tqatar issue28

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Features82 Work in Progress

Had Channing Tatum not flexed his comedic muscles by mining his stripper past, he might have been just another jock who peaked too early. An Oscar-worthy dramatic role and a surprising new hobby show that he still has unfinished business. By Rob Haskell Photographs by Collier Schorr Styled by Jason Rider

86 The Strength of Simplicity At Yves Saint Laurent’s final home in Tangier, Morocco, a stunning example of plain yet highly refined décor — and a dramatic changeup from the treasure palaces that came before. By Marian McEvoy Photographs by François Halard

90 One Nearly identical fashion for men and women makes a strong statement about the way designers are approaching gender today. Photographs by Jamie Hawkesworth Styled by Joe McKenna

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Copyright © 2014 The New York Times

ON THE COVER: Photograph by Collier Schorr. Styled by Jason Rider

Channing Tatum in a vintage T-shirt, QR410,

meletmercantile.com, and Ralph Lauren,

ralphlauren.com, Black Label sweater

(worn underneath), QR600.

Page 82

StyleNovember-December, 2014

18 T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine

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Table of Contents

Left: Inside Joerg Koch's library, a pair of sofas and a chair by Konstantin Grcic. Below: Salvatore Ferragamo coat, QR15,401.

Lookout16 Sign of the Times

The convergence of creativity, technology and big money is upon us.

20 This and That Ridley Scott hits the club; vegetables are chic; Carsten Höller’s birds; Rodarte’s rugs; funny memoirs; and more.

26 Watch Report The enduring elegance of simple chronographs.

28 Market Report Black-and-white sweaters that are anything but boring.

33 Take Two André 3000 and Fran Lebowitz chew on spicy oatmeal, two-way sunglasses and a handbag shaped like a train.

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Page 61

Quality57 In Fashion

The subtle romance of crochet and lace.

61 In Fashion Men’s wear gets a military makeover.

65 Making It Meet the unlikely 36-year-old craftsman behind Berluti’s exquisite handmade shoes.

Arena67 Business of Style

The all-American designer Michael Kors turns Shanghai into his own personal runway.

77 The Thing A punching bag by Karl Lagerfeld.

78 By Design A brutalist 1960s church is home to Joerg Koch, the editor of the Berlin culture magazine 032c.

96 Document A cheeky charades group acts out its favorite clues.


Lookout Qatar34 Market Watch Form does not always follow function; these bags defy

all rules.

36 This and That Printemps and a boy’s magical journey; Buccellati

makes a leap forward with rebranding initiatives; Jaeger-LeCoultre returns to Abu Dhabi.

40 The Perspective An exhibition by two expats titled “Liquid Portraits”

dives into complex issues with the fresh and interesting perspective of outsiders.

42 On Fashion Josep Font reimagines the revived Spanish label,

Delpozo but is consistent in his portrayal of the Delpozo woman, intelligent, poised with a particular way of relating to the world.

44 On Art Mixed media artist Tareq Sayed Rajab de Montfort

cuts an interesting figure in his progressive, sometimes controversial, body of work and trains of thought.

47 On Heritage At the Italian leather shoe brand Santoni, Giuseppe

Santoni and his master shoemaker, Silvano Sollini, tell of the brand’s determination to pass on the trade to a younger generation.

54 Artistic Pursuit The Kayys, a home-grown brand, have portrayed

lifestyle imagery that was highly relatable to women in the Gulf.

56 On Architecture Crest, designed by architect of our time Zaha Hadid, is

a piece whose technical construction is dictated by its impending moves across the globe.

Arena Qatar70 The Artist Iranian artist Shirin Neshat touches on political

issues, social taboos and feminism, all in images that are mesmerizing to the beholder, and almost as intriguing as the artist herself.

74 The Creator Filmmaker Mohamed Al Daradji focuses his lens on

war-ravaged Iraq and the untold stories echoing across its plains.

Publisher & Editor In ChiefYousuf Jassem Al DarwishChief ExecutiveSandeep SehgalExecutive Vice PresidentAlpana RoyVice PresidentRavi Raman

EDITORIALEditorSindhu NairChief Fashion CorrespondentDebrina AliyahSenior CorrespondentsAbigail MathiasAyswarya MurthyEzdihar Ibrahim Ali

ART

Senior Art DirectorVenkat ReddyDeputy Art DirectorHanan Abu SaiamAssistant Art DirectorAyush IndrajithSenior Graphic Designer Maheshwar ReddyPhotographyRob Altamirano

MARKETING AND SALESSenior Manager – MarketingFrederick AlphonsoManager – MarketingSakala A. DebrassAssistant Manager – MarketingThomas JoseMathews CherianMedia ConsultantsHassan RekkabLydia YoussefAccountant Pratap ChandranSr. Distribution ExecutiveBikram ShresthaDistribution SupportArjun TimilsinaBhimal RaiBasanta P

T, THE STYLE MAGAZINE

OF THE NEW YORK TIMESEditor in Chief Deborah NeedlemanCreative DirectorPatrick LiDeputy Editor Whitney VargasFashion Director Joe McKenna

Managing Editor John Haskins

Photography DirectorNadia Vellam

THE NEW YORK TIMES

NEWS SERVICESGeneral ManagerMichael Greenspon Vice President, Licensing and SyndicationAlice TingVice President, Executive Editor The New York Times News Service & Syndicate Nancy Lee

LICENSED EDITIONSEditorial Director Josephine SchmidtCoordinators Gary CaesarJaisy De La Cruz

PUBLISHED BY

Oryx Advertising Co WLLP.O. Box 3272; Doha-Qatar Tel: (+974) 44672139, 44550983, 44671173, 44667584 Fax: (+974) 44550982Email: [email protected] website: www.omsqatar.com

COPYRIGHT INFOT, The New York Times Style Magazine, and the T logo are trademarks of The New York Times Co., NY, NY, USA, and are used under license by Oryx Media, Qatar. Content reproduced from T, The New York Times Style Magazine, copyright The New York Times Co. and/or its contributors 2014 all rights reserved. The views and opinions expressed within T Qatar are not necessarily those of The New York Times Company or those of its contributors.

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The Kayys Resort collection 2015

Page 54


BY ROB WALKER

Sign of the TimesThanks to a convergence of creativity, technology and big money,

the Golden Age of Design may finally be upon us.

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23November-December 2014

THE GOLDEN AGE OF DESIGN has been heralded many times over the past couple of decades — four, by my count. Now, this previous momentum paired with technology, community and big business has fueled something new: an unprecedented belief in the power of design to not only elevate an idea, but be the idea.

First, at the turn of the 21st century, it became a democratic affair. Everyday objects were made more beautiful and more readily accessible, and suddenly it was no longer acceptable for things to be unnecessarily unattractive. Moment two arrived soon after, by way of products such as the iPod, which exemplified the possibility of form as actual function. ‘‘Design,’’ Steve Jobs told me in 2003, is ‘‘not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.’’ And the business world took note of what design could do for profits.

As the aughts advanced, it occurred to people that if design could make products work better, it might also be able to make the world work better. Design was heralded as a creator of social change: Magazines like Good spread the word about its impact on humanity and politics; the Cooper Hewitt museum staged a show in 2007 called ‘‘Design for the Other 90%,’’ and a popular T-shirt from the period read: ‘‘Design Will Save the World.’’ Finally, a fourth moment: The advent of social media made clear that the masses not only responded to design; they cared about it enough to speak up. A new Gap logo was attacked by online mobs, and Tropicana scrapped a redesign of its orange-juice packaging after a public rebuke.

THESE DAYS, engineering-centric Silicon Valley sees design as something that no longer just adds value, but actually creates it. Last year, Nest Labs, maker of the sleekly styled smart thermostat, was purchased by Google for $3.2 billion. This was not just a staggering amount of money for a company that specializes in household objects; it was Google’s second most expensive acquisition ever. The industrial designer Yves Béhar, who is behind the elegant Jawbone Up fitness tracker, sometimes takes equity stakes in start-ups he works with rather than payment. Instead of thinking of himself as an outside consultant, Béhar invests in companies that invest in design, banking on their future growth.

The idea that design can generate profit is now being embraced by venture capitalists, too — that rarefied class known for its relentless focus on the marketplace as the ultimate arbiter of value. The well-regarded Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers raised eyebrows last year by bringing in John Maeda, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, as a partner. The firm has noticed more designers starting companies with the help of engineers, rather than the other way around.

Kleiner’s Mike Abbott points to the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who moved from software to hardware when he founded Square, the seamlessly designed product that lets anyone take credit-card payments through a smartphone. Similarly, the home-sharing firm Airbnb’s systematic thinking and simple user interface have made it immensely popular — and earned it a $10 billion valuation. (Two of its founders are RISD graduates.) Smart design is intrinsic to its success.

‘‘People who make things generally have not been in the seat of power,’’ Maeda argues, ‘‘because they’re busy making things.’’ But he believes that’s starting to change, and that eventually people like Airbnb’s co-founders will bring design-based thinking to mainstream business practices.

THIS DESIGN MOMENT is also about a different marketplace — that of ideas.

The influential MoMA senior architecture and design curator Paola Antonelli believes that one of design’s most important functions is ‘‘to help people deal with change.’’ Her exhibitions have featured projects such as the EyeWriter, a pair of glasses outfitted with eye-tracking technology that lets a user ‘‘draw’’ with his eyes. Created for a paralyzed artist, the product is a collaboration between technologists and designers, and relies on open-source software. It has no commercial ambitions. It’s simply a sharp example of an expressive designed object.

We’re living in a time of ‘‘acknowledged urgency,’’ Antonelli says, and pragmatic fields from science to politics to business are looking

to design for ‘‘inspiration, alternative processes, metaphor and a bit of uplift.’’ (‘‘Delight’’ has become a buzzword in Silicon Valley.) As a result, design has become incredibly multifaceted in recent years, encompassing subfields such as interaction design, critical design, environmental design, social design, biodesign and service design, to name just a few. It’s become a medium for expressing ideas, raising provocative questions and addressing social and individual anxieties.

SO IS DESIGN a business builder or idea spreader? Both, often at the same time.

In earlier moments, the democratization of design was about what we could buy. Now it’s about what we can make and how we can sell. The online marketplace Etsy has redefined how small-scale makers can earn a living, or at least subsidize a creative hobby. Last year, the site hosted more than a million active shops. According to a 2012 survey, nearly a fifth of Etsy sellers considered running their creative businesses their full-time job. Crowdfunding services like Kickstarter also enable aspiring design entrepreneurs to find support for their projects. One breakaway success was an early-stage ‘‘smart watch’’ called Pebble, which could connect to smartphones, display emails and text messages and even run apps. Two years ago, without the backing of an established company — let alone venture capitalists — its founders raised more than half a million dollars in a matter of hours, eventually bringing in $10 million to develop the watch. As Maeda observed, today’s design student may be less interested in building a portfolio than in simply crowdfunding an idea.

Allan Chochinov, head of the Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts, talks about how design has moved ‘‘from the aesthetic, to the strategic, to the participatory.’’ In his thinking, the ‘‘open source’’ ideology we normally associate with certain corners of tech culture has made its way into design. Engineering and design are melding; code-y enterprises are making objects; and objectmakers are hardwiring all kinds of things with code. Young designers need to be conversant in tools like the Arduino platform (inexpensive hardware for programming interactive objects) and customizable Raspberry Pi computers (credit card-sized circuit boards that can plug into monitors and keyboards). Style, functionality and engineering are now one and the same, and even mundane objects are virtuously designed.

What is certain is that all these combined elements — style, function, social impact, creativity and profit motive — have yielded an original vision of what design is and why it matters. Design has fundamentally changed the way we experience the world, from the way we interact with objects to our expectations about how organizations are structured. It’s a new and exciting moment for design — that is, until the next one comes along.

‘People who make things generally have not been in the seat of power, because

they’re busy making things.’ But that’s

starting to change.

24 T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine24

Lookout

This and ThatA Cultural Compendium

24

From left: Alexander McQueen jacket, QR16,002, and pants, QR7,992. Marni top, QR3,422, and pants, QR3,095, modaoperandi.com. Derek

Lam top, price on request, and pants, QR3,605. Louis Vuitton jacket and pants, price on request, louisvuitton.com.

Prada jacket, QR7,682, and pants, QR6,590. Miu Miu top, QR9,139, and pants, QR6,099.

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A sleek new silhouette elevates the ’70s staple from

business-casual kitsch.

Dust Off the Leisure Suit

FASHION MEMO

‘‘Beautiful, no?’’ the Belgian artist says, pointing to a Siberian rubythroat darting around a large cage in what was once the guest room of his Stockholm apartment. Höller, known for his playful, participatory installations — tube slides that span multiple floors, rooms with giant mushrooms hanging from the ceiling — has spent the past several years filling his personal aviaries with feathered friends acquired from Belgium, Italy, Holland and Germany.

Höller also meticulously photographs his collection, tracking each bird’s development from egg to adult. ‘‘They look quite beautiful when they are older,’’ he says. ‘‘But in the beginning, they look like aliens.’’ In addition to incorporating the birds into his 2011 exhibition at the New Museum in New York, he has been making photogravures of one-of-a-kind canary crossbreeds with the Danish artist Niels Borch Jensen. ‘‘I just don’t know where it comes from,’’ the former agricultural entomologist says of his obsession. Certainly not his mother: ‘‘She’s like, ‘What kind is this?’ and I say, ‘I’ve told you like a hundred times, that’s a song thrush! It’s very easy to recognize!’ ’’ andquestionmark.com — DAN CRANE

Cuckoo’s NestCarsten Höller’s home is literally for the birds.

Cinema’s most distinguished directors don’t typically make documentaries about nightclubs — but then, Annabel’s isn’t just any club. With rich red banquettes and walls dotted with Art Deco paintings, London’s most storied members-only boîte has for decades been home to celebrity habitués like Frank Sinatra and Lady Gaga, and has become synonymous with revelry and riotous nights. In ‘‘A String of Naked Lightbulbs,’’ produced by Ridley Scott, actors, supermodels and rock stars conjure the blurry nocturnal memories they shared at the establishment — reportedly the only bar ever patronized by Her Majesty the Queen. The film focuses quite a bit on the drink of choice — claret, always claret — and the strict dress code that once kept the Beatles from getting through the door (in fairness, they weren’t wearing shoes). And while it does an excellent job of recapping the early days of the scene, it also makes a case for the venue’s enduring relevance. ‘‘I think when something is put together with that kind of affection,’’ the musician Bryan Ferry says, ‘‘it kind of lasts forever.’’ annabels.co.uk — NATE FREEMAN

Ridley Scott Hits Annabel’s

ILLUSTRATIONS BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS

ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE


GOD SAVE THE ZINE Clockwise from top right: Darren Goins’s ‘‘Big Bright Eyes

on This Big Bright Screen’’; Sumi Ink Club’s ‘‘Variety Gate’’; Ed Templeton’s ‘‘Photographs by Spot’’; Travis Diehl’s ‘‘Spiralogues’’; Sarah Soquel Morhaim’s ‘‘Year of the Ghost’’; Alex Heilbron’s ‘‘Strawberry’’; Public Fiction’s ‘‘Dispatches’’ #1 and #5.

While insurrectionary pamphlets have existed since the invention of the printing press, zines only came of age in the 1970s thanks to punk culture and cheap Xerox copying. Today, they embrace different styles (pointillism, poetry) and subjects (gay goths, Italian dogs), but almost all are still self-published in limited runs. In Los Angeles, artists are rediscovering these D.I.Y. publications as a way to experiment and showcase their work. For ‘‘Photographs by Spot,’’ Ed Templeton combines laser-printed photos of the SoCal punk and beach scenes with covers that have been Risographed — an ’80s copying technique that uses a stencil and single-color ink. Travis Diehl’s ‘‘Spiralogues’’ documents a trip to Robert Smithson’s earthwork ‘‘Spiral Jetty.’’ Sumi Ink Club, by Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara of the band Lucky Dragons, reproduces details from the illustrations they make at public drawing events. ‘‘Any way you can cheat Kinko’s is smiled upon,’’ says Jenn Witte, of Skylight Books in Los Feliz, where stapled and stitched zines are displayed on a clothes rack. skylightbooks.com — JONATHAN GRIFFIN

FEELING FOR

Zines that aren’t just for angry teens.

The vegetarian-heavy menu trend in downtown Manhattan is picking up steam, but unlike other food fads, this one doesn’t seem like it will go out of fashion. In March, Bobby Flay opened the Mediterranean-inspired Gato, where the best-selling item is a kale and mushroom paella. In SoHo, stylish diners are flocking to Navy, where Camille Becerra incorporates ingredients sourced from a Pennsylvania farmers’ cooperative into a vegetable- and seafood-based menu that includes charred snow peas with peanuts, chili and basil. Later this fall, Amanda Cohen will move Dirt Candy, her popular meat-free restaurant, to a larger space on the Lower East Side, while Jean-Georges Vongerichten is expected to open his newest spot, a vegan and vegetarian eatery for ABC Home, in early 2015. At Narcissa, in the newly revamped Standard East Village hotel, John Fraser has made vegetables from the hotelier André Balazs’s upstate farm the basis of a fantastic meal. ‘‘Chefs aren’t thinking about how to make ‘vegetable’ dishes anymore,’’ according to Flay. ‘‘They’re making interesting, healthier dishes in general, and vegetables have become more a part of that.’’ gatonyc.com, navynyc.com, dirtcandynyc.com, abchome.com, narcissarestaurant.com — LAURA NEILSON

Center-Stage VegetablesFOOD MATTERS

To shape the narrative of each fashion collection, the Rodarte designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy manipulate the structure of their textiles, subjecting fabrics to hand-painting, distressing and even burning. For the Rug Company, the sisters are applying their love of 3-D textures to five new styles of carpet — including porcelain, ivy and marble motifs — that echo some of their clothing’s most memorable patterns. Taking into account ‘‘how every thread interacts with each other and how the fibers read in different rooms and light,’’ they ‘‘worked on shades and textures that would make a whole world for someone.’’ From QR448 /sq. ft., therugcompany.com — EVIANA HARTMAN

LOOPED IN Laura (left)and Kate Mulleavy in front of their ivy trellis rug. Below: a cobalt motif in knotted wool and silk.

