AIR Magazine - Gama Aviation - March'21

MARCH 2021

STANLEY TUCCI

In nature, the falcon is a fierce fighter. In business, the Falcon 8X is just as powerful and agile. Every inch reflects its military DNA, with lean and mean aerodynamics and advanced Digital Flight Controls to get you to places others can’t. Nothing flies like a Falcon because no other jet is built like one.

Fierce. Fast. Agile. Falcon 8X.

Contents

AIR

Maison Martin Margiela spring/summer 2000, Mark Borthwick Purple, spring 2000

MARCH 2021: ISSUE 114

FEATURES Thirty Two

Forty

How did Stanley Tucci make the leap from mere movie star to foodie guru? Mick Brown finds out.

Minimalism, deconstruction, the rejuvenation of luxury, the internet... why 90s fashion was a decade like no other.

Stan The Man

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The Nineties

Forty Six

Fifty Two

The high-heel king is launching a fashion academy with a difference – it will teach how to make money.

A new book reflects on the rise, fall and rise again of women in cinema.

Over to Choo

When Film Was Female

PRAETOR 600: CERTIFIED OUTPERFORMANCE. The Praetor 600 — the world’s most disruptive and technologically advanced super-midsize aircraft that leads the way in performance, comfort and technology.

Unveiled at NBAA in October 2018 and now certified by ANAC, FAA and EASA, the Praetor 600 did not just meet initial expectations, it exceeded them. Named for the Latin root that means “lead the way,” the Praetor 600 is a jet of firsts. It is the first super-midsize jet certified since 2014. The first to fly beyond 3,700 nm at M0.80. The first with over 4,000 nm range at LRC. The first with full fly-by-wire. The first with Active Turbulence Reduction. The first with a cabin altitude as low as 5,800 feet.

The first with high-capacity, ultra-high-speed connectivity from Viasat’s Ka-band. And all of this, backed by a first-placed Customer Support network.

Learn more at executive.embraer.com/praetor600.

L E A DING T H E WAY

Contents

MARCH 2021: ISSUE 114

REGULARS Fourteen

Radar

Sixteen

Objects of Desire Eighteen

Critique Twenty

Art & Design EDITORIAL

Twenty Four

Timepieces

Chief Creative Officer

Twenty Eight

john@hotmedia.me

John Thatcher

Jewellery

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 Fifty Eight

Motoring

The seventh generation of Mercedes’ S-Class can’t yet drive itself, but there’s a fair bit it can do which other premium cars simply can’t

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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Gama Aviation MARCH 2021: ISSUE 114

Welcome Onboard MARCH 2021 Janine Tomb Managing Director Gama Aviation

Welcome to the new issue of AIR, Gama Aviation’s in-flight magazine.

This month I am delighted by our achievement in reaching our 5 year anniversary of meeting and exceeding the ISBAH (Commitment to Excellence in the International Standard for Business Aircraft Handling).

Our teams in Sharjah are rightly proud of continuing to achieve this standard, offering our clients excellence in service delivery, every mission, every day.

Gama Aviation’s started in 1983 as a bespoke aircraft manager and operator in the UK, and has since grown to be a leading, global, business aviation services organisation. With a fleet of over 230 aircraft, we have bases across Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East. Our headquarters are located at Farnborough Airport, England, where we are listed on the London Stock Exchange (Gama Aviation PLC: GMAA).

In 2009, we opened an aircraft management office in Dubai, and applied for a UAE Air Operating Certificate (AOC). The GCAA awarded Gama Aviation’s UAE AOC in 2010, after which we grew our managed fleet of charter and private jets in the UAE. It quickly became apparent that Dubai International Airport was becoming increasingly restrictive in terms of slot and parking availability, in addition to airspace and taxiway congestion, which is not conducive to business aviation operations. Our industry is geared towards saving time for our clients. This led to our Group CEO identifying Sharjah International Airport as an intelligent gateway to Dubai and the Northern Emirates for private jet users.

In 2012, Gama Aviation was granted the concession at Sharjah International to provide VIP (‘FBO’) handling services, and in 2014 we opened the airport’s very first FBO facility. Sharjah International has since become a popular business jet hub – and fuel stop location – due to its ease of use and close proximity to the heart of Dubai and the Northern Emirates. We operate stunning passenger and crew lounges, with dedicated customs/immigration, along with providing line maintenance services and hangar/parking solutions. In a nutshell, we offer the highest levels of service delivery in our industry, for prices that are lower than the regional market rate. A very special service in Sharjah that also sets us apart is the fact we can arrange airside access for passenger vehicles to the aircraft steps on both arrivals and departures. Sharjah offers true door-to-door time savings for visitors and residents of Dubai and the Northern Emirates.

An important component of Gama Aviation’s service offering in Sharjah is line maintenance and AOG (Aircraft On Ground) support in the surrounding region. In addition to our engineers holding US/FAA A&P licenses, our maintenance approvals include UAE/GCAA, UK/EASA, Isle of Man, Bermudan and Cayman registered aircraft. Our maintenance capabilities cover the Gulfstream G650, Bombardier Learjets, Challengers and Globals, Embraer Legacies, Hawker 800/900 and KingAir types.

Our group services include: • Aircraft management • Aircraft charter • FBO services: VIP aircraft and passenger handling • Line maintenance for business jets • Special missions support such as air ambulance operation and engineering modifications Thank you for choosing to fly with Gama, and for being part of our continuing success. We wish you an enjoyable journey.

MARCH 2021

STANLEY TUCCI

Cover: Stanley Tucci Austin Hargrave AUGUST

Contact Details: info.mena@gamaaviation.com / charter.mena@gamaaviation.com

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Gama Aviation MARCH 2021: ISSUE 114

Falcon 7X returns to our managed fleet We are delighted to showcase this Falcon 7x, that has returned to our managed aircraft fleet. The Falcon7X, as with the whole Falcon family, has a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’. A style and grace in both design and performance that only the French can seemingly create

We are rightly proud that this aircraft, and more importantly our client, has returned to Gama Aviation family.

We believe that in the same way the Falcon 7X is unique, so to do we have a certain way of operating and managing aircraft that is hard to define and describe. We believe our account managers [and Richard Hughes in particular for this client,

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really focus and appreciate exactly what is required by each individual client to ensure we deliver their exact requirements.

Sometimes it is very hard to explain what that is, and how it is achieved.

However, we understand and our clients understand that this is not purely a numbers game. Great service, great understanding, and

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Gama Aviation MARCH 2021: ISSUE 114

‘

It is the level of service that we believe makes Gama Aviation stand alone. In the market there are many pricing models and financial structures but the costs of operating aircraft come out in a similar place. However, the intimate knowledge Gama have of our requirements and the support offered by Richard, the wider account management team and the Gama organisation as a whole, make it a very easy choice to have them as our business aviation partner. Quite simply, we trust implicitly their advice, and how they operate our aircraft

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great attention to detail, knowing what will be required before it is requested. That is how we believe we develop close and enduring client relationships, ensuring we deliver a decisive advantage to all of our clients and their aviation mission.

As mentioned earlier, that certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ is hard to define and deliver but is the piece, we believe, that sets us apart. It was confirmed in our negotiations when returning the aircraft to our managed fleet, that the level and agility of the service we offer is paramount. Our client truly trusts our account management team to deliver on the promises we make. And believes that our wider management and aviation expertise has proved crucial in ensuring the very best advice is always readily

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available, to support the client and their management team.

It was mentioned that although Gama Aviation has grown over time, there is still the feeling that all the right people are contactable within the organisation, when they need to be. If our CEO needs to have some input on a matter, or our CCO needs to confirm some technical advice, they are more than happy to take time to ensure the matter is solved. The trust in that relationship is vital.

If you would like to discuss any Aircraft Management proposals or just hear in ore detail just how we do things please email Mark Smith, our Head of Aircraft Management, via mark. smith@gamaaviation.com, to discuss in strictest confidence your particular business aviation requirements.

BEST IN CLASS A new paradigm of flight is about to take off. Designed for discerning travelers, the G500™ can fly at more than nine-tenths the speed of sound while surrounding you in a spacious, luxurious cabin.

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NICOLAS ROBINSON | +44 7950 885 967 | nicolas.robinson@gulfstream.com

Radar

AIR

MARCH 2021: ISSUE 114

The oldest trophy in competitive sport will be contested this month as two teams compete for the Prada-sponsored America’s Cup from March 6-15. It dates to the year 1851, and was for 132 years won by an American boat, constituting the longest winning streak in the history of sport. This year, however, it will be won by either the defending champions, Emirates Team New Zealand, or Italy’s Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli Team (team member pictured right). Whomever proves victorious will hoist what is billed as sport’s most difficult trophy to win, while the loser will have little to console them – at the inaugural race, Queen Victoria asked one of her attendants to tell her who was in second place. “Your Majesty, there is no second,” came the reply, a quote still widely referenced before every America’s Cup race.

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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

ROGER DU BU IS

E XCALIBUR SPIDER Celebrating its partnership with Pirelli, Roger Dubuis’ technicians have created the Excalibur Spider and Excalibur Spider Pirelli ‘hyper horology’ timepieces, for which the manufacturer’s signature skeleton flying tourbillon is housed within a 39mm case. Available in pink

gold with white accents, titanium total black, or sporty red and black, all three versions are equipped with interchangeable straps containing the profile of a Pirelli intermediate tyre on the inside. They are available as limited editions of just 88 each.

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

DE BEERS

M O T L AT S E M A R V E L R I N G Taking its name from South Africa’s Motlatse Canyon – one of the Earth’s largest – where each day the rising and setting sun casts an intense light into the canyon’s plunging depths, Motlatse Marvel is one of five striking sets totalling 39 pieces in all, which were revealed by De

Beers during Couture Week. Replicating that intense light in its suite, Motlatse Marvel comprises seven styles including this beautiful ring, for which varying cuts and hues of diamonds have been selected to convey the suffusion of sunlight at dawn and dusk.

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

SA I N T L AU R E N T

LE MAILLON

Designed to echo a retro style of handbag, Saint Laurent’s Le Maillon satchel arrives fresh for Spring ’21. A new season necessity, it comes in myriad shades: black, dark green, deep brown, navy, brick, red eros, vintage white, and this, eye-grabbing mustard hue. Cut to create

a rectangular shape and round edges, making it both smart and stylish, the calf-leather satchel is adorned with a distinctive bronze-toned jewellery closure that’s prominent against all colourways.

