Portfolio | December 2017

ISSUE

144

SUPER RENTERS

REIGN SUPREME

Where the one per cent rents

How the streetwear brand became a unicorn

DUBAI’S MARTIAN CITY

INSTAGRAM INFLUENCERS

The UAE’s push to settle on Mars

The new social media stars

LIVE FOREVER Can a group of bio-hackers, entrepreneurs and scientists change the way we live?

PanoMaticLunar

Beijing · Dresden · Dubai · Geneva · Hong Kong · Macau · Madrid Nanjing · Paris · Shanghai · Shenyang · Singapore · Tokyo · Vienna

DECEMBER ISSUE 144

The business of life & living

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AFRICA’S ART P16

An inside look at Cape Town’s stunning new museum of contemporary art

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CONTENTS UPFRONT

20

MICHELIN STARS

Are they completely immune to popular opinion?

LIVING

74

HOTEL

24

EDINBURGH REVISITED

A wonderful home in the heart of the Scottish city

26

LUXURY DEPARTMENT

How department stores are fighting the online competition

33

CULINARY CHARMS

A restaurant with a difference in the centre of Berlin

São Paulo’s most exclusive lodgings

80

WHAT TO PACK

From Paris to São Paulo, we’ve got you covered

84 GIN

Why this spirit is the must-have drink this winter

88

EXHIBITION

The House of Dior celebrates 70 years in Paris

90

COLUMN

KISS’s Gene Simmons on power

13

33,349 copies January - June 2017

DECEMBER ISSUE 144

CONTENTS FEATURES

40

THE TRANSHUMANISTS

The scientists and futurists imagining a future where man and machine become one

48

THE SUPER RENTERS

Why do the one per cent prefer to pay thousands of pounds in rent rather than buy in the centre of London?

54

DUBAI’S MARTIAN PUSH

Why Dubai is looking at the Red Planet to help solve some of mankind’s biggest problems

60

INSTAGRAM INFLUENCERS

Who are the new breed of social media influencers and how have they changed the marketing industry?

68

SUPREME BEING

How the streetwear brand became the first billion-dollar clothing unicorn

14

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UPFRONT

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DECEMBER / ARTS

ISSUE 144

Instant icon Rebecca L Weber visits the new Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town

N

ow that it’s here, the absence of a major museum of contemporary African art anywhere on the continent, let alone a tourism and design hub such as Cape Town, seems impossible to imagine. In September, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (MOCAA) opened, giving visitors a chance to experience work by artists who are, somewhat ironically, better known in New York and London.

Africa before it was shipped off around the world. At the time, it was the city’s tallest building, in the centre of the harbour. But it fell into disuse and disrepair, both an eyesore and invisible in the busy area that became known as the V&A Waterfront.

When Heatherwick first visited, it was difficult to even get a sense of how much available space it held. The purpose-built industrial tubes that once held grain stood empty, but the soaring concrete made it impossible to see

It took more than two million hours of manpower to create the smooth hot wire effect on the concrete silos Millennials should feel at home in the Instagram-friendly environment: all the art has been created after the year 2000.

Whatever preconceptions one might have about what African art is, or can be, or how a former grain silo converted into exhibition space might look or feel, they’ll be challenged from the first entry.

Architecturally, there’s no other space in the world like MOCAA’s Thomas Heatherwickdesigned atrium. Nearly a century ago, the building stored grain from around sub-Saharan

or access the spaces in between.

Heatherwick likens the carving effect they eventually used to a hot wire cutting through butter.

But the sticks of butter were 33-metre-high concrete silos, which meant more than two million hours of manpower to create that smooth hot wire effect.

A single piece of archival corn was the inspiration for the shape scooped out of the silos. Using a 3-D scan of the kernel, and intersecting it against the eightstorey high silos, the irregular and unusual angles created an

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UPFRONT

The sculpture garden

Every city is trying to get its library, opera house and contemporary art museum. It’s like an arms race

18

unexpectedly beautiful space while paying homage to the site’s history.

The cathedral-like atrium is cool and cocooning – the perfect refuge from the business and heat just outside. The old concrete, quarried from Table Mountain, has layered colours and textures inviting the kind of touching normally not allowed in a museum. “We were interested to try to make a heart of the building that was a social space that brought people together,” says Heatherwick. “The galleries don’t bring people together, they divide you completely. And there also will be, I hope, exceedingly challenging work coming on.

And it felt that this is a breathing space for that.”

In the past two decades, museums focused solely on contemporary art have become must-haves in cities around the world. Zaha Hadid designed the Maxxi, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, in Rome. Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art commissioned Diller Scofidio + Renfro to build a much larger structure on a new site. Frank Gehry designed the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, as well as the Guggenheim Bilbao and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Heatherwick once visited an architecture studio working on dozens of art museums at once.

“I remember just thinking, ‘This has become a cliché.’ And in the context of Europe and

North America and Asia, it has.

It’s like an arms race. Every city is trying to get its library, opera house, and contemporary art museum,” says Heatherwick.

“But then when looking at a continent as big as the whole of Europe and North America combined not having a place where artists can share their work, that was compelling, and made me think, ‘Well, OK, maybe it’s not such a cliché.’”

Private collectors are a driving force behind much of the new museum boom, both for those that are focused solely on contemporary art as well as those with a broader scope. At a time when fiscal conservatism has many governments restricting budgets, wealthy individuals with private

collections have largely been welcomed. Private institutions can implement changes faster than a bureaucracy-laden state one, but are more prone to the idiosyncratic tastes and interests of an individual collector.

MOCAA is unusual in that it is a joint venture between the V&A Waterfront and Jochen Zeitz, former chair and CEO of Puma: a public not-for-profit museum that is privately funded. The V&A provided the building, and Zeitz has loaned his works as the founding collection for his lifetime.

“Hopefully I’m going to be around for a while,” he says with a laugh.

The Waterfront is already the most-visited destination in Africa, with 24 million people per year.

Situated by the harbour, it’s

DECEMBER / ARTS

ISSUE 144

NEW ART MUSEUM OPENS IN JAKARTA Museum MACAN, Indonesia’s first museum dedicated to contemporary art, has opened in Jakarta. Featuring more than 800 works of art, the museum is the brainchild of Haryanto Adikoesoemo, the president of chemicals and logistics company AKR Corporindo and an avid art collector. “The idea to build a museum came about a decade ago,” Adikoesoemo explains. “I reflected on how art has had a tremendous effect on how I view the world and my creative capacity as a businessperson, and I wanted for Indonesians to experience that as well.” The museum opened last month and is expected to be a huge draw for locals and visitors alike.

home to a large shopping mall, restaurants and ferry boats to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was a political prisoner.

“We heard that Mark [Coetzee, the museum’s curator] and Jochen were looking for a home for their collection,” says David Green, the Waterfront’s CEO. “Contemporary art. That really appealed. Encouraging living artists, telling stories of current issues rather than historical.”

Zeitz and Coetzee always envisioned the collection in a public space. “We were very focused in what we would buy, how we would be, what our strategy would be. We went about it very differently than if I were buying African art as a private individual just to hang it up on my wall,” Zeitz says.

In May, Sotheby’s in London held its first Modern and Contemporary African Art auction, selling pieces for a total of $3.7 million. This included Earth Developing More Roots, a sculpture by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui made of bottleneck foil wrappers and copper wire, for $955,915. This new international interest in investing in African art, and the attending rising prices, is a concern for those don’t want to see the continent’s best work destined for overseas collections.

“The continent’s masses will be the biggest losers,” wrote Chika Okeke-Agulu, an associate professor of art history at Princeton University, for The New York Times shortly after the Sotheby’s auction. “They will be denied access to artworks that define the age of independence and symbolise the slow process of postcolonial recovery.”

MOCAA’s presence won’t end this outward flow of African art to the rest of the world. But it does mean that significant African art will have a place on the continent, and that one doesn’t have to travel to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, MoMA, or the Tate Modern to see them. “Whether someone likes the design of the museum or not, it’s the first time that contemporary artists in Africa have had this missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle,” says Heatherwick.

“We feel privileged to have the chance to be a collaborator on this – the missing element in the infrastructure of art in Africa.”

South Africa doesn’t have a strong museum-going culture.

The transformation of the existing museums in the postapartheid era into all-inclusive spaces visited by all races remains a slow work in progress. With the rand weak against currencies like the pound, dollar, or yuan, the already meagre government budget can’t compete against museums and collectors at international auctions.

Even with MOCAA’s private funding – the R500 million (nearly $40 million) budget is large by South African standards – much will have to be done to make all feel welcome. “There is no blueprint for what we did here. We don’t have a 100-year history to build on. If you look at successful museums today, you can’t compare – we are sort of a start-up,” says Zeitz.

“It needs to be accessible for everyone. It needs to not just be art, but art that tells a story, whether that’s social, environmental, political. You want to talk about today and the future.”

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UPFRONT

Star power James Brennan examines whether the Michelin star ratings can ever be truly unswayed by popular opinion

I

20

n a world of increasing uncertainty, it’s good to know there are some things we can always rely on. Death, taxes and internet trolls count for three of them. And then there’s the Michelin Guide.

For over a century, the little red book has been dispensing measured wisdom on which restaurants are worth visiting on our travels. In separating the organic wheat from the chlorinewashed chaff, inspectors are anonymous, thorough and fair.

Most crucially, they are unbiased and unswayed by popular opinion.

And on that point we can all rest assured. Or can we?

In a recent article in the Financial Times, political columnist Janan Ganesh upheld the Michelin Guide as a welcome antidote to the rising tide of populism. It is a final refuge of experts in a world where experts are jeered and pilloried on social media. It is a constant, a shamelessly undemocratic entity in a political landscape riven by referenda. Michelin inspectors accept your right to an opinion, but they don’t give a stuffed courgette flower what it is.

Michelin, Ganesh asserted, can be considered “radical”, “punk rock” even, in its “defiance of the majority mood”. No amount of Twitter trolling can persuade it to dish out even a Bib Gourmand. A restaurant might have a marketing budget the size of Gordon

Ramsay’s ego, but only culinary excellence such as his can be rewarded with Michelin stars.

It calls to mind the 2014 BBC TV documentary series Restaurant Wars, a lavish production that chronicled two Manchester restaurants’ attempts to be the first in that city since 1977 to win a Michelin star. Chefs Simon Rogan and Aiden Byrne went head to head to bring a bit of Michelin sparkle to Manchester. Both failed.

The city that gave the world barm cakes, Scotch eggs with black pudding and Vimto still hasn’t been blessed with a Michelin star for over four decades. Which all goes to show: you can have all the hype and hubbub of a national broadcaster behind you, but Michelin still doesn’t give a fig.

Across the North Sea in Copenhagen, there’s Noma. The original ‘New Nordic’ restaurant of chef Rene Redzepi swept all others aside to be named the World’s Best Restaurant for three years in a row, from 2010 to 2012.

An international panel of food journalists, critics, restaurateurs, producers, winemakers and probably the occasional Michelin inspector (after all, who would know?) voted it No 1. The Michelin Guide, however, only ever deemed it worthy of two stars out of three.

Maybe the ‘stinking whale’ soubriquet of Noma’s early years was just too pungent a tag to shake off? Perhaps it was outré

DECEMBER / FOOD

ingredients like live shrimp and ants that scuppered it in Michelin’s eyes? Despite the gastronomic world’s willingness to embrace new and challenging culinary ideas, it was Rasmus Koefed’s more conservative Geranium that became Copenhagen’s first and only three-star restaurant in 2016, much to the bemusement of chefs and critics alike.

The above tales of two gastronomically opposed cities illustrate that Michelin won’t bow to any kind of pressure. Or will it?

ISSUE 144

enjoyable experience for people who couldn’t care less about gongs and awards. If they want to stay in business, some of the old institutions might have to take heed.

Was Michelin’s decision to award stars to hawker stalls an attempt to stay relevant in a changing market? Here’s what Rebecca Burr, editor of the Great Britain and Ireland Michelin Guide, had to say: “I think, if anything, the comparison we could have with Singapore could be the pubs. We started awarding stars

The barriers between fine dining and relaxed restaurant-going are eroding.

The Michelin stars are reflecting that Let’s visit a third city to find out.

Singapore got its first Michelin Guide in 2016. In it, single stars were awarded to Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice & Noodle in Chinatown, and Hill Street Tai Hwa Noodles at Crawford Lane.

Nothing unusual about that, you might think. But neither of them are restaurants.

They are hawker stalls. In food courts – un-air-conditioned sheds with plastic stools, no tablecloths and a distinct lack of stuffy sommeliers and maître ds.

The chicken rice dish is a steal at under $2 a serving. Not what you’d normally associate with Michelin stars.

Recent years have ushered in a more casual approach to dining out. The barriers between fine dining and relaxed restaurant-going are eroding. Those stiff, joyless gastro-palaces with impenetrable menus and withering waiters are in retreat. And eating in restaurants is becoming a more inclusive and

to pubs a long time ago, 15 years ago, perhaps. For a star, it is all about the food. You can tell, is there a confidence here? Has the chef grasped an understanding of flavours, ingredients, pairing? The skill levels? Have they really tested this behind the scenes before it hits the menu?”

“Dining as a whole has changed. We’re just reflecting what’s going on in the industry.