Lookout This and That

Dream Weavers

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Lookout This and That

CLOSE READ

Four comedians bare their souls (and other bits) in their upcoming memoirs.

On beauty: ‘‘If you are lucky, there is a moment in your life when you have

some say as to what your currency is going to be. I decided early on it was

not going to be my looks. I have spent a lifetime coming to terms with this idea

and I would say I am about 15 to 20 percent there . . . Believe me, blond hair can take you really far, especially with

the older men. It can really distract from the face.’’ (Dey Street Books)

On parenting: “I enrolled them in a small private school that Meryl

Streep and Dustin Hoffman sent their kids to . . . There wasn’t a dry eye in

the playground as Ms. Streep handed over her lunches to her kids and,

with the brave determination of her Oscar-winning performance as

Sophie, made the choice to get in her Volvo station wagon and

drive away.’’ (HarperCollins)

On performance: ‘‘The number-one rule in show business is: Never follow

a singer with a singer. The number-two rule in

show business, incidentally, is: Never look Barbra

Streisand in the eye when she is walking onstage, or

during foreplay.’’ (HarperCollins)

On modesty: ‘‘Directly showing family and neighbors and co-workers that

you’re proud of the way you live accomplishes something on a core

level that intense advocacy sometimes can’t. So for the most part your style is to lead by example, to show ordinary people — Oprah, say — around your

home, to . . . see what kind of family the four of you really are. And let Oprah

take it from there.’’ (Crown Archetype)

For more than a decade, Scott Corey’s by-appointment-only showroom has been Santa Fe’s best-kept fashion secret, with big-name designers making pilgrimages to his warehouse to source denim, cowboy boots and Southwest antiques. With the jewelry designer Julienne Barth, Corey has opened Santa Fe Vintage Outpost, a new shop along the historic East Palace Avenue, just a block down from where the Manhattan Project physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer once kept an office. The adobe storefront houses Mexican peasant dresses, wool blankets and reworked indigo Mali cloth alongside Barth’s own creations and jewelry from Zuni, Navajo, Hopi and Santo Domingo tribes. ‘‘If it’s interesting and unusual,’’ Corey says, ‘‘it’s in here.’’ santafevintage.com — KATE DONNELLY

Vintage AmericanaWHEN IN SANTA FE

New Orleans has long been regarded as a buffet for culture enthusiasts: jazz aficionados, food obsessives, architectural purists, literary junkies and those seeking enlightenment in the form of wanton decadence. Missing from the menu, however, has been a marquee art festival. That changed in 2008, when the city hosted America’s largest international biennial, Prospect.1, to help bolster its post-Katrina renaissance. Kicking off this month is the exhibition’s third installment, Prospect.3, during which museums, public parks and galleries dotting scrappy St. Claude Avenue will be transformed into a showcase for nearly 60 artists from around the world. Curated by Franklin Sirmans of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Prospect.3 aims to be a reflection of the city’s singular spirit — a show that mixes the canonized with the newly celebrated (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Camille Henrot, Lucien Smith) to explore ideas about the American South, crime and punishment and the region’s embrace of Mardi Gras culture. ‘‘New Orleans is a place where you have this high contrast between the clean and the dirty, the good and the bad, the old and the new, those who have and those who have not,’’ Sirmans says. ‘‘It’s really a microcosm of our whole country.’’ Oct. 25-Jan. 25, 2015, prospectneworleans.org — DAVID AMSDEN

URBAN RENEWAL Clockwise from above: Will Ryman’s steel sculpture, ‘‘Icon,’’ 2011; Camille Henrot’s sound and video installation, ‘‘Grosse Fatigue,’’ 2013; Lucien Smith’s oil painting, ‘‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,’’ 2013; the curator Franklin Sirmans.

A different kind of carnival rolls into the Big Easy.

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Lookout

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHARLIE ENGMAN

Watch Report

Don’t Work So HardAfter years of ever-complicated mechanisms, the simple

chronograph still gets the job done — elegantly.

Top left: A. Lange & Söhne Double Split, QR467,491, alange-soehne.com. Boss suit, QR7,264, hugoboss.com. Brunello Cucinelli shirt, QR2,257. Top right: Chopard L.U.C. 1963 Chrono, QR161,802, us.chopard.com. Marc Jacobs suit, QR7,264, marcjacobs.com. Brunello Cucinelli shirt, QR2,294.

Bottom right: Montblanc Meisterstuck Heritage Pulsograph, QR125,611, montblanc.com. A.P.C. jacket, QR2,203, apc.fr. Gucci shirt, QR1,074, gucci.com. Bottom left: Longines Single Push-Piece Chronograph, QR39,165, longines.com. Michael Kors jacket, QR1,438, michaelkors.com. Brunello Cucinelli shirt, QR2,148. S

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Lookout

The basic crew goes supergraphic.

Black and White Sweaters

Market Report

Clockwise from top left: Ami, QR1,329. Comme des Garçons Shirt, QR1,547. Topman, QR291. Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane, QR4,915. Alexander McQueen, QR5,443. Kent & Curwen, QR1,802.

Dior Homme, QR3,640. Krisvanassche, QR2,541.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOANNA MCCLURE

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FIFTY YEARS AGO in Omaha, Neb., Cedric Hartman came up with a design that foretold the future of lighting: a slim metal floor lamp with a small triangular shade that all but disappeared in a room. Unlike the attention-grabbing lamps of the time, with their decorative bases, bulky shades and ambient lighting, Hartman’s slender design directed light only where needed. ‘‘The goal was to make a lamp that didn’t force you to look at it during the day but got the light where you want it,’’ he says.

The result was the 1UWV, which had the functionality of a task lamp but was attractive enough to put in the most stylish homes. Within a year, the Museum of Modern Art selected the lamp to be part of its permanent collection, and it quickly became a favorite of high-end decorators as well as architects and perhaps the most widely imitated lamp in the world. Flip through books on Billy Baldwin, Mark Hampton, Hugh Newell Jacobsen or virtually any interiors magazine and you will find it. Like a game of ‘‘Where’s Waldo?’’ you will see it, discreetly peeking over the arm of a chair, or perched quietly next to a sofa.

Today, due to the advent of tiny, flexible LED strips, a lamp can take on almost any form. But back then, such a low profile was revolutionary. Despite its delicate design, the 1UWV is so well made that it lasts for decades, holding its value like a vintage Mercedes or a Rolex. In person, the quality of the lamp, down to its elegant, transparent spherical switch, is immediately

apparent. The act of unwrapping a beautifully packaged Hartman feels almost ceremonial, as if you are revealing something precious and exquisite. (It actually comes with white gloves, the kind worn by handlers of expensive artwork.) Its subtlety makes for incredible versatility. In traditional settings, it’s a jewel-like accessory; in contemporary spaces, it is understated and architectural.

The perfectionist in Hartman has mixed feelings about the 1UWV today. He believes technology has made it possible to address some of what he considers the lamp’s shortcomings. ‘‘In my view, it isn’t well enough articulated and I was always bothered by it getting too hot,’’ he says. To him it was a rough draft, or a memorable early role for which he’s been forever typecast. In subsequent years, he’s continued to design lights, in addition to sofas, chairs and tables — ‘‘quiet, good-looking pieces,’’ as he describes them — though the 1UWV is still his best-known work.

Hartman, like his designs, does not call attention to himself. He still lives in Omaha, preferring to quietly focus on his craft. Despite his aversion to self-promotion and his physical distance from the centers of the design world, he has succeeded not only in building a profitable business, but also in making a product that stands on its own merit. At 85, Hartman has no intention of retiring. ‘‘I’m thinking about an LED component for the 1UWV,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m still working on getting it right!’’

A Light TouchCedric Hartman’s understated floor lamp

became an immediate design classic when it launched in 1966 — and has never fallen from favor.

BY TOM DELAVAN PORTRAIT BY ANDRES GONZALEZ

Design Report

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REBRIGHT IDEA Hartman’s iconic

1UWV lamp is surprisingly low profile, just thick enough to conceal the long bulb and supported by a metal tube only half an inch wide. Top right: Hartman in his Omaha, Neb., loft.


Lookout

With circular tops and clean lines, a midcentury workhorse

enters the modern era.

Tray TablesMarket Report

Clockwise from left: Crate & Barrel, QR542. e15, QR8,265. Holly Hunt, price on request. NVDRS, price on request. Design Within Reach, QR3,258. B&B Italia, from QR2,614. Roche Bobois, QR5,389. B&B Italia, QR6,397.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOANNA MCCLURE

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Lookout


This is ultra-awesome to me. There are a lot of sexual references

in this, and I have that in my art as well. I think it comes from being a kid and fantasizing about things.

I remember when Giuliani tried to close Ofili’s show at the Brooklyn Museum. Even for Giuliani, who was endlessly horrifying,

it was a shocking thing to do. But if this guy uses actual elephant dung in his work, then perhaps I’d rather just have a

picture of a picture in my house.

A retrospective of the Turner Prize-winning English painter (Oct. 29-Feb. 1, newmuseum.org).

It’s a fun desk thing if you work at an office. But I’m not home a lot, and everything already comes up on my smartphone.

This is doing the same job, but just making paper that you have to throw away.

I don’t know if I need that much variety in one pair of shades. You got a lot of flipping around, a lot of joints. It’s like a fire truck with a driver

in the front and a driver in the back.

Just taking a spoon to it and eating it was kind of brutal.

I know everybody’s on a health kick, but I always go back to the foods I grew up with

as a kid: Now & Later, Laffy Taffy and Starburst.

If I saw a girl in the club with it on, I’d be like, Oh, that’s pretty interesting. But I don’t know if I’d pay for that

much for it. I wear an orange hat every day and it costs, like, a dollar.

Fran Lebowitz

Bad Seed’s Chili Granola, which goes with tacos or yogurt (QR40, mouth.com).

I was vastly entertained that the Internet, which is killing newspapers, now gives you something where you

can print out a little newspaper. It’s like a hunting rifle that makes little deer.

I’m not a granola purist — I do not consider eating to be a field of ideology and scholarship, unlike everyone else.

But ‘‘chili’’ and ‘‘granola’’ are two words that should never go together.

You can tell the idea came to him as if it was the concept of gravity — ‘‘And then it

came to him!’’ — but it’s too adorable for me. I’d be more

interested in a train in the shape of a handbag.

American essayist, understated style icon and gavel-banging ‘‘Law & Order’’ judge whose next book is coming together so

slowly that ‘‘I could write in my own blood without hurting myself.’’

Atlanta-based rapper, actor and professional Polaroid shaker who is best known as one half of

the pioneering hip-hop duo Outkast. He recently starred as another musical icon, Jimi Hendrix, in the biopic ‘‘Jimi: All Is by My Side.’’

André 3000

Created with Pharrell Williams (QR47,077,

Dover Street Market, New York).

A web-connected box that spits out news headlines, text messages, daily schedules and most-liked Instagram photos (QR725, littleprinter.com).

They’re two-way sunglasses, all right — they stay on one way, they fall off the other. I only

have one pair of sunglasses because they were so expensive. It was either one and an

apartment, or two and live outside.

Moynat’s Train Bag

Tiny Printer

Chris Ofili Show

From Kaibosh and the Norwegian clothing line Haik (QR892, kaibosh.com).

Reversible Sunglasses

Take TwoA dual review of what’s new.

Spicy Granola

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New It bags take on unpredictable shapes defying

form and function.

Shape Shifting Market Report

Clockwise from top left: Perfume Bottle Clutch, Lanvin, QR9,392; Monster Baguette, Fendi, QR8,962;

Cinnamon Wood and Resin Clutch, Nathalie Trad, price on request; Braque Gun Sling Clutch, Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane, QR4,273; Cabas Tote, Celine, price on request;

Joni Fringe Clutch, Michael Kors, QR3,259; Powder Pink Clutch, D’Squared2, QR2,531;

Crushed Ice Hexagon Clutch, L’Afshar, QR3,938.

BY DEBRINA ALIYAH

Lookout Qatar

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Perhaps because of its melancholic winter weather and the impending promise of a new year with revived resolutions, Christmas is often depicted as a magical and festive time, especially for the young. This holiday season, Printemps and Burberry tell the story of a young boy who dreams of an adventure crossing the English Channel from London to Paris by floating through the night sky on a magical umbrella with his beloved teddy bear. Dubbed “The Magical Christmas Journey” the story is brought to life through the illustrations of Tom Haugomat, a Paris-based illustrator famed for his minimalist works that invite different interpretations from his audience. The piece brings together the silhouette of the Printemps store, the skyline of London, the Burberry woman dressed in the house’s iconic trench coat, and the little boy floating over the Parisian rooftops with his bear, narrating the story through the illustrator’s perceptive eyes. “The collaboration and concept work took more than a year,” says Frank Banchet, the artistic director of Printemps. The boy’s magical journey becomes the central theme for the department store’s decor and artistic lead for the festive season. “The windows will, for the first time, feature an interactive element to allow visitors to explore the Christmas ambience,” Banchet says. In homage to the fairy tale adventure, Burberry also launched a special collection for Printemps based on London icons. DEBRINA ALIYAH

Keeping With the Spirit of the Season

A Legacy of Jewels

The Regalia jewelry suite, inspired by imperial elegance and comprising ethically-sourced Mozambican rubies set in platinum, will be exclusively revealed at the Jewellery Arabia exhibition in

the Kingdom of Bahrain for the first time this year. Held under the patronage of His Royal Highness Prince Khalifa bin Salman

Al Khalifa, the Prime Minister of Bahrain, the exhibition will take place at the Bahrain International Exhibition and Convention

Center from November 18-22, 2014. SINDHU NAIR

Fabergé, the iconic artist jeweler, presents a one-of-a-kind rococo high jewelry egg pendant crafted in 18-carat yellow gold, emeralds, rubies

and multicolored gemstones.

Tom Haugomat’s illustrations showcase the brand’s seasonal story.

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Lookout Qatar This and That



After successful collaborations with the Shanghai and Venice Film Festivals, Swiss watch brand Jaeger-LeCoultre continues to support the creativity of filmmakers from the Gulf region in a four-year partnership, returning to Abu Dhabi for the eighth Abu Dhabi Film Festival, held at the Emirates Palace from October 23 to November 1, 2014. Jaeger-LeCoultre

welcomed Carmen Chaplin, friend of the brand, as the guest of honor during the film festival, one of the largest and most influential festivals dedicated to film in the

Middle East. Chaplin belongs to a long line of artists who have a particular kinship with the art of film; her grandfather was Charlie Chaplin, the renowned actor and director of the silent film era. Carmen Chaplin followed in his footsteps as an actress, director and writer. “When they are made at a high level, watches are

like a form of art — it takes so many people to make one watch, it’s kind of like a film, I suppose,” says Carmen.“When I went to the manufacture I was fascinated by the amount of people involved and how everyone has a specific job that they do, just like on films — someone does the makeup, others do the hair and others the production, and all of it together creates something beautiful when it works well. The

making of a watch truly does mirror the production of a film.”For the opening night of the festival, guests watched Emirati director Ali Mostafa’s new film A to B. The occasion also saw the brand celebrate its iconic

Reverso, presenting a personalized Reverso watch to the winners of the Best Actress and Best Actor of the Year awards in the narrative competition. REBECCA ANN

PROCTOR

A Crazy Love for Technique

Spending much of his childhood in the family’s jewelry workshop, it was the redolence of the technical process that sealed his love for all things gem and metal. Luca, a third-generation member of revered Milanese jewelry

family the Buccellatis is passionately protective of the fiercely independent legacy of his family’s brand in a landscape increasingly dominated by holding groups. “I know people think that we are crazy. We are crazy,”

Buccellati says, describing the lengthy and extensive work that the brand pours into each individual piece, some jewelry pieces taking up to two years to complete. The Buccellati boutique on Via Monte Napoleon is a Milanese

institution that has, for close to a century, represented the aristocratic process of bespoke fine jewelry and refined silversmithing techniques. After years of under-the-radar marketing efforts that have drafted the brand into

a sort of elite old-school club, Buccellati made a leap forward with rebranding initiatives last February including the introduction of new collections for a younger market. “The artisanal detail and dedication

behind the pieces does not change, of course,” Buccellati says. The atelier is powered by about 65 craftsmen, many of whom, like the Buccellatis themselves, have worked from generation to generation for the house.

“They embody the values of our family. The honeycomb process and the fur-like effect silverwork are all DNA of our designs which are drawn from archival works of my grandfather and the artistic and cultural history of

Italy,” he explains. Mario, Luca’s grandfather, has a distinct design influence in the house’s collection till today; one of its bestselling silver pieces is a

mirror frame by Mario that was drawn from the window of Milan’s Duomo. Available at Ali Bin Ali, Royal Plaza, Doha. DEBRINA ALIYAH

The hypnotizing bouquet of solid gold being melted into liquid is one olfactory

experience of which Luca Buccellati swears ‘there’s just nothing else like it’.

