AIR Magazine - Nasjet - January'21

JANUARY 2021

MARIA GRAZIA CHIURI

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Contents

AIR

JANUARY 2021: ISSUE 112

FEATURES Thirty Two

Ave Maria Lisa Armstrong meets Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior’s first female creative director who has transformed the house.

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Forty

Keeping Up With The Jones Felicity Jones on falling pregnant while filming and George Clooney’s reaction.

Forty Six

Fifty Two

How Audrey Hepburn’s beautifully clothed characters prompted her enduring influence on modern style.

Designer Kris Van Assche details how he has helped storied shoemaker Berluti step into the 21st century.

Power Dressing

Best Foot Forward

Contents

JANUARY 2021: ISSUE 112

REGULARS Fourteen

Radar

Sixteen

Objects of Desire Eighteen

Critique Twenty

Art & Design EDITORIAL

Twenty Four

Timepieces

Chief Creative Officer

Fifty Eight

john@hotmedia.me

John Thatcher

Motoring

ART

Sixty Two

Art Director

Gastronomy

Kerri Bennett

AIR

Sixty Six

Illustration

Journeys

by Jet

Leona Beth

COMMERCIAL

Sixty Eight

Managing Director

What I Know Now

Victoria Thatcher General Manager

David Wade

david@hotmedia.me

PRODUCTION Digital Media Manager

Muthu Kumar Twenty Eight

Jewellery

Tiffany & Co.’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Anisa Kamadoli Costa, roadmaps the company’s drive toward sustainability.

Tel: 00971 4 364 2876 Fax: 00971 4 369 7494 Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from HOT Media is strictly prohibited.

HOT Media does not accept liability for any omissions or errors in AIR.

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NasJet JANUARY 2021: ISSUE 112

NasJet is the first private charter company in Saudi Arabia, providing bespoke aviation services for discerning clients and institutions since 1999. Currently, the company manages and supports in excess of 18 fixed-wing aircraft, making us the largest and most experienced private jet operator in the region with a fleet insured value exceeding $2 billion.

NasJet, part of NAS Holding, employs 1,400 in-house aviation industry experts, operating 24/7 from our state-of-the-art flight centre in Riyadh and across the world, delivering a superior level of safety, service and value. At NasJet we have the expertise and international experience to operate corporate aircraft worldwide. Every hour of every day, we are moving planes, crews and inventory across continents. We give you peace of mind when it comes to our commercial operations. As a Saudi company we are backed by some of the most prominent shareholders in the world. We are established.

On our Air Operator Certificate (AOC), NasJet currently operates:

Welcome Onboard JANUARY 2021

• Cessna Citation Excel, which can seat 6 passengers and fly for up to 3 hours non-stop • Embraer Legacy 600, which can seat 10 passengers and fly for up to 6 hours non-stop • Gulfstream GIV-SP and G450 Aircraft, which can seat 13-14 passengers and fly for up to 8 hours non-stop • Gulfstream G650, which can seat 15 passengers and fly for up to 15 hours non-stop • Airbus 318ACJ, which can seat 19-23 passengers and fly for up to 8 hours non-stop • Boeing Business Jet (B737-900), which can seat 38 passengers and fly for up to 9 hours non-stop • Boeing 767, which can seat up to 44 passengers and fly for up to 14 hours non-stop • Airbus A319, which can seat up to 32 passengers and fly for up to 8 hours non-stop • Falcon 900, which can seat up to 12 passengers and fly for up to 9 hours non-stop NasJet is pleased to offer the following services: • Aircraft Purchase and Sales. We have aircraft available for sale and management, or we can manage the purchase or sale of other aircraft.

• Aircraft Acquisition, Acceptance, Completion and Delivery. We can find you the new aircraft that suits your needs, customise it to your liking, monitor the build of the aircraft at the manufacturer, and supervise the final delivery process to ensure a smooth and rewarding private aircraft experience.

• Aircraft Management. In this role we are responsible for your aircraft from all aspects to grant you the highest safety standards, the best service, and the most economical management solutions.

• Block Charter. We provide you with charter solutions sold in bulk at discounted rates.

• Ad-Hoc Charter. We can serve your charter needs on demand, where and when you need us.

NasJet has established itself as the first to market our Private and Commercial AOC Services. We welcome the opportunity to serve you, and look forward to seeing you aboard one of our private jets.

Captain Mohammed Al Gabbas Chief Commercial Officer Cover: Maria Grazia Chiuri © Alique, courtesy of Christian Dior

Contact Details: nasjet.com.sa / +966 11 261 1199 / sales@nasjet.com 9

NasJet JANUARY 2021: ISSUE 112

NasJet Adds To Fleet Company adds an Airbus A319 and the Falcon 900 NasJet has added two new aircraft models to its fleet - the Airbus A319 and the Falcon 900.

Chief Commercial Officer of NasJet, Captain Mohammed Alqabbas, said this step complements the operational expansion strategy adopted by NasJet seeking to promote and enhance its offerings to clients from both the public and private sectors.

Alqabbas outlined the features of the newly acquired aircraft models, where the Airbus A319 boasts a high operational efficiency with eight hours of flight time and a spacious cabin with capacity for 30 people, while the Falcon 900 enjoys advanced capabilities and features, a flight time of nine hours, an array of entertainment and comfort features, and a capacity for 12 passengers.

Furthermore, Alqabbas reiterated NasJet’s aspirations and efforts to enhance its position within the Middle East’s private aviation sector through offering updated and comprehensive aviation services that include aircraft sales and preparations, consultations, aircraft management, operational support for flights, technical support, and private jet maintenance.

Knowledge Exchange

Image: NasJet has added new aircrafts to its luxury fleet.

NasJet updates leading industry influencers on its operations, plus KSA market developments

NasJet was once again honoured to partake in Corporate Jet Investor Dubai: a conference which attracts a prestigious cross-section of industry movers, shakers and decisionmakers.

The fourth iteration of the event, hosted by The Ritz-Carlton, Dubai, was an opportunity to examine the realities of managing and operating aircraft in the Middle East – while time was also dedicated to discussing matters affecting neighbouring markets.

The midday session served as an opportunity for speakers Captain Mohammed Al Gabbas (NasJet’s CCO ) and Yosef Hafiz (NasJet VP) to take to the stage and provide delegates with a pulse check of 10

both NasJet’s business focus, and of the wider Saudi Arabian private jet landscape – including a timely update on GACA’s newlyimplemented rules and regulations.

“It’s safe to say that, this time last year, people were sceptical of the new GACA Rules and Regulations,” said Hafiz.

“Observers openly wondered how GACA was going to regulate other aircraft that are not registered in Saudi Arabia.”

Said rules came into full effect as of 1 January 2019, and require all aircraft owners – regardless of where they are registered – to be on a Private Operators Certificate (under Part 125) or on a commercial Air Operator

Certificate (under 121 Special Unscheduled).

“GACA has taken a strong stance against aircraft owners and operators, they put their foot down, and did not offer an extension beyond the 1st January deadline,” admits Hafiz. “But they needed to regulate the market, as there were a lot of savvy owners managing an aircraft on their own, with the pilot, and they weren’t doing a good job. There’s been a pushback from some of the aircraft owners but eventually, they are all going to have to comply. They will all have to find an AOC holder, an OC holder, who can maintain their aircraft for them.

It’s predominantly about safety.”

A positive impact is that the ‘grey market’ (where private aircraft owners

NasJet JANUARY 2021: ISSUE 112

For us – as with other operators in Saudi Arabia – aircraft management is where the future lies

conduct illegal charter flights without an AOC), is almost eliminated in Saudi Arabia,” says Hafiz. “It’s almost nil.

We are seeing less and less grey market charter, which was a big issue for management companies in KSA. Cabotage [the transport of cargo or passengers from one destination to another, for a fee, within the same country] has been eliminated completely. Anybody who wants to fly domestically has to be with a Saudi company that has an AOC or an OC in Saudi Arabia.”

From a NasJet-centric aspect, Captain Al Gabbas spoke of the previous 12 months as being, “The best year since we started the business – and there’s a couple of reasons behind that. We merged some services with our sister company FlyNas – so maintenance and operations became one department – and we also decided to 12

remove five Fokker aircraft, which were not needed because there was not enough demand in Saudi Arabia.”

The selling is no surprise, being in line with NasJet’s shift of focus to aircraft management.

Says Hafiz, “For us – as with other operators in Saudi Arabia – aircraft management is where the future lies. As a company we used to do fractional ownership; we used to do ad hoc charter; we used to own the assets. That doesn’t work. It’s not about owning the asset; we’ve learned that over the last 20 years of business. The changes that we have made have shown positive results for us as a company. Our future lies in consolidating all the efforts we have to manage aircraft in Saudi Arabia.”

The captain added, “There are good margins for us there and it’s our core business – we do supplement that

with charter, and a lot of the aircraft that we operate are on a Commercial AOC, so there’s a high demand for charter flights, especially from the government sector. That helps our aircraft owners offset some of the cost.”

Casting an eye to the future, Captain Al Gabbas was direct about his optimism for NasJet operations. Hafiz provided the colour commentary, saying, “The need for jet owners to have an AOC or OC registration has meant that competition among aircraft management companies in Saudi Arabia has continued to rise.

This demand has led to aircraft owners seeking providers who can provide them with a better level of service – which has led ultra-high net worth individuals (UHNWI) directly to NasJet’s doorstep.”

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Radar JANUARY 2021: ISSUE 112

Chanel, published by Assouline, available now assouline.com

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Image credit: © Ed Feingersh/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

AIR

The heavyweight impact of Gabrielle Chanel on style is perfectly illustrated by this triple-decker tome. An homage to house’s heritage, this slipcase set from Assouline includes three volumes: Chanel Fashion, Chanel Jewelry And Watches, and Chanel Fragrance And Beauty. It’s the latter which contains the story of the most famous scent of all, Chanel N°5, which will forever be intrinsically linked with screen siren Marilyn Monroe, who served as the perfume’s brand ambassador in advertising campaign’s such as this from 1955.

