The Rake June 2020 - Issue 70

In a recent conversation with a man I admire a lot, Jean-Claude Biver, he highlighted something that really resonated with me. He said: “The problem today is that we are in the third millennium. But the third millennium is still being run by old men who grew up in the 20th century and are applying 20th century rules to the world.” What does he mean by that? The best example probably comes from Oliver Stone’s 1987 film, Wall Street. Even though this is meant to be a cautionary tale about the seduction of easy wealth and the moral bankruptcy of eighties yuppie culture, an interesting thing happened when the film was released. Instead of most viewers identifying with the protagonist, Bud Fox — played by Charlie Sheen, many years before…

I’ve never been someone to invite change. When I was little, a few things happened that scrambled my comprehension that life was reliable and happy, and that things would follow a linear, if not uneventful, path until I perhaps fell in love, got married, had children, and offered my children the same love and security I was shown by my parents. Things like family bereavement and life-changing injuries. I never regarded the accusation of living a sheltered existence as much of an insult. Amid the changes wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, there is at least one silver lining that eases my discomfort at losing simple pleasures, such as spending time with colleagues, and more important matters, such as hobnobbing around Mayfair, where The Rake’s office is situated (a postcode chock-a-block with…

NICK SCOTT A former Editor-in-Chief of The Rake, Nick spent several years as a staffer at U.K. Esquire and GQ Australia, and is now the Editor of the U.K. edition of Robb Report, as well as a regular contributor to The Rake, the FT’s How To Spend It, Hole & Corner, and Director, the Institute of Directors’ magazine. His writing has also appeared in a range of titles including The Observer, Radio Times and Women’s Health, as well as branded content titles for Hackett, Bentley, Lexus, Toyota and Richard Mille. An ardent believer in old-fashioned journalism, he frequently dreams of a mass public burning of rehashed press releases posing as editorial. His sartorial philosophy is summarised by a self-coined axiom: “Style and fashion are like love and infatuation.” For this issue…

“The best-known American in the world” was how Paul Robeson was described without irony or argument by a journalist in 1964. Yet today, among the Instagram generation, his name is mostly forgotten. That is set to change, as the Academy Award-winning director Steve McQueen has announced plans to bring Robeson’s story to the screen. It is perhaps fitting that cinema, a medium in which Robeson excelled, will restore his renown as a cultural monolith and social justice campaigner. Paul Leroy Robeson was born in April 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey — a town known more for its redbrick university than the realities of its stark income divide. His father, William Drew Robeson, was an escaped slave who became a Presbyterian minister, while his mother, Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson, was a Quaker…

This is something of a landmark for The Rake — actually, it could be an avant-garde moment for modern magazine-ing. The image opposite, ladies and gents, is the first image shot for The Rake by the subjects in the image, on a timer. Yes, i-D magazine made a front cover using Zoom, but at the very least the model knew what she was looking at. The Spanish husband and wife modelling duo of Oriol Elcacho and Davinia Pelegri are pros, of course; in fact, it is a bit like Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf playing doubles together. But why this format? Well, like the rest of us, Oriol and Davinia (who are expecting a baby soon) have been in isolation in Spain, secluded in a hamlet of 70 people in the…

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives”; the film producer Robert Evans would beg to differ. The life of Evans, who died aged 89 in October last year, had a pristine Hollywood three-act structure, full of twists and tragic flaws. As head of Paramount, he produced some of the most admired American films ever, married seven times, and was a hypnotic raconteur with a unique sense of style. But he was also ostracised from the film business for a catalogue of terrible decisions. Evans had elements of both Fitzgerald and Gatsby: addictive, charming, contradictory, prodigious and tantalisingly unfulfilled. Born in Manhattan in 1930 to Jewish parents on the Upper West Side — his father was a dentist in Harlem — the young Evans dabbled…