Its all-leather interior houses three compartments for essentials.

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

VA N C L E E F & A R P E L S

CUFF BR ACELE T A recurring muse of the house, the starfilled sky takes centre stage once more in Van Cleef’s latest high jewellery collection, Sous Les Etoiles, which encompasses more than 120 one-of-a-kind pieces – four years in the making. A feast for the eyes, hot-pink Madagascan and midnight-blue 4

Sri Lankan sapphires meet Afghan emeralds and fiery red Burmese rubies, resplendent against the brilliance of white diamonds. Included is this cuff bracelet, formed from white gold, 41 oval-cut pink sapphires (57.98 carats), mauve sapphires, coral and diamonds.

OB JECTS OF DESIRE

ALEX ANDER MCQUEEN

THE WORKER BOOT While the weather here still allows for heavy footwear, Alexander McQueen’s functional yet carefully crafted – as is the ethos of the house – worker boots are an essential addition to a man’s wardrobe. A staple of the men’s collection and updated for Spring/Summer 21,

the lace-up boots are fashioned from black, shiny spazzolato calf leather and feature silver hardware and topstitch detailing. Notable design twists include an exaggerated toe shape and thick rubber lug sole. They’re finished with the McQueen signature.

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

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OB JECTS OF DESIRE

ROL L S-ROYCE

PHANTOM IRIDESCENT OPULENCE at its peak. The iridescence relates to the sheen of over 3,000 hand-sewn tail feathers, displayed here behind the glass ‘gallery’ which runs across the Phantom’s dash, a space that can be customised to show artworks of the owner’s choosing.

Before it embarks on a tour of other GCC countries, a one-of-one Phantom ‘Iridescent Opulence’ debuted in Abu Dhabi, one of the marque’s biggest markets for its bespoke division. If the recently unveiled Ghost is post opulence, this Phantom is opulence 7

OB JECTS OF DESIRE

M U L B E R RY

ICONS EDITIONS relaunched Alexa all feature in their diminutive forms, while also included is this, the luggage-inspired Roxanne, which debuted in the AW03 collection.

Like its siblings, it’s crafted from signature sustainable leather, a heavy grain style that is responsibly sourced.

To celebrate 50 years of craftmanship this year, British brand Mulberry will sporadically drop limited-edition collections across 2021, beginning with this handpicked line up of the brand’s most coveted bags in miniature sizes. The Iris, Amberley, Bayswater, Bayswater Tote and the newly 8

OBJECTS OF DESIRE

Critique MARCH 2021 : ISSUE 114

Film Bliss Dir: Mike Cahill A love story in which a down-and-out woman tries to convince a down-on-his-luck man that their broken world is just a computer simulation.

AT BEST: ‘Bliss feels like a bunch of grandiose ideas in search of a connecting thread.’

– Alex Savellev, Film Threat AT WORST: ‘Fails to draw us in on an emotional or intellectual level.’

– Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times

Dara of Jasenovac Dir: Peter Antonijevic AIR

10-year-old Croat, Dara, must face up to the horrors of the Holocaust-era when she is sent with her mother and siblings to a concentration camp.

AT BEST: ‘A unique World War II story worth watching.’

– Ray Lobo, Film Threat AT WORST: ‘Thinly disguised propaganda, cynically using the Holocaust to push a troubling nativist agenda.’

– Jay Welssberg, Variety

Land Dir: Robin Wright Robin Wright’s directorial debut tells the story of one women’s search for meaning in the vast and harsh American wilderness.

AT BEST: ‘A raw but beautiful, rich story about deep sadness, isolation, and healing through nature.’ – Sabina Dana Plasse, Film Threat AT WORST: ‘There’s just not enough here to make it a worthwhile retread through familiar territory.’ – Benjamin Lee, The Guardian

Penguin Bloom Dir: Glendyn Ivin The true story of how a woman paralysed physically and mentally following an accident finds hope in a wounded baby magpie.

AT BEST: Tthe film’s emotional manipulations work, even if they’re obvious.’ – Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent AT WORST: ‘There’s a thin line between feel-good entertainment and hokum. This comes awfully close to the latter.’

– Robert Levin, Newsday 18

Critique MARCH 2021 : ISSUE 114

Books ollywood heavyweight Ethan Hawke last released a novel some twenty years ago. So is A Bright Ray of Darkness – the story of a young Broadway actor dealing with love, fame, and heartbreak – worth the wait? Ron Charles of The Washington Post certainly seems to think so. “[This is] the work of an author who knows every aspect of the profession from the inside… Hawke is a genius at conjuring the hush of the auditorium, the thrill of live actors, the magical sense of a performance moving through time.

He’s written a witty, wise, and heartfelt novel… a deeply hopeful story… Bravo.”

Patti Smith agrees: “Hawke circles, descends, and crawls into his characters skin. Grimy shadows pass over the footlights, into the bowels of the theatre, where a struggling actor, perhaps mirroring the writer, seeks the vine of redemption, and claws his way into becoming. Riveting work.”

A work of historical fiction that moves between Germany on the eve of World War II and present-day Wisconsin in the US, Send For Me by Lauren Fox, tells of love, longing, and the powerful

bonds of family, with the central character, Annelise, ultimately left with an impossible choice: the past, or her future. “A sense of foreboding shadows this bittersweet intergenerational tale of love and trauma… Subtle, striking, and punctuated by snippets of family letters.. Fox has imbued this deeply personal, ultimately hopeful novel, which she explains in an author’s note is based on her own family’s story, with emotion, empathy, and an essential understanding of the complicated bonds between generations and the importance of reckoning with the past in order to embrace the future. An intimate, insightful, intricately rendered story of intergenerational trauma and love, enthuses Kirkus Reviews.

Also left impressed was Clare Lombardo of the New York Times. “An anthropological excavation… It is haunted throughout by the endlessly fascinating question of inheritance.

How much of our stories – and which parts – truly belong to us? The book is a real achievement – beautifully written, deeply felt, tender and thoughtful.

In Verge, author Lidia Yuknaviych’s

tapestry of stories paints a portrait of human resilience on the margins, drawn with characters who are innocent and imperfect, wise and endangered.

“Yuknavitch’s writing is as sharp as ever and her empathetic takes on the grief, trauma, and beauty of marginalized souls are as precise as they are gripping. This is a book that lingers,” praises Refinery29.

Lambda Literary also hailed Yuknaviych’s writing. “Dynamite… I don’t know of any other writer who can render the brutality of life with such honesty and dazzle. That Lidia Yuknavitch can create such beauty out of the tragedy of contemporary life is testament to her skill as an artist. Verge is volatile and vital, and it hits where it hurts, in the most oddly pleasurable way.”

“Insistently visceral,” declares Kirkus Reviews. “These howls from the throats of women, queer characters, the impoverished, and the addicted remind us of the beauty and pain of our shared humanity. Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.”

Credit: Penguin Random House

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Art & Design MARCH 2021: ISSUE 114

Gold Fingers The late photographer Terry O’Neill’s work on the James Bond movies is celebrated in a new book, with iconic and revealing images of everyone from Connery to Craig WORDS: CHRIS ANDERSON

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very James Bond movie begins the same way. The viewer appears to be staring down the barrel of a gun, just as Bond himself walks into view, then turns and shoots – a sequence as iconic as the theme tune playing over the top. And perhaps this is the closest we can get to imagining ourselves as Terry O’Neill, the legendary British photographer who was present on the set of many Bond films, looking through his camera lens at the likes of Sean Connery and Roger Moore, and whose images have arguably defined our perception of the character as much as any stunt or gadget.

With his career taking off in the early 1960s, O’Neill began working with a wide range of celebrities, from music icons such as the Beatles and The Rolling Stones, to politicians and movie stars, with his work appearing in countless magazines and newspapers. His images are often collected today in books and exhibitions, with Bond: Photographed

by Terry O’Neill, The Definitive

Collection, edited by James Clarke and published by ACC Art Books, released while the latest Bond movie, No Time To Die, remains in quarantine.

Sadly, it is something O’Neill himself will not get to see, with the photographer passing away in November 2019. Clarke, who edited the new book, was at least able to meet with him briefly before his death. “It was the July before, and we had every intention of spending time together, talking about various photographs, but he became so unwell,” the writer recalls. “Luckily, Iconic Images, which manages his archive, had all sorts of interviews with him about his entire career. So I was very fortunate to have this huge range of material, and I’ve drawn on it a lot here.”

From looking at O’Neill’s Bond images, the photographer’s work on the series can be traced from the second movie, From Russia With Love with Sean Connery, through to George Lazenby’s only outing, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and then into the Roger

Moore era, with stills from the set and publicity material for each. Timothy Dalton escaped O’Neill’s lens, but the photographer did return for Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye, and later met Daniel Craig for Skyfall. He even worked on the 1960s spoof version of Casino Royale.

Has there ever been a photographer more associated with Bond? Probably not. “He was on it from the beginning, and actually worked on Dr No,” reveals Clarke. “Buried in one of the Iconic interviews, he says, ‘Yeah, I worked on Dr No, but I lost the photographs.’ So we have no actual evidence [laughs]. But what I think this says, at the time it was just another job. He took the photos, handed them in, and he was off to whatever came next.”

For context, Clarke reveals in his introduction that at the time of the first movie, Dr No in 1962, Bond was already popular as a literary character.

US president John F Kennedy was a fan, and real-life MI6 agents were apparently 21

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Terry O’Neill is as important to our visual sense of Bond as much as Connery or Moore It was this, according to Clarke, that helped O’Neill develop such close association with the Bond movies. “He certainly sustained a friendship with all of the Bond actors, and I think a few movies in there is a real sense of: Terry O’Neill is the man for the job when it comes to photography,” Clarke describes.

“If you look at the series for Diamonds Are Forever, there are some really playful images, with Connery pretending to take a photo of O’Neill himself. And I love the shots with Connery still in his tuxedo, playing the slots in Las Vegas.

That’s during their break time. It’s Connery and O’Neill just hanging out!”

