December 2019 - Issue 67

The Rake

The Modern Voice of Classic Elegance.

The Rake4 min read
Letter From The Founder
At my peril I paraphrase Queen Elizabeth II in her speech to Guildhall on the 40th anniversary of her accession to the throne. “2019 is not a year I shall look back on with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents
The Rake3 min read
Letter From The Editor
Have yourself a merry little Christmas,It may be your last,Next year we may all be living in the past… No good times like the olden days,Happy golden days of yore,Faithful friends who were dear to us,Will be near to us no more… Familiar with the lyri
The Rake2 min read
Contributors
Chilean-born photographer and director Nino Muñoz got his start as a photography assistant at the age of 18 in 1990s New York City; in the two decades since he has earned acclaim for a signature style that is at once grounded in fashion and steeped i
The Rake6 min read
The Socialite Network
There is a park that is known for the faces it attracts. The smile on their faces, it speaks of profound inner peace. They’ve taken a lifetime lease on Paley Park… Paley Park is nestled in the heart of Midtown Manhattan — on the site of the former St
The Rake5 min read
‘I’d Have So Much Adrenaline I’d Go And Shoot Guns At The Arcade. Then Go For Gelato’
The Rake meets Gala Gordon at the distinctly unrakish hour of 9am, a positively American time for an interview. What’s more, it’s in darkest Streatham, where a family home has been requisitioned temporarily for our photoshoot. The house’s calm suburb
The Rake2 min read
A Calling From The Wild
Ask the man in the street to name a ‘beast of burden’ — or, perhaps, forget the street and ask one of those loud-shirted intellectual neophytes squeezing all of his Reader’s Digest-crammed general knowledge into two minutes of fame on a daytime T.V.
The Rake6 min readAmerican Government
Invest
A product endorsement by the POTUS could have lost some of its lustre of late, but just a decade ago, Barack Obama declaring his fondness for his BlackBerry amounted to, advertising experts said, free publicity worth up to £33m. Days later, on the da
The Rake4 min read
Our Julie
Consider, for a moment, life in Scandinavia in the fifties and sixties. We can’t say for sure, but it was probably about as jolly as a Jeremy Corbyn speech on renationalisation. And it might, therefore, account for the mid-century wave of beautiful N
The Rake3 min readFashion
What Dreams Are Made Of
Remember when you were at school there was that one item of clothing you just had to own? It would appear in daydreams when you were supposed to be focusing on classwork or avoiding rogue paper planes. In these dreams, a markedly more chiselled versi
The Rake4 min readFashion
From The Ground Up
There is a time-honoured adage — indeed, one of the oldest in the English language, dating back to the mid- 16th century — that insists you can’t teach an ageing canine neoteric methodologies. Try telling that, though, to the trio of young, dashing e
The Rake4 min readFashion
A Famiglia Story
Why is Italy so inextricably linked with stylishness? Does it go back to the Apennine Peninsula’s role as the cradle of the Renaissance? To elite Florentine families such as the Medicis, whose appearance, identity and status were part of the same pac
The Rake8 min readFashion
I’ve Got Sole But I’m Not A Soldier
A love affair with shoes is not just for women — let’s get that out of the way. And men, not women, are to blame for the existence of the stereotype. For decades we have poked fun at our partners’ fascination with footwear, refusing to employ any nua
The Rake5 min read
Rake Commends: Gstaad
Gstaad is a small ski-resort town nestled in the Swiss Alps that — alongside St. Moritz, Courchevel and Zermatt — has long been regarded as the epitome of idyllic Alpine chic, and favoured by the jet-set both historic and contemporary. The great thin
The Rake2 min readFashion
The Collector Auro Montanari
special thanks to 11 Cadogan Gardens hotel There is something about Auro Montanari — otherwise known by his watch-collecting, self-publishing nom de plume John Goldberger — that immediately tells you that you are in the presence of greatness. His boo
The Rake2 min read
The Edifier Paul Feig
special thanks to Mark’s Club Having lived in Los Angeles, plugged into the central nervous system of the Hollywood film industry in my capacity as the assistant to Kathryn Bigelow, I can state with absolute certainty that Paul Feig should not exist.
The Rake15 min read
Jon Hamm Has Something On His Mind
If Jon Hamm’s character in 30 Rock is anything to go by — he plays the impossibly handsome Dr. Drew Baird, whose inadequacies are overlooked because of his pulchritudinous presence — he must have it easy in life. After all, he is a wildly successful
The Rake2 min read
The Comforter Thomas Kochs
shot on the terrace of the Royal Penthouse at Corinthia London There are very few people who could convince the United Kingdom’s national broadcaster that a similar programme should be made about them twice. Thomas Kochs is one such man: the BBC docu
The Rake2 min readFashion
The Gentrifier The Countess of Lucan