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

OBJECTS OF DESIRE

Master craftsmanship, effortless style and timeless appeal; this month’s must-haves and collectibles

OB JECTS OF DESIRE

RICHARD MILLE

R M 7 1 - 0 2 A U T O M AT I C T O U R B I L L O N TA L I S M A N Glitter balls abound as Richard Mille struts back into the 70s to find inspiration for its latest eye-grabbing timepiece. Two years on from the black and white hues of the RM 71-01, the misery of 2020 is washed away in an ocean of colour as CĂŠcile Guenat, Creative

and Development Director at Richard Mille, celebrates the era that birthed electronic and disco sounds and legendary nightclubs like Studio 54. It’s imbued in a collection of ten models, each presented in a limited edition of 7 pieces.

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

GARR ARD

FA N FA R E E A R C L I M B E R S An exquisitely feminine interpretation of the fans worn by ladies at the grand opera masquerade balls that were the height of fashion in 1735 (the year in which Garrard was founded), modern, stylised Fanfare jewels dance with brilliance upon

a captivating pendant and ear climbers.

Comprised of two delicate parts worn in front and behind the ear, the design of these 18-carat rose gold ear climbers sees them overlap to form a three-dimensional diamond and mother-of-pearl fan.

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

MIU MIU

U P CYCLED Miu Miu creatives have scoured vintage stores and markets across the globe to unearth fabulous fashion finds from the 30s through to the 80s. The reason? To upcycle them with signature Miu Miu embroideries and embellishments and offer a strictly limited

selection of 80 one-off and numbered designs, each completed by hand. Among them is this 1960s embroidered coral red crepe day dress, customised with a contrasting black crepe panel and white collar; available at Miu Miu Hong Kong.

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

HERMÈS

ARCE AU LIF T TOURBILLON RÉPÉ TITION MINUTES A one-of-a-kind model in rose or white gold, the profile of a horse – cut to follow the curve of the dial and to reveal the tourbillon and minute-repeater movements – is the distinctive mark of this extraordinary timepiece. Another

overt nod to the heritage of the house appears via the design of the tourbillon carriage and barrel bridge, which invoke the wrought ironwork on the entrance, railings and staircase at the boutique on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

DUNHILL

EYEWEAR Harping back to British style icons from the 70s and 80s for inspiration – though very much an example of contemporary craftmanship – the new Dunhill eyewear collection comprises acetate frames defined by oversized shapes, a vintage aesthetic, and

a refined finish. Available in colours which range from bold to muted, you’ll find the Dunhill logo both on the left-side lens and on the discreet plaques on the temples, while the design of the hinges is reminiscent of the lock closures on particular Dunhill bags.

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

BENTLEY

BENTLEY MULLINER BLOWER crafted from the design drawings and tooling jigs used for the original four Blowers built and raced by Sir Henry ‘Tim’ Birkin in the late 1920s. To create Car Zero, every single component was laser-scanned as part of a wheels-up, sympathetic restoration.

After 40,000 hours of work, Bentley Mulliner has completed the first new Bentley Blower in 90 years, with the delivery of Car Zero – the prototype car for the Blower Continuation Series which will eventually total a highly exclusive run of just 12 cars, each

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

A. LANGE & SÖHNE

S A X O N I A O U T S I Z E D AT E First presented in 2018 in two versions, the Saxonia Outsize Date has added a further two iterations – in pink gold and white gold – to its ranks, both resplendent in a new argenté-coloured dial. Minimalist in design, the vivid dial sees the outsized date

positioned at 12 o’clock and counterbalanced by the subsidiary seconds dial positioned at 6 o’clock. Baton indices are applied in solid gold. The classic design follows through to the proportions of the 38.5mm, exquisitely finished case.

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OBJECTS OF DESIRE

Critique JANUARY 2021: ISSUE 112

Books

AIR

T

he Authenticity Project, by Clare Pooley, tells the story of lonely artist Julian Jessop who, of the belief that people are never truly honest with one another, decides to put his theory to the test. He writes his true feelings in a journal and leaves it in a café for others to read and add to.

Before long, the journal finds its way into different hands in myriad locations, its pages full of honest tales, “A well-suited subject for the Instagram era, this book makes you realise that no one’s life is what it seems,” says Good Morning America, while Kirkus Reviews calls it, “An enjoyable, cozy novel that touches on tough topics.”

Author Sophie Kinsella was also enthused: “I loved that it has such an intriguing premise, wonderful characters and is utterly truthful about the lies that we all tell. It’s a clever, uplifting book that entertains and makes you think.” As was fellow scribe Mike Gayle, who hailed the book as, “Beautifully written, thought provoking, and uplifting, The Authenticity Project is a warm and endearing tale about truth, friendship and the power

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of connection. Pooley’s characters will stay with you long after you turn the final page. It was a joy to read.”

David Chang (the chef behind Momofuku and star of Netflix’s Ugly Delicious), has released a memoir, Eat A Peach. It’s an intimate account of how he made it as a chef, and the many lessons learned along the way, chiefly, that that success can be much harder to understand than failure.

“David Chang is one of the world’s most creative chefs, but it wasn’t obvious he would become that. I was absolutely enthralled by his underdog story, which he tells with passion, humour, and skill.

Don’t miss this incredible memoir!” recommends Brian Grazer in the New York Times. Writing for the same paper, bestselling author Adam Grant was also a fan of Chang’s work, “David Chang is one of the most beloved chefs on earth, but his inspiring memoir is not just for foodies. He’s one of the most audaciously openhearted and honest humans you’ll ever find. This book is for anyone who has ever felt like an underdog or an underachiever – or aspires to become an entrepreneur or

a more decent person.” The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, says that, “With humour, pathos and heaping spoonsful of self-deprecation, Mr. Chang covers the ins and outs, the fires and floods, that come with running a restaurant – while constantly questioning his place in the constellation of celebrity chefs.”

A long-running feud between the owners of fried chicken outlets in a tiny Kansas town is the premise for The Chicken Sisters, by KJ Dell’Antonia.

“A charming first novel about family, regrets, and second chances.

Dell’Antonia deftly deals with issues of mental illness, marriage troubles, and dreams deferred, all the while telling a funny satire of reality TV. An utter delight from start to finish,” reckons Booklist.

Also writing in praise of the debut novel is fellow author Laura Zigman.

“Nobody knows the humor and pathos of complicated family relationships better than K.J. Dell’Antonia, which is why this story about sisters and fried chicken and reality TV is such a satisfying read. It’s like the comfortfood of novels: warm, memorable, and wholly original. I loved it.”

Critique JANUARY 2021: ISSUE 112

Art

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Tracey Emin, More Solitude, 2014. Neon, Edition 2/10, 30.6 x 115 cm. Collection of Michelle Kennedy and Richard Tyler © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2020j

s the new President of the United States takes office, Washington’s Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery turns its gaze toward the First Ladies.

Through the use of portraiture, Every Eye Is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States, aims to shed light on the stories and personalities of each sitter, focusing on their challenges and accomplishments. Writing for Forbes, Stephen Rabimov was drawn to two portraits in particular. “Nancy Reagan passed away in 2016, leaving behind a legacy of public service and charitable work. She is especially famous as a style icon, who borrowed some of Jackie Kennedy’s favourites, such as classic wool suits, pearls and sleek coats, but made it all her own. [Aaron] Shikler’s stunning painting truly reflects Reagan’s combination of Washington elegance, Hollywood glamor, and that iconic red dress,” he enthuses.

“Baltimore-based artist Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama is equally intriguing. It is a life-size image of the first African-American First Lady in a sleeveless gown designed by American

designer Michelle Smith for Milly.

Obama’s towering figure, in a reflective pose similar to Rodin’s Thinker, sits on top of cascading rainbow-hued pleats set against a solid blue background.

Sherald used greyscale instead of browns when painting Michelle’s skin, making her look dreamlike…The image seems nostalgic yet ultramodern.”

While the gallery remains closed, all the portraits featured in the exhibition can be viewed at firstladies.si.edu.

London’s Royal Academy is currently showing Tracey Emin/Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul, a study of the artists’ signature styles. “The static solipsism of Munch’s figures emphasises the more frantic energy and neurotic lines of Emin’s painting,” writes Tim Adams in The Observer. “If the psychological pain Munch tried to dramatise lay in being one step removed from the self-absorption of his women, Emin is only ever inside her figures. In paintings such as Because You Left and This Is Life Without You – You Made Me Feel Like This, in which pale reclining nudes are smeared with the crimson

of Emin’s aborted past, the urgency of the solitude and abandonment makes Munch look almost tame or reserved.”

Awarding the show a full five stars, The Times’ Rachel Campbell-Johnston notes that, “The most evocative works by Munch are not necessarily the most famous. Study the quietest instead: his watercolour sketches of nude women, hunched, huddled and slumped, often on a bed that (as so famously with Emin) doubles up as a stage on which a damaged life is played out. Munch picks out their bodies in the colours of a bruise.

“Emin’s contemporary counterparts have an analogous power: their forms are smashed, scrawled and clotted.

Bodies are veiled with paint dribbles, drenched in floods of colour, defaced with scratches like scars. These are less paintings about feelings than paintings that you actually feel. To step into this show is to walk straight into your own dark inner world.”

The exhibition shows until February 28, 2021.

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AIR

Art & Design JANUARY 2021:ISSUE 112

L

Standing Tall Why Marc Standing’s colourful journey ensures a bright start for London’s hip new gallery

WORDS : CARU SANDERS

ike many of his surrealist forefathers, artist Marc Standing has used dreams, the subconscious and a stream of consciousness to create his art.

Dreamlike scenes in pastel hues complete with painted collagelike layers render the works both disquieting and inviting, while beckoning the viewer to explore the fantastical elements at play.

Originally from Zimbabwe, Standing spent his childhood and youth among the dramatic landscapes and wildlife of southern Africa, influences that find their way into the visuals of his work today. He describes his childhood there as sun-drenched, idyllic, and says that he knew he was going to be an artist from the get go.

With no other career fallback plans to distract him, Standing studied painting at the University of Cape Town. In 2001, his emigrated with his family to Australia, swapping one sunshine coastline for another. Standing notes that while the natural world and the emotional imprint of his memories and upbringing in Africa featured in the tonal palette of his earlier works, he has personally felt disconnected from a sense of home. “Having said that, when I visited Uganda a few years ago, I did feel a very real sense of connection of being back on my home continent,” he explains.