It’s not us that’s changed, it’s the restaurants that have changed. Our philosophy has always been about good food. We’re just observers.

If a place opens up we’ll go there, look what they’re doing. There’s no set formula, our work would be really boring if there was.”

One thing people can’t accuse Michelin of is being boring.

There’s rarely a dull moment in the world of tourism-based restaurant ranking. Stars come and go. Sometimes chefs hand them back, as Sebastien Bras of Le Suquet restaurant in

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DECEMBER ISSUE 144

UPFRONT / FOOD

Hawker stalls in Hong Kong and Singapore have won stars in recent years

NOMA in Copenhagen and Christian Puglisi, who railed against restaurant awards earlier this year

Will Michelin taking money from South Korea create pressure to award the country stars?

22

Languiole did in September. Bras wanted to distance himself from the pressure of being ranked, saying: “At 46 years old, I want to give new meaning to my life… and define what is essential.”

More recently, Christian Puglisi, chef-owner of Relae in Copenhagen, offloaded at restaurant awards culture in a scathing social media rant. He said he was tired of the constant need for ranking and listing everything in the restaurant industry. “Who the hell has the right to judge me or anyone else on a scale with thousands of other cooks?” he wrote.

But, if anything, Michelin is growing. New cities are being added all the time, especially

in Asia, and not without controversy. The guides in Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau and Seoul were all commissioned by government-run tourist boards. The Washington Post reported South Korea will pay Michelin more than $1 million over four years, which some feel raises questions about the impartiality of Michelin’s experts.

According to the food critic and avid Michelin restaurantgoer Andy Hayler, Michelin has to take these commissions to pay the bills. Which, to go back to Ganesh’s punk rock analogy, is akin to The Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten doing adverts for butter.

“In theory there is nothing wrong

with that,” Hayler told the Korea Exposé website. “The question is, if taking the money from the tourist boards puts them under pressure to award stars, and I think this is an incredibly valid question.”

Any time now, Michelin will launch its first governmentsponsored guide to Bangkok – a city whose street food is considered among the best in the world. It comes at a time when Thai authorities are cracking down on street food vendors in the interests of “cleanliness, safety and order”, in favour of Thai fine dining and a better class of food tourist. As the rest of the world leans towards the casual, Bangkok, it seems, is craving formality.

It will be interesting to see if any of Bangkok’s endangered street food stalls are awarded stars by those unswayable experts at Michelin.

HONG KONG TOPS FINE DINING PRICE TABLE According to a new survey, Hong Kong is the most expensive city in Asia for fine dining, with Singapore second and Tokyo third. The Julius Baer’s Lifestyle Index 2017 compares 22 goods and services across 11 Asian cities including Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Mumbai, Taipei, Jakarta, Manila, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Tokyo. This is the first year that fine dining was included in the survey.

UPFRONT

Northern light A charming period mansion in the heart of Edinburgh

Single family home

10 bedrooms

8 full baths

W

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indmill House is an outstanding mansion house built in the Georgian style and located in beautiful, secluded grounds in the heart of Murrayfield. Built over four floors and extending to 9,863 square feet, the house retains the period features and proportions of a grand Georgian mansion with a modern twist. It boasts a host of period features including ornate cornice work, ceiling roses, pillars in the hallway, oak parquet flooring in the entrance and working fireplaces in the principle rooms. On the lower ground floor, there is a selfcontained apartment with its own entrance and direct access to the garden area. This section of the building would be ideal for an au pair or indeed as extended family accommodation, if required. Approached via a private driveway, the house has a right of access over the driveway shared with the Coach House.

Edinburgh

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struttandparker.com

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DECEMBER ISSUE 144

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UPFRONT / YACHTING

DECEMBER ISSUE 144

UPFRONT / RETAIL

Death of the department store?

Emma Woolacott examines whether the ailing department store sector can be revitalised

T

here’s nothing quite like a traditional department store. The stuff of childhood memories, the best ones make their customers feel valued and special and have a truly timeless atmosphere.

Once, these hallowed halls were a mainstay of the retail industry; however, in recent years, the world’s department stores have been struggling like never before.

According to market research firm IBIS World, indeed, the sector is near-moribund, with department stores around the world expected to grow their business by just 0.8 per cent a year over the next five years.

Over the last 12 months, the number of outlets in the US has plummeted, with Macy’s and Sears shuttering more than 100 stores each. In Australia, Myer’s is struggling, and is also closing stores. And in the UK, the sector is doing little better, with John Lewis reporting a 2.8 per cent slide in full-year profits, and Debenhams’ performance flat.

“Department stores are probably the most difficult format to trade from, due to high overheads and multi-source competition,” says Deakin Business School retail expert Dr Steve Ogden.

“The convenience they offer in terms of range and choice has long since been superseded by both specialist, niche and online retailers. Similarly, the kudos of the department store shopping

experience has slipped in the consumer’s eyes.”

The main problem for department stores appears to be the inexorable rise of internet commerce. Around the world, people are no longer seeing a shopping trip as a pleasant afternoon out, but are instead turning to their PCs for the items they need.

Many department stores are responding to this new competition with an ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ approach. In the UK, for example, Debenhams, John Lewis and Selfridges have all introduced ‘click and collect’ services; in the US, department stores now get around one-fifth of their business online.

“Such services have blurred the line between online and in-store shopping, further catering to timepoor customers,” says analyst Christopher Edwards of IBIS World.

But is this the right strategy?

Retailers such as Macy’s have been forced to invest in new distribution centres to handle the increased volume from online shopping; meanwhile, competing more directly with the likes of Amazon has meant cutting prices to the bone. Pressure to match online retailers’ services with free delivery and returns doesn’t help.

For Macy’s, this has meant a fall in gross margins from 39.8 per cent in 2013 to 39.2 per cent last year; and this price pressure

2.8%

Fall in John Lewis’ fullyear profits over the past 12 months

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Stores closed

by Sears and Macy’s over the past year

has only been intensified by competition from discount or ‘offprice’ stores, which are booming.

In the UK in particular, however, some department stores are dealing with this increase in competition by going back to their roots and trying to recreate the premium experience of the past.

“External competition is not a new phenomenon for department stores, which have taken major steps to recapture market share in recent years,” says Edwards.

“Some stores have started to focus on personal shopping experiences by increasing the number of staff they have on shop floors and providing additional customer services.”

At John Lewis’s new store in Oxford, for example, one fifth of the floor space is turned over to service experiences, including personal shopping, technology training, manicures and makeovers.

Staff have even been given theatre training by the Oxford Playhouse to enhance the atmosphere.

“More than a route to selling things, our Oxford shop is a place that aims to inspire and delight our customers and is entirely focused on customer experience with Partners and finishing details at the heart of that,” says managing director Paula Nickolds.

Fifteen of its stores now house Kuoni travel agents and two have spas, and the chain has held events in conjunction with British Vogue,

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“By offering exclusive ranges, department stores are both increasing their own brand presence and also ensuring that consumers continue to perceive their stores to be destinations to purchase unique items,” says Edwards.

“This is a trend that has increased over the past five years, as stores have adopted new tactics to ensure increasing loyalty and footfall in their stores.”

It’s worth noting that the renewed focus on the shopping experience is more appropriate for some department stores than others. It seems to be working out best for those businesses, such as Liberty’s and Selfridges in

The chains that weather the storm will consolidate and plough money back into improving tired stores

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More conventionally, many British department stores are trying to pull customers in by designing their own clothing labels or collaborating with well-known brands. House of Fraser is working with Biba, Linea Weekend, Label Lab and Howick, while Liberty has deals with high-profile brands such as Nike, Supreme, Barbour and Dr Martens.

London, or Saks in New York, that have prime retail locations.

Saks, for example, set up a popular six-month fitness and beauty pop-up at its Fifth Avenue flagship store over the summer, offering rotating pop-up classes and events from local gyms and fitness programme.

“Saks has a long history of creating breakthrough, experiential

environments in our stores – in 1935, an indoor ski slope was constructed in the flagship store in order to offer skiing lessons. The Saks Wellery, our latest concept shop, focused entirely on wellness, continues the Saks tradition of elevating shopping to a higher level by building exciting customer experiences,” says chief merchant Tracy Margolies.

“We want the Saks Wellery to be a sanctuary for our customers – a place to find peace and solace in the middle of our bustling city.”

Other department stores, though, may have more of an uphill struggle to be seen as a special destination, and a day out in their own right. Throughout the US, in particular, out-of-town malls were built by the thousands in the latter part of the last century, with the assumption that a department store would be the development’s biggest draw.

These days, however, there’s little appetite for the sort of slow shopping that such stores represent – which is why they are closing in their droves. According to figures from RBC Capital Markets, indeed, Macy’s, Penney, Kohl’s, Dillard’s, and Sears Holdings have between them shuttered more than 750 stores, or 20 per cent of the total, since 2013.

And US real estate research firm Green Street Advisors has estimated that 800 more stores across all chains would have to close for the industry to return to the sales-per-square-foot peak that it achieved in 2006.

However, a focus on quality, not quantity, is working for British department stores; and around the world, the chains that weather the storm will be those that hold their nerve. They must continue to consolidate, while ploughing cash back into improving tired stores and enhancing the shopping experience – returning outdated and dreary stores to the cathedrals of commerce of the past.

CENTURY CITY MALL DEBUTS VIP SUITES Los Angeles’ Westfield Century City Mall has debuted its VIP Private Suite. Members enter the mall via a private ramp and enter into a private courtyard.

Guests can access the mall’s 200 boutiques through back-door access, meaning celebs are kept away from prying eyes. Three team members are assigned to each visitor to The Private Suite, including a Team Leader who accompanies every member throughout, coordinating in advance with shops and restaurants to ensure the visit is as smooth as possible.

as well as wellbeing workshops with brands such as Liz Earle.

Other stores are attempting to entice customers by offering ‘popup’ events and services. Liberty, for example, has hosted yoga workshops, art exhibitions and cinema screenings over the last year.

But it’s Selfridges that perhaps takes the idea furthest, hosting various group activities in the ‘conceptual farmhouse’ in the basement of its London store.

Customers – who must remove their shoes and surrender their phones before entering – have been treated to lessons in such basic life skills as grinding spices and even peeling potatoes.

UPFRONT / RETAIL

DECEMBER ISSUE 144

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DECEMBER UPFRONT / THE BUSINESS

ISSUE 144

Top table

Photos by Maidje Meergans

Hilda Hoy discovers Ernst, a Berlin restaurant with a difference

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t’s a chilly, misty morning in Berlin’s northern district of Wedding, and the shutters have just come up on an unassuming storefront of grey concrete. A gleaming doorbell embossed simply with five letters – Ernst – is the only indication that this is Berlin’s most hyped restaurant of the moment. Inside, sitting at the wooden countertop that wraps around an open kitchen, Ernst’s chef and founder,

Dylan Watson-Brawn, rubs sleep from his eyes and sips on a green tea. Just 24, Watson-Brawn is softspoken under his black hooded sweatshirt, though his voice rises animatedly once he gets going on one of his favourite subjects: his restaurant’s produce, and the farmers who grow it.

The culinary team he’s assembled is busily unpacking the day’s market haul: crates overflowing with cavolo nero kale

and dandelion greens; apples, walnuts and purple-blushed turnips; a sack of golf ball-sized potatoes with soil still clinging to them. For now, the mood is relaxed and unhurried. There are still eight hours to go until the doorbell begins to ring and guests start arriving for the single dinner seating of the night.

Something of a culinary wunderkind, Vancouver native Watson-Brawn began working

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DECEMBER ISSUE 144

UPFRONT / THE BUSINESS

The Ernst team

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in restaurants as a teen. By the time he landed in Berlin at 19, he’d already racked up experience at Tokyo’s triple-Michelin-starred Ryugin and Copenhagen’s Noma.

He wasted little time making a name for himself in Berlin’s gastronomy circles, launching a series of pop-up dinners out of his own apartment. This past August, Ernst finally opened as a permanent restaurant, a coolly understated space of polished concrete and sheer, flowing linen curtains.

But what sets Ernst apart is not only the story of its founder and his culinary talent, but also its innovative and rather gutsy business model. To score one of the coveted 12 seats at the counter per night, customers must first purchase a ticket via the restaurant’s website. The full, non-refundable payment (€155 for the winter menu, €135 the rest of the year) is required upfront – all that’s left to pay for on the night of are drinks. The advantages for the restaurateur are clear.

“This makes sense from a fiscal perspective. We don’t have that classic restaurant’s cash flow problem,” Watson-Brawn says. “We get all the money from tickets up front. We’re not buying from our suppliers on credit.”

This liquidity enables him to continually invest in the asset he values the most: pristine, seasonal produce, the very best money can buy. “From April to the end of November, we always buy in surplus, when we have the best produce and the best prices. I’m very happy to buy 40 kilos of lingonberries now and preserve them to use later.”

His business partner and co-chef Spencer Christenson trails in, shouldering the catch of the day from the local fisherman

To get one of the 12 seats, customers must first buy a ticket online that costs $184. All that’s left to pay for on the night are drinks who provides a regular supply of freshwater fish. Some days it’s char, pikeperch, or eel that he nets – today it’s trout, which were still swimming in the waters of western Berlin’s Havel River until earlier this morning.

