the rest of us. One imagines Google’s Sergey Brin spending his days encased in
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advanced wearable technology, orbiting the earth in a driverless spaceship, landing only to introduce humanity to new products from the mother ship. On the West Coast, the credible technologist simply must use devices and materials more advanced than the masses use. One wouldn’t want to be caught lugging around an old Dell laptop, or, God forbid, a BlackBerry. Karp’s style may not fit the public’s idea of homo futurus, but it is perfectly consistent with the image of New York’s tech industry. New York tech, where Tumblr is based, is distinguished from its Silicon Valley cousin less by technical merit, and more by its design aesthetic and its close relationship with the creativity and culture of the city itself. While still small, New York has had legitimate hits and is now being taken increasingly seriously. Tumblr, the company Karp founded with his friend Marco Arment, offers free personalized home pages and
open and shut Beyond the coat rack, a sliding metal fire door conceals a washer, dryer and laundry chute.
Modern living Clockwise from top left: Karp’s girlfriend, Rachel Eakley, at work, near the metal skeleton of a motorcycle; the living room bar cabinet; old-school board games; the farmhouse-style open kitchen with soapstone counters and a brass Watermark faucet.
as such is technically a competitor to Facebook and Twitter. However, the comparison ends there. Tumblr is minimalist and easy to use but also infinitely customizable; it is a genuine creative tool. Using Facebook, meanwhile, demands about all the creativity you’d need to renew a passport. As Karp puts it, ‘‘here’s your vanilla white profile page: now fill in your interests, add your friends.’’ He built Tumblr in reaction to Facebook, which he regards as ‘‘insanely restrictive.’’ Indeed, much of the New York tech industry can be understood as a reaction to the one-size-fits-all ethos of Silicon Valley. ‘‘There’s something very prescriptive in how the Valley builds its tools,’’ Karp says, ‘‘even the ones that are supposed to be expressive.’’ Consider Etsy, which is a kind of eBay for the design-conscious; or Kickstarter, which provides a platform for financing creative projects; Shutterstock, which licenses images; or BuzzFeed, a social news Web site. The major New York tech firms, with the exception of Foursquare, New York’s popular social-networking app, either cater to creators, or depend on some tie to the creative or media industries as their comparative advantage. That New York tech has more style than its West Coast counterpart cannot be doubted. But the nagging question is whether the East has substance as well,
and more particularly, whether it can actually compete with the power, money and experience of Silicon Valley. Tumblr, which is among New York’s most successful tech firms, sold for $1.1 billion to Yahoo earlier this year, which is a trifle compared with Microsoft (valued, at press time, at $263 billion), Google ($299 billion) or Apple ($423 billion). Nonetheless, Karp, who admits ‘‘we’ve got a ton to prove,’’ is optimistic about New York tech over the long run. ‘‘Historically, singleindustry cities eventually collapse,’’ he says, referring to Silicon Valley and effectively throwing down the gauntlet. ‘‘It’s the New Yorks, the Londons, the cities that have multiple industries, that are able to survive.’’ That’s what history teaches, he says, but ‘‘it’s really easy to forget that when you’re at the forefront of whatever industry.’’ The long view of New York’s prospects is also what appealed to Andrew McLaughlin, a former Google executive who moved east and is now senior vice president at New York’s Betaworks, which bills itself as ‘‘a company that builds companies.’’ (The New York Times Company is an investor.) ‘‘If you’re placing a long-term bet on consumer tech,’’ he says, ‘‘then the mix of skills you’ll find in New York, while maybe less technical, seems like a better bet to make.’’ As a veteran of both East Coast and West Coast tech, McLaughlin captures the aesthetic gap as ‘‘the difference between a Palo Alto office park and a Bushwick loft.’’ For one thing, ‘‘New York takes authenticity very seriously,’’ he says, while ‘‘the West Coast doesn’t give a damn.’’ ‘‘Functionality’’ matters most, he says, and while he has enormous respect for Google, ‘‘no one at Google spends time thinking about how to make their office park ‘authentic.’ They want it to be awesome, with robots, driverless cars, that kind of stuff.’’ Another difference is that New York’s tech industry tends to work with, or on
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By Design
Much of the New York tech industry can be understood as a reaction to the one-size-fits-all ethos of Silicon Valley. ‘There’s something very prescriptive in how the Valley builds its tools,’ Karp says.
bathed in light The master bathtub, from Sunrise Specialty Co., overlooks the living room. The rest of the bathroom is down the hall.
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top of, what’s already there, whether physically or conceptually. ‘‘The West Coast thing is to destroy what came before,’’ while New York is ‘‘layering and working with what’s here already,’’ McLaughlin says, making reference to Rem Koolhaas’s seminal 1978 manifesto on urbanism, ‘‘Delirious New York.’’ Koolhaas argued that New York was a ‘‘collective experiment’’ in a ‘‘factory of man-made experience.’’ The city is the center of culture, creativity, advertising and finance: the question is whether New York tech can somehow help tie it all together. The physical spaces inhabited by the main New York firms reflect the layered approach being built into the city’s infrastructure, rather than exiled in the suburban office parks, and echo the original Bell Labs in the West Village. Tumblr’s offices are in the Flatiron district, housed on two floors in an old
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building with rough wooden floors. Betaworks occupies a handsome industrial space in the meatpacking district with 22-foot ceilings and cast iron pillars, surrounded by fashion labels like Alexander McQueen and Tory Burch; the building once belonged to the publisher of Collier’s Encyclopedia. Kickstarter’s offices are in a rough Lower East Side loft with reclaimed cabinets and tin ceilings. (The firm is currently refurbishing a new space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, out of a building that once belonged to the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company.) Most of New York tech remains in Manhattan, but Karp has moved to Williamsburg, which, to state the obvious, is not a traditional C.E.O. hangout. It turns out that Karp and his girlfriend, Rachel Eakley, tried the West Village for a while but didn’t like their location. He went on a search for ‘‘old buildings,’’ and in Brooklyn he found more of what he loves, unblemished by ‘‘too much drywall,’’ which, according to Karp, has spoiled neighborhoods like TriBeCa. Karp’s loft also enjoys perfect views of the east Manhattan skyline. He looks out at the Niemeyer-Le Corbusier United Nations complex, with its broad tower reflecting water and sky. It was that view that sealed the deal and convinced Karp he could leave the island. He started thinking that looking out on Manhattan would be ‘‘so much frickin’ cooler than being in the West Village and seeing the Jersey skyline.’’ But not all is perfect: his view also includes an eruption of nondescript condos that have infected the Brooklyn bank of the East River. ‘‘I get so nauseated when I see these big glassy things,’’ he says, which look like ‘‘something out of Florida.’’ He denounces the spread of ‘‘generic, superbland architecture by people who decided that contemporary architecture is big glassy buildings. The stuff bums me out.’’ Once upon a time, to make it in the tech industry was to migrate from east to west, where the engineers and the venture capital could be found. Yet it seems highly unlikely that either Karp or Tumblr will move to the Valley anytime soon, for matters of taste as much as anything. ‘‘If there’s any broader issue I have with the Valley,’’ Karp says, it’s that ‘‘you’d have to be out of your mind to live in Palo Alto.’’
Above it all Above left and right: the master bedroom, which overlooks the living room, has blackened-steel and glass walls. An Eero Saarinen for Knoll chair sits in the corner.
Arena Qatar
REFINED TASTE HH Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani, has been dubbed as “Qatar’s culture queen”.