The through line of his entire body of work can be seen as a representation of influences garnered from his travels, of the experience of a place, the quality of light, the shifts in the weather – all underpinned in a search for identity. Over time, Standing has also experimented with sculpture, silkscreen and textiles, though his current body of work is concerned with collage-like layered painting, colour, print and mark making.

Though Australia never felt like home, it did find its way into his work, channeled through an interest in Aboriginal culture, as well as the history of the continent. Standing found success there fairly quickly, finding galleries to represent him in Sydney and Melbourne, though he found the art scene to be somewhat insular. He discovered this when he decided to leave Sydney for Hong Kong and was informed by his galleries 21

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that it would be a challenge to work with him if he moved to a different continent. “Artists aren’t really encouraged to leave and move back.”

The trajectory of an artist with wanderlust is an exciting one, though not altogether painless: “Every new place you go to, you have to start again and find a new network to sell your work to,” Standing notes. Even so, he felt compelled to move to Hong Kong, arriving there when the territory was experiencing a very real sense of momentum as an artistic destination.

Hong Kong had begun to attract global attention when Art HK, which was later branded Art Basel Hong Kong, opened in 2008 to drive this evolution.

Today, it’s a regional ecosystem for blockbuster shows in the Far East and interest in collecting art has grown in tandem with the rising level of wealth in pockets of Asia and the emergence of a more affluent middle class.

Finding himself in the midst of another place with a distinctive British colonial history, it was the light that seduced him along with the smorgasbord of pastel-coloured buildings, all of which helped steer his compositions in a new artistic and pictorial direction. “Hong Kong is so colourful,” he exclaims by way of explanation for his current pastel pallet, the vibrant visuals forming the colourful language within his art. “I don’t think people realise what a beautifully coloured city it is, how bold. People paint their walls bright pink and blue.”

Standing has completed residencies in the Philippines, Mexico, India, the Maldives and Shanghai, each place informing his practice. “Every place I go to has an impact. In India, I worked with a miniature painter, in Mexico, a paper mache artist.” His travels, the natural world, the iconic urban ‘rainbow’ building in Hong Kong, the resplendent corals of the Maldives, and traditional cultural practices all find their way as motifs and colour scapes to become in his words, “a painting, within a painting, within a painting.”

His paintings are meditative – he often works on a series of six or seven at a time. Every mark that goes down informs the outcome, regardless of whether this is seen in the final piece or not. “Themes concerning 22

displacement, identity and mortality run through a lot of my work. Having moved around in my life, I have always been interested in how we identity ourselves within a heightened age of globalisation,” says Standing.

Standing travelled extensively while living in Asia, to the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and India. After nearly two decades as a rolling stone, he was finally ready to gather some moss. In 2018, he moved to London to settle there. Familiar with the sense of adventure and disconcertment of moving alone to a new country, Standing had turned 40 and felt that it was ‘now or never.’

His pre-covid existence in London was a whirl of social gatherings and art openings, until March 2020 forced him, like everyone, to take a step back.

He focussed on what he wanted to paint without worrying about representation or collectors. While the whole world was rocked by the pandemic, it has allowed us – he reasons – to step into a new groove. “We were distracted for a very long time,” he says. “I think

‘I’m almost told ‘what the image will

be. It’s kind of magic

’

it’s important that we recalibrate and look closely at things.”

While Standing focussed on his work, a gallery found him. Serena Dunn, the artistic director of London’s newly opened Grove Square Galleries, reached out and invited Standing to showcase his work alongside four other international talents – Orlanda Broom, Crystal Fischetti, Elena Gual, and Harry Rüdham – in an exhibition titled The Colour of Abstraction: New Ways of Seeing, which features bold new paintings and mixed media works created especially for the exhibition, each artist celebrating colour and joy in what has become an uncertain, confined and somewhat beige world.

“I feel like artists are shamans in a way, and the paintings conjure up their own story for you to tell,” says Standing. “That happens a lot with my practise – images will start appearing, so I’m almost told what the image will be. It’s kind of magic.”

The Colour of Abstraction: New Ways of Seeing will run until January 22 grovesquaregalleries.com 23

Timepieces

JANUARY 2021: ISSUE 112

Time In Office With Joe Biden due to take up residency in The White House this month, now is the perfect time to to look back on the standout watches that have seen some of America’s Presidents through their time in office WORDS: ALAN SEYMOUR

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resident Biden’s watches reflect his ‘everyman’ (albeit a well-to-do one) approach to politics. He’s been seen wearing a Tissot T-Touch, a two-tone Seiko Chronograph, an Omega Seamaster, and an Omega Speedmaster that received considerable attention after he wore it during a 2017 InStyle magazine interview and photoshoot.

Biden is also known to sport a Vulcain Cricket alarm watch. Somewhat of a presidential tradition, since Harry Truman in the 1940s, every subsequent US President has owned a Cricket – whether it has been a personal purchase or a commemorative gift, normally from Vulcain itself.

The man he evicted from The White House, Donald Trump (2016-2020), has a remarkably tasteful personal collection of timepieces – one that stands in stark contrast to the somewhat dubious Trump-branded watches previously retailed by the merchandise wing of his business.

Opting for a Vacheron Constantin Historiques Ultra-Fine 1968 for much of his time in the White House, including his 2016 election night, Trump has also been spotted with a Patek Phillipe Golden Ellipse and a Rolex Day-Date.

Interestingly, Trump was the winning bidder on one of fellow POTUS Ronald Reagan’s watches (a Colibri of London) at a watch-themed charity auction in 1995. An auction that also saw Trump offer his own Universal Geneve Senna Limited Edition for sale alongside the likes of Oprah Winfrey’s Breguet Marine and Tom Hanks’s Cartier Tank.

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Barack Obama’s (2009-2017) first noteworthy watch was a TAG Heuer Series 1500. It appears he wore the timepiece daily from his time as an Illinois State Senator right up until his 46th birthday in 2007 when he began wearing a Jorg Gray JG6500 chronograph. A gift from members of the Secret Service detail assigned to him during his Presidential campaign, Obama’s JG6500 features the Secret Service’s logo on the dial and is only available for purchase by members of the Service. Supplementing it with a number of digital sports/fitness watches from Fitbit and New Balance, Obama continued to wear his JG6500 throughout his time as president.

Some time after leaving the Oval Office, Obama upgraded his wristwear to a white-gold Rolex Cellini, wearing it for his post-Presidential portrait found hanging in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery.

Choosing a humble Timex Ironman for the majority of his time in office, Bill Clinton’s (1993-2001) watch story begins in earnest after his presidency. Retirement has seen Clinton emerge as a full-blown ‘watch guy’ sporting a range of highend pieces from Audemars Piguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Panerai, Rolex, A. Lange & Söhne, Vulcain (naturally), Cartier and many, many more.

Clinton has also been known to gift watches from Detroit-based watchmaker Shinola. A company he has lauded for its role in the revitalisation of its native city. In 2014 he stated: “I bought

14 of them myself… I just give them away and hope that I’ll make [Shinola] more customers.” Clinton himself has been spotted wearing at least three different Shinolas, including one he was gifted when touring the factory bearing the President’s seal on its dial.

Infamous for the Watergate scandal and his subsequent resignation, the standout watch associated with Richard Nixon (1969-1974) is one that he never actually owned. Celebrating Apollo 11’s successful 1969 moon landing, Omega created a limited edition of 1,014 yellow-gold Speedmasters (the steel version of which was the officially issued mission watch). The edition’s first 28 pieces were earmarked as commemorative gifts for those closely involved in the landing, with number ‘1’ meant for President Nixon and even engraved as such. However, Nixon was forced to decline the watch due to its high value and governmental gifting rules. Which, given his later disregard for the rules, was somewhat ironic.

One watch that did find its way into Nixon’s possession was, of course, the Vulcain Cricket. Presented to him after a speech to the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors whilst Vice President in 1955, Nixon praised it in a letter to Vulcain five years later saying, “it has given excellent service… and has served as my alarm clock around the world.”

President Lyndon Johnson (19631969) was apparently fond of watches with customised dials such as his Patek Philippe with the dial inscription, ‘Do

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Some time after leaving the Oval Office, Obama upgraded his wristwear to a whitegold Rolex Cellini

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rank of five-star General and serve as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during the Second World War. Eisenhower initially wore a US Army-issued Elgin ‘field watch’ but eventually gifted it to his aide Sgt. Michael ‘Mickey’ J. McKeogh – as recalled in the latter’s autobiography, Sgt Mickey and General Ike. McKeogh’s daughter later donated the watch to Pennsylvania’s Eisenhower National Historic Site where it remains to this day.

In due course, a yellow-gold Rolex Datejust on a Jubilee bracelet followed the Elgin. The Datejust in question was the 150,000th officially certified chronometer produced by Rolex and was given to Eisenhower in 1951 by the brand. As requested by Eisenhower, his initials were engraved on the bracelet’s clasp as well as the caseback along with five stars and the date he was appointed NATO Commander. Shortly before his death in 1969, Eisenhower gave the watch to his valet of nearly 30 years, Sgt. John A. Moaney.

During his Presidency, Eisenhower also wore a Vulcain Cricket, which, according to anecdote, once sounded

its alarm during a press conference he was giving on raising the tariff for Swiss imports. Amongst other watches (including pieces from Vacheron Constantin, Heuer, Patek Philippe and Longines), Eisenhower owned a unique Hamilton customised to feature portraits of his immediate family on the dial.

Harry Truman’s (1945-1953) watches were altogether more utilitarian than his predecessor’s. Befitting his former military career (having seen action during the First World War), a photograph of Truman taken during the 1950s sees him proudly sporting a Gallet Flying Officer chronograph on his wrist while standing in front of his presidential aircraft, Independence.

It is believed that it was, in fact, the then-Senator Truman who successfully lobbied for the Flying Officer to be issued to US Air Force pilots during the Second World War. Residing in the Harry Truman Presidential Library and Museum of Missouri, Truman’s Gallet is engraved ‘Col. Truman/From/ Vic/Paul’ identifying it as a gift from members of his Senatorial staff.

