issue
128
books on demAnd
Tech heAdquArTers
A publishing revolution in Paris
Inside the silicon Valley offices
slIm AArons
ryAn holIdAy
The man who photographed summer
machiavelli for the internet age
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august issue 128
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Portfolio.
PRIvATE MEMbERs’ CLUbs P46
For more than a century, London has been home to private clubs where the gentleman can retire for the evening and converse with likeminded souls. These days, it’s not just men who become members and the clubs have modernised. But as always, they’re still somewhat picky... and therefore, still desirable to join.
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AUGUST ISSUE 128
CONTENTS UPFRONT
12
FITBIT’S FUTURE
Trying to escape the shadow of Apple
18 DIGITAL SUITCASE
Your set of luggage is about to join the technological age
20
LIVING
The new Rolls-Royce Dawn for the new breed of Rolls driver
CAPE TOWN’S FINEST HOTEL
ROLLS-ROYCE
23
ENGLISH WINE
The story of England’s success making sparkling wine
26
TATE MODERN
What it tells us about future museums
30
PARISIEN BOOK REVOLUTION
How printing on demand is saving bookshops
70
The One&Only resort in the heart of the city
80
POLO SHIRTS
How they became the stylish everyman’s everyday everything
86
JAPANESE WHISKY
How it came of age and became sought after
89
ROMAN EXTRAVAGANCE
Heinz Beck’s restaurant in the heart of Roma
90
COLUMN
The business of Zlatan Ibrahimovic
09 9
33,388 copies July - December 2015
PORTFOLIO.
AUGUST ISSUE 128
CONTENTS FEATURES
34
INSIDE SILICON VALLEY’S OFFICES
The top tech companies are increasingly creating the most advanced offices. But to what end?
40
DUBAI ENTERPRISE
The UAE has seen a huge increase in the number of entrepreneurs, and it’s all part of a bigger plan
52
DON’T HAVE A COW
The startups making it possible to have all the animal protein you want – with no need for animals or livestock farming
58
RYAN HOLIDAY
The digital age has created its own gurus with one man playing the system better than most
10
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PORTFOLIO.
upfront
technology | global
Giant steps
upfront
portfolio.
Can Fitbit CEO James Park lead his company out of the shadow of Apple? Words: Brian X Chen
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Portfolio.
E
arlier this year, Fitbit invited guests to a Las Vegas hotel to witness something that it promised would “ignite the world of health and fitness”. The event was intended to make a splash for the wearable tech company’s new product, the Blaze, a $200 smart watch that measures a wearer’s steps, heart rate and sleep. The watch got a lot of attention that day – but not all for the better. The term ‘Fitbit Blaze’ became one of the most talked-about topics on Facebook and Twitter, but some people were comparing the device, unfavourably, to the Apple Watch. Many reviews of the gadget later made the same Apple comparison. Fitbit’s stock tumbled more than 12 per cent that day. “I was going in thinking, ‘This is going to be awesome,’” James Park, Fitbit’s chief executive, said of the Blaze introduction in an interview in April. “I was definitely pretty surprised when I looked at some of the aftermath of it.” The reaction to the Blaze encapsulates the predicament facing Fitbit, the young company
that has been a leader in wearable technology. In many people’s eyes, it lives in the shadow of Apple, the Silicon Valley behemoth whose touch-screen smart watch could potentially stomp its smaller rival out of existence. This even though Fitbit has been trying to do everything right – and has largely succeeded. Fitbit, which went public last year, has been increasing revenue at a rate of more than 90 per cent as sales of its fitness trackers soar. Last year, Fitbit sold 21.3 million devices, double the 10.9 million it sold in 2014. Fitbit is also the world’s largest maker of wearable devices by market share, according to the research firm IDC. Yet the fact that Fitbit’s products focus on one thing – tracking your fitness – is not helping the company’s image in this era of Swiss Army knife devices, where products like the iPhone and Apple Watch can do multiple things. History has been unkind to single-purpose gadgets, many of which have flopped, like Cisco’s Flip camcorder, or have struggled, like the action camera from GoPro. Competing with Apple, whose cash hoard exceeds the size of
august /fitbit
many countries’ gross domestic product, is also not easy. Although Apple recently reported its first sales decline ever in iPhones, Apple Watch sales appear to be growing. Apple does not break out sales of the watch, but analysts estimate it has sold 12 million of them since the product’s April 2015 debut. As a result, Fitbit’s stock has fallen about 10 per cent since it went public last June. “There were concerns around competition, particularly from Apple,” Katy Huberty, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, said of investor scepticism around Fitbit.
21.3m Fitbit devices sold last year
Park said “it actually does not bother me at all” when people frequently compare his company to Apple. He said the Apple Watch serves a different market than Fitbit’s $60 to $250 accessories that focus on health monitoring. Fitbit purposely took the opposite approach from Apple Watch, he added. The strategy was to begin with simple devices, to make wearables more approachable, and carefully layer on more features over time. In contrast, the Apple Watch started out doing a bit of everything: showing notifications, tracking fitness statistics and making phone calls.
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“We look at it from a consumer point of view,” Park said. Apple Watch “is a computing platform, but that’s really the wrong way to approach this category from the very beginning”. An Apple spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment. Indisputably, Fitbit is growing, both in staff and sales. At the company’s San Francisco headquarters, a timeline on the wall in the fifth-floor hallway illustrates the firm’s history. In 2007, when Park, a Harvard dropout who had worked on photo-sharing software, founded Fitbit with his business Portfolio.
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partner Eric N Friedman, who is now Fitbit’s chief of technology, the startup had just two employees. By 2015, it had 1,101. Inside the offices, furnished in mid-century modern style, employees are constantly shuffling in and out of conference rooms for meetings. On a recent visit, a group of new hires was touring the headquarters. Still, a concern among investors is whether Fitbit can extract more money from existing customers. Most of its sales are from people who buy Fitbit devices for the first time, not those who upgrade. In addition, many people may end up leaving their Fitbit devices in a drawer. Of those who bought a Fitbit device in 2015, 28 per cent stopped using it by the end of the year, according to the company. “That means that many people who buy Fitbits don’t use them for long, and presumably aren’t going to buy another Fitbit device,” said Jan Dawson, an independent technology analyst. “They have to constantly find new people to sell Fitbits to, whereas most consumer electronics companies can rely on a good amount of repeat business.” Addressing some of these concerns falls partly to Woody Scal, Fitbit’s chief business officer, who oversees sales and marketing for the company. Last year, Fitbit acquired FitStar, which makes apps offering video instructions on workouts. The apps charge a monthly subscription fee for access to exercise programs, an example of how Fitbit could eventually collect money from software services. But it may be a while before 14 FitStar has an impact on Fitbit’s results; earlier in April, the FitStar app was ranked 157th in the health and fitness category of Apple’s App Store, according to App Annie, a research firm. Fitbit Portfolio.
said FitStar had accumulated 3.5 million downloads and has a loyal user base. The big picture for Fitbit, Scal said, is its evolution into a digital monitoring platform to discover and prevent health problems. Fitbit has teamed up with corporations that offer wellness programs for employees. BP, for example, offers Fitbits to more than 23,000 employees, partly to ensure they are getting enough sleep before they work on oil rigs. Scal said the data from sleep monitoring, a feature built in to all
Fitbit’s products focus on tracking your fitness, where products like the iPhone and Apple Watch can do multiple things
Fitbit devices, could lead to new health revelations. “I believe we’ve tracked more nights of sleep than have ever been tracked in the history of man,” he said. “We can actually now compare it to normative data that we have and we can identify irregularities.” As for Apple, though Park said he was not bothered by the rival company, it has long been in his sights. When Timothy D Cook, Apple’s chief executive, introduced the iPhone 4S in 2011, for example, Park had a realisation. At the time, the new iPhone added a capability to synchronise with wireless accessories using the standard called Bluetooth. Fitbit trackers back then lacked Bluetooth connectivity, but Park wanted them to be able to synchronise data immediately with the iPhone. “It could enable a lot of possibilities in terms of realtime feedback,” he said So Park gathered a few top employees into a conference room. They decided to re-engineer the Fitbit products to support the new feature. The decision set product releases back about six months, but the revised devices became bestsellers. Park said Fitbit was poised to innovate products to stay competitive. Sensors are getting more sophisticated, so he imagined a situation where high-end Fitbit devices could eventually support mobile payments or control smart home products like internetconnected light bulbs. Yet the products will stop short of resembling the Apple Watch. “We’re going to be very careful with how we include these things over time,” Park said. “I think one of the general knocks against smartwatches is that people still don’t know what they’re good for, so they’ve crammed everything in.”
S I M P LY T H E B E S T
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upfront / spend 1
SamSung gear IconX headphoneS The small, in-ear wireless earbuds have 4GB of storage to keep your music (about 1,000 songs’ worth) and a built-in accelerometer and heart rate monitor to track your movement, heart rate and distance travelled, which then calculates calories burned. No more getting tangled up in wires when you run, or having to carry your phone or MP3 player with you. All the data can be synced with other fitness apps such as MapMyRun or Runkeeper. $199
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Sony glaSS Sound Speaker
5
foldImate It won’t be available until next year, but this could be a game-changer when it comes to one of life’s most boring tasks. You attach your shirts to the purple clips and the machine drags them in, steams them to take out the wrinkles, gives them a spritz of freshner and then folds them perfectly in that way shops do, but you can never quite manage. It then stacks them neatly for you to put away or pack in your suitcase. Foldimate.com / Around $700
3
trackr bravo The coin-sized TrackR Bravo can be attached to your wallet, bag, bike, etc, and via the app on your phone you can ring up a missing item around the home to find where it is. You can also set a notification so it will alert you if you’r trying to leave home without an item, such as your car keys. Handy if you live at the top of Burj Khalifa. It also crowdsources via all the other TrackR users to send you GPS updates for any stolen items, thus giving it a range way beyond your immediate vicinity to help you track missing items. $29 Portfolio.
The Glass Sound Speaker lets you stream Bluetooth audio anywhere in the house, with a glass tube tweeter for clear highs and a 360° soundstage, plus builtin 50mm woofer for a decent midrange. There’s four hours of battery life and you can adjust an LED filament to mimic soft candlelight ready to accompany The Best Of Barry White. $799
august issue 128
upfront / suitcase
Your suitcase is texting Luggage is getting a tech upgrade. Words: Matthew Schneider
T
hroughout the nearly 560-square-metre store, attendees of Raden’s launch party were spinning suitcases on their wheels, checking out their USB ports and toggling through iPad stations to learn more. Outside, curious onlookers stared through the windows at rows of candy-coloured Radens lining the walls. Now, the showroom is open for all, and while it does not actually sell Radens on site, bags can be ordered there for delivery. The Raden difference is tech. The company aspires to make more than mere suitcases. Their bags are smart – in the Silicon Valley sense of the word. The included battery, which is approved by the Transportation Security Administration, can charge phones or USB-connected devices and
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Portfolio.
sync to a Raden app to geo-locate your bag (it can send you a push notification when it reaches the baggage carousel) or weigh it, using a handle sensor. Tell the app your flight details, and it will find what overage fees apply. The goal is “giving humanity to an appliance”, said Josh Udashkin, Raden’s founder and chief executive, citing, with entrepreneurial dreaminess, models like Apple’s iPhones and Dyson’s vacuum cleaners. At 32, Udashkin, who practised law and worked for the shoe company Aldo negotiating real estate deals, has a practised way with business-school jargon and a marketing guru’s reverence for the limitless potential of branding. So far, his zeal has convinced a cadre of investors to the tune of $3.5 million in seed funding. “You’ve
got to make that one perfect thing,” Udashkin said. “I’m trying to make one perfect polycarbonate suitcase.” Raden’s suitcases come in two sizes ($295 for a smaller carry-on size and $395 for a larger checkin size, or $595 for the pair) and seven colours. It includes a battery that zips out of the bag for any necessary troubleshooting or repairs, and help is as near as the app, where you can chat with customer service representatives. In its march toward tech-enabled luggage, Raden is not the first, and it is not alone. Fellow directto-consumer startups like Away and Bluesmart are working similar angles. But Raden’s approach is singularly bombastic. Many of its competitors have been slower to adopt tech-enabled bags. Samsonite is not currently promoting its earlier foray into smart tech, a line called GeoTrakR that included removable LugLoc tracking devices. Tumi recently announced a wireless tracking device to be released in the second half of 2016, though it is an accessory rather than a bag. In April, Rimowa introduced a series of bags with a new Rimowa Electronic Tag that allows travellers to check their bags via a smartphone. Back in the showroom, the sun rose and fell – virtually, at least – on 365 Raden in sculptural form as Champagne and canapés circulated. The hope is clear enough: that the sun never sets on Raden’s empire building. The image was a deliberate one, said Udashkin, in shades and a gold Saint Laurent jacket printed with a tropical sunset and customised with two Raden Rs. The Raden Instagram account features picture after picture of sunrises and sunsets as a nod to the possibilities of travel. And, of course, as one more bit of canny branding. “I thought the sunrise and the sunset were something we could own,” he said.
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upfront / Automotive
cArs | London
Rolls-Royce Dawn The drophead Rolls for the new luxury elite
O
ver the past decade, Rolls-Royce has faced an adaptation challenge: the rise of the new luxury elite saw the age of its core customer drop. “In 2009 the average age of our drivers was 55, now it is 45,” CEO Torsten Mueller-Oetvoes said. Demand began to fluctuate. 20 Rolls-Royce sold 3,785 hand-built cars last year, down from 4,063 in 2014, in part because of a 54 per cent drop in sales in China. The Dawn is the company’s response: a curvaceous, Portfolio.
contemporary four-seater drophead that expresses an evolution of the traditional Rolls-Royce DNA, where 80 per cent of the exterior body panels are unique to any model that has preceded it. Modernised features include the ability to control the car’s technology with voice commands, a touch pad that recognises writing for smartphone-like functionality, and an 18-speaker concert-hall audio system. Every model is bespoke, with 44,000 colour choices and a vast choice of customisation options throughout.
4.9
Seconds it takes to reach 100km/h
80%
of exterior of body panels are unique to this new model
But the Dawn has retained that traditionally elegant approach with features such as the customised umbrella housed in a heated storage compartment and a plush lamb’s wool floor covering – the result of having crossbred Australian and US sheep to create the thickest fleece in the world. It appears to be working – even if you have the $335,000 starting price, you might find it tough to buy one. According to RollsRoyce, the entire production run for this year and 2017 have already sold out.
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august issue 128
upfront / england wine
Grape Britain Wineries with an English accent. Words: Christine Ajudua
O
ne recent Saturday morning, four Australians, two Britons and this reporter met beside chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier vines, ready to sample what’s been called one of the world’s finest sparkling wines, at the source. We were 141 kilometres from France’s Champagne region, on the English side of the Channel, in a two-pub village
called Ditchling, in East Sussex. Here lies Ridgeview Estate, which took the top prize for bubbly at the 2010 Decanter World Wine Awards (DWWA), never before given to a producer outside France. This was no anomaly. Increasingly, English sparkling wines have been racking up awards, and like Ridgeview, many hail from the South Downs. With the same chalky soil as Champagne’s Côte des Blancs
502
Vineyards in England in 2015
(geologically linked by the Paris Basin, which runs under the English Channel), the rolling grassland, ancient woodland and white cliffs between Hampshire and Sussex counties in southeast England encompass not only part 23 of Britain’s newest national park, but also a burgeoning wine region. And rising temperatures have been working in its favour. Mark and Sarah Driver, a former hedge fund owner Portfolio.