This embodies Ernst’s core principle: serving only the freshest, most carefully raised produce and meat. Five nights a week, these are crafted into minimalist tasting menus of 20-30 courses, each of which is designed to let the essence of the ingredients shine through. A single wedge of butternut squash roasted over apple wood, fried tempura style, then served in a mushroom reduction. A globe of cured egg yolk nestled in a charred cabbage leaf. One fat cep mushroom, split and grilled with pine oil. It’s a hybrid of French and Japanese culinary sensibilities, aiming for balance and poignancy rather than bold flavours.

Consistently having such highquality produce is only possible because Watson-Brawn spent the last years diligently cultivating relationships with farmers. Often this meant showing up and helping out in the fields until he earned their trust. “Not only do we want their produce, we want their best produce. We want their insight.”

The greens that arrived today were grown on a biodynamic farm north of Berlin. The marigolds drying over the stove – destined to become vinegar – were foraged from another. Everything in the Ernst kitchen comes straight from the source, though that doesn’t necessarily mean local. A farmer in Sicily delivers lemons, persimmons, artichokes, and pistachios; a farm in Austria raises the Mangalitsa meat. Soon, a diver in northern Norway will be providing fresh scallops and sea urchins. No less dedication goes into the wine list.

DECEMBER ISSUE 144

UPFRONT / THE BUSINESS

“How can we present our restaurant to ensure the right people come, the people that really want to be here?”

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Sommelier Christoph Geyler, who left double-Michelin-starred Rutz to join Ernst, regularly travels to biodynamic vineyards around the continent. Last year he spent four days at one in the Mosel Valley, pulling on a pair of muddy boots to help with the Riesling harvest.

Temporary pop-up food events or supper clubs, which is how Ernst started out, have exploded in Berlin in recent years. Though it wasn’t always the plan to evolve into a fulltime restaurant, Watson-Brawn calls those years a “test pilot” phase, during which he could refine his concept and, just as importantly, lay some crucial groundwork.

Those years of building a brand, not to mention plenty of media coverage, are what now makes people willing to shell out money in advance for a seat at his counter.

Since Ernst opened in August, the nightly dinner seatings have sold out many weeks in advance.

Above: Dylan Watson-Brawn and sous chef Paul Klein butchering a lamb in one of their supplier’s farmhouses

There was “not a chance”, Watson-Brawn says, that he would have opened Ernst under the conventional restaurant model.

“We thought to ourselves, ‘What are the most annoying things you have to deal with in a restaurant, and how can we use technology to move beyond them?’”

The ticketing system eliminates one of the biggest frustrations: cancelled bookings and no-shows.

Image is carefully considered, for the sake of branding but also to manage customer expectations.

That’s why the Ernst website doesn’t list the exact number of courses or depict any dishes, since the menu changes every night.

“The question always is: ‘How can we present our restaurant to make sure the right people come, the people that really want to be here?’” he says. “I want people to come in with an open mind.”

This also enables the Ernst chefs to retain their creative freedom and be uncompromising in their principles. Agility is built into the process: The menu

always depends on the produce of the day, and is often decided spontaneously in the hours leading up to the meal as the team banters and plays around in the kitchen.

Sous chef Paul Klein chips in with a story from this morning’s market excursion. “Yesterday was a holiday, so the farmer got lazy and the chives he had today were from last week,” he says. Other restaurants, with regular menu items to make, would have to take the substandard chives anyway.

“But we can pass.”

When this evening’s 12 guests take their seats at the counter, they certainly won’t be missing those chives. Not when there are so many other fresh, compelling things coming out of the kitchen in perfectly timed succession: fermented wild mushrooms, trout sashimi, a sweetly roasted Jerusalem artichoke, an exquisite tangle of fat-marbled Mangalitza ham. And there’s still so much more to come – Ernst is just getting started.

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DECEMBER ISSUE 144

UPFRONT / CLASSIC READ

Good to Great

By Jim Collins

Small changes over time lead to sustainable growth and a buy-in from staff, which drives future growth

A

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classic of the business genre, Good to Great saw its author Jim Collins study the performance of 1,435 companies over a 40-year period and distil those lessons into a book. He picks 11 companies that became great and examines why and how they achieved greatness. Greatness, as defined by Collins, was a company that went from average stock returns to returns that exceeded the general stock market by three over a 15-year period.

Collins argues that such change is not the result of one miracle moment, rather a framework that was stuck to at all levels of the company. A place where staff and management were committed to excellence over a long period of time. Collins gives the example

of Walgreens, the American pharmacy company. He writes: “For more than 40 years, Walgreens was no more than an average company, tracking the general market. Then in 1975 Walgreens began to climb. And climb. And climb. It just kept climbing.

From December 31, 1975, to January 1, 2000, $1 invested in Walgreens beat $1 invested in Intel by nearly two times, General Electric by nearly five times, and Coca-Cola by nearly eight times.

It beat the general stock market by more than 15 times. I asked a key Walgreens executive to pinpoint when the good-to-great transformation happened. His answer: ‘Sometime between 1971 and 1980.’ Walgreens’ experience is the norm for good-to-great performers. Managers at Abbott

1,435

Number of companies Jim Collins and his team studied for the book

said, ‘It wasn’t a blinding flash or sudden revelation from above.’

And at multinational KimberlyClark: ‘These things don’t happen overnight. They grow.’”

This sums up Collins’ book: good things happen over time, if you do the right things daily.

Management can see if it is working and demonstrate the evidence that it is to staff. They then buy into more change and a virtuous circle begins. The opposite strategy, Collins argues, leads to chaos. “Why do most overhyped change programmes fail? Because they lack accountability, they fail to achieve credibility, and they have no authenticity. They launch change programmes with huge fanfare, hoping to ‘enlist the troops’.

They start down one path, only to change direction. After years of lurching back and forth, these companies discover that they’ve failed to build any momentum.

Disappointing results lead to a new direction, which leads to disappointing results. It’s a steady, downward spiral.”

Collins’ ideas may seem simple, but they are effective, and the success of his book illustrates that in a crowded marketplace, simple, effective ideas resonate.

LIVE

FOREVER Lauren Razavi explores the world of transhumanism

LIVE FOREVER

I

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magine if you could live your entire life as the very best version of yourself: smarter, faster, funnier, stronger. All you have to do is take a pill each morning. Now think about a world where your children, parents, siblings and friends all live for hundreds of years rather than just into their seventies or eighties. A realm where your own lifespan is not only longer, but indefinite. All you have to do is go for an hour-long session at a genetic therapy clinic once a month.

This might sound like something from an episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror, but futurists and technologists from some of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated companies are claiming that these capabilities are just years away. Those involved with the scene are known as transhumanists, and more and more people are joining them. So what exactly is transhumanism?

“Transhumanism is the idea of taking what‘s most distinctive about humans – the features that separate us from animals, such as our intelligence and our ability to reason – and amplifying it,” says Dr Steve Fuller, a transhumanist and professor of sociology at the University of Warwick. “Transhumanism may be about extending human life in our current biological form, but it may also be about uploading our minds to machines that can improve our intellectual capacity, enabling us to think much larger thoughts for much longer periods of time.”

It’s a vision that many of the world’s best-known entrepreneurs and innovators are buying into – from Tesla’s Elon Musk to Google’s Larry Page and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Humans have dreamed about the prospect of eternal life since the dawn of civilisation. Could we finally be on the cusp of achieving immortality – or, at the very least, welcoming significantly longer lifespans?

The term “transhumanism” was coined around 50 years ago by the British evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley. He believed that humans could be genetically modified to become smarter and live longer. As new technologies emerged in the 1980s and ’90s, a new wave of transhumanists became interested in maintaining biological bodies indefinitely by repairing the genetic damage that causes ageing and death. Around the same time, the notion of mapping the human brain and uploading a version into a machine began to gain traction among technologists and futurists as the potential of artificial intelligence was revealed.

Interest in transhumanism has continued to rise steadily ever since.

“We’ve already witnessed the life expectancy of humans in the Western world doubling and tripling over the past 500 years, and the number of people living on the planet has tripled too. Our capacity to extend our power over the environment and even outer space has increased enormously,” Fuller explains. “Transhumanism continues on that same trajectory, focusing now on the more radical directions being opened up by developments in fields like nanotechnology, biotechnology, cognitive science and information technology.”

In a strange twist of fate, former US president George W Bush – who was dubbed “The AntiScience President” by MIT Technology Review – played an important role in bringing transhumanists together during his time in office. In

LIVE FOREVER

2004, Bush created a bioethics panel, which concluded that federal governments should not fund embryonic stem cell research, mainly due to its controversial status among religious groups. This symbolic decision effectively ended any American government funding for biomedical research until Obama was elected four years later. While private funding helped to keep some research projects alive, it presented a huge blow for the burgeoning transhumanism movement.

Key transhumanists such as renowned computer scientist Ray Kurzweil and the futurist philosopher Max More banded together and signed a declaration against Bush’s bioethics decision. This marked a new chapter for transhumanism. More came up with “the preactionary

“Transhumanism is the idea of taking what‘s most distinctive about humans and amplifying it”

principle” – as opposed to the precautionary principle – which is the notion that meaningful progress involves taking risks and pursuing ambitious research, and that this must not be held back by traditional belief systems. All of the different groups involved with aspects of transhumanism came together under one banner to support this principle. Despite more than a decade of solidarity for the movement, transhumanism has yet to capture a mainstream audience. Now might be the time it’s finally able to do so.

“Too many people have only a vague idea of what technology might make possible for us in the near future,” says David Wood, a transhumanist and chair of the London Futurists meetup group, which has been running since 2008 and currently has more than 6,500 members. “Today, I suppose the first goal of transhumanism is to clarify the difference between science fiction and real world science.

The second is to make clear that some of these possible futures are actually very wonderful. The third is to ensure society doesn’t strangle this movement unnecessarily – and to achieve that, organisation and coordination is necessary.”

Transhumanism has captured the attention of influential figures all over the world, but exactly how it should be understood is far from clear. Is it just an exclusive club for the world’s wealthy tech elites? An extension of the ever-expanding wellness trend? A fresh political ideology that emphasises technology over economics as a means of organising society?

Or should it be classified as a modern religious movement, along the lines of scientology? A look at the movement’s relationship with traditional religions may shed some light on the matter.

“Some old philosophies are fundamentally opposed to transhumanism. The bioconservatism view, for example, is that we must leave nature as it is,” Wood says. “In contrast, transhumanists believe we must continue as we have throughout history: with medical interventions, the creation of new chemicals and improvements to quality of life.

We say go further – let’s improve nature, improve humans, and gently but firmly oppose mindsets that seek to limit humanity’s potential.”

For most of the world’s major religions, death marks an important passage in an individual’s spiritual journey. As transhumanists seek to use technology to overcome, or at least indefinitely delay, the conclusion of life, it creates a tension around notions of man’s traditional place in

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Transhumanists underplay the harm that could be done as people experiment with new drugs to engage in reverse genetic engineering

universe. For transhumanists who are also religious, it can be difficult to reconcile the two perspectives.

“In a sense, the motivation for transhumanism is theological. It’s about the idea of humans becoming Gods,” says Fuller. “If you take the idea that humans are created in the image and likeness of God – a popular notion in strands of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the whole idea of transhumanism doesn’t seem so strange.”

But becoming the designer of evolution – essentially playing God – unearths a variety of other moral questions. “There are certainly worries,” Wood says. “If we are careless, then we will make mistakes, and we could inadvertently make something worse rather than improving it.”

Not everyone will be convinced by the transhumanist vision of humanity’s future, but it’s difficult to ignore the fast pace of technological change happening all around us. Public perceptions of technology and its potential are constantly evolving as a result – and the appetite for riskier technologies and scientific developments is growing rapidly. But is the level of risk properly understood? Is society prepared for the potentially negative consequences of these futuristic technologies?

“There will be a lot of disasters. There’s no doubt about it,” Fuller says. “Transhumanists underplay the harm that could be done as people experiment with new drugs to expand their minds or engage in reverse genetic engineering against ageing. Even if you can show that these treatments work – and within a few years, we’ll be able to – we won’t really know what the side effects are until the technologies are trialled on a fairly large scale.”

Growing pains aren’t the only risk ahead. Mark O’Connell, author of the transhumanism-focused book To Be A Machine, has spent time with transhumanist communities in numerous countries.

One of his biggest concerns is the potential for their ideas to exacerbate existing social inequalities. “The point transhumanists always make is that human enhancement technologies will be like mobile phones,” he says. “When the technology

The term ‘transhumanism’ was coined around fifty years ago by the British evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley

first comes, it’s really expensive, but then production gets cheaper, and more people can afford it.

It’s almost like a ‘trickle down economics’ theory of human enhancement.”

While the development of these enhancement technologies is, to a large extent, already inevitable, the way transformative solutions are integrated into society is still fertile ground for debate. Wood shares O’Connell’s concerns that such technologies may only be available to the super rich, and that levels of social inequality will increase as a result.

“Today, being born into a wealthy environment means you can expect to live around nine years longer than if you were born into a poor environment.

That inequality of lifespan is already getting bigger,” Wood explains. “Technology exacerbating inequalities is something to worry about because people feeling alienated leads to consequences like extremism and political unrest. Unless we address the growth of inequality, we risk undermining progress towards a better transhumanist future for everyone.”

