must movie of the year the coen brothers make a ... - wwd

Must Think Must Go Must Do Must Try Must Wear Must Be Must Read Must Watch Must Eat Must Buy Must Give

the must issue

MUST Movieof the year

The Coen BrothersMake a Beauty With

OsCar IsaaCBy LYNN HIrsCHBErG

MUST-HAVES

119 Gift Ideas

From Tod's, Prada,

Berluti, and More

MUST WARDROBE

How to Dress

From Dawn to Dusk

(Nike, armani, Etc.)MUST LUXURY

secrets revealed!

How Hermès

Makes Its silk Tie

MUST MENSWEAR

Ovadia & sons,

Charming Designers

of New York City

MUST FUTURE

almost Paradise:

spike Jonze

reinvents Tomorrow

Must Do

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: holiday 2013

volume XII number 4

The Must List:From Berluti to Tod’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10Edited by Alex Badia

Naughty or Nice?Who’s Giving What This Year . . . . . . . . . . 28By George Gurley and Nate Freeman

♦ ♦ ♦

Inside Oscar Isaac:A New Coen Brothers Antihero . . . . . . . . . 33By Lynn Hirschberg

The 24-Hour Man:Dawn to Dusk and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42Photographs by Alexander Neumann

Secrets of the Silk:The Making of the Hermès Tie . . . . . . . . . . 52By Tom Teodorczuk

From Scruff to Buff:The Loss of Fashion Innocence . . . . . . . . . . 58By Leon Neyfakh

The Brothers Ovadia:Menswear’s Genius Underdogs . . . . . . . . . . 64By Matthew Schneier

Jolly Saint Nicholas:The Nick Lowe Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68By Jim Windolf

The Look of Her:Spike Jonze Reimagines Tomorrow . . . . . . 71By Matthew Lynch

I Married a Billionaire:The $87,500 Christmas Card . . . . . . . . . . . . 72By Pola Debevoise

Contents for Holiday 2013

o n t h e c ov e r : o S c A r I S A Ac P h o t o g r a P h e d b y b r i a n b o w e n S m i t h . S t y l e d b y a l e x b a d i a . l e v i ’ S c o t t o n d e n i m S h i r t, $ 6 8 .

to subscribe or buy a single copy of m, visit classofman.com or call 800-289-0273.

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: holiday 2013

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|17

|42Costume National’s leather jacket, Kris Van Assche’s wool turtleneck

and Ermenegildo Zegna’s silk pants. Ermenegildo Zegna shoes.

“I WAS AN ENTHUSIASTIC

MOD. IT TOOK QUITE A

CHUNK OUT OF YOUR

WAGE PACKET.”

—NICK LOWE

“I have just seen the

old me for perhaps the last

time.”—Leon

Neyfakh

Must Shades from the M Must List: Giorgio Armani, Tom Ford,

and Westward Leaning

“The entire Men’s Silk department is devoted to it.”—CHRISTOPHE GOINEAU, of Hermès

FOLLOW� OUR�STYLISH�

��-HOUR�MAN�FROM�DAWN�

TO�DUSK…� AND�BEYOND!�

|68

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|33

“YOU�CAN’T�REALLY�TRAIN�A�CAT�”�—OSCAR ISAAC

|52

|10

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New York - 14-15 January 2014 - Metropolitan Pavilion & Altman Bldg - premierevision-newyork.com

Paris - 18-20 February 2014 - Parc d’Expositions Paris-Nord Villepinte France - premierevision.com

N E W Y O R K _ S Ã O P A U L O _ P A R I S _ M O S C O W _ S H A N G H A I

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EDITORIAL DIRECTORPeter W. KaPlan

CREATIVE DIRECTORnancy ButKus

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CONTRIbUTING wRITERS FOR THIS ISSUEPOla DeBeVOIse, nate FreeMan, GeOrGe Gurley,

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aleXanDer neuMann, nathan PasK, BrIan BOWen sMIth

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M is a registered trademark of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Copyright © 2013 Fairchild Fashion Media. All rights reserved. Print-ed in the u.s.A. Volume XII, No. 4. M (issn 0746-5076) is published 4 times a year by Fairchild Fashion Media, which is a division of Ad-vance Magazine Publishers Inc. Principal office: 750 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017. shared services provided by Condé Nast: s.I. Newhouse Jr., Chairman; Charles H. Townsend, Chief Executive Officer; Robert A. sauerberg Jr., President; John W. Bellando, Chief Operating Officer & Chief Financial Officer; Jill Bright, Chief Administrative Officer. Canadian Goods and services Tax Registration no. 123242885-rt0001. send all editorial, business, and production correspondence to M, 750 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017. Edit: 212-630-3500. Advertising: 212-630-4600. single-copy sales: 800-289-0273. For permissions requests, please call 212-630-5656 or fax the request to 212-630-5883. For reprints of articles, please contact the YGs group at 800-501-9571. Visit us online at www.classofman.com. To subscribe to other Fairchild Fashion Media magazines on the world wide web, visit www.wwd.com/subscriptions. M is not responsible for the return or loss of, or for damage or any other injury to, unsolicited manuscripts, unsolicited art work (includ-ing, but not limited to, drawings, photographs, and transparencies), or any other unsolicited materials. Those submitting manuscripts, photographs, artwork, or other materials for consideration should not send originals unless specifically requested to do so by M in writing. Manuscripts, photographs, and other materials submitted must be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope.

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VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES nIcOle zussMan

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, FOOTwEAR NEwS & DIRECTOR OF

bRAND DEVELOPMENT MIchael atMOre

Page 6 : : Holiday 2013

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Page 8 : : holiday 2013

Must-Read Our guide to the season

Welcome to our Must Issue! With it we commemorate the year-end holiday mood with an extended Must

List—a handsome feature husbanded to the page by our fashion director, Alex Badia, and shot by a team that has come to be known, in-house, during the giddy deadline hours, as the M Squad (comprising photographers George Chinsee and Patricia Heal, as well as stylist Mariana Vera).

With its carefully selected assortment of goods, the Must List is meant not only to look nice but to serve as a practical guide for those readers who may find themselves in the grips of the gift-giving anxiety that has been known

to undercut the merriment of the season.The Must theme reverberates throughout

the rest of the issue. Our cover subject, the actor Oscar Isaac, has been on the cusp of stardom for a while, and his talents are on display like never before in a great new picture from Joel and Ethan Coen, Inside Llewyn Davis. Writer Lynn Hirschberg met with Isaac at the Cafe Edison, not far from our midtown office, to catch him before his breakthrough, and photographer Brian Bowen Smith took terrific advantage of the actor’s intensity and good humor in a cinema-verité-style shoot in Manhattan’s East Village.

Our Must designers are the twin brothers Ariel and Shimon Ovadia, the brains behind a

rising New York brand that excels in traditional menswear, Ovadia & Sons. Matthew Schneier describes their upward trajectory, from the garmento world to the runways, in another of his sure-footed profiles of the minds who drive the industry.

There is a lot of other Must material ahead that we shouldn’t spoil for you, including: Alexander Neumann’s vibrant all-day fashion shoot with model Jarrod Scott (who, come to think of it, has a Must mustache); a profile of ever-stylish singer-songwriter Nick Lowe; and our latest bulletin from the subculture of bil-lionaires, which is written by someone who must resort to a nom de plume, lest she no longer be invited anywhere.

Earlier this year, Brian Bowen Smith published his first collection, Projects (Damiani), which includes his distinctive portraits of Warren Beatty, James Franco, Jennifer Aniston, Cindy Crawford, Demi Moore, and Hilary Swank, among many others. He photographed Oscar Isaac for this issue’s cover, not to mention the pictures of the

actor that appear inside, in Manhattan’s East Village. A onetime assistant to Herb Ritts whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, W, and Interview, Bowen Smith lives in Los Angeles with his wife and young son.

For this issue, Nathan Pask photographed singer Nick Lowe in London (for “Second Wind: The Style and Substance of Nick Lowe”) before jetting off to Paris and Lyon to capture the secrets of Hermès for our story on the brand’s world-famous silk necktie (“Secrets of the Silk: The Making of the Hermès Tie”). Born and bred in Australia, Pask has lived in London since 2000 and has shot for Condé Nast Traveler, Esquire, Bullett, and other publications.

For M, Matthew Schneier has chronicled the creative processes of notable designers Dries Van Noten, Scott Sternberg, and Haider Acker-mann. This time, with “The Brothers Ovadia,” he meets with Ariel and Shimon Ovadia, the twin-brother team respon-sible for one of menswear’s most unlikely success stories. Schneier—whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Details, and Paper—is the deputy editor of Style.com.

editor's letter

Lynn Hirschberg, the editor at large for W maga-zine, is known for her percep-tive stories on people in entertainment, such as Bill Murray, Les Moonves, Rick Rubin, Rebel Wilson, and Michael Douglas. Having profiled Bradley Cooper for our first issue, she returns to M with “Inside Oscar Isaac,” an in-depth portrait of the

man who stars in the new Coen brothers movie. In addition to her duties at W, Hirschberg, a former editor at large for The New York Times Magazine, writes for New York.

contributors

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• The •

Must ListPart fantasy lookbook. Part actually useful Guide™

for the Gift-GivinG season. behold the items and accessories, from axe to umbrella, from sunscreen

to sneaker, sPecially selected by the squad.

