Sept 29 09 2017

29.09.17 NEW MONEY

Is the Bitcoin bubble about to burst?

Plus:

a Star turn with lydia leonard meet meghan markle’s beauty go -to and salman rushdie’s My London

A$AP Rocky Shot by Juergen Teller

Causing chaos with hip-hop’s hottest property

CONTENTS 4 Skipping, sipping and totes gripping films in CAPITAL GAINS 6 Keeping up with the Crawfords in UPFRONT 9 Our MOST WANTED are Mary Katrantzou’s mules 10 Off the chain, it’s Liam Payne in FLASHBULB

LYDIA LEONARD is period-drama perfect 21 Diamanté redux in STYLE NOTES 23 Slick hoodies and new-term kicks in MEN’S STYLE 25 Put your BITCOIN where your mouth is 30 Read this, A$AP 41 Rack ’em up in BEAUTY 45 Are you eating your ADAPTOGENS? 49 GRACE & FLAVOUR has a disruptive 14

EDITOR Laura Weir

dinner at Flavour Bastard

TART whip up some namesake puds 53 Cheapskate wine clubs in DRINKS 55 Do your HOMEWORK in SE10 57 ESCAPE to Mumbai 58 Salman Rushdie’s MY LONDON

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Jonny Cochrane. Cover: A$AP Rocky photographed by Juergen Teller. Styled by Jenny Kennedy.

GUESS X A$AP ROCKY T-shirt, £49, at selfridges.com. Jacket, scarf and jewellery, A$AP Rocky’s own

Here are the ES team’s must-see autumn TV series

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ALIAS GRACE ‘I was completely obsessed with The Handmaid’s Tale, so I’m cancelling my November plans to binge watch the next Margaret Atwood dramatization on Netflix, Alias Grace, about servants accused of murder in 1843.’

Frankie McCoy, features writer

BLUE PLANET II ‘The countdown is on for national treasure David Attenborough’s return to narrate the BBC’s jaw-dropping follow-up to the 2001 nature series, with Radiohead and superstar composer Hans Zimmer providing the new soundtrack to the deep blue yonder.’

Matt Hryciw, chief sub editor

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AMERICAN VANDAL ‘“Have we reached peak True Crime?” asks Netflix, with its hilarious new spoofdocumentary that pokes fun at our obsession with the genre. Compulsive viewing.’

Dipal Acharya, commissioning editor

THE DEUCE ‘Set in a sleazy 1970s NYC, the new Sky Atlantic series by The Wire’s creators about the rise of the porn industry is already unmissable. James Franco is amazing as a pair of identical twins; Maggie Gyllenhaal (right) is even better.’

Hamish MacBain, associate features editor

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STRANGER THINGS, SERIES 2 ‘I’m a crazy Eleven fan girl so I can’t wait for Netflix’s second series of Stranger Things. It can’t start soon enough.’

Jenny Kennedy, fashion editor

Visit us online: standard.co.uk/esmagazine • Follow us:

@eveningstandardmagazine

@ESmagofficial

@ESmagofficial

Editor Laura Weir Deputy editor Anna van Praagh Features director Alice-Azania Jarvis Acting art director Emma Woodroofe Fashion features director Katrina Israel Commissioning editor Dipal Acharya Associate features editor Hamish MacBain Features writer Frankie McCoy

Acting art editor Andy Taylor Art editor Jessica Landon Picture editor Helen Gibson Picture desk assistant Clara Dorrington

Beauty editor Katie Service Deputy beauty and lifestyle editor Lily Worcester

Social media editor Natalie Salmon Office administrator/editor’s PA Niamh O’Keeffe

Merchandise editor Sophie Paxton Fashion editor Jenny Kennedy Fashion assistant Eniola Dare Chief sub editor Matt Hryciw Deputy chief sub editor Nick Howells

Contributing editors Lucy Carr-Ellison, Tony Chambers, James Corden, Hermione Eyre, Richard Godwin, Daisy Hoppen, Jemima Jones, Anthony Kendal, David Lane, Mandi Lennard, Annabel Rivkin, Teo van den Broeke, Nicky Yates (style editor at large), Hikari Yokoyama Group client strategy director Deborah Rosenegk Head of magazines Christina Irvine

ES Magazine is published weekly and is available only with the London Evening Standard. ES Magazine is published by Evening Standard Ltd, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, Kensington, London W8 5TT. ES is printed web offset by Wyndeham Bicester. Paper supplied by Perlen Paper AG. Colour transparencies or any other material submitted to ES Magazine are sent at owner’s risk. Neither Evening Standard Ltd nor their agents accept any liability for loss or damage. © Evening Standard Ltd 2016. Reproduction in whole or part of any contents of ES Magazine without prior permission of the editor is strictly prohibited

29.09.17 ES MAGAZINE 3

capital gains What to do in London

by FRANKIE M c COY

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Sophisticated slurp

Get one step closer to that terribly suave person you know you’re destined to be at Wiltons as it launches its Oyster Masterclasses, where you’ll learn to differentiate Colchester natives from Jersey rocks — all while quaffing champagne, naturally. £65.

2 Oct (wiltons.co.uk)

B there first

The Royal Court is a breeding ground for plays that go stratospheric or transfer to the West End. Make the most of the cheap tickets at the theatre’s International Playwrights programme, with plays such as B, a darkly comic thriller from Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón starring Paul Kaye (above) — and boast to your mates that you saw it first.

Tickets from £12. To 21 Oct (royalcourttheatre.com)

Glass act

Pull on your drinking boots: London Cocktail Week is back, toasting our city’s fantastic cocktail scene with oceans of events, from immersive vodka tasting in a Polish forest to international bartender swaps, a cocktail village and £6 drinks offers across town.

Just remember to drink some water... 2-8 Oct (drinkup.london)

Stare at some seriously covetable designer fabrics literally too beautiful to wear at Gallery 8’s Styled by Design, which features fine art textiles from the likes of Picasso, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. 3-7 Oct (graymca.co.uk)

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Jump TO IT

Relive your innocent playground days as Equinox launches Jumprope: a perfect lunchbreak 30 minutes of intense calorie-smashing skipping, with weighted ‘fury’ ropes and banging music. Trust us, it’s a lot harder than you remember...

Launches 2 Oct (equinox.com)

last chance: Tate Britain’s excellent Queer British Art exhibition, marking 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, comes to an end on 1 October. (tate.org.uk)

es magazine 29.09.17

CLARE SLATER LONDON The Handbag, £365

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Depressingly grey autumn days need brightening with shiny new things, so you should probably hotfoot it to Clare & Co’s pop-up shop in Chiswick to snap up just that from one of the independent designers showing their jazzy, oh-sojoyous handbags, jewellery and more. Until 8 Oct (clareslater.com)

Blockbuster blowout

Pick out next year’s Oscar contenders as the BFI London Film Festival kicks off, showing an epic 243 films over the course of 12 days, starting with Andy Serkis’s Breathe, starring Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield (right).

4-15 Oct (bfi.org.uk)

look ahead: Adidas launches its first 10km City Run

in Shoreditch, with promised discounts at restaurants to motivate you to the finish line. £40, including free T-shirt (adidascityruns.com)

Getty Images; Alamy; illustration by Jonathan Calugi @ Machas

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Fabric 8

Totes recommended

fendi ss18

upfront Laura Craik on supermodel genes and Sunday night TV blues

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es magazine 29.09.17

Kaia Gerber and Cindy Crawford, right. Left, the new TV show

“There are now more celebrities in the world than there are cockapoos”

considered A Child in Time the perfect Sunday night viewing, but I’m hoping The Last Post, which occupies this Sunday’s cosy BBC1 9pm slot, is a bit more upbeat.

It wouldn’t be hard.

INSTA-multitasking ‘OBSESSED’ is the ultimate made-forInstagram word, I’ve decided, and this week I’m OBSESSED with Eva Chen. To be fair, this isn’t a new obsession — Chen didn’t get to be Instagram’s director of fashion partnerships without being really good at Instagram — but this week she’s taken her multitasking skillz to a whole new level, posting so many emoji and captionspattered Stories (left) that her eyeballs must be in danger of imploding. Mainly, I’m in awe of how she finds time to exercise, despite going to all the NY/ London/Milan shows, a pursuit that barely left me with enough energy to lift a tube of Pringles, never mind a dumbbell. Here’s Eva upside down on a yoga mat! Eva boxing in a gym! Whatever Instagram is paying her, the woman deserves a rise. And then a holiday.

HOT

The Basquiat exhibition So good. Get thee to the Barbican.

NOT

Ian The least popular boy’s name in Britain, apparently.

EastEnders’ Ian Beale

Josh Shinner; Getty; Rex

unhappy sundays I had just finished Ozark, possibly the darkest TV I’ve ever watched, so you’d think I’d be in the market for something light and fluffy, what with winter drawing in and interest rates about to rise and helicopters droning overhead as they try to abort the next terrorist attack. But no: it was straight on to being thoroughly depressed by the new Benedict Cumberbatch (left) vehicle, a cheery tale about a missing child and the disintegration of a marriage. Those fond of playing the ‘at least I…’ game on Sunday evenings (as in: ‘my career is in the toilet but at least I didn’t lose my child in a supermarket’) may have

Silver stars: Cindy and pals on the Versace catwalk

versace ss18

o the big news from all the fashion weeks is that Kaia Gerber won. She won Celebrity Model Offspring, which is kind of like Britain’s Top Model, but not, because in Celebrity Model Offspring, every contender already has the advantage of famous genes. Tall, gorgeous, but born in Doncaster to a dinner lady and a scaffolder? Soz. If you want to be a model, you’ll have to go the proles’ route and linger outside Topshop Oxford Circus instead.

It will come as no surprise to Cindy Crawford fans that her 16-year-old daughter’s first bona fide show season went off with a bang. Kaia walked for Burberry, Prada, Fendi, Bottega Veneta and more — fashion fans are still recovering from the majorness of the Versace show, in which she shared a catwalk not just with mum, but with mum’s Nineties supermodel chums Naomi, Claudia, Helena and Carla ( far right). But while good genes and nepotism played their part (duh), so too (according to the industry) did Kaia’s good manners. Just as when Kendall Jenner started her modelling career, designers, stylists, photographers and make-up artists are falling over themselves to rhapsodise about how ‘humble’, ‘kind’ and ‘hardworking’ Kaia is — partly to quash any perception that she is over-entitled, but mainly because good manners genuinely matter.