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“Increasingly, English sparkling wines have been racking up international awards”
24
and a former lawyer turned finewine enthusiasts, husband and wife, bought 2.4 square kilometres in a valley between Alfriston village and the East Sussex coast and started planting vines. Their Rathfinny Estate recently opened as England’s largest vineyard. With their Möet & Chandontrained winemaker, the Drivers plan to produce one million bottles of “world-class” sparkling wine annually (last year, all of Britain released about four million) while creating a sustainable, state-of-the-art hub for English wine tourism. From the Rathfinny Trail (a new public footpath that cuts through the valley) to the Flint Barns (the estate’s formerly derelict farmhouse, just opened as an oldmeets-new B&B and cafe), it’s a bit of an “If you build it, they will come” scenario. A three-hour tour (from $53) took me through poppy-strewn rows of GPS-planted Champagne clones, hand-pruned around steel posts, to the local oak-clad Portfolio.
5.1m
Bottles of English wine produced last year
winery. The Drivers are already applying for Protected Designation Of Origin (PDO) status to create a standard and a name for Sussex-made bubblies — à la ‘Champagne’. “Perhaps in the future we’ll refer to this as ‘Sussex,’” said Howard Corney of his Court Garden blanc de blancs, which he poured inside the Ditchling vineyard’s restored barn while joking, “I have a cousin who very generously refers to our wine as ‘Ditchwater.’” With his wife and winemaker-son, Corney has spent the last decade growing vines on the site of a Saxon farm that’s still home to chickens, sheep and bottle-fed lambs, and won two trophies at this year’s International Wine Challenge. Whether or not the PDO pans out, Sussex has the most vineyards of any county in Britain, with more opening for tasting tours. Even Nyetimber, whose Classic Cuvée blend was served at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and whose medieval West Sussex estate
is normally closed to the public, has introduced occasional open days with guided tastings. Lately, it’s also been touring the country in a 1968 double-decker bus, converted with a copper-and-wood bar and a retractable roof. Nearby, the young Gladwin brothers, behind London’s “wild food” restaurants Rabbit And The Shed, just started offering tours at their family’s Riesling-focused Nutbourne Vineyards. Beside its ancient windmill, now a terraced tasting room, they’ll barbecue on old vine trimmings. Meanwhile, having helped pioneer wine tourism everywhere from Champagne to South Africa’s Cape during the last three decades, the Hampshire-based Arblaster & Clarke has begun operating on home turf. “I have lived and worked in the South Downs for over 20 years now,” said the GM Caron Fanshawe. She said she “never imagined” the company would one day offer a South Downs Vineyard Walk alongside its tours in such renowned wine regions.
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art | london
Modern art for all? What the new Tate Modern tells us about the museum of the future. Words: Eleonora Belfiore
T
he Switch House – a £260 million new extension to the iconic Tate Modern – is about more than 26 the need for more wall space. It is, or aspires to be, an experiment in figuring out what a 21st-century museum should look like. The vision behind the new Tate Modern is bold for a major global Portfolio.
art establishment institution. The flexible spaces offered by the new building mean that Tate will be able to showcase work that truly reflects the rich complexity of today’s artistic production and its blurring of the lines between traditional disciplines and art forms. No longer just a space for hanging pictures, displaying
sculptures and projecting filmed images, it will now be capable of integrating live performance into its programming, and truly exploring mixed media art. This is very exciting, and it certainly points to a common challenge that all contemporary art museums face in the 21st century. Yet it is not this that makes the new Tate Modern such an intriguing experiment. An outreach programme called the Tate Exchange is due to launch next month. This is not your usual outreach initiative, sequestered away in a mouldering basement. Instead, the entire fifth floor is devoted to it, testament to how
august upfront / architecture
interesting and unexpected this project is. Tate describes it as: “An open experiment. It’s an ongoing programme of events developed by artists, practitioners, and associates, both within and beyond the arts sector, aimed at building a dialogue around art, society, and the wider issues facing us today.” Tate senior staff have endeavoured to think of ways in which it might become a place where the public comes not just to look at art, but to discuss it, to make things, to meet for work or to convene socially. The fifth floor and its “making areas” will be open to the public every day. Even
the content that is to be presented to audiences will be collaboratively curated by the 50 or so Tate Associates, who “range from charities, universities, healthcare trusts, community radio stations, volunteer groups, to many more, both within and beyond the arts”. So, what exactly is going on here? In order to understand the nature, goals and strategies of the exchange we need to take a step back and consider the context in which the new Tate operates. Between 2013 and 2015 I was director of studies of the Warwick Commission On The Future Of Cultural Value, a project that reviewed the state of the
87%
Higher social groups accounted for the vast majority of all museums visits
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cultural ecosystem in England with a view to making policy recommendations. The picture emerging from the commission’s final report was bleak: funding cuts at central government levels have been accompanied by even more significant reductions in funding at the local level, while access to and participation in the arts remains heavily eschewed in favour of the well educated, the wealthy and the white sections of the population. Even free entry to national museums, one of the few arts policy measures to enjoy crossparty consensus, did not fare well. The report quoted data showing that in museums funded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS): “Visits by UK residents fell by three per cent over the period 2008-09 to 2011-12 while visits from UK residents from lower social groups fell even more, by 12 per cent. The higher social groups accounted for 87 per cent of all museums visits, the lower social groups for only 13 per cent.” This picture has been further confirmed by a recent study of the Taking Part survey, which gathers data on cultural and sport participation in England, conducted by DCMS itself. This showed that “consistent museum and gallery goers” tend to be from a higher socio-economic group. The new Tate extension has attracted considerable public funding: DCMS contributed £50 million, the Greater London Authority £7 million and Southwark council £1 million to the building budget. These are substantial figures at a time in British social history defined by the proliferation of food banks, the rise of child poverty and reductions 27 in social security spending. Predictably, running costs of the enlarged Tate will go up, and so might be their regular grant-in-aid. The extent to which enjoyment of what the Tate museums Portfolio.
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(and the other heavily funded arts organisations) have to offer is restricted to the most privileged and well off in society (as well as London tourists) is therefore a delicate political problem. It is also an ethical issue. It is a problem with no easy solutions, however, in that its causes are ultimately structural and not up to any single organisation to remedy. Still, there is a growing 28 consensus that arts institutions that absorb the bulk of available subsidies ought to do more to be inviting, relevant and less daunting for groups who are not regular arts attenders. Portfolio.
upfront / architecture
The exchange is the way that Tate is taking up this challenge. Working with its 50 associates, which comprise established arts organisations, universities (including my own institution), and small community-based arts groups in London and beyond, Tate will offer curated content that is collaboratively produced. It will involve the public in its creation, enjoyment, and discussion with a view of encouraging a genuine exchange of ideas between artists, cultural professionals, museum staff, and the public on what the arts’ place, meaning, relevance – or
Top: an artist performs live art alongside Untitled by Donald Judd, at the Tate Modern’s new Switch House Above: a visitor walks past Square Tubes (Series D) by Charlotte Posenenske
indeed lack thereof – might be in today’s society. I am notoriously sceptical of heavily funded organisations’ attempts to ditch their elitist image and divert attention from their audience demographics by playing the “inclusion” card. This is too often a self-defensive strategy rather than the result of a genuine desire to change. But I am also convinced that the task of achieving a more democratic, fair, representative arts funding policy is not one that can be left to the arts sector alone. Artists, activists, the general public and academics have a role to play here. Tate have offered a space in which they say they welcome exploration, challenging discussions and creative experimentation. It’s too early to say how far they’re prepared to push and be pushed, and whether they’ll bring themselves to relinquish their cultural authority (at least on the fifth floor of the new building), but this is too tempting an invitation to refuse. Because the debate on what the museum of the future might look like needs as broad a range of voices as possible. Eleonora Belfiore is the professor of communication and media studies at Loughborough University
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august issue 128 technology | paris
The bookshop that prints on demand New chapter for a classic Paris bookstore. Words: Ciara Nugent
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authier Charrier, a design student, stepped inside one of Paris’ newest bookstores and wondered, “Where are all the books?” “I saw this empty, open space – just a couple of stools – and I wondered, ‘Did someone mess up?’” Charrier said. No one messed up. The pronounced stock shortage inside the Librairie des Puf, run by the publisher University Press Of France, is not the result of an ordering mistake, but the heart of the shop’s business model. There are books, but they are not delivered in advance from wholesalers. They are printed on request, before the customer’s very eyes, on an Espresso Book Machine. On Demand Books, the US company that manufactures the machine, chose the name as a nod to an activity you can complete in the five minutes it takes to print a book: have a quick coffee. Labelled, not so modestly, the “Gutenberg press of the 21st century” by its creators, the machine sits in a back corner of the shop, humming as it turns PDFs into paperbacks. Customers use tablets to select the titles for print – adding, if they want to, their own handwritten inscriptions – while sipping coffee in the light and airy storefront in the Latin Quarter of Paris. “The customers are all surprised,” said the shop’s director, Alexandre Gaudefroy. “At first, they’re a little uncomfortable with the tablets. After all, you come to a bookshop to look at books. But thanks to the machine and the tablets, the customer holds a digital library in their hands.” From a business standpoint,
Gaudefroy said, “I don’t have to worry about space for the stock. We’re in a space that measures less than 80 metres squared, and I can offer readers as many titles as I want.” And that is a lot of titles. All 5,000 books published by Les Puf are available, as well as an additional three million books compiled by On Demand Books, including titles from 10 large US publishers and the public domain. Les Puf ’s prestige in the industry has helped it secure even more titles – a group of French publishers are expected to hand over PDFs of their titles in a few weeks. “What’s
“We’re revising the chain of book production, because we’re a bookseller, publisher, printer and a distributor” really exciting is that, thanks to the on-demand model, we can revive old titles, which we previously hadn’t bothered with because they’d only sell five or 10 copies in a year,” Gaudefroy said. “On-demand, it’s a new economy for us.” About 2,000 out-of-print Puf titles will be made available to customers in the coming months, Gaudefroy said. “We’re completely revising the chain of book production because we’re a bookseller, a publisher, a printer and also a distributor,” he said. It is a radical reinvention of a store that first opened its doors in
1921. The original Librairie des Puf occupied a far larger, multilevel space in the corner of Place de la Sorbonne, and had packed window displays and a bustling intellectual crowd from nearby universities. It was long a cultural and academic symbol, until it was forced to close because of falling profits and soaring rents. Then, about 10 years ago, the site was sold to a men’s-clothing chain, much to the chagrin of locals. But its closing was no exception. From 2000 to 2014, 28 per cent of Paris bookstores closed, according to a 2015 report from the Paris Urban Planning Agency, a body assembled by the City Council in 1967 to chart social and economic evolution in the French capital. Crippling rent increases in Paris’ densely populated centre were mostly to blame, as well as growing competition from e-commerce sites that are able to offer far more titles than a cramped city bookstore. The decline in sales of newspapers and magazines also contributed, since these are often sold alongside books in French bookstores. The Latin Quarter, which has the highest concentration of bookshops in the city, was among the worst-hit areas. In an effort to protect the neighborhood’s unique character – and prevent so-called blandification – the Paris City Council in 2008 made it the centre of its Vital’Quartier programme. The programme buys retail spaces across Paris, renovates them and rents them to small culturally significant enterprises at far below market rates. Les Puf was leased one of these spaces on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Portfolio.
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Left: the Espresso Book Machine prints, collates, covers and binds a single book in a few minutes
allowing it to reopen just a few blocks from where it closed. “We’re already thinking about opening in other big cities in France – in university towns like Lille, Bordeaux and Lyon,” Gaudefroy said. “After a few weeks of business, there’s a real commercial motivation for doing so because, well, we’re selling a lot of books. A lot more than predicted. We thought we’d sell 10, 15 books in a day, but it’s been more like 30 or 40.” “It’s an investment, but if it’s well managed, it can be very profitable,” Gaudefroy said. Along with the low rent for its retail space and the elimination of the cost of overproducing books that may not sell, Les Puf benefits from an affordable two-year lease on the Espresso Book Machine from the French printing association Ireneo. And France’s fixed-book pricing law, which prohibits anyone from selling books at a discount, means Les Puf can charge the price set by 32 the publisher for each book. “A lot of publishers I know are interested in the idea, especially when we tell them how little it costs us,” Gaudefroy said. So far, the store has relied on foot traffic and Portfolio.
the pull of the machine’s novelty to draw customers, but a social media and leafleting campaign aimed at students is planned. Les Puf’s success is not an anomaly. Times are still tough for brick-and-mortar shops, but signs of a recovery are widespread. In the United States, sales in physical bookstores rose by 2.5 per cent last year, the first increase since 2007. In Britain, the largest chain bookseller, Waterstones, announced a return to profitability at the end of last year after the arrival of the indie bookselling success story James Daunt as managing director. Daunt decentralised control of the chain’s 275 stores, encouraging individual managers to modify their stores’ layouts for the local book-buying audience, thus scrapping an ingrained industry practice that had effectively allowed publishers to dictate which books appeared in best-seller sections. Independent bookstores, too, are beginning to carve a path out of their business’s decade of decline. “It’s an industry that is very much starting to rebound,” said Nick Brackenbury, one of the founders of NearSt, a mobile
Alexandre Gaudefroy, manager of Presses Universitaires de France, looks at books printed by the Espresso Book Machine
application created in London that is helping to wean customers off buying books on Amazon.com, encouraging them to return instead to their local stores. “Bookshops are starting to do lots of little innovative things and getting people to come back into them,” Brackenbury said. For many bookstores that have the space, like Gogol & Co in Milan, La Fugitiva in Madrid and Java Bookshop in Amsterdam, remaking themselves as hybrid bookstore-coffee shops has become a reliable way to attract customers. Others are emphasising something unavailable online – the experience of visiting a bookstore.
