Luxury January — February 2015
Features
Elegant clothes in crimson hues prove that red really is the color of Valentine’s Day.
Photographs by Jamie Hawkesworth Styled by Joe McKenna
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Lost Knowledge
To get a taxi license, London cabbies must first spend years learning every nook and cranny of the city’s 25,000 streets. But as GPS and Uber encroach on the prestigious profession, is the ultimate test of human memory just a big waste of time?
By Jody Rosen Photographs by Rory van Millinngen
82 There's Something About Quvenzhané
For the world’s biggest 11-year-old movie star, there’s more to life than red carpets, awards ceremonies and A-list friends. There’s also pizza. By Nicholas Haramis Photographs by René and Radka 86 How to Do Good Art
As he prepared for the Fondation Louis Vuitton that opened in November in Paris, the polymath Danish artist Olafur Eliasson explained that art is just one of the ways — along with politics, philanthropy and cooking — he hopes to change the world. By Ned Beauman Photographs by Nigel Shafran
ON THE COVER: Photograph by René and Radka. Styled by Julie Vianey. Quvenzhané Wallis in an Antik Batik top, QR675, antikbatik.com.
"The weather project" by Olafur Eliasson, which drew more than two million visitors to the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern.
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ANDREW DUNKLEY & MARCUS LEITH
64 The Irony of Red
Table of Contents
Page 46
Lookout 10 Sign of the Times
Andrew O’Hagan comes around to the idea that, yes, life really is better in the digital age. Fornasetti takes on Valentino; Gillian Wearing heads home; London’s new food scene; paint-splatter prints; and more. 16 Market Report
Practical and chic, low-stacked party heels are on the rise. 17
Watch Report
Diamond timepieces for evening that also work for day. 18
On Beauty
The sophisticated romance of an undone braid. 20 Take Two
Joan Collins and Alexander Wang unwrap a sparkly handbag, a bankbreaking chocolate tree and some sausage soap.
Page 42
Quality 37
In Fashion
Shimmering clothes that still allow the wearer to shine.
41 The Thing
Cartier’s mesmerizing serpentine cuff.
Clockwise from top left: the British handbag designer Anya Hindmarch in the English countryside at age 10; Prada coat, QR12,120, Jil Sander sweater, QR6,100, jilsander.com. Altuzarra skirt, QR4,015, Dior earrings, QR1,565, . Tod’s bag, QR4,620, tods.com. Céline shoes, QR3,500.
42 In Fashion
Khaki trenches that make a statement. 46 Profile in Style
Anya Hindmarch shares the precious moments and behind-the-scenes ideas of her brilliantly clever bags.
Arena
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: HINDMARCH FAMILY; ARNO FRUGIER
12 This and That
49 Food Matters
To fast or feast? Weighing the options in Germany’s Black Forest. 53 Entertainment
Hollywood’s brightest stars are lighting up Broadway.
ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
Yousef Ahmad: Story of Ingenuity, Calligraphy on paper.
Lookout Qatar
Page 27
22 This and That
Karl Lagerfeld reveals his third personality; personal shoppers in Heathrow Airport help Qatari travellers; Ulysse Nardin showcases exclusive maritime-inspired time pieces at the Qatar International Boat Show; Qatari filmmakers and artists come into their own.
24 Market Watch
Precise movements and precious gems come to the 2015 Doha Jewellery and Watches Exhibition.
26 Lap of Luxury
The eagle is a mighty creature, one that signifies strength, vision and power across cultures. In the world of Stefano Ricci, it is emblematic of the men Ricci designs for — focused, powerful and definitive in their style.
27 The Journey
Yousef Ahmad, one of the country's most coveted artists, talks about his creative evolution that has culminated in a series of work on handmade paper produced from palm trees.
28 Creative Fire
The Fire Station is all set for its rebirth. Within its walls Qatar Museums is launching a new Artist in Residence program that it hopes will nurture emerging talent while providing them a platform for the exchange of ideas.
30 Trend Watch
Punk accents contradict 70s boho riffs this season. Designers have looked to the punk subculture every decade since it hit the US, UK and Australia in the late 70s, and it still persists.
58 Wanderlust
33 The Thing
Arena Qatar
One night in 1932, Gabrielle Chanel looked up at the Parisian night sky. And thus was born Chanel jewelry.
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From carefully preserved relics of some of the oldest Buddhist temples in northern Thailand, to kitschy tattoos and hip coffee shops, Chiang Mai offers something unique for curious backpackers and culture connoisseurs.
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Copyright © 2014 The New York Times
Sign of the Times
As technology advances, plenty of nostalgists believe that certain elements of humanity have been lost. One contrarian argues that being attached to one’s iPhone is a godsend. BY ANDREW O’HAGAN
them life used to be hard. They think it’s a routine out of Charles Dickens, a tale of filthy lodgings, stale bread and no Internet, where even the most resourceful among us struggled to survive in a world without teeth-bleaching or Kindle. My daughter rolls her eyes whenever I begin my stories of woe. ‘‘Here he goes,’’ she says. ‘‘Tell the one about how you used to walk to school alone. And the other one, about how you had to remember people’s phone numbers! And: Watch this. Dad, tell the one about how you used to swim outside, like in a pond or something. With frogs in it!’’ ‘‘You know, darling. It wasn’t so long ago. And it wasn’t such a hardship either. There was actually something quite pleasant about, say, getting lost as you walked in a city, without immediately resorting to Google Maps.’’ ‘‘As if!’’ And so it goes. No contest. The infant experience of the easy life can only ridicule the idea that patience and effort used to be fine. But I’ve been trying to examine the problem from a new angle, and I keep coming back to the same truth: Life is better. In some nostalgic, carefree, totally invented Mississippi River of the mind, we were always floating downstream in a vessel of our own making, always happy to have nothing, living high on our wits and our basic decencies. But was it nice? Was life as good as it is now? One is almost programmed, if over the age of 35, to say no to this question. One is supposed to stare into the middle distance and recall the superior days of a life less needy, the rich rewards of having to wait and having to try and having to do without. But the actual truth, my friends, is that my childhood would have been greatly, no, infinitely, improved, if only I’d had a smartphone and a dog walker. To believe in progress is not only to believe in the future: It is also to usher in the possibility that the past wasn’t all that. I now feel — and this is a revelation — that my past was an interesting and quite fallow period spent waiting for the Internet. At home, I’ll continue to cause a festival of eye-rolling with my notion that some values were preserved by the low-tech environment, but, more generally speaking, life
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SHUTTERSTOCK
THE CHILDREN DON’T believe me when I tell
SYLVIE FLEURY, ‘‘YES TO ALL,’’ 2008, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK
has just gotten better and better. The question is: How far would you go with that? My daughter’s mother goes all the way. ‘‘I can sit in my holiday house in the country,’’ she says, ‘‘and order furniture, clothes, anything really, to come from London and Paris. It’s killed provincialism. It’s also killed human loneliness.’’ ‘‘That’s shocking,’’ I say. ‘‘Luxury can’t kill loneliness.’’ ‘‘You want to bet?’’ So, I’ve been on the back foot. I didn’t know it when I was young, but maybe we were just waiting for more stuff and ways to save time. Is that right? Were we just waiting for Twitter to come along and show us there were sexy and clever people out there and funny stuff happening all the time in places we’d barely even heard of? I mean, how could I ever pretend life was even half tolerable in the 1970s, when a slow game of Pong or a fast episode of ‘‘Mork & Mindy’’ felt like a glittering revelation of things to come? My God: It took punk, which was basically just a bunch of art students jumping around wearing safety pins, to wake us out of the doldrums. I grew up in a world where people did mental arithmetic just to fill the time. Then I got over it — and some. I’ve come fully round to time-saving apps. I’ve become addicted to the luxury of clicking through for just about everything I need. Yesterday morning, for example, I realized I needed to know something about a distant relative for a book I’m writing. I’m old enough to remember when one had to pack a bag and take a train; when one had to stand in queues at libraries, complete an application form, then scroll for hours through hard-to-read microfiche and take notes and repeat. I’m not 104, but I wrote a whole book that way, my first, and it took forever and it didn’t add much to most of the paragraphs. Yesterday, I had the information from an archive website in about 20 minutes. Then I made a list of winter clothes to purchase from Mr. Porter. Then I ordered a car from Uber to take me to King’s College London to teach a class, and I emailed my notes to my office computer from the car and I dealt with a dozen emails and I read a review of a restaurant I was going to that evening and watched part of a video of a ballet I was due to see before dinner. What has been lost? Nothing. Has something gone out of my experience of life by ordering all the shopping on Ocado rather than by pushing a cart around the aisles of a supermarket for an hour and a half? Yes: A pain in my backside has been relieved. It is all now done by a series of small, familiar flutterings over the keyboard, which I can do at my leisure, any time of day or night, without looking for the car keys or straining my sense of sociability by running into hundreds of people who are being similarly tortured by their own basic needs. I’ve always liked music, the sheer luxury of having a particular recording there when you want to hear it, but nothing in my long years of hunting
for and buying records can beat Spotify. I’ve heard many a nostalgist say there was something more, well, effortful, and therefore poetic, in the old system of walking for miles to a record shop only to discover they’d just sold out. People become addicted to the weights and measures of their own experience: We value our own story and what it entails. But we can’t become hostages to the romantic notion that the past is always a better country. There’s a few million girls with flatirons who will happily tell you the opposite. Getting better is getting better. Improvement is improving. There will, of course, always be people who feel alienated by a new thing and there might be a compelling argument to suggest all this availability is merely a highspeed way of filling a spiritual gap in our lives. Yet I can assure you there was no lack of spiritual gap in the lives of people living in small towns in 1982. It was just a lot harder to bridge that gap. We used to wait for years for a particular film to come on television, thinking we might never see it. One had practically to join a cult in order to share a passionate interest. I can still remember Tupperware parties, when — Oh, the good old days! — women would meet at each other’s houses on rain-soaked evenings to try out and buy pastelcolored breakfast bowls. And that was a good night! Communication was usually a stab in the dark: You might find someone to talk to about your favorite book, but more likely you wouldn’t, unless you moved to New York or took to wearing a sandwich board. And now you can find the love of your life by posting a picture and proving you’ve got a GSOH (great sense of humor). Every day now there’s something new to replace the old way of doing a crucial thing that was hard to do. Is it the middle of the night and you live in Idaho and you want to talk to someone about your roses? Is it Christmas Eve in Rome and you want to know where to hear some music and light a candle? Physical loneliness can still exist, of course, but you’re never friendless online. Don’t tell me the spiritual life is over. In many ways it’s only just begun. Technology is not doing what the sci-fi writers warned it might — it is not turning us into digits or blank consumers, into people who hate community. Instead, there is evidence that the improvements are making us more democratic, more aware of the planet, more interested in the experience of people who aren’t us, more connected to the mysteries of privacy and surveillance. It’s also pressing us to question what it means to have life so easy, when billions do not. I lived through the age of complacency, before information arrived and the outside world liquified its borders. And now it seems as if the real split in the world will not only be between the fed and the unfed, the healthy and the unhealthy, but between those with smartphones and those without. Technology changed my character. It didn’t
What a supreme luxury it is, being able to experience nowadays your own reach in the world, knowing that there truly is no backwater, except the one you happily remember from the simple life of yore. change my parents’. My mother says she wasn’t touched by the moon landing or the Internet, though she admits that having a fridge has made a wonderful difference. She’s not nostalgic for the days when they would place the milk bottles out on the window ledge overnight — that does the trick, in Scotland — though she has a general feeling that life was cozier and friendlier years ago. I must have taken some of that from her, but the more I think of it the more I see it as an affectation. For me, life did not become more complex with technology, it’s became more amenable, and what a supreme luxury it is, being able to experience nowadays your own reach in the world, knowing that there truly is no backwater, except the one you happily remember from the simple life of yore. My daughter was right to laugh. Because what she was hearing was a hint of vanity and a note of pride in my stories of the unimproved life. In point of fact, we sat in the past and burned with the desire to get out, to meet people, to find our voices, to discover the true meaning of luxury in our confrontation with a panoply of genuine choices. Our wish wasn’t to plant a flag on the ground of what we knew and defend it until death, but to sail out, not quite knowing what was past the horizon but hoping we might like it when we got there. My favorite record when I was a teenager, trapped in a box bedroom in a suburban corner of old Europe, was ‘‘How Soon Is Now?’’ by the Smiths. I had taken a bus and a train and walked for miles to buy the record, and it told a story about giving yourself up to experience. I don’t know where the physical record has gone. It’s probably still in my mother’s attic. But the song is right here at the end of my fingertips as I’m typing, and in the new, constantly improving world around us, it took me just under 15 seconds to locate it. Would anyone care to dance?
January - February 2015
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Lookout
This and That A Cultural Compendium
ILLUSTRATIONS BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS
ON THE VERGE
Jewels Without Gems
A Gilded Getaway Everything about La Réserve, a new Haussmann-style hotel and spa which recently opened in the Eighth Arrondissement in Paris, harkens back to the grandeur of the Belle Époque. Like previous collaborations between the interior designer Jacques Garcia and the hotelier and vintner Michel Reybier (La Réserve’s Geneva property and the chateau at Reybier’s 225-acre vineyard in Bordeaux), the secluded 40-room residence is an exercise in effortless glamour, adorned with rare antiques and draped in ghost damask, papal purple and ballet-satin pink. For the full Baudelairian experience, there’s also a smoking parlor and round-the-clock butler service. lareserve-paris.com — DANIEL SCHEFFLER
— MARELLA CARACCIOLO CHIA
The New Marylebone
A FINE MESS Clockwise from above: fried chicken with collard greens and black-eyed peas at the Lockhart; Chiltern Firehouse’s 19th-century facade; butterscotch-drizzled ice cream at Fischer’s. Far right: grilled sardines and fried cassava at Shuttlecock Inc’s Pan Am-themed dinner event, Mile High.
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T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine
Since the February opening of André Balazs’s Chiltern Firehouse — and its celebritypacked restaurant — the quiet neighborhood of Marylebone has turned into London’s latest culinary destination. Away from the paparazzi, there’s Fischer’s, a new Viennesestyle cafe from the restaurateurs behind the beloved Wolseley and the just-launched Beaumont Hotel. Nearby, at Beast, diners feast on Norwegian crab and Nebraskan steak around candelabra-topped communal tables set underground. For upscale Southern comfort, the Lockhart serves fried chicken with friggitelli peppers, while Carousel is the new headquarters of Shuttlecock Inc, which stages culinary events with themes like ‘‘Canada Day’’ and ‘‘the golden age of air travel.’’ And next spring, the crew behind Clerkenwell’s eccentric Zetter Townhouse will unveil a second location in the area, with a curiosity-filled lounge serving molecular cocktails and modern bistro fare. chilternfirehouse.com, fischers.co.uk, beastrestaurant.co .uk, lockhartlondon.com, carousellondon.com, thezettertownhouse.com — CHRISTINE AJUDUA
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: FEDERICA CIOCCOLONI (3); JOE OKPAKO/PROJOE PHOTOGRAPHY; COURTESY OF FISCHERS; TIM CLINCH; PATRICIA NIVEN
NOW BOOKING
Instead of mining precious metals and stones to create her one-of-a-kind accessories, the Italian jewelry designer Olivia Monti Arduini makes necklaces and bracelets — and even corsets, capes and vests — out of MODEST RICHES From porcelain. There is a top: the Waterfall necklace, about luminous quality to her QR8,750; the designer pieces, one of which Olivia Monti Arduini; the Opium necklace, inspired a show of erotic about QR6,920. jewelry in Madrid last spring, and a lightness of touch that belies her painstaking craft. Acknowledging that the average necklace takes about 20 hours to make by hand, Monti Arduini says with a laugh, ‘‘While I love the Zen-like concentration, I doubt I will ever find an assistant patient enough to help me.’’ oliviamontiarduini.com
Lookout
This and That
PERFECT PAIRING
Fornasetti and Valentino come together on a new project that sparks the senses.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: UGO MULAS/GIOVANNI GASTEL; COURTESY OF VALENTINO (4); DAVID BAILEY. ILLUSTRATIONS BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS
THE SURREAL LIFE Above: the Valentino creative directors Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri. Top right: the designer Barnaba Fornasetti. Fornasetti for Valentino items, clockwise from left: a serving tray, plate, scarf and stool.
Valentino ended last year with a bang. Their New York flagship store opened in December and, the label’s creative directors, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, staged a haute couture spectacle uptown at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The one-nightonly event also debuted a collaboration with Barnaba Fornasetti, who took over his family’s design and decorative arts firm after his father Piero’s death in 1988. Each of the items — a stool, a foulard, a serving tray, an eyeglasses case and a plate — corresponded to one of the five senses. If the elder Fornasetti’s madcap surrealism was at odds with the rational beauty of Valentino Garavani, the couturier who founded the house, their successors have more in common. All three are believers in bottega dell’arte, or ‘‘art workshop,’’ which Piccioli likens to Andy Warhol’s Factory. ‘‘To make something pop, it has to be with people, not all alone in an atelier,’’ Chiuri says. ‘‘It almost has to be like an accident.’’ The Fornasetti pieces do look a little accidental, by way of a Dadaish cut-up trick: each is one part camouflage print, designed by Piccioli and Chiuri, and one part woman, illustrated by Fornasetti in his father’s pen-and-ink style. She is black and white, but her lips are Valentino red. Fornasetti for Valentino items will be available exclusively at 693 Fifth Avenue, N.Y. — SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT
FASHION MEMO
Color Outside the Lines This season, smeared, spotted and splattered clothing paints a pretty picture.
From left: Céline shoes, QR2,440, barneys.com. Dior jacket, QR24,040. Dries Van Noten jacket, QR6,120, mohawkgeneralstore.com. Proenza Schouler bag, QR3,200.
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ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
Gillian Wearing Goes Home The Turner Prize-winning artist on returning to her roots in her new film.
THEATER TALK
The stars aligned for the stage debut of a Gershwin classic.
‘‘I’m from the West Midlands, an in-between place near a congested motorway on stilts and fields with horses and a river. There’s all this lovely landscape, but it’s just a place for people to get from A to B. My mother still lives there, and it’s where I shot my new film, ‘We Are Here.’ I’d always wanted to shoot something where I grew up, to go back to that point in my life where I was learning things for the first time. I have a very specific visual memory of my home. I saw beauty there that no one else could see, and I saw it with a sense of loss and regret, as if from beyond the grave. The film’s title is taken from a little passage in Edgar Lee Masters’s ‘Spoon River Anthology,’ a collection of poems by fictional people who lived in a small town, where one says, ‘And we — we, the memories, stand here for ourselves alone. For no eye marks us, or would know why we are here.’ ’’
regenprojects.com
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: DAVID LEVENE/EYEVINE/REDUX; GILLIAN WEARING/ COURTESY REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES; GILLIAN WEARING/COURTESY REGEN PROJECTS LOS ANGELES, AND MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON; GIANNI ANTONIALI/IKON; SAVERIO LOMBARDI VALLAURI. ILLUSTRATION BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS
Paris has recently become a breeding ground for Broadway hopefuls. A new musical based on the rollicking Vincente Minnelli movie ‘‘An American in Paris’’ was held there, and will travel to the Great White Way this spring. The circumstances surrounding its creation were unusually collaborative. The Théâtre du Châtelet’s general director Jean-Luc Choplin thought it would be fun to mount the musical, which originated as an orchestral work by George Gershwin, but when he contacted the Gershwin estate about obtaining rights, he learned that the veteran Broadway producers Van Kaplan and Stuart Oken had the same idea. They decided to work together, hiring the star choreographer Christopher Wheeldon to direct. ‘‘Gershwin worked a lot in Paris in the 1920s, and it’s great to have his music back here,’’ he says. ‘‘But to take it to New York too? That’s the cherry on the cake.’’ chatelet-theatre.com — DANA THOMAS
PECULIAR BEAUTY Left: a still from ‘‘We Are Here’’; below, a still from ‘‘Fear and Loathing,’’ the other film in her ‘‘Everyone’’ show.
BY DESIGN
The Artist is Seated
ATTENTION TO DETAIL Above: a performance at the University of Milan of Marina Abramovic’s ‘‘Counting the Rice’’ on a wooden prototype of the architect Daniel Libeskind’s table. Right: the new concrete model.
Marina Abramovic has joined forces with the architect Daniel Libeskind and the furniture design firm Moroso to create a limited-edition table from her ongoing ‘‘Counting the Rice’’ performance, in which participants are instructed to sit down and separate lentils from rice for at least six hours while keeping a tally. ‘‘During the process, people go through many emotions,’’ Abramovic says. ‘‘They get bored, they get angry and then they have a feeling of timelessness.’’ The futuristic concrete pew recalls the oblique angles often seen in Libeskind’s work while reflecting the austerity of the performance. Any sense of asceticism, however, ends there — the first of 30 tables, which are being sold at auction, went for roughly QR382,660 this fall at Fondation Beyeler in Basel. Moroso — TOM DELAVAN January - February 2015
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MIU MIU SHOES, MIUMIU.COM. ROCHAS SANDALS, SIMILAR STYLES AT MODAOPERANDI.COM. NICHOLAS KIRKWOOD SANDALS, SIMILAR STYLES AT NICHOLASKIRKWOOD.COM. AQUAZZURA SANDALS, BERGDORFGOODMAN.COM. PIERRE HARDY SHOES, PIERREHARDY.COM. MICHAEL KORS SANDALS. LOUIS VUITTON SHOES. VALENTINO GARAVANI SANDALS.
