T Qatar Jan-Feb 2014 by Oryx Group of Magazines

Travel January – February 2014 A view of the 1940s staircase of Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen's monastic Antwerp house.

Far and Away Fall fashion made to travel: relaxed clothes smartened up with jackets and belts. Photographs by Karim Sadli. Styled by Jonathan Kaye. House Proud Louis Vuitton constructs one of the legendary Modernist Charlotte Perriand’s never-built house designs. By Pilar Viladas.

In Orwell’s Footsteps Looking at Myanmar today through the eyes of the author of ‘‘Burmese Days.’’ By Lawrence Osborne. Photographs by Richard Mosse.

68 Of the Essence The Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen is known for rigorous, spare design that retains a sense of life. Captivated by a once-stately house in Antwerp, he distilled it to its elements — and made it his home. By Tom Delavan. Photographs by David Spero.

ON THE COVER: Photograph by Karim Sadli. Styled by Jonathan Kaye. Céline coat, QR148,500, and shirt, QR3,550.

DAVID SPERO

Features

Sign of the Times Instagram has created a new breeding ground for lifestyle envy.

This and That Indie rock stars go solo; Meadham Kirchhoff does Topshop; furry accessories; and more.

On Beauty A face without makeup looks effortless, but takes a lot of work.

Making It The House of Chanel is preserving Old World artisan ateliers for the future.

By the Numbers Sir Richard Branson joins the space race.

Take Two Gay Talese and Juliette Lewis take on Saint Laurent roller skates, Sylvester Stallone as an artist and more.

Quality 31

In Fashion With a sculptural consideration of form, these clothes must be viewed from all sides. Photographs by Andrea Spotorno. Styled by Jason Rider.

Home/Work The Japanese design couple Chitose and Junichi Abe, who run very different fashion labels, find common ground in their Tokyo home. By Kelly Wetherille. Photographs by Tetsuya Miura.

Arena 41

On the Verge The citizens of Belgrade, Serbiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s war-torn capital, are recasting their home into a burgeoning hub for design, culture and creativity. By Viia Beaumanis. Photographs by Danilo Scarpati.

84 Document The Franz Ferdinand bassist Bob Hardy snaps selfies in bed.

Clockwise from top left: Hotel Moskva,Belgrade's first grand hotel built in 1906; Japanese designer Chitose Abe in her home office in Tokyo; Bottom: sheep by the prop stylist Victoria Petro Conroy upholstered in (left) Larsen Shearling fabric, QR560 per yard, and (above) Pollack Wool Loops fabric in pearl, price on request; pollackassociates.com.

DANILO SCARPATI, TETSUYA MIURA, STILL LIFE: MARKO METZINGER.

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Publisher & Editor-In-Chief

Yousuf Jassem Al Darwish Chief Executive

Lookout Qatar

Sandeep Sehgal Executive Vice President

Alpana Roy

Vice President

Ravi Raman

EDITORIAL Editor

Sindhu Nair Deputy Editor

Srinivasan V.L

Lookout Qatar Frances Hartog relates the mesmerizing tale of a 53-yearold Dior Zemire dress at a conference at Doha's Museum of Islamic Art; Alia El Tanani of the luxury design company Living In Interiors has an eye for the unusual; Tod’s leather collection for men is all about the double stripe; the Lady Arpels Ballerine Enchantée watch takes its inspiration from dancing butterflies and fairies.

Chief Fashion Correspondent

Debrina Aliyah

Senior Correspondents

Abigail Mathias Ayswarya Murthy Ezdihar Ibrahim Ali Sub-Editor

Sue Eedle

ART Senior Art Director

Venkat Reddy

Deputy Art Director

Hanan Abu Saiam

Assistant Art Director

Ayush Indrajith

Senior Graphic Designer

Maheshwar Reddy

Photography

Rob Altamirano

Culture Cue Doha wants to hold on to its charming history but by reimagining it. The Old Doha Prize brings together architects from two countries, Qatar and UK, to revive old Doha — bringing the idea of a global world to reality. By Sindhu Nair. Showing Now Jordanian artist Jehad Al-Ameri is influenced by three places: a village in Jordan; Baghdad; and Granada in Spain. By Abigail Mathias.

MARKETING AND SALES Senior Manager – Marketing

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Market Watch The spotlight is on the jewelry that will be the highlight of a luxury exhibition, the Doha Jewelry and Watches Exhibition. By Debrina Aliyah.

O Couture! A new couture showing in Singapore put the focus on Asian designers as it paved way for the formation of a new federation of designers. By Alexandra Kohut-Cole.

The New Breed We bring you the new decisionmakers in a country that is on its development path, the youthful go-getters who know that for a nation to grow, they first have to effect change from within. By Ayswarya Murthy, Debrina Aliyah and Sindhu Nair. Photographs by AbdulRahman Al-Baker

Trend Report A Middle East-exclusive preview of the Gap Spring/ Summer 2014 Collection. By Priyanka Pradhan.

Hassan Rekkab Lydia Youssef

Marketing Research & Support Executive

Kanwal Baluch Accountant Pratap Chandran

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T, THE STYLE MAGAZINE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES Editor in Chief

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Patrick Li

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Whitney Vargas Fashion Director at Large

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Managing Editor

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Alice Ting

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VIEW FINDER Pre-Instagram, this was the main way New Yorkers spied on the lives of their neighbors. The artist Gail Albert Halaban shot this from a nearby apartment window.

Sign of the Times

Where the Grass Looks Greener

Instagram has created a new kind of voyeurism — in which you can look into the carefully curated windows of the rich, famous and stylish — and a new kind of lifestyle envy. BY SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT

‘‘THE DEPARTMENT STORE is the last promenade for the flâneur,’’

wrote Walter Benjamin, the German critic, whose impossible project — ‘‘The Arcades Project,’’ more precisely — documented street life in Paris after the Industrial Revolution. He wrote of gleaming wants, windows gazing back at him, shoppers and wanderers alike becoming reflections of their desires. ‘‘The crowd,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria — as a landscape, now as a room. Both become elements of the department store, which makes use of flâneurie itself to sell goods.’’ This flâneuring took place when Paris was the capital of the 19th century. Its arcades — high iron-and-glass arches sheltering

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individual blocks lined with shops — numbered over 300 (under 30, now). Manhattan, capital of the 20th, replaced arcades with department stores and made spectator art of window displays. What is the new Paris, the new Manhattan, the arcade in the age of digital reproduction? It is Instagram: the app built to make you covet your neighbor’s life. Only now your own personal Joneses are hundreds of miles away in L.A., or on the Greek island of Patmos, or in Milan. Doesn’t matter — all it takes is two clicks for today’s flâneurs, renamed ‘‘followers,’’ to float onto Margherita Missoni’s balcony. That is, a small and square and semipermanent display of Margherita Missoni’s balcony that makes you wonder if an antique rocking

GAIL ALBERT HALABAN, ‘‘OUT MY WINDOW, FLATIRON, CAKES AND BALLOONS,’’ 2009, COURTESY OF EDWYNN HOUK GALLERY.

Section

Belongings being so easily conflated with belonging, Instagram induces a longing to be on a scene, the scene, the next one, a better one.

WISH YOU WERE HERE Clockwise from top left: Instagram images of Claridge’s, London, by Jessica Diehl; a private home in Gloustershire by Amanda Brooks; a Parisian composition by Laura Bailey; a Manhattan selfportrait by Stephanie LaCava; spectators’ shoes at the Giambattista Valli show in Paris by Lisa Marie Fernandez; and a pool in Puglia, Italy, by Rafael de Cárdenas.

horse isn’t the outdoor seating solution you’ve been waiting for, although you do not have a balcony, or even a patio, and cannot in fact remember the last time you were outdoors. If Twitter is the street, Facebook the suburban-sprawl mall, and Pinterest some kind of mail-order catalog, Instagram is the manywindowed splendor of a younger Bergdorf’s, showing all we possess or wish for, under squares of filtered glass, each photographic pane backlit 24/7. Each pane is, or intimates, an entire landscape or room. Follow enough of the international lifestyle-setters, and you’ll see: women’s fashion, men’s fashion, home or apartment décor, beautiful food, art, color-coordinated books and magazines. Of course, the tags for these old categories are updated: #birthdaylove for a manybraceleted hand holding a pink Nat Sherman; #nodiets for an aerial view of Ibérico ham on a plate. All elements must be carefully staged to look happenstance. Only the crassest Instagrammer snaps a new pair of shoes in a box, or plainly on a floor. The cannier, cinematic one will instead make a display of the shoes, arranging her feet on a shabby-chic desk next to a Grolsch bottle of daisies atop a stack of French translations. The writer Stephanie LaCava snaps her snakeskin Pradas opposite Audrey Gelman’s funny bunny slippers at Paris Fashion Week. A few cobblestoned streets away, the swimwear designer Lisa Marie Fernandez shows off her white Manolo Blahniks next to her friend’s yellow pair of Gianvito Rossis. Such Instagrams are mimetic: the contents, the casually rarefied setting, the off-kilter composition. What each says is not ‘‘this is a good shoe’’ or ‘‘these shoes look good on me,’’ but ‘‘these shoes look good in my life,’’ which is what Benjamin meant when he said goods are sold by flâneurie.

What feels new with Instagram is the mode of photography that feels most akin to the window display. Rafael de Cárdenas, the architect, shows off Biarritz by way of melons and Marlboros on a snowy white cloth. Jessica Diehl, Vanity Fair’s style and fashion director, snaps her stay in Claridge’s, the five-star hotel in London. The model-slash-writer Laura Bailey comes home from a trip with — she writes — ‘‘Paris in my bag’’: a strand of Chanel pearls, a Chanel stylo eyeliner, a black diamanté hairpin and a handwritten note, all displayed too well and too brightly to make anyone believe these items have ever seen the inside of a clutch. These are technically still lifes, but in spirit they are actually the new self-portraiture. It isn’t strange to say, or to hear, from an acquaintance run into on the street, ‘‘I recognized you’’ — not by your face or your body, but by your ‘‘style.’’ Meaning: a hand with carmine nails holding a copy of Anne Carson’s ‘‘Red Doc.’’ A pair of Illestevas resting on the edge of a Café Gitane plate, beneath it a new issue of The Journal. ‘‘The arrangement was the meaning,’’ Joan Didion writes in ‘‘Blue Nights.’’ The same is as true of objects as of words, and the small compositions of personal belongings so recognizable as ‘‘Instagram’’ are, simply, selfies without a face. Similar compositions can also represent others. One of my favorite recent Instagrams, by the Los Angeles artist David Kitz, is of bandages, Motrin and other supplies for an injury from CVS, all heaped together on a plain white bedspread; the tag is #anklesprain, the caption is ‘‘Got the best girl in the world,’’ and the heart melts. This is my kind of lifestyle envy. For the more aspirational, there is Amanda Brooks, the American socialite who now lives in Oxfordshire, England, with two kids and a million horses. In lieu of a family portrait, Brooks will Instagram four pairs of kayaking sandals on a dock. Instead of photographing her scads of friends, she ’grams a plate heaped high with packets of quince paste, which she has made to give as gifts. In the comments, a stranger asks her for the recipe. Belongings being so easily conflated with belonging, Instagram induces a longing to be on a scene, the scene, the next one, a better one. Some hours you can scroll without end as a long block of squares lights up in unison, every frame swinging open to a new angle on the same scene: the same Jay Z performance at Pace Gallery in Chelsea, the same Delfina Delettrez presentation in Paris, the same Ken Okiishi paint-balling robots at the Frieze Art Fair in London. ‘‘There it was,’’ says the narrator in the Willa Cather story ‘‘Paul’s Case,’’ looking up at a wonderland of glowing panes, ‘‘what he wanted — tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas pantomime.’’ Close observers of Instagram may have noticed the recent rise of a conscious-or-not homage to Walter Benjamin, a snap of the modern flâneur: taken alone on the street, while looking through a store window — the most reflexive of surfaces — at oneself.

January-February 2014

Lookout

This and That A Cultural Compendium

Fluffy Stuff

Nubby, fleecy or bouclé, creamy textured wool is cozier and more durable than the beige Belgian linen that designers have grown so fond of. Ideal for furniture, these fabrics nod to vintage Chanel suits and childhood teddy bears but still feel luxuriously modern. — TOM DELAVAN WINTER WOOLLIES Sheep upholstered in (clockwise from top left): Larsen Aran fabric, QR939 per yard. Pollack Wool Loops fabric in pearl, price on request. Larsen Shearling fabric, QR561 per yard. Knoll Luxe North Island upholstery fabric by Dorothy Cosonas, price on request.

The illustrious Art Deco dealer Félix Marcilhac is selling off his own collection of treasures. Since opening his namesake Parisian gallery in 1969, Félix Marcilhac has been the foremost dealer in French 20th-century decorative arts for clients like Yves Saint Laurent, Andy Warhol and Catherine Deneuve. Now 71, he’s passed his business on to two of his children and has started downsizing. The best of his personal collection — largely museum-quality works from the Art Deco and Art Nouveau periods — will be sold at Sotheby’s in Paris. Karl Lagerfeld, another client, is contributing to the catalog. Among the more than 300 lots in the sale are some legendary pieces: a 1930s console by Pierre Legrain (whom Marcilhac calls Deco’s best designer); a sensual 1913 Nautile armchair by Paul Iribe; and the dealer’s favorite, a 1926 bronze figure by the artist Gustave Miklos. Sale at Sotheby’s Paris, March 11-12. — PILAR VILADAS ILLUSTRATIONS BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS

PRIZE POSSESSIONS Clockwise from above: a room in the dealer Félix Marcilhac’s Paris apartment with a lacquered desk by Jean Dunand and Jean Goulden and a rosewood chair by Marcel Coard; a 1928 bronze head by Gustave Miklos; a shagreen armchair by Jean-Michel Frank. All will be sold at the Sotheby’s auction.

SHEEP BY VICTORIA PETRO CONROY; PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARKO METZINGER. MARCILHAC: SOTHEBY’S/ARTDIGITAL STUDIO.

ART MATTERS

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This and That

LISTEN UP

Singular Sensations

BRIAN DEGRAW OF GANG GANG DANCE In its 12 years of existence, Gang Gang Dance has gained underground cred for its vanguard yet visceral take on electronic music. That experimental trademark makes the imaginative accessibility of ‘‘Sum/One’’ (4AD) — the fulllength debut from the Dance co-founder and keyboardist Brian DeGraw, under the name bEEdEEgEE — surprising, even to DeGraw himself. ‘‘This album is so drastically different from what I’ve done in the past,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m really impressed with pop music, but it never crossed my mind to actually make it before.’’

MICHAEL MILOSH OF RHYE ‘‘Woman,’’ the first album from the electronicsoul duo Rhye, received widespread praise upon its release earlier last year, in no small part due to the smooth, androgynous vocals of Michael Milosh. Although Rhye provided the mainstream breakthrough for Milosh (who records solely under his last name), the Canadian musician had already put out three genre-defying albums of his own. ‘‘Jetlag’’ (Deadly/eOne), his latest, artfully layers recordings of exchanges with his wife and collaborator, Alexa Nikolas. ‘‘I’d drum on my wife’s tummy and edit together the sounds of us laughing,’’ he says. ‘‘Even our dogs make cameos.’’

BRYCE DESSNER OF THE NATIONAL The guitarist Bryce Dessner is flying solo to focus on his other passion: classical music. Intricate compositions take center stage on ‘‘Aheym’’ (Anti- Records), a recording of four challenging pieces written by Dessner and performed by the string ensemble Kronos Quartet, along with contributions from Sufjan Stevens, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Dessner himself. ‘‘I have this other life under the magnifying glass in a successful rock band,’’ he says. ‘‘Concert music serves as a personal room for me to let all of myself out.’’ — MATT DIEHL

Meadham Kirchhoff Does Topshop Fresh off a triumphant ready-to-wear presentation this spring — a typically demented, dazzling mash-up of Charles Addams and Leigh Bowery — the London-based fashion label Meadham Kirchhoff has put together a witty new collection for Topshop, which includes everything from a pair of glittery ruby platforms with marshmallow heels to frilly baby-doll dresses and mohair jumpers. It’s another spirited line from a design team that is determined to break the rules. ‘‘The industry has become dictatorial,’’ Edward Meadham says. ‘‘All we ask is that we can show our clothes exactly how we want to, exactly how it comes out of us. What people make of it after that is up to them.’’ — AARON GELL

A Man of Letters

Marco Zanini, the newly appointed creative director for the house of Schiaparelli, pens a love note to Cartier’s custom stationery. I’ve always written letters. When I was in high school, I’d go around Milan hunting for the most perfect paper and envelopes. I have had many types of stationery, but one of the few that I love most is from Cartier. I designed it in New York a couple of years ago at their custom-made stationery boutique, which is the only store that provides that service. If you are in Paris, they don’t do it. The border is red, blue and white — superclassic, almost preppy. Perhaps the best letter I received was the first from Christian Lacroix, who was my idol in the late ’80s. I started trying to contact him as a teenager, and he was kind enough to answer back. I treasure his letters because they really encouraged me to chase this big fashion dream I had.— MARCO ZANINI 16

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FROM LEFT: ALEXA NIKOLAS; COURTESY OF 4AD; COURTESY OF ANTI- RECORDS; MEADHAM KIRCHHOFF FOR TOPSHOP. ILLUSTRATION BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS.