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S i l i c o n Va l l e y ’ S Mind-boggling HQS Facebook has Wi-Fi-enabled wildflower meadows, LinkedIn an in-house pastry chef, and Samsung tai chi in the cactus garden. But they’ll all be left behind by Amazon’s jungle biospheres. Take our tour of the tech campuses of Silicon Valley Oliver Wainwright
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rom the fifth-floor putting green of Samsung’s Silicon Valley headquarters, looking out at a rolling horizon of sunscorched mountains, it’s quite easy to forget you’re at work. An executive is practising tai chi by the cactus garden, while another jiggles in a robotic massage chair nearby. A volleyball match is in full swing in the lush-planted courtyard below, while raucous shrieks of table football emerge from the Chill Zone, next to a row of space-age nap pods. “Meet by the ping-pong tables,” reads a sign stuck on the window. “Today’s spinning class will be on the terrace! :)” With its new $300 million office block, which stands like a stack of gleaming white hard drives at an intersection north of San Jose, the South Korean electronics giant is plunging headlong into the holiday camp workplace culture of the Bay Area tech scene. “We wanted to introduce more of a startup vibe to the company,” says Jim Elliott, Samsung’s vicepresident of memory marketing, a job title as otherworldly as the building he works in. “We were all separated in our different departmental islands before, but this building is about bringing people together and encouraging chance encounters. We want to get people out of the boardroom.” Samsung has had a base here for 30 years, housed in a cluster of nondescript sheds, but this 10-storey beacon is designed to shift its brand image in North America from purveyor of fridges and washing machines to powerhouse of cuttingedge semiconductor innovation. Designed by NBBJ, an architecture firm that is conjuring futuristic jungle-filled biospheres for Amazon in Seattle and a handful of vast tech offices across China, the building is the product of research into behavioural psychology and the neuroscience of work. “It’s all about mobility,” says architect Scott Wyatt, who heads NBBJ’s corporate workplace division. “If you sit down for more than 20 minutes, you get dumber.” Walking outdoors, he says, is when your brain achieves optimum cognitive function, so the Samsung office is configured to get people out of their chairs as much as possible. With pairs of floors separated by an outdoor terrace, employees are never more than a floor away from stepping outside. The 36 cafeteria, meanwhile, is housed in a separate starshaped building, so they have to walk out to lunch – where 10 kinds of global cuisine are on offer in a food court worthy of an upscale mall. Samsung’s fun-filled office-cum-wellness-centre is just the latest in a wave of new flagship headportfolio.
Right: Facebook’s HQ with a big walking garden on the roof Below: Airbnb’s bedouin tent meeting rooms
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With increasing competition to attract the best minds, the silicon giants are now racing to outdo each other with ever more elaborate facilities
quarters in the San Francisco Bay Area that mark a radical departure for the tech industry, which has never much cared for its surroundings before now. Norman Foster is busy erecting a doughnut-shaped flying saucer for Apple, set in a 150acre park in Cupertino, where 3.7 miles of curved glass will soon encase a continuous tube of offices, built to the precision of an iPhone. Not to be outdone, Google has hired two of the most fashionable designers of the moment, Bjarke Ingels and Thomas
Top: Proposal for Google’s North Bayshore campus Above: Facebook’s open plan office
Heatherwick, to concoct a retro-futuristic fantasyland of plug-in work pods beneath swooping glass tents. Such dreamy visions mark a recent and radical shift from the tech world’s default setting of the generic suburban business park. “Microsoft always said the buildings don’t matter,” says Wyatt, who has worked on countless projects for the Bill Gates empire. “The tech attitude was: ‘Just give me a garage.’” All that has changed. With increasing competition to attract the best young minds, the silicon giants are now racing to outdo each other with ever more elaborate facilities (filled with ever more bountiful snacks). The mother of all pimped-up garages now rambles along the highway in Menlo Park, 15 miles 37 west of Samsung’s HQ, standing like a line of conjoined aircraft hangars piled up in a car crash. With walls jutting out at odd angles and zigzagging staircases casually bolted on as if at random, it bears the unmistakable hand of Frank Gehry. Stretching portfolio.
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across 40,000 square metres, his Facebook headquarters is a hymn to the beloved startup foundation myth of the loose-fit inventor’s shed. Housing the biggest continuous office floor in the world, seating around 3,000 workers in an open-plan jumble, it is a suitably gargantuan home for a social network that now counts one fifth of the world’s population in its membership. Walking the office floor feels like exploring a techie jungle, where lianas of cables dangle from the seven-metre-high ceiling, servicing “pods” of programmers, while novelty helium balloons sway above their adjustable standing desks. “We encourage people to ‘hack’ their space,” says my young tour guide, as we navigate this rough and ready world of raw steel beams and exposed ductwork, passing a piñata modelled on Donald Trump, a leopard in a pink cape and a life-size stuffed polar bear. “We’re only one per cent finished connecting the world, so we want the building to look unfinished too.”
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reestanding plywood meeting rooms are daubed with colourful murals from resident artists, while other walls are plastered with motivational posters, made by the company’s print studio, the Analogue Research Lab, featuring ominous mottos such as: “Eventually everything connects.” “When Zuck [CEO Mark Zuckerberg] says something in the morning,” one Facebooker tells me, “it can become a poster slogan by the afternoon.” At the top of a dogleg staircase, in a moment of Alice In Wonderland revelation, we come to a nineacre rooftop park, a bucolic idyll of sloping lawns and wireless-enabled wildflower meadows that look out across the marshy rust-coloured flats of the bay. Cranes are busy building housing next door (which, although partly funded by Facebook, the company insists is not the rumoured “Zeetown” for its workers), while volunteers set up marquees on the roof for “global causes day”, an annual charity initiative. “No one pays attention to how much you’re at your desk,” says my guide. “As long as you get your work done, you can be lying on the lawn or sitting at the grilled cheese bar.” Free food on tap is a fundamental part of the tech workplace, and Bay Area companies have long competed over the breadth of their snack offering. But the stakes are now shifting towards health-conscious 38 choices: the ubiquitous jars of jelly beans and M&Ms are increasingly supplanted by dehydrated broccoli florets and kale crisps, washed down with a gulp of Soylent. Google has rearranged its snack counters so you have to pass fresh fruit before you reach the candy, while in the cafeteria of LinkedIn’s new San portfolio.
“As long as you get your work done, you can be lying on the lawn or sitting at the grilled cheese bar”
Francisco HQ, a wall lists local suppliers, beneath the slogan: “Know your farms, know your food.” “I like to start my day with a kimchi rice bowl, or maybe some sushi,” says one LinkedIn employee, as we stroll around the never-ending buffet. “We have an in-house pastry chef whose cakes are to die for and eight flavours of homemade ice cream.” Sheathed in a sinister cloak of faceted black glass, somehow befitting the professional networking site, LinkedIn’s new 26-storey tower is a vertical promenade of tech office clichés. We pass the wireless headphone rack of a “silent disco” zone and a Nerf missile play area, then a “pillow fight” meeting room and a “post your own haiku” wall, each space exuding the forlorn air of a besuited businessman trying to be wacky. Leaving the offices, we pass through a corridor where a distorted trompe-l’oeil mural makes a slogan appear to float in thin air, filling your field of vision with bold capital letters: “FOCUS ON WHAT MATTERS.” A few blocks away, one of the region’s fastest growing companies is rapidly filling the floors of a former paper factory, where it has converted the industrial spaces into a theatrical playground of themed work zones. At Airbnb, you can have your meetings in a log cabin or a Milanese loft apart-
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Left: Ramen cafe-themed meeting room at Airbnb’s HQ Below: Airbnb’s themed meeting rooms
ment, a bedouin tent or a replica ramen cafe – each space meticulously recreated from the website’s holiday rental listings. A c c o r d i n g t o t h e c o m p a ny ’s i n - h o u s e Environments team, it’s about “how we can create spaces that are home-like, but highly effective, functional spaces that allow people to do great work, but hopefully in ways that surprise us”. Some people nestle in bean bags, hunched over their laptops on a stepped seating terrace, others meet in an Airstream caravan, while studious types can squirrel themselves away in leather armchairs in a dimly lit study. At the centre of it all, in a defining moment of startup nostalgia, is a meeting room modelled on the apartment down the road where the company first began. If the office is trying to be a physical manifestation of the company’s motto – “Belong anywhere” – it all feels a bit like a budget version of The Crystal Maze, each set decorated with props sourced from eBay or Etsy, and built with the longevity of a shopwindow display. Out on the street, leaving the living wall-lined lobby, you’re confronted with a stark symbol of one of the symptoms of the success of this room-letting behemoth, in the form of a type of enclosure that doesn’t make it into the themed office landscape: the tents of a homeless encampment, huddled beneath the flyover. It is a reminder of the side effects that the booming tech industry is having on the immediate context outside its hermetically sealed, candy-coated walls. The recent influx of companies from the valley to the city, lured here by considerable tax incentives, is not only increasing rents but bringing other unexpected consequences. “Tech offices can have a kind of deadening effect on the city,” says Allison Arieff of SPUR, a nonprofit urban research centre. “Because they now provide their employees with everything on site for free – from coffee to dry-cleaning to haircuts – local businesses are often forced to close down when they move in.” For all their talk of community, the dotcoms are proving to be some of the least civic-minded businesses around. As a gesture of public goodwill, LinkedIn’s tower gives a vast chunk of its ground floor over to an airy “public room”, where you may sit and have your lunch and use the Wi-Fi, but San 39 Franciscans won’t be so easily persuaded. “Nobody cares about your tech job,” reads a poster on a nearby lamppost. “Be courteous to others when in public and keep the feral careerism of your collegial banter on mute. Or get mugged. We can hear you.” portfolio.
The UAe enTerprise
Dubai is going boldly forward, building a global reputation as a hub for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and several recent studies show that entrepreneurship is on the rise in the UAE as a whole. But what’s fuelling this?
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n May 2016, a study by professional network LinkedIn showed that the number of its UAE members identifying entrepreneurship as their job function increased by 98.3 per cent between March 2015 and March 2016. “In recent years we have noticed that the UAE has evolved to be a preferred destination for talent, entrepreneurs and innovators from across the world,” says Nada Enan, senior manager for marketing and PR for LinkedIn in the Mena region. The LinkedIn study wasn’t the first to suggest that the UAE is becoming an increasingly attractive destination for entrepreneurs. A survey conducted by bayt.com and YouGov in November 2015, entitled Entrepreneurship In The MENA 2015, showed that 66 per cent of residents in the UAE would like to be entrepreneurs. It was also in November 2015 that His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum announced the creation of the Dhs2 billion Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Innovation Fund to provide financing for innovators, prioritising projects that align with the UAE Vision 2021 (the government’s plan for the socio-economic development of the country). Hassan Al Hazeem is managing director and CEO of Intercoil International Company, the manufacturer of mattresses, bedroom furniture and foam founded by his late father, Abbas Ali Al Hazeem, in 1974. “The fact that the Dubai government is so passionate about promoting innovation, especially in the past few years, shows how committed it is to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is all about innovation,” says Al Hazeem, adding that he sees tremendous opportunities for entrepreneurs to capitalise on the government’s commitment to innovation, especially in the run-up to Dubai Expo 2020, which is being billed as “a festival of human ingenuity”. Intercoil employs more than 500 people and has a presence in 23 countries, and Al Hazeem is com-
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This current progression is no accident; it is the result of long-term planning
MusTafa Y KoITa Founder of Koita Organic Foods Mustafa Y Koita lived in the United States and the United Kingdom before relocating to Dubai 10 years ago. He had always wanted to start his own company, but it wasn’t until three years ago that he succumbed to the “entrepreneurial bug” and decided to pack in his secure job with a defence contractor and “take the jump”. Deciding on a “phased approach”, he started buying containers of tea and selling them into other countries in the region, taking advantage of Dubai’s status as a “natural trading hub for the whole world” and its close proximity to other countries in the Gulf, as well as the Indian subcontinent and North Africa. As a trader, revenue was high but his profit margin was low, so he moved into distribution, becoming the sole distributor of Scottish brand Go Coco Coconut Water in the UAE, during what he describes as the “coconut water boom”. Success. Then, in March 2015, he launched Koita Organic Milk, which after just 16 months can be found in 312 locations in five countries and is the number one organic milk brand in the UAE. Koita highlights a number of factors that make the UAE appealing to entrepreneurs: the process of setting up a business, which he says is easy, doesn’t necessitate a lawyer and requires a low initial investment; the fact that a number of the UAE’s economic free zones enable 100 per cent foreign ownership of a business; the purchasing power of consumers, and their willingness to pay a little more for products that they are used to, having access to in the US and Europe but can’t find elsewhere in the UAE; the approachability of government agencies; and the “huge effort” Dubai is making to highlight entrepreneurship with initiatives such as the Dubai SME 100, which ranks the top performing SMEs in the emirate, increasing their visibility to big customers and in turn boosting sales. But perhaps the main reason Koita chose to start his business in the UAE, rather than the US or the UK, is that he spotted one of the many gaps in the market “The organic trend or organic adoption hasn’t hit the Middle East like it has in the United States or in Europe,” he says. “So the opportunity is here. And it’s not just food, there’s opportunity for all western FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] business models, where you can literally take them from the West and replicate them.”
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Leith Matthews Founder of Make Business Hub, founder and managing director of Akin Barber & Shop (Salty Beard Grooming Co), founder and business lead of restronaut. me and co-founder and COO of Snapp Mobile Loyalty Solutions
Dubai Internet City, a free economic zone that offer expat entrepreneurs the right to 100 per cent ownership of their businesses
mitted to promoting the “Made In The UAE” mark as a sign of quality to the wider world. “The Dubai government has done a fantastic job of building the Dubai brand globally and I believe we should follow that example,” says Al Hazeem. Part of that brand is Dubai’s growing reputation as a hotbed of entrepreneurship and its significant steps towards becoming an innovation hub. Vijay K Tirathrai is CEO of the Entrepreneurs Organisation (EO), a global peer-to-peer network of more than 11,000 entrepreneurs with 153 chapters in 48 countries, including a UAE chapter, founded in 1997. A close observer of Dubai’s growth over the past 20 years, Tirathrai has noted the emirate’s transformation from a trading hub into a centre for manufacturing, construction and services, which has seen the world open up to the idea that the UAE is a “serious commercial capital” and Dubai the “go-to place” in the Middle East for entrepreneurs. The growing attractiveness to entrepreneurs of Dubai in particular can be attributed to a number of factors, according to Tirathrai. These include the emirate’s status as a “safe haven” in a region beset by political instability; its “strategic location in the
“Dubai has a youth and energy and it has a feeling of rapid change”
Having founded Make Business Hub, a co-working space and cafe in Dubai Marina, in 2012, Leith Matthews sold it 14 months later, and moved on to his next project – or rather projects. Matthews is a serial entrepreneur, and he is currently involved in three start-ups: Akin Barber & Shop (Salty Beard Grooming Co), a barber shop on Dubai’s Sheikh Zayed Road; restronaut.me, an online platform that helps individual and businesses plan unique parties and events in Dubai; and Snapp Mobile Loyalty Solutions, a loyalty app. “Dubai was different back then [in 2012], the start-up or entrepreneurial ecosystem wasn’t in place. Anybody like me interested in setting up a business in Dubai felt quite alone and without much of a network for support or advice,” he says. “There weren’t any places or even that many events designed specifically for young entrepreneurs. A strong independent cafe scene goes hand in hand with a city’s start-up scene, so a place like Make was definitely needed.” The process of starting a business in Dubai is still not perfect in Matthews’ opinion, requiring a lot of paperwork and an approvals process that can be frustrating at times, but he is confident that things are improving all the time as efficiencies are put in place to make it easier for small businesses to set up. “I believe it is an exciting landscape for new businesses that is enticing people to join the entrepreneurial ranks,” he says. “Dubai has a youth and energy that I am very excited about, It has a feeling of rapid change and I personally (in my own small way) want to be a part of that change.”