Lookout
Market Report
Party Shoes A low stacked heel is a joyfully practical choice for a night on the town. PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOANNA M C CLURE
Clockwise from top left: Miu Miu, QR3,240. Rochas, QR2,460. Nicholas Kirkwood, QR2,040. Aquazzura, QR2,730. Pierre Hardy, QR4,170. Michael Kors, QR2,000. Louis Vuitton, about QR7,870. Valentino Garavani, QR4,720.
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ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
Watch Report
TOP ROW: STYLED BY MALINA JOSEPH GILCHRIST. MODEL: JUN YOUNG AT TRUMP. MAKEUP BY ANNE KOHLHAGEN FOR DIORSKIN AT SUSAN PRICE NYC. HAIR BY RO MORGAN AT SUSAN PRICE NYC. MANICURE BY YUKO TSUCHIHASHI FOR DIOR VERNIS AT SUSAN PRICE NYC. BOTTOM ROW: STYLED BY JASON RIDER. MODEL: SIGNE RASMUSSEN AT NEXT. MAKEUP BY AKIKO SAKAMOTO USING CHANEL FOR SEE MANAGMENT. HAIR BY RACHEL TOLIN USING ORIBE. MANICURE BY RIEKO OKUSA FOR DIOR VERNIS AT SUSAN PRICE NYC
Dressing Down The new diamond timepieces for evening have an oversize masculinity that makes them fitting even for day. PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHARLIE ENGMAN
Top left: Chanel Mademoiselle Privé, QR145,520; Rag & Bone sweater, QR1,800, rag-bone.com. Calvin Klein Collection pants, QR5,080. Top right: Hublot Classic Fusion, QR44,800, hublot.com. The Row sweater, QR3,825, neimanmarcus.com. Jil Sander pants, QR1,860, bergdorfgoodman.com. Bottom right: Baume & Mercier Promesse, QR25,315, baume-et-mercier.com. Proenza Schouler sweater, QR4,190. Chloé skirt, QR6,740, net-a-porter.com. Bottom left: Patek Philippe 5298P Calatrava, QR421,800. Marc Jacobs cardigan, QR3,020. Ralph Lauren Collection skirt, QR5,800, ralphlauren.com.
January - February 2015
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Lookout
On Beauty
In Praise of Messy Braids This winter, unkempt plaits — relaxed and lived-in — are the perfect complement to evening wear. BY CATHERINE LACEY
quite as elegant as the French braids some of my classmates wore. Densely folded and a little severe, the style implied so much: a meticulous parent, leisurely mornings and adequate protein consumption. Wearing their braids like shiny armor, these girls seemed prepared for the trials of middle school. I had my hands in too much paint and glue for my parents to ever let my hair grow past my shoulders, but even if I’d had the locks for a French braid, I would have lacked the personality to pull it off. There are those who braid and those who give up when they realize how many ‘‘easy steps’’ it takes to complete a deceptively simple hairstyle. My arms ache just thinking of all the girls straining today in front of YouTube videos and angled mirrors to recreate the inverted Dutch style made famous by Katniss 20
T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine
IMAGES COURTESY OF SHUTTERSTOCK
AS A CHILD IN RURAL AMERICA, I thought there was nothing
and untrained, depending on your perspective). For this reason, I’m happy to see an uptick of wild, livedin braids on the streets and on runways of late, their affect more personal and approachable than those of my homeroom days. The models in Erdem’s latest spring show wore slightly undone, simple English braids with lush, elaborate gowns: The look was formal but off-kilter. Then there were the barely-even-braided braids that seemed to hang off the coifs of Pucci models — the results of an arduous day, perhaps, or of indecision (up or down?). Michael Kors’s truly untamed plaits suggested a bit more intimacy; this was the kind of bedhead you mostly see on lovers or roommates, only here it was paired with prim dresses and skirts in nostalgic prints. A tomboyish counterpoint to the lace and lipstick of the holiday season, an untidy braid suggests warmth, activity and having better things to do than fuss over some exacting updo or sleek blowout. Of course, effortless appeal rarely comes without effort. Hairstylists will tell you there are products necessary to achieve a truly insouciant messy braid, one that stays just loose enough without unraveling completely. Anthony Turner, who styled the Everdeen in ‘‘The Hunger Games’’ — a Erdem spring show, recommends a base spray to scrupulous coil that wraps diagonally stop the braid from slipping, a pin-tail comb to around the skull from crown to nape. It create a strong center part, a Mason Pearson comes as no surprise that a woman who brush for back combing and then, with hair could create such a painstaking pulled over the ears, simple elastics to formation upon her own head could secure the braid, followed by a dry launch an arrow at a small animal from shampoo to give a matte finish. And, he a startling distance. adds, ‘‘Try to train yourself not to think What I can manage is a certain kind about it too much.’’ of half-do, one that requires the My method is less expert, but has a minimum of skill and allows for the WILD WEAVES Clockwise from top left: a relaxed certain everyday authenticity: Make maximum of error, and which is held braid; Clinique hairspray to hold the style, QR50; Kérastase Powder Bluff dry shampoo a halfhearted attempt at the braid of together at the nape of the neck with to create a matte finish, QR135; a short tail; Alterna Haircare Caviar your choosing. Then go about your bobby pins. Like my own origins, this Clinical foam for volume and lift, QR130, alternahaircare.com; Oribe Maximista Thickening Spray to create texture so the braid busy day. Voila! By evening, the braid — let’s call it the American — is will hold, QR100; Bumble and Bumble Surf Spray, a salt water messy braid is yours. And you make it an amalgam of European styles but is solution for a windblown look, QR95, bumbleandbumble.com; a traditional braid just slightly askew. look so easy. more relaxed and untethered (or lazy
PRODUCTS: MARKO METZINGER (7). ALL OTHER IMAGES COURTESY OF SHUTTERSTOCK
Like my own origins, this braid — let’s call it the American — is an amalgam of European styles but is more relaxed and untethered (or lazy and untrained, depending on your perspective).
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Lookout
A dual review of what’s new.
Joan Collins
Alexander Wang
O.B.E.-decorated English actress, no-holds-barred memoirist and sharpclawed catfight queen whose cosmetics, skincare and fragrance line, Timeless Beauty, is available through QVC UK.
American fashion’s boy wonder and creative director of Balenciaga whose recent H&M collection further established the downtown scenester as a household name.
Love the bag, hate the decoration. To me, it looks like some old tinsel was bunched together and stuck on it. It’s for somebody with not a great deal of taste.
I’m squeamish at the sight of blood. But if I’m being honest, once you’ve seen one pickled brain in a jar, you’ve seen them all. This would be a great gift for a very sick person.
I don’t need it. All I do before bed is take off my makeup, put on my night cream, clean my teeth and watch an episode of ‘‘Downton Abbey’’ or ‘‘Orange Is the New Black.’’
Oh my god! I can’t think of anything more ghastly! If I had to have soap with the aroma of food, I’d choose eggs. Or freshly baked bread, like the croissants you get in Provence.
I can’t have this in the house! I am a total chocoholic. I’m like a drug addict for chocolate. I would probably eat the whole thing.
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Marc Jacobs Bag Metallic ‘‘Mini Trouble’’ with party bow (QR4,920).
Creepy Book
I personally don’t change my wardrobe for the holidays, but, I have to say, it’s a very good-quality Christmas bow. I think it’ll do really well in the Asian market.
I don’t like anything internal. I called in sick on dissection day in biology class. But I am obsessed with plastic surgery shows. I love to see what people look like afterward.
‘‘Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital’’ (QR145).
Techy Night Light A device that tracks and improves sleep using sound and color (QR1,090).
Meat Wash Frank Leder’s Bavarian sausage hand soap (QR175).
Edible Tree A limited-edition nine-pound, 25-tier chocolate sculpture (QR4,190).
I’m really good at sleeping. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of. I can sleep anywhere, anytime, so I don’t know if it would be the first thing I would buy. Getting up is a harder task.
I thought it was some sort of cough-syrupy sausage marinade. It doesn’t smell salty, which is good. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather my hands not smell like pork.
First thought: toothache. And I only like bittersweet dark chocolate, although I did like the pistachios. I prefer dried fruit to chocolate — anything dehydrated, really.
ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
COLLINS: NATE BECKETT/SPLASH NEWS/CORBIS. WANG: BEN HORTON/GETTY IMAGES FOR CURVE. FROM TOP: COURTESY OF MARC JACOBS; ‘‘MALFORMED’’ BY ADAM VOORHES AND ALEX HANNAFORD/PUBLISHED BY POWERHOUSE BOOKS; WITHINGS; BRET WOODARD; LA MAISON DU CHOCOLAT
Take Two
Lookout Qatar
This and That
Ahead of Its Time
The Third Personality Karl Lagerfeld expands his fashion universe. In the 1949 British cult noir film The Third Man, novelist Holly Martins explores an extension of himself through the projection of a third personality — an idea that the multifaceted designer Karl Lagerfeld references in the work of his own eponymous label. In Lagerfeld’s context, the first two roles as long-time creative director of both Chanel and Fendi have shaped what most of the public perceives, but in Karl Lagerfeld brand is the image of a third woman closest to his personal style and taste. “It’s a proposition many women can identify without being part of a special category,” he explains. There’s a definitive monochrome look to the collections, much like the black and white outfit that Lagerfeld has always worn, finished off with a sense of punk. It is also within this label that Lagerfeld has expounded on his universe, giving rise to ‘Karlism’ — a collection of quotes that gives vision to his clothes and ‘Karl Daily’ — a newspaper dedicated to his views and works. The inaugural Karl Lagerfeld boutique in the region finds its home in Lagoona Mall, spanning 80 square meters and equipped with interactive technology to bring to life the world of Karl. The designer has long been inspired by old Arab culture (“what we call in Europe, ‘Orientalism’”) and the stylized designs of Arab calligraphy, ceramics and tiles. As for the rising style makers from this region, “I love the look and style of Arab women that are unique to their culture,” he says. — DEBRINA ALIYAH
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you buy one of our timepieces you become part of a lasting legacy. These watches are built for watch connoisseurs. They are limited pieces for serious buyers. The first watch starts at $7,000 (QR25,490).” Chorao mentions some of the many unique features of the timekeepers, “The watches don’t rust and need no service, for life.” In a competitive industry, this is a company unafraid of imitations. “We are not so concerned about counterfeits. It is not easy to duplicate these pieces because each watch is full of complex mechanisms.” The Freak piece, for example, has no hands and no dial. — ABIGAIL MATHIAS
THE LIST Bvlgari Diva, Heathrow airport price, £285 (QR 1,580); Mulberry Oxblood Lily in Ostrich Mix, £2083.33 (QR11,480).
The Lives of the Rich and Famous A new research conducted among High Net Worth (HNW) individuals in Qatar has revealed that nearly three quarters (72%) prefer to spend money on quality experiences rather than owning more luxury items. The research, commissioned by Heathrow Airport’s VIP Service, revealed that a desire for privacy was the main motivation for choosing experiences rather than acquiring more possessions. It is with providing this exclusivity that Heathrow Airport’s VIP Service was made available to First Class and Business Class travellers, flying on any airline to or from Heathrow. The service is designed to offer travellers total privacy, with a personal lounge where both check-in and security are taken care of, and a luxury limousine delivers the passenger directly to the steps of the departing flight. Lubna Shaddad Rojas, Personal Shopper at Heathrow Airport says: “As a stylist, my job is to do the hard work for the shopper,” says Rojas. “I find things based on my customer’s brief and collect it from stores located across all our different terminals.” Qatari customers seem to have fallen prey to this indulgence as “research shows that Qatari customers are among the region's most frequent users of the service”, according to Rojas. “Around 32,000 Qataris visited our stylists last year. The average spend of our Qatari customer was around QR7,134 (£1,200).” — SINDHU NAIR
ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF KARL LAGERFELD; COURTESY OF ULYSSE NARDIN; COURTESY OF HEATHROW AIPORT SERVICE
Ulysse Nardin made its presence felt at the recently concluded Qatar International Boat Show (QIBS). The watchmakers have been partnering with the boat show since its inception; this year they showcased some unique pieces. Christophe Chorao, Managing Director, Middle East talks about the timepieces that have defined his brand. “We have always been associated with the sea, so this is a fitting place for us,” says Chorao. Keeping with the maritime activities is a tradition that is passed through generations, “We have been the official timekeeper for the Monaco yacht show for more than a decade,” says Chorao. “When
Melting Pot A view through the eyes of Qatari and Brazilian artists. The final event in the Qatar Brazil 2014 Year of Culture calender — Here There — showcases the works of 42 artists from the two countries at Al Riwaq gallery till March 30, 2015. Exploring the environmental, cultural and social aspects of life in Qatar and Brazil, the works have been curated by three teams (one for Qatari artists, one for Brazilian and the last dealing with artists’ books) spread across five countries. While the artists chosen are mostly young (this is most obvious in the post-modern, conceptual works of the Brazilian artists), veterans like Ernesto Neto and Khalifa Al Obaidly are also featured. “The variety of work explores thought-provoking and challenging themes that people of both countries will understand and relate to,” says Alanoud Al Buainain, one of the curators of Qatari art (and an artist herself). The various installations — from 3D models and murals to photographs and collapsing sculptures — are intended as a commentary on the transformation of culture and society in these two countries; a dialogue on where we are coming from, where we are heading and what we are losing or gaining in the process, through the eyes of the respective countries' most impactful artists. — AYSWARYA MURTHY MAKING CONNECTIONS ACROSS A THOUSAND MILES Selected works from the show feature celebrated and emerging Qatari and Brazilian artists.
Tales From the Desert The country’s latent filmmaking talent got its due in the spotlight at the Ajyal Film Festival where over two dozen short films and documentaries created in Qatar were screened.
COURTESY OF QATAR MUSEUMS, COURTESY OF DOHA FILM INSTITUTE
MADE IN QATAR Left: Amreeka Laa!; Below: Hind's Dream.
The subject matter was as varied as the storytelling styles, and it was a unique treat to be flying to Istanbul with the national chess team only to return to Doha 15 minutes later to fight off a horde of zombies. For the audience, the experience was satisfying, with a range of emotions being tugged on in short bursts of time — whether they were relating to a hapless mobile phone addict, or sympathizing with a young, expat who has been lured into the country with the promise of a good job, or wandering the city along with the spirit of a recently deceased woman as she gets a glimpse into the lives of her loved ones after her death. An accomplished jury that included Emirati animator Mohammed Saeed Harib, Bahraini artist Hala Mohammed Al Khalifa and a veteran of Qatari theatre Saad Borshi presented several awards for artistic vision, acting prowess, cinematography and other technical aspects of filmmaking. Surprisingly, many of the entries were from first time filmmakers, often students. From stunning CGI to compelling claymation, the two nights were testimony to the technical mastery of young filmmakers in the region, in addition to a glimpse into the preoccupations of the younger generation in the country today — injustice, health, communication, humanity, horror and hope. — AYSWARYA MURTHY
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Lookout Qatar
Market Watch
Fine Things Precise movements and precious gems come to the 2015 Doha Jewellery and Watches Exhibition. BY DEBRINA ALIYAH
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: BAUME ET MERCIER; CARTIER; DAVID WEBB; IWC; HERMES; GARRARD
Clockwise from top left: Clifton in alligator strap, Baume et Mercier; Ronde Louis in filigree panther motif, Cartier; Snake bracelet with carved coral, emeralds and diamonds, David Webb; Portugieser annual calendar, IWC; Medor mini steel with diamonds geranium, Hermes; Wings collection duo ring, Garrard.
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ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JAEGER-LECOULTRE; LONGINES; MIKIMOTO; PIAGET; PASQUALE BRUNI; ZENITH; VACHERON CONSTANTIN; MOUAWAD
Clockwise from top left: Rendez-vous Celestial automatic, Jaeger-LeCoultre; Conquest 1/100th Horse Racing, Longines; adjustable necklace with Akoya cultured pearl, coral, jadeite and diamond, Mikimoto; Black Tie vintage inspiration in pink gold, Piaget; special Bon Ton edition in fluorescent lemon, Pasquale Bruni ; Academy tribute to Felix Baumgartner edition, Zenith; The Year of the Goat series in platinum, Vacheron Constantin; Source de Vie ring in sapphires and diamonds, Mouawad.
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Lookout Qatar
Lap of Luxury
It is All in the Details Subtle elements that are not outwardly visible form the arch of luxury at Stefano Ricci.
COLOR PALETTE Clockwise from top right: the ancient silk looms at Antico Setificio Fiorentino; the eagle head mannequin is the house's signature; the creation of a suit by Florentine craftsmen.
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In the world of Stefano Ricci, the visual of the eagle is emblematic as a mannequin head adornment representing the men that Ricci designs for — focused, powerful and definitive in their style. There’s a dignified air in the Doha boutique that resounds with its highly private yet prolific clients. Swatches of fine fabrics for bespoke tailoring and ready-to-wear cashmeres share space with hand-crafted home silverware. The values of the house find an appreciative audience this part of the world, with clients flying in the house’s master tailors at convenience. It is an engaging process that allows the construction of a suit to go beyond just numbers and measurements. “When the master tailor meets the client, he will be able to derive the personality, movements and needs of a real person,” explains Dario Donnini, the house's global sales and strategies manager. The little details are then communicated to the atelier back in Florence, where befittingly, suits are crafted from hand entirely. “Life, business, friendship and even romance, are all based on details. It is in the details that we pursue higher standards,” Donnini says. There’s an enchanting sense of Florentine pride to the house, as many Italian labels can attest, traced to the refined craftsmanship of local artisans. The preservation of artisanal work and commercial viability have become inseparable elements in flying the ‘Made In Italy’ flag, something that the house cemented through its purchase of the eighteenth-century Antico Setificio Fiorentino silk workshop in 2010. It is the last remaining workshop in the world that still operates antique looms to produce silk; the semi-mechanical looms were designed by the genius Leonardo Da Vinci himself. Working by special commissions, the workshop produces
T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine
made-to-measure fabrics including the Uccellini damask silk that was used by Stefano Ricci to present a special eveningwear line. For a house that is very much rooted in familial values, the acquiring of the silk workshop is homage to their ancestral land’s history. “Stefano and his wife Claudia founded the house with a lifestyle vision and now their children, Filippo and Nicolo, have come into the business too. It is very much a family thing,” Donnini explains. At the heart of the creative process, Stefano himself remains the source for innovations and new ideas. Sketches and directive on fabrics and leather are then brought to life through the master crafters, in a business that now expands into home décor and yachting interiors. “There are special requests to create garments in exotic crocodile skins to match the interiors of cars or yachts,” Donnini says. The process entails long hours of research for a perfect patch of leather or fabric to create the commissioned item. Though classical in production, the house finds modernity in the ready-to-wear collections. Silhouettes are updated to contemporary needs with outerwear becoming trimmer, and fabrics are manipulated to include cashmere and silk blends this season. “The signature lies in the details that are noticable only to the wearer,” Donnini points out. Semi-precious stones adorn shirts and fur collars while the Prince of Wales check is the arch to this season’s silks. “Crocodile skin accessories are always treated to be soft to appear unostentatious,” Donnini explains. One final gesture that is meant only for private appreciation, is the eagle head in an octagonal frame stitched onto the insides of jackets. After all, even the most powerful of men needs a little selfaffirmation.
IMAGES COURTESY OF STEFANO RICCI
BY DEBRINA ALIYAH
Lookout Qatar
The Journey
The History of Yousef's Work Yousef Ahmad is one of the country's coveted artists and he shares his creative journey that has culminated in a series of work on handmade paper produced from palm trees. BY SINDHU NAIR PHOTOGRAPHY BY SEMA PANTHER
A RETROSPECTIVE Clockwise from top: Yousef Ahmad one of the country’s coveted artists shares his creative journey; the latest of his works: paper made from palm leaves are arranged geometrically within a frame; Traditional Tailor, one of Ahmad's early paintings; Fort Al Zubarah, portrayal of a bygone era.