In the fall, individual members of three of indie music’s most inventive bands released their own solo projects that pushed the limits of their signature sounds.

Character Study

FASHION MEMO

CHANNEL THE ANIMAL Clockwise from above: Maison Martin Margiela scarf, QR4,350. Coach hat, QR1,813. Rick Owens gloves, QR13,053. Tom Ford boots, QR23,551.

Furry Bits

Take the chill off by layering on sumptuously shaggy gear that will keep you warm without sacrificing even a bit of cool.

It’s a dying art, to be a character in the world today. People won’t let you into their apartment if they think you’re a character — something might happen. It scares them. But because of my camera, I’ve been able to bounce around, meeting wonderfully strange people. I’m not interested in some girl or guy who’s really good-looking but doesn’t have a story. It can be a simple story, mind you — a desire to graduate college, or to make the football team. I feel really lucky to have photographed a lot of athletes at extraordinary times in their lives. They write me sometimes and say, ‘‘I saw this photograph that you did of me, where I’m nude, and I just think it’s so beautiful. I showed my kids and they said, ‘Why don’t you just put it up on the wall?’ ’’ Their kids can’t believe their parents ever looked like that. I always wonder if the pictures I take will be folded into a wallet, looked at only when the person is alone. It’s such an intimate thing, taking a photograph. My camera lets me flirt with life. — BRUCE WEBER ‘‘All-American Volume Thirteen: Born Ready,’’ QR455. ‘‘Bruce Weber: The Film Collection,’’ QR218.

THE SCENE

An Alley Runs Through It

An unexpected location in Portland, Oregon, has evolved into a gleaming retail destination. Two old nightclubs in the heart of downtown Portland have been gutted and transformed into Union Way, creating an unlikely shopping hub and a new shortcut between two of the city’s most famous landmarks, the Ace Hotel and Powell’s City of Books. Designers from the local Lever Architecture firm kept the original 1920s frames from both structures and polished them up with a Pacific Northwest palette — dove gray concrete floors and sustainably farmed poplar wood. Inside Union Way are nine trendy food and retail outlets, including: Danner, an Oregon heritage brand with boots that perfectly fuse form and function;

the purveyors of prep Steven Alan; Quin candy shop, which has been described by its proprietors as ‘‘ ‘Yo! MTV Raps’ meets a Paris metro station’’; and Boxer Ramen, presided over by chef Micah Camden, the man who also helms Little Big Burger, arguably the best meat puck in town. ‘‘It’s almost meta, but Union Way both comments on and embodies all of Portland’s lifestyle and aesthetic aspirations,’’ says Carrie Brownstein, co-star of the hit American television series ‘‘Portlandia’’ and the city’s de facto mayor. ‘‘It says, ‘This is Portland,’ but at the same time it asks the very same thing: ‘This is Portland?’ ’’ — KATHRYN BOREL

ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

January-February 2014

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: SEAN THOMAS; LAURA GUIMOND; JAMIE FRANCIS; LAURA GUIMOND. ILLUSTRATIONS BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS.

As Bruce Weber releases a new installment of his ‘All-American’ photo anthology and a box set of his films, he reflects on the intimacy of taking pictures.

On Beauty

Super Natural

A face without makeup looks wholesome and shows confidence — but doesn’t come without effort. BY RACHEL R. WHITE PHOTOGRAPH BY AMY TROOST

WHEN GISELE BÜNDCHEN tweeted a photo of herself with her new baby this past summer, the snapshot was notable for more than her sweet, beatific gaze at her infant. Bündchen was sun kissed, windblown and apparently not wearing any makeup at all — and she looked more appealing than ever. Taking a vacation from makeup suddenly seemed like a fresh idea. In a culture in which the daily veneer of cosmetics can feel like a kind of armor, going bare makes a strong statement. For decades, a woman didn’t leave the house without her powder compact and lipstick; today many keep what amounts to a small arsenal stocked with supplies to apply on the train, in the car or in the

office bathroom. Yet on the spring 2014 runways, there was little to no makeup — or at least that was the illusion — with models channeling the confident girl who’s too cool to care. The story is a wholesome one with a moral: the face as a smooth, perfect canvas that has been prudently protected from the sun, hydrated by eight glasses of water a day and refreshed with eight hours of sleep a night and perhaps a dab of a semiprecious cream like La Mer. And this show of time and money spent doesn’t stop at the jawline, because what is a serenely beautiful face without a neck and décolletage to match? ‘‘It is an expensive look,’’ says Victoria Tsai, the founder of the Tatcha skin care line. ‘‘Or it can be, if you don’t take care of your skin.’’ Tsai’s formulas, which feature green tea, red algae and rice bran, were inspired by her work studying the closely guarded rituals of Japanese geishas, whose skin, beneath their theatrical makeup, is so legendarily exquisite that there is a phrase to describe it: mochi hada, or rice-cake skin. ‘‘The no-makeup trend has been a big one in Asia for a long time, and it’s very much about the skin — in Asia, they spend far more money on skin care and far less on makeup,’’ Tsai says. Skin care in the United States, meanwhile, can resemble a clinic or construction site, in which we blast away with lasers, LED’s and battery-operated scrubbing devices, or smear on burning topical applications that can leave the epidermis begging for mercy. ‘‘I always compare skin to your favorite silk blouse,’’ says Isabelle Bellis, who trained with the cult Parisian facialist Joëlle Ciocco and works on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. ‘‘If you have some imperfections in your silk blouse, the way you will treat it is with delicate attention.’’ Bellis isn’t completely opposed to new technology, but prefers a hands-on method for herself. ‘‘Like most Frenchwomen, I am very religious about my home care routine,’’ she says. ‘‘I always massage my skin to help circulation and oxygenation of the tissues.’’ And while it may take more than a daily massage to transform our vacation photos into Gisele Bündchen’s, Tsai argues that less really is more. ‘‘When a man walks out there, George Clooney or Ryan Gosling, they get groomed, but you feel like you are seeing them as people. But when you look at a lot of the actresses after two hours of makeup, they are tucked inside of a beautiful shell — you can’t really see them,’’ she says. ‘‘When you step out from that veil of makeup, you are inviting people to look at you as a person.’’ Crème de la Mer (QR1,037 for 2 ounces); Tatcha deep hydration lifting mask (QR102); Joëlle Ciocco lait onctueux capital (QR357 for 3.4 ounces).

DANI/ONE MODEL MANAGEMENT. HAIR BY AKKI AT ART PARTNER. MAKEUP BY PEP GAY USING TEMPTU AT STREETERS.

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Lookout

Making It

Preservation Society When fashion’s Old World specialty ateliers were on the verge of extinction, Chanel came to the rescue. Now it’s ushering them into the future. BY DANA THOMAS PHOTOGRAPHS BY ESTELLE HANANIA

‘‘IT’S LIKE WE MOVED FROM the 19th century to the 21st century in 24 hours,’’ says Hubert Barrère, the artistic director of Lesage, the famed embroidery house. ‘‘From Zola to Tron overnight!’’ Barrère is standing in the 89-year-old company’s airy new studio in a modern building in Pantin, a scruffy northeastern suburb of Paris. Recently, Chanel moved Lesage and a few of the other traditional specialty handcraft ateliers it has quietly purchased over the last 17 years to the Pantin complex to have them in one place, working in concert. For nearly a century, or more, these various houses — including Lemarié, specializing in feathers and flower making; Goossens, the famed jewelry makers; and Maison Michel, the hat makers — were run by their founders or family members. But as the last generation found no heirs to lead them into the future and with fashion becoming faster and more industrialized, these ateliers were on the verge of extinction. Chanel executives understood that if these houses shuttered, the loss of skills and the institutional knowledge of their artisans could decimate couture — and in turn, damage the entire fashion industry. Today, there are few people who can precisely sew

delicate sequin daisies onto black chiffon, weave pink ostrich plumes into a cashmere-soft swath or turn stiff organza into camellia blooms, as a few artisans did in the days leading up to the recent Paris fashion shows. Before the move, most of the ateliers were located in their original 19th- or early-20th-century Paris workshops, which, as Barrère notes, ‘‘was wonderful and with so much charm, but charm is charming for only so long. Now we have space and light’’ — a necessity, he says, for this type of precise, handcrafted work. Each house also has space for new archive rooms that store decades’ worth of antique patterns, buttons and swatches. The original acquisition of the artisan houses was ‘‘somewhat egoist on our part,’’ admits Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion. ‘‘We gave them a lot of business.’’ Though Chanel established a subsidiary called Paraffection (‘‘with affection’’) to group the ateliers together, the company does not keep them all to itself — quite the contrary. Luxury brands like Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton and Valentino regularly commission the ateliers for specialty work. In addition, each year, Chanel hosts a special fashion show, Métiers d’Art, in a different city — next month it will be in Dallas — to spotlight the artisans’ work. Karl Lagerfeld attends, along with representatives from the houses, who explain to the guests the beauty and rarity of the craftsmanship. While the charm of the traditional workshops may indeed be lost, the artistry of the work has been secured for the future.

ARTS AND CRAFTS Clockwise from top left: at Lemarié, flowers are made with materials like organza, leather and velvet, using various tools, including heated curling irons; artisans at Maison Michel steam and then stretch the hats over limewood molds before drying them in the oven; Goossens gold cuffs are hammered and shaped on metal forms.

January-February 2014

Lookout By the Numbers

Space Race The irrepressible English billionaire industrialist Sir Richard Branson, who has built his Virgin brand into a global empire, is finally expanding into the only place left: outer space. His Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo is poised to become the first commercial aircraft to take civilians into the thermosphere. The six-passenger spaceliner, which has taken a decade and several hundred million dollars to go from fantasy to reality, has maintained a reservation list since 2005, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Katy Perry already claiming spots. But they’ll have to wait to take their turn after Branson, who plans to be the first to fly in 2014. It’s a moment he’s been waiting for since he was 19 and watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin step onto the moon. ‘‘I was glued to the television,’’ he recalls, ‘‘and already dreaming of joining them in space.’’ — JEFF OLOIZIA Amount collected in deposits:

$250,000

80% male 20% female

542

Future celebronauts:

640 NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE SIGNED UP FOR VIRGIN GALACTIC FLIGHTS

William Shatner (Branson alleges he’s afraid of flying.)

4 inches

Diameter of the opening on NASA space toilets (Astronauts must practice on a ‘‘positional trainer.’’)

Food served onboard:

‘‘The Right Stuff’’

Age of oldest deposit holder

Stephen Hawking Ashton Kutcher

THE ‘‘STAR TREK’’ CAPTAIN WHO DECLINED AN INVITE:

BRANSON’S FAVORITE SPACE MOVIE:

round trip

Number of people who have been to space:

$80 million

Price of flight:

Age of youngest deposit holder

NONE

Length of Virgin Galactic flight: about

2 hours (Average flight time from New York to Chicago: 2 hours, 15 minutes)

Time spent in zero gravity aboard SpaceShipTwo:

Fear of flying:

‘‘What if I don’t come back? With the whole light-years thing, what if I come back 10,000 years later and everyone I know is dead? I’ll be like, ‘Great. Now I have to start all over.’ ’’ — Paris Hilton

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3-6 minutes 18 million+

Views on YouTube for Chris Hadfield’s zero-gravity version of David Bowie’s ‘‘Space Oddity’’

Maximum velocity of SpaceShipTwo

Mach 3.5

(approximately 2,664 miles per hour)

Number of people who have walked on the moon (Indeterminate: number of people who have ‘‘moonwalked.’’)

@richardbranson let’s shoot a music video in SPACE!! #nextLEVEL TWEET FROM @JUSTINBIEBER

Highest point of Virgin Galactic flight:

About 68 miles

U.S. Air Force members who cross a 50-mile altitude are awarded astronaut wings.

MARK CHIVERS

Gender of future Virgin astronauts:

Lookout

Take Two

Gay Talese

Juliette Lewis

Legendary journalist, best-selling author and sharpdressed man whose 1966 article ‘‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’’ is considered a benchmark in celebrity profile writing. He is currently working on his 12th book, which he expects to finish early next year.

Oscar-nominated actress, ferocious rock chick and giddy freak-flag waver who stars alongside Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts in the film adaptation of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning play, ‘‘August: Osage County.’’

Napoleon would have probably had an ostrich pen from one of the Hapsburg Dynasty women that he was hanging out with. I write with a pencil with a strong eraser, then I graduate to a Montblanc pen, which I have several of, and then I go to a typewriter.

I’m into lavish things — I once wore a turban I bought from a bazaar in Istanbul through an airport — but not when it comes to pens. Who needs a foot-and-a-half feather when you’re writing? I’m sure it would tickle someone, though. It definitely could.

From Rocky to Rambo to Rembrandt — why not? He has that attitude. When he first came out with ‘‘Rocky,’’ people wanted him to let someone else direct it. He said, ‘‘No, I want to direct it.’’ Though he eventually did not direct the movie, I always thought, That guy’s really smart to do that. But I wonder if we need another painter with an Italian name?

Pen Maison Martin Margiela’s ostrich feathertipped ballpoint (QR218).

Art

I love everything about it. Remove the name recognition, and he could have a nice career as a painter. He’s very obviously Basquiat-inspired, and he’s probably saying more than you’d ever know about him as an actor, or in interviews.

The paintings of Sylvester Stallone, whose exhibit at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg closes Dec. 1 (rusmuseum.ru).

Anybody who seriously believes they’re improving themselves through some product, either a cream or a surgeon’s needle, is crazy. I have seen so many once-lovely women misguided in having surgery done, and they look worse. Even Jackie Onassis had a bad job.

Cream Guerlain’s Orchidée Impériale Eye and Lip Cream, which promises ‘‘visible results from the moment of application’’ (QR728 for 15 milliliters).

It’s perfect for young Michael Jordan aspirants seeking new challenges, or for Lady Gaga when pirouetting on a piano. I haven’t roller-skated in 60 years, but I’ve seen a lot of roller-skating done in nightclubs. And I remember once, I think it was in China, I saw waiters in roller skates.

I would like to change Iggy’s life with Tony Bennett’s recent CD, ‘‘Live at the Sahara: Las Vegas, 1964.’’ I listen to opera and the great, classic pop singers. I don’t mean that I’m closed or fixed in my narrow way of thinking, but it’s very hard to hear the words.

Shoes High-top sneaker roller skates by Saint Laurent (QR4,186).

Music The Australian rapper Iggy Azalea’s debut EP, ‘‘Change Your Life’’ (QR22).

It feels really good on my hands. I thought it was a chemical perfume, so I wasn’t even going to open it and just tell you I hated it, but it smells nice. I’m a big believer in beauty inside and out, and I’m a health-food-store gal — the wonderful people who work in the beauty aisle at Whole Foods can tell you a lot.

This looks like what we skated on in ‘‘Whip It!’’ They just look like a tennis shoe hooked up to some wheels. They’re not too fancy-pants for being YSL. I will try them out on Venice Beach perhaps, where I roller-skate every Sunday. Just kidding, but I do go running.

Iggy Pop is the only Iggy I know and love, but I’m not opposed to Top 40 radio. It’s sort of like enjoying a homemade cake versus eating something from the Hostess factory. I’m a big lyrics person and there’s only so much ‘‘let’s hit up the club’’ and ‘‘we’re gonna dance all night’’ I can handle.

ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine

LEWIS: STEVE SANDS/GETTY IMAGES. TALESE: ANDREW H. WALKER/GETTY IMAGES. FROM TOP: MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA; COURTESY OF GALERIE GMURZYNSKA; GUERLAIN; COURTESY OF SAINT LAURENT; RANKIN.

A dual review of what’s new.