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Middle East”; its attraction to expats from across the globe seeking “greener pastures”; and its “firstclass infrastructure”, including Emirates airline’s network, which has created “a global footprint” and draws in people from all over the world. Despite the fact that Dubai is a “new kid on the block” compared to established business cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore, Tirathrai believes it is a truly global city in the making. This progression is no accident; it is the result of long-term planning. Dubai Internet City (DIC), a free economic zone – one of many in Dubai that offer expat entrepreneurs benefits including the right to 100 per cent ownership of their businesses – dedicated to information and communications technology (ICT), opened for business in 2000. Majed Al Suwaidi, managing director of DIC, as well as Dubai Outsource Zone, Dubai Media City, Dubai Studio City and Dubai Production City, explains that when HH Sheikh Mohammed gave the go-ahead for DIC, his idea was to create an industry that barely existed in the UAE at that time, transforming Dubai from an oil-based econo44 my into a knowledge-based economy. Having attracted global big hitters including Dell, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn, Samsung, SAP, Microsoft and Nokia to DIC, and with them a glut of talent, Al Suwaidi and his team started looking at new opportunities to grow the ICT sector. In 2013, portfolio.
“there is a place for everyone if you have a passion for what you do and work hard to achieve it”
Becky Balderstone Founder of Ripe Ripe supplies organic produce and health foods through its home delivery service, farm shop and popular farmers’ markets, held across the UAE. It’s founder, Becky Balderstone, started the business back in 2011, having spotted a gap in the market. “Ripe started from my own passion for fresh organic food,” says Balderstone. “When I moved to Dubai I quickly realised there wasn’t the variety of organic produce readily available that I was used to in the UK. My husband was working on an agricultural project at the time and I knew there were some fantastic organic certified farms here in the UAE growing amazing produce, but I couldn’t find a specific retail outlet for them. So Ripe was born.” Launching a concept that didn’t exist in the UAE at the time allowed Balderstone to grow her business without worrying too much about competition, as she almost certainly would have had cause to do in the UK. Ripe now incorporates two brands: Ripe Organic, “a platform for us to bridge the gap between local farmers and customers”, and Ripe Markets, which has transformed from traditional farmers’ markets into food and craft markets, which supports fellow SMEs, enabling them to launch on a small scale and build brand awareness without taking too big a financial risk. “Dubai is growing at a fast pace and there is plenty of opportunity to launch and grow a business,” says Balderstone. “There is a place for everyone if you have a passion for what you do and work hard to achieve it.”
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In5, which Al Suwaidi describes as an “innovation hub”, was created, “to help cultivate a new generation of entrepreneurs in the UAE”. “We deal with entrepreneurs, we deal with investors, we deal with coaches, mentors and experts in their field, we deal with the government, we deal with many different parts of the entrepreneurial ecosystem within the ICT sector,” says Al Suwaidi. “I have direct access to all of the 1,600 companies that we have within our zone. So I can go to Microsoft, for example, and say, ‘Can you support this group of entrepreneurs that is interested in developing on a Microsoft platform?’ Whereas for an individual entrepreneur it’s very difficult for him to be able to go and knock on Microsoft’s door and ask for support.” “We do not only look at the start-up phase of a business, we support companies for at least three years after they join our programme,” adds Al Suwaidi. “We don’t just support them for six months and expect that their business will grow. We understand that the development of entrepreneurs and this ecosystem requires a long-term strategy.” The road to success hasn’t been entirely smooth. “In the initial phase we were always trying to convince people about the idea of becoming an entrepreneur,” says Al Suwaidi. He admits that there are still challenges to be overcome; his goal is to persuade people that it’s not that difficult to become an entrepreneur. “Our target is to have more and more people jumping on this entrepreneurial bandwagon,” he says. Mona Ataya, CEO of Mumzworld, an e-commerce site devoted to “all things mother, baby and child”, which was set up in Dubai Internet City in 2011, first jumped on the entrepreneurial bandwagon in 2000, when she co-founded the online jobs board bayt.com, which has become the largest jobs site in the Arab world. “As a country that encourages and embraces innovation and entrepreneurship, it was the natural breeding ground for these businesses,” she says. For Ataya, innovation, constant challenging of the status quo and achieving things that once seemed unreachable are in the DNA of the UAE, and therefore of its youth, but there are challenges to be overcome. “Entrepreneurship is increasingly being looked at as a key contributor to job creation and economic independence for young people, while building a knowledge-driven economy,” she says. But Ataya is concerned about young UAE nationals’ traditional preference for secure public sector jobs over the highrisk world of the start-up. “The light is at the end of a very long tunnel, and many aspiring entrepreneurs are scared to take that journey into the tunnel,” she says. Dr Constance Van Horne, assistant professor of strategy and coordinator of internships and alumni in the College Of Business at Abu Dhabi’s Zayed
“Emirati students are now more willing to get their hands dirty. There’s more pride being taken in starting from the bottom up”
University, was the project lead for the most recent Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report from the UAE, compiled in 2011, which showed that only 6.3 per cent of the UAE population aspired to become entrepreneurs, the lowest among innovation driven economies assessed by GEM. The report also showed an increase in the aversion to risk as a factor preventing people from starting a new business in the UAE. Van Horne attributes these statistics partly to the UAE’s bankruptcy laws, which don’t offer legal insolvency and thus not enough protection for start-ups, but predominantly to the fallout from the global financial crisis of 2009-2010. “My students still talk about it, and they’re only 22,” she says. But attitudes are changing, and Van Horne expects the GEM report for 2016, which she is currently working on, to reflect this. She has noticed a trend for more “hands-on entrepreneurship” amongst her Emirati students, who she says are now more willing to get their hands dirty. “There’s more pride being taken in starting from the bottom up,” she says. The UAE government can, in part, be credited with this change in attitude, among young Emiratis in particular., according to Van Horne “When the lead- 45 ers [of the UAE] say entrepreneurship is a good thing, that is more powerful than anything else,” she says. “When the leaders are saying failure comes before success, that is such a powerful tool for us as teachers, as professors, as mentors.” portfolio.
members’ clubs
Members only The enduring appeal of London’s members’ clubs
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Alan Tyres
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members’ clubs
“There are no rules as such at White’s. Either you’re the right sort of chap, or you’re not. And if you’re not, you will never really understand why not”
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he image of the English gentleman squeezed into a leather armchair at his club, reading the financial pages of the newspaper or drinking brandy, muttering occasionally about the Suez Crisis or the Tanganyika Affair is one that has lived in the imagination for centuries. London’s gentlemen’s clubs were places where the great and the good could get away from the pressures of Empire, land-owning and government – to say nothing of getting away from their womenfolk – and blow off some steam with likeminded individuals. Discreet, exclusive and steeped in tradition, clubs such as White’s, Brooks’s and Boodle’s set up in the latter half of the 18th century as places for the aristocracy to gather and socialise on their visits to the capital. Over the next century, more overtly political establishments sprung up, like the Reform Club and the Carlton Club, which was an integral part of the growth of the Conservative party and the scene of the 1922 meeting where Tory backbenchers met to overthrow the coalition government of the day. The 18th and 19th centuries also saw houses for eminent fellows in the arts, sciences and the military. The history of power and influence in Britain has been bound up with these places. Many endure today in Mayfair, Pall Mall and St James’s, havens and remnants of a certain sort of England, where those to the manor born enjoy the finer things largely untempered by the march of time. David Cameron was a member at White’s, but found it politically expedient to resign his member-
ship in 2008 over the issue of the non-admittance of women members; his late father Ian was the chairman. Membership is strictly by proposal only but, as the quote above from a member shows, either you’re in… or you are very much not. In clubland, normal rules do not apply. At Pratt’s in St James’s, all male staff members are referred to as “George”, for the avoidance of confusion. A potentially upsetting 1980s development, on the hiring of the first female steward, was averted by the elegant solution of referring to her as “Georgina”. This world will probably continue as long as there is an England, but a new wave of private members’ clubs has sprung up in London, places where you are as likely to meet a film director as a baronet, a fashion designer or a captain of industry. You might even, shocking though it may sound to some, be talking to a woman. She may not even be called Georgina. In Portman Square, a few hundred yards from Selfridge’s, is the 5,000-member Home House, where Reece Williams, font of all knowledge on the club, explains the history. “It was built in 1776 by Elizabeth, Countess of Home. She wanted to create a ‘house of pleasure’, and commissioned the architect James Wyatt,” he says. “He was notoriously slow, and she was notoriously short-tempered, so she eventually sacked him and replaced him with his arch rival Robert Adam “He finished the interior and removed the main staircase, and put in this current one. It’s Adam’s finest remaining townhouse and stair. Throughout its life, the building has been the residence of the ambas-
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sador to France, it was owned by Earl Grey of tea fame, and it housed the Courtauld Institute Of Art. “Now we are back to its original role, what the Countess of Home designed it for: a house of pleasure.” The club, where members pay a joining fee of £1,840 and an annual membership of the same sum, boasts drawing rooms, tea rooms, restaurants, a gym, a nightclub and a peaceful garden in the back – quite the rarity in this bustling part of London. There are bedrooms on the upper floors, which are available to members, and also to nonmembers, who can avail themselves of all the club’s facilities during their stay. “A few members actually live here and will stay for extended periods, months at a time,” says 48 Reece. “We have a vast range of people from their early twenties to their late eighties, people from the law, the arts, and quite a lot of the finance crowd, because we are close to Mayfair. We have about 30 per cent female membership, which is quite high as clubs go. portfolio.
Hospital Club
“It’s a good mix of people. A rock band can sit quite happily with a g roup discussing finance and a group discussing art and they all seem to get along. It’s pretty laid back here. There’s a great photo of U2 after they did their final show in Hyde Park, they had their afterparty here and he is in the doorway on the shoulders of Noel Gallagher. “At Home House it is really just about entertaining and having fun in this amazing space. ‘Nudity is discouraged’ was one of the original rules. But only discouraged.” A similarly glamorous but perhaps more genteel experience is in store at The Arts Club on Dover Street in Mayfair, the hub of both London’s hedge funds and private galleries. In a large, airy dining room, expensively dressed ladies who lunch do not look like they have offices to rush back to. Covent Garden, W1 Annual subscription: £825 Joining fee: £250
members’ clubs
Dover St Arts Club
“A few of our members live here and stay for extended periods, months at a time”
Alice ChadwyckHealey, the club’s executive director, says: “Mayfair is the centre of London. Ever yone seems to gravitate here: f ashion, finance, the arts, whichever part of London you live in, it’s in the centre.” As the name suggests, the Arts Club has been a destination and meeting place for creative greats over the years including Charles Dickens, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Franz Liszt. “Its original home was in Hanover Square but it moved to Dover Street 20 years later,” says Alice. “It was a place for artists, creators, people of the theatre to come together to trade ideas and drink far too much. It survived a cracking attack during the Blitz, which split the tree in the garden down the middle, but it survived. It is still there.” And so is the club. “We have a foot in each camp because we are a Mayfair club but we are also an arts club; all we ask of our members is that they show a demonstrable
The first-floor laanding at the Dover Street Arts Club
interest in the arts, but they are from all walks Dover St W1 of life – and from all over Annual subscription: the world.” £2,000 With a gorgeous garJoining fee: £2,000 den, a charitable foundation, restaurants and bars, it’s not hard to see why. The club has recently added some luxury bedrooms and suites on upper floors; and these are available to non-members. With membership fees of £2,000 a year, and a joining fee of the same amount, struggling artists living in a garret need not apply, but the Dover Street establishment would certainly be a target-rich environment for those hunting a wealthy patron or two. The dining room is full of the well-heeled from all over the world. “London has become so cosmopolitan over the last 10 years and this is a little village of that microcosm. You can mix with people who represent what is going on in the world, people who are from here or who have come to London,” says Alice. “They may not all live here, perhaps they are just in town for a few days for meetings, but you meet people who move and shake the world. This is a global force and that is very refreshing.” London’s status as a world city where the best and brightest come together is also in evidence at The Hospital Club in Covent Garden, which was the brainchild of Eurythmics guitarist Dave Stewart and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. “Paul Allen was fascinated by the idea of what happens when you connect creative people from totally different worlds,” explains the Hospital Club’s creative director, Michael Berg. “He asked: ‘What happens when you put different creative people together? What happens if you put a brain surgeon and an artist in the same room?’ And he put that idea to Dave, and Dave set about finding a space for them to make it happen.” That space, as it turned out, was a derelict building on Endell Street that had a distinctly colourful past. “It was a government secret hospital for soldiers with venereal disease in the Second World War. Then later it was a maternity hospital. And then later, it was the place where the first dialysis was done in the UK.” He gestures expansively around the sprawling bar, filled with beautiful people relaxing or having meetings. “You’re sitting just outside where the 49 operating theatre was.” Today, there are no operations going on, but this is a hive of creation and connectivity. There is a TV studio – the first in Europe to be able to broadcast in HD – there are recording studios, a club, an portfolio.
member’s club
L’Escargot
art gallery. Tony Blair, Al Gore and Judi Dench have spoken here; Chris Martin, Jay Z, Beyoncé, B o n o h a ve a l l p e r formed or filmed. “The 2008 recession created a generation who had been made redundant and they said, ‘What are we going to do now?’ And they set up their own creative businesses, and they needed a place, not just to work from but that they could call home and where they could meet people. So we have artists, writers, musicians, but we also have entrepreneurs, lawyers, accountants. We acknowledge that you cannot just have a club of creatives, you need people who support the creative industries. This is like Andy Warhol’s Factory, but with a business plan.” In 1896, Frenchman Georges Gaudin set up a restaurant that became celebrated for its snails. In 1927, he moved to a Greek Street, renaming it L’Escargot after his signature dish. A plaster bust of Gaudin atop a snail, with the motto ‘slow but sure’, is still there today, but time moves on even if the snails farmed in the basement do not, and L’Escargot now has a private club above the restaurant. “Everyone who is anyone has been here throughout L’Escargot’s history,” says George Pell, who 50 runs the 700-member private club. “Frank Sinatra, Coco Chanel… Ella Fitzgerald sang here.” “Now we have a club that is a home from home for artists, theatre people, and interesting people from all walks of life. People have to be proposed by an existing member. Our bulldog Doris is on the memberSoho, W1 Annual subscription: £450 Joining fee: £150
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Le Salon Bleu on the first floor at L’Escargot
Quo Vadis
ship committee and helps make any difficult deciDean St W1 sions that we cannot!” Annual subscription: £500 A short Soho stroll Joining fee: away on Dean Street, £150 Sam Hart and his brother own Quo Vadis. It comprises four townhouses knocked together and begun life in 1926 as the restaurant of Peppino Leoni. An Italian, he was interred on the Isle of Man during the Second World War, and the place temporarily became a curry house, but both proprietor and restaurant recovered from that unhappy interregnum, and by early 1960s it was “incredibly glamorous,” says Sam.
members’ clubs
Home House Portman Square, W1 Annual subscription: £1,275 Joining fee: £1,275
“It was a very star-studded place. Leon had a Chicken Sofia Loren dish in honour of one of his favourite patrons. “There were not all that many restaurants in London at the time: the moneyed still had very large domestic staffs and entertained at home. Quo Vadis was very special.” Its fashionability declined somewhat over the next generation, but in 1997 the premises was bought by a partnership including Marco Pierre White and enfant terrible of British art, Damien Hirst, whose shark in formaldehyde was displayed here. “It was a members’ club of sorts under Hirst and company,” says Sam. “It was extremely trendy and
The Imperial staircase, which rises through the entire height of the house to a glass dome, revealing the sky above
busy for a bit but they inevitably ended up all arguing and falling out. We took it over in 2007.” Today, it is a very London blend of understated, timeless elegance and an outward-looking, eclectic place that wants to have fun and do business. “We are quite open-minded,” says Sam of the 2,500-strong membership, who pay £500 a year. “We don’t like it being cliquey where everyone is the same as each other. A lot of clubs cater for a certain sort of person: Soho House for the media, English gents in Pall Mall. “We feel a room is a lot more interesting if you have lots of different people in it. Tolerance and an appreciation of different people is what we are about.” 51 And there might even be the chance of bumping into the ultimate English icon. “In my time,” says Sam. “We have had every James Bond in here.” London’s private members’ club scene has been shaken, and now it has stirred. portfolio.
