5T H ANNI VER SA RY ISSUE
AU T UM N / WIN T ER 2016
F E AT U R I NG
E T H A N HAWK E ‘I ’ V E BE E N A PA RT OF T H I NG S T H AT H AV E BROK E N T H ROUG H , A N D I T ’ S BE AU T I F U L’
Rod Paradot
See the ďŹ lm DIOR.COM/HeartsAndMind
Dylan Roques
See the ямБlm DIOR.COM/HeartsAndMind
Discover more.
ARMANI.COM
CALIBER RM 63-01 DIZZY HANDS
457J4 SI HOUSE CHECK JACQUARD ON NYLON METAL BLACK WATRO LONG ANORAK IN METALLIC AND IRIDESCENT NYLON METAL BLACK WATRO WITH JACQUARD MOTIF. JACQUARD TECHNIQUE CREATES A RIP-STOP DESIGN ON THE SURFACE THAT IS DERIVED FROM THE STONE ISLAND HOUSE CHECK AND INTEGRATES THE COMPASS ROSE IN THE VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL CHECKED PATTERN. THE FABRIC HAS BEEN RESIN TREATED INSIDE TO ACHIEVE A MILD WATER RESISTANCE. GARMENT DYED THROUGH DOUBLE COLOUR RECIPE WITH THE ADDITION OF A SPECIAL ANTI-DROP AGENT. DRAWSTRING AROUND THE RAISED COLLAR. TWO LARGE POCKETS ON THE FRONT WITH HIDDEN SNAP FASTENING. THE POCKETS ARE CONTOURED BY ZIP; THE GARMENT CAN BE FOLDED AWAY AND PACKED INTO THE ZIPPED FRONT POCKETS. ELASTIC TAPE AT CUFFS. DRAWSTRING BOTTOM HEM.
WWW.STONEISLAND.COM
456J5 SI HOUSE CHECK BY DORMEUIL/NYLON METAL WITH PRIMALOFT® INSULATION TECHNOLOGY STONE ISLAND, IN COLLABORATION WITH DORMEUIL, LAUNCHES THE STONE ISLAND HOUSE CHECK, ITS OWN IDENTIFYING DESIGN IN A TEXTILE. DORMEUIL HAS BEEN, SINCE 1842, ONE OF THE WORLD’S FINEST MANUFACTURES OF WOOL FABRICS; ALL MADE IN HUDDERSFIELD, UNITED KINGDOM. THE WOOL NYLON FABRIC, MADE WITH A DOUBLE WEAVE, USED ON THE REVERSE SIDE, CREATES A DESIGN WHICH INTEGRATES THE STAR MOTIF OF THE COMPASS IN THE CHECK PATTERN. RIBBED BOMBER COLLAR. FRONT YOKE, BACK AND PART OF SLEEVES IN NYLON METAL. PRIMALOFT® PADDING, AN EXCLUSIVE BLEND OF ULTRA THIN FIBRES THAT CREATE MILLIONS OF AIR POCKETS AND PROVIDE THE GARMENT WITH EXCEPTIONAL INSULATING CAPACITY. HIDDEN POCKETS WITH ZIP. ELASTIC CUFFS. ZIP FASTENING.
FLAGSHIP STORE: 79 BREWER STREET_LONDON_W1F 9ZN
44449 DAVID-TC HOODED JACKET IN DAVID-TC. BEGINNING WITH A STAR-SHAPED POLYESTER / POLYAMIDE SUBSTRATE, GARMENTS IN DAVID-TC ARE SEWN AND THEN SIMULTANEOUSLY GARMENT DYED AND TREATED WITH AN ANTI-DROP AGENT. DURING THE DYE PROCESS, UNDER PRESSURE AT 130°C, THE FABRIC UNDERGOES HEAT-INDUCED COMPRESSION, RADICALLY TRANSFORMING ITS HAND AND BODY. INSIDE THE HOOD, AN ADDITIONAL DETACHABLE LAYER IN WOOLLEN CLOTH. DIAGONAL APPLIED POCKETS ON FRONT WITH SNAP CLOSURE AT UPPER FLAP AND ZIP FASTENING AT SIDE. SNAP-FASTENING STRAP AT CUFFS. DETACHABLE LINING IN ULTRALIGHT NYLON WEIGHING ONLY 26 GRAMS PER SQUARE METRE, FILLED WITH THE FINEST DOWN BY DIRECT INJECTION. GARMENT DYED WITH SPECIAL COLOUR RECIPES. RAISED COLLAR. SNAP FASTENED.
WWW.STONEISLAND.COM
43927 SOFT SHELL-R WITH PRIMALOFT® INSULATION TECHNOLOGY SHORT JACKET IN SOFT SHELL-R, TWO-PLY PERFORMANCE FABRIC WITH AN 8000 MM WATER COLUMN. THE OUTER FACE, WITH A JERSEY APPEARANCE, IS LAMINATED TO A BREATHABLE, WINDPROOF AND WATERPROOF MEMBRANE. THE FABRIC CONSTRUCTION BESTOWS THE GARMENT WITH EXCELLENT FLEXIBILITY AND COMFORT. THE GARMENT HAS BEEN PADDED WITH A SUBSTRATE IN PRIMALOFT®, AN EXCLUSIVE BLEND OF FIBRES WITH ULTRA FINE DIAMETERS, CREATING MILLIONS OF AIR SACKS, WHICH PROVIDE EXCEPTIONAL INSULATION CAPACITY. RIBBED JERSEY BOMBER COLLAR. DIAGONAL POCKETS WITH HIDDEN ZIP FASTENING. RIVETED EDGE AT CUFFS, BOTTOM HEM AND FASTENING. ZIP FASTENING.
FLAGSHIP STORE: 79 BREWER STREET_LONDON_W1F 9ZN
Introducing neomatik—a series of new watches with the next generation automatic movement DUW 3001.
Tangente neomatik and Metro neomatik
nomos-glashuette.com/en/neomatik
D E S I G N PO R T R A I T.
Michel, seat system designed by Antonio Citterio. www.bebitalia.com B&B Italia Store London, SW3 2AS - 250 Brompton Road T. +44 020 7591 8111 - info.bromptonroad@bebitalia.com UK Agent: Ben Ritson - T. +44 793 1556345 - sales@ritsondesign.com
Contents
34 CONTRIBUTORS: The lovely people who helped make the issue 36 OUT-TAKE: Introducing Ethan Hawke 38 EDITOR’S LETTER
41 – 69 PORTER: From Picasso's berets to Christopher Dresser's teapot; Esperanza Spalding's soundtrack to the genius conference; Stone Island to astronauts’ pens. Let the Porter guide you
70 – 71 BRAVING THE ELEMENTS Words David Hellqvist Photography Tom Craig Styling Dan May
72 – 89 THE AUTUMN WINTER COLLECTIONS Photography Laurence Ellis Styling Scott Stephenson
106 – 113 PEARSON & PEARSON Interview Ray Murphy Photography Tereza Červeňová
90 – 105 ETHAN HAWKE Words Rachel Syme Photography Billy Kidd Styling Dan May
150
130
58
64
136
90
114 – 129 OUT OF HOURS Photography Ilaria Orsini Styling Alex Petsetakis
130 – 135 TIME IS A LUXURY Words David Hellqvist Photography and Artwork Alma Haser Styling Alex Petsetakis
136 – 149 R&D Words Will Wiles Photography Carlos Chavarria Max Creasy, Matteo Mendiola
Cover 1: Ethan Hawke by Billy Kidd. Ethan wears wool suit and cotton T-shirt DIOR HOMME Cover 2: Juno Calypso 7-Day Honeymoon 24
Contents
150 – 163 JOHN PAWSON Words Will Wiles Photography John Spinks Styling Scott Stephenson
164 – 169 CRAFT WORKS Words Ray Murphy Photography Pani Paul Styling Alex Petsetakis Scott Stephenson
170 – 177 SIERRA MADRE Words Richard Grant Illustration Mark Aspinal
196 – 203 THE JINGLE JANGLE Photography Robin Broadbent Styling Alex Petsetakis
204 – 227 HOME COMING Photography Blair Getz Mezibov Styling Dan May
179 – 195 COMMENTARY & FICTION Words Nicholas Blincoe, Giles Duley Brian Patrick Eha, Kalpesh Lathigra Rebecca Schiff, Mark Singer Photography Giles Duley Kalpesh Lathigra Illustration Ceyln, Louise Pomeroy
228
164
204
179
242
248
228 – 241 JUNO Introduction Emma Bowkett Photography Juno Calypso 28
242 – 247 SWINGERS Photography Neil Bedford Styling Dan May
248 – 269 ETHIOPIA Words and photography Frédéric Lagrange
270 – 271 STOCKISTS
Online store www.richardjames.co.uk Shop +44 (0)207 434 0605 Bespoke +44 (0)207 287 9645
HERMÈS BY NATURE
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Dan Crowe CREATIVE DIRECTOR Kuchar Swara EDITOR (PRINT & DIGITAL) Ray Murphy FASHION DIRECTOR Dan May SENIOR FASHION EDITOR Alex Petsetakis FASHION FEATURES EDITOR David Hellqvist ART EDITOR Ling Ko PHOTOGRAPHIC DIRECTOR Emma Bowkett
SENIOR EDITORS Tom Craig, Reportage Chris Difford, Music Brett Steele, Architecture Alex Doak, Horology Fergus Henderson, Food Samantha Morton, Film Nathaniel Rich, Literature Amol Rajan, Politics
DESIGN EDITOR Will Wiles SUB EDITOR Kerry Crowe PRODUCTION & SPECIAL PROJECTS DIRECTOR Emma Viner-Costa CONTRIBUTING FASHION EDITOR Scott Stephenson EUROPE EDITOR Donald Morrison US EDITOR Alex Vadukul AUSTRALIA EDITOR James W Mataitis Bailey INTERIORS EDITORS Huw Griffith, Tobias Alexander Harvey EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Cécile Fischer, Jack Morrison, Dizz Tate ADVERTISING INTERNS Wulang Derrida, Lucy Allen
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Laura Barber Richard Buckley Kyle Chayka Kabir Chibber Alex Griessmann Leo Hollis Lily Robinson Albert Scardino Minnie Weisz Philip Womack
WORDS José Afonso, Nicholas Blincoe, Emma Bowkett, Tony Conigliaro Dick Cuthell, Hélène Darroze, Alex Doak, Giles Duley, Brian Patrick Eha Cécile Fischer, Richard Grant, Alexander Hawkins, David Hellqvist Frédéric Lagrange, Kalpesh Lathigra, Madeleine Morley, Jack Morrison Ray Murphy, Oscar Quine, Rebecca Schiff, Mark Singer Esperanza Spalding, Rachel Syme, Dizz Tate, Will Wiles
SPECIAL THANKS RIBA Venues
PHOTOGRAPHY Tawni Bannistern, Neil Bedford, Michael Bodiam, Samuel Bradley Robin Broadbent, Juno Calypso, Tereza Cervenová, Carlos Chavarria José Pedro Cortes, Max Creasy, Giles Duley, Michael Egloff, Laurence Ellis Emanuele Fontanesi, Stefan Giftthaler, Alma Haser, Billy Kidd Frédéric Lagrange, Kalpesh Lathigra, Luke & Nik Matteo Oriani and Raffaele Origone, Matteo Mendiola, Blair Getz Mezibov Ilaria Orsini, Pani Paul, Giles Revell, Owen Silverwood, John Spinks Benjamin Swanson ILLUSTRATION Celyn, Mark Aspinal, Nathalie Lees INFOGRAPHIC Ling Ko
“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.” VLADIMIR NABOKOV
32
MANAGING DIRECTORS Dan Crowe, Kuchar Swara PUBLISHERS Dan Crowe, Kuchar Swara, Matt Willey ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono ACCOUNTS CK Partnership CIRCULATION CONSULTANT Stuart White ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono andrew@port-magazine.com GROUP BRAND & PARTNERSHIPS MANAGER Natasha Ingham CONTACT info@port-magazine.com +44 (0)20 3119 3077 SYNDICATION syndication@port-magazine.com SYNDICATED ISSUES Port Russia portmagazine.ru Port Spain ISSN 2046-052X Port is published twice a year by Port Publishing Limited Unit 6, Albion Riverside Building 8 Hester Road, SW11 4AX +44 (0)20 3119 3077 port-magazine.com Founded by Dan Crowe, Boris Stringer Kuchar Swara and Matt Willey. Registered in England no. 7328345. Colour reproduction by Ralph Wills at PH Media. All rights reserved. Reproduction, in whole or in part without written permission, is strictly prohibited. All prices are correct at time of going to press but are subject to change. All paper used in the production of this magazine comes, as you would expect, from manageable sources.
BY A . & P.G. CA ST I G L I O N I
TACC I A
1962
F LO S .COM
P H : Zo ë G h e r t n e r - U K D i s t r i b u t o r : A t r i u m Lt d - Te l . 0 2 0 76 8 1 9 93 3 - f l o s @ a t r i u m . l t d .u k
Contributors
34
RACHEL SYME Rachel’s writing, reporting and editing have been featured widely in the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal. She is based in New York City and is currently working on her first (non-fiction) book for Random House. She is also founder of the Women’s Lives Club, a group dedicated to reading women’s biographies.
JUNO CALYPSO Having only graduated from the London College of Communication in 2012, 26-year-old photographer Juno Calypso has received widespread international recognition for her provocative and imaginative selfportraits. Working often in the guise of a fictional character named Joyce, Calypso’s images challenge laboured constructions of femininity.
BILLY KIDD Billy Kidd is a self-taught photographer whose advertising and editorial clients include Mr Porter, Nike, Versace and Vogue Italia. He has also captured iconic portraits of George Bush Jr, Jeff Koons and Pharrell Williams, among others. His work has been exhibited in Milan and New York, and has been featured on the PDN’s ‘30 emerging photographers’ list.
MARK SINGER Mark Singer is a veteran journalist who has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1974. He has garnered widespread acclaim for writing personal, in-depth profiles, selections of which were included in his 2005 work Character Studies. His 1996 profile of Donald Trump named ‘Trump Solo’ has been adapted into Trump and Me, a short yet revealing book on the life behind the reality star-turned US presidential candidate.
REBECCA SCHIFF Whilst studying at Columbia University, Brooklyn-based writer Rebecca Schiff was awarded the Henfield Prize for fiction. She has since gone on to publish her latest work The Bed Moved, an examination of what it is to be a Jewish woman in New York. Her stories have been published in the American Reader, Electric Literature, Guernica and Fence.
GILES DULEY Giles is a photojournalist and triple amputee whose recent work has focused on the impact of conflict on civilians. He was awarded a fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society in 2013, and has won several awards at the Prix de la Photographie Paris: Px3. Giles previously specialised in music photography and his 2000 portrait of Marilyn Manson was voted one of the greatest rock photos of all time by GQ.
Elliott Erwitt, 2013
Naoto Fukasawa: Demetra
Out-Take
Ethan Hawke by Billy Kidd Styling Dan May Ethan Hawke wears wool suit and cotton T-shirt DIOR HOMME
Oscar-nominated screen and stage actor, award-winning author, graphic novelist and father: For Ethan Hawke it all started with the boy standing on a table in Dead Poets Society – the “O Captain! My Captain!” moment. Driven and focused, he has consistently chosen projects that require a deep and long-term investment, often without any sign of pay-off, or even completion (a work ethic similarly visited elsewhere in this issue). 36
Hawke worked on his graphic novel, Indeh, half as long as he worked on Boyhood, the innovative 2014 family saga that director Richard Linklater filmed over the course of 12 years. So, Hawke the elder statesman? “I’m a father of four now. This definitely feels like another chapter of my life where I’m not a boy.” Read the cover story on page 90
Editor’s Letter
Kalpesh Lathigra was in Istanbul’s Taksim Square covering the refugee crisis last summer when a faction of the armed forces launched a coup. Police were shooting at people in the street and the government imposed a state of emergency. He called his wife. They agreed not to tell their two children. Then he went back into the crowds, shots still cracking in the dark, to take photographs. Some of these, and his story of the evening’s chaos, are on page 184. Kalpesh is a friend and long-time contributing photographer to Port, and I’m glad his work is in this, our second 5th-anniversary issue – gladder still that he’s alive. His work ethic, which borders on compulsive, is something we encounter again and again in our contributors. Another case study: author and longstanding Port veteran, Richard Grant, was told he would die if he dared venture through the bandit-ridden Sierra Madre mountain range in Mexico. A hardened travel writer, Grant hastened to the scene looking for stories. He very narrowly escaped death. The tale is on page 170. Our cover star, actor Ethan Hawke (page 90), operates in much the same way, though perhaps with fewer loaded weapons. “I definitely work in obsessive cycles. When I was doing the Chet Baker movie [this year’s Born to Be Blue], I just killed myself on Chet Baker,” he says. “There was no rhyme or reason to anything in my day but reading about jazz and trying to practice the trumpet. That’s just the way I am.” 38
There was a working theme of ‘The Future’ for this issue, partly as we are looking ahead to what Port might look like – having become an ‘old’ magazine now, by contemporary standards – and also because we wanted to celebrate some of the creative people who are shaping the future of culture. Therefore, we also feature contributions from Sonic Youth’s front man Thurston Moore (page 272), exclusive fiction from the bewilderingly good Rebecca Schiff, an art project by photographer Juno Calypso, and much acclaimed New Yorker writer Mark Singer on Donald Trump’s, err… unusual presidential campaign. Speaking of the future, I’m proud of the team we’ve built to carry Port forward, including the newly appointed and always excellent Dan May as fashion director, and the formidable Emma Bowkett as photographic director. This issue also sees the launch of Port’s new watch supplement, TENTEN – an intelligent, in-depth take on contemporary horology. (The title is echoed in nearly every picture of a watch you see.) Our concern here extends beyond snazzy pictures of watches: there is radical, groundbreaking science and an attempt to trace how time is represented in literature – as well as a great deal more (including beautiful pictures of watches). After all, without time there would be no future. To the future! Dan Crowe
paulshark.it
SIERRA MADRE
41
The Porter: From Picasso’s berets to Christopher Dresser’s teapot; Esperanza Spalding’s soundtrack to the genius conference; Stone Island to astronauts’ pens. Let the Porter guide you p54
p47
p55
p62
p52
p61
The Porter
Dick Cuthell
42
Unsung Horns
When I was a kid, I was left some money in a will by some old ladies from church and bought a trumpet, but, eventually, I thought: ‘I’m fed up of this trumpet. It’s too sharp, too brash’, so I got rid of it. I couldn’t afford the trumpet that I really wanted, but then I fell in love with a flugelhorn, a beautiful French one, and I didn't bother with the trumpet anymore. Eventually, it got trashed when I was touring with The Specials in Japan and the crowd rushed the stage. People let off fire extinguishers and we were choking, coughing our guts up. Afterwards, I remember the stage manager taking me backstage where my horn was lying in pieces under a blanket like a dead body. In 1970 musicians started asking me for more of a bright brass sound [on their records]; I went out and bought this Vincent Bach Stradivarius cornet. I've played this on lots and lots of stuff: Eurythmics, Madness and The Specials – this is ‘Ghost Town’, right here. This cornet sounds totally different; it has got character to it, with it being old. It’s not really perfect, like the intonation is with new instruments, so you know, it might sound a bit wonky here and there. But that’s the instrument. Dick Cuthell is a British horn player and record producer who has worked with The Specials, Bob Marley and Rico Rodriguez
Photography Michael Bodiam Set Design Imogen Frost
43
The Porter
Alexander Hawkins
Eraserhead The brilliant and controversial thinking of French philosopher Michel Foucault turned the intellectual world of 20th-century Paris on its feet. He was a puzzle to orthodox historians and philosophers alike and, where academia was concerned, he sidestepped disciplines altogether. The self-willed son of a physician, he resisted both the provincialism of his upbringing and French conservatism at large, to cast himself as a subversive. “A good club sandwich with a coke,” he said, much to the chagrin of his fellow countrymen, “that’s my pleasure.” Like Nietzsche before him, it’s difficult to say whether Foucault the historian-philosopher overshadowed Foucault the man, or the other way round. But, for all his well-known questioning of authorship and personal identity, it’s harder still not to see the bulk of his work as, in some way, autobiographical. Foucault’s topics of research often stemmed from issues that troubled him personally, and his books on sexuality, mental illness and crime all explored society’s response to ‘deviance’. Power was another subject of focus, and with his dense, somewhat cryptic style of writing, he asserted that, rather than a force wielded by the privileged few, power is at work everywhere in society, even where we least expect it. According to Foucault, every institution exercises control – be it a school or a hospital – and all human relationships are marked by their own power struggles. His shaven head, wire-rimmed glasses and preference for dressing in black and white have seen him described as a ‘metaphysical Eraserhead’ by American academic James Miller, who claims in his biography that Foucault was “perhaps the single most famous intellectual in the world.”
Tony Conigliaro
A Cocktail for the King I’d just started bartending when I first met Dick Bradsell (aka the Cocktail King and inventor of the espresso Martini). He pulled up a stool and ordered a margarita. I had no absolutely no idea how to make one, so I pretended we had run out of triple sec and ran to the other bar to ask my friend Fabrice Limon for the spec. “This is good,” Dick said, once I’d finally served him. We chatted about how I wanted to move to London and he offered me a job interview. It seemed I had got away with it, but just as he was leaving, Dick turned around and said: “By the way, the triple sec is right behind you.” It was a taste of his wicked sense of humour to come…
44
A lot of people think that my own work is about science and drinks, but it’s really not. It’s about providing an all-encompassing, satisfying experience for those that pass through the bar. Dick taught me how to do that, and I’ve carried it with me, always. Dick was also extremely creative. He had an instinct for flavour and an eye for detail. These qualities made for some incredible creations. My favourite of Dick’s drinks is the lesser-known coral fizz – Peychaud’s bitters on a sugar cube, covered with rose liqueur and topped with champagne. These simple but delicious ingredients make for a beautiful drink, with the fizzing sugar cube looking like a piece of coral in the glass. It was so artistic: conceptual bartending, before they became buzzwords. Many years later it inspired my cocktail, the rose – one of my first forays into the world of perfume and cocktails. The concept was simple: I wanted to recreate the experience of sipping a glass of champagne while walking through an English summer garden. The champagne’s bubbles, the teardrop flute and the precise amount of rose essence all enhance the scent and make for an incredible sensory loop. Aroma follows taste follows aroma, and so on, becoming fuller and richer with each sip. London-based bartender, author and drinks pioneer Tony Conigliaro runs the award-winning 69 Colebrooke Row in Islington, Bar Termini in Soho and Drink Factory in Hackney.
THE ROSE Ingredients 1 white La Perruche sugar cube 10 microns of rose essence 100ml Perrier-Jouet Directions 1. Prepare a sugar cube by soaking it in 10 microns of rose essence, added to it with a pipette 2. Place the soaked sugar cube in a Riedel grappa glass and top with champagne Recipe taken from Drinks by Tony Conigliaro, Ebury Photography Benjamin Swanson
45
The Porter
Will Wiles
Light Touch
“If the last century was the electronic revolution, this is the century of the photonic revolution,” says Carlotta de Bevilacqua, vice president of Italian lighting design company Artemide, a brand with a startling vision for the home: what if your lights could transmit data? “If you think about fibre optic cables,” de Bevilacqua says, “they already connect the USA to Europe, Europe to Asia and so on. Light is already carrying data. Thanks to LED technology, we have another way to write that data.” A study conducted by the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa
has shown that the technology is practical, successfully turning one of Artemide's existing lamp models – Demetra, pictured – into a data transmitter. It promises one-way, secure data transmission within the home or office. Rather than being broadcast like regular Wi-Fi, the signal can only be read within the cone of light emitted by the lamp. De Bevilacqua calls it ‘Li-Fi’, and claims it could be 30 times faster than your present home connection, without any change in the quality of the light, and without influence from other nearby light sources.
Demetra table lamp NAOTO FUKASAWA for ARTEMIDE
46
Photography Luke & Nik Styling Alex Petsetakis
M a l e c o n a t d a w n , C u b a 2 0 1 5 — S e b a s t i a n o To m a d a P i c c o l o m i n i
The Porter
Dan Crowe
Take Your Pick Starting out, I didn’t have the money to buy an electric guitar, so I settled for an acoustic. I bought it from Denmark Street in London, but what I really fell in love with that day were plectrums. They looked to me like exotic fish scales, or credit cards for aliens. I loved the multitude of colours and materials they came in. It seemed there were more varieties of plectrums than guitars themselves. Were those ones for people with huge fingers, and those for kids? I bought about 30. Twenty years on, looking at my collection, I recently wondered: do guitarists have this obsession with picks? So I asked Robert Fripp, founding member of King Crimson, what plectrums mean to him. “My current models are handmade in Japan, although I have tortoiseshell picks from the early 1970s; discontinued to safeguard the creatures. The two key elements are: shape, triangular; and flexibility, like a sharp tool… precise, for a specific approach to playing.” So, yeah, Fripp is into them. He refers to them as tools, which makes more sense than credit cards. I stopped playing in 1997 to finance my first magazine. But I kept these little tools… just in case.