Lookout Qatar

More Than Just a Dress Speaking to an immensely attentive audience at the recent art conservation conference organized by the Orientalist Museum and held at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Frances Hartog related the mesmerizing tale of how a 53-year-old Dior Zemire dress came to be in the possession of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. Hartog, the museum's senior textile conservator, was the key person involved in the restoration of this legendary dress, of which it was once thought no versions had survived. The original costume was shown in Dior’s 1954 Winter collection at Blenheim Palace to an audience that included Britain's Princess Margaret, but this version of the Zemire was commissioned by the wife of a leading British textile manufacturer to showcase his new semi-synthetic fabric. “Little else is known about the history of the dress until it turned up in a Paris auction, at which time it was said to have been found in a cellar close to the Seine and possibly worn for fancy dress,” Hartog said. The dress was bought at the auction by curator Claire Wilcox, and underwent diligent restoration work by Hartog’s team to prepare it for a 1940s and 50s haute couture exhibition that took place in 1997 at the V&A. More than a decade later, the dress is still celebrated, as it marks one of the most important textile restoration works in the world. “It is considered to be Dior’s most historically-inspired piece and a departure from his more familiar avant-garde work,” she explains. Hartog was one of the panelists at the Doha conference, which focused on artwork from past to present and the integral role restoration plays in preserving art for the next generation. DEBRINA ALIYAH

Timeless Tribute

Depicting a female figure — part dancer, part butterfly — this creation perpetuates the tradition of ballerinas and fairies to which Van Cleef & Arpels is so attached. Yet it is not only in design but also in the mechanics of timekeeping that the maison has borrowed its theme from a ballerina. On a watch with a retrograde display, the hands, instead of turning about an axis, trace an arc before returning to their initial position to begin another cycle. Here, when the user presses a button at the 8 o’clock position, the ballerina’s tutu comes to life. The veil indicating the hours rises first, followed by the second veil, which positions itself against the minute scale. They remain in place, enabling the time to be read, then return simultaneously to their initial positions. One of the feats of this complication lies in its fluid movement: the ballerina appears to move her wings with grace and poise. For its Lady Arpels Ballerine Enchantée watch, Van Cleef & Arpels has drawn inspiration from a quote by dancing legend Anna Pavlova that echoes the imagery of the maison: ‘’I’ve been dreaming that I was a ballerina, and that I was spending my whole life dancing as lightly as a butterfly...’’ SINDHU NAIR

The new collection from brand Gant is said to be a tribute to its heritage and the seasons take on American sportswear. A mix of tradition and innovation, classic elegance and modern sportiness is the main source of inspiration. Refined elegance seems to be the brands motto this season. GANT Time FW 2013 collection is available at select Paris Gallery, Time House and Blue Salon outlets across Qatar. ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTSEY: VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM (V&A), VAN CLEEF & ARPELS

Dancing to Time

Your Soul in Here

While being driven around Cairo, Alia El Tanani studied a sight that most people casually glance past daily: the ancient city aqueducts made of Egyptian stone.

INTERIOR GEM Clockwise from top left: at Living In Interiors Doha, furnishings of various brands serve as moodboards to help clients envision their living spaces; woodwork finishing in a client′s home.

Soon afterwards she began commissioning a wall made entirely of the stone in one of her projects, to the surprise of her contractors. The material, abundantly available, had long lost its luster and fallen into a category considered cheap and common. “It was an epiphany. The aqueducts lasted for centuries, and we had local expertise and skills to work with the material,” she explains. Her persistence resulted in a beautiful project, and the revival of the Egyptian stone among her interior design circles. Her foresight brought an entire industry back to life. “It was like witnessing the rise and fall of an era,” she says. Alia and her husband founded the luxury design company Living In Interiors in Cairo, and opened a Doha outpost a decade ago. Working on various projects of both the residential and commercial kind, the company has made major inroads with influential Qatari families, many of whom have become friends and are still “continuously decorating their homes,” Alia shares. The Qatar showroom carries a range of luxury designer furnishings, but the piece de resistance is the woodwork finishing made exclusively by the company’s workshops. With technology and climate control, they have successfully built a niche of customizing wood pieces in the interiors of their clients’ homes. But interior designing extends beyond just the visual experience; for Alia it is all about recreating the soul of the owner into the space. Working closely with her clients, Alia aims to identify the finishing touch that will change just a well-designed project into an actual living space. “You have to inject a part of yourself into the space. That’s what makes it yours,” she says. And growing with the evolving landscape of Doha for the past decade has been a life lesson for the designer. “Instead of branding people’s taste, I have come to play the role of organizing their needs and wants, hopefully, all into one space,” she says. Living In Interiors, Porto Arabia, +974 4495 3510. DEBRINA ALIYAH

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTSEY: LIVING IN INTERIORS, DOHA, TOD'S

The Double At the menswear presentation shows, there were several interesting double stripes color combinations that were spotted on the bags of stylish guests. Nods of recognition were given by those in the know; it is the new subtle brand marking for Tod’s leather collection for men. The double stripe made its debut in spring last year, gaining so much traction that it is now part of the brand’s main offering. The stripe colors are customizable to individual liking on most of its men’s leather goods including briefcases, shoppers and rucksacks. For the on-trend style-savvy guy, bright blues, reds and oranges in exotic skins are a charm, while the classic gentleman can choose the sturdy calfskin in subtle browns, blues and greys. The double stripes will also be making a new appearance this spring as a detail on pockets of ready-to-wear jackets in leather and suede. Tod’s, Villaggio Mall, +974 4413 4937. DEBRINA ALIYAH

January-February 2014

Lookout Qatar

CULTURE CUE

Doha Wants to Look Back

BY SINDHU NAIR

THE NEED COULD BE the consequence of a conscience-call, as many of the old buildings have already been obliterated. Whatever has triggered the need, one of the results is an inspiring project bringing together architects from two countries, the UK and Qatar, to reimagine an old square of central Doha while retaining its cultural heritage. Young architects and urban designers from Qatar collaborated with their British counterparts in this architectural design competition, reimagining the urban landscape of Old Doha. Very intelligently, this project was named the Old Doha Prize. The competition brought together four teams who worked intensively to research the neighborhoods of Al Asmakh and Al Najada in Doha. Following a design charette brief, they developed contextual design responses for the area based on the idea of “Al-Turath al-Hai” or “Living Heritage” in which history is a live and evolving concept rather than something static to be preserved simply. The proposals presented a variety of approaches to heritageled regeneration, which could be relevant to the future of Old Doha. While all the architect groups conjured up beautiful images of Old Doha, the winning team of four women, Fatma Fawzy, Alaa Larri, Alicja Borkowska and Iris Papadatou, stood out for their “design brilliance” and for their all-female team harmony, which resulted in designs that struck a chord. But for many, including the participants and even the jury members, it was not the end result that was memorable but the process of reaching it. Fatma Al-Sahlawi, an architect and urban designer at the Qatar Museums Authority who was the organizer and a jury member for the Old Doha Prize, says, “The most striking aspect was not the resulting design submissions, but the process which led to them. The most striking topics of discussion were not solely architecture and design, but an

THE PAST IS THE FUTURE Clockwise from left: The teams visit the neighborhoods of Al Asmakh and Al Najada; the winning team with Saud Al Amiry, Practising Architect and Founding Director of RIWAQ, Center for Architectural Conservation, Ramallah, Palestine; sketches leading to the concept.

array of multidisciplinary subjects such as anthropology, socioeconomics, political governance, and many more.” Fatma Fawzy echoes Al-Sahlawi’s words, saying that the experience involved much more than just designing. It went on to touch other facets like working seamlessly in a team, understanding different perspectives and finally agreeing upon a final product that is a collaborative mix of all the best thoughts. “Starting from how the team worked together and how the idea builds up from one person to the other, till it reached the stage where it satisfied everyone is a remarkable exercise,” she says. Larri, too, feels that having both local and fresh eyes facilitated coming up with the final idea. “At the end of this charette, knowledge and experience gained are invaluable,” she says. The exercise was also about cultural exchange. Papadatou explains: “This was a great way to be fully immersed in the local culture, discuss issues and gain a really insightful understanding into Doha life, traditions and its people that you rarely get when you visit the country in the capacity of a tourist.” The women also bonded well, facilitating a cohesive approach to the concept while demystifying the role of women in Qatari society. “Since we were an all-female team, it was also very interesting for us to understand the role of women in Qatar. In the West there are a lot of preconceptions and negative press about the role of women in Gulf countries, so it was amazing to see how that doesn’t seem to apply in Qatar and that there are many independent, professional, successful women who live and work here, in the same way that we do back in the UK,” says Papadatou. The winning concept for Old Doha is highly ambitious while being sustainable (ambitious

T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine

also because it is sustainable), namely to create a walkable, ethical place that protects the valuable architectural heritage and memory of the existing fabric but also enables it to become flexible and adaptable for the present and future of Qatar. “We reimagined the neighborhoods of Al Asmakh and Al Najada as places for learning, injecting various education programs into the site. The thinking is that these would act as attractors and catalysts for growth and regeneration on a local as well as a global scale, enabling ‘room by room’ development. We drew a lot of inspiration from the Qatari vernacular, the courtyard as a madrasa and social place of learning, implementing it on the macro urban scale, as well as the micro scale,” says Borkowska. Even if the concept is visionary, Papadatou feels that it is very much rooted in the Qatari culture, “in the memory of its past as well as the ever-changing patterns of its present, making it multifaceted and adaptable.” And from the young architect come inspiring contemplations; “The great thing is that a dialogue about the future vision of Doha has started, and we do hope that it can continue, in order to challenge preconceptions and involve as many people as possible, inspiring a better urban future for Doha.” This is almost in tune with what Fatma Al-Sahlawi envisions for her country: “A balance between the new and old. And within the old, to achieve a balance between preserving and retrofitting. Appreciating the old as an opportunity with potential, and not as a static artifact.” The Old Doha Prize was organized by the British Council and Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) as part of Qatar UK 2013 Year of Culture, in association with the Doha Architecture Center, Msheireb Properties, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London.

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTSEY: OLD DOHA PRIZE

For a country that is working at a frantic pace to get its infrastructure in place and paint an ultra-luxe canvas of its business hub, it is encouraging to know that Qatar is also interested in retaining its history.

CURTAINS OF LIGHT Clockwise from left: Al-Ameri's work is a perspective of energy; Jehad Al- Ameri pictured in front of his painting; The Anima Gallery showcases "The Andalusian Curtain."

PHOTOGRAPH OF ARTIST COURTSEY: ANIMA GALLERY

On Art

Power by Persuasion

Jehad Al-Ameri prefers to let his work do the talking. It is not hard to be charmed by his unassuming personality. BY ABIGAIL MATHIAS PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT ALTIMIRANO

THOUGH ENGLISH is not his first language, he made the effort to express himself, using hand gestures and a broad smile. The Jordanian artist was in Doha for his first solo exhibition and couldn’t have been more excited. “I come from a family that has always been involved in the arts. My brother Mohamad AlAmeri is also a well-known artist and poet,” says Al-Ameri discussing his brother’s tremendous influence on his artistic life. For Jehad Al-Ameri, his canvas was almost predetermined by his family’s patronage of the arts. “When you are a child, you are influenced by the writers and artists in your family. My parents motivated me to express my creativity,

and that has made me what I am today,” he says. He has participated in more than 50 group exhibitions in Jordan, Lebanon, Italy, Egypt and the US, and acccolades have come at regular intervals. In 2005 he shared the second award of the annual exhibition of the Jordanian Plastic Artists Association. In the same year he received the first award in the field of painting at the Jordan Youth Festival. He also completed two months artistic residency in Switzerland in 2006. As a youngster Al-Ameri was deeply influenced by his surroundings. “I travelled to Baghdad to study art between 1998 and 2002.” Following the Kuwait invasion, Iraq was in the midst of a tumultuous time. “It was terrible to witness so much loss and destruction. Iraq is a country that bears a rich artistic heritage. Art still thrives there. I have a lot of memories from my time there,” he says nostalgically. These experiences changed his perspective as an artist and student. “Three places have helped infuse my work. These include my village in Jordan, which is close to Palestine,” he reminisces about the family-owned farm there. “The second place that had a huge influence on me is Baghdad, and finally Granada in Spain, where I have lived for the past few years.” Of course it is not merely the location that has impacted him. He believes it is the people of the place that have had the most influence. “When I paint I like to touch the soul of the people. This is what has a lasting impact on my work,” he explains. Al-Ameri explains his Doha exhibition, a mammoth project that focuses on an imaginary castle in Andalusia. It is an attempt to amalgamate poetry and the visual arts. He explains; “I started with old poetry composed by Andalusian poets, the main source for which was a text written on the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain.” Titled “The Andalusian Curtain," the exhibition is an exploration of female energy and the aesthetic architecture of that era, along with the architecture of light. Commenting on the title of the exhibition, Al-Ameri says, “I use the word 'curtain,' because my objective is to reveal something of the depth and essence of the great Islamic civilization of Andalus, in relation to its contemporary counterpart in modern-day Spain.” Having been profoundly influenced by Spanish culture, he adds: “The backdrop of Andalusia helped make the subject more personal.” Al-Ameri’s work has been acquired by several cultural institutions in Jordan, Italy, Switzerland, Spain and Greece. As an avid student and patron of the arts, he believes it is crucial to keep art heritage alive. “I love the fact that Qatar is trying to promote art and culture. This is something that Arab World really needs.” The artist’s work is now showing at Anima Gallery till the end of January.

Lookout Qatar CARRERA Y CARRERA Bamboo Ring, price on request

ASPREY Chaos Necklace, QR512,025

Drawing inspiration from the symbolism of bamboo for good luck in Far Eastern culture, Carrera y Carrera‘s Bamboo collection has had equally fortunate success. The bamboo ring with amethyst stone is part of the brand’s new extension to the collection, featuring carefully carved yellow gold bamboo stalks as the band and white gold bamboo leaves paved with diamonds as the mounting for the stone.

The coming together of an extensive assortment of precious stones to form an "organized chaos" makes this necklace a unique visual experience. The necklace, which took 150 hours to complete, comprises 80 gems of different shapes methodically placed to ensure each stone is perfectly aligned. Designed as part of Asprey’s Chaos collection, the necklace is a reinterpretation of a classic necklace structure given a new twist with the detailed inclusion of the various colored stones.

Market Watch

Glitter and Gloss

If all that glitters is not gold, it must be jewels. From the heritage piece handmade in India to a Qatar-inspired piece of jewelry from a global brand, jewelry design has taken the accessory world by storm with its range of innovation. With the annual Doha Jewelry and Watches Exhibition (DJWE) around the corner, it is time to turn your attention to our picks of the season.

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTSEY: ASPREY, NIRAV MODI, CARRERA, ESCADA, FERRAGAMO, ROBINSON PELHAM, MOUAWAD

BY DEBRINA ALIYAH

NIRAV MODI Mughal Choker, price on request The choker is part of the brand’s Mughal collection, which was inspired by the Mughal miniature school of art that thrived between the 16th and 19th centuries in India. The collection pays homage to the artistic history of its designer’s country, drawing on iconic floral motifs that were prevalent in Mughal art. The floral motifs of the choker are handcrafted with different diamond cuts — 46 carats in total — and mounted in 18K white gold.

ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine

ESCADA Twin Heart Bracelet, QR1,750 Escada's fine jewelry collection has been growing quietly in strength, focusing on classic solid designs that reflect the simplicity of the brand's philosophy. This gold plated and diamond paved twin heart bracelet is perfect for a casual outtake.

MOUAWAD Love M Earrings, QR19,200 From the Love M collection, Mouawad imagines a logoplay of its definitive M flower charms in this pair of 18K rose gold earrings. The flower charms are an extension of Mouawad’s signature M heart motifs adorned with white diamonds. The diamonds are hand-set into each of the charms using the micro-pave method, allowing for precision crafting of this delicate design.

SALVATORE FERRAGAMO Galuchat Ring, QR24,242 Drawing inspiration from Salvatore Ferragamo’s favorite shagreen texture in his shoe designs, the Galuchat fine jewelry collection features stingray leather as its main element. This Galuchat ring is anchored by the main rutilated quartz stone and paved with diamonds. Since the launch of the label’s fine jewelry collection, the Galuchat range has remained one of its most sought-after pieces.

ROBINSON PELHAM Doha Pearl Asteroid Ring, QR130,750 The Pearl Asteroid ring is a special tribute to Doha, paying homage to the city’s history in the pearl diving industry. Designed to symbolize the waves of the sea surrounding the central pearl, the ring is a custom one-of-a-kind design set in 18 karat yellow gold. The colors of the sea were recreated using extremely rare Paraiba Tourmaline stones from the original Brazilian mine where the gemstone was first discovered. The ring is one of two pieces designed exclusively for the Qatar UK Year of Culture Fashion Exchange program.