As there are now more Celebrities, celebrities and ‘celebrities’ in the world than there are cockapoos, it stands to reason that there will also be more celebrity offspring. So many celebrity offspring are there, in fact, that they even have their own show — Growing Up Supermodel, featuring ‘seven hot young models risking it all to live up to the careers of their famous parents’. Whoever you are, if you want a successful career, you have to work hard, play nice and be grateful. No matter what mum and dad did for a living, in life, you only get what you give. With apologies if you now have that New Radicals song in your head for the rest of the day.

THE most WANTED TIPPING THE VELVET: Mary Katrantzou’s decadent jacquard mules are a step in the right direction come party season

Mary katrantzou velvet jacquard shoes, £540 (marykatrantzou.com)

PHOTOGRAPH BY Natasha Pszenicki STYLED BY Sophie paxton

29.09.17 es magazine

FLASHBULB! Party pictures from around town

by FRANKIE M c COY photographs by james peltekian Ellie Goulding

Phoebe Collings -James

Poppy Delevingne Tom Odell

Edie Campbell

Susie Lau Ed Marler

Matthew Josephs

Isamaya Ffrench Jess Glynne Jasmine Guinness

That’s so Fiorucci, Soho Mr Armani, Wapping Olivia Palermo

Who else could lure Olivia Palermo and Dizzee Rascal to Wapping on a Sunday but Giorgio Armani himself? They didn’t need much persuasion to stay, either: after a beautiful catwalk show, Tobacco Dock turned into a neon-lit, champagnefuelled nightclub, where Ellie Goulding jumped on stage to perform and Paloma Faith and Liam Payne chatted about babies.

Rock’n’roll.

Georgia May Jagger

Fiorucci certainly made L’Escargot hardcore, as the club-kid favourite fashion brand launched its Soho store with one hell of a party at the French restaurant. Georgia May Jagger and Edie Campbell ran around drinking Martini cocktails while the Theo Adams Company threw mysterious packets of pills and powders (and cabbage leaves) into the queuing crowd outside.

Giovanna Battaglia Engelbert

Lady Weymouth

Dame Zandra Rhodes and Grace Woodward

Charlotte Wiggins

Patrick Gibson

Sam Rollinson

DJ Locksmith

Eve Delf Clara Amfo

Just Cos, Trafalgar Square

Paloma Faith

Greta Bellamacina

Liam Payne

Lady Amelia Windsor

Sabine Getty

Will Poulter

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It’s official — Cos has been saving our wardrobes for 10 years now, and what better way to celebrate its birthday than with a rather beautiful bash at the National Gallery.

Tom Daley pondered Cézanne’s Bathers along with new hubby Dustin Lance Black and the inseparable Charlotte Wiggins, Sam Rollinson and Eve Delf pulled their best portrait poses in the neon forest light installation.

Dustin Lance Black

Tom Daley

GO TO eveningstandard.co.uk / ESMAGAZINE FOR MORE PARTY PICTURES

FLASHBULB! Party pictures from around town Rita Ora

Ozwald Boateng and Erin O’Connor Michael Roberts

Lulu Guinness

Feel the Love Mayfair

Daphne Guinness

Love magazine and Miu Miu performed the astonishing feat of squeezing literally every fashion VIP — Adwoa, Cara, Jourdan, check — into Loulou’s for its epic Perrier Jouët-fuelled LFW party, with the actual Muppets jetting in from LA so that Miss Piggy could show off in Miu Miu and Kermit could cuddle up to Joan Smalls.

Heels on reels Bloomsbury

Isabeli Fontana

Pam Hogg

Manolo Blahnik

If we had to walk a mile in someone’s shoes, we’d make them Manolos, and fellow fans — from Anna Wintour to Derek Blasberg and David Bailey — stalked over to the Curzon for the premiere of the Manolo Blahnik: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards documentary.

A well-heeled crowd indeed.

Jonathan Saunders and Katie Grand

Charlotte Tilbury

Georgia Fowler

Alexa Chung

Adwoah Aboah

Lara Stone and Doutzen Kroes

Joan Smalls

Mabel McVey Charlotte Olympia

Nick Grimshaw Eliza Cummings

David and Catherine Bailey

Patrick Grant

Maria Kastani and Mary Katrantzou

Grace Wales Bonner Name here

Kim Hersov , Whitney Bromberg Hawkings and Noor Fares

Anna Wintour Tallulah Harlech

Jamie Campbell Bower

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Leo Bamford and Martha Ward

Clever Mary Katrantzou — showing a SS18 collection adorned with gorgeous colourful flowers was the perfect excuse for pals, Flowerbx founder Whitney Bromberg Hawkings and Nasiba Adilova, to throw an equally floral dinner at Mark’s Club.

Picture credit

Smell the roses Mayfair

Tania Fares and Nasiba Adilova

GO TO eveningstandard.co.uk / ESMAGAZINE FOR MORE PARTY PICTURES

14 es magazine 29.09.17

PhotographS BY ben quinton

Class act Make-up by Yulia Yurchenko. Suit by Alex Eagle for The Store

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She has been dazzling critics with her turn as a Scandinavian diplomat in Oslo. As it transfers to the West End, Lydia Leonard talks to Frankie McCoy about Brexit, sexism on stage and why she said no to plastic surgery

’m sitting in a bare, cell-like National Theatre dressing room, empty but for a sad smoking regulation notice and a hatstand. But Lydia Leonard’s energy lights up the gloomy space. Swivelling hyperactively in an abandoned desk chair, the 35-year-old actress is sounding off about everything — from Brexit to the gender pay gap in acting to plastic surgery — at breakneck speed.

Her fine features don’t betray a trace of tiredness, despite her having just finished the first full run through of Oslo, JT Rogers’s Tony Award-winning play about the Norwegian couple who brokered the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that ultimately led to the 1993 Oslo Accords — a groundbreaking step towards peace in the Middle East (it is, Leonard insists, ‘much funnier than you’d expect’). The three-week National Theatre run sold out and Leonard, who stars as Norwegian diplomat Mona Juul opposite Toby Stephens’s Terje Rød-Larsen, is already looking forward to its transfer to the West End in October.

It’s the perfect role for an actress who has made her name playing culturally vital women through history: Virginia Woolf to James Norton’s Duncan Grant in BBC2’s Life in Squares; Jackie Kennedy in Martin Sherman’s Onassis, opposite Robert Lindsay; and a critically acclaimed turn as Anne Boleyn in the RSC’s adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, for which she was variously described as ‘seductive’, ‘minxish’ and ‘wonderfully vixenish’. That star performance took her and the rest of the cast to Broadway, where she was nominated for a Tony for best actress in a supporting role. ‘One of the best times of my life,’ she recalls fondly, although she still

insists that ‘the quality of the theatre in London is the best in the world’.

Not that the London scene is immune to the usual problems when it comes to gender discrimination in the acting world, where women are notoriously paid less than their male counterparts. The pay gap is ‘an issue I care deeply about’, says Leonard. But she’s more concerned with changing the world than one industry.

‘I don’t always think it’s that helpful to view it through the prism of the acting world. Actors’ wages are determined on a whole host of complicated and sensitive factors, which is why we have agents. In the theatre I take comfort in the fact that much older actors are probably paid more than me, as it lets me believe there might be some stable progression in this most unstable of careers.’

She adds that ‘it’s a problem across all professions and by no means just acting’ and finds the recent furore over the BBC pay gap ‘so irritating because it’s distracting from a serious conversation about equality’.

The acting world has made leaps and bounds even in the years since Leonard went to drama school at the Bristol Old Vic in 1999. It was, she says, ‘weird... I didn’t love my time there.’ Back in the late Nineties, she explains, the drama school only accepted three women each year — compared with nine men. ‘So it was very hard to get in if you were a woman,’ she winces. ‘It was terrible, it was really unequal. But it was classical training and they didn’t want to turn out loads of classical actresses that there weren’t parts for.’

Another incident occurred early in her acting career which you suspect would not have happened to a man.

Lydia Leonard and Toby Stephens rehearsing Olso

Costume drama queen: Lydia Leonard in Wolf Hall with Ben Miles, above, and in BBC2 comedy Quacks, left

“Brexit feels like it is making our country smaller… It felt to me like a signal of retreat” Leonard played David Frost’s girlfriend, Caroline Cushing, in Peter Morgan’s original 2006 Donmar production of Frost/Nixon, starring Michael Sheen and Frank Langella. But when Ron Howard decided to make the play into a film — which was nominated for five Oscars in 2009 — while Sheen and Langella were kept on, Leonard was dropped for Rebecca Hall.

She smiles wryly. ‘I wasn’t ever going to be in it, because it was a big Ron Howard film, but some of my better known friends were auditioning. So I suggested to my then agent that maybe they might get me an audition, even though I was only about 24 and it would be someone well known who’d get the part. And she said, “No darling.

It’s about bone structure. Now, I’m not going to be the one to tell you to get plastic surgery…” And I thought, well it sounds like you’re telling me to get plastic surgery!’ Despite knowing that age and relative obscurity were the true reason she hadn’t got the role, she laughs ‘that sort of leaves you with lingering doubts about your bone structure for the rest of your career’.

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Hot seat: Leonard as Jackie Kennedy with Robert Lindsay in Onassis

As is quite evident, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Leonard’s bone structure; she has the sort of regal face you feel you know from the walls of the National Gallery, and is perfect for period dramas (‘It’s quite English isn’t it, to get stuck in period dramas?’ she laughs. ‘We seem to have an obsession with class and manners.’) She was born in Paris, although moved to the UK at the age of four, and her first memories of acting come from growing up with ‘this big mirror in my room [in front of which] I used to make myself cry’. Unusual stuff, perhaps, to her non-acting parents: her father is an accountant, while her mother is a costume historian, often critical of the occasionally inauthentic designs her daughter wears on screen and stage (‘She’s like, “Hemlines would never have been up there!”’). Her mother is also Irish and like many a pro-Remainer with an Irish parent, Leonard is in the process of getting an Irish passport.

‘Since when did one ill-conceived, unfairly influenced and misreported referendum have the sole claim to what is and what is not democracy?’ she asks. ‘Brexit feels like it is making our country smaller, less relevant and less brave in the world. It felt to me like a signal of retreat, of a desire to shut the drawbridge and face inwards. Which is sort of the total opposite to what culture and the arts need to do, and need to be about. So I’m extremely anxious for the arts after Brexit. Not only will money be harder to come by, but the desire to play it safe, to not experiment, may become more common.’