The Merchant of Moscow “If a picture gives you a psychological shock, buy it. It’s a good one.” This was the advice that the great Russian art collector Sergei Shchukin gave his daughter at the turn of the 19th century. During the first quarter of the 20th century in Russia, this small inconspicuous man with an uncontrollable stutter – a member of Moscow’s conservative and provincial merchant class – would open the doors of his Trubetskoy palace to the public to share his collection of paintings. Rooms adorned with the sunset palette of Matisse, the distorted perception of Picasso, the looming bodies of Degas and the earthy hues of Cezanne, all crowded under the ceiling’s ornate decor. It was here that a generation of young art students would draw from the canvases they observed and eventually find their way to abstraction. Since Peter the Great, wealthy czars had supported the arts, but by the end of the 19th century, it was Moscow’s merchants – particularly Shchukin – who were buying the “shocking” work of new French painters, pieces like Matisse’s ‘La Danse’ and Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ that were scorned by the aristocrats of old Slavic-Russian values. It was well known that only Shchukin’s most sophisticated visitors could get a glimpse of one of his
48
Photography Luke & Nik
Image courtesy © Musée d’Etat des Beaux Arts Pouchkine
Madeleine Morley
precious Gauguins, which he kept hidden behind a curtain. He was a unique, open-minded collector, and regularly became close friends with the artists he supported. He would spend hours in front of a painting before he decided whether or not to purchase it, allowing its mood to wash over him. In 1918, after immigrating to Paris with his family to escape the political upheaval of the revolution, Shchukin’s collection became the property of the state, and was hidden in museum storerooms. Almost 100 years later, the Foundation Louis Vuitton will host an exhibition of 130 of his collected works. “Nothing will ever replace the sensitive, invested, courageous and committed eye of the private art collector, enamoured often to the point of addiction and madness,” says the exhibition’s general curator, Anne Baldassari. Ultimately, Shchukin’s talent wasn’t business but instinct, curating and selecting the defining works of an art historical epoch. The show is a reminder of the power and eventual prestige that emerges from making the right choices at the right time.
Musée d'Art Moderne Occidental, Moscow, 1932
Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection runs at Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, from 22 October 2016 – 20 February 2017
49
The Porter
Alessi’s 1991 reproduction of a teapot designed by Christopher Dresser in 1879.
50
Jack Morrison
Back to the Future Christopher Dresser (1834–1904) was an industrial designer before the term had even been invented. A true visionary, his work would not seem out of place alongside the modernist creations of the Bauhaus era or postmodern curios of Ettore Sottsass and The Memphis Group. Quite simply the man was a genius, and he refused to let the period in which he lived limit his thinking or creativity. Dresser’s academic achievements almost parallel those of his design. In 1850, he received a doctorate for his work on botany from the University of Jena, Germany, and subsequently went on to produce several works of authority on design and ornament. Having worked for Tiffany & Co, Linthorpe Art Pottery, and Liberty of London, Dresser aimed to fulfil his mantra with each project: "The cheapest and commonest of things need not be ugly.� Conceived by Dresser and produced by James Dixon and Sons, this astonishingly prescient Alessi teapot from 1879 embodies a simple philosophy that remains just as relevant today.
Photography Matteo Oriani and Raffaele Origone
51
The Porter
David Hellqvist
Cool Wool There’s a reason most designers prefer autumn to spring, as that’s when they get to bring out the heavy fabrics to play with. Summer is about t-shirts and shorts, whereas winter allows for wool and cashmere. Sure, wool works for the cold summers of the Nordic countries, and is also cooling in warmer climates, but it’s for the current season that the fabric is at its best. That’s why The Woolmark Company, an international organisation promoting the fabric globally, has collaborated with acclaimed men’s designer Lou Dalton on knits for her AW16 line. In Dalton, known for her wearable yet directional collections, Woolmark appear to have found the perfect partner. “I come from a tailoring background and was introduced to wool in cloth form, many moons back,” Dalton explains. “It’s a robust and hard-wearing fibre, which makes it a go-to material for menswear.” To complete the collaboration, The Woolmark Company invited knitwear experts John Smedley to join in. According to Dalton, the troika makes sense: “It's a company steeped in history, incredibly forward thinking and with an amazing profile – who wouldn't want to collaborate with such an esteemed brand?” Today many fashion houses prefer to use manmade technical materials, but Dalton argues technical and natural fabrics are equally important. “They both have their place within menswear but, as a natural fibre, wool is far superior,” she tells me. “It’s more luxurious to wear against the body than a plastic fibre, as its ability to breath makes it more comfortable to wear.” “There’s a traditional sports element to what we do, and Merino wool is excellent at regulating body temperature,” Dalton adds. “It provides warmth without overheating the body and it also draws sweat and moisture away from the skin.”
The Woolmark Company with Lou Dalton and John Smedley Merino wool jumper
52
Photography Luke & Nik Styling Alex Petsetakis Talent Scott Stephenson
Dan Crowe
Top Down We love a drop-top in the UK and perhaps one of 2016’s most talked about and controversial launches was the Range Rover Evoque Convertible. But was it worth the column inches and the wait? In short the answer is yes, it was. Convertibles are normally two-seater and low, but this fella has four decent-sized and high-positioned seats, so you are, well, higher than other people in their cars: never a bad thing. It’s a concise amalgamation of different car genres which, oddly, works. The roof can be lowered whilst on the move – up to 30mph, in fact – so if it starts raining in traffic, you don’t look like a lemon, sitting in drizzle waiting until standstill to get the roof up. There is some serious tech inside: a huge 10.2-inch touchscreen information system, allowing for three-dimensional sat nav – as well as pretty much every other digital mod con you could need in 2016 – dominates the central panel. It also handles incredibly well, partly due to the lower centre of gravity caused by its bodystrengthening additions. If you like the idea of a stylish SUV droptop – which sounds like it should be an oxymoron –thankfully Land Rover have made it work. Oh and it’s a mean off-road vehicle too, did I mention that?
Special thanks Scene Photography Studio
Interior details of the Range Rover Evoque Convertible
Photography Benjamin Swanson
53
The Porter
Jose Afonso
The Doorman I started working at the Palácio Estoril in 1951. I began as a dishwasher, but two years later I moved to the kitchen, then worked as a bellboy, and finally, in 1963, became the doorman, which I still am today, 53 years on. After the end of World War II, the hotel was bustling and frequented by esteemed guests, as many European families, from Spain, Italy, Romania and Bulgaria, were living in the Estoril at that time. Although it might not be true for the rest of Portugal, the atmosphere in Estoril was very bright, and the area became widely known as the ‘Coast of Kings’. The Count of Barcelona, Infante Juan, whose father was King Alfonso XIII of Spain, was a guest I enjoyed greeting, as he always had a few moments to speak with me. Being the ousted king of Spain, he often had a number of Spanish nobility visiting, in particular the Duke of Alba. Besides visits from royalty, another memorable moment was the filming of the 1969 Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The actors and crew spent about three months at the hotel and we got to know them. The director chose many of the hotel staff to play similar roles in the film, and I was chosen to play the doorman. I appear in the scene where James Bond (George Lazenby) first arrives at the hotel. This job is my life, and I hope I can keep on doing it for a while longer. What I will miss most when I retire is the interaction with guests, whom I’ve become friendly with over decades. As you can imagine, after 65 years, the Palácio Estoril is my family. The advice I would give to future generations is the same my father gave me: be an honest and humble worker.
Jose Afonso, 86, is the doorman at Portugal’s five-star Palácio Estoril Hotel
54
Interview Dizz Tate Photography José Pedro Cortes
MA X WEARS OUR GUERNSEY JUMPER, INFORMED B Y O U R H E R I TA G E A N D M A D E O F F I N E W O O L .
LO N D O N – B E R L I N – TO K YO – S U N S P E L . C O M
The Porter
David Hellqvist
Tech Check Even fashion brands can fall prey to predictability at times; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, you might say. But in the end that can become restrictive; there’s beauty in the unexpected – that’s often where the magic happens. It was, perhaps, with that in mind that Italian hightech clothiers Stone Island decided to surprise us for AW16. Beside its usual, top-of-the-game technology-infused garments – like the polypropylene denim and featherweight leather down – this season its creative director, Carlo Rivetti, decided to add another layer. For the first time ever, Stone Island has designed and produced its very own check pattern on a wool fabric. Usually, we’re excited about Stone Island innovations like fabrics that change colour depending on the temperature, but this is something new. The company collaborated with 174-year-old French textile company Dormeuil on the House Check. Though started by a Frenchman, Jules Dormeuil, the company makes all its fine fabrics in Huddersfield – an English town that’s been synonymous with wool and worsted cloth manufacturing since the early 19th century. Over in Stone Island’s laboratory in Bologna, the plan for House Check had always been to integrate the brand’s compass logo within the horizontal and vertical lines of a plaid pattern. This meant that an intricate structure for the weave had to be created, so Rivetti decided to use a rare antique Jacquard Dobcross fly-shuttle loom, meaning it could be woven at a slower pace, allowing the loom to delicately navigate the complex design. Remaining true to the company’s innovative ethos, House Check has since been transplanted on to more technical fabrics, such as Nylon Metal. Here, the trilobate structure of the nylon yarn, with its grey and white tones, results in a distinctive metallic sheen. Carlo Rivetti can’t help himself, and therein lies the brand’s charm. Whether it’s high- or low-tech, natural or manmade, the ultimate purpose of the material and the final garment is to test boundaries, and to go where no other check has gone before.
56
Photography Benjamin Swanson Set Design Imogen Frost Styling Alex Petsetakis
Detail from House Check jacquard on nylon packable trousers and anorak STONE ISLAND
57
The Porter
The Beret Picture a beret wearer in your head and they’ll most likely be French. Perhaps they’ll be in a striped Breton top, if you believe in stereotypes. But if you were to trace the hat’s history, you’ll find that it’s got as much to do with Spanish fashion as with French mode. The two often overlap, as was the case with French-Basque tennis player Jean Borotra, who famously wore a blue beret while playing at the Wimbledon championship throughout the 1920s. It was Borotra that helped popularise the beret internationally, bringing it to an audience outside of France and Spain, where it has been commonly worn since the 13th century. But the beret has always had an artistic air too, which only makes its affiliation with elite special forces around the world even stranger. This mixture of the intellectual and the macho means it is an alluring piece of clothing to work with today, as proven by Isaac Larose and Marc Beaugé’s Larose Paris brand. Having mastered everything from the trilby to basketball caps, Larose Paris now also offers berets (from AW16), with or without its signature zip pocket. There is no one else, arguably, that personifies the beret and its creative ambitions quite like Pablo Picasso. Born in Malaga in south-east Spain, he spent most of his adult life living in France, where he died in 1973 from a heart attack. Some viewed him as a sartorial role model as well as an artistic master, as suggested in the 2014 book Institute of Contemporary Arts: 1946-1968. According to its coauthor Anne Massey, researching the book unveiled the true power of Picasso’s beret. “Among the monthly internal [ICA] bulletins we found one concerning lost property,” Massey says. “It revealed that berets were left behind around the time of the Picasso show – he wore one and everyone was trying to copy him.” Well, we know what they say about imitation…
'Homme au béret basque' Picasso Pablo
Esperanza Spalding
Soundtrack When I was a teenager, my family didn’t have a car so I’d have to get everywhere by public transport. The Discman had just become a phenomenon, and I had mine on me wherever I went – for the walk to the bus stop and the journey onwards. At about 15, I stopped playing classical violin and started playing bass. It was a very transformative age for me. It was also the first time I heard Cibo Matto’s Stereo Type A – that record completely changed my life. It’s playing in my head now... It takes me
58
Image courtesy of RMN (musée Picasso de Paris) Photo (C) RMN-Grand Palais (musée Picasso de Paris)
David Hellqvist
back to field trips and trying to avoid other people so I could just be in my own space. Or to being alone in my room. Or to all that time spent on the bus. But even more, it takes me back to how I felt living in the world at that time. I thought I was really badass. Walking down the street, Stereo Type A was my soundtrack to Portland. Everything looked cinematic and beautiful with it playing. The way the light came through the half-overcast sky on to the damp sidewalks. It made me think this world is my fucking oyster, and I’m going to crack it. At that age, I had this compulsive enthusiasm about what I was going to make of my life. I thought I was so smart and cool and it was only a matter of time before everyone else figured it out. As soon as I got to high school though, I didn’t feel that great. I was very insecure as a teenager. But the fact that Stereo Type A was so beautiful, so sophisticated and just so badass, and that I got it and I liked it, to me meant that I also had to be sophisticated, cool and badass. That album influenced me in two ways. First, it sounded so different to Viva! La Woman. It was the first time I realised that bands and artists could sound completely different, album to album. That was part of my initial fascination: how can the same people make something that sounds so very different? I try to have that eclectic, unafraid approach with what I do. I’ll do a hundred different things and they’ll all sound different: Cibo Matto gave me that. Second, it’s got that ‘fuck it’ quality. That attitude of ‘This is what I’m hearing, this is what I’m interested in, this is what I have to say. Fuck it. I’m going to do it and make it great’. That’s the fundamental energy I received from Cibo Matto. That approach to work – to refine, to tweak, to edit it and not to stop until it’s right. There are moments when we all go ‘Fuck it. I hear this and I’m going to keep on working on it – on its lyrics, on its production, on its melodies until it sounds satisfying and completely beautiful.”
Hair Andrita Renee Makeup William Murphy
Esperanza is a bassist and singer living in New York and Austin, Texas
Interview Oscar Quine Photography Tawni Bannister
59
The Porter
Photography Luke & Nik
Private Tor
Private calf leather bags GIORGIO ARMANI
60
Styling Alex Petsetakis
PH. JACKIE NICKERSON
WOOLRICH SINCE 1830 AMERICA'S OLDEST OUTDOOR CLOTHING COMPANY WOOLRICH RESERVOIR, PENNSYLVANIA
woolrich.eu
The Porter
David Hellqvist
Sprezzatura
Classic tailoring brands, like Canali, have spent decades refining the Italian knack for looking dressed up and casual at the same time. The secret, we’re told, is in the fabrics. The spirit of sprezzatura, the Italian word for effortless cool, comes alive when the finest possible cloth is used for suits, shirts and trousers. To help explain Canali’s charm and never-ending allure, we asked Elisabetta Canali to sit down with her father, Eugenio Canali, to discuss the pros and cons of taking over the family business, and what challenges lie ahead for a modern tailoring house based on tradition and craftsmanship. Elisabetta: What would you say defines Canali in 2016? Eugenio: Canali today is very different from the company my father and uncle founded 80 years ago. We are much larger, more diverse and more international, but I’m certain that they would still recognise the same company. There is a series of values that they placed at the heart of their company, which remain at the core of Canali today and continue to guide us in moving forward. They are: quality, excellence, craftsmanship and the ‘Made in Italy’ ethos, with a constant attention to the needs and changes in the market and in our customers. What has changed since Giacomo and Giovanni started Canali in 1934? The decades that have passed have seen the arrival of new generations with new ideas, new energy and new visions for the future of the company, but through all this we maintain the same approach. Obviously, the means we have at our disposal have changed with the arrival of new technology, exclusive new blends and fabrics, new markets and new customers, but our feet remain proudly planted in our heritage. In what ways do men dress differently now compared to then? There is a new sort of dress code these days, focused more on freedom and spontaneity. There is more room for a personal point of view too. I think men expect more from their clothing – it has to be elegant, comfortable and fit in with today’s lifestyle. That’s why we developed the Travel collection of garments and accessories using new blends and special treatments to give fibres and cloth a resistance to creasing and crumpling, while making sure our clients look impeccable at any time of the day – even after a long-haul flight! How does Canali continue to honour the traditions and heritage of Giacomo and Giovanni? By taking their ideas and developing them, and pushing ourselves with the same spirit of adventure and desire to grow as they did. What is the next frontier of fashion and what are the challenges facing Canali in 2016? Like any moment in time, the current situation is not without its complexities and difficulties, but these challenges need to be looked upon as opportunities, offering new stimuli for change and spurring on creativity and performance. We are always looking for innovative new ways of showing our clients our product – helping them to understand and appreciate it fully. What’s more interesting to you: style or fashion? The two are strictly linked. We aim to create fashion with style, with attention to detail, quality, functionality and form. What do you think gives Canali the strength to pull through? A genuine passion for what we do, and a profound sense of shared satisfaction when we understand that we are doing the very best we can. How has the aesthetic and business model changed over the last season or so? Every season we change, offering new shapes and fabrics and new colour palettes, but we’re always faithful to our brand’s identity and our image. 62
Photography Stefan Giftthaler
Canali president and CEO, Eugenio Canali
63
The Porter
David Hellqvist
A Union Kris Van Assche, the artistic director of Dior Homme, was asked by the powers that be to design a small capsule collection celebrating the launch of Dior’s New Bond Street store. The brief demanded that the collection pay tribute to the French brand’s artisanal craftsmanship and the store’s historic location. Cue briefcases, cardholders and wallets in smooth calfskin, and hooded nappa blousons, inspired by the red and blue colours of the Union Jack. Smooth calfskin wallet with printed and debossed details inspired by the Union Jack flag DIOR HOMME at 160-162 New Bond Street, London
Hélène Darroze
Elements In the Basque country you never use black pepper, you always use piment d'Espelette (Espelette pepper) to season ingredients. That’s our culture, so I have always cooked with it. It's not a very strong pepper; it’s piquant, a strange combination of sweet and spicy flavours. I get mine from a little provider in Espelette, in the Labourd province. It’s a small and very unique culture, and in order to be sold as piment d’Espelette, farmers have to follow some strict rules. For example, you can only water them once after planting. After that, they’re only allowed rainwater, unless the grower is given special permission from France’s agricultural regulator. We worked with a small dairy producer to create an Espelette pepper butter, which is now on the table at the beginning of lunch and dinner at all of my restaurants. It’s ideal for seafood too – poached lobster in this butter is amazing. It's a really nice pepper that’s very flavoursome. Once tried, it is never forgotten; you will never want to cook with anything else. Hélène Darroze's eponymous restaurant at The Connaught hotel, London, has two Michelin stars.
64
Photography Luke & Nik, Benjamin Swanson
Alex Doak
Wheeler Dealer Drive de Cartier is a completely new men’s watch collection from the grande dame of Parisian jewellery, and a shining example of its Swiss watchmaking division’s knack for a particularly luscious and beautifully balanced case shape – just when you thought every shape had been done. (Apparently, the taut lines of Drive’s rounded-out square are inspired by the world of vintage motoring.) But what’s notable is the steel number featured here: a future men’s classic, kitted out with a self-winding mechanical movement, crafted in-house at Cartier’s Geneva site, crisply decorated and ticking beneath an intricately engraved dial. And all for precisely £5,000, where equivalent manufacture watches regularly command thousands more. Despite the blurb from Cartier about what sort of swarthy alpha male this watch is aimed at (“…people say he’s a connoisseur, sensitive to the precision of a fold, an exact shade of patina or a meticulously turned cuff or lapel…”), the steel Drive de Cartier could simply be an intelligent choice for anyone looking to buy into a brand and a breed of watchmaking that’s as versatile as it is refined. Steel Drive de Cartier watch CARTIER
Photography Benjamin Swanson Set Design Imogen Frost
65
The Porter
Jack Morrison
The Pen
The legend goes that when faced with the issue of how to write in space, the US spent millions of dollars developing a pen that would do the job, while their Soviet counterparts simply chose to use the pencil. In truth, NASA did use everyday pencils on many manned missions, but during the 1960s, astronauts began to use a mechanical alternative, loosely based on the Fixpencil – a design by Swiss luxury stationer Caran d’Ache, the metal body of which solved the problem of using combustible material such as wood inside the flight deck. In 2016, the Geneva-based brand’s stationery was used on board Solar Impulse, the world’s first round-the-world solar flight, continuing a love affair with the worlds of discovery and exploration. Established in Geneva in 1915, Caran d'A che was named after the French satirist Emmanuel Poiré, whose pseudonym originated from the Russian word for pencil: karandash. It has since become synonymous with highly skilled stationery manufacture and unusual production methods. For example, for over 30 years Caran d’Ache has applied and refined Chinese lacquer in house – a process so unique that only a select few watch brands are able to replicate it. The lacquer is taken from the tree Rhus verniciflua, and then applied to each fountain pen with a brush made from human hair. It’s this combination of Swiss craftsmanship and attention to detail that sets Caran d’Ache apart. And while it may not be so useful at zero gravity, the Varius China Black fountain pen marks the culmination of over a century of skill and experience. China Black silver-plated rhodium coated fountain pen CARAN D’ACHE
66
Photography Luke & Nik Styling Alex Petsetakis Talent Scott Stephenson
“Steinway allows me to unfold the world o f i m a g i n a t i o n .”
YUJA WANG s t e i n way a r t i s t
STEINWAY HALL
L O N D O N 4 4 m a ry l e b o n e l a n e , l o n d o n w 1 u 2 d b
f o r m o r e i n f o r m at i o n o r t o a r r a n g e a p r i vat e a p p o i n t m e n t at o u r l o n d o n s h o w r o o m s , p l e a s e c a l l :
0 2 0 7 4 8 7 3 3 9 1 o r e m a i l i n f o @ s t e i n way. c o . u k
The Porter
Jack Morrison
The Genius Bar To answer the age-old question: how many scientists does it take to change a theory? Twenty-nine, 17 of whom must have a Nobel Prize. The Solvay Conference of 1927 brought some of the world’s leading scientists to Brussels, to discuss ‘electrons and photons’, following the introduction of quantum theory. It also led to instrumentalism being established as the norm in the method of scientific investigation, a principle that has survived until the present day. Among the most notable faces shown in this photograph, Albert Einstein stands out instantly – his eccentric hair and deadpan expression drawing attention to the centre of the frame. The 1927
68
Photo colourisation Sanna Dullaway
From left: Third row A Piccard E Henriot P Ehrenfest E Herzen TH de Donder E Schroedinger J-E Verschaffelt W Pauli W Heisenberg R H Fowler L Brillouin Second row P Debye M Knudsen W L Bragg H A Kramers P A M Dirac A H Compton L V de Broglie M Born N Bohr Front row I Langmuir M Planck M Curie H A Lorentz A Einstein P Langevin Ch E Guye C T R Wilson O W Richardson
conference would give birth to the long-running debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr (far right, middle row) over the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, with Einstein asserting that Heisenberg (third from right, back row) was incorrect on the grounds that “God does not play dice”. Bohr’s infamous rebuttal, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do”, is perhaps reflective of the turbulent relationship between the two. You may well miss Auguste Piccard (furthest left, back row), a pioneer of deep sea and atmospheric exploration and developer of a pressurised cockpit that would allow him to become the first man
to reach Earth’s stratosphere in a balloon. But it’s more likely that you’ll recognise him for another, more unusual legacy – he was the inspiration for Professor Calculus in Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin. “I made Calculus a mini-Piccard,” Hergé once said, “otherwise I would have had to enlarge the frames of the cartoon strip.” The lack of diversity in the group photo is striking, with only one female invited to be a part of the formulation of this new area of science. Yet that one woman, Marie Curie, was arguably the most accomplished scientist present on the day, being the only person in history to win a Nobel Prize for both physics and chemistry. 69
Words David Hellqvist Photography Tom Craig Styling Dan May
Braving the Elements
Woolrich John Rich & Bros has been supplying sturdy outdoor wear to those working in extreme environments since 1830. To celebrate this longstanding relationship, we chat with creative director Andrea Canè about keeping that heritage alive, and we travel to Iceland to see how the brand is using 21st-century technology to protect against the elements
Andrea Canè, the creative director of Woolrich John Rich & Bros., understands menswear. He knows what makes guys tick and how they shop. And, as head of WP Lavori – the Bologna-based company that owns Woolrich Europe, British outwear label Baracuta, and distributes heritage brand Barbour in Italy – Canè is well versed in what differentiates womenswear from men’s. “In my opinion, our unique selling point is the fact that we sell garments with a purpose,” he says. “Everything is done for a reason and our clothing is premium quality, and also comfortable.” In 1830, John Rich II, the son of a Liverpudlian wool carder, set off for America in search of a better life. He ended up in Pennsylvania where he opened a woollen mill to help clothe the local workmen, be it loggers or miners. At the time wool was considered hi-tech, long before the days of GORE-TEX and taped seams. “Wool was, without a doubt, the best material available for the outdoors and protecting people from the elements,” Canè tells me. “If we go back to the original catalogues that we still have – and guard as a historical memory of the country – it’s interesting to see the focus on the technical and warmth qualities of wool.” Clothing had a simple purpose: to protect the wearer from the elements, and Woolrich was born out of that ambition. Today, consumers expect so much more from their clothing – garments need to look the part and fit into our lifestyles too. But it seems that Canè is well aware of how to adapt to modern needs. “The company has grown along with our customers and this has helped us to define the way in which entire generations think about our brand,” he says. “Woolrich is worn by the contemporary citizen, people who love comfort, functionality and durability with a sophisticated and contemporary touch.” Despite this progressive mentality wool is still an essential part of the Woolrich collection for AW16, a nod to the 186 years of history behind the label. “For this season, we’re launching a parka available in Loro Piana Storm System,” Canè explains. “This is our way of paying homage to wool and the woollen traditions of the company.” The Woolrich’ parka is a good example of versatility too, as, over the years it has come to symbolise the brand’s functionality. The earliest style, the Arctic Parka, was introduced in 1972 for workers on Alaskan pipelines. Purpose-built for that specific industry, it might have lacked mainstream appeal at the time, but Canè has managed to re-appropriate it for an urban lifestyle living up to 21st century wardrobe demands. “Yes, the new Arctic Parka ‘No Fur’ builds upon the quality, the technical performance and the traditions of the original, but adds a more contemporary, urban dimension to it,” he says. It seems that Canè’s main challenge is knowing how to respect the past while catering for the future – and so far, so good.