January-February 2014

Lookout Qatar

Market Watch

POMELLATO Colpo Di Fulmine Set, price on request QELA Tourath Ring in Pink Gold, QR36,000 Qatar's own luxury label will be making their debut appearance at DJWE this year after its well-received inaugural boutique opening last September. The label has a dedicated workshop for handcrafted jewelry pieces and this Tourath ring is part of its Mashrabiya collection. Set in pink gold with white diamonds, the piece comes from the inspiration of the ornamental patterns of the Arab Mashrabiya motif. The ring is also available in white gold for QR46,000.

The collection strives to find a balance between bold and delicate elements by highlight big gemstones with fine settings. This earrings and ring combo set in burnished rose gold with small sapphire stones surrounding the main garnet stone is part of the collection’s new direction towards oval-shaped stones. Other striking color plays in the collection include amethyst and ruby as well as topaz and tsavorite.

VERSACE Greca Ring, price on request

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTSEY: QELA, POMELLATO, VERSACE

The Greca ring is from the label’s fine jewelry classic collection, which reinterprets Versace’s iconic Greek key in a new look. With its unique curved shape, the new Greca line presents pendants, earrings, bangles and bands characterized by precious stones such as diamonds, blue sapphires, red rubies and emeralds. The mix and match of gold and silver colors aims to highlight the neoclassical influences of the Greeks.

ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine

Trend Report

Springtime Blues

T Qatar had a Middle East-exclusive preview of the Gap Spring/Summer 2014 Collection, straight from a special presentation in New York City. With a new creative director at the helm, and a bold direction, the collection throws up quite a few novel touches. BY PRIYANKA PRADHAN

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTSEY: GAP

BLUE BLOCKS: Gap Spring/ Summer 2014 collection takes on a sophisticated color palette, with emphasis on monochromes.

NEW YORK City’s busiest, most glamorous borough is surprisingly quiet in the mornings. The city’s wailing sirens disrupt the quiet every once in a while, while the crisp, cool air comes laden with the aroma of espresso and cream cheese bagels. On one such morning, I hurry along to the preview of Gap’s Spring/Summer 2014 Collection, heading towards Spring Studios on Varick Street in Manhattan’s artsy downtown district. As I step inside the gallery, I find it reflects a minimalist aesthetic, with warm, wooden interiors set against the backdrop of stark white walls and a high ceiling with wooden beams — an unusual setting for the young and vibrant all-American casualwear brand. But that was before I met Rebekka Bay. Expertly working the crowd and mingling with journalists, the new global Head of Design and Creative Director of Gap was making her way across the studio towards me. I observed her as she took each guest through the collection personally, animated and passionate about the first Gap collection under her direction. Before being snapped up by Gap Inc. to fill the position left vacant by former Creative Director Patrick Robinson in 2011, Bay already had 17 years of experience in fashion retail under her belt. After founding in 2006 and leading the upscale casualwear brand COS owned by Swedish high-street retailer H&M, she moved on to Danish fashion house Bruuns Bazaar, where she served as Creative Director. Now back in Manhattan at the Gap Inc. headquarters, she aims to lead the brand’s portfolio with crystal-clear vision. “Part of my mission is to make sure that all the branches of Gap, baby, men′s and women′s, speak with one voice as a brand, and to make sure the brand is relevant in the era we live in. "Today, Gap is much more about a certain lifestyle; it is about how we evoke the connection and how we work that into iconic pieces; how much newness is added every season and how to speak one language across the brand

January-February 2014

Trend Report

with small tweaks and succours,” Bay says. The changes in the core aesthetic of the brand’s new collection are evident. Her Nordic sartorial sensibilities have made their way into the collection with minimalist lines, a sophisticated color palette, emphasis on monochromes and trendy updates to classic Gap pieces. She adds; “There is this idea of working around that perfect little uniform with a shirt, shorts, or a little skirt or denims. In the Spring/Summer 2014 Collection we focus a lot on length, proportions and volumes.” For instance, the collection sees dip collars and turnup cuffs in a playful tweak to denim jackets and casual shirts. Even the classic Gap indigos are getting made over, with new types of washes and experiments in dyeing with different colors. The statement Gap denim dress comes in a demure, classic version as well as a bolder, '90s-inspired wash in the new collection. Hemlines remain a bit conservative but one sees a lot of experiment in fabrics, shapes and even prints. This sleek new aesthetic also extends to menswear. Sweatshirts make a big statement in the collection, as do foliage and camouflage print. As models strut onto the ground-level ramp at the studio, the keen attention to detail is seen spilling over from womenswear to the men’s collection. Tony Kretten, Gap’s VP of men’s global design, says: “One of the influences at the conceptual stage was owning blue as a color. Ranging from the blue canvases of Yves Klein, the great French painter, to iterations of inks and slates — just a beautiful array of blues. The menswear collection is also about how do we take khaki and reinterpret it in a very modern way, to offer this beautiful blue with tons of whites and naturals.” Gap menswear is also focusing on collaborations with men’s lifestyle magazines, having just launched its second limited edition in association with GQ. Kretten indicates there are more such third-party collaborations lined up this year for Gap’s consumers — a move to assert the brand’s positioning and fresh creative stand. Kretten says, “Rebekka has brought it all together to bring together a common conceptual point for Gap. In the past the brand seemed schizophrenic — Gap baby would look like one brand, while menswear would look like another and womenswear yet another. Now, the color palettes and the vocabulary we use to speak to the customer have all started to come together.” Using this language, Gap is hoping to influence the "millennial generation," the style-conscious and constantly "connected" consumers. With a modern take on the brand’s heritage, the creative direction aims to nudge Gap towards a more style-conscious, refined and globally relevant status. Little wonder, then, this elegant, upscale venue was chosen to complement the new collection. Even though the typical art studio champagne-and-caviar fare is replaced by hot coffee and spinach juice for the morning, the theme of Gap’s Spring/Summer 2014 remains unequivocally “sophisticated casual-chic”. The Gap Spring/Summer 2014 Collection will be available in February in stores throughout the Middle East.

T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTSEY: GAP

Lookout Qatar

In Fashion

Back to The Future

The season’s strongest designs are anything but two-dimensional — with a sculptural consideration of form, these are clothes to be viewed from all sides. PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREA SPOTORNO STYLED BY JASON RIDER

Maison Martin Margiela coat, QR40,604.

ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

January-February 2014

Quality

In Fashion

Prada dress, QR22,568. Yohji Yamamoto shoes, QR6,152 (worn throughout). David Webb ring, QR45,864. Meiyo lamp by Studio Wieki Somers.

ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine

Dior dress, QR20,020, and rings (worn throughout), QR2,148 (right) and QR2,475. Jin lamp by Studio Wieki Somers.

January-February 2014

Quality

In Fashion

Bottega Veneta coat, QR11,466. Yohji Yamamoto hat, QR5,242. Right: Chugo lamp by Studio Wieki Somers.

ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

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MODEL: LILY M C MENAMY/NEXT PARIS. MAKEUP BY KARIM RAHMAN, MAKEUP EXPERT FOR L’OREAL PARIS. HAIR BY MARC LOPEZ AT ARTLIST. MANICURE BY SOPHIE A. AT CALLISTE USING DIOR NAIL PRODUCTS. STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS: ALEX TUDELA, LAËTITIA LEPORCQ.

Balenciaga dress,QR8,918; Forty Five Ten, Dallas. All lamps available at Galerie Kreo. Photographed at Galerie Kreo in Paris.

January-February 2014

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A House United

Individually they run two of the most coveted — and contrasting — labels in fashion, Sacai and Kolor. But the Japanese design couple Chitose and Junichi Abe find some common ground in their airy Tokyo home. BY KELLY WETHERILLE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TETSUYA MIURA

EVERY SO OFTEN, CHITOSE ABE FINDS herself folding a load

of laundry in the modern home she shares with her husband in the outskirts of Tokyo, when she comes upon a garment she’s never seen before — a long, V-neck cardigan, for instance, or a pair of cropped trousers — and thinks, ‘‘Oh, this is what he’s doing!’’ Both fashion designers with rabid cult followings — she, with Sacai; and he, Junichi Abe, with Kolor — the couple rarely compare notes when it comes to their collections. Neither has ever been to their spouse’s runway shows (more a matter of familial commitments than a lack of interest), and you’ll never see them wearing a piece from the other’s collection. In person, they are perfectly complementary. Chitose, with her rhinestone-adorned nails and blingy accessories, is outgoing and chatty; Junichi, dressed in dark pants and a simple white T-shirt, is more serious, with a low, measured voice. One morning in late July, Junichi pours cups of iced oolong tea as Chitose scoops up their toy poodle Coro, a tiny gray fur ball belonging to their 15-year-old daughter, Toko. Later, Junichi will be the one cuddling the dog as his wife makes coffee in the immaculate open kitchen. ‘‘We share the housework,’’ Junichi says, adding that they also take turns leaving their respective studios early to have dinner at home with Toko. While their relationship seems a near-equal partnership, Chitose says there is one area that she has stayed out of, leaving the decisions up to her husband: the design and interior decoration of their custom-built wood-and-stone house, which was 38

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GLASS HOUSE Clockwise from above: a fitting room in the Sacai store in Tokyo’s Minami Aoyama neighborhood; Chitose in her ‘‘cluttered’’ home office; Junichi in his spare office studio in the city’s Yoyogi section.

A MIXED MATCH Clockwise from top left: Sacai fashion mixes modern and traditional; Chitose with the family poodle, Coro, on the balcony of the couple’s home; the first and only Sacai store in Tokyo, which opened in 2011; a look from Sacai’s fall 2013 runway show combines masculine suiting with lace; at work in the Sacai atelier; another of her signature hybrid pieces at the Sacai store.

Neither Chitose nor Junichi has ever been to the other’s runway shows, and you’ll never see them wearing a piece from the other’s collection.

completed three years ago. Unlike many Japanese homes, theirs is spacious and airy, with floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto a large balcony overlooking a wooded area. The space is almost hauntingly spare, a geometry of blank surfaces offset by a few neutral accents and pieces of art. Aside from the presence of a doggy bed in the center of the living area, a visitor might imagine he’d stumbled into a model home. ‘‘My own space is really cluttered with a bunch of different things,’’ Chitose says. ‘‘I like it to be more jumbled.’’ The shelves in her home office are jammed with a colorful menagerie of dolls, toys and other kitsch objects, like a stuffed toy whose body parts are shaped like various cuts of meat, bought at a ceramics shop in Paris. The couple met 24 years ago while working for Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, as part of a four-person design team charged with starting the Junya Watanabe brand. Elements of Kawakubo’s deconstructed aesthetic are apparent in both of their collections. Sacai is known for splicing together different fabrics and seemingly incongruous design elements. The fall collection includes velvet dresses melded with trench coats, plaid skirt suits grafted onto hunting jackets and leather motorcycle jackets made new with fur sleeves. Chitose is an expert at mixing high and low, masculine and feminine, traditional and modern. Today, as usual, she is wearing Sacai: a heather gray sweatshirt dress with a flouncy skirt of narrow blue and white stripes at the back, accessorized with navy, red and aqua blue high-top sneakers. January-February 2014

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ALL LAID OUT Right: Junichi considers colors and patterns in his studio. Far right: Kolor’s utilitarian flagship store in Tokyo’s Aoyama neighborhood. Below: Kolor’s work space reflects the label’s no-frills aesthetic.

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developed Japanese fabrics, riff on standard men’s wear styles, employing a contrasting band of color on the bottom of a jacket, or designing a trouser’s waistband in an opposing fabric. While they don’t view one another as direct competitors — even though Sacai also includes men’s wear — increasingly their lines are finding their way into the same stores. One wonders if there isn’t perhaps a collaboration in their future. ‘‘I don’t really like the things she likes,’’ Junichi says. ‘‘So I think we both know —’’ Chitose laughs. ‘‘We’d argue,’’ she says definitively. ‘‘We’re both quite strong-willed, so I think it would be difficult to reach a mutual understanding. Other things we can agree on, but when it comes to work we both become very different people.’’

RUNWAY: COURTESY OF KOLOR.

Her looks have won important admirers, among them Anna Wintour, Suzy Menkes and Karl Lagerfeld, who not long ago called her the most interesting designer of the moment. Chitose credits her love for startling juxtapositions to the seemingly endless contradictions of her home city. Tokyo is often described as an enigma — a place where the world’s top luxury brands sit alongside wacky boutiques; where the latest technologies coexist with ancient Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. ‘‘There’s such a variety of things interlaced with each other, and I think that’s really interesting,’’ she says. Her main goal is to make clothes that are uplifting. ‘‘By wearing our clothes, I want people to think that it was a really happy day,’’ she explains. Junichi, by contrast, takes inspiration from within, letting new ideas bubble up ‘‘from the emotions that come up unconsciously,’’ as he puts it. His designs, while also displaying extraordinary craftsmanship and an impressive sense of texture, are considerably more understated. Softly tailored silhouettes, made from custom-

CLEAN AND SIMPLE Clockwise from right: Kolor fabric is measured and cut; a look from Kolor’s fall 2013 collection; a pair of the label’s colorblocked dress shirts.

Fashion Flash

O Couture!

A couture extravaganza took place in Singapore featuring the best in Asian design talent, heralding reappearances by French couturiers and forming a new federation. BY ALEXANDRA KOHUT-COLE

PICTURES CREDIT: FIDE FASHION WEEKS

THE GLITTERATI The Singapore show put the best of Asian designs on display.

IT WAS QUITE A FEAT to bring together the cream of Asian designers in a couture week that managed to incorporate a dedicated Japanese couture evening as well as a French one. “Both cities are enjoying their influential fashion power with their inspiration and sense of new fashion,” noted veteran Japanese designer Yumi Katsura. Asian design luminaries like Guo Pei from Beijing, Michael Cinco from the Philippines, Sebastian Gunawan from Indonesia, Lie Sang Bong from Korea, Vatit Itthi from Thailand and Frederick Lee from Singapore, all design leaders in their homelands, were a part of this fashion event. And Fashion Week 2013, presented by The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands, organized by FIDé Fashion Weeks, brought them together in October 2013. The French couture contingent was represented by presentations from Alexis Mabille, On Aura Tout Vu, Stéphane Rolland and Julien Fournié. “I think it’s the environment we’ve created — there is a sense of camaraderie. We very purposefully themed different nights per country so the Japanese would really rally around one another and help support them. I think it’s nice to see that backstage and translated onto front rows,” said Frank Cintamani, chairman and founder of FIDé Fashion Weeks. With Forbes.com reporting that Tokyo already famed for its street fashion, hosts almost 40 percent of the world's top fashion retailers, it comes as no surprise that an entire evening was also dedicated to Japanese designers. “Fashion in Paris influences women of all generations while in Japan it is rather the younger generation now. I think there are no more boundaries in fashion and there is a globalisation of the fashion culture,” according to Kenzo Takada, founder of the fashion house Kenzo. Katsura explains that the Japanese fashion industry is different from that of France or Italy. “In Japan we have less support for our fashion industry from the government, as nationals are paying less attention to fashion design in Japan than in France and Italy. It is also very important to have more Japanese ‘world fashion fames’ such as Issey Miyake, Kenzo Takada, Comme des Garçons (Rei

Kawakubo), and Yohji Yamamoto.” Veteran avant-garde designer Junko Koshino, who charts Azzedine Alaia as her biggest inspiration, mixed up a retrospective showcase with designs for her new collection in a fusion of fabrics spanning latex and leather to silk and organza. She presented silk parachute capes that looked as if they had a life of their own, ready to take off. “The elaborate material which is used for haute couture is easy to use, such as the silk of the Silk Road,” says Koshino. With a theme of Japanese spirit, the collection was about “translating Japan’s own history and tradition into today’s modernism, which is contemporary, highquality and chic." Originally from Osaka, Koshino showed her collections in Paris for 22 long years until 2000. The Tony Award nominee for her designs for the Broadway musical “Pacific Overtures” is renowned for her costume designs for operas such as “Madame Butterfly” and “The Magic Flute." And she has recently been commissioned to design Myanmar’s national team uniforms. She is proud to show in Singapore, Koshino says. “It does not matter about the size of a country, it is just important [that they] understand." Yoshiki Hishinuma meticulously painted the flora and fauna themes on an ultra feminine assemblage of silks and chiffons by hand. Hishinuma, from Sendai City, honed his skills at the Miyake Design Studio, specializing mainly in stage costume. In the 1980s he produced unique collections that he named “Kite Clothes” and “Air Clothes". He began showing his eponymous women’s clothing line in Paris in 1992 and was awarded the Mainichi Prize for Fashion in 1996. Keita Maruyama’s opulent psychedelic play on the cheongsam contrasted with the cute styling of tiny cardigans, 50s skirts and swinging ponytails and the simplicity of a silk bomber jacket bringing the fragile powder blue embroidered train of its dress beneath. Maruyama debuted his first collection in Tokyo in 1994, winning the Mainichi Fashion Grand Prix New Face Award and

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CONTRASTING STYLES Right: Designer Katsura's show of sparkling kimono in soft greys and pinks. Far right: Maruyama walks the catwalk with his creations.