YOUSEF AHMAD talks to his Qatari countrymen with an
easy familiarity. Sitting outside his exhibition,Yousef Ahmad: Story of ingenuity, at Qatar Museum Gallery in Katara, Ahmad talks animatedly to the Qatari visitors. But he does it with equal enthusiasm when the next group of visitors walks in. This time it is an Indian family, and he explains his work with a patience that comes naturally to him. He is from the older generation of Qataris who have seen the country rise from oblivion to gratification; from pearl trading to oil and gas wealth; a country that wants to make its name not just on spot deals, but leave a cultural mark in the region with not much of its own but from curating exhibitions and buying art, artefacts and installations sourced through its immense wealth. But the country has a few homegrown artists too and Ahmad is one of them and perhaps the most well-known. Ahmad has similar goals as his country, but he is much more specific; he wants to create something from his country's soil, something that is entirely Qatar's own. “It should have the smell of Qatar,” he says, and in his pursuit for such creative insights, he happened to experiment on palm tree leaves from which he produced handmade paper. His latest artwork is a culmination of this new paper while using desert pigments from the earth of Qatar to create rustic effects in geometric and very balanced frames along with calligraphic annotations. “You need to work hard to make your work unique. This is the difference between a real artist and others mediocre ones,” Ahmad says about his pursuit for a personal signature line of art. The exhibition highlights the Qatari artist's body of work through a selection of his most striking artworks from his early career in the 1970s until today. It showcases three phases in Ahmad's artistic development, from the early oil paintings that include the historic depiction of Al Zubarah Fort, to his mixed media calligraphic pieces and then through to his new conceptual artworks presenting his ability in developing an innovative artistic style. “Most of the people know me for my calligraphic work,
but there are some who have known me from my early days,” says Ahmad, taking us through his journey in selfrealization and artistic revelation. This exhibition is a short curation of Ahmad’s work in the last 40 years. “The first painting shows our early glory of the Al Zubara Fort area and it has never been shown to the outside world. The next room shows calligraphic textures. That was done when I was a professional calligraphist of Al Arab magazine. It gives you an appetizer to take you to the next phase of my career,” says Ahmad, leading us to the next room where he has exhibited his most recent art, work on handmade paper from Qatar. “The whole world is against pollution and with global warming upon us, it is imperative that we take responsible action. I want to be part of this movement and my work is in response to this scare,” says Ahmad. Yousef Ahmad: Story of ingenuity, located at the QM Gallery, Building 10, Katara, is on display from November 2014 until February 14, 2015.
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Lookout Qatar
THE FIRST GLIMPSE Clockwise from left: Hala Al Khalifa gives us tantilising sneak peaks of the repurposed structure; a view from inside; the other side of the honey comb; the refurbished exteriors.
Creative Fire
A Spark. A Flame. An Inferno. The Fire Station is all set for its rebirth. Here is the sonogram. The picture might be fuzzy, the lines unclear, and each of us may be pointing at different things, but the thrill of anticipation is real. And so are the dreams and possibilities.
ON THE SURFACE, nothing would change. Sure, the bright, red
fire trucks would be conspicuous by their absence but they have been long gone in any case. As Hala Al Khalifa most memorably puts it, “the inhabitants of the old civil defense building will no longer be putting out fires; they'll be igniting them”. The fires of creativity; of a new consciousness. Come March this year, the iconic structure which used to house the fire department reinvents itself as the home of Qatar Museum’s Artist in Residence program, headed by Al Khalifa. For nine months, 20 local artists from a range of disciplines will be rubbing elbows within its honeycomb walls; early participants in the country’s first such experiment to tap into the grassroots and unleash its hidden potential. The goal is lofty but the steps leading up to it are simple. Small. And surefooted. And it starts with the building. “There is a grandness and beauty to the building,” Al Khalifa says. “Any building that is being repurposed automatically has a history, a magic.” The building will continue to be called Mathafi. The Fire Station. The 700 square meters of garage space will now be
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hosting exhibitions. Inside, walls will be pulled down to create “raw, industrial-looking” artists’ studios. Within its concrete and metal confines, poets will dream, photographers will moodily contemplate their prints, and artists, with paint splattered on their noses, will swivel their brushes with wild abandon. This is the picture Al Khalifa paints as she sits with her colleague Anum Bashir at Al Riwaq gallery, which is currently hosting Here There; a major exhibition for Qatar Museum that has turned the spotlight on Qatari artists, some of whom are exhibiting for the first time. In many ways, this is a preview of what is to come and what the Fire Station is going to be about, they say; the celebration of young Qatari talent, many hitherto unknown. The Fire Station will take this further with "an indigenous, local approach to art production”, according to Bashir. “A large part of being a successful landscape for art and culture is to produce within the country and give young artists the platform to grow, exhibit and collaborate.” The take away from Here There is the the pleasant realisation that now many
IMAGES COURTESY OF QATAR MUSEUMS
BY AYSWARYA MURTHY
THROUGH THE ARTIST'S EYE Computer models of the reinvented Fire Station don't reveal too many clues as to what may have changed inside although we are told to expect a complete revamp.
better.” This is at the very core of the Fire Station philosophy. “We bring in a young fashion designer, shove him alongside a sculptor and tell them, ‘Now make something cool, inspiring,’” she laughs. Though the residency starts only in September, the Fire Station will officially open in March this year with a nostalgic show featuring some of Qatar’s finest artists, who were part of a similar clique almost 20 years ago. Artists like Dia Azzawi, Mahmoud Obaidi, Yousef Ahmad, Ibrahim El Salahi — the old boys club of Qatari art — were part of the very first residency held in 1995 under the auspicious of Sheikh Hassan. “It was a private, low key and intimate affair,” Al Khalifa says. “And it played an important role in the evolution of the art scene here, resulting in a domino effect in the 90s.” The show pays homage to this unassuming little meeting of the minds and the series of events that it led to and reflects on “how we are here today because of it”. She doesn’t give away anything more but it's clear that this opening will be symbolic of the veterans “passing on the baton to the next generation”. Chatting with the ladies, who exude a scrappy, young startup kind of enthusiasm, it’s easy to forget that they have the whole weight of Qatar Museums rooting for them. So not only will the residency entail mentorship and critique from respected local artists, it would put the residents in close contact with some of the big international names that the museum continually attracts; the likes of Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois, Takashi Murakami and Damian Hirst. Incidentally, the Fire Station has four reserved studio spaces for visiting artists. Aside from artists, the resident would get to interact with world-class curators, art historians and professors, who are frequently invited by Qatar Museums. The fabulous gallery space will showcase several exhibitions throughout the year. “Ultimately the space is for everyone,” the team reminds us. “We want artists and families to come, interact with our artists and be inspired. The Fire Station will be attached to a park, there will be reading spaces, an arts and crafts store, a cinema, a plaza, a restaurant and more,” says Al Khalifa. Being in charge of a one-of-a-kind program means they can’t use the usual performance indicators to evaluate themselves. “Our benchmarks and success are very personal to us,” Al Kahlifa explains. But the team is aware that the measure of its success as a residency is to see how the young artists will be able to “fly away into the world” and ensure they continually keep creating. At the end of the nine months, the artist would have not only honed their voice but would also intuitively know how best to get galleries to represent them, collectors to notice and commission them, how to sell and manage their art; the mundane and temporal aspects of art. “We are not an institution and this is not a business course but continuity is very important,” Al Khalifa says. It’s the sign of a healthy, beating heart.
“The inhabitants of the old civil defense building will no longer be putting out fires; they’ll be igniting them,” says Al Khalifa.
of the young artists are braving to go beyond the traditional Khaleeji art to explore different media and step outside the lines. The Fire Station team could see the beginnings of “a very strong culture dusting off and reinventing itself”. It does seem like there will be no dearth of talent to fill the 20 studio spaces that are currently up for grabs at the Fire Station. Even more so because the program is open to anyone with an inspiring way to tell a story, irrespective of how they choose to say it. Bashir herself is indicative of the multi-disciplinary pool of artists the team hopes to nurture at the Fire Station. A prolific fashion blogger who is also currently working on a collection of her own, Bashir is part of the small but creatively-inclined team that is managing the Artist in Residence program; and deriving from their own energy and passion, they have a vision of how exactly this would look like. “When we say art, we are not eliminating fashion or music or film. The possibilities of collaboration and what that might lead to opens several other exciting roads. Now more than ever before, we are in such a collaborative industry,” Bashir says. “Architects working with designers, writers engaging with painters; everyone is working to create something bigger and
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Lookout Qatar
Sweet Ritual Punk is accenting boho riffs right now. Designers have looked to the late 70s subculture every decade since it hit loudest in the US, UK and Australia, proving that the icon of attitude still persists. BY ALEXANDRA KOHUT-COLE
IN 1994, John Galliano was the British designer of the year, Hussein
Chalayan launched his label and the late stylist, Isabella Blow, bought Alexander McQueen’s entire graduate collection. Gianni Versace put Elizabeth Hurley in ‘that’ safety pin dress, the Damned had reformed and their sometime supporter band, The League, headlined a 14-band punk gig dubbed “F*** Reading”. A pastiche of Sid Vicious’ spirit — grommets, spiked hair, studs — seeped through the autumn and spring runways like little veins of steel. Sarah Burton's McQueen offered zipped kimono sleeves, Hedi Slimane toughened Saint Laurent's fluid-dress-floppy-hat vibe with leather-fringed biker vests and glam LA rock chicks via crystal-studded biker jackets and shimmering sequined luxe punk. Chunky-chained Chanel padlock pendants glimmered glamour with wry humour, Meadham Kirchoff invitations enticed to ‘reject everything’, Jun Takahashi — a collector of vintage Seditionaries originals — slashed his tough slogan tees at Undercover. and Azzedine Alaia had a laugh — wittily waiting until the fashion hordes had left Paris before deigning to show. “Punk to me is attitude,” says LA-based stylist Marjan Malakpour, designer of tours for David Bowie, Cher, Shirley Manson, the Killers and the Strokes. The double MVPA award-winner and co-creative designer of NewbarK shoe label is a big fan of “its rebellious style, rule breaker, leather and studs. Personally, I love mixing it in my styling, it gives an edge. I don't
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IT'S THE ATTITUDE Clockwise from top left: Ebony Walton opens Rebecca Paterson's show as a tribute to Ruth Tarvydas in her bejewelled Dadadada silk georgette top; British singer/ songwriter Paloma Faith in Michael Cinco at the Met Gala in 2013; a couture piece by Tarvydas shown at her memorial show; British Punk band the Clash in their heyday circa 1978
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF AFP
Trend Report
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: STEFAN GOSATTI; COURTESY OF MICHAEL CINCO; AFP.
PUNK IS HERE Clockwise from top left: Vivienne Westwood RTW SS1; the Seditionaries boutique stacked with designs by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm Maclaren; an unidentified man with punk-style spiked hair tours the dinosaur exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History.
think punk will ever die.” This punk attitude oozed out of Galliano’s Dior couture AW99 show and McQueen’s SS99 robotically spray-painted dress modeled by Shalom Harlow. Nicolas Ghesquière’s Balenciaga SS11 ‘Children of Punk’ and Donatella Versace’s AW13 ‘Vunk’ paid tribute to the genre — by now completely chic. In 2013, Andrew Bolton curated ‘Punk: Chaos to Couture’ at the Met in New York; to the launch, Zandra Rhodes wore her own vintage 1977 ‘Conceptual Chic’ bejeweled safety pin dress. Bolton’s point, haute couture and punk being “about creating one-off pieces”, resonates with Asian Couture Federation founder and chairman of Fide Fashion Weeks, Frank Cintamani, “If you think of every couturier that succeeded over the long term,” he says, “much of their work was in its time branded ‘rebellious’, ‘controversial’ or ‘subversive’. It doesn’t seem too far off the zeitgeist of punk.” The ACF and Fide Fashion Weeks, co-organised the 16th Telstra Perth Fashion Festival in September. ACF member designers — the leading Asian couturiers Sebastian
Gunawan from Indonesia, Frederick Lee from Singapore and Dubai-based Michael Cinco from the Philippines — showed at the festival to introduce an inaugural international element. Perth, as a gateway to Asia, is expected to mushroom as a future fashion and luxury hub owing to oil and gas revenue. “Punk is as relevant today as mainstream rock was in the 70s’,” says Cinco — who is internationally celebrated for the Swarovski-embellished fantasy couture that he designs for his predominantly Arab, Russian and Kazhak clients. “Punk is here to stay,” he continues, “It’s an expression of one’s individuality and personal views; Vivienne Westwood or Jean Paul Gaultier. It is love, a way of life; a massive influence in fashion.” Elements of the aesthetic are mainstream — chains, tartan, ripped fabric, studded anything, body piercing, “It has to be practical, wearable and sellable,” says Sebastian Gunawan. “Creativity is an important part. It works up to the point its sellable and market-accepted.” Frederick Lee says punk style is always iconic. “It captures a unique sense of rebellion individualism, finding a look that’s anti-materialistic and edgy. The new version of punk is about femininity, rebel, girlish, wearing accents to create a look with subtle punk appeal.” The punk movement was as resounding in Australia as in New York and London in the late 70s/early 80s’. “Perth, having a large British migrant population was almost like a satellite for punk, as in Britain. It had hopped over, mixing it all up,” explains the internationally renowned Australian designer, counter culture expert and academic, Rebecca Paterson, whose designs are collected by museums worldwide including London’s V&A. Paterson has famously collaborated with renowned Japanese textile engineer, Junichi Arai and works with Shibori, the Japanese dying technique, “in an Australian and random way,” experimenting with ancient Asian — Indian, Chinese and Japanese — textile traditions. “I’m interested in how a ‘Larikan’ Australian touch can mix it up with these traditions. I like to muck-up something like Arai does, pinch from Indian, UK, US and Kuta”. Punk is her
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favorite pop culture. Paterson arrived back in Perth following fiveyears in Mumbai, in time to design a capsule collection for the festival by her label 33Poets — in honor of her close friend, Ruth Tarvydas, who had committed suicide last year. The internationally acclaimed couture designer, Tarvydas, was a unique pioneer of Australian fashion since 1970 and the first to export outside Australia. Tarvydas’ design ethos was classic, relaxed yet razor sharp couture, pieces that held red carpet goers enthralled globally. “She was a very, very good cutter like Galliano — she was sexy and could make it work on the body,” says Paterson, “and her personal style equally strong. She would wear the officer’s hats with sexy legs, off the shoulder and short. That was her signature, and we never saw her without it,” Festival director, Mariella HarveyHanrahan, initiated a tribute runway show celebrating her most iconic designs. “I think everyone was inspired and humbled by the beauty and genius of her life’s work,” says Paterson. HarveyHanrahan invited Paterson to show at the festival because she wanted to bring something different to the audience “I knew she would deliver something special,” Paterson says. Paterson’s punk, sub culture perspective honored Tarvydas’ classic couture “in respect of Ruth’s beauty, her genius, her questing — and love of roses. I chucked in a whole heap, it could not have worked without her roses,” she says. The collection titled ‘Homage’ “was back to the 70s” and heavily featured ripped stockings: “I wore them in the 80s, she appropriated them in an evening look in a 90s collection, so I did that homage to her collection — with my punk roots. It was romantic punk — flowers, stockings, putting contradictions together,” says Paterson. Tarvydas was to feature in a book of famous people wearing Paterson’s clothes. “I was inspired by Ruth liking and wanting to wear the silk georgette Dadadada top with over knee boots and her signature officer’s hat. She was a Dadadada girl, party girl and also deeply spiritual.” Poignantly, Paterson says designing ‘Homage’ “was like a pilgrimage — in part, my creative process reflecting aspects of her unique romantic work — so it was a sweet ritual”. Paterson explains that “Ruth and Rei Kawakubo would
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definitely look at punk, but in an intellectual way. I think that the way Rei looked at what she was doing; ‘I am going to do whatever I like’ — punk in general allowed that. Rei is looking at it in art terms and she would place it onto the frock. I think that Ruth took that freedom that Rei took to the world. It came from questioning and counter questioning.” Enduring punk appeal is such that in 2004, a Sheikha from Abu Dhabi bought Paterson’s entire ‘Selfh’ collection; “not evening stuff but punk”. The princess arrived with bodyguards. Everything had to be made ten inches longer; a short skirt would be made right to the ground. It was Bauhaus — I flipped it around but kept the original font so it was Hausbau — she loved it!” Paterson says. Twenty years on, the late Alexander McQueen has passed the gauntlet to the courageous Sarah Burton, a transformed John Galliano is at the helm of Maison Martin Margiela, Hussein Chalayan has revived Vionnet couture. And the couturiers are rebel heroes displaying an enduring punk attitude that will never die.
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF AFP
THE HOMAGE COLLECTION From left: A punk take on a 1920's dress as part of Rebecca Paterson's 'Homage' collection featuring the Tarvydas ripped stockings and red rose (photo: Stefan Gosatti); An example of Paterson's Shibori textile work that she makes herself.
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The Thing
IMAGES COURTESY OF CHANEL
In 1932, Gabrielle Chanel presented her first jewelry collection. She admitted to having found her inspiration simply by looking up at the Parisian night sky whilst strolling the ChampsElysées brightly lit up with its advertising. With the sky streaked with stars, and the moon in its first lunar phase — “Why look any further?” she said. The latest collection, Cosmique de Chanel, is a study of contrast in materials: between white gold and black; white ceramic enhancing the diamonds’ sparkle on the rings and pendants. As if emerging from an imaginary sky, the Cosmique de Chanel collection brings a touch of audacious modernity with a feel of eternity. An exclusive Chanel showroom will open in March 2015 at the Lagoona Mall, Doha.
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Trend Report
Fashion Under the Hammer
Pat Frost speaks about Christie’s and her personal journey in fashion through auction.
IN ACTION Pat Frost at the Suzy Menkes fashion auction held in July 2013.
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COURTESY OF CHRISTIE'S
BY SINDHU NAIR
COURTESY OF CHRISTIE'S
FASHION HISTORY Clockwise from left: Elizabeth Taylor's Gina Fratini wedding dress, worn at her second marriage to Richard Burton sold for £62,500 (QR342,390); an empire line gown from Schiaparelli's sale; an ivory silk tulle empire line Alexander McQueen gown worn for various photoshoots by Daphne Guinness by; a cherry red crocodile Berkin Hermès bag sold for £40,000 (QR219,130); a Schiaparelli sky blue silk crepe bolero, 1940, sold for £22,500 (QR123,260).
CHRISTIE’S DIRECTOR and
Specialist Head of Textiles and Costumes, Pat Frost’s session, Handbags under the Hammer, of the two-day Christie’s educational workshop on International Art Market, held in Dubai in October, had more participants than other sessions of the program. That there were more Emirati women in this session was not very surprising considering Middle Eastern women’s fascination for bags. In the silhouette of an Arab woman clad in a not-so-exciting black abaya (though contemporary abayas no longer necessarily fall under this classification), the accessories and the bag in hand are the only two conspicuous elements that can never be compromised. Taking the fascinated audience through the history of bags, Frost proved without much effort that there was no greater investment than a bag, not just for the value but also for the purpose behind it. From a charmingly embroidered work bag dated 1675, embellished with unicorns, butterflies and squirrels, to the present-day manifestation, one of the variations in thick, spongey, bright red and yellow plastic, in the shape of a McDonald’s carton, from Moschino, handbags have evolved but retained a strong hold on
women’s affection. Frost’s expertise is not only in handbags but in the fashion industry through her work with auction house Christie’s. But her entry was not spectacular:“Sometimes you need a little luck. While I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life after university, I accidentally discovered Christie’s,” she says though her life at Christie’s has been far from ordinary. “I started as an administrator in 1987 on a general sale, of which, at that time, there were at least two a month,” says Frost of her beginning at the auction house. “The learning curve was very steep indeed as I learned everything on the job and by reading as many books as I could find as well as following trend setters in fashion through social media.” Frost has had many fashion highs but one of the many unforgettable moments in her life with Christie’s was when a trunk with patterns by a designer from early history was discovered. “I remember opening a trunk in a warehouse in the industrial suburbs of Paris to find over 100 calico patterns for Schiaparelli gowns, together with swatches of material,” says Frost. “There followed two months of intensive research to try and find an existing gown that matched the patterns. We finally matched them to Schiaparelli’s ready-to-wear collections of 1953 onwards.” In the course of this enquiry, Frost got to exchange ideas with experts on cutting and on Schiaparelli, among them Azzedine Alaia, Christian Lacroix, Billy Boy and a number of
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heads of fashion departments at major museums worldwide. “That's why I love fashion — it is a real network. Everything is so interconnected,” she says. Christie’s tryst with fashion began early, with its first textile sale in 1975 including the wedding trousseau of a most fashionable woman, the Countess von Wied, from
“I feel that local fashion is very much rooted in local traditions but is also very adaptable to modern life. Western design married to Eastern tradition would be unbeatable. I very much look forward to seeing this relationship blossom,” says Frost. 1868, “so fashion has always been on Christie’s agenda” according to Frost. “Even in the 18th century we were selling laces and silks. We started to sell ‘Street Fashion’ in the mid-1990s,” she says. But it is another sale that has inspired Frost the most. “Elizabeth Taylor’s sale was the most groundbreaking sale I have worked on,” she says. “She was larger than life and twice as beautiful.” For someone who follows the fashion scene so closely, Frost has her predictions and favorites too. “There is a recent concentration on wonderful prints, for which Mary Katrantzou and Peter Pilotto have been very influential,” she says, “However, I think that structure is also a theme at the moment, for which Nicolas Ghesquiere is certainly prominent. I think the influence of Japanese designers has been rising again.”