70
Kolfina wears striped cape, checked trousers and fur hat WOOLRICH JOHN RICH & BROS, Boots RED WING
Daniel wears GTX mountain jacket WOOLRICH JOHN RICH & BROS
71
PAUL SMITH
Photography Laurence Ellis Scott Stephenson Styling
The Autumn Winter Collections
DUNHILL
BERLUTI
MARNI
CANALI
LOUIS VUITTON
GIEVES & HAWKES
BOTTEGA VENETA
VALENTINO
MARGARET HOWELL
HERMÈS
DIOR HOMME
RALPH LAUREN PURPLE LABEL
SALVATORE FERRAGAMO
Vintage shirt
ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA COUTURE
GIORGIO ARMANI
PRADA
Grooming Tyler Johnston at One Represents using Le Soin Noir by Givenchy and Bumble and bumble Models Benno Bulang at Tomorrow is Another Day Oscar Scott at SUPA Model Management Jon Cooper at Select Model Management
CALVIN KLEIN COLLECTION
Ethan Words Rachel Syme Photography Billy Kidd Styling Dan May
Multi-talented and multi-genred, Ethan Hawke has always slipped freely between the roles of arthouse luminary and A-list favourite. Port meets an actor firing on all canons as he relishes a new, more distinguished, chapter in his life
Hawke
Wool suit DIOR HOMME
COVER STORY
Wool suit and cotton T-shirt DIOR HOMME
92
This page and previous: Will wears chambray rabbit print zip-up shirt PRADA
93
COVER STORY
Micro-check wool oversized shirt and wool serge narrow trousers DIOR HOMME, Trucker hat and patent leather loafers throughout stylist’s own
94
COVER STORY
95
COVER STORY
When I walk into a coffee shop in Brooklyn to meet Ethan Hawke, he is already engaged in exactly the kind of conversation you might dream Ethan Hawke has in Brooklyn coffee shops, if you were to dream about such things. A strapping young man in a baseball cap with the galumphing demeanour of a golden retriever has stopped by Hawke’s tiny table to introduce himself. He says he is an aspiring actor (of course) who really admires Hawke’s work and has a few questions about how to stay the course despite the crushing rejections and heartbreaking uncertainties of a life in the arts. Hawke, who at 45 has only just started to grey around the temples enough to hint at wisdom, kindly shakes hands with the plucky hopeful, flashes that famed Hawkean smile (weaponised dimples; snaggletooth proud), and says, with gravel in his throat, that the only way forward is to focus on finding good material. If the work is worthwhile, Hawke continues, the rewards will come. He wishes the young man luck, tells him he’s been exactly where he is, and that if this is what he is meant to do then he must stick it out. It is the kind of boilerplate hang-in-there-baby message that sounds oddly profound coming out of certain mouths, and, in Hawke’s voice, the message to carry on feels urgent. When Hawke tells someone to keep acting, it feels intense and insistent, like he is a member of a dying civilisation straining to keep an oral tradition alive. Hawke himself lives to act; truly believes in its world-shifting potential and still refers to it as an art form even after three decades in the business. When a guy like that tells you to go for it, it resonates. The young man beams, takes a deep breath, and strides out of the coffee shop into the summer heat holding his drink like a trophy. Hawke doesn’t mind playing the role of old-timer every now and then. In fact, he tells me after the young man leaves, he is thrilled about his age, because it means he finally gets to star in westerns. A boy from Austin, Texas at heart, he tells me he has been waiting his whole life to reach the point where his face matches the genre. “I just finally have enough lines in my face to get cast,” he says. Hawke is wearing a battered trilby and a rumpled short-sleeve buttondown, the standard uniform of cool dads haunting Boerum Hill coffee shops during the school day. (His two youngest children, daughters Clementine, 8, and Indiana, 5, are in fact in school just down the street; he walks them there every morning.) “There’s no real place for the male ingénue in a western,” he continues. “Well, sometimes there is, but those aren’t the parts you want to play anyway. They all get killed early or hung by their thumbs.” This year, Hawke went all-in on the mythology of the American West. He appears in two westerns: one big-budget
(Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven reboot, out in September) and one indie (Ti West’s grifter drama In a Valley of Violence, coming in October), and he also published Indeh: A Story of the Apache Wars, a graphic novel about the trials of Geronimo in the 1870s told from an Apache perspective. He says he didn’t intend to have all these projects hit at once, but he also sees a kind of poetry in the symmetry. “There is definitely a theme to this year,” he says. “I have been working on the graphic novel for six years, so that’s kind of a coincidence. I definitely work in obsessive cycles. When I was doing the Chet Baker movie, I just killed myself on Chet Baker. There was no rhyme or reason to anything in my day but reading about jazz and trying to practice the trumpet. When I was making a documentary last year, I was hypnotised by other documentarians. That’s just the way I am.” We start talking about why he is obsessed with the West, why it felt like a subject he needed to tackle right now. “As far as Mag Seven goes,” he says, leaning in, “I would have done that film for free. Don’t tell MGM. But getting to ride horses in the desert with Denzel Washington? That’s fun. With In a Valley of Violence, it’s the total opposite, this lowbudget spaghetti western that we made in the middle of the desert outside of Albuquerque.” And Geronimo? “It’s a mysterious thing of what brings a white guy to want to write about the Apache,” he says, with a slight bow of the head. “I can promise you it’s not that I have any interest in appropriating a culture that’s not mine. But I grew up camping around that territory with my dad, and Geronimo became one of my passions. Then I remember seeing the biopic ‘starring Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman and Jason Patric and Matt Damon and also Wes Studi.’ I remember it really upset me, because I thought: God. What if they made Malcolm X and it ‘starred Jason Patric, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, Matt Damon and also Denzel Washington?’ You would never do that. There’s so much white guilt around this story, and yet it is such a good story. If Shakespeare were writing now, he would write about Geronimo.” Talking to Hawke can feel a bit like talking to the most excited person in a college literature seminar: he quotes Shakespeare; he brings up white privilege and the perils of climate change (“People are going to look back on photos of our traffic jams and think, ‘What were they thinking? Didn’t they know?’”); he waxes misty about the time he interviewed Kris Kristofferson and how it gave him respect for the journalistic endeavour. He is ebulliently chatty, like a pile of words are always at the back of his teeth. And yet, all of these disparate verbal threads somehow coalesce into an artistic fervour that is inspiring rather than exhausting; Hawke always wants to be thinking about something new, creat-
Micro-check wool oversized shirt, cotton T-shirt and wool serge narrow trousers DIOR HOMME
96
COVER STORY
97
COVER STORY
that require a deep and long-term investment, often without ing something new, noodling on a project and a big idea. It any sign of pay-off or even completion. He grinds away on seems to keep him youthful, no matter how many weathered things he believes in, often for decades. He worked on Indeh lines appear on his cheeks. He seems less like an established with graphic artist Greg Ruth for six years, at first trying to actor (which he is; he has two Oscar nominations to prove get it made as a film, but finding that no studio wanted to it) and more like a ceaseless seeker who must keep sparking take it on. “When I was first trying to pitch this movie, they mental flint to survive. Acting is one way of letting off crejust saw it all as so educational,” he laments. “I felt like, ‘You ative steam, but Hawke says he has never felt satisfied just guys! This is going to be the greatest western ever told. It’s being in front of the camera. He has published two novels going to be amazing.’ But I actually think the graphic novel (The Hottest State in 1998, which he then made into a film and shows you what a great story it is and makes it come alive Ash Wednesday in 2002), one children’s book (2015’s Rules for a in a way that a script was never able to. For example, in the Knight), the new graphic novel and co-founded the New York opening of the book, Geronimo’s family gets killed and he’s Public Library’s Young Lion award. He works as often in the visited by a hawk. In a movie, does the bird speak Apache? theatre as he does on the screen, having made his Broadway If it speaks Apache, is it translated? If it speaks Apache, is it debut at only 22 in a revival of The Seagull, which led to founda female voice? Is it a male voice? All of a sudden, it could be ing the cult-popular Malaparte theatre company with three bad, like, comically. But in the book, it’s just a fucking drawfriends, which lasted until 2000. He has directed three films, ing of a big hawk’s eye. You can be graphic about it and pay including 2001’s Chelsea Walls – a tepidly reviewed drama homage to what really happened, but at the same time it’s about five bohemians living in the Chelsea Hotel – and clearly art. I found this is the right medium for this story, 2014’s Seymour: An Introduction, a documentary about beloved after all this time.” Manhattan piano teacher Seymour Bernstein. He has plans Hawke worked on the graphic novel only half as long to direct a feature next, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ as he worked on Boyhood, the innovative 2014 family saga Camino Real (Williams is Hawke’s great-granduncle), which that director Richard Linklater filmed over the course of 12 he hopes to start filming next year in Cuba. “I want to go years. Hawke earned an Oscar over there. It’s like the sunset of nod for playing Mason Evans Sr, the 20th century. It’s all right there. a somewhat absentee musician You see the Karl Marx theatre, and “I feel like the pursuit of making father to two children who transithen Coca-Cola trucks going by. tions from cool rebel, to destrucIt’s a fascinating moment. I’ve had the rights to the play for five years, tive has-been, to a resigned and but I’ve been wanting to do this for middle-aged guy playmeaningful, substantive art means pensive 15 years.” ing rock songs in a bar over the course of the long production. Hawke wants to remain diverHawke took on Boyhood as a sified, free to pursue any artistic labour of love, admitting that at whim that zooms into his brain. He more to me now than it did when times he doubted the film would realises that being in a position to ever see the light of day. “I didn’t even think this way is a rare privithink it was ever going to come lege. “I’ve never worked as hard as out,” he says with a little laugh. my father,” he admits, referring to “But I did it because I feel like his father James, an insurance actuI was 19 or something” the pursuit of making meaningary in Texas who separated from ful, substantive art means more his mother Leslie when Hawke was to me now than it did when I was 19 or something. As you four years old. “He got two weeks off a year his whole life. I’ve get older, you are faced with the inevitable disappointments got months off a year. I get to go on vacation with my kids. I about how hard the world is, and that kind of crushing pull travel. I pursue interesting avenues.” towards mediocrity. But I’ve seen things penetrate. I’ve been It might be fair to say that without Hawke, more exploraa part of things that have broken through, and it’s beautiful. tory (or dilettantish, depending on your view) young actors You kind of chase it. You just keep chasing that brass ring.” like James Franco and Shia LaBeouf wouldn’t have a model to follow, though Hawke is quick to note that he took his Another one of Hawke’s multi-decade projects that broke cues for his peregrinations from Dennis Hopper. through in a big way is the Before series, also with Linklater, “There’s a quote by Hopper in which he says that when that follows a pair of lovers (Hawke and Julie Delpy) from he was growing up, he didn’t know you were supposed to their swooning 20s to disgruntled 40s over the course of pick an artistic medium,” Hawke tells me, flashing that three dialogue-saturated films. Jesse and Celine are always smile again. “He just thought it was the arts, and you were talking, from the moment they disembark a train together either in the arts or you weren’t. Then if you’re in the arts, in Vienna in Before Sunrise, to their charged reunion in Paris you can be like, ‘I love dancers. I love musicians. I love paintin Before Sunset, to their fraught marital struggles in Greece in ers and sculptors and actors and songwriters. I just love all Before Midnight. The trilogy is a meditation on time: the way that shit. So I pick that.’ That’s kind of where I always saw it changes the way two people talk, touch each other, fight myself. I didn’t know that there were all these distinctions. I with one another. Throughout the three films, viewers get a kind of just saw it as dedicating my life to the arts.” chance to watch Hawke grow up, but also not as quickly as When Hawke talks about being dedicated to his work, it perhaps they might hope. There is an evolution, but it is subis more than just an abstract idea. If there is any one aspect tle, frustrating and often unremarkable. The pair’s maturity to his career that has made it stand out from those of other is hard-earned, but they still make plenty of mistakes. actors that burst on to the scene as bright young things (in Hawke says that in his own life, he has reached a point Hawke’s case, it happened twice; first with his poignant ‘O where he finally feels like an adult, able to own his past Captain! My Captain!’ moment in Dead Poets Society, and then errors and see himself clearly. He credits his second wife, as the grungy romantic heartthrob of Gen Xers everywhere Ryan Shawhughes, whom he married in 2008, with surin Reality Bites), it is that he has consistently chosen projects rounding his life with a calm aura. “To be totally frank with 98
COVER STORY DATE
WORK
1985
Appears in first feature, the science fiction film Explorers
1989
Breakthrough role in Dead Poets Society
1992
Makes Broadway debut playing Konstantin Treplev in Chekov’s The Seagull
1993
Founds theatre company Malaparte
1994
Stars opposite Winona Ryder in Reality Bites
1995
Starts filming with Richard Linklater for Before Sunrise, co-written by Hawke and Julie Delpy, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay
1996
Publishes novel The Hottest State
1999
Stars as Kilroy in Tennessee Williams’ play Camino Real
2000
Plays Hamlet in Michael Almereyda’s film adaptation, set in contemporary New York City
2001
Appears in Training Day, alongside Denzel Washington
2002
Makes screen-directorial debut with Chelsea Walls
2002
Publishes second novel, Ash Wednesday, which becomes a New York Times bestseller
2004
Stars in Before Sunset
2006
Directs second feature, The Hottest State, based on his 1996 novel
2006 — 2007
Stars in 8-hour production The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard; the performance wins him a Tony award
2013
Completes ‘Before’ trilogy by starring in and co-writing Before Midnight
2014
Appears in Linklater’s coming-of-age epic, Boyhood
2014
Releases documentary debut Seymour: An Introduction, a profile of classical musician Seymour Bernstein
2016
US release of Born to Be Blue, a biopic of legendary jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, in which Hawke stars
Upcoming films include
Maudie, The Magnificent Seven and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
you, and it’s something that’s really annoying here,” he says, “but in recent years, my friendship with my wife has been a really powerful force in my life. Because, knock on wood, my life feels on stable ground.” Though he doesn’t say so outright, his emphasis on marital stability seems to contain a subtle spark of defiance in it, a wink at the fact that his second marriage has settled into quotidian bliss despite the fact that the tabloids once tried to explode it. It is true: Shawhughes did work as nanny for his two children with Uma Thurman when the two actors were still married. But, as Hawke once assured The Guardian, Shawhughes’ childcare tenure was only a brief stop on her way to graduate school, and the two only crossed paths again a year after he separated from Thurman in 2003. “I know people imagine some kind of Sound of Music type love affair,” he told the paper in 2009. “But the truth is by the time Ryan and I were falling in love, it had been a long while since I had employed her." Hawke remarked that at the time the divorce from Thurman devastated him, and was one of the reasons he started spending more time out West, camping and staring at the stars to try to relieve the pain. It was then that he got the idea for Indeh and started on the trajectory that has led him to this year. Now, he has an active and healthy relationship with his two oldest children, Levon, 14, and 18-year-old Maya, who will start at the dance and drama school, Juilliard, in the fall. I ask him if things are better or worse now for young actors, in light of his daughter pursuing the same career
path. He laughs. “I remember hearing Paul Newman or Warren Beatty talk about how my generation was worse than theirs. I guess everybody always says that. But I do feel that there’s the pull, the current, the under-toe of pulling people towards worrying about the wrong things. But all I can do is tell them what I know.” We are back to the idea of Hawke as elder statesman, though of course he shows no signs of letting go of the baton yet. He is working now more than ever – he says he has to, with the decline of money in the indie film market: “It’s a lot harder to get paid to act than it used to be. The only thing you get paid for is a big studio movie. So you make hay when the sun is shining, or whatever that expression is. There’s a lot of good parts for me right now.” And he repeats his earlier confession, “Though I would have done Magnificent Seven for free.” As we leave the cafe, Hawke offers to walk me across Atlantic Avenue, where cars are whizzing by at top speed. He flings an arm out in front of me, a protective paternal instinct that seems to surprise him. “Let’s not get killed,” he jokes. As we reach a shady corner where we planned to separate (he has his daily routine of answering emails, strumming guitar, working out details for Camino Real and picking up the kids to get to), I remark that he seems particularly cheerful and at peace. He agrees, and says he is simply revelling in his current role as Brooklyn superdad. “I’m a father of four now. This definitely feels like another chapter of my life where I’m not a boy.” 99
COVER STORY
Check cotton flannel shirt, cotton T-shirt and wool serge narrow trousers DIOR HOMME
100
COVER STORY
101
COVER STORY
Cashmere double-breasted overcoat with techno membrane and wool serge narrow trousers DIOR HOMME
102
COVER STORY
Will wears wool jacket with stitching and chambray rabbit print zip-up shirt PRADA 103
COVER STORY
104
COVER STORY
Grooming Claudio Belizario at Jed Root using R+Co Photographic assistant Ousman Digital technician Chirs Luttrell at HauteCapture Styling assistant Monica Hofstadter
Nylon quilted peacoat DIOR HOMME
105
Pearson
& Pearson Landscape designer Dan Pearson and industrial designer Luke Pearson are two brothers who’ve ascended to the top of their fields. Here, they invite Port into Dan’s London studio for an intimate conversation about the affinity between their practices, the creative values their parents instilled in them, and how people respond to beautiful design
Interview Ray Murphy Photography Tereza Červeňová
PEARSON & PEARSON
Dan Pearson is his Lambeth-based studio, south London
108
PEARSON & PEARSON
Brothers Dan and Luke Pearson embody the immense range and variety of human activity contained within the word ‘design’. On Dan’s side is greenery and gardens. On Luke’s is industry and infrastructure. Chuckling brooks and wild, gentle planting that seeks to conceal its artifice, against the more thoroughly man-made – but no less gratifying – environment of the airport business class lounge. Dan, the elder brother, was born in 1964, three years before Luke. His love for gardening dates back to his early childhood – he recalls, aged five, building a garden for his toy trolls, and also watching, fascinated, as an ecosystem grew up in a pond dug by his father – a sight that decided him on becoming a gardener. After dropping out of A-levels, he went to train at the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden, Wisley and later at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh, before completing a three-year course at Kew. He established his garden design business in 1987. During his studies, he travelled to untamed, mountainous places, from northern Spain to Nepal, finding garden flowers growing in their natural habitats. Inspired by this, he has made naturalistic wildflower landscapes, nurtured slowly over time, his hallmark. An early connection with Terence Conran and his sister, Priscilla Carluccio, helped smooth a path into the wider world of design. After winning the silver medal at the Chelsea Flower Show, Dan became a household name as an author, columnist and broadcaster. But it is the gardens that remain his most important work. Today, he is Britain’s most prominent landscape gardener – a designers’ designer, creating gardens for Jonathan Ive and Paul Smith, and to accompany schemes by Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers and David Chipperfield. Luke, meanwhile, studied design at the Royal College of Art. After graduation in 1993, he worked with veteran industrial designer Ross Lovegrove, before setting up his own studio with Tom Lloyd, whom he met at the RCA. PearsonLloyd, as the partnership is called, will be 20 years old next year, a company as thoroughly at home in the corporate nonplaces of the networked world as Dan is in the rockfields of the Pyrenees. PearsonLloyd is the epitome of top-flight industrial design, bringing quiet refinement to global audiences. Its big break was an airline lounge for Virgin Atlantic, and the studio’s sleek, minimal furniture can Luke Pearson in the garden of his Hoxton studio, London
“Without a doubt, the influence of detail, precision, exploration and crafting was right in front of us from day one.” 109
PEARSON & PEARSON
be found in Virgin ‘clubhouses’ to this day. But the Hoxton-based studio is perhaps best known for those bubbles of high status, the first class section of the plane itself: it designed Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class Suite and Lufthansa’s Business Class section. To these spaces, PearsonLloyd brought a hugely influential spirit of calm sophistication, eschewing gadgetry for the simpler elegance of the furniture atelier. Even if you are not one of the gilded ones who dwell in the nose of the plane, chances are that you have sat in a PearsonLloyd chair. It’s a giant of the world of contract furniture, with lines for Walter Knoll, Teknion and Bene. In the home, the company has designed products for minimal-chic kitchenware brand Joseph Joseph, bringing the same qualities of understatement and reassurance, precisely what you’d want from the go-to designers of your aircraft or high-speed train interior. What’s striking, when viewing the Pearson brothers’ very different work side by side, is that they trade in much the same commodity: comfort. Albeit the comfort to be found in very different places.
at all because you were in the woods on the bike that you’d just made or repaired. It was quite an industrious household – we were all doing something different, weren’t we? We were encouraged by our parents to work with our hands, and work creatively with what we liked to do. LP: I often reflect on it now, having two children and seeing how they develop. It was a strange balance between allowing us to be exactly what we might become, given the things that were around us, and gentle nudges in certain directions at times. We had an incredibly patient father, and a very industrious, capable mother who seemed to be able to turn her hand to anything. She was somehow very physical with her creative process and he was probably a little more cerebral. It was a very unpretentious household – even if you had quite serious thoughts about something creative, it was dealt with in a very matter of fact way. DP: I think it was a very natural thing for us to make things that were three-dimensional, and that’s what we’ve both done, isn’t it? What I see of your work now, Luke, is that it’s beautifully crafted and reduced back
Inside PearsonLloyd’s studio in Hoxton, east London
PORT: Could you introduce one another and describe each other’s work? Dan Pearson: This is my brother Luke Pearson, who is three-and-a-half years younger than me. Luke works in three-dimensional, product and furniture design. Luke Pearson: My brother Daniel, from the earliest memories, was always on his knees with his backside in the air planting, or rootling, or discovering or changing the shape of our garden. So, for me, it was an inevitable path for him to become a shaper of gardens and spaces. I’m not quite sure how I would describe Dan, whether I would describe him as a plantsman, or a landscape architect, or a gardener… People often ask me, and I try to shy away from any particular definition, because I think it’s broader than that. I think at times it’s very close to being an artist, but I wouldn’t describe it as that either. DP: My earliest memories of Luke are him taking things apart and putting them back together again. He spent hours and hours on bicycle repair and Fischertechnik models. A lot of the time we wouldn’t see you 110
to what it needs to be. It’s very well thought through, and I can see that is a complete product of what you were working on as a child, in terms of wanting to ‘get things right’. LP: Our mum was so prolific. She often developed seemingly random processes, and she would then meticulously control them. She’d throw paint or bleach on leather, stretch it and cut it with scalpels, then gain control over what appeared to be a completely uncontrollable process to produce extraordinary fine-patterned, well-crafted clothing. Dad was meticulous in how he processed the information and created his paintings. Without a doubt, the influence of detail, precision, exploration and crafting was right in front of us from day one, wasn’t it? DP: Yes, definitely. PORT: In your formative years, how did you both influence each other? LP: I’m not sure. Dan left home when I was 13 and I didn’t know what I wanted to do at that stage. Even though my father had taken me to see the
Royal College of Art show since the age of 10, it never occurred to me to be a designer. I think one of the biggest differences between us is that I can’t quite see what else Dan would’ve done. Having my own garden, I’ve realised that it doesn’t always work through design alone. You’ve got to have an intense knowledge of plants to make it look effortless, and then you’ve got to design it. What Daniel ended up doing seems beautifully inevitable, whereas what I’ve ended up doing… I think probably if I’d been more adventurous, I’d have done sculpture. DP: I think it’s sort of inevitable what you’ve ended up doing because what you were interested in right from the very start was how things worked. The whole thing of pulling things apart and putting them back together better is absolutely what you do now. It’s about making things as ergonomically beautiful as possible. I think we’re both working three-dimensionally and in quite a particular way. LP: We actually feel like what we are most happy doing is trying to understand how things change the way people behave. People respond to beauty
a mismatch between client expectations and us, as designers. This is one thing about being a designer: you’re not just doing it just to earn a living, you’re doing it because you absolutely need to do it. When I look at a project Dan’s done and some of the projects he’s decided not to do, I think he’s been a little more discerning or more closely linked to who he is and sometimes that has to do with wisdom, and sometimes luck or scale. Daniel, in a way, is probably at least 12 years ahead of me because you started doing your first projects with people when you were about… 18? DP: I did, but I didn’t have an education. I trained as a gardener, but not a designer. In a way, I learnt the design as I was working while you were going formally through an art college system. There are points at which I wish I’d gone to art college. I always knew I wanted to do something creative and I thought the only way to do it was to learn how to garden. I think that those 12 years you’re talking about, we probably inhabited those years differently, but there were points where I was envious of you going through that art college system and I was working effectively in gardens.
The meeting room at Dan Pearson Studio
and they respond to touch. There are a lot of things that are sensorial. DP: I think gardens work on that sensorial level, and I think a lot can happen in them that can affect people in very different ways. We were brought up in a very particular environment from the mid-70s when we lived in this house in the middle of a big garden. It was quite hermetic because there was a big hedge around it, so we didn’t really feel like we needed to go out. We didn’t go on big family holidays, and we kind of did things at home, or locally. I think that environment has definitely impacted on both of us, because it had such a strong atmosphere and such a strong sense of place. PORT: Do you remember any advice that you’ve given each other, whether it’s about struggles with a client or a particular project? LP: I think Dan’s always been very clear about what he doesn’t want to do, and that has been a great benefit to channelling the creativity down one line. Sometimes I regret doing certain jobs because I think there was
I loved it, every moment of it. But that process of how to get from A to B is really interesting, isn’t it? LP: Really, we were both privileged. We had an education from day one. DP: We were. We had constant tutorials from mum and dad from being really small. We never realised it, but the time that dad spent with you and your bike or with me in the garden, and mum doing the same, it was all incredibly valuable in terms of getting us to try and explain ourselves. That is something we both have to do in our business: we have to explain ourselves to people and we have to show them how we’re thinking, why it’s a way forward, and be convincing about it because we’ve thought it through. LP: Creativity isn’t to do with a set of skills, necessarily. Often it has to do with the ability to see things – I don’t think you need to have gone to art college to get that ability. Art college is a relatively new invention, and I think it’s there because it’s a great idea to give a platform to people that would otherwise never get access. It might come full circle because education is getting so expensive. 111
PEARSON & PEARSON
112
PEARSON & PEARSON
DP: We’re also seeing people become more interested in learning a trade, which is what I did with gardening. I remember thinking at that time, when you were going through further education and friends of mine were at university, that actually my world was completely different from theirs. But I was very glad to be learning something I could do, physically. I’m quite heartened to see young people coming back now and wanting to learn a craft. PORT: Could you each pick one of your favourite projects from the other’s repertoire? DP: For me, I’ll only travel on Virgin planes because Luke did the Business Class flat bed. The seats create a whole environment where, for a small amount of time you’re allowed to feel really comfortable. Everything works very nicely and it’s your own place, you’re privileged to be there. I always enjoy those flights because of his seats. LP: When you did Home Farm, I came around a couple of times to do digging and planting with you – that was the project that Dan did for 14–15 years. It was interesting because I kind of revisited those moments [from our childhood] when I’d look at my brother and my dad and they’d be standing and pointing at plants. Dan walked around with Francis, the owner [of Home Farm], and I could hear him having exactly the same conversations: “What’s going to happen here then?” “Let’s change that next year… Let’s try something different...” I think that project gave me access to the Dan I remembered, and how he wanted continually to get a space that feels right as opposed to sort of make it finished. You’ve got another layer to your projects now. But it’s very difficult, not being a gardener, to judge them at a distance and understand what’s been done to the landscape without being there. PORT: And finally, if you were to collaborate on a project… Have you ever talked about it? What do you think that might look like? LP: I think it might be a building. I wouldn’t want to do furniture; I’d want to do something that was spatial. DP: We’ve both talked a lot about buildings, having done the houses we’re in, and I can see that it wouldn’t be a big leap for you to actually become an architect – an informal architect. I think we’d both really enjoy that collaboration. We both work with architects at times, and that language is quite an interesting place to be… that discussion between inside and outside. I think we could have a lot of fun.