Culture Camp
Who Scores High? While the lower Gulf region has acquired a taste for patronage of the arts, the cultural approaches of the UAE and Qatar are starkly different. Which will eventually prove the more popular remains to be seen. BY SINDHU NAIR
Portrait By Brigitte Lacombe
The opening of the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) in Doha in November 2008 was an attention-grabber for a number of reasons. The I.M. Pei-designed architectural wonder’s location in then-obscure Doha was one. Another was the boast of the MIA’s director at the time, Oliver Watson (previously Chief Curator of Middle East Collections at the V&A in London), that the importance of the MIA collection was immense even though the collection itself was not huge. “When we talk about the importance of the collection, it is not the monetary value that we are talking about,” said Watson. “We are only interested in the cultural value, aesthetic beauty and historical significance. Any big museum would give their right arm to have this collection.” A hyperbolic claim, it seemed back then, but as the art world now reckons, he was just stating the facts. That the opening night’s guest list included stars like London art dealer Jay Jopling, artists Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons and of course the creator of the masterpiece, I.M. Pei himself, was a
further reason that helped put this new museum on the “art radar.” The New York Times journalist Gisela Williams, reporting on the event, said: “It was the kind of red-carpet treatment that might have christened the Louvre Pyramid in Paris or the Guggenheim in Bilbao.” Five years later, Doha has several more museums planned (two already open and one in the construction stage) and is one of the biggest buyers of art globally. As the art world has realized, the opening of the MIA was indeed a harbinger of more bold cultural initiatives from Qatar. The most recent has been the massive Damien Hirst installation “The Miraculous Journey” outside the Sidra Medical Centre, consisting of 14 huge figures ranging from 15 feet 9 inches to 35 feet in height and weighing between nine and 28 tonnes each, which took three years to create and is said to have cost around $20 million. The series portrays the gestation of a fetus, beginning with the fertilization of an egg and ending with a fully-formed baby. Its unveiling coincided with the Doha opening
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Sub Section CULTURE SPREAD Left, The I.M.Pei designed Museum of Islamic Arts building; below, Anotnia Carver of Art Dubai.
of a first solo exhibition in the Middle East by the same controversial artist. Entitled Relics, it runs until January 22. The chairperson of the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA), the Emir’s sister HH Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani, whom The Economist once dubbed “Qatar’s culture queen,” was also the funder and initiator of the Hirst project, and is said to be very closely associated with the artist, having “supported” his earlier show at Tate Modern. In a sponsor’s note for that show she said: “Here in London this exhibition, sponsored by an Arab institution and held in a power station transformed by Swiss architects, reminds us that we live today in a truly global world.” Her comment echoes the QMA’s objective “to become a global leader in the world of museums, art, heritage and archaeology.” The goal comes with a sustainable vision of “cultivating a new voice for Qatar for generations to come; our purpose is to be a cultural instigator for the new generation,” according to a QMA source who did not want to be named. On the number of new museums planned for Qatar, the QMA spokesperson said: “The QMA has opened the Museum of Islamic Art and MIA Park; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art; the Al Riwaq exhibition space; and the QMA Gallery at Katara; and in the next few years it plans on opening the National Museum of Qatar, the Olympic and Sports Museum and the Orientalist Museum.” But there was no further comment on these future museums, as they are in the “planning phase.” “Some are ideas that will combine collections; others are standalone projects that will require their own facility. As projects move out of the planning stage and realize a clear direction, we will announce them,” the spokesperson said. Following close on Qatar’s heels is Abu Dhabi with its mammoth Manarat Al Saadiyat, a 15,400-square-meter arts and culture space, a $27-billion development project featuring three “starchitect” museums: the Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Zayed National Museum by Norman Foster and the Frank Gehry-rendered Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
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These mushrooming museum developments are being watched with growing interest by art buffs. Antonia Carver, director of art fair Art Dubai, feels that the regional arts scene has undergone a great shift over the past decade, given the burst — and then rapid deepening — of international interest, and the rise of art centers in the Gulf. She says that although there has always been a “museum culture” in cities like Cairo, Beirut and Tehran, and the scene in Beirut gives rise to more and more small-to-medium-scale institutions, the museum developments in Doha, and then Abu Dhabi, are at the other end of the scale. “So while there will not be a real museum culture developing in these cities at street level, the commitment of the Qatar and UAE governments to cultural projects can only bode well for the future — and the ways in which the Sharjah Biennial is connecting with its audiences demonstrates the great potential that exists here,” she opines. According to Dr Abdellah Karroum, the director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, “every country and each museum adopts a different strategy and methodology. It is important to create projects here and now, taking into consideration the context.” Comparing the museum strategies of the UAE and Qatar, and speculating on the likely rivalry between these two countries, Dr Karen Exell, lecturer in Museum Studies at UCL Qatar, feels each of them has its own unique agenda. “Abu Dhabi has gone down a franchise route; they have developed relations with the Western museums, the British Museum working on their National Museum and the Guggenheim and Louvre on the respective museum franchises. The result of this,” says Dr Exell, “will be the development of very impressive museums and the introduction of the concept of a universal culture.” This concept apparently lacks popular appeal, and faint echoes of local and regional disapproval can already be heard in the art community. Local people might say that the type of exhibits presented “do not represent their culture,” says Dr Exell. “So when the museums open we will have to wait and see whether Emiratis
IMAGES COURTSEY, Shutterstock, Art Dubai, QMA, the Third Gallery, Mathaf, Gehry Partners and QMA
The Damien Hirst’s exhibition at Tate Modern, ‘sponsored by an Arab institution and held in a power station transformed by Swiss architects, reminds us that we live today in a truly global world,’ said Sheikha Al Mayassa.
Culture Camp
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ART SPEAK Clockwise from top left: The Miraculous Journey, by Damien Hirst; Claudia Cellini, owner of Dubaibased gallery The Third Line ; Dr Abdellah Karroum, the director of Mathaf; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; Damien Hirst talks to the press before the launch of his exhibition in Doha; Kitab Kharida alAjayib, an exhibit from Hajj: The journey through Art, an ongoing exhibition at MIA.