It’s bittersweet, then, that Oslo is a brilliant depiction of successful negotiations between acrimonious nations.

‘There are lots of parallels between the play and where we are now with Brexit. Both require incredibly skilled negotiators,’ she says. ‘The intricacies of negotiations are played out brilliantly in Oslo, but I have less confidence in the skills of the negotiators we have putting through “the will of the people in Europe”. David Davis et al might do well to spare a few hours to watch the brilliant way Leonard, as the cool-headed diplomat Juul, efficiently keeps peace talks on track.

For Leonard, at least, when such incredibly strong, ‘real’ female roles keep coming her way, she can afford to be philosophical about the vagaries of her own profession.

At the end of the day, she muses, ‘actors are really just a commodity, bought and sold like a tin of baked beans. As soon as you realise that, you’re happy’.

‘Oslo’ is at the Harold Pinter Theatre from 2 October to 30 December (atgtickets.com)

style notes What we love now EDITED by KATRINA ISRAEL

Frontier KNITS

The father of franchising

ALANUI cardigan, £2,029, at stylebop.com

An avant-garde new tome hails 70 years of the legendary French fashion designer Pierre Cardin.

The style powerhouse was one of the first to transform a name into a truly international brand that spanned home decor to restaurant interiors. £130 (assouline.com)

If last winter’s hero coat was the fur-lined khaki parka, this season it’s sure to be Italian label Alanui’s cashmere cardigan that draws from Native American inspirations. Siblings Nicolò and Carlotta Oddi’s tribal-inspired fringed jackets take up to 15 hours to complete and make the cosiest of sartorial statements.

SMYTHSON Mara travel backgammon set, £395

Nathalie du Pasquier untitled pattern, 1983; far right, from top, Untitled, 2016; A Painting in a frame, 2014

Location, Location

CÉLINE necklace, £520, (020 7491 8200)

CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC bag, £1,285, at selfridges.com

Nathalie du Pasquier, a founding member of the Memphis design collective, has an exhibition at Camden Arts Centre featuring new pieces in her vibrant, abstract style. Her work also inspired Valentino creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli’s AW17 collection, his Victorian silhouettes splashed with her colourful compositions. Nathalie du Pasquier: Other Rooms, 29 Sep to 14 Jan (camdenartscentre.org)

InSTARglam Roving French photographer Felix Forest’s eye for design is as refined as the still life interiors he captures at

@felix_forest

The bling RING

The moment we laid eyes on Raf Simons’ rhinestone belts and jewelhandled bags at Calvin Klein, we knew diamanté was destined for a redux. The notion was confirmed in Paris by Anthony Vaccarello’s high-octane encrusted mini dresses and glittering Saint Laurent boots, followed by Isabel Marant’s twinkling earrings and sparkling pumps. Wear yours with crisp tailoring this autumn to dial down the disco factor.

SAINT LAURENT AW17

Natasha Pszenicki

ISABEL MARANT AW17

To mark its 130th anniversary, Smythson is moving back into its original digs next week after seven relocations over the years. Its elegant new abode is just a dice-throw up the road, returning to the grand Grade II-listed Arts and Crafts building at 131-132 New Bond Street.

KURT GEIGER boots, £229 (kurtgeiger.com)

VALENTINO AW17

Memphis BELLE

MANGO earrings, £12.99 (shop. mango.com)

Follow us at @eveningstandardmagazine

29.09.17 es magazine 21

MEN’S STYLE What to buy now

Big Ben’s bit on the side

by TEO VAN DEN BROEKE, style director OF esquire UK

Top of the Shops

Garbstore has provided discerning Londoners with its unique offerings since 2008. Next year is its 10th anniversary and to celebrate, it’s opening a pop-up store — Garbstore.ten — in Covent Garden’s Seven Dials. A range of exclusive products includes an appealing selection of kimonos from its own collection and a slick range of hoodies and track pants from a collaboration with Surf is Dead. In addition, there’s an array of one-off events taking place during the pop-up’s tenure (including a weekly coffee-shop colab with Japanese coffeeware brand Kinto). (couvertureandthegarbstore.com)

Ben Machell goes for gold at a London stag weekend

A Garbstore x Surf Is Dead hoodie, £115

Garbstore hoodie, £215

Peak sneaks

Whether teamed with a suit or sweats, right now it’s all about wearing sneakers, and the style of the moment is the runner.

Defined by a blocky, flat sole and a mesh-meets-leather upper, a whole host of brands from classic Italian sportswear giant Diadora to Scandi fashion label Acne Studios has released supercool styles for autumn. Here’s my pick of the best.

Fendi Vocabulary running sneakers, £570 (fendi.com)

Jonny Cochrane; Josh Shinner; illustration by Jonathan Calugi @ Machas

DIADORA V7000 Amaro sneakers, £105

Acne Studios Jimmy sneakers, £310 (acnestudios.com)

the big picture

What a wonderful label Margaret Howell is. Dedicated as much to producing high quality, British-designed basics as it is to championing the talent of other like-minded designers (Howell’s Wigmore Street store stocks interiors objects by the likes of Robin Day and David Mellor), this autumn the 40year-old brand is hosting an exhibition of specially commissioned photographic works by British artist Simon Phipps in its flagship store. Consisting of a series of soaring abstract shots (pictured) of post-war sculptures, don’t expect to leave the exhibition emptyhanded… British Post War Public Art by Simon Phipps. To 22 Oct. Margaret Howell, 34 Wigmore Street, W1 Eduardo Paolozzi, Ventilation Shaft Cover, Pimlico (1978-82)

Bernard Schottlander, 2MS Series No.1, Milton Keynes (1970)

stag do! Last weekend! And I was invited!

I’d never been more psyched. Not just because I was looking forward to drinking myself blind — I can’t do that disingenuous thing of pretending not to enjoy the occasional bout of ritualised heavy drinking — but because it was all going to happen here, in London. Can you imagine?

The whole thing felt decadently convenient.

So after a Friday night of lager and world class Punjabi cuisine in Whitechapel, it was an early start the next morning for a trip to the Olympic velodrome.

I’ve always loved the velodrome, in the sense that I think it looks cool. But to actually go inside? And ride a bike around a track with an incline of 42 degrees?

That had never crossed my mind, primarily because I’m terrible at riding bikes, being a toxic mixture of cowardly, clumsy and weirdly top-heavy. But the groom loves cycling so there I was, having my feet strapped into a bicycle with no brakes — of course no brakes! — as the lingering aroma of world class Punjabi cuisine wafted around the arena where Team GB won so many golds.

“As I hit terminal velocity I was like a hungover Bradley Wiggins” I started pedalling. It felt weird. I was on the flat bit going about two miles an hour and my heart was already pounding. There were other people on the track, not part of our stag party, who’d obviously spent the past six months dreaming of this moment.

They were wearing proper cycling kit rather than a stinky, baggy football top, and they didn’t giggle nervously when going round the corners. They also didn’t reek of stale Cobra and karahi lamb chop masala. They were basically professionals.

I just kept pedalling. And as it turns out, it’s almost impossible to stop pedalling on those bikes.

So very much against my will, I kept getting faster and faster. To my horror, I began to overtake the real cyclists simply in order to avoid them. This meant I found myself going higher and higher up the incline, which meant I had to pedal faster and faster, which meant I had to overtake more people, which meant I had to go even higher and even faster. As I hit terminal velocity, I was like a hungover Bradley Wiggins. It was horrible, but somehow, I survived. After that it was showers, then off to karaoke. That was no less terrifying. Perhaps I’ll tell you about it next time.

29.09.17 es magazine 23

illustrations BY tom jay

T

here’s a cartoon currently popping up in the inboxes of Mayfair’s bitcoinobsessed hedge fund managers. It’s titled ‘how to be an analyst’ and the hedgies are poking fun at their financier ‘inferiors’. When the digital currency rises in value, the analyst declares it a ‘bubble headed for a crash’. When it falls, it’s ‘bitcoin’s dead!’ The value’s flat? ‘No return on investment’. And if bitcoin’s price moves, it’s ‘too volatile’. The bitcoin believers are mocking the way cryptocurrency sceptics find fault whatever happens.

All of which illustrates how split the City is over bitcoin. Some herald it as a ‘monetary revolution’; others decry it as a boom about to go bust. Earlier this month, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan, declared the currency a ‘fraud’, arguing that it should only appeal ‘if you were in North Korea… a drug dealer or a murderer’. At the Barclays’ financial conference in New York, he said, ‘If we had a trader who traded bitcoin, I’d fire him in a second,’ sending bitcoin’s price down 6 per cent. He proclaimed it ‘worse than tulip bulbs’, a reference to the tulip mania in the Dutch golden age. Meanwhile, Chinese regulators have ordered all digital currency exchanges to close and banned fundraising through initial coin offerings (ICOs). The central bank warned that cryptocurrencies are being used ‘as a tool in criminal activities such as moneylaundering and drug-trafficking’.

Could the most famous cryptocurrency be headed for a crash? The likes of Dimon arguably have a vested interest in bitcoin failing. ‘As the boss of one of the biggest banks in the world, why would he like anything that reduced his control over the money supply?’ says one hedge fund manager and bitcoin fan. A further concern is how in vogue bitcoin is. In the late Nineties, before the dotcom crash, celebrities piled in to internet start-ups that mostly ended up going bust. Now, Paris Hilton is taking part in a fundraising for digital token LydianCoin, while bra baroness Michelle Mone has said she will accept bitcoin as payment for lavish Dubai flats.

Outside the financial world, bitcoin remains little understood. Notably, Google’s auto-complete suggestions for ‘is bitcoin...?’ are ‘safe’ and ‘legal’. What makes people pay attention, though, are headlines like this: ‘If you

Currency AFFAIRS With China shutting down bitcoin exchanges and the CEO of JP Morgan calling it a ‘fraud’, Rosamund Urwin asks if the cryptocurrency is a bubble ready to burst 29.09.17 es magazine 25

Getty

Court in the act: Mark Karpelès, right, and Charlie Shrem, below, were both charged with bitcoinrelated offences

bought $100 of bitcoin seven years ago, you’d be sitting on $72.9 million now’.

So what exactly is this magical money tree?