The set of Casino Royale, released in 1967, seemed just as eventful. “We debated including that one, but if you’re covering O’Neill Bond, it has to be in there,” says Clarke. “It’s not a mainstream Bond film, but there are some terrific photos, and in the interviews he gave, O’Neill talks with a real sense of awe about Ursula Andress, and the movie star she had become, and his amazement at there being so many famous people in one film.”

Does O’Neill’s work on Bond lose

anything by not covering Timothy Dalton? “It’s a blank spot,” says Clarke, “but O’Neill didn’t work on those movies, and I suspect it was largely because he was so geared to working in Los Angeles at that point, during the 1980s, that it wasn’t convenient to do so.”

But he did come back for Pierce Brosnan’s Bond debut in GoldenEye. “There’s a particular portrait of Pierce Brosnan in character – an iconic shot, Bond posing with a gun – and that became the key art for the movie poster campaign,” says Clarke. “So his photography would feature everywhere, even in the most obvious promotional situations.”

An artistic licence to take photographs of Bond, which has led to an impressive body of work. As he reflects on his opportunity to raid O’Neill’s archives, Clarke concludes, “We live in an era of these huge movie events, such as Star Wars or the Avengers, and Bond really set a template for that back in the 1960s.

Terry O’Neill is as important to our visual sense of Bond as much as Connery or Moore – a blockbuster photographer, in every sense.”

All images: Terry O’Neill/Iconic Images Ltd.

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flattered by the association. But as O’Neill himself once said, “When we started, we all thought it was going to be a one- or two-film thing. We never dared to think it was going to turn into this huge franchise.”

The photographer had some thoughts, over time, on why it developed that way.

“What’s great about it, and I think it’s the real secret to why it’s been so successful for so many years, is that with each decade, each James Bond, they have really kept up with the times,” he said.

“Sean Connery in the 1960s was cool and classic; he really fits that decade.

Roger Moore in the 1970s added more humour; very Cary Grant. In the 1990s, Pierce Brosnan came aboard and added a real style. Then Daniel Craig – he’s the perfect modern Bond.”

The book opens with chapters on Connery and Moore, then switches to specific movies, covering Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Diamonds Are Forever and Live and Let Die, followed by the publicity stills for GoldenEye. Towards the back, the shoots O’Neill conducted with many of the so-called ‘Bond girls’ are featured, from Honor Blackman and Jane Seymour to Ursula Andress and Britt Ekland.

Images from the set of the Casino Royale spoof conclude the book, with Craig, the latest Bond, featured in the introduction.

There is something iconic and familiar about the images shown. “This is a closeup of Terry O’Neill’s experience, literally through his lens,” Clarke explains.

“And as well as the images, we have his contact sheets too. These have little notes and annotations on them, and it’s kind of unfiltered. You get to see these rare candid shots.”

Clarke was able to ask George Lazenby and Jane Seymour to contribute to the book, as well as Robert Wade and Neal Purvis, the screenwriters of No Time To Die. “Lazenby really looked the part, as these photos show, and it was great to speak to Jane Seymour,” Clarke reveals. “She talked about Live and Let Die, and the experience of making the movie, but also about Terry O’Neill.

They had a few days together to work on promotional shots, before filming began.

She talked with great affection about his personality and the rapport they had, and his ability to put the subject at ease.

And if you asked other celebrities, they would say the same.”

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Timepieces MARCH 2019: ISSUE 114

AIR

Flower Power

Takashi Murakami, whose artworks have sold for over $15 million, has collaborated on the ultimate limited edition timepiece with Hublot

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hen Louis Vuitton’s former creative director Marc Jacobs (who was at the helm of the brand from 1993-2014) invited Japanese artist Takashi Murakami to makeover the house’s signature monogram collection in 2003, it was the start of a collaboration that would last for 12 years. The resulting Multicolore bags became fashionista must-haves, and are today among the most sought-after of all LV modernclassics. Now, almost two decades on, Murakami’s latest commercial collaboration is set to become another sell-out success.

Following several lauded launches at this year’s LVMH Watch Week, Swiss watchmaker Hublot has followed up with the latest addition to its ‘Hublot Loves Art’ collection.

In the presence of company CEO Ricardo Guadalupe – who joined a select audience in Tokyo via a live hologram link – Takashi Murakami was

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introduced as the brand’s latest artistic collaborator.

During the announcement at Hublot’s flagship boutique in Ginza, the artist was presented with the first of 200 Classic Fusion Takashi Murakami All Black watches, that were inspired by the colourburst, smiley-face, flower paintings that helped establish Murakami’s ‘Superflat’ art movement.

Now 58, Murakami’s paintings and sculptures have steadily grown in international importance and his work, that sees the commercial and fine art worlds collide, regularly fetches hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. When his erotic manga sculpture My Lonesome Cowboy (1998) sold for $15.2 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2008, it catapulted him to the position of most commercially and critically successful Japanese artist working today.

Small wonder, then, that Hublot was keen to add Murakami to the roster

Credit © Tracy Llewellyn / Telegraph Media Group Limited 2021

WORDS : TRACEY LLEWELLYN

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These pages: Takashi Murakami and the Classic Fusion Takashi Murakami All Black timepiece

of pop- and op-artists it has already worked with – a group that includes, among others, Tristan Eaton, Shephard Fairey, Carlos Cruz Diez, Richard Orlinski and Marc Ferrero. As for Murakami, his interest in watchmaking stretches back almost a decade, with his first foray into dial art being the ‘Death Takes No Bribe’ timepiece that he worked on with his friend and independent watchmaker Hajime Asaoka.

And that, according to Murakami, is why he was so excited to visit Hublot last year, just before the start of lockdown. “I actually decided to work on the watch when I visited the factory in Switzerland,” he said during the launch of the new timepiece.

“Everything there was of an amazing quality. I have a factory, too [the Hiropon production workshop], but the computerised machines plus the many artists making the watches at Hublot is a combination that I dream of. Being 26

there was a fantastic experience.”

As for what impressed him most, Murakami says simply: “The lunch.

Honestly, lunchtime is great because the factory is like a neighbourhood – a home.” An outstanding dining memory was the wine in the Hublot canteen due to its amazing quality, which for Murakami was a guarantee that everything at the brand would be done at the highest level.

From there, the collaboration progressed smoothly. The Classic Fusion was selected as the base model and Murakami’s smiling flower was chosen as the artist’s dial signature.

But, following Hublot’s always disruptive approach, there were several twists to come. While Murakami’s flowers are known as little explosions of psychedelic colour, Hublot opted for the classic, all-black livery that it first experimented with in 2006 – a decision that was apparently initiated by the artist himself. And, in a bid to

My head is already flying into the future and this watch will be my timeline

bring dynamism to the piece, the brand decided to have the petals on the dial in a state of perpetual motion.

“We always want to be unique,” says Guadalupe. “So, we decided to bring in a three-dimensional element with petals that rotate while the middle of the flower – the smiling head – is stationery. It really is a piece of art on the wrist.”

The limited-edition watch has a 45mm ceramic case with both satin and polished finishings. On top of the sapphire crystal is the smiling flower head encrusted with 107 black diamonds. The 12 petals, formed from a single disc, are further set with 456 brilliant-cut black diamonds and fitted onto a ball-bearing system that enables them to spin around the dial in response to the movement of the wearer’s wrist. Within the case is Hublot’s self-winding Unico movement with 72-hour power reserve.

Despite the complexities and the physical separation of artist and watchmakers, there were few problems in the watch’s development. “Hublot is my kind of partner,” says Murakami.

“The collaboration was smooth which was amazing. Just amazing.”

Ending on a philosophical note, Murakami referenced how, for him, both watches and art conjure up notions of mortality – a watch will tell time for centuries to come, and by placing art on the dial, the artist himself is put into an enduring timeline. “[Eventually] I will die,” he says, emphasising that both time and art will live on. “My head is already flying into the future and this [watch] will be my timeline.”

Set to become a watch for collectors, only 200 examples will be made.

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Jewellery MARCH 2021 : ISSUE 114

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From Venice With Love While we can’t travel to La Sérénissime, Chanel’s one-of-a-kind creations take us on an enchanting tour of its sights WORDS: SARAH ROYCE-GREENSILL

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Opening pages, clockwise from top left: Bague Camelia Baroque; BO Volute Croisiere; Eboulssante Spinels Necklace; Bague Lion Secret Saphir Bleu; Constellation Astrale Earrings These pages, clockwise from below: Camelia Venitien Hoops Earrings; Constellation Astrale Ring; BO Lion Emblématique; Bague Lion Secret

Credit © Sarah Royce-Greensill/ Telegraph Media Group Limited 2021

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Flowers are hewn from translucent rock crystal in a nod to Murano glass

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t’s safe to say that Gabrielle Chanel would not have embraced a leggingsand-hoodie lockdown wardrobe.

Even in the depths of her grief following the accidental death of her lover Boy Capel, she flung on her pearls, packed up her blazers, heels and hats and escaped to Venice with her close friend, the Polish pianist Misia Sert and her artist husband José-Maria.

There, she sought comfort in the city’s byzantine splendour, in the art and beauty around every corner. The city became an enduring source of inspiration for the couturier, and it’s this love story that the house explores in its latest high jewellery collection, Escale a Venise (Stopover in Venice).

Launching virtually during Paris Haute Couture Week (it was delayed from last July’s showcase), the 70-piece collection explores the Floating City as seen through Chanel’s eyes, over four dazzling chapters.

La Sérénissime celebrates the city’s architectural wealth, with the geometric facade of the Doge’s Palace rendered in an almost pixellated arrangement of baguette and brilliant-cut diamonds in the Eblouissante suite.

A necklace leaves a dramatically long strand of diamonds trailing down the decolletage from a series of rosegold diamond motifs and Asscher-cut diamonds, two of which can be removed and worn as earrings. A matching ring showcases a similarly striking stone.

The Sérénissime suite was inspired by the gold mosaics of Saint Mark’s Basilica: tessellated squares of onyx and

pavé diamonds are highlighted with pink, orange and yellow sapphires, their shades almost muted in comparison to the 27-carat oval mandarin sapphire that blazes at the centre.

