The Rake December 2017 - Issue 55

In October, sitting opposite Ralph Lauren in his extraordinary office, filled with photographs and mementoes of his life and creations, a thought came to my mind. Ralph Lauren is not the president of the United States. But he should be. Because he represents everything that is beautiful about the incredible country I grew up in. A beauty that stands marred by the nation’s current leadership. Never has the country been more divided, with a seething palpable animosity between what is perceived to be a minority of intellectual elites who reside on the coastal cities deadlocked in a perpetual combat of ideals with those populating the vast agrarian states who are derided as the ‘fly-overs’. But as someone who spent a year living and working at Montana’s largest commercial cattle ranch, I…

Comfort and joy wouldn’t be the nouns we’d associate with the current tidings. To paraphrase Tiny Tim, “Will we have Christmas after all?” On the whole, by the time I reach Christmas, my mood is lifted by the melodrama of chestnuts on an open fire, St. Coca-Cola and his reindeer, Three Kings, one Queen (and her Christmas speech), carollers, and rested merry gentlemen. So why am I so upbeat when the world seems intent on being miserable? Perhaps the anticipation of the holiday season Christmas, which gives me good cause to be hopeful, lies in the annual rustling up of our Rakes of the Year awards, which we have produced in association with Bell & Ross, a brand we have long admired, and we are excited to reveal their latest Watch…

A former staffer at both U.K. Esquire and GQ Australia, Nick was Editorin- Chief of The Rake for three years before leaving the role to pursue a number of creative projects in the summer of 2014. His work has appeared in the FT’s How To Spend It, The Guardian, Sky Magazine, Radio Times and Women’s Health, while past interviewees include Kings of Leon, Elle Macpherson, Ozzy Osbourne, Jessica Alba, Dave Grohl, Hugh Jackman, Duran Duran, Martin Freeman and Eric Cantona. Away from lifestyle editorial, he’s a budding stand-up comic and is working on his debut novel on the rare occasions that time permits. For this issue, Nick talked to Nicolas Cage for our cover story (page 92) and travelled to Biella in Italy to go behind the scenes at the…

“Five notes, two strings, two fingers, and one asshole.” That’s all Keith Richards has ever needed to get by. Well, that, and perhaps an indestructible physical make-up from hell, a few hip cats with a thing for the blues by his side, and the blessings of the gods. Drug busts, heartbreak, heroin: there isn’t much the archetypal rock ’n’ roll guitar-slinger hasn’t endured. That he’s managed to emerge from the madness of his misadventures (relatively) unscathed, to the disbelief of lovers and naysayers alike — let alone keep one of the world’s greatest bands charging forth for more than five decades — is cause enough to hail him as the definition of a rake. There was once a time when the world’s most “elegantly wasted” man (as the critic Nick Kent…

*Products available at TheRake.com Bordeaux is the sixth largest city in France, located on the Garonne river on the Atlantic coast. It is also the wine industry’s capital of France, and its region is home to famous Grand cru vineyards such as Lafite, Margaux and Latour. Bordeaux has magnificent 18th and 19th century architecture and winding medieval streets. We can thank Haussmann for the thoughtful design and urban planning of this fine city during the reign of Napoleon III. It suffered a fall from grace in the past, so in 1995 its new mayor, Alain Juppé, set in motion an effort to clean up the city, to bring back the glory days of its 19th century Golden Age. Today Bordeaux is a vibrant, young and enchanting little city, with fine hotels,…

For his autumn/winter 2017 menswear collection for Balenciaga, the designer Demna Gvasalia, who’d elevated the oversized hoodie to haute status at Vetements, vowed to “make tailoring sexy again”. His method? To cut a roomy jacket, dispense with the shirt all together, and lower the skinny trousers to a point just above the pubic bone while encasing the feet in a pair of expansive — and conspicuously branded — biker boots. This wasn’t so much casual Friday as steam-punk Saturday. What would the venerable couture house’s creator have made of all this? Hard, if not impossible, to say, as, during his long and illustrious tenure as “fashion’s Picasso” (Cecil Beaton) and “the master of us all” (Christian Dior), Cristóbal Balenciaga made J.D. Salinger look like a blabbermouth. “He is seldom to be…