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OPPULENT PSYCHEDELIA Clockwise from right: Junko Koshino takes a bow; Yoshiki Hishinuma painstakingly handpainted the flora and fauna on fragile silks and chiffons; the designer Hishinuma with a model.

of Western,” says Katsura. The new body will watch over and nurture new designers, as does the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) in New York. The ACF will affect Asian fashion in the future and, as Junko Koshino puts it, “it will show the importance of manufacturing — the importance of our hands. It will tell the real story from Asia.” This, without a doubt, is positive not just for Asian couture but couture globally.

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Shiseido Sponsorship Award in 1996. In 1997 he started showing his designs in Paris. Yumi Katsura took the audience on a roller coaster of contrasting styles. The vibe was electric and her energy and passion shone through in the clothes. From light cocktail frocks to exquisitely detailed gowns and a plethora of the deliciously elaborate fairytale wedding dresses she is known for, her lively spirit and humor shone through as she waved two tiny Singapore flags to a standing ovation. The show switched gears seamlessly, holding the audience’s attention in a viselike grip, and the gem of her show was a glittering jeweled kimono of soft greys and pinks with two orange flowers adorning either side. Katsura describes her philosophy: “I placed importance on traditional designs that have survived generations because of their universal value. So, I showcased new designs and added my contemporary interpretation to traditional ones.” At 85, Katsura is one of Japan’s most prolific designers, and her wedding dresses are considered modern masterpieces. In 1981, Katsura expanded her business into the US, France, and the UK. In 1988, the Yumi Katsura Bridal Museum was established in Kobe and today there is a Yumi Katsura Bridal House New York on Madison Avenue in New York City. Katsura is the first Asian member of the Camera Nazionale Della Moda Italiana, and she even designed a vestment for Pope John Paul II. Katsura finds showing in Singapore important, as Asia as a whole is represented. "The couture show in Singapore was really significant and a meaningful challenge for the Asian fashion industry as we haven’t had such occasions so far. I have been insisting that Tokyo should take responsibility for this role of being a fashion pioneer in Asia." With such a high caliber of diverse designers from so many countries around the world, the week was one of couture-inspired creativity, drama and dreams. It also witnessed the inauguration of the Asian Couture Federation (ACF). “Through the activities of the ACF, we find talented designers in Asia and provide chances [for them] to appeal to the world — creative activities which merge Eastern culture and design with that

BALKAN BEAT Clockwise from above: Jovan Jelovac, the founder of Belgrade Design Week, at the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art; Comunale, a loftlike Italian restaurant in a converted warehouse on the Sava River; Moritz Eis, a popular artisanal ice cream shop.

On the Verge

Belgrade’s Awakening

After years of struggle and strife, the citizens of Serbia’s war-torn capital are recasting their home into a burgeoning hub for design, culture and creativity. BY VIIA BEAUMANIS PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANILO SCARPATI

HIDDEN IN A SWATH OF DENSELY forested parkland where the Sava River meets the Danube, one of Europe’s first national modern art museums sits in disrepair. The glass-roofed structure, built in 1965, once displayed works by Miró, Ernst, Rauschenberg, Hockney and others, but for the last six years it has been empty, as the government’s financing to renovate the space has dried up. Today Jovan Jelovac, the impresario behind

Belgrade’s weeklong design summit, held each June, has commandeered the abandoned, multilevel space as the headquarters for his roster of presentations, exhibitions and parties. This summer afternoon, sauntering past an assembly of fashionable attendees, Jelovac rattles off a list of his ‘‘formative gods,’’ citing everyone from Eugène Ionesco to Federico Fellini, Buckminster Fuller to Joseph Beuys. But his real muse, January-February 2014

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‘Living in a war zone gives you a nice appreciation for the ephemeral nature of things. People here live in the moment. They enjoy themselves.’

it seems, is Belgrade itself. An indefatigable booster of his home city, Jelovac is equal parts global publicist, cultural advocate and triage nurse. Assisted by an all-female team he describes as ‘‘supermodels and capoeira fighters turned international design aficionados,’’ he travels the world hunting down people like Ross Lovegrove, Simon de Pury, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron and Rem Koolhaas to speak at his annual symposium. After Karim Rashid attended in 2006, he designed a cafe, gave the city’s Mozzart Casino a psychedelic redo, opened a signature boutique and even married a local woman. WHILE POST-COLLECTIVIST capitals

often redefine themselves in a blast of showy glitz (see: ’90s Moscow), here the end of Socialism — starting with the death of Tito in 1980, followed by the chaotic breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992 and the ensuing Balkan conflicts, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people in the region — brought culture and design to a standstill. However, when residents finally began to recover from that grim nightmare around 2000, they found themselves smack in the middle of the Information Age, where global ideas — aesthetic and otherwise — were accessible for anyone with an Internet connection. In fact, reinvention is seen as a birthright in this culture, which has seen so much struggle and strife. Today there is a palpable energy in the air as Belgraders go about purposefully transforming their home into a stylish and design-savvy city. 44

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In the last few years, outside investment has poured in, which has led to an impressive array of international projects that will soon recast the Belgrade skyline. No one is more excited than Jelovac. ‘‘We’re redefining for the 21st century,’’ he says, citing as evidence the new Ada Bridge, a dazzling feat of architecture opened in 2012, as well as the pending addition of Zaha Hadid’s extravagantly warped commercial-residential complex in the historic Dorcol area, Sou Fujimoto’s spiral building in Savamala and Wolfgang Tschapeller’s breathtaking science center in New Belgrade. Meanwhile, the government of the United Arab Emirates, which has already agreed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in agriculture and banks in the region, is rumored to be ogling the ruined Ministry of Defense as a potential hotel project. On the local level, there is the emerging Belgrade Design District, an initiative of young designers who have reimagined an abandoned shopping mall as a platform for hip local brands, and Boris Ivanovic, an entrepreneurturned-design enthusiast, who has funneled the fortune he has made in broadband into his passion project, the Art of Kinetik, a line of luxury speedboats. ‘‘There is talent here, like everywhere else. It’s just roughed up and underdeveloped,’’ he explains. ‘‘We’re providing an environment to cultivate it into something polished and sophisticated.’’ The city’s taste for elegance can certainly be

CREATIVE CLASS Clockwise from top left: Boris Ivanovic, whose speedboats retail for up to $5 million; Hotel Moskva, the city’s first grand hotel, built in 1906; Square Nine hotel, which opened in 2011 and features an impressive collection of midcentury modern furniture; ‘‘The Greek Monsters,’’ an installation by the design group Beetroot, during Belgrade Design Week at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

In a capital razed so many times over the years, design tends to look forward, not back. Reinvention is seen as a birthright in this culture.

GREEN ACRES Right: an Old Town park overlooking the neighborhood of Savamala.

seen in a slew of sleek new boutique hotels that have cropped up. The most impressive addition is Square Nine, a $40 million project opened in 2011 by the brothers Nenad and Nebojsa Kostic and designed by the São Paulo-based architect Isay Weinfeld, who conceived a handsome modern facade and decked out the interiors in rich Brazilian woods. The brothers filled the rooms with midcentury Danish, Scandinavian and American pieces and stocked the dining room with chefs and bartenders from five-star hotels like Claridge’s in London. In a capital razed so many times over the years, design tends to look forward, not back, which makes the refined vintage swagger the Kostics brought to the project all the more striking. ‘‘People here abolish history. They want the new,’’ Nebojsa says. Which has led to the traditional familystyle restaurants giving way to trendier places serving more international fare. At Belgrade’s most fashionable restaurant, Dijagonala 2.0, the chef, who recently did a stint at Rene Redzepi’s acclaimed Noma in Copenhagen, serves up plates of smoked calf’s heart carpaccio and prawn-and-lobster sausage. The rock starturned-designer-restaurateur Aleksandar Rodic has opened a pair of terrace-front

restaurants inside the Beton Hala, a vast riverside warehouse: Comunale, which serves up modern Italian fare, and Iguana, a jazz bar and restaurant with a Thai-accented menu. After hours, the stylish set head to Savamala, the venerable neighborhood where a group of Bosnian Serbs initially plotted the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which has been refashioned as the city’s latest night-life district. ‘‘We’ve been through so much,’’ Nenad Kostic says. ‘‘Living in a war zone gives you a nice appreciation for the ephemeral nature of things. People here live in the moment. They enjoy themselves.’’ But they’re also serious about turning Belgrade into a stylish, thriving city. ‘‘This new generation is super-open-minded about innovation and change,’’ Jelovac evangelizes, sitting in the garden at the Macura Museum, an austere black cubelike building on the outskirts of town. The first art museum built in Serbia in decades, it houses one of the Balkans’ largest private collections of Eastern European avant-garde art. ‘‘We’re experiencing a rush of design spirit, the talent reawakening from a long slumber.’’

January-February 2014

URBAN RENEWAL Clockwise from far left: Supermarket, a former grocery store that’s been transformed into a concept shop, featuring fashion, art, a spa and a restaurant; the Ada Bridge, which spans the Sava River and links the city with New Belgrade; a chapellike installation in the garden of the Macura Museum, the first new art museum built in Serbia in years.

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CITY OF INDUSTRY Clockwise from left: a new painting by Serban Savu, whose work has been compared to Edward Hopper’s, entitled ‘‘Unité d’habitation,’’ in his studio; an opening at the Paintbrush Factory, a central hub of the Cluj art scene; Cluj’s most wellknown gallery, Plan B, is overseen by the curator Mihai Pop (in coat), pictured with the artists Ciprian Muresan, Cristian Rusu and Savu.

Art Matters

Traction in Transylvania Lacking a famous art school, government support or even a location most people can point to on a map, the small medieval city of Cluj, Romania, has become an unlikely breeding ground for the next generation of art stars. BY ZEKE TURNER PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRANK HERFORT

TWO YEARS AGO, the painter Adrian Ghenie was in his friend’s studio, having a coffee with some former classmates — all Romanian artists and gallerists in their mid-to-late 30s — when it sunk in: they had made it. ‘‘I realized that Mircea was having a show in Salzburg, and Cipri, right next to him, was going to show at Tate,’’ Ghenie recalls of his friends Mircea Cantor and Ciprian Muresan. ‘‘We’re having shows at MOMA San Francisco. And Plan B’’ — the gallery Ghenie started with the artist-turned-dealer Mihai Pop in Cluj in 2005 — ‘‘was

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going to Basel. I realized I don’t have to go out to Paris or London to find out what’s going on in art, because we are it right now. And we were still in Cluj having coffee like normal people!’’ In the last decade, Cluj-Napoca, better known as Cluj, an Eastern European university town of about 325,000 permanent residents, has become an unexpected art world hothouse, its homegrown talent pool earning rapturous praise on the international stage. Ghenie is represented in New York by the powerful Pace gallery, and his work has caught the eye of major collectors, including the Christie’s owner François Pinault. At two separate Sotheby’s auctions in the last year, his sales tripled and then doubled their respective estimates. While Ghenie and Victor Man are the best known of the group, success has come to each in his own right, as if lightning struck multiple limbs of the same tree. It was the Italian critic and Flash Art founder Giancarlo Politi who in 2007 first called them the Cluj School, in the manner of Dresden and Leipzig. Already known abroad for his 2005 video ‘‘Deeparture,’’ depicting a wolf and a deer left alone in a Parisian white-cube gallery, Cantor won the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2011, which came with a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou last fall. Muresan, too, first gained wide notice for a video: ‘‘Choose,’’ showing his young son mixing Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the same glass. The work landed him a place in the 2009 New Museum show ‘‘The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,’’

MURESAN: COURTESY OF DAVID NOLAN GALLERY, NEW YORK. CANTOR: COURTESY OF MIRCEA CANTOR AND GALERIE YVON LAMBERT, PARIS. PHOTO BY ANDRÉ MORIN. GHENIE: © ADRIAN GHENIE, COURTESY OF PACE GALLERY.

HISTORY LESSONS Left: Adrian Ghenie’s ‘‘Pie Fight Interior 8."; Right: Ciprian Muresan’s ‘‘The Refrigerator’’.

school, they retain a special brand of pragmatism, cynicism and dark wit. Their output — somber, intellectual, haunted by history and laced with gallows humor — reveals the psyche of a country sentenced to grapple with its past for decades to come. Ghenie’s thickly worked canvases depicting what look like melting faces have drawn comparisons to the work of Francis Bacon, but his titles making reference to pie fights lend the works a layer of slapstick. Muresan’s video of dog puppets evokes the human potential for brutality. The Romanian critic and curator Mihnea Mircan, 37, summed up their generation as ‘‘allergic to utopia.’’ In this spirit, they navigate success in a postCommunist environment, where for decades most any achievement required working with the regime. ‘‘I trust myself better than I trust others,’’ Serban Savu, 35, says, explaining the self-reliance he and his colleagues have developed. ‘‘Nobody helped us to construct the art scene.’’ It’s mid-August, and Savu is piloting his black Volvo sedan through Manastur, the area where he grew up. Originally intended as a Le Corbusier-inspired modernist project, the green space between the blocks was filled in with additional units as Ceausescu shunted Romania onto an industrialist track and crowded peasants into towns and cities. Savu’s social realist-style paintings, which have drawn comparisons to Jean-François Millet, Edward Hopper and Pieter Bruegel, offer gentle, complex depictions of Romanians generations on — agrarian families uncoupled from their homes and still uncomfortable with the transition decades later. ‘‘It’s our generation’s task to start building,’’ says Mara Ratiu, 35, a senior lecturer and vice rector at the University of Art and Design of Cluj-Napoca, where many of the Cluj set studied. ‘‘I’m doing this at my university with my colleagues. Mihai is doing that in his gallery program.’’ She’s just returned from the Venice Biennale and is sitting in Cluj’s Museum Square, a cobblestone plaza in the old city. ‘‘I hate sometimes living in Romania,’’ she admits. ‘‘It’s crazy to live here because you have to deal with so many difficult things. On the other hand, what’s very fascinating is this pioneering work,

‘This thing happened in such a short time. There was a month when if you opened Artforum, every three pages was an ad with a Romanian, and from really big places like MOMA or Tate.’ as one of the world’s 50 top artists under 33. Last year, he had a show with the Polish artist Anna Molska at the Tate Modern in London. ‘‘I found it somehow miraculous,’’ Ghenie, 36, adds of the group’s success, coming from a state with paltry, temperamental support for the arts and a university with no reputation abroad. ‘‘This thing happened in such a short time from that place, which had little tradition. There was a month when if you opened Artforum, every three pages was an ad with a Romanian — and from really big places like MOMA or Tate to smaller, private galleries.’’ ‘‘Nobody bet on such a successful artist from this small scene — maybe one, but not five,’’ Muresan, 36, agrees. ‘‘This is weird.’’ Why this flowering? Well, the best explanation is the artists’ work and, perhaps, their work ethic, a trait they often attribute to cultural cross-pollination from the Germans and Hungarians who settled in the area years ago. Romania is still recovering from decades of isolationist and brutal rule under Nicolae Ceausescu, and this fall the country’s justice system began the first trial in decades of one of its own for abuses during the Communist era. Twenty five years after Ceausescu’s lightning-quick trial and execution on Christmas Day, when most of the artists were in grade

January-February 2014

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PET PROJECT Clockwise from top: the crew behind Sabot gallery, also housed in the Paintbrush Factory, Cluj’s artist incubator, includes Daria Dumitrescu, Radu Comsa, Stefano Calligaro, Razvan Botis and Alice Tomaselli; Tomaselli’s ‘‘Tatami’’; ‘‘Untitled (From the White Shadow of His Talent)’’ by Victor Man.

the idea of building something.’’ With its centuries of history and culture, Cluj is fertile ground. But in 2005, when Ghenie and Pop decided to start Plan B, Romania’s second largest city seemed more like a place they couldn’t escape. Ghenie had just returned penniless from living in Vienna and Catania, Sicily, where he had begun doubting his ambition to be an artist. Ghenie’s brother introduced him to a friend, a stockbroker who had recently purchased a big house in Cluj with empty walls and offered him a tidy sum to help start an art collection. Meanwhile Pop, who was running an exhibition space at the university as a graduate student, was frustrated with interference from the administration. The two found a space in the city center