A bulbous ring bears a six-carat Padparadscha sapphire at the centre of a byzantine cross of onyx and yellow sapphires, reminiscent of the voluminous Verdura cuffs that Chanel loved so dearly.

The Gran Canale chapter pays tribute to the city of water, with stripes of vibrant blue lapis lazuli or rich scarlet spinels and white diamonds calling to mind gondola mooring poles.

In the Volute Croisière set, diagonal red-and-white stripes appear across tasselled earrings and a dramatic, sevenstrand sautoir necklace, fastened with a chunky yellow-gold chain, while in the Volute Venitienne set the stripes are more boldly rendered as lapis-anddiamond ellipses punctuating a pearl and gold chain sautoir and a between-thefingers ring.

The most playful chapter in the collection, Gran Canale also riffs on the tourist’s view of the city, with a set of brooches depicting ice creams and a handsome, hat-wearing gondolier.

The Ruban Canotnier suite turns their signature straw boater hats into a playful diamond-set motif, finished with cherryred ribbon - a nod also to Chanel’s own beginnings as a hatmaker.

The third chapter, Isole della Laguna, presents three new interpretations of the camellia flower, a Chanel house code, each one inspired by an ancient metier d’art practised on one of the islands that

dot the Venetian Lagoon.

Flowers are hewn from translucent rock crystal in a nod to Murano glass; composed of a precious jigsaw of carnelians and fire opals like the ancient mosaics of Torcello; and fully set with diamonds outlined by onyx in a dazzling ode to the flourishes of Venice’s baroque art and architecture.

The final chapter, Spirito de Venezia, explores Chanel’s fascination with the winged lion, the emblem of Venice that became her talisman. A superstitious Leo, Chanel always associated the lion with luck and good fortune, but it was after her visit to Venice that it became a bona fide symbol of the house, and it has made regular appearances in Chanel high jewellery since 2013.

Here its majestic profile guards a 10ct Type IIa diamond in one cocktail ring and flanks a 30.92ct blue sapphire in another. Whether picked out in white diamonds or yellow sapphires, set in the middle of a medallion or atop a single earring, it possesses a regal strength that captivated Chanel.

In the Constellation Astrale suite, it’s not the lion itself but the star-studded, midnight-blue background on which it appears at the top of Saint Mark’s Basilica that takes centre stage.

A mosaic of gold-flecked lapis lazuli is adorned with asymmetrical yellow sapphire stars across a bib necklace, bracelet, earrings and cocktail ring. It’s a bold, vibrant take on Chanel’s declaration that she wanted to, “cover women with constellations”, and one that can’t fail to raise spirits.

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How did Stanley Tucci make the leap from mere movie star to foodie guru? Mick Brown finds out

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Who wants to spend their whole lives as themselves? I don’t

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hat a nice man Stanley Tucci is. Intelligent, courteous, amusing, a smart conversationalist. If you were having a dinner party, Tucci would be the first person you’d want at your table.

But what the hell would you cook?

Tucci is a terrific actor, whose long career includes major film and television roles and a cluster of awards, but meeting him it’s easy to get the impression that the thing he loves talking about most in the world is food.

Tucci loves to eat. “I do!” And he loves cooking. He co-wrote and co-directed one of the great films about food, Big Night, and starred in the film Julie & Julia as the husband of Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep), the chef who introduced French cooking to America.

He is the author of two cookbooks himself, The Tucci Cookbook (2012) and The Tucci Table: Cooking with Family and Friends (2015) and is working on a food memoir. On the day we meet, he’s hosting a Zoom ‘cookalong’ for the literary agency Curtis Brown, where his wife Felicity Blunt works (Tucci is one of her clients). “I’m doing a fettuccine con funghi,” he says. “Mushrooms. A little onion, shallot, vegetable stock, a little butter, parmigiana, a little parsley over the top… Delicious!”

In a career spanning some 35 years, Tucci, 60, has made more than 80 movies – from art-house chamber pieces to popcorn blockbusters, from The Devil Wears Prada and The Hunger Games to The Lovely Bones, as well as television series such as ER. But now, for some reason, seems to be a Stanley Tucci moment. He has made the leap from being a character actor, who a lot of people like, even though they couldn’t always put a name to the face, to cult figure. The 34

American TV show Saturday Night Live lionised him in a celebrity skit as ‘The Tooch’. In April, as lockdown hit home, an Instagram post of Tucci making a negroni in his kitchen (“a good sweet vermouth, if you can find one”), described by one critic as ‘powerfully erotic’, attracted over one million views. There are even Stanley Tucci T-shirts. Though he had nothing to do with that. “I’m not that savvy. I wish I had better business acumen.”

How, I ask, has all this happened?

He laughs. “Because I’ve been around so long. Honestly, I don’t know.

But it makes me really happy. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t.”

We are meeting, before the latest lockdown, at a members’ club in Barnes, south-west London, where Tucci – who was born and grew up in upstate New York – has lived with Blunt and their five children since 2013. A slight, trim man (he works out daily) with a shaved head, he’s a fastidious dresser; people, he laments, don’t dress the way they did when he was a child. His father, an art teacher, and “very suave-looking”, always wore a suit and tie to work. Tucci has written and directed five films and only recently realised that he always writes a scene where someone is dressing in front of a mirror. “I remember so distinctly as a child, watching my father get dressed. Even if it’s a simple suit, you’re transforming to make something new happen.”

This morning Tucci has dressed in a black pea jacket, a dark quilted gilet and well-cut Italian trousers over polished boots. His black thick-framed glasses were part of the costume for his character as the studio head Jack Warner in the 2017 TV mini-series Feud: Bette and Joan. “I liked them,

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so I nicked them – as they say.”’

Tucci is here to talk about his new film, Supernova. He plays an author, Tusker, in a long-standing relationship with a pianist, Sam (Colin Firth).

Tusker has been diagnosed with earlyonset dementia, and the pair are on a journey in their antiquated camper van to the Lake District, to visit Sam’s sister. Tucci gives a deeply affecting performance – which is already being talked of as Oscar worthy – as a man all too aware of his faculties sliding away from him. “I want to be remembered for who I was and not for who I’m about to become,” he tells Sam. “That’s the only thing I can control, and that’s all I have left.”

Supernova is the second film from Harry Macqueen, whose 2014 directorial debut.Hinterland, another love story, was made for just over $13,000. When his agent sent him the script, Tucci says, “it was like nothing I’d ever read before”.

Colin Firth is one of his closest friends, and Tucci suggested to Macqueen that Firth should play Sam. “Harry said, ‘Amazing!’ And of course, I’d already slipped Colin the script without telling Harry.

Colin read it and said, ‘My God, it’s so beautiful.’ I said, ‘I know.’”

Without ever descending into lachrymosity, Supernova superbly depicts the toll exacted by dementia, and the terrible moral dilemma that arises in a relationship when one person decides that their life is no longer worth living, and the other must pay the price. “Exactly,” Tucci says.

“Whose loss is greater? And whose need is greater? That’s the thing both Colin and I loved about it. And in that situation you’re watching that loss as it happens. You’re grieving every minute.”

This page: Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada, 2006

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The only problem with being a father is you’re a human being, do you know what I mean?

Much of Supernova’s effect derives from the obvious chemistry between Tucci and Firth.

They have been friends for 20 years, since working together on the film Conspiracy in 2001. “We just hit it off,” Tucci remembers. They stayed in touch over the years, and ended up living not too far from each other when Tucci moved to Barnes following his marriage. The families have been close ever since – one of Firth’s sons went to the same school as one of Tucci’s daughters – sharing dinners at each other’s houses and holidays at Firth’s home in Italy. “We have the same sense of humour. We just talk about anything – our kids, politics, art, movies, whatever.”

“First impressions were of a gentle, thoughtful person,” Firth tells me via email. “Perhaps a little more sophisticated than the rest of us. We’ve been around each other for many of the most significant moments. Best and worst. The shallow banter has never abated, but we’ve seen each other at our most troubled and our happiest. One of the great marks of friendship is being comfortable with being utterly boring together. There are very few people in whose company I feel greater ease. For whom I care more. And who can also cook.”

Making Supernova, the cast were billeted in “what do you call it?” Tucci says, “a holiday camp?” Firth would come over to his chalet and Tucci would cook dinner. “That was one of the loveliest bits of making the movie because I got to hang out with one of my best friends, and cook and talk about the job, or whatever.”

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This “ease in one another’s company”, Firth writes, was a critical factor in playing the relationship between Tusker and Sam. “In some ways, the lighter moments are harder to achieve than the intense stuff. This is where our friendship gave us our greatest advantage. Complete trust. And we make each other laugh – which was also helpful in decompressing from the heavier moments.”

Tucci grew up in the town of Peekskill, Westchester County, in upstate New York, the eldest of three children (his sister is the actor Christine Tucci). At the age of 11 he was cast in a school play, “and I knew it in a second. I felt more comfortable onstage than I did offstage. And I still feel that way. Who wants to spend their whole lives as themselves?” He laughs. “I don’t.”

Tucci built a career on versatility. He played supporting roles in films and TV series, from light comedy to thrillers.

His career had hit a lean spell when he was cast as Nigel, the art director of Runway magazine (a thinly disguised American Vogue), in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, alongside Meryl Streep playing the termagant editor Miranda Priestly, and Emily Blunt as her snide assistant, Emily. It would be the biggest success of Tucci’s career so far. It would also forge a friendship with Blunt that would prove particularly felicitous.

By then Tucci’s wife Kate, a social worker, had developed breast cancer.

The couple had married in 1995 and had three children, twins Isabella and Nicolo, who are now 20, and Camilla, who is 18, as well as raising Kate’s two children from a previous marriage.

Tucci stopped working to be at home

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The perfect husband? They need to call Felicity and get the truth of it. But let’s continue that myth

the meal the waiter comes around, and she says, ‘Do you have a cheese cart?’ I thought, that’s incredible.

That’s really sexy and disgusting.”

Tucci jokes that ‘75 per cent’ of their conversations are about food.

“She loves to eat,” he says. “I love to eat. And we’re both, thank God, blessed with fast metabolisms.”