“This is one thing about being a designer: you’re not just doing it just to earn a living, you’re doing it because you absolutely need to do it.” 113
114
Double crepe robe and wide leg trousers TOPMAN, Shirt GIORGIO ARMANI Kerry patent opera pumps CHURCH’S, Raad wears his own earring througout
Photography Ilaria Orsini Styling Alex Petsetakis
Out of Hours
Corduroy jacket RICHARD JAMES, Sequin jacket ETRO, Velour soft jacket JOHN VARVATOS
115
116
Checked double-breasted suit and leather boots PAUL SMITH, Shirt with multiple buttons J.W.ANDERSON
117
118
Wool split-hemmed flared trousers WOOYOUNGMI, Kerry patent opera pumps CHURCH’S
Loose fit silk jacket and trousers with snail print J.W.ANDERSON Silk shirt ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA COUTURE, Kerry patent opera pumps CHURCH’S
119
120
Cashmere embellished jumper and wool patterned trousers ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA COUTURE Leather boots PAUL SMITH
Double-breasted suit and cotton shirt DRIES VAN NOTEN
121
122
Faces printed classic silk shirt and wool trousers LOUIS VUITTON Socks FALKE, Kerry patent opera pumps CHURCH’S
123
124
Three-piece corduroy suit RICHARD JAMES, Socks FALKE, Kerry patent opera pumps CHURCH’S
125
126
Calligrapher metal and acetate opticals PERSOL at DAVID CLULOW
Washed calfskin two-button jacket and cotton shirt DIOR HOMME Piano coated trousers ACNE STUDIOS, Leather boots PAUL SMITH
127
128
Velvet evening jacket DUNHILL, Silk tassel scarf MARGARET HOWELL
Grooming Adam Szabo at Atomo Management using American Crew Model Raad at Tomorrow is Another Day Photographic assistants David Mannion, Harry Sloan Styling assistant Jack Morrison Special Thanks to RIBA Venues
Wool flat collar blazer, split collar shirt, turtleneck overlay and split-hemmed flare trousers WOOYOUNGMI Kerry patent opera pumps CHURCH’S
129
Words David Hellqvist Photography & Artwork Alma Haser Styling Alex Petsetakis
Time is a Luxury
After nearly 30 years as artistic director of Hermès’ menswear line, Véronique Nichanian picks three of her favourite pieces from past collections, discusses the timeless allure of the French brand and sets out what luxury means to her in 2016
Killian wears blouson with ribbing metis goatskin and silk twill with En désordre print HERMÈS Spring Summer 2016
HERMÈS
131
Chester wears hooded blouson in baby lamb HERMÈS Autumn Winter 2007
Opposite: Tom wears turtleneck pullover in cashmere with knitted chaîne d’ancre pattern HERMÈS Autumn Winter 2011
Grooming Ditte Lund Lassen using Fresh, NARS cosmetics, Bumble and bumble Talent Killian Butler, Tom Pande, Chester at Tomorrow is Another Day Photographic assistant Caitlin Chescoe
HERMÈS
133
PEARSON & PEARSON
Véronique Nichanian, 134 Hermès Menswear Creative Director
Sitting in a quiet courtyard in the midst of Paris’ 5th arrondissement, with just a few hours to spare before her catwalk show, Hermès Men’s creative director Véronique Nichanian is calm. She seems relaxed, even though, I’m sure, putting on one of the headline shows during Paris fashion week must be extremely stressful, even maddening, at times. But her inner calm stems from confidence in her own skills, her team’s experience, the quality of the clothes and the never-fading allure of Hermès. For nearly 30 years, Nichanian has been in charge of the French luxury brand’s men’s offering. She started it, famously, by pitching the idea in 1988 to Jean-Louis Dumas, the former chairman and artistic director of Hermès, over a rooftop coffee and croissants. Since then, Hermès has been a staple on the Parisian shop floors, and a favourite among editors finishing off another packed show day with the label’s signature, understated luxury. Hermès isn’t really a fashion brand – few people go to Nichanian for a trendled aesthetic. Instead, Hermès oozes the complete opposite: a timeless purity, which defines the its clothes, advertising and overall image. Sitting casually cross-legged on a bench, protecting her eyes from the strong June sun with a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, Nichanian offers her own explanation: “As a brand, Hermès is defined by almost 180 years of integrity, quality, sensuality, creativity and pleasure. It’s also about fantasy.” She’s right: there’s an undeniable level of fantasy attached to the brand that Thierry Hermès founded in 1837. Today, there are only a small handful of fashion brands that are perceived as pure luxury and Hermès is arguably the one with the lowest public profile, making it slightly obscure and secretive, which only adds to its appeal. Luxury is the key word and the driving force in this industry, and Nichanian has her own take on what the word means in 2016.
Photography Emanuele Fontanesi
“Today everybody is very rushed, you have to do everything as fast as possible, but I say, ‘OK, let‘s slow down’, and that to me is luxury,” she explains. “That is true luxury today, to slow down. Perhaps it should be called ‘slow happiness’?” It seems that too much lavishness in fashion doesn’t appeal to her either: “We live in a time of superlatives. Just be simple and honest, and do things beautifully with your hands, your head and your heart – that’s the meaning of contemporary craftsmanship,” she says. “In the end it becomes a beautiful object or piece of clothing, which will bring people happiness and connect to their emotions.” According to Nichanian, Hermès has to be a positive force, bringing strength and happiness to fashion; all garments need to have a message and that’s why they’re part of a collection. “I don’t consider myself an artist, but in a way there’s something artistic about bringing lightness to the people and making them happy; it’s very important to me,” she says. “I don‘t want to do a show where the clothes are like the end of the world. Let‘s talk about how life is beautiful instead, even if I have in mind that the world is facing unsettled and complex political and economic contexts.” Largely known for its leather goods and accessories, Hermès quickly built its reputation and business on producing quality. Whatever they put out, clothes or bags, there’s a consistent sense of perfection. “At Hermès, the house will always keep in mind the excellence of what we are doing. It takes time, and time is on our side, as the Rolling Stones say. When you take your time in a relationship, that’s when you’re happy,” Nichanian tells me, before pointing out that beauty comes at a price. “Yes, it‘s a costly product, but it’s a fantastic and demanding product with honesty behind that.” There are valid questions to ask, though, about the role of luxury in modern culture, and how the industry can stay relevant. Nichanian knows that stagnation is not an option: she has to look forward in order to keep Hermès contemporary. “We play with new fabrics, using technical materials and mix them with leathers and other natural fabrics,” she says. “We fuse tradition with technology, and the products we make express that.”
Throughout our conversation, Nichanian keeps coming back to one word: lightness. “Yes, I define my collections in terms of lightness. But in two senses: lightness in the construction and lightness in the way I conceptualise them,” she says. “If you ask me to define what modernity is today, it‘s just that: lightness. I remember my father‘s clothes were always very heavy and today it‘s important, as you want to travel light, to have clothes that follow you in life.” There are only a handful of women designing menswear on Nichanian’s level. But for the Parisian designer, it seems to have been the natural path to take, as she feels at one with the pragmatic approach some men take to clothes. “I feel very comfortable with all the millimetres, tiny details and choosing the fabrics,” Nichanian explains. “I’d say it’s a little bit like architecture in a way, a mix of product design, style and fashion.” “For six months, my team and I work deeply on all the visible and invisible details, shapes and proportions,” she adds. “For me, fashion is the effect of the silhouette on the runway.” Nichanian kicks off her meticulous design process with the fabrics and, as part of her fabric research she spends two months each season developing new materials. “Looking at the materials before starting with a garment is very exciting because everything is possible at that time, you can do anything you want,” she explains. “I’m always working on something different. For me it‘s important, but I’m sure it’s the same for all designers if they want to lead and not follow. I’m always interested in the next step.” All those years ago, Véronique Nichanian was given carte blanche to develop Hermès menswear as she wished and this has been her way forward ever since: mixing tradition with technology. The result is what might be considered contemporary luxury, and Nichanian puts its success down to the freedom she enjoys. “What I love about Hermès is that we are part of a family in a way,” she says. “It gives me freedom and I can do exactly what I want. That freedom is huge and it’s my engine.”
135
Research might not be obviously sexy, but it’s the very stuff of design DNA. The world’s leading designers must continually adapt new materials and processes to their products. We speak to three pioneering brands to hear how they’re doing it
Where the Superloon by Jasper Morrison for Flos gets checked and assembled. This room has been built inside the warehouse expressly for the assembly of this lamp.
R& D Words Will Wiles Photography Carlos Chavarria Max Creasy Eric Einwiller Jeremy Furchette Matteo Mendiola
R&D
“If you use technology just to use technology, it becomes like a fetish or a gimmick,” says Piero Gandini, president of Italian lighting company Flos. “Technology is a service, not something you follow just to create some artificial need, or even worse, excuses to make products. We are very far from that.” Nevertheless, design and research are deeply entwined. It is in designers’ natures to constantly look for new materials and new processes, and to apply them to their work. In Flos’s case, that goes back to the foundation of the company, when a lighting shop owner called Arturo Eisenkeil wanted to make lampshades using a spray-on wrapping material used by the US army. And this adaptation of materials from other industries continues today, as in the case of Coalesse’s groundbreaking carbon-fibre chair. This necessitated investment and in-depth research, thinking in new ways and, according to Coalesse’s director of design, John Hamilton, the creation of a “whole new supply chain”. In other instances, however, the material might be very old, it is just being used in an unprecedented fashion. In either case, pushing processes in new directions can involve overcoming a good deal of resistance from fabricators and experts, as Flos discovered when developing the Skygarden light. The playful Dutch designer Marcel Wanders had a very large dome-shaped light with a shade 138
lined with decorative moulded plaster, like a traditional ceiling – a quirkily literal take on the term ‘ceiling light’. But lining the curved interior of a lampshade went against every instinct for the traditional makers. “We went to plaster guys, and they all refused this,” says Gandini. “From the smaller artisans to the bigger companies, they all said this is not makeable, this will break, it will be too fragile.” But as the company hunted for a firm that would cooperate, it learned more about the process and the limitations, and started to look in very specialist directions – for instance, how structures are designed to withstand earthquakes. “[We gave our own] solutions for these kind of things, and we had an idea how to produce something bigger,” Gandini says. “Then we approached a father-and-son artisan company, and it was funny because the father said ‘it can’t be done, it can’t be done’, but the son was willing to try.” Together, they designed new machines and new processes, and the light was successfully brought to market. Sometimes, the resistance against innovation can come from within one’s own company. It’s the perennial problem of R&D in any industry: when there’s no obvious immediate business advantage to a line of investigation, there will be voices saying it’s a needless expense. While developing the LessThanFive carbon-fibre chair, John Hamilton found it was
useful to have ‘internal champions’ for the project to keep up support. “It’s hard when you’re trying to disrupt your own systems and to get people to think about what you’ve been working on for a long time in new ways,” he says. “It took a couple of us to say ‘No, this is really important for us, we need to show we can do things in new ways, and even if we lose money on the business side of it, the learning will be worth it.’” Once the chair was launched and started to sell, the internal sceptics were won over. “They came back to us and said ‘I can’t believe that you were right, some people love it.’” It seems Hamilton’s hunch was well founded. Now that the company has experience with carbon fibre, it is beginning to apply it to other products and components previously made with steel, improving other parts of its range in more prosaic ways. For Flos’s Skygarden light, a traditional material was being pushed in a radical new direction; for the LessThanFive chair a hightech material was being applied to mass-production design for the first time. But for Vitsoe’s 620 chair, the research and development process reached both forward and back in time. The 620, a fibreglass and leather armchair, was first designed by the German giant Dieter Rams in 1962, as a modern, inexpensive and Continued on page 142
1
Founded 1962 Founders Dino Gavina and Cesare Cassina Headquarters Bovezzo (near Brescia), approximately one hour east of Milan Staff 576 worldwide Notable clientele Ermenegildo Zegna Coture Salvatore Ferragamo, Hugo Boss, Céline, Dior Armani, Brioni, Victoria Beckham Michael Kors and Missoni
Flos
A view of the HQ, from the outside. On the first floor stands the R&D department and the secret lab. The tree on the right was moved from the old factory and relocated to the new one back in the ‘70s.
Simplicity can be extremely complicated, a principle well demonstrated by Flos’s Superloon standing lamp. The light, designed by British minimalist Jasper Morrison, is an elegant glowing disc mounted on a pivoting stand, resembling the offspring of a movie spotlight and a shaving mirror. The only features that hint at its technical sophistication are the thinness of the disc and the lunar evenness of the light it produces. Superloon uses a technology called edge lighting, which is primarily used in display systems and more utilitarian commercial settings. But Flos was looking to apply it in the home. “We showed some designers how edge lighting worked, using architectural lighting suspensions for office space that we have,” explains Flos’s chief executive Piero Gandini, “and they reacted in different ways.” Konstantin Grcic, for instance, employs it in on a very small scale in the OK lamp. But Morrison proposed something much more ambitious, stretching the capabilities of the technology. Edge lighting uses LEDs, but rather than simply arranging them in a field pointed where you want the light to go, it arranges them around the edge of the
1
Above: A corner of the Flos warehouse. Portraits of Philippe Starck and Achille Castiglioni have been printed and stuck to the wall by the workers.
140
Flos
Below: A view from above the ‘secret’ lab where an elite of artisans forge the samples of the upcoming projects.
Research & Development
field, pointed inward. So the LEDs in Superloon are arranged at the outermost edge of the disc, and point towards its centre. What turns this into a glowing field emitting a smooth beam of light is a sandwich of prismatic films. These capture the ray emanating from the LEDs and ‘turn them’ 90 degrees, out into the world. Gandini refers to it as a kind of “indirect direct” light. That makes it sound almost easy, but it wasn’t. In normal applications, edge lighting uses square or rectangular forms. Arranging the LEDs in a circle – and a relatively large circle at that – meant it was fiendishly difficult to get the prismatic films to work correctly. “The risk of bad lighting, or dim lighting, or inefficient lighting, is very very high,” says Gandini. “So it was problematic to achieve serious quality and good efficiency. We went everywhere. We went to factories from Germany to Taiwan, and we looked at every material… This stuff needs to be very specific.” The calculations to align the LEDs with the prisms were a considerable headache. “And if you do that on a big scale as we did, you really multiply the problem.” But the result is not only attractive, it achieves something unusual for LED lighting: it gets warmer as the light is dimmed, similar to an incandescent light.
Design / Autumn Report
Above: The luminous disk of the Superloon by Jasper Morrison being controlled in the anti-dust room.
Below: Stacked on the rack before the final assembly, a couple of Guns Lounge lamp stands from Philippe Starck’s Guns Collection for Flos.
Right: A view of the presentation room where designers are invited to review their projects and samples.
141
R&D
John Hamilton at Coalesse design studio and headquarters in San Francisco
Continued from page 138 flexible modular system for the home. Fifty years later Vitsoe – the company that holds the rights to the chair and a number of other Rams classics, including the hugely popular 606 shelving system – decided it was time for a complete overhaul of the design. But, this was not just innovation for innovation’s sake says John Kings, Vitsoe’s [head of ] product development, echoing Gandini. “I’m always looking for what the most definitive material or process might be for the specific job it has, so while I’m interested in the latest technologies, there comes a point where 142
newer is not always better. And we’re certainly looking for better, not newer.” This philosophy led to the use of coir for the chair padding, as shown in the case study (see page 141). But it also involved a remarkable chain of discoveries concerning the fibreglass body of the chair – discoveries that were a result of archival research, as much as experimentation on the workshop floor. There was no record of the original fabricator of the fibreglass components, so Kings was looking for new methods and materials to make the parts. Carbon fibre was among the materials exam-
ined, but eventually they had narrowed the search to a British company that could mould the shell in a combination of polycarbonate and ABS (a tough, versatile thermoplastic best known for being the stuff of Lego). Then came a breakthrough: one of Kings’ German colleagues managed to track down the original German supplier of the fibreglass shell, which was still in business. “There were archive notes of the manufacturing process, there were people there familiar with it Continued on page 146
2
Founded 1959 Founders Niels Wiese Vitsoe, Otto Zapf and Dieter Rams Headquarters London, United Kingdom Staff 58 worldwide Academic acumen Vitsoe is a founding member of the Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Industrial Sustainability at the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London
Vitsoe
Hanging rail to keep the 620 Chair Programme cushion covers crease free
The 620 chair, by German designer Dieter Rams, is far from new – it made its debut in 1962. But Vitsoe, its manufacturer, keeps the design under continual development, rather than letting it become a museum piece. And this is exactly as the practical and pragmatic Rams would want it. The 620 is a masterpiece of modular flexibility: its fibreglass arms can be detached and replaced, and multiple units can be connected together to make a sofa. “The whole point of Dieter’s thinking was to try and make long-lasting furniture that could actually be affordable,” says John Kings, Vitsoe’s head of product development. “He deliberately made use of new technologies such as plastic moulding to get over the traditions of the German furniture industry, which was hand-carved wood, way beyond what your ordinary person needed to fit out their new home.” Once the chair reached its half-century in 2013, Vitsoe decided on a “complete teardown” of the chair. “It was exactly that process of seeing which materials, components, technologies were worth keeping up, and which have advanced,” says Kings. Many aspects of the design didn’t have to be touched, they
2
were still perfectly suited to their job. But others could be improved. The chair’s wooden base, for instance, was originally finger-jointed plywood, which did not offer the absolute precision desirable of bolting and unbolting fibreglass components. So Vitsoe switched to the latest CNC milling techniques. Most interesting, however, was the material used to pad the seat. Before 2013, that was polyurethane foam – common in seating up and down the market, inexpensive and versatile but not very durable. But rather than looking forward to the most advanced materials now available, the team looked back to what was originally specified in 1962. This turned
Vitsoe
Research & Development
out to be coir, a tough fibrous matting made from shredded coconut husk: “the stuff that was the next step on from stuffing chairs with horsehair,” Kings says. When foam appeared, it supplanted coir on cost grounds. But coir has a remarkable advantage. It’s incredibly resilient, so much so that the main client of Vitsoe’s UK-based supplier is the Sellafield nuclear plant, which uses coir for packing spent nuclear fuel rods. “We’ve realised the most hardwearing, long-living material, and the most comfortable, is the one that is 100 years old,” says Kings. “This stuff will last lifetimes. Although it’s greater in price, it’s completely worth it.” Top: Coir pad made from shredded and rubberised coconut for long-lasting comfort.
Opposite top: 620 arms wrapped in protective foam for storage.
Bottom:High back 620 chair at Vitsoe London 3–5 Duke Street.
Opposite bottom left: 620 swivel base assembly. Opposite bottom right: Cut away 620 chair base to show hidden engineering.
144
Design / Autumn Report
145
R&D
“I’m always looking for what the most definitive material or process might be for the specific job it has, so while I’m interested in the latest technologies, there comes a point where newer is not always better. And we’re certainly looking for better, not newer.” John Kings Vitsoe Flos “is not a business venture, it is a cultural venture. We have to create some business as we go, but it is mainly a cultural venture.” Piero Gandini Flos “It’s hard when you’re trying to disrupt your own systems and to get people to think about what you’ve been working on for a long time in new ways. It took a couple of us to say ‘No, this is really important for us, we need to show we can do things in new ways, and even if we lose money on the business side of it, the learning will be worth it.’” John Hamilton Coalesse Continued from page 142
The Superloon by Jasper Morrison assembled in the Flos warehouse.
146
and the tooling was still in place, Kings tells me. “[The moulds] still had Vitsoe’s name on them and the surfaces were in amazing condition for their age. These huge hydraulic compression machines don’t die. And that solved all our problems at once.” In-depth research had resulted in no change at all: a completely faithful component. It’s a story that connects all these efforts to innovate – a sense that design is an ongoing dialogue of material and technique, connecting to previous generations of designers and artisans. All of these companies are acutely aware of being part of a design tradition of experimentation, exemplified by the fibreglass and plywood investigations of Charles and Ray
Eames in the 1950s. “I think if [the Eameses] were alive today, they would be playing with carbon fibre, in combination with wood,” says Coalesse’s Hamilton. “As designers, it is our responsibility to be looking at materials and wondering how we can process them different ways.” Indeed, Coalesse has an internal project specifically to do this, continually applying old-world materials to new-world processes, or vice versa, to see if something useful can be developed. This sense of being part of a continuum is nicely expressed by Gandini when he says that Flos “is not a business venture, it is a cultural venture. We have to create some business as we go, but it is mainly a cultural venture.”
3
Founded 2008 Founders Coalesse is a bringing together of the three design partnership companies acquired by Steelcase Inc: Brayton, Vecta and Metro Furniture Headquarters Michigan, United States Staff 100 worldwide Notable collaborations Emilia Borgthorsdottir Cory Grosser, Arik Levy, Lievore Altherr Molina, Jean-Marie Massaud, Scott Wilson & MINIMAL Patricia Urquiola and Michael Young
The LessThanFive chair takes its name from its most remarkable feature: its weight – less than five pounds. For a durable stacking chair, that’s unprecedentedly light – an achievement made possible by its material, carbon fibre. A fraction of the weight of steel but many times stronger, carbon fibre is composed of woven mats of fabric-like carbon mesh, which are shaped, coated in resin, vacuum-packed and then cured in an oven. John Hamilton, design director at Coalesse, was challenged to develop the chair by James Ludwig, vice president for design at Coalesse’s parent company, Steelcase, after a conversation about carbon fibre use in the aerospace industry, where it originated. Hamilton went to the Hong Kong-based designer Michael Young, who has experience using the material to make bikes for Giant. Indeed, there’s even an identifiable hint of bicycle DNA in LessThanFive’s slender legs. Designing a frame that would be robust enough for regular use, but strikingly slender, took extensive computer modelling. Even then, results were unpredictable. “There were times when we thought we understood what we were working with
Coalesse
Sculpture by John Chamberlain on kitchen countertop Opposite: Carl Andre floor piece at foot of kitchen stairs
3
Coalesse
Research & Development
and we had computer calculations that were telling us what the model should do,” Hamilton says. “We would make the model, break it but it wouldn’t be the same as what the computer said.” Indeed, for all the cutting-edge technology involved, the company describes LessThanFive as a breakthrough in craftsmanship, rather than industrial processes – in some respects it was a hand-made object, owing much to the designers’ eye and instincts. Hamilton and the company saw the chair as a test bed as much as a prototype – a way of mastering processes that could then be applied more broadly. Carbon fibre is an expensive material, but the intention was to look at trade-offs that might be achieved:
for instance, reducing shipping costs with smaller, lighter components. Coalesse is now looking to develop new carbon fibre products, and as might be expected, a table will follow the chair. But the material opens up some unexpected possibilities. The table will have detachable legs so that it can be packed flat or reconfigured into different shapes. And, for the first time, UPS will be able to deliver it. “We’ve had struggles here in the US because of the weight restrictions on what the post is able to deliver; the UPS guys won’t take anything over 50lbs,” says Hamilton. “But you can now ship a table and four chairs for 25lbs. An Amazon drone could be able to fly with it and deliver it.”
The Coalesse design studio, San Francisco, California.
148
Top: Dappled light and shadows makes any sketch better. Bottom: Collaborative project spaces allow for work to be constantly present and iterative. Opposite: Digital fabrication shop allows for rapid prototyping and building in a variety of forms.