PhotoGraPhs by Patricia heal and george chinsee

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USTs: 1. Watch Phillipe Patek Tk watch, tktktkktktkktktkt.2. Sweater Phillipe Patek Tk watch, tktktkktktk3. Surfboard Phillipe Patek Tk watch, tktktkktktk4. Watch Phillipe Patek Tk watch, tktktkktktkktktkt.5. Watch Phillipe Patek Tk watch, tktktkktktkktktkt.6. Watch Phillipe Patek Tk watch, tktktkktktkktktkt.7. Watch Phillipe Patek Tk watch, tktktkktktkktktkt.8. Watch Phillipe Patek Tk watch, tktktkktktkktktkt.9. Watch Phillipe Patek Tk watch, tktktkktktkktktkt.

1| UST UMBRELLA This is what you need to hold over your head: the Fox Umbrella, with Scorched Whanghee Handle ($230). You read that right: Scorched Whanghee. Made in London, so you know it works.2| UST WING TIP The com-fortable, durable, classic Church’s City Line Eastcote Wing Tip Shoe ($434). Also made in London. This is a shoe that fairly screams gentry. Park a pair of these babies under somebody’s bed, and you, sir, will not be asked to leave anytime soon.

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1| UST REVIVAL TIMEPIECE We begin with a recently revived model, the Cartier Tank MC ($20,800). Makes jolie musique when it ticks.2| UST DIVING WATCH You might get the bends if you come up too fast from the bottom of the Aegean Sea, but this watch, the Rolex Oyster

Perpetual Yacht-Master II ($18,750), will be just fine, thank you. 3| UST CELEBRITY COLLABORATION CHRONOMETER Hélas! It’s the Audemars Piguet LeBron James ROO ($51,500). It’s a beautiful

object—and it really puts the “Le” in “LeBron”!4| UST EVERYDAY WATCH Here we have a lovely everyday watch, simple and elegant, the Baume & Mercier Clifton ($3,547).

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UST-carry The Louis Vuitton Cabas Tote ($2,980), in deep French red, made of the distinctive, brand-specific Epi leather (pleasant to the touch, strong enough to withstand rough weather), adds a dash of elegance to the messy business of air travel in a time of clogged check-points and struggling carriers.

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1| UST DUFFEL Fairchild Baldwin’s Bobby Duffel ($1,050), top left, is perfect for the man who needs to get his effects together in a hurry, without looking like a schlump. Made of wool and leather. 2| UST BLANKET The Bottega Veneta Throw (it’s made to order, so ask for the price when you call for one) works for business-class naps. 3| UST SNOWBOARD The Etro Snowboard ($2,330), center, in paisley, imbues even the most extreme half-piper with Italian high style. 4| UST WOVEN HAT The Bottega Veneta Hat ($310), center. Works in Brooklyn. Works in Milan. 5| UST RIBBED WINTER HAT Marc by Marc Jacobs Hat. Helps you make it to March in style ($54). 6| UST warmth The Barbour Tailored Sapper Jacket in Waxed Cotton ($399) heats you up while allowing you to move your arms enough to chop down a tree (or make wild gestures while talking on your cell).

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7| UST WOODSMAN TOOL The Best Made Company’s Hudson Bay Axe ($225), bottom, looks sharp. And is sharp. Very sharp. Careful out there, guys. 8| UST PANTS Ralph Lauren Purple Label’s Pants ($695), made in tweed, are warm enough for Maine and stylish enough for Manhattan. Will last a thousand years. 9| UST BOOT The Bally Vincens Boot ($1,250), middle right, was the favorite outdoors shoe of all those we sampled. Rugged, but as soft as a pillow against your foot. 10| UST SOCK The Pantherella Sock in Merino Wool Fair Isle ($35) ensures that you will never have cold feet, literally or figuratively. 11| UST SPORT WATCH The IWC Ingenieur Chronograph Silberpfeil ($13,100), a Swiss watch with an alligator strap, is tough enough for a climb up the Matterhorn. 12| UST FLASK Don’t forget to take this Coach by Billy Reid Whiskey Flask ($200) to the Army-Navy game, or just sip from it in the comfort of your living room. 13| UST GLOVES The design and manufacturing know-how of an expert accessories company is evident in this pair of Coach Men’s Deerskin Gloves ($148). 14| UST WINTER NECKTIE The Alexander Olch wool mesh cravat ($150) is something you can wear on the piste or at the fireside. 15| UST KNIT SWEATER Just thinking about the Alfred Dunhill Cable-Knit Roll-Neck Sweater ($875) warms you right up.

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1| UST PAJAMA A great number of men sleep in their boxers, it’s true. Then again, a great number of men wear sweatpants to the airport. Both fashion choices are a sign of giving up. We urge you not to give up, and Hanro is here to help us in our mission, with this hand-some Striped Pajama Set ($260). 2| UST SLEEPY-TIME ACCESSORIES Toss in this Travel Blanket ($495) and Eye Mask ($195), both from Armand Diradourian, a company that, working closely with its team of Himalayan artisans, excels in cashmere, and you will be sure to take your next trip to dreamland in comfort and style.

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What good is having lovely things if you don’t have lovely things to put your lovely things in? Ergo, the Must valises. 1| UST RED AND BLACK These colors, representing the power of the military (red) and the church (black) in 18th-century France, gave Stendhal a great idea for a novel—and have now inspired this handsome Pierre Hardy Perspective Cube Pouch ($225). 2| UST TEXTURE Jil Sander comes through for the guys with a coolly elegant Large Pouch ($350). 3| UST SECRET KEEPER Smythson Grosvenor Triple Pouch in Birch ($760) is perfect for small items easily lost. 4| UST VINTAGE The Ghurka Vintage Chestnut Pouch ($160) looks like something that might contain a forgotten manuscript. 5| UST TRAVEL The Comme des Garçons Star Embossed Zip Pouch ($100) can hold an iPad. 6| UST EURO KEEPER The Balenciaga Classic Continental Zip Wallet ($495) comfortably holds oversize currency without wrinkling it. 7| UST CARD HOLDER, PART I The Tod’s Credit Card Holder ($125) classes up your blown-out AmEx card. 8| UST CARD HOLDER, PART II The Want Les Essentiels de la Vie Kimpo Card Holder ($160) is a little beauty. 9| UST CARD HOLDER, PART III The Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci Credit Card Holder ($240) is just right for journeys to distant lands. 10| UST SOUND These powerful speakers for the insides of your ears, the B&O BeoPlay H3 headphones ($249), fit nicely into any of the pouches shown here.

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FRAGRANCE

1| UST LUXURY COLOGNE To scent or not to scent. That is the question. We say yes. And it’s hard to smell any better than you will when you slap on some Yves Saint Laurent L’Homme Parfum Intense ($100; 100 ml). 2| UST LIMITED-EDITION Acqua di Parma celebrates the tenth anniversary of its unisex fragrance Colonia Assoluta with this Edizione Speciale 2013 ($186; 180 ml). 3| UST FRESH Dab on a bit of the woodsy Aqua Vitae ($245; 200 ml) from Maison Francis Kurkdjian, which is run by a master parfumier who toiled behind the scenes at the big houses before striking out on his own in ’09. 4| UST COLLABORATION This year gave us a number of possibilities for best designer collaboration. The enve-lope, please. And the winner is…Dries Van Noten par Frederic Malle ($265; 100 ml). We admit it: M loves Van Noten. We can’t help it. We love the guy.

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UST CUSTOM LEATHER Diego Della Valle, the billionaire president and CEO of Tod’s, one of Italy’s finest family businesses, has done it again. Here is a new collection of gorgeous and durable goods—released under the name J.P. Tod’s Sartorial Touch—that allows the man with pockets as deep as his interest in style to customize various bags and shoes to his specifications. Shown here, J.P. Tod’s Sartorial Briefcase ($2,425) and J.P. Tod’s Sartorial Monk Strap Shoe ($1,545).

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1| UST TOWEL Are you thirsty? Not compared to this Nautica Block Stripe Beach Towel ($39) you’re not. 2| UST SANDALS Flip-flops? Not so much. Go with these Alvaro Buckled Leather Sandals ($350; courtesy of Mr Porter). 3| UST FUN WALLET This Prada Saffiano Beach Wallet ($595) makes the perfect complement to the cheesy beach-shop items you’ll be buying on your next visit to Saint-Tropez. 4| UST SWIM TRUNKS Leap off the yacht in these suits from Robinson Les Bains—the Cambridge Long (in purple, bottom left) or the Oxford Long (black and red, top right) ($265 apiece). 5| UST duffel The Dior Homme Paris Blue Soft Leather Duffel ($4,500) looks stylish even when its contents are hastily crammed inside it. 6| UST VACATION WATCH The Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean Watch ($3,600) is just right for vacation: It keeps the time when you don’t feel like it. 7| UST FACE CREAM In the yellow container, it’s Clarins Sunscreen for Face Wrinkle Control Cream SPF 30 ($32).