Soon afterwards, Blunt moved to America from London to live with Tucci and his children. In 2012, the couple married in a private ceremony at home, followed a month later by a wedding at Middle Temple Hall (where Blunt was called to the bar after training as a barrister) in London, attended

by Colin Firth and Meryl Streep, where Emily Blunt was a bridesmaid and Steve Buscemi the best man.

A year later, the family moved to England, settling close to Roehampton, where Blunt grew up. She wanted to be near her family, Tucci explains, and it was too hard for her to work from America. “And it didn’t matter where I lived. It was hard for the kids to leave, and hard for me to leave my family – still is hard.” But the children have adjusted to English life like a dream. “They say things like, ‘I thought it was quite lovely’ – but still with an American accent.”

Blunt is 21 years younger than Tucci.

For her to become stepmother to his three children was, he says, “huge. I’m a stepfather myself. It’s the hardest job.

But she’s incredible.” She has embraced the part of Kate in Tucci’s life in a way that a more insecure person might have found difficult. “Felicity put together this beautiful book for the kids, of pictures of them with their mom. When we did a cookbook together, she said do you want to include any of Kate’s recipes in the book? I said, well I guess so, so she found some and said, let’s get a picture of Kate in here…”

Their son Matteo was born in 2015, and a daughter Emilia three

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years later. Tucci is fond of quoting the maxim that you are only as happy as your unhappiest child, and fatherhood – particularly to five children with such a wide agespread – is “the hardest thing in the world. You just want to get it right.

“The only problem with being a father is you’re a human being, do you know what I mean?” He laughs. “And everyone is always changing. From five to six, eight to nine. From 12 to 12-and-a-half – those are completely different people. They smell different.

They look at you differently – with so much hatred! So you’re always trying to play catch-up. Should I do this, that? Should I yell? Should I be quiet? Then you’re like, just kill me.”

Covid has wrought the same confusions and anxieties in Tucci’s life as in everybody else’s. He was able to travel to Spain and Italy for work during the summer. But he has been unable to see his parents in America for more than a year. A trip to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary and his father’s 90th birthday was cancelled.

His mother is 84. “They’re both in incredible shape, but when you’re 90, you’re 90,” Tucci told me in a second conversation by telephone, on the day after the most recent lockdown was announced. “It’s angering because you know there hasn’t been great leadership on either side of the pond, and that’s really frustrating to my dad. He said to me, ‘I can’t see my grandchildren because so many people in government have made so many mistakes.’”

“And it’s only getting worse. The virus is rising again and it’s terrifying, devastating for families. I’ve been very lucky that no one in my family has been harmed by it. But how long can that be avoided? I really can’t wait for my parents to be able to get the vaccine.”

Three of his children who should be at university are now at home.

There is homeschooling to be

Credit: © Mick Brown / Telegraph Media Group Limited 2021

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with his wife, but was then offered a part in the medical drama ER. “Having a wife who was in and out of treatment, and having to work on these medical shows… that was interesting.

But it was the only way I could make money. We had three little kids, my stepdaughter, a mortgage. And Kate was going through severe treatments.”

In a desperate search for a cure, the couple went to Holland, where Kate was treated with a device called an Energetic Corrector, designed to reactivate weakened cells though electrical oscillation. The treatment, Tucci says, was “very beneficial”, but too late. Kate had been diagnosed at stage four, and the cancer had metastasised.

There is a painful parallel in Supernova, when Tusker admits to Sam that he has stopped taking the medication that is supposed to arrest his slide into dementia. “Tusker knows that his medication doesn’t do anything,” Tucci says. ‘That’s the part of this story that is so heartwrenching. You try to do everything, but there is nothing you can do.”

Kate’s death in May 2009 at the age of 47 stopped everything. “It was a very difficult time. With three kids, how do you do it? You just do. I had an incredible support system. My family, my parents, were incredible.”

It was 12 months before he felt comfortable about travelling for work, filming Burlesque, a musical comedy with Cher and Christina Aguilera, in Los Angeles, where he was able to take his parents and children. Tucci says he had no thoughts then of what the future might hold, and whether he would ever marry again. “And then I met Felicity, and I knew.”

In July 2010 he was a guest at the wedding of Emily Blunt and the actor John Krasinski, held at George Clooney’s house on Lake Como.

There Blunt introduced Tucci to her sister, Felicity. Tucci would later joke how he had never seen someone so slender enjoy their food so much.

“It was astounding really. I thought she had some sort of disease.”

Shortly afterwards, he was in London filming, and they had dinner at the City restaurant L’Anima. The meal lasted four hours. “At a certain point I couldn’t do it any more,” Tucci would later remember. “At the end of

This page: Tucci in Big Night, 1986

taken care of. Blunt has a full-time job; Tucci has a book to finish – a memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food. “It’s all so complicated. We’re prepared for it now, and that’s some sort of solace. But you’re afraid for the people that you love who are vulnerable – and just on a superficial level you want to have a social life.”

In May, at the height of the first lockdown, he wrote a piece for Atlantic magazine describing holding the domestic fort for the family, while Blunt continued to work from her office upstairs. What the piece made clear was just how attuned Tucci is to the demands of housework. He is, he says, “a very tidy person”. First thing in the morning, before he’s even made coffee he is reaching for a damp cloth to wipe the kitchen surfaces.

“Then we can move forward. And then I’ll make a terrible mess of it.

But that’s part of the process.” His studio at the bottom of the garden where he writes and pursues his other

passion of painting, is “a disaster”.

But the house is “incredibly clea”’.

Ironing? “No. My father loves ironing.

But I’m not a very good ironer, and I’m also not a very good folder.” Between the cleaning, the cooking and the cocktails, he seems to be a paragon of domesticity. Every woman I know, I tell him, seems to regard him as the perfect husband. He laughs. “They need to just call up Felicity and get the truth of it. But let’s continue that myth.”

In writing his memoir, he says, he has come to realise how “profoundly significant” the family meals of his childhood were. It carries memories, he says, of “intense happiness, obsessiveness and strange dichotomies” – there was a period when his mother would serve frozen TV dinners – “this woman who was completely obsessed with if you ate this pasta with this sauce, and never any butter on the table.”

The Tuccis are originally from Calabria, where only bread is put on the

table, to be used as a scarpetta (‘little shoe’) and dipped into the sauce. “Taint it with the butter,” he says, “then you won’t taste the sauce. And still when I see people eat Italian food certain ways, I can’t… It doesn’t only offend me. It offends the entire Italian civilisation.”

I ask, when is he at his happiest – apart from being with his family, of course, and at the stove, and making negronis. There are times when he is painting, he says when he feels incredibly happy. And skiing. “I’m probably happiest when it’s winter. I like snow. And I like when you finish skiing and you go and have a cocktail, raclette, fondue. I love all that.”

So, food again. “I love rabbit. Usually I’ll just make it with tomato, onion, maybe some olives. So I took this rabbit and added a little garlic, shallot, fennel, a bay leaf, loose herbs, white wine, a little bit of cognac, mustard and salt, and chicken stock – cooked it for 25 minutes in this thing. And oh, my God…’ I’ve lost him.

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WORDS : CHRIS UJMA

Why the decade was like no other for fashion AIR

INTERVIEW: JOHN THATCHER

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t was perhaps inevitable that the big, brash trends of the 80s would see a reaction as we entered the 90s – I mean, a penchant for outsized shoulder pads that made their wearer look like the starting quarterback for the Miami Dolphins was always on borrowed time.

Yet as the 90s unfolded it became clear that this was no ordinary decade for changing fashions. From Kurt Cobaininspired grunge to Tom Ford-tailored ensembles, the wholesome supermodels through to the waifs, no decade illustrates the incongruous nature of fashion trends quite like the 90s.

That opinion was the starting thought for Colleen Hill, curator of costume and accessories at The Museum at FIT, New York, for her new book: Reinvention & Restlessness: Fashion In The 90s, published this month by Rizzoli.

“The 90s had an array of coexisting and sometimes conflicting trends that made it an especially dynamic decade,” says Hill. “For example, although minimalism and grunge shared a similar ethos – a rejection of 1980s opulence – they were incredibly different in appearance.

Yet they existed simultaneously, and I would argue that they were equally important around 1993.

“Minimalism carried forward in a way that grunge did not, but even that trend cycled in and out over the course of the decade. Fashion editors were already mentioning a ‘return’ to minimalism by the end of the decade, only a few years after it had taken hold in the first place. It was an era with a lot going on and something for everyone, which is part of what makes it so appealing.”

As Hill opines, though trends like minimalism and grunge represent the

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more overt reactions to the opulence of the 80s, there were more subtle retorts: “The work of Martin Margiela – whose designs can be described as many things but can perhaps be best categorised as deconstruction – was defying the ways that fashion could be understood and appreciated. For instance, Margiela eschewed the ‘need’ for supermodels to sell his clothing, instead casting his friends and women he saw on the street.

Even when more traditional notions of luxury fashion were reinstated during the mid-90s, executives at preeminent fashion labels realised their brands would gain more attention by hiring younger, edgier designers. Galliano and McQueen were stars, but they likely wouldn’t have been welcomed at Dior or Givenchy a decade earlier,” argues Hill.

The 80s were not the sole influencer, with myriad factors sparking numerous trends. “Fashion was more widely and quickly disseminated, due in part to its growing presence in popular culture,” says Hill. “That was exemplified by television shows like MTV’s House of Style, CNN’s Style with Elsa Klensch, and movies like Clueless. The fashion industry also benefited from developments in technology and the internet. Runway shows were increasingly spectacular and newsworthy. Fast fashion was burgeoning. In general, increased interest in fashion meant that more people were experiencing and partaking in more ideas from a greater number designers – there was simply more space for fashion. In addition to exciting, up-and-coming designers like Todd Oldham and Isaac Mizrahi, numerous designers that had been well known

during the 1980s – Romeo Gigli, Thierry Mugler, Vivienne Westwood – were still very active in the following decade.”

As Hill touches on, as in the case of almost every other industry technological advancements, led by the rise of the internet, were beginning to imprint on fashion as a whole. “It [the internet] was just starting to be influential during the 90s, but it did make a big impact,” says Hill. “Some brands began to sell their wares online. Photographs taken during runway shows could be emailed around the world, allowing for an almost immediate look at the latest presentations. Designers such as Walter Van Beirendonck and Helmut Lang began to experiment with presenting collections on CD-ROMs rather than staging live presentations. And one of my favourite 1990s fashion-adjacent films, Party Girl, starring Parker Posey, was the first to premier online.”