Bitcoin is the grandaddy of thousands of other cryptocurrencies. It was released in 2009 by an individual under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Speculation abounds about who he actually is — the late computer developer Hal Finney and computer scientist Nick Szabo were touted as possibilities, though both denied it. It’s a virtual payment network, not unlike Paypal, except with no owner. Instead, computers across the globe process transactions and keep a shared ledger (a ‘blockchain’) that enables different contracts to occur.

It has its own currency, bitcoin, the unit in which the network carries out transactions. Getting your hands on bitcoin is relatively straightforward: you can buy them on an exchange, as you would any other currency (one is worth around £3,000), or you could accept them for goods and services. But you can also ‘mine’ new ones — like mining gold, except instead of digging it out of the ground, you are rewarded with bitcoins by using your computer to verify other bitcoin transactions.

With bitcoin, the money supply is controlled by the computers. That means it doesn’t require a central bank, so there’s no Bank of England printing money (hence the Twitter meme with the Queen looking irked: ‘Tried Bitcoin. Didn’t have my face on it’). That prize keeps shrinking, meaning there’s a finite supply. Circulation is limited to 21 million by 2140, although each one can be subdivided into millions of pieces. Every bitcoin is accounted for in the ledger, so you cannot get a counterfeit.

You spend them in the same way you would spend other currencies. Contrary to perception, bitcoins are traceable — you can see which internet addresses every bitcoin has been at — but the owners’ names are encrypted. As of 2015, 100,000 vendors, including The Pembury Tavern in Hackney and Nincomsoup café in Old Street station, accepted bitcoin as payment. There’s even a church in Gospel Oak that accepts it for its collection. It is now so mainstream that a £1.65 million Peckham townhouse has just become the first UK property that can be bought using the digital currency, and there are ‘bitcoin ATMs’ (including one in the Londis on King’s Road).

The irony of the debate over a bubble is that bitcoin was born just six weeks after Lehman Brothers went bust, as people searched for an alternative to the existing monetary system. It had its roots in the Julian Assange-backed ‘cypherpunks’ movement of the

Two sides of the bitcoin: JP Morgan boss, Jamie Dimon, left, is a skeptic, while Arthur Hayes, below, cofounded a bitcoin derivatives exchange

“It’s like 1999… People are basically selling air”

Digital cash and carry: a bitcoin ATM, left, at a King’s Road Londis

Nineties, in which activists argued the internet would create a new world outside the nation state. The conversation had died down until the financial crisis resurrected it. The first transaction came in 2010, when computer programmer Laszlo Hanyecz persuaded someone to accept 10,000 bitcoins he’d ‘mined’ in exchange for two pizzas. It came to be embraced by libertarians as a way, like gold, to store wealth. Silicon Valley then joined the bitcoin crypto-rush, interested both in the technology and its potential as a way to raise cash.

Bitcoin has, however, been hit by crisis and scandal.

It first entered mainstream consciousness as the currency of the Silk Road, the online black market where drugs were sold. Two major bitcoin names have also ended up in court. Charlie Shrem, who set up Bitinstant (in which the Winklevoss twins invested), went to prison after being convicted of aiding and abetting an unlicensed money transmitting business, a charge related to the Silk Road. Meanwhile, Mark Karpelès, former head of what was once the world’s biggest bitcoin exchange, Mt Gox, was charged in Tokyo with embezzlement and data manipulation after Mt Gox collapsed in 2014.

‘I reject the idea that [cryptocurrencies] are only used by criminals and terrorists,’ says Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of BitMEX, a bitcoin derivatives exchange based in Hong Kong. ‘The real currencies that finance terrorism and crime are the dollar and the euro. The cryptocurrency movement will only expand. It is a digital currency version of “I don’t trust the government”; the analogue version being gold.’

It has emerged that even JP Morgan has routed customer orders for bitcoin-related instruments, although the bank does not take positions on this with its own cash. Emad Mostaque, co-chief investment officer at hedge fund Capricorn Fund Managers in Mayfair, says, ‘I can bet you JP Morgan’s wealth customers are asking, “Why don’t I have bitcoin?” It doesn’t move with other assets, so it’s a good hedge.’ Mostaque adds that

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Crypto crib: the Peckham townhouse available to buy with bitcoin

savers can even buy bitcoin in their ISA: ‘If you could put one per cent of your ISA in it, and it can return 10 times that or it can collapse, what would you do?’

The main worry about bitcoin, Mostaque explains, is initial coin offerings, the latest financial fad. ICOs are where ‘tokens’ in a new digital currency that promise future goods and services are sold as a way for a company to raise cash. This is where it starts to look like a bubble. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, but also a platform for apps, allowing developers to sell a stake in the app by issuing tokens with ICOs. In June, one raised $30,000 in half an hour; purchasers were buying a token called ‘F***’ (described as ‘a social cryptocurrency that aims to help everyone around the world give a F***’). There’s even a prostitution cryptocurrency, Lust, for sex workers and their customers.

‘ICOs are like when companies floated in 1999 with a website address and a smile,’ says one Square Mile cynic. ‘Same thing, different way to throw your money away. People are basically selling air.’ Scammers can use blockchain technology to create ICOs that perhaps look promising but are essentially flimflam. More than £1.3 billion has been raised in ICOs this year. Where is the money coming from? Analysts say it is often from those who bought bitcoin on the cheap some years ago and are now millionaires. The UK watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority, warned that anyone thinking of buying coins in an ICO should only do so if they are prepared to lose everything. One banker likened it to the South Sea Bubble of the 1700s, where a company bought up the rights to trade in the South Seas, then sold shares in its company which eventually become worthless.

“China can’t stop people using bitcoin — you can’t shut off the internet” There are echoes of other crises too. In 1929, millionaire Joe Kennedy sold his stocks after a shoeshiner gave him share tips, the theory being that by the time the boy on the street is telling you what to buy, values have become inflated. The Wall Street crash followed. ‘This time, it’s bankers hearing their teenage nephew has bought bitcoin,’ says that same sceptic.

So what’s the problem with bitcoin? ‘The main issue is that established currencies have a legal footing in each country whereas bitcoin doesn’t,’ says a banker who asked not to be named. ‘Governments can clamp down on trading in it, like in China, saying it is circumventing capital controls.’

Bitcoin believers: Paris Hilton, left, and Michelle Mone, above, who is accepting bitcoin for Dubai flats, above

Governments have reason to fear bitcoin. It removes the role of government as the central issuer of money — and guarantor that money is real. As another banker notes: ‘There’s a huge amount of power in controlling the money supply, such as using quantitative easing to pump cash into the economy. All the Western economies are based around an ever-increasing money supply. Bitcoin has a fixed supply of currency — that hasn’t ended well in the past, like when Britain came off the gold standard in the 1930s. If a government can’t print more money, it can’t run a budget deficit.’ As the founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty probably didn’t actually say: ‘Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.’ This is why China — where most of the biggest bitcoin miners are — has cracked down heavily on cryptocurrencies. ‘China is afraid of anything it can’t control,’ Hayes explains. ‘But it can’t stop people using bitcoin — you can’t shut off the internet.’

Bitcoin’s fans argue it will have the most profound uses in countries where the money system is broken, such as in Zimbabwe and Venezuela. It could also benefit the 2.5 billion adults who don’t have bank accounts, and enable immigrants to send remittances home more cheaply than services like Western Union do. As such, fans believe bitcoin could help create a more equal world. ‘In the region we work in — emerging economies — banks don’t provide services for the majority,’ says Hayes. ‘Bitcoin allows people to invest, to participate in a global phenomenon.’

When the central bank of Cyprus seized savings, citizens downloaded bitcoin apps on their phones. Others believe Brexit could make bitcoin take off in Britain — although it’s probably too expensive to trade (there’s an $8 transaction fee, so you’re not using it to buy a Starbucks mocha). Still, the technology is likely to become more sophisticated, ironing out flaws and making a future cryptocurrency viable — a bitcoin 2.0. If there is a crash, something sustainable could emerge from the wreckage.

That could still be used for nefarious purposes. In Lionel Shriver’s most recent novel, The Mandibles, she envisaged a dystopian future in which the US experiences hyperinflation due to a newly created international reserve cryptocurrency.

In the shorter term, if a crash is coming, ordinary investors who see bitcoin as a sure bet could be the worst burnt. It is the old Square Mile cliché: ‘caveat emptor’. Or as one investor puts it: ‘Bitcoin is like Catholic sex — you need to know when to pull out.’

29.09.17 es magazine 29

howhe rolls He’s hip-hop royalty, a fashion darling — and in A$AP Rocky’s world, anything can happen.

Hamish MacBain meets music’s most exciting star for an exhilarating morning of chaos PhotographS BY juergen teller stylED BY jenny kennedy

30 es magazine 29.09.17

LOEWE jeans, £450; BALENCIAGA trainers, £595, both at selfridges.com.

Falke socks, £11 (falke.com). Jacket and scarf, A$AP Rocky’s own

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$

even o’clock on a Tuesday morning, and I am standing behind Selfridges on the corner of Duke Street and Edwards Mews. In front of me, sitting in a shopping trolley that has just been shoved into the middle of the road by one of his crew, laughing his head off as a black cab is forced to come to an abrupt stop, is A$AP Rocky. In front of him is Juergen Teller, snapping away, also grinning at the scene that is developing. At the behest of his subject, Teller will soon also be in a shopping trolley, as will a member of the ES fashion team, joining the orchestrator of this chaos in a three-cart race from one side of the street to the other.

‘That’s lit!’ said orchestrator beams, more than once.

Rewind about half an hour and we are in a meeting room above Selfridges. Rocky, having turned up just before 7am pushing one of those three shopping trolleys (he requested five last night), clasping a hot drink, answers my cursory ‘How’s it going?’ with a sheepish grin and a withered, ‘I’m tired, man’. He has, it transpires, been up for a long time — 48 hours or so — and has come straight from the studio.

Later, I will ask the artist responsible for the best single of 2015, ‘LSD’, whether he still likes to take lots of LSD. ‘Oh trust me: I love it,’ he says. ‘Yeah. I just dropped yesterday!’

At one point, I am informed that Rocky may instead want to talk in New York in a couple of days. Which — although all of this was his idea — seems understandable. But it turns out all that is needed to rouse this superstar is half an hour of shopping-trolley drag racing, followed by a nice, big, pre-interview blunt.