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8| UST CLASSIC SUNTAN LOTION We also recommend, for those who like to tan, in the brown bottle, Hampton Sun SPF 8 Gel ($35). 9| UST APRÈS-BEACH SCENT Middle of the page, in the glass bottle with the burgundy top, it’s Atelier Cologne Gold Leather Ecrin Absolue ($295). Smells nice! 10| USTEYE-POUCH CARE Even if you’re not the type to relax on vacation, you can look like you’re kicking back with the Acqua di Parma Revitalizing Eye Treatment ($55)—it’s the brown bottle sticking out of the yellow kit bag. 11| UST KIT BAG In eye-catching yellow, the Jacobs by Marc Jacobs Dopp Kit ($39). 12| USt beach SHADES The score is You: 1 Sun: 0, with these Marni Double-Bridge Aviator-Style Sunglasses ($440). 13| UST SURFBOARD And, finally, cut the waves with our chef d’oeuvre in the resort category: from the Gagosian Gallery in New York, a limited-edition short board designed and inked by American painter Richard Phillips ($5,000). 14| UST floral Marc by Marc Jacobs ($178) Shirt, bottom right, has a light, easy feel to it, even when sand is stuck to your skin.

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1| UST TORTOISESHELL Look smart while fighting off the glare in these vintage-style Giorgio Armani sunglasses ($300). 2| UST AVIATOR From Tom Ford comes a look that refuses to go out of style: the Charles 62-mm Aviator Sunglasses ($320). 3| UST RETRO The Children of California model ($250) from Westward Leaning makes you feel like you’re on vacation in 1961.

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1| UST TWO-TONE The Rick Owens Bicolor Leather Lace-Up ($1,300), in leather and rubber, with slightly upturned toe, is a gift for your

feet. 2| UST HIGH-TOP Bieber wears ’em. You can, too: the Christian Louboutin Alfie Flat ($1,275). 3| UST ANIMAL PRINT Roberto

Cavalli has topped himself with this new Just Cavalli model ($415). 4| UST STYLE A hip, understated kick from Italy, the Officine Creative

Woven Leather Sneaker ($600). 5| UST LACES Go bold or go home: KRISVANASSCHE’s take on the high-top with his Multi Lace-Up ($832).

6| UST STRAP This stylish shoe gives you the best of both worlds (strap and lace)—it’s the Perspective Cube from Pierre Hardy ($695).

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UST shirt This pleated-bib tuxedo shirt from Canali ($395) is the right blend of formality, style, and comfort. UST CUFF LINKS It’s impossible to choose among these bits of plumage for the elegant male, so we have selected three: 1|The Tiffany & Co. Acorn in 18-karat gold, with hematite ($2,300). 2|Harry Winston Sapphire-and-Diamond Cuff Links (price on request). 3|Chopard Happy Diamond Cuff Links, set in 18-karat gold ($14,220).

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UST SWEATER It’s a classic gift for a reason. We recommend this straightforward Berluti brown cashmere sweater ($4,980).


UST BAR SET Yes, it’s portable. Make any hotel room a boîte with Tumi’s Mixology Set ($4,995).

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1| UST HOT SAUCE A bottle of ketchup was once a staple of the American

table. Now, increasingly, it’s spicier stuff, like Sriracha chili sauce ($4), from Huy

Fong Foods. 2| UST ROBOT From Unbounded Robotics we have the first

robot butler sophisticated enough for home use, the UBR-1 ($35,000).

3| UST PRINT Our favorite new magazine is the beautifully designed Modern Farmer (yearly print and digital subscription, $30). 4| UST EXHIBIT Don’t

miss Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mau-ritshuis. On view through January 19 at the Frick Collection in New York City

(admission: adults, $20; seniors, $15; students, $10). 5| UST SCOOTER Zip

around Italian-style on the brand-new Vespa 946 ($9,946). 6| UST-READ A

terrific new memoir, Daniel: My French Cuisine (Grand Central Life & Style, $60),

from chef and restaurant genius Daniel Boulud. With an introduction by Bill Bu-

ford. 7| UST SOUND QUALITY Digital culture is great and all, but nothing

beats a landline call on this black rotary-dial telephone ($60 at Amazon.com).

UST JOCK beardsLong beards were once the facial accessory of sea captains, members of religious orders, and hermits. Now it’s a fashion choice for fighters, ballers,

defensive linemen, and the World Series–winning Boston Red Sox. From left to right: James Harden of the Houston Rockets; Brett Keisel of the Pittsburgh

Steelers; New York Met Justin Turner; Jonny Gomes and Mike Napoli of the Boston Red Sox; Los Angeles Dodger Brian Wilson; Mixed Martial Arts fighter

Kimbo Slice; New York Jet Nick Mangold; Sean McGrath of the Kansas City Chiefs.

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SERENA BASS executive chef at Lido, New York

: What’s the best present you’ve ever received?BASS: Since I don’t believe in guesswork, last year, to be helpful and at his request, I sent my oldest son a list of presents—any one of which would have been fine. My most-wished-for was Abyss bath sheets and Corail. All the colors are stunning, and they soak up bathwater like nobody’s business. As Christmas approached, boxes started arriving. He’d bought me everything on the list. What a guy.

: So what do you want this year?BASS: Well, that’s easy: I want a Vitamix, so I can puree at will. And a bottle or two of Comme des Garçons Avignon perfume, please.

GEORGE WAYNE style arbiter, Vanity Fair contributing editor, wit

: What would you like for Christmas, George?WAYNE: Besides the prerequisite health, wealth, and happiness? There will certainly be no need for the tacky schmatta now that the parvenu Shawn Carter is colluding with Barneys. If, however, Sergey Brin is tuned in, nothing would be more superlative, more memorable, more unforgettable this season than settling into Seat 1A, on Boxing Day, of the Singapore Airlines A380—the world’s best—and being cosseted, fawned over, and plied with the finest caviar and cuvée, all the way to the most intriguing 21st-century cosmopolis on our planet today—Singapore! Now, that would be beyond fabulous—it would be fagulous!

SLOANE CROSLEY author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number

: Hi, Sloane. What’s the best thing you’ve ever received?CROSLEY: I once wrote an essay about volunteering at the Museum of Natural History’s butterfly exhibit and how frightened I was of this one mammoth moth called the Atlas moth. It’s the width of a hardcover book, and I never once saw it move. My boyfriend at the time went to Evolution and bought me a dead version. Merry Christmas, baby, here’s your worst fear in a box! It was so comically and unwittingly wrong, I loved it.

ANN COULTER author, pundit

: What are your thoughts on the Christmas season?COULTER: Hmmm, Christmas…Christmas… Is that the old pagan holiday that always seems to fall right in the middle of Kwanzaa? All I want for Christmas is an Obamacare waiver.

Courtney Love singer, actress

: What are some memorable gifts you’ve given over the years? LOvE: I got David LaChapelle a 16th-century gate in London that I transported to Hana, Maui. It was extremely extravagant. Cost a fortune. I gave my daughter [Frances Bean Cobain] a Black Card at 14. Her first expenditure was $15,000 at the Ritz Paris with Marianne Faithfull on a bottle of Pétrus. I was furious at them! But if you’re gonna drink for the first time, you might as well drink with a professional.

POPPY DELEVINGNE model, Chanel ambassador

: What’s a notable gift you’ve received from someone close? DELEviNgNE: [My sister, the model] Cara once gave me Molton Brown hand soap for Christmas. I didn’t speak to her for a month.

: You got any shopping tips that you abide by each holiday season? DELEviNgNE: Always buy something for someone that you can enjoy as well. Like Twister. Or a bottle of tequila.

TIFFANY DUBIN client liaison at Sotheby’s

: What would you like this year?DUBiN: My Christmas wish list includes: My daughter’s acceptance to the college of her choice, a piece of Ettore Sottsass jewelry from the 1960s, and a job promotion!

INDIA HICKS designer, exhausted mom

: Tell us some of your favorite holiday gifts, if you would. HiCKS: I once received a porcelain- china gravy dish from my godfather, Prince Charles. I was about 8 years old at the time, so it was a little confusing. Of course, later it became apparent this was part of a set of china. Each birthday and Christmas, another piece of the collection arrived, and now, in my mid-forties, I have a complete dining set, which is so grand that I nervously keep it wrapped up in the Thomas Goode boxes the pieces originally arrived in!

page 28 : : holiday 2013

NAUGHTY or NICE?Have You Been

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Courtney Love, GeorGe Wayne, MiChaeL Musto, Minnie Driver, anD Many More notabLes anD QuotabLes WeiGh in on What to Give anD reCeive

by GeorGe Gurley and nate Freeman

LAURYN FLYNNfashion and jewelry designer, celebrity stylist

: It’s gift-giving time, isn’t it?FLYNN: I start breaking into hives at the thought of gifts. I mean, to figure out what to buy, for whom, and what—who knows what everyone wants or what they may already have? So last year I began to custom-gift for friends and family, and this turned into a small collection, Hawk N Sparrow. The inspiration came to me when I wanted to wear something Jack Sparrow’s sister would wear. So I began making these custom items and giving them as Christmas gifts. I would make a cool leather jacket, a hand-painted flannel-and-tee combo, studded fingerless gloves, and it’s cool.