While technology began its inexorable march into our daily lives, movies and magazines were still huge influencers during the 90s. Fashion would play a starring role in movies like the aforementioned Party Girl (1995) and Clueless (1995), while this was also the decade in which Sex and The City (1998) launched. The industry even lampooned itself in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1994), which was shot during Paris Fashion Week and featured a whole host of designers and models.

The trends were communicated via fashion bibles like Vogue. With its once titanic influence now diluted by online and social channels, does Hill think the likes of Vogue will ever wield such influence again? “I would argue that

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Galliano and McQueen were stars, but they likely wouldn’t have been welcomed at Dior or Givenchy a decade earlier

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Opening pages: Maison Martin Margiela spring/summer 2000, Mark Borthwick Purple, spring 2000; Anna Sui spring/ summer 1993, Enrique Badulescu, Harper’s Bazaar.February 1993 Previous page: Shalom Harlow sprayed by paint guns, Alexander McQueen, spring/ summer 1999 Left: Film still from Reality Bites, Steve Zahn, Winona Ryder, Janeane Garofalo, and Ethan Hawke, 1994 Opposite: Parker Posey, Patrik Andersson, Detour, March 1995

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Minimalism carried forward in a way that grunge did not, but even that trend cycled in and out over the course of the decade Vogue is still very powerful, but now we have many voices in fashion,” states Hill.

“That’s exactly what we need in an age that is increasingly focused on diversity and inclusion, and I think that’s where we will remain. Although many 21stcentury publications are online rather than in print, they can still wield a lot of influence. Of course, there were other voices in the 1990s, too – The Face and i-D are just two examples of incredibly influential alternatives to Vogue.”

One of the most controversial (and indeed, most unsettling) trends to emerge in the 90s was that of the waifish look, often labelled ‘heron chic’, which saw a move away from the perceived perfection of the early ‘90s supermodels (Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer et al) to pencil-thin models walking the runway. Viewed with hindsight, does Hill think this turn set a dangerous precedent for the modelling industry?

“The fashion industry has long proffered unattainable physical ideals, though discussions around that fact really took off during the 1990s. Very thin models are still very much part of runway shows, but they have also sparked a demand for more physical diversity within fashion.

I always argue that a good designer can

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make anyone look great in clothes.

“Although we have a long way to go in that regard, we are moving in the right direction, and I do think looking back at the 1990s can remind us of the importance of moving forward,” she suggests.

Another way in which the fashion industry is moving in the right direction is by addressing environmental concerns.

During the 90s, such concerns were manifest in the designs of labels like Katharine Hamnett and Moschino, while the decade also shared our current fondness for nostalgia. “The environmental concerns that became part of fashion during the 1990s set the stage for our concerns with sustainability today,” states Hill. “As for nostalgia, I find it really interesting that part of our taste for ‘retro’ fashion now centres on looks from the 1990s!

Platform shoes are a great example of how multi-layered fashion influences can be. They are originally a 1940s style that was revived in the 1970s, the 1990s, and again today – and some examples show all of those influences in one.”

The on-going global pandemic will also shape the fashion industry. If 90s fashion was at least in part a reaction

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to the culture of the 80s, how does Hill think fashion may react postpandemic? “I hope that we will a) want to dress up after having spent so much time in our comfy at-home attire; b) be more concerned than ever about sustainability, especially considering all of the waste that’s been generated by the use of disposable masks; and c) see a real creative renaissance in design, particularly among young people who have struggled as students or emerging professionals.

They have had to be extraordinarily resourceful during this time, and I hope it results in something positive.

Reinvention & Restlessness: Fashion In The 90s, by Colleen Hill, is out this month, published by Rizzoli

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The high-heel king is launching a fashion academy with a difference – it will teach students how to make money WORDS: CHARLIE GOWANS-EGLINTON

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immy Choo is wearing a suit and tie when we speak over Zoom, and he tells me: “I have my crystal shoes on.” I’d be disappointed if he didn’t.

He became a household name thanks to his shoes – or rather, his Choos – when he teamed up with the Vogue accessories editor Tamara Mellon to launch the Jimmy Choo brand in 1996, although at that point he was already a regular visitor at Kensington Palace, where he talked Diana, Princess of Wales through his shoe designs for her.

“She influenced the whole world, and even people right now, they’re still talking about her,” he says. “Not only Euro countries, but the Far East countries, everyone is talking about her because she gave a lot of love to her country. She cared about charities, she cared about old people and young people, she cared about education.”

Education is something that Choo is hoping will be part of his legend too.

Choo sold his 50 per cent stake in his company in 2001 and since then, as well as designing his couture line, he has “been travelling for 20 years to different cities, different types of school, working with so many fashion weeks, attending all the design fashion forums”, he says. He was awarded an OBE in 2003 for helping to make London a global centre for fashion and design.

Choo has worked with the British Council, which specialises in international cultural relations and education, for a decade. It was his son’s idea that perhaps he might one day open a school of his own.

The project has kept the 72-year-old motivated for the past year while locked down alone in his second home in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, separated from his wife and family in London by Covid-19 restrictions.

“Because I’m at home by myself, even when you say you’ll come up with some ideas, sometimes I will sit down and switch on my UK radio and listen to Magic, Capital radio, BBC, listen to the news, listen to music. But in the mornings, or in the evenings at 10, 11 o’clock, I will get my paper and my cup of tea, and I’ll sketch designs.

You have to move your mind all the time. The more you create, the more ideas come up. I cannot go out, but I still have to do exercise at home.

Physically, I think I’m strong. I eat 48

proper food, have vitamin C . . . but, more importantly, I have a vision. I think about my academy that will open soon, so my mind is very strong.”

The JCA | London Fashion Academy is to open its London campus in Mayfair, London, this September (jca.ac.uk). Paying fees of £18,000 ($25,00) a year, a group of 100 students will study fashion design and entrepreneurship at three levels, foundation diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate, with Choo to guide them.

“London is still home to me, so I’ll be in and out. I want to see what they’re doing. I want to talk to them, to make sure they come to the academy to study, not because they want to be famous.

“It’s not easy to become famous,” he says. “It’s a lot of people helping

you, promoting you. You have to be something very good as well. If you don’t have good skills, good ideas, people cannot promote you in the first place. If my father never gave me the ideas, skill and love, taught me how to design and make a shoe, I wouldn’t be here today. And I’m thankful to my college teacher who helped me, slowly and patiently. The Chinese always say, ‘When you drink water, think about where the water came from.’ ” After growing up in Penang, Malaysia, Choo moved to London and in 1982 began studying at Cordwainers Technical College (now part of the London College of Fashion) “when everything had to be made by hand – there were no computers”.

The UK capital doesn’t exactly have a

You have to move your mind all the time.

‘The more you create, the more ideas come ’

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Opening pages: Jimmy Choo at his London studio in the early 90s.

Previous pages, from left to right: Jimmy Choo shoes worn by Diana, Princess of Wales, circa 1997; Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City Opposite, from left to right: Jimmy Choo shoes worn

by Diana, Princess of Wales; Jimmy Choo at his London studio in 2003

shortage of fashion schools, however.

Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, opened its college of fashion and design in 2013 on a site in Soho that used to house part of Central Saint Martins’ fashion and fine art campus, which itself is now part of a much larger site in King’s Cross. And with tuition fees at an all-time high, you have to wonder if there’s the demand – or need – to justify another institution.

However, the school of Choo has a USP: business. Design courses offer training in ‘design and entrepreneurship’ and ‘professional incubation’ of each student’s fledgling business. When I studied at Central Saint Martins ‘commercialism’ was a dirty word. Success wasn’t measured in profits, but by being featured in the pages of the right magazines or worn by the right people; to 50

follow the money was to sell out.

Then came the 2008 recession, the deepest since the Second World War. And now the Covid-19 recession. Many of those ‘cool’ magazines have shuttered their businesses, as have many of the ‘cool’ fashion designers whose clothes appeared in them. Even fast fashion is struggling, as the permanent closure of Topshop’s world-famous Oxford Street flagship store proves. And Brexit poses further problems for an industry used to sourcing materials and producing clothes in European hubs.

“A lot of designers, they know design,” he says, “but they do not know about business. In the old days, once I’d come up with a design, I’d look at it – ‘Oh, it’s so beautiful, definitely it will catch the press’s attention!’ I wasn’t a businessman. But working for years and years, you learn it slowly. My

vision for the academy is to teach them my knowledge for design, but also to have a business mind as well. And you have to love what you’re doing. If you say, ‘I love money’, then you cannot get ideas. Money covers both eyes.”

A week before our call, news of a Sex and the City revival broke.

Its shoe-loving protagonist helped Choo’s rise to pop culture stardom: losing her shoe as she runs to catch a ferry, Carrie Bradshaw cries, “I lost my Choo!” a phrase that entered the modern vernacular. I ask him what shoes he would design for her now. Couture trainers?

“I can do one thing at a time. I’m putting my effort, my heart into education so I think I would give it to an up-and-coming student. My father always said to me, whatever you do, if you can share out, share out.”

Credit: Charlie Gowans-Eglinton, The Times, News Licensing

they know design, but they do ‘ A lot of designers, not know about business ’

He had a passion for standing up for these people who were locked up and treated so poorly

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In the month of International Women’s Day, a new book reflects on the rise, fall and rise again of women in cinema

WORDS : DAISY GOODWIN

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In 1917, Universal Studios released eight films with women credited as directors; 100 years later the same studio produced just one, Pitch Perfect 3. That is the surprising reality behind Helen O’Hara’s fascinating polemic, Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film.

Anybody who has watched the latest in the Wonder Woman franchise, ‘helmed’ by a woman, Patty Jenkins, might assume that women were taking their rightful place in mainstream Hollywood just as Kamala Harris is doing in the White House. But as a new wave of feminist film historians and critics like O’Hara are revealing, this is no steady climb, but a U-shaped recovery.