Truman was the first President to wear a Vulcain Cricket (it appears he owned several). His original piece was presented to him by the White House News Photographers Association in 1953 as a farewell from office. Bearing in mind its purchasers, the watch was humorously engraved ‘One more please’.

Widely regarded as one of America’s greatest statesmen, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) was instrumental in steering America out of the Great Depression and leading America to Allied victory during the dark days of the Second World War. It’s known that FDR owned at least three pocket watches; an Audemars Freres, last seen publicly when it was listed on eBay for $1.45m; an A. Frankfeld, currently in the collection of New York’s Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum; and a L. Leroy & Cie, sold by his eldest son via Sotheby’s in 1988.

As well as this trio, President Roosevelt also wore a yellow-gold Tiffany & Co. branded, Movadobuilt wristwatch. Said to be a gift from his son-in-law, Tiffany looked to this watch as inspiration for its 2015 CT60 collection.

Credit: @Alan Seymour / Telegraph Media Group Limited 2020

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unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ In 1964, he commissioned a run of Hamiltons with the same inscription, as well as his initials, to give as personal gifts. Another Cricket wearer, LBJ wrote to Vulcain in 1964: “I am deeply grateful for your kindness in preparing my Cricket wrist alarm watch.

I value it highly and feel somewhat less than dressed without it.” One of his Crickets (he owned several) is now in the collection of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Texas.

But the watch most associated with LBJ is the Rolex Day-Date – a yellow-gold version on a bracelet with semi-circular, three-piece links – which he was first spotted wearing in 1965.

There are no previous references to the term ‘President’s bracelet’, leading to speculation that Rolex actually christened the band in honour of President Johnson. Rolex adverts for the Day-Date from the period even proudly proclaimed it as “The president’s watch.” Rumour has it that Rolex soon began offering every POTUS a Day-Date on the namesake bracelet as a celebratory token.

One of the most charismatic individuals to take up residence in the White House, John F. Kennedy’s (1961-1963) known watches were all gifts – a Bulova from a female admirer in 1941, a Cartier from his wife Jackie in 1957, and a Nastrix from U.S. diplomat David Bruce and his wife Evangeline in 1963. Photographs show Kennedy regularly wearing a rectangularshaped Omega. Given to him in 1960 by his close friend and campaign-trail ally, Grant Stockdale, the watch was engraved with a message predicting his Presidency and today is housed in the Omega museum in Biel, Switzerland.

Also worthy of mention, is a Rolex Day-Date purported to be a gift from Marilyn Monroe with a personal engraving and an accompanying handwritten love poem, all of which sold at auction in 2005 for $120,000. Its provenance has been contested with the watch’s serial number seeming to date its production to 1965; two years after Kennedy’s assassination and three years after Monroe herself died.

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s (1953-1961) Oval Office years followed a glittering army tenure that saw him reach the

Opening pages: President Biden wears a Vulcain Cricket alarm watch These pages, from left to right: white-gold Rolex Cellini; postPresidential portrait of Barack Obama at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, in which he wears a Rolex Cellini

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Jewellery

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JANUARY 2021 : ISSUE 112

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Making A Difference Tiffany & Co.’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Anisa Kamadoli Costa, roadmaps the company’s drive toward sustainability WORDS: JOHN THATCHER

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ith great power there must also come great responsibility. And so it is that storied New York jewellery house Tiffany & Co. continues to reset the standard for sustainability practices within the industry.

In 2019 it became the first global luxury jeweller to provide the provenance of its individually registered diamonds (generally those 0.18 carats or larger). The bar for traceability was raised again at the tail end of last year, with the brand now able to detail the exact craftsmanship journey of those diamonds – from where they were responsibly sourced and subsequently sorted for size, colour and clarity, to where they were cut and polished (in addition to the U.S, Tiffany has workshops in Mauritius, Botswana, Vietnam, Cambodia and Belgium), 29

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graded, set, and finally placed into that iconic blue box. And as we enter a new year, so do the thoughts of Tiffany & Co.’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Anisa Kamadoli Costa, turn to writing the next chapter in a sub-story of the brand that dates to 1995. “That was when we first opposed irresponsible gold mining near Yellowstone National Park in the United States,” says Costa.

“Tiffany & Co. has a deep legacy of conserving the natural landscapes that provide the raw materials and the inspiration for so many of our creations,” continues Costa, who, prior to joining the brand, held positions in finance and private philanthropy.

“Almost two decades ago, we realised that our best means of ensuring a socially and environmentally responsible supply chain was to go above and beyond industry standards and control as much of our supply chain as possible. Today, we’re more vertically integrated than any other jeweller.”

Such commitment is, naturally, valued by Gen Z (a recent survey of that demographic found that nearly 80% prefer to buy from companies with a solid track record of implementing socially responsible policies), but it’s also the case that older generations with the budget to buy any brand will consider such differentials.

Through Tiffany’s commitment to traceability, it’s now possible to celebrate a romance that blossomed in Australia, say, with the purchase of a diamond mined in the country.

For clients, then, the attraction is obvious. Yet for Tiffany, diamond traceability is so much more than marketing. “The manner in which precious metals and diamonds are extracted is of the utmost importance,” states Costa. “The precious materials we use in our jewellery come from the Earth, and we care about the conditions where the materials are sourced, and products are crafted.

“While many jewellers buy only polished gems on the open market, Tiffany sources rough diamonds directly from responsible sources, cutting, polishing and setting many in 30

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It’s important to understand that change is much harder if we work alone

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our own workshops around the world.

This allows us to both meet our own superlative quality standards and ensure a safe and welcoming working environment for our artisans.

“By taking transparency to a new level, we reinforce our commitment to ensuring that every step in the journey of our diamonds can contribute to the wellbeing of people and the protection of the planet.”

Costa’s global outlook is informed by dovetailing her role as Tiffany’s CSO with that of CEO of the company’s foundation. “Balancing these two roles is about identifying where they intersect and the ways that corporate responsibility and strategic philanthropy complement each other. By leading both corporate sustainability and strategic philanthropy at Tiffany, I have different strategies to draw from when it comes to identifying solutions and finding partners for progress. Having a seat at both the company and the foundation tables allows my teams to drive more holistic, collaborative, and complementary solutions “As a business, we look for ways to make a positive impact in everything we do, everywhere we work – from sourcing our raw materials from responsible mines, to paying workers in our diamond workshops a living wage, to using sustainable paper in our iconic blue boxes and bags, to making smart investments in renewable energy and carbon-saving projects. As we look to the future, we know we can make a lasting, positive impact – on people and the planet – when we consider all of the issues holistically.

For Costa, being able to make a difference is key, though it’s something she knows must derive

from collaboration. “It’s important to understand that change is much harder if we work alone,” she informs. “It takes partnership between business, government, civil society, and individuals so we are able to accelerate the positive impact that we can have on consumerism on a global scale. More attention on our inter-dependencies – not just to each other but also to local communities and to the environment – could make a meaningful difference.

I also think it is important for companies to look across their business to ensure that they are not unintentionally working counter to their purposes, such as political spending being misaligned with positions on climate change or human rights.”

At Tiffany, looking across the business has led to the creation of a roadmap titled 2025 Sustainability Goals, which outlines the company’s priorities in that area for the coming years. “These commitments across our pillars of Product, People and Planet are based on the results of a robust assessment of Tiffany’s social and environmental impact and opportunities, developed in alignment with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals,” details Costa.

“Tiffany’s 2025 Sustainability Goals are also the result of extraordinary cross-functional collaboration, co-created with partnerships from teams across Tiffany. I am looking forward to all we will achieve in the upcoming years, guided by our goals.’

While looking forward, Costa also takes a moment to look back, proudly.

“Tiffany & Co. has long used the power of its voice and the Tiffany brand to speak out and raise awareness about critical issues of importance to us.

I am proud that we have been doing so for 25 years in a thoughtful manner.

“We believe that, ultimately, the jewellery industry can be a force for positive change.”

With an impassioned Costa driving such change within the industry, you can be sure that force will prove all powerful.

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AVE MARIA How Maria Grazia Chiuri transformed Dior

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WORDS:LISA ARMSTRONG

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f, at any point during the past four years, you’ve found yourself thinking that a superior denim jumpsuit might just be a new workwear solution, sighed over a swishy, calflength skirt, lusted after a kitten heel with a sewing-tape slingback or caught yourself wondering about the genesis of those ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ T-shirts, then you’ve been MGC’d.

The 56-year-old Maria Grazia Chiuri, who is responsible for all these much-copied ideas, has, against the odds, transformed Christian Dior from an illustrious label that sold plenty of bags and perfumes, into a powerhouse of relevant ideas about clothes, subverting ideas around status dressing and smartness in the process.

When she joined one of France’s most cherished brands, Maria Grazia knew immediately what to do with this ‘feminine’ French house, which, ironically, hadn’t had a female creative director in its 70-year history: make it genuinely women-friendly. ‘I wanted women to come to Dior for everyday items, not just for occasions or bags,’ she says in her plangent Italian accent.

It’s hard to square Dior’s current

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clout with the clouds that hung over it just five years ago when Maria Grazia took the top gig. John Galliano had spectacularly crashed and burnt in 2010 and his successor, Raf Simons, left after three years. Maria Grazia seemed oblivious to the ghouls watching the unfolding psychodrama. And it was intensely dramatic, given that she herself was leaving Pierpaolo Piccioli, her ‘work husband’ of 25 years, in Rome, where they’d worked their way to the top of Fendi and Valentino.

We’re on Zoom. Of course we are.

France has just gone into its second lockdown. Maria Grazia spent the first one with her two adult children Rachele and Niccolò, and her husband, another Paolo (Regini), at their apartment in Rome. This time, she and Rachele are in Paris. ‘It was basic,’ she says of those first weeks of March. ‘I had to go out and buy pens and paper so I could work in my apartment.’ But lockdown also gave her a welcome chance to reset. Until 2020, she had an insane schedule commuting between Paris and Rome, overseeing six collections a year and criss-crossing the globe.

She’s fully cognisant that a woman

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I’ve toned my clothes down in Paris.