JOAN JULIET BUCK writer, actor, editor

: What would you like this year, Ms. Buck? BUCK: I want a Volvo station wagon, and I need it before Christmas.

DUANE HAMPTONwriter (Mark Hampton: The Art of Friendship), mom, grandmother, theatergoer, New Yorker

: What’s the best present you have received?HAMPTON: In the late 1980s, Carol and Punch Sulzberger steered me down the weight-gain path (my husband, Mark, simply metabolized the calories right away) by sending our family a five-pound box of Enstrom’s “World Famous” Almond Toffee from Grand Junction, Colorado. I have been sending and giving boxes of it to friends ever since…and those friends are known to get anxious if their candy doesn’t arrive just when they want it.

: Best presents given?HAMPTON: The collapsible back-scratcher I gave to a bunch of people in 2002 was a great hit. It looked like a little pen—even had a pocket clamp on it. To this day, I will run into someone from that party who tells me that was the greatest present ever!

WARIS AHLUWALIA designer, actor, founder of House of Waris

: What’s a good gift this year?AHLUWALiA: I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on the island of Murano this year, making glasses. Well, to be forthright, I’m not doing the blowing, just the sketching. What’s better than handblown, personalized glasses?

SLOANE CROSLEY author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number

: Hi, Sloane. What’s the best thing you’ve ever received?CROSLEY: I once wrote an essay about volunteering at the Museum of Natural History’s butterfly exhibit and how frightened I was of this one mammoth moth called the Atlas moth. It’s the width of a hardcover book, and I never once saw it move. My boyfriend at the time went to Evolution and bought me a dead version. Merry Christmas, baby, here’s your worst fear in a box! It was so comically and unwittingly wrong, I loved it.

MICHAEL MUSTO Out.com columnist, man-about-town

: Hi, Michael. What would you like this year for Chr—MUSTO: I have a bad-movie club consisting of myself and four other friends who get together on a regular basis to watch terrible films in my apartment. And we’ve devised a great strategy for Christmas gifting. Every year, about a month before the holiday, we send each other lists of exactly what we want. This way, we get to attempt to erase the horrors of our childhoods while nabbing the precise gifts of our dreams. We also allow for the opportunity to throw in an extra surprise thing or two for each person, to keep things spontaneous and interesting.

: Anything specific in mind?This year, I’m requesting The Disaster Artist (the book about the best bad movie of all time, The Room), as well as a DVD of The Sweet Ride (an obscure 1968 flick with Michael Sarrazin, Jacqueline Bisset, and Bob Denver, set in Malibu), Yves Rocher shower gels, and large socks. And I will get them!

STEPHANIE LACAVA author of An Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris

: Do you have a strategy when it comes to buying for others?LACAvA: The hardest person to buy for is my husband. I got him this antique set of hard-to-find books one year. I think he opened it and said something like, “Tiny books, just what I always wanted!” He’s very much a gentleman and always appreciative, though.

Andrew SaffiR founder, The Cinema Society

: What’s your approach to buying Christmas gifts?SAFFiR: I like giving people things that they can use but wouldn’t necessarily splurge on for themselves. A really luxurious, zillion-ply cashmere sweater or cashmere socks, for example.

: Have you ever received a particularly memorable present?SAFFiR: [My boyfriend] Daniel [Benedict] bought me a set of antique formal studs and cuff links—from England, from the 1920s—that I love and wear every time I have to slip into black tie. I also like just about anything monogrammed. A monogrammed gift shows you didn’t wait until December 24 to buy it—as I often do.


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ALEX HITZ chef, cookbook author, founder of gourmet food line The Beverly Hills Kitchen

: What do you want this year?HiTZ: When it’s Christmas, all I ever want is Green Vitabath. I use it every day, and it’s getting harder and harder to find.

: What do you like to give?HiTZ: I always send food—blue cheese, caramel cakes, foie gras. People thank me at the gym for months afterward. Some years, I just send a donation to a food bank or children’s home instead of buying presents. That’s my favorite, but people have said to me, “We are touched, Alex, but next year just send the present!”

Have You Been NAUGHTY or NICE?

EUAN RELLIE investment banker, husband of Lucy Sykes Rellie

: Evening, Mr. Rellie. Christmas. Go.RELLiE: Christmas is the most lonely time of the year for many people, and the most stressful. Suicide becomes super fashionable. We should really be generous with our time and with our attention, and patient and thoughtful. That’s probably the kindest gift we can give.

: What else? RELLiE: Lucy is buying all of her presents from eBay this year. Probably just a coincidence that eBay just hired her as a consultant and curator. We’re friends with Devin Wenig, who runs eBay. He is a cool guy, but Lucy has become a bore, just talking about eBay all day long.

: Any other tips?RELLiE: The simple key to buying presents is that you have to buy something the person wouldn’t buy for himself. Otherwise, there’s not much point. You might as well just lend him some money. And please don’t give me novelty gifts. Save your money. I’m middle-aged now. I want socks and woolly jumpers and handkerchiefs and all those things I hated getting when I was a kid.

: Ha-ha.RELLiE: Plum Sykes wrote a good piece in The Spectator saying how fed up she was of giving gifts to all her nephews and nieces and getting nothing in return. This year we’re going to Plum Sykes’ newly built stately home in Gloucestershire, and my mother-in-law is making me dress as Father Christmas and come down the chimney. Christmas is lovely for the kids. It’s all bloody work for the dads. In England, we’re more obsessed with the thank-you letters than with the original present. I spend about 65 percent of my time now trying to persuade my feral sons to write thank-you letters. It’s basically hopeless. My sons have decided they want to be Jewish. They prefer Hanukkah to Christmas. Heathcliff, 10, says he loves the dreidel. He is also the only child in the world who claims not to like ice cream.

Minnie Driver actress, singer-songwriter : Tell us about a nice gift you once gave.DRivER: My mother, Gaynor, cycles everywhere in London. And she’s always cold, and it’s always raining, and she’s very chic. So I knew that I had to buy her a very beautiful coat that she could wear on her bike. It had to be shortish but cover her knees. So I went to Prada, and I found the most beautiful fur-lined rain jacket, and at the same time I found the most wonderful bag that was the perfect size that she could swing across her like a messenger bag—she could still cycle and look chic and be protected from the rain.

: What would you like to receive?DRivER: I reeeeally want a Porsche. But no one’s going to buy me that. What I would really like is, I want a bread-maker. And I want a sewing machine. But I’d like an old sewing machine. I’d quite like an old Singer one. I don’t sew that much, but I would love to have a lovely old sewing machine.

DAVID NETTO interior designer, writer

: Any memorable presents you can think of offhand?NETTO: One Christmas, my father and I went to Verdura and picked out a pin together, which we gave my mother, and it was terrific. It was one of the largest aquamarines in the world. My mother was rather overwhelmed. And that same Christmas I got from him, very unexpectedly, one of the rarest architecture books that you can own, which is Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus. It’s an extremely rare book from the 18th century.

: What’s Christmas like for you now?NETTO: The great thing is when you have children. I love Christmas because of my kids, and in the tradition of Netto family first editions, I gave Kate, my daughter, a first edition of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, beautifully bound, that I found in London. It’s got a great leather binding, and the book is by Ian Fleming, which she won’t care about until much later. But we certainly love the movie, so it was something special between her and me.

CHRISTOPHER MASON TV host, author, journalist, and performer of musical roasts and toasts : What about Christmas? Do you like it?MASON: I usually spend Christmas in Sag Harbor, with my friend Ivana Lowell and her daughter Daisy (now 14). As a Christmas treat, I always make Daisy a big, bubbling batch of ginger-butterscotch sauce, one of her favorites, and give her some electronic accoutrement du jour. : Anything else?MASON: Every year I give my parents the same gift, which they seem to adore: a dual membership to the Royal Oak Foundation, so they can explore National Trust castles and gardens all over England. It’s a miraculously simple gift that keeps on giving.


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: summer 2013

INSIDE OSCAR ISAAC

THE COEN BROTHERS HAND A RISING STAR THE MOST FASCINATING ROLE OF HIS CAREER. HE STILL HASN’T QUITE SHAKEN IT.

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Burberry Brit’s leather jacket ($1,995), Boss’

cotton shirt ($145), and Diesel’s cotton

jeans ($178). Borsalino hat

($625) and Marc Jacobs belt ($345).

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: holiday 2013

At the CAnnesFilm Festival last May,Oscar Isaac was anxious.he had been to Cannestwice before—with the filmAgora, in which he playedRachel Weisz’s suitor, and Robin Hood, in which he protected the honor of Léa seydoux. In both cases, he had been told that the films and the festival would change his life, that he would be transformed into a major movie star. Isaac had half-listened;

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: holiday 2013

Rag & Bone’s wool coat ($895), Simon Miller’s

cotton jacket ($450), Raleigh Workshop’s

cotton T-shirt ($42), and John Varvatos Star USA’s

cotton jeans ($199).