The Art of Creation

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT WWW.JAEGERLECOULTRE.COM

SHINING STARS:Buccellati enamel bracelet; bracelet tulle and pink sapphire earrings.

From left: Sencha De Groot, Wonho Chung, Lea Sfeir and a guest at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival; Duomètre à Quantième Lunaire.


MILVIN GEORGE, Managing Director, Middle East, Turkey and India for Officine Panerai, the luxury sports watch brand, loves India and is on first-name terms with many Bollywood stars. “Hrithik (Roshan) loves our watches. He is a Rado Ambassador but he chose to wear a Panerai in his latest blockbuster, Bang Bang,” he says. “We do very well with Bollywood. Aishwarya (Rai Bachchan) bought Abhishek (Bachchan) a Panerai; he owns two of our watches now.” George was in Mumbai two weeks ago; two days earlier he was in Bangalore and Chennai and then traveled down to Hyderabad and he will be going back to Mumbai in a week’s time. “The India market

means huge business for us,” explains George.

The luxury watches segment is not only becoming popular in India, it seems to be a

global phenomenon. According to a 2014 study by the World Watch Group, global

consumer demand for luxury watches grew by 5.7%. Global

demand was fueled once again by BRIC markets with the highest year-on-year increases in China (+59.4%), Russia (+20.4%) and India (+12.0%).

Established mature markets such as Germany (-9.2%), the

United States (-7.9%) and Japan (-5.5%) experienced single digit

demand decline, whilst Italy (+8.8%) and the United Kingdom (+3.1%) saw growth

in interest last year compared with 2012. Digital Luxury Group Founder and CEO David Sadigh comments: “Consumers from

around the world are more and more falling in love with fine watches, especially women. The segment currently represents the largest untapped opportunity, both in Asia and the Americas.”

Explaining the Middle East market, George is confident about the luxury segment for watches always seeing growth in the region. He is truly impressed with Qatar and the vision the leaders seem to have. “I have been coming to the country for a while and have seen changes; it is a pleasure to see how the leaders have planned strategically for sustainable growth,” says George. “Qatar’s new airport is impressive. In the retail segment, more malls are in the final stages of completion, like Festival City, Qatar Mall, expansion of Villaggio Mall, and major ones at Lusail City. These are

A Horologic ExperienceTQatar talks to one of the foremost experts in the

art of watch marketing about the brand he represents and the history that comes with it.

BY SINDHU NAIR

Watch Report

CONNOISSEURMilvin George, Managing Director, Middle East, Turkey and India for Officine Panerai, keeps an eye open for trends, but Panerai has a very focused DNA which is all about keeping to its traditional silhouette; the PAM00507, the latest in the Panerai series, the Luminor Submersible 1950 three-day power reserve with enhanced power in pink metal.

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exciting times for the country and for us to grow with the prosperity.”“Qataris are known for their consumption of luxury, and this comes mostly from

understanding the high value of brands and the history behind them,” he says. While not touching on the global financial implications of high luxury brands, George

says that Panerai has done exceptionally well in the past few years. Panerai has 13 boutiques in the region (Middle East, Turkey and India), with one boutique in Villaggio in Doha and a presence in many multibrand boutiques. The seasonal shows in Paris, Milan and London are to fashion what the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH), held annually in January, is to watchmaking. It is here that the prototypes of watches are previewed by buyers and media and then committed to launch dates.

“Our watches are all handmade and hence we do not commit to big numbers for production,” says George. The latest addition to the Officine Panerai family is the Luminor Submersible 1950 power reserve with enhanced power in pink metal, which adorns George’s wrists. “The watches come with an automatic mechanical movement. It is made of 237 components and it features the second rest device,” he says. “The satin finish of the movement and the engravings all showcase detailing that comes with the Italian heritage and the mechanical precision of the Swiss.”

Like most luxury brands, the watchmaker comes with a lot of heritage. Giovanni Panerai opened his watchmaker’s shop on Ponte delle Grazie in Florence in 1860, and filed

for his first patent as early as 1937 to create a new material to meet the military needs of the Royal Italian Navy, for which the company had already been supplying high-precision instruments for a number of years. Thus Officine Panerai created Radiomir, a radium-based powder that gives luminosity to the dials of sighting instruments and devices. Later Radiomir was replaced by Luminor, a less hazardous material.

“In 1993 our collaboration with the Navy ended and Officine Panerai presented a collection of three series of

limited-edition watches to the public: the Luminor, the Luminor Marina and the Mare Nostrum, which drew inspiration from the historical models created for Second World War commandos and immediately became highly sought-after items for many collectors and enthusiasts. We released 1,000 watches for the public which were sold out almost immediately, because till then the watches were available only for the Navy and had cultivated an exclusive status,” explains George. “In 1997 we were acquired by the Richemont Group.”

The next milestone was when Officine Panerai launched its first in-house movement, in 2005 — the P.2002, a hand-wound caliber with GMT function and an eight-day power reserve, similar to the Angelus movements used in the 1940s. “The movement is the heart of a watch and to have your own movement is the most important step for any watchmaker,” he says.

While Panerai seems to be a watch that is efficiently immersed in nautical history and mechanical precision, does it ever feel the need to follow trends or create innovations to match the needs of the market? “Panerai does not follow trends,” he says. “We stay close to our DNA and learn and innovate around it. We offer new materials, new cases, like the latest model is with a higher percentage of copper, which gives it a pinkish hue; the handmade colorful straps and the innovations in movements and caliber are the maximum we can innovate since our followers come to the brand not for its trendiness but for its vintage value, the core of its heritage.”

The women’s watches segment has gained focus in the luxury sector, and Panerai does keep an eye open for these customers, but without sacrificing any of its archetypal typescripts. “The watch is a masculine watch and its size is bigger than most of the available watches in the market,” says George. “But we do have women who love to wear Panerai, and they come from a sports background. We have women customers in Qatar too, typically educated and well-traveled Qatari women. We have launched colorful straps to keep our women customers attracted.

“The demographics of a watch connoisseur have changed drastically, with younger people going in for luxury buying much earlier than before, and also showing an interest and a depth of understanding for the fine art of watchmaking,” he says.

‘In 1993 we released 1,000 watches for the public which were sold out almost

immediately, because till then the watches were available only for the

Navy,’ says George.

COLOR BURSTOfficine Panerai in color straps for women customer.


The World of TemporalitiesLiquid Portraits by Christto and Andrew, curated by Misha Michael, dives into complex issues that are interpreted as

unpretentiously as the artists imagined.

BY SINDHU NAIR

The Perspective

IT IS A CURIOUS CONFLUENCE: a Canadian curator of Indian origin at a cultural art center that was on the verge of being shut down due to lack of funds, and an artistic (second such) venture from a Puerto Rican and a South African. But they have one common thread of connection — they are all based in Qatar, part of the country’s majority population of immigrants. They are here, as of now. That is what the exhibition, Liquid Portraits, currently showing at the Katara Art Center, is about — the change that seems to be a constant for an indefinite period of time; social identities and the concept of identity in today’s global context. In a way, the exhibition is also symbiotic with the Center itself, and how it is being revived by a cultural wave that has engulfed the country.

Meet Misha Michael, the assistant curator at

THE COLLABORATION From left: Misha Michael, the curator of Liquid Portraits, with the two artists, Christto Sanz and Andrew Weir;“Permanent Temporalities” mixed media work by the two artists, priced at QR16,000.

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Katara Art Center making her curatorial debut in Doha, and the two artists, who prefer to be known by their indistinct first names, Christto and Andrew — Christto Sanz from Puerto Rico, who is completing a master’s degree in Visual Communication and Photography in Spain; and Andrew Weir, who is currently completing an M.A. in Museum and Gallery Practice at University College London’s branch in Qatar. The artistic duo produces photography, mixed media objects and videos exploring social identities, the media and reinterpretations of history.

“Christto and Andrew’s practice evolves as a symbiotic process strengthened by a cross-pollination of their differing backgrounds,” says Michael. “They do not criticize but rather highlight two parallel dialogues — a local one and an expatriate one — which weave together a complex network of cultures and subcultures evident in most Gulf and MENA contexts.

“It is a juxtaposition of technology; the relationships with people around you, from a national to the laborer; to how the history of the country is interpreted, and how one relates to the formation of cultures, which varies according to personal interpretations,” explains Michael.

While the exhibition explores the many layers within the country — of Qatari nationals and the transient population, and the mostly nonexistent coming together of these

communities — the exhibits are themselves powerful, thought-provoking, even provocative works that transcend material classification.

The highlight of the exhibition is an installation called “Permanent Temporalities”, a mixed media presentation of a pair of lower limbs with the feet fitted in traditional Arab sandals, standing straight on concrete blocks, with fairy lights fitted below the sandals. “The concrete block signifies construction or economic prosperity. With prosperity comes luxury and riches, and that is shown through the lights below the sandals,” says Michael, which she insists is her own interpretation of the duo’s pursuits. While Christto and Andrew don’t contradict the curator’s reading, they add: “This piece shows movement in conjunction to change, and in a way it also implies progress.” Another shocking entry in the photographic exhibit is a lady of questionable Arab origin, holding a tray with a single eye, in all its gruesome detail. The lady also sports an eye patch. While this piece arouses the same repulsive curiosity that we would associate with a Damien Hirst work, this is the one piece that had been sold, according to Michael, just a week into the exhibition — a rare (but not first) sale for the art center and for Christto and Andrew as reasonably new entrants in the field of art (though they have exhibited in the UAE, Asia and Europe). The Lamda print on photographic paper is titled

“Wakeful Dreams” and has a price tag of QR12,000. Another equally stirring work that could be paired with this same print is an eye, another Lamda print, called “Melting Realities”, which makes us question the process that makes the eye seem so real. “The eye, for the artist, conveys the country’s vision or the thought process behind the vision,” explains Michael. The artists use other facets to show displacement, like the models used: from the working class, laborers or even helpers, most of them vaguely familiar because of the anonymity associated with them. Economic progress is depicted by buildings forming the background, while historic interpretations touch on the pearl diving occupation of early inhabitants who are being replaced by this same anonymous worker class. Michael explains: “Scavenged objects are transformed into cement molds and regular people into models through photography to subvert and further notions of value, commodification and occupation. As a result, each object and character within their photographs becomes a symbolic reflection of these layers found in Qatari society.”

While Michael explains all the concepts and contextual implications of each of the artists’ exhibits, the silent duo look on, almost as if capturing every visual to be reproduced later as another work of art, in another curious but thought-provoking representation.

‘Christto and Andrew’s practice,’ says Misha Michael, ‘evolves as a symbiotic process

strengthened by a cross-pollination of their differing backgrounds.’

AN EYE FOR AN EYE?Far left and clockwise: Wakeful Dreams is an eerie Lamda print of an Arab woman looking straight ahead, daring the world; The Factory of Good Intentions is an artist-commissioned work that explores the domestic worker’s world; Modern Promises show the progress in the country and a foreign worker; Mimetic Gesture juxtaposes the old pearl diving tradition with the modern outlook.


TRAINED IN ARCHITECTURE, which is seemingly becoming a prerequisite for fashion designers these days, Josep Font has been merging the triptych of art, fashion and construction since his debut at the revived Spanish label Delpozo in 2012. For spring 2014 he conjured Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s portrait of a gypsy woman; this fall it was Italian painter Duilio Barnabe and words from the retro-futuristic novel “Logan’s Run”; and for next season, Font’s third at the creative helm of Delpozo, the late abstract painter and theorist Josef Albers’ “The Interaction of Color” forms the vital beginnings of its spring/summer 2015 collection, supported by inspirations from the land art of Nils-Udo and the 19th-century glass creations of

Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. His academic background has helped Font gain insight into volume, space and proportion. “They are very relevant elements that are applied throughout each season, and their combination is key in my designs,” he says. The combination has Font exploring colors as not only a visual ingredient but also an architectural element for spring 2015: “On one hand you can find bold graphic, and on the other, designs of a more subtle palette,” the designer explains. The appointment of Font — beloved by pivotal fashion editors for his refreshingly romantic perspective on New York Fashion Week, and by retailers for his commercial viability — to Delpozo, after the passing of the label’s founder Jesus del Pozo

Craftsmanship is set to make a comeback in Delpozo’s forthcoming

2015 collection, with Creative Director Josep Font once again taking

inspiration from the world of art.

The Interaction of ColorOn Fashion

BY DEBRINA ALIYAH

NEW TIDES Josep Font’s appointment to Delpozo has heralded a revival of the brand in international markets.

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in 2011, was meant to herald a fresh start with a new creative vision, but the artistic genius of the late designer lives on in Font’s body of work. “Out of respect, we did not want to change what he had done but him and I, there’s many similarities between the two chapters,” Font explains. There’s an uncanny resemblance between the way Font works and Delpozo’s style: the draping on mannequins, the emphasis on clear creative inspiration, the consistent analysis in color and fabric, and the quest to make perfect patterns to create the voluminous silhouettes that are signature to the brand. The legacy is easily recognized in the current collections: pieces with subtle yet complex draping, patterns rich in geometric shapes, structured pleats and richly-crafted lapels. This near-obsessive accent on craftsmanship and the construction of every single piece finds a parallel in haute couture work, giving rise to Delpozo’s new term for what they do: prêt-à-couture. It is hardly surprising, given that Font was already a star at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture prior to his move to Delpozo. The label’s atelier works with the vision of realizing couture craftsmanship in small production quantities, instead of pursuing the exclusive “one time only” badge associated with haute couture. “The collections become available to more than one customer, and it is highly relevant to the modern fashion landscape where women now always look for something personal to set them apart,” Font tells us. Delicate fabrics like bobbinet tulle that are traditionally reserved for haute couture are juxtaposed with modern technical materials, meshing together the time-honored and the new. Development into this new prêt-à-couture niche also involves exploring the emergence of a growing new market, an affluent and design-conscious generation of women who are aficionadas of unique aesthetics, a generation that is increasingly prevalent in the Middle East. Font has been consistent in his definition of the Delpozo woman “of intelligence, poise, and a particular way of relating to the world”. These elements accurately describe some of his most supportive advocates from this region, the

likes of fashion influencers Deena Abdulaziz and Najla Maatouk. In just three seasons the Arab market has surged to become one of the biggest buyers of the label; the ss15 collection will be available in three multibrand boutiques in Qatar alone, including the celebrated Per Lei Couture.

“The Arabian woman has within her nature a constant search for detail. Embellishment is relevant to the extent of how she dresses, and we extend these elements in our pieces,” Font explains. Delpozo only has two flagship stores for now — a brand new stateside outpost in Miami and another on its home turf in Madrid. The business focus, however, is still on the clothes and the establishment of the label’s characteristic features. “Each collection is an evolution of the previous,” Font muses. “I feel that the future for fashion is to bring back craftsmanship into fresh and modern designs.”

ART IN COLOR Looks from the label’s spring/summer 2015 collection that drawon Josef Alber’s work.

Font has been consistent in his definition of the Delpozo woman as having ‘intelligence, poise, and

a particular way of relating to the world’.


IT IS NOT OFTEN that an Arab artist speaks up, and speaks up loudly, about issues of Arab identity and religion, a sphere so taboo that it is always easier just to feign opinions. Perhaps because of his liberal education and an in-depth knowledge of Arab history thanks to his pedigree, De Montfort is daringly eloquent in his quest to make his voice heard.

The Tareq Rajab family in Kuwait are founders of the privately-held Tareq Rajab Museum, which houses the biggest collection of traditional clothing from the Arab world and over 30,000 items of Arabic calligraphy, Islamic art, manuscripts and jewelry collected by the family over the past two generations. Spending his childhood and teenage years with the artifacts in the museum and reading the books in the library formed the foundations of what informs De Montfort’s work today. “For the first few years of my life I didn’t have many friends. The only things that were real to me were the things in the museum. I would talk to the jewelry or the manuscripts or customs. I will always be grateful to my family because I grew up touching and feeling these things, which other people will only ever see behind a glass,” De Montfort says.

The private museum holds an unparalleled and pivotal collection relating to the artistic and cultural history of the Arab world. Calligraphy, manuscripts, miniatures, ceramics, metalwork, glass, jade, wood and stone carvings, and objects produced in the Islamic world over the past 250 years like costumes, textiles, jewelry and musical instruments, form the extensive exhibition. “My grandparents bought a lot of ethnic jewelry from across the Middle East, Asia, Far East Asia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe to build the museum collection. They were also able to acquire very large collections of bedouin silver, which at that time was thought to be worthless,” he recounts. In 2001, the Tareq Rajab Museum opened Dar El Cid Exhibition Halls, aimed at promoting art and culture through lectures and exhibitions. The gallery received a tremendous

Mixed media artist Tareq Sayed Rajab de Montfort, born in Kuwait and now based in

London, cuts an interesting figure in his progressive, sometimes controversial, body

of work and trains of thought.

A Quest for BeautyOn Art

BY DIANA FARID

ARAB LEGACY Left: De Montfort channeling a sheikh in a self-portrait. Right: The artist explores heritage elements in The Kashmiri Room.

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BODY OF WORK Clockwise from top: Visualising the concept of contemplation versus adoration; merging of Arabian motifs; reimagining a famous Arab poem, “The Perfumed Letter”.

‘I do believe the East and West meet in me,’ says De

Montfort.


response, prompting the museum to launch another interactive-based arm on Islamic calligraphy to trace the development of the Arabic script.