will visit, whether the regional tourist appreciates it, whether they feel a connect to the presentations or if the art is too distant in its approach for a link to be made.” In the end it all comes down to how the UAE measures its success. The UAE has to decide its path: to be a global voice affecting the international community, or to take the heritage route and make a local impact. So while critics have said that the modernization of cultures is overshadowing grassroots ventures, we will have to wait and watch the UAE model, says Dr Exell. Qatar, meanwhile, has a completely different modus operandi, where it buys in the necessary expertise on the operational side to work along with the QMA’s cultural development agenda, a more local collaboration with a regional focus that Sheikha Al-Mayassa has described as “a hybrid of local culture and international expertise.” “Here they really want to emphasize the fact that Qatar is leading, and it is not a case of someone coming from outside and taking the lead,” Dr Exell says. But that still leaves it open to criticism, alienating local people, as they are not yet familiar with the purpose of museums. “This is because the museum culture is still new to the region; it is not yet a pursuit that the people in the Gulf indulge in. So there is still a gap,” she says. While the UAE model is getting all the international attention, in terms of sustainability and the long-term success of these projects it might be Qatar that finally triumphs, prophesies Dr Exell. Lama Hourani of Foresight32, a gallery in Amman, who follows museum developments, is reticent about choosing between the Gulf’s two museum giants. “I can’t judge which is better,” she says. “Is it the international approach, or building museums that reflect the Muslim or local identity? I believe a
combination of both — to bring experiences from around the world to inspire and expose local talents, and to build upon our own identity and reflect our culture through art — should work best.” Art Dubai’s Carver, meanwhile, feels the two rafts of museums reinforce the idea of the Gulf as a whole being a single destination. Art acquisitions Sheikha Al-Mayassa is also said to be the “mysterious buyer” of some of the world’s most valued and highly-priced art pieces, though this has not been confirmed by any of the auction houses. Sotheby’s and Christies refuse to comment on art acquisitions by Qatar and Abu Dhabi, saying these countries are “their clients.” We presume they are their chief clients. Over the past seven years the QMA and the Qatari royal family are estimated to have spent at least $1 billion on Western paintings, sculptures and installations, including the last privately-held version of Paul Cezanne’s “The Card Players” for over $250 million — a record price for a work of art. That acquisition was just the latest in a series of purchases that includes some of the very best work by Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko ($70 million for his “White Center” in 2007), Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst ($20 million for his pill cabinet and another $20 million for “The Miraculous Journey”). Since the QMA refuses to comment on these buys, other organizations in Qatar are equally tight-lipped. But Dr Exell states categorically: “The region is already recognized as one of the biggest buyers of contemporary arts, older Western art
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and also Arab art.” There is a genuine effort to create a cultural hub in the Gulf, shifting the focus of the art world not just away from the West but also away from Cairo and Damascus. “They are the new patrons of art,” says Dr Exell. “Nobody can even dream of buying what they (Doha in particular) are purchasing. It is a combination of Sheikha Al-Mayassa’s personal interest in Western contemporary art and her desire to put Qatar on the global map, to say ‘this is the new center of art appreciation and culture’.” Mayssa Fattouh, artistic director and curator at Katara Art Center, one of the few independently-run galleries in the country, feels that although museums in the East are actively involved in art acquisition, the fact that European museums have already acquired collections and are awash with purchases could be another reason why the market seems flooded with purchasers from the Middle East. “More recently developing countries, especially ones with an excess of GDP, have been investing in art and making numerous acquisitions,” says Fattouh. “Abu Dhabi and Qatar are the undeniable bandleaders.” But the interest in acquisitions, Fattouh adds, is not a new phenomenon. “Qatar’s National Council for Culture, Arts and Heritage started investing in the arts over 25 years ago, with acquisitions mostly done through auction houses.” Antonia Carver is particularly excited to see some major works being acquired by the Gulf museums and thus made accessible to the public. Unfortunately, while we hear the news of the big buys, we still have to wait for them to be showcased in
The effort to create world-class art collections in the Gulf, essentially from scratch, has buoyed the international art market, and has contributed to some of the escalation in prices.
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one of Doha’s new museums. Meanwhile, however, this acquisition drive is having the twin side effects of raising prices and also raising the profile of Middle East artists around the world. “It has affected the market, but it has also created a real need here in the region and internationally for Middle Eastern artists and artworks,” says Claudia Cellini, owner of Dubai-based gallery The Third Line. “This is something that has been vital to allowing artists to develop more sophisticated practices.” Carver agrees. “At Art Dubai we see many institutions visiting year-on-year, researching and often acquiring works by artists based in the Arab world, Iran, Turkey and South Asia. Museums such as the Tate, LACMA, the Guggenheim, the British Museum are all committed to following developments in the region. This potentially enables artists to make work on a significant scale — perhaps in terms of ambition and concept, rather than size,” she observes. Lama Hourani of Foresight32 says that while big Gulf purchases have affected galleries and artists in the Jordanian capital, it has also encouraged art galleries in countries like Syria and Lebanon to move to the Gulf. “The positive part of these developments is the growing interest in collecting art amongst the young generation of entrepreneurs and business owners in the Middle East,” she says. But the exaggerated prices of artworks in the Gulf tend to constrain those who wish to collect. Though the Gulf countries are showing a latent interest in building a cultural profile and in engaging local citizens and the expatriate community in art appreciation, Mayssa Fattouh feels that there is an essential difference between these two objectives. “One is looking at art from a distance as an object to be consumed,” she says, “and the latter is taking an engaged part; it involves production, raising social criticism, politics. Here Qatar lacks the ground-level vision required to trigger an art culture.” Who knows whether the Abu Dhabi model will fare any better?
IMAGES COURTESY, QMA, Robert Altamirano, Jean Novel Designs, Robert Altamirano
ONGOING DEBATE Clockwise from left: The Hymn by Damien Hirst; Mayssa Fattouh, artistic director and curator at Katara Art Center; The Miracalous Journey; The Louvre Abu Dhabi- Jean Nouvel; Dr Karen Exell, lecturer at UCL.
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classic tone Vice-chairman Giovanna Ferragamo does not take an active role in designing the creations now but does oversee the process.
On Heritage
The Art of Being Italian
Ferragamo seems to have it all: heritage, “Made in Italy” exclusivity, and now impressive financial results. T Qatar meets the personalities behind the brand. By sindhu nair
IMAGE COURTSEY: FERRAGAMO
Vice-Chairman Giovanna Ferragamo has a smile that
spreads across her face, and eyes that twinkle with a hint of mischief. She looks across the room at Massimiliano Giornetti, the firm’s creative director, and asks me: “He is nice?” She pauses as I nod in agreement — having just interviewed him — then continues: “He is friendly, warm and approachable, very unusual for designers.” We are sitting in comfortable surroundings in Forte dei Marmi, a small town near Florence, with the mountains of Tuscany towering over us in regal surreal glory. I have been invited to spend an afternoon with members of the family and the brand’s leading designer ahead of the launch of the latest Ferragamo perfume. There are no airs and graces about Giovanna, despite her being
the daughter of the legendary Salvatore Ferragamo. She looks at Giornetti fondly for a moment and then turns to me and says: “Ask me many questions. It is just you and me now.” The Tuscan-based brand has seen a phenomenal rise in revenues and profits this year, after demand from the Asia-Pacific area helped lift its 2012 net profits by 30 percent to 106 million euros ($137 million). It’s yet another indication of the resilience top luxury brands have shown during the economic slowdown in Europe, helped by demand from wealthy tourists from emerging markets. According to Bloomberg, Ferragamo’s recent growth spurt is largely due to markets on the perimeter such as Indonesia, Vietnam and especially China, where Ferragamo has doubled its number of stores to about 66. In just a few years the Asia-Pacific region has become the largest contributor to Ferragamo’s revenues (36 percent), maybe not surprisingly since Goldman Sachs has predicted that China will consume about 29 percent of the world’s total luxury goods by 2015, surpassing Japan as the world’s top luxury brands market. But according to Milton Pedraza, CEO of the New York-based researcher, Luxury Institute LLC, the reason for Ferragamo’s higher revenues is not just booming demand for luxury goods in developing countries but also its great product line-up, the culture of the brand, and how it builds relationships that allow it to gain greater market share.
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Pedraza acknowledges that the company’s 2011 initial public offering (IPO) gave the company more resources to invest in stores across Asia, but feels that family traditions and values were and are still the brand’s most powerful marketing tool. “Ferragamo is a very consumer-centric brand,” he says, “a brand that knows its consumer extremely well, with a deep-rooted relation with consumers — one main reason for the consistent success of the brand.” Giovanna Ferragamo would argue that coherence and trust are among the values Ferragamo stands for. “We have always been very careful to be in touch with our roots,” says Giovanna. “We have been very strict in our principles of workmanship and credibility; and the brand is synonymous with absolute integrity.” When Giovanna’s father Salvatore began his shoemaking career a century ago, he was so passionate and detail-oriented about his craft that he spent time studying the anatomy of the foot, so as to be able to produce the very best footwear, comfortable as well as attractive. Sixty-nine-year-old Giovanna, unlike her surviving siblings, all of whom were very small when their father passed away in 1960, has some memories of him. “He was the one to push me into the fashion arena, very demanding in certain aspects of work while being open in others,” she says. “He shared a wonderful relation with his workmen,” Giovanna goes on. “They were more like family. He used to respect each person and felt that each one of them had an important link to the end product and the brand.” While Salvatore made the brand famous with his iconic shoes, other family members expanded the group to
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include ready-to-wear, perfumes, jewelry, leather goods and watches. But all of this was part of a bigger plan. “My father was always telling us, ‘when all of you join the company, we will expand into more countries and make so many more new products’,” says Giovanna. “He was already well known in the U.S. He traveled a lot — to Australia, to Japan — and just before he died he was studying the anatomy of the Asian feet. He was open to expansion and was already planning for this. “I started the ready-to wear collection; my sister opened the accessory line; and then we opened the men’s line,” she recounts. “Each one of us, as we joined the company, was expanding in new areas. The group has grown a lot.” Giovanna has stepped back from her designing days — she led the design team from the 1960s to the ’90s — but she still oversees the creative side of things. “I enjoyed my time when I was doing it,” she
heirloom An event held by Salvatore Ferragamo in honour of Sophia Loren, Rome, February 25,1935.