Back in the meeting room, we sit. To my left, A$AP Ferg — the second-most famous member of the A$AP Mob collective, who was recording with him last night — pops open a packet of M&S cookies and listens in quietly. In front of me, Rocky, 28 — aka Pretty Flacko, or if you’re Liam Gallagher, WhatsApp Ricky — soon proves himself, despite the self-inflicted circumstances, to be charming, funny and articulate. He is not, he says, in town to party. Today is just how he rolls.

When I ask him what he’s been up to while in London, he replies: ‘I’ve been in the studio, just that, nothing else. Don’t even leave. It’s in my room, so...’ When I ask him what he’ll be doing for the rest of his time here (two days or so), he says ‘recording my album, staying in my room.

Writing video treatments, coming up with campaign plans and marketing plans for my companies, my entities.’

A$AP Ferg, left, with Rocky

A$AP Rocky with rumoured flame Kendall Jenner

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The latest of these ‘entities’, the ostensible reason we are here this morning, is a collaboration with — you guessed it — Selfridges. But not, as you might by now be expecting, a normal one because Rocky doesn’t really like or do normal. So rather than just sticking a logo on some clothes and then sticking those clothes on a rail somewhere up in the men’s department, Rocky and his umbrella company, AWGE (it rhymes with ‘org’), will instead be opening a New York-style bodega within the confines of one of the world’s most famous department stores. It has been in the works for a while. ‘Four years ago, Michèle Lamy organised a lunch on a barge for Frieze art fair for about 40 people,’ buying and merchandising director Sebastian Manes later tells me. ‘A$AP was there, and so was I, and were very casually chatting over lunch and a glass of wine, and he said he’d love to do something together. The whole thing’s been very organic, and the bodega was completely his idea.’

“I’ve been working a lot with my boy Skepta, just exchanging vibes in a brotherly way” For Rocky himself, the appeal is simple. ‘I feel like London, and so many different parts of Europe, don’t know what a New York bodega looks like inside so I wanted to bring that here,’ he says, explaining that the AWGE Bodega will be selling ‘food, clothes, toys, films: you name it’. He will, he says, be involved in every last product. ‘For sure: I have to be. Because if not, it won’t be my aesthetic, you know? I have a certain etiquette in the way I work. So for me it’s like... it’s not my way or the highway, but I’m just very adamant about what I want. And I know what I want.’ To add to the authentically New York feel of the place, he will also be doing a few shifts behind the till. ‘That’s gonna be a new thing for me,’ he says, ‘and I’m excited.’

Rocky can now add this new profession to that of muse (the first black face of Dior Homme); fashion designer (not least his well received collaboration with Guess); actor (he was brilliant in 2015’s Dope; has ‘just finished’ another film called Monster with Jennifer Hudson; and talks seriously and at length about wanting to soon do theatre); record label boss (AWGE’s first artist, Playboi Carti, has gone ‘three times platinum’); and — of course — being one of the best rappers on the planet, though he finds ‘rapper’ reductive, preferring ‘artist, renaissance man’.

He is also an unashamed ladies’ man, most recently being linked to one Kendall Jenner. I ask him if he is currently, to use a phrase of his that I like very much, ‘single as a dollar bill’, and he laughs loudly. I then mention that there have been a lot of pictures of him and Jenner in the press. ‘Yeah, I know, man,’ he smirks. ‘You know... that’s the press, what can I tell you? A$AP Rocky and ladies?

That’s nothing new.’

Jacket and jewellery, A$AP Rocky’s own

From left, Rocky with Cara Delevingne shooting the 2014 DKNY campaign; as the face of Dior Homme; on stage with Mary J Blige at the BET Awards this year

There’s then a pause, before he asks: ‘Can I get some cookie?’

It’s not hard to see why both the ladies and, more seriously, the fashion world have fallen so hard for A$AP Rocky. And it’s not just because he is a ‘pretty motherf***er’, though that is true, and helps. What is more important is an innate sense of style that allows him to dress flamboyantly and excessively while somehow always still seeming masculine. He can effortlessly mix highend with low-end, and doesn’t like big, visible brand names. ‘Some people assume you have to With Pharell have name brands, or it has to be expensive, but it’s Williams just gotta be your personal preference. It’s called “personal style”. As long as you got personal style, that’s what we respect, we don’t care about labels and brands. I mean, it’s good if you got a cool label, nobody going to knock that — I like that, I’m all for it — but you gotta develop a personal style first.

As an individual, if it’s wearing the same pair of pants and shoes every day, then do that. Make it you, though. Own it.’

Born Rakim Mayers in Harlem, New York, to a Barbadian father and an African American mother, he got a sense of this very early on. ‘I remember I was five or six years old, and my mom dressing me for Easter,’ he says. ‘And I’m looking in the mirror just crying. And she’s like, “What’s wrong?” I just didn’t like the way she put my stuff

Rocky on the Gucci Cruise 2017 front row

34 es magazine 29.09.17

“New sounds, new waves, new swag, new everything.

Who’s the man you go to for that? Yours truly”

together. So she let me just change my outfit around a little bit, put the sneakers on I wanted to wear, and I had my belt and all this other stuff tucked in. I was six years old! And from that day, I knew that I didn’t feel comfortable in certain stuff. So being that young, and being that precise and sure? It was meant to be, man.’

In second grade — at eight years old, around when he first started rapping — he would wear high waters (short-cut trousers) to school ‘because I wanted to be a mac’. By his early teens, he was wearing ‘Prada and whatnot. Fourteen, Prada, the ghetto? That don’t even mix. It was incredible.’

These years, though, were tough. At 12, his father went to jail for drug dealing (and passed away in 2012 as Rocky’s career was exploding). At 13, his older brother Ricky was shot dead in Harlem.

For a time he, his mother and his sister Erika lived in shelters. He turned to selling drugs and at 16 spent two weeks in jail at Rikers Island. It was at this point that he resolved to take rapping more seriously. He joined A$AP Mob (established by his late mentor, Yams) and in 2011 released ‘Purple Swag’, which quickly blew up, introducing his laconic flow to the world. By the end of that year he had signed a $3 million (£2.2m) record deal.

The third A$AP Rocky album will be out later this year (or ‘AS-A-P: no pun intended’). Its creator likes working in London, always has. ‘It’s just special to me for some reason. I’m just... I express myself way better when I’m in an environment that allows me to be. When I’m here, for the most part, I’m in a peaceful, creative environment and I’m testing the waters and making new music, messing around with new sounds and anything that’s innovative.’ I ask him who he has been working with, and after checking with one of his A$AP people — ‘Can I say?’ — he reveals that he has ‘been Rocky with former working a lot with my boy Skepta, just exchanging energy flame and vibes in a brotherly way’. Rocky is a huge grime fan.

Chanel Iman ‘All that stuff, all those guys, I’ve been on that stuff for

A$AP Rocky in the film Dope

AS SOON AS POSSE: Also coming to a shop near you soon The AWGE Bodega won’t just sell any old merch: A$AP Rocky’s crew, A$AP Mob, have their own designs on the place, with exclusive Mob fashion collections in among the AWGE mugs, lighters, Oyster-card holders and packets of crisps. Meet the Mob members making their mark.

Performing with Rihanna, left, and at the Guess Originals X A$AP Rocky party with Skepta

Getty; Eric T White; Rex Features

A$AP Lou and A$AP Snacks

some time, I think it’s cool,’ he says, going on to enthuse about everyone from Stormzy to ‘my favourite of all of them, my favourite UK rapper’, CASisDEAD. He tells me the album ‘sounds futuristic’. When I ask if it’s as much of a stylistic leap forward as his second (the out there, psychedelic At.Long.Last.A$AP) was from his first (the radio smash-loaded Long.

Live.A$AP), he looks at me and smiles. ‘I’ll let you be the judge.’

He then asks me to turn my dictaphone off, makes me promise not to write about the lyrical themes (‘leave that for the jump’) and the next thing I know I am holding A$AP Rocky’s iPhone to my ear, listening to a new A$AP Rocky song that was ‘just finished last night’, while A$AP Rocky raps along to it in front of my face. ‘This new album is just basically like all my albums: evolved,’ he says when it has come to an end. ‘They’ve been missing me, they’ve been waiting for me, they need some new music, they need some new sounds, new waves, new swag, new everything. And who’s the man you go to for that? Yours truly. So I’m back, like I never left.’

By now there are Selfridges employees floating in to work and next door another meeting room full of them, who are waiting eagerly to show him the prototypes of the products that will be going into this bodega of his. Rather than things like this being a drag, he insists it’s something he enjoys, ‘because not only am I helping them, but I’m getting the experience, seeing how corporate people work and developing a protocol and whatnot’. It will be far from the last collaboration of this kind that he does, he says.

And with that, A$AP Rocky is off to his next appointment, after which he will finally get to bed. Well, maybe...

AWGE Bodega is open from 2-11 October. Book a time slot at selfridges.com/awgexselfridges

(aka Cozy Boys) Real names Louis Levin (right) and Justin Scott Ages 26 and 30 How did you meet Rocky? ‘Through Yams, RIP’: A$AP Yams, aka Steven Rodriguez, was the hip-hop industry legend who founded A$AP Mob in 2006 and died of an accidental drug overdose in 2015.

What’s your drink of choice? ‘Grapefruit juice’ The Brand Cozy World What Lou and Snacks exclusively launch their first Cozy World collection, featuring T-shirts, beanies, dressing gowns, slippers and a travel wash bag ‘for comfy coziness worldwide’.

A$AP Twelvyy

Real name Jamael Phillips Age 28 How did you meet Rocky? ‘About 10 years ago now we met in Harlem. He took my shorty from me!’

What’s your drink of choice?

‘A Shirley Temple’ The brand LYBB (Last Year Being Broke) What A collection of hoodies, T-shirts and athletic wear branded with the LYBB logo, designed to be worn ‘as a constant reminder to cater to the ideology of perpetually cultivating one’s undying work ethic’.

29.09.17 es magazine 35

Carted off: A$AP Rocky with Juergen Teller. Rocky wears, GUESS X A$AP ROCKY T-shirt, ÂŁ49, at selfridges.com. Jacket,

jeans, trainers and jewellery, as before

Fashion assistant: Eniola Dare. Grooming by Crystabel Riley using RMS Beauty.

Prop stylist: Julia Dias

Go to standard.co.uk/ esmagazine or our social platforms to see the video of A$AP Rocky and Juergen Teller’s trolley racing.