De Montfort considers himself lucky to have had a family with such an affinity for culture and heritage, because the museum has played a crucial role in shaping the art he himself creates today. “I wish to reflect an Arab identity that is cosmopolitan in its own right, in a development of its own traditions and history and stories, yet looking ahead, but still embracing the past,” he says. At the age of 17, De Montfort moved to Britain, where he studied art at the University of the Arts London. Since then, the context for all of his work has reflected his dual Arab Islamic and Western mindset. He seeks to passionately embrace his fascination with both cultures, trying to merge them in a continuous quest to redefine beauty. His work achieves this by mixing aesthetic ornamentation and styles to mirror both Western philosophy and the legacy of the Islamic Golden Age of intellect and learning. “I wish my work is a statement that is a paramount issue for Arabs today and also an act that keeps me faithful to a movement of art that influences my work — 19th-century Romanticism and the Pre-Raphaelites, who believed in looking backwards in order to move forwards,” he elaborates.

He chooses various types of art that contain components of his own identity, and uses his own body as a canvas to reflect his beliefs and work. “Everything I do in my work has to be authentic; since my social-economic background is exactly the narrative I discuss in my work, so I like to use my own body in my art. Although Rudyard Kipling said that East is East, West is West, and they shall never meet, I do believe they meet in me,” De Montfort claims.

The artist is currently helping to promote his family museum’s collections abroad, meeting with scholars, academics and important figures in the Islamic museum collection world. “I am in the process of planning a large-scale exhibit with the museum’s collections in London and Qatar,” he announces

He lives in awe of the Golden Era of Islam, where scholars rediscovered the lost wisdom of the Western Classical period and translated texts that would seep back into Europe and catalyze the European Renaissance. “We gave modernity to the West, and this is a very important part of my job as well,” De Montfort explains, adding that his main inspiration is derived from the Prophet Mohammed’s words that “God is beauty and God loves beauty.” “The type of work I am trying to do as an Arab Islamic artist who belongs to a global society is to let the world understand Islam in its plural kind of way. A lot of ideas that may seem new go back to the old days of Islam, but is brought forward in a fine art context.”

De Montfort mixes aestheticornamentation and styles to mirrorboth Western philosophy and the

legacy of the Islamic Golden Age ofintellect and learning.

ANIMAL INSTINCT De Monfort favors using his own self in his artwork.

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Cutting-Edge CraftsmanshipIt can take up to five years for Santoni’s shoemaking

apprentices to hone their skill, now a rare art form that is increasingly lacking in craftsmen.

BY REBECCA ANNE PROCTOR

On Heritage

THE DNAGiuseppe Santoni, CEO, Santoni, encourages the collaboration between tradition and present-day innovation.

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IN THE LOWLANDS of Italy’s Marche region, between the two hilltop cities of Macerata and Corridonia, is an area known as the home of Italian leather manufacturers as well as shoes and handbags. It is here, in a small

workshop of approximately 15,000 square meters, that Italian footwear brand Santoni creates its cutting-edge and high-end shoes. And while the luxury goods industry is increasingly dominated by factories that mass-produce retail products, Santoni prefers to keep its traditional manufacturing techniques

alive through young and eager-to-learn apprentices — a mission that reflects the brand CEO Giuseppe Santoni’s desire to marry tradition with modernity. “The world is moving fast, but we’ve held on to our heritage,” says Silvano Sollini, the master shoemaker and technical manager at the workshop.

Sollini’s attention to detail is vital to the success of Santoni. “Passing on our knowledge is the key to being able to continue to offer a product that is regarded as a work of art,” he says. Here, craftsmen devote endless hours to creating Santoni’s double monks, Derbys and classic brogues, among other styles, incorporating materials such as baby calf skins, deer, iguana, suede and exotic baby crocodile. Everything is handmade — even the color, which is one of the company’s distinctive features. Santoni’s craftsmen spread it out with their hands on each pair of shoes, using the velatura technique, which involves a series of steps to create the desired hue.

It all started in 1975 in Corridonia with Andrea and Rosa Santoni’s passion for shoes. Today the company is present in around 70 countries and makes over $60 million per year. It employs more than 450 artisans who use traditional shoemaking techniques to create the label’s well-known shoes. While men’s shoes were originally the core of the business, nine years ago Santoni expanded the collection to include women’s shoes, in both casual and formal styles. Santoni’s ready-to-wear shoes come with Goodyear-welted soles and blake stitching. The company also offers custom-made and bespoke services; the former provides customization of the internal lining, colors and skins, while the latter uses cedar shoe trees to create a lasting model that is ready three months after a measurement is taken. The company has also recently introduced the sneaker into its family of styles, providing it with another avenue for creation.

Giuseppe Santoni, who became Santoni’s CEO in the ’90s after his father, encourages the collaboration between tradition and present-day innovation. “I have a very young team of designers that travel the world in search of fresh influences,” says Santoni. “Through interacting with different cultures they are able to anticipate new trends and create contemporary collections.” However, this forward-thinking ideology should be weighed against the fact that in the 40 years that Santoni has been making shoes, it has never allowed the efficiency of mass production to alter its more time-consuming and traditional craftsmanship. Santoni’s mission is to uphold the tradition of fine shoemaking, but endow each pair of shoes with a cutting-edge look. It is this goal that he has relayed to craftsmen such as Sollini.

Nothing is automatic at Santoni. The artisans work more or less the way they did during the ’70s — from eight o’clock in the morning until six in the evening, with two hours for lunch. At the helm is Sollini, who began making shoes at the age of 9 and took his first job at 13. A patient yet firm teacher, he supervises his workers with a watchful and attentive eye. “Think three big workshops where up to 450 people work together every

‘The complexity of this kind of organization is unbelievable,’ says Sollini. ‘Most of all, as you can imagine, we need to count on many people,

especially young ones, who are ready to work in this unique way.’

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CONCEPTTO PRODUCT

A pair of Santoni shoes can take

up to six months to create; the process

is explainedin detail by Silvano Sollini to his pupil,

Matteo Valle.


day using their hands,” he says. From concept to the finished product, a pair of Santoni shoes can take up to six months to create. The process begins with the selection of skins, which are then cut and hand-sewn. The pattern can then sit for around 10 to 15 days, during which time the soles are cut and hand-finished. After the shoe has been assembled and the sole has been stitched, the shoe is colored by hand according to the velatura technique, which ensures every pair of shoes has a unique and deep shade of color. The last step is polishing the shoe. A reverence for quality is found in every step of the process — even the thread is soaked in beeswax to make it more resistant. But this kind of work takes years and years of experience. “The complexity of this kind of organization is unbelievable,” says Sollini. “Most of all, as you can imagine, we need to count on many people, especially young ones, who are ready to work in this unique way.”

The company requires people who are not only skilled with their hands but also passionate, concentrated, committed, and sensitive to quality. What has been observed among newly-hired staff is a kind of natural selection process. The company is open to hiring new people, but many of them give up after the training period.

“If they expect a mechanical, repetitive job, they immediately understand this is not the place,” says Santoni.

Despite the difficulty of the craft, Santoni is still able to find young and motivated people who want to learn the art of shoemaking and who are ready to work closely with an older generation of skilled artisans. And passing on knowledge to the next generation is the only way to maintain Santoni’s famous quality. “It’s for this reason that we firmly believe in internal training, and Giuseppe Santoni set up a school and a workshop, especially for the most complex competences of shoemaking, such as the cutting of the leather, the coloring, and the stitching, all by hand,” says Sollini.

Santoni’s School of Crafts serves as a way to maintain tradition, and it is here that the older generation of craftsmen shares its skills with a younger generation, keeping traditional Italian shoemaking techniques alive. “I believe our approach is very important for society, as we pass on a richness and heritage that is truly and authentically Italian,” adds Giuseppe Santoni. “I’m extremely proud of being Italian, and luckily Santoni reflects many of the values that people usually attribute to Italy: authenticity, passion, quality, design and creativity. Our country has been through some difficult times over the last few years, but we still maintain our values, which are strong in our private and business life.”

But how do today’s luxury consumers understand the value of traditional shoemaking? With so many brands to choose from today, not all of them made with Santoni’s finely-honed craftsmanship, there’s a risk that buyers might search elsewhere for a brand that looks similar but isn’t so expensive. Giuseppe Santoni asserts that this is not the case. “Luxury consumers are more and more informed and educated about quality, so it’s important to give them not only a dream, but also a concrete value,” he says. “Santoni conveys an incredible value for money, according to customers’ opinion. Our product is expensive, but our customers are ready to pay for it as they know they will receive an even higher value for their money.”

Sumptuous velour, leather tassels, patchwork, silk and black patent are just some of the materials that imbue historical shoe models with a contemporary and ever-creative look. “In terms of quality, we work to offer only the best shoe possible,” says Sollini. “In terms of design, ours is a product with a distinctive style that is elegant and contemporary at the same time.”

“I have a very young team of designers that travel the world in search of fresh influences,” says Santoni.

PRECISIONSilvano Sollini teaches the art of shoe-making to Matteo Valle, an apprentice in the factory.


EIGHTY-SIX internationally-renowned fine art and antique dealers, mostly French, converged on Paris between September 11 and 21, 2014 to take part in the invitation-only Biennale des Antiquaires, a showcase of culture, savoir-faire and heritage, where they presented more than 5,000 rare and beautiful objects worth in total about $40 billion. This major event in the global art market calendar, which debuted in 1962 and this year welcomed its 27th edition, provides an international stage for exhibitors seeking to attract the elite of wealthy art collectors and connoisseurs from around the world. Far from the mood of austerity in Europe, the prestige art market proved it was in the pink of health, especially for exceptional artworks and luxury jewelry.

The interior design of the Biennale being an incredibly important part of the fair, French decorator Jacques Grange was tasked with recreating the feel of the Château de Versailles’ lush, perfectly-manicured gardens (the work of the talented 18th-century French gardener

André Le Nôtre) over 14,000 sq. m of exhibition space under the iconic glass dome of the Grand Palais. It included carpets resembling flower beds, an imposing scented fountain, trellises, arbors and potted topiary.

Handpicked galleries like Kraemer and François Léage from Paris, Marlborough from New York and Gisèle Croës from Brussels presented their rarest masterpieces, ranging from archaeology and Asian art to 18th-century furniture and modern paintings. Mikaël Kraemer, fifth-generation antiquarian of the Paris-based, family-run Kraemer Gallery, which holds the world’s largest privately-owned collection of 18th-century French furniture and objets d’art, said: “It’s a great time now to buy French antiques, which are undervalued. Today, our clientele are the most powerful and richest people in each country and city. They are much younger than in the past — mainly in their mid-40s, when they were 20 years older not too long ago. Before, you had to work all your life before acquiring an antique

Parisian RendezvousThe Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris proved once again to be the perfect occasion for fine jewelry brands to introduce their

creations to another type of audience: the art-loving crowd.

BY NINA STARR

The Marketplace

THE MARKET Below and right:French decorator Jacques Grange recreated the feel of the Château de Versailles’ lush, perfectly-manicured gardens for the Biennale des Antiquaires.

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or artwork. The market has changed, which is positive. Many of our collectors mix antique furniture with Old Master or Impressionist paintings, or modern or contemporary art, and this gives a certain cachet to each of their art pieces. If you mix top quality in every category together, you get very wonderful, eclectic results.”

While jewelry has always been a part of the Biennale, it used to showcase mainly vintage jewels. This year, however, haute joaillerie was placed in the spotlight, with 14 contemporary fine jewelry houses including Boucheron, Bulgari, Cartier, Chanel, Chaumet, Dior, Piaget, Siegelson, Van Cleef & Arpels and Wallace Chan — the highest number in the Biennale’s history and comprising one-sixth of the exhibitors — displaying their ultra-luxury collections, including many one-off creations. In addition to Giampiero Bodino from Italy and David Morris from England making their first-ever Biennale appearances at the 2014 edition, visitors saw the return of Alexandre Reza and Graff Diamonds after absences of 14 and 12 years respectively.

Hands down the most improved collection since the 2012 Biennale, Piaget surprised us with 125 creations that marked a true turning point for the brand. Commemorating its 140th anniversary this year, Piaget decided the time had come to devote an intense effort to its

jewelry sector, which it hopes to grow from 30 to 50 percent of its business, investing heavily in larger, top-quality precious stones of significant importance rather than fine stones. Jewelry Marketing Director Jean-Bernard Forot noted: “The Biennale is almost the single most important high jewelry event for Piaget, as it is apparent that each participating brand is in a class of its own.” Gold is Piaget’s metal of preference, and its €409,000 18-carat pink gold necklace with imposing turquoise beads and marquise-cut diamonds featuring the ‘palace’ motif (a traditional technique used by Piaget since 1966, where the upper part resembles a wild silk-like iridescent ribbon and the bottom is made from hundreds of interwoven links, providing suppleness) required 400 work hours, testifying to the brand’s dedication to preserving the skill of exquisite gold craftsmanship within the manufacture.

Biennale veteran Cartier, a participant in the fair since 1964, presented a panther medallion on a magnificent platinum necklace set with blue sapphires, onyxes and diamonds by master glyptician (or gem-cutter) Philippe Nicolas that illustrated the meticulous art of micromosaics, a centuries-old tradition born in Italy. To create the micromosaic in volume was a major challenge requiring thousands of work hours, much more than the time needed on even a very complex necklace.

ALL THE GEMSClockwise from top left: Bulgari jewelry being crafted; three stages in the making of Cartier’s panther medallion; the medallion is set in a platinum necklace with blue sapphires, onyxes and diamonds.

‘It’s a great time now to buy French antiques, which are undervalued,’ says Mikaël Kraemer, antiquarian of

Kraemer Gallery.

Chanel, meanwhile, at the Biennale for its fifth time, presented 87 creations characterized by audacity and inspired by the freedom cherished by Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, referencing the Café Society movement that spanned the decades from the 1920s to the ’60s. Having invented a completely new lifestyle, the period marked a break with all existing social conventions. Chanel’s €1.3 million Café Society necklace, associating blue and yellow sapphires, orange garnets, tsavorites, spessartites, red spinels and diamonds, shone in an interlacing of primary colors like light, airy mobiles, evoking a stained-glass window or a sort of flower, and representing a new vocabulary at Chanel in terms of color and design.

Celebrating its 130th anniversary, Bulgari showcased approximately 100 unique pieces “to establish Bulgari’s creativity as a blend of innovation, use of unusual gemstones (in shape and color) and excellent craftsmanship,” according to the firm. “The Biennale is one of the most important events in the world; the most refined and expert art collectors from all over the world attend this event,” remarked Senior Jewelry Director Giampaolo Della Croce. Divided into three main themes — Diva, Serpenti and Musa — the Bulgari collection included a €17 million necklace set with more than 1,100 carats of impressive emeralds. Detachable diamond and ruby clips on the sides could convert into a pair of snake earrings.

In reinterpreting Peau d’Âne (Donkeyskin), a little-known French fairy tale of a young princess and her quest for love, Van Cleef & Arpels revisited its favored themes of feminine

figures, magic and romance via a delightful mix of precious and hard stones. A brooch in the shape of a dragonfly with thin transparent wings set with multicolored pink sapphires illustrated its innovative Mystery Setting technique, where see-through rather than opaque stones are used and the metal structure completely disappears from view. Three years and several hundred craftsmen in both in-house and independent Parisian high jewelry workshops were required to make the collection. President and CEO Nicolas Bos commented: “There is, really, a French and Parisian tradition of high-end jewelry. Paris remains today the capital of high jewelry in terms of craft and technique. You find great jewelers in different countries, but there has been such a strong tradition here of innovation in high jewelry that is very difficult to surpass.”

Completed just in time for the Biennale, a necklace featuring a stunning 125.30-carat cabochon-cut Burmese sapphire paired with a 33.14-carat natural pearl by the Bond Street jeweler David Morris was proof of the brand’s uncanny ability to track down the most fabulous stones of the very best colors and cuts. Jeremy Morris, son of the founder, had perhaps the best explanation for the centrality of such treasures to this year’s Biennale des Antiquaires: “Jewelry is an art form. Each piece incorporates many artistic mediums, from drawing and painting to creating the design and crafting the jewelry itself, like a wearable sculpture. And jewelry not only speaks to the designers and allows them to express themselves, but also allows wearers to say something about their personality.”

Van Cleef & ArpelsPresident and CEO Nicolas Bos commented: “There is, really, a French and Parisian tradition of

high-end jewelry.”

CRAFT AND TECHNIQUE Clockwise from left: a Bulgari necklace being set; the €17 million Bulgari necklace set with more than 1,100 carats of impressive emeralds; Bulgari’s Elizabeth Taylor collection.

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IN A PRISTINE WHITEWASHED LIVING ROOM, two ornately overdressed girls share a laugh while indulging in servings of chocolate cake from a lavishly scrumptious dessert spread. The setting, a familiar social ritual in this part of the world, struck an instant chord with local girls, while the deliberately decorative fashion choices quickly got questions popping: “Where can I get my hands on it?” These campaign images made their appearance on Instagram mid-2012, and rang in the debut of the label The Kayys. The photographed Ramadan collection was a sell-out success, with client-label communication all done via social media.

Fast forward to a hundred thousand followers and five collections later, The Kayys have now established stockists and far-reaching sales medium beyond their initial online guerilla sales tactics. But the label remains an undeniable case study in the power of social media not only to promote but to conduct commercial transactions — a unique approach that is widespread only in the Gulf countries. It is, nonetheless, less simple than just uploading images and waiting for the likes to pour in. The Kayys portrayed lifestyle imagery that was highly relatable to women in the Gulf, and created appropriately aspirational clothing to match these ideals. Every post is calculated and

produced. “It is a very personal space to communicate what is inspiring us and to express the vision of the brand,” says one of the designers behind the label, Hend Al Subaey. “It was a lengthy process but was important to create the exact image that we envisioned for the brand.”