On Isaac: Rag & Bone’s cotton denim jacket ($380), Levi’s cotton T-shirt ($28; sold as set), and Diesel’s cotton pants ($178). On model: Officine Creative’s leather jacket ($1,950) and Calvin Klein’s cotton jeans ($69.50).


made in new york

Isaac was born in Guatemala and

trained at the Juilliard School,

which he likens to “boot camp.”


: holiday 2013

he wanted to believe the praise, but, over his career, he had learned not to have crazy expectations. Despite a twenty-minute standing ovation at Cannes in 2009, Agora, which takes place in ancient Greece, was deemed too esoteric for American audi-ences and received a very limited distribution—and Robin Hood just didn’t work. Isaac went home to New York and kept booking interesting parts. Guatemalan by birth and raised in Miami Beach, he has the rare ability to convincingly play different eth-nicities, from Hispanic hustler to Russian mobster to English nobility. His versatility (he can also sing!) was a virtue and a complication: He was terrific in roles such as the doomed petty criminal in Drive and the security-guard savior in W.E., directed by Madonna, but he was not distinct enough for true cinematic stardom.

But Cannes in 2013 was different. Isaac attended the festival as the face of Inside Llewyn Davis, the new movie written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, in which he portrays a folk singer in 1961 who is equally talented and self-destructive. The char-acter is the latest in a long line of beautiful losers created by the Coens, who consis-tently detail and embrace the unique and stubborn vein that runs through American culture with one gorgeously flawed protagonist after another, from Barton Fink to the Dude. Their latest antihero, Llewyn Davis, is a pure talent—he has no tolerance for the compromises that might help him become a commercial success, although he craves a large following. Based loosely on the life of singer Dave Van Ronk, who influenced Bob Dylan but never found mainstream success, Inside Llewyn Davis is both funny and a subtle meditation on what it is to be an artist.

After the first Cannes screening of the film, Isaac, dressed in a white button-down shirt and dark pants, walked into the press conference with the rest of the cast, the Coens, and T Bone Burnett, who supervised the music. Isaac had heard that the 10 a.m. screening had been a smash, but he was still nervous about the reactions of the international journalists. Immediately, a hand shot up and a critic from a London newspaper asked Isaac, “WHO ARE YOU? Where did you come from? And where are you going, because you are going to be famous!” Isaac laughed awkwardly but looked pleased.

“It was a great setup,” he told me four months later, over a 3 p.m. lunch on a cool fall day. We were in a booth at the Cafe Edison, in Times Square, an anachronistic spot that could have been a location for Inside Llewyn Davis. Isaac, who is 33, was wearing a thick gray sweater and jeans, and he had a military-like stubble on his head, which he had recently shaved. His dark, round, lemur-like eyes are his fortune: They are hugely expressive and can be, at once, menacing, melancholy, searching, love-struck. During Inside Llewyn Davis, he often looks simultaneously hurt and defiant—but at the press conference, he just looked shy and shocked. “I think I started babbling about artistic context,” Isaac continued, while eating a Greek salad. “It was intense at Cannes—a lot to take in. I found it very confusing.”

A lthough he didn’t win best actor at the festival (that citation went to Bruce Dern, for his excellent work in Nebraska), Isaac’s career tra-jectory has definitely changed. He is in every scene of Inside Llewyn Davis, and he is riveting. “I understand Llewyn,” Isaac said. “This is a

guy from a working-class background. He’s the worker—not the shooting star in the sky.” Strangely, Isaac is a mix of both: his twelve-year career has been a series of fast starts and sudden stops. As a teenager, he was in bands rather than plays, but he didn’t adopt a particular sound. “I was in ska bands, punk bands, hard-core rock bands. I was a musical whore, available to any genre,” he said. “I would sing acous-tic ballads and industrial-sounding rock, but I wasn’t a good enough musician to do covers of other people’s songs, so I wrote my own. I was always trying to sound like something other than myself. At Juilliard, that changed.”

He and his buddies also shot elaborate home movies. “I would usually play the villain,” Isaac recalled, “and his henchman.” Interested in acting but unhappy with the drama teacher at his school, Isaac skipped over grade-school productions and in-stead auditioned for professional theater jobs in Miami. His mother and father, who is a doctor, were supportive, and almost instantly Isaac landed the part of a Cuban prostitute. “I can’t remember the name of the play,” Isaac said now. “But after that, I was asked to play a young Fidel Castro in When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba, a play that was going to New York. Walking around Manhattan, I passed by the Juilliard School, and I went in and asked for an application. They told me that I had missed the deadline by a week. I took the application home anyway and came back the next

John Varvatos Star USA’ s cotton T-shirt ($89.50) and AG’s cotton jeans ($178).Frye boots ($288) and Stetson hat ($178).


: holiday 2013

Bringing it all Back home

The actor, in New York City, after

his Cannes success.


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: fall 2013

Grooming by Lisa-Raquel at See Management, using REN products.

Tailoring by Tailors NYC Fashion Assistants: Luis Campuzano and

Mercedes PSL Bass

FreewheelingTo judge by the

ecstatic reaction of the press at Cannes, Inside Llewyn Davis

will make Isaac a star at last.

Dior Homme’s wool coat ($2,600), Boss Orange’s

cotton T-shirt ($70), and 7 for All Mankind’s cotton

jeans ($198). Stetson hat ($165) and Oliver Peoples

sunglasses ($340).


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day and said please, please, please, and the woman at the desk postdated my form. I auditioned a few weeks later, and I got in. That was the reason I moved to New York.”

On the application to Juilliard, Isaac was asked what life experiences would contribute to his acting. “I wrote that I had been a transporter in a hospital,” Isaac said. “For nearly two years, my job was to move people in extreme situations: take someone very ill to the X-ray machine, or take a dead body to the morgue. I saw people in the most extreme circum-stances. Every day, that job made me think about existence. Even now, right before a take in a film, I’ll think, I’m going to die. I don’t say that to make myself sad, but to remind myself that nothing really matters. I’m going to die: It’s a liberating sentiment for me.”

At Juilliard, Isaac studied theater rather than film acting. “That school is like boot camp,” he explained, taking a sip of Coke. “They want to break you down and then build you back up into the actor they want you to be. I remember that one of the teachers said to me, ‘You have such a great sandy quality to your voice. Is that from all the flamenco you lis-tened to growing up?’ I’m not going to comment on how racist that is, but no, I’m not from Spain, and I grew up listening to Jimi Hendrix rather than maracas.” He paused. “I worked hard at Juilliard, and because of the training there, I now have a skill set to do almost anything. For instance, in Llewyn Davis, I do a Queens accent. It’s a little thing that most people won’t notice, but I learned that kind of nuance at Juilliard.”

After graduating, in 2005, Isaac played a Russian criminal trying to sell plutonium in PU-239, a movie for HBO. “Years later, Madonna saw that film,” Isaac said. “She must have liked it, because she didn’t even ask me to audition for W.E. Instead, I was summoned to her lair. We talked: Madonna was very funny and very open about love and her personal life. I was struck by her candor, and I thought, Why wouldn’t I do her movie?”

W.E. was also a respite from playing bad guys: In the candy-colored, futuristic Sucker Punch, Isaac was the villain, the only human male in a sea of beautiful female comic-book warriors. (“It was a wild imagination explosion,” Isaac explained, “but it didn’t find an audience.”) I first noticed him in Drive, when he brought depth to a stock character: the wayward outlaw husband of an innocent woman. “I didn’t have to audition for Drive,” Isaac recalled. “I sat with the director, Nicolas Winding Refn, at the Noho Star for four hours and told him why I wasn’t going to do his movie. I think that made him like me. As it was written, I hated the char-acter. In the script, he was a Mexican, tatted-up guy who beat his wife and gave alcohol to his infant son. When you saw this guy, you wanted the blond people—Carey Mulligan, who played my wife, and Ryan Gosling, who played my rival for her affections—to get together. I absolutely did not want to play that role. So Refn said, ‘Make him anything you want him to be.’ And I rewrote my character.”

Drive should have catapulted Isaac, but his complex portrayal of a man caught between his criminal past and his family was not seen by a large audience. “Around then, I auditioned for the lead in the Bourne sequel,” Isaac said, sounding a little frustrated. “I had twelve hour-long screen tests, and they kept calling me back and calling me back, but they eventually gave the part to Jeremy Renner, who was much better-known. The studio wasn’t willing to take a chance on me. It was upsetting. I was

so worried that would happen again with Llewyn Davis.”To cast their film, the Coens initially auditioned musicians rather than

actors. After a short time, they realized that they needed an actor who could sing rather than a musician who could act. “I knew they had seen some musicians, and I was told to send in a tape with me singing any song,” Isaac explained. “I also knew that the script was loosely based on Dave Van Ronk’s life. I look nothing like Dave Van Ronk—he was a six-foot-five, 250-pound Swede that kind of resembled John Goodman. Peo-ple would go see him because he was crazy. He howled. I tried to channel him by singing his song “Hang Me,” but I sang it very quietly. I filmed myself at home, and I did so many takes—maybe thirty. For me, it’s not so much talent alone as talent and obsessiveness.” The Coens watched the tape and then sent it to T Bone Burnett with a note that read, “What do you think of this guy? He’s a good actor, can sing, and isn’t square.” Burnett instantly wrote back, “I think we found our Hitler!”