Design / Autumn Report
149
JP
John wears cashmere jumper and striped cotton shirt BRUNELLO CUCINELLI
John Pawson is a rebuke to the stereotype of minimalist architecture as icy and joyless. Now, at last, Britain might be warming to his work. We meet the architectural designer as he completes a spectacular home for London’s new Design Museum
Words Will Wiles Photography John Spinks Styling Scott Stephenson
JOHN PAWSON
Inside John Pawson’s Notting Hill home, London
152
153
JOHN PAWSON
John wears cable-knit cashmere jumper POLO RALPH LAUREN at MR PORTER Washed striped cotton shirt MARGARET HOWELL
154
It’s a hot summer’s day in London, and the ground floor of John Pawson’s office in King’s Cross is ablaze with light. But the man himself keeps his desk downstairs, below street level. “I let the others look out of the window,” he says cheerily. “I prefer to look at the blank wall.” ‘Perfect!’ I think. He has said something ‘minimalist’ before I have even had time to get out my notebook or recorder. This is John Pawson, you see – there are rules. Pawson is not Britain’s most famous architectural designer. However, he is its most famous minimalist architectural designer; indeed, famous for being minimalist. Interviews with him fall into a pattern. The author must feign trepidation, and ham up the expectation of Pawson being a chilly zealot, ready to pass judgement on their dress, their home, their timekeeping, because that’s what minimalists are like, right? This is a man who, according to legend, was thought to be a bit on the austere side by Cistercian monks. And then – surprise! – he turns out to be pleasant and un-supervillain-like. “It always comes as a shock to me. People say to me ‘What’s the worst building that you know?’,” Pawson says when asked if this ever becomes tiresome. “I’m not interested in the negative. And how other people live, I just find fascinating. People expect a shaved head, wearing black…” Neither of which is true of Pawson, who repeatedly has to blow a stray lock of fair hair out of his eyes, and who is wearing a white shirt, open at the neck. Within architecture, where the minimalist mystique doesn’t have the same force, Pawson has a reputation for affability and charm, and he doesn’t disappoint: he’s easy-going, reflexively self-deprecating and drily witty, despite being horribly jet-lagged after a nightmare flight from Hokkaido in Japan. On the day of his departure, a typhoon hit, and he was stuck on the tarmac for six hours as the plane shook in the wind. “Luckily for me they very kindly served drinks while we were waiting,” Pawson says. Considering the circumstances, serving drinks sounds like a given – it’s typical of Pawson’s graciousness to describe the act as “very kind”. Pawson was in Hokkaido for a job – a resort hotel. His 35-year career has always involved an element of jet-setting: his big breaks were designing the Cathay Pacific business class lounge at Norman Foster’s Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong in 1998, and designing Calvin Klein’s flagship store in New York. But lately, the projects have been getting bigger. This includes his highest-profile work to date: the transformation of the former Commonwealth Institute in London’s Holland Park into a new home for the Design Museum. On a smaller scale, he is adapting a farmhouse in the Cotswolds into a new home for himself – an unusually significant job, as it was homes for himself, friends and family that founded his reputation. This is not yet on site, which he describes as “a sore point”. “It’s obviously taking much longer than any of our other projects, he says. “I can’t make my mind up.” The Design Museum is, by contrast, on the cusp of completion.
JOHN PAWSON
155
JOHN PAWSON
Inside John Pawson’s studio in King’s Cross, London
156
JOHN PAWSON
Study models and prototypes on a table in Pawson’s studio
157
JOHN PAWSON
158
JOHN PAWSON
“I know most people only see my work through pictures, [but] I do notice that when people walk into places that I’ve done, they change physically.”
Striped cotton shirt BRUNELLO CUCINELLI
Designed by Scottish firm RMJM and completed in 1962, the Commonwealth Institute was a much-loved local landmark with a distinctive finned copper roof. Although its original purpose had withered away in the 21st century, there was outcry when its demolition was proposed, and the intervention of the Design Museum in 2009 was widely welcomed as a way of saving an unusual outcropping of jet-age modernism. Pawson isn’t concerned that his first major project in the UK is within someone else’s shell – instead, he sees opportunity. “It’s always a problem in Britain finding a piece of clear land in the right location to build something new,” he says. “You get a better location in an existing building, and in a pretty spectacular building. We would never have been allowed to build in a park, or [under] a roof that allows you such a sense of space. I was interested to see what could be done with the existing building. It’s a challenge in itself.” When the institute’s conversion was first put forward, there were some concerns that dividing its remarkably open interior into gallery spaces might dilute one of the special qualities of the building: its cavernous, open interior under that soaring copper paraboloid, which, as Pawson puts it, had a “Star Wars Galactic Convention feel”. He’s confident that the specialness has been preserved. The stairs now circle the central well of the building “like an open-cast mine”, and each of the three main exhibition spaces is visible wherever you are. “Everything is sort of… there,” right in front of the visitor, Pawson says. “The roof is untouched, and it’s visible – in fact it’s slightly higher.” Some souvenirs of the original institute are retained, for example a world map, marble floors and stained glass. The rest will be classic Pawson: all plain, unadorned materials, woods and white walls. Here, there’s a touch of minimalist concern – there will be a lot of visitors, of course, perhaps more than in any other Pawson environment. A lot of unwashed hands. “I didn’t want white anywhere you’d touch,” he says. “The public can’t touch any white, it’s out of reach. Just to be practical.” Pawson was born in Yorkshire, in 1949. When did his taste for minimalism develop? “I’ve always been obsessional,” he says, and attributes his liking for unadorned simplicity to his Methodist parents, and to the plain stone architecture of Halifax, his home town. He studied at the Architectural Association in the 1970s, and under Shiro Kuramata, the Japanese designer who fused minimalism with postmodernism. One of his earliest commissions was a small apartment interior for the travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin, who had visited a South Kensington flat Pawson had designed for Hester van Royen, Pawson’s first wife. “I had turned a two-bedroom flat that she was renting into a one-bedroom flat, without permission,” he remembers, amused. “I was slightly economical with the information about what was happening… I just thought that the result would be so spectacular. 159
JOHN PAWSON
“I don’t design what I do because I want to try and live the way it’s telling me to. It’s just how I want things. It’s a reflection of who I am and what I am.”
160
JOHN PAWSON
These stark concrete stairs in Pawson’s studio are typical of his signature brand of minimalism
162
“I was driven by this terrible urge to just clear everything out, [leaving] this spectacular Georgian 12ft-ceiling room with corniced ceiling and fireplace. Very nice, but of course there was nothing else, it wasn’t very practical but it was a very nice space,” he adds. “Bruce came around and got very excited, he said he felt freed.” The result was not just Chatwin’s small apartment, but also a famous essay, ‘A Place to Hang Your Hat’. It’s hard to imagine a greater compliment, or a better recommendation. “What’s nice about writing is that it describes places, I think, much better than photographs,” Pawson says. “I know most people only see my work through pictures, [but] I do notice that when people walk into places that I’ve done, they change physically, they…” He straightens his shoulders and raises his head, looking up. “Bruce was a prime example of that. He went slightly bonkers, walking around and around.” This sounds like an example of the peculiarity of minimalist architecture, the reason it is regarded with something close to superstition. It is held to have almost magical properties to elevate its inhabitants, but that comes with a perceived edge of moral castigation. (Don’t touch the white!) I must admit to being guilty of this myself, having written a novel in which the minimalist apartment of an obsessive modernist composer drives a flat-sitter insane. Pawson finds this amusing. “I don’t design what I do because I want to try and live the way it’s telling me to,” suggesting there’s no effort to control himself or anyone else. “It’s just how I want things. It’s a reflection of who I am and what I am, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like eating. I’m not an ascetic – it’s not asceticism, it’s aestheticism.” The story about the Cistercian monks finding the monastery he designed for them, in Novy Dvur in the Czech Republic in 2003, rather too austere is, it seems, at least partly a myth. In his re-telling, some monks found the exceptional quality of his building too extravagant, rather than too plain, when all they needed was four walls and a roof. Pawson, meanwhile, disclaims any connection between minimalism and godliness. “When it comes to the church, you do your best to get the proportion and the materials right, and you hope it becomes sacred,” he says. “You can only give the monks the best that you can do… It won’t turn a novice into a monk.” Nevertheless, there does seem to be some influence. Does Pawson have any belief in what’s called ‘architectural determinism’ – the power of a designed space to make you better, or worse, as a person? He did say that people stood up straighter when they walked into one of his buildings, after all… “I’d say they relax, actually,” he says, gently. “You go somewhere and you feel good. That’s what I first noticed as a boy. It’s the difference between a building that’s just a building and architecture that’s special.”
JOHN PAWSON
163
Words Ray Murphy Photography Pani Paul Styling Alex Petsetakis Scott Stephenson
Craft Works
Port and Levi’s® Made & Crafted™ meet Michelin-starred chef Ollie Dabbous and designers Matteo Fogale and Laetitia de Allegri to discover how they are using simple techniques and unearthing unique materials to shape the future of their industries
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” Often misattributed to Einstein, this axiom by influential German statistician, economist and Keynesian protégé EF Schumacher, hit upon a timeless truth. Simplicity is, perhaps, the most cerebral approach to creativity. But in a technology-obsessed age, where over-designed furniture and deconstructed food dishes snapped from above can command more online coverage and ‘likes’ on social media channels, how do modern-day creatives resist the lure to overcomplicate things, while still continuing to develop? To answer this, we meet Michelin-starred chef Ollie Dabbous and award-winning design duo Matteo Fogale and Laetitia de Allegri, all styled in Levi’s® Made & Crafted™. Like Dabbous, Fogale and de Allegri, Levi’s® Made & Crafted™ – the contemporary, sophisticated collection within Levi’s – is creating tomorrow’s classics by building on a successful reputation for quality product, using meticulously sourced materials (like Italian hand-waxed leathers and proprietary selvedges denim) and state-of-the-art production techniques. Here, we sit down with all three creatives and delve into their approaches to innovation.
164
Laetitia wears Crew sweatshirt and Slouchy jeans LEVI’S® MADE & CRAFTED™ and her own trainers
Matteo wears Heavyweight 8oz T-shirt and Tack slim jeans in After Thought LEVI’S® MADE & CRAFTED™ and his own trainers
165
MATTEO FOGALE & LAETITIA DE ALLEGRI Designers
Uruguayan Matteo Fogale and Swiss-born Laetitia de Allegri met while working at Barber & Osgerby, the leading industrial design studio responsible for creating Vitra’s Tip Ton chair (2011) and the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic torches. It was here that they came to appreciate the “vision of making something that you really believe in”, and learned some of the simple principles that helped lay the foundations for their own partnership, which began four years later. “Barber & Osgerby have a really interesting approach to design where they don’t sacrifice, or compromise too much what they want to do, they just stick to what they believe,” Fogale tells me. “I think that’s a really important lesson.” The pair’s first breakthrough project, the -ISH collection (2014), saw them build a beautifully clean line of furniture and tableware
using old denim, paper and cotton. As well as winning them recognition from the design community, it gave their practice a focus: recycled and repurposed materials. “The material we used for the collection was already on the market, but it was used in a very industrial sense,” says de Allegri. “We brought it to life, and showed the beauty of the material through a different way of using it.” Now located in northeast London’s Blackhorse Workshop, a creative hub for ‘makers’, located in a quiet backroad in Walthamstow, the duo spend hours poring over materials online and in sample libraries, digging through fabrics and compounds that could be given a new purpose. Rather than highlighting the fact that they’re using sustainable material to produce furniture pieces, Fogale and de Allegri are advocates of an understated approach.
Bloomberg Chair from Re : connect - a seating island
166
-ISH side table 2
“We like that people might not really know that it is made from waste, I think it’s interesting,” Fogale says. “[The product] doesn’t have to shout ‘I’m recycled, I’m made out of discarded glass and wood’. The material could be as precious as any stone or metal, but then made in a sustainable way.” In the past, Fogale suggests, recycled material was often associated with ‘cheapness’ and bad quality, but that appears to be changing. Specialist manufacturers, such as London-based Smile Plastics, have been working with designers to release high-end recycled materials that look and feel organic – some are even designed to contain natural-looking blemishes. Fogale and de Allegri see this as an opportunity to push sustainable product design even further, while continuing
to uphold their refined, minimalist aesthetic. “Smile made this material out of recycled yogurt pots, by mixing the plastic and the aluminium foil of the pots, and they created this beautiful material which is very unique,” Fogale says. “That’s really interesting because it means you’re not designing just a chair, or a piece of furniture – you can also choose how it looks by controlling the look of the material itself.” “Each piece would be unique and you’d never have the same one twice,” de Allegri adds. Reworking existing materials may involve complex chemical reactions, but it provides a simple solution to the environmental question, while resulting in individually characterful products that break away from the hegemony of mass production.
167
Ollie wears Wool cashmere-lined Type II Pile Trucker Heavyweight 8oz cotton T-shirt, Italian selvedge chino pant in After Thought LEVI’S® MADE & CRAFTED™
Photography assistant Liberto Filo Grooming Davide Barbieri at Caren using Bumble and bumble
168
OLLIE DABBOUS Chef
Pea & Mint by Ollie Dabbous
When Ollie Dabbous first opened his eponymous London restaurant in 2012, he couldn’t have predicted just how successful his first few years in business would be, given that he was relatively unknown (despite having trained under Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir), in a crowded sector. Following gushing reviews from some of the UK’s leading critics, such as AA Gill, the bookings wouldn’t stop coming. But what made it all the more surprising is that he built such a rapid following with restrained, British cooking that refused to latch itself on to any food trends. “It’s harder to be good than original. Anyone can be original; it’s easy to be original,” Dabbous tells me confidently, before explaining why he feels there’s more skill in making a classic lemon tart from scratch than placing the deconstructed elements on a plate. Sure, the latter may make for a better photo, but it’s unlikely to taste as good as the original. “I think nowadays people don’t really want food that’s ‘chefy’ and technique driven. I think they want something a bit more natural, a bit more seemingly effortless,” he adds. “Yes it’s nice to be wowed, but equally I think people just want a tasty plate of food rather than a showcase of the chef’s skills.” Earning a Michelin star just eight months after opening only strengthened his resolve, and in the years that followed, he has injected more and more British produce into his restaurant’s lunch, dinner and tasting menus. “I’m happy to say we work more with British farmers and butchers [these days]; you get a more tailored service,” he says. And the treat-
ment of the ingredients after sourcing is, of course, just as important to Dabbous. “The more you process food, the more you can actually detract from it. If you get an amazing organic sand-grown carrot, and the flavour’s phenomenal, or an amazing rib of beef – just put it on the barbeque. You don’t need all this refining.” It appears to be a proven formula, given the accolades he’s received. But winning the plaudits of gastronomes and critics alike must bring with it a pressure to constantly develop new dishes, techniques and toy with the ‘new’. Not so, according to Dabbous. “A lot of young chefs are guilty of thinking they can reinvent the wheel, but I think the role of the chef is to take great produce and make it better,” he says. “Sometimes you don’t have to do a lot to it. Sometimes, to make it as good as it can be, it might mean that you’re actually doing something quite classic.” And that’s because, ultimately, customers remember great taste over great presentation. This self-assuredness and insistence on championing simple British produce is likely why Dabbous has become the ‘chefs’ chef’. But more than that, he seems to have a deep understanding of what really drives customers through his doors, week in, week out. “Whether now, whether in 20 years’ time, value for money is always going to be important to customers [as well as] friendliness and good service,” he says. “With food, yes everyone has different opinions on things, but there’s something quite brutally honest about flavour – something is either delicious or it isn’t.” Simple, really.
169
SIERRA MADRE
Mad Sierra
170
SIERRA MADRE
adre Words Richard Grant Illustration Marc Aspinal
SIERRA MADRE
Home to bandits, drug traffickers and seemingly bottomless gorges, Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range is often called a ‘no-go zone’. Here, British travel writer Richard Grant recounts his dramatic journey through the lawless territory – ruled by guns, cocaine and merciless killers
1. There’s a saying in the Sierra Madre that you’re not a man until you’ve killed a man; I went there because I couldn’t believe such a place still existed in the 21st century, and I wanted to write about it. I went because my marriage had fallen apart and I needed to plunge myself into something reckless and all-consuming. People kept telling me that I was insane, that I was sure to get kidnapped or killed, that the Sierra was a no-go zone full of bandits and feuding drug traffickers. I thought they were exaggerating. I had heard equally dire warnings before going to Haiti, Central Africa, backwoods Appalachia, and other supposedly dangerous places to which I had ultimately travelled unscathed. I had yet to learn a simple truth summarised by the Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1911. “Nothing happens until it happens,” he said, as he sailed away to France from the revolution that toppled his regime. From the back porch of my house in southern Arizona, I could see the Sierra Madre Occidental, the ‘Mother Mountains’ of Northwest Mexico, rising out of the desert and dominating the southern skyline. Ridge after ridge were stacked up in the distance in paler shades of blue. It’s a kind of Wild West that sits on America’s back doorstep, and has never known the rule of law. Apache Indians were still raiding and murdering from 172
their strongholds in the Sierra Madre in the 1930s. In recent decades, the Sierra has become one of the world’s biggest production areas for marijuana, opium, heroin and billionaire drug lords. There are still bandits on horseback, gold prospectors riding mules, indigenous tribes like the Huichol and Tarahumara, who listen to their peyote shamans and retain their language and culture. A few Tarahumaras still live in caves and hunt with bows and arrows. 900 miles long, 70 miles wide, the Sierra Madre contains four canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon of Arizona, and is crossed by only two paved roads and one railway. I became consumed by the idea of travelling the entire mountain chain from north to south, although the topography was so tangled and canyon slashed that such a journey would require many curves and detours. I sat on my porch and stared at the mountains and pored over maps at night, tracing possible routes with the tip of my forefinger. The Internet was remarkably unhelpful, because so few people ventured into the Sierra backcountry, or knew what was happening there. I took a monthlong crash course in Spanish and learned the basics of riding a horse. I went to see an old Arizona cowboy, novelist and former heavyweight prizefighter named JPS Brown. He had prospected for gold and herded cattle all over the northern Sierra Madre. He was one of very few outsiders who knew its culture well, and he gave me the direst warning of all. “If you go up in those mountains, what you’re going to find is murder,” he said. “The last place you want to find is the heart of the Sierra Madre, because that’s where you’ll get shot on sight, no questions asked, and the guy who shoots you will probably still have a smile on his face from saying hello.” Surely he was overstating things, I thought, or trying to scare me away for my own safety. Surely there was a way to skirt around the most dangerous areas, and travel in relative safety. When it became clear that I was going anyway, he offered me the following advice, which I wrote down carefully in my notebook: “You need someone from there to vouch for you. If you can win peo-
ple’s trust in one place, they can pass you along to a friend or relative in the next place. If you arrive somewhere and you don’t make friends in 20 minutes, leave immediately. Don’t ever travel alone, because you become prey. And whatever you do, don’t mention drugs. He gave me the names of some trustworthy cattle ranchers deep in the Sierra. Then someone in Tucson, Arizona, invited me to his family ranch in the northernmost range of the Sierra Madre, and my journey got underway. I had a four-wheel drive Toyota pick-up truck, which I loaded up with camping gear and books about northern Mexico.
2. The Sierra was everything I needed it to be. The mountains and the isolated culture they harboured were so rough and rugged that they scoured me down to a basic, elemental version of myself. There was no mobile phone reception and very little electricity, so the distractions of technology fell away. My senses came to life, and were honed to a keener edge by the ever-present danger. The violence, I discovered, flared up and down in different places at different times. There were gun battles and assassinations over drug turf and cartel rivalries, but most of the homicides flowed from the Sierra’s extreme codes of honour and revenge, and the fact that men had money now from selling and trafficking illegal crops. Mainly they spent that money on alcohol, cocaine, AK-47s and pick-up trucks, in that order, which made for a very volatile social environment. I was challenged a few times, but being calm and respectful, and travelling with a local person, always seemed to defuse things. Along the way, there were sights and experiences never to be forgotten. I stood on the high rimrock of a gigantic canyon in pine forest with snow on the ground, and looked down at brightly coloured birds flitting through the tropical jungle a mile below me. I passed many raucous nights in rough little cantinas, with musicians wailing out the soul-
ful accordion polkas known as corridos, which in the Sierra Madre often recount the valiant deeds of famous drug traffickers. At the Tarahumara Easter festivities, the corn beer known as tesguino was brewed up in big clay jugs and plastic buckets. For two days, the participants were strutting, staggering, falling-down drunk. They stripped off their clothes and painted their bodies in black and white stripes, and fought mock battles with wooden swords and carved AK-47s. Old men played scratchy music on homemade violins while statues of God and Jesus were hauled out of an old stone church with a row of human skulls behind the altar. God was carved out of wood with a stuck-on beard, a green robe and his right hand lifted up. Over the years, all the fingers had broken off except the middle one, so it looked as though God was flipping the bird. My travel system worked well. I made friends everywhere I went, and they gave me introductions to friends or relatives in the next town, village or ranch. The Sierra Madre is a place of incredible hospitality, as well as incredible violence and lawlessness. I tried not to travel alone, but it wasn’t always possible, and all you really needed was the name of someone ahead. A few times I was stopped by rough-looking armed men in big pickup trucks, and I was never sure if they were cops or narcos, and since the cops were neck deep in the drug business, it didn’t make much difference. They would ask me where I was coming from, and where I was going. I would give them the names of people I had just befriended, and a name of someone where I was going. That was enough to satisfy them and wave me forward. I didn’t travel at night. Going through a bandit area I would travel in the early morning, when people said the bandits were asleep. If there was violent conflict ahead, I would wait until it was over, or alter my route. I had a vehicle breakdown in a bad place and a mule that bolted, and a long crazy night snorting cocaine with corrupt police officers. But all in all, the journey was going far better than anyone had predicted. If you followed a few simple rules, the Sierra Madre was surprisingly safe for a foreign traveller. After two and a half months of meandering southbound travel, I made it down into the southern Sierra Madre in the Mexican state of
“Now I had the loaded gun, and this felt better, but I still had no idea what was going on.”
173
SIERRA MADRE
Durango. I had contacts lined up further south among the Huichol Indians, and a Mexican wildlife biologist who was going to escort me down through the mountains, and study jaguars and wolves along the way. The biologist had to back out, and suddenly I found myself alone, vulnerable, exposed, without any names or contacts for the road ahead. I came downhill into the city of Durango, rested up in a hotel, took my first hot shower in weeks, and tried to come up with a plan B. In a guidebook, I read about a town called San Miguel de Cruces in the Sierra Madre above Durango City. The author described it as a good “jumpingoff point” for exploring the spectacular jungled canyons and old colonial mining towns in an area known as Las Quebradas, ‘The Breaks’. He warned that there was drug growing in the area, but I was used to that. Researching further, I found out there was a new tourist resort near San Miguel de Cruces, and in the state tourism office, I found a flyer for it, describing cabins, horse rides and fishing. Here was the perfect plan B. I would arrive there as a tourist, make some friends, and get some names and introductions for the journey further south. The road to San Miguel de Cruces, like most roads in the Sierra Madre, was a mixture of fine powdery dust and rough washboard littered with jagged rocks and deep potholes. I rattled and jolted my way uphill in first gear in four-wheel drive, with the windshield wipers going full tilt to deal with the dust. After three hours of this, I arrived in the grim, shabby, half-abandoned town of San Miguel de Cruces. It looked like a good jumping-off point for hell. A woman in a store gave me directions to the new tourist resort, and it seemed incredible that such a thing could exist up here. She also warned me not to drive at night, because there were bandits and bad men on the road. On the way to the resort, I picked up two hitch-hikers, a man and his son. In the US, picking up hitch-hikers is considered risky, but in the Sierra Madre, it was a tactic I used to increase my safety. The most dangerous thing was to travel alone, and if hitch-hikers could be befriended, they could smooth the way into a new destination. But these hitch-hikers were surly and uncommunicative. I was getting a bad impression of Durango. Compared to the colourful, extrovert states I had come through – Sonora and Chihuahua – it seemed colder, darker, more self-contained and foreboding. I dropped off the hitch-hikers, and soon afterwards reached a blue sign reading Centro Turistico with diagrams of cabins, horses and fish, and an arrow to the left. The shadows were getting long, and I was glad to have found sanctuary.
174
3. I followed a long winding dirt track through oaks and pines, stopping several times to open and close stick-and-wire gates. Then I came over a rise and down towards a cluster of half-built cabins by a trout hatchery. Standing there by a battered old Chevrolet pickup truck were two men in cowboy hats with beers in their hands. They looked at me like I was a big fat pork chop that had just landed on their plate. I knew immediately they were predators. My instincts were screaming at me to turn around and get out of there, but the sun was sinking down, and I was worried about the bandits and bad men on the roads at night. There was nothing to do but fall back on charm and bullshit in my improving Spanish. I got out of the truck, confident, respectful and friendly. “Hello, good afternoon gentlemen,” I said. “How are you? I’m looking to stay in one of the tourist cabins.” They smiled and looked at each other. “You are alone?” said the taller one. He had mocking, suspicious, menacing eyes and a silver scorpion pinned to his cowboy hat. “Yes, let me explain. I write for tourism magazines. I was at the state tourism office in Durango City. They said I should come here and write about the new tourism centre.” “And you want to rent a cabin?” “That’s right.” “He wants to rent a cabin,” said the shorter one. He was heavyset, unshaven and less menacing. The taller one laughed and shook his head. The shorter one laughed and offered me a beer. I accepted the beer with relief. The best thing was to make friends with them, and drinking is the key male-bonding ritual. “Ah, thank you,” I said. “I am Ricardo from London, England. What are your names?” The taller one was Abel. The shorter one was Lupe. They showed me an unfinished cabin and said it would cost 200 dollars for the night. “I don’t have enough money,” I said, although five 100-dollar bills were strapped to my leg. “I had better be going.” “No,” said Abel. “You can sleep for nothing under the trees. There is no problem. Do you have a gun?”
“I learned something I never wanted to learn: what it feels like to be hunted.”