Designed by three Qatari sisters, Hend, Ghada and Maha, The Kayys certainly have found the magic formula in capturing the spirit of the modern Arab woman in their demi-couture offerings. The collections illustrate different strong thematic messages, yet find parallels in their feminine and visually attractive aesthetics. It sometimes feels as if the pieces were created purely for the editorial experience, though the luxurious and comfortable fabrics suggest otherwise. The coming together of three personalities into one creative direction has become the trademark for the label. “Each of us has an input, which is why we believe our clothing is successful. There’s lots of love and care into assimilating three minds,” Hend says. Ghada bagged the prestigious Young Designer award as part of The Kayys at the 2013 Qatar Arab Woman Awards, while Maha graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar last year with a final collection that quickly caught the attention of local fashion retailers. “I like imperfections; I like the tension, and my designs walk the line between drama and discipline,” Maha says of her creative vision.

Each piece from the collections is produced in the label’s atelier in Doha, with a dedicated focus on the hand-sewn crystal embellishments that are integral to the DNA of The Kayys. The demi-couture concept, though costly

MODERN ARABLeft: statement sweater using ‘Arab English’. Below: sketches of the Resort 2015 collection.

The story of a home-grown brand, The Kayys, that captures the spirit

of the modern Arab woman.

The Power of Three Artistic Pursuit

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and challenging, allows for the sisters to ensure each piece is perfectly executed and to cater to customization requests from clients. “Quality execution is key to enable us to compete internationally. Social media has introduced us to the world beyond this region and we must show what Qatar is made of,” Hend explains. The mushrooming of influential multibrand boutiques in the region, the likes of Symphony and D’NA, has also helped The Kayys gain ground with fans away as far as New York City; trend forecaster Alyson Cafiero was recently spotted in the label’s ensemble at the opening of the Dance and Fashion Exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology Museum. “The community is very supportive; a lot of our sales come from local girls who make it a point to wear regional designers,” Hend says.

The Resort 2015 collection, which was previewed at D’NA Doha a couple of months back, finds its inspiration from the celestial elements of the universe — the sun, the moon and the stars, all noteworthy fodder for the embroidery and embellishment work the label is known for. Primarily in pastel colors, the

garments evoke the luxe sportswear vibe and feature a statement element of Arabic letters on key pieces. “‘Dream on, Dreamer.’ We phonetically spelled out this phrase in Arabic to reflect a trend in the Gulf that we call ‘Arab English’. It’s a little something of our culture that we wanted to inject into the collection,” Hend says.

The stark contrast between modernity and tradition

comes into play again in the collection’s campaign images featuring a model with a neon wig zigzagging through an Old World gilded living space. “It was shot in the home of a friend whose family are big collectors of antiques, which they have preserved impeccably,” Hend says. The sisters then took the collection to Paris, where they shot the pieces on models against iconic landmarks in the city. The inclination for theatrical presentations to reinforce the lifestyle image have served the label well; its spring/summer 2014 launch, which presented live models as art installations, is still one of the most talked-about events in Doha.

The success of the clothing line has prompted the introduction of jewelry and accessories as part of their next season’s offerings. Via Instagram, black-and-white teasers of geometric prints have begun to give fans a little taste of what’s to come. “It is a two-way thing. We get to gauge what attracts the most attention, and it is as important for us to listen as it is to create,” Hend says.

The coming together of three personalities into one creative direction has become the trademark for the label.

OFF THE RUNWAY The label’s Resort 2015 collection was shot in the home of a friend who is an avid collector of antiques. Far right: the sisters working in the atelier.


OVER THE POOL IN the center of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A’s) John Madejski Garden, a translucent and almost invisible structure reflects rays of sunlight on the opening day of the London Design Festival 2014. Depending on one’s perspective, the sight could be considered reminiscent of a Hollywood movie depicting an alien spaceship floating over the pond, the metal piece presenting a stark contrast to the serene garden landscape of the landmark museum building that is over a century old. In this sense the structure, named ‘Crest’, has fulfilled the primary requirement of the pivotal installation for the annual Festival — to provide a talking point to attract and engage visitors.

This is only the beginning of the journey for the installation, which will ultimately find its permanent home surrounded by our Arabian desert in Dubai. Crest, designed by an architect of our time Zaha Hadid, is a piece whose technical construction is dictated by its impending moves across the globe; its shape will also evolve with its travels to come. “It was designed with these specifics in mind, that it needs to be taken apart and to be reassembled, so the process of creating the piece is based on its journey,” explains Melodie Leung, the associate at Zaha Hadid Architects who is overseeing the project.

As with most of Hadid’s designs, the installation was an experiment to test the limits of form and material and find a perfect equilibrium. The curved structure came to life with the assembling of two layers of 8mm pre-stressed solid aluminum. Through an experiential collaboration between the architects and engineers on the project, the key was to achieve a precise form with tension on the surface of the shell structure with the thinnest possible layer of metal. “It was a new process for us,” Leung explains. “There were a lot of testing and editing of many different versions before we arrived at this. But there’s still plans to continue further research on this method.” At the V&A’s pond, the large flat plate of metal was lifted until it found its own self-supporting ideal shape — the perfect mechanical line that was intended in the research. Once over the pond, Crest becomes an interaction tool between the sky on one side and the rippling water on the other, or as Hadid puts it, “a compelling interplay with light and reflection”.

Crest was commissioned with the intention that it will become the centerpiece outdoor installation for the new ME Hotel Dubai that is due to open its doors early in 2017. The hotel, a first for Zaha Hadid’s firm in that it is handling both the exteriors and the interiors of the building, also marks a new frontier for the Melia Hotels group in establishing its new ‘ME by Melia’ lifestyle brand, which has recently seen openings in London, Madrid, Mallorca and Ibiza. “The Crest signifies a connection between East and West, and what Hadid has

done is experimental and boundaries-pushing in terms of design, something very pertinent to ME,” says Tony Cortizas, the company’s vice-president of brands.

“In Dubai the Crest will continue to explore the relationships between the fluid and Cartesian, solid and void, surface and structure inherent within the hotel’s design,” Hadid explains. This comes about, she says, in the contrasting philosophical elements between the building’s exterior and interior, the vibrant lifestyle-driven pulse of the ME brand with the sleek and serious lines of the Opus building in Dubai’s business-driven Burj Khalifa district.

“It is very stark, very binary and very solid on the outside,” explains Christos Passas, Associate Director of Zaha Hadid Architects. “But on the inside, it is everything that is between the spectrums of black and white.” What started as a project to design buildings in the business district became a full-fledged constellation of mixed-used functions, including offices and serviced residences as well as the hotel. “We wanted to take it forward with the Opus building because it is a very efficient and interesting building in itself,” Passas says. Hadid’s design remit will extend to signature furniture that is purpose-built or selected by the architect herself.

With a three-year timeline from now until Crest anchors down in Dubai, there seems to be an exciting yet uncharted journey ahead for the installation, both as a visual exhibit and in the continuous evolution of the structure itself. “You can always feel the structure reacting if you touch or handle it, but it will always settle back into that ideal form based on where the two ends land like a sheet of paper,” Leung explains. “But there’s endless possibilities to experimenting with length and shapes.” While Hadid herself envisages the piece emerging from the fountain at the center of a pool as part of the new hotel, the fluidity and engineering of the installation may mean that it just finds its own shape and fate as it settles in the eternal sunshine of Dubai.

From West to East inPerfect Equilibrium

A structure that first came to life against the backdrop of a historic red-brick London landmark will find a new

incarnation in a modern Arab city as Zaha Hadid’s ‘Crest’ journeys from West to East.

BY DEBRINA ALIYAH

On Design

PAPER THIN ‘Crest’ as the highlight piece of the 2015 London Design Festival.

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Lookout Qatar


Kindred Spirits

Lace and crochet are sisterly acts of devotion to the intricacies of fashion.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW KRISTALL

STYLED BY JASON RIDER

In Fashion

Burberry Prorsum dress, QR10,176, burberry.com.



Left: Sacai Luck jacket, QR4,245, and skirt, QR2,796, barneys.com. Right: Loewe sweater, QR3,240, barneys.com. Chloé skirt, QR11,997.

Quality In Fashion



Missoni dress, QR10,140. Sharon Wauchob dress (worn underneath), QR2,549, sharonwauchob.com.



Left: Louis Vuitton dress, about QR22,574, bra and underwear, price on request, louisvuitton.com. Right: Dior dress, QR34,953. Cami NYC slip, QR502, caminyc.com. Allen Edmonds x Club Monaco shoes (left), QR1,329, clubmonaco.com. Grenson x Club Monaco shoes (right), QR1,420, clubmonaco.com.

Quality In Fashion


Quality

Prada vest, QR4,879, prada.com. Margaret Howell pants (worn throughout), QR2,257, margarethowell.co.uk.

Course of ActionIn luxe fabrics and elegant cuts,

the utilitarian appeal of military wear is more than rank and file.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ARNO FRUGIER STYLED BY JASON RIDER

In Fashion



Quality In Fashion

Calvin Klein Collection shirt,

QR3,459. Hermès belt, QR4,187, hermes.com.



Ralph Lauren Black Label

coat, QR7,992, ralphlauren.com.


Quality In Fashion

Bottega Veneta sweater, QR4,551, bottegaveneta.com. Vintage belt.

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ELEVEN YEARS AGO, JEAN-MICHEL CASALONGA, a goofy mutton-chopped kid from Perpignan, France, was studying for an advanced degree in physics when he decided to switch career paths and become a shoemaker. He probably shouldn’t have been able to just talk his way into an apprenticeship at Berluti, one of the most prestigious men’s shoe companies. But young blood is rare in the world of bespoke footwear, and Casalonga is, if not persuasive, at least persistent. ‘‘I had to call the guy who was in charge of the workshop every week for months,’’ he recalled. ‘‘Finally, he just said, ‘Come in for a few weeks, and we’ll see.’ ’’

Casalonga was 23 when he started as an unpaid intern. He hid his work from his parents for a year and a half, and tried to balance shoemaking with his studies. He had always loved building things as a child — tree houses, compasses, a leather case for his pocketknife — and first saw shoemaking as an extension of this tinkering impulse. ‘‘I just wanted to learn for myself,’’ he told me at Berluti’s timeworn workrooms in Paris, off the Champs-Élysées. But this extracurricular activity quickly became an all-consuming passion. He dropped out of school and spent five years learning the approximately 250 precise steps needed to make a single pair of Berluti shoes, eventually becoming the house’s

youngest maître bottier, or master shoemaker, at age 30 in 2008. In a sense, Casalonga’s story is just another version of the artisanal

epiphany that has led many others of his generation to cast off their parents’ white-collar career expectations and dedicate themselves to making things — be they pickles or violins — from scratch. But not all new-age artisans have Casalonga’s client list. Creating custom shoes for Berluti means catering to the needs of some of the most image-conscious, cocksure, swaggery men on the planet. These peacocks are easy to parody, and their special requests don’t help matters: the African dictator who reportedly spent around $85,000 to have a pair of Berluti shoes stitched with pearls; the unsubtle Lothario who requested that a pair of women’s breasts be tattooed onto his vamps and was politely asked to take his business elsewhere. Such masters of the universe needn’t bother to come in to a Berluti boutique; the company sends Casalonga to size them up wherever they may be — a palace in Riyadh, a yacht moored off Monaco.

Berluti, which has been owned by the French luxury conglomerate LVMH since 1993, has expanded in recent years, adding custom suits and a ready-to-wear collection to its offerings, but shoes — bespoke shoes, specifically —

A YOUNG SOLE Casalonga, 36, in a traditional leather shoemaker’s apron in front of sculpted lasts in Berluti’s Paris workshop.

BY STEPHEN HEYMAN PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRANÇOIS COQUEREL

Making It

The Shoemaker’s ShoesLike a growing number of his generation, Jean-Michel Casalonga

is interested in old-world artisanship over mass production. Meet the master craftsman behind Berluti’s exquisite bespoke shoes.

Quality

Quality Making It

remain a cornerstone of the brand’s prestige. Casalonga has made them out of hand-oiled Venezia leather, but also beaver tail, python and shark. He has made derby shoes and riding boots, and golf shoes that cost more than golf carts. His job has turned him into a student of masculine insecurity. He has given a boost to short guys who want to be taller, and a little extra toe for tall guys who think their feet look comparatively puny. He knows the lining fetishists: the Japanese clients who want a little flash when they de-shoe at a restaurant in Ginza, the Arabs who need their wingtips to stand out from the pile at the mosque. He has studied the foot bones — metatarsals, phalanges, etc. — and can tell if you play soccer or tennis, if you spend most of your days standing or sitting, if you’re a frequent long-haul flier and will need to account for swelling. ‘‘Shoemaking is a relationship. You start with somebody touching the feet, which is something a bit intimate,’’ he said.

A typical pair of Berluti custom shoes, designed by Casalonga or one of the company’s other two master shoemakers, takes 50 man-hours to construct over a period of at least six months. They start at about $7,000, and can run much higher. There is a fitting — six to 12 measurements are made, for volume, width, weight-bearing — for the last, a model foot precisely carved out of hornbeam. Casalonga carves the lasts on a paroir, an appealingly medieval tool sourced from Paris flea markets — it’s essentially a giant machete attached at one side to a workbench. In his heavy leather apron and thick-rimmed glasses, Casalonga wields it expertly, slicing off shavings of hornbeam in great big sweeping motions, while constantly referring back to his indecipherable measurements and pencil notations.

‘‘It’s a bit like a sculpture,’’ he said. ‘‘For me, we work in the way of making the foot more beautiful than it is.’’ The last is used to make a prototype — a fully functional shoe, made of second-rate leather — which goes out to the client and is then cut up and marked for further adjustments. More carving to the last is followed by hand-grinding the finer details with a coarse file called a rasp, and then sanding the rough parts smooth. Finally, the soles and uppers are constructed around the last, painstakingly stitched together by hand

using pig hair wrapped in seven strands of linen. The finished shoes are then colored, also by hand, with Berluti’s blend of mineral dyes.

Everything about Casalonga’s life is anachronistic, from his job to his choice in music (Northern soul) to what he drives (a 1961 Vespa that he meticulously restored himself). He lives in the Latin Quarter, because he finds it refreshingly uncool, and when he’s not working, retreats to his personal workshop near his parents’ place in Perpignan, where he is now restoring a classic Citroën 2CV, the iconic French ‘‘deux chevaux.’’ ‘‘My wife says it’s a nightmare to go shopping with me, because I’m always examining the construction of everything, wondering how it’s built and if I could do it better,’’ he said. In the kitchen, Casalonga doesn’t cook, but he peels. ‘‘I peel everything with a knife. Tomatoes, grapes. Have you tried a peeled grape? It’s so good.’’

Suffice it to say, Casalonga loves shoes: He owns 50 pairs and describes himself unironically as a ‘‘shoe addict.’’ Still, he sees choosing his particular line of work as something of an accident. ‘‘What I really like to do is work with my hands. I came into shoes and I still love them, but it could’ve been tailoring or something else.’’ Even in other superluxury men’s wear companies, he now has contemporaries, like Angelo Di Febo, who became Brioni’s youngest-ever master tailor — one of only four men to hold that title — at age 27. ‘‘Ten years ago I would’ve said we will be the last ones,’’ Casalonga said. ‘‘But now I can say definitely there will be a new generation. They don’t want to be bankers or office workers. They want to make things. So it can be shoes, it can be suits, it can be furniture, a boat.’’

Casalonga was recently in Hong Kong, where a powerful Chinese client desired a pair of driving shoes that would look like fashionable loafers but perform like Formula One racing boots. (He made Casalonga test-drive his McLaren to drive home the point.) Casalonga said experiences like these make for good stories, but not much else. ‘‘I don’t want to sound blasé, but this life traveling around, meeting customers, is more funny than exciting.’’ He’d rather spend the day at his paroir, carving.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE The process of making

Berluti bespoke shoes, from an initial anatomical mold and

measurements (top left) to a finished custom

alligator shoe (far right). One pair takes 50 man-

hours and at least six months to design.

Casalonga has studied the foot bones — metatarsals, phalanges, etc. — and can tell if you play soccer or tennis, if you spend most of your days standing or sitting, if you’re

a frequent flier and will need to account for swelling.


An American in Shanghai

BY NICHOLAS HARAMIS PHOTOGRAPHS BY KA XIAOXI

Business of Style

Michael Kors takes his one-man show — glamorous fashions, zingy one-liners, crazed fans and all — on the road.

‘‘HERE, TAKE A FAJITA.’’ Michael Kors spins the lazy Susan like it’s the Wheel of Fortune so that a starchy circle lands in front of me. ‘‘Add a little bit of onion to it. Some hoisin. Put a little cucumber on that duck skin — turn it into a dietetic delight!’’ The 55-year-old American designer arrived in Shanghai from New York yesterday and, despite a bit of jet lag, he’s in good spirits. He’s currently on the wave half of the wall-and-wave mentality he’s adopted over a lifetime of travel. ‘‘You hit a wall,’’ he says, pantomiming the impact, and moving into a fluid, rolling-with-the-homies arm motion. ‘‘After that, you ride the wave.’’ This is Kors’s first trip to the city, where he’s come to open a glistening, two-story flagship. He will also host a thousand style-savvy guests (including the actors Camilla Belle, Freida Pinto and Hilary Swank, who have been flown in for the occasion) at his label’s first-ever hyper-immersive, multimedia runway show in an airplane hangar an hour’s drive away. But right now, he’s focused on food. Picking at another dish, he says, ‘‘Ooh, I love crystal shrimp!’’ His smile widens the way it does when he’s about to crack a joke. ‘‘You know her, right? The drag queen from Nashville? She’s friends with Won Ton Consommé!’’