Most transhumanists assume that people will welcome the opportunity to boost their intelligence through drugs, or that everyone will want to combat the ageing process and become immortal.

Fuller believes that reality will be a little different.

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“We likely have to think about a world in which a large proportion of people don’t want any part of it,” he says. “If we have a society where say 50 to 80 per cent of people won’t upgrade in any serious way, but 20 to 25 per cent choose to do so, what kind of world do we have then? What do you do about the people who don’t want it?”

Advancements in robotics are creating new opportunities to improve human bodies and senses. Mechanical limbs and cybernetic implants mark a new era for the human body as it becomes increasingly entwined with technology. In the future, workers that refuse to adopt these body enhancements could find themselves left behind in the job market, particularly when it comes to the use of devices that improve cognition or memory.

As O’Connell puts it: “There’s a real worry that if we were to create a higher, more sophisticated, more intelligent form of human, it would be a catastrophe for the rest of us.”

If the current makeup of the transhumanist community is anything to go by, the world may already be on its way towards O’Connell’s catastrophic future. Ultra-rich white men from the technology industry are in disproportionate abundance in the movement, suggesting that this homogeneous and exclusive demographic are the early adopters who’ll come to define and regulate more widespread implementation of transhumanist technologies. The transhumanism movement is

Mark O’Connell, author of To Be A Machine, has spent time with transhumanist communities in numerous countries

often criticised for its lack of diversity, particularly in terms of gender and race. Is transhumanism just an echo chamber for a particular set of values held by a certain kind of Silicon Valley entrepreneur?

“Before you encounter transhumanists in the flesh, it’s quite easy to imagine them as being purely eccentrics or in some way inhuman. A lot of them are quite eccentric, but I also found many to be likeable and easy to identify with,” O’Connell says. “I was able to see the human dimension behind these almost inhuman ideas they support.”

James MacFarlane, a PhD student at the University of Warwick, is currently authoring one of the first ever studies about transhumanist communities. So far, he has conducted more than 30 interviews with transhumanists across groups in the US and the UK. “Overall, the numbers are certainly more on the male and middle class side of things.

They’re the general population that make up this movement as far as I’ve observed,” he explains. “But in terms of advocacy and passion, there’s definitely no enthusiasm disparity from one gender or another.

I wouldn’t say there’s any antagonism between genders and races within the groups I’ve seen.”

While the transhumanist community is lacking in diversity for the moment, there’s little doubt among supporters that their movement is on the cusp of going mainstream. Given the growing interest in transhumanism, achieving diversity may just be a matter of increasing the reach of transhumanist ideas. Wood believes that transhumanism will be a dominant philosophy in the years ahead. “More and more people are realising that, actually, our existing philosophies are failing to cope with the pace of change in the world and failing to give people a sufficient sense of meaning,” he explains.

In the past couple of years popular culture has been flooded by transhumanist influences. From big budget video games like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that sees a global civil war between humans that are enhanced by robotics and those that reject technological enhancements, to the Hollywood adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, a cult Japanese anime where artificial intelligence merges with human intelligence within a cyborg body. As the technologies that drive the imagination of transhumanists become more and more accessible, the general public seem eager to indulge in fantasies of how they might change what means to be human.

“At the moment, we have all sorts of different groups, movements and communities that are loosely organised around different forms of advocacy but, despite doing similar things, aren’t necessarily namechecking transhumanism,” MacFarlane adds. “I have no doubt, however, that we’ll see transhumanism spread much more widely in the future.”

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JOINT SELLING AGENTS

RISE OF THE SUPER-PRIME RENTERS Jesse Onslow Norton investigates why the one per cent are renting rather than buying London’s best properties

I

n London’s Park Lane there’s a luxury, five-bedroom apartment that overlooks Hyde Park. Originally built in the 1920s

by Sir Edward Lutyens, its grand drawing room and elegant black marble kitchen evoke the regal atmosphere of a bygone age.

How much is too much to pay for an exquisite penthouse in one of London’s most prestigious neighborhoods? $10 million? $20 million? How about $40,000 a week?

As London grapples with the ramifications of Brexit and tries to retain its status as Europe’s leading finance hub, a new trend is emerging in the property market. ‘Super-prime’ rental properties, homes that cost more than $6,500 a week, are rapidly gaining popularity. According to estate agent and property consultancy Knight Frank, in just the first six months of 2017 interest in the capital’s super-prime rental market increased by as much as 62 per cent.

Over the same six-month period, sales from London properties valued over $6.5 million were down 40 per cent, and this is depressing the market. According to LonRes data from estate agents Savills, super-prime homes are now worth 17 per cent less than they were in 2014. But the depreciation of London homes is only one of the reasons why tenancies exceeding $ 13,000 a week have risen 50 per cent year-on-year.

In 2014, the UK government reformed how stamp duty is calculated on property transactions.

Under the current legislation, the tax payable on

purchasing a $20 million home has increased by 63 per cent to a bill of more than $2.2 million. If the property is part of a portfolio, an additional three per cent tax is levied on buyers for owning more than one home.

The high level of stamp duty is incredibly unpopular, but it is estimated to bring home the UK government more than $15 billion each year.

Increasingly, however, potential homeowners are calculating that they can divide the capital they would pay on stamp duty over a two- to three-year rental period. Not only does this avoid excessive taxation, but it also protects would-be buyers from the growing depreciation in London’s housing market.

“When you purchase a property now, you pay an extraordinary level of stamp duty, more than anywhere else in the western world. If you’re coming in from overseas you can pay up to 15 per cent if you’re buying a second property,” explains David Adams, director at Humberts, an international estate agents operating out of London. “Under the new rules, stamp duty can run into millions of pounds depending on what you’re purchasing.”

In a normal market, if homeowners choose to resell a property after 12 months they’re able to do so without making too much of a loss. But with stamp duty tax set at 12 per cent on properties exceeding $2 million, the loss can be extraordinarily difficult to absorb. Many purchasers are now reluctant to commit to staying in London longterm and are preferring to mitigate the growing cost of moving by renting instead of buying.

Britain’s stamp duty is unpopular but brings the UK government more than $15 billion each year

SUPER-PRIME RENTERS

“A lot of the tenants we deal with come in and out of London, and normally they are only here for between 18 months and three years, maybe up to five years at an absolute push,” says Izzy Birch-Reynardson, head of residential lettings at Savills Mayfair. “They are paying what they would pay in stamp duty to acquire that asset is quite a hefty chunk off their rent and it means that you actually haven’t exposed yourself to an asset that could end up depreciating over the time. That, for me, has been one of the biggest drivers that we’ve seen.”

For many super-prime renters it’s also about minimising stress. Normally the kinds of people renting this category of home have got several other properties around the world. In the UK, renting a property rather than buying it involves less paperwork and admin. But there are other economic benefits to renting over purchasing too.

“The economic benefits are that they can use their capital elsewhere if they’re not investing it into a property and also it gives them flexibility to move,” says Lucy Morton, lead director of residential agency JLL. “They’re not committing to a purchase, they’re just committing to a letting. Normally for a year with an option for a second and a third year. Particularly for high-networth individuals, they like to be able to have the flexibility to move from city to city.”

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he prohibitive stamp duty tax on UK property purchases is just one of the catalysts b e h i n d L o n d o n ’s growing super-prime rental market. As one of the world’s most influential financial hubs, the UK’s capital also attracts highly skilled workers from the asset management, hedge fund and investment banking industries.

These high net-worth individuals are key to driving demand for London accommodation, but it’s not just high-flyers in the finance sector that are being attracted to the super-prime rental market.

“The financial services sector is definitely the cash cow for the market, but now you’ve also got the tech industry coming through. About three years ago those people were spending a lot of money to live in up-and-coming areas like Shoreditch and living in loft conversions,” says Birch-Reynardson. “As that industry is maturing and developing we’re seeing more high calibre tenants coming further into prime central London, which

The kitchen and office at 28 Mallord Street, which is on the market for £8,500 per week

is not something that we’ve seen before. They definitely have bigger budgets now.”

As well as finance and tech sector professionals, a large number of London’s super-prime renters are successful businessmen from the Gulf and China.

Often they bring their children so that they can be educated in the UK’s world-famous private school system. Families will often continue to rent properties even when children are old enough to attend boarding schools, which means some super-prime tenants may retain a rental property for as much as 10 years. In some cases, if the parents choose to live elsewhere, the home is only occupied on weekends and during the summer when the children are on school holidays.

“During the longer summer holiday they’ll fly back to their country of origin, or they may have a holiday house in the South of France. But during term time, they want a house or a home for the children to come home to,” says Adams. “You also have a large number of people who spend a lot of time doing business in the UK. These people get sick and tired of living out of a different hotel each time they visit and want to be able to fly into a home environment where they’ve got their own set of clothes, rather than always living in a hotel.”

London is a city with no shortage of luxury accommodations, and this can mean that competition for super-prime tenants is intense. In the heart of St John’s Wood it’s possible to get a two-floor penthouse with spectacular views of central

SUPER-PRIME RENTERS

There’s a two-floor penthouse in St John’s Wood going for $10,000 a week

84 Clapham Common

London for $10,000 a week. The luxury apartment comes with four bedrooms, a lavish drawing room, a sleek contemporary kitchen and its own private lift. But even properties like this are not to everybody’s taste.

High-net-worth individuals who choose to rent in London tend to be some of the most discerning property customers in the world. When it comes to negotiating terms on super-prime rentals, it’s not unusual for estate agents to receive special requests from the potential tenants.

“They all have special requests and they are never ever straight forward at all. The amount of negotiation to get these deals together is absolutely extraordinary,” says Adams. “Two this year that I’ve had is somebody who wanted to refurbish an already refurbished property. They wanted their particular choice of marble fitted into all of the bathrooms.”

The tenancy negotiations for such high value property can be difficult for estate agents to navigate.

Landlords need assurances that the desired work is in keeping with the type and style of the property, otherwise it might lose lose resale value. Quite often the taste between the owner and the renter can differ considerably, but the UK’s stringent heritage laws also play role. Many of the properties available in the super-prime rental market are listed buildings, meaning that renovations can only be carried out with approval from the local council.

“As an estate agent you might suddenly find yourself asking bizarre questions like, will the bathrooms be worth more in white marble or beige marble,” explains Adams. “It can be a difficult tightrope to walk, somebody else wanted a tunnel from the house to the indoor pool so they didn’t have to go outside to get into the pool, they wanted some sort of covered walkway or a tunnel going from one to the other. That wasn’t easy to achieve.”

Assuming estate agents are able to guarantee the amendments are not going to take away from the value of the property it’s often worthwhile for landlords to consider the requests. Often the amounts involved are sufficient to justify most household makeovers, even if they’re only

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for a 12 month contract. Adams recalls one potential tenants requesting that doors were moved from one part of a wall to another so that the rooms were more symmetrical.

“When it comes to furnishings and amenities, the calibre is a lot higher than it was just a couple of years ago,” says BirchReynardson. “I had one tenant quite a long time ago now who went to having a bidet put into a bathroom, and the bathroom was brand new but it was ripped out to ensure this was put in.”

One common priority for super-prime tenants is that houses are sufficiently secure, especially if the home is not going to be lived in permanently. If tenants are non-domiciled in the UK then they’re looking for something that will be safe to leave the valuables in. In some extreme cases tenants have requested that houses are knocked back because they’re too close to the road or there wasn’t enough space for security teams to patrol. But it’s not all high stakes, sometimes potential tenants just want to know that they’ll be able to throw the best parties.

“A lot of business people are primarily looking for entertaining spaces. They want to be able to entertain in style for the short time they’re here. They might want to hold dinner parties, so they’re looking for decent size drawing rooms and dining rooms,” says Adams. “Often that means that they also need ancillary accommodation attached to the house for maids or drivers because they intend to keep somebody here to keep an eye on the property while they’re away.”

With so many high-net-worth individuals turning away from ownership in favour of tenancy, this emerging trend has caught the imagination of the tech companies in Silicon Valley. So often the ambition is to create a home environment that matches the

Airbnb has launched two new services catering for the high-end property market this year

experiences of a high-end hotel, and this is something that accommodation platform Airbnb is seeking to capitalise upon.

In June 2017, Airbnb announced its intention to launch Lux, an ultrapremium tier of accommodation.

Rather than catering to tourists or low-end business travels, the new platform will feature the world’s most exclusive mansions, penthouses and mega-homes.

The news of Lux comes shortly after Airbnb announced Select, a new premium way of filtering accommodations based on high-end amenities and services. Both Lux and Select indicate that Airbnb is hoping to leave couchsurfing behind in favour of luxury offerings. The Silicon Valley tech firm has been courting celebrities to promote the new services on social media. When Beyoncé performed at the Super Bowl she posted images of her $10,000 a night Airbnb property in Santa Clara.

Back in London, uncertainty over Brexit continues to suppress property values and homeowners have little appetite to sell during a downturn. While stamp duty remains excessive, the super-prime rental market will continue to be an attractive option for both owners and potential tenants.