In Rome, I can be more dramatic and whimsical

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Previous page: Maria Grazia Chiuri © Laura Sciacovelli This page: all images © Morgan O’Donovan Opposite: © Laura Sciacovelli

who shops at Dior for denim or T-shirts must have a far-from-everyday bank balance. But while she can clearly tap into the tastes and peccadillos of the super-rich, she understands what makes any wardrobe work – that mixture of stylish utilitarianism and wearable fantasy that can elevate your mood and the way the world views you.

Every so often she lights a cigarette and sips some black coffee. “A typical Italian,” she says ruefully. If you’re wondering what the woman with access to some of the most desirable clothes on the planet is wearing, today – and most days – it’s an impeccably cut navy jumper and denim, her hair slicked back into a ponytail. “I don’t know why, but I’m the only one in my family who looks permanently… creased.

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Paolo wears a suit every day, even in lockdown.” He is a successful tailor, I point out. “But me,” she continues, “I’m always discovering that I’ve left a vital bit of my outfit in another country.

That’s why I love simple uniforms.”

Sometimes the impeccable Paolo tells her she could scrub up a bit more. “I just say, Paolo, come on, it’s 2020.”

This is the same woman who laughed when her then-boss, Valentino, told her she was too old, at 32, to wear miniskirts. “He detested my baggy military jackets and combats. Once he said to me, ‘Tomorrow I want to see you in a dress and heels.’” Needless to say, he didn’t. And this is why she’s a heroine of modern fashion.

And also why it must have been completely maddening for her to read

reviews dismissing her early Dior collections as ‘too commercial’, as if making clothes women actually want to buy is a lesser talent than creating museum-worthy statements that never get worn. It’s not as if she didn’t already have a string of successes behind her. In the 1990s at Fendi, she and Piccioli worked on the Baguette bag that helped propel the company, in 1999, to a sale to LVMH and Prada reported to be worth around $850 million. At Valentino, they alchemised a ladies-who-lunch label into one of the hottest brands of the past decade.

What plenty saw as a minus – her age – Maria Grazia views as a major source of strength. “Fifty-two is very different from 32. You’re not so obsessed with what people think about your work.

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These pages, clockwise from top left: © Teresa Ciocia; © Morgan O’Donovan; © Lean Lui; © Laura Sciacovelli

You know you’re going to upset some people and that’s fine. I’m ready every day to retire. No problem,” she says.

I’m pretty sure she means it. I’m equally sure there was no way she wasn’t going to make it work – and that dying her naturally raven-dark hair creamy calico yellow at the age of 50 was partly to make herself look less ‘cosy’. With the indigo shadow that orbits her dark eyes and her knuckles full of rings, that’s a distinctive look she’s got going.

“Actually, I’ve toned my clothes down in Paris. In Rome, I can be more dramatic and whimsical. Here… well, for one thing, I’m always dressing for warmth.”

When I first met Maria Grazia around a decade ago, she was still at Valentino and barely spoke – not to journalists, at any rate. “Well, I literally couldn’t speak English,” she laughs. Even now, I can hear Rachele’s disembodied voice chipping in when her mother’s English occasionally falters. Eventually, Rachele joins us on screen – dressed almost identically to her mother, but in black.

They’re extremely close. When the now 24-year-old was living in London for six years, Maria Grazia often visited her flat, sleeping on the sofa bed.

Rachele, who took a gender studies course, now works at Dior, helping to ensure the house doesn’t stumble into rows about gender and racial identity.

“I honestly don’t think fashion says the wrong things intending to hurt,” says

Maria Grazia. “It’s ignorance. I grew up in the Catholic church, so I had a lot to learn.” At Valentino after one collection with an Out of Africa theme, she and Piccioli were at the centre of a row about cultural appropriation.

With regards to her childhood, we’re not talking Angela’s Ashes. “My parents were amazing. My mother worked in a dressmaking atelier. She really pushed me to be independent and not marry the first man who came along. So did my father. That wasn’t normal then.”

Italian society still, to an extent, expects women to define themselves in relation to the men in their lives, she thinks. “It’s subtle, but it’s there.”

That was one of the reasons she sent Rachele to study in London.

Lockdown revealed that the inequality isn’t confined to Italy. “On Zoom, I got to see through my design team, many of whom have young children, how tough it was trying to stay on top of work, the kids’ schooling… I think particularly so for women.”

Many of the messages Maria Grazia conveys through her collections – most notably feminism, and the importance of the environment and the arts – are hardly controversial, although given the current penchant among the self-appointed morality police to ‘cancel’ brands they deem to have transgressed, you can understand why she might steer clear of any potential

You know you’re ‘going to upset some

people and that’s fine. I’m ready every day to retire. No problem

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controversy. “Why? I believe it’s important for fashion to engage with the cultural debate,” she says. “I really think fashion can be a force for good.

One thing we saw during lockdown was how fast so many fashion labels responded by producing PPE.” I think she relishes the challenge of setting the right tone of intellectual enquiry around Dior as much as she loves perfecting a comfortable jacket that respects the house tradition. There was eye-rolling in some quarters about her feminist-sloganned T-shirts, but when cheaper copies quickly flooded the market, Maria Grazia was delighted.

If some have their consciousness raised 37

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via a Dior show, she’s fine with that.

For 2019’s cruise show in Marrakesh, she painstakingly put together a network of African craftspeople and designers, giving them equal billing; and she invited Grace Wales Bonner, the 28-year-old mixed-race British designer, to design one of the label’s classic Bar jackets and New Look skirts in the show. That’s not normal among creative directors and it takes confidence.

When I ask how hard it was to adapt to the profoundly conservative, largely male ethos at Dior, she’s both candid and generous. “I think one of the challenges was that I didn’t understand the French culture or speak the language,” she says, although that didn’t stop her concluding that some things had to change. “I think they [the 38

management] were curious about my approach. It was evident they never spoke to women who told them what they really thought. The marketing team was all men. They’d have arguments about what they thought women wanted and I’d say, “Are you sure?”’

Astonishingly, she was the first creative director who took the trouble to meet every employee in Dior’s Paris HQ. It’s this collaborative approach that ensured Dior has had as good a 2020 as can be. The three collections she produced under lockdown were all well received, particularly cruise, which she showed in Lecce, Puglia, where her father grew up. Chiuri understood what a valuable spotlight Dior can shine on tourist-forsaken regions. She worked with local musicians, technicians

and craftspeople to create a floodlit showcase for a haute-meets-homespun collection of linen skirts, apron dresses and broderie-anglaise shifts.

What’s gratifying for her – above and beyond the significant upturn in Dior’s revenues and the power that gives her to ignore any critics – is the way her ideas have been absorbed by the high street. The fact that she – and lucky Rachele – live in Dior clothes means the pieces are bound to be pragmatic and comfortable. The sacred Bar jacket is now so deconstructed it almost feels like a cardigan and yet is clearly still recognisable as Dior. Watching her extrapolate from Christian Dior’s femininity to create something that resonates with today’s women is truly fascinating.

CREDIT: @ LISA ARMSTRONG / TELEGRAPH MEDIA GROUP LIMITED 2020

‘ I really think fashion can be a force for good’

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Why Felicity Jones had a surprise in store for the director of her new movie, George Clooney

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elling your boss that you’ve fallen pregnant can be stressful enough, but when you’re Felicity Jones, your boss is George Clooney, and he’s just finished a script for a big budget Netflix film in which the character you play is central, you’d likely be a little more apprehensive about having that chat.

“Yeah, 100 per cent,” she says when asked if she feared being fired. “I mean – it happens. Far more than it ever should. So I was very happy that I was able to keep my job, number one. But George just made it completely seamless. I mean, I’m sure in the background there was all sorts of stuff going on that I was completely protected from. And he just totally made it really easy. You know, ‘If you’re willing to keep doing it, I’d love you to stay onboard’ – so to speak. And it was quite an instinctive, organic process. We originally decided that we would CGI the bump and do all sorts of technical wizardry. And then once we’d started shooting and George was watching the footage, he came to my trailer with Grant [Heslov, the film’s producer] and they said, ‘We’ve looked at it and it’s going to work so much better you being pregnant – so let’s just embrace it.’ I mean, it made absolute sense for the story and the narrative. So there were a few, actually, weirdly quite minor changes that had to be made. And then we carried on along that course. But it was a very open, trusting dialogue from the beginning, and a testament to George’s modernity and the kind of person that he is, that I think I never felt for a second that it was a problem.”

It may have appeared that way to Jones, who would go on to give birth during lockdown, but for director Clooney there were indeed problems to hurdle. “I was in the middle of Iceland, 42

really miserable, and I get a call from Felicity and she goes, ‘So there’s news’.

And I go, ‘What’s the news?’ She goes, ‘I’m pregnant’. And I’m like, ‘Great’.

And I go, ‘OK, that complicates things’.

“And she was so gung-ho, she wanted to do all the wire work and everything. She said, ‘I’ll be all right’. And I was like, ‘No, no, no, we’re not putting anybody pregnant on a wire.’ And initially we started out trying to shoot all of that stuff with her, with just doing a head replacement, which is an awkward thing to do, where you shoot it three times with a body double.

“Eventually we just sat down with her and said, ‘You know, people go away for two years on a flight to another planet, they have se-x, it happens, you know, you’re pregnant.’ And it changed everything for us. It actually gave us a sort of something to lean into for the end of the movie, which I think ends up being a real bonus for us.”

Based on the novel Good Morning Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, The Midnight Sky, in which Clooney also stars, is a post-apocalyptic tale that follows Augustine [Clooney], a lonely scientist in the Arctic, as he races to stop Sully [Jones] and her fellow astronauts from returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.

Being pregnant on set proved a unique experience for Jones, one she fully embraced. “I did get to sit down a lot, which was a real joy! [laughs] I’ve never been so well looked after in my entire life. I thoroughly recommend being pregnant when you are shooting. [laughs] It’s the absolute best. And people bring you things, it’s really nice, like chocolate cake. Yeah, I just had a really lovely, easy time of it, with some really special lovely people. I wish it was more salacious but annoyingly, it was everyone… and ultimately

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There’s this feeling that everyone is coping but underneath we’re all about to burst into tears

doing that? And you obviously see that with George’s character and his relationship to the young girl back on Earth. But I think the fact that it was in many ways a relationship drama, but in the guise of an action film, was definitely a draw.”