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As a fashion historian, Frost has also been watching Raf Simons at Dior with interest as “he weaves historical elements into his all new designs,” she says. While the earlier vibrant social scene gave fashion and even auction houses enough to document and grow into more of a collector’s item, in the current scenario of less haute couture and more ready-to-wear with comfort taking the trend by storm with some stunning pieces being presented in fashion shows, it is a matter of dispute as to whose dresses Christie’s would auction if it were to choose someone from this era. Frost thinks she would pick “a celebrity, with a very active social life, lots of friends and relations, preferably one who is part of the contemporary art scene, or public life, or simply a pop or film star”. Frost puts herself in this imaginary scenario and picks her contenders: “I would say my strongest living contenders at the moment are Kate Middleton and Daphne Guinness, with Beyoncé Knowles not far behind.” Frost has no secrets up her sleeves on the bag that will later create auction history but she strongly advices Middle Eastern women to buy the bag they like most. “If it increases in value, then that is a bonus,” says Frost. “However, the safest choice at the moment would be an Hermès bag made of rare, exotic leather, preferably with diamond-set locks and hardware.”
ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
COURTESY OF CHRISTIE'S
SALE IN PROGRESS Ellisa Schiaparelli sale in progress; An important wedding dress worn by Elizabeth Taylor for her first wedding to Conrad ‘Nicky’ Hilton, 1950, the oyster silk satin wedding dress designed by M.G.M. Chief Costume Designer Helen Rose, estimated at £30,000 – 50,000 (QR163,800-QR272,900) but sold at £121,875 (QR665,420); a one-of-a-kind specail commission alligator bag sold for $124,976 (QR456,160)in the online Hermès charity auction.
In Fashion
Quiet Splendor There’s an elegance to clothes that sparkle in the evening light but don’t outshine their wearer. PHOTOGRAPHS BY JULIA HETTA STYLED BY MALINA JOSEPH GILCHRIST
Donna Karan New York dress, QR31,050, donnakaran.com. 39
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In Fashion
Chanel hand-beaded dress, QR275,740. Prada shoes, price on request.
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ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
Prada coat, QR20,870, and dress, QR24,730.
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Marc Jacobs dress, QR12,385, and pants, QR8,740, marcjacobs.com.
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ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
MODEL: LUCY EVANS AT SELECT. HAIR BY TERRY SAXON AT JED ROOT. MAKEUP BY LILI CHOI USING LAURA MERCIER AT ARTLIST. MANICURE BY BRENDA ABRIAL AT JED ROOT. ON-SET PRODUCER: JAMILA WAHID AT BRACHFELD. PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT: SASCHA HEINTZE. STYLIST’S ASSISTANT: LAËTITIA LEPORCQ
Quality In Fashion
Quality
The Thing Ever since Louis Cartier began designing diamond vipers in 1910, the French house has dreamed up a menagerie of lithe creatures, ranging from onyx-studded panthers to gold crocodiles. Now Cartier has coiled a serpent around an exotic gem to create a one-of-a-kind platinum cuff. Handcrafted in the jeweler’s atelier atop its boutique on the Rue de la Paix in Paris, the piece required seven artisans — one wax sculptor to create the shape, two jewelers, three setters (one just for the center stone) and a polisher — and about 2,000 hours of work. The result is a stunning snake, made up of 1,700 diamonds, tightly clutching its coveted prize: a 53.78-carat cabochon-cut rare emerald from Brazil. Price upon request, cartier.us. — BROOKE BOBB PHOTOGRAPH BY KATE JACKLING
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Quality
In Fashion
Khaki for Days A great-looking trench makes all the sartorial difference. PHOTOGRAPHS BY ARNO FRUGIER STYLED BY JASON RIDER
J. W. Anderson coat, QR5,830, Dover Street Market New York. Sacai Luck skirt, QR1,545, barneys.com. Louis Vuitton scarf, about QR2,210, louisvuitton. com. Dior earrings (worn throughout), QR1,570. Céline shoes (worn throughout), QR3,470. Tod’s bag (worn throughout), QR4,620, tods.com. ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
Michael Kors coat, QR12,040, and sweater, QR3,270. The Row skirt, QR9,680. Prada scarf, QR1,790, prada. com.
Quality
In Fashion
Burberry Prorsum coat, QR17,880, burberry.com. Jil Sander sweaters, QR3,250 and QR3,400 (worn underneath), jilsander.com. The Row skirt, QR9,680. 46
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ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
MODEL: SABINA LOBAVA AT ELITE NEW YORK CITY. HAIR BY SHIN ARIMA USING REDKEN FOR FRANK REPS. MAKEUP BY SERGE HODONOU USING M.A.C. COSMETICS FOR FRANK REPS. MANICURE BY YUKO TSUCHIHASHI FOR DIOR VERNIS. CASTING BY ARIANNA PRADARELLI. STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS: KELLY HARRIS AND RAYNER REYES. SHOT ON LOCATION AT THE INVISIBLE DOG WAREHOUSE
Max Mara coat, QR5,440. Equipment sweater, QR1,015, equipmentfr .com. A.L.C. skirt, QR1,810, barneys.com. Lanvin scarf, QR1,440.
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Quality
At work. I could spend hours looking at the print of a handdrawn map of London by Stephen Walker behind my desk. With my father in 1972. He started his business when he was young and inspired me to do the same. He was my Harvard Business School, in a way.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: HINDMARCH FAMILY; ANDREW WOFFINDEN; EMMA HARDY; MORGAN O’DONOVAN; EMMA HARDY
Family photo in 2009. If you are happy, your kids will be happy (advice from my mother-in-law).
Profile in Style
Anya Hindmarch The beloved British accessories designer turns to playful inspirations to breathe a little life and laughter into luxury. BY EVIANA HARTMAN
PLENTY OF DESIGNER BAGS have sparked wait-list frenzies
throughout the years, but only Anya Hindmarch has managed to incite a legitimate riot. Her ‘‘I’m Not a Plastic Bag’’ tote — the British designer’s most famous, and infamous, creation (a collaboration with the nonprofit We Are What We Do) — drew lines in the thousands across Britain upon its launch in 2007; by the time it was released in Taiwan, it caused a mall stampede that sent 30 shoppers to the hospital. Hindmarch’s luxury leather goods continue to inspire a fervent following, albeit a more peaceful one, for their balance of impeccable craftsmanship, custom detailing and irrepressible whimsy, a mix Hindmarch has been refining since she launched her line in 1987. She was only 19 at the time, but even before then — the moment she inherited a Gucci bag from her mother at 16, to be exact — ‘‘I knew exactly what I wanted to do,’’ Hindmarch says. ‘‘There are just so many different roles that women play, and bags help fulfill those roles. They’re quite mood-altering.’’ Now, Hindmarch — named a Member of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2009 — oversees a staff of 300 and 58 stores, including a new bespoke boutique inside Bergdorf Goodman where, as in all her stores, items can be embossed with messages in the customer’s own handwriting. Her sly sense of humor and Pop sensibility are evident not only in her collections but also in her taste for art and design. ‘‘I tend to enjoy playing with things that seem ordinary,’’ she says, ‘‘but doing them in an extraordinary way.’’ 48
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Spring 2015 handbags. I was obsessed with covering my notebooks at school, and I wanted to make the same stickers out of exquisite leather.
Office in 2009. My staff spraypainted the wall after the M.B.E. announcement and I didn’t even notice until the day after.
TOP ROW: ANGUS MILL; DENNIS GILBERT/VIEWPICTURES; MARK SMITH; ANYA HINDMARCH; RICHARD SAJA; ANYA HINDMARCH. MIDDLE ROW: ANYA HINDMARCH; ANYA HINDMARCH; COURTESY OF KELLOGG’S. BOTTOM ROW: EMMA HARDY; PHILIPPE HALSMAN/MAGNUM PHOTOS; JOONEY WOODWARD
The artist Richard Saja embroiders over traditional fabrics to create something funny; that’s why I put his work in the Madison Avenue store.
Paper sculpture by Mark Smith for the Bergdorf boutique. I like the idea of these very lightweight pieces of geometry inside this lovely dome. I love glass domes. The 2007 tote that launched a thousand queues. We used the formula of an It bag — used and slightly abused.
Table by Martino Gamper made of old dining room tables, commissioned for the Bergdorf Goodman boutique. I love the mashing-up of old and new.
Clutches from this season. We collaborated with Kellogg’s and even created a new cereal: Fashion Flakes.
Spring 2014. The collection was inspired by weightlessness, so the bags were all on tiny wires and we controlled them like a kinetic sculpture.
Making of the Crisp (a.k.a. potato chip) Packet clutch. The idea was a modern sculpture you could wear. Everyone was going, ‘‘What are you thinking?’’ but it’s been a massive success. Kellogg’s packaging from the 1980s. The combination of craftsmanship and humor is really important to me.
Bespoke shop in London. The idea for the exterior came from the look of oldfashioned shop fronts, before branding became the mark of differentiation.
Two of my five children at home. I quite like the contrast between the painting and the graffiti on the wall. I think Churchill would have enjoyed it, too.
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Food Matters
Famine or Feast
Is it more rewarding to subsist on broth and cold mountain treks at a German clinic for 10 days or to settle into five-course Michelin-starred meals? One writer heads to the Black Forest to weigh the merits of the purge and the binge. BY CATHY HORYN PHOTOGRAPHS BY THIBAULT MONTAMAT
EATING CLEAN From top: the fruit juice “lunch”’ served during the 10-day fast at the Buchinger Wilhelmi clinic on Lake Constance; lunch at the three-Michelinstar restaurant Schwarzwaldstube in Baiersbronn includes grilled quail, a Breton lobster and a granite of sour cherries.
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Food Matters
BARE ESSENTIALS Clockwise from far left: a visitor at Buchinger Wilhelmi getting a hydro massage; a couple after the sauna; the clinic’s exterior; a meal for nonfasting patients at Buchinger; the clinic’s austere accommodations.
‘For the digestive rest day you will choose from rice, fruit or porridge,’ the concierge said. ‘Just one.’ ‘For every meal?’ I asked. THE GERMANS HAVE always been goofy about health cures — affusions,
colonics, fasts — and they want a setting that matches the rigor of the treatment. There are thermal spas in the Swiss Alps, and the Mayr clinics in Austria, where they perform deep gut cleanses. Journalists have remarked on the intensity of Mayr — the dry spelt bread, the ritual of chewing each bite 30 to 40 times — while conceding that they look and feel amazing afterward. I wanted those results, too, but I wanted something more from my purge holiday than a flat belly and brighter skin: I wanted a German experience, whatever that meant. I love certain German writers and artists, have listened to Karl Lagerfeld yak about Little Karl in Hamburg and, like millions of American kids in the ’60s, I savored the dummkopf jokes on ‘‘Hogan’s Heroes,’’ the TV series about a German P.O.W. camp. My ideas about the country were pretty high-low. In that spirit, I proposed a trip of extremes. For the first part, I would spend 10 days fasting at Buchinger Wilhelmi, a retreat in southern Germany on the shores of Lake Constance — ‘‘Swabia’s sea’’ in the opening pages of ‘‘The Magic Mountain,’’ Thomas Mann’s novel about a healthy young man who goes to a Swiss sanatorium for a visit and stays seven years. I wanted a place out of a novel, a hospital of sorts, not fancy but lavish in its authority. My German friends assured me that Buchinger was strict. Founded in 1953 in the town of Überlingen, it lies near orchards and vineyards, although I would enjoy only a daily glass of juice and a cup of vegetable broth. That’s 250 calories a day. No booze or caffeine. I would occupy a small, cell-like room — to be sure, one with a view of the lake — and I would submit to a routine that included hot liver compresses and enemas. After 10 days, I would not only emerge thinner (this seemed a certainty), but energized from all that discipline. ‘‘If all goes well,’’ Raimund Wilhelmi, Buchinger’s co-director, said, ‘‘you feel you could change the world.’’ The second leg of my trip was to take place in Baiersbronn, a small town in the Black Forest. What was in Baiersbronn? Eight Michelin stars. Somehow, 52
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in the past decade, it has become a culinary capital, led by two family-run hotels, Bareiss and Traube Tonbach, each with a three-star chef. (The Hotel Sackmann, also in town, has a two-star restaurant.) I intended to spend my post-fast weekend eating some of the best cooking in Germany. The outcome of this journey of opposites was nothing that I could have foreseen. In mid-July, I landed in Zurich and drove across the plains of BadenWürttemberg, a kingdom of farms, to the clinic and the lake’s alpine-blue sliver. I was new to fasting and had only an omnivore’s sense of pleasure. But Baiersbronn was just 95 miles from Buchinger. How could I not go and try? I was in Germany, land of kirschen and duck fat. THE SUN WAS STILL blazing when I pulled up
to Buchinger, its facade a cross between Bauhaus and a ’60s motor lodge. I had pictured a more secluded setting, but, thanks to German prosperity, suburban villas had encircled the clinic. Still, the interior felt private. As a young concierge led me to a terrace, I was pleased to see a wide, sloping lawn broken up by flower beds and a swimming pool where people lay about reading and sunbathing. The place had an objective air of health, emphasized by the low, drab buildings that housed patients’ quarters and therapy rooms. My room was also a luxury-dampener. It contained a wide single, built-ins and a gleaming bathroom. There was Wi-Fi and TV. It seemed like a good place to be while one is deliberately refusing food and the brain is turbulent with thoughts and emotion. In that state, you don’t want to be looking at prints of King Ludwig. If the décor were any less humble, you wouldn’t trust the program. It wouldn’t feel German. ‘‘Fasting is pure, it’s simple,’’ Wilhelmi said when we met. ‘‘The things around you should correspond to your inner state of mind.’’ His grandfather, Otto Buchinger, successfully used fasting to cure his own rheumatic fever after World War I, and his daughter, Maria, opened the clinic based on his holistic methods. Wilhelmi and his wife, Francoise, a
BREAK FAST Clockwise from far left: a woman in traditional German dress looks back at the Hotel Traube Tonbach in Baiersbronn; the Schwarzwaldstube’s dining room at the hotel; a plate of quail with barbecue marinade, tomato compote and mushrooms at Schwarzwaldstube; cows in Baiersbronn.
physician, took over in the mid-’80s. Of the few thousand people who stay at Buchinger each year, he said, two-thirds are fasting — often for two or three weeks. The rest are eating low-calorie vegetarian meals prepared by the chef, Hubert Hohler, who is something of a star in Germany. But the main mission is therapeutic fasting to relieve ailments like stress, obesity and arthritis. Before the concierge left, he handed me a blue booklet with the corner of page 121 folded down. ‘‘Here, read this,’’ he said. ‘‘It contains important information about your fast.’’ He explained that I would begin with a ‘‘digestive rest day,’’ to ease my system into it. I would also be evaluated by a doctor, who would help me choose therapies from the clinic’s deep roster. ‘‘For the digestive rest day you will choose from rice, fruit or porridge,’’ he said. ‘‘Just one.’’ ‘‘For every meal?’’ I asked. ‘‘Every meal.’’ After he had gone, I glanced at the book and tossed it on the bed. The day was too nice to waste indoors. I walked down to the town, full of people — kids, beer drinkers at cafe tables, old people in Tevas and shorts on bikes. I drank in the delights of a German summer and bought a cheese sandwich. My last. Then I dragged myself up the hill to my new home. That night, I dreamed I was getting married. The next day at breakfast I met three patients: Sarah Marks, who handles client services for an asset-management firm; and Teresa Carulla and her daughter Julieta, all from London. At any one time about half of the patients are German, French or Swiss, with a smattering of Dutch, Brits, Americans and people from the Middle East. I heard that a member of the Obama administration was at the clinic during my stay. One man had been in residence for a year to confront his obesity. But of all the people I met, I found the attitude of the Carullas the most inspiring. Teresa, on her fifth visit, described her ordeal with kidney cancer and how fasting had helped her recovery. (Recent studies indicate such a link.) Julieta, a mother of four — slim, pretty, maybe a little skeptical — was on her first fast.
Sarah, picking at her brown rice, commented that it seemed weird to be spending thousands of dollars to deny oneself food. Julieta smiled. ‘‘I know, I had that problem, too,’’ she said, ‘‘even though I saw the benefits to my mother.’’ She then urged us to go on the morning hikes and take the cooking classes. As I was thinking I would never do that, she said, ‘‘You don’t want to miss them.’’ Walking back to our rooms, I asked Sarah why she had come to Buchinger. ‘‘Fasting has been in the press a lot — that was an attraction,’’ she said. ‘‘And I had never been in this part of the world.’’ I told her about Baiersbronn, and she looked startled and then laughed. ‘‘I just want to be able to wear my jeans again without a red mark left by the button.’’ Everything at Buchinger ran like clockwork — the morning checkups, the midday rest periods. One day, Sarah booked herself a Golden Gate Anti-Age facial in the clinic’s beauty salon. The two-hour treatment boasted a gold finishing mask. She got there early but seeing the facialist’s door closed, took a seat upstairs to wait until she was called. She heard a scolding voice and looked down the stairs. It was the facialist, hands on her white-clad hips: ‘‘Mrs. Marks, what are you doing sitting on a chair?’’ ‘‘I’m waiting,’’ said Sarah. ‘‘You should be down here! We’ve lost 20 minutes and now you can’t have the golden glow facial.’’ Generally, though, this dependability added to Buchinger’s womblike atmosphere (‘‘cold womblike,’’ in Sarah’s view), where life’s most basic choices are made for you. On schedule, I went to see my doctor, Dorothe Hebisch, a trim woman of late middle age. Right off, I told her I didn’t have any problems — a problem itself, for then Dr. Hebisch couldn’t propose therapies other than classic massage and foot reflexology. She also suggested I take an art class. Hoping for something more exciting, I said, ‘‘What about Kneipp?’’ A German specialty, it involves being hosed with hot and cold water. Dr. Hebisch agreed January - February 2015
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and concluded by explaining that I would begin the fast in the morning after drinking a solution of Glauber’s salts. The next day in my room I drank the stuff, and the expected happened. It wasn’t so bad. Around 1 p.m., a nurse entered and said, cheerily, ‘‘I have your hot liver compress.’’ I lay down and, after placing a hot water bottle on my belly, she girdled me in a cloth. It was a very babyish sensation. But by then, my head was throbbing, so I didn’t care. Sarah reported later that she spent the day ‘‘curled up like a dog.’’ Around 6 p.m., when I went up to the main salon for soup, my legs felt very spongy. The next morning, feeling better, I joined Sarah and 30 others for the daily wanderung. Julieta was right; the walks were the best thing about Buchinger. Every morning at 6, we’d board a bus at the clinic and in no time were hiking into forests and across meadows, nearly five miles. I missed only one — the morning I got to the lobby at 6:01. Eventually it was time for my Kneipp water treatment, in the therapy wing. A Mrs. Hoffmann, her blond hair in a bun, led me into a white-tiled room and told me to strip. ‘‘You will stand there,’’ she said, indicating a stall in the corner. ‘‘Is it going to hurt?’’ I said meekly. Mrs. Hoffmann laughed incredulously. ‘‘Ja!’’ I giggled and danced to the stall. I was glad Mrs. Hoffmann slipped so easily into cahoots, given the setup. Holding the nozzle of a hose, she told me to stand with my hands pressed against the tile. Then she released a stinging jet of hot water on my skin. It was intense but not unpleasant. I did a full rotation before she lowered the nozzle and said, suddenly, ‘‘Now you can cry.’’ ‘‘What?’’ I asked. ‘‘Now you can cry!’’ she said, grinning. And before I grasped her meaning, an icy blast hit me. I crumpled in a poor imitation of the Venus de Milo as we both screamed with laughter. I got more restless as time went on. I swam every day, and I was learning new things — maybe above all that I didn’t need much food. I lost 10 pounds. But the euphoric energy that the Wilhelmis spoke of never materialized. Some days I could barely move I was so tired. I was surprised at the similarities between Buchinger and the hermetic world conjured by Mann — the pedagogy, the fact that no one was immune from being called a patient, all the talk of moods and weight loss. (Yes, like a nature lover bringing Thoreau to the woods, I brought ‘‘The Magic Mountain’’ to the clinic.) Not understanding at all what time means in such a place, I began to wish the days away, so I could get to Baiersbronn and back to normal life. ‘‘So you want the two extremes?’’ Wilhelmi said with a chuckle when I told him my plan. Francoise, however, was full of cautions when we met on my last day. By then, I was back on regular food. ‘‘Your sense of taste is so refined after a fast that a cherry is like a firework, so the tendency is to eat more,’’ she said. ‘‘Just be very, very attentive at Baiersbronn not to eat dessert. Or have just one bite. And, please, don’t take bread and butter!’’ As I was due for lunch in Baiersbronn, I said my goodbyes early to Sarah. She, too, was ambivalent about her fasting experience. I mentioned Francoise’s warning about the bread. ‘‘Am I really going to say no to a cute waiter offering seven kinds of bread?’’ I said. Sarah shook her head and added: ‘‘especially if some of the bread is warm.’’ So, a little before 1 p.m., after crossing one forested valley after another, I sat down at Schwarzwaldstube, the domain of the chef Harald Wohlfahrt and one of the most celebrated restaurants in Europe. The occupants of a dozen tables in the small, elegant room were already into their first courses. I was in heaven. At the suggestion of the maître d’, I ordered the five-course set menu. And as he started translating from the German, my head began to
For a hot liver compress, I lay down and, after placing a hot water bottle on my belly, a nurse girdled me in a cloth. It was a very babyish sensation. But by then, my head was throbbing from lack of food, so I didn’t care.