IMAGES COURTESY, FERRAGAMO, Banca dati archivio, photograph by locchi firenze, Ferragamo
then and Now Clockwise from far left: The Ferragamo family with Salvatore,the creator of the brand; a model walking Salvatore Ferragamo’s A/W men’s collection; the whole Ferragamo family.
BEAUTY AND DETAILS Left, Freida Pinto,Massimiliano Giornetti, Karolina Kurkova at a recent event; below, Vaporosa, prototype of a grey satin high heel pump embroidered with pearls, silver and gold beads and rhinestone in a floral motif.
Top to bottom From top: David Lee, Salvatore Ferragamo with models wearing his inventions, Kimo,1951; left, Giovanna and Ferruccio Ferragamo at the launch of their latest perfume; below, Damigelle, prototype of a brocade ankle boot with gold kid heels, created especially for Sophie Loren, 1957.
remembers. “Every collection was like a test for us. There was so much work involved, it was very stimulating times.” With a strong and distinctive fashion sense, Giovanna loves to mix and match her clothes to achieve a classic look with a twist of modernity. “Never boring though,” she laughs. “I always had to dress the shoes, instead of doing it the other way around!” One most important link in the Ferragamo story is Giovanna’s mother, Wanda Ferragamo. After Salvatore’s death in 1960 Wanda, who had no experience of working, was left not just to manage their five children but also to steer this huge company, a job she seems to have done really well. She served as the chairman of Salvatore Ferragamo Italia S.p.A. until August 2006 and was its director until June 2011, when the company went public. “She was clever and determined, and also passionate about the brand her husband created,” recalls Giovanna, adding: “We called her The Boss.” The success of the brand is also attributed to CEO Michele Norsa, appointed in 2006 with a 35-year track record as executive manager of Italian family firms in fashion (Benetton) and publishing (Rizzoli) and an IPO
for Italian fashion house Valentino under his belt. It was Norsa who orchestrated Ferragamo’s IPO, selling about 22 percent of the company to fund an ambitious plan to open 25 stores — ten in China alone — plus a refurbishment of flagship stores in major world capitals such as London and New York, according to INSEAD Knowledge. Norsa stressed the global importance of China when he talked to INSEAD Knowledge this summer: “Combined with the growth of Europe and the United States, China has become fundamental. In the next five to ten years we will still see opportunities on the perimeter in China, because second, third-tier Chinese cities are representing this opportunity,” he said, referring to domestic growth within the country. With turmoil and uncertainty in the global economy, many observers questioned the timing of the IPO. But Norsa and the family have proved the naysayers wrong, with positive results over the past few years. “A lot of people were thinking that probably a new listing would only happen in Asia or outside Europe. We proved there were still opportunities for good companies,” Norsa said. The two successful IPOs, Valentino and Ferragamo, paved the way for other Italian brands such as Brunello Cucinelli and Moleskine to follow suit with listings on the Milan stock exchange. In his meeting with me, SF group president Ferruccio Ferragamo, Giovanna’s brother, explains the strategic thinking behind the IPO. “We decided to go public on the stock exchange because it seemed the most coherent choice in terms of governance for a company such as ours, and aligned with our plans for global expansion. Nevertheless, we decided to float the minimum percentage of stock with the aim of keeping an absolute majority of share capital to continue along the path of development marked out by my family in recent years.”
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While cynics carped that the IPO would sound the death knell for Ferragamo’s creativity and its “Made in Italy” cachet, nothing drastic has happened at all to mar the company’s performance or damage the brand’s Italian exclusivity. “From a manufacturing point of view, the public offering obliges us to be increasingly efficient, and we were committed to further increasing the group’s profitability,” says Ferruccio, adding that it was improved operational efficiency that led to the upturn in SF’s earnings. “Being a completely ‘Made in Italy’ company is a strategic choice in which we believe wholeheartedly, a choice made by my father when he moved to Florence in 1927, for the very reason that he found a unique heritage of craftsmanship and production excellence here.”
‘Luxury goods and brands such as ours have held up better,’ says Ferruccio Ferragamo, ‘perhaps because of our consistent, diversified presence in all the world’s markets.’
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old and new Clockwise from top: Satin sandal with cage heel, photographed by Lorenzo Cicconi Massi from the Ferragamo museum; Salvatore Ferragamo Galuchat; shoes and dress from Salvatore Ferragamo women’s A/W14 collection.
brand exclusive. Which is why this year’s Ferragamo collection caused excitement with the new modern deconstructed look for which Giornetti seems to have found a passion. Gladiator boots, tailored trench coats, wrap skirts and brocade pants brought out the season’s edgy trend, without losing Ferragamo’s classy twist and its love for neutral colors. Fashion has become much more democratic according to Giornetti, and everyone now has access to it, making the work of designers much more challenging. “I have to think of consumers who live around the world, and also understand that the consumer has changed to become more conscious, and even bold, in their fashion statement,” he declares
courtesy of Ferragamo
Nothing is left to chance at Ferragamo, and as far as generational change is concerned, the family has a rule that only a maximum of three members from each new generation can join the company. “We are a huge family, which in its fourth generation includes more than 70 members,” says Ferruccio. And to be able to become part of the company is no simple inheritance that can be taken for granted. The “aspirants” need to have a master’s degree, have gained two years’ work experience outside the company, and lastly pass an admission exam conducted by members of the family working in the company. “At present, there are two members of the third generation in the company: my niece, Angelica Visconti, who is Retail and Wholesale Director for Italy, and my son James, who is Women’s Leather Products Director,” he says. Reflecting on the fact that the brand seems to have successfully weathered many storms, Ferruccio feels the luxury goods sector has felt the effects of the global recession a little less than others. “Looking at today’s results, luxury goods and brands such as ours have held up better, perhaps because of our consistent, diversified presence in all the world’s markets,” he says. And is Ferragamo’s design creativity also holding up in today’s global fashion market? Creative director Massimiliano Giornetti is said to have a flair for doing the extraordinary, after his very imaginative move to launch a collection inside the Louvre. For someone who had a distinct flair for architecture but later decided that fashion was the best way to express his creativity, Giornetti certainly has come a long way in proving his instincts right. Thirteen years with the brand, and Giornetti feels that craftsmanship and heritage are not just what Ferragamo is about but are also part of his own upbringing and conviction. The brand and the designer are so intimately connected that it seems as if they both stand for the same ideals, almost at the risk of the creator losing a bit of his own identity to keep in with the brand’s DNA. Luxury, to Giornetti, is a matter of materials research, quality and construction, right down to achieving maximum functionality of the final product, and also finding special precious detailing to make the
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NEW DIRECTION Clockwise from left: Marco Probst steering the house toward new horizons; the construction of a crocodile Brilliant bag; art collaboration with Arnaud Kool featuring illustrations of real people with Delvaux bags.
To Accessorize
The Awakening Belgian pride is poised to make a global impact.