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MISSION TO MARS

MISSION TO MARS Iain Akerman discovers the UAE’s ambitions to colonise Mars is just one of a number of projects focused on the Red planet 54

MISSION TO MARS

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n February this year, the UAE launched a plan to colonise Mars by 2117. As plans go, it was an ambitious one, but not unusual for a country used to grand statements of intent and then delivering on them.

“We aspire in the coming century to develop science, technology and our youth’s passion for knowledge,” tweeted Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, announcing the project earlier this year. “This project is driven by that vision.”

It’s a vision that has many layers. The UAE’s plans to colonise Mars may seem futuristic, but more immediate and practical steps are being taken closer to home. The Emirates Mars Mission will send an unmanned probe to the planet in 2020, making it the first ever mission to the Red Planet by any Arab or Muslim country, while $136 million has been set aside for the construction of a city in the desert that aims to replicate life on Mars. All in preparation for 2117.

The company tasked with designing this Mars Scientific City is the Copenhagen- and New York-based Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). It’s a project the firm says will explore what a vernacular Martian architecture could look like, adapting to local climates and landscapes by designing for an environment that includes low gravity, low pressure, extreme colds and high levels of radiation.

“When you begin to inhabit a world that has no existing ecosystem, environmentalism takes on a whole new meaning,” said BIG in a project statement. “The challenge is not to preserve the existing environment, but rather to design and engineer a whole new manmade ecosystem, making us take the step up from custodians to creators of our own little Martian circle of life.”

The resulting structures will include interlocking geodesic domes made of ultralight plastic and secured deep in the desert, inside of which will be buildings 3D-printed using Martian sand. The feasibility of underground spaces will be tested and, as part of the project, a team will live in the city for a year.

Yet why Mars? Why the continued fascination? Why dream of living in an environment that

is hostile to human life? These are questions that span the entirety of the past century.

“Historically Mars was the only other planet where astronomers could study the surface (Venus is completely covered by clouds) and some believed that there was evidence for life,” says Paul Kalas, an astronomy professor in the department of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. “This subsequently permeated popular culture and science fiction films for many decades.

“Now we know Mars’ surface features are not due to primitive or intelligent life, yet our imagination continues to be inspired by the many interesting stories that were told in the past.”

The UAE, of course, is far from being alone when it comes to dreams of reaching Mars. In March this year, US president Donald Trump signed a $ 19.5 billion Nasa bill with the goal of sending humans to the Red Planet. It was the first such authorisation bill in seven years, with Trump stating in his speech to both houses of Congress that “American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream”.

Nasa, for its part, has long been committed to the idea of human travel to the planet, with the challenge of developing systems and capabilities required to explore beyond low-Earth orbit, near-Earth asteroids, and eventually Mars, all integral to the beginning of a new era in space exploration.

“We’ve been working hard over the past several years to develop a sustainable Mars exploration plan, which we believe is Nasa’s next giant leap in human space exploration,” says Cheryl Warner, a spokesperson for Nasa. “We know there are challenges to sending humans to Mars, from getting there to landing, living and working on the planet and safely returning home. While our long-

“The challenge is to design and engineer a whole new manmade ecosystem”

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term Mars architecture is still under development, we recently announced a concept for a deep space gateway and a deep space transport in the vicinity of the moon to support human missions to distant destinations, including the Red Planet.”

Although the $19.5 billion is in line with Nasa’s funding in recent years, the space agency’s acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, stated that it “bolsters our ongoing work to send humans deeper into space and the technologies that will require”. By deeper he means not only Mars, but further afield, out beyond Jupiter and Saturn, where Nasa’s Cassini mission recently announced it had found the ingredients needed for life on Enceladus, the gas giant’s icy moon.

How you get to the further reaches of our solar system, however, is a matter of continued and varied discussion. Do you take incremental steps, or giant leaps? Manned or unmanned? One-way or return?

“There is a debate between those who want to take incremental steps in space exploration because of the reduced risk and costs, and those who want to tackle the long-term goals immediately,” says Kalas. “Establishing a moon base [for example] would develop all the expertise needed to go further, such as to Mars, whereas others might want to focus all efforts and funds into the ultimate jackpot – human presence on Mars.”

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) director general, Jan Woerner, has discussed the possibility of creating an international ‘village’ on the moon as the next step towards obtaining the know-how and infrastructure needed to head into deep space.

Nasa, meanwhile, as Warner says, has announced concepts for a deep space gateway to support human missions further into the solar system.

“Those missions would begin with the first integrated mission of Nasa’s Space Launch System

From top left: the surface of the Red Planet; Nasa HQ before a launch; Elon Musk launching SpaceX’s Dragon Capsule

MISSION TO MARS

rocket and Orion spacecraft from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida,” says Warner.

“These unique capabilities will open deep space to human exploration and will provide a vital role in crewed missions to Mars.”

W

ith the International Space Station to be decommissioned within the next 10 years, the international community will be left without an outpost on which to test next-generation life support systems, communications technologies and the physical and psychological effects of weightlessness and isolation on the human body. Which is why Nasa views its deep space gateway and deep space transport as critical.

“I envision different partners, both international and commercial, contributing to the gateway and using it in a variety of ways with a system that can move to different orbits to enable a variety of missions,” says William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for human exploration and operations at Nasa’s headquarters in Washington, DC. “The gateway could move to support robotic or partner missions to the surface of the moon, or to a high lunar orbit to support missions departing from the gateway to other destinations in the solar system.”

Aside from Nasa, it is Elon Musk who garners the most Mars headlines, although the Netherlands-based Mars One and its plans to send Mars dwellers on a one-way journey to the planet by 2032 sometimes takes the biscuit. It plans to help cover the costs of the mission by screening training in a Big Brotherstyle reality TV show.

It is the billionaire entrepreneur Musk’s SpaceX, however, that is taken most seriously outside of Nasa. By seeking to reduce space transportation costs and enabling the colonisation of Mars, the SpaceX programme has excited even the most sceptical of observers. Key to the company’s plans is the ‘BFR’ rocket.

Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide in September, Musk said construction of the 35-storey space vehicle would begin early next year, with a launch to Mars set for 2022. Crewed missions would then land in 2024.

“I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a space faring civilisation and a multi-planet species than if we’re not,” said Musk at the congress. The BFR will be 48 metres long and contain 1,100 tonnes of propellant, with a Mars-transit configuration consisting of 40 cabins – equating to about 100 people per flight.

“In 2024 we want to try to fly four ships, two of which would be crewed – two cargo and two crew,” said Musk. “The goal of these initial missions is to find the best source of water. And then for the second mission, the goal is to build the propellant plant. So we should, particularly with six ships, have plenty of landed mass to construct the propellant depot, which will consist of a large array of solar panels and then everything necessary to mine and refine water, and then draw the CO2 out of the atmosphere, and then create and store deep-cryo CH4 and O2.

“Then build up the base, starting with one ship, then multiple ships, then start building up the city, then making the city bigger... and even bigger. And over time terraforming Mars, and making it really a nice place to be.”

The dangers of humans venturing into deep space, however, are apparent. In October last year the ESA’s Schiaparelli lander – supposed to be the first European probe to operate on Mars – crashed as it attempted, ironically, to land. Part of the ESA’s two-part ExoMars astrobiology project to search for evidence of life on Mars, a rover is expected to land on the planet’s surface in 2020, with the overall mission to last into 2022 and possibly beyond.

Primary risks include accelerating away from Earth and decelerating to land on the planet’s surface. Without the protection of Earth’s magnetic field, there is also the problem of shielding astronauts from high-energy particles that damage living tissue.

“The harsh radiation environment of space always struck me as the greatest challenge, both en route to Mars and once humans arrive,” says Kalas. “Without a thick atmosphere or strong magnetic field, the surface of Mars is directly exposed to radiation that is harmful to biology. As an astronomer who uses

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has reduced space transport costs and excited many observers

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the Hubble Space Telescope, I can quite literally see many thousands of high energy particles hitting the sensitive cameras after just a few minutes of exposure time.”

Ongoing scientific research is being undertaken into radiation-induced diseases, the decline of bone density in low-gravity environments, and cognitive and behavioural disorders. Nasa is also looking at ways of manipulating the DNA of astronauts to protect them from radiation.

Can deep space exploration be made safe enough for humans to survive? Can a human colony on Mars really be established? The answer to the latter is predominantly yes, although the debatable issue concerns timescale. SpaceX’s timelines, for example, are ambitious, with Mars colonies to be established less than 20 years from now. Kalas believes the timescale will be closer to 50 years.

“I think the prospect of humans visiting Mars is very good, although it will take some time,” says John Southworth, a lecturer in astrophysics at Keele University in the UK. “I remember attending talks even in the late 1990s saying that it was already technically possible.

“However, the prospect for long-term colonisation is much more hazy. Do we have the technology for this? Can we find suitable people to go to Mars knowing that there is both danger and a good chance they will never return? Can we change the planet on a large scale to make it more habitable?” These are questions that could well be answered, even if only partially, by a successful Mars landing, which would lead to a more detailed understanding of the planet’s properties. It would also enable experiments in low gravity and allow for the cultural implications of such a mission to be explored.

“There are four terrestrial planets or rocky planets in our solar system, and Mars is the most hospitable relative to Mercury and Venus,” says Kalas. “Thus Mars has a role for our possible future, yet it is also critical for understanding our origins. Planetary scientists have imaged surface features that show the existence and flow of water in the distant past of Mars. Darwin speculated that the origin of life occurred in a ‘warm little pond’, yet even now the origin of life on Earth is greatly debated among scientists. How and when did

“Can we find suitable people to go to Mars knowing there is a good chance they will never return?”

chemistry become biology? Some say it only took 800 million years after the formation of the Earth.

Could that have happened on Mars too? Mars is extremely significant in our quest to understand the origin of life.”

As we move further into the solar system it is believed that space exploration will improve life on Earth by advancing scientific knowledge and discovery, driving technological development, and providing economic opportunities across numerous industries.

“For human space exploration, I’m one of the people whose imagination likes the idea of Mars colonies,” says Kalas. “One might note that all animals display a behaviour which is to explore their environment. Humans might call this curiosity, but this is also a very critical behaviour related to survival of a species. Every form of biology needs to move through space in order to discover new ecological niches that could maximise its chances to reproduce and thrive. It stands to reason that every technological civilisation would likely take this fundamental drive and look up to the sky for new niches that could host the species.”

There is also a practical and cultural element to humankind’s obsession with mars. That somehow, by creating a self-sustaining human population on Mars, we will build a safety net in the event of Earth suffering a catastrophic asteroid impact.

“I think this is primarily a cultural thing,” says Southworth. “A deep desire to have a plan B in case something awful happens to our own planet.”

BAD INFLUENCE Are the new breed of marketers a natural evolution of social media or are they unregulated, unprofessional and a bad influence on teenagers? Gary Evans explores the world of the Instagram influencer

Y

ou sign up and pick a username: you’re @PortfolioReader. Take a selfie on the plane, add a filter, post it. You follow a few people and a few people follow you.

Here comes your first like – your first likes. Someone leaves a comment: ‘Love this!’

Over 100 followers. You move on from selfies, move away from filters. You post a picture of the crooked little cobblestone street that curves down to a white-sand beach on holiday; of the steam that floats bluely from a flat white in that cool new coffee shop; of the dog footed to its long shadow in the park at sunset.

Your followers go up – 500, 600, 700. You buy a better phone to take better pictures. You add the maximum 30 hashtags – #exploretocreate, #liveauthentic, #keepitwild – so people can find your photos. More likes. You spend time writing and rewriting your captions. More comments.

You now have 1k followers. You receive an e-mail.

This brand is big fan of @PortfolioReader. They want to send you a gift, completely free – a pair of socks. All you have to do is post a picture of those socks. Why not? Free socks. You agree.

You are no longer an Instagram user: you are an Instagram influencer. It’s in the Cambridge Dictionary: “Influencer, noun, someone who affects or changes the way that people behave.”

Survey by research firm L2 found 83 per cent of beauty brands, 84 per cent active-wear brands, and 91 per cent of luxury brands use influencers to advertise their stuff. Instagram now has 800 million users. The number of people whose behaviour an influencer can affect has never been bigger. Influencers have never had more influence.

But the backlash has begun.

“It’s largely because the industry doesn’t understand them,” Vikki Chowney says. Chowney is chief content strategist at Hill+Knowlton Strategies, one of the world’s biggest public relations companies.

Hill+Knowlton works with influencers, but certain things concern Chowney: that influencers show “no regard to the potential negative impact they can have on people”, that they are unregulated, and that some pay for followers.

A recent survey by the Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement found Instagram the most detrimental to young people’s mental health and wellbeing. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission repeatedly warned influenc-

ers about not including clear markings on adverts, warnings many still ignore. And marketing agency Mediakix recently set up a couple of Instagram accounts, bought followers, posted stock images. Brands offered to send free stuff to these fake accounts. Chowney’s right to be concerned, isn’t she? Aren’t influencers a bunch of hustlers?

“Brands and agencies usually try to exploit influencers,” says Rachel Ecclestone (@urbantraveller, 98k followers). “Influencers are creating quality content that’s free advertising for brands.

Brands need to see that this is something people used to pay a lot of money for.”

Ecclestone travels to specific places to take pictures. She uses professional equipment and photo editing software. She puts time and effort into posting pictures every day. “A lot of people just expect you do things for free. There’s an attitude that if you are going to ask for money then people take it the wrong way. They say, ‘It’s just Instagram.’”