A month passed before Joel Coen phoned Isaac to tell him that his life had almost definitely changed. “Joel called and said, ‘We’d like for you to be a part of our movie, if you want to be in it,’ ” Isaac recalled, still sounding surprised. “I assumed that it was the Bourne situation all over again—that the studio did not want to take a chance with me in the lead role, and Joel was giving me a smaller part. I said, ‘A part of it?’ Only then did Joel say, ‘We’d like you to play Llewyn Davis.’ ”

The Coens must have realized that Isaac understood the complicated nature of the character: Llewyn Davis is brilliant but impossible. The movie begins with him waking up on a borrowed couch in the Upper West Side apartment of a Columbia professor and his wife. As he leaves their apartment, he accidentally lets their large orange cat escape. Since Llewyn is instantly locked out of his temporary home, he must take the cat with him on his journey. “There were a few different cats,” Isaac ex-plained, “and I have a complicated history with cats. I used to think I could speak to cats. As a kid, I would meow and cats would come to me, but not long ago, I met a cat that bit me. I felt his tooth go all the way into my arm. I ended up in the hospital for two days. I found out that a cat bite is a serious thing. So, four years later, I show up on the Coen brothers’ set, and they say, ‘These are the cats that will be tied to you by a wire.’ They attach the cat to you so it doesn’t run away. At one point, one of the cats freaked out and scratched my face. They just put makeup on me and sent me back to work.” He smiled. “That’s my job.”

The sight of Isaac/Davis balancing his guitar case and a tabby cat is the key image of the film. It is also consistent with the cinematic vision of the Coens. All of their characters (Llewyn Davis especially) are like cats: prickly, idiosyncratic, independent, fascinating. Cats never try to be likable, but are always true to their nature.

“You can’t really train a cat,” Isaac said, as he was getting ready to leave. He was late for a rehearsal for an Inside Llewyn Davis folk concert at Town Hall. He would be performing songs from the film, and he was jittery about singing alongside full-time musicians such as Marcus Mumford, the Punch Brothers, and Elvis Costello. “I heard that both Joan Baez and Patti Smith are going to perform,” Isaac said. “That’s intimidating. I can’t decide whether to sing the songs as Llewyn or myself. At this point, it’s getting hard to tell the difference.”


“It WAs Intense At CAnnes—a lot to take in. I found it very confusing.”


A day and night of high style. Follow our well-appointed urban prince—played by Jarrod Scott—from daybreak to dusk and beyond.MAN

HOUR24MANHOUR24the

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: holiday 2013

Photos by AlexAnder neumAnnstyLed by Alex bAdiA

Thomas Pink’s cotton boxers ($50).

wardrobe

DawnWe meet our hero during a contemPLative Pause before the action begins.


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Gap’s wool, polyester, and cotton jacket ($248), Vince’s cotton hoodie ($195), T by Alexander Wang’s rayon-and-silk tank top ($75), and Nike’s cotton-and-polyester sweatpants ($80). Persol sunglasses ($370), Adidas x Rick Owens sneakers ($690), and Felt bicycle ($679).

7:30 a.m.Time To geT The blood pumping—noT in a gym, wiTh iTs fees and fungi, buT in The griTTy ouTdoors.


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: holiday 2013

Hermès’ wool suit ($4,100) and Brioni’s cashmere-and-silk

turtleneck ($950). Ermenegildo Zegna pocket square ($100)

and Gucci briefcase ($2,700).

8:40 a.m.behoLd our man, in fuLL armor. onWard! to the office


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: autumn 2013

Calvin Klein Collection’s wool coat ($1,995), Burberry London’s wool blazer ($1,995 for full

suit), Emporio Armani’s cotton shirt ($295), and Ermenegildo Zegna’s wool pants ($475). Oliver Peoples sunglasses ($430), The Tie Bar pocket

square ($10), Sermoneta gloves ($92), Jil Sander envelope ($480), and Hermès shoes ($790).

2:45 p.m.even betWeen meetings our hero is as boLd as an autumn stag.


: autumn 2013

Bottega Veneta’s wool turtleneck ($890), Dries Van Noten’s silk shirt ($320), and Hugo’s wool pants ($1,145 for full suit). Omega watch ($6,000).

5:18 p.m.a LuLL in the battLe. he texts.


: autumn 2013

Frette towel ($150) and Omega watch ($6,000). Grooming products, opposite page, clockwise from left: Evolution Man Moisture Protect SPF 20 Bronze ($34), The Art of Shaving Chelsea Collection ($425 for stand, razor, and brush), Oribe Imperméable Anti-Humidity Spray ($39), Tom Ford for Men Bronzing Gel ($48), Tom Ford for Men Intensive Purifying Mud Mask ($60), Givenchy Le Soin Noir Sérum ($410), Tom Ford for Men Oil-Free Daily Moisturizer ($105), Tom Ford Oud Wood Eau de Parfum 50 ml ($210), Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle 100-ml Cologne Bigarade ($175), and Tom Ford for Men Anti-Fatigue Eye Treatment ($75).

6:05 p.m.before the evening rounds comes the aLL-imPortant grooming rituaL.


: autumn 2013


: holiday 2013

Valentino’s cotton shirt ($550) and Ermenegildo Zegna’s silk pants ($795).

7:00 p.m.a gaze toWard the traPs and deLights that aWait in the streets beLoW.


Emporio Armani’s triacetate-and-polyester tuxedo jacket ($1,325) and tuxedo pant ($775),

and T by Alexander Wang’s linen-and-silk T-shirt ($80). Burberry shoes ($575).

5:50 a.m.the night’s assignations comPLete, our hero heads home, PerhaPs a LittLe Wiser, PerhaPs not….

Grooming by Gregg Hubbard @ Ba-reps, using Chanel beautyFashion Assistant: Luis Campuzano

Fashion Intern: melcys mateo


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SILK SHEETS A roll of fabric that will be made into luxurious cravats.

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By Tom Teodorczuk

Photos By naThan pask

This is how iT’s done, From The aTeliers oF lyon

To The shop window

the Making

herMès tie

S e c r e t S o f t h e S i l k

o f t h e

luxury

120513.MW.Hermes.indd 53 11/1/13 8:16 PM11012013201852

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: holiday 2013

S ince its introduction in 1949, the Hermès silk necktie has set the standard. It is a staple

of CEOs, politicians, and royalty. Michael Bloomberg has worn one while opening New York fashion week. Less brave politicos such as John Kerry and Bill Clinton reputedly wear Hermès ties in private, sensitive to being called out for not wearing garments made in the U.S.A. Prince Charles is a devotee, while designer Michelle Smith, founder of the Milly fashion line, sold one to Jackie Onassis during her days as a shopgirl. It was a present for Henry Kissinger.

“The tie is not an accessory but a product we pay great attention to,” says Christophe Goineau, creative director of Hermès men’s silk department. “The entire men’s silk department is devoted to it.”

After bags and scarves, the cravat is the biggest seller for Hermès, which is another way of saying it is the company’s most important item of men’s clothing. Last year, Hermès posted a record net profit of $958 million, with an estimated 10 percent of sales in ties.

The company, which has its flagship store on Rue du Faubourg in Paris, was founded in 1837 by Thierry Hermès to supply noblemen with beautifully made saddles and harnesses. It branched out into making bags and scarves in the thirties and introduced the necktie in 1949. Legend has it Hermès began selling ties after staff at a store in Cannes noticed a neighboring casino turning away gamblers who tried to enter sans cravat.

The story of how Hermès moved into designing its distinctive animal prints is equally legendary. Designer Henri d’Origny, who remains one of the company’s key necktie designers at the age of 79, joined Hermès as a freelance designer in the late fifties. Not long afterward, he was doodling patterns of equestrian motifs in an empty Hermès shop when Patrick Guerrand-Hermès, a member of the dynasty, looked over his shoulder and liked what he saw. The first collection of Hermès animal-print ties was released in 1965, and they have done a roaring trade ever since.

Hermès remains a family business. Pierre-Alexis Dumas, a sixth-generation descendant

of the company’s founder, is artistic director. The company has rejected the outsourced, mass-production culture adopted by so many of its competitors, choosing to weave, engrave, and print its ties at middle-size workshops, known as ateliers, in Lyon, the longtime hub of the French silk trade.