By tapping into ideas of loneliness and solitude as the world struggles with forced lockdowns and a loss of human contact, will the film resonate more than it may have done if released pre-pandemic? “I was thinking the film explores what we’re going through, which is that our foundations have been completely shaken up. And talking to various friends everyone is saying the same sort of thing; they feel incredibly on edge all the time.

And there’s this feeling that everyone is coping, or seemingly coping, but underneath it we’re all kind of slightly about to burst into tears at any moment. And I think we didn’t realise when we were making the film just how relevant those issues would be. It’s a sort of contradiction, isn’t it? Because now it’s a bizarre paradox that we need each other more than ever yet we can’t be close to each other. And so we’ve got all these weird horrible sort of paradoxes to try and get our heads round in such a strange time that no one has the answer for. And I think that is hopefully where the power of the film lies, that there aren’t any answers. I mean, all we can come back to ultimately is a sense of valuing those connections that we do have, of realising that our time is limited and – without sounding like there are too many platitudes – that we do sort of make the most of what we have.

Let’s hope that out of this horror time there is a greater connection and a greater sense of community and we don’t go into something far worse.”

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Credit: Jason Adams / The Interview People

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that does come from the top, that does come from George. He creates that easy-going familial atmosphere that meant that being pregnant was not in any way an issue and it sort of added to the fun of it.”

Born in Birmingham, England, 37-year-old Jones is an Oxford graduate who scored her first movie role aged 12, before progressing into TV with the BBC and latterly awardwinning turns in critically acclaimed hits Like Crazy (2011) and The Theory of Everything (2014), for which she was nominated in the best actress category at both the Oscars and Golden Globes.

It was, however, in the leading role of Jyn Erso in the most successful Star Wars spin off so far, 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, that she is best known to fans of sci-fi. The Midnight Sky marks her second step into science fiction, so has she always been a fan of the genre? “The best science fiction is much closer to home, in that you obviously go into a far-away land in order to speak a greater truth,” she says. “And that’s when science fiction is at his best, when it’s really anchored in a human reality. And this film felt like, yeah, it had a message.

It’s not just banal pointless action.

It has a very strong core to it, which is probably why I wanted to do it.”

Another drawing card for Jones was how the characters developed in such a remote setting. “Definitely. I think that’s what was so engaging about it, that you’ve got all these separate individuals trying to wrestle with the need for connection. And trying to navigate – literally in the spaceship – through the universe, but also on an emotional and personal level they are trying to navigate what it is that gives their life meaning and what it is that they value. And those questions are always interesting at any time, but they seem even more relevant with what we’re all going through at the moment. But yeah, and I think it tapped into a loneliness as well.

There’s this idea that on the ship they have no idea whether they are going to reconnect with earth.

And so, similarly in the book, it was prompting lots of questions about how we forge connection with others and can we forge genuine connection, and what is the point of

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POWER dressing AIR

Melissa Twig on Audrey Hepburn’s enduring influence on modern style

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Like so many women, I had a poster of Audrey Hepburn stuck on my bedroom wall when I was younger. It was a picture of her gazing backwards over one shoulder in a strapless pale pink Givenchy gown with her hair piled in a bun on top of her head. I looked at it every morning during an unhappy first year at university and it always made me feel slightly better.

Her poise, her understated elegance, her beautifully clothed characters running through the streets of Rome and Paris, and her enduring relationship with Hubert de Givenchy are a few of the many reasons why Hepburn became the emblem of 20th century fashion. But there is also an indefinable quality about her – something in the way she looks and dresses that draws people of all ages to her.

It is this essence of her that 26-yearold London-based director Helena Coan has tried to capture in Audrey – a documentary now available to watch on Amazon and iTunes. In it, she follows the behind-the-scenes story of Hepburn, the twice divorced, professionally restless woman so often trying to escape from the voracious demands of her own fame.

The documentary itself strikes a sad note at many points in a journey that spans the major events of the 20th century from the Second World War in Holland – where Hepburn grew up as the child of divorced Dutch aristocrats and volunteered for the Resistance – to her heyday as one of the screen’s most recognisable icons, and her later work with Unicef in the 1980s.

Coan’s documentary was produced by the same team that made McQueen – that fascinating dive into Lee McQueen’s life – and so it should come as no surprise that clothes feature heavily in Audrey. Partly because it is nigh on impossible to chart Hepburn’s life without touching upon the enormous impact she had on fashion, and the way her style would later became emblematic of an entire era.

The problem with icons is that after a while we stop seeing them clearly.

Hepburn’s images have become so ubiquitous, that I am not alone in being almost numb to them. Whether it is a little black dress in Breakfast at Tiffany’s or a little white dress in Sabrina, I knew her most famous outfits so well that I have stopped appreciating just how beautiful they were. Which 48

is why it took this documentary to remind me of her immaculately tailored clothes – and how quietly revolutionary they must have been.

Though she was already an Oscar winner and a muse to Givenchy, Hepburn had a down-to-earth fashion sense in her daily life that was still quite unusual at that time. In the Fifties, women rarely left the house without a low heel on, and more often than not would be wearing a full skirted dress with stockings. But in Rome, where Hepburn lived for more than 20 years, she was rarely seen out of her ubiquitous ballet flats, which she infinitely preferred to heels, and her colourful gingham or navy cropped trousers, which she wore with oversized jumpers or shirts.

In fact many of the staples we wear today – the ones that are that wonderful mix of comfort and style – were pioneered by Hepburn. Her simple pale-pink wedding dress from her second marriage was a precursor to the one Lily Allen wore to wed David Harbour in Las Vegas.

Hepburn’s love of black polo necks has been regularly copied over the years – although none of us can quite emulate the way she looked in Funny Face when her character transforms from studious librarian to fashion icon by wearing a black polo neck, black trousers and black penny loafers out to dinner in the French capital.

It is a similar story with oversized

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It is nigh on impossible to chart Hepburn’s life without touching upon the enormous impact she had on fashion

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Opening pages: Audrey Hepburn in Paris during filming of How to Steal a Million, 1965 These pages, from left to right: Audrey Hepburn wears a Givenchy coat in a scene from How to Steal a Million, 1965; Hepburn at the Givenchy salon in Paris sometime in the 1960s Next pages: Hepburn in a publicity shot for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961

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Credit: © Melissa Twig / Telegraph Media Group Limited 2020

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white shirts – which Hepburn regularly wore on film in both Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany’s – and in real life right up until the Nineties with print trousers or fitted checked skirts. Hepburn knew instinctively that a white shirt should be worn slightly large with something slimfitting on the bottom half – a style lesson that is still applicable today.

But of course, Hepburn wasn’t only beloved for her understated elegance – as my teenage years of gazing at her in a silk gown so proved.

As the former Givenchy creative director Clare Waight Keller explains in the documentary, the relationship between Hubert de Givenchy and Hepburn was far more than just a professional one. Their lifelong collaboration may have begun during the 1954 film Sabrina – when the designer’s modern approach to tailoring first rocked the fashion world – but the two quickly became the sort of friends who would lean on each other for the rest of their lives.

And perhaps that is why Hepburn always looks so luminescent in his double breasted wool skirts and his beaded bodice gowns – because he really knew her and made the outfits especially for her. “I dressed many other actresses, but I never made such a friendship, had such close collaboration with anyone,” said Givenchy about his greatest muse. “And this new style, this new way of dressing, its way of moving was born in parallel.”

In return, she generously credited him with turning her into the icon she is. “Hubert made all the dresses in my first films. It was he who gave me a look, a type, a silhouette.

It was he who made me visually what I became,” she later said.

In the trailer for Audrey the narrator explains, over flashing images of the actress in yards of couture satin and silk, that, “she was a fashion icon, but she was also so much more than that.”

Of course she was – everyone in the public eye is more than how they are perceived. But Hepburn’s partnership with Givenchy and her own clothing choices became a symbol of something beautiful to young girls everywhere – particularly, perhaps, unhappy ones unaware of how much better life could get.

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BEST FOOT FORWARD WORDS : ANNA MURPHY

How to usher the house of storied shoemaker Berluti into the 21st century? With a playful take on the past, says its creative director, Kris Van Assche

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In a world where everything is virtual, there’s something very special about going back to the USP of tactility; feeling the leather, looking at the stitchings

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Kris Van Assche, the softly-spoken Belgian at the helm of Parisian menswear house Berluti, is desperate for a digital detox. For the past two days before our interview he has been presenting his spring/summer 2021 collection via Zoom calls and FaceTime sessions, trying to showcase the intricacy and artisanship of the brand’s leather craft, suits and delicate silk shirting via a juddering Wi-Fi connection and the now-familiar pleas to ‘unmute’. There’s only so much detail you can garner about a sweater when it’s in front of an iPad camera.

“So it’s nice to get away from the screen and talk things over in person,” says the slight, elfin designer when we meet in his atelier in the 8th arrondissement of Paris to peruse rails of clothing as the sun streams across the city. “It’s funny, during this whole period we’ve become reliant on technology, but it’s underlined for me just how essential the human part of the process is,” he says.

While the ‘shout it from the rooftops’ aesthetic of other brands might parlay well into the digital world, the quiet nuances of Berluti are difficult to convey via smart screen. That’s because the historic bootmaker, founded in 1895

by Alessandro Berluti and acquired by the LVMH luxury conglomerate in 1993, is all about the detail. Of course there are the shoes – historically worn by the likes of Andy Warhol, Yves Saint Laurent and Frank Sinatra – but also the sharp tailoring and innovative leather craft that have evolved during Van Assche’s stewardship of the brand.

He took over in 2018, after an 1154

year stint at Dior Homme, during an almighty game of menswear musical chairs. The house’s former creative director Haider Ackermann announced his departure after three years of steering Berluti in a darker, more glamrock direction. Van Assche jumped ship from Dior, replaced by Louis Vuitton’s Kim Jones. Keeping up? Just one year after his debut collection, coronavirus and the ensuing lockdown took hold.