He shoots a look at his husband and business partner, Lance LePere, who met Kors while interning at his Paris office. ‘‘What color are the walls, Lance?’’ Scanning the empty, ornate main room of the Dragon Phoenix restaurant, LePere says, ‘‘Um . . . Ladurée?’’ Kors shakes his head. ‘‘You must be exhausted. I say it’s Claridge’s.’’ Kors raises an eyebrow as if he’s just taught everyone an important lesson on globalization. ‘‘The world is connected,’’ he says. ‘‘Ladurée turned into Claridge’s, which is really Tiffany, and Audrey Hepburn just wafted by!’’

It’s this limitless reserve of campy one-liners that has made Kors such a pleasure to watch for 10 seasons as a judge on the fashion competition series ‘‘Project Runway,’’ which helped propel his business into a billion-dollar empire. The show is also why, on the other side of the world, he can’t cross

the street without running into a fan — or a knockoff of one of his coveted handbags.

After dinner, while exploring the Bund, a city-center boardwalk surrounded by oddly shaped skyscrapers with bright lights casting rainbows along the Huangpu River, Kors is stopped multiple times — often by smartly dressed women in their 20s,

MISTER CONGENIALITY Michael Kors on the terrace of his suite at the Peninsula

hotel, overlooking the famous Bund, a scenic

waterfront destination in central Shanghai.


Arena Business of Style

who, ironically, recognize him by the aviators he wears anytime he’s out in public, even at night. He gamely poses for photos — almost always with his arms at his side, superhero-style, and always with that toothy showbiz smile. He absentmindedly hums ‘‘Slow Boat to China,’’ a pop standard from the ’40s that’s been covered by his idols Liza Minnelli and Bette Midler. ‘‘Everyone is so young here,’’ he says. ‘‘I feel like Methuselah.’’

The following night, Kors arrives at his new shop on Nanjing Road, not far from Tory Burch and Abercrombie & Fitch stores and just across the street from where Chairman Mao’s former home has been turned into a museum. He’s here to cut a ribbon, to christen the place, and Miranda Kerr was invited to help. The store is packed with photographers. ‘‘They must be here for Miranda,’’ he says, bounding off with that arm-swinging, sideways walk he uses to close out his runway shows into the crowd.

Kors’s origin story in the world of fashion is about as American as apple pie — or, as was the case for a Jewish boy growing up in suburban New York, Sunday-night Chinese. His ‘‘liberal and out-there’’ mother, a former model who attempted to try out for the Philadelphia Eagles football team (‘‘at 128 pounds, she wasn’t what they had in mind’’), was loving but far from doting, allowing her young teenage son to take unchaperoned weekend trips into the city with friends. There wasn’t a time when he didn’t care deeply about theater, fashion and the theater of fashion. According to legend — and nobody loves to mythologize Kors more than he does — he designed the dress for his mother’s second wedding when he was 5 years old. At 16, instead of going to his prom, he stopped by ‘‘to watch the red carpet arrivals,’’ and then

headed off to Studio 54, where he was a screwdriver-drinking regular in ‘‘Olivia Newton-John ‘Physical’-era’’ outfits. A short stint in acting school was followed by a shorter one at the Fashion Institute of Technology; he dropped out after nine months to work at Lothar’s boutique, whose owner gave him the chance to display his own designs. Soon after, Kors was discovered by Dawn Mello, Bergdorf Goodman’s fashion director at the time, who set his career on the right path, and by 1981, at the age of 22, his clothing was being sold in stores around the country.

Even as a child, he was drawn to the rush of adventure. When, in grade school, his classmates brought guppies for show and tell, he brought European currency. ‘‘There I was, like, ‘This is Italian lire. These are French francs.’ I think I was bitten really young,’’ he says, taking in the cacophony of the city from the rooftop patio of his suite at the Peninsula hotel. (He orders ‘‘one club sandwich, no egg, with a side of fries,’’ before marveling again at the view.)

The stamps in his passport have reflected his evolving aesthetic over the years — mixing the known and the unexpected to keep his classic designs fresh season after season. Glamour and aspiration are what fashion is all about for Kors, who has never been one to work through his demons with all-black ensembles. ‘‘I think about design the way I think about travel,’’ he says. ‘‘If it’s totally from left field, it turns out to be the thing you wear once and never again. But if it’s something you know too well, you’re bored by it.’’ Now, every time he goes somewhere, he checks to see what people are wearing — and listens to get a sense of what might be missing from their closets. It started in Paris, in 1997, when he was hired by

Glamour and aspiration are what fashion is all about for Kors, who has never been one to work through his demons with all-black ensembles.

MASS APPEAL Left: the designer at the opening of his new store on Nanjing Road. Below: Peking duck and other traditional Chinese dishes during dinner at the Dragon Phoenix.


the French fashion house Céline. ‘‘It was the first time I’d noticed that women would buy white winter coats,’’ he says. ‘‘They didn’t give a hoot.’’

He’s since ‘‘played with Capri, Wyoming and Big Sur,’’ but not with any sort of specificity. ‘‘We will not get back to New York and do sea-foam green and gold cheongsam wraps. I never want to turn it into, ‘Oh, here she comes, wearing the national costume of Zimbabwe!’ ’’ While dining out in Sydney a few years ago, for example, he noticed a woman wearing a strapless dress over a bathing suit top rather than a bra; his 2011 resort collection captured the undoneness of a day at the beach, with sarong-like skirts and ombré T-shirts. Last year, on a getaway on Long Island to design looks for spring 2014, he became transfixed by the way the curtains in his beach house blew in the wind. ‘‘That was the moment,’’ he says. The ensuing designs mixed in bits of airy white linen, but there were no Norma Desmond nightgowns or robes. ‘‘It was just a feeling — nothing literal. It’s like if you buy something too place-specific for your house, like, ‘What am I going to do with this Balinese

prayer table? I live in a one-bedroom in Murray Hill!’ ’’Even on this short trip to Shanghai, he’s taken mental

notes of the people he’s seen and the clothes they wear: ‘‘natty’’ men carrying clutches, the prevailing use of yellow and, on one woman, a particularly eye-catching pair of diamante heels, ‘‘almost like she was playing soccer with a diamond ball.’’

The thing that separates Kors from his less approachable peers — in fact, the thing on which he’s built his entire business — is his desire to be liked, and with it the effortless way that he’s made himself into a likable showman, as engaged at the Met Ball as he is when talking to his customers. And he in turn can tell a lot about a culture from his public appearances. In the Tokyo store, people not only waited ‘‘perfectly and calmly,’’ but also ‘‘in single file,’’ while his Toronto crowds have always been ‘‘friendly.’’ He was mobbed at a cosmetics store in Manila by women wearing traditional Philippine garb — ‘‘organza sleeves, very Imelda-ish.’’ But nothing quite compares to New York, where his annual Fashion’s Night Out event turns into what he describes as ‘‘Gunfight at the O.K. Corral — we had a lady throw her infant to cut a line and meet me. Then there was the sofa-jumper, but that’s anticlimactic compared to the baby-thrower.’’ On the street, he’s had women remove their

shoes to prove to him that they’re wearing his designs. ‘‘I’ve even signed asses in New York,’’ he says. ‘‘I have! It’s the weirdest thing.’’

Later tonight, Kors will be driven to the Hongqiao International Airport for the Jet Set Experience, a runway spectacle with holograms, a fake snowfall and the one-off pieces — from cutaway swimsuits to floor-length fur coats — he’s created for the event. He’ll air-kiss actresses and, when it’s all done, take the stage for a Broadway-style send-off next to the supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. But that’s not for another few hours. It’s his final afternoon in Shanghai, and he’d like to spend it checking out the French Concession, an area lined with colonial homes and peppered with market stalls. It’ll have to be quick — ‘‘drive-by sightseeing,’’ as he calls it. ‘‘I want to take in all the sights and sounds and smells of the city,’’ he says. And then out comes that giant grin again. ‘‘A little ceramics shopping wouldn’t kill me either.’’

Kors is stopped multiple times — often by smartly dressed women in

their 20s who, ironically, recognize him by the aviators he wears anytime

he’s out in public, even at night.

OFF THE RUNWAY Clockwise from top left: Kors at his fashion show in an airplane hangar; Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (right) and other models backstage; a skyline selfie.


AT FIRST IT’S the background score that arrests your attention, and slowly the imagery gets mesmerizing, and then you realize that it’s the culmination of both elements that makes you sit still to apprehend the myriad layers that are so characteristic of Shirin Neshat’s work. The work on view is “The Passage”, which was part of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Doha auction, the first video work ever to be auctioned in the region. To understand Neshat’s work you need to understand the context of her

upbringing, her values and her strong beliefs, none of which are easy propositions. To get under the layers of complexity Neshat portrays, you need to understand the two completely divergent outlook that her motherland has appropriated: a liberal, culturally alive Iran with the (former) queen, Farah Pahlavi, actively promoting culture and art from the nation, and the present Islamic fundamentalist government that banned all artistic pursuits by its citizens. You also need to comprehend

The Inner Battle

BY SINDHU NAIR

Shirin Neshat’s work has pervaded Doha with her solo exhibition being showcased for the first time in the Middle East at Mathaf. Here she talks about the country that influences her, and her attempts at disregarding these influences to make a strong personal statement.

The Artist

A STRONG VOICEIranian artist Shirin Neshat stresses that although she is very passionate, her work is not just the result of this emotion, but is produced after years of research.

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Neshat’s art training in California, where her mind was thrown open to the prejudices that the West had towards Islam while it also made her aware of the diverse artistic pursuits of that part of the world. Neshat’s art awakening followed all these complex trails, but her true calling came only when she traveled back to her country after a long absence, “partly disillusioned by the competition (in the US) and by the indecisiveness on what my art should be about and how I can contribute as an Iranian artist to the American art discourse”.

With no static spoiling the Skype connection, her voice crystal-clear though distinctly soft, she says: “I was so affected by the change I saw in Iran that I returned many times to get a clear view, and then, even without a distinct career path in mind, I knew I had to look for answers to my personal queries. I had to figure out how to express the impact of all the emotions my country had awoken in me.” So while she was deeply disturbed by the fundamentalism that she saw in her country, it was this very regression that stimulated her to bring to the art world a wide plethora of work that touches a global

audience and inspires dozens of Iranian artists.Her first work is in photography, a medium she says

was the most appropriate for her subject as “it had the realism that was so needed”.

A series of stark black and white photographs entitled “Women of Allah” offer conceptual narratives on the subject of female warriors during the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. “On each photograph, I inscribed calligraphic Farsi text on the female body (eyes, face, hands, feet, and chest); the text is poetry by contemporary Iranian women poets who had written on the subject of martyrdom and the role of women in the Revolution. As the artist, I took on the role of performer, posing for the photographs. These photographs became iconic portraits of wilfully armed Muslim women. Yet every image, every woman’s submissive gaze, suggests a far more complex reality behind the surface,” explains Neshat.

While her art always revolved around these two themes of women and the fundamentalism in Iranian society, her later works are more generic, though women

THE MASSES Clockwise from left: Ibrahim (Patriots) from “The Book of Kings”, is one of the patriots photographed by Neshat, who portrays the notion of heroism; Sara Zandieh; Nida, also from “The Book of Kings” series, depicting the new generation of Muslims, fearless and religious but not dominated by religion.

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remain an essential component in her whole body of work.

“I have gone back and forth on these subjects,” Neshat agrees. But fundamentalism is just an aspect, not an entirety, she specifies. “The majority of my work has been very secular. None of my work is political; it is a reaction, specifically my reaction to the political reactions happening in Iran and later on in the rest of the Arab world. I did not specifically have a strong opinion, but I wanted to ask a lot of questions. I wanted to find out why women who were known to be submissive were carrying arms and taking on the role of militants.”

But she was very specific in her attempt not to stereotype her work for fear of the generalization that Islam is subjected to in the West and her work was in direct response to this need. “I was in constant battle to defend the fundamentalism that is associated with Muslims in general while speaking against the same element in my own country,” she continues. “As an Iranian, I wanted to look and draw inspiration from my cultural background but was constantly frustrated by the ignorance of the Western media about our art and inherent cultural history,” adding that the Western artist does not have to work around these challenges.

Being away from her home country was a “mixed blessing”, according to Neshat. “Not being in my country, not being near my family was particularly painful for me.

The positive was that I learnt to be true to myself, and have a perception that is not biased and I could tell a story truthfully.” The fact that she had a Western audience also made sure that her work could travel beyond the boundaries of Iran.

In this context, Neshat had to take a strong stand through her artistic creations, especially after the 9/11 outrage, as her address of political issues took on a moral responsibility. Though even with increasing tension between her country of residence, the U.S. and her home country, Iran, her photographic work, the Book of Kings, does not take sides, “except maybe with the Iranian people, who are ultimately caught between them”.

“I especially wanted to move away from the political stance my earlier work evoked. But in 2009, I was again drawn back to the Green Movement, and wanted to help by using my experience. The Book of Kings was in direct response to this movement.”

In a series of close-up portraits of contemporary Iranians, titled “Masses”, the signature stark black and white images remains visually stunning yet severe, relating the seriousness and importance of the current moment in Iranian history and elevating the defiant Iranians of the Green Movement as well as the youth of

CONTRADICTIONS Clockwise from top: Neshat poses before “Our House Is on Fire”, the last series exhibited at Mathaf that show the real picture of those affected by the Arab Spring in Egypt; “Speechless” and “Offered Eyes” from the “Women of Allah” series.

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the Arab Spring to the status of the legendary heroes of the Persian Shahnameh, or Book of Kings.

The series is also part of the first solo exhibition at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha by any artist. Titled “Afterwards”, this major show introduces a group of existing and newly-produced works of Neshat, as well as a selection of video installations commenting on the historical, cultural and political realities on which the artist has focused for the past 30 years.

Abdellah Karroum, the director of Mathaf and curator of this exhibition, explains the basis for the selection of works for Afterwards, which he agrees was a difficult task in itself; and while he explains this, it does seem possible that there is no categorization of Neshat’s work — it can take on the meaning that is foremost in the mind of the viewer.

“Her (Neshat’s) work encompasses the existing elements, her personal history and her response to all the experiences. It is not a reaction but a response to what is happening around her,” says Karroum. “It is Neshat’s inner self in juxtaposition with the outside world; her story in reflection to the world. This will be the ground where poetry and image meet to create a visual treat.”

The exhibition, spread across five rooms and represented by the binary elements, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, showcases her recent works. Karroum touches on her earlier work called Women of Allah, which speaks of seduction and violence in one breath. “There is attraction and repulsion in one picture; women with submissive glances look directly into our eyes, and when you look close, a gun adorns the woman’s ears, and then when you look back at the eyes, they seem to reflect fierceness,” says Karroum.

“Afterwards,” according to Neshat, “is how an artist looks back at her body of work, to understand without being biased, by looking at Iranian history. And by looking at the two bodies of work being shown here, it shows the change, the new 2011, a modern generation that is not dominated by religion, while not rejecting it, through the power of storytelling.”

While Neshat’s challenge has always been to bring out personal work untouched by the happenings around her versus the work of art that comes out with all the

pressure that is around her, to reach out with her art to make a lasting impression, Karroum, through his selection seems to dwell on the artists’ personal battles and touch on her ability to “see things” and “build images”.

Karroum says, “Neshat talks about building, creating and destroying, and all in one stroke of brilliance.”

Neshat is delighted with the growing flood of Iranian writers and artists, even transcending the censorship that plagues her country. “The cultural scene of the country is its saving grace, and I feel moved to see the vast amount of work that comes from Iran,” she says. “God knows, we have suffered so much.”

It is this censorship that her video installation, “Turbulence”, showcased at the Mathaf exhibition, touches on. Gender is a central theme in this work, taking up her much favored topic of opposites. “Turbulence” showcases two videos, one in which a man recites to a packed audience, while on the opposite wall is an Iranian woman singing poignantly to an empty theater, touching on the sensitive issue of Iran’s censorship of women artists and performers. “We are talking about emotions, yet political reality. We are talking about poets, poetry and theater, and we are also talking about militants. We are talking about male and female. For some reason all my work is about these contradictions,” she laughs. “Maybe it is about me, I am full of contradictions myself.”

Museums and auction houses are great platforms for promoting new artists, though in some cases they can also make art inaccessible, because of the high premium paid for some artists, which should not be the case.

“If you asked me to choose between success and pleasing an audience I would choose the latter because that is why I chose to become an artist,” she says, adding, “Overvaluation of art should not be allowed. Art is for appreciation by the masses first.” But Karroum is clear about the role of Mathaf, “which is to collect and to witness art thus chronicling history and through the art to educate the masses about the spirit of progress.”

The last of the binary digits of the exhibition showcases a recent work of Neshat, a historical piece if you can call it that, as it maps the history of a recent event. “Our House is on Fire”, comprises profile shots of old Egyptian people and labeled feet of the young dead. Again there is the contradiction theme that Neshat spoke of. But in these series, there is a subtle difference. “These are real people who have been through tragedy and seen the horrible massacre after the Muslim Brotherhood regime was ousted by the militants,” says Neshat.

“These are the mothers and the fathers who have experienced tragedy at close quarters, ” she says. “The tears and the sadness that surrounds these photographs are real, and hence it leaves you thinking about the futility of war and destruction.”