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with damaged parquet floors and called it Plan B. Then they used the money to mount a Victor Man show. It may have started as a fallback plan, but Plan B quickly became the catalyst for a new scene. Juerg Judin from the gallery Haunch of Venison in Zürich flew in to see Ghenie’s first solo show on the advice of the British curator Jane Neal. When Judin arrived at the airport in Cluj, Savu and Ghenie showed up late to pick him up in a red Soviet-made 1982 Lada. The work, however, impressed him, and on returning to Zürich, he mounted a show in 2006 called ‘‘Cluj Connection,’’ curated by Neal, presenting works by Cantor, Ghenie, Man, Muresan and Savu, among others, as a group for the first time. Ghenie’s paintings sold out, and Judin added him to the gallery’s roster. In 2007, Plan B was the only Eastern European gallery with a booth at the Armory Show in New York, and Pop took the reins of Romania’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Plan B opened a second exhibition space in Berlin shortly thereafter. After it lost the white-cube space in Cluj, Plan B joined with the nonprofit gallery Sabot in 2009 to renovate an old paintbrush factory in the light industrial district close to the city’s center. They envisioned a complex of performance spaces and studios. ‘‘It’s a factory, and I really feel that I am coming here as a worker,’’ says Daria Dumitrescu, 36, the gallerist running Sabot. When the Paintbrush Factory opened in October 2009, more than 1,000 locals from Cluj turned out to see what the artists and gallerists there were up to. Cluj’s artists tend to share a pessimistic streak, and as a result, they seem primed for their moment in the spotlight to elapse, but seven years after the original Cluj coming-out in Zürich, the city continues to draw interest. At the end of 2012, Cluj was included in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show ‘‘Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art.’’ Until January, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton in Paris is showing artists from Cluj as part of the show ‘‘Romanian Scenes,’’ and the Arken Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen just concluded a show called ‘‘Hotspot Cluj — New Romanian Art.’’ Phaidon included Cluj in a new book published in September, ‘‘Art Cities of the Future,’’ alongside the likes of São Paulo and Istanbul, metropolises 30 and 40 times its size. It’s a frantic pace, and the gallerist Pop, 39, can’t help wondering how long Cluj will hold onto its stars. Cantor has long worked out of Paris, for instance, and Ghenie is spending more time at his studio in Berlin. Pop is also preparing for the moment when the art world’s eyes shift to the next big thing. ‘‘The shows about Cluj, I find them O.K., but I know quite soon they will be gone,’’ he says, sitting on a bench at the botanical garden on one of the hills overlooking the city. ‘‘The people who are organizing these shows, they like to map territories,’’ he adds. ‘‘And when they already know who’s good, who’s not, they go further to map another territory and another territory.’’ ‘‘In our case in the East, it’s important to constitute something,’’ Pop continues. ‘‘From the very beginning the idea was that if we open Plan B, it will be a long-term project. In the West, everyone is always asking you ‘What’s your next project? And what comes next? Next, next!’ There’s no next. Next is to sustain yesterday’s project.’’

MAN: COURTESY OF VICTOR MAN AND BLUM & POE, LOS ANGELES.

Cluj’s artists tend to share a pessimistic streak, and they seem primed for their moment in the spotlight to elapse. But seven years after its coming-out, the city continues to draw interest.

January - February 2014

Fall Fashion Page 48 Louis Vuitton Builds a House Page 56 Burmese Days Page 58 Designs with Life Page 68 The New Breed Page 74

Maison Martin Margiela jacket, QR5,788. Calvin Klein Collection jumpsuit, QR25,298. CĂŠline belt (part of pants, not shown), QR5,278; Hirshleifers, Manhasset, N.Y. Opposite: Ralph Lauren Collection coat, QR19,649. Victoria Beckham shirtdress, QR1,638.

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Take the scenic route in timeless, relaxed silhouettes smartened up with sporty belts and tailored jackets — perfect for a grand tour or a weekend jaunt.

FA� AND AWAY PHOTOGRAPHS BY KARIM SADLI STYLED BY JONATHAN KAYE

ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

January-February 2014

Max Mara jacket, QR3,822. Victoria Beckham shirtdress, QR1,638. Balenciaga top (worn over shirt), QR3,622. Céline pants, QR5,278; Hirschleifers, Manhasset, N.Y. Céline sandals, QR10,338. Opposite: Louis Vuitton coat, QR16,125. Victoria Beckham shirtdress, QR1,638. Céline pants, QR4,550. ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

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January-February 2014

Chloé vest, QR8,918. Céline shirt, QR3,567, and sandals, QR2,900. Max Mara pants, QR6,825. Opposite: Maison Martin Margiela coat, QR9,300. Gucci shirt, QR4,004. ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

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January-February 2014

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PHOTO ASSISTANTS: ANTONI CIUFO, LAURENT CHOUARD, FLORENT VINDIMIAN. DIGITAL OPERATOR: EDOUARD MALFETTES AT DIGITART. STYLIST’S ASSISTANT: MAX ORTEGA. TAILOR: CAROLE SAVATON.

Calvin Klein Collection coat, QR10,902, and pants, QR5,642. Céline shirt, QR3,567. Opposite: Alexander McQueen jacket, price on request. Dior pants, QR6,552. Céline belt (part of pants, not shown), QR5,278, and sandals, QR10,338. Model: Iselin Steiro/ Women Management NYC. Hair by Damien Boissinot at Jed Root. Makeup by Christelle Cocquet at Calliste. Manicure by Typhaine Kersual at Jed Root. Prop styling by Alexander Bock. Production by Brachfeld Paris.

January-February 2014

T’S HARD TO THINK OF A MODERN WOMAN

more modern than Charlotte Perriand. Creative, intelligent, well traveled and athletic, the native Parisian was a pioneer of design at a time when women’s options in the field were limited mainly to ceramics and textiles. In the 1920s, Perriand transformed a room in her apartment into a glass and metal bar for entertaining, and she saw the potential of tubular steel as a material for furniture. And it was largely thanks to her vision that the architect Le Corbusier became famous for the 1928 steel and cowhide chaise longue, and other iconic pieces, on which he collaborated with Perriand and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. (This was not long after Le Corbusier dismissed a jobhunting Perriand with the now infamous words ‘‘We don’t embroider cushions here,’’ and even after he admitted his mistake, it took decades for Perriand to get equal credit for their designs.) Perriand went on to create other furnishings, as well as interiors and buildings, but the first house she designed on her own, a 1934 secondplace entry in a magazine competition for an affordable beach house, remained unbuilt — until now. Louis Vuitton, which took Perriand as the muse for its spring/summer 2014 women’s Icônes collection, worked with the Charlotte Perriand Archive to construct La Maison au Bord de l’Eau (the House on the Waterfront), which will be displayed at Design Miami (Dec. 4 to Dec. 8) and then put up for sale. The house — a compact structure of four rooms

flanking an open-air living space — is elegant in its economy, and looks as if it could have been designed today, a spirit that appealed to Julie de Libran, the creative director of Louis Vuitton women’s collection. She admires Perriand’s ‘‘refined’’ color sense, but also the fact that ‘‘she was so intelligent and pragmatic,’’ adding that ‘‘functionality was her way of thinking.’’ (Perriand once traveled to Asia with a compact wardrobe of interchangeable ‘‘modules,’’ a philosophy that is reflected in the Icônes collection’s colorful, adaptable pieces.) Pernette Perriand, Charlotte’s daughter, and Pernette’s husband, Jacques Barsac, who run the archive, said that not only was the project one of Perriand’s favorites, but that it was also a very early example of prefab design, another aspect of Perriand’s ahead-of-the-curve sensibility that appealed to Louis Vuitton. With its debut in Miami Beach, the house can now inspire a future generation of design pioneers.

As an homage to Charlotte Perriand’s creative force, Louis Vuitton is building, for the first time, one of the legendary Modernist’s never-realized designs. BY PILAR VILADAS

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EASY LIVING Clockwise from far left: Charlotte Perriand’s sketch of La Maison au Bord de l’Eau; furnishings designed by Perriand, inside the house, which will be shipped in sections from Europe, and reconstructed on site in Miami; Perriand’s Plurima bookcase, made by Cassina, doubles as a room divider; the designer in 1934; a rendering of the main room of the house; a pulled-back rendering of the unit; her Tokyo Outdoor chaise longue, available from Cassina.

January-February 2014

VANTAGE POINT The picturesque Popa Taungkalat Buddhist monastery sits atop an outcrop of Mount Popa, an active volcano southeast of Bagan in central Myanmar.

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IN ORWELL’S OOTSTEPS WANDERING AROUND Yangon, the former capital city of Myanmar, always makes me think of George Orwell. Yangon’s old British buildings have the look of Gothic ruins gone astray in a tropical forest that cannot accommodate their scale. They rise up under a monsoon moon, massive and darkened and ill placed — the High Court a Queen Anne-style brick castle with a gloomy clock tower, like a London railway station reproduced here by some demented committee. Seen after midnight, they recall the state prisons and labyrinths of ‘‘1984,’’ a novel that, like many of the works by a onetime Burma resident then known as Eric BY LAWRENCE OSBORNE PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD MOSSE Blair, was once nominally banned here. Times, though, have changed: at the first Irrawaddy Literary Festival earlier this year, copies of Orwell books were handed out to participants, and the organizers of Britain’s Orwell Prize came to the country to celebrate their man’s Burmese past. Blair would have been amused. It is strange to think of a young and unknown Orwell, who was born in India to a father who worked as an overseer of the colonial opium business, perhaps pacing around the ghostly Sule Pagoda 90 years ago and taking in this same view that I often enjoy when walking around the Maha Bandula park late at night. Back then, I suppose, on empty Sule Pagoda Road next to the park, gangs of boys did not play soccer under streetlamps, their naked backs glistening with sweat. The streets were probably swept free of garbage, and the dogs that swarm through them today would have been taken care of in brutal fashion. It was a different city, a famously wilder, greener place. During a monsoon week, I lay in the Strand Hotel in proper British style, reading Orwell again, with a plan to find traces of his Burma in the cities of Yangon, Bagan and Mandalay — areas that are swiftly being renovated by the state to make Myanmar, long closed to the outside world, a mainstream tourist attraction. The Strand, right on the river, is still a gateway to Yangon’s British past, with its high tea of mout lin mayar (rice-flour cakes) and dumplings stuffed with jaggery, its army of butlers and its high and noble bar. I read ‘‘Burmese Days’’ with my 3 p.m. Earl Grey and scones, followed by a scented cheroot cigar — rain pounding the windows — and was surprised to find that it is the rare Orwell work in which a landscape is as powerfully depicted as the characters. Published in 1934, ‘‘Burmese Days’’ was Orwell’s first book, and although it reveals the insidious effect that his

In Myanmar, a long-isolated nation now opening up to the world after decades of brutal military rule, one still finds romantic echoes of the former British colony that inspired the young author to pen his first novel, ‘Burmese Days.’

January-February 2014

stint as a policeman in various small Burmese towns had had upon him (most famously recorded in his essay ‘‘Shooting an Elephant’’), it also demonstrates his sensitivity to an underlying way of life — the rhythms of the Irrawaddy, the culture’s supernatural undercurrents, the grace and secrecy and stoicism of a ‘‘native’’ population that had no voice. It also contains surely the best description of a traditional slapstick zat pwe dance performance ever committed to paper, down to the young dancer moving the two halves of her derrière to a complex rhythm. The hero of ‘‘Burmese Days,’’ the young John Flory, has many traits in common with the quiet, withdrawn 20-something bookworm Eric Blair. Both protagonist and author had to co-exist with an array of exasperated and maddening colonial types. Of course, Flory, after being rejected by a shallow English socialite, ends up killing himself with a pistol, while Blair enjoyed a happier future, returning to England to become George Orwell. But the two share a host of irritations, rages and sadnesses, and I suspect a dark love of the Burmese forests. (There is a wonderful scene, in fact, during the first monsoon rains, in which Flory wanders naked into the forest and lets the downpour heal his heat rashes.) ‘‘Your whole life is a life of lies,’’ the narrator rebukes himself. ‘‘Year after year you sit in Kipling-haunted little Clubs, whisky to right of you, Pink’un to left of you, listening and eagerly agreeing while Colonel Bodger

develops his theory that these bloody Nationalists should be boiled in oil.’’ What was the real extent of Burma’s spell over Orwell’s mind? It was explored in depth by Emma Larkin in her book ‘‘Finding George Orwell in Burma,’’ in which she makes a sinisterly compelling argument. Orwell’s great trilogy of novels (‘‘Burmese Days,’’ ‘‘Animal Farm’’ and ‘‘1984’’), she contends, presciently track the development of Burma — a colonial society transformed, through independence and the socialist military coup in 1962, into a version of ‘‘Animal Farm,’’ and then ‘‘1984.’’ Fortunately, the evolution continues with recent reforms and the 2010 release from house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, the famous dissident and now opposition leader. Orwell was posted to the Irrawaddy Delta in 1924 and spent his days doing crime-scene forensics and surveillance work, a job that gave him an invaluable insight into how police states work. But the monotonous, disorienting plains may also have shaped him in darker ways. Burma was one of the most violent parts of the British Raj. Dacoits, or armed gangs, roamed its waterways, visiting terror on the populace. As I wandered every night through the heart of Burma’s old colonial city — known in Orwell’s day as Rangoon — down the length of Merchant Road and the wide avenues dripping with interwoven trees, I sensed how that long-dead society with its secret police and its neurotic surveillance bureaucracy had given rise directly both to the authoritarian government of today and Orwell’s masterpiece of yesterday. But the verdant capital, to which officials like Orwell longed to return after lengthy stints in the jungle, remains alluring. ‘‘Oh, the joy of those Rangoon trips!’’ as Flory puts it in ‘‘Burmese Days.’’ ‘‘The rush to Smart and Mookerdum’s bookshop for the new novels out from England, the dinner at Anderson’s with beefsteaks and butter that had travelled eight thousand miles on ice, the glorious drinking-bout!’’ I couldn’t find Anderson’s and its beefsteaks — it has long disappeared, or perhaps it has been renamed. Still, the British buildings remain, with their curious resemblance to the fictional London slums described in the opening pages of ‘‘1984,’’ ‘‘sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken houses’’ — except that they are also monumental, lovely and haunted. Often painted aquamarine and dark liver-red, garnished with creeping moss and ferns, and adorned with dripping laundry, they are the ruins of an older city that is still alive — accidentally beautiful things preserved by failure. Around the corner from the Strand, I often passed a pale gray columned classical European building, flying a state flag out front and bearing the Orwellian label BUREAU OF SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS. A man was asleep

It is strange to think of a young Orwell, born in India to a father who worked in the colonial opium business, pacing around this same ghostly pagoda 90 years ago and taking in the same view.

WRITTEN IN STONE The 729 stupas at Kuthodaw Pagoda in Mandalay each house a marble slab inscribed with Buddhist scriptures and are collectively referred to as the world’s largest book. Opposite: the High Court building in Yangon (left), a vestige of the city’s colonial past.

January-February 2014

As I wandered every night through the heart of Burmaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s old colonial city, I sensed how that long-dead society had given rise directly both to the authoritarian government of today and to Orwellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s masterpiece of yesterday.

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SWEPT ASIDE A moat surrounds Mandalay Palace, the dwelling place of Burma’s last monarchy. Opposite: colorful brooms sit outside the ancient Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, where Buddhist worshipers gather in prayer.

on the porch, his head resting on a tray of cauliflowers. One night, I made a time-consuming trek to find a Muslim shrine I had always wanted to visit, the tomb of the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, which today lies on a deserted back street not far from the Shwedagon Pagoda. Zafar was exiled by the British to Rangoon in 1858 after the failed Sepoy Rebellion and died there four years later. The shrine that now houses his remains is spare and unvisited, and a lone guardian comes to the locked metal gates to admit the curious. Standing there in pouring rain, at the edge of an unlit alley, I wondered at the way my own people had busily gone about terminating dynasties — and histories — that might threaten their own new order. The guardian showed me around, and then we stood under the pasty portrait of Zafar himself pinned to the outside wall. ‘‘First visitor this month,’’ he said sadly, but with an ineffable defiance. How quickly memory is effaced. The work of empire, indeed, is the work of memory effacement. On another night I went to have dinner at the home of a 90-year-old British Army veteran named Tancy McDonald. A retired minister of the Anglican church who was married to a Burmese woman for many years, he lives in a neighborhood near the airport called Insein, quiet as a rural hamlet in the jungle, and over tea and jaggery he remembered with perfect clarity the society Orwell had described in his book — the world of the ‘‘pukka sahib,’’ or the aloof, impeccably gentlemanly British administrator. Like Orwell’s mother, Tancy’s British father owned a rubber plantation in the south, and it’s possible they knew each other.