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PEAKS AND TROUGHS A sweeping view of Baiersbronn and the Tonbach Valley, where the Hotel Traube Tonbach is located.
swim. ‘‘To start,’’ he said, ‘‘yellowfin tuna and mackerel, the tuna baited in star anise and served with oysters, tips of passe-pierre … then Breton lobster cooked in a crustacean butter and served on green asparagus, with small squids. …’’ I thought of Sarah back at Buchinger, and our cups of broth. ‘‘The main course, quail, charcoal-grilled and served with a mash of tomatoes and artichokes … a slightly smoked marrow … the cheese course and then dessert of cherries from the region, marinated in port wine sherry and filled with a hazelnut stone … served with elderflower ice cream and a granite of sour cherries.’’ It was just as Francoise had predicted — every bite was an explosion in my mouth. Pushing some of the quail and mash onto my fork, I thought, This is pure pleasure. Leo Tolstoy may have said that the refusal of food ‘‘is more than pleasure, it is the joy of the soul,’’ but poor Leo never got to taste Harald Wohlfahrt’s cooking. I ate everything — the portions were small — and drank a split of wine, a delicious white from Karl H. Johner in the Baden region. When I got up from the table, it was 3:30 p.m. I felt great, not the least bit full. Then I went for a long walk in the valley. The next morning, at breakfast, I stuck to oatmeal, ignoring the big German buffet at the Traube Tonbach. Later, I headed to the Bareiss for lunch by its three-star chef, Claus-Peter Lumpp. That meal was also sublime, playful in its flavors and colors. And at each hotel, I adored the scene: the returning families, the afternoon cakes on the terrace. But it is also true that I couldn’t wait to join that other great German tribe — the hikers in the Black Forest. I was up at dawn to walk, and out again in the afternoon. I went five miles. So Francoise needn’t have worried; in the end, Buchinger’s philosophy prevailed. And what was that philosophy? Cleansing the body of bad toxins? Gaining self-control? Finding inner peace? Ja-ja-ja. It was all that and something besides — time. If you’re not filling up huge portions of your day with eating — or your brain by thinking about food — then you have more time for other stuff. You may even discover hidden talents. Shortly after I returned from my trip, I received an email from Miriam Bredella. Miriam is a remarkable woman — chic, German-born, an associate professor of radiology at the Harvard Medical School. I met her at Buchinger. She was on her first fast, with her mom. Miriam is actually doing research with fasting volunteers in Boston to study the effect of fasting on different kinds of body fat. But that’s not why I mention her. Miriam took the art class, among other activities. ‘‘I hadn’t drawn or painted since I was in middle school,’’ she said. ‘‘I just started drawing with charcoal and painting with my fingers. It was like meditation. It was one of my highlights.’’ And, almost as a token, she attached the paintings for me to see. They were of boats and the sun on Lake Constance.
Entertainment
Theater People As much as Broadway now relies on Hollywood actors to bring in the crowds, so A-listers increasingly view stints onstage as integral to a rich career. Here, six award-winning actors on their new roles. BY HERMIONE HOBY PHOTOGRAPHS BY COLLIER SCHORR
Since he was 12 years old, BRADLEY COOPER has been obsessed with Joseph Merrick, whose life as a freakish curiosity for 19th-century English society became the subject of Bernard Pomerance’s 1977 play, “The Elephant Man”. Now Cooper, 39, is fulfilling a lifelong dream in performing the part of Merrick at the Booth Theatre, where it premiered in 1979. The actor explained that there would be no poster of his face on the outside of the building. “The more anonymity I can maintain, the better theatergoing experience people can have,” he said. “And if for some reason ‘The Hangover’ fans are in the audience making noise, it’s one-hundredth of what Merrick would have had to deal with when he walked into public.”
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GLENN CLOSE, who last appeared on Broadway a neat two decades ago as the faded movie star Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard”, now returns as the matriarch of the WASPy family in Edward Albee’s 1966 play “A Delicate Balance”, alongside John Lithgow and Martha Plimpton. “I’d rather be in this very tight ensemble than some star vehicle,” she said. “We’re all experiencing the phenomenon that if you get a word wrong it can have a distressing domino effect, so you have to be kind of rescued by your fellow actor.”
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HAIR BY GEORGE ORTIZ FOR ORIBE HAIRCARE/CONTACTNYC. MAKEUP BY SHERI KORNHABER
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“It’s less about string theory than about love,” said JAKE GYLLENHAAL of his role as a beekeeper who falls for a physicist in “Constellations”, the new play by the British playwright Nick Payne. The 33-year-old actor has performed on smaller New York stages, but this is his Broadway debut. “If you know anything about love or have experienced it in any way, you might know more about string theory than you think you do.”
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For her role as Mrs. Kendal in ‘‘The Elephant Man”, in which she stars alongside Bradley Cooper and Alessandro Nivola, PATRICIA CLARKSON, 54, will be playing an actress who is taken into Merrick’s trust. “She has a beautiful line,” said Clarkson. “She says, ‘Of course he is rather odd. And hurt. And helpless not to show the struggling. And so am I.’ And that’s it. I think as performers, as actors, people in the public eye, we often mask tremendous pain and struggle and sadness and it’s just there. It’s just part of the game.”
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HAIR BY BRENT LAWLER USING ORIBE HAIR CARE AT STREETERS. MAKEUP BY KAORU OKUBO FOR MANAGEMENT + ARTISTS. CHARVET SHIRT, $380, 011-33-1-4260-3070. MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA PANTS, $785, (212) 989-7612
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MARTHA PLIMPTON stars in “A Delicate Balance” as Julia, a 36-year-old who flees her disintegrating fourth marriage to return to her parents’ home. Theater, according to the 44-year-old actor, “has its own type of mystery for me because it’s an ongoing process. I mean, not to get too precious about it, but it’s a loom, you know? And all of you are the working parts of that loom and you’re making this marvelous piece of fabric.” Then: “That was too pretentious, even for me.”
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Chiang Mai: Culture, Coffee and Contrast
From carefully preserved relics of some of the oldest Buddhist temples in northern Thailand, to kitschy tattoos and hip coffee shops, Chiang Mai offers something unique for curious backpackers and culture connoisseurs. BY PRIYANKA PRADHAN
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAVANYA ULLAS
THE 12-COACH TRAIN departs Bangkok’s bustling
enough to snap back to the present. “Free Wi-Fi and coffee”, “Home-grown, organic coffee here”, “Become a certified barista” boards welcome us into a lane, choc-a block with banners outside manicured gardens and landscaped outdoor sit-outs. A whiff of freshly brewed coffee, cigarette smoke and hot pancakes is enough to entice a traveler into one of these coffee shops. My fancy, latte-art laden coffee arrives as I begin to wonder where the oldworld charm of the town has suddenly vanished. “This is small town with a very urban, or say, say hipster vibe,” says the Thai coffee shop owner, who introduces himself as Nico. “Chiang Mai is multicultural, brimming with interesting contrasts and it is also very tourist-friendly. You can also find the best cuisine from Italian to Mexican catered to more than four million tourists that arrive every year.” He adds, “You know, local Thai people here don’t enjoy coffee. Most of the coffee produced in the country is either consumed as instant coffee or exported as the same. This ‘local, freshly-brewed coffee’ culture is purely tourist-led and has started to thrive only in the past five years. In fact, today Chiang Mai has the highest
CULTURE SHOCK Clockwise from previous page: Wat Chedi Luang was the tallest structure in the Lanna Kingdom in the 15th century AD; the old Chiang Mai Cultural Center; the trendy and upscale Nimmanhaemin Road; one of the coffee shops that crowd the town.
Hua Lamphong Station with a loud groan, slowly leaving behind the mayhem of the city’s sleepless streets. Traffic lights, strobe and neon lights whiz past the windows, fading into gradual darkness as the overnight journey to Chiang Mai begins. By breakfast-time the next day, it feels more like time travel than a ten-hour train journey. The crisp mountain air and idyllic, wayside railway stations greet victims of raucous nights at Khao San Road, promising a refreshing change of scene from Bangkok. Outside the Chiang Mai Railway Station, a bevy of striking red, fire-truck styled local taxis stand waiting for the stream of tourists that arrive every morning. “Which hotel you go?” taxi drivers ask, scurrying to find their first customers for the day. I observe how the hotel’s name is enough for taxi drivers to tell exactly where I need to go. No GPS needed in a town where its inhabitants seem to be on a first name basis with each other. As the taxi drives past the old town, scenes from an age-old era seem to come alive. The 700 year old city of Chiang Mai was built in 1296 to be the capital city of the Lanna Kingdom (the kingdom of a million rice fields) by its ruler King Mengrai. The town is surrounded by a moat built by Chiang Mai’s last ruling Lanna dynasty in the 13th century AD to keep Burmese invaders and Mongols from entering. As we drive along the circumference of the moat, I wonder how such a shallow moat was able to keep an entire army from entering the city. However, according to a local legend, this seemingly innocuous moat was filled with deep waters and ferocious crocodiles during the olden days. Eventually, the city did come under attack from the Burmese army, who established their own kingdom in Chiang Mai, in the 16th century AD. The Lanna Kingdom’s walls may have partially collapsed since, but the four majestic gates of the kingdom are immaculately restored. These gates serve as important landmarks giving a distinct feeling of being lost in a time warp in this slowmoving, historic town. A walk down a few winding bylanes is
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Serpents (Nagas) are used along the tiers of temple roofs, which according to a Buddhist legend are meant to represent the cosmic river of life source.
density of coffee shops in all of Thailand.” There’s a strong rationale behind this trend. Thailand produces two kinds of coffee — the Robusta, which grows in southern Thailand, contributing to 98% of the coffee produced in the country and the Arabica, which is grown in Chiang Mai and the neighboring Chiang Rai regions, which contributes only 2 percent of the total produce. According to Nico, in Chiang Mai, this coffee shop trend can be attributed to the exceptional quality, soft texture, low acidity and pleasant floral notes of the feature that begs for attention is the serpentine element in these locally-produced Arabica beans. temples. According to Thai mythology, serpents known as ‘nagas’ In an attempt to cash in on the strong coffee sub-culture, even had served the Buddha faithfully and hence deserve a significant Starbucks has set up its towering two-storey shops across town. place in Thai architecture, particularly in the northern provinces of When I quiz Nico about competition from the global giant, he asks Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. The nagas appear on the arches, along innocently, “Do they make coffee? Really? I thought they only sell the tiers of temple roof and especially on carved staircases as seen cups of milk.” in two very important temples in Chiang Mai — the Wat Chedi Stepping outside, the green-and-white Starbucks logos stand out Luang and the Wat Lok Molee. among the modest buildings in Chiang Mai. In stark contrast, At Wat Lok Molee, which was first mentioned in a charter in local settlements are simple and functional, built in the Lanna style 1367 AD, nagas are used along the tiers of temple roofs, which of architecture. These homes, called, ‘Ruen Kaaccording to a Buddhist legend, are meant to lae’ are similar to traditional Thai houses, represent the cosmic river of life source. TEMPLES AND TRADITIONS Clockwise except that these are constructed entirely from The skillfully constructed naga staircase, seen from left: the classical fingernail dance of the Lanna Kingdom era; traditional teak wood and built elevated from the ground to at Wat Chedi Luang speaks of another legend — sword dance; Opposite page: the naga protect them from floods. the naga shape carved stairs symbolize the three staircase that mythically links earth to heaven; scene from the Elephant Rescue The 300 temples in Chiang Mai prominently ladders that mythically link earth to heaven. This Camp; traditional Khan tok dinner, feature intricate teak wood carvings, just like temple was the tallest building in the Lanna nimble Thai women perform the silk weaving dance. the Lanna homes. However, another unique Kingdom at the time of completion in the mid-15th
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The coffee shop trend can be attributed to the exceptional quality, soft texture, low acidity and pleasant floral notes of the locally-produced Arabica beans. century AD and even housed the mystical and much revered Emerald Buddha (originally found in 43 BC in the Indian city of Patna) in its prime. Fascinated by these ancient legends, I make my way to the Old Chiang Mai Cultural Center for a deeper insight into the kingdom, through music and folk dance. Taking center stage are the classical dances from Chiang Mai, collectively called ‘Fawn Thai’ which include the graceful ‘Silk Weaving’ dance and the more famous ‘Fawn Lep’ or the fingernail dance. Another spectacular tradition is the Lanna sword dance (Fawn Lap) performed to music from two famous Thai stringed instruments, the Seung and the Pin Pia. The male dancers balance swords on different parts of their bodies while fighting off their rival with a sword sheath — a feat that defended Chiang Mai against their enemies for centuries. A short, red-truck taxi ride and what seems like another timewarp away is the trendy neighborhood of Nimmanhaemin, where hip, young locals step out for a drink or two. Packed with tattoo and piercing studios, upscale pubs playing Thai pop music, fashion boutiques and posh bookstores, the crowd here is almost exclusively Thai and unmistakably prosperous. In contrast to this, are the intersecting lanes of the Chiang Mai Night Bazaar, inclusive and thronged by tourists that happily embrace the synchronized chaos, seedy bars and dealers of everything from T-shirts to
mind-bending experiences. Nightlife ends early, though. So much that even the ubiquitous and generally reliable 7-Eleven convenience stores won’t serve certain beverages after midnight. Surprising, for such a backpacker-friendly town, but there seems to be a concentrated efforts by the locals to keep some of the old traditions alive to prevent the town from turning into yet another party haven and losing its very soul in the process. Chaing Mai seems to offer something for everyone. Adventure and thrill-seekers go zip-lining or trekking in the forest canopies nearby, while wildlife enthusiasts spend a day bonding with Thai elephants at rescue centers, and culture buffs visit one of the many hill-tribe villages in and around the city. But for those looking for a fun night in the town would probably find themselves juggling shots of espresso at a rad little coffee shop.
Getting There: Chiang Mai International Airport is well connected via 17 international airlines. From Bangkok to Chiang Mai: 700 kms, 10 hour train ride either overnight or during the day, 70 minutes by air , 11 hours by bus. Where to stay: Yindee Guest House, Ratvithi Rd (Old town), Spicy Thai, Nimmanhaemin road.
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January - February, 2015
HAPPY TIMES
Fashion’s Romance With Red Page 64 Human Knowledge at Its Finest Page 74 The Movie-Star Life of Quvenzhané Wallis Page 82
FROM TOP: RENÉ & RADKA; JAMIE HAWKESWORTH; RORY VAN MILLINGEN
The Progressive Art of Olafur Eliasson Page 86
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THE IrONY OF ReD In the mood of love, indulging in
feels absolutely delightful.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMIE HAWKESWORTH STYLED BY JOE M C KENNA
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Aganovich shirt (red), QR3,915, and shirt (white), QR3,400, thecorner.com.
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Paco Rabanne dress, QR25,135, barneys.com. Falke tights (worn throughout), QR140, barenecessities.com. Loewe shoes, QR3,460, Opening Ceremony. Opposite: Thomas Tait dress, QR9,530, Louis. J. W. Anderson hat, QR2,915 j-w-anderson. com. Loewe shoes, QR3,970, Opening Ceremony.
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Dolce & Gabbana cape, QR23,660, and skirt, QR10,910. 6397 turtleneck, QR1,260, totokaelo.com.
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Loewe pants, QR17,450, Opening Ceremony, jacket, QR10,380, Dover Street Market New York, and shoes, QR3,970. Opposite: J. W. Anderson top, QR8,540, skirt, QR9,100, and hat, QR2,915. Loewe shoes, QR3,970.
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ADDITIONAL CASTING BY SHELLEY DURKAN. PRODUCTION: LAURA HOLMES PRODUCTION. MANICURIST: ADAM SLEE AT STREETERS FOR RIMMEL LONDON. SEAMSTRESS: MICHELLE WARNER. PHOTO ASSISTANTS: JACK JOHNSTONE AND ANDY MOORE. STYLIST'S ASSISTANTS: CARLOS NAZARIO, JOHN PASHALIDIS, GERRY O’KANE AND ALEX TUDELA. HAIR ASSISTANT: OLIVIER HENRY. MAKEUP ASSISTANT: LOUISE BRYAN. SET ASSISTANT: ROXY WALTON. SPECIAL THANKS TO SPRING STUDIOS AND 3 MILLS STUDIOS
CĂŠline jumpsuit, QR21,855. Loewe shoes, QR3,970. Opposite: Louis Vuitton dress, price on request, and earrings, price on request. Models: Adrienne JĂźliger/ Viva, Lululeika Ravn Liep/ Scoop, Daphne Simons, Grace Simmons/Next and Poppy Okotcha/Nevs. Hair by Tomohiro Ohashi at Management + Artists using Bumble and Bumble. Makeup by Miranda Joyce at Streeters. Set Design by Poppy Bartlett at Magnet.
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NERVE CENTER At Knowledge Point School in Islington, candidates prepare for their oral exams by taking classes on topics like ‘‘South West London Turnarounds,’’ reciting runs of streets with partners and learning aides-mémoires for London’s bridges.
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Lost The examination to become a London cabbie is possibly the most difficult test in the world — demanding years of study to memorize the labyrinthine city’s 25,000 streets and any business or landmark on them. As GPS and Uber imperil this tradition, is there an argument for learning as an end in itself?
