Every watchmaker has their signature house hero, the identifiable brand calling card: there’s Rolex’s robust and bulletproof Submariner, Audemars Piguet’s knockout Royal Oak, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s ultraclassic Reverso. But some brands also produce a sel

Had you taken a stroll on Wimbledon Common during the latest U.K. lockdown and encountered a conspicuously elegant woman muttering Gallic phrases to herself — she would have been shy of five-feet-six, with auburn hair, and dressed in a style she hers

Imitation is a funny old thing — the sincerest form of flattery, they say. As it happens, I agree; I indulge in it often. My only party trick is half-decent impressions, which people seem to find relatively amusing, and it’s useful around the dinner

“It takes nine tailors to make a man,” said the Elizabethan writer John Heywood. Well, Mr. Heywood, we have news for you. These days, we think it takes only seven. And not the seven you’d necessarily expect. You see, we men, we simple creatures, can

DIGITAL OP: GEMMA GRAVETT PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT: SAMI WELLER ASSISTANTS: VERONICA PEREZ AND AMELIA HUDSON MAKE-UP & HAIR: JULIE THOMAS AT DAVID ARTISTS USING CHANEL ROUGE ALLURE INK LAQUE AND CHANEL LE LIFT LOTION MODELS: ARIELLE PANTA @ SELECT MO

Longines’ winged hourglass logo hasn’t graced just aviation pieces: as well as the Army Air Corps and the International Aeronautical Federation, the French Navy is among those to have benefited from the precision instruments of a manufacture founded

PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT: DERRICK KAKEMBO FASHION ASSISTANT: AMELIA HUDSON GROOMING: GEORGIA HOPE MODEL: RODNEY CHARLES @MODELS 1 ■

When Maria Grazia ‘Lella’ Lombardi, a butcher’s daughter born during the second world war in a small Italian village near Turin, stepped out of her Matra at the end of the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix — the last to be held on the Montjuïc street circuit —

Over the past few decades, Manchester’s fame has most commonly been associated with the beautiful game, in which the town’s two leading football clubs — United and City — have dominated. (Since the Premier League’s inception, in 1992, they have won a

“What I think we missed most in 2020 was the human contact. Spending time with friends, enjoying their physical presence, their warmth of spirit, their conviviality. For me, 2021 will be a year to remake these bonds, to luxuriate in the company of my

Last year the coolest guy I ever met died. Unlike the two million people around the world who have perished as a result of Covid-19, my friend died in an accident. He was working on his pick-up truck when it must have come off a jack-stand and crushe

A couple of years ago, Her Serene Highness Princess Virginia Carolina Theresa Pancrazia Galdina von und Zu Fürstenberg, or Ira, as she is (mercifully) known, asked me to write her life story. Ira is just fabulous. I first met her in Marbella; she is

Grace Jones is an intersectional iconoclast whose fluid approach to style, identity and creativity was decades ahead of its time. Transcending national, sexual and racial stereotypes, she has cross-fertilised music, fashion, cinema and her own life i

‘Fashion Leader Favors A Lengthened Hemline’, read a headline in The New York Times on November 29, 1961, accompanying a picture of a svelte woman about to cross the road. This, the caption informed readers, was “Countess Crespi in green wool suit wi

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Since its cornerstone was laid one crisp autumn morning in 1792, the neoclassical residence-cum-seat-of-power that would go on to be named after the blanched Virginia freestone from which it is constructed has become a hotbed of occasionally mawkish

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘grand tourer’, or GT, can be defined as “a car designed for comfortable long-distanced touring”. The term, derived from the Italian gran turismo, originated in the mid-century with cars made by marques s

Turnbull & Asser burgundy paisley traditional silk Jacquard gown In his captivating tome A History of the World in 100 Objects, the British art historian and former museum director Neil MacGregor explores the breadth of human endeavour via the prism

Dukes Bar in London is renowned for its martinis, but equally so, we imagine, for the man behind them. Alessandro Palazzi has been in the hospitality industry since the 1970s, and his unwavering determination to make each of his guests feel like roya

Even for the casual observer, a loom weaving an intricately designed fabric is a hypnotic sight. For those who adhere to the tenets of this magazine, witnessing weft interlace with warp — based on complex mathematical sequences that, like the chalk e

If destiny has a poster child, there’s a fair chance her name is Bebe Buell. As far as conservative towns go, the naval enclave of Portsmouth, Virginia is as starched as they come. As far as conservative eras go, the early 1950s was one of buttoned-d

It is difficult to pin down what exactly it is about cars that elicits such passion and devotion from those who love them. For those on the outside, spending tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of your particular currency on a car seems ridiculo

A common interpretation of the Audemars Piguet Code 11.59 collection, unveiled at SIHH in 2019, is that it epitomises, in beautiful harmony, two distinct eras in the brand’s history: pre- 1972 traditionalism and post-1972 avant-gardism. Few readers o

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Japan’s first moniker for ‘suit’ — sabiro — may have been named for Britain’s Savile Row, but it was in Italy that the nation’s early tailoring apprentices began to train, and from where they brought back the soft-shoulder silhouettes and rolled lape

If the beatification of timepieces could be deemed a globally recognised creed — Organised Horologism, if you will — what buildings might qualify as holy sites? Any number of architecturally eclectic constructions dotted around the Jura mountains wou

The story goes something like this: there is a boy who floats, and his father thinks it’s wonderful until he sees how it frightens other people, so he weighs his son down with rocks in a rucksack in order to stop the gesticulations, derision and judg