Instagram: @evening standardmagazine Twitter: @ESmagofficial Facebook: @ESmagofficial

36 es magazine 29.09.17

beauty

Set design by Kerry Hughes. Model: Kateryna at Hired Hands. Nails by Erin Kristensen at United Artists using Bobbi Brown. Flowers from Rebel Rebel. Vase, £14 (westelm.co.uk)

by katie service

Perfect Pair

Clockwise from above left, PUPA firming breast enhancer, £32, at escentual.com. NIP + FAB bust fix, £16.25 (nipandfab. com). THIS WORKS perfect cleavage firming lotion, £38 (thisworks.com).

STELLAR DÉCOLLETAGE dry oil mist, £68 (stellardecolletage.com)

PHOTOGRAPH BY Aleksandra Kingo STYLED BY lily worcester

Stretch marks begone!

These new-gen skincare lotions will smooth and firm your bust 29.09.17 es magazine 41

beauty

You beauty!

ON THE SOAPBOX

Meghan Markle’s go-to brow expert SHERRILLE RILEY explains the charm of a virgin brow

‘V

irgin brows’ is a term I came up with for brows that appear to have never been touched; they look and feel natural with hairs brushed upwards to open the eye area and lift your face, giving it a fresh look.

Here are some tips on how to get them.

Boost hair growth by applying castor oil (£9.95, at pukkaherbs.com) directly on the brow — this will stimulate the hairs, allowing them to grow faster and thicker. Alternatively, the GP Nutrition supplement Enhance Me (£55 for 14 days; gpnutrition.co.uk) contains nutrients and vitamins (such as biotin) to speed up healthy hair growth.

Tweezerman x Huda Beauty Use pencils and powders slant tweezer, only to achieve the virgin £28, at harrods.com look. The brand Anastasia Beverly Hills has a wide selection of brow powders and they are very good, but pencils are much more precise — professionals tend to prefer pencils. Avoid at-home tint treatments as they often appear too unnatural and brassy for this look.

Style your virgin brow by brushing upwards using a spoolie (brow brush) or an old toothbrush; this is so that you can see the shape of the brow properly. Then gradually start filling in the hairs using soft strokes, mimicking the direction the hair grows. The front of your brows tends to grow upwards while the rest of them tend to grow outwards.

Once they have been filled in, use a spoolie to brush them through — this is important so you don’t get a build-up of product.

1

2

3

anastasia beverly hills Brow Powder Duo, £17, at cultbeauty.co.uk

T Annabel Rivkin gets in the Mixa

Josh Shinner; Natasha Pszenicki

Headspace

Ben Barnett’s Hydrotherm 3D massage is a fully immersive, stress-busting treatment combining a face-up, full-body massage atop giant water cushions and a bespoke guided meditation. The session can be recorded and used for DIY mediation at home. 60mins, £167, at Grace Belgravia (gracebelgravia.com; benbarnett.co.uk)

hirsty, thirsty, thirsty skin. Faded tan, lizard leg, central heating, bit of an Arctic wind. Are we all getting more sensitive or is it just me? (*Bursts into tears* *Makes self laugh* *Eats fridge*) Ideally the amount of moisturiser you slap on to your body should be dictated by the needs of your skin rather than your bank account. Ideally. And so, welcome to the ideal world of Mixa, a French apothecary brand that shines a fragrant spotlight on sensitive and dry skin. The lustre of the French pharmacy remains undimmed; time was, all the fashion editors would dash around Paris in between shows to try to get their hands on one tube or another, just to be able to say, ‘Oh, it’s terribly cheap. I pick it up in Paris. I use it as a make-up remover, a moisturiser, a mask and to polish my Chloé boots.’

Anyway, Mixa has landed at Superdrug in various forms, but my hero is the Cica Repair Body Lotion, an intensive skin-damage treatment that reads as a light body lotion. Active on scars and stretch marks, it takes dryness in its stride and the smell is as nice as anything I’ve slapped on. Could it be orange blossom? Might it be bergamot? Who cares, it’s a wonder and it sinks in.

The thing about heavy body creams is this: however virtuous they may feel to apply, they take forever to soak in, leaving you sticking to sheets, schvitzing into clothes and generally feeling punished. Well you wouldn’t catch a French woman glueing herself to her silk shirt now would you? Mixa is an angel delight that does the job with marvellous French insouciance. For six quid.

Mixa Cica Repair Body Lotion, £6.49, at superdrug.com

Read your stars by Shelley von Strunckel at standard.co.uk / horoscopes /today

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beauty

Superfoods

2.0

Liz Collins/Trunk Archive

Imagine an ingredient that could raise energy levels, reduce stress and regulate your hormones. Introducing adaptogens, the wellness world’s new obsession.

By Rebecca Newman

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Buff

46 es magazine 29.09.17

they normalise the hormones and bring you back to biochemical balance.’

It was an extreme case of adrenal fatigue that led Naomi Buff, the bright-eyed and glossy-haired nutritionist behind Naomi’s Kitchen, to adaptogens. ‘I’d been running round like a superwoman: moving house three times in one year, with two small children and starting a business,’ she explains. ‘I was exhausted, burnt out.’

Searching for a way back to health, Buff started to explore the potency of adaptogens such as rhodiola, the root of which has long been used in the East to combat fatigue and as an antidepressant.

‘After my burn-out I started to use adaptogens seriously and regularly.’ She was sufficiently impressed that, with the help of Sara Palmer PhD, the Cambridgebased scientist behind Lumity supplements,

“If an athlete is going through an intense regime, adaptogens will help their body adapt” she set out to design the I AM range. ‘My I AM Energised blend features some of the adaptogens that helped me in my recovery and are a staple in my diet when I feel fatigued.’

Rhodiola is also a favourite of top trainer Jon Denoris, who trains athletes and celebrities from his Marylebone space, Club 51. ‘Rhodiola is excellent during periods of increased stress, or when an increase in drive, focus or sporting performance is required. Using adaptogens with training is a technique long used by Soviet coaches: if an athlete is going through an intense regime, it will help their body adapt to this physical stress.’

Round the corner from Denoris on

Chiltern Street, the acclaimed Devon wellbeing retreat Yeotown has opened its first Yeotown Kitchen. The new café’s menu features adaptogen-based drinks, ‘Yeotonics’, designed in collaboration with Arianna Huffington’s chef/nutritionist Heather Umlah. Patience is a calming brew based on schisandra, an Ayurvedic herb associated with reducing anxiety.

Perspective is an immunity tonic that contains ashwagandha — a herb celebrated for its ability to strengthen the immune system and combat stress. At new café High on Duke Street, you can order maca hot chocolate (maca root benefits are said to include a positive effect on hormone balance and energy levels).

Then, just as you were wondering if there was anything they couldn’t fix, Dr Frances Prenna Jones (below) has incorporated them into her skin cream, Day Work, to ‘protect against the stress response of cells in the skin, which is provoked by the environment’.

And Purearth cold press juice company has launched a ‘Shot to Trot’ dose of ginseng, to boost energy and also libido (other well-known adaptogens include reishi, shiitake and liquorice).

Are there any downsides?

‘Because adaptogens really do work, you should take them with care,’ advises Denoris. Rhodiola is best taken in the morning, for example, and in limited quantities.

‘If taken to excess, liquorice root can increase blood pressure so it should only be taken under the care of a professional.’

Finally though, it seems there is a real alternative to that can of Coke. Something that may bring your mind and body back to equilibrium — and not only give you the acuity to finish the task in hand, but also the energy and stamina to enjoy it.

On the defensive: get your fill of adaptogens

The snack With health benefits to rival goji berries, jujubes are the new desk munchie.

Abakus dried jujube fruit, £1.99 (abakusfoods.com)

The power powder A daily dose of efficiency with maca — delicious in almond milk. Moon Juice Brain Dust, £25, at cultbeauty.co.uk

The mask Soothe and safeguard city skin with an infusion of coco and adaptogen, pure aloe. Skin & Tonic Coco Mask, £22, at content beautywellbeing.com

The supplement And breathe… a pill to ease low mood and aid concentration. Pukka Wholistic holy basil, £16.98 (pukkaherbs.com)

The brew Sip a cup of this mood-boosting ginseng tea. The Real Tea Company More Zest herbal tea, £5.99, at tea-direct.co.uk Getty

E

ver get bored of feeling knackered, stressed or manic? Ever reach for another coffee/biscuit and wish there was instead some magic pill that would give you a healthy buzz, and raise your energy levels — without any kind of comedown? Maybe something that would afford calm and clarity.

What about, let’s reach for the stars here, something that could also give you better quality sleep and even a bit of anti-ageing?

Let me introduce you to adaptogens. Mainly derived from herbs and roots, adaptogens are plant-based compounds that modulate the body’s stress responses, promote healthy immune function and stimulate energy. Long celebrated in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, suddenly their benefits are being recognised in the West. In LA, the likes of Gwyneth (above) pick them up at cult health store Moon Juice; now in London you can stop by Selfridges to pick up one of the new Naomi’s Kitchen adaptogenic powders — great in a smoothie — or sip a delicious ‘adaptogenic latte’ at Notting Hill’s Farmacy restaurant.

So first of all, what is an adaptogen?

‘The term was coined in the 1940s, to refer to a group of plants that essentially help us to “adapt” to stress in our environment,’ says nutritionist Eve Kalinik. ‘They work instinctively to “turn up” or “turn down” your body’s response, depending on where our internal stress thermostat is hovering, to bring you back to homeostasis.’ In layman’s terms, they return you to an even keel.

To understand how they do this, Omniya health clinic’s Dr Sohère Roked explains we must look to our adrenal system. ‘The adrenals are small glands that sit on top of the kidneys and produce hormones such as oestrogen and cortisol.’ If we experience prolonged stress and are stuck in ‘flight or fight’, we may end up with far too much — or far too little — cortisol in our blood, which puts pressure on our sympathetic nervous system, creating symptoms such as unstable moods and low energy.