You now have 10k followers. You buy a DSLR camera.You edit photos in Photoshop and Lightroom.

More brands want to send @PortfolioReader freebies.

But you now expect a payment.

James Street runs Whalar. A brand approaches Whalar with a brief, which it takes to suitable influencers. Whalar only takes on Instagram accounts with more than 10,000 followers and at least 1 per cent engagement (the number of people who like and comment on a post). Some brands pay for the best numbers, others the most creative pictures. Whalar’s influencers charge between $10 and $20,000 per post. Whalar takes 10 per cent. But what does Street’s company do that influencers and brands couldn’t sort out between themselves?

“We recently did a campaign for Dior,” Street says, “which involved 200 influencers around the world and was completed in a month. Doing this on an individual basis would be almost impossible. We see ourselves as the Airbnb of the influencer landscape, so we provide the tech and the process to connect both the brand and the influencer.”

Not all agencies treat influencers fairly. Elif Filyos (@thefashionmedley, 104k followers) says some patronise her, misrepresent her to brands, don’t pay her on time, or don’t pay the full agreed fee. Most influencers have a problem with late

“Influencers are creating quality content that’s free advertising for brands”

BAD INFLUENCE

Below: Yasmeena Rasheed Bottom: Urban Traveller

and unpaid invoices. “They just assumed because I’m an influencer I must be stupid,” Filyos says.

“They didn’t count on the fact that I used to be a lawyer and have zero tolerance for disrespect.”

Some brands also try to dictate how Filyos photographs their products, “As though you are a photographer working for them – that’s a problem.

Instagram is your portfolio, your style, your platform – not theirs.” Things get confusing here. Filyos sees herself as a collaborator, not a freelance employee.

Yasmeena Rasheed (@y.asmeena, 92k followers) says, “For me, two of the most important qualities to keep in my social media is authenticity and credibility. So, I only advertise for brands that align with my values and that I genuinely like. That’s how I keep my relationship with my followers so authentic.”

So, influencers are making genuine, authentic recommendations, like a friend would? “People

“Many ad agencies don’t like influencers because they feel like their success hasn’t been earned”

don’t like influencers, or being influenced,” Simon Manchipp says, “because they don’t like the idea of not knowing they are being advertised to.”

Manchipp runs SomeOne, a brand consultancy based in London. If influencers don’t write ‘spon’ or ‘ad’ on their post, then “audiences feel like they are being lied to”. Instagram recently stepped in with a new tool it hopes will ‘bring transparency and consistency to branded content’. Influencers will highlight adverts with a subheading that reads ‘paid partnership with…’ Will this legitimise the work influencers do?

SomeOne already works with influencers, but Manchipp says the wider industry isn’t so keen: “Many traditional ad agencies don’t like influencers because they feel like their success hasn’t been earned.” So why would a brand choose a single influencer over a team at an advertising agency?

“To cut costs,” Ben Shaw says. Shaw works at in the ‘social arm’ of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, an ad agency that employs over 1,000 people in offices around the world. Shaw says without an agency like his – which does work with influencers – you

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get what you pay for: “[Influencers] often create work that is just influencer plus message, instead of a proper creative idea, something that doesn’t just fall into the same cut and cadence the influencer doles out for every brief they get from a brand.”

You now have over 100k followers. A designer wants you to wear their clothes. A car company wants you to test drive their car. A tourist board wants you to send you on holiday in their country. Your fee goes up and up. But now you always have one eye on engagement. Will this picture get enough likes? You worry you’re playing it safe, rehashing the same sort of image. Then: stage fright. “Once our Instagram became more popular,” Kyla Trethewey says, “we did find ourselves with a little bit of stage fright.”

Trethewey and Jill Mann quit their day jobs in 2013, sold all their furniture, and hit the road across America in an old caravan. The Canadian pair (@ourwildabandon, 132k followers) use Instagram to share photos from their trip. They work with brands like HTC, T-Mobile and Google, and have an agent who represents them.

Trethewey says: “We had to take a step back and remind ourselves that the amount of likes you get on a photo is not an accurate representation of the quality.” Many brands work with influencers precisely because they produce a certain type of image. Rich McCor (@paperboyo, 320k followers) makes paper cutouts, holds them in front of land-

marks, and photographs the results. The Jumeirah Emirates Towers – with the edition of gesticulating cutout arms – become a pair of squabbling robots.

McCor says: “I turned down a number of opportunities because some brands wanted their logos dominating the photo. That means saying no to some tempting offers, but that authenticity and honesty is a crucial factor in this field.”

That word again: authenticity. A recent New Yorker piece had a go at exactly that – influencers and their authenticity. In ‘How to Be an Amazing Influencer Like Me’, a writer poses as ‘Molly Matilda’ and says: “What am I most deeply passionate about? Authentic brand partnerships.”

She wakes up next to a tub of peanut butter and goes for walks in her new favourite sneakers. Her followers needn’t wonder whether or not they’re looking at an advert. “Because the answer is always yes! These are all #ads!!”

You now have 250k followers. You quit your job and become full-time influencer. Bloggers and

BAD INFLUENCE

Clockwise from left: Urban Traveller, Our Wild Abandon, Paper Boyo, The Fashion Medley, Our Wild Abandon

citizen with entrepreneurial guile and a selfie camera.” Sound familiar?

Storr explains how psychological studies suggest we change with our environment. “In 1965,” he says, “we were a collective, hippies, peace and love, anti-materialistic, then just 20 years later we were yuppies in wine bars. ‘Greed is good.’ What happens in the middle of that time? A massive change in the economy.”

As well as the rise of neoliberalism, of free-market capitalism, Storr points to another big change during that time: the rise of the self-esteem movement.

“We tell our kids they’re wonderful, they’re special.

We don’t let anybody come last on sports day – everybody gets a ribbon. We changed the way we raised our children. This generation raised in the late 1980s and early ’90s has been pumped full of this madness. That is the millennial generation. And the psychological literature shows steep rises in levels of narcissism.” Apply these two ideas to influencers and it appears they’re both winners and losers in the race to become the perfect self.

Storr says influencers have influence because humans are tribal animals. We direct our atten-

“I turned down a number of opportunities because some brands wanted their logos dominating the photo”

podcasters want to interview @PortfolioReader.

Magazine journalists too. But you also notice on your post the odd sarcastic comment, negative remark, outright abuse. Even family, friends, complete strangers ask, “What exactly is it you do?”

In his new book, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us, Will Storr examines our idea of “the perfect self ”. Storr describes this person as: “An extroverted, slim, beautiful, individualistic, optimistic, hard-working, socially aware yet high-self-esteeming global

tion to people who already attract attention, so they attract more attention, and we give them even more attention. It’s “the Paris Hilton effect”. We’re programmed to follow leaders.

“Influencers are inarguably winners,” Storr says.

“They’re the 0.1 per cent. But there’s a big problem with this stuff.”

During more collective times, Storr says, entertainment companies would invest heavily in “extremely talented people” like influencers.

Social media platforms don’t do that. They are “massively exploitative” and treat influencers “extremely shabbily”.

Storr recently interviewed a musician influencer who worked with a coffee brand: “She was very upbeat about it,” he says. “To me, that’s tragic. In her heart, that woman is an artist and this is what she’s been reduced to: hawking this terrible coffee product. It’s the internalisation of it. She’s desperately convincing herself that this is a good

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thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s desperately cynical. I think it’s really hard to argue that this is a system set up for creative people. I think it’s a disaster for creative people.”

It’s clear not everyone can afford to turn down work. If you’re not enthusiastic, there’s someone waiting in line who will “believe” in a brand and do it cut-price. Financially, you need to be pretty well off to stand by all your ethical and moral and creative values. It doesn’t come cheap, authenticity.

Anthony Bogdan (@anthonybogdan, 135k followers) never complains. He likes the flexibility of the work, being able to spend time with his kids. And brands, agencies and people in general are starting to take his “slightly odd job” more seriously.

“We have been viewed as hugely spoiled by many,” Bogdan says. “Which is correct. But the majority of the time I work all hours of the day and very rarely have a holiday or even weekend.

“Most people still think our work consists of shooting a selfie with a phone camera and slapping a filter on it. An image can easily take a whole day to create. Most influencers I know never stop.

They juggle negotiating, marketing, accounting, photography, communication, editing, modelling, and styling – all at once. It works much like a oneman media agency.”

You now have 500k … 800k … 1m followers. A six-figure income, blue-chip brands. @ PortfolioReader is a brand itself. PR and advertising hire huge teams to do what you’re doing alone. Let The New Yorker write its funny arti-

FIVE INFLUENCER CONTROVERSIES When influencing goes wrong: shadow banning, shambolic festivals, and fake photos The Fyre Festival The Fyre Festival was a two-weekend music event scheduled to take place on Bahamian island Great Exuma in the summer of 2017. Kendall Jenner (kendalljenner 84m followers), Emily Ratajkowski (@emrata, 15m followers), Hailey Baldwin (@haileybaldwin, 10m followers) all promoted Fyre. Attendees paid thousands of dollars to attend the “luxury festival” and arrived to tents and sandwiches instead of villas and gourmet meals.

Disney backs down In 2016, Time named PewDiePie one of The World’s 100 Most Influential People. The Swedish comedian, who vlogs about videos games, signed deals with Disney and Google. He was later accused of making anti-Semitic remarks and those companies cut all ties. PewDiePie – real name Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg – currently has over 16 billion views on YouTube.

Don’t say shadowban Some influencers blamed a recent drop in engagement on Instagram’s mysterious “shadowban”. The term refers to a social media user being blocked by the community without knowing about it. On Instagram, that supposedly means your pictures are hidden from users who don’t already follow you, which stops you from attracting new followers. If you’re shadowbanned, even hashtags won’t help. It’s all very complicated and it makes certain influencers very angry.

Taj Mahal VIP This year, Amelia Liana (@amelialiana, 483k followers) found herself in the mainstream press for apparently faking her Instagram pictures. She posted a photo of herself at the usually bustling Taj Mahal. There wasn’t another tourist in sight. Some said she edited out visitors, others that she never went at all and photoshopped herself on to a picture of the landmark. People began to pick apart all her other photos too. It didn’t do Liana any harm. Her followers went up.

Poker face Dan Bilzerian (@danbilzerian, 23m followers), on the other hand, appears to be in the controversy business. “The King Of Instagram” recently posted himself about to eat a meal served on the back of a woman in a hot tub, on International Women’s Day. A few days before, the professional poker player posted another female friend wearing a bikini and riding a 100-year-old endangered tortoise. And they’re just the controversies we can actually print.

66 Anthony Bogdan likes the flexibility of the work and being able to spend time with his kids

cles. They’ve been around for a century. You’ve been at it just a few years and your audience will soon be bigger than theirs.

But you can’t switch off. You can’t slow down.

Every day you share your life, sell yourself, whether you’re being paid or not. Not everyone takes what you do seriously. Some people probably never will. So what? Pass the camera. That’s the way it goes, because that’s what this is: being an influencer is the business of you.

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A LOVE SUPREME David Whelan examines streetwear’s first billion-dollar brand

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t’s probably hard to conceive now that Supreme, the ultra-hip and ultra exclusive fashion brand worn by everyone from Victoria Beckham to Kanye West, started life as the brainchild of a young British teenager in Crawley, a nondescript town south of London, while he slaved away in a battery factory.

But it did.

James Jebbia, the son of an American air force soldier and an English high school teacher, spent his childhood plugged into the skate scene of America, T Rex and David Bowie, thinking how best to combine his adoration of the sport with his love affair with music. This made for a dynamite cocktail of the street and the ethereal, which would become the bedrock for Supreme – a clothing brand and lifestyle choice favoured by the young, hip and relentlessly cool for the best part of 30 years.

Just this year, however, Supreme has changed.

News broke that it sold 50 per cent of its stock for $500 million to The Carlyle Group, catapulting the brand from the street to the stratosphere.

Once rubbing shoulders with skateboarders and hoodrats, Supreme can now refer to Uber and Snapchat as comparable entities. This is a huge shift in its status, and it has some wondering what’s next. Put simply, Supreme has never been about the money. It’s been about the opposite.

For most brands, this would be considered par for the course. Develop, grow, receive investment, become Nike. A simple if ambitious plan. But huge sums of money and Supreme sit uncomfortably together – like a vegetarian who hides steak under the tofu in the fridge. In 2014, Supreme received another big investment – but Jebbia kept it quiet, worried, perhaps, of what changes that would have on his brand. To work, Supreme must be cool – and counterculture. Not in an unpleasant, snarky way, but as an actual motivation. When Jebbia was young, he would travel to London and shop at the hippest places he could find. He wasn’t after the big, noticeable brand – but the items that no one had heard of, except by word of mouth. And this is mirrored in their sales technique: it’s not uncommon to wander through Soho (of either London or New York) on a Thursday (Supreme always show off their new lines on Thursdays, or Saturdays in Japan) and see huge queues of fashionably dressed young men and women outside tiny boutique stores. The probable reason? Supreme dropping its latest line in tiny, desirable amounts. Lower supply to up the demand.