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FOOD SCIENCE
Imagine a world where you could get any animal protein you want – with no need for animals or livestock farming. Milk without cows, eggs without chickens. And yes, even dinosaur meat. This world is closer than you think Marta Zaraska
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food science Gelatin-free Gummy Bears
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he ecological footprint of animal agriculture is huge. Producing meat, dairy and eggs is responsible for as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the transportation combined. What’s more, livestock-farming dries up water reserves, pollutes air, takes up our scarce agricultural land. And the foods in question are not the best for our health, either. Last year a report by the World Health Organization declared that processed meats such as bacon and sausage cause cancer, and that unprocessed red meats are quite likely also culprits. In response, start-ups have become motivated 54 to ease the pressures on the environment and to offer consumers products that would be safer and healthier. Enter cow-less milk, eggs without chicken, animal-free gelatine, shrimp with no shrimp, and lab-grown meat. Here are five companies leading the movement to change the way you eat. portfolio.
1. Alexander Lorestani, CEO and co-funder, Gelzen “I’m obsessed with gelatine,” admits Alexander Lorestani, a molecular biologist, who just last year founded a biotech company, Gelzen, to produce animal gelatine without animals. And to prove his point, he has already whipped up gelatine from an extinct mastodon. Lorestani has a good reason to be obsessed with gelatine. “There is a tremendous unmet need for gelatine that isn’t from an animal. The alternatives that exist – agar, pectin – are suitable for an extremely narrow range of products,” he explains. Why not just use the traditional gelatine, which is made from a protein called collagen, and obtained from animal skin, tendons and bones? First, there is the vegetarian market. It was Nick Ouzounov, a co-funder of Gelzen – and a vegetarian – who made Lorestani aware of how difficult it is to find products that don’t contain animalderived gelatine. Gelatine is not just in marshmallows and gummy bears, but also in yoghurts, ice cream, even cosmetics. What’s more, Lorestani says, animalfree gelatin would help solve the problem of antibiotic resistance, to which modern livestock farming is largely contributing. In the US alone, about three times as many antibiotics (by weight) are sold for veterinary use as they are for human use. So how exactly does one make gelatine without animals? It all begins with a DNA code, Lorestani explains. “The DNA sequence for collagen for a huge variety of animals, from extinct mastodon to cows and chicken – these are on the internet in public databases. You pick one, then you go to a company that prints that DNA for you, and they give you the DNA in an envelope.” Next step is to “program” that DNA into a microbe such as yeast or bacteria, and the microbe will then produce the desired collagen inside its cell. All that happens in fermentation vessels resembling those found in breweries. The first collagen that Gelzen made was that of a mastodon. “We hoped that it would really illustrate the fact that you don’t need an animal to produce gelatine,” Lorestani says. The team has made gummy bears out of the mastodon gelatine, and tasted them. “It was, well, like biting into a gummy,” Lorestani laughs, “just without the fishy, animaly-smell.”
2. Arturo Elizondo, CEO and co-funder, Clara Foods “Eggs are one of the most resource-intensive products on the market today: currently, it takes more than 2,400 litres of water to make a dozen eggs,” says Arturo Elizondo, CEO of Clara Foods, a San Francisco biotech startup that prides itself in producing egg white protein without egg-laying hens. A vegan himself, Elizondo calculates that the egg whites that Clara Foods will soon put on the market would be at least 80 per cent more efficient when it comes to water and energy use. What’s more, they would be safer for consumers – with zero risk of salmonella infection. But do not expect an egg in a shell that you can crack, or one that you could fry sunny side up – at least not yet. Clara Foods, Elizondo explains, is an ingredient company. “We produce ingredients that currently require really unsustainable processes.” That ingredient is an egg white protein that is made in a process similar to the gelatine made by Gelzen. Clara Foods engineers yeast
“Currently, it takes 2,400 litres of water to make a dozen eggs”
food science
from a French chestnut tree to produce chicken egg protein. “The technology itself is not new,” Elizondo admits. “It’s been used for a few decades to replace pigs for insulin production. Insulin protein used to come from pigs but now it’s almost entirely made from microorganisms.” What is new is that recently the cost of using this technology has dropped considerably. “You don’t need to invest millions of dollars to get to a small proof of concept. It allows a new wave of companies to come in and really take on challenges that older companies wouldn’t touch,” Elizondo says. So far Clara Foods has produced small batches of egg powder, resembling whey protein powder, which they then used to bake meringues and macaroons. As for yolk, Elizondo believes it’s 55 doable, too, just not such a good business opportunity. “Consumers will often buy eggs and then throw away the yolks. It’s incredibly inefficient and wasteful to look at a product and say, ‘I only need half of it.’” portfolio.
3. Uma Valeti, CEO and co-funder, Memphis Meats In February 2016 the world’s first lab-grown meatball was fried in San Francisco. On a YouTube video of the event, the meat looked, well, meaty, and those who witnessed it claim the thing smelled and tasted just like the real deal. Although it was not the first cultured meat that has ever been cooked (that title belongs to a burger fried in 2013 in London, and made by a team of Dutch scientists), it was far cheaper. In 2013, a kilogram of cultured beef stood at about $2.3 million, but a mere three years later the cost of the Memphis Meats beef was “just” $40,000. And Uma Valeti, a Minnesota cardiologist and the CEO of Memphis Meats, promises that these costs will spiral down, fast, and in five years or so lab-grown meats will start appearing on the shelves of supermarkets. Valeti grew up eating meat, but at some point stopped “being comfortable” about it, and went vegetarian. He doesn’t want to turn the world vegetarian, though. “Our philosophy is: eat what you love to eat. It’s the same delicious meat that you ate when you were growing up, but that one is just coming from a much better place,” he explains. To grow a meatball in a petri dish you begin with stem cells taken by a biopsy from a living animal – or from a piece of meat. Valeti saw the enormous potential of stem cells when he was working as a cardiologist. “When patients would come with a massive heart attack, I would inject stem cells into their hearts to grow heart muscle. And that’s when I thought, Why can’t we use similar technologies to grow food?” he recalls. To produce meat, stem cells are let to multiply in a nutrient mixture, where they grow into strands of muscle fiber. Such meats would not only have enormously less environmental impact (about 80 per cent less greenhouse gas emissions, and 90 per cent less water use), but they could be designed to be healthier than regular meats – with less saturated fats, for example. Valeti believes that in 50 years or so we will be eating mostly cultured meats: “I see that as a process, like when cars replaced horse and buggy.” As 56 for dinosaur steaks, he thinks it’s possible. “If somebody wants to put a billion dollars into growing dinosaur meat there is no reason why we couldn’t do it,” he admits. “We could grow something like that using the DNA that’s there, from all the excavations that have been done,” says Valeti. portfolio.
“If somebody wants to put a billion dollars into growing dinosaur meat there is no reason we couldn’t do it”
food science
Meatball grown in a petri dish, presented the oldfashioned way
4. Dominique Barnes, CEO and co-funder, New Wave Foods Although New Wave Foods shrimps are not made out of animal protein, the way Clara Foods eggs or Gelzen gelatine are, and are produced entirely out of plants, that’s one of their biggest pluses. The reason? They are shellfish allergen free. Dominique Barnes, a marine conservationist, came up with the idea for plant-based shrimp when she was working as a shark biologist at a Golden Nugget Hotel in Las Vegas. “I wanted to do something to be kind to the oceans, and it seems like shrimp has some of the worst practices – both for environmental and social justice,” she recalls. She has a point: shrimp farms have already destroyed an estimated 38 per cent of the world’s mangroves, and reports of child labour and illegal land seizures pour from shrimp-farming countries such as Thailand. Although Barnes admits she would not order shrimp in a restaurant, in the process of designing plant-based shrimp she had to eat a lot of the shellfish. “The biggest hurdle was getting the texture right – the first bite is different from a second bite, and it’s constantly changing as you chew, as the fibres break down,” she explains. Barnes and New Wave Foods co-funder, biomedical engineer Michelle Wolf, screened a lot of plants to find the right molecules to make shrimp. “Once you find these ingredients you have to figure out how to put them together on a molecular level. It’s a bit like molecular gastronomy,” she says. The end result looks to the eye exactly like a shrimp, which bring up a question: is it natural? Barnes believes that it’s the conventional shrimps that are unnatural. “The way it’s farmed now, with all the antibiotics they have to apply to reduce disease – is that natural? Our ingredients are all natural, and you can find them on the shelves of your grocery store.” One of the most important ones is algae. “Shrimp eat algae, so algae contribute to their colour and flavour,” Barnes says. The New Wave Foods are expected to start appearing on the shelves of supermarkets in a matter of months.
Shrimp farms have destroyed an estimated 38 per cent of the world’s mangroves
food science
Shrimp made from plants
5. Ryan Pandya, CEO and co-funder, Muufri Ryan Pandya believes that Muufri can not only make “milk without the moo” (hence “Muufri”), but that it can be designed to be far superior to conventional milk. Pandya, a bio-engineer who calls himself a biohacker, started the company in 2014 to “apply datadriven scientific approach to developing dairy products”. Or, as he also says: “to customise milk”. Muufri is using a similar process to that applied by Gelzen or Clara Foods. “We are part of the same revolution,” Pandya admits. They obtained a special type of dairy yeast and turned it into what Pandya calls a “protein making machine”. “We add a single gene that encodes cow’s milk protein and the yeast starts to eat sugar and produce milk protein,” he explains. But, of course, milk is much more than just protein. It also has fats, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals – things that have to be added to the product. To find the perfect replacements for milk’s fats and carbohydrates, the Muufri team scours through the plant kingdom, and Pandya seems positive that they’ll find the exact match to make their animal-free milk taste just like the real deal. “If you taste soy milk or almond milk, they have this kind of grainy flavor. It’s because of the plant proteins,” Pandya explains. Since Muufri milk will have the same animal protein as cow’s milk, it’s far more likely that consumers won’t be able to taste the difference. Replacing cow-made milk with yeast-made milk not only promises great benefits to the environment – less greenhouse gases and lower water consumption – it also could be better for health. First, there is lactose – a sugar which most adults can’t properly digest (in China 99 per cent of adults are lactose intolerant). Then, there is cholesterol – implicated in heart disease. And, last but not least, hormones and antibiotics used in livestock production that can make their way into milk. All these things – from lactose to anti- 57 biotics – would not be present in animal-free milk. As to when we will be able to drink milk without “moo” (and without cholesterol), Pandya is still uncertain. He has set his sights at 2017, but first, he says, he wants to make sure that the product is “just perfect”. portfolio.
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RYAN HOLIDAY
Machiavelli 2.0 The man behind American Apparel’s most controversial (and effective) ad campaigns has reinvented himself as a business philosopher. Leaning heavily on philosophy his book, The Obstacle Is The Way, became a surprise hit among US athletes and his latest, The Ego Is The Enemy, is set to blast him into the mainstream
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ou might not have heard of Ryan Holiday, but he is part of a new breed of authors that is revolutionizing publishing. Holiday, and others like him (writers and investors such as Tim Ferris and Tucker Max), have built personal brands worth millions. Holiday – who dropped out of college when he was 19 – makes his money from books, consulting work (he advises authors, musicians and brands) and from one-on-one phone consultations (costing $33 a minute). He is part of what’s termed the ‘new economy’ – mobile, tech-savvy twenty- and thirty-somethings who promote themselves (hiring a PR company is so passé) and write, broadcast (mainly on podcasts) and consult. They make a lot of money, promote and invest in their friends’ projects and, crucially, are open about the whole process. The subtext for their fans is: “Yes, you can do this too.” Holiday first made his name not from openness, but from deceit. He was in charge of marketing for American Apparel, the clothing brand renowned for its marketing campaigns – often smutty, often controversial, but always effective. He mentioned one of his tactics in his debut book, Trust Me I’m Lying, a warts and all account of his time as a PR consultant. To take just one example: American Apparel was about to launch a new range of dog clothes. The day before the launch, Holiday got an intern to fax an image of a dog wearing one of the Halloween costumes to a number of bloggers with the headline: “I work at American Apparel but even I can’t believe what they have done now!” The bloggers bit and the article got massive coverage – taking advantage of the currency of outrage so popular among bloggers – and the clothes sold out. Job done. When he was promoting Tucker Max’s film, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, he defaced the film’s
promotional poster accusing Max of misogyny and then sent photos of the vandalism to blogs claiming it was part of a real protest movement against Max’s sexism. “I orchestrated fake tweets and posted fake comments in articles online. I even won a contest for being the first one to send in a picture of a defaced ad in Chicago.” The tactic worked: the book the film was based on got a huge amount of publicity, ending up at the top of The New York Times bestseller list. While these tactics might seem underhand, Holiday claims the new media landscape is fundamentally flawed, an echo chamber of lazy, deceitful bloggers and reporters, increasingly blinded by the need to get eyeballs on stories. Holiday makes no bones about the fact he took advantage of this system to promote his clients’ products, declaring on the first page of the book: “I’m paid to deceive. My job is to lie to the media so they can lie to you.” There is some disconnect between Holiday the amoral media manipulator and Holiday the author. If Trust Me fell short of being an actual mea culpa, he at least laid the tactics out there, which unsurprisingly did not go down too well with much of the media he had criticised. It was hard to believe he was exposing these secrets because, as he claimed in the book’s introduction, he was “tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. I’m pulling back the curtain because I don’t want anyone else to get 59 blindsided”. It’s hard to think of this statement as anything other than another manipulation, another tactic to sell his book. But, far from being a PR overlord mired in the New York media landscape, Holiday lives a rather simple life. PORTFOLIO.
RYAN HOLIDAY
THE NEW BREED TUCKER MAX Arguably one of the first writers to capitalise on the web to promote their work was Tucker Max. A former law school (dropout), whose incendiary frat-boy stories garnered him hundreds of thousands of fans. Through sheer word-of-mouth, he got a book deal, and it (I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell), sold more than one million copies. www.tuckermax.com
TIM FERRIS If Tucker Max was the first, then Tim Ferris is probably the most successful. His Four Hour empire (The Four-Hour Workweek, The Four-Hour Body, The Four-Hour chef ), has spawned a lucrative career as an investor, broadcaster and blogger. His podcast is wildly popular (his 150 podcast have been downloaded more than 70 million times), and he has built a career as an investor, putting his own money into companies such as Twitter and Uber. www.fourhourworkweek.com
JAMES ALTUCHER Probably the most interesting of the bunch, and certainly the most honest – he is a serial entrepreneur, who claims to have set up 20 companies and failed in 17 of them. His books, mailing list and podcasts are hugely popular, mainly due to his searing honesty and ability to focus in on the reasons why some people succeed and others fail. www.jamesaltucher.com
ROBERT GREENE A writer who has gained a cult following among rappers, athletes and business leaders, Greene’s books focus on power, strategy and seduction, and he deals in pithy truisms (a recent Twitter post: “What money should buy is not lifeless objects but power over people.”) www.powerseductionandwar.com
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Holiday is based in a rural part of Texas, and his Instagram feed is full of pictures of his pets (which include goats, chickens and dogs). Like Tim Ferris, he believes in doing nothing that is not necessary. His work schedule is relentlessly logical: no extraneous meetings, phone calls or e-mails, a daily to-do list written on an index card and at least three hours of writing a day. In the afternoon he runs or swims, and then fixes his schedule for the following day. Unlike many in corporate America, he values sleep; in an interview with the Lifehacker website he said: “I think it’s important to get at least seven to eight hours. I can count on one hand the times I pulled an all-nighter in my life. I think working really late is overrated and usually the result of poor planning.”