“We manufacture our ties, from the first thread to the orange box, in our workshops in Lyon,” says Goineau. The design process takes between six and eight months, requiring more than 2,000 hours of work for especially elaborate patterns. Once a design of the tie has been drawn in the Paris studio, it is divided into a number of frames by the engraver and sent to the printer for color tests. Hermès uses a chart of 70,000 colors, which is unique, according to Goineau: “It is difficult to count the number of colors included in a tie, since its details are so subtle,” he says.

The assembly stage for the ties takes another six months. Giant

rolls of silk, imported from the company’s farm in the mountains of Brazil, are spread across 50-meter tables. Artisans mix each color into the tie, applying it meticulously in an effort to find the right pattern. The silk-twill thread is then woven and undergoes several discrete stages of reviewing and finishing. “We control the whole chain of weaving to ensure a constant quality,” says Goineau. “The solidity of the twill is exceptional.”

On the surface, the Hermès tie is made like just any other: The pattern is traced, the material is cut, and the pieces sewn together to make the tie. But several factors mark Hermès as unique. While most ties manufactured by other companies comprise three pieces of fabric—the large end (the blade), the small piece (the tail), and, between the two, the neck piece (the gusset)—the Hermès tie contains only the blade and tail. “When we print ties, we print the linings at the same time,”

1 2A member of the

in-house design team, located in

Lyon, France, draws a tie using a silk-screen

process.

The fabric, made from Hermès’ own silk farm in Brazil, is cut and folded on 50-meter tables.

: holiday 2013

3

4

7

5

6

A colorist pours ink onto a table prior to

the engraving process.

A worker in the Lyon atelier precisely folds the fabric to ensure the

signature “dovetail” in the back.

Artisans in the color workshop mix inks, like those in the pots at left, to create one of more than 70,000 hues.

A sheet with four possible shades to be used in the neckties.

La voilà! A tailor hand-stitches the tie, bringing together the blade and the tail with the triplure.

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THX LXMH LXXK Abxve: Mxrc Jxcxbs sxits fxr Fxll/Wxntxr 20xx. Lxft: Somxthing nxw frxm the

plxyful Kxnzx. Bottxm: Thx lxtxst in Lxxxs Vxxttxn.

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Goineau explains.The creation process also gives

the Hermès tie its unusual ability to withstand years—decades, even—of wear and tear. “When we ask someone what he has done with his old ties, they usually tell us that they have thrown them away, but not the Hermès ones. None of our clients throw away an Hermès tie,” says Goineau. He attributes the special durability to the triplure, a wool-and-cotton lining. “We have only one triplure in our tie, while our competitors use two materials,” he says. “The advantage is that this material supports very well if it is dry-cleaned.”

Just a year after it has first been designed, the tie hits Hermès stores. The company introduces two new tie collections each year, continually making subtle modifications to established designs. For instance, throughout the years, the 59 EA vintage silk tie has had more than 100 different colors applied to it. “Our designs evolve perpetually—we never engage in a big revolution, but we change in each collection the size of the designs, the rhythm, and color combinations,” says Goineau.

Hermès divides its ties into the

whimsical and the classical, with each group featuring heavy-twill and light-twill fabrics. The most popular whimsical ties are the signature animal prints. Current designs range from duck and bat prints to giraffes playing basketball, not to mention an Italian motorbike rider sharing the road with horses.

The Hermès tie is perhaps the men’s fashion equivalent of an observation made by late

Italian novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Recent innovations include silk ties made of thicker material and the size of the majority of ties being reduced to a width of 8 centimeters (compared with 9.1 centimeters previously). The latest collections reference the digital age, too, with ties featuring keyboards, microchips, and USB sticks. The USB tie even contains a small pocket for storing a flash drive. “Our design is inspired by the contemporary items of a man living in the 21st century, so that is the digital world, sports, and hobbies,” Goineau says. This season the theme is the sporting life, with designs featuring kite-surfers and boomerangs.

Goineau maintains the company’s clientele extends beyond bankers and businessmen: “It has now been about four years that it has not been mandatory to wear a tie at work. It has brought a new style of clients, such as artists and architects, who use ties for pleasure.”

Once you join the Hermès tie club, you never want to leave—although the price (currently, a tie in the U.S. starts at $195) sometimes causes memberships to lapse. My mother told me she had bought my father an Hermès tie sometime in the seventies, only for him to lose it at an airport. I asked her why she didn’t buy a replacement. “You came along, and I couldn’t afford it,” came the disconcerting reply. Father, forgive me.

C’EST LA MODE The factory floor in Lyon.

Above: Ties from the brand’s geometric-pattern collection.

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THX LXMH LXXK Abxve: Mxrc Jxcxbs sxits fxr Fxll/Wxntxr 20xx. Lxft: Somxthing nxw frxm the

plxyful Kxnzx. Bottxm: Thx lxtxst in Lxxxs Vxxttxn.

page 57 : : summer 2013

HOME Some neckties will find a

temporary home here at the Rue du Faubourg

boutique in Paris.

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A reporter who never gAve much thought to fAshion heAds to freemAns sporting club, An All-purpose style emporium in new york city, for A heAd-to-toe mAkeover. but his new style brings new complicAtions. By Leon neyfakh PHOTOS By LeXIe MoReLanD


A t 28 years old, I am a man—a guy?—who has never put any effort into being fash-ionable. That’s not to say I don’t care how I look. Nor

am I one of those people who takes pride in being out of step with trends. It’s just that I don’t have enough energy or imag-ination to make deliberate, let alone so-phisticated, decisions about my appear-ance, and I lack the perceptual machinery to understand what clothes mean—their connotations, what they say about me. If you asked me to construct an outfit that sent a message to strangers about who I am and what I’m like, I would stare at you blankly, like a cow at a fence.

And so I have come to Freemans Sport-ing Club, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to be converted. Not just made over, but convinced by the store’s team of haircut-ters and suit-fitters that I have been miss-ing out—that, if I wanted to, I could be the kind of man I have always assumed I wasn’t.

As I wait my turn in the Freemans bar-bershop, I glance at the regulars—their hair already so correct that it’s unclear what they’re doing here—and wonder if it’s possible that, when I leave later today, I will be mistaken for one of them.

For the past year or so, I have been wearing the same thing pretty much ev-ery day: black jeans, a white V-neck, and one of the five identical button-downs I bought at Uniqlo in 2009. Before that, I wore clothes chosen for me by my moth-er. I have had the same haircut forever, ex-cept for a year when I had a rattail (I was 7) and that time in eighth grade when I grew

bangs and shaped them into spikes using Elmer’s Glue. My favorite things to wear when I want to stand out are a stripy jer-sey, which my girlfriend calls my “heroin-addict shirt,” and a down vest that reminds me of Marty McFly’s cool red jacket from Back to the Future. At Freemans, I will be shorn, shaved, and dressed like a real mod-ern man for the first time in my life.

Freemans Sporting Club is a lodestar for the rugged but pretty men of New York. It is a place that gives them permis-sion to be finicky and purposeful about how they look—where they can work with professionals to craft an appearance without being made to feel unmanly. The barbershop at Freemans, known simply as “Barbershop,” was rebuilt only recently (from 300-year-old spruce reclaimed from an old barn) to accommodate the hun-dreds of customers who show up every week for haircuts, shaves, and beard trims.

I watch in the mirror as Ruben Aronov, the barber assigned to my case, stands behind me and talks with his asso-ciates about what needs to happen. “He has a good jaw,” one of them says. Then Ruben starts talking about what he’s go-ing to do to the various “sections” of my head. I did not even know my head had sections. He takes the glasses off my face. The world goes blurry. I am acutely aware that I have just seen the old me for perhaps the last time.


While he works, I ask Ruben—who I find out later is part owner of the shop—what sorts of hairdos are requested by the typical Freemans man. (My usual line before someone cuts my hair is, “Clean it up, please, and leave the ears halfway covered.”) Ruben tells me that one time a guy asked him to shave his head but to leave a circular patch at the top. Another time, a fellow who was going to Burning Man wanted the hair on the back of his head arranged in an X. Those are outliers, though, Ruben says. A lot of guys come in asking for the “Ryan Gosling.” Others just ask him to do what he thinks is right. This is Ruben’s special power, I gather: He can look at a man and know how to shape his hair to capture his essence. When I came in, he says, he could tell I wasn’t going to go for anything extreme. “You’re not too conservative, but I don’t see you doing insanely edgy, you know what I’m saying?” he says. “I don’t mean that in a bad way.”

I ask Ruben for some advice about keeping my hair looking good after I leave—and generally be-ing a fashionable man once I’m out in the world. He recommends something called Mr. Natty Hair Clay—but he warns me that unless I really com-mit myself, it’s not likely I’ll stick to the program in the long run. (“If you’re not that guy, I dunno….”) Then again, he says, it’s possible the haircut will have such a profound effect that I’ll never go back to the way I was. “Sometimes I’ll change a dude’s persona so much that he’s like, ‘Whoa,’ you know what I mean?” Ruben says. “I swear, they’ve texted me at 2 a.m., drunk-texted, telling me, ‘Dude, I’m sorry it’s late, but I’m fuckin’ on fire right now!’ ”

This sounds like what I want! As Ruben shaves my face, using some Imperial Barber pre-shave oil, hot foam, and Aesop Shaving Serum, I fantasize about the circumstances under which I might feel compelled to text him tonight, with pretty girls passing me in the street and compet-ing with one another for my eye contact. Before I know it, I am being handed my glasses. I take a breath, slip them on, and allow myself to come into focus. What I see astounds me: My hair is shorter on the sides than it has ever been, and long on top, where it is draped from right to left in a glossy, perky swoop. It makes me look fo-cused, prosperous, and sure-footed. I look like a man who is supposed to be somewhere.