It’s marketing genius – based in the street, spread by word of mouth, you have to get up early to wear Supreme. But this investment suggests a new twist – a move toward something bigger, perhaps.

“It’s a market in which they’ve been the best for a long time and if people want to get paid for that, now is the right time”

Supreme founder James Jebbia, who founded the brand in 1994

Even if you have never worn their clothes, Supreme is not hard to pick out – most of their signature lines contain the famous red box-out, with the word SUPREME nested in the middle. It’s an iconic and memorable design, almost certainly inspired by the work of legendary conceptual artist Barbara Kruger and, in particular, her piece, We Don’t Need Another Hero, which oozed anti-consumerist values. This investment clearly goes against that – but whether it pollutes the soul of the brand is up for debate.

“I don’t see it as selling out at all,” says Dan Sandison, current editor of football/fashion magazine Mundial and former editor of HYPEBEAST. “I think Supreme as an underground, New York skate store as something that hasn’t existed for a long time. That spirit still remains to a certain extent, in the people who work for them, the designs they put out and how they conduct their business, but it is, after all, primarily a business. It’s not a personal art project and that’s never really been the case, not since the very early days. It’s a market in which they’ve been the best for a long time, and if people want to get paid for that, then I think now is probably the time to make that happen.”

Supreme is growing. In the past 10 years, stores have opened across the bleeding epicentres of fashion – in Tokyo, Paris, London and, now, New York. It now counts 11 boutiques as part of its growing empire. The newest in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a huge space – 3000sqft, complete with a large skate bowl, and opened by New York mayor Bill de Blasio. This is a far cry from its origins within a rundown warehouse on Lafayette Street. As Supreme expert and Highsnobiety columnist, Ross Wilson, described it: “Long before the round-the-block lines, the security guards, the crowd control barriers, the ticketing system, release dates and even the LA, London and Paris stores, Supreme was just a little skate store on a semi-abandoned street in downtown Manhattan.”

Lafayette Street gave Supreme the perfect place to forge its identity – skateboarders in LA were sun-kissed and rode their boards in majestically designed parks, the skaters of Lafayette were graffiti artists and rebels, grinding on crumbling, unloved curbsides. The news of the investment broke, perhaps not coincidentally, within hours of the new store opening – a sign that Supreme may finally be drifting away from its middle-finger salute policy toward the mainstream. “[The investment] won’t bother a large segment of their audience,” says Sandison. ”There are a lot of kids who buy Supreme who won’t even know this has happened, and if they do, I don’t see how it will even enter their world. They care what

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their friends think, what the brand means as social currency and how they can get hold of rarer and more elusive drops. That’s it. They don’t care who is paying the wages. Snapchat and Uber operate in a similar way, and there’s no shortage of teenagers with expendable cash using their services.” But what about the early adopters – the people who fell in love with it alongside Wu-Tang and Big-L? “As for some of the older heads, who have perhaps been around since the start with the brand,” Sandison says, “they’ll probably have something to say on it. Supreme is such a powerhouse though, and has built such goodwill and sentiment over the years for driving a streetwear phenomenon, that it’s hard to imagine that criticism will have much cut-through.”

Music has always been a fertile ground for inspiration for Supreme. From the brand’s origins as a store that not only curated fashion but the music it played through its speakers, to partnerships with Morrisey and Gucci Mane, Supreme has kept its roots close to our ears. And that’s one of the main appeals of the brand and its stores – that you would find likeminded, interesting people to hang and talk to, and share overlapping passions. It’s being part of a club that not everyone fits into; you buy a Supreme Box Logo sweater to say something about yourself. It says: I get this, I understand, and if you do, too, let’s chat.

There’s no doubt, however, that the money will influence the way the company operates.

Top left: A host of celebrities, including Rihanna, have worn the brand in recent years Above: A Supreme store in Hong Kong

“However large it has become,” says Sandison, “there has always been the feeling that Supreme has been a tight-knit thing, and there’ll be new voices that want to be heard. Whether that affects output or attitude, we’ll have to wait and see.”

It’s interesting to remember that, until this year, Supreme had private investment for three years – but kept it a secret. A fair amount of Supreme superfans thought that the news of Carlysle’s investment was, in fact, a joke. “I think there’s going to be a lot of people, as there already has been over the past 10 years, who become frustrated that their favourite brand has become mainstream, or ‘sold out’, as they do more ambitious and boundary-pushing collaborations and projects, but surely

A LOVE SUPREME

that’s what it’s all about,” says Sandison. “If they were still just selling white T-shirts and skate decks, they wouldn’t be where they are today.”

Supreme is clearly about shifting gears, and doing the unexpected. Recently, for example, their clothes have been moving toward a more genderless vibe. Once the kingdom of dudes and masculinity, nowadays the brand has won accolades for its runway shows, which championed ‘gender-neutral’ looks. Many female models Instagram themselves lounging in Supremewear – a far cry from the brand’s origins. Nowadays, Supreme collaborates with all sorts – from Budweiser to Louis Vuitton, Comme des Garçons to Nike. This autumn saw Jebbia work alongside Vuitton’s menswear designer,

Supreme collaborates with everyone from Budweiser to LV

Kim Jones, to make a variety of skate gear – with the LV logo. It proved a huge success. “It’s always been hard to predict where they’re going to go as a brand,” says Sandison, which makes them so alluring. “If they can keep that spirit of independence, and keep controlling the conversation, then they’ll be fine. Louis Vuitton was fun and brilliant. It came in for a lot of criticism, but I think a couple of decade old skate shop doing a collaboration with LV, with Kim Jones involved, is exactly what streetwear and fashion should be doing. It was disruptive and didn’t take itself too seriously.”

This spirit of collaboration and experimentation makes for a hugely accessible brand that feels just as comfortable on the catwalk as it does in a skate park. It’s a clever magic trick, which Jebbia has put down to music. Speaking to Vogue this year, he said: “There are always critics that don’t understand that young people can be into Bob Dylan but also into the Wu-Tang Clan and Coltrane and Social Distortion. Young people – and skaters – are

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A LOVE SUPREME

A Supreme store on LA’s Fairfax Avenue

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very, very open-minded… to music, to art, to many things, and that allowed us to make things with an open mind.” In another way, it must be fulfilling for long-term fans to see a brand they admire doing so well – $1 billion for exclusive streetwear is almost absurd, considering how its new shoulder-rubbers, Uber and Snapchat, are two of the most frequently used apps in the world.

It seems that the logical next step for Supreme is world-domination. They are projected to make a profit of $100 million this fiscal year, which means there is money to burn. Movement into more outlet stores and the opening of larger, more expansive stores is surely the immediate next step, followed by a larger marketing campaign. Currently, the Tokyo store is the only official way to buy the brand in Asia – the online store only ships to US and Canada.

Hong Kong, Seoul and Shanghai seem like obvious expansion points. Supreme has always shied away from obvious billboard advertisement – preferring to have people like Kanye West casually be caught wearing their latest line, or have skateboarders like Sage Elesser hit the park in their gear. Previously,

The brand is projected to make $100 million in profit this year, which means there is money to burn

Supreme published their own magazine to promote the brand and then shifted onto Instagram; it kept them in control of themselves at all times, and avoided any comparison with soulless corporations who try to act human. Supreme has always had a soul.

As the brand has evolved and aged, so have its buyers – the attention will clearly shift to new, unSupremed people. The next generation. There is also the chance that Supreme could go the way of BAPE, which was bought out and saw a drastic drop in quality and reputation. Collectors of Supreme have seen their clothes spike in value in recent years – with Supreme Instagram chronicler Taye (@suprememuseum), observing that prices often change, unexpectedly, but are always high.

“I’m not even for a second going to pretend like I know when the right time to buy and sell is,” they have said. “I thought two years ago was a good time to sell when I started to see certain box logo tees peaking over the $600 mark and those were the rare ones at the time. Now I’m seeing recent released box logo tees like the Brooklyn store opening tee eclipsing the $1,000 mark.” Whether or not Supreme’s expected expansion will flood the market with more of the brand, and lowering the price of it in general, is yet to be seen; another route could be that a division begins between clothing made preand post- independence, with the pre- lines being considered ‘vintage’ and, therefore, worth more. It’s another thing worth waiting to find out.

In the end, the route for Supreme seems fairly simple. People like their clothes. They like their branding, the way they operate, the manner in which it genuinely feels like a labour of love – this majestic milkshake of music, fashion, iconography, rebellion.

Keeping all those things, without ending up, say, being over-sold in Urban Outfitters, is key. “People wanted to be part of a club that it was difficult to join,” says Sandison. “If you still get the feeling that you’re completely out of your depth when you go in one of their stores, then I think they’ll be alright. They should keep that element. People like that.” Jebbia has said in the past that brands often get comfortable and that, when they do, they falter – perhaps the move toward investment is just one other way of keeping himself and his team alert, to remind themselves that while they are a business, they also came from somewhere and meant something. The battle for Supreme’s soul has not only just begun – it’s been raging since day one.

Capital charms

The Fasano brings European chic to the heart of Brazil

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LIVING / HOTEL

FASANO SÃO PAULO

WHERE TO STAY

Brazil

PRICE From $550 per night

fasano.com.br/

 GRU

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A

fter more than one hundred years of experience setting up and running some of Brazil’s best restaurants, the Fasano family created a hotel in 2003. Located in the upscale Jardim Paulista district, the Fasano is all about understated elegance. The lobby is a large, red-bricked affair, dotted with oversized leather armchairs. The chairs are the perfect place to people watch, with Baretto, the jazz bar off reception, a magnet for the city’s well heeled.

The rooms, and the views from them, are stunning, as is the rooftop health club. This is modern Brazil at its best: cosmopolitan, classy and full of life.

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FROM THE CONCIERGE

GO

The São Paulo Museum of Modern Art is a wonderful, albeit small, homage to Brazil’s modern art scene. Modelled after the MoMA in New York, it’s home to more than 5,000 pieces. The exhibitions change on a regular basis and there is a large permanent collection as well. There’s also a large sculpture garden outdoors and a substantial library.

SEE

For unrivalled views of the city, head to the top of the 161m Banespa Building.

Looking like a whitewashed version of the Empire State Building, it offers spectacular views of Brazil’s capital.

EAT

São Paulo is the culinary capital of South America, with a huge range of options, largely due to the city’s multicultural population. Head to TUJU for a new take on Brazilian cuisine, overseen by its owner and chef, Ivan Ralson. Formal, but fun, TUJU also has a wonderfully large drinks menu.

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DECEMBER LIVING / INVESTMENT

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Rolls-Royce Phantom VIII A classic piece of furniture that is well worth investing in

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Concealed cooling compartment between the rear seats and the rear coach doors to chill for your bottle of vintage Bollinger 1

Double-glazed windows with 3mm thick panes to dampen external acoustics

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The Gallery – an application of glass running across the fascia designed to encase bespoke art

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Lalique frosted glass LED headlight clusters with the power to illuminate up to 600m of road ahead

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3

Heated golf umbrella compartment hidden within the front driver’s door frame

4

6.75-litre V12 engine with twin turbocharging allowing 0-100kph in 5.3 seconds

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Tyres filled with 2kg of ‘SilentSeal’ foam to dampen road noise and surface irregularities

or a car that has built its reputation on its cosseted, backseat passenger experience, a lot has changed in the world of Rolls-Royce’s marquee. To begin with, the Phantom VIII has been designed, for the first time, with self-driving in mind.

It is discreetly slicker than its predecessor; the grille tilts back a few degrees, the flanks are tapered, and the fast-back roofline creates the distinct impression of speed. Justifiably so, given the average age of a Rolls-Royce driver has been dropping steadily for years in line with the rise of a new generation of global elite. Beyond performance, the centurion status of the Phantom is further elevated by inclusions of bespoke art in the form of The Gallery – a piece of glass that sweeps across the fascia encasing a private art collection. Custom colour options, including a devilishly ostentatious deep purple hue named after the poison ‘Belladonna’, ensure the Phantom’s collectability remains as rare as the patrons it attracts.

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LIVING / STYLE

What to pack ...for winter weather in São Paulo and beyond

Average temp

24°c

Bali Melbourne Johannesburg Rio de Janeiro

ALSO WEAR IN...

25°C 24°C 22°C 24°C

DECEMBER

SÃO PAULO

Chance of rain: 55%

WHAT TO SEE

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MUSEO DO FUTBOL Brazil has more great footballers than any other nation on Earth.

So it’s no surprise that its biggest city has a museum dedicated to the beautiful game. Located at Pacaembu Stadium (home to Corinthians), the Museo do Futbol is a modern, playful homage to the

sport. With a host of multimedia displays, set over two floors, there’s something for all fans of the game.

Head there early when Corinthians are playing at home and check out the atmosphere of a real Brazilian football match. Entrance costs $3 and the museum is open every day except Mondays.

DECEMBER

ACCESSORIES

ISSUE 144

Bottega Veneta intrecciato leather travel wallet $647 matchesfashion.com

Thom Browne round-frame silver-tone sunglasses $701 mrporter.com

Master & Dynamic MW60 headphones $592 neimanmarcus.com

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81 1. Burberry reversible cotton-gabardine trench coat $2,106, mrporter.com 2. Moncler Gamme Bleu grey cotton sweatshirt $536, harveynichols.com 3. The Elder Statesman printed cashmere and silk-blend T-shirt $626, mrporter.com 4. Saint Laurent embroidered-back distressed skinny jeans $671, matchesfashion.com 5. A.P.C. basile suede deck shoes $200, apc.fr

LIVING / STYLE

What to pack ...for winter weather in Paris and beyond

Average temp

6°c

Amsterdam Berlin Copenhagen Glasgow

ALSO WEAR IN...