CONVERSATIONSAbdellah Karroum and Neshat present “Afterwards”, Neshat’s first solo exhibition in the Middle East.

‘We are talking about emotions, yet political reality. We are talking about poets, poetry and theater, and we are

also talking about militants,’ says Neshat.


Arena Qatar

Iraq in 35 mm

BY AYSWARYA MURTHY

Home to one of the oldest civilizations and continually inhabited for close to 8,000 years, Iraq has learnt to rise from the ashes again

and again. But this knowledge doesn’t necessarily soothe the pain of the living. Filmmaker Mohamed Al Daradji focuses his lens on the

war-ravaged country and the untold stories echoing across its plains.

The Creator

IF YOU WERE PRESENT that Thursday evening in the Museum of Islamic Art’s (MIA) auditorium, you would have seen much surreptitious tear-wiping against the flickering light of the screen. Somewhere among the sparsely populated seats, it’s difficult to pinpoint where, the sniffling that began almost half an hour into the movie didn’t abate until well after the credits stopped rolling, punctuating the anguished sounds of the wailing woman on screen. Director Mohamed Al Daradji, whose love of cinema began as a means of retreat into fantasy, denies his audience this very escapism. His intentions are the diametric opposite: to take his viewers down the dusty

roads of rural Iraq, through the rubble of its cities and the rugged beauty of its ancient ruins, straight into the hearts of its long-suffering people teeming with weary, decades-old sadness that unpredictably aches and bleeds like a fresh wound.

Son of Babylon was Al Daradji’s second feature film to be selected as Iraq’s official entry to the Oscars, a fact that is clearly indicative of his pivotal role in the “new Iraqi cinema movement”. “There was never a film industry to speak of in Iraq,” he says. His distinctive afro, which you would expect to bob around entertainingly, remains as calm and centered as its owner. “During the

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Saddam regime, films were mostly government-sponsored propaganda, and the lone television channel exclusively telecast Saddam’s speeches. With the American invasion in 2003 and the ensuing violence, the production and screening of independent movies became unthinkable.” In the psyche of the average Iraqi, everything aside from concerns of immediate survival has been relegated to the bottom of the pile. And it is in this claustrophobic climate of fear, where you “can’t build a theater without worrying about it being destroyed by a car bomb”, that Al Daradji and fellow filmmaker Oday Rasheed are slowly but surely laying the foundations of ‘Baghdadwood’, through the Iraqi Independent Film Center (IIFC).

Al Daradji is in Doha for Doha Film Institute’s Hekayat Khaleejiya — Stories from the Gulf. Two of his feature films are being shown, but he doesn’t watch them with the rest of the audience, choosing only to make an appearance towards the end for the Q&A session. But he stays for the screening of the six short films from Iraq. With a cast entirely made up of children from a local orphanage, the stories depict, in stark contrast, innocence against the backdrop of unrelenting violence. One is shot entirely in a graveyard and another gives a glimpse of the American occupation through a young boy’s sketches. Each one is a testimony to the resilience of the Iraqi people, lovingly crafted by the 20 students currently learning filmmaking at the center.

Not only have the IIFC and Al Daradji helped these short films see the light of day, they are also taking them to the people to whom it would mean the most. The events and festivals division of the center holds an annual three-month-long mobile cinema film festival, the fourth edition of which was moving through the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah and its surrounding villages, plastic chairs, projectors and all, even as Al Daradji was addressing film enthusiasts in the plush indoor auditorium at MIA. In one village, 500 people turned up for their screening. “We decided in 2009 to start this initiative because our films were known outside Iraq but

THE SEARCH Scenes from “Son of Babylon”, which traces the journey of a young boy and his grandmother in search of his father who has been missing for more than a decade.

not within it. Son of Babylon was released in 25 countries but not in my own,” he says. “We needed to do something.” The 45-odd screenings planned are tenaciously on schedule, according to him, despite the country being in the throes of turmoil due to the looming threat of ISIS militants.

Iraq will somehow weather this crisis, just as it has done others earlier. Like certain years in recent history – 1980, 1991, 2003, 2006 – this too will leave “deep impressions on the mentality of Iraqi people” and will be continually revisited by filmmakers like Al Daradji, drawn by how it will reshape the way of life in the country for years to come. Having left Iraq under tragic circumstances following the execution of his cousin by the Ba’athist regime, Al Daradji didn’t return for close to a decade, during which he studied filmmaking in Holland and the United Kingdom. When he eventually came back in 2003 to shoot his first film, “Ahlam”, it was as if he had landed in a different country. “There was no patch of greenery left in Baghdad. Everything was destroyed, especially people’s psyche,” says Al Daradji. It was an eerie experience. That’s probably why, on the surface, his movies seem to be preoccupied with violence and its impact on


The Creator

than a decade ago takes them from prisons to mass graves in a heartbreaking journey, the boy just as eager for a sign of his father as for a glimpse of the famed ruins of Babylon. Emotions run high both on and off the screen. “Abu Dhabi, Tokyo, Edinburgh, Berlin, Sarajevo… No matter where it is screened and how many years have passed, the reaction is the same,” Al Daradji says. And everywhere he is met with the same stunned disbelief when he reveals that neither of his protagonists are professional actors.

The young boy, Yassir Talib, was a serendipitous find who agreed to be part of the film after checking with his dad that it was OK. And Shazada Hussein was a grieving widow whom Al Daradji encountered when he was scouting rural Iraq for stories and locations. “We went to random towns, knocked on strangers’ doors, and they told us about their lives,” he says. “Their stories haven’t been heard for years, and they wanted to talk; they wanted people to be aware of what they had been through; it was their release.” Hussein’s husband had been missing for nearly two decades, but the trauma was raw. The usually stoic lady, who had previously recounted her experiences

without shedding a tear, was inconsolable during the filming of the scene at the mass grave (which was incidentally shot very close to an original Ba’athist mass grave). It was fragile, emotional work, and it was only the resolve to see the story told that helped the crew complete the filming. “You see, she wasn’t crying for her fictional son but her real husband, who is one of the one million people who have gone missing in Iraq since 1980.”

the human condition. But delve deeper and there’s more to it. “I try to analyse events and the reactions to them in the context of history. There can’t be violence without a basis for it, and it’s these underlying factors that I want to expose, so that people can think critically about them and understand whatever unfolds in the future,” he says. Even within Iraq, there is a desperate need for a medium to showcase these untold stories. When conflict is so commonplace that it is ingrained in their daily lives and becomes part of their identity, people tend not to want to talk about it. “They’d rather forget,” he

says. But mourning, healing and rebuilding all require an intact memory.

Son of Babylon follows a Kurdish woman and her grandson as they travel to southern Iraq just days after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Unreliable buses, Michael Jackson-loving old men, former Ba’athist soldiers, American GIs, families looking for their husbands, brothers and sons, all aid and hinder the duo in their quest to find Ibrahim, the sole surviving parent of the effervescent young boy and the only son of his sickly grandmother. Hope turns to despair as their search for the man who disappeared more

‘In the psyche of the average Iraqi, everything aside from concerns of immediate survival has

been relegated to the bottom of the pile.’

THE TRAVELING CINEMA The Iraqi Independent Film Center’s annual mobile cinema festival draws big crowds in cities and villages, people eager to listen to stories from and by their fellow countrymen. Below: Scenes from “The Sands of Babylon”, which follows the story of Ibrahim, the missing man from “Son of Babylon”.

Arena Qatar

The ThingFor 118 years, Louis Vuitton has been embellishing everything

from steamer trunks to cigar cases with its logo. But not until they

enlisted the heavyweight designer Karl Lagerfeld did the house ever

create a punching bag out of its classic canvas. This limited edition

of 25, which comes with boxing gloves, a monogrammed mat and

its own embossed luggage (for those who want to take their

workout on the road), is part of a series of six collaborations Vuitton

has undertaken with artistic luminaries such as Cindy Sherman,

Frank Gehry and Rei Kawakubo. About QR637,000 ($175,000);

celebrating.monogram.lv. — BROOKE BOBB

PHOTOGRAPH BY FABRICE FOUILLET



Arena

‘‘LIKE ANY GERMAN BOY FROM THE PROVINCES, I dreamt of living in New York,’’ said Joerg Koch, the editor of the German magazine 032c, who was raised in Wuppertal. His life took a different course, and yet the Brutalist church complex in which he lives in the center of Berlin is far from parochial. For Koch, the founder of an influential progressive magazine that cultivates an aesthetic of raw elegance, St. Agnes is a logical choice of home. The former Catholic parish and community

center was built in the mid-1960s by the celebrated architect and city planner Werner Düttmann and is considered to be a significant contribution to Germany’s Brutalist vernacular.

Koch, his wife and their two children recently settled into the imposing structure and are finding themselves surprisingly comfortable in an architecture not known for its hominess. The family moved from nearby Mitte, where Koch had lived since 1995 — back when, according to him,

Brutalism, Family Style

BY MARCO VELARDI PHOTOGRAPHS BY HENRY BOURNE

A monolithic former church complex becomes the center of a rich cultural scene, and a surprisingly joyful home.

By Design

REGAL UNION From left: the main room of Joerg Koch’s Berlin apartment, where the carpet extends up the walls and a 19th-century portrait hangs over leather chairs and a Biedermeier cabinet; the church tower of St. Agnes, designed by the architect Werner Düttmann.


‘‘art and music flourished, often at the expense of hot water and working telephones.’’ Mitte allowed Koch room to experiment and to build the foundations of his artistic and professional life. Today the offices of 032c are housed in a stunning contemporary building by the architect Arno Brandlhuber — but Koch, bored of what he calls the ‘‘monoculture of Mitte,’’ was looking for a new spot to pioneer.

In 2012, the German gallerist Johann König and his wife, Lena, invited the Kochs to visit the run-down building in the working-class residential neighborhood in Kreuzberg. The Königs had audaciously purchased it with a grand vision: ‘‘To bring together people who produce something culturally relevant, be it architecture, exhibitions, magazines or books.’’ The list of occupants now includes the architecture firm Robertneun, the nonprofit art center Praxes and the art-book publisher the Green Box. The main church, measuring more than 8,000 square feet, will be

converted by Brandlhuber into an exhibition space for König’s gallery. The last remaining wing, at the back of the complex, will contain studios for students of New York University.

Restoring the monolithic concrete structure is an enormous undertaking that the families hope will not only bring new life to the neighborhood but will also recast an architectural style that has suffered from an image problem. (Brandlhuber describes St. Agnes as a ‘‘brutiful place.’’) The Kochs now live in an apartment that once served as a rectory, just below the Königs, who occupy the only other private residence in the complex. The unorthodox layout has proved practical for the young family. ‘‘The beautiful thing is that the apartment gives

BY CONTRAST Clockwise from far left: in the library, a pair of sofas and a chair by Konstantin Grcic; a kitschy ceramic vase on a Pallas table also by Grcic; an industrial pendant hangs over a green marble counter in the kitchen.

‘We always liked the rich color palette of Milanese apartments but

cannot deny our Teutonic fascination with industrial design,’ says Koch.


Arena Home Front

you complete flexibility. You have one side with a very classical plan of defined bedrooms, a bathroom and kitchen,’’ Koch says, “and another with a large, open space where we have a library, a studio and a terrace.’’

Throughout the apartment, the Kochs have sought to turn up the contrast between new and old, conservative and radical, raw and refined. A heavily ornate ceramic vase sits on a minimal black table by Konstantin Grcic; a 19th-century Lüsterweibchen chandelier hangs in front of a sleek, mirrored scrim; contemporary leather chairs flank a Biedermeier cabinet. The juxtaposition is perhaps most evident in the main room, where a soft purple carpet custom-made by the historic German producer Vorwerk extends across the floor and up the walls to meet a rough concrete ceiling. ‘‘We always liked the rich color palette of Milanese apartments,” Koch says, ‘‘but cannot deny our Teutonic fascination with industrial design.’’

The drama and spareness of the purple room give the apartment an air of artful sophistication, yet the space is also full of warmth. ‘‘There is nothing more disturbing than going into an apartment that looks essentially like an installation where you can’t see any traces of family life,’’ Koch says. The purple room has become a Saturday disco place for the children. ‘‘We dance in here to really loud Rihanna tracks until we’re all on the floor.’’

RAW AND REFINED Clockwise from top right: the Kochs’ bed, covered with a digitally printed fabric depicting a lush landscape; Joerg and Maria in the purple room, a baseball bat by the skate brand Supreme against the wall; a 19th-century Lüsterweibchen chandelier in front of an installation by the fashion duo Bless.

November-December, 2014

GOLDEN TOUCHChanning Tatum, Sensitive Superstar Page 82 YSL’s Passion for Chintz Page 86 Fashion’s Androgynous Statement Page 90

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PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST Channing Tatum took

up sculpture while shooting a film in New Mexico several years

ago. Vintage sweatshirt, QR772, tank top,

QR451, and pants, QR451, meletmercantile.com.

Channing Tatum has gone from

being a stripper in Florida to one of

Hollywood’s top-earning actors.

What does that do to a person?

BY ROB HASKELL PHOTOGRAPHS BY COLLIER SCHORR

STYLED BY JASON RIDER


EARLIER THIS YEAR, a university in Illinois called Robert Morris decided to offer scholarships to prospective members of its new varsity video-game team. At a time when mathletes, chess kings and all manner of nerds have avenged themselves thoroughly and far beyond the horn-rimmed realm of Silicon Valley, this piece of news shouldn’t have raised any hackles. Perhaps more surprising has been the attention suddenly focused on the high school athlete, so often doomed to a more bitter fate. In February, the satirist Jason Headley released a web short called ‘‘It Doesn’t Get Better’’ — a spoof of the ‘‘It Gets Better’’ campaign against bullying — in which erstwhile football captains and homecoming queens warn that life goes swiftly downhill after graduation. In June, the journal Child Development published a study that showed that popular adolescents were more likely to abuse drugs and commit crimes.

In Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 film ‘‘Magic Mike,’’ we meet the title character, played by Channing Tatum, as he emerges from postcoital slumber into a beer-colored Tampa morning, dragging his remarkable body — huge shoulders, tiny waist, a bas-relief of bare buttocks — to the bathroom to shave his pubic hair. ‘‘Foxcatcher,’’ the new film by Bennett Miller, opens to a somewhat different expression of Tatum’s intense and bankable physicality: the figure of Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz grappling violently on the mat with a dummy, the camera trained on his squirming fingers and misshapen ears, the microphone uncomfortably sensitive to the sound of his panting. After practice, Schultz retreats to a grim brown apartment where the lampshades don’t entirely cover the bulbs, and where a gold medal in a velveteen case seems to offer hollow consolation. This is a Tatum role bereft of sexual glamour; the jock has come crashing down to earth.

‘‘Foxcatcher’’ explores the true-life relationship between Schultz and John E. du Pont, who in 1996 murdered Schultz’s brother Dave, also an Olympic champion wrestler. It’s a cautionary tale, Tatum says. And for all its libidinal swagger, so is ‘‘Magic Mike,’’ whose script was based on Tatum’s own experience parlaying his football physique into work as a stripper in Florida at age 19. Both films speak to the limits of physicality, to the hazard of betting early on one’s body. Joseph Allen, a psychologist at the University of Virginia who was the lead author of the study on popular kids published in Child Development, has a cute term for this: ‘‘the high school reunion effect,’’ in which the beautiful ones return looking diminished, to the quiet glee of rehabilitated nerds in their Audis. Tatum, if he hadn’t stumbled into movie stardom — hardly the career he dreamed of while on the football field at Tampa Catholic High School — might have been just such a casualty, and he knows it well.

He arrives for breakfast in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Venice wearing khakis, a white T-shirt and turquoise sneakers — the costume of someone who doesn’t feel the need to embellish what nature provided. He is missing a sliver of his left eyebrow, the result of a bad hop on the baseball field, one of the many stigmata of his athletic glory. ‘‘I’ve always negotiated the world very physically, from football to tussling at the playground to taking my clothes off,’’ Tatum says. ‘‘My dad’s a physical guy. I think that’s how I wanted to see myself as a kid, how I won approval, and it’s no secret that that’s how I got into this business. But over time I’ve been able to develop other aspects of myself, sort of on-the-job training.’’ Tatum’s corn-fed look and winking self-awareness have proved a winning combination. Two years ago he starred in three films in the span of five months that grossed over $100 million each; a feat unheard of in Hollywood.

One of those blockbusters, ‘‘21 Jump Street,’’ offers a hilarious exploration of the high school reunion effect. In it, Tatum plays a barely literate meathead (opposite a meek and bookish Jonah Hill) who returns to high school as an undercover police officer to find that the behavior that had made him a popular teenager — for example, punching a black, gay student in the parking lot — now begets outrage. Reid Carolin, Tatum’s best friend and production

partner in the company Free Association, believes that the movie succeeds in part because we are watching Tatum work through his own life story. ‘‘I don’t know if he understands how brilliantly he’s channeling and poking fun at that part of himself in the character,’’ Carolin explains. It’s tempting, in any case, to think that Tatum has been reappraising an old idea about himself so that he can move on to new ones.

Tatum’s path to fame is well known: a blue-collar upbringing mostly in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, an unsuccessful go of college on a football scholarship, then construction jobs, stripping, dancing, modeling and, finally, Hollywood. The actor, now 34, had to cobble together an education along the way. He is still adding matter, to use a term from sculpture, which has been his quiet passion for the last few years. ‘‘I could never carve away marble like the ancients,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m more of an additive guy.’’