Pointing to research done at the Swiss Herbal Institute, Dr Roked continues: ‘Adaptogens work to redress the balance between the adrenals, the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus. Remarkably, they will work whether you are experiencing either adrenal Naomi fatigue or overstimulation —

feast

grace & flavour Grace Dent has some legitimate issues with wacky upstart, Flavour Bastard

“Pudding scented with musky vetiver felt like being frottaged by a goth in a B&Q garden centre”

Ambience food

Jonny Cochrane; illustration by Jonathan Calugi @ Machas

A

popular corporate aim these days, trumpeted in meetings, is to be ‘disruptive’. To shake the tree. Shift the narrative. By disrupting things, one might upset a few fuddy-duddies at first, before potentially being celebrated wildly by one’s awed peers. I feel this might be the genre of thought which led to Frith Street, W1, now containing a restaurant called Flavour Bastard. And how, when I telephoned to discuss a reservation, the phone was ‘answered’ by a recording of a comedic skit where an Indian man shouted, ‘Not taking reservation, bastard’, then slammed it down.

Except they do take reservations. ‘How funny,’ I thought. ‘What a truly disruptive way to pay one’s rent and business rates in a prime W1 location!’

It’s safe to say, however, that if Flavour Bastard hoped to be talked about by the London restaurant scene, it succeeded. For the past five months Flavour Bastard’s wonkily ominous arrival has peppered industry gossip, especially when Vic Singh and Pratap Chahal began giving interviews vowing to make nothing ‘authentic’ and instead take ‘vibrant ingredients from around the world, removing rules and traditions’, and serve ‘tiny plates’ (their words) ‘combining creative flavours and techniques’. And at this point, noting the menu contained kimchi, curds, smoked goat with frankincense, vetiver infused puddings and mussels with jerk and rum, I began to emit a loud quacking sound of unfettered derision which friends said hinted that I was finally laying an egg.

Still, I took my friends EBP and Kate one Thursday night — I needed to see it with my own eyes. Flavour Bastard will feasibly always attract

flavour bastard 63-64 Frith Street, Soho, W1 (020 7734 4545; flavourbastard.com)

1

Roast sweet potato

£6.50

1

Bread and butter

£3.50

1

Tandoori-fried chicken

£6.50

1

Miso aubergine

£7

1

Monkfish

£8

1

Bottle of Cabidos Sec

1

Kimchi rice cake

£3.50

1

Lentil doughnut

£3.50

1

Bastard steak tartare

£7.50

1

Quinoa pudding

3

Glasses of Cabidos Doux

Total

£25

£7 £21 £99

the curious as well as anyone needing to ram a wacky London dining experience down a visitor’s throat. One could stroll an out-of-towner down Old Compton Street, circuit them up Wardour, nip them into the Toucan on Carlisle Street for a Guinness, then whisk them into the oh-so-fancy, clever, disruptive surroundings of Flavour Bastard. Job done: they’ll be talking about you and your London ways in Rotherham for weeks.

Personally, I never want to go back as there are approximately 198 other restaurants that don’t dispatch myriad eensy-weensy bowls of confusing, underwhelming nonsense ‘for sharing’. ‘Flavour Bastard’ will be eye-rolling shorthand for you and the fact you’ve always thought you were ‘it’.

The greatest thing I ate that evening were the white lentil, chorizo and pecorino doughnuts, which were deftly seasoned, appealing-looking, carby joyful lumps, and came in a portion of three, thank God, as I will only divide a lentil fritter into three if I am under prisoner of war confinement.

The weirdest thing was the roasted sweet potato (squishy) with fennel yogurt (creamy), strewn with chilli popcorn (woah, Pratap, mate, stop there) and sunflower seeds. A small bowl of two or three mouthfuls of tandoori-fried chicken was quite pleasing. The next three dishes I recall ordering half-heartedly, as by this point I sensed nothing fabulous was happening here and to feed three of us, we’d need to order double the amount. I chose a small plate of monkfish with watercress cream, a Bastard steak tartare and the miso and mango aubergine with peanut-buckwheat crumble.

These dishes sat around slightly unloved while we drank Cabidos Petite Manseng Sec and pondered whether to go to Brasserie Zédel for dinner.

The quino-and-cucumber pudding scented with the strong musky perfume vetiver felt like being frottaged roughly by a goth in a B&Q garden centre. I keep a photo of it on my phone as an appetite suppressant. Flavour Bastard is definitely a disruptive presence on the London restaurant scene. And I know that its future lies in the fact that at least some part of you, deep down, wants to experience it, too.

29.09.17 es magazine 49

feast

tart london Jemima Jones and Lucy Carr-Ellison make a deliciously crunchy tartlet with plump autumn blackberries

The proof is in the pudding: Lucy and Jemima flick through the first copy of their new cookbook

Jemima Jones (left) and Lucy Carr-Ellison

Josh Shinner

T

hroughout September we’ve been popping out mid-morning for a stroll on Hampstead Heath, where the beautifully bright sunshine reminds us of crisp early autumn days in New York. To be walking amid nature just as the leaves are turning in your own city is truly magical. We are so incredibly lucky to live in London. Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate when you’re slogging through the Tube at rush hour, but when you enter one of our many parks you realise how green and special a place the capital is. The Heath feels quite superior and unique, a place where you can lose yourself wandering through the huge old beech trees.

At this time of year it’s also a wonderful place to go blackberry picking. We recently filled a few baskets with deliciously ripe berries, making sure to get the very plumpest and shiniest. We love them in the morning on top of porridge with cashew butter and honey, with meringues and whipped cream in an autumnal Eton mess or stewed into a coulis and poured over a stack of pancakes.

We made these little tartlets for a job recently. Tart bases like this are much more substantial than normal pastry, which can often be flavourless and soggy. Crunchiness is guaranteed thanks to the biscuits and almonds in these, both of which work very well with the lemony mascarpone and berries. You could also try making this into a big sharing tart by pressing the base into a big baking tin and setting in the fridge.

Makes 10

blackberry tartlet

For the base 100g flaked almonds 130g dark chocolate Hobnobs, roughly broken 120g unsalted butter Sea salt

Preheat the oven to 200C and toast the flaked almonds for 5-7 minutes, until golden, then blitz in a food processor until roughly chopped. Place in a mixing bowl. Blitz the Hobnobs to crumbs and add to the almonds. Melt the butter in a small pan over a low heat, then pour it over the almonds and biscuits and mix together with a pinch of sea salt.

Line a 12-hole tart tray with cling film, then press about 11/2 tbsp of base mixture into each hole, thinly spreading over the bottom and up the sides. Place in the fridge for two hours to set.

Whisk the filling ingredients together and fill each tartlet case almost to the rim. Top with whole blackberries and mint.

For the filling 250g mascarpone 1 tbsp Greek yoghurt Zest of 1 lemon 1 tbsp maple syrup 1 tsp vanilla paste To serve 2 punnets of blackberries 2 sprigs of mint, stalks removed

29.09.17 es magazine 51

In the MIX

FEAST

‘S Sager + Wilde

Cheap Mondays

Venture out at the start of the week and you can drink fine wine with your meal for a snip, says Frankie McCoy

D

Jonny Cochrane; Getty; glassware available at waterford.co.uk

rinking wine just makes every restaurant experience better. The food is more delicious, you are more fun and your companions seem more interesting. But all too often mark-ups make sinking a bottle with your rare breed steak prohibitively expensive, forcing you to either stick parsimoniously to one glass, eking out each sip until your Chardonnay is as warm as your soup, or go large and accept that you’ll be lunching on homemade cheese sandwiches until pay day.

the start of the week is also the thinking behind Hawksmoor’s £5 corkage fee on Mondays (compared with £25 on other days). It’s ‘a little life perk for the good guys who don’t give up easily on the weekend’, says Mark Quick, head of wine.

‘We find the calibre of customer willing to bring a nice bottle of plonk in for a Monday lunch to be of the highest level. Very interesting people.’ He recommends bringing friends to drink a magnum — or even jeroboam — with your chateaubriand “drink a magnum — or and creamed spinach, as that £5 applies to any size bottle. This is faultless logic, which even jeroboam — with should similarly be applied to the noyour chateaubriand” corkage Monday policy of Sager + Wilde However, there is a solution. Mondays. and the Quality Chop House, allowing you While weekend hedonists are at home to spend freely on the former’s delicious sipping repentant bone broth, some of ’nduja taglierini and the latter’s famous London’s top restaurants entice dedicated Barnsley lamb chops. winos with special Monday deals.

Then there’s Fitzrovia’s The Remedy, Merchants Tavern’s Monday Wine Club, for which saves you from stressing over the example, offers 50 per cent off a selection of Chablis options at the corner shop with its wines on its quiet day, with a different focus Monday Night Fever: 12 excellent wines each month — September has been all about that you can drink at shop prices every Greece, with rich, tannic Nemea and Monday over a plate of fabulous lardo. natural Assyrtiko all to be drunk half price.

Book a table though — owner David ‘It’s a great way to offer something more Clawson says that it’s often their busiest interesting and unusual, allowing night, when they welcome ‘a Corking: guests to be more adventurous delightful mix of winos from This Hawksmoor is a swathe without the risk of a big bill,’ all over’. So cancel your on Air Street points out general Netflix binge and put manager Derryn Nel. down the steamed Rewarding customers broccoli: Mondays are who dare venture out at the new wine days.

Douglas Blyde lunches with a lady who is crazy about cognac

he’s already drinking at the bar,’ says The Gilbert Scott’s hostess, directing me to Michelle Brachet. The self-billed ‘Crazy Cognac Lady’ raises a cool coupe of aromatic amber liquid. Devised by barkeeper Dav Eames, the ‘feather in the cap’ is an assertive cognac cocktail named after the feather logo of Frapin VSOP, blending salty sherry, fig and apricot.

‘People think cognac is prohibitively expensive and only for after dinner,’ says Brachet, savouring the mix that proves the spirit’s versatility.

Brachet is a self-proclaimed atypical ambassador of the drink, being ‘young, female and British’. Her love for the brandy of Charente in France’s southwest began in childhood when her father, Roy (the ‘fastest Linotype operator at the Evening Standard’), allowed her to dip a digit into his Christmas ‘Hine’. The resulting ‘waves of flavour’ made her heart go ‘boom, boom, boom…’.

Over our cognac-rinsed lunch, Brachet, a former Porsche 911 driver and bobsleigh champion, reveals a love of speed, which seems at odds given her muse demands time to take on complexity. ‘The trick of tasting is to take it gentle, slow, which reflects how it was made,’ she says.