5°C 4°C 4°C 5°C

PARIS

DECEMBER

Chance of rain: 50%

WHAT TO SEE

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CHÂTEAU DE VERSAILLES Worth the trip outside Paris, this is the ultimate monument to royal excess. Louis XIV got the country’s best architects to transform a hunting lodge into a remarkable palace. With its extravagant gardens, the famous hall of mirrors (with 357 mirrors in all), and its

opulent ceilings, this is a stunning homage to one man’s power. A big highlight is the king’s table, once again in the antechamber of the Grand Couvert, which has been fully restored and is now reopen to the public. Best to reserve tickets before you arrive and go after 3pm if possible, when it’s far less crowded.

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1. Saint Laurent fur-trimmed cotton-canvas parka $5,196, matchesfashion.com 2. Balmain lace-up leather skinny pants $2,767, net-a-porter.com 3. Glorymount 70mm black boot $2,012, asia.christianlouboutin.com 4. Alexander McQueen cream floral-print silk shirt $1,470, harveynichols.com

ACCESSORIES

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IWC Schaffhausen alligator, 18-karat red gold diamond watch $21,508 net-a-porter.com

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Saint Laurent monogram quilted pebbledleather wallet $810 matchesfashion.com

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83 Astley Clarke moss agate venus pendant $1,765 harveynichols.com

LIVING / FOOD

High spirits Mark Smith explores the newly fashionable world of gin

Juniper berries

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MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

F

rom Winston Churchill to TS Elliot, JG Ballard to James Bond, gin has been the staple palate-pleaser of legends both real and imagined for generations.

Eschewing the macho swagger of whisky and seductive urban joie de vivre of vodka, gin has always been a sophisticated spirit that whispers rather than shouts, quietly content to take a back seat to its sexier and more popular cousins – until now.

Gin is undergoing a renaissance. A resurgence in cocktail culture and its relative ease of production have giving rise to waves of new artisan gins from all over the globe. “Gin is – and has been for four years at least – our most popular spirit category. It’s also showing no signs of slowing as it grows by around 30 per cent yearly,” says Chris Hysted-Adams, general manager of Melbourne’s famous Black Pearl bar.

Recently minted as the world’s best bar at the Spirited Awards in New Orleans – a sort of ‘drinks Oscars’ –

 MEL

it’s fair to say Chris, himself a former Bartender of the Year winner, knows a thing or two about serving up an alcoholic treat. The dapper denizens of the Black Pearl’s favourite gin drinks, according to Chris, are Negroni, martini, and South Side – in that order.

“Gin is an incredibly versatile spirit,” Chris says. “With countries all over the world creating their own styles of gin – Australia and America especially – it’s really breaking the boundaries of what this spirit is capable of achieving.

“People are really digging all these new gins coming out. In fact, with so many Australian gins being released, people are becoming more curious than ever about the category.”

Gin has a longstanding reputation as the quintessential English drink – a reputation achieved despite its Dutch roots. Traditionally flavoured with juniper, it was initially valued for its medicinal qualities before the modern, drinking version appeared with the invention of Genever, a Dutch-style gin, in the 17th Century. Finding its way across the English Channel, it became well known in Britain after William of Orange took the English throne, with low taxation and ease of production resulting in more than half of London’s drinking establishments being ‘gin joints’.

The Age of Empire saw it spread around the world where it has enjoyed a niche popularity. And although it still pales by comparison to other drinks in terms of volume of the market, its star is undoubtedly rising – according to Jonny Forsyth, global drinks analyst at Mintel, a market intelligence agency.

“Gin is very small relative to other global spirits categories like whisky

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Steve Schneider

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LIVING / FOOD

The Black Pearl, Melbourne

Unlike the whisky and vodka markets, which are dominated by big brands, gin has been an accessible drink for smaller distillers to experiment with

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and vodka. Gin’s biggest market by volume is Philippines, followed by US – although gin is tiny in the context of a huge spirits market.”

Forsyth says that gin’s recent renaissance comes from Europe, where sales have increased in recent years, led by the popularity of premium and craft gin in Spain and the UK, but also increasingly in Germany.

“Gin has grown as consumers have become attracted to quality spirits, meaning they appreciate gin’s more nuanced taste and sophisticated image,” Forsyth says. “Drinkers also like the fact that gin uses a range of botanicals, which appeals to their desire for natural ingredients and experimental flavours.”

The UK still remains gin’s heartland, where sales have grown from $1.15 billion in 2014 to an estimated $1.7 billion in 2016. Tristan Stephenson has been well placed to see gin’s rise first hand. Author of the Curious Bartender series of books, he’s also a world-famous gin mixologist. He says the rise of artisan gins, and an explosion in cocktail culture, has seen gin’s popularity rise.

“I think the general rediscovery of the gin and tonic has had a hand

in this, along with the renaissance of the cocktail. Over half of all reputable classic cocktails out there contain gin, so stocking a bottle or two is essential.

Then there’s the rise of craft distilling, which has flooded the marketplace with small gin brands – the go-to spirit of the artisan distiller on account of it being relatively quick and easy to make.”

But what does he love so much about gin? What’s so special about it?

“I’m fascinated by juniper itself,” he says. “It’s not an ingredient we use much in cooking or in any other drinks, and yet it’s intrinsic to the gin flavour profile and therefore hundreds of classic cocktails. The best gin drinks are usually the classics in my opinion. Drinks like martini, Martinez, Negroni and gin fizz.

All of these cocktails permit the juniper to shine a little, and that for me is a good gin drink.”

Unlike spirits such as whisky and vodka where a handful of major brands dominate, gin has been an accessible drink for smaller distillers to experiment with, much to Tristan’s delight. “I think that the excitement for gin that has been generated by these small brands is fantastic,” he says.

“Yes, some are better than others, and

some will likely never develop beyond a few cases in their nearby towns and villages. As the number of gin distilleries in the UK grows, the need for the next new distillery to diversify its brand, flavour, or marketing strategy increases, and this leads to increasingly tenuous brand stories and occasionally some rather weird ingredients.”

It’s not many barmen who can justifiably claim to have helped start a worldwide rebirth of cocktail culture, but Steve Schneider can. With a range of mixing skills that would give Tom Cruise and Bryan Brown a real run for their money, he is the former head bartender at Employees Only in New York and the central character in the documentary, Hey Bartender.

Founded in 2004, Employees Only is considered one of the seminal bars for the craft cocktail industry and played a central role not only in the revival of

DECEMBER ISSUE 144

THREE RECIPES TRISTAN’S COCKTAILS Martini Ingredients 50ml gin 15ml dry vermouth Method Stir over ice for at least a minute and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a very small slither of lemon peel (or not at all). Drink while it’s still cold.

the cocktail scene in the US, but more broadly too, winning the coveted ‘World’s Best Cocktail Bar’ award at Tales of the Cocktail. “Gin’s popularity has risen in conjunction with the popularity of the bartender,” says Schneider.

“A decade ago, I could name about five or six classic cocktail bars in NYC, and now there’s seemingly one on every stop on the subway. When the bars started taking pride in these cocktails, their guests soon followed suit.”

A former US Marine, in 2012 Steve won the Cocktail World Cup, an international bartending competition held in New Zealand. He’s also taken home six awards for fastest bartender in different speed competitions around the world and is now the co-owner of Employee’s Only Singapore – the company’s first expansion outside of NYC. “At EO in Singapore, gin is one of the most popular spirits, as is our EO Gimlet

and Fraise Sauvage. Gin and tonics outside of the US aren’t treated like just another party drink, but are treated like a legit, serious cocktail,” Steve says.

Stephenson believes the industry is in the midst of a ‘gin bubble’, where the popularity of many smaller, artisan distillers will soon burn themselves out.

But analyst Jonny Forsyth thinks the market will continue to expand globally.

“We expect the market to continue growing healthily in UK and Spain – led by smaller craft brands – with the most successful being bought by big spirits players,” he says. “But we also expect it to find new markets in US and China, which will really put gin on the map.

For example, gin is seen as quite a cheap spirit option in the US, but this is slowly changing and once premium gin takes off in the US global sales will rocket.”

Either way, gin lovers look to be in for an exciting next few years.

Gin fizz Ingredients 40ml gin 20ml lemon juice 12ml sugar syrup Half an egg white Method Shake with cubed ice, then shake again with no ice (to improve the foaminess). Pour into a chilled

highball glass and top up with soda (no ice).

Garnish with a slice of orange.

STEVE’S COCKTAIL EO Gimlet Ingredients 1.5oz Perry’s Tot – Navy Strength Gin .75oz EO lime cordial* Method Add ingredients to a mixing glass. Add ice, shake and strain over a large ice block in a rocks glass. Garnish with a kaffir lime leaf and lime wheel. *EO lime cordial Heat four cups fresh lime juice, 2.5 cups agave nectar and 30 bruised kaffir lime leaves.

Let cool, strain and bottle

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LIVING / ART

Christian Dior at Les Arts Décoratifs Exhibition to mark 70th anniversary of the House of Dior

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T

he Musée des Arts Décoratifs is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the creation of the House of Dior. This lavish exhibition invites visitors on a voyage of discovery through the universe of the House of Dior’s founder and the illustrious couturiers who succeeded him: Yves Saint

Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons and, most recently, Maria Grazia Chiuri. Dior, of course, is one of fashion’s true legends and the exhibition reveals the breadth of his influence, which can be seen in designers’ collections even today. Featuring more than 300 haute couture gowns, as well

as illustrations, sketches, photographs, letters and accessories, the exhibition is remarkably comprehensive. Spanning a space of more than 3,000 square metres, the size and scope of the exhibition does justice to Dior’s lasting influence.

Lesartsdecoratifs.fr, 107, Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris

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Clockwise from left: Christian Dior in his apartment in 1947; Junon gown, Haute Couture, Fall-Winter 1949; A model having a dress fitted before a show in 1953; John Galliano for Christian Dior, 1999

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LIVING / COLUMN

On Power

By Gene Simmons

I

’m not the first person to say this, and I won’t be the last. But it bears repeating.

Life is not kind or fair. I didn’t make these rules. I’m just aware of them, and that is what gives me power. “All men are created equal” is one of those American ideals we are told to believe in, and it is a nice sentiment. But it is patently untrue.

In almost every case – every facet of life, biology, society, physics, etc – it is untrue.

In fact, a more accurate statement might be: “All men are created equally unequal.”

Some of us are born taller. Some are born shorter. Some of us are able to run faster.

And some are naturally slow. And some of us are born smarter. That’s right. Some people’s DNA naturally makes them smarter.

However, it’s worth noting that members of Mensa are not necessarily the most powerful or rich. Being “book smart” does not necessarily equal wealth or power. By contrast, people who are the least intelligent by traditional standards can end up being the most powerful and rich. And that’s because they have other characteristics that enable them to excel. The will to win. The will to learn. The will to never give up. The will to work harder and longer hours than the guy next to you.

We may not all be born with intellectual gifts, but we can all work longer and harder and smarter. The worst student in class can end up more powerful than the straight-A student, if he plays his cards right. There are certain shortcomings that can be overcome with effort, hard work, and perhaps some luck. These are the stories we often cite when we make claims like, “You can do anything you set your mind to.” Some shortcomings, however, cannot be overcome with effort.

Some things are impossible. Fortunately or unfortunately, the only way to gain the wisdom to know the difference between the impossible

and the possible is to try, to work very hard, and to fail – a lot.

But the fact remains that we do not start on equal footing from birth. Whether we think life should be fair is irrelevant. I believe that life should not be fair, even if we had the power to wave a magic wand and make it all fair. As a species, unfair circumstances are, counterintuitively, our greatest strength. Darwin showed us that evolution throws things at the wall to see what sticks. And this process makes us stronger. Harsh circumstances are the reason we are here, with brains and immune systems and problem-solving skills.

Unfairness, hardship, asymmetry: these are sources of pressure, and pressure turns coal into diamonds. This is a concept that, sadly, we seem to be on the verge of forgetting in this country. The more we attempt to make life easier for the less fortunate – though these are all worthy endeavours – the more we forget that these utopian ideals are not the natural order of things. The further we manage to get from the reality of natural selection, the less prepared we are to face the realities of our world.

Nature may be cruel, but this is neither right nor wrong. Nature simply is, and we must be aware of and prepared for this fact in our quest to gain power. Political correctness tells us that nothing is more important than the way people feel. If something offends us, it is to be snuffed from the public discourse.

We believe this because we are trying to love one another. Because the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we are afraid: afraid of failure, afraid of feeling sad or bitter, afraid of not accomplishing our goals, afraid of death. We want to construct an artificial world around us that will shield us from these negative and necessary parts of life, but in doing so, we leave ourselves unprepared for the realities of the world.

As a species, unfair circumstances are our greatest strength.

Pressure turns coal into diamonds

90 From On Power by Gene Simmons © 2017. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

Simply amazing.

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