Knowledge AT 10 PAST 6 on a January morning a couple of winters ago, a 35-year-old man
named Matt McCabe stepped out of his house in the town of Kenley, England, got on his Piaggio X8 motor scooter, and started driving north. McCabe’s destination was Stour Road, a small street in a desolate patch of East London, 20 miles from his suburban home. He began his journey by following the A23, a major thruway connecting London with its southern outskirts, whose origins are thought to be ancient: For several miles the road follows the straight line of the Roman causeway that stretched from London to Brighton. McCabe exited the A23 in the South London neighborhood of Streatham and made his way through the streets, arriving, about 20 minutes after he set out, at an intersection officially called Windrush Square but still referred to by locals, and on most maps, as Brixton Oval. There, McCabe faced a decision: how to plot his route across the River Thames. Should he proceed more or less straight north and take London Bridge, or bear right into Coldharbour Lane and head for ‘‘the pipe,’’ the Rotherhithe Tunnel, which snakes under the Thames two miles downriver? ‘‘At first I thought I’d go for London Bridge,’’ McCabe said later. ‘‘Go straight up Brixton Road to Kennington Park Road and then work my line over. I knew that I could make my life a lot easier, to not have to waste brainpower thinking about little roads — doing left-rights, left-rights. And then once I’d get over London Bridge, it’d be a quick trip: I’d work it up to Bethnal Green Road, Old Ford Road, and boom-boom-boom, I’m there. It’s a no-brainer. But no. I was thinking about the traffic, about everyone going to
the City at that hour of the morning. I thought, ‘What can I do to skirt central London?’ That was my key decision point. I didn’t want to sit in the traffic lights. So I decided to take Coldharbour Lane and head for the pipe.’’ McCabe turned east on Coldharbour Lane, wending through the neighborhoods of Peckham and Bermondsey before reaching the tunnel. He emerged on the far side of the Thames in Limehouse, and from there his three-mile-long trip followed a zigzagging path northeast. ‘‘I came out of the tunnel and went forward into Yorkshire Road,’’ he told me. ‘‘I went right into Salmon Lane. Left into Rhodeswell Road, right into Turners Road. I went right into St. Paul’s Way, left into Burdett Road, right into Mile End Road. Left Tredegar Square. I went right Morgan Street, left Coborn Road, right into Tredegar Road. That gave me a forward into Wick Lane, a right into Monier Road, right into Smeed Road — and we’re there. Left into Stour Road.’’ We were there, on Stour Road. It was a cold day, with temperatures hovering just above freezing, and snow in the forecast. For McCabe, on his bike, the wind chill made it feel considerably colder. He was dressed for the weather: a thermal shirt, a sweater, an insulated raincoat, Gore-Tex pants pulled over his jeans, gloves, work boots, a knit cap under his motorcycle helmet. McCabe is a tall man, about 6-foot-2, and he is solidly built, like a central defender on a soccer team. He’s handsome, with a wide smile and blond hair. He speaks in short sentences, snappy and definitive, especially when talking about London. We were in Hackney Wick, an industrial area adjacent to Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, where the 2012 Olympic Games
BY JODY ROSEN PHOTOGRAPHS BY RORY VAN MILLINGEN January - February 2015
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were held. Stour Road sits in a particularly remote corner of the sharing a piece of cheese. It’s on the facade of a building in Philpot Lane, neighborhood — a few wind-lashed streets, lined with warehouses, hemmed on the corner of Eastcheap, not far from London Bridge. in by canals and a highway flyover. If you go to LTPH headquarters, where the examinations are conducted, you ‘‘They call this area Fish Island,’’ McCabe said. ‘‘I’m not much of a will behold a grim bureaucratic scene, not much different than the one fisherman, but many of the roads here are named for fishes — freshwater you might find in an office devoted to tax audits: nervous test-takers, dressed fishes, I believe. So just here you’ve got Bream Street.’’ He gestured down in suits, shuffling into one-on-one sessions with stone-faced examiners. But a road where a lumberyard was set back behind a corrugated metal fence. for more than a century, since the first green badge was issued to a hackney ‘‘Follow that to the end, you’ll come to Dace Road. You’ve got Roach Road. cabman piloting a horse-drawn carriage, the test has been known by a name All names of fishes.’’ that carries a whiff of the occult: the Knowledge of London. McCabe had spent the last three years of his life thinking about London’s roads and landmarks, and how to navigate between them. In the process, HE ORIGINS of the Knowledge are unclear — lost in the murk of he had logged more than 50,000 miles on motorbike and on foot, the equivalent Victorian municipal history. Some trace the test’s creation to the of two circumnavigations of the Earth, nearly all within inner London’s dozen Great Exhibition of 1851, when London’s Crystal Palace played host to boroughs and the City of London financial district. He was studying to be a hundreds of thousands of visitors. These tourists, the story goes, London taxi driver, devoting himself full-time to the challenge that would earn inundated the city with complaints about the ineptitude of its cabmen, him a cabbie’s ‘‘green badge’’ and put him behind the wheel of one of the prompting authorities to institute a more demanding licensing process. city’s famous boxy black taxis. The tale may be apocryphal, but it Actually, ‘‘challenge’’ isn’t quite the is certain that the Knowledge was in word for the trial a London cabbie place by 1884: City records for that year endures to gain his qualification. It has contain a reference to 1,931 applicants been called the hardest test, of any kind, for the ‘‘examination as to the in the world. Its rigors have been likened ‘knowledge’ [of]…principal streets and to those required to earn a degree in squares and public buildings.’’ law or medicine. It is without question a In 2015, in any case, the Knowledge is unique intellectual, psychological and steeped in regimens and rituals that physical ordeal, demanding unnumbered have been around as long as anyone can thousands of hours of immersive study, remember. Taxi-driver candidates — as would-be cabbies undertake the task of known as Knowledge boys and, committing to memory the entirety of increasingly today, Knowledge girls — London, and demonstrating that mastery are issued a copy of the so-called ‘‘Blue through a progressively more difficult Book.’’ This guidebook contains a list sequence of oral examinations — a of 320 ‘‘runs,’’ trips from Point A to Point process which, on average, takes four B: Manor House Station to Gibson years to complete, and for some, much Square, Jubilee Gardens to Royal London longer than that. The guidebook issued to Hospital, Dryburgh Road to Vicarage prospective cabbies by London Taxi and Crescent, etc. The candidate embarks on Private Hire (LTPH), which oversees the the Knowledge by making these runs test, summarizes the task like this: — that is, by physically going to Manor To achieve the required standard to be House Station and finding the shortest licensed as an ‘‘All London’’ taxi driver you route that can be legally driven to Gibson will need a thorough knowledge, primarily, Square, and then doing the same thing 319 of the area within a six-mile radius of more times, for the other Blue Book runs. Charing Cross. You will need to know: But the Knowledge is not simply all the streets; housing estates; parks and a matter of way-finding. The key is a open spaces; government offices and process called ‘‘pointing,’’ studying departments; financial and commercial the stuff on the streets: all those places centres; diplomatic premises; town halls; ‘‘a taxi passenger might ask to be registry offices; hospitals; places of taken.’’ Knowledge boys have developed worship; sports stadiums and leisure a system of pointing that some call KNOWLEDGE BOY Over three years, Matt McCabe logged more than 50,000 centres; airline offices; stations; hotels; ‘‘satelliting,’’ whereby the candidate miles on motorbike and foot within the city, the equivalent of two clubs; theatres; cinemas; museums; art travels in a quarter-mile radius around a circumnavigations of the Earth, while studying to become a London taxi driver. galleries; schools; colleges and run’s starting and finishing points, universities; police stations and headquarters buildings; civil, criminal and poking around, identifying landmarks, making notes. By this method, the coroner’s courts; prisons; and places of interest to tourists. In fact, anywhere a theory goes, a Knowledge student can commit to memory not just the taxi passenger might ask to be taken. streets but the streetscape — the curve of the road, the pharmacy on the If anything, this description understates the case. The six-mile radius from corner, the mice nibbling on cheese in the architrave. Charing Cross, the putative center-point of London marked by an equestrian Decades ago, most Knowledge boys did their runs on bicycles. Now, statue of King Charles I, takes in some 25,000 streets. London cabbies need to nearly all test-takers buy or lease motorbikes. There are thousands of men know all of those streets, and how to drive them — the direction they run, and women plying the city’s streets on two wheels, at all hours, which are one-way, which are dead ends, where to enter and exit traffic circles, in all weather, doing runs and gathering points. It’s a ubiquitous London and so on. But cabbies also need to know everything on the streets. Examiners sight: a Knowledge boy on a bike, with a map or notepad strapped to his may ask a would-be cabbie to identify the location of any restaurant in London. Plexiglas windscreen. When the candidate has completed his 320 Blue Book Any pub, any shop, any landmark, no matter how small or obscure — all are runs — and his accompanying 640 quarter-mile radii point-gathering fair game. Test-takers have been asked to name the whereabouts of flower expeditions — he will have covered the whole of central London. At which stands, of laundromats, of commemorative plaques. One taxi driver told me time he takes a brief written exam, proceeds to the first stage of the oral that he was asked the location of a statue, just a foot tall, depicting two mice examination process, and the test begins in earnest.
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The testing takes place at the LTPH office in a series of ‘‘appearances,’’ face-to-face encounters between Knowledge candidate and examiner. The test-taker is asked to ‘‘call a run’’: to identify the location of two points and to fluidly recite the shortest route between the points, naming all the streets along the way. A Knowledge boy is first given 56 days between appearances to study; then, as he progresses, 28 days, and 21. The questions, meanwhile, get harder, with candidates asked to locate more obscure points and to recite longer, more byzantine journeys across London’s byways. Each appearance consists of four runs, and each run is scored according to an elaborate numerical system. Your total score earns you a letter grade, from AA to D. (AA’s are exceedingly rare; D’s aren’t.) Candidates who acquire too many bad grades are bumped backward — ‘‘red-lined’’ from appearances every 28 days back to every 56 days, or from 21s to 28s. There is no such thing as ‘‘failing’’ the Knowledge. You can either quit, or persevere and pass: proceed all the way through to the end of your 21-day appearances, gaining sufficient points to earn your ‘‘req’’ — to meet the ‘‘required standard,’’ and complete the test.
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OR MATT MCCABE, that goal was within spitting distance. He was
‘‘on 21s, on six points,’’ making appearances just three weeks apart, with six points on his tally, and only six more needed — just two solid appearances, perhaps, away from getting his req. It was a pointing mission that brought McCabe to Fish Island that morning in January. He’d visited the neighborhood before, but had heard that a new point had come up in a candidate’s appearance a couple of days earlier. So he’d returned to take another look at the area — in particular, at H. Forman & Son, a wholesale fishmonger on Stour Road. ‘‘Forman’s is quite famous,’’ McCabe said. He was standing outside the H. Forman & Son warehouse, a shedlike structure the size of a small airplane hanger. ‘‘They supply fish to the top restaurants in London. But now they’ve opened their own restaurant.’’ McCabe scrutinized the menu posted on a wall outside the building. He took a note on a small pad: ‘‘Chef: Lloyd Hardwick.’’ Hardwick, McCabe discovered by checking Google, had been the executive chef at the sleek restaurant on the top floor of the Tate Modern museum. ‘‘You have to look into these things. You know, the examiner could turn around and say, ‘Name me two Angela Hartnett restaurants,’ or ‘Name me four Gordon Ramsay restaurants.’ ’’ McCabe showed me a sign indicating that the restaurant also housed an art gallery. ‘‘You’ve got to note that. Instead of Formans restaurant, the examiner might give you Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery. That could be enough to throw you off.’’ McCabe said: ‘‘This is an up-and-coming area. It looks like nothing, you know — but you put a bit of paint on the brickworks, smarten the place up, and all of a sudden it becomes a spot for little boutique stores or the up-and-coming D.J.s. You’ve got warehouse conversions; you’ll see guys coming out of the buildings in the morning — suit-and-tie, briefcase. If you’re driving a cab, you could pick someone up in the City at the end of the day heading back this way.’’ McCabe had spent his entire professional life in the building trade. He’d worked alongside his father, an electrical engineer, and then as the owner of his own small firm specializing in roof maintenance, steel work and asbestos removal. He liked the work, but it was grueling — 15-hour days, seven days a week — and the £50,000 ($80,000) he took home wasn’t enough, to his mind, to justify the sacrifices. A job as a taxi driver seemed an attractive alternative. London cabbies are self-employed businessmen who set their own schedules. The metered fares of taxis are high, and drivers keep what they earn. The overhead — the cost of gas and of owning or leasing a taxi — can be steep, but cabbies who put in the hours can make a good living. There are no official statistics, but drivers themselves will tell you that London cabbies can earn around £65,000 per year, about $100,000, while maintaining an enviably flexible schedule. As a cabbie, McCabe figured, he could work seven, 10, 15 days straight — and then take four days off to spend time with his wife Katie, a hairdresser, and their children, Archie, 4, and Lulu, 3. He sold his
engineering outfit and devoted himself full-time to the Knowledge, living off the savings he’d gained from the sale of his business. It was now 37 months since he’d paid the £525 enrollment fee to sign on for the test and appearances. ‘‘The closer you get, the wearier you are, and the worse you want it,’’ McCabe said. ‘‘You’re carrying all this baggage. Your stress. Worrying about your savings.’’ McCabe said that he’d spent in excess of £200,000 on the Knowledge, if you factored in his loss of earnings from not working. ‘‘I want to be out working again before my kids are at the age where someone will ask: ‘What does your daddy do?’ Right now, they know me as Daddy who drives a motorbike and is always looking at a map. They don’t know me from my past, when I had a business and guys working for me. You want your life back.’’ The Knowledge is notorious for snatching away lives, and for putting minds in a vise grip. ‘‘Everything becomes about the Knowledge,’’ McCabe said. ‘‘My wife will be talking to me about plans or the kids, and it’s not even registering what she’s saying. Because all I’m thinking is, ‘I can’t turn right into that road in Hammersmith, can I?’ If you read the paper, or watch the news or a film, you’re looking at the background. ‘Oh, I know that road there.’ ’’ McCabe said that he dreamed about the Knowledge: sometimes exhilarating visions of zooming through London streets, more frequently nightmares about unfamiliar roads or disastrous LTPH appearances. Often, McCabe would wake in the middle of the night and hurry downstairs to study the map. In his dining room, there were three maps: two jumbo London street plans — one laminated on the dinner table and one tacked to the wall — and an enlarged view of the W1 postcode, the bustling zone which stretches south from Marylebone to Piccadilly and east to Soho. McCabe had ledgers he’d filled with jottings on topics like ‘‘Small and Awkward Squares.’’ There were also flashcards that McCabe had made up, listing a point on one side (‘‘Tooting Mosque, SW17’’) with information about its location and navigation on the other (‘‘Gatton Road, one way, access via Fishponds Road’’). McCabe stacked the cards in piles of 300; he had 40,000 in all. His home, he said, had become a library of the Knowledge. But book-learning gets you only so far. ‘‘You’ve got to get out on the bike,’’ McCabe said. When he was doing Blue Book runs, McCabe would ride the streets all night, leaving when his wife got home from work at 9 p.m. and returning at 4 in the morning. Pointing, McCabe told me, can be ‘‘very cold, very lonely, very dangerous.’’ One night, McCabe was out pointing on his motorbike when a driver slammed into him from behind. McCabe went over the roof of the car, but suffered just a few scrapes and bruises. The bike was totaled. ‘‘I’m stationary in the filter lane, and the car just came around the bend and hit me,’’ McCabe said. ‘‘This was on a road called Pound Lane. Right across from the fire station at the corner of Harlesden Road.’’ As McCabe progressed through the Knowledge, his pointing technique had become more refined. ‘‘At the beginning you might go to the Savoy Hotel on the Strand,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s a famous point; everyone knows it. But you start to think: What’s a more obscure point on the Strand? So you’ll pick up the Coal Hole Public House a few doors along. You start looking at George Court and find a little bar called Retro, a gay bar that plays ’80s music. You start thinking about the bits and pieces. I’m at the stage now where I’m looking at a new bar that just opened — inside a cinema. I’m picking up handbag shops, bowling alleys. You learn to kind of savor them little gems.’’
The Knowledge is a uniquely British institution: a democratization of what P. G. Wodehouse winkingly called the feudal spirit, putting an army of hyperefficient Jeeveses on the road, ready to be flagged down by any passing Bertie Wooster.
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T IS TEMPTING to interpret the Knowledge as a uniquely British
institution: an expression of the national passion for order and competence, and a democratization of what P. G. Wodehouse winkingly called the feudal spirit, putting an army of hyperefficient Jeeveses on the road, ready to be flagged down by any passing Bertie Wooster. But the Knowledge is less a product of the English character than of the torturous London landscape. To be in London is, at least half the time, to have no idea where the hell you are. Every London journey, even the most banal, holds the threat of taking an epic turn: January - February 2015
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The guy headed to the corner newsagent makes a left where he should have gone right, blunders into an unfamiliar road, and suddenly he is Odysseus adrift on the Acheron. The problem is one of both enormity and density. From the time that London first began to spread beyond the walls surrounding the Roman city, it kept sprawling outward, absorbing villages, enlarging the spiderweb snarl of little roads, multiplying the maze. Take a look sometime at a London street map. What a mess: It is a preposterously complex tangle of veins and capillaries, the cardiovascular system of a monster. All metropolises are quirky, but in most of them efforts have been made to mitigate the idiosyncrasies, to make the cities legible, navigable, beautiful. In Manhattan and Chicago, planners tamed chaos with gridded street schemes; Baron Haussmann obliterated twisty medieval Paris with his sweeping grands boulevards, transforming the city into a linked chain of vistas, plazas and parks. London, though, makes no sense. It was the capital city of the greatest empire in history, yet it doesn’t look or feel imperial. There are miles of monotonous ugliness, disrupted not by splendor, but by gentility — the pretty whitewashed homes and stately squares in the well-heeled districts of West and North London. St. Paul’s Cathedral sits at the back of a small semicircular plaza that is pinned-in by the office towers and bendy streets of the financial district. It is difficult to get a decent view of the most beautiful building in town. The genius behind St. Paul’s, the architect Christopher Wren, nearly became London’s Haussmann. Just days after the catastrophic Great Fire of 1666, Wren produced a plan to rebuild London as an Italian-style city, with wide boulevards that terminated in piazzas and raised stone quays. But the plan never gained traction. The explanation usually given is economic: If Chicago is an expression of American pragmatism, and Paris an ode to symmetry, then London is a monument to English mercantilism and love of private property, to the power of the bourgeois freeholders and shopkeepers, who clung too tightly to their little patches of land to permit the clearing of space for Wren’s plan. In London, lucre trumps grandeur. The result is a town that bewilders even its lifelong residents. Londoners, writes Peter Ackroyd, are ‘‘a population lost in [their] own city.’’ London’s labyrinthine roadways are a symbol — and, perhaps, a cause — of the fatalism that hangs like a pea-soup fog over the Londoner’s consciousness. Facing the dizzying infinitude of streets, your mind turns darkly to thoughts of finitude: to the time that is flying, the minutes you are running late for your doctor’s appointment, the hours ticking by, never to be retrieved, on the proverbial Big Clock, the one even bigger than Big Ben. You can see it every day in Primrose Hill and Clapham, in Golders Green and Kentish Town, in Deptford and Dalston. A nervous man, an anxious woman, scanning the horizon for a recognizable landmark, searching for a street sign, silently wondering ‘‘Where am I?’’ — a geographical question that grades gloomily into an existential one. Which is where the Knowledge comes in. It is a weird city’s weird solution to the riddle of itself, a municipal training program whose graduates are both transit workers and Gnostics: chauffeurs taught by the government to know the unknowable.
road that loops above the Strand — along a sequence of one-way streets: Catherine, Exeter, Wellington, Tavistock, Southampton, Henrietta, Bedford, Garrick. To access C.A.B. — the Chelsea, Albert, and Battersea bridges — you take C.O.B.: respectively, Chelsea Bridge Road, Oakley Street and Beaufort Street. A series of streets running north to south through Soho — Greek, Frith, Dean, Wardour — are Good For Dirty Women. But the majority of a student’s time at Knowledge Point is spent in two cramped rooms on the school’s ground floor, where maps are arranged on flat tables and angled easels. These rooms are devoted to ‘‘calling-over’’: sitting with a partner, taking turns reciting runs, in an effort to replicate the conditions of oral examinations at the LTPH office. Anytime you step into Knowledge Point you will find students, faces pinched in concentration, calling-over runs in the specialized jargon mandated by Knowledge examiners. A skilled caller — a ‘‘woosher,’’ in Knowledge slang — can sound like a slam poet or a rapper, whipping off street names and turnings in a pleasing syncopated rhythm as he races through London streets in his mind’s eye: Leave on the right Lillie Road, left Eardley Crescent, left Warwick Road, forward Holland Road, comply Holland Circus, leave by Uxbridge Road, forward and right Shepherd’s Bush Green. More often, what you will hear at Knowledge Point is the sound of strain: groans, hems and haws, cursing. Matt McCabe had been coming to Knowledge Point since he started on the test. A stickler for routine, he arrived each morning at 8:45. When the doors opened at 9, he would sit down across a table from his call-over partner, Steven Vine. I met McCabe and Vine at Knowledge Point one morning and watched them call-over. They spent hours switching off, settling into a patter of run-calling punctuated by mumbled expletives and other exclamations: ‘‘good pull’’ (when you correctly identify a tricky point), ‘‘bad drop’’ (when you forget a point or road that you should know), ‘‘nice line’’ (when your call sketches a nice straight path across the map). To call-over effectively is to find a golden mean between geography and geometry. The aim is not just to navigate cleanly, naming the right roads, but to make the shortest and most elegant line between points. While McCabe called-over a run, Vine followed along, tracing his partner’s route with a marker on the laminated map. When McCabe finished, he and Vine stretched a ball-bearing chain over the map to assess the straightness of his call. This practice is known as ‘‘cottoning the run,’’ a phrase that dates to the days when Knowledge boys would use lengths of cotton twine to measure their runs. ‘‘They have a saying, ‘Don’t let the cotton strangle you,’ ’’ McCabe said. ‘‘It’s a reminder: Don’t get too tied up in having the perfect line. You’re always trying to calculate: ‘Which one would look the prettiest on the map?’ But sometimes you just gotta let it flow.’’ The London landscape throws up constant impediments to the ideal of traveling in a straight line: parks, railway yards, one-way streets. The Thames presents another challenge. Because the area below the river is referred to as South London, most people assume that the dozen central London bridges spanning the water stretch north-to-south. In fact, the Thames’s flow is meandering; in places, the river crossings run along the opposite axis. (A Knowledge boy mnemonic instructs: ‘‘East to West, Lambeth or Westminster Bridge is best.’’) At Knowledge Point, McCabe leaned over the map and pointed to the King’s Road in Chelsea. ‘‘If you were going from here, say, all the way out to Canary Wharf, you might cross the river twice to make it the shortest line. So you might run it across Westminster Bridge and bring yourself back across Tower Bridge. That will be a straight line, because you’re understanding the bends in the river.’’ At his late stage of the test process, McCabe found himself facing a novel problem: too much Knowledge. ‘‘London now feels very small. At the beginning, you would be standing in Piccadilly and someone says to you, ‘Take me to Kilburn,’ and you would say: ‘Oh my God, that feels miles away.’ Now, I can take you endless amounts of ways. And that’s the dilemma you’ve got now: you see too many options.’’ Seeing, for a Knowledge candidate, is everything — at its heart, the
The posterior hippocampus, known to be important for memory, is bigger in London taxi drivers than in most people and, for successful Knowledge candidates, enlarges as the test progresses.