This, in fact, turns out to be true: I am late for my suit fitting. I thank Ruben and head next door, where a distinguished man named Jon Callahan and his associate, Winston Tolliver, have me try on something in “indigo” and something in what I’m told is Donegal tweed. Like all the clothes I’ll be wearing out of the store, they are designed in-house by Freemans Sporting Club.

“I’m doing whatever you say,” I tell them when they ask me what I think.

Jon likes the indigo—“The shoulder and the chest are perfect,” he says—but, after some debate,

we end up going with the tweed, because the jack-et is available in a smaller size, and it is explained to me that smaller, tighter, and narrower is a more modern look.

As I stand and look at myself in the mirror, I am amazed that this “traditional British tweed,” as it’s described to me—a material I have long as-sociated with professorial lamewads—could look so cool. And while the pants are a little bunched up below the knee, I’m assured that a bit of tailor-ing will fix this and I will walk out with a “clas-sic break” that leaves the bottom of the pant legs barely grazing my shoe tops.

Next up: the shirt and tie. “What’s your shirt size, do we know?” Jon asks.

We do not.“OK, let’s measure you.”After finding the best possible option—a dunga-

ree shirt in a delicate robin’s-egg blue matched with a “tonal” tie that I’m told will look really cool—Jon submits, in the most diplomatic way possible, that I have kind of a weirdly shaped body. “You’re, in real-ity, a good candidate for having made-to-measure or bespoke, for both suits and shirts,” he says. “You’re tall. And you’re broad. And thin.”

Before long, I am face-to-face with a version of myself I have never seen. I look like I should be going

THE METAMORPHOSIS First page: The made-over author at Freemans Sporting Club. Left: Before the transformation, in his “heroin-addict shirt.” Below: Barber Ruben Aronov finds order in the chaos of locks and whiskers.

I feel lIke a prInce…


to an awards show where I will win all the awards.Wearing my new clothes, I am led onward,

through a bustling restaurant also owned by Freemans, toward a secret room for tailoring. I squeeze past beautiful young people eating brunch. Has my new look made me fit in with them? Or has it elevated me to some higher lev-el? As such thoughts pass through my brain, I am worried that I will sweat through my shirt. Also, that I will get hives on my neck before my photo shoot, which happens to me sometimes.

We enter the tailor’s quarters by way of a door camouflaged as a bookcase. There, I meet Alex Young, a wry man with a British accent, who is Freemans’ suiting director. He is wearing a brown suit with comically large pants, which seem to con-

tradict some of the things I’ve learned so far today.“Your pants are very baggy,” I say, as he kneels

down to measure my ankles.“Yeah,” he says, after getting back up to my

level. “I like baggy pants.”Later, when we’re alone, he says he doesn’t con-

sider himself a fashionable guy, and when I ask him if that makes his job at Freemans kind of difficult, he says he doesn’t think tailoring has anything to do with fashion. He tells me wearing trendy clothes is evidence of a “deep-rooted psychological issue,” which leaves me feeling confused.

As I walk onto the street and start toward home, I feel like a prince. When I glimpse my reflection in a tinted window, I stop to look.

On the subway, I think about the three parties I’ll be attending this evening with my girlfriend, Alice, and how, by the end of the night, I will have seen pretty much every single person I have ever met in New York City. I’m also thinking about whether I should buy the suit instead of giving it back the next day, like I’m supposed to. Although it costs $1,195, it seems like a bargain, given that I feel like a million bucks.

I walk in the door of the Brooklyn apartment I share with Alice, and right away I can see it on her face: She does not like my new look. “I hate it,” she says, not holding back.

“You hate it how?” I ask. I feel like I’m taking a cold shower.

She takes a softer tone. “Well, how do you feel in it?”

“I…I don’t know,” I say. Because all of a sud-den, I don’t.

I realize I should have seen this coming. Alice, though stylish herself, takes a hard line when it comes to men’s fashion: In her opinion, it is sim-ply not masculine to express yourself through your garments. It is better, she believes, for a man to look normal—which is to say, invisible.

In my new configuration, I am very much not invisible.

After she tells me I will have to get my hair fixed as soon as possible, we have a fight. I tell her I no longer want her to come with me to the parties. In a huff, I sit at my computer and start e-mailing random people—my sister, my boss, dis-tant friends—photos of my new look. Everyone sends replies telling me I look great. “You look like you’re going to turn into a superhero,” says one friend. “This is very, very cool!” By the time night falls, I have come back around to feeling sure I have never looked better in my life. Alice, mean-while, seems to have grudgingly accepted the new me, at least for the evening. She even agrees to come into the bathroom and help me apply a

…but alIce

doesn’t lIke my

new look.

FASHION, HO! This page, left: Felix Aybar, head tailor at Freemans Sporting Club, gets the fit just so. Below: The author clings to the garments that marked his pre-Freemans identity. Right page: The end result.


second coat of Mr. Natty to my hair, though later I will notice that she has left the tin very close to where we keep the garbage can.

As Alice and I leave the apartment, I catch one last glimpse of the strange man in the mirror and think to myself, I am about to blow so many minds. But a funny thing hap-pens when we walk into the first party of the evening: The host, Miriam, says hello, helps me stash the beer we have brought along, and then…gives us a tour of her apartment. I nod and smile while thinking, But isn’t there something you want to ask me, Miriam? I run my fingers through the wave in my hair to make sure it’s still there. Finally, I tell Mir-iam, sheepishly, about the crazy thing I did earlier in the day. She rushes to admit that I do indeed look spectacular—better than any other guy at the party and better than she has ever seen me. Then a handsome editor named Chris says that looking at me is mak-ing him feel underdressed. Glancing down at his own straightforward outfit, he says, “I usually dress better than this.”

For the next several hours, in one con-versation after another, I find I have to tell everyone, “Guess what, I got a makeover today” to prompt them to weigh in on my look. “This is very dapper,” says one so-called friend. “You look smashing,” says another. But these are small victories. I am not fuck-ing on fire, and I feel no desire to text Ruben.

As we head home, Alice sees me sulking and asks what on earth I thought was going to happen. I tell her I don’t really know.

“Think of it this way,” she says. “The fact that nobody reacted all that strongly is actu-ally a good thing. It doesn’t mean your out-fit’s not stylish—it means they don’t think it’s that strange for you to be wearing it!”

I like where she’s going with this.“So the reason no one cares about how

fashionable I look is that, in their minds, I’m just that kind of guy?”

Alice nods and smiles.As we get ready for bed, she asks if I’m still

upset with her for not being into the new me.“No,” I say. “It’s nice that you like the

old one.”After all, the suit does have to go back

to Freemans.Once Alice falls asleep, I think about her

remark from earlier, about “fixing” my hair, and I wonder if she’s really going to make me go to a normal barbershop the next day. I can’t tell yet if I’m going to let this hap-pen. But just in case, I get up and grab the tin of Mr. Natty and stash it in my underwear drawer. I might need it again.


THE

BROTHERSOVADIA

By matthew schneier Photos By jenna greene

ariel and shimon ovadia, the 31-year-old twin designers of Ovadia & Sons, are not identical, though you would be forgiven for assuming that they were. They have the same close-cropped hair and red scruff beards. They finish each other’s sentences and sit at match-ing desks in their shared Soho office. But Shi-mon’s face, you come to realize, is a little lon-ger, his voice a little reedier. He is the one you will sometimes find wearing leopard-print Vans.

The occasional skate shoe aside, the Ovadias are most often found in sport coats, tailored trousers, and monk straps. They are the design-ers and poster boys for one of the brands most championed by the menswear blogosphere, a heterogeneous group that coalesces under the quippy rubric “#menswear.” Their designs rep-resent one of the most popular of the move-ment’s many subsets: a stately, neo-geezer style. It accepts jeans and sneakers but prefers hounds- tooth blazers, pocket squares, and spread col-lars. It is a loving homage to an earlier time, before casual Fridays and the abolition of the requisite tie at ‘21.’

The brothers founded Ovadia & Sons three years ago, despite having no formal design train-ing. It now has a small staff but remains Ovadia- owned and Ovadia-operated. “You hear all the time: Don’t go into business with your fam-ily,” says Shimon. “For us, it was only go into business with your family. We don’t want any

outsiders.” It is a family business in the pur-est sense of the word, right down to its name, which alludes to their father and his history in the garment industry. “If it weren’t for him,” adds Shimon, “we would probably never be in this business.”

Moshe Ovadia, a professional soccer player in his native Israel, immigrated with his family to the U.S. in the early