It’s been a period of reflection for Van Assche. “Personally, I think I’ve become more patient, and I’ve cooked for the first time in 20 years instead of relying on local restaurants,” he jokes. He first moved to Paris in 1998 after studying womenswear at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.

Van Assche, originally from the small Flemish town of Londerzeel (his mother worked as a secretary and his father was in the automotive industry), arrived in the City of Light at just the right time: he had signed up to an internship in the menswear department of Yves Saint Laurent, then under Hedi Slimane, just as his star was in the ascent. Soon Slimane was installed at Dior Homme in what was to become one of the most high-voltage menswear

moments of recent memory, with Van Assche his second in command. By 2007, he had taken over the Dior reins.

Of the effect lockdown has had on his work, Van Assche says, “I think what we’ll learn from this is that the craft way, the artisanal way, the limited-edition rarity of what we can do at Berluti, is going to become super important. In a world where everything is virtual, there’s something very special about going back to the USP of tactility; feeling the leather, looking at the stitching.”

That expertise is embedded in the sole of a Berluti shoe. The house is the apogee of artisanal leather craft – one of France’s national monuments. The Italian Alessandro Berluti hailed from Le Marche, the hub of Italian shoemaking; Tod’s was also founded there. After relocating to Paris during the glory days of the belle époque, the young cobbler found his elongated, angular style in vogue

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with the high society of the day.

Toulouse-Lautrec wore Berluti to the Moulin Rouge, Visconti liked his with a glossy patina, and Sinatra threw a fit when he learnt that his bespoke pair would take a year to make. When I visited Olga Berluti’s paint-splattered workshop some 14 years ago, the granddaughter of the founder – who would personally fit Saint Laurent’s and Warhol’s shoes – showed me the specially decorated lasts of famous clients. Warhol’s were in Coca-Cola logos, Sinatra’s in piano keys, and Visconti’s in pearls and feathers.

To own a pair was to become part of an exclusive club – quite literally: Olga, who is now retired, set up the Swann Club as a collective of clients who would be wined, dined and taught how to polish their shoes with the dregs of their champagne, to lend an ‘effervescent patina’, she told me.

Does Van Assche feel a responsibility as the custodian of this rich history?

“Yes, there has always been this historic client, but he’s actually not as classic as you might think. The design of a Berluti shoe was always eccentric; there was a twist to it. These men – Gianni Agnelli, Jean Cocteau, JFK – they didn’t want to be invisible on the street,” says Van Assche.

And no one could accuse his own interpretation of Berluti of shrinking into the shadows; the designer developed an angular, jagged take on the classic Berluti shoe, as well as suits in rich jewel-toned leathers and coats in neon yellow, fuchsia and lime.

Van Assche’s aesthetic has always veered towards quieter and darker territory – his work at Dior explored music and artistic subcultures, for example – so the Berluti look is a surprising departure. The Swann Club – named after Berluti enthusiast Marcel 56

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Berluti needs to be experienced in real time

All pages: Looks from Berluti Spring/Summer 2021 Below: Kris Van Assche

Proust’s debonair man-about-town protagonist Charles Swann – may have closed, but Van Assche has amassed a millennial cohort of K Pop stars and models such as Bella and Gigi Hadid as fans, for whom the bright, bold aesthetic translates well on Instagram.

“Colour was a totally new thing for me, anyone who knows me knows that,” Van Assche says; in the 11 years I’ve been acquainted with him, I’ve never seen him wear anything other than a uniform of black, and his collections at Dior Homme stuck to a monochrome palette with occasional punkish touches of red and yellow.

Today, he’s getting experimental with the paintbox – his autumn/ winter collection comprises rainbowbright hues and clashing patterns on shaggy faux furs. “Suddenly I’m a colour freak. Patina was a new thing, too, but I think it’s healthy for a designer to clash his identity with the identity of the brand,” he says.

He’s gone back to the drawing board, too, toying with the leathers synonymous with shoemaking and adapting them to ready-to-wear clothes; Van Assche demonstrates this by showing the lightness of a shirt made in paper-fine leather. “I’ve been trying new things with our R&D department – I think they expect

me to ask them to make a leather swimsuit next or something.”

Working within unexpected constraints has been a hallmark of 2020, but for Van Assche the pandemic has been an education. “It has reminded me how essential it is to have that upclose contact, not just with the clothes but with my team, the artisans, the clients. Berluti needs to be experienced in real time.” Try as Apple’s Tim Cook and the rest of Silicon Valley might, the smooth flow of a liquid-light leather coat or princely pair of shoes won’t be replicated digitally any time soon.

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Credit: A@ Stephen Doig / Telegraph Media Group Limited 2020

Motoring JANUARY 2021: ISSUE 112

Fast Learner Because the McLaren 720S just wasn’t quick enough

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WORDS: WILL DRON

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ear-wheel drive, 755bhp and a wet road is a combination that certainly focuses the mind. I know this because I spent an afternoon tickling the throttle pedal of a McLaren 765LT at a rain-soaked Silverstone circuit, exploring the bounds of adhesion between tyre and asphalt in rather more detail than I’d have liked. These are conditions in which Ayrton Senna excelled but beyond what most mortals, myself included, would feel comfortable pushing a $380,000 supercar to its limits.

Still, this is Silverstone in September, so it comes with the territory – what was I expecting? On with the job.

The 765LT is a substantial development of the 720S, which previously sat at the top of the ‘Super Series’ in McLaren’s arsenal. The 765 part of the name refers to both the number of horses produced by its twin-turbocharged V8 engine (765PS, or 755bhp) and the number of units being produced.

The LT stands for longtail, a family of cars that dates back to the 1997 McLaren F1 GTR, with the emphasis on ultra-light weight, increased power and enhanced driver engagement.

Given that the 720S couldn’t really be regarded as a gutless porker, the engineers were forced to use every molecule of grey matter available to make it lighter, faster and more dynamic.

The toughest instruction from management was to remove 70kg from the 720S’s 1,419kg (DIN) kerb weight, which was no easy task given weightsaving was a focus in the first place – the 720S has a carbon fibre monocoque tub, for example. But shaving a few grams here and there – including switching to a new titanium exhaust that’s 40% lighter than the steel equivalent, reducing the thickness of the windscreen and side windows by 0.8mm, and switching to polycarbonate glazing at the rear – add up to a total saving of 80kg. This is the kind of forensic, obsessive approach to problem-solving for which McLaren has made its name.

The engine team was similarly singleminded in extracting every drop of performance from the powerplant. It’s still a four-litre twin-turbocharged V8 at its core but the forged aluminium pistons are bespoke, while it borrows the three-layer head gasket from the hardcore McLaren Senna (which sits in 60

McLaren’s ‘Ultimate Series’ of cars). The 765LT has also been given carbon-coated followers in the valve train, an additional fuel pump and a revised oil pump, while the engine management system has been tweaked for increased power, and improved torque delivery and throttle response compared with the 720S. Peak power comes in at 7,500rpm and is up 45bhp from 710bhp in the 720S. It’s also a lot more than is offered by the Ferrari 488 Pista’s 3.9-litre twin turbo (710bhp at 8,000rpm), and the character of the McLaren’s motor is quite different, with peak torque of 590 lb ft at 5,500rpm compared to the Pista’s 568 lb ft at 3,000rpm.

A gearbox tuned for 15% more-rapid acceleration than the 720S results in a potential 0-100km/h time of 2.8 seconds, though it’s the 0-200km/h time that McLaren is most proud of: seven seconds dead. Zero to 300km/h takes 18.0 seconds and from there it’s not long before the car hits its 330km/h.

Out on track the gearing and torque characteristics mean power seems to surge on and on, and the rear wheels seemingly able to rotate as if unimpeded by the ground on which they’re resting.

On the wet Silverstone International circuit, shod with Pirelli P-Zeros rather than the usual Trofeo R rubber, joining Hangar Straight proved as hairy a motoring experience as I’ve experienced.

Threading it through The Loop, you brake lightly while changing down to third gear, then, taking care not to be too aggressive on the first lap, ease on the gas. Hello, wheelspin. Short shift into fourth and there’s a punch in the back as the cogs switch and the 765LT urges you on. You give the accelerator another squeeze; the back end writhes around like a lizard on a hotplate.

“It does that in the dry, too,” my racing driver passenger tells me over the intercom (the enhanced quad-exhaust soundtrack is glorious but muted with the helmet on), yet I can’t help feeling it might be a significantly less bumtwitching experience when the sun’s out.

Hangar Straight could be completed without shifting up from fifth gear but putting it in sixth, to drop the revs and help settle the car, revealed the aero of the 765LT is still no match for its outright grunt. Even in the wet it’s possible to hit 240-250km/h before the braking zone into Stowe corner,

If the way it generates speed is mind‘ blowing, the way it scrubs it off is perhaps more impressive ’

Credit: The Independent/The Interview People

and despite 25% more downforce over the 720S thanks to a 5mm lower front end, extended front splitter, elongated active rear wing work and extended rear diffuser, the rear wheels could still be made to lose traction approaching those speeds.

In Active mode the electronic stability systems allow the back end to remain eye-wideningly lively but the amount of power being fed to each of the rear corners is controlled by the computer to at least help you keep the nose pointing in the right direction. The mid-engined balance helps prevent any kind of pendulum effect, too.

So although on the power out of the blisteringly-quick Stowe corner in fourth gear I found myself adding an armful of opposite lock, the car didn’t quite swap ends. There’s a seat-of-yourpants communication there – it comes very swiftly indeed, but the 765LT isn’t a car that throws surprises at you.

If the way it generates speed is mind-blowing, the way it scrubs it off is perhaps more impressive, especially

given the inclement conditions of our track experience. The brakes – carbon ceramic discs with forged aluminium brake calipers (the six-piston front units and pads in the MSO Clubsport pack are also borrowed from the Senna) – combined with the active rear wing that rises up under braking, offer tremendous, linear stopping power even in the wet, and I felt far more confidence on the brake pedal than the throttle.

We didn’t get an opportunity to drive the car on the road – its character there remains to be seen – and the rather extreme conditions of our track test didn’t lend themselves to a close examination of the interior (I barely even looked at the instrument binnacle, truth be told, such was the intensity of the driving experience), though the ultra-thin carbon seats (again coming from the Senna) hold you tight without being uncomfortable.