Tatum did not exactly coast through adolescence on the strength of his appearance, and he did not always believe that the world of ideas was available to him. As a child he struggled with A.D.H.D. and dyslexia, was prescribed stimulants and did poorly in school. ‘‘I have never considered myself a very smart person, for a lot of reasons,’’ he says. ‘‘Not having early success on that one path messes with you. You get lumped in classes with kids with autism and Down Syndrome, and you look around and say, Okay, so this is where I’m at. Or you get put in the typical classes and you say, All right, I’m obviously not like these kids either. So you’re kind of nowhere. You’re just



different. The system is broken. If we can streamline a multibillion-dollar company, we should be able to help kids who struggle the way I did.’’

It amazes him now to consider that, given his academic challenges especially, no one thought to push him toward the arts. His father was a roofer who fell through a roof and broke his back, and his mother worked a variety of what he calls normal American jobs. ‘‘It’s just weird that for some people art is a luxury,’’ he says. ‘‘My parents had no artistic outlet. Some people pass down music to their kids, but I couldn’t tell you what my mom’s or dad’s favorite song is. So when I started going out into the world, I was drawn to people who knew about movies, art, even fashion. I went to New York and did the whole modeling thing, and I just learned everything I could from anybody who knew something I didn’t. I’ve had a few John du Ponts in my life, to be honest. I think that’s one thing I’m pretty skilled at. I can look at a person and say, They’ve got something that I want up there in their head. I’m going to do my best to get in there and absorb it. My mom said, ‘Be a sponge.’ And so I’ve learned more from people than I have from school or from books.’’

Tatum met Carolin during the making of ‘‘Stop-Loss,’’ the Kimberly Peirce-directed 2008 film about young Iraq War vets. Carolin had a number of fascinating projects on his plate at the time but wasn't earning tons of money, and Tatum was having no trouble making money but couldn’t find a project that interested him. Their union has been felicitous: Tatum produced ‘‘Earth Made of Glass,’’ Carolin’s award-winning documentary about the Rwandan genocide, and Carolin wrote ‘‘Magic Mike,’’ a film that earned more than $150 million on its $7 million budget. And though their collaboration may initially have married one man’s brain with another’s body, it has evolved into a partnership of equals. Earlier this year they visited Gambia in pursuit of a story they are hoping to develop together. They are honing a script for a biopic about Evel Knievel and another for a film about the Marvel superhero Gambit. They are working on a documentary about military dogs for HBO. There are television projects on the horizon, too. And the pair may try their hand at directing. In September they began shooting a sequel to ‘‘Magic Mike,’’ a road movie based on Tatum’s experience at an annual stripper convention, where, with thousands of women in the audience, a dancer could make more money in a single night than he could over the entire rest of the year. Tatum wrote a handful of scenes with Carolin.

‘‘Chan’s a blue-collar person, a worker by nature,’’ Carolin said. ‘‘So when he’s producing or financing or developing, he doesn’t just want credit for something. He’s looking to get into it, to learn to do it. He’s so physically talented and good-looking and all that movie star stuff, but there’s a curiosity in him that originates in the fact that he really did struggle. Football didn’t stick. College didn’t stick. And yet he has the highest emotional intelligence of anyone I know. And he has the ability to teach others, including me, how to make decisions from that place.’’

People who know Tatum often refer to his sweetness, and lately, unbidden, they mention what a terrific father he must be. In May of last year, Tatum and his wife, the actress Jenna Dewan-Tatum, had a daughter, Everly. He finds fatherhood difficult, but it has taught him to be a more diligent student of himself. ‘‘You notice your behavior, like, Wow, I don’t have much patience right now. Why is that?’’ he explains. ‘‘You spend the day watching this thing constantly taking in information, and you have to be sure you’re making that happen. At the end of the day when I put her to bed, I feel glad to have some peace but say to myself, That was so much fun.’’

Tatum pursues his sculpture in a small studio made from a converted catch-all room at the back of his house in the Hollywood Hills. He stumbled into the art several years ago while shooting Soderbergh’s ‘‘Haywire’’ in New Mexico. Wandering through town on his day off, he passed a storefront through which he could see someone working on a large figurative sculpture. ‘‘For some reason I was captivated,’’ he recalls. ‘‘And I had this sort of feeling that I could do it. I don’t know why.’’ He stood staring until the artist beckoned him inside and offered him some clay to work with. Tatum, who still prefers to work in clay, cites Auguste Rodin as one of his sculptural heroes. (‘‘My stuff

ends up looking like his stuff,’’ he says, ‘‘although it’s crazy that I would even put our names in the same sentence.’’) He acknowledges that making art has been a refuge from acting at a time when he has never had more offers. ‘‘It’s so internal. You get so focused on yourself as an actor,’’ he says. ‘‘You never feel totally confident that you got it right, and in the end the director will cut everything away to tell the story he wants to tell. With sculpting, nothing is cloudy or mystical. It’s just about this object, and if you’re trying to depict reality, and you do it well, then the outcome is the truth.’’

‘‘Foxcatcher’’ is a film that frustrates any search for the straightforward truth; it offers a devastating account of an inexplicable act, and Tatum admits that when he first read the script, about eight years ago, he didn’t understand it. Was John du Pont, played by an utterly transformed Steve Carell, in love with Mark Schultz? Was he driven by a desire to please an unloving mother (Vanessa Redgrave, marvelously haughty as the old Mrs. du Pont)? ‘‘There’s definitely an Oedipal element,’’ Tatum acknowledges. ‘‘But there’s no resolve. There’s no huge lesson. It just tries to show what really happened, and that’s never easy.’’ Tatum’s friends say that he has never prepared more intensely

for a role. He trained for it in the gym during breaks from shooting ‘‘White House Down’’ in Canada. Mark Ruffalo, who plays Mark’s brother Dave Schultz, advised him to study the real Mark Schultz closely. Tatum spent a number of days with Schultz, and the two remain in touch.

‘‘It felt like a sensitive situation because Mark Schultz really wanted me to get everything correct,’’ Tatum says. ‘‘In a two-hour movie I’m never going to be able to show everything about a person, but I tried to grasp the most poignant things and to imbue them into the film. Mark didn’t expect to like it, though it turned out that he did. He was just hoping he’d be relieved, and I think maybe he wanted to get some justice. I’m not sure it’s full enough of that stuff for him — all the stuff that people did to him, terrible, terrible things. The movie doesn’t do that. It shows these relationships that are complicated and beautiful and horrible.’’

Schultz seemed to understand that he might benefit from moving outside his tightly circumscribed world by accepting du Pont’s offer of housing and financial support. This proved to be a disastrous mistake, but Tatum empathizes deeply with the notion of risk that originates in desperation. ‘‘Personally, I like being pushed into corners,’’ he says. ‘‘It forces you to be creative. Being a stripper exposed me

to a lot of people I might never have met, and that has turned out to be a gift. There are lots of characters I feel I can play as a result. So when people tell me they want to act, I’m like, Okay, if you want to act, go see America. If you can afford gas money, go talk to people and see how they really live. Sure, you can go to theater class at a young age. That’s not how I did it. I would have loved to learn things earlier than I did, but then maybe I wouldn’t have gone and done the things that gave me insight into what it is to be human — to have fears and wants. Like the fear of asking a girl out on a date when I can’t afford dinner at Chili’s, so instead maybe we go to Checkers and I make it cool by turning it into a picnic, put the burgers in a basket of my mom’s and try to make it romantic. That’s the kind of worry I used to have.’’

On screen, Mark Schultz’s brooding face, the stiff, lumbering carriage of his body, so primed for violence, seem to offer testimony to the deepening wells from which Tatum, no longer merely a heartthrob or a gunslinger or a slouch, is now able to draw in his acting. Critics who have not always taken him seriously will find it hard to ignore the achievement of ‘‘Foxcatcher.’’ Though he remains a physical specimen — this summer he backflipped off the skids of a helicopter into a mountain lake on ‘‘Running Wild,’’ the popular television show hosted by the extreme outdoorsman Bear Grylls — there is still more catching up to do. Recently Tatum’s wife bought him lessons from a sculptor who emphasizes classical technique.

‘‘I’ve never studied the classics, but I’d like to,’’ Tatum says. ‘‘My teacher offered to show me how the Greeks were able to sculpt someone perfectly. From there you can go off and experiment — sort of like jazz. Once you learn to play anything, you can break the form and go and do something even bigger.’’

‘I’ve always negotiated the

world very physically, from

football to tussling at the playground

to taking my clothes off. I think that’s how I wanted

to see myself as a kid, how I won

approval, and it’s no secret that

that’s how I got into this business.’


BODY AND SOUL Vintage coveralls, QR1,449, and tank top, QR451, meletmercantile.com. Vintage boots, QR1,085, What Goes Around Comes Around L.A. Grooming: Jamie Taylor using Tom Ford for The Wall Group.

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BY THE SEA Yves Saint Laurent’s bedroom at Villa Mabrouka with Jean-Michel Frank-style furniture designed by Jacques Grange, a 19th-century French wood and beaded glass chandelier and a raw-silk bed cover.


Yves Saint Laurent’s last home, Villa Mabrouka, shows just how

sophisticated ‘plain’ decorating can be — and how radical chintz can seem.

BY MARIAN MCEVOY PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRANÇOIS HALARD

THE ST�ENGTH OF SIMPLICITY

IT’S THE ANTITHESIS of his other homes. Villa Mabrouka in Tangier, Morocco, which the iconic fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent shared with his partner, Pierre Bergé, is the visual incarnation of a breath of fresh air. No collections of priceless paintings, museum-class Asian antiquities, Renaissance bronzes or walls clad in hand-carved wood paneling here. For almost a decade, until Saint Laurent’s death at 71 in 2008, his preference for artfully layered spaces heaped with beautiful rarities gave way to rooms of spare sophistication. The Villa Mabrouka (mabrouka is ‘‘luck’’ in Arabic) is by far his most surprising refuge and an object lesson in the power of paring back.

But first, the others: There was the two-bedroom apartment furnished with fine, early American furniture and oil paintings of American Indians in Manhattan’s Pierre hotel, and the 19th-century neo-Gothic Château Gabriel near Deauville, France. There was a sumptuous ground-floor apartment filled with French Art Deco furniture, antiquities and paintings by Picasso, Goya, Matisse and Ingres on the Rue de Babylone in Paris, and an exotic 1920s compound decorated with French colonial-era furniture and handcrafted Moroccan details, once owned by the painter Jacques Majorelle, in Marrakesh. Compared with Saint Laurent’s other residences, the rarely photographed or seen Villa Mabrouka is not only plain but cheery. His lifelong addictions, bouts with depression and nervous breakdowns have been recounted in numerous books, documentaries and, more recently, two feature films, but you’d be hard pressed to find anything sad or brooding here.

Life at Mabrouka was quiet and private. Saint Laurent read, listened to opera and the birds, and watched movies and fishing boats. He went on walks and shared simple meals with close friends, including his muses Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise, the interior designer Alberto Pinto and the garden designer Madison Cox. The glamorous dinners and parties he ringmastered at his other houses were long over by the time he and

Bergé moved in for the summer in 1999.The villa is situated on a cliff five minutes

uphill from downtown Tangier, overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar and the southern coast of Spain. Built in the 1960s, it incorporates Modernist and traditional Moroccan features including large, metal-framed floor-to-ceiling windows, whitewashed stucco walls, giant crenellated horseshoe arches and checkerboard-marble floors. One enters the walled compound through a circular courtyard shaded by a huge, drooping rubber tree and a phalanx of chest-high ferns. Sloping gardens spill over terraces laced with wide stone paths and steps that lead down to a biomorphic swimming pool carved into a hill of rock. Cox was responsible for planting palms, Italian lemon trees, climbing vines, iceberg roses, bougainvillea and hydrangea hedges, and installing a large dovecote. The expat American architect Stuart Church designed a pink stucco pavilion with a fireplace and windows looking onto the strait.

But it’s not Mabrouka’s scenery or the ‘‘Moroccan Moderne’’ architecture that stirs the heart; it’s the décor. Most of all, it’s the bold use of chintz. Invented centuries ago in Calicut, India, the glazed cotton fabric printed with colorful patterns depicting flowers, birds, trees, fruits and butterflies became wildly popular during the 17th and 18th centuries. Long considered a staple in the houses of European aristocracy, chintz was elevated in the 20th century by influential interior designers including Colefax and Fowler, Elsie de Wolfe and Rose Cumming. During the last half century, international decorators with a penchant for the pretty, traditional, European ‘‘country-house’’ style used miles of the stuff, often in matching patterns, for curtains, bed covers, wall coverings and upholstery in unabashedly feminine rooms frequently accompanied by needlepoint pillows, porcelain knickknacks and layers of ruffles. Given its association with décor overkill — and the growing love of anything hard-edged and midcentury-modern — chintz’s appeal faded. It took Saint Laurent and his decorator,


Jacques Grange — who used it brazenly and sparingly in Villa Mabrouka’s big, tall, whitewashed rooms — to banish the folderol and make clichéd chintz look fresh again.

Grange, whose clients include Francis Ford Coppola, Valentino, François Pinault and the Mark hotel in New York, worked with Saint Laurent and Bergé for more than 30 years decorating most of their residences. He told me that collaborating with Saint Laurent at the Villa Mabrouka was a revelation: ‘‘For the first time in his life, Yves wanted a restful, open, happy environment — not a treasure palace,’’ he said. For the homes in Normandy, Paris and Marrakesh, Grange and Saint Laurent would often start by devising a scenario, or ‘‘storyline,’’ based on references to a person, painting or novel. The décor at Saint Laurent’s Château Gabriel was based on characters in Marcel Proust’s ‘‘In Search of Lost Time.’’ The style of the Rue de Babylone apartment spoke to the influence of two friends, Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles — among the most important patrons of the arts in the 20th century. For Mabrouka, Saint Laurent conjured a Tangier house where an imaginary English couple might have lived in the 1950s. ‘‘When he suggested using chintz, I was astonished,’’ Grange said. ‘‘It was a totally new reference — one doesn’t automatically connect Saint Laurent’s taste in interior design with big, whimsical, turquoise and yellow floral prints.’’

SERENE SPLENDOR Clockwise from left:

the entrance hall, with a harlequin-

patterned marble floor; the dining room

with walls clad in bamboo matting, late-19th-century

lamps from Madeleine Castaing’s Paris shop

and dining chairs by McGuire; the

Salon Jaune, with sisal carpeting, 17th-

century Andalusian pottery bowls, a

Claude Lalanne mirror and armchairs in

a yellow chintz by Rose Cumming. Opposite: in the

Salon Bleu, plush seating upholstered in quilted cotton chintz,

also by Cumming.

Saint Laurent insisted on quality materials and workmanship. Most crucially,

he was a stubborn, driven rebel with a pitch-perfect take on glamour and fantasy.

Contrary to what many people think, not all couturiers are gifted, or even competent, designers of rooms. (Coco Chanel, Hubert de Givenchy and Karl Lagerfeld are notable exceptions.) Saint Laurent’s personal decoration was as finely tuned and willful as his fashion collections. He was also one of the most avid collectors of fine art, objets and furniture of our time. He insisted on quality materials and workmanship, and he could afford them. Most crucially, he was a stubborn, driven rebel with a pitch-perfect take on glamour and fantasy. His rooms are impossible to copy.

Today, the Villa Mabrouka doesn’t look exactly like the photographs on these pages. All of the big upholstered sofas and armchairs remain in place, but many of the other furnishings and objects — the giant bronze Claude Lalanne water-lily mirrors and the library, for instance — have found a new home in Bergé’s current Tangier house nearby, the Villa Léon l’Africain. But Mabrouka’s bedrooms are untouched; even the padded basket-bed that belonged to the last of the fabled couturier’s four French bulldogs (all of them named Moujik) remains nestled in a corner.

The house has been on and off the market for a couple of years now, at prices in the $10 million range. But until some lucky soul snaps it up and transforms the House of Luck, it will retain the atmosphere that made it Yves Saint Laurent’s last, and most stylishly restful, stand.


ONEAs fashion designers blur the lines between the sexes,

the freedom to dress regardless of gender allows boys and girls to forge their own identities.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMIE HAWKESWORTH STYLED BY JOE MCKENNA


On him: Prada sweater, QR8,593,

shirt, QR2,002, and pants, QR2,367,

prada.com. On her: Prada

sweater, QR8,228, shirt, QR2,002, and

pants, QR2,367. On both:

J. W. Anderson shoes (worn throughout),

price on request, j-w-anderson.com.


96 T Qatar: The New York Times Style Magazine ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE


On him: Marni shirt, QR8,228, and pants, QR2,585, barneys.com. On her: Marni blouse, QR5,134, marni.com, and skirt, QR3,568, nordstrom.com. Opposite, on him: Kenzo jacket, QR4,150, and pants, QR1,620, openingceremony.us. On her: Kenzo jacket, QR3,914, and pants, QR2,130. Comme des Garçons Shirt shirt, QR1,784.



On him: Givenchy jacket, QR14,345, shirt,

QR3,969, skirt, QR3,331, and shorts, QR2,421,

givenchy.com. On her: Givenchy coat, price

on request, and dress, price on request.

Opposite, on both: J. W. Anderson top,

QR2,276, and pants, QR2,348,

saksfifthavenue.com. Models: Nora Attal and

Nader Chaudhry. Hair by Didier Malige.

Makeup by Lisa Butler using Chanel Les

Beiges. Casting by Ashley Brokaw.

Set design by Bette Adams for

Mary Howard Studio



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Ozymandias

4-methylcyclohexane methanol

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12 Charades CluesFriends who regularly play the game together demonstrate their greatest hits.

BY LEANNE SHAPTON PHOTOGRAPHS BY GUS POWELL

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