“No, I…” “You’re here alone and unarmed?” He gave a sinister little laugh, chuckled, whistled and shook his head. “Aren’t you afraid someone will kill you?” said Lupe. “Why would anyone want to kill me?” I said. Abel said, “To please the trigger finger.” That’s when the fear gripped my heart, and turned me cold, and I began to tremble even though I knew showing fear was the worst thing I could possibly do. Lupe pointed out that “someone” could kill me, and throw my body down a ravine, and no one would ever know. Abel thumped his chest, and said, “We are the real killers here. Further north they grow more drugs, but here we are cien-por-ciento matónes, one-hundred-per-cent killers.” He pulled out some cocaine, poured a little pile of it on to his scarred leathery palm, gulped it down, and chased it with a swig of beer. Lupe did the same. They didn’t offer me any. This was a bad sign. Abel stared at me with venom and menace. Lupe, playing good cop to Abel’s bad cop, said, “Don’t worry. We are friends. We will get drunk together. Do you have beer?” I said, “I have something better than that, my friends.” I went into my truck and pulled out a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, two-thirds full. It was a calculated risk. Getting drunk with them offered the best chance of making friends, but it was equally likely to make them more belligerent and unpredictable. I passed around the bottle. They each took a big swig, nodded in satisfaction, and fetched three beers from their truck. I was trying everything I knew to be charming, hearty and funny. Sometimes I would get them laughing, and we would be amigos again, and I would start to think that maybe I would get out of here alive. Then Abel would scowl and grow suspicious again. Or a predatory look would come into his eyes, and he would stare at me as if he could scarcely believe his luck. Again and again, he asked me if I was really alone and unarmed, and what I was doing here. “I am travelling through Mexico writing about places that tourists can visit,” I lied fluently. “At the tourism office in Durango, they said I should come here. Don’t you want tourists at your tourism resort?” Abel didn’t believe me. He didn’t believe that I was British, or that I was a writer. To prove my identity, I opened up the box of books in the back of my truck, and found one that I had written with my photograph on the jacket. “What are you doing with all these books?” said Abel. His eyes were fierce and crazy. “These are books about Mexico. I have a lot of books about Pancho Villa. He is a hero of mine and from Durango.” “Pancho Villa?” exclaimed Lupe. “Pancho Villa was my cousin. Abel is related to Pancho Villa also.” “That’s amazing!” I exclaimed, clutching on to a lifeline. “That’s wonderful! I never thought I would meet a cousin of Pancho Villa. Villa 175
SIERRA MADRE
“I felt focused and alert, clear headed and agile, with a deep black dread in my core.”
is my hero! Look!” I started pulling out books about Pancho Villa in wild excitement. I heaped up all nine of them and grinned. “What do you think of Pancho Villa?” asked Abel. “He was an extraordinary man, a great man, a brilliant general, a true revolutionary, a true hero of the revolution, a…” “Pancho Villa was a Mexican!” snarled Abel, thumping his chest. “You’re not Mexican. Pancho Villa has nothing to do with you. You shouldn’t have these books. Pancho Villa is for Mexicans only.” He ground out his cigarette on the calloused palm of his hand and stood there fuming with rage, looking entirely homicidal. “I’m a scorpion,” he said, pointing to the emblem on his hat. “Hundred-per-cent killer. Watch out.” “Calm yourself,” said good cop Lupe. “We’re friends here. Everything is tranquilo. We will drink.” “So tell me about the tourist centre,” I said. “What is there for tourists to do here?” Abel thumped his chest. “We are hundred-per-cent hunters here. We kill things. Hundred per cent! Do you understand me?” He went into his truck, pulled out a .22 rifle and loaded it. He pointed to my truck. “You drive,” he said. I got into the driver’s seat. Abel sat next to me with the rifle between his knees. Lupe was on the other side. “Where?” I asked. Fear had turned me numb and passive. It occurred to me that I might be driving to my execution but I concentrated on following directions and not high-centering the truck. They directed me up and down various dirt tracks and then told me to park and get out. The air smelled of skunk and I said so. “Here,” said Abel, handing me the rifle. “Shoot it. Kill it.” Now I had the loaded gun, and this felt better, but I still had no idea what was going on. There was no skunk to be seen, and I was too frightened and intimidated to point it at Abel. They gestured to a trail and told me to walk ahead. I walked down the trail and emerged at the foot of a gorgeous waterfall. “You see?” said Abel. “It’s beautiful. Write that. We’ve got the best fucking waterfall. This is the fucking BEST for tourists! You write that.” 176
He finished his beer and hurled the can into the pool at the bottom of the waterfall. Lupe did the same. My beer was still half full. I was trying to drink as slowly as possible without them noticing that I was drinking slowly. “Now,” said Abel. “Up the trail. You first.” We drove back to the cabins, and had a rifle-shooting contest, aiming at an empty cigarette packet wedged in a tree. A caretaker of some kind came out of one of the buildings. He introduced himself as Jesús and when Lupe and Abel’s backs were turned he pulled down on his bottom eyelid, making the Mexican sign for, “Watch out.” I shot first. Despite the fact that it was nearly dark and my hands were trembling, I was only two inches high. There was a case of beer at stake, but was it better to win or lose? Then Abel shot. His bullet was right next to the cigarette packet. “I win. You lose,” he said. He ground another lit cigarette into the palm of his hand and bored his eyes into mine. I gave him the money for a case of 24 beers, shook his hand, and congratulated him on his shooting. The caretaker went inside to get the case of beer. By the time he came out with it, Abel had lost the money in his pockets somewhere. He snarled at me, “Give me my fucking money, gringo.” “That is not correct,” said the caretaker. “We all saw him give you the money. You have it somewhere. But that’s okay. Keep the beer and you can pay me tomorrow.” “Get your pistol, Lupe,” said Abel. “Let’s make the fucking gringo the target this time. He’s got no right to be here.” “Calm yourself,” said Lupe. “We have beer. We have cocaine. We will have a good time.” They gulped down two more piles of cocaine. The caretaker pulled down his eyelid again, and said it was time for him to be going. “Me too, goodnight my friends,” I said, jumping quickly into my truck, driving across the creek and parking under the trees about 200 yards away. I parked next to a picnic table, and then walked away from my truck, deeper into the woods. I stood behind a tree, watching and waiting. I didn’t know if they wanted to rob me, kill me or just frighten me some more, but I was sure they would come for me.
4. I stood there for 40 minutes in the dark, and then I heard the engine of their truck, and sure enough, here they came across the creek. They stopped by my truck, saw I wasn’t there, and then put on their high beams and started roaring through the trees, while I ran and hid, ran and hid. I learned something I never wanted to learn: what it feels like to be hunted. My spine was pressed up against the corrugated bark of a pine tree. My heart was hammering against my rib cage with astonishing force. The headlights came swinging closer now, and I turned my face to the side, afraid that it might reflect the light. My breathing was short and fast and made no sound. The lights swung away and I took off running again, deeper into the forest and the darkness, with the wide eyes and edgy floating gait of a frightened deer. I crossed a creek and climbed a slope and worked my way into a thicket of oak saplings. The numb fear was gone now, and so was the panic. This was a new type of fear. I felt focused and alert, clear headed and agile, with a deep black dread in my core. I was also disgusted with myself for being such a fool. What was I doing here? What the fuck was I thinking? The high-beam headlights were still strafing the darkness in the woods across the creek.
Finally they gave up. I watched them park their truck near my truck, and light a campfire. I waited and waited, getting colder and colder. The moon was up and I could see them drinking and putting more wood on the fire. After two hours or so, they lay down by the fire and covered themselves with blankets. Their truck was parked in the middle of the dirt track that led out, and it was blocking my truck. I came out of the thicket, climbed down the slope, crossed the creek, and waited until the first hint of grey light in the east revealed the situation. They were asleep in their blankets and I saw there was enough room to drive around their truck and make my escape. Down on all fours, heart hammering, I crept very slowly and quietly to the driver’s door of my truck. I got the keys out of my pocket without making a sound, unlocked the door, opened it with a slight creak, eased into the driver’s seat, and then turned the key. There was a sickening hiccup before the ignition caught and then I was swinging past them as they rose out of their blankets, looking bleary and confused, and I was across the creek and gunning it up the hill, expecting to see that big dented Chevrolet truck in my rear-view window, and knowing I would have to stop at the first stick-and-wire gate, and that’s where they could catch me. But I never saw them again, and I still don’t know what they were after, although killing me to please the trigger finger seems like the most likely explanation. Joe Brown was right. There are men here who pride themselves on their willingness to kill, who murder to boost their reputations, and because they can get away with it in these remote lawless mountains. They threatened to kill me for no good reason, out of sheer belligerent territorial meanness, and as I drove away from there, shaken to my core, my terror became jangled up with anger. What kind of wretched scum would hunt an unarmed stranger through the woods at night? I drove out of the mountains and north across the plains and deserts and I didn’t stop driving for 15 hours until I was in striking distance of the US border. I was furious with myself, full of rage and contempt for my tormentors and done with the Sierra Madre. 177
Introducing The New Yorker Today app. Download it to get the best writing in the world on the events and ideas of the moment.
Get a continuously updating feed of our editors’ selections from all that we publish: blog posts written within the hour, stories from the current issue, classic articles of the past, cartoons, and podcasts. The best of what we do, in one simple app.
Download the app at newyorker.com/today
Commentary: Digital babies, revolt in Turkey, giving up booze and President Trump (God help us) p189
p184
p192
p180
Lifting the Lid on Trump The author considers the reality of national life and death in this painful presidential election
by mark singer
T
hotels slathered with blinding ornamentation, the goal being to titillate suckers with the fantasy that a Trump-like life was a lifelike life – to distract from the fact that he had lured them inside to pick their pockets. The odds favouring the house notwithstanding, the casinos would in time fail, a saga of serial bankruptcies (six!) that would correlate with Trump’s nastiest habits, his cruel pleasure in stiffing creditors and his hair-trigger litigiousness. His personal life was no tidier. During the first of his three marriages, he had committed blatant adultery (along the way snookering the New York Post, a tabloid, into publishing a headline with a putative quote from his mistress and future second-ex-wife: “BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD”). Equally promiscuous had been the bankers credulous enough to lend Trump billions. No longer creditworthy, he possessed only one remaining exploitable resource – his brand. Going forward, moneyed partners would assume all the risks and, in exchange for having his name on their buildings, Trump would earn back-end equity when a project succeeded. Such details were hidden from a public for whom the Trump illusion
o try to understand how and why one of America’s two major political parties managed to nominate a presidential candidate so self-absorbed, defiantly ignorant, intellectually vapid, impulsively combative, compulsively mendacious and recklessly erratic as to jeopardise the United States’ strategic international alliances, national security, and standing as a rational guardian of the world order, begin with the inanity of our electoral protocols. Our national anthem brightly declares us “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Politically, though, we are the land of the easily amused and the home of the readily fooled. The 2016 campaign got underway the afternoon of January 20, 2013. Earlier that day, President Barack Obama had taken the oath of office marking the inauguration of his second – and final – term. Officially, this meant four more years to command the armed forces, steer the world’s largest national economy through its recovery from the most dire crisis since the Great Depression, and fulfil the duties and responsibilities designated by the Constitution. The Republican Party leadership, however, was having none of it. Throughout Obama’s first term, the opposition had embraced a content-free agenda of resolute obstructionism, a strategy still in effect. Obama would be the lamest of lame ducks. Other than the ceremonial formalities, they vowed, his presidency was kaput. In this regard, they were enabled by a political punditocracy that had already turned its attention to the next election. Focus conscientiously upon the arduous work of governance? For the possibility of transcending partisan differences for the common good? For the redress of stark social and economic inequalities? Please. Only the horse race, it seemed, mattered. When, in June 2015, Donald Trump formally declared his candidacy, he had already spent four decades clamouring for public attention. New Yorkers knew him as a roughedged rich kid from the outer boroughs – son of a developer who amassed a fortune building rental housing in middle-class Queens – who had crossed the river into Manhattan and ingeniously succeeded, as no one previously had dared, at branding real estate. Depending upon one’s perspective, Donald was either a self-parodying parvenu or an aspirational figure. He developed residential high-rises plastered with the ‘TRUMP’ moniker, then diversified in Atlantic City, where he built casino
survived. For more than a decade preceding his candidacy, Trump’s day job had been reality television star. No longer – and perhaps not ever – an actual billionaire, he now impersonated one on TV. Trump’s role on ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘The Celebrity Apprentice’ constituted his political capital, an asset he would leverage to seduce millions of voters suspended in their own collective fog of make-believe. America’s first-ever reality TV presidential campaign began infamously, of course, with Trump’s slander of Mexicans as rapists and drug smugglers. Islamophobia followed. The bigotry extended his four-year run as the nation’s birther-in-chief, promoter of the racist lie that Obama had been born not in Hawaii but in Kenya, rendering his presidency illegitimate. Birtherism – stirred with economic populism, fear and nativism – begat Trumpism, a brew concocted by a narcissist drunk on his metamorphosis into demagogue.
180
COMMENTARY
“By the time the first primary votes were cast […] the monster had long since risen from the laboratory table and run amok. ”
Eventually, 16 other horses joined the race, among them senators, governors, former senators and governors, one in-way-over-his-head retired neurosurgeon, and one erstwhile corporate chief executive. The latter two, in particular, hoped to trade upon their outsider status with an electorate disgusted by the political status quo and especially by Washington. Any of the contenders seemed as likely to prevail as Trump, whose candidacy for far too long was treated by the press, the public and the Republican establishment as a relatively harmless novelty. Trump win the nomination? Get outa here. The general election? – beyond ludicrous. Cable news doted upon Trump because, regardless of one’s politics, he provided entertainment, which meant bigger ratings, which meant bigger revenue. The digital and print media, while perhaps less cynical, knew that Trump delivered good copy. Still, subject him to labour-intensive investigation? We’re busy. By the time the first primary votes were cast, in early February, his candidacy was sevenand-a-half months old. The monster had long since risen from the laboratory table and run amok. There had been 13 debates and ‘candidate forums’, and Trump had dominated virtually all of them – bullying, interrupting, taunting and lying about his opponents. One by one, short of votes, short of money, they gave up. Each retreat seemed inevitable and each seemed to embolden him. When challenged, he attacked the moderators. During campaign rallies, he incited his supporters to spew venom at the luckless journalists assigned to cover him. Throughout, Trump’s sordid history – racial discrimination against would-be tenants; dealings with organised crime; employment of undocumented immigrants; deeply ingrained misogyny; unconscionable fleecing of desperate enrollees in his fraudulent getrich-quick real-estate seminars; refusal to pay contractors whose businesses then failed – hid in plain sight, accessible with a few keystrokes, thanks to years of exertions by superb journalists (Wayne Barrett, David Cay Johnston, Timothy O’Brien, Tom Robbins et al.). With laudable exceptions – Politifact. com (a project of the Tampa Bay Times), Fact Checker (ditto, Washington Post), Factcheck. org (Annenberg Public Policy Center) – not until Trump had clinched the nomination did most news organisations subject him to the scrutiny they could have and should have from the get-go.
Illustration Louise Pomeroy
181
By the time of the first debate (of three) with Hillary Clinton, the election was six weeks away and the race was perilously close. Arrogant as ever, Trump showed up unprepared. Clinton did decidedly the opposite. Not long into the proceedings, Trump was reduced to petulant defensiveness. At the end, both his feet were perforated with multiple bullet holes – a historically awful performance. How awful? One of his most pugnacious partisans, Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City, showed up in the spin room to cry foul. The debate moderator, an equable, self-restrained network anchorman, had had the temerity to correct one of Trump’s more
flagrant lies by citing widely documented data. “If I were Donald Trump,” Giuliani said, “I wouldn’t participate in another debate unless I was promised that the journalist would act like a journalist and not an incorrect, ignorant factchecker.” Goddam facts! Twenty years ago, while preparing a profile of Trump for the New Yorker, I spent a great deal of time with him across several months. Early on, I decided not to take personally the transparent distortions that constantly burbled from his lips – or, if you will, his reflexive lying – telling myself, ‘That’s just the way the man talks.’ Trump said many things that I found baffling, such as when he described the
apartments he sold as belonging to three categories: “luxury, super luxury and super-super luxury.” This taxonomy led to my conclusion that he “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.” Naturally, Trump hated what I wrote and my reward was his undying enmity. But I knew that my verdict was accurate, evidence of which the electorate has now been exposed to for more than a year. Still, I am resisting presumptuous optimism. This is a matter of national life or death. Trump, soul or no soul, might yet be the next occupant of the White House. Should that come to pass, dear Lord, please save ours.
Showing the Impossible Attempting to capture the plight of Syrian refugees, the photographer visits a camp in Lebanon to illuminate the complex stories of its inhabitants
by giles duley
I
n my work as a photographer I’ve documented many refugee’s stories: in Bangladesh, South Sudan, Angola and Afghanistan to name just a few. But the Syrian refugee crisis was the first I’ve witnessed from its beginning. Over the past four years I’ve spent much of my time in Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, or following the refugee trail across Europe. While I can never truly understand, those years have given me some insight. My work doesn’t focus on the dramatic, the scenes of mass exodus or panoramas of camps. Instead my work focuses on the mundane, the daily: documenting families and their journey. Many of these families I have revisited over the years, and it is through their experiences I try and tell the story. One of the hardest things has been to watch the children of those families grow, as hopes of peace and returning to Syria fade. To bear witness to a whole generation stuck in limbo, often uneducated, highly vulnerable, bored, listless and increasingly without hope. Children left maimed by the war, disabled children unable to access basic medical care, psychological scars manifested in eating disorders: just some of the stories I’ve tried to tell. Children like Khawla, a Syrian refugee living in Lebanon who I first met in 2014. At the time she was 12 years old and lived in a small makeshift camp by the sea, a few miles from Tripoli. She lived with her sister, six brothers
and mother. Her father was missing in Syria. The camp was on wasteland by a cement factory, the air thick with its dust. There was little protection from the elements, the children got sores from insect bites and everyday there was the threat of eviction. There were no schools for the children, no jobs, the hospitals and doctors too expensive. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees provided Khawla’s family with food coupons, but there was no support for accommodation or shelter provided. The tent Khawla lived in was made from blue tarpaulin, torn down movie posters and salvaged wooden posts. It neither protected them from the heat or sheltered them from the cold. Her family had fled their home in Idlib, Syria after three years of living in the midst of a brutal civil war. With no end to the war in sight and with living conditions becoming impossible, they took refuge in the relative safety of Lebanon. There though, they had nothing. Without a father her family was particularly vulnerable. For a while her mother and sister worked in a salt factory; like many refugees they were taken advantage of, paid far below the normal rate. While they worked, Khawla looked after the tent and two of her brothers, both of whom are disabled. Then one day there was an accident, the tent burned down and what few possessions they had were lost. For Khawla this was the end; she could take
182
COMMENTARY
no more. She swallowed rat poison in a suicide attempt and told her sister that she had done it to help the family – one less mouth to feed. Khawla didn’t die. Her sister told her mother and they managed to get her to hospital. She spent 13 days in intensive care, pushing the family further into debt.
H
ow do you photograph a story like that? How do you do justice to Khawla without exploiting her vulnerability? For weeks I visited her family and the camp, without finding the photograph. If it doesn’t feel right, I’d rather not even get my camera out of the bag. Yet her story had to be told, for she is not alone. Increasingly there are stories of young Syrian refugees feeling suicide is their only option. Finally, though, the photograph did come to me. We were sitting outside chatting, when Khawla walked by, the setting sun behind her. In that moment I saw the image. The glare of the light would come close to fogging my film, leaving her silhouette almost ghostlike, the image reflecting her own frailty. It’s as if she is about to fade away. In May 2016, two years after first meeting them, I revisited the family. Things have changed little, if anything they have grown worse. Khawla, who is so quick to learn, doesn’t attend school. She has a nervous smile that lights up a room, yet still talks daily of suicide and a desire to end the suffering. The family is
Khawla, 12 years old, at the makeshift camp where she lives, near Tripoli, Lebanon. September 2014
struggling to survive with no breadwinner and the two disabled boys needing extra support. Since her suicide attempt Khawla has had no counselling or psychological intervention. But she is not alone, in the region there is a whole generation of children suffering like Khawla. According to a Unicef report, an estimated 3.7 million Syrian children (one in three of all Syrian children) have been born since the conflict began five years ago, their lives shaped by violence, fear and displacement. In total, Unicef estimates that some 8.4 million children (more than 80 per cent of Syria’s child population) are now affected by the conflict,
either inside Syria or as refugees in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon. Syria’s next generation is growing up uneducated, marginalised and brutalised; they are vulnerable, exploited and often without hope. Who is to blame? What can be done? Ask any Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) and they will say the solution is peace in Syria. But as more regional and world powers become involved, that seems unlikely any time soon. The reality for now is that the world has to find ways to help the children in Syria, in the camps in neighbouring countries and those who’ve resettled in Europe. There are amazPhotography Giles Duley
ing projects being run, individuals dedicating their lives to help and NGOs providing support – but it is not enough until every Syrian child has access to education and a safe environment. It is, after all, this generation that will be expected to rebuild their shattered country. They are the hope for the future in the region and they cannot be abandoned. Giles Duley is photographing the long-term effects of conflict on communities around the world for a five-year project called Legacy of War. Visit legacyofwar.com for more info 183
Turkish Spring The photographer found himself caught in the middle of an uprising. Resisting the impulse to flee, he grabbed his camera and headed into the fray
by kalpesh lathigra
Friday 15th July 2016 — It is around 7pm. I am at my apartment in Taksim, eating melon and drinking black tea. I am in Turkey laying foundations for a project in response to the refugee crisis. My days have been spent walking the cobbled streets of Karaköy, sourcing props and making plans. The humidity today is unbearable. I feel drained. My twitter feed stops at journalist Borzou Daragahi. Borzou, photographer Ivor Prickett and cameraman Jeremiah Bailey-Hoover are friends. A few years back we were on the same hostile training course in Hereford, England – thrown together for a week, navigating frightening fictional scenarios one would rather not be in. All three men are now based in Istanbul. Twitter reports that the Bosporus and Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridges have been blocked by tanks. Rumours are circulating of a possible coup. Helicopters fly overhead and as I look out of my window I can see the people below checking their phones with haste. I used to be a photojournalist working for national newspapers, covering world events. I don’t do that kind of work anymore. WhatsApp buzzes from London; it’s my brother. “I trust you to make the right choices in life. You have two young children and a wife here. You owe it to Nimisha, Maya and Sehn to keep out of harm’s way. Thank you.” The BBC report an attempted coup. I can no longer access Twitter or Facebook but the Guardian and the Telegraph are reporting the same. Mum is on the phone. I keep her calm. I call Nim, we agree to not to tell the kids. She knows me too well and doesn’t push further. “Just be careful,” she says. Sala prayers are being read at the mosque. Traditionally they are read to announce a funeral. In the Ottoman era they were called during diffi184
COMMENTARY
cult times of war, but since the establishment of the republic they have not been heard. They echo through the streets. People are streaming out below me carrying red flags. I grab my camera bag. In Taksim Square I see a crowd around the Republic Monument. It’s Atatürk’s symbol of a secular Turkey, a division of state and religion. As I look more closely I can see behind the crowd a group of young soldiers surrounded, enclosed. Protected by some, others charge forward. I can see fear in the faces of these young soldiers. I feel no fear, excitement or adrenaline. I weave back and forth through the crowd making photographs instinctively. Minutes go by and helicopters fly above the crowd. Shots are fired, two men fall in front of me. Others try to grab the soldiers’ rifles. I take pictures quickly, the memory of past life returning. Ambulances arrive. I hear from another photographer that a man on a motorcycle was shooting into the crowd. I leave. Back at the apartment I download the pictures and send them to a German newspaper I have a relationship with. I can hear fighter jets over the city. The sonic booms shake the building so hard the glass shatters. I go back out, a man in the street grabs me and implores me not to go ahead – there are bombs. I keep moving. Reaching the square I see that the crowds have thinned out. The soldiers have been arrested and taken by the police. I look for Ivor. His Instagram feed had him here a few minutes ago. I had missed him. The morning brings calm. I catch up with sleep and make calls to friends and family. Twitter and Facebook are back up and people have been leaving messages: “Keep safe”. Over a beer with Ivor that evening we agree that we are selfish, making work without thinking about the consequences to our families, our friends. The demonstrations continue night after night, but I will not go again and make photographs. I have nothing more to say.
16/07/2016 00:23 It is said that the Turkish flag represents the reflection of the moon and a star in a pool of the blood of Turkish warriors. The flag is frequently called al bayrak (the red flag) and referred to as al sancak (the red banner) in the Turkish national anthem. All through the night, supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gather around Istanbul’s Taksim Square – some carry small flags, while others wrap their flags around their torsos. This group has one of the largest flags, which makes its way through the square enveloping all in its path.
185
16/07/2016 00:21 A contingent of soldiers had come to Taksim Square in support of the coup. They soon find themselves surrounded by members of the public against the coup and supporters of President ErdoÄ&#x;an. The tension and
186
fear in this soldier are palpable as he watches his colleagues being shouted at by members of the public, while others try to calm the tensions down in the square.
COMMENTARY
16/07/2016 00:20 Supporters of Erdoğan shout“God is great" and sing the Turkish national anthem ‘The İstiklâl Marşı’ as others clamour on the Monument of the Republic, which was crafted by Pietro Canonica and inaugurated in 1928. The monument commemorates the fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, following the Turkish War of Independence.
16/07/2016 00:06 “Make way for them, make way for them... Let them through… Everyone calm down... Make way.” So it goes on, as the soldiers stand surrounded by those against the coup.“No... Keep them there… Wait for the police… Sit down everyone,” these are the voices I hear as the contingent of soldiers that form part of the attempted coup are surrounded. Some of the public want to attack them and others want to shout. This goes on throughout the night, as soldiers’ eyes fill with fear and panic, not knowing what to do. As the coup dissipates police arrest the soldiers.
187
16/07/2016 00:27 Shots fire into the crowd around Taksim Square. There is confusion; a man screams in pain as he is shot in the back by an unknown assailant on a motorcycle. The public scream and try to wrestle guns from soldiers who fire in the air. Four more casualties are reported.
16/07/2016 00:33 People try and comfort the man who, minutes ago, was shot in Taksim Square. He begins to lose consciousness as they wait for an ambulance to arrive.