H
e keeps meticulous notes and something he calls a Commonplace Book, which is essentially a filing system. “Every book I read is broken up and digested on 4x6 inch cards, which are all broken up loosely by themes. I don’t have a great exact memory but I know in broad strokes what I have on these cards and whenever I’m writing or speaking and need it, I pull it out and find it,” he told Lifehacker. This ethic has enabled him to write four books in five years, a remarkable output. In his 2014 book, The Obstacle Is The Way, Holiday focused on a philosophy that has become increasingly popular in the US: stoicism. One of the four principal schools of philosophy in ancient Athens, and the most practical, stoicism is all about maintaining a calmness and a strength of will no matter what troubles you may face. Its most famous exponent, Seneca, believed destructive emotions (envy, shame, greed) result in bad decisions. Seneca practised what he preached, for after being wrongly accused of being involved in a plot to assassinate the Roman Emperor Nero, he was ordered to commit suicide. In stoic fashion, he did as he was commanded, cutting three veins and drinking poison. Modern stoicism is not nearly as dramatic, and has become a fashionable philosophy among tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists: men (it’s nearly always men) who believe they can bend the world to their will. It’s no surprise that Obstacle became a hit among that demographic, as well as among US athletes. Indeed, everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to LL Cool J to Chicago Cubs manager, Joe Maddon read it. “Stoicism as a philosophy is really about the mental game,” Holiday says. “It’s not a set of eth-
RYAN HOLIDAY
THE RYAN HOLIDAY MANIFESTOS OF MODERN MANIPULATION
The current media system laid bare, with a virtual how-to guide in modern marketing. Holiday “trades up the chain”, in which news is broken on small blogs and passed to successively larger and more influential media outlets. Despite being nothing more than hype and marketing smoke he got his clients huge coverage for the price of sending an e-mail.
The title is a quote by Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and the book is structured around three disciplines: perception, action and will. It argues that obstacles don’t inhibit success, they create it. On the way to their 2014 Super Bowl victory, Michael Lombardi and Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots distributed copies to their staff and players.
ics or principles. It’s a collection of spiritual exercises designed to help people through the difficulty of life. To focus on managing emotion; specifically, non-helpful emotion.” He has returned to this theme with his latest book, Ego Is The Enemy, in which he focuses on everyone from Marcus Aurelius to John D Rockefeller, mining history to show how various figures “remade the world in their image with sheer, almost irrational force… who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition”. What sets Ego apart from other self-help books is the intelligence of the writing and the real-world
In an era that glorifies social media, reality TV and other forms of shameless selfpromotion, Holiday argues that the battle against ego must be fought. Armed with the lessons in this book, “you will be less invested in the story you tell about your own specialness, and as a result, you will be liberated to accomplish the worldchanging work you’ve set out to achieve”.
examples from history – Holiday is no starry eyed optimist, and his tone is relentlessly logical. Cleverly, his books promote the same tactics his company Brass Check offer to clients: promotion, editing, markeitng and strategic advice. His clients include many of his peers: Tim Ferris, Lewis Howes, James Altucher, as well as everyone from Google to Tony Robbins. In a world where the dominant narrative is one 61 of scarcity (success for you means less chance of success for me), Holiday is refreshing in his openness and, ironically, his honesty. This media manipulator has come of age, and may just be about to hit the big time. PORTFOLIO.
slim aarons
The man who phoTographed summer…
s
lim Aarons wasn’t just a photographer, he was a chronicler of the beautiful people and the good life they lead. American and European society was never captured so well as through the lens of the snapper who ingratiated himself with his subjects and spent the best part of his life loafing and photographing his way through parties and holidays. His work is a celebration of relaxation, and no more so than on summer holidays. Born George Allen Aarons, he joined the army at 18 years of age and became a photographer for the military magazine Yank. During the Second World War he was awarded a Purple Heart for bravery, but latterly said that all war taught him was that the only beach worth landing on was one “decorated with beautiful, semi-nude girls tanning in a tranquil sun”. So, naturally, he moved to California. From the 1950s through until the ’80s he travelled the world, Leica in hand, taking photos of, as he put it, “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places”.
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The images he took appeared in publications including Life, Holiday, Town & Country, Look, Venture, and Travel & Leisure. His first book, A Wonderful Time (1974), is considered something of a masterpiece of the lifestyle photography genre and copies now change hands for upwards of $2,000. But it’s that lifestyle that he so beautifuly preserved with his photos, in an era before smartphones and selfies – he was the person who showed the world how the wealthy enjoyed the good life, from Monaco to St Barts, all while enjoying it himself as he became one of the crowd, a socialite himself, in all but wealth. His work has now become iconic, and prints regularly sell for thousands of dollars. In the last few years they’ve been worn as well, with many of his images being used as all-over prints for Orlebar Brown beach shorts – the image opposite being one of them. The summers captured in his images are the epitome of that lauded glamour of the early jetset age, stylish but simple. Here are some of our favourites.
Guests around the swimming pool at the Hotel du Cap EdenRoc, Antibes, France, August 1976
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slim aarons
Left top: Circa 1965: Freddie and Howard Cushing surfing with friends at Bailey’s Beach Left bottom: guests around the pool at the Monte Carlo Beach Club, Monaco, August 1970 Above: Slim Aarons slouches in a chair with the Acropolis and its surroundings as a backdrop Right: film producer Kevin McClory takes his wife Bobo Sigrist and their family for a drive in an ‘Amphicar’ across the harbour at Nassau
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Right top: holidaymakers waterskiing in front of the Carlton Hotel, Cannes, 1958 Right bottom: Natale Rusconi riding a Hotel Cipriani motor launch with the Church Of San Giorgio Maggiore beyond, in Venice, Italy, in September 1978 Below: the pool at the Lyford Cay Club at Lyford Cay on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, 1962
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living
portfolio.
Hanoi’s train street
august issue 128
I
f you ever fancied an apartment in handy walking distance to public transport, then “train street” in Hanoi’s Old Quarter is as close as you’ll probably find. The tracks through this neighbourhood are so close to shops and buildings that at some points you could lean out of your window and touch the train. Locals have adapted to this twice-daily inconvenience (around 3:30pm and 7pm every day) and it’s become part of their routine. Shop displays are dismantled and the residents saunter off the tracks, moving their chairs and bicycles to make (just) enough room for the train to pass through. Then they return to life on the tracks until 69 the next train blasts its horn to announce it’s on the way. Emirates Airlines launches a daily service from Dubai to Hanoi on the third of this month. Portfolio.
living / hotel
one & only caPe Town
Where to stay
Dock Rd, V & A Waterfront, Cape Town, 8001
Price From $886 per night
oneandonlyresorts. com
CPT
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T
he One & Only hotel brand is a comparatively new one having only been launched in 2002, but in that time they’ve established themselves as one of the top names for five-star luxury resorts. The Cape Town resort was their first and is still, arguably, the best hotel in the country. The basics are, as expected, pretty impressive. All 131 rooms are at least 60 square metres in size and either have views of the Table Mountain or of the marina. They come with 42-inch flatscreen TVs, iPod docking stations, complimentary Wi-Fi throughout, and bathrooms featuring rain showers. The real joy of the hotel, however, is the fact it’s somewhere you might actually want to spend some time, rather than just being a place to go back to at night. The central island area (see above) includes one of the best, and wellequipped, spas in the country while the pool area with surrounding cabanas is a little haven of relaxation within the resort itself. You can also get food and drinks (including champagne) delivered to you
it puts you right in the middle of one of the most exciting cities on the continent, while also creating a place to retreat in five-star luxury
poolside. And if you like wines, this is a good place in the city to enjoy them. While South Africa is one of the best producers of wine in the world, it also has a currency that is relatively weak, meaning that it offers tourists really good value for money. You can order a bottle of decent Pongratz sparking wine in bars around the city for little more than $8, but it also means you get good value at the upper end of the market. The hotel has a large three-storey wine loft stocked with South African vintages, and an
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in the hotel
award-winning sommelier – also one of the nicest people in the city – in Luvo Ntezo, who can guide you though them. And of course it’s not just wine, as Cape Town is somewhere you can enjoy high-end living, food and drink for a fraction of the price elsewhere. The idea of having a hotel like this in a city is logical, but rare. Most hotels in cities are in towers to maximise space, while resorts are usually by beaches or on islands, but the One&Only in Cape Town puts you right in the middle of one of the most exciting cities on the continent, while also creating a place to retreat in five-star luxury. It’s a rare trick that has been pulled off brilliantly, and in this hotel you can see the template that has grown around the world with a brand that is increasingly one of the marks of excellence.
eat
There’s a branch of Nobu in the hotel, but the best place to eat is Ruben’s. Local chef Reuben Riffel marries Cape Malay traditions and flavours with Dutch and British fare. The loin of springbok is a fantastic local dish.
spa
Situated on its own 1,000-square-metre private island in the midst of the resort. As well as offering all the treatments you’d expect, they also have vitality pools, steam room, sauna, ice crusher fountains and more.
extra touch
The hotel is the ideal base, situated just walking distance of the V&A pier and the city, but also a 45-minute drive from the wine country. Trips to vineyards and estates can be arranged by the hotel
places of interest in the area eat
revel
wander
see
The Test Kitchen is the most celebrated, and arguably the best, restaurant in the country and well worth eating at. There’s usually a big waiting list for a table, however, so book well in advance.
Long Street is where most of the nightlife is located. Head to Mama Africa’s to start with some food, then on to venues like The Waiting Room, The Zulu, Zula Sound Bar And Cafe, The Loop, and more.
The V&A Harbour is a two-minute walk from the hotel and full of great bars and restaurants – all incredibly well priced – shops, markets and museums. It’s also where you get the boat to visit Robben Island.
Cape Town Helicopters can take you to the Cape Of Good Hope to see the bottom tip of Africa, before flying along the False Bay. Other trips are available, all worth doing.
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In defence of the three-week vacation
T
he ancient Romans believed in generous vacations: they took sightseeing tours for two to five years at a time. In more recent centuries, Europeans of means and faint constitutions spent multiple months languishing at spas. Yet so many of us 72 today – I’m speaking of those fortunate enough to have the resources and the vacation days – remain slavishly attached to our 24/7 connectivity and take only a week at a time, maybe two, off work. But it can be difficult on a weeklong Portfolio.
vacation to unwind our anxious psyches. Short trips require quickly shaking off travel fatigue so we can hustle through a sightseeing agenda, trying (and usually failing) to wean ourselves off addictive phone and e-mail checking, maximising every day of good weather, hoping each flight departs on time and that no one gets sick. In all that hurry, there’s little unstructured space to wander and investigate. And without time to spare, wrong turns become sources of squabbles and
frustration rather than opportunities for the unexpected. When I have weeks to explore a new place, I love getting lost in other countries. It’s an amplified version of what travel already feels like: decentring, humbling, vividly sensitising. On a lengthy trip to Thailand, my partner and I rode motorcycles through the mountains surrounding Chiang Mai. At any sign along the highway that intrigued us, we’d turn off, sometimes on to a dirt road into nothingness.
Words: Jynne Dilling
Because some places take a bit longer to reach
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But other roads led us to soak in sulphurous hot springs, canoe through the frigid dark of caves, sit with monks and share tea. Stumbling upon some full-moon festivities, we met a stranger at a riverbank who gave us orchids and sparklers to decorate a banana leaf. Our glittering leaf sailed away alongside hundreds more, trailing smoke and carrying wishes for the year ahead. No matter if it’s not far-flung adventure you’re seeking, but a restful vacation staying in one place. A related gift is the space to finally be still; more than any exotic destination, stillness appears to be the elusive luxury of our age. On a month-long sabbatical from my job – a benefit that increasing numbers of companies have started offering to longtime employees – I stayed close to home, in the woods of the Hudson Valley, trying out a daily yoga
and meditation practice with a small group of friends. Stripped of 3G wireless coverage, freed of workplace urgencies for an entire month, I had the chance to start each day with a quiet walk at dawn and watch the fog lifting off the grass, the tiptoeing deer, the changing green of spring leaves. Among my friends, with all this newfound time together, fresh rituals emerged: silent breakfasts, afternoon walks capped off with chocolate macaroons, sneaking wildflowers into one another’s shoelaces while we set up for yoga. With each passing week, habitual urges and anxieties subsided, the afternoon walks got longer, and our conversations meandered and deepened. I felt greater intimacy not only with my friends, but with myself. Pico Iyer describes this kind of time off “partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldn’t ordinarily explore". Given enough time, this remoteness can be explored whether you’re with family and friends or alone, whether you travel just a few hours away, or fly to the other side of the world. My most profound experience with remoteness came quite far from home. Midway into a Himalayan trek with my brother, it dawned on me just how precarious our situation was: well beyond cellphone range, alone with our guide, days of difficult hiking away from help should something go wrong. This danger had been evident in the abstract when we planned the trip, but along the way I experienced a different form of knowledge – the bodily knowledge of what walking 10 hours a day, day after day, actually feels like, our isolation measured out in steps. “Do people you take on this trek ever get sick?” I asked our guide, not certain if I wanted to know the answer. “Oh many sick, many sick,” he immediately replied. Our boots beat a nervous rhythm on the trail in the subsequent pause before he added, offhandedly, “Some die.” A week earlier at the trekking agency, my question of whether there’d be an opportunity to wash my hair during the
trek produced hysterical laughter. My brother and I argued over whether to bring a heavy jar of Nutella so we could have something to slather on the endless meals of chapatis. “Do people die?” was not even remotely on our checklist. In fact, that trek landed us in real danger, as an unexpected blizzard coincided with a night of altitude sickness. We had to push through hours of heavy snowfall, wearing socks as gloves and heaving for oxygen, to make it over a 5,182-metre pass. I don’t recommend wandering into the Himalayas without proper acclimation or gear, as we naively did. (And pro tip: do bring the Nutella.) But it was a profound experience to be stripped of all the insulation and clutter of regular life, to be reduced to a pure animal state. I felt terrified, raw and awake to the fragility of life – the farthest I’d ever been from home in both mind and body. Soon the blizzard became so dense that I could only follow the footprints left by our guide, gasping for air and terrified I would step off a cliff, when abruptly out of the whiteness emerged the enormous head of a gaur, the wild ox of the Himalayas; I couldn’t even see the rest of his body. I stopped. That disembodied black head exhaled huge clouds of steam as we gazed at each other, everything else blinding snow. I had to walk for many days to reach him, but here he was, waiting to show me what true ease looks like. The awe and radical serenity I felt in that moment likely echoed that of the ancient Romans when they first saw the Great Sphinx of Giza, towering over them in the desert sand, or that of vacationers who have shed their familiar, daily routines and taken time to come face-to-face with the unknown. The wondrous details of the world await us all: it just can take a few weeks to reach them. I calmed down and 73 took my next step. Jynne Dilling is the author of We Mammals In Hospitable Times, a poetry collection based on her experiences as the Antarctica Writer In Residence Portfolio.
living / style
what to pack
W
...for mild weather in Copenhagen, and beyond
Average temp
17°c
18 °C 17 °C 18 °C 19 °C Paris Warsaw Zurich Vienna
also wear in...
august
copenhagen
Sunshine hours: 12
additional info street food market Copenhagen Street Food on Papirøen (Paper Island) is the city’s first street-food market. It offers a huge range of goods, from soups, ragouts, stews, pulled duck burgers and homemade gourmet pizza to organic ice-cream, sorbets and
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Danish cakes. It’s also a good place to try beers from Danish micro breweries. The market runs from midday until 9pm every day and until 10pm on Saturdays, giving it a feel of permanence, rather than a weekend pop-up. Well worth a visit. copenhagenstreetfood.dk
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1. Burberry polo shirt $425 2.Thom Browne jersey $390 3. Gucci corduroy trousers $660 4. Botega Veneta bag $2,398 5. Taylor Vintage seersucker reversable shorts $98
accessories
Santoni calfskin sneakers $436
Dries Van Noten’s leather cardholder $105 UOMO Salvatore Ferragamo $94
Field Notes memo book $10
Portfolio.