For the full 80kg weight saving the air conditioning and audio system are deleted as standard but can be added at no extra cost, and 360-degree

cameras can be added, too, while eight interior colourways are available, with bespoke options from MSO. MSO will also provide you with a naked carbon exterior finish, if you like… at a cost.

For a car like the 765LT, it’s the performance upgrades that are likely to win bragging rights, as well as superiority on the track. It’s a car that is seconds quicker round a circuit than the 720S, making it a proper plaything for anyone with the time, money, skill and inclination. It’s not quite as focused as the Senna when it comes to track dominance but it’s not far off, and fits much more naturally into the street environment.

This appears to be a winning combination: the entire 2020 allocation have found homes, representing around 40% of the total allocation. Interest in the 2021 production run is strong, according to McLaren, which is a good news story for a British manufacturer that has been in the headlines for all of the wrong reasons recently.”

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Gastronomy JANUARY 2021: ISSUE 112

All Will Be Fine As he releases his latest book, the three-Michelinstarred chef Thomas Keller shares how fine dining has evolved, and how it changes lives

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homas Keller has read finedining’s obituary before. “This is the fourth time,” he says, unruffled. “Three financial crises in the ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s and, of course, Covid.” For the celebrated American chef, holder of three Michelin stars at both the French Laundry in California and Per Se in New York, fine dining never dies. It evolves.

Evolution is a recurring theme in Keller’s new book The French Laundry, Per Se, a sequel to the best-selling French Laundry Cookbook which, even 21 years after publication, holds as canon for any young chef of ambition.

His latest recipes are, he advises, “even more complex than in The French Laundry Cookbook,” a reflection of the advances across not only Keller’s own restaurants since he launched the French Laundry 26 years ago, but across fine dining in general.

His French onion soup, for example, an intricate preparation of warm jellied consommé, beef cheek, truffle and Comté mousse, requires an immersion circulator, a chamber vacuum sealer and iSi Siphon, tools rarely seen in a professional kitchen, let alone a domestic one, in 1994. Ingredients now are “of a quality that would have astonished me 26 years ago”.

Through persuasive prose and Deborah Jones’ pin-sharp photography,

Keller reveals the stories behind his restaurants, their people and their purveyors.

“You come into a restaurant and you see very little of what goes on, and that’s intended. You don’t need to know everything. You see the dining room, the staff, the chinaware, the glassware, the bottles of wine, you see the food.

That’s a minor part of what goes on in a restaurant.”

The middle of a global pandemic is, arguably, not the most felicitous time to release a tome in defence – and celebration – of elite gastronomy. One might well ask, who cares about the precise placement of a pluche of chervil?

Who has time to dehydrate pea skins for 24 hours?

Certainly, it was inevitable that when Keller reopened the French Laundry serving a $850 menu (a cheaper $350 menu is served al fresco), he would receive brickbats. He sounds weary of defending his craft.

“Why does fine dining always get criticised for being a frivolous expense?

We know the quality of the food, we’re confident that the food has the highest nutritional value available in that food and that it’s at the peak of its flavours.

Spending $10,000 to get box seats at a football game is probably a little more frivolous than buying nutritious food to put in your body.”

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does fine dining always get criticised ‘ Whyfor being a frivolous expense? ’ news; what are you going to do? You go back to what you feel is normal, you go back to the things that you missed in your life. And part of what everybody misses is dining out and travelling.”

Whatever comes next for fine dining, he’ll watch with interest. “Forty-four years ago when I started cooking, our countries [UK and US] were in last place. You guys had boiled beef and we had hot dogs. In my lifetime, I’ve watched both our countries excel. We [now] have the best chefs, the best restaurants, the best products. I’ve watched the whole thing from a front row seat.”

The French Laundry, Per Se by Thomas Keller is available now, published by Artisan Books

Opening pages: smoked sturgeon rillettes on an everything bagel, by Deborah Jones These pages, clockwise from top: yukon gold potato rôti à la broche, by Deborah Jones; Thomas Keller in his kitchen; cover of The French Laundry, Per Se

Credit: Credit: @ Hilary Armstrong / Telegraph Media Group Limited 2020

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The French Laundry, Per Se states the economic argument: “I don’t think the guests realise how many lives they change simply by dining at our restaurants. Not just mine, but all restaurants throughout the country.”

In conversation, he’s even more forthright: “We’re the largest private employer in America. We employ more people than anybody except the U.S Government. We employ more women than anybody except the U.S Government. We employ more single mothers than anybody except the U.S Government. We employ a larger age demographic than anybody. We embrace any level of education. We’re truly a democratic profession.”

He knows that fine dining will rally – it always does – and he has no fears for the future of ‘destination dining’: “People will get on airplanes again”.

But, he says, “I worry about the three or four hundred thousand restaurants in America, the small restaurants that will close because they don’t have the resources, the capability, the relationships. That’s really the question you should be asking: how can we help those restaurants?”

For his part, he’s proud to have had a seat on the Economic Council for Restaurants (controversial for being allmale) and to have been able to represent his profession and say “listen, we need help. We need help a little differently than other people.”

Keller’s own restaurants have not been immune to the devastation wreaked by the pandemic: back in August, Bouchon Bakery and TAK Room at the $20b Hudson’s Yard development in New York both shut. And in November the French Laundry itself made the headlines when California’s Governor Gavin Newsom attended a lavish mixed-household birthday dinner there, at a time when ordinary Californians were being asked to curtail their Thanksgiving plans.

His lowest ebb came at furloughing staff. “Monday March 20th, when we had to tell over 1,100 [staff] they didn’t have a job any more. I mean, how do you do that? We went from having a business to not having a business in one day.”

Asking him now how he sees the future, he sounds cheerily optimistic. “I think once Covid is over – and it really is encouraging from what I see on the

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Travel JANUARY 2021: ISSUE 112

JOURNEYS BY JET

Xigera Lodge

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Botswana

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panning 15 000-square-kilometres, the Okavango Delta ecosystem, a major wetland ringfenced by the Kalahari Desert, supports a remarkable diversity of wildlife.

Equally remarkable is the newest addition to its rich, diverse landscape, Xigera Safari Lodge, which opens this month. 95% solar-powered, sustainability is at the heart of Xigera (it’s pronounced ‘Kee-jera’), which nestles subtly into its stunning surrounds.

Touching the earth lightly, the lodge’s 12 individually designed air-conditioned suites, including one two-bedroom family suite, extend over two islands. Architect Anton de Kock designed the buildings in complete synergy with their surroundings, using torched timber cladding and softly undulating rooves inspired by the wingspan of the region’s rare Pel’s Fishing Owl. For those seeking complete seclusion, a singular Baobab Treehouse calls. Standing proud one kilometre away from the lodge, with a guide stationed close by, here, amid the seclusion of this sculptural tree house, you will experience Africa at its most raw and remarkable.

The lodge’s interiors have been conceptualised

by Toni Tollman and Philip Fourie, who collaborated with Southern Guild gallery in a ground-breaking project that spanned over two years. They commissioned work from more than 80 artists and artisans from Botswana, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Mali and Eswatini, 66

meaning that every object and surface that guests encounter is a celebration of African craftsmanship, featuring bespoke items made exclusively for the property. They amount to the largest collection of African design anywhere in the world.

Resting on the western edge of the Moremi Game Reserve, overlooking the verdant floodplains of the Okavango Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Xigera offers up remarkable experiences both on land and on the water. Unlike other highly structured safaris, Xigera will offer guests total flexibility. Morning, afternoon and evening game drives are at guests’ leisure, while they can also explore the Delta’s waterways by traditional canoe, glass-bottom mokoro and motorboat – complete with ‘feet-in-the-water’ sundowners.

That feeling of flexibility extends to dining.

Chefs here operate a ‘anything, anytime’ approach, allowing you to dictate what you’d like to eat, when you’d like to eat it, and where you’d like it served – perhaps a breakfast set up in the bush, or a picnic on your private deck? Whichever your preference, post dinner drinks (there’s a cellar stocked with fine and vintage wines) are definitely best enjoyed under the light of the starlit sky aside the lodge’s firepit.

Fly your jet into Botswana’s Maun airport. From Maun, a scenic 25-minute flight by light aircraft will deliver you to the Xigera airstrip, a 10-minute drive from the lodge.

Travel OCTOBER 2020:ISSUE 109

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What I Know Now

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JANUARY 2021:ISSUE 112

David Kellie CEO, NATURAL DIAMOND COUNCIL I’ve been fortunate to have worked with a number of great leaders throughout my career and I consider them to have been mentors to me – even if they didn’t realise it at the time! Each has been very different but successful in leading organisations by presenting a clear vision with infectious passion.

This may sound over simplistic, but I believe that successful leaders create focused solutions that all stakeholders can buy into. Complex solutions that are not universally understood are rarely successful, so I always try to simplify strategies.

For me, the definition of personal success changes with experience. Like most people, at the start of my career I was more competitive. Most people have 68

some degree of ambition and so want to climb the career ladder to be successful.

As I became more experienced, I took greater pride in the success of the organisation or team in which I was a part, not least because the impact as a team is so much greater. Now, nothing gives me greater pleasure than leading a team to achieve goals that they didn’t think possible and to see the satisfaction and pride in achieving those goals.

I hope that I can help others build confidence in the same way that my career mentors built mine.

I’m very fortunate that I don’t over worry about issues. I believe in getting them resolved, moving on, and using time and energy to explore and develop opportunities. I don’t take on roles or

positions that I’m not passionate about, because I have to enjoy what I’m doing to be my better self. I prefer to work with people that share the same passion – skills can be learned, opinions can differ, but a united passion for a project or goal is ultimately what drives success. And it makes life so much more enjoyable.

The one lesson that I would like to have taught my younger self would have been to be more self-confident. It wasn’t until my mid-30’s where I took on bigger challenges in my life and career and realised the extent to which I enjoy and respond to such challenges. I wish that I’d known myself better in my 20’s, but I guess that’s one of the few benefits of getting older.

Now my ambitions are to take on greater challenges to continue testing myself.

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