One of the first people to realise the potential of film to tell stories, as opposed to capturing real life, was a young French woman called Alice Guy, who worked as an assistant to Léon Gaumont. In 1896 she asked to borrow the company camera. “It seems like a silly, girlish thing to do, but you can try if you want,” she remembered her boss responding. Alice shot a fanciful story called La Fée aux Choux, or The Cabbage Fairy. It was only 30 seconds long, but it was the beginning of film as a narrative art from.

Alice went on to become head of production at Gaumont and then, having married a cameraman called Herbert Blaché, moved to New York.

Here the couple started a studio, Solax, and Alice made films with a feminist slant such as Making an American Citizen (1912), in which an eastern European immigrant learns, through a series of vignettes, that he must treat his wife respectfully to assimilate into his new culture. Alice’s film career ended when her husband left her and she nearly died of Spanish flu.

The American women who followed her – such as Lois Weber, who was a contemporary of DW Griffith and Cecil B DeMille, was considered their equal, made more than 200 films and pioneered the split-screen technique in 1913 – have until now been written out of cinema history.

As this book makes clear, the early days of Hollywood were full of female directors, writers, producers and actors; in the 1910s there was a perception that women were needed to transform what could be a rather dodgy 54

back-room medium into wholesome family-friendly entertainment.

The first film star was a woman – Florence Lawrence, the Biograph Girl — and in 1916 probably the most powerful person in Hollywood was Mary Pickford, who not only starred in films and collaborated on scripts, but in 1919 founded a film studio with her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, and set up United Artists with Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and Griffith. Pickford and her friend Frances Marion, a screenwriter, not only had power, they also tried to promote other women – Marion held ‘cat parties’, or what we would now call female networking events.

However, in the 1920s Hollywood morphed from a scrappy creative frontier, making up the rules as it went along, into a moneymaking machine where the studios took over distribution.

‘

The first film star was a woman and the most powerful person in Hollywood was Mary Pickford

’

Opening pages: Canadian-born film actress Mary Pickford, circa 1916 Below: American film director Dorothy Arzner on a set at Paramount Studios, 1934 Right: Clara Bow on set

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than a man) is only now starting to equal the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Yet institutional inequality continues: female stars earn considerably less than their male peers; only one woman, Kathryn Bigelow, has won a directing Oscar (not surprisingly, as the people who vote in this category are almost exclusively older white men); and the horrors of the casting couch led to #MeToo abuses. With the result that much of the best female talent (Shonda Rhimes, Jill Soloway, Sally Wainwright) works in the slightly less sexist world of television.

If Hollywood is to survive as more than a machine that churns out superhero franchises, it needs to get back to its roots and put women properly at the heart of the picture.

Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film, by Helen O’Hara, is out now

Credit: Daisy Goodwin/The Times/News International

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The new corporate structures in this system were exclusively white and male. Directing came to be seen as a man’s job, and the only female director to work steadily through the 1930s was Dorothy Arzner, a lesbian with an Eton crop who wore the jodhpurs-andboots combo popularised by DeMille.

She discovered Katharine Hepburn, casting her as an aviator in her first movie, Christopher Strong (1933).

The power of Hollywood to shape the nation’s character meant that after a series of scandals the studios came under pressure to clean up their act. When in 1928 Clara Bow, then the biggest female star in Hollywood, refused to sign a morality clause (which prohibited drinking and ‘immoral behaviour’), the studio held back $25,000 from her contract, which she forfeited when cited as a co-respondent in a divorce case.

The prudish censorship imposed by the 1934 Hays Code, which constricted the kinds of stories that could be told, was not all bad for actresses, though – fewer sex workers on screen meant that women were playing lawyers, journalists, business tycoons: Hepburn in Adam’s Rib (1949), Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940), Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (1945).

Ironically, O’Hara points out, it was when the ‘New Hollywood’ male directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg came into their own in the late 1970s, free from the constraints of censorship, that these powerful female parts dried up and women were back to playing love interests.

Even in an age of increasing equality off screen, the cult of the auteur, in the US almost exclusively male, led to a preponderance of the male gaze.

The number of films that would pass the ‘Bechdel test’ (where two female characters talk about something other

Lois Weber made ‘more than 200

films and pioneered the split-screen technique in 1913, but has been written out of cinema history

’

These pages, from left to right: Lois Webber; Katharine Hepburn, 1932

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

Motoring

MARCH 2021: ISSUE 114

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Top of the World The seventh generation of Mercedes’ S-Class can’t yet drive itself, but there’s a fair bit it can do which other premium cars simply can’t WORDS: ANDREW ENGLISH

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ill it fly? Is it amphibious? Can it catch aliens, can it drive itself? There was a fair bit of anticipation about how much technology Mercedes-Benz has thrown at the seventh-generation version of its S-class flagship saloon, a series that has oft been dubbed ‘The Best Car In The World’ and usually a showcase for Mercedes’ latest technology.

Just a note on the self-driving here, especially to Tesla owners.

Whatever you’ve been told, not one production car on sale can legally drive itself with the driver’s hands off the steering wheel (Level Three SAE).

Oliver Thöne, project director for the new S-class, explains the latest United Nations regulations includes a requirement that Level Three cars need to recognise an emergency services vehicle coming up fast behind in the same way that a human might, which is with sight and/or sound.

This is not easy and requires at least a highly enhanced rearview camera, as well as the plethora of radar, stereo high-definition cameras, enhanced positioning systems, ultrasound sensors, high-definition mapping, Lidar (light detection and ranging) and really super-smart software that SAE Three self-driving entails.

So, and you are probably ahead of me here, the new S-class doesn’t self-drive to that level, although Germany is about to allow stretches of autobahn where cars such as the S-class can strut their self-driving stuff.

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and corners with generally pleasing proportions, although the front, with its huge air intakes, LED matrix headlights that project warning signs on the road in front as well as lighting the way ahead, and that big radiator grille, is not to my particular tastes.

Equipment levels depend on which of the five trim levels (AMG Line, AMG Line Premium, AMG Line Premium Plus, AMG Line Premium Executive and AMG Line Premium Plus Executive) takes your fancy. There’s even a Maybach version on its way where the sky’s the limit.

It’s amazingly complicated, comfortable and cossetting. There are little head poufs hanging from the head restraints like hibernating velvet bats, and seats which rub and warm your back. An uprated voice control helps to keep track of things, but did we really need several degrees of active seat bolstering through corners, or myriad levels of low-level cabin lighting?

Oh, and the combined rectangular

screens across the dash that have made Mercedes interiors so easy to use and classy for the last few years are no more.

Instead, the new S-class gets a single oblong digital instrument binnacle and a 12.8in portrait centre screen, which handles most of the audio, heating, sat nav and communications functions.

So far so Tesla, although the S-class’s displays are better done and the control systems easier.

Why has the car industry settled on these big portrait screens? Slavish copying of Tesla notwithstanding, there are other reasons such as ease of use, simplifying the complex control of ever more connectivity features, not to mention cost – big screens might look expensive, but they’re far cheaper than the complex buttons and switches that they replace.

Try and avoid the domination of the cabin by that screen, and the finish-andfit of this Merc is simply gorgeous. You

Credit: © Andrew English/Telegraph Media Group 2021

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In the meantime, Thöne reckons it has the world’s best Level-Two system, especially with the contact sensors in the steering wheel, which means you don’t have to waggle the steering about every 30 seconds to tell the car that, yes, you are still there and not sitting in the back watching a movie on the seat-back screens.

Level Three, when and where it is allowed, will come in the form of an optional pack for the S-class, without the self-aggrandising bull effluent. Despite that, in very strict circumstances, with sensors embedded in the garage, this new uber Mercedes will park itself – safely, which strictly speaking is Level Four autonomy. If you think this is an over-cautious approach from what is, after all, the company that invented the modern motor car and also produced the one of the first-ever self-driving cars (in 1995 Ernst Dickmanns and his team at Bundeswehr University produced an experimental autonomous S-class concept), then you need to consider that this is about safety.

In the last 48 years, successive generations of the S-class have debuted the first European use of airbags and three-point seat belts, as well as infra-red night vision. The Mercedes flagship has helped to popularise anti-lock brakes and crumple zones, along with PreSafe technology, which prepares the safety systems if sensors determine an inevitable accident. Mercedes doesn’t just throw self-driving at the market with its fingers crossed behind its back.

New S-class safety innovations include revised airbags, with a front central bag to prevent passengers clashing heads in a side impact, and new rear-seat airbags, which unfold in a tubular structure inflated with compressed gas to protect in case of a frontal impact.

All the cars run on air suspension, which will jack up the body by 80mm to protect occupants if a side impact is detected to bring the lower frames into contention. Then there’s the option of a rear-steering system, which turns the rear wheels by 10 degrees in each direction to increase agility at speed and improve manoeuvrability at low speeds.

It’s a big saloon/limousine and at over five metres in length and resolutely low riding, it’s almost wilfully old-fashioned in a world still fixated with high-riding SUVs. The design doesn’t shout, but massages your eyes round the extremities

might think that some of the optional materials are of questionable taste, but there’s no denying the craft that put them together, which verges on marquetry.

This is mass production of the highest order and the cabin isolation and refinement are beyond compare. Well, unless it’s a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley we’re talking about; even then, my money’s on the Merc.

“We rebuilt the whole system,” says Thöne of the air suspension – and it shows. Yes, if you go looking for it, there’s the minutest bit of hollow thump and vibration over low-speed, sharp-edged bumps, but it’s so much better than anything else outside of the Porsche Cayenne for which, they too, rebuilt the whole air suspension system.

What’s completely amazing about this car, though, isn’t the minor niggles, nor the cosseting ride (the old car did that, too), but the body control when you press on. Over bumpy roads, country roads with broken edges and undulations that threaten to heave the body into the air, not once did the big Merc feel anything less than all over it – and that was on 20inch wheels with Pirelli P-Zero tyres, not

always the finest-riding covers.

That two tonnes of saloon can do this is extraordinary; you can drive it like a hot hatchback and it not only copes as well as the best of them, it also continues to provide the most sublime ride quality.

How do they do that?

The brakes are powerful and progressive, the steering inert but accurate. The engine is powerful and while it isn’t as immediate or as mellifluous as the old V8, it’s still got a snarl to reckon with.