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F YOU FOLLOW your London A-Z Street Atlas halfway up Caledonian
Road, in Islington, you’ll find Knowledge Point, the largest of London’s 10 schools dedicated to the test. The school occupies a nondescript two-story building, but you can’t miss it: At all hours of the day, Knowledge boys’ motorbikes line the sidewalk out front. For several years in the 1990s, there was something else parked alongside the bikes: the steed of a mounted Metropolitan Police officer, who did the Knowledge on horseback, after, and during, his working hours. The school offers specialized lectures on dozens of topics: ‘‘Hotels Outside Central London,’’ ‘‘South West London Turnarounds,’’ ‘‘Barracks & Military Establishments,’’ ‘‘Lambeth & Waterloo.’’ Pupils pick up trade secrets, the aides-mémoires and acronyms that have been passed between generations of Knowledge boys. There’s ‘‘Cat Eats Well Then Shares Her Beef Gravy,’’ a mnemonic denoting a path north from the Aldwych — the crescent-shaped 80
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Knowledge is an elaborate exercise in visualization. When McCabe calledAt Knowledge Point, McCabe explained the quirks of various examiners. over, he closed his eyes and toggled between views: picturing the city at There was Mr. Gunning, who favors runs with difficult strictures: He likes to street level, the roads rolling out in front of him as if in a movie, then pulling impose road closures, or to ask candidates to do runs while steering clear the camera back to take in the bird’s eye perspective, scanning the London of streets with traffic lights. Ms. Gerald, one of two women examiners, map. Knowledge boys speak of a Eureka moment when, after months or years specializes in runs with lots of novel points. ‘‘There’s another examiner, Mr. of doggedly assembling the London puzzle, the fuzziness recedes and the city Hall,’’ McCabe said. ‘‘He’s a tricky one. They have a nickname for him. snaps into focus, the great morass of streets suddenly appearing as an Everyone calls him the Smiling Assassin.’’ intelligible whole. McCabe was startled not just by that macroview, but by the minute details he was able to retain. ‘‘I can pull a tiny little art studio just from AVID HALL IS, in fact, quick with a smile. He’s 53 years old and baldthe color of the door, and where it’s got a lamppost outside. Your brain just headed. He wears rimless glasses and dark suits and ties. I met him remembers silly things, you know?’’ one afternoon at the LTPH office. He was sitting at the desk where he The brains of London taxi drivers have attracted scholarly attention. conducts examinations, with a large London map and various notes Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London, has spent spread out in front of him. ‘‘It isn’t so bad in here, is it?’’ he said. He nodded 15 years studying cabbies and Knowledge boys. She has discovered that the slightly towards the area down the hall where Knowledge candidates wait to posterior hippocampus, the area of the brain known to be important for be called in for appearances. ‘‘You can’t believe everything you hear.’’ memory, is bigger in London taxi drivers than in most people, and that a Hall knows what it’s like to sit on the other side of the examiner’s desk. Like successful Knowledge candidate’s posterior hippocampus enlarges as he all examiners, he is a cabbie, a Knowledge graduate with many years of taxiprogresses through the test. Maguire’s work demonstrates that the brain is driving on his CV. He left school at age 16, and got a job in the confectionery capable of structural change even in adulthood. The studies also provide a department at Harrods before becoming an electronics engineer. At age 27, he scientific explanation for the experiences of Knowledge students, the majority decided to try for a career as a cabbie. Hall had a keen sense of direction and of whom have never pursued higher education and profess shock at the had always loved maps. He passed the Knowledge in less than two years. amount of information they are Hall became an examiner in able to assimilate and retain. 2008, and soon developed the Historically, taxi driving has been reputation that earned him the a white working-class industry, Smiling Assassin moniker: He was dominated by East Londoners: first, a kind man, with a warm, welcoming the Irish, and later, cockneys and manner, who asked very difficult Jews. For a century at least, the runs. It is common knowledge London black taxi has been a vehicle among test-takers that Hall of upward mobility, steering a path supports Crystal Palace, the football into the middle class. Today’s team based in South East London, Knowledge candidates include a and that he lives somewhere nearby. new generation of London strivers. He is known, and feared, for At Knowledge Point, there are giving vexing South London runs. nearly as many black and brown Matt McCabe had Hall in two faces bent over maps as white ones, appearances, when he was on his and in the clamor of voices calling 28s. McCabe said: ‘‘He’s fair, but runs you hear a variety of accents very hard. He’ll take you from — South Asian, West African, Kensington or Chelsea and he’ll Caribbean — mingling with the get you to run it down to Peckham broad vowels and glottal stops of or to Dulwich. He’ll put you in Estuary English. the dilemma: Do I take Vauxhall The students are united by shared Bridge or Battersea Bridge? TAKE A SEAT Examiners are known for their various quirks — such as suffering, and by a common He’s very technical. And he’s very requesting routes without traffic lights or, in the case of the ‘‘Smiling Assassin’’ adversary. For a Knowledge boy, into South London.’’ David Hall (above), favoring difficult South London runs. the LTPH examiners have a kind of Hall is also known for doing his mythic status, inspiring a mixture of fear, resentment and awe. Appearances homework. Examiners have to burnish their own Knowledge to keep a step are highly ritualized. Candidates heed longstanding Knowledge traditions, ahead of examinees, reviewing road closures and traffic patterns, and, in wearing suits and ties to appearances and addressing the examiners formally. their spare time, hitting the streets to pick up new points. Hall is a dedicated McCabe said: ‘‘It’s: ‘Yes, sir, three bags full, sir.’ You can sit in there and pointer. When I told a Knowledge boy that I was planning to interview Mr. before you’ve even done anything, you’ve said ‘sir’ 15 times.’’ Hall, he said: ‘‘I heard he went out pointing on Christmas Day.’’ Examiners insist that the formality is important, designed to inculcate One afternoon, I met Hall outside Palestra House, the office tower in a professional code and to prepare future cabbies for the ornery London Southwark that houses LTPH. He was carrying a digital voice recorder and a public. But there is also humor, of a sort, in the testing room. For clipboard with notes and maps, which he’d drawn himself. We walked north, generations, Knowledge examiners have seized on the poetry of London crossing the Millennium Bridge, which links the South Bank of the Thames nomenclature to craft cheeky runs: Snowman House to the ICE Train, with the City of London, and then turned east, following the thrumming traffic Hamlet Gardens to the Globe Theatre, the Eye (the giant Ferris wheel on along Queen Victoria Street. At a corner, Hall started scribbling notes. ‘‘You the South Bank of the Thames) to the Nose (a tiny sculpture, reputedly have to work out: How do the roads go? Is Queen Victoria Street curving modeled on Lord Nelson’s nose, embedded in Admiralty Arch). One there? Is Friday Street going north? At the end of Friday Street — yep, you’ve examiner, Tony Swire, likes to quiz candidates about their lives and use got a forced left with a blue arrow. A Knowledge candidate needs to take that information to concoct runs, off the top of his head, that flaunt his own a mental picture of the road or the arrow there.’’ Hall drew an arrow on his vast London Knowledge. When Swire learned that Matt McCabe’s wife map, indicating the forced left. was a hairdresser and that his children were named Archie and Lulu, he Just west of the intersection, on the north side of Queen Victoria Street, gave McCabe a run from the Mayfair salon of celebrity hairstylist John stood an elegant old church, with a spire that jutted above the surrounding Frieda, the ex-husband of Scottish pop singer Lulu, to Archie Street, a tiny buildings. Hall said: ‘‘That’s St. Nicholas Cole Abbey. It’s a Wren church. dead-end road in Bermondsey. In fact, the church predated Wren by several centuries, but it was destroyed in
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the Great Fire, and Wren rebuilt it. That’s a point I’ll ask occasionally— I have done before. I’m very fond of City of London churches.’’ It is said that the Knowledge is as much about learning history as learning your way around. After completing the Knowledge, Hall undertook a yearslong course of study to earn the ‘‘blue badge’’ of an official London tour guide. While Hall strolled around the City pointing — logging road works and making notes about new restaurants and bars — he led me on an impromptu walking tour: more Wren churches, medieval livery companies and guild halls marked with elaborate coats of arms, the Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers, the Innholders Hall, a carved likeness of Winston Churchill’s face in the center of a clock above the doorway of an office building. Toward evening, we made our way back along Queen Victoria Street, passing a massive three-acre building site, the future home of Bloomberg L.P.’s European headquarters. The construction project had revealed further remains of the Temple of Mithras, a Roman ruin first discovered in 1954. The temple once stood on the banks of the Walbrook, a now-buried river that brought fresh water to Roman Londinium. Hall said: ‘‘In the religion practiced here, they used to have seven ordeals. If you were a Roman soldier, one of the ordeals was to put you over a fire pit. If you could withstand that particular ordeal, you went to the next stage in that religion.’’ Hall said: ‘‘The thing about London is, it’s forever changing. The old city is preserved, of course, but there’s always a new city coming forth. There really is no end to the Knowledge. It’s infinite.’’
Johnson, London’s mayor, whom taxi drivers regard as a zealous deregulator, friendly to big business at their expense. (At the rally, cabbies held placards that read: ‘‘Uber: Under Boris Exempt from Regulation.’’) In his public statements on the matter, the mayor has walked a fine line. ‘‘London’s black-cab trade is crucial to the fabric of the city,’’ Johnson said. ‘‘There must, however, be a place for new technology to work in harmony with the black cab, and we shouldn’t unnecessarily restrict new ideas that are of genuine benefit to Londoners.’’ Others are less hedging. In July, Forbes ran an editorial by staff writer John Tamny, extolling Uber as a ‘‘disrupter’’ of the taxi business and casting London’s cabbies as passé: ‘‘Just as automation, free trade and general economic progress have allowed us to shed previously important skills such as sewing, farming, and yes, addition/ subtraction, so does it allow us — indeed, it requires us — to shed oncerelevant knowledge. . . . As for London, the GPS has, much to the chagrin of some cabdrivers with telegraphic memory, rendered their knowledge of one of the world’s great cities largely irrelevant.’’ Taxi drivers counter such claims by pointing out that black cabs have triumphed in staged races against cars using GPS, or as the British call it, Sat-Nav. Cabbies contend that in dense and dynamic urban terrain like London’s, the brain of a cabbie is a superior navigation tool — that Sat-Nav doesn’t know about the construction that has sprung up on Regent Street, and that a driver who is hailed in heavilytrafficked Piccadilly Circus doesn’t have time to enter an address and wait for his dashboard-mounted robot to tell him where to steer his car. HE TEST-TAKERS of a Such arguments may hold for a century ago who tottered while. But given the pace of their way to the Knowledge technological refinement, how long on bicycles earned a heady will it be before the development reward: not just a green badge, of a Sat-Nav algorithm that works but something close to a guaranteed better than the most ingenious living. Today’s Knowledge candidates cabbie, before a voice-activated GPS, are banking on that pattern holding, or a driverless car, can zip a but history seems to be veering passenger from Piccadilly to Putney in a different direction. These more efficiently than any Knowledge days, a person can walk into the graduate? Ultimately, the case to LTPH office and, with relatively make for the Knowledge may not be minimal effort, acquire a license to practical-economic (the Knowledge drive one of London’s nearly 60,000 works better than Sat-Nav), or moralminicabs, a fleet that vastly political (the little man must be outnumbers the approximately 25,000 protected against rapacious global black taxis. Minicab drivers do not capitalism), but philosophical, have to demonstrate familiarity with spiritual, sentimental: The THE GRADUATE McCabe at the wheel of a classic-looking TX4 Elegance black taxi. London; an applicant is merely Knowledge should be maintained required to pass a background check and take a ‘‘topographical test.’’ because it is good for London’s soul, and for the souls of Londoners. The Minicabs can also offer cheaper fares than taxis, whose metered pricing Knowledge stands for, well, knowledge — for the Enlightenment ideal of schemes are strictly regulated. encyclopedic learning, for the humanist notion that diligent intellectual For years, the black taxi industry has decried minicabs as an inferior endeavor is ennobling, an end in itself. To support the Knowledge is to make service that poaches business rightfully belonging to Knowledge graduates. the unfashionable argument that expertise cannot be reduced to data, that But many consumer advocates regard minicabs as a welcome corrective — there’s something dystopian, or at least depressing, about the outsourcing of a reasonably priced alternative to black taxis, whose hefty fares are beyond humanity’s hard-won erudition to gizmos, even to portable handheld gizmos the reach of most Londoners. (A 2013 survey by the travel website that themselves are miracles of human imagination and ingenuity. London’s TripAdvisor deemed London’s taxis the world’s most expensive, with an taxi driver test enshrines knowledge as — to use the au courant term — an average cost per trip of £27, about $43.) artisanal commodity, a thing that’s local and homespun, thriving ideally in the In theory, there are rules in place that offer advantages to traditional London individual hippocampus, not the digital hivemind. cabbies: Theirs are the only rides that can legally be hailed on the street. But You could also call the Knowledge the greatest tribute a city has ever paid times are changing, and curbside hailing may soon be as quaint a relic of old to itself, a love letter more ardent than ‘‘I ❤ N.Y.’’ or anything else a Chamber London as the clubman striding through Mayfair in his bowler hat and of Commerce might cook up. The Knowledge says that London is Holy Writ, boutonniere. Recently, the London taxi trade has been roiled by the rise of a great mystery to be pored over, and that a corps of municipal Talmudists Uber, the smartphone app-based ride-sharing company. On June 11, thousands must be delegated to that task. To the extent that the mystifying clichés hold of drivers staged a one-hour-long ‘‘strike,’’ gridlocking streets to protest what — that taxi drivers are London’s singers of songlines and fonts of folk wisdom, they view as Uber’s illegal evasion of London’s metering laws. The Licensed carrying not just the secrets of London navigation but the deep history of the Taxi Drivers Association, a black-cab advocacy group, has brought a series of city and its streets — the disappearance of the Knowledge would be an assault lawsuits against Uber drivers. But at the demonstration, the cabbies’ anger on civic memory, a blow, if you will, to historic preservation. Smartphone apps was directed less at Uber, per se, than at Transport for London and Boris and Google Maps may ensure that Londoners will never again be lost in their
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own city, but if the Knowledge disappears, will something of London itself be lost — will some essence of the place vanish along with all those guys on mopeds, learning the town’s roads and plumbing its depths?
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IKE MOST CABBIES and Knowledge boys, Matt McCabe worries about
the future of the taxi business. But in January 2013, he had more pressing concerns. A few days after his visit to Fish Island, McCabe went on an appearance and scored a B, leaving him with 10 points, just two shy of his goal. Barring a calamity, a brain-freeze, it seemed a foregone conclusion that his next appearance would be his last. Three weeks later, on a Friday, McCabe rose, as usual, early, with his children, and went through a routine he’d established over many months. He made sure he was cleanly shaven, that his shoes were polished, his suit pristine. He took the train into London, disembarked at London Bridge station, and walked to the LTPH office at a measured pace, trying to keep his heart-rate steady. He arrived with time to spare and took his seat in the waiting area with a dozen or so other Knowledge candidates. At around 2 p.m., McCabe’s name was called, and he was ushered into the office of a man he’d never met before. David O’Connor is a veteran examiner with a reputation as a hard marker. McCabe knew that O’Connor liked to test whether candidates had been getting around on the bike, and liked to give runs that worked the center of the map. McCabe sat down and breezed through his first three runs. He was nervous, but his calls, he thought, were solid. Surely it was a done deed now? For the session’s final run, O’Connor asked McCabe to take him from the Sun and Doves to Emirates Stadium. McCabe closed his eyes. He could see the Sun and Doves: It was a pub on the corner of Coldharbour Lane and Caldecot Road, down in Camberwell. Of course he knew Emirates Stadium, the home of Arsenal, the Premier League football team. McCabe said: ‘‘Sun and Doves, Coldharbour Lane. Emirates Stadium, it’s Drayton Park. That’s the North Bank entrance.’’ O’Connor nodded: the Knowledge boy had identified the points correctly. McCabe closed his eyes again, to make sure he saw the line clearly. Then he called the run: Leave on the right, Coldharbour Lane Left into Denmark Hill Forward Camberwell Road Forward Walworth Road Comply Elephant and Castle Leave by Newington Causeway Forward Borough High Street Forward over London Bridge Forward into King William Street Forward Lombard Street Forward Bank Junction Forward Prince’s Street Forward Moorgate Forward Finsbury Pavement Forward Finsbury Square Forward City Road Comply Old Street roundabout Leave by City Road continued Right Provost Street Right Vestry Street Left into East Road Forward New North Road Forward Canonbury Road Comply Highbury Corner Leave by Holloway Road Right Drayton Park Set down on the left It was a nearly seven-mile-long journey, due north, from Camberwell to Holloway, in Islington, north-central London. When McCabe finished the call, he and O’Connor sat in silence for what seemed to McCabe an eternity. Finally, O’Connor stood up and extended his hand. He said: ‘‘Well done, Matt.
Welcome to the club. I’m pleased to say that you’re now one of London’s finest.’’ It was the first time in the more than three years McCabe had been coming to LTPH that an examiner had called him by his first name. ‘‘It was an emotional moment,’’ McCabe said. ‘‘It was hard to hold back the tears. Three years of complete financial stress, family stress — studying for 13 hours a day, seven days a week. Suddenly, the whole thing was very casual. It was quite, you know, ‘Sit back, relax, loosen your tie.’ And then Mr. O’Connor was telling me what to expect doing the job. He was giving me his inside knowledge after being a London cabbie for, like, 20-odd years.’’ McCabe went home to his family. He and his wife, Katie, ordered take-out from a Thai restaurant, put on loud music, and danced around the house with their children. When the kids went to bed, the McCabes drank a few beers and dismantled the Knowledge library: stored the flashcards and pages of notes, took the maps off the wall. Katie, McCabe said, ‘‘cried for about two days solid.’’
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CCABE HAS BEEN DRIVING a taxi for just over a year and a half.
He is still new at the job, relatively speaking; in London cabbie lingo, he’s a ‘‘Butter Boy’’ — but a boy, a recent Knowledge graduate. He has the leanings of a traditionalist, though. Many cabbies today are opting for new minivan-style Mercedes taxis, or cabs decorated with ‘‘full wrap-liveries,’’ advertisements in eye-popping hues. McCabe owns a TX4 Elegance, a car with the classic London black cab look. ‘‘I like the iconic shape,’’ he said. ‘‘To me, if you’re gonna be a London cabbie, that’s what you should be driving.’’ In June, McCabe took part in the demonstration against Uber. He said, ‘‘We’re trying to be the best in the world, and trying to stay competitive as well. And, you know, the way Uber seems to operate in London — when it’s quiet, they do the work for next to nothing, when it’s busy, the rates are three times dearer than a London cab.’’ For now, McCabe is making a good living. ‘‘The rewards are there. You have to do the hours. I mean, a normal day for me is a 12-hour day.’’ He said: ‘‘What I’ve done is a trade. A minicab driver, an Uber driver — they won’t do the undertaking I done. They won’t put in the three years.’’ ‘‘I had a gentleman in the cab recently,’’ McCabe said. ‘‘He told me that a couple of nights earlier he’d been eating in a restaurant in Chelsea, and the Uber car turned up. He said, ‘We want to go to Wapping.’ And the driver said, ‘Where’s Wapping? Is it in London?’ And it’s, like, a massive borough. He’s never heard of it! So, I picked this guy up. He said, ‘Wapping.’ I went, ‘Yes, sir.’ And he said, ‘Kennet Street.’ I went, ‘Yes, sir.’ He got in the back, and we were off. And he told me, ‘That’s why I’m reverting back to London cabs.’ ’’ McCabe said, ‘‘The moment a person tells me at the window where they want to go, we’re going. There’s no mucking about. I want to get you from A to B as quickly as possible. Because as nice as the person may be, I want to get them in and out. So I can get the next person in the back of the cab, and I’m earning more money.’’ McCabe is still doing the Knowledge, after a fashion. He’s embarked on the three-year course to become a licensed London historian — an official tour guide, like David Hall. ‘‘I’m fascinated with the quirky little bits of London history,’’ McCabe said. ‘‘The famous lamps at the Savoy. The secret tunnels that link up to St. James’s Palace.’’ When he’s in his cab, McCabe keeps his eyes peeled for another London curiosity: the Knowledge examiners, his erstwhile tormentors, now colleagues, who may be out driving their own taxis, or gathering new points. Each workday, McCabe makes his way into the city’s center via South London, guiding his taxi through the streets that have flummoxed many a Knowledge boy attempting to call one of Mr. Hall’s runs. McCabe hasn’t spotted Hall yet, but he hopes he will sometime. It would be nice, he says, to have a beer with the Smiling Assassin. Back in the winter of 2013, shortly before McCabe’s final appearance, I asked him how he was handling the pressure. He said: ‘‘If you overcome the nerves, your training will take over. When I get into that room, I try to think: ‘This guy is an examiner, but when he’s not sitting here, he’s behind the wheel, driving a cab.’ He could pick me up tomorrow, you know, or pick my wife up. That calms me down. I think to myself, ‘This guy is just a cab driver, same as what I want to be. He’s just a London cab driver. He doesn’t know everything.’ ’’ January - February 2015
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STANDING TALL Quvenzhané Wallis, who takes the lead in ‘‘Annie,’’ directed by Will Gluck. Bonpoint coat, QR2,310. Monnalisa skirt, QR825, alexandalexa .com. Topshop socks, QR45, topshop.com. Adidas Originals sneakers, QR275, adidas.com.