188
COMMENTARY
16/07/2016 00:36 After being lifted on to a stretcher by the public, the man is rushed to the ambulance parked 100 yards away. It feels like it takes an eternity to get him there, through the crowds and manmade obstacles of bollards and mini-walls, with other casualties being transported at the same time from different directions across the square. This man was one of four people shot by an unknown aggressor on a motorbike in Taksim Square.
Our Genes, Ourselves Considering the extraordinary potential of genetic engineering, the author wonders whether it will aid humanity, or create a new form of inequality
by brian patrick eha
I
n 1866 a friar in what is now the Czech Republic, who had spent several years crossbreeding pea plants in his monastery garden, published a paper describing some of the laws that govern the inheritance of genetic traits. Largely ignored in his own time, Gregor Mendel could hardly have known all that his groundbreaking work would one day yield. Since the successful mapping of the human genome in 2003 – a kind of lunar landing for the cosmos within us – research in the field has progressed to a startling degree. Genetic engineering, once belonging only to the realm of science fiction, is now a headline-making reality. One of the latest post-genome mapping innovations is CRISPR-Cas9, a powerful new method of gene editing that promises to give humanity the power to modify our own genetic code. By using enzymes to locate and snip out bad genes before inserting beneficial ones, CRISPR could be used to cure a host of harmful conditions, including cancer. Dubbed a ‘search and replace function’ for DNA, it could even impart HIV resistance to those at risk of infection. Genetic engineering has other uses, too. Last autumn, Chinese scientists announced that they had engineered hyper-muscular beagles using CRISPR. By altering the dogs’ embryos, they ensured that the animals, if bred, would pass on the genetic mutation to their pups. The first CRISPR trial with human patients began this August. In the absence of new regulation, innovation continues to play out at the edge of ethics. Cell biologist Paul Knoepfler may have had the beagle experiment in mind when he told the New York Times last June that the field of genetic research“seems to move in dog years. It feels like seven times faster than real time.” Largely unnoticed amid the furore over CRISPR has been the work of GenePeeks, an American genetics start-up whose technology could revolutionise family planning and public health. GenePeeks offers an ounce of prevention where CRISPR promises a pound of cure. Rather than editing the DNA of living cells, the company simulates the process of reproduction by digitally combining the DNA of prospective parents to find out what genetic diseases, for example cystic fibrosis, their future children would be at risk of developing. “What our technology does is predict the genetic profile of a hypothetical child, pre-
conception,” says Anne Morriss, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. “We literally make digital babies.” It works like this: prospective parents seeking the help of a sperm or egg bank – couples with male fertility problems, same-sex couples, single women – provide a saliva sample that is analysed at GenePeeks’ sequencing lab in Missouri. Their DNA is then digitally combined with the DNA from thousands of donor sperm or eggs to produce simulated babies. The would-be parent then receives a risk report. Until now the company simply eliminated from contention any donor whose genome posed any risk whatsoever to the prospective parent’s future child. But from now on GenePeeks will share everything with clients, including the particular genes and mutations that may have led to disease. Should there be a red flag, a ‘genetic counsellor’ will be available to answer their questions; their as-yet-unconceived children’s genomes will be an open book. The service, which costs about $2,000, is not yet available to ‘mainstream’ couples, but the numbers being crunched are staggering. GenePeeks matches clients up with every donor
“In the future, genetic inequality may be the issue of the day, just as income inequality is in ours.”
in its network, creates 10,000 digital babies for each pairing, and checks each digital baby for more than 8 million genetic mutations. And the technology is improving all the time. GenePeeks continually takes in new data from the US National Institute of Health, the Sanger Institute and other organisations, allowing it over time to add to the list of mutations – and resulting diseases – it screens for. (Later this year, the number of diseases will jump from more than 500 to more than 1,000.) “If there wasn’t this worldwide community of public data resources, our company couldn’t exist,” says Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton and co-founder of GenePeeks with Morriss. As the genetic databases grow more comprehensive, it may even become possible to assess the risk of inheriting complex diseases such as diabetes, in which multiple
genes are implicated rather than just the current single gene disorders. “We are entering a whole new era,” Ronald Green, a bioethicist at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, told the Guardian in 2014, “an era where biology becomes information.” Some 6,000 known diseases are caused by genetic mutations, but only five per cent of them can be treated. Of those we can treat, many are quite rare, making the available therapies enormously expensive. Glybera, the first gene therapy to be approved in Europe, is instructive. It treats a life-threatening disorder that causes acute pancreatitis and which aff licts about one in every 1 million people. With a price tag of $1m, it has been bought only once since hitting the market in 2012 – a “commercial disaster”, according to the Economist. But we can’t afford to dismiss such rare conditions. The 600-odd diseases that GenePeeks detects – all of them conditions linked to individual genes – together account for more than 15 per cent of infant deaths and paediatric hospitalisations. As genetic researchers have known for nearly a decade, and clinicians are now beginning to unde stand, everybody on the planet is walking around with disease-causing mutations. Most rarely result in problems, because they involve recessive genes, meaning that only people who inherit mutated copies from both ‘carrier’ parents are at risk. This helps to explain why testing one parent for potentially harmful traits is not sufficient. “The patient of interest to you,” says Morriss, is not the prospective mother or father but “the child that these two people may conceive.” That proved true for Morriss herself. Without knowing it, she was a carrier for MCAD deficiency – a serious metabolic disorder – and so was the sperm donor she and her female partner chose. Only a warning from the doctor a few days after Morriss gave birth saved her son, Alec, from dying in infancy. But for the first year of his life, she was afraid that he wouldn’t wake up in the morning. Having done everything she could to provide for her infant son, she has said, it was devastating to realise that “the biggest threat to my son’s life was embedded in my own genome.”
G
enePeeks was born out of that fear. Morriss, who has an MBA from Harvard, sees the company’s service as a “natural extension” of the maternal instinct to protect the health of 189
ing system, preparing them for the challenges they might face after birth. It can also be coupled with in-vitro fertilisation – creating embryos, testing each of them for genetic mutations and implanting only those which are disease free into the mother’s womb, while discarding the rest. In that way, every parent could ensure the birth of a healthy child. It thus becomes a fraught question as to what we consider a disease. The bestselling book NeuroTribes, for instance, has argued that autism should be treated less as a potentially curable disease than as a different mode of cognition, a different way of being. Silver acknowledges that there may be an “ideological battle” to come, but for now, he says, every disease GenePeeks screens for quite plainly involves “a deficiency in gene activity”. When it becomes possible to evaluate risk for more
one’s child. She and Silver launched their initial service quietly in 2014, working with a couple of sperm banks, but in October 2016, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, they will launch publicly, announcing their new service for the patients of fertility clinics. In the United States, about 400,000 people visit fertility clinics each year. Another 50,000 go looking for a sperm donor, and a further 25,000 seek out an egg donor. In the first year, then, nearly half a million Americans will be eligible for a GenePeeks test. By the end of 2016, the service will have also been rolled out in Japan. With a potential client base of that size, the company could kick off a revolution in public health, making it de rigueur to identify and eliminate disease risk before conception. Such a sea change in reproductive care would sharply reduce infant and childhood mortality rates, as well as the number of elective abortions performed after prenatal testing reveals a disorder in the foetus. Of those tested, “most people will get great news,” Morriss says. “More than 90 per cent of people will learn there isn’t a risk. But in six or seven per cent of the cases there’s going to be a real risk” – a 25 per cent chance that the parents’ child could be born with a serious disease. To read through the list of harmful conditions GenePeeks screens for is to confront a host of exotic pathologies, of which the public has little or no awareness. There is combined SAP deficiency, which can cause muscle twitches and seizures as well as fatal lung infections; Ellis-van Creveld syndrome, which stunts bone growth and commonly causes life-threatening heart defects; hyaline fibromatosis syndrome, which slows growth, causes painful bumps in skin and, in its severe form, can result in death. There are hundreds more like them – or rather unlike them, for each is unique, and uniquely terrible. The idea that we could wipe out these diseases, make them extinct, is enormously appealing. Morriss says: “We would like to be standing at the door of every fertility clinic or [obstetrics and gynaecology] practice or family practice”. Standing, that is, at the doorway of life, ready to thrust back the frailties of mankind. There is a subtle but crucial point to make here: GenePeeks’ service does not ensure that all children will be born free of genetic disease; it ensures, rather, that genetically diseased children will not be born. Embryos with defective genes will never be given a chance at life. Even if the technology had existed before Morriss herself gave birth, she would not have been able to spare her son the dangers of MCAD deficiency; she would instead have given birth to a different son, using a different sperm donor. Alec would never have existed. For those couples committed to the idea of conceiving together who have a high likelihood of passing on a harmful disease, GenePeeks’ service can be used as an early-warn-
complex conditions, says Silver, “we’re going to be focusing on conditions that are a serious detriment to life.” (He includes autism among them, and told me last year that GenePeeks could already catch 20 per cent of autism cases with its current technology.) In interviews, Morriss is adamant about not being in the ‘designer baby’ business, insisting that her company’s clients are interested only in healthy – not perfect – children. GenePeeks’ patents, however, far from reflecting this narrow mandate, are incredibly broad, covering “the likelihood that a hypothetical child of any two persons […] will express any trait or disease that is subject to genetic inf luences” – including height, eye colour and skin colour. It’s not hard to imagine this technology – or that of a future competitor – expanding from strictly therapeutic to purely cosmetic uses. Should parents, for example, be able to select their future child based on appearance? The technology to do this already exists. GenePeeks’ patents declare that “same-sex and infertile couples will be able to simulate the genomic profile of their ‘own’ purely hypothetical child and match this profile to the ones created virtually [with sperm donors].” Stephen Latham, the director of Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, puts the case against so-called “liberal eugenics” eloquently. While selective reproduction “can have some good effects in the sense that it can avoid expense, burdens on families, burdens on caregivers,” he says, “it has a very bad effect on currently existing disabled people, because it makes them rarer, it makes us less used to dealing with them and it makes us want to devote fewer resources to them. It makes us blame their parents for their
190
COMMENTARY
“What our technology does is predict the genetic profile of a hypothetical child, pre-conception – we literally make digital babies.”
existence – as if any good parent would have avoided having a child that creates this kind of burden. If we have a world where people can avoid having children with disabilities, then when people with disabilities are born, they will be that much more marginalised.” Silver himself was once a proponent of radical genetic engineering – a kind of CRISPR run amok. In his 1997 book Remaking Eden, he opined that “in a society that values individual freedom above all else, it is hard to find any legitimate basis for restricting the use of reprogenetics.” Yet he predicted that the use of these technologies eventually would enshrine in society a caste system divided between what he called the ‘GenRich’, a genetically enhanced elite, and the unmodified ‘Naturals’, a permanent underclass. Eventually, he writes, “the GenRich class and the Natural class will become […] entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee.” Silver now finds such predictions naive. “What I didn’t realise then and have since come to realise, is that just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it will be done,” he says. “CRISPR is a pretty drastic step. It’s genetic engineering of the embryo with a friendlier name. People get very worried when it comes to altering the genomes of human beings. We’re not doing that. We’re going to let parents have an embryo implanted that might have been implanted anyway. But instead of rolling the dice, we’re putting the dice on the table.”
C
RISPR, it turns out, can inadvertently go off target, ignoring the right genes and snipping the wrong ones, modifying regions of the genome potentially to harmful effect. New research has shown that the algorithms developed to predict off-target effects – and to look for them in CRISPR’d cells before introducing the cells to a patient’s body – miss a significant number. Imagine trying to cure a patient’s cancer with CRISPR, only to find that you’ve accidentally activated a cancer-causing gene. Rolling the dice indeed. GenePeeks’ service, says Morriss, is “a much safer and a much saner way to protect the health of your family”. CRISPR research shows no sign of slowing down. The very real risks, to say nothing of popular concerns about playing God, haven’t stopped researchers from racing to develop and perfect new techniques, nor have they stopped venture capitalists from pouring tens of millions of dollars into the start-ups trying to harness and market the technology. So what will the public ultimately choose: an ounce of prevention, or a pound of cure? Will people reject such technologies altogether? Or will the prevention of genetic diseases prior to conception become mandatory, like vaccinations after birth? In all likelihood, it will be parents themselves who drive the demand for such services. Why should we let the imperfections of
our genes hold our offspring back? “We are at a place as a species that we can do this,” Morriss has said.
F
ast forward to 2026. What might a world of ubiquitous genetic intervention look like? By then effective gene therapies may exist for many diseases, while GenePeeks may be able to detect children’s risk of inheriting even complex conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. Less positively, the world of sport might well be scandalised by widespread “gene doping” – think hyper-muscular beagles in human form. Some couples – or some countries – may take China’s one-child policy much further, selecting and bringing to term only those embryos with their preferred sex, skin colour, eye colour, height and other attributes. In Western nations, on the other hand, you may need a religious exemption to get out of mandatory genetic screening before having a child, just as my parents did to get me out of vaccinations as a tot. Insurance companies may refuse to cover your kids if they end up being born with a disease you could have prevented.
In the future, genetic inequality may be the issue of the day, just as income inequality is in ours. Feminists could demand that a GenePeeks-like service be fully subsidised by the government, arguing that to deprive a mother-to-be of such a vital procedure would prevent her from making a fully informed reproductive choice. Meanwhile, bioethicists will debate issues of privacy and consent related to unborn babies. These things may never come to pass, or they may only scratch the surface of the radical changes to come. Morriss, who started her career working on poverty issues in the developing world, points out that the world is already “genetically stratified”, since in many countries only the affluent can afford to care for a child with a serious inheritable disease. The latest drug to treat cystic fibrosis costs more than £100,000 a year – so much that the United Kingdom’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence rejected it as too expensive for the National Health Service. While the drug is available in the US, France and Germany, “kids with cystic fibrosis are being born all over the world,” MorIllustration Celyn
riss points out. “What we’re talking about is a world where you have a fighting chance to protect your family.” Even Latham readily admits GenePeeks’ potential for good. But he’s concerned about the idea of expanding its service to cover complex conditions in which multiple genes are implicated, the interactions of which are not well understood. “The moment you get away from pretty simple single-mutation diseases, you start getting into a world where actually we’re not very good at genetics yet,” he says. And he wonders openly how parent-child relationships might change “if, rather than children being a surprise and a gift, they start looking like a selected product”. Between parents’ urges to safeguard their children and governments’ need to rein in health costs, the ability to avert, or repair after the fact, the most devastating outcomes of conception will likely be irresistible. Beyond that, who knows? As Silver wrote in Remaking Eden, “The desire to have biological children and to provide them with the greatest number of advantages is a powerful force indeed.” 191
The Madness of Sobriety Being on the wagon can be an unpredictable crash course in controlling your new-found emotions. But it’s worth it. Probably
W
hen I gave up drinking, I was the first to congratulate myself. It was no big deal. I was soon slimmer, my skin was fresher, springier. I was sleeping better because I was no longer shaking myself awake with gulping wet snores and I was taking fewer nocturnal bathroom trips. “When he urinated, it sounded like night prayer,” so F Scott Fitzgerald wrote, and, though I have no idea what he meant, I can only add: a-fucking-men. As the year went on though, I found sobriety opened on to a more unpredictable landscape. I always seemed to be on a hair trigger, sometimes yelling, sometimes laughing, and not always sure which was which. The clumsiest TV advert became positively Chekhovian. The family eating a pasta sauce. The freedom of the open road in a German automobile. The zit-free first date thanks to a dab of germicidal cream. These 30-second dramas would raise me, shake me and reduce me to tears. I was a menace in crowds, in bus queues and in meetings, always ready to slam my fist on the table and shout: “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth.” I don’t think I ever heard the word ‘labile’ before I went sober: suddenly it was my middle name. The drunk writer is a romantic figure – at least to other writers, and certainly to aspiring writers. Anthony Burgess warned admirers of
Dylan Thomas that the poet never wrote drunk, only ever sober, “painfully sober”; which is a backhand kind of warning, because it makes the night before sound like essential spadework for the morning’s composition. This is one kind of sobriety: harum-scarum and desperate: You want sobriety! You can’t handle sobriety! Geoff Dyer’s book Out of Sheer Rage begins by confessing that the aim was to write a sober academic study of D H Lawrence: “I can remember saying that word ‘sober’ to myself, over and over, until it acquired a hysterical, near-demented ring.” The result is a masterpiece, but like the Drunken Master kung fu film series, all the mastery lies in evasion. Dyer never once squares up to his subject. I never thought this kind of white-knuckled sobriety applied to me. I had been worried about my drinking for a long time, but when I gave up, it came easily. I didn’t slip. I never had to reset the dial to zero. I didn’t spend the mornings sweating last night’s alcohol on to my keyboard. I was fine. Yes, I was fine. Except that I had no earthly idea what my reaction would be in any situation. The man from Porlock might come to my door, but I had no clue how he would leave. With warmth? With hugs and confessions? With tears, regrets and promises? We’re talking a range somewhere between a free blowjob and a ride home in an ambulance.
192
COMMENTARY
F Scott Fitzgerald published his essay ‘The Crack-Up’ in Esquire magazine, a curious confession of fallibility and weakness. He tells us that during a six-month period of sobriety he began to make hopeful plans for another few productive years. But as he began to savour this new life he realised it was already too late; the fracture was already there. Immediately, he “cracked like an old plate”. It’s no surprise he started drinking again. Re-reading ‘The Crack-Up’, I wonder if I did experience this desperate sobriety, after all. There was an entire year of lunacy. I was sometimes fierce, other times saintly. Fitzgerald claims he was so tightly wound that he could only bear the company of doctors and well-bred children under the age of 13, and only watched the films of Katharine Hepburn. I could only watch rom-coms. If you have no idea how you’re going to react to the most everyday situations, then you are mad. Only mildly mad, maybe, but mad nevertheless. In my first year of sobriety, it often felt safer to lock myself away from other people. I sympathise with Fitzgerald, yet I suspect that he misdiagnosed his condition. Was he really irreparably cracked? If you have drunk since you were a young teenager, and drunk to excess, whether to celebrate or to commiserate, to find courage or to relax, if you cool down with one beer and then get tanked with another, how would you know how to react without a drink? What’s more, if you have always tried to drink like a man and maintain your dignity whether you are drunk as a skunk, hungover as a dog or thirstier than a halibut, what kind of emotions did you experience, anyway? The first demented, near-hysterical year of sobriety is a crash course in having emotions. Could Fitzgerald have ridden out the madness of sobriety, if he had hung on longer than six months? Perhaps not. In his mind, the worst kind of drunk was the drunk who claimed to have feelings: “a drunk with great bursts of sentimentality, or resentment or maudlin grief.” Rather than risk being ridiculed for the shallowness of his emotions, he thought it better to have none at all, and simply maintain the air of an authentic drunk. There is a line in his notebook: “Then I was drunk for many years, and then I died.” It can hardly be faulted as an epitaph: hard and cold, just waiting for the chisel that will put it in the stone.
Fashion shoot for Baccarat by Martin Parr (2005). Paris, France. , image courtesy of Magnum Photos
by nicholas blincoe
Port Fiction How to be a Slut by Rebecca Schiff
193
For years, I had the idea that I was going to write a how-to story about sluttiness, but I kept talking myself out of it. I couldn’t figure out what Ihad to say that wouldn’t be simplistic, and then I realized that being a reluctant virgin for too long was the way into this narrator’s psyche. From there, it just became fun to play with the form and make her run around. Having this story in a men’s magazine like Port is oddly appropriate. The narrator thinks about men a lot. The story is populated by men, real and imaginary. I think she’d be thrilled to be next to ads for fancy razors. — Rebecca Schiff
Be a virgin first. Be a virgin for too long. Spend the rest of your life trying to blow up any pockets of virginity that still exist inside you. Terrorise those pockets, for they are the imperial power, and sleeping around is resistance, is Che in the mountains, is Mohammed Atta learning to fly planes into ugly modern architecture. Make this comparison at parties. Offend people. Men like women who are crazy, or asleep. You sleep poorly, so you’ll have to go with crazy. “Too soon?” says a girl. She looks rested. “Too late,” you say. “9/11 was an inside job,” says a man with a Garfield tattoo. “Why were you a virgin for so long?” Tell him that you were slow, that things grew for you slowly, that you’re not sure if it matters who did 9/11, or why. What matters is what happened after. You are here with him now, in your one set of sheets.
go see an installation in a gallery. You are a woman without warts.
Wash your sheets. Or don’t. Nobody’s coming back. Empty the garbage can beside your bed. Keep the garbage can fresh with plastic bags, bags that thank you for shopping, bags of endless gratitude from people who came here to open stores.
Cry once when you’re in the middle of fucking. It will be dark, the guy will be Australian, uncircumcised. Something in the foreskin causes tears. That’s why they keep taking it off.
Sleep with lawyers. There are many lawyers disappointed around the law. When a lawyer gets your number, make sure you have his, too. When he calls, it will say “Lawyer” in your phone. Don’t pick up. Let a lawyer talk to your voicemail, uncertain for once in his litigious life. Get some warts lasered off your vagina. When it’s done, 194
Wear tight jeans. Be obvious. You’re not an obvious person, but here, you will have to disregard the subtlety you prefer. The truth is that you are a sad person. Being a slut works in service of this sadness, solves it and perpetuates it, puts a dick in it. Men like to discuss the challenge of unhooking a bra, but it’s the unzipping of jeans that impresses you. Why does this person think he can take your pants off ? And what if your pants don’t come off easily? Then a person is pulling your pants off. Say, “I’ll do that.” Say, “Let me get that.” Say, “These are pretty tight. You have no idea.”
Get your first real boyfriend. By coincidence or not, he will also be uncircumcised. Cry all the time. Cry when he makes you breakfast. Cry when he doesn’t. Cry over Indian food. He won’t dump you for crying. Dump him. Sleep with someone else. This man doesn’t feel the same in your arms. He feels lumpy and soft, like nobody you know. Cuddling is one of a slut’s greatest challenges. Arm placement, leg placement, when to let go.