‘‘The Burmese always had to call every British person ‘Sir,’ ’’ he recalled. ‘‘It was appalling. But then again, I also remember Rangoon as a beautiful place — a population of 400,000, clean, orderly. You can’t imagine how nice it was. The mistake we made after the war was to get rid of the British administration. It was a disaster. India and Malaysia didn’t make that mistake.’’ ‘‘How about the changing of the country’s name?’’ ‘‘Actually, I prefer Myanmar to Burma. It’s more authentic.’’ ‘‘But it’s a variation of the same word,’’ I objected. ‘‘Both are valid.’’ There was a canny smile in return. Tancy remembered the war. The British were virtually unarmed, and the Japanese entered Rangoon easily. Separated from his artillery unit, Tancy simply walked to India with three friends, where he joined a new unit. He was happy to fight for the British. He asked me if I’d be taking the ‘‘road to Mandalay,’’ so named, of course, after Kipling’s rousing poem. ‘‘It’s a bit of cliché,’’ I said. On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin’-fishes play, An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay! Kipling is a tough and formidable poet, but like Orwell, I cannot stand his failed attempt to render working-class soldier patois. In fact, Orwell both loathed and admired Kipling, the ‘‘good bad poet,’’ as he called him. And yet, the intense vibration that the very word ‘‘Mandalay’’ sets up in the English-speaking mind is a remarkable thing. Didn’t Frank Sinatra do a

January-February 2014

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version of Kipling’s ditty? ‘‘Maybe it’s all a cliché, as you say,’’ Tancy replied. ‘‘But Mandalay is still Mandalay. At least they didn’t change the name. It’s filled with businessmen now — you might find it somewhat unromantic.’’ IN KIPLING’S AND INDEED ORWELL’S time, one traveled from Rangoon to Mandalay by paddle steamer on the Irrawaddy, a journey of several days. Via the new recently completed express road, it takes about nine hours. On the way, one can stop to visit the nation’s new capital city of Nay Pyi Taw, which was created out of nothing beginning in 2004 to replace Yangon. The Indian journalist Siddharth Varadarajan noted on a visit to Myanmar’s capital that it is ‘‘the ultimate insurance against regime change, a masterpiece of urban planning designed to defeat any putative ‘colour revolution’ — not by tanks or water cannons, but by geography and cartography.’’ The whole thing is lit up at night like a wedding with no guests. It’s a utopia with no guiding principle, and a capital city with no diplomats, since they refuse to leave the comforts and karaoke clubs of Yangon. And yet it is filled with imperial longings and references. The name means ‘‘Abode of Kings’’: an attempt, then, to start yet another new history. Before continuing on to Mandalay, I headed east to Bagan, where I stayed a couple of nights at a new resort called the Aureum Palace, which has been opened inside the archaeological zone, among more than 2,000 temples ranging from the 11th to the 13th centuries. There can be no more astute positioning of a contemporary resort, something the Chinese honeymooners in the temple-view pool surely appreciated. Restored as a ‘‘Burmese Angkor Wat,’’ Bagan is an inevitable stop on the tourist circuit. Where Nay Pyi Taw is a postmodern utopia, Bagan is a modern vision of an ancient one. Its thousands of pagodas spread across a parklike plain have been restored in strange and inauthentic ways, a gaudy mix of the 12th century and the 21st. It’s beautiful, moving and only half convincing. ‘‘Then where does the past exist . . . ?’’ Winston’s interrogator, O’Brien, inquired in ‘‘1984,’’ still a good question. The most interesting of the great Bagan pagodas is the forbiddingly massive Dhammayangyi, built by King Narathu around 1170 to atone for the sin of murdering both his brother and his father, Alaungsithu. Its interior is windowless and gloomy, the inner sanctuary walled off for centuries as if its contents had been a state secret that even succeeding generations would not be allowed to see. According to popular legend, the evil king demanded that the stones be mortared together so finely that a blade could not pass between them, decreeing that any workman who failed to do so would be relieved of his arm immediately. As I wandered around the half-lit galleries admiring the frescoes of elephants, a young girl in yellow thanaka face paint approached, holding a cellophaned book for sale to tourists: ‘‘Burmese Days.’’ She led me to the slotted stones where the arm severing

Garnished with creeping moss and dripping laundry, the old British buildings are the ruins of a city that is still alive — accidentally beautiful things preserved by failure.

GOLDEN OLDIE Visitors gather outside the towering, gilded Shwedagon Pagoda. An exact replica of the pagoda was built in Nay Pyi Taw, which has been Myanmar’s capital since 2006.

January-February 2014

Inwa, the old ruined capital that was destroyed by an earthquake in 1839. From my hotel, the Sedona, at the edge of the vast moat that surrounds the Mandalay Palace, I could walk the mile to the East Gate — the only one that foreigners are allowed to use. Above this gate hangs a shrill sign courtesy of the army, which is called the Tatmadaw in Burmese: TATMADAW AND THE PEOPLE, COOPERATE AND CRUSH ALL THOSE

is thought to have happened and made me place one of my arms in the groove. It fit perfectly. She then said that Narathu was assassinated ‘‘by Indians,’’ making a chopping motion on her own tiny arm. ‘‘How do you know?’’ I asked. ‘‘Whisper, whisper.’’ ‘‘Is it true?’’ ‘‘Buy Orwell, one dolla.’’ I drove to Mandalay on the road that winds alongside the Irrawaddy. It’s a long, lulling drive through lowland paddies and bamboo thatch villages. In the distance, I could make out the great brooding river flashing between low hills and scattered gold pagodas, where flocks of goats wandered with boys in bamboo cloche hats. The outskirts of Mandalay came upon me gradually, strangely anachronistic: chimneys of little factories puffing black smoke, like the piecemeal industrial landscapes of the 19th century; wide waterways of hyacinth and sugar palms, still more gold pagodas, white-horned cows everywhere, men hacking at logs, and horses tethered under kapoks. ‘‘Mandalay is rather a disagreeable town — ’’ complained the narrator of ‘‘Burmese Days,’’ ‘‘it is dusty and intolerably hot, and it is said to have five main products all beginning with P, namely, pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prostitutes.’’ The pagodas are still here, if the other four ‘‘products’’ are less in evidence (though the latter might be more familiar to the aforementioned businessmen). Mandalay is one of the few places in Myanmar where a foreigner can ride a motorbike, and on mine I went through the town’s chaotic temple neighborhoods, past the teak U Bein bridge at dusk, where the monks sit along the lakefront on weathered terraces. I visited the jetty at the end of a long, tree-shaded road, where the boat leaves for

HARMING THE UNION. Ironic to think that Orwell did his police training less than a mile away. The Palace itself possesses something of the moated grandeur of the Forbidden City in Beijing, with its teak-roofed towers rising above the gates. It is mostly a military base now, off-limits to visitors, but that was the case under the British as well. The wooden palace, where Burma’s last two kings, Mindon and his son Thibaw, ruled in the quarter century before the arrival of the British, is a modern reconstruction of the 1859 original, which was burned down during World War II. To walk the now bare-bones rooms of the ‘‘Famed Royal Emerald Palace’’ during the rains, when they are empty, is haunting indeed, what with their dark red wooden columns and their life-size models of the two kings and their consorts sitting on replica thrones. One sees Thibaw’s dainty royal bed surrounded by four glass-encrusted columns, and vitrines full of imperial regalia, including the ruby-covered royal sandals. A whole arcane, intricate world of ritual reduced to a single glass case of dusty relics. Where does the past live, then, as Winston was asked? Nearby, in the Kuthodaw Pagoda, is the so-called world’s largest book, its inscribed stone tablets housed in 729 whitewashed stupas arranged in lines, each tablet bearing a page of the Buddhist canon. Walking through the starflower trees between the stupas, among families enjoying open-air picnics, one is bound to think yet again of Orwell, who would have known this place well. The British maintained a garrison here until 1890, and they are thought to have stripped all the gold lettering from the texts (as well as stealing 6,000 bronze bells). But a physical stone book of such size is far less easy to ban than mere paperback copies of ‘‘1984,’’ or for that matter the paper books that had disappeared from Orwell’s imaginary future. The tablets might have been either an inspiration or a warning to the young police officer who wandered here almost a century ago, or perhaps they left no impression on him at all. In the end Burma was utterly alien to Orwell. He described the place, sometimes lovingly, but ultimately its warmth and beauty eluded him. Perhaps he could not see his way past the colonial machinery in which he was implicated. Out of its oppressive heat, cruelty and beauty, however, he made not one great novel but three.

Standing in the rain, at the tomb of the last Mughal Emperor, I wondered at the way my own people had busily gone about terminating dynasties — and histories — that might threaten their own new order.

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IN PLAIN SIGHT Temples dot the landscape in the ancient city of Bagan. Opposite: the Myanmar Port Authority (left) sits across from the former British tax office in downtown Yangon.

January-February 2014

OF THE ESSENCE The Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen is known for rigorous, spare design that retains a sense of life. Captivated by a once-stately house in Antwerp, he distilled it to its elements â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and made it his home.

BY TOM DELAVAN PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID SPERO

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NATURAL SELECTION The spare, spacious living room is anchored by two custom-made Atelier de Saint-Paul tables, designed by Vincent Van Duysen, and old Chinese stools, and softened with a hand-woven Iranian carpet and a deep Axel Vervoordt sofa and a Pierre Jeanneret chair. An artwork by Tadashi Kawamata hangs behind the table.

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January-February 2014

While many architects are reluctant to outfit their designs with anything other than 20th-century classics, Van Duysen is as likely to use a slouchy club chair as a Le Corbusier chaise.

REFLECTIVE SURFACES Van Duysen, framed by a Congolese figurine and an art piece by Thomas Houseago on the wall of his bedroom, looks out over the garden, where an ailanthus tree shades the pool.

EVERY DAY, ON HIS WAY to his

studio not far from the center of Antwerp, the architect Vincent Van Duysen would pass by a stately 19thcentury building. Unlike most of the narrow brick structures commonly found in his native Belgium, it had an expansive white facade with large neo-Classical windows. Although it was clear to Van Duysen that the structure had good bones, it was shrouded in graffiti and neglect. One day he noticed that the house seemed to be unoccupied; he made some inquiries and discovered that the house was for sale, and for a surprisingly reasonable price. ‘‘There is one catch,’’ the lawyer for the estate said. ‘‘There is a hermit living in the attic.’’ Apparently, a clerk who once worked in the notary offices 72

on the ground floor had taken up residence in the house at some point, become increasingly agoraphobic and now was a permanent fixture in a dark corner of the attic. The offices had since closed, yet the bearded old man remained. He lived in what was little more than a box, ‘‘surrounded by vials and bottles and little papers,’’ Van Duysen recalls. And the resident hermit wasn’t the only problem. ‘‘The house was very, very ugly,’’ he says with a grimace. The ground floor was a rabbit’s warren of small dark offices. The stairs were covered with layers and layers of carpet and linoleum, a palimpsest of previous renovations in the 1940s, ’50s and ’70s. But Van Duysen, perhaps more than anyone, could see through the

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mess. In 1999, when he bought the house, he had already made a name for himself at the age of 37 with a number of influential buildings and residences, and was identified with a distinct style, one of architectural rigor that is still pleasing to the senses. Van Duysen is often referred to as a minimalist, but he rejects the label categorically. This house, in particular, reveals something more complex. ‘‘I try to reduce things to their essence,’’ he says, ‘‘but not at the expense of comfort and soul.’’ While many architects seem to think of furnishings as an afterthought, Van Duysen takes a more holistic view. ‘‘I think of the furnishings at the same time as I conceive the space.’’ This is not surprising, given his background. Van Duysen has designed everything from door handles to skyscrapers. Dozens of furniture companies have commissioned him to design products, from tiles and sinks for Obumex to furniture for B&B Italia and chandeliers for Swarovski. He owes this sensibility in part to several formative collaborations with

interior designers, including the late Belgian decorator Jean de Meulder, who taught Van Duysen what he calls ‘‘l’art de vivre.’’ De Meulder’s sophisticated international clientele required an understanding of luxurious comfort that Van Duysen has incorporated into his own work. While many architects are reluctant to outfit their designs with anything other than 20th-century classics, Van Duysen is as likely to use a slouchy club chair as a Le Corbusier chaise. Van Duysen worked for Aldo Cibic, one of the founders of the 1980s design collective Memphis and a significant figure in postmodern design. He was also influenced by deconstructivism and minimalism, which were both emerging as important movements in architecture at the time. In 1988, he returned from Milan to Antwerp, where he began to make his own mark. Ilse Crawford, then the editor of Elle Decoration, became a champion of his understated style, publishing photos of his Antwerp apartment, where he used the natural woods and linens that Belgium itself has since become known for. Van Duysen bemoans the

A SIMPLE PLAN Delft tile lines the kitchen, furnished with a La Cornue stove, a custom-made table, Chinese farmerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chairs and a light fixture from Workstead in Brooklyn. Ceramics designed by Van Duysen are stacked on the stove.

January-February 2014

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The biggest challenge was the staircase, one of the few interior elements Van Duysen chose to save. His solution was to change the flow of the entrance entirely, creating a slow reveal. fact that elements of his personal style have become ubiquitous. ‘‘Things that were the opposite of fashion became fashionable,’’ he says with a frown. Like his work, Van Duysen himself is a study in contrasts. In photos he appears somber, almost menacing, but in person he is warm and engaging, almost effervescent. ‘‘He is a very cuddly guy,’’ says Julianne Moore, a great admirer of his work who has become a good friend. His shaved head and lean physique suggest the efficiency and precision of an architect, but his compact frame seems unable to contain his energy, which spills out in an excited chatter and peals of laughter. ‘‘I have some Mediterranean blood on my mother’s side,’’ Van Duysen explains. ‘‘You can see something in my work that is Northern European, almost Calvinist, but there is something else.’’ Undaunted by the prospect of the renovation and the squatter in the attic of the house he coveted, Van Duysen purchased it and set to work. The transformation, which took more than two years, was remarkable. ‘‘People would stop and stare as workers restored the exterior to perfection,’’ Van Duysen says. An imposing front door was painted a flawless black gloss finish. Inside, he started by peeling away the less thoughtful previous renovations. One of the first things he uncovered was a small central courtyard, which he painted a gleaming white and surrounded with large windows so the light from above illuminates the adjacent rooms. ‘‘It’s my own little James Turrell,’’ he says. A lone Japanese maple provides a dash of green that offsets the bone-colored poplar floors and walls. The biggest challenge was the staircase, one of the few interior elements Van Duysen chose to save. ‘‘I had many sleepless nights about it,’’ he remembers. ‘‘I didn’t want it to

THE ART OF LIVING A Nan Goldin photograph hangs over the master bed. Opposite: Gaston, one of Van Duysen’s two dachshunds, stands before the 1940s staircase.

dominate, to become too important.’’ His solution was to change the flow of the entrance entirely, creating a slow reveal. Before, you passed through the front door and were immediately presented with a formal entryway and staircase, but Van Duysen’s design keeps you in suspense. By blocking the immediate view of the stairs with two floor-to-ceiling doors, he created a featureless cube illuminated by a single light bulb. The doors guide you to a room to the right where your eye is drawn to the internal light well, and only after passing through this space do you find yourself in front of the stairway, bathed in a soft light, the spacious living room to your left. Next, Van Duysen turned a number of small offices into one vast living room. Unstained poplar floors and stuccoed walls provide a monochromatic backdrop for a massive abstract Thomas Houseago

sculpture on a rosewood slab pedestal. The artwork, strong enough to overwhelm most spaces, is on equal footing with the architecture and the scale of the room. Here, and throughout the house, there is a balance between the highly structured and the almost haphazard. Two large unadorned oak tables and a row of 13-foot-high windows along one side of the room give it a monastic feel; on the other side lies a vintage rug with deep chairs and a sofa that begs to be slept on. The clean, simple geometry of the architecture is tempered by heavy linen curtains that pool on the floor. One wall of the garden is covered in a perfect rectangle of ivy; on the other is a looser arrangement of wisteria, ferns and a 150-year-old ailanthus tree. The second floor contains the private quarters of the house, including a master suite and a guest room. In order to get to the bedrooms, you must first pass through a room painted charcoal, striking in its contrast from the rest of the house, and signaling an entry into a part of the house that is private and intimate, even hinting at decadence, with a dark gray velvet sofa, tables piled with books, moody photographs by Dirk Braeckman and

Robert Mapplethorpe, and a television that disappears discreetly into a black wall. And what of the inherited tenant? On the third floor of the house is the apartment that Van Duysen created for the hermit, who has since passed away. Apart from the installation of a skylight, the rest of the attic has not yet been renovated. But Van Duysen has already imbued the room with an accidental beauty. Neat stacks of old interiors magazines have faded to a pale cerulean blue, and light streaming in from the skylight casts shadows on the drapery of a dropcloth tossed over a pair of Van Duysen’s own prototype leather chairs. Van Duysen points out the corner where the hermit was holed up when he first visited the house. While many would have sought to evict the old man, the architect instead struck up a tenuous friendship. ‘‘He started reading about me, following my career,’’ he says. ‘‘He would write me beautiful letters, telling me about the history of the house, about the tree in the backyard.’’ As it turned out, Van Duysen may have more in common with the hermit than he once thought. ‘‘I can spend days in this house,’’ he muses. ‘‘Sometimes I don’t want to leave.’’

