The Rake December 2016 - Issue 49

You might have noticed that, in the past year, many of the garments you see in The Rake are a result of collaborations with our favourite artisans and brands for our e-commerce platform. In each instance, the product is an expression of what we think is the core identity of that particular brand, refracted through our own exuberant sensibilities. Case in point: a Huntsman house tweed hacking jacket (pictured), created from a tweed woven by Islay’s oldest mill, with colours meant to express a nocturnal mood of twilight and starlight and styled straight out of Huntsman circa 1976, as if cut by the legendary Colin Hammick himself. Or a Gaziano & Girling urban commando boot — the first time they’ve married the ultra elegant, slim-waisted and elegantly elongated toe box…

This has been a big year. Christmas is just around the corner, and it couldn’t have come sooner. Whatever your political or social affiliation, I don’t think you can argue with the notion that some comfort and joy is needed. I may have my history wrong, but I am not sure anything truly bad has been carried out in the name of Father Christmas. There may be the odd fatwa on the devil, and those who don’t watch out, cry or pout, but you shouldn’t take that too seriously (but be good, for goodness sake). So I can only assume that this eccentric, colourful date in the calendar is a force for good, and we should take full advantage. I am proud to say that The Rake’s final issue of 2016…

GAVIN BOND Gavin is London-born and New York-based, dividing his time between America’s east and west coasts. He studied fashion design at Central Saint Martins, but has been in the U.S. for the past 20 years, photographing for clients such as Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, HBO, Showtime and several other major film studios and television networks. When he is not working with the world of Hollywood he istravelling back and forth to Mexico City, working with the Black Jaguar- White Tiger Foundation, which he says he is “very proud to be a part of. My dear friend Eduardo saves big felines including jaguars, tigers, leopards and lynxes from circuses, zoos and illegal breeders.” He is working on an exhibit that will be launching on a global scale in 2017 to raise…

Al Pacino is a short man in long films, a sapling looking for a city, a counter-cultural epic hero who poses and imposes against the hues of the time. In the early seventies his sad good looks broadened the under-palate of cinematic manhood: winter-wet eyes, pepper-tree nose, a mouth stilled to fine fear and a voice that sifts motes of dim music. Raised in the Bronx, Pacino developed a close relationship with his grandfather when his father abandoned him and his mother when he was two. It also infused a hungry work ethic: early jobs included shoe shiner, furniture mover, fresh-fruit polisher and movie usher (he was fired from the latter for admiring himself once too often in the mirror on the stairs). A rebel from a young age, he…

If you judge a city on numbers alone, Tokyo is a winner. The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan locale in the world, home to a staggering 37.8 million people. Fifty-one of the Fortune Global 500 companies reside in Tokyo, more than any other city, and many consider Tokyo to be the world’s greatest food destination, given that it boasts more Michelin-starred restaurants than anywhere else. There are even more vending machines per capita than in any other country, some of which sell goods such as draft beer, tinned bread and underwear. A curious visitor may feel inclined to seek out these oddities, for they offer a glimpse into quirky Tokyo, one of the city’s many sides. If your shopping habits are more conventional, though, Tokyo is home…

For some actors, the key to a role starts with the voice. For others, it’s the walk. For Adolphe Menjou, who made his debonair mark during the waning days of silent cinema in the 1920s, it was all about an impeccably waxed moustache allied to an immaculate dress suit. In an era when character was telegraphed, kabuki-like, through appearance and gesture, the moustache, he wrote, “was the mark of a villain — a rich city slicker or a foreign nobleman”, and the Pittsburgh-born, French/Irish-descended Menjou ran the roguish gamut, playing “Russian aristocrats, Italian Marcheses, and suave but unsavoury blackmailers”. He revelled in his status as the go-to guy for blithe decadence — he even played Lucifer in D.W. Griffith’s 1926 epic The Sorrows of Satan — and he avidly embraced…