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living / style
W
What to pack ...for mild weather in Perth, and beyond
Average temp
14°c
15 °C 20 °C 15 °C 21 °C Sydney Cape Town Buenos Aires Toronto
also Wear in...
August
perth
Sunshine hours: 8
additional info Lotterywest Federation waLkway Within the Kings Park and Botanic Garden, the 40-minute walk begins east of the Lord Forrest Roundabout. It travels through the Western Australian Botanic Garden and over the spectacular elevated 52-metre
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glass and steel arched bridge to the Beedawong amphitheatre. Along the way you get to see the Swan and Canning Rivers, the diverse Western Australian flora, Aboriginal art, the Water Garden and Marri woodland forest. It’s a fine way to spend an afternoon.
august issue 128
city look
accessories
2
1
Coach x Disney squinting Mickey hangtag $41
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Frends’ handmade rose gold-tone and white leather headphones $150
77 1. Stella McCartney’s black shirt with diagonal stripe $1,100 2. Alexander McQueen blazer $2,395 3. Dolce & Gabbana for Net-a-Porter, tulip print skirt $945 4. Jil Sander velvet platform sandals $795 5. Carolina Herrera Baret Bag $1,462
Gucci’s for Net-APorter iPhone 6 case $270
Portfolio.
living / style
The sneaker care technicians
B
ack in the day, sneakerheads had all kinds of homemade methods for cleaning their shoes: a Tide-to-Go pen, a little bleach with toothpaste or some dish detergent with water and a toothbrush to scrub away grime. Commercial shoe cleaners existed, of course. But treat your prized Air Jordans with chemicals not designed for sneakers? No way. If you want to see how far sneakers – and the cleaning of them – have come, pay a visit to a store in the Little Tokyo neighbourhood called Jason Markk. Inside, a wooden shoeshine chair is reserved not for wearers of Italian loafers but men and women in Nike and Adidas shoes. And behind the counter, well-groomed
Carlo Borromeo at home
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young men in white dress shirts, denim aprons and fresh sneakers have a title known in-house as SCT, or Sneaker Care Technician. Using house-brand cleaning products and considerable knowhow, they make dirt stains, heel drag and other street markings disappear, returning bustedlooking Superstars and Yeezy Boosts to a state that is more fresh-out-of-the-box. “A customer will usually come in with one to five pairs of shoes,” said Jason Markk, 35, the founder, who started selling his cleaning solution in 2007 and opened the store two years ago. “The running record is 54 pairs.” He and his team see a wide spectrum of sneakers and conditions. “We’ve had shoes caked in mud,” Markk said. “Then we get shoes that need a little touch-up. One of our SCTs will say, ‘Let me see what you got.’ Then we’ll tell them, ‘OK, what we
suggest on this material is this, this and that.’” Jonmarc Francisco, SCT manager, chimed in to recall one infamous drop-off: a pair of Bapes (sneakers by fashion label A Bathing Ape) covered in blood. “Not just a little bit,” Francisco said. “Soaked. The guy nearly blew up his hand on the Fourth of July.” But after careful scrubbing and buffing, he said, “the shoes looked almost brand-new. The guy was super happy”. The store offers a “classic clean” ($10 to $15, depending on the shoe material), a “deep clean” ($23 to $28) and, for the truly fanatical, the “purple label detail” ($65 plus), which includes a deep clean, deodorising and a thorough going-over of the laces, insoles and lining. Standard turnaround for most jobs is three days. The service has been limited to those willing to brave Los Angeles traffic to drive downtown. But
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in June, Markk opened a pop-up shop in the Footaction store on East 14th Street in New York City, bringing the white-glove treatment to sneakerheads there until the end of the month. If the Los Angeles store is any indication, business was brisk. Markk and his technicians have so far cleaned more than 15,000 pairs of sneakers. Two more arrived at lunchtime, carried in by a young woman named Megan Warden. She stepped to the counter and was met by Justin Familara, a technician who looked over one pair, Nike Air Max 1s, and gave his professional assessment: undersole crud, a common sight. Her other pair, Nike Roshes, were practically new, but they were also white. “They’re supercomf,” Warden said. “But the stains are very obvious. That’s what I get for buying white shoes.” She has tried to clean her shoes at home, she said. But pointing to the staff,
she added: “They’re way better at it than me. Before they were here, you just bought new sneakers.” Markk’s prescient idea was to treat sneakers like the expensive, fetishized footwear they have become. If Bruno Magli oxfords are well cared for, why not Nike Airs? But the drop-off service, if not his foray into sneakers, was an afterthought, he admitted. Markk grew up in Los Angeles, playing basketball, listening to hip hop and being the DJ at parties. Sneakers, he said, went hand in hand with that culture. In his 20s, while working at an ad agency, he had a revelation one night as he cleaned his Nike hightops with a homemade concoction of warm water and mild dishwashing soap: Why wasn’t there a sneaker-specific cleaner on the market? He asked around and found that many fellow sneakerheads were also doing the homemade thing. So he decided to create a sneaker-cleaning product and hired a chemist. Research and development took 10 months. “He would call me and say, ‘I’ve got a new sample for you,’ and I’d take it home and test it on my shoes,” Markk said. “I’d take little notes, like, ‘It foamed up too much.’” He wanted a versatile product that would not damage shoes and that could clean suede, pony hair, ostrich leather and any other exotic material sneaker designers use. Once he had his winning formula, Markk quit his job and spent a summer selling kitchen knives out of a trailer in the middle of nowhere. It taught him the fundamentals of sales. In 2007 he began marketing his cleaner, scoring instant raves from streetwear blogs like Hypebeast and collaborations with influential sneaker shops like Undefeated in Los Angeles and the now-closed Nort/Recon in New York City. His store here was intended as a retail flagship, a place to sell his
bottled solution, hog-bristle brushes and other products. But the ‘JM Throne’ (the shoeshine chair) made him realise he had an opportunity to create a personal-service experience. For VIP customers, like DeAndre Jordan of the Los Angeles Clippers, he offers bulk sneaker home pickup. Like Markk, his aproned technicians, who work behind a wall of shoe-filled cubbies, regard cleaning sneakers as a labour of love. Sneakerheads themselves, they can check the latest styles and handle rare models, like the pair of original 1985 Air Jordan 1s that a woman brought in. They belonged to her father, and she was having them cleaned as a gift to him. On this day, Joe Aguilar, a staff member at the store for more than a year, was working the brush on an “iconic” pair of Jordans; instead of the more common Jumpman
“Markk and his technicians have so far cleaned more than 15,000 pairs of sneakers” logo, they had the Swoosh symbol. “For me to work on this, I get off on the hype of it,” Aguilar said. “I want to take care of this, and I want it to look brand-new.” He added: “It’s like a basketball team here. Everyone is good in their own way. It’s like, yo” – he pointed to his co-worker Joseph Henderson – “this dude is the bomb at doing suede. We’ve got somebody who’s great at doing Timberlands. Everybody’s got their finesse.” Markk, the man who created the cleaner and assembled the expert 79 crew, said his store’s meticulous process reflects his customers’ love for their kicks. “It’s like a car: You just don’t mess up a dude’s car,” Markk said. “It’s respect.” Portfolio.
living / style
The unstarched shirt
I
n 1925, when René Lacoste won both the French Championships and Wimbledon, he wore a starched white shirt with buttons extending all the way down the front and sleeves reaching to the wrists. In 1926, he won the United States National Championship wearing the same shirt but with its sleeves cut short: a daring evolutionary step toward an archetype of sportswear. In 1933, Lacoste went into business with a knitwear manufacturer to mass-produce la chemise Lacoste, a short-sleeved 80 pullover with a turndown collar, three buttons on its placket and a breathable piqué-cotton body. Ads extolled its suitability not just for le tennis and le golf but also for la plage (the beach): not just for athletic exertion but for general Portfolio.
leisure. The shirt was not rigid, but there was a rectitude to it. It promoted physical comfort while adhering to social strictures. The line from there to casual Friday runs fairly straight. Lacoste once told People magazine that he derived inspiration from seeing one of his fancy friends, the fifth Marquess of Cholmondeley, take the court in the shirt he wore to play polo: ‘‘A practical idea, I thought to myself.’’ It is true that the polo shirt as we know it originated on the polo field, but it is also true, and telling, that the game’s name has attached itself to many other garments. If you check inside the collar of a Brooks Brothers oxford-cloth button-down, you will see it declared “the original polo shirt”. When you flip
through 1940s newspapers, you will find boys’ knit-cotton crew necks promoted as “polo shirts”. What an American calls a turtleneck sweater, a Briton calls a polo-neck jumper. A camel’s-hair coat was, in the 1920s, a polo coat. The brand name Polo Ralph Lauren first materialised on a label, paying quiet tribute to customers’ Gatsby streaks, in 1967; Lauren did not hitch his pony and rider to a polo shirt until 1972. The connotations of polo are elite but not effete. What is a polo player if not an aristocrat fused with a cowboy? And yet a “polo shirt” sounds somehow more approachable than a “tennis shirt”, probably because the equestrian game exists at such a ludicrous remove as to seem no more substantial than
Words Troy Patterson
How the polo shirt became the stylish everyman’s everyday everything
august issue 128
a mirage. The oddities attendant to the status of reappropriated symbols are delightfully rich. Ralph Lauren, born in 1939 as Ralph Lifshitz, has frequently been compelled to defend his trademark against the United States Polo Association, founded in 1890 as a sports organisation. Entering the rag trade with its US Polo Assn line in 1981, the group aroused the ardent curiosity of Lauren’s legal team. Lawyers have met with limited success in arguing that polo (the institution) endeavours to ride the shirttails of Polo (the upstart) by selling shirts emblazoned with twice as many horses (and at half the price). Meanwhile, Lacoste remains the brand emblematic of branding itself. Descended from the player’s personal insignia, the famous crocodile is sometimes claimed as the first commercial logo designed for display. Though that distinction more likely goes to the diving girl of Jantzen – the suit that, to believe its slogan, “changed bathing to swimming” in the 1920s – both symbols emerged from the same pool of ideas. The years between the wars marked the advent of purposedesigned sportswear and its slippage into the mainstream, guided by the new prestige of youthful vigor. Advances in technology abetted shifts in standards of decorum, and now here you are, wearing yoga pants out to dinner. When the American company Izod brought the Lacoste shirt to the United States in the 1950s, offered in colours livelier than Wimbledon white, it assumed its destiny among preppies. To complete a costume radiating vernal energy, a fellow would pick one up at Brooks Brothers or at the Andover Shop, which once composed a bit of ad-copy doggerel rhyming “crocodile” with “signs of style”. In Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Neil Klugman, of stifling Newark, meets Brenda Patimkin, of gilded Short Hills, at her country
club, gets her number and picks her up at a tennis court to take her on a date. They chat, and when Neil has ceased to fume that Brenda said, “I go to school in Boston,” when she could have less coyly said “Radcliffe,” he checks out her threads: “There were two wet triangles on the back of her tiny-collared white polo shirt, right where her wings would have been if she’d had a pair.” To match the phantom wings, she wears Bermuda shorts cinched with a tartan belt. The polo must have peaked as a signifier of prep insidership in the 1970s. By 1982, the casual version of the Ivy League look had emerged as mass style. Izod moved $400 million worth of shirts that year. It was a marketplace where anyone could go to the mall for a polo decorated with the frisking fox of JC Penney and where some connoisseurs of tennisclub style, sophisticated unto a slight loucheness, could repair to the pro shop for one sporting the logo of Boast, a Japanese maple leaf easily confused with an homage to marijuana. Hints of the old meaning still linger in the shirt’s basic form, but to get across the point that you would rather be sailing, it helps to choose a shirt with a brazenly Biff-ish emblem – the whale of Vineyard Vines, say – or else select one in a colour like flamingo pink, which tells a Palm Beach story. The turndown collar is essential to the polo’s presentability. If you doubt the importance of a collar to establishing the overall effect of an outfit, you would be well advised to talk with your tailor. Or your priest. This flap of fabric, so often superfluous to function, frames the face and caps the body, proving essential to tone. Thus is the polo shirt a staple of uniforms everywhere, from parochial schools to fast-food chains. Thus does the tourist in the aqua blue polo cling to his dignity in much the same way that the shirt clings to the fullness of his belly.
Risking neither the uncouth of a simple T nor the stiff ceremony of a button-down, it’s just a shirt, which is its defining virtue
René Lacoste
Fred Perry
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Portfolio.
living / STYlE
All these details are heavily weighted. Each creates a context. Will the long tail be tucked in? (If so, will the effect be that of a golfer on the course or a dork on a date?) Will the collar be popped? To upturn it, reappropriating the collar as a haughty ruff, is controversial; the wearer risks resembling an antagonist from an ’80s comedy, one of the snooty stooges upon whom the nerds revenge themselves. But I have also encountered a man who believes he accidentally initiated a collar-popping trend at his boarding school by simply trying to hide the zits dotting his adolescent neck. The logo sits at the symbolic heart, like a civilian rank insignia or an unwilting boutonniere. The chest presents a perch for charging tigers, waddling penguins, leaping marlins – any of a hundred thousand symbols. Some emblems wield their talismanic power discreetly, while others seem to demand the worship of false idols. Ralph Lauren’s “big pony” shirts inflate his embroidered icon to a size that overwhelms a pectoral. In Mexico, counterfeit versions have been popular among high-level drug traffickers and, in turn, lowerclass teenagers. Four years ago, The Associated Press quoted a psychologist who hypothesised that the kids on the street were thumbing their noses either at the police or at everyone: “Many youths are also using it as a way of making fun of snobbish status markers.” Which brings us to those polo shirts bearing no emblem at all, an absence that may indicate the wearer’s simple aversion to clutter or, alternatively, her pointed refusal to be branded. Some refuseniks will recall that Banana Republic once relished pitching its “un-alligator travel shirt” to people of their persuasion. The 1984 holiday catalogue recommended this garment to “those of you who don’t particularly care to use your chest as a billboard, but enjoy the amenity of wearing a finely knit piqué shirt”. In 1952, the British tennis player Fred 82 Perry introduced a polo shirt featuring a triumphal garland on its chest and, typically, two lines of piping on its narrow collar. In the decades since, members of a certain slice of British youth culture – mods and ska boys and skinheads and Portfolio.