January-February 2014

THE MIDDLE EAST continues to be on the receiving end of bad press. If it is not reports of flaunting fabulous wealth or acquiring trophy assets, then be sure it is about human rights violations or women fighting for equal rights. Never in history have we been so concerned with political correctness, and yet there has never been a time when such stereotypes have become so rampant. It is, however, not difficult to see how the world might have come to such conclusions about the Arabs. For one, they are highly private, where cultures eschew revealing too much about themselves. Stereotyping is a norm, not only by the outside world but also by expats living in this region, simply because so little is known. And, letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not forget, the Gulf consists of young countries that are just finding their diplomatic footing, so there are bound to be teething pains, especially in the social context. But inside the bubble is a new generation of Arabs who are pioneering change in their own communities. The faces of this new shift are the unassuming, educated young Arabs who are concerned less about pedigree than people development. They understand that for a nation to grow, they first have to effect change from within, and that sparking new mindsets is the most vital initiative. They have no qualms in breaking through their own cultural barriers to bring about new positive ideas that help the growth of their people, be it in the business, social or creative spheres. Forging ahead in their own chosen fields, these go-getters will soon be the next decision-makers in the region. And no, they are not riding camels or dripping in gold.

THE NEW BY DEBRINA ALIYAH, SINDHU NAIR AND AYSWARYA MURTHY PHOTOGRAPHS BY ABDULRAHMAN AL-BAKER

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY DEBRINA ALIYAH

ABDULRAHMAN AL-BAKER

IT IS WINTER, and while droves of seems to tell more of a story than just Photographer and Visual Artist Qatari boys are busy prepping their the subject. camping gear and changing tires Qatar is now ready, says Haman, with on their Land Cruisers for the sand the recent art boom and increasing duning season, Haman (as interest from the local community in AbdulRahman Al-Baker is fondly the creative fields. In the early days, known) is avoiding the sand and there were constant struggles with trying to write a proposal. The proposal is long, and he trying to get people to read photographs and has had sleepless nights, but it is nearly ready. “It is for understand the intrinsic values of a good photo. “With the greater good, a multipurpose training space to awareness and artistic education, we are moving train photographers,” he says. This will be presented forward now,” he says. “It is important to see more local soon to the cultural arm of a government institution, artists be commissioned for artworks by institutions and it will not be an easy task to get the project off the here.” He is riding on this foresight, hoping that his ground, but Haman is ready to do what it takes. proposal will be accepted and another new A mixed media artist with Qatar Foundation, it was development tool will be created for photographers in Haman’s caped crusader identity as a photographer the country. that shot him into Doha’s creative limelight. And in a Watching Doha grow from a sleepy town into a bustling nation with an army of budding young fashion and city, Haman had always been visually inspired by the design talents, the collaboration opportunities were beach and the huge clouds, but these days, he has endless. Qatari fashion darlings like Latifa Al-Mudaihki taken a new liking to Souq Waqif. “I love showing it off to and Fahad Al-Obaidly are big fans. Haman’s eye for visitors; the colors and scents are divine,” he quips. detail and his patriotic vision to present Qatar in a Aptly, he helps us tell the stories of his peers through his better perspective come through in his work, which lens on a journey through the souq.

ALIYA AL-OBAIDLY Fashion Designer BARELY A MONTH into the her deep understanding of what launch of Aliya, the eponymous Arab women want. Her couture Aliya Haute Couture couture label of the collection is highly personalized to soft-spoken designer, the individual orders, and, almost collection has nearly sold out, exclusively, each design is made for in the process earning the only one client. In contrast to the designer a new moniker as the old-world ways of couture in Europe, Queen of the Night. It is no reference to any Arab women reach out to the designer only on one late-night partying, but her golden touch in platform here, using social media. “It is a fresh way of crafting sensuous yet culturally appropriate marketing that just fits so well with the culture of Arab evening wear that has won her the crown. women, who prefer anonymity and privacy,” she Designing for the women of Qatar is a complex explains. After amassing a solid following here in Qatar, equation, with the need to find the balance she is ready to spread her wings into the rest of the between modernity and modesty, and appealing to region, starting with Bahrain, the homeland of her father. the right channels of communication, but Aliya The decision to go regional is to keep her perspectives seem to have struck gold with her signature Islamic fresh and to explore the intricate plurality of Arabic patterns and Indian embroidery. culture as inspiration. The sudden surge in the local fashion arena has “It is difficult to maintain the same spirit in every created a wave of designs that are trendy yet collection, but every new detail, especially when drawn similar, but what sets Aliya apart from her peers is from our history is just so enriching,” she says.

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BAHIYA AL-HAMAD

WHILE WE ARE on the topic of breaking stereotypes, no one breaks them sharply than Bahiya Al-Hamad. The soft-spoken young Olympian was the flag bearer and among the first female athletes from Qatar last year at the London Olympics. “It’s every athlete’s dream to represent their country in the Olympics. With the whole world watching us, I wanted to show everyone what Qatari women are truly capable of,” she says, her voice low and her words measured. One would think that after more than six years of training (read: having to make herself heard over the din of a shooting gallery) Bahiya would have been forced to develop a bigger voice box. But everything about her spells quiet dignity. And wielding a gun is last thing you would imagine. It started as a hobby six years ago. “Shooting is a major hobby in my family. So I used to accompany my cousins to the Qatar Shooting Club.” Two weeks after she had fired a rifle for the first

Olympic Rifle Shooter

time, she realized she wasn't going to put it down. She has been training every day since then. “Except when I have to take a break for my studies,” she reminds us. Currently pursuing her foundation studies in chemistry, she is not sure if her heart’s in it. “I’ll probably be changing my major,” she says, almost to herself. But what her heart is definitely set on is representing Qatar again in the next Olympics. Having clinched 17th position globally at her first try, it can only get better with another four years' worth of training and sporting events in her kitty. Even as she poses for the pictures, her eyes continually keep darting towards her father, who is standing at a distance, all guardian angel-esque. Dark and brooding, he sports a confused smile when he is invited into the frame but obliges nonetheless. “You know my father was the first one to agree when I told him I wanted to take up shooting professionally,” she says after the session. “Right away he said ‘No problem. Go ahead and do it.’” Looks like the whole family is in the business of wrecking stereotypes.

January-February 2014

KHALID HAS to react to the political turmoil that marks the region, and he chooses to do so online. His work is not the typical cartoons that the Arab world is familiar with. It has minimal details and a subtle punch that is completely new to the “old media regime,” and hence rejected by many mainstream publications in his native Sudan and Egypt. Thus started Khalid's personal “Arab Spring” and the world now has a political cartoonist who decided to shun the path often trod to open a Facebook page called Khartoon to pen his personal reactions to the political issues the Arab world is facing. Not surprisingly, his most popular cartoon, and his first cartoon soon after the Tunisian vendor set himself on fire, was of Khalid’s hand, with each finger representing the flag of countries like Egypt and Libya. Akin to a political analyst’s prophecy, the countries marked followed the path of the Tunisian struggle. “It doesn’t take a genius to guess that,” he laughs. Thus Khalid was in the limelight. “It just spread, it was free,” he says about his cartoon. “It was used by activists and people just picked it up.” And when

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KHALID AL-BAIH

one of his cartoons was used Political Cartoonist as graffiti on Cairo's Tahrir Square, before the fall of Mubarak, with his name on it, he knew he had found his personal calling. He says that being present, even through art, was an “honor”; for though he was not on the ground fighting for the cause, he was part of that historical movement. And that is the power of the art that Khalid wants to wield sitting in his workspace at the Qatar Museum Authority where he works as a multimedia specialist. Khalid remembers a cartoonists' convention in France where he realized how the Europeans and even the Africans could never understand the censorship issues that the Middle Easterners encounter. “They don’t understand what we have to go through,” he says. And that, he feels, is the strength of the cartoonist from the region, finding an alternative way to saying something without hurting or offending anyone. “We work around the hindrances.”

KHALID MOHAMMED ABOUJASSOUM

KHALID is a busy man. He is an entrepreneur who is out to prove to Winner, Entrepreneur the world that the country is serious in its pursuit of a knowledge-based economy. He is passionate about technology, and when he is not conceptualizing new tech-based products, he is busy mentoring young people or giving speeches at conferences. He is the country’s prized poster-child for entrepreneurship. “Somebody has to start and make it happen, though it does come with lot of pressures, from peer to social,” he says, dismissing his status quo. His one “big advantage” is his family’s support and belief in his competencies. “I usually discuss everything with my father and he encourages my entrepreneurial streak,” says Khalid, adding; “Even if they don’t understand, their trust in me is unconditional, because of my track record.” Entering the Stars of Science competition was the “craziest” thing he has ever done. Well, it would not

Stars of Science 2012

sound crazy in some parts of the world, but in the social milieu in which Khalid was brought up, where family and work take precedence over everything else, it was indeed an unconventional path to tread. “I did not tell my family until I got through and had to leave my job for the competition,” he says. The experience at Stars of Science 2012 was “intensive," remembers Khalid. It involved four months of boot camp and gave him hands-on practice at turning an idea into a practical project. The amount of confidence this completion gave him was “immense,” and “coming from a region that has lost the art of discovery and making things, and where consumption is dominant, this experience changes a lot of your assumptions, your definition of possible and impossible, and triggers a mindset or paradigm shift." Khalid is now working on two projects, commercializing "Tahi" (Arabic for "Chef") — an automated cooking pot and gamifying Stars of Science, which will then inspire other students. “There are millions of Khalids out there,” he says. “I just got lucky.”

January-February 2014

KHAWLA AL-MARRI

Khawla is an Emirati professional artist who wants to do something beyond painting the canvas. Inspiring youth is her current vocation, be it through her job or on social media. She is Head of School Programs at Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, a role that brings her in constant touch with children of all ages as she guides them to develop an appreciation for culture and art. A difficult proposition, one would think, but this is one task Khawla loves to undertake and a task, she argues, “that is not impossible." She says: “Working with students helps you understand teaching techniques. I love the way children perceive art and come up with entirely new interpretations thus opening the way for more dialogue and communication.” Khawla’s love for the creative world began early. “It is a subject that allows you to present ideas and have a dialogue with the world,” she says of her passion. And she decided to focus on presenting her culture through contemporary artwork and installation art in the Middle East and the United Kingdom. Her passion has borne fruit, too, with her work auctioned twice at Christie’s in Dubai and purchased by the Women’s Museum in Dubai. Her work is bold, bright and yet deeply submerged in the culture of the region. Her pop art and street art is free-spirited, thriving and flamboyant, almost mirroring her personality. Her tryst with the social media is not pure fun. With more than 10,000 followers on Instagram, most of her updates give the followers a glimpse into the art world of the Middle East. Choosing her own career was not at all difficult for Khawla because “the region welcomes modern and contemporary art and encourages diversity.” She has chosen her path prudently, intent to give back to the society that has nurtured her. “With the rise of the museums in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates I decided to dig deep into museum culture and understand art deeply.”

Artist and Educator

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LAYLA AL-DORANI Entrepreneur

IN A CULTURE where refusing any offering of food is considered a big taboo, Layla has made breakthroughs with her mantra of "eating to live". The yoga guru and health entrepreneur is a trailblazer in effecting healthy changes while challenging the business landscape of Qatar that is just warming up to female players. Struggling to find infrastructure and financial support for her health start-up, she poured her personal savings into the venture with a one-track mind focused towards success. In two years, through word-of-mouth marketing and social media, Raw ME Qatar now stands steadfast among health enthusiasts and new converts to the juice movement. Its core offering of cold-pressed juices and juice cleanse diets has helped changed the way many Qataris approach eating. “People realize that they don’t really need to eat that much if they are eating right,” she says. The increasing demand is pushing for the company to expand production, but as a female entrepreneur, Layla is still battling cultural norms within business institutions. “A lot of women use their husbands as proxy to get things done when it comes to business affairs, so when I approach ministries alone for papers and approvals, it is difficult for them to take me seriously,” she explains. Her pragmatic hands-on approach, including fixing her own machinery (“I broke a toenail in the process”), is also one that is uncommon in Qatar. But her efforts to keep costs to the minimum are essential so that resources can be directed to the production of healthy juices for her clients. Layla’s next vision is to rope children into the movement, to help battle the soaring numbers of diabetic and obese schoolkids in the country. “People are spending so much money on processed and sugary products. There needs to be a shift in mindset to spend the money on wholesome real food instead,” she says.

Founder, Raw ME Qatar

January-February 2014

NASSER ambled onto the Lusail racing circuit one morning in 2006 because he had heard about a tryout and thought it might be interesting. “I had never ridden a racing bike before. My experience of racing was limited to quad bikes.” Predictably, he didn’t qualify. But what he did next defies all logic. “I was upset for a while. I was sitting at home mulling it over. Then I went and bought myself a bike.” Within a week he was back on the very same track on his shiny new racing machine and this time nothing was going to stop him. “I started enjoying it more every time and I was getting better, faster and proving myself.” And though his family was a bit anxious as the business management graduate’s fascination with grease and rubber grew, Nasser says they soon came to accept his new lifestyle. After three years of entering every SuperBike race in Qatar, flying his own colors and paying for his own tires, the Qatar Motor and Motorcycle Federation sat up and took notice of him. It is only recently that Nasser has been participating in races abroad, particularly the Moto series. In fact he is still basking in his ninth position at the

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NASSER AL-MALKI

Spanish Moto2 in Barcelona. Racer (Superbikes, Moto, Endurance) His ultimate dream is to race in the Moto Grand Prix. "The riders there are much, much more experienced than me. I have been barely racing for seven years now. I still have a long way to go to be able to compete on that level and challenge bikers of that caliber.” For Nasser, the journey has only just begun. Serendipity and sheer willpower have brought him this far but many other potential racing champions in Qatar might not get that lucky. “I think we have some of the best, fastest riders in the Middle East. People here love bikes.” But there isn’t the information and training to channel this natural passion into the sport, he says. “We need training schools with qualified instructors who can teach young kids the right way to ride. Not race, just ride,” says the self-taught racer. "I would really like to help set something like that up in the future.”

One-Night Stands Remember rock’s glory days when guitarist plus hotel room equaled disaster? Bob Hardy, the bassist of the smart and infectious art-rock foursome Franz Ferdinand, isn’t tossing televisions from his window, but instead snapping selfies in bed. He has performed this ritual in every room he has stayed in on the road starting in 2005 at the Mondrian in Los Angeles (top left), when the band was there to perform its first big hit, ‘‘Take Me Out,’’ at the Grammy Awards. Eight years on, Hardy 86

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now has amassed over 320 such images, from the Prince Hotel on Japan’s Mount Naeba to the Driskill in Austin, Texas. ‘‘I don’t really like having my picture taken,’’ he says, referring to the books obscuring his face, which have included everything from Kingsley Amis’s ‘‘The Old Devils’’ to Chelsea Handler’s ‘‘Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea.’’ ‘‘This is more about just documenting my life touring and having some memory of where I have been.’’ — DAVID COLMAN

BOB HARDY. TOP ROW, FROM LEFT: MONDRIAN HOTEL, HOLLYWOOD, CALIF.; GRAND HOTEL MAJESTIC GIA BAGLIONI, BOLOGNA, ITALY; CHARLTON HOUSE, SHEPTON MALLET, ENGLAND. SECOND ROW: DRISKILL HOTEL, AUSTIN, TEX.; HOTEL STRAF, MILAN; BEAU-RIVAGE HOTEL, GENEVA. THIRD ROW: NAEBA PRINCE SKI RESORT, YUZAWA, JAPAN; WESTIN EXCELSIOR, ROME; SCANDIC FRONT HOTEL, COPENHAGEN. FOURTH ROW: MAL MAISON, ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND; THE FOUR SEASONS, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA; JARDINS SECRETS, NIMES, FRANCE.

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