To discuss Delvaux is to discuss Belgium. Charles Delvaux made his first trunk luggage in 1829, a year before the founding of Belgium as a nation. And as Belgium grew, Delvaux became intertwined with the nation’s identity, prospering through political and industrial revolutions, and surviving through colonialism, migration and war. “It’s really Belgo Belge, such a strong Belgian identity,” says Belgian fashion icon Didier Vervaeren. The relationship has a strong root among its people that is hardly rivaled by any other in the world. Handbags and leather pieces are inherited from generation to generation, and the gifting of a Delvaux piece between family members marks a significant milestone like marriage or childbirth. “It has always been the symbol of luxury in Belgium. My grandmother had several Delvaux handbags and they were the treasured heirlooms in the family,” says Damien Carlier, a Belgian fashion designer based in Qatar.
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With a 184-year legacy, Delvaux is the oldest leather manufacturer in the world. But while its younger contemporaries from neighboring France have gone on to become global luxury icons, Delvaux remains steadfastly local in its reach. Beyond its deep entrenchment in Belgium, very little of the brand is known outside the country. The brand’s initial international efforts to open stores in Los Angeles and Paris in the ’80s were not successful except for a small cult following in Japan. But those early missteps were no deterrent to the billionaire Fung brothers of Hong Kong, who saw the legacy and potential in Delvaux. In 2011, the brothers through their investment company Fung Brands Limited, acquired a controlling stake in the company from the Schwennicke family who had run Delvaux for the past 80 years. It was a much-needed partnership to help renew Delvaux’s image on the global stage and to highlight the house’s atelier, which
courtesy of delvaux
By DEBRINA ALIYAH
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specializes in master leather craftsmanship. This was, after all, a house that holds Belgium’s royal warrant for leather goods, and manufacturer of some of the best leathers in the world. Following the acquisition, Marco Probst, previously of Hugo Boss and Chloe, was appointed as Delvaux’s CEO. In the span of two years, international sales for the house have risen from 4 percent to 20 percent with the opening of new points of sale in Beijing, Seoul, London, Paris and, most recently, Doha. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, says Probst, to helm a brand that has such storied history and archive. “I still get goose bumps every time I speak about the legacy of the brand,” he quips. The new direction of Delvaux has seen an increased commissioning of collections that are more contemporary and colorful. Every new piece is designed as an interpretation from the house’s design archive, which consists of more than 3,000 handbags dating back to the days of founder Charles. The Madame bag, the au courant hit among global style makers (Katie Holmes and Sienna Miller are fans), was first conceived in 1977, while the house’s signature Brilliant bag was designed in 1958. “Every brand wants to fall back on a history as its marketing strategy, and here we have years of archival works to refer to. Isn’t it a dream to be legitimate, without making up stories?” asks Probst. The quality and craftsmanship of Delvaux’s handmade bags have been essential to its longevity and brand loyalty in Belgium. The after-sales department is an integral part of its atelier, where bags as old as 40 years are still being sent in to be refurbished. The preservation of this skill has recently become a priority, with an increasing interest from young Belgians. Delvaux’s senior craftsman Mohammed Benelcaid, who teaches evening classes in leatherworking at Brussels’ Institut des Arts et Metiers, says the renewed interest may have been caused by the economic crisis, resulting in young people becoming more aware of the value of quality work. “Such know-how is priceless. Wagering on artisanal quality and know-how required audacity, but artisanal excellence remains the pillar of Delvaux,” says Kaat Debo, director of the Fashion Museum Province of Antwerp, “and this could well make the difference in the current economic climate.” It is in this new economic climate that Delvaux is hoping to make its mark, appealing to the growing set of clients who are seeking more than the usual flashy names. The absence of a distinguishable monogram and continuous collaborations with esteemed yet lowprofile artists on various projects have given Delvaux a sort of “secret handshake” status. As Tina Craig of BagSnob puts it, “when you carry a Delvaux, you are not flaunting the fact that you’re carrying a high-end designer. It is understated chic at its very best — only insiders will know the house behind your bag, but the
Every new piece is designed as an interpretation from the house’s design archive, which consists of more than 3,000 handbags.
undeniable legacy From top left: bags awaiting after-sales service; Princess Paola visiting the atelier in the 1980s; the original Delvaux trunks feature amply bowled lids to allow rainwater to run off; a small bag made from Delvaux’s specialized fish skin leather; the Venetian hallway as the centerpiece of new Delvaux boutiques.
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quality will be recognized.” This understatement continues in the house’s new store concept designed by Luxembourger artists Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil in collaboration with retail space architect Tiziano Vudafieri. Breathing new life into Delvaux’s decades-old boutique at Galerie de la Reine in Brussels, the design duo combined their conceptual installations with traditional Flemish furnishings, setting the mold for future Delvaux’s boutique. “Delvaux was like a sleeping beauty coming back to life and it was very interesting for us,” says Feipel, “there’s a discretion and softness to the brand, which we could relate to.” But heralding the brand has not been a walk in the park for Probst. The initial response to the acquisition by Fung Brands garnered backlash. “This brand is an institution; whatever it does, it is watched by Belgians,” Probst explains, “There was a misunderstanding, and people felt it was an attack on national pride being acquired by an outsider.” And then there was the issue of internal change. Having operated under very few owners, the brand had developed a certain business process that was very focused on the Belgian market. Probst had to introduce a new model to cater to the new visions. However, his efforts have paid off. Recent artistic projects including handbag art installations in 10 Corso Como, Milan and at the iconic Manneken-Pis statue in Brussels have revived positive interest among Belgians. New presence on social media and the opening of new points of sale internationally have in turn increased nationalism. “This brand is 184 years old; I don’t want to be the guy who ruins it!” Probst says. In the heart of Brussels lies The Arsenal, a former maintenance and repair depot for military vehicles that has been refurbished as the headquarters and atelier of Delvaux. The Arsenal is also home to the ultimate showpiece for Delvaux, its tribute museum, which houses the earliest luggage trunks made by Charles himself. That these pieces are still in existence in mint condition is the biggest testament to the quality of work produced by the house. The museum is a private venue, open only by invitation, and is part of the brand’s work in providing an engaging experience with clients. “This is a brand that needs introduction and communication for new clients to understand the where, how and why,” Probst says.“We are not just asking people to buy this or that; we are not an in-your-face brand.” Communication and education are on-going, even to the younger generation of Belgians, especially with artistic collaborations. This long tradition of working with external creative personalities, including Martin Margiela, continues. The various collaborations, resulting in art illustrations, installations, and keepsake booklets, represent very personal relationships with clients and help highlight the playfulness and relevance of the brand. Most recently, Belgian painter and illustrator Arnaud Kool conceived the idea of Venetian window illustrations for the house’s spring 2014 presentation at Paris Fashion Week. At the showroom, there was an unexpected air of cheerful interaction between fashion editors and guests with the brand. The bags, instead of being perched on a pedestal, were dangling on guests’ arms as photos were snapped and laughter was shared. It was endearing, just like the time the founder of Belgian cafe Le Pain Quotidien, Alain Coumont, recounts his earliest memory of the house: “I was 10, and I had used an old Delvaux bag as my fishing gear sack.” Delvaux’s first store in the Middle East is now open at Porto Arabia, The Pearl-Qatar.
‘This brand is 184 years old,’ Probst says. ‘I do not want to be the guy who ruins it!’
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design Quality From top: inspiration sketches made by the design team of the 1950s; new techniques are developed in the atelier; the leather library at The Arsenal where skins dating back over 30 years are kept, allowing precise matching of leather for aftersales repair work.
Men's FASHION
from top: Will sanders; craig mcdean; alia malley.
November — December 2013
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by michael hirschorn Photographs by Hedi Slimane Styled by sarah richardson
He sings, he dances, he acts, and he’s not afraid to get silly in self-mocking comedy shorts. Drawing a line from Frank Sinatra to Jay Z, Justin Timberlake has become this generation’s master of ceremonies.
Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane shirt, QR10,700, and T-shirt, QR928.
Justin Timberlake is playing the long game. He’s the Kasparov of showbiz. He has survived far longer than most artists, tracing an arc from pop-culture absurd — first appearing on the Mickey Mouse Club at age 11 — to pop-culture sublime, a solo career that has triumphed at a time when entertainment, and celebrity, have become more disposable than ever. ‘‘I’m 32,’’ he says over coffee this summer in downtown Manhattan. ‘‘I know that I’m still young, but I’ve been in this business two-thirds of my life and you just learn that some things are accepted the way you hope and some aren’t.’’ To a remarkable degree, across multiple disciplines, they have been: his band ’N Sync’s success, at its time, rivaled that of the Beatles; teeny-bopper adulation could’ve been a velvet coffin, as it was for other members of his group and that of the other ’90s phenomenon, the Backstreet Boys. But Timberlake methodically worked his way out of it, rebranding himself as a dapper solo artist, a picker of modest but choice acting roles (most notably as Sean Parker in ‘‘The Social Network’’) and as a
master of this generation’s gift to comedy, the viral short. The digital shorts he created with the music-comedy trio the Lonely Island, and his ‘‘Saturday Night Live’’ skits, centered largely on parodies of oversexed ’90s R&B stars. They also served to gently distance him from his teenage self, less oversexed than, say, the members of Jodeci, but perhaps similarly mockable. He also, smartly, knew when to shut up, going AWOL from music for almost seven years, absent some key collaborations, before returning this spring with a complex, densely produced best-selling album, ‘‘The 20/20 Experience.’’ ‘‘You get to this point, which I’ve done in the last five or six years, where you become less worried about success and failure,’’ he says, speaking of ‘‘20/20,’’ which is filled with eightminute rave-ups and signature Timbaland trance-outs. He may be only in his early 30s, but he has taken on the philosophical aspect of someone a generation older. ‘‘I’m sure there’s some self-help cheese-ball book about the gray area,’’ he says, ‘‘but I’ve been having this conversation with my friends who are all about
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What has let Timberlake bridge three generations of fans has been a certain kind of generationally specific decorum: gracious, polite, patient, deferential. He may have you naked by the end of the song but he will do so by using Antioch rules. the same age and I’m saying, ‘Y’know, life doesn’t happen in black and white.’ The gray area is where you become an adult . . . the medium temperature, the gray area, the place between black and white. That’s the place where life happens.’’
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thers spend years in obscurity,
carving off pounds of credibility for meager dollops of fame. Timberlake was more or less born famous, disposably so, and then fought his way to something more real and lasting. And he has done it over a two-decade span that has been marked by rapid-fire cultural churn, building up and tearing down artists at a manic pace. You jump on the party bus only to see it crash in a ditch moments later. Timberlake’s secret has been to remain detached from these hyper-accelerated comings and goings of fad, trend, in, out. ‘‘If you can answer the question of why you’re doing it, it’s the right thing to do,’’ he says in Mr. Miyagi mode, describing his decision to put out his first album since ‘‘FutureSex/LoveSounds’’ in 2006, a gap in content production that would have spelled doom to a lesser talent. ‘‘To answer the question ‘Why?’ for the first time in my career, is: because I wanted to.’’ This year, among other things he wants to do, is put out the second part of ‘‘The 20/20 Experience,’’ which he describes intriguingly as the ‘‘hotter, older evil twin sister’’ of ‘‘20/20,’’ and then, even more intriguingly: ‘‘If you could imagine you’re 16 and she’s everything you thought. She’s Marilyn Monroe and then you meet her older sister; everything that’s dark and wrong about her at that age is why you become infatuated with her.’’ Hot, older ‘‘20/20’’ will be supported by a major arena tour this fall. This, after he headlined a sold-out stadium tour this summer with Jay Z, an intermittently awkward and thrilling pairing of two very different showbiz traditions, or at least two people who learned very different things watching Frank Sinatra. Jay Z took Sinatra’s
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Grooming by Amy Komorowski for Axe/ Celestineagency.com.
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Tailor: Olena P.; Photo Assistant: Rudolf Bekker; Stylist’s assistant: Alice Lefons.
Dolce & Gabbana sweater, QR7,600.
By inclination and design, Timberlake is positioned apart from the prevailing trends in music, fashion, sensibility. None of these interest him particularly, and his refusal to engage with the ephemera of a particular pop culture moment may in fact be his secret. suit-and-tie phlegmatic self-confidence, merged it with hip-hop’s swagger and created a model for the 40-plus black artist/businessman that is unprecedented in the genre. Timberlake took from the crowd-pleasing Sinatra, bringing back the idea of the ‘‘performer’’: the all-singing, all-dancing entertainer, whose craft didn’t interfere with showing the fans a good time. Along the way, thanks in part to the growing amount of time spent collaborating with Jay Z, he has modeled a new kind of postracial, postmacho white male.
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imberlake appears in two movies
this year. In the first, ‘‘Runner Runner,’’ he plays a Princeton student and online poker player who believes he was swindled out of his tuition money and goes after the site’s shady owner, played by Ben Affleck. In December, he has a memorable cameo as Jim Berkey in the Coen brothers’ ‘‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’’ a dry comedy very loosely based on Dave Van Ronk’s life and the Greenwich Village folk scene of the ’60s. I say loosely because Van Ronk’s life, as captured in the book, ‘‘The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir,’’ is a rollicking tale about New York folk at the literal moment before Bob Dylan and the ’60s were about to turn this whole little jewel box of bohemia into Pompeii. The movie, by contrast, lingers like a persistent melancholy. When the Coens called, Timberlake had actually just watched Martin Scorsese’s documentary ‘‘No Direction Home: Bob Dylan,’’ and when they asked if he had heard of the now largely forgotten Van Ronk, who played a kind of Salieri to Dylan’s Mozart, they were surprised to hear he had. Dylan, Timberlake says, ‘‘jacked a little of Van Ronk’s thing and made it his own.’’ Berkey is the husband and singing partner of Carey Mulligan’s Jean Berkey, who (improbably) cuckolds Timberlake’s character with the husky, E.Q.-challenged Davis, played by the relative newcomer Oscar Isaac. Timberland’s role is a small one, but his
Berkey is a significant foil to Davis, who is the most talented musician in the story, but has no ability to connect with audiences. Timberlake’s Berkey, unencumbered by neuroses about authenticity and craft and gazing ingenuously at the world around him, looks destined for mainstream success. It is a sly Coen brothers joke: one can see them clearly identifying with the hirsute, curmudgeonly Davis, fighting Talmudic battles with shadows; Timberlake’s Berkey just floats through the whole scene. ‘‘Talent doesn’t always equal success,’’ Timberlake says, drawing a universal connection. ‘‘A case can be made a lot for that.’’ Timberlake, it has been said, has gone far on likability, which is also a way of mildly patronizing him. He is his generation’s dapper master of ceremonies, turning up as a reliable good time on everything from ‘‘Saturday Night Live,’’ to ‘‘Jimmy Fallon,’’ to the MTV Video Music Awards and, of course, the Super Bowl. But what has let him bridge over multiple iterations and now three generations of fans has been a certain kind of generationally specific decorum: gracious, polite, patient, deferential. He may have you naked by the end of this song, but he will do so using Antioch rules. This quality was much mocked in the wake of his apologies for that ‘‘wardrobe malfunction’’ at the Super Bowl in 2004, wherein he had Janet Jackson’s right breast naked at the end of their joint performance. An apology? How . . . polite. And even as his lyrics are strewn with references to twerking and booties, he seems unable to express current pop culture’s quasiporny sexuality with anything approaching conviction. Timberlake’s ‘‘dirty’’ video for ‘‘Tunnel Vision,’’ which showcased him almost moping about an empty studio intercut with images of naked dancing women, was notably less ‘‘hot’’ than the exuberantly ‘‘dirty’’ video released a few months earlier by Robin Thicke, who has positioned himself as a kind of Timberlake 2.0 cyborg. Timberlake, who like Thicke is married, looks miserable and isn’t even shot in the same space as his naked dancing girls. Timberlake doesn’t do R-rated well. By inclination and design, Timberlake is positioned apart from the prevailing trends in music, fashion, sensibility. None of these interest him particularly, and his refusal to engage with the ephemera of a particular pop culture moment may in fact be his secret. This moment, and indeed, many of the previous moments, have been driven by technological change. ‘‘A lot of people in our biz want to write songs that people want to hear and make movies that people want to see,’’ he says, ‘‘but if the medium is changing at such a rapid pace, the question is, How do you do that?’’ His answer is to look sideways at iconoclastic artists he admires — like Josh Homme of Queens of the
Stone Age, Dave Grohl, Trent Reznor or Kanye West — and backward at artists who were able to transcend their moment and create something that mattered years later. Like who? His name-checks would make a boomer’s heart skip a beat: Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Dylan, Bobby Womack and his fave, Donny Hathaway. ‘‘The 20/20 Experience’’ is aural Spielberg: entirely original yet drenched in five decades of dense pop music history. Technology, he says, has jammed so much newness into the culture that culture has not figured out how to respond yet. As a result, ‘‘There’s not as much substance’’ in music. Speaking to the nadir — the end of the last decade — he says, ‘‘All the soul of it was removed. It was made for whatever the trending medium was. . . . You had two or three different female artists who were doing literally the same song, just different song titles. They are saying the same thing with the same melody, with the same B.P.M.’’ This is not to say that Timberlake is some kind of purveyor of nostalgic pap à la Michael Bublé. The 2013 J. T. experience may lack the industrial thwap of dub-step, now scrambling your innards in every car commercial, but that’s because, as he says with uncharacteristic edge, ‘‘Tim [Timbaland, his producing partner] and I were doing that seven years ago. Someone put some cocaine on top of that, and it turned into what it turned into.’’ And it’s true. Have you listened to ‘‘FutureSex/LoveSounds’’ recently? It sounds even better now than it did then, hit after hit laid into a skittering, luscious flow that is pure sex — pure, parent-approved, consensual sex, that is. Which brings us back to his role in ‘‘Inside Llewyn Davis’’ and the Village folk era. Timberlake reveres Dylan, but he also understands Dylan as largely a construction, an artistic projection. ‘‘I always bring up Robert Zimmerman. ‘Do you know who Robert Zimmerman is?’ They say, ‘Who’s that?’ Look it up.’’ Van Ronk, in his memoir, describes the Dylan persona as a kind of freestyle riff on who he thought Woody Guthrie really was. Van Ronk’s memoir describes Dylan as so cosmically full of it that he himself probably had no idea what was true and what wasn’t. Timberlake takes a different moral from the story of Van Ronk and Dylan. He sees the Dylan persona as ‘‘methodical,’’ and that constructedness, he says, is the very essence of how an artist connects with his audience. It’s called performing, and performing is a noble calling, a kind of greater realness. The authenticity is in the ability to make the connection. ‘‘I try to talk to people about how much acting goes into music,’’ he says. ‘‘How much of a character goes into what you put on stage. You ever sit down with Jay? He’s not the guy he is on stage. I’m not the guy I am on stage. I am a performer. It’s an elevated idea.’’
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Out of this world This season’s starkly powerful silhouettes hold their own against Iceland’s extreme landscape of jagged lava fields, mossy hills and shining white glaciers. photographs by Craig M c Dean Styled by Jane How
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Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci top, belt and skirt, prices on request; Opposite: Donna Karan cape, QR3,250, and dress, QR8,350; Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane boots, QR8,700.
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Mary Katrantzou dress, QR70,600; Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane boots, QR8,700.
Iceland
isn’t just a country — it’s a mood, a waking dream, an alternate realm of cliffs and moss, a place where you can still experience the sublime, that shiver of fear in the face of monumental nature. A field of flammable moss — gray-green, like the ocean on a stormy day, stretching away under a sky the color of ice. On the first morning I woke on this remote island, it was all I could see. About 315,000 people live here among eerie rock formations and shining glaciers, but the landscape is so austere and weird, you might think that you had woken in an outpost in an alien world. One imagines, at every turn, the darting movements of the hidden people (‘‘Huldufolk’’) among the crags. In ‘‘Journey to the Center of the Earth,’’ Jules Verne wrote that the entrance to a subterranean passage was on Iceland’s Snaefellsnes peninsula. It’s easy to see why he would have imagined this. To visit is to be enveloped in a physical landscape so extreme that visions of it invade even your sleep. Along the steepest mountainsides, small horses stick like burrs, grazing where no American horse could maintain its balance. Iceland is a place of contradictions, at once archaic and modern, immensely gray yet strangely lush, covered in various mosses and bright green grasses, which thrive even amid stark lava fields. Everyone is known by first name, even the president. Icelandic people have one of the highest life expectancies in the world, and one of the best state health-care systems. But get past the immediate environs of Reykjavik, and you emerge into a chthonic world, a place of raw rock and ice dipping over the edges of mountains; it’s easy, on these plains, to imagine the Vikings building their villages, launching their ships. At the national park, Thingvellir (spelled slightly differently in Icelandic, which still uses two letters from Old Norse), you can touch the mounded remnants of the booths from the Vikings’ annual gatherings. It was here that the first Icelandic council originally met in 930 A.D., and where every year an elected member read the nation’s laws out loud to the people. The past is present everywhere: signs on the road point you to the former homes of characters from ‘‘The Sagas of Icelanders,’’ a set of interlocking prose narratives about life in the Middle Ages here, which remain central in the culture. At Gullfoss (‘‘Golden Falls’’), the island’s most spectacular waterfall, it is said that the falls get their yellow glow and their name from a man centuries ago who buried his gold when he died, not wanting anyone to have it. In late summer, the light fades slowly, reluctantly. On the Ring Road — Iceland’s main ‘‘highway,’’ circling the island — waterfalls continuously pour and scores of sheep roam free, without dogs to guard them or fences to bound them. The Icelandic horses sleep on their sides — at first glance, they look dead — as their impossibly long manes lift in the wind. The vista is still, vast, apocalyptic. Hardship breeds companionability. Everyone in Iceland — at least outside of the city — is friendly. At last count, 121 people occupy the nation’s jails. And apparently many of them are allowed home for Christmas. There are few, if any, places where volcanoes are such a living presence. Since 2010, there have been two eruptions here. At Dyrholaey, a dramatic stone arch extends out from the dark lava cliffs, as white foam waves crash along the black sand beach below, the land and water in stark contrast. In the distance, majestically, stands Reynisdrangar, a famous rock formation that looks like