A young Mod in Woolwich, London, 1981
The turndown collar is essential to the polo’s presentability. If you doubt the importance of a collar to the overall effect, you would be well advised to talk with your tailor
such – have loyally bought and stolen Fred Perrys. It has not been lost on them that the player was a working-class hero who legendarily weathered snubs lobbed by the toffs of the All England Club. The writer Ian Hough has discussed the message the shirt sent when worn by football hooligans in northern England: “The laurel wreath of Manchester’s Perry Boys said, ‘Look at us again, and you’re gettin’ filled in, sunshine.’” If the polo shirt can be not merely anti-elitist but even the correct costume for thuggery, it can and will be anything – an everyman’s everyday everything. Risking neither the uncouth of a simple T nor the stiff ceremony of a button-down, it’s just a shirt, which is its defining virtue. The shimmer of its heritage figures in the fact of its propriety. But only a shimmer. The best polos are 100 per cent cotton, but the Platonic one is, in its meanings, entirely elastic.”
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1. Stone Island $125 2. JCrew $45 3. Hugo Boss $135 4. Ralph Lauren $90 5. Dunhill $265 6. Fred Perry $88 7. Lacoste $90 8. Gucci $540
Available from mrporter.com
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august living / style
issue 128
Stan Smith, the accidental style icon
Portfolio.
Around late 2001, one of Smith’s daughters came home and told him, “You’re famous”
has been ages since he advised a student to buy Stan Smith shoes. “The other shoes got better,” he says, conceding the obvious. But as the utility of the Adidas Stan Smith expired, the model passed into an afterlife as a classic of design. Around late 2001, one of Smith’s daughters came home and told him, “You’re famous.” A Jay Z lyric had specifically indicated that the shoes, expanding on their cachet as country-club loungewear, had developed a reputation as ideal kicks for weekends in the country, “lampin’ in the Hamptons”. They are now a favourite among a wide array of people in the art world and the image business, with fans ranging from Marc Jacobs and Phoebe Philo to David Bowie and Pharrell Williams.
It is unpretentious footwear for potentially pretentious feet. The simple white leather shoe is a blank slate. “It’s like a canvas in a way,” Smith says. The structure accommodates cosmetic variation, and thus the shoe is suited to the sort of special-edition treatment that is the artisanal bread and whole-fat butter of contemporary sneaker merchandising. Moreover, this blank slate is appealing for the very purity of its blankness, a perpetually refreshing austerity that makes a strong claim for the universal chic of minimalism. This is all pretty strange to Stan Smith. Sometimes, when travelling, he amuses himself by asking pedestrians shod in Stan Smiths, “Do you like the shoe?” They do.
Words: Troy Patterson
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n the 1960s, when Stan Smith was a tennis star at the University Of Southern California, players wore canvas shoes. Americans preferred Converse, Smith recalls, and Australians favoured the Dunlop Green Flash, with its zigzag sole promising sure-footedness on grass. In 1971, when Smith was the No 1 player in the world, Adidas approached him about endorsing a fleeter alternative: the first leather tennis shoe, which had first been marketed seven years earlier and was originally named for the French pro Robert Haillet. They struck a deal that landed a sketch of Smith’s face on the model’s tongue. Eventually, Smith’s name overran the model’s brand, and today the golden age of Adidas tennis shoes is remembered for the Rod Laver, with its nylonmesh uppers and polyurethane soles; the Nastase, with its euro air and wicked namesake, Ilie Nastase; and the Stan Smith, with its plain white body accented by a green heel tab. “It was considered high-tech,” Smith says. “My shoe has these little studs on the bottom,” offering improved traction. The leather felt light, the support strong, and a bit of air would flow through the air holes perforating each side like the crisp ghost of the manufacturer’s triple stripe logo. The shoe was elegantly 84 spare and on its way to achieving prestige as a style item. Smith won 39 singles titles and 61 doubles titles and now leads a tennis academy in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He is 68, and it
living / drink
R
eally? They make whisky in Japan?’ If I had a dollar for every person who has said that to me, my drinks cabinet would be full of expensive bottles. They’ve actually been making whisky in Japan for nearly 100 years, but it’s only since the turn of the millennium that these beautifully crafted spirits have started to wow critics and drinkers alike. 86 The event that made whisky fans first take notice was in 2001, when Nikka’s Yoichi 10 Year Old Single Cask Whisky won the Best Of The Best award from Whisky Magazine – the first time a non-Scotch whisky had claimed the Portfolio.
prize. A Gold medal two years later for Suntory’s Yamazaki 12 Year Old at the International Spirits Challenge and Japanese whisky was big news, but it would take one more award to give the category huge exposure. In late 2014, whisky writer Jim Murray named The Yamazaki Sherry Cask 2013 as his World Whisky Of The Year. Awarding it a staggering 97.5 points out of 100, he described it as “as rounded as a snooker ball” with notes of “plum walnut cake” and “juicy dates”. Only 18,000 bottles of this whisky were released, and it didn’t sell out straightaway, but once Murray’s book was published, all remaining bottles
were snapped up in a matter of hours. This whisky only cost $150 on release, but it now reaches close to $3,000 at auction. A 2,000 per cent return on your investment, thanks to a solitary award? Well, yes, but its scarcity had an effect, too. Add to that the huge media interest, and Japanese whisky had come of age. The knock-on effect has been huge, but at a cost to drinkers. Not only has the price of many Japanese whiskies risen, but the rocketing demand has led to a shortage of aged stock across the industry, with companies being forced to release NAS (non-age-statement) whiskies until stocks come back to healthy levels. The NAS issue is a
Words Stuart Peskett
How Japanese whisky came of age
august issue 128
contentious one, with some vehemently opposed to buying whisky with no age guarantee on the bottle – but if distilleries don’t have enough liquid, they have little alternative. Some of the best bottles, however, are not drunk – they are traded for big money, just like the best wines from Bordeaux. Unlike wine, whisky does not mature or improve in the bottle – the flavour does not change at all – but the high prices are directly linked to its rarity. In some cases, there will be fewer than 100 bottles left of a particular whisky in the world – and every time one is drunk, the value of the remaining bottles goes up.
This whisky only cost $150 on release, but it now reaches close to $3,000 at auction This is particularly true when it comes to ‘lost’ distilleries – those that have fallen into disrepair or even been demolished. The prime example in Japan is Karuizawa, a big, rich, sherry-cask-matured whisky, whose distillery stopped production in 2000 and will never be reopened. Bottles of Karuizawa change hands on auction sites for thousands of pounds. Why else is Japanese whisky so hot right now? The taste. Although the Japanese replicated the Scotch whisky model – even choosing distillery locations with a similar climate – their whiskies do not taste the same as Scotch, which is mainly due to the way they are made. When the crushed barley is mixed with water, this liquid is known as ‘wort’. In Scotland, the preference is for a cloudy wort, bringing out nutty/malty notes in the finished whisky, but in Japan, the wort is always clear, accentuating the clean fruitiness. When I taste Japanese whisky, this purity really comes through, with fragrant orange blossom a common note. I’ve recommended some Japanese whiskies to try below. If you’ve never drunk a Japanese whisky, you really are missing out. And when you do, you’ll be tasting an overnight success story 100 years in the making.
FIVE jaPaNESE WHISKIES TO TRY… OR INVEST IN
Hibiki Harmony Hibiki whiskies are always beautifully packaged in bottles that make stylish decanters. Harmony (the English translation of the word ‘Hibiki’) is a blend of more than 10 malt and grain whiskies, including some from Suntory’s Hakushu and Yamazaki distilleries. The whisky has that classic orange-blossom note, along with hint of cinnamon, clove and apricot, as well as a little peppery spice. $75
Nikka Coffey Malt Whisky Never tried Japanese whisky before? Start here. Nikka Coffey Malt is made with malted barley but in a straight column still, not the more common onion-shaped pot still. You’ll get aromas of candied lemon peel and cake spices with a full-bodied, spicy palate brimming with clove and cinnamon and a refreshing citrus character. $75
Ichiro’s Malt Chichibu 2009 Port Pipe Ichiro Akuto comes from a long line of wine and sake makers, and spent time at Benriach distillery in Scotland before setting up in Japan. This bottle spent a two-year ‘finishing’ period in port pipes, imbuing the whisky with an inviting perfume of raspberries and strawberries, a fragrant floral note and soft spices. A delicate, fruity whisky. $220
Yamazaki Sherry Cask 2016 If you are lucky enough to find a bottle, buy it immediately. You’ll then have to decide whether to drink it, and indulge yourself in a torrent of dried fruit, sweet spice and toasty oak, or sell it on to an eager collector. The official price when it was launched was $300, but expect to pay way in excess of that. probably only via auction. From $2,200
Karuizawa 1970 42 Year Old Cask #6177 Karuizawa is by far the most sought-after of all Japanese whiskies, and with the distillery now closed, bottles are in short supply. This one was aged for 42 years in a sherry butt and has powerful aromas of cinnamon, raisins and mulled wine, elevated by heady incense and sandalwood notes. An epic whisky that must be tried. $9,000
Portfolio.
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august living / food
issue 128
Top table Heinz Beck’s Roman extravagance with three Michelin stars
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Photos: Janez Puksic
t’s perhaps surprising to find that only one restaurant in the Italian capital has a full three Michelin stars, but if anything, it’s a sign of how hard it is to get the full set. La Pergola is the epitome of Heinz Beck’s style and Italian dining at its most extravagant. From olive oils and vintage balsamic vinegars by the best producers in Italy, and the finest ingredients sourced in the Mediterranean, to the opulent setting and views out of the Eternal City, this is a special restaurant. La Pergola’s wine cellar was also the winner of the Grand Award from The Wine Spectator and holds more than 60,000 bottles by around 3,500 labels. If you’re looking for fine dining paired with wine in a beautiful setting, then this is up there with the best that Europe has to offer.
the chef’s gLobaL recommendation heinz Beck’s three restaurants to try 1. Quique dacosta (Spain) 2. Le calandre (Italy) 3. ryugin (Japan)
La PergoLa, rome
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Water garden
Scampi carpaccio
Herbal fusion with tapioca pearls
Kikuna Afila cress Papaya brunoise
Venus clams caviar mango brunoise
Zucchini purée
“During one of my trips to Japan, I had the chance to walk through a real Japanese garden and I immediately fell in love with it. The inspiration came soon after and I created ‘Water Garden’, a symbol of peace, tranquillity and cleanliness. All the emotions generated in me by the sight of this wonder are reproduced in this dish. My personal homage to Japan and its culture.”
Rome Cavalieri Hotel, Roma
romecavalieri.com
FCO
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Lamb cube on tomato sauce, saLty ricotta and basiL “My wife Teresa and my mother in law come from Sicily and they both are very good in cooking. They taught me a lot about Mediterranean flavors and tastes as well as about family traditions. This bright and passionate dish is dedicated to these two fantastic women.”
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causa tradicionaL “A cold gazpacho of celery and green tomatoes (obtained with the technique of laboratory centrifuge) lays on the bottom of the platter. Patanegra gratinated lobster medallions over it and the lobster claws previously cooked. The garnish is made with cubed potatoes, green beans, herbs and edible flowers.” Portfolio.
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AuGusT issue 128
livinG / Column
The business of Zlatan By David Randles
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t is not typical for footballers to secure a move to a club of Manchester United’s standing in the twilight of their careers. But such is the allure of Zlatan Ibrahimovic that Old Trafford became a summer destination for the well-travelled Swede. Semi-retirement outposts including the United States and China hold out hope of attracting the now former Paris Saint-Germain striker, but it is the greatest cash-cow of them all, the Premier League, that became the destination for a colourful character who refers to himself only in the third person. Ibrahimovic was reunited with the new United boss Jose Mourinho – the manager he described as the “most intelligent” he had worked with while at Inter Milan, before Pep Guardiola lured him to Barcelona in 2009 – the Sweden international told the world: “I have made my choice... the future is written.” In classic Zlatan style, he added: “I just have to push the button.” So, as United procrastinated before offering long-serving midfielder Michael Carrick, 34, a recent one-year contract extension – the perception being his legs are not what they once were – where is the logic in drafting in another veteran of the same age? Put simply, Carrick doesn’t sell many shirts in Bangkok, Beijing or even locally in Burnage. Three United players figured in sports retailer Kitbag’s Top 10 best-selling shirts in the lead up to last season (the period July 1 to September 31, 2015). With club and England captain Wayne Rooney in sixth place, new recruits Bastian Schweinsteiger and Memphis Depay occupied fourth and third respectively. With a flurry of sales coming in pre-season, Depay was a new entry in 2015 following his £25 million move from PSV Eindhoven, whereas Schweinsteiger shirt sales saw an incredible 795 per cent increase year-onyear as the former Bayern Munich star leapt 27 places.
Compare this to Angel Di Maria shirt sales, which witnessed a dramatic slump in the wake of the Argentinian’s summer switch from United to Paris Saint-Germain, plummeting from third in 2014 – when he moved from the Bernabeu to Old Trafford – down to 100th last year. In other words, PSG doesn’t shift many shirts. United does, and on a global scale with the right name emblazoned across the back. With Ibrahimovic already nestled comfortably inside the top 50, runaway leaders Lionel Messi (first) and Cristiano Ronaldo (second) could have closer company in the shirt sale stakes. A move could be the perfect fit for both club and player, and particularly for United’s accountants mindful of how capitalising on Ibrahimovic’s name would go some way to filling the gaping financial hole left by the club’s Champions League absence this season. As the player is on a free transfer, his reported £220,000 a week wage demands over a one- or two-year contract wouldn’t be an issue when weighed against potential commercial gains from pairing one of football’s most recognisable names to one of its strongest performing global brands. Of course, it helps that Ibrahimovic can play a bit, too. Since making his debut for Malmo in 1999, his CV boasts some of Europe’s top clubs: Ajax, Juventus, Inter Milan, Barcelona, AC Milan and PSG. A switch to United could be the ultimate swansong for a franchise footballer who has won a staggering 30 trophies in four countries for six teams. His goals-to-games ratio is also up there with the best – 392 in 677. Suggestions that age is now a barrier can be tempered somewhat by the front-man just coming off his most prolific campaign. His 50 goals in 51 matches included 38 in the league, a PSG club record. Of course, the Premier League is far less forgiving than Ligue 1, but, with an 11-letter surname and an even bigger reputation, goals may not be the most vital statistic by which Ibrahimovic is measured at Old Trafford.
“Goals may not be the most vital statistic by which Ibrahimovic is measured at Old Trafford”
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David Randles is a sports journalist, senior lecturer and BA Sports Journalism programme leader at the University of Chester. Portfolio.
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