Outside of when the air-traffic control slot is closing for your Learjet, an S-class isn’t likely to be driven that hard. Instead, it cruises round the major capitals like a big shark, carrying those who run the world between meetings, meals and mistresses.

In 1991, my former editor, Peter Dron, attended the launch of the thirdgeneration S-class (designated W140) in Germany. “Erm, it’s big and nice,” he reported back. “But if you want to put it another way, it’s nice and big.”

I couldn’t really put it better myself, except to add that yes, the S-class is still the best car in the world.

What’s completely “ amazing about this car is the body control when you press on

”

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Table Talk Marina O’Loughlinn shares a bite with Yotam Ottolenghi

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Gastronomy MARCH 2021: ISSUE 114

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Opening pages, from left to right: hot tomatoes © Issy Croker; Yotam Ottolenghi These pages, clockwise from left: celeriac shawarma © Issy Croker; crumpet lobster toast © Issy Croker; burrata, peach, and corriander seeds © John Carey

I’ve a feeling today’s dish might permeate the deepest anosmic or ageusic fog. My son described it as “tasting very adult”, and Ottolenghi says: “He’s right. I don’t think my kids will eat it.” The moodiness of the Arabic spice mix baharat, the slightly bitter tang of the tahini, which, mixed with lemon, water and garlic, fluffs up improbably and goes on to make a kind of moussey crust on the lamb: amazing.

“Not everybody likes tahini. I adore it.”

Why this particular dish? “I thought we could do something quick from Ottolenghi Simple [his latest bestselling book].” His idea of quick is different to mine, which is toast. Cheese on toast if I’m being fancy. “Siniyah is a classic in Palestinian cooking and other cuisines

across the region, where you put the tahini either on top – I call it a Middle Eastern shepherd’s pie – or underneath and then pile all the lamb on top.”

Though his London restaurants – Ottolenghi, Nopi, Rovi – are still closed, he has a test kitchen under a railway arch in Camden. This place, where he and his team conjure up new recipes, has always felt like my version of Dahl’s chocolate factory, and its spirit inhabits Ottolenghi’s Instagram account. I’m glued to this, the only thing even to momentarily tempt me into making my own bang bang noodles. At a time when everyone and their pug is doing Insta-cookalongs, his is still something special. Is this how he coped while the business was idle? “We’re in this kind

Credit: Marina O’Loughlinn/The Sunday Times/News International

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can’t imagine what it must have been like for Yotam Ottolenghi to lose his senses of taste and smell.

It would be like David Hockney losing his sight or Dolly Parton her voice: unthinkable. But that’s what happened to him thanks to a pummelling bout of Covid-19.“I wasn’t tested,” he says, “so I only suspect I had it.” This was before people finally woke up to loss of taste and smell as key symptoms. “But I was really, really ill. Terrifying. And I’m never ill – I pride myself. It was also around the time we had to face our staff and tell them the bad news about closing and I couldn’t be there.

“I’m completely fine now. But there was one day when I panicked, starting to write down passwords. I just thought I was going to die.”

Do I really need to introduce Ottolenghi? A man who has people queuing round blocks at book signings (especially in the States where he has rock-god status); a man responsible for a million dinner party dishes sparky with pomegranate molasses or nutty with tahini; a man who makes supermarkets rethink what’s on their shelves. He’s another of my guests resistant to the idea of cooking together (“the wi-fi in my kitchen is terrible”) and I’m not sure if I’m paranoid or relieved. The pressure of cooking Ottolenghi’s food in front of actual Ottolenghi might finish me off.

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of moment of transition, frozen in time thanks to government schemes, in a sort of fool’s paradise. Because we haven’t been totally thrown into the water at the deep end, we’ve no idea what it’s going to be like afterwards. Who knows?”

We talk about all the think pieces being churned out right now – ‘We asked 10 big-name chefs what restaurants are going to look like postpandemic’ – which, when boiled down, turn out to be paragraphs of ‘not a clue, really’.

“Everyone in the restaurant business is like this. I wake up at 4am worrying about it. We’re trying to prepare, make plans, look at spreadsheets – how to reduce costs? But restaurants are about food, cooking, service – these things have to happen or it’s not the thing it’s supposed to be. Every day, it’s like the Moral Maze, the decisions that have to be made.”

It’s now such a cliché to say the ‘new normal’, or ‘weirdest of times’, but it’s hard to do otherwise, isn’t it? “It’s so weird. There’s nothing to punctuate the day, only meals. It’s hard to focus.

But otherwise it’s a kind of peculiar paradise, an idyllic life with the kids, going for walks, looking at flowers and bugs and birds. Then I start tormenting myself for not posting or emailing or having Zoom meetings. I don’t know whether I’ll look back and think this was a glorious period or a total disaster.”

Being stuck at home with two small, energetic boys (Max, 7, and Flynn, nearly 5) can’t be easy? “The home schooling is ... interesting. Trying to teach them French when neither of us speaks it.

Trying to teach Flynn a few numbers.

But I can’t get him to sit down for five minutes. I have nothing but admiration for teachers – how do they get them to sit down and learn anything?”

I know some people, ahem, who couldn’t wait to escape from their small children, but Ottolenghi is evangelical. “I love spending time with them. Karl has moments when he’s had too much, but for me it’s magical, something I’ll never forget. We have picnics and play music for hours. I think they’ll remember this for ever too.” Isn’t cooking for children day in and day out a chore? It’s what put me off cooking for ever in the first place — so relentless. “We share it, but Karl (his partner) cooks more than I do. It’s

I don’t know ‘ whether I’ll look

back and think this was a glorious period or a total disaster

’

fun, though, making things I know they love, meatballs and fritters. Anything meatball-related. And a quick chilli sauce and pickles to make it grown-up for us.

Cooking for them has been a real joy – and they have kind of expanded their horizons a bit.”

He can see I’m sceptical. “I do know what you mean, though,” he concedes.

“I made them these delicious prawns with butter, garlic and lemon juice and they just rejected it. Karl said, ‘welcome to my world’. It’s not even that they don’t like it, they do it because they can.

Because once you say no dessert unless you eat up, they manage to hoover it down. Brutes!” This period is bound to have a kind of dreamlike quality for them. “It’s haunting,” he agrees. “And there’s good stuff, everybody cooking

and all the creativity happening in the food world. But not knowing what’s round the corner, it’s very intense.”

When you have this random, act-ofGod gun to your head, as we all do right now, you can become adrenalised by it at first. But when the stress kicks in, the responsibility for his staff, some of whom have been with him for up to 17 years, does he ever fantasise about moving away from the restaurants, just concentrating on his enormously successful books?

“I always have ideas for writing that’s nothing to do with food, something I’ve been playing with for a while. But the restaurants are crucial. The staff too. We have a successful business.

A life’s project and something I love.

I’m so proud of it that I’m determined that it’ll continue to thrive after this.

We’re not going to fall victim to some arbitrary bug.”

When he reopened his Notting Hill deli for takeaways, it was welcomed back joyously by locals: “a sign that things will get back to normal,” said one. And isn’t that all we can hope for?

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Travel MARCH 2021: ISSUE 114

JOURNEYS BY JET

Can Ferrereta AIR

Santanyi, Mallorca

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pening its storied doors this spring in the Mallorcan town of Santanyi (quaint and quiet in a lesser-known part of the popular island), Can Ferrereta is a meticulously restored 17th-century building that now houses a 32-room hotel.

Art and design are to the fore here, with the family owners contributing works from their private collection and adding to those from the likes of Guillem Nadal, Dominica Sanchez, Miquel Planas, Manolo Ballesteros, Riera i Aragó and Jordi Alcaraz – Spanish artists of regional and national renown. A focal (and talking) point of the hotel is a stunning two-metre sculpture by the renowned Barcelona-born Jaume Plensa, while on-display images of the historic building captured pre-renovation were shot by local contemporary photographer Barbara Vidal.

Texture plays an important role in the design – walls have been splayed in mortar rough coats, bedheads woven from hemp rope by local artisans and Santanyí stone is a defining feature.

From Deluxe rooms to the hotel’s signature Pool Suite with its own private sundeck, garden and pool, the rooms here are individually designed with bespoke furniture and hand-picked art.

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By day, guests will spend long and lazy afternoons by the 25m pool, surrounded by flourishing gardens bursting with Mediterranean plants, cypresses, olive trees, jasmine and iconic purple bougainvillea. By night, it’s dinner at Can Ferrereta’s signature restaurant OCRE, which occupies the building’s former wine cellar. One can choose to dine al fresco on the Mallorcan patio or under the original wooden beams and stone arches, one of which has graffiti dating from the 17th century. Overseen by Chef Alvar Albaladejo, it will serve seasonal Mediterranean fare, made from local produce, much of which will have been sourced from Santanyí’s much-loved food market.

Christened the ‘gold-stone village’ for its goldhued sandstone, Santanyí occupies a privileged position slightly inland from more than 48km of spectacular coastline. Formally a walled town which protected its people from pirate invasions, this will be its first luxury hotel. It’s a region that also offers easy access to some of Mallorca’s most beautiful and unspoilt beaches, with fine-grained white sand, hidden coves and crystal-clear sea.

Land your jet at Palma de Mallorca Airport, from where Santanyí is a 40-minute drive away

Travel OCTOBER 2020:ISSUE 109

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What I Know Now

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MARCH 2021: ISSUE 114

Hélène Darroze THREE-MICHELIN-STAR CHEF I first felt successful when I began to feel, very much, that I was in line with who I am.

One thing I always do is take time each evening to write down the ten reasons I have to be thankful for the day.

A lesson I learned the hard way happened just a few years ago. I opened one restaurant only to please my ego. I failed with it and had to close it down a few months after it had opened. That experience taught me that I should never do things for the wrong reasons. Something should be done because it is the right thing to do and you believe in it.

Outside my line of work, someone who currently inspires me is US vice president

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Kamala Harris. As a woman, I am so proud that the US finally has a female as vice president. I think her fight for women and people of colour is so inspiring. My grandmother always inspired me, too.

Loyalty, generosity and honesty were the motors of her life.

My definition of personal success is being able to remain loyal to the personal values that you hold.

If I could go back and tell my younger self only one thing, it would be to believe in your dreams. Everything is possible.

I would love to be more involved in charity.

I dream of having my own foundation for children’s education.

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