Brachet pours super savoury, single vineyard, pulsating, pinnacle Fontpinot XO (£104.78, masterofmalt.com) alongside Marcus Wareing’s supple sousvide duck. ‘You hardly need drink it because its smell lasts forever.’ Clearly enraptured, she recalls another standout lunch at Oxford’s Restaurant Elizabeth (RIP). ‘I won a bet on the Grand National and spent the winnings on chateaubriand steak and three crème brûlées.’

I ask her to sign her big book, The World of Cognac (£25, quillerpublishing. com), five years in the making. The cover shows neat, copita-like glasses, not grand cognac balloons. ‘The balloon is a bane!

Smaller, tulip-shaped glasses release aromas in a more controlled manner. In fact, I’d like to declare a “smash the snifter” campaign!’

29.09.17 es magazine 53

HOMEWORK

Wallpaper* editor-in-chief Tony Chambers on a regeneration project with design at its heart, light metal tables and an artistic stroll through St James’s

THE BUILDING

up :W

Opening this month, One Tower Bridge is a development on the Thames masterplanned by local architects Squire & Partners. Amid its low-slung, limestoneclad residential buildings and one 20-storey tower is Haworth Tompkins’ Bridge Theatre, where the London Theatre Company debuts on 18 October with Young Marx. The development also brings a crop of new eateries including the latest Ivy outpost, Brighton seafood and steak joint The Coal Shed and an eponymous restaurant by top Welsh chef Tom Simmons. (squireandpartners.com) mi on

a rk nP

i ng

T

hough a couple of decades from completion, Greenwich Peninsula is already shaping up to be one of London’s most fascinating future neighbourhoods. A gargantuan 150 acres, it has that winning combination of generous public space (including miles of river frontage), forward-looking architecture (Santiago Calatrava’s landmark Peninsula Place is in the works, as are five prism-like residential towers by Skidmore Owings & Merrill) and audacious art (Conrad Shawcross’ The Optic Cloak, rising above the area’s energy centre).

Most importantly, Greenwich Peninsula’s developer, Knight Dragon, recognises that regeneration projects of this nature often spell bad news for the creative industries, which find themselves quickly priced out by the influx of commercial enterprises. So it made a counter move, dedicating 2.67 acres of land at the heart of the peninsula to a design district, the first of its kind in London and hopefully a harbinger of better urban planning in our city’s future.

S ha p

Greenwich time

Chris Floyd; Alamy

“In an era of cookie-cutter commercial towers, this comes as a breath of fresh air” The Design District (due for completion in 2020) will offer a permanent base for more than 1,500 creatives at tiered, affordable rents, starting at £10 per square foot. The pedestrianised space (left) will have artists’ studios and flexible workspaces spread across 16 buildings, including a transparent market hall by Spanish architects SelgasCano, which created Second Home Spitalfields as well as the rainbow-hued 2015 Serpentine Pavilion.

There will be ample rooftop terraces and public squares, by Copenhagen-based landscape consultants Schulze + Grassov.

Seven other highly respected architectural practices have been enlisted to work on the project: Assemblage, Architecture 00, Adam Khan, David Kohn, Mole, 6a and Barozzi Veiga. Designing independently of each other, they will produce a riot of colour and form that serves as an apt metaphor for London’s creative landscape.

As Knight Dragon’s vice-chairman, Sammy Lee, puts it, Greenwich Peninsula Design District is ‘designed by creatives for creatives’. In an era dominated by starchitectbuilt company campuses and cookie-cutter commercial towers, this comes as a breath of fresh air. Against the currents of gentrification and commercialisation, the district will go far to keep London creative. (greenwichpeninsula.co.uk)

THE PERSON

South Korean-born, Eindhoven-trained designer Wonmin Park made his name in 2012 with Haze, an ethereal furniture range made of translucent slabs of resin.

Now he is again busting the boundaries of material with Plain Cuts, a series of aluminium tables with a lightness and grace that is rarely seen in metal. They will be shown at PAD London from 2-8 October, before a solo show at the Paris gallery from 12 October. (wonminpark.com)

THE TECH

The BeoVision Eclipse, by Danish designer Torsten Valeur, is that rare beast of a TV that combines sculptural form with cutting-edge functionality. A black glass screen cuts through a curved band of anodised aluminium, the TV’s self-lighting OLED pixels can turn on and off individually to create virtually infinite contrast levels, while the soundbar below the screen can connect with up to eight speakers. From £8,290 (bang-olufsen.com)

THE EXPERIENCE

Celia with Green Plant by David Hockney at Sims Reed Gallery and, right, the ICA

On 19 and 21 October, Wallpaper* will be joining forces with the St James’s Crown Estate for a self-guided art and design tour, starting at the Royal Academy’s Academicians’ Room and ending at the newly renovated ICA. Highlights include Michael Craig-Martin’s drawings of modernist architecture at Alan Cristea, Catherine Opie’s portraits and landscapes at Thomas Dane and a group show exploring the decline of the postwar American dream at White Cube Mason’s Yard. (wallpaper.com; stjameslondon.co.uk)

29.09.17 es magazine 55

escape

Petal power: Phool Gulli

EDITED by dipal acharya

what to see

where to stay

Stay regal: The The Taj Hotels group continues Taj Mahal Palace, to grow its portofolio of and above luxury hotels in the city — its sleek Santa Cruz outpost is the latest opening — but the original grand dame of the city is still The Taj Mahal Palace in Colaba (the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge joined its starry roster of former guests last year).

Opt for a room in the original palace wing, a neo-gothic delight. On a budget? In terms of boutique hotels, ABODE strikes the perfect balance between hipster-worthy colonial interiors and modern conveniences.

Breakfast club: Abode hotel

mumbai’s the word

Traces of old Bombay may still exist in this sprawling metropolis, but India’s original ‘City of Dreams’ is now so much more than that. From trendy designers and boutique hotels to a restaurant opening worthy of the world’s 50 best, welcome to 21st-century Mumbai

Not your usual tourist attraction but Dhobi Ghat is the world’s largest open air laundromat, and the dhobi’s (washers) are as much a part of the fabric of Mumbai as the dabbawallas — the tiffin men (right). Catch the latter in action at the iconic Churchgate station come lunchtime.

And for pure Insta-fodder, Phool Gulli flower market — awash with baskets of fragrant jasmine and orange marigolds — has it all.

Where to shop

mumbai’s coolest neighbourhoods 1. CHOWPATTY BEACH (left) comes alive on Saturday night and is a short hop from Marine Drive.

Getty; Tom Parker; Alamy

2. KALA GHODA is the unofficial arts district, with galleries galore.

3. MALABAR HILL, a chi-chi neighbourbood that’s great for mansion spotting.

4. COLABA (right) is the old British quarter.

5. BANDRA is the place to find Bollywood stars in their natural habitat.

6. JUHU (left) has buzzing bars, beaches and soon — rumour has it — a Soho House.

Le Mill — this smart multibrand boutique is great for young Indian and international designers.

Gem Palace — the divine new outpost (below) from Jaipur jeweller Sid Kasliwal, with knockout interiors to boot.

Bungalow 8 — in a new home at Wankhede cricket stadium and arguably the city’s best lifestyle store.

Sabyasachi — the master craftsman from Calcutta when it comes to contemporary Indian fashion. Christian Louboutin is a fan.

Bombay Perfumery — clean, minimalist scents from this hip new perfumer. Think Byredo, but better.

Bowl foods: Bombay Canteen

Where to eat

At Bombay Canteen, arguably the city’s most buzzworthy recent opening, you’ll find small plates (chicken tikka tacos anyone?) and cosy all day dining. Fans of Dishoom should visit Yazdani Bakery. Unchanged since 1953, it’s one of the original Iranian cafés and its brun maskas (hard buttered croissants) are superlative. You can’t come to Mumbai and not sample the worldfamous street food. Elco Market, in Bandra West, does all the classics — from pani puri to mountains of masala chaat.

getting there

A week’s tour to Mumbai with Greaves India costs from £1,555 per person, including flights, accommodation, transfers and walking tours. (greavesindia.co.uk)

my london

salman rushdie as told to dipal acharya

Home is…

New York.

What would you do if you were Mayor for the day?

Consider holding a London referendum about seceding from the UK and staying in Europe.

Last play you saw?

I went to see Dreamgirls (above) at the Savoy Theatre at the end of July with June Sarpong, Kathy Lette and her son. I liked the first act much more than the second.

Where is the best place to let your hair down?

It would be nice to have hair to let down.

If you had to be locked in a building overnight, which would it be?

Buckingham Palace (above), but only if I could be Queen.

And yes, I’d bring a friend and we would totally rule.

Favourite shops?

The only London shops I’ve been to in the past several years are a) Harrods because I needed shoes and b) Selfridges because I managed to arrive in London without any pocket handkerchiefs — which I still old-fashionedly use and which aren’t easy to find.

Earliest London memory?

I arrived in January 1961. It was sunny and cold, and my father and I checked in at the Cumberland Hotel near Marble Arch. The nearby Odeon was showing The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s, and we went to see that and

58 es magazine 29.09.17

The author likes to drink vodka and tonic at the Savoy and idolises James Joyce had chocolate milkshakes (below) at a Lyons Corner House. I was 13 years old and on my way to boarding school.

Ever had a run-in with a policeman?

I have spent more of my life in the company of policemen than I ever expected. Many of them became my friends. So, no run-ins, no. I have however been on a number of occasions to the ‘Secret Policemen’s Ball’, actually an annual Special Branch party at Scotland Yard to which they invited all the people they protect or have

protected. At these parties, I met, among others, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Enoch Powell.

Favourite place for a nightcap?

The drink would either be vodka and tonic or bourbon on the rocks, depending on my mood. Maybe in the bar at the Savoy (left).

Biggest extravagance?

Never flying coach.

What are you up to at the moment?

Answering questions about my new novel and wondering what on earth to write next.

Best thing a cabbie has said to you?

‘Get out of the cab. Now!’ This was back in the early 1970s in Soho. When I got out, he zoomed off down the street and screeched to a halt beside an elegant lady and a man in a wheelchair. It was Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona. I understood the cabbie’s point of view completely.

Who’s your hero?

I love James Joyce (right) for doing everything better than everyone else.

From Joyce you learn humility.

He’s always going to be better than you.

‘The Golden House’ by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape, £18.99) is out now

Getty; Alamy

Best place for a first date?

Somewhere that I didn’t tell the Evening Standard about.

Who do you call when you want to have fun?

Lady Antonia Fraser, the most enjoyable lunch companion I know.