The Rake Febuary 2019 - Issue 62

I once said that the man you see on the cover of this magazine should reflect back to you the person you would like to be. I meant that the individual gracing the front-facing real estate of this tome should be a self-made man, a man who has grown more elegant and into his most pure, essential self as he has got older, and most importantly a man who has lived a life uncompromised, who could walk away from all he had accomplished knowing his ethics and integrity were intact. But I was wrong. Because what I’ve discovered is that the term ‘rake’ as we define it — an individual who, having mastered the rules, bends them to their indomitable will with aplomb and class — has no gender. This…

Julianne Moore says, and I quote, “Tom is such a lovely, gentle, wonderful soul, so incredibly sensitive and empathetic, patient; I loved working with him.” Which was nice of her. Alas, she wasn’t talking about me. Rather, about a fellow cover star of the magazine and the man largely responsible for the revival of sartorialism in this millennium: Tom Ford. His tastes and style have re-turfed the landscape that accommodates formal clothing, his brand has encouraged intelligence in the pursuit of beauty, and the casting of Moore in A Single Man was perhaps the best manifestation of Ford’s genius. So what does that say about us in asking Julianne to be the first woman to appear on the cover of The Rake? Well, leaving aside the fact that showcasing the most…

RICHARD PHIBBS Canadian-born Phibbs brings an artist’s eye to every photograph he takes, in advertising and editorial, fine art and his personal projects. His work has appeared in major publications including Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar U.K., Vogue China, Town & Country U.K., GQ Russia, and Elle Decor. He has shot advertising campaigns for iconic brands such as Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, and his fine art photography is in the private collections of Bill Clinton, Ralph Lauren, Francis Ford Coppola and Anderson Cooper, among others. Phibbs’s portraits present subjects as varied as Meryl Streep and Rafael Nadal, Beyoncé and Hillary Clinton with a poignant intimacy. His visual sensibility gives his film work the same distinctive point of view that is his print trademark. In this issue Richard has captured the…

In March last year, an announcement was made that seemed to clear up a mystery that, despite persisting for the best part of a century, had lost none of its potency. The journal Forensic Anthropology claimed that an assortment of bones found on the eastern Pacific island of Nikumaroro in 1940, including a skull, were “a 99 per cent match” for those of Amelia Earhart, the pioneering aviator who had become the world’s most famous missing person when she disappeared — along with her navigator, Fred Noonan — on July 2, 1937, during an attempt to circumnavigate the equator in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra. Alongside the bones were a woman’s shoe, a navy tool used by Noonan, and a bottle of the herbal liqueur Benedictine — apparently Earhart’s airborne beverage…

My love affair with Hong Kong began when I read James Clavell’s Tai-Pan as a teenager, before I visited this fantastical city for the first time. I am now fortunate enough to visit Hong Kong three or four times a year, mainly for work, and my connection with the city has bloomed into a wonderful relationship over the years. Hong Kong is unique because it blends Asian and Chinese life with British and western culture in an exciting and balanced way, and in many ways I consider it to be the New York of the east — albeit in a more concentrated form. My go- to guide for visiting Hong Kong is as follows: The Mandarin Oriental in the Central district is like a home away from home. Not only has…

Just how starkly oxymoronic the phrase ‘female war photographer’ was during world war II is neatly encapsulated by a comment made by a United States Marine Corps general to Dickey Chapelle during the battle of Okinawa. Chapelle, camera poised to capture the troops’-eye view of a blood delivery at an army field hospital, had ignored direct orders not to go ashore from the U.S.S. Relief, and the first words she encountered emanated from the lips of an incredulous commander: “Get that broad the hell out of here!” Chapelle’s talent jumps out from her body of work — a vast repository of gritty, acutely provocative work documenting humanity and violence: panoramic shots of U.S. helicopters flying over Vietnamese rice fields in 1961; executions by Algerian rebel firing squads; a U.S. marine sat…