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Roller skates, pizza, math class and an Oscar nomination: the life of an 11-year-old movie star. BY NICHOLAS HARAMIS PHOTOGRAPHS BY RENÉ AND RADKA
ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
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THE AIRLINE SKATE CENTER, next to the Jefferson Gun Outlet on a dusty
strip of highway in suburban New Orleans, is Quvenzhané Wallis’s favorite place to hang out. They serve her favorite food (pizza) and she can listen to her favorite song (Ariana Grande’s ‘‘Break Free’’) while indulging in her favorite pastime (roller skating). And on this sticky afternoon in October she never once complains — not even 50 laps in — about feeling dizzy or nauseous or the least bit achy in the calves. Like most sixth graders, Wallis could swerve and spin and twirl around to a soundtrack of Pharrell and Justin Bieber all day long with only occasional pit stops to fuel up on orange soda. Unlike most sixth graders, she has to slow down every now and again to answer questions from a breathless journalist about how it feels to be the youngest Oscar nominee ever. ‘‘I’m not gonna name names,’’ she says, ‘‘but sometimes when reporters are talking it gets a little boring because I don’t have any jokes to tell because the questions are so serious.’’ Inquiries into inspiration and motivation elicit eye rolls. At one point, while discussing the director and co-stars of her new film, ‘‘Annie’’ — Will Gluck is a ‘‘really nice man,’’ Jamie Foxx is ‘‘a really nice guy’’ and Cameron Diaz is ‘‘really nice’’ — she lets out an exasperated yawn. Then she gets up in her pink Nike hightops and sparkly pink top (her favorite colors are turquoise and pink). ‘‘Why doesn’t a bike stand up on its own?’’ she asks. Even on her tiptoes, the 5-foot-2 actress looks very much like a young girl. ‘‘I’ve got it!’’ I find myself yelling, apparently desperate to make an 11-yearold think I’m cool. ‘‘Because it’s two-tired!’’ Despite my better judgment, I go in for a needy high-five. Wallis’s precocious, at times petulant charm — littered with as much toilet humor as schoolyard sagacity — is her secret weapon, and it’s what makes her stand out from all the pretween beauty queens who’ve been trained to follow a script. She couldn’t even read one when she went to an open audition in her hometown of Houma, La., for the part of Hushpuppy, a girl struggling to care for her dying father, in the filmmaker Benh Zeitlin’s magical-realist odyssey ‘‘Beasts of the Southern Wild.’’ She delighted viewers during the 2013 movie awards season, when she consistently appeared with puppy-shaped handbags slung over her shoulder, in large part because her affect so easily swings between wide-eyed sweetness and sniffy ennui. While she’s undeniably natural when bringing the inner life of a child to the screen, it’s a little early to tell if that’s because she is a child. Recalling why he cast Wallis in ‘‘Beasts,’’ Zeitlin says, ‘‘It was just the feeling behind her eyes.’’ That way of ‘‘showing emotion without using words’’ convinced the director Will Gluck that she had what it took to play the world’s most famous orphan (or, in this version, foster child) in ‘‘Annie,’’ with Jamie Foxx as the Daddy Warbucks character and Cameron Diaz as the mean-spirited foster mother Miss Hannigan. ‘‘There were certain moments when I read the script with her, when she’s supposed to be optimistic, and she was able to do it on her face without being like, ‘I’m optimistic!’ ’’ Gluck says. ‘‘I was really concerned about not casting Broadway kids. We didn’t want anyone who knew how to emote to the back of the house.’’ While some critics interpreted ‘‘Beasts’’ as a post-Katrina parable, the ‘‘Annie’’ remake, Gluck insists, isn’t trying to make any sort of socioeconomic statement. ‘‘Every character in this movie really was cast race-blind,’’ Gluck
says, explaining that his main goal was to introduce Annie’s story to a new generation of moviegoers. ‘‘It’s funny, because adults always call this a rags-to-riches movie, but when kids see it, that’s the last thing they think. Annie hates Miss Hannigan, she hates her experience, but she never complains about being poor. All she cares about is finding her family.’’ Right now, all Wallis cares about is finding the two tokens she needs to play a new round of Hoop Fever, which she’s infuriatingly good at (basketball, she says, is also a favorite). When I swear under my breath after losing yet another game, she holds out her hand. ‘‘You owe me a dollar,’’ she says. Her mother, Qulyndreia, adds, laughing, ‘‘She made a killing on the ‘Annie’ set.’’ Wallis, the youngest of four siblings raised by a schoolteacher mother and a truck-driver father, could reportedly earn up to one and a half million dollars for the movie, which had her singing and dancing and sun-will-come-out-ing her way through Manhattan over about 60 days. ‘‘I was so impressed with her,’’ says Foxx, who spent a lot of time on set with Wallis and his two daughters. Diaz helped Wallis with her homework when they weren’t shooting, and was equally charmed. Asked about the pressure that might have come with reviving such an iconic character, Diaz says, ‘‘I’m not certain that a girl that age has that kind of awareness. I don’t think Q did, anyhow.’’ Between scenes, Wallis and the other child actors were taught by ‘‘a real teacher who doesn’t care about movies,’’ Gluck says. ‘‘They’d be like, ‘Ugh, we have math,’ and I’d say, ‘Good, because math is going to serve you much better than this nonsense.’ ’’ But things are only going to get more nonsensical for Wallis, who has two new films coming out (one of them a drama costarring Russell Crowe, Jane Fonda and Octavia Spencer) and a lucrative contract as the first celebrity face of Armani Junior. (Giorgio Armani says that he ‘‘immediately realized that we were looking at the debut of a true star of American cinema’’ in Wallis, who told Piers Morgan last year that she was wearing ‘‘Amour Junior’’ at the Oscars.) Despite all this, things at home haven’t much changed. She has two dogs, Sammy and Sugar, who play-fight (‘‘not punch-punch, fight-fight’’) in the backyard. She loves watching ‘‘Frozen,’’ and is reading Roald Dahl books (‘‘The Witches’’ is her favorite). Her classmates are somewhat curious when she returns from a shoot, but only briefly. ‘‘Of course, when strangers see me they’re star-struck because of who I am, but my friends take me as a friend because I’m their friend — not because I’m a movie star.’’ I try to get a few more details about what it’s like to balance homework and Hollywood fame. ‘‘How about three more questions?’’ she says. ‘‘Make them big so I can answer them big.’’ Her pursed lips and unwavering stare are both an invitation and a challenge. Has she ever, um, broken any bones? ‘‘No,’’ she says incredulously. ‘‘I’m scared to but I also kind of want to.’’ What’s her favorite way to introduce herself to people? ‘‘Hi, people call me Quvenzhané. But you can call me tonight.’’ I rack my brain for another, but I’m too slow. ‘‘We’re done now,’’ she says. Perhaps she’d like another slice of pizza? ‘‘No more pizza! I’m only 11 and a quarter. Two slices is all I can eat.’’ Wallis is spraying digital bullets at drug dealers and terrorists when her mom comes over, a little concerned about the violence of the video game. But seeing how well her daughter is doing, she lifts a line directly from ‘‘Beasts’’: ‘‘Who da man?’’ she says. Without breaking concentration, Wallis screams, ‘‘I’m da man!’’
‘When I come back from shooting my friends are like, ‘‘Where have you gone?’’ And I’m like, ‘‘Blah blah blah.’’ Sometimes they’ll say, ‘‘Ooh, there goes that movie star!’’ But it’s not like they think of me as their movie-star friend.’
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ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
PROP STYLIST: LAUREN NIKROOZ
Bonpoint sweater, QR1,255. Lanvin Petite dress, QR4,190. Styled by Julie Vianey. Hair by Robbi Rogers. Makeup by Stefanie Willmann at See Management for Chanel.
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IN PROGRESS Unfinished wooden sculptures at Studio Olafur Eliasson, which occupies a converted brewery in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. Opposite: at the studio, two of the 90 staff members who assist the artist.
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HOW To DO GOOD ART As he prepared for an exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton that opened in November, Olafur Eliasson discusses his work — which includes a school, an architecture practice, a charity, a cookbook and a herd of Icelandic sheep, and which is meant to make the world a better place. Really. BY NED BEAUMAN PHOTOGRAPHS BY NIGEL SHAFRAN
‘‘IRONY OR NOT?’’ said Olafur Eliasson, looking around
the meeting table. At his studio in Berlin, the answer is almost invariably ‘‘not,” but perhaps here an exception could be made. Eliasson and a few of his staff were finalizing the title of a new book chronicling the five-year history of the Institut für Raumexperimente, a small art school that Eliasson ran until February. The title under consideration was ‘‘How to Make the Best Art School in the World.’’ ‘‘It would be nice to piss off the very academic art schools,’’ Eliasson said. ‘‘I do think we had the best students in the world. But is irony really the economy I want to support?’’ In the end, Eliasson and his staff agreed that such good-natured braggadocio was pretty harmless in irony terms, although the cover would be designed so that at first glance the book would appear to be titled simply ‘‘How to Make.’’ Eliasson had also ensured that the book would include a photograph of a puppy that one of the students had met on a field trip. ‘‘Every book should have a picture of a puppy in it,’’ he told me, ‘‘because it just makes you so happy.’’ If, like me, you operate under the assumption that irony is automatically more sophisticated than earnestness, it is confounding to enter Eliasson’s world. One of the most extensive private holdings of his work belongs to the advertising executive Christian Boros, whose appointment-only museum in the Mitte district, the Boros Collection, was originally built as a Nazi airraid shelter but over the years has also functioned as a banana warehouse and a notoriously debauched techno club. This is the nature of Berlin, where things cascade with contradictory meanings, where ‘‘post-’’ is a ubiquitous prefix, where hipsters chase oblivion in the ruins of old dogmas. Irony is almost always a safe bet here, not least in the expat art scene. So you arrive at Studio Olafur Eliasson with certain expectations, and when you find that, on the contrary, it is one of the most
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SHOW AND TELL From top: ‘‘Inside the Horizon,’’ a recently completed installation at the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris; cooking using the Studio Olafur Eliasson cookbook; an advertisement for the ‘‘Little Sun,’’ a solarpowered LED lamp distributed worldwide; ‘‘Your wave is,’’ a three-dimensional mesh of light-emitting cables hung over the Palazzo Grassi on Venice’s Grand Canal in 2006.
LEFT COLUMN, FROM TOP: IWAN BAAN; FG | ARCHITEKTUR & INDECHS; MADDALENA VALERI; SANTI CALECA. MIDDLE COLUMN, FROM TOP: JULIENNE SCHAER/COURTESY PUBLIC ART FUND; IAN REEVES/COURTESY OF SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART; MATTHEW SEPTIMUS; STUDIO OLAFUR ELIASSON. RIGHT COLUMN, FROM TOP: STUDIO OLAFUR ELIASSON; ANDREW DUNKLEY & MARCUS LEITH; OLE HEIN PEDERSEN
earnest places you have ever been, you start looking around for the cracks. Eliasson was born in Copenhagen to Icelandic parents in 1967. His most celebrated work to date is 2003’s ‘‘The weather project,’’ for which the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern was converted into a gigantic, artificial solarium, attracting over the course of six months two million visitors, who often felt compelled to lie down on the floor, spelling out political messages with their bodies or just gazing at themselves and each other in the mirror on the ceiling. My own favorite work of Eliasson’s is ‘‘Your waste of time,’’ an installation at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City last year that consisted of several chunks of ice, detached by seasonal melting from an Icelandic glacier, that had been fished out of a lake, shipped to New York and installed in the refrigerated gallery. There they sat for nearly four months, crystalline but also surprisingly grimy, stout as rock but also frail enough to need their own microclimate — individual and real and lost. A lot of Eliasson’s works are like this: irruptions of the elemental into a museum setting, as if the building had sprung some mythic leak. Others are harder to convey in a high-concept pitch. When I visited the studio, Eliasson was working on a commission for the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a major new museum that opened in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in Octobers. In addition to taking over the ground floor for the Fondation’s inaugural temporary show, he would be constructing a permanent ‘‘grotto’’ from which the Frank Gehry-designed building could be flatteringly viewed. Although Eliasson showed me plenty of sketches and models for the exhibition, I never quite formed a clear idea of what he was planning to do, apart from that it involved mirrors and curves and tinted glass. This side of Eliasson’s practice takes the form of a highly refined fun house, subjecting you to experiments in human perception that don’t sound like much until you see them firsthand. The intended effect often seems to be a pre-intellectual wonder, so that you will have basically the same experience as the 5-year-old next to you. There’s a reason why Eliasson feels an imperative to appeal to the broadest possible audience. He believes that in normal life we have a tendency to hurry along on autopilot, seldom questioning our deeper assumptions. Art, by goosing the senses, can make us more conscious of our positions in time, space, hierarchy, society, culture, the planet. In the long run, this heightened consciousness will result in change for the better — emotionally, socially, politically. In other words, Eliasson has a faith in the improving power of art that has been out of fashion since Victorian times. But his ambitions aren’t bounded by his studio. He is on friendly terms with Bill Gates, Kofi Annan and Michael Bloomberg, and regularly attends the World Economic Forum in Davos to discuss public policy with the people who make it. ‘‘I don’t go there to meet world leaders,’’ he joked. ‘‘I go to become a world leader!’’ In fact, he already talks like a politician much of the time, with a habit of disappearing into a haze of generalities and wonk-speak and anecdotes of uncertain relevance. The concepts he draws on — inclusivity and engagement and trust and so on — seem to have been filtered to ensure that you could no more be offended by his
BRIGHT FUTURE Clockwise from top left: Brooklyn Bridge as seen during Eliasson’s ‘‘The New York City Waterfalls’’ project in 2008; from the ‘‘Grey Sheep’’ series, 2013, featuring Eliasson’s own herd of Icelandic sheep, bred to rehabilitate the Icelandic economy; ‘‘The weather project’’ of 2003, which drew more than two million visitors to the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern; ‘‘Your rainbow panorama,’’ built on top of the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark in 2007; an interior view; ‘‘Your waste of time,’’ 2013, for which chunks of ice were transported from Iceland’s largest glacier into MoMA’s PS1 gallery; ‘‘One-way colour tunnel’’ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007.
statements than you could be offended by the colored lights he puts in museums. Yes, he has given a TED talk. And yet the longer I spent with Eliasson, the harder I found it to cling to my cynicism, because he’s such a good advertisement for sincerity. One of Eliasson’s friends, the author Jonathan Safran Foer, told me over the phone that he found spending time with Eliasson ‘‘overwhelming, whether overwhelming in the sense of at times feeling almost too much, or overwhelming in the sense of being really moving. You sit down with Olafur for a meal and he picks up the fork and stares at it for a moment and you think, Oh my god, he’s either inventing a new fork or wondering how to get forks to people who don’t have forks. ’’ He added: ‘‘After I’ve spent an hour with him I feel like I need a nap, but it’s because he has more curiosity than anyone I’ve ever met, and a greater belief in a person’s ability to be useful and to change things. Somehow he lives his entire life with the urgency of someone who just walked out of the doctor’s office with a dire prognosis.’’ Eliasson has 90 people working for him. Few of them have job titles. Four days a week they all eat a healthy vegetarian lunch together in the light-filled canteen upstairs, with a rotating schedule for washing the dishes afterward. Initially, I found the atmosphere at the studio rather too good to be true, like a hippie cult before night falls. But when I joined Eliasson for lunch on my second day at the studio, I sat there eating my roasted carrots and enviously contemplating how much better my life would be if I, too, received that bounty of vegetables and sunlight and intelligent chatter. Sebastian Behmann, who heads Eliasson’s architecture practice, told me that you can track how long someone has worked at Studio Olafur Eliasson by how much healthier they look every year (and indeed many people have stayed on for a decade or more). In 2013, Studio Olafur Eliasson published its own 368-page cookbook of sustainable vegetarian recipes. This is just one of the unpredictable byproducts of the studio, which often resembles a sort of ongoing Apollo project. Others have included the art school, a full-scale architecture practice, a series of publications, a charity and a herd of Icelandic sheep. As motley as these pursuits may sound, Eliasson would argue that they all emerge from a single mind-set, and that they’ve all been made viable by his years of practical experience as an artist. ‘‘If you can make a show in Venice, which is the most difficult damned thing one can do, not just because working with Italians is a mess, but also because you’re in a city on water in the middle of nowhere and getting a hammer and a nail is impossible . . . you can make a show on the moon,’’ he told me. ‘‘So as an artist, you become an entrepreneur by definition. . . . The art world underestimates its own relevance when it insists on always staying inside the art world. Maybe one can take some of the tools, methodologies, and see if one can apply them to something outside the art world.’’ For instance, sheep. ‘‘It started with the financial crisis,’’ Eliasson told me when I asked about his herd. ‘‘Björk said everybody must think innovatively. So we started buying up lambs to rescue the Icelandic economy January - February 2015
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‘You sit down with Olafur for a meal,’ says Jonathan Safran Foer, ‘and he picks up the fork and stares at it for a moment and you think, Oh my god, he’s either inventing a new fork or wondering how to get forks to people who don’t have forks. ’
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— but I think we ended up burdening it! My mistake was I wanted to turn it into an art project. Still, it was a nice excuse to go to the countryside and drink vodka and play with the sheep.’’ Eliasson began breeding lambs whose meat would be particularly well-suited to Moroccan tagines, with the intention of selling diced, marinated lamb to delis in Iceland. ‘‘I just couldn’t convince my partners that people in Iceland would eat tagine.’’ In the end, the lambs were slaughtered, their meat frozen and their wool knitted into 20 ‘‘secular prayer mats.’’ Other ventures have been less quixotic. After they adopted two children from Addis Ababa, Eliasson and his wife, the art historian Marianne Krogh Jensen, started 121Ethiopia, a project that works to improve the lives of children in Ethiopian orphanages. 121Ethiopia operates on a modest scale. Little Sun, Eliasson’s other philanthropic enterprise, does not. Developed with the Danish engineer Frederik Ottesen, the Little Sun is a very efficient solarpowered LED lamp, cheerful in design and lightweight enough to wear around the neck on a lanyard. Since the lamp’s debut in 2012, more than 200,000 have been distributed, over a third of them to regions in Africa with no electricity, the rest at venues like Tate Modern or Coachella. While Eliasson was still discussing the Institut für Raumexperimente book, I was taken upstairs to the Little Sun workshop to meet Felix Tristan Hallwachs, who heads the project. ‘‘We’re not going to solve the Ukraine crisis, we’re not going to solve IS [Islamic State],’’ he said. ‘‘But in theory if everyone has a light at home and can study, then you have less chaos in the world, probably.’’ If there isn’t much irony at Studio Olafur Eliasson, I came to feel, it’s not because irony is proscribed. Irony doesn’t offend anyone and it doesn’t go over anyone’s head. Irony is simply not required, because the things you can achieve with crusading sincerity are self-evidently so much better. At worst, you could argue that Little Sun makes Eliasson’s talk about the power of museum art look a bit vaporous by comparison. But at Studio Olafur Eliasson the distinction between art and direct intervention is barely even recognized. Hallwachs told me: ‘‘Olafur’s work uses media from photography to oil paint to all kinds of installations and architecture. Now business is part of the range of media as well.’’ Eliasson told me that he was hoping to present a work at the next G7 conference that would evaluate the German public’s degree of trust in Chancellor Angela Merkel and perhaps in the process inspire a renewal of the European relationship with Africa. I asked him whether, in order to achieve such an ambitious and specific political objective he would need to make a new type of work, something more targeted, more explicit. Possibly, he replied — but he would be just as likely to bring along something like ‘‘Riverbed,’’ which consists of a riparian landscape constructed inside the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen from 180 tons of Icelandic bluestone. For Eliasson, art need never be marginal, and art need never be just a carrier for a message. Art can change the world with the sheer intensity of its art-ness. Or, perhaps, by helping to get the artist in a room with the energy minister of Nigeria. If Eliasson had his way, the same ‘‘everyone’s invited!’’ quality that makes his work so appealing to institutions might sometimes be pushed to extremes that would leave even those institutions flustered. Before I left the studio, I related to Eliasson something that happened to me in July last year at Warm Up, the Saturday afternoon dance
REFLECTIVE SURFACE Above: one of Eliasson’s hanging sculptures in the studio. Opposite: the artist at work.
party held in the courtyard of MoMA PS1. It was oppressively hot and muggy on the outdoor dance floor, and halfway through the afternoon I had the idea of going inside to spend a few minutes with ‘‘Your waste of time,’’ the piece with the chunks of ice, to cool off. Arriving at the gallery, however, my friends and I found that it had been locked for the duration of the event, so we could do no more than press ourselves against the chilly door. When I told Eliasson this story, he looked genuinely pained. ‘‘What a pity!’’ he kept saying. ‘‘What a pity! I would have left that door open.’’ But would he really have wanted drunken revelers slithering over this ancient ice that he’d imported from thousands of miles away? ‘‘If the ice melts and disappears — well, maybe it’s beautiful that there was once an iceberg, and then there was a party and now the iceberg is gone.’’ He pointed out that this would have been an excellent metaphor for man-made climate change. ‘‘People underestimate how robust art is.’’ He added: ‘‘If we don’t believe that creativity as a language can be as powerful as the language of the politicians, we would be very sad — and I would have failed. I am convinced that creativity is a fierce weapon.’’ ‘‘Inside the Horizon,’’ a specially commissioned grotto by Olafur Eliasson, is now on view at the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. An exhibition of Eliasson’s work, the inaugural show at the Fondation, will run until Feb. 16, 2015.
January - February 2015
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Document
9 Wallpaper Studies From museums, stately homes and National Trust houses in England. BY LEANNE SHAPTON
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THE WEST TURRET BEDROOM, Blickling Hall, Norfolk
EDWARD III TOILET, Newstead Abbey, Nottingham
STOREROOM, Calke Abbey, Derby
SITTING ROOM, Carlyle’s House, London
THE KING’S ROOM, Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire
BEDROOM, Lanhydrock Estate, Cornwall
SITTING ROOM, Charles Dickens Museum, London
DINING ROOM, Charleston House, East Sussex
ATTIC PASSAGE, Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk
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