special thanks to Annabel’s For almost 50 years the name Lucan has meant one thing: Lord Lucan, who was a dashing figure, gambler, sportsman and doting father. The disappearance of Lord Lucan, and the ensuing manhunt, has, for some reason, gripped th
The Rake2 min read
The Separators Christopher Modoo and Richard Wheat
special thanks to Mark’s Club For a couple of dapper gents about town, the circumstance in which Christopher Modoo met Richard Wheat was a little incongruous. “It was at Hampton Court train station,” Wheat says. “We were going to the football — an Ar
The Rake2 min read
The Uplifter Michael Nouri
special thanks to the Grand Havana Room, Beverly Hills When Edward Sahakian, the proprietor of Davidoff of London, suggests there is someone you should meet, you pay attention and assume the best. So it was one day on a casual drop-in at his St. Jame
The Rake5 min read
Men Overboard
It’s fortunate that Stavros Niarchos didn’t live to see the headline printed in The Washington Post on April 17, 1996. “Greek tycoon, Onassis rival Stavros Niarchos dies at 86,” it read, proof positive of the whimsical cruelty of history. Despite hug
The Rake4 min readFashion
The Rake Lifetime Achievement Award Alan Flusser
special thanks to The Polo Bar, New York When it comes to men’s dress codes, “the times” — as a Minnesotan folk singer of no little repute once rasped — “they are a-changin’”. In fact, we stand at “the precipice of a new era”, according to the sartor
The Rake12 min read
How A Peasant Village Rose Up
“The great majority of tourists visit Switzerland between the middle of July and the end of September,” observed Baedeker’s Guide to Switzerland in 1895, adding that if one were of a botanical bent and wished to “see the scenery, the vegetation, and
The Rake2 min readFashion
The Equalizer Jonathan Alexander Edwards
special thanks to Kent, Haste & Lachter Boardroom bluster, cocktail-lounge class, Pitti Box panache: Jonathan Alexander Edwards, the founder of the razor-sharp menswear forum MilanStyle.com, can nail it all. It’s a talent that was instilled, by osmos
The Rake5 min readFashion
A Royal Flush
Men need trousers. This simple statement was key to the formation of Kit Blake, the tailoring brand I created with Richard Wheat that does not sell suits. When I looked at my own wardrobe one day and realised I had 10 blue blazers but only two pairs
The Rake7 min read
He Can Rule The World
special thanks to Chelsea Barracks If you had been driving the 30-minute stretch from the Cheshire town of Frodsham to Connah’s Quay Labour Club on a Saturday night in 1987, you would almost certainly have chanced upon a blond-haired boy banging out
The Rake4 min readFashion
Heroes Of The Frontier
Audemars Piguet’s success in adorning the wrists of A-listers — from Jay-Z to Denzel Washington via Ellen DeGeneres and James Corden — has brought the house wider public attention. Clued-up members of the mechanical watch intelligentsia, though — ser
The Rake6 min readFashion
For Auld Lange Söhne
Germany is a place of great fascination for me. The beautiful countryside, the exquisite music, the — unpopular opinion alert — fabulous language, and the glaring juxtaposition of the rural and urban cultures of, say, Bavaria and Berlin… Recently I n
The Rake6 min read
A Match Made In Heaven
The Crosby Street Hotel will forever be connected to one of my most vivid, seminal and beloved memories of the greatest city on the planet, New York fucking City. As someone who was born there (Mount Sinai hospital), raised there (U.N., Anglo-America
The Rake3 min read
The Essence Of Zegna Man
Describing what sounds like some kind of sartorial superhero who’d rather fight crime in a pair of neatly pressed trousers than latex tights, Antonio Sanna is discussing ‘Zegna Man’ at Ermenegildo Zegna’s central London store. In front of us is a sin
The Rake3 min read
An Offering To The Sun Gods
With its dazzling white sand, glassy, turquoise waters, and verdant forest set along an ancient, craggy coastline, the paradisiacal Caribbean island of Antigua is straight out of a storybook. Teeming with colourful wildlife and imbued with that speci
The Rake3 min read
The Best Little Shop In The World
The first time I visited Naples — many years ago now — I arrived late in the evening. The next morning, with the sun low but presaging a day of fierce heat, I set out with one destination in mind: E. Marinella on Riviera di Chiaia. It helped, of cour
The Rake4 min read
Alta State Of Consciousness
If you are an haute couture client — in other words, if you take your place at the table of the top one per cent of the top one per cent — you can look forward to certain privileges when it comes to shopping for clothes, chief among them the guarante
The Rake4 min readFashion
The Story Of Our Time
“Twelve years, 350 pages, 315 photos, 150,000 words…” Alan Flusser describes his latest book, an illustrated biography of Ralph Lauren, as “the most difficult and challenging project I’ve ever undertaken”. And yet he makes it pretty clear that it was
The Rake3 min read
Bring The Thunder
Comedy theorists call it the ‘switcheroo’: in a two-character dialogue, the bad guy feigns a spell of uncharacteristic benevolence, lulling his nicer and less dominant sidekick (Blackadder frequently does it to Baldrick) into a feeling of comradely r

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