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something from ‘‘Game of Thrones,’’ which filmed some scenes nearby. A search-and-rescue ranger, pointing out wild blueberries growing at the bottom of the nearby mountain (tart, tiny, delicious) told me that for some farmers the volcanic eruption of 2011 was good — about a fifth of an inch of lava acted as a mineral-rich fertilizer. Any more and ‘‘phht,’’ he said, shaking his head. The Icelandic still tell stories and make folk metaphors about the world around them. One day I drove to Jokulsarlon (literally, ‘‘glacialriver-lagoon’’) — a sublime, unearthly glacial lake studded with broken pieces of glacier, which float, blue and shining, among waters where seals play. With a handful of others, I got in a flotation suit and climbed onto a tiny rubber pontoon boat. Our guide — a young Icelandic woman who loved the ice as one might love the beach — took us unnervingly close to the glacier’s edge. Dark blue and ashstriped icebergs drifted past us like boats from the underworld. As we turned for the harbor, our guide got a little dreamy. ‘‘Use your imagination,’’ she told us, gazing out, ‘‘to really look at the ice shapes, to see what they resemble — animals and spirits.’’ In Iceland the geology is primary, humans are secondary. We are used to living our lives as if we are in control, predicting this and manufacturing that. In Iceland you are aware at every turn of your smallness, the irrational, slow forces at work. The glaciers seem alive, like sentient entities. To be here is to be returned to a child’s sense of precarious awe: How on earth did this come to be? Even here, changes encroach. One day, I hiked at Falljokull (‘‘Falling Glacier’’), near Vatnajokull National Park. Like all the ice in Iceland, the glacier is shrinking rapidly. It used to creep forward every winter. Then it began retreating. First 9 yards. Then 21 yards. Now, the guides estimate, it is losing up to 37 yards a year. Nearby, at the Grand Guesthouse Gardakot — a pristine farm near the dramatic cliffs at Dyrholaey — the host, Eva, who also worked as a ranger, explained her worries about the puffin colony nearby. ‘‘There was no snow last winter,’’ she said. ‘‘This summer, some of the puffins left, suddenly — abandoning their eggs.’’ Here, as elsewhere in Iceland, the hospitality felt natural, as if you were visiting friends of friends. Over breakfast, Eva talked about growing up on the neighboring farm; her husband grew up in Vik, the nearest town. Unlike many young Icelanders, who head to Reykjavik, they chose to stay in the country. On the way to the rental car drop off near the airport, I got lost; as I was pulling up, a white compact swept past us, and a brighteyed young man jumped out. ‘‘Are you Meghan?’’ he asked. ‘‘I'm from the rental car agency. I have your scarf,’’ he said, and handed me a plastic bag. I’d left it five days ago. ‘‘I have to rush off and do a drop in Reykjavik. In fact,’’ he continued, ‘‘if you’re going to the airport, your should just drive there yourselves, and leave the car in the parking lot.’’ ‘‘What will I do with the keys?’’ I asked. ‘‘Oh,’’ he said, ‘‘just leave the doors unlocked and the keys inside.’’ He spread his arms and smiled. ‘‘It’s Iceland!’’ — Meghan O'Rourke
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photo assistants: simon roberts, huan nguyen, gregory Mild. digital tech: tanya houghton. stylist’s assistants: eliza conlon, florence arnold. printing by box studios.
Ann Demeulemeester dress QR9,980; Opposite: Giorgio Armani coat, QR46,200; Rick Owens shorts, QR3,200. Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane boots, QR3,250. Model: Suvi/Next NY. Hair by Malcolm Edwards at Streeters London. Makeup by Peter Philips at Art + Commerce. Production by Bryn Birgisdottir for Pegasus Pictures. November-December 2013
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what lies bEneath
the killer instincts of the modelturned-actor jamie dornan.
Photographs by KARIM SADLI STYLED BY JOE M C KENNA
Say you’re a handsome young actor on the verge of
breaking through, but you want to escape being known for being pretty. What do you do to rise above it and establish yourself as an actor in your own right? For Jamie Dornan, the answer was to play a murderer of women — and to do so very convincingly. The 31-year-old Irishman, who was first seen nearly a decade ago as the face of Calvin Klein, drew raves for his performance as Paul Spector, a serial killer terrorizing Belfast, in the BBC Two police procedural ‘‘The Fall,’’ which was broadcast earlier this year and will return for a second season in 2014. Dornan’s handsomeness is certainly part of what makes the character so arresting; the trim beard, furrowed brow and sinewy muscles definitely don’t fit the stereotype of the homicidal maniac. But what’s especially unnerving is how swiftly he can go from being a family guy, doting on his two daughters, to a monster who strangles his victims, then ritualistically bathes them and paints their nails afterward. Dornan, whose acting career began with a small part in ‘‘Marie Antoinette’’ and includes a recurring role on the fantastical ABC series ‘‘Once Upon a Time,’’ describes his reaction to winning ‘‘The Fall’’ lead (opposite Gillian Anderson) in a single word: ‘‘Terrified.’’ He’d originally gone out for the part of a police investigator, and for a while he was convinced he was about to be fired. But Dornan, who prepared by boning up on the literature of psychopaths and serial killers like Ted Bundy, grew to enjoy playing ‘‘someone with that sort of rottenness within him,’’ he says. If anything, he got too deep into the part. ‘‘I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that I was saying ‘me’ and ‘I’ a lot’’ when discussing torture and murder, he recalls. ‘‘My fiancée had to keep saying, ‘Can you please stop?’ ’’ — Jesse ashlock
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Calvin Klein Collection coat, QR12,700, and jacket (on table), QR4,100; T by Alexander Wang sweater, QR1,000. Neil Barrett pants, about QR2,250; Opposite: Our Legacy sweater, QR870. All prices are indicative
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Lanvin jacket, QR18,200; Jil Sander top,QR2,650; Balenciaga pants, price on request; for similar styles, call Opposite: Prada coat, QR19,000, shirt, QR2,130, and pants,QR3,200.
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Comme des Garรงons Homme Plus shirt, QR2,400, pants, QR2,000, and coat (on table), QR6,000; T by Alexander Wang T-shirt, QR290; Bottega Veneta bracelet, QR2,100. Opposite: Givenchy by Ricardo Tisci shirt, QR24,000; Burberry Prorsum pants, QR2,900; Dolce & Gabbana shoes (worn throughout), QR2,900; Gucci coat (on table), QR21,800. Hair by Damien Boissinot at Jed Root. Grooming by Hannah Murray. Set design by Max Bellhouse. Produced by Ragi Dholakia.
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manicure by Marian Newman at Streeters for Chanel. tailoring by MICHELLE WARNER. stylist’s assistants: CARLOS NAZARIO and JOHN PASHALIDIS. Set AssistaNt: Emma Pascoe. photo assistants: ANTONI CIUFO, JP WOODLAND and SIMON MCGUIGAN. hair assistant: ALEX JAMES FAIRBAIRN. grooming assistant: REBECCA MUIR.
Clockwise from top left: Leonard Cohen; Paul Weller and Pete Townshend; Bryan Ferry; Michael Stipe; Charlie Watts; Screamin’ Jay Hawkins; John Lee Hooker and Carlos Santana; Frank Zappa; David Bowie; Kiss.
Men in Suits The iconic rock ’n’ roll photographer Mick Rock reflects on the eternal allure of the bad-boy frontman. Rock ’n’ roll and fashion form a unique pact that has been percolating for decades, as the images from John Varvatos’s new book show. For a designer, who better to showcase your wares than a hot musician? Because most rock musicians are also performers, they are very attuned to their bodies. It is the swagger with which they sport their attire that generates the sexiness that is so seductive. They enjoy the clothes they wear. Bryan Ferry has always been regarded as one of the most stylish
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of rock’s practitioners. I took a photo of him in 1975 (top right) at his home in Notting Hill Gate, London, in which he is lounging against a wall wearing a rumpled khaki suit, cigarette in hand. I call it his ‘‘Our Man in Havana’’ look. His attitude is louche and casual, as if he had made the decision of what to wear in a whimsical moment with very little thought. He looks like the cat’s whiskers! All photos from ‘‘John Varvatos: Rock in Fashion’’; Harper Design; QR218
Clockwise from Top Left: Mark Hanauer; Janette Beckman; Mick Rock (2); Kate Simon; Vincent Lignier; Richard E. Aaron; Baron Wolman; Mick Rock; Bob Gruen.
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