“I like cuddling,” you say to Lumpy. “But for sleep, I need you to not be touching me.” You are a polite slut, a cuddly one. You don’t tell men to leave, even when you’d rather they go. Rehearse a speech about how you need the bed to yourself. Say you have an early meeting. You don’t even go to meetings. You meet with students whenever you want. A student is not a reason to keep a man out of your bed. Get bitter. Forget to be bitter. A friend who is married will ask if you’re afraid of diseases. Ask her if she’s afraid of diseases. Tell her you sleep with a lot of married guys and they don’t use condoms. Tell her the married guys never use condoms. Take the free condoms at the post office. Buy stamps. Entertain the idea that stamps should be free and condoms should cost. Think about the Stamp Act. Just because you are a slut doesn’t mean you don’t think about American history. Benjamin Franklin was a slut. Jefferson, too. “He spent time in France” is code. Sluts are everywhere. Assign poems about sluts. Your students will giggle, and look to each other to make sure that everyone knows what sex is, but then they will start talking. Your goal is to get them to talk. “Frost got game,” says a boy in the class. “Yes,” you say. “And how does the structure of the poem indicate that he has it?” The boy in the class also has game. He will ask what you do for fun. Mention activities. “Movies,” you’ll say. “Books. I like to climb mountains.” On the last day of class, he’ll say, “So you’re not my teacher anymore.” “Not at this moment,” you say. “But you may have me again for English 24.” Teach English 12, 24, and 96. The department has decided to number its classes in multiples of twelve. Sleep with another member of the English Department. He has tenure and makes you pretend to be one of his students during sex. Be convincing in this role. Explain why your paper for English 72 is late. Tell him things have been crazy in your other classes, plus you have three jobs, plus you had an abortion yesterday. “Did you really have an abortion?” he asks. “No,” you say. “What kind of slut are you, anyway?” Be the kind of slut who takes Plan B. Be the kind of slut who keeps Plan B in a bedside drawer, next to condoms, the diaphragm you’ve never tried, inexplicable packets of lube. Where does the lube come from? In the night, a lube fairy gives you samples. You like the words on the packets: “Water-based,” “natural feel.” The words give you hope
when no one is visiting. When someone visits, forget to use the packets. You own a tub that pumps lube into your hand. Pump gently. A little goes a long way. Watch movies. Climb mountains. You can’t fuck all the time. At the top of a mountain, take a picture of yourself. Document everything you do and post it to the sexual internet. Even the right book can help, the right movie. It’s an intellectual era, though nobody knows this yet. Read books about LBJ, the CIA, pesticides, bees. Say “Cointelpro.” Say “Shea Stadium.” One day, people will be nostalgic for a time when a book about Robert Moses could get you laid. Call it “getting laid.” Call it “hooking up,” “scoring,” and, once in a while, “bonking.” Find another boyfriend, one you hope will be the last omelette maker to make you the thing called breakfast. “Call me a slut,” you say. “You’re my slut.” “No, just slut.” Stop using condoms. Tell your boyfriend you had warts ten years ago, but nothing since. “Great,” he says, and knocks you up. Get an abortion. You can’t see yourself having your boyfriend’s baby. Your friends pretend to be proud of you. A nurse-practitioner in a great outfit hands you a pamphlet about birth control. Now you have an IUD. Now you have Mirena. The diaphragm stays in your drawer, in its case. Your boyfriend stays your boyfriend until you replace him. Make a list of everyone you’ve ever slept with. Password-protect this document as though you are famous. Update it less and less frequently, until sometimes seeing the document in your miscellaneous folder startles you. Make a list of everyone from history you’d like to fuck. Saul Alinsky. Steve Biko. Springsteen. Would you sleep with Robert Moses? Would you sleep with Moses Moses? Would you sleep with Jane Jacobs? Why are these your questions? “Aim higher,” you write on student work. “I’m impressed by the risks you took in your introduction.” “DOUBLE SPACE, please.” Hypothetical questions come at the end of poems you assign in class. If you were the speaker, which road would you take? The slutty road? The road less slutty? Get slightly less slutty. Tell guys it’s late. They don’t know that eleven is not late for you, that you won’t be asleep for hours. Read about the Berlin Wall. Read about Velcro. You miss the dicks, but you know they’re still out there if you need them. 195
Photography Robin Broadbent Styling Alex Petsetakis
The Jingle Jangle
Striped 69 necklace PAUL SMITH 196
Vivienne Westwood Tank Solo in 18kt pink gold 197
198
Stoned rings with aged metal finish GUCCI
Crystal rock Saturn necklace LOEWE 199
Traveller stamp necklace LOUIS VUITTON 200
Leather and metal bracelet PRADA
201
Java 10 calfskin bracelet with brass buckle HERMÈS 202
Bronze penis pendant VIVIENNE WESTWOOD
Model Adam Wallace at D1 Models 203
Photography Blair Getz Mezibov Styling Dan May
Homecoming
Lane wears heavy wool twill coat and wool roll-neck RICHARD JAMES
Brandon wears double-breasted goatskin and alpaca peacoat DUNHILL, Denim shirt DSQUARED2, paul smith Cotton vest SUNSPEL
Kate wears bomber jacket LOUIS VUITTON, Jersey drawstring shorts TODD SNYDER for CHAMPION, Vintage Nike t-shirt
Kate wears vintage cable-knit vest, denim skirt and baseball cap Lane wears shearling jacket and trousers with side stripe HILFIGER EDITION, Cotton hoodie AMERICAN APPAREL
Kate wears shearling bomber jacket with satin sleeves SALVATORE FERRAGAMO Vintage Adidas cotton vest and leggings, Chuck Taylor All Star trainers CONVERSE, all jewelry Kate’s own
Brandon wears long shearling coat and cashmere joggers RALPH LAUREN PURPLE LABEL
Lane wears Winston jacket PRESIDENT’S, Vintage hoodie, Cotton blend tech fleece shorts NIKE at MR PORTER
Lane wears oversized wool cardigan PRINGLE OF SCOTLAND Kate wears vintage Nike cotton top
214
Brandon wears shearling jacket COACH Wool funnel neck sweater CANALI
Brandon wears shorts UNDER ARMOUR
216
Brandon wears tweed wool coat BOTTEGA VENETA, Cotton sweatshirt C.P. COMPANY, Track pants NEIL BARRETT, Chuck Taylor All Star trainers CONVERSE
Lane wears bomber jacket and wool roll-neck HUGO BOSS, Shorts UNDER ARMOUR
Top: All clothing POLO RALPH LAUREN Bottom: Brandon wears cashmere cable-knit sweater POLO RALPH LAUREN, Lane wears checked shirt POLO RALPH LAUREN
Top: Kate wears plaid cotton shirt POLO RALPH LAUREN, Baseball cap PATAGONIA
Lane wears G4 blazer BARACUTA, Cable knit roll-neck jumper ETRO, Baseball cap POLO RALPH LAUREN
Brandon wears Melton wool duffle coat MHL by MARGARET HOWELL
Kate wears bomber jacket C.P. COMPANY Vintage baseball cap Lane wears patchwork leather jacket NEIL BARRETT
Brandon wears checked wool jacket, knitted vest, leather belt and wool trousers PRADA, Vintage Adidas Stan Smith trainers
Kate wears wool mohair roll-neck sweater FENDI
Lane wears coat and sweater EMPORIO ARMANI, Vintage hoodie, Cotton blend tech fleece shorts NIKE at MR PORTER Brandon wears wool coat AMI, Sweatshirt hoodie and fleece sweatpants STONE ISLAND Grooming Claudio Belizario at Jed Root using R+Co Models Brandon Harris at Re:Quest Model Management Lane McAllister and Kate Driscoll at IMG Models Photographic assistant Ousman Digital technician Chirs Luttrell at HauteCapture Styling assistant Monica Hofstadter
Brandon wears boxers and shorts UNDER ARMOUR
19 August 2016, day 4 of 7, 5.21pm
Introduction Emma Bowkett
Photography Juno Calypso
Juno
Through a glorious haze of candy floss pink, enter the world of Juno Calypso. Her darkly comic, offbeat selfportraiture is placing her firmly at the centre of the European photography scene. Working alone, often as her fictional character Joyce, Calypso’s meticulously staged performances use absurd beauty rituals to explore the construction of femininity and challenge notions of perfection. We meet her at her London home to discuss a new set of pictures taken exclusively for Port
JUNO CALYPSO
230
19 August 2016, day 4 of 7, 5.45pm
19 August 2016, day 4 of 7, 12.12pm
231
JUNO CALYPSO
232
19 August 2016, day 4 of 7, 5.08pm
JUNO CALYPSO
233
JUNO CALYPSO
234
‘A Solitary Love Affair’, 19 August 2016, day 4 of 7, 12:40pm
JUNO CALYPSO
235
JUNO CALYPSO
236
18 August 2016, day 3 of 7, 12:39pm
18 August 2016, day 3 of 7, 12:23pm
237
JUNO CALYPSO
238
18 August 2016, day 3 of 7, 10:46pm
JUNO CALYPSO
239
JUNO CALYPSO
240
‘Sensory Deprivation’, 17 August 2016, day 2 of 7, 7.39pm
My introduction to Juno Calypso was a picture entitled ‘Popcorn Venus’. In this elaborately orchestrated performance, we see Joyce in a blonde wig, glasses, false teeth and lashes so heavy they weigh on her eyelids. She is standing in a giant powder-pink birthday cake surrounded by prawn cocktails and ’80s party food, looking rather bored. Sitting in Juno’s bedroom in Dalston, surrounded by recognisable wigs, costumes and cans of bizarre meat, I feel like I’m in one of her pictures. It’s the room she was born in, and the place she spends most of her time researching her projects. I ask her about the early work. “It was not the first time I had presented myself as Joyce, but ‘Popcorn Venus’ was my first big staged picture,” she tells me. “It was for my degree show, the show that would present me to the world.
“At university, I had been introduced to the work of the photographer Jeff Wall. The main thing you hear about him is that he will often take six months to set up one picture. I thought, ‘This sounds wonderful. I have three’,” she remembers. “I got the idea [for ‘Popcorn Venus’] from the Addams Family, where they cook the cake with the stripper inside it. I thought, ‘That’s a good dark reference’.” This dark humour is integral to Juno’s work. She encourages her audience to laugh at the character they see in her photographs. But Joyce, however, is not passive; she’s very much in on the joke. Last year, Juno went on a one-woman honeymoon tour, renting rooms in a love hotel in Pennsylvania while telling those she met that she was a travel writer. Home to a salmon-coloured, heart-shaped bath encircled by mirrors, and a huge circular bed with a skylight, the hotel was the perfect location for Joyce to perform pre-marital fantasies. “These hotels haven’t changed décor since the ’60s. One man designed the whole thing and it’s a mess… a time warp,” she tells me. “I thought: surely a million fashion photographers must have used this. But they hadn’t. It was the underdog. That’s what I liked about it.”
Though her work is sophisticated and takes time to conceive, Calypso is not interested in making perfect pictures. She sees the struggle for perfection in photography, which mirrors anxieties she, as a young woman, has felt. Anxieties of trying to achieve the perfect body, the perfect self. Working alone with camera and remote control, she plays out bizarre beauty rituals in order to critique contrived constructions of femininity. To me, Juno’s art is not ostensibly about femininity. It’s about identity and isolation. She is confronting the notion of self – whether that be male or female. At the beginning, Joyce was key to the performance… a mask or veil. But as Juno evolves, the line separating her from Joyce becomes less defined. “She’s an elusive, shapeshifting character,” Juno says.
241
Photography Neil Bedford Styling Dan May Swingers Sporting the Dunhill Links collection, Port plays 18 holes on a Buckinghamshire golf course designed by the father of the European Tour, John Jacobs OBE
Woolrich Tank Solo in 18kt pink gold Woolrich Tan
246
Woolrich Tank Solo in 18kt pink gold Woolrich Tan
Grooming Terri Capon at Stella Creative Artists using Estée Lauder and Leonor Greyl Models Chris Peck at Models1, Tom James at Select Model Management Special Thanks Buckinghamshire Golf Club 247
Port travels through northern Ethiopia to meet the congregations populating its monolithic churches, and the industrious salt miners and camel herders working the land
Words and photography FrĂŠdĂŠric Lagrange
Ethiopia
A salt quarry worker and his camels in the Danakil Depression. Northern Ethiopia's Afar depression is one of the hottest places on Earth, with temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). Parts of the region stand at 135 metres below sea level.
ETHIOPIA cover story
1 — A camel caravan in the early morning heading to the salt quarry where the workers will work the entire day extracting bricks of salt. In the afternoon, after the bricks have been loaded on to the camels, the caravan will head back to the nearby village. Camels have been used to haul salt in Africa since the Middle Ages. 2 — In this picture, a worker readjusts his camel straps on the morning walk to the quarry. The Danakil caravans of camels are some of the last in Africa, as paved roads are being built throughout the country. The camels transport the salt across the desert to the market town where it is sold to traders and loaded on to trucks.
250
1
2
ETHIOPIA
251
ITINERARY Eritrea
TOPOGRAPHY
Red Sea Saudi Arabia Yemen
Sudan Gulf of Aden Ethiopia Rivers / Lakes
AddisAbaba
Somalia
Desert Low Hills Plateau
South Sudan
Mountain THE TRIP Day 1: Addis Ababa Day 2: Flight from Addis Ababa to Dalol Day 3 and 4: Danakil Depression Day 5: Drive to Wukro Day 6 and 7: Trek in the Tigray region Day 8: Drive to Lalibela Day 9: Day at Lalibela and evening flight back to Addis Ababa
252
Somalia Kenya
Red salt formation landscape in the Danakil Depression, left behind from Red Sea floods centuries ago.
253
ETHIOPIA
1
1 — A road carved into the crusted salt of the Danakil Depression. Being very close to Eritrea, and in fear of any brief incursion from Eritrean troops, military escorts accompany us everywhere while we travel in Danakil. 2 — A salt worker holding his working tools, which are used to extract salt bricks. Most of the men working in the salt quarry are Muslim, and come from nearby villages. During the warmer months they head back to their communities high up in the hills. 3 — A worker extracting bricks of salt in the Danakil Depression. Once on the market, each brick will be sold for approximately US$0.40. 4 — A camel lying on the hot ground, waiting for salt bricks to be loaded on to its back. The salt extracted from the Danakil will mainly be distributed around Ethiopia.
2
254
3
4
ETHIOPIA
255
1
ETHIOPIA
1 — A herder’s home stands dramatically on top of a cliff in Tigray. The Tigray region has some of the most magnificent landscapes in Ethiopia. 2 — Farmers breaking for lunch in the shade of a lonely tree in the Tigray region, close to Lalibela. The scenery felt almost biblical sometimes here. 256
2
A priest at a church we found while walking through the Tigray valley. The church has been entirely carved into the rock.
1
ETHIOPIA
260
1 — A look across the vast, rugged expanse of the Tigray. 2 — Pilgrims just outside the Biete Medhane Alem monolithic church, Lalibela.
ETHIOPIA
261
2
ETHIOPIA cover story
1
A FEW THINGS ON ETHIOPIA 1. Ethiopia is the most inhabited land-locked country in the world
2. Founded in 980 BC, Ethiopia is one of the world’s oldest nations 3.
There are over 80 languages and 200 dialects spoken in Ethiopia
4.
Ethiopia is largely considered to be the region from which modern humans set out for the Middle East; some of the earliest evidence for anatomically modern humans has been discovered there
262
5.
During the Scramble for Africa, Ethiopia was the only African nation to defeat a European colonial power (Italy) and retain its sovereignty
6.
Ethiopia was the first independent African nation to join the League of Nations, and the United Nations
7. The Ethiopian Highlands, or the ‘roof of Africa’, form the largest continuous area of its altitude on the African continent; little of its surface falls below 1500m 8.
Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley is one of the few landmarks on the African continent that's visible from space
9.
With 850 bird species, Ethiopia has one of the world's most diverse avian populations
10. At the 1960 summer Olympics in Rome, Ethiopian Abebe Bikila became the first black African to win a gold for the marathon – he ran the entire race barefoot 11. Coffee Arabica is indigenous to Ethiopia; the nation is a world leader in the export market, having sold over $730m worth in 2013
COFFEE EXPORT BY DESTINATION FOR 2012/13 Volume (1000 60kg bags) 577
Other 17.8%
146 147
Italy 4.5% Sudan 4.6%
162
France 5%
231
USA 7.2%
256
Belgium 7.9%
392
Japan 12.2%
462
Saudi Arabia 14.3%
853
Germany 26.5%
2
ETHIOPIA
1 — Interior of the church of Biete Giyorgis (Church of Saint George), Lalibela. 2 — Priest at the church of Biete Giyorgis, Lalibela.
263
ETHIOPIA
1 3
264
2 4
5
ETHIOPIA
1 — Priest at the church of Biete Giyorgis, Lalibela. 2 — A worshipper at the monolithic church of Biete Giyorgis, Lalibela. 3 — Young pilgrims outside the Biete Medhane Alem, Lalibela. 4 — Habte Maryam, the priest at the 12th century cave-church of Yemrehanna Kristos. 5 — White-robed pilgrims gather at the Biete Medhane Alem, Lalibela. Starting as early as 4:00am, a quiet stream of men and women, wrapped in white shrouds, commute to the church for mass. An eerie and surreal silence prevails as the visitors congregate, murmuring prayers and listening to the service. The smoke of the burning incense adds to the visual eeriness.
265
ETHIOPIA
1 3
266
2 4
5
1 — A priest recites the mass inside Biete Medhane Alem, Lalibela’s largest monolithic church. 2 & 3— Worshippers at the Biete Medhane Alem, Lalibela. 4 — A ghostly presence wrapped in a white robe inside the church of Biete Giyorgis, Lalibela. 5 — A man emerging from a door in the rock wall around Biete Medhane Alem, Lalibela.
1 — A priest reads the Bible alongside a worshipper standing outside the church Biete Giyorgis, one of many churches hewn into Lalibela’s rocky hills. 2 — A crusty landscape of sulphur and mineral salt near Dallol (the hottest inhabited place on Earth), in the Danakil Depression. There is no life present in this area, neither floral nor animal, due to the toxic sulphuric steam. If an unfortunate bird loses its way above this deadly desert, it will soon perish.
1
ETHIOPIA
2
269
STOCKISTS
abc ACNE STUDIOS ALESSI AMERICAN APPAREL AMI ARTEMIDE BARACUTA BAUME & MERCIER BELL & ROSS BERLUTI BOTTEGA VENETA BREGUET BREITLING BRUNELLO CUCINELLI BULGARI C.P. COMPANY CALVIN KLEIN COLLECTION CANALI CARAN D’ACHE CARTIER CHURCH’S COACH COALESSE CONVERSE
jlmnop acnestudios.com alessi.com americanapparel.co.uk amiparis.com artemide.com baracuta.com baume-et-mercier.co.uk bellross.com berluti.com bottegaveneta.com breguet.com breitling.com brunellocucinelli.com bulgari.com cpcompany.co.uk calvinklein.com canali.com carandache.com cartier.co.uk church-footwear.com coach.com coalesse.com converse.com
J.W.ANDERSON JAEGER LECOULTRE JOHN VARVATOS LAND ROVER LARSSON & JENNINGS LEVIS MADE & CRAFTED LOEWE LOUIS VUITTON MARNI MARGARET HOWELL MONT BLANC MR PORTER NEIL BARRETT NIKE NOMOS GLASHÜTTE OMEGA PATAGONIA PATEK PHILIPPE PAUL SMITH PERSOL POLO RALPH LAUREN PRADA PRESIDENT’S PRINGLE OF SCOTLAND
j-w-anderson.com jaeger-lecoultre.com johnvarvatos.com landrover.co.uk larssonandjennings.com levi.co.uk loewe.com louisvuitton.com marni.com margarethowell.co.uk montblanc.com mrporter.com neilbarrett.com nike.com nomos-glashuette.com omegawatches.com patagonia.com patek.com paulsmith.co.uk persol.com ralphlauren.co.uk prada.com presidents7bell.com pringlescotland.com
defgh
rstuvw
DAVID CLULOW DIOR HOMME DRIES VAN NOTEN DRINK FACTORY DSQUARED2 DUNHILL DUNHILL LINKS EMPORIO ARMANI ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA COUTURE ETRO FALKE FENDI FLOS GIEVES & HAWKES GIORGIO ARMANI GUCCI HERMÈS HILFIGER EDITION HUGO BOSS
RADO RALPH LAUREN PURPLE LABEL RAYMOND WEIL RICHARD JAMES RICHARD MILLE ROLEX SALVATORE FERRAGAMO SEKFORD SHINOLA STONE ISLAND SUNSPEL TIFFANY & CO. TODD SNYDER TOPMAN TUDOR UNDER ARMOUR VACHERON CONSTANTIN VALENTINO VITSOE VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WOOLMARK WOOLRICH JOHN RICH & BROS WOOYOUNGMI
270
davidclulow.com dior.com driesvannoten.be thedrinkfactory.com dsquared2.com dunhill.com alfreddunhilllinks.com armani.com zegna.co.uk etro.com falke.com fendi.com flos.com gievesandhawkes.com armani.com gucci.com hermes.com tommy.com hugoboss.com
rado.com ralphlauren.co.uk raymond-weil.com richardjames.co.uk richardmille.com rolex.com ferragamo.com sekford.com shinola.co.uk stoneisland.co.uk sunspel.com tiffany.co.uk toddsnyder.com topman.com tudorwatch.com underarmour.co.uk vacheron-constantin.com valentino.com vitsoe.com viviennewestwood.com woolmark.com woolrich.com wooyoungmi.com
IN ADDITION TO GLOBAL KIOSKS, TRAVEL HUBS, AND NEWS STANDS PORT CAN BE FOUND HERE
Also available on the entire VistaJet fleet, vistajet.com HOTELS 41 HOTEL ANDAZ HYATT BLAKES BROWNS CHARLOTTE STREET HOTEL CHELSEA WYNDHAM CLARIDGES HOTEL CONNAUGHT CORINTHIA COVENT GARDEN HOTEL DEAN STREET TOWNHOUSE EGERTON HOUSE FOUR SEASONS HOTEL HAYMARKET HOTEL HILTON PARK LANE JUMEIRAH CARLTON TOWER JUMEIRAH LOWNDES HOTEL KNIGHTSBRIDGE HOTEL MANDARIN ORIENTAL MARRIOT MARBLE ARCH MARRIOTT PARK LANE MY HOTEL BLOOMSBURY NUMBER SIXTEEN ROYAL GARDEN HOTEL
41 Buckingham Palace Road 40 Liverpool Street 33 Roland Gardens Albermarle Street 15-17 Charlotte Street Chelsea Harbour Drive 49 Brook Street 16 Carlos Place Whitehall Place 10 Monmouth Street 69-71 Dean Street 7-19 Egerton Terrace Hamilton Place 1 Suffolk Place 22 Park Lane 1 Cadogan Place 21 Lowndes Street 10 Beaufort Gardens 66 Knightsbridge 34 George Street 40 Park Lane 11-13 Bayley Street 16 Sumner Palce 2-24 Kensington High Street
SANCTUM SOHO HOTEL SANDERSON HOTEL ST PANCRAS SWISSOTEL THE HOWARD THE BENTLEY THE BERKELEY THE CADOGAN THE DORCHESTER THE FORBURY THE GORE THE HALKIN THE LANDMARK THE LANESBOROUGH THE LANGHAM THE MAY FAIR THE MILESTONE THE PARK LANE HOTEL THE PELHAM HOTEL THE RITZ THE SOHO HOTEL THE ZETTER HOTEL W LONDON WYNDHAM GRAND LONDON
9 Adam Street 40 Dover Street 67 Dean Street 28 St James’s Street 18 Clifford Street 9 Halkin Street 127 Piccadilly 7-12 Gracechurch Street 24 Ludgate Hill 8 Northumberland Avenue 24 Hertford Street 16 St James’s Square 191 Portobello Road 23 Mecklenburgh Square 45 Dean Street 162 Chiswick High Road 20 Portman Square 116-123 Pall Mall 131-137 Cromwell Road 9 Fitzmaurice Place 5 Hamilton Place 15 Abchurch Lane 28 Berkeley Square 7- 9 Babmaes Street 44 Great Cumberland Place
OXFORD & CAMBRIDGE CLUB PENZANCE ART CLUB PORTLAND CLUB QUEEN’S CLUB RAC CLUB RAC CLUB EPSOM RENDEZVOUS ROYAL BRITISH LEGION CLUB ROYAL OCEAN YACHT CLUB ROYAL SOCIETY OF MEDICINE ROYAL THAMES YACHT CLUB SHOREDITCH HOUSE SOHO HOUSE THE BROMPTONS THE COBDEN CLUB THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB THE DORCHESTER CLUB THE ENGLISH MARTYR’S CLUB THE GEORGE CLUB THE HOSPITAL CLUB THE IVY CLUB THE KINGLY CLUB THE ROOKERY THE WATERMARK CLUB TRAVELLERS CLUB
20 Warwick Street 50 Berners Street 379-381 Euston Road 12 Temple Place 27-33 Harrington Gardens Wilton Place 75 Sloane Street 53 Park Lane 26 The Forbury 189-190 Queens Gate 5 Halkin St 222 Marylebone Road Hyde Park Corner 1c Portland Place Stratton Street 1 Kensington Court Piccadilly 15 Cromwell Place 150 Piccadilly 4 Richmond Mews 86-88 Clerkenwell Road 10 Wardour Street Chelsea Harbour
CLUBS ADAM STREET ARTS CLUB BLACK’S BOODLE’S CLUB BROOK’S CLUB CALEDONIAN CLUB CAVALRY AND GUARDS CLUB CLUB QUARTERS, GRACECHURCH CLUB QUARTERS, ST PAUL’S CLUB QUARTERS, TRAFALGAR COLONY CLUB EAST INDIA CLUB ELECTRIC HOUSE GOODENOUGH CLUB GROUCHO CLUB HIGH ROAD HOUSE HOME HOUSE LONDON INSTITUTE OF DIRECTORS KENSINGTON ROOMS LANSDOWNE CLUB LES AMBASSADEURS CLUB LONDON CAPITAL CLUB MORTON’S MEMBERS CLUB NAVAL & MILITARY CLUB NEW CAVENDISH CLUB
71 Pall Mall Chapel Street, Penzance 69 Brook Street Palliser Road 89 Pall Mall Woodcote Park Clubhouse, Epsom 14 Old Park Lane 247 - 249 N ew King’s Road 20 St James’s Place 1 Wimpole Street 60 Knightsbridge Ebor Street 40 Greek Street Rose Square 170 Kensal Road 25 Northumberland Avenue 53 Park Lane 62 Chamber Street 87-88 Mount Street 24 Endell Street 9 West St (Front door) 4 Kingly Court 12 Peter’s Lane 35 Scrutton Street 106 Pall Mall
271
Things I Like / Things I Dislike
Thurston Moore Susan Sontag’s diaries reveal a witty fondness for the humble list, as a way of conferring value and exploring the realms of her knowledge. Her list of likes and dislikes has become justly notorious. Here Thurston Moore, founding member of Sonic Youth, picks up that baton. LIKE Susan Sontag, especially the splendid portrait of her in the bear suit, and I like that her birthday is January 16th – the same as my true love; Disk Union; Cherry Garcia; PG Tips; The Flash; Jonathan the dog (RIP); Eurostar to Paris; Lee Ranaldo’s collection of Beat literature; Iggy; Cheetah Chrome; Leni Sinclair; Bees; Honey; ZDB (Lisbon); Road trips with Coco; Transconsciousness; Belarus Free Theatre; Anthology Film Archives; The spectacular non-violent artwork of London’s Angry Brigade; Oxfam; Blue hair; MC5; Rockheim’s Black Metal Room; Radieux Radio; Mimeograph machines; Anne Waldman; Italy; Zazie’s piano solos; Jules’ five-year-old voice; Guinness cake; The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics; Lou and Laurie with their dog at Wallsé; Chelsea Manning; Warm scones; Shooting stars; Agent Provocateur; The BFI; Debbie Googe; The Diggers (San Fran); Puppy breath; Louise Brooks; Cassette tapes; The trees in Clissold Park; Paul Marlow; Hardcore matinees; Cafe OTO; Catenaries; Her mandolin rehearsals; Eleanor Moore (my ‘mum’) on the beach; Gareth Pugh; Afternoon tea in Newington Green; Flashback Records; Southbank Poetry Library; Norwegian black metal; Mermaids; Community gardens; Astrid Proll; The BBC; Vivienne Westwood; Star children; Letting the Led out; Saints; Popcorn; Sonny Sharrock; The Full Moon Borders; Passports; “Leaders”; Royalty; Front of house sound limiters; Aggressive spell-checks; Sirens; Mobile phones; Meat; Weaponry; Cars; Digital music; Slander; Courgettes; “Vacations”; US presidential elections being too dismal to speak of; Knighthoods; Being called “Sir” in general; Haters; Meanies; Ghost writers; Ghosts; Sun-dried tomatoes; Sun burning; Los Angeles; Conservatives not conserving; Orwellian speak; The smug; The second take; Airport fiction; No pudding; No-smoking signs; Noskateboarding signs; No-bicycle signs; No-dogs signs; Saying goodbye DISLIKE Thurston Moore appeared at the launch of the Bowers & Wilkins Listening Room at House of St Barnabas, London, to celebrate the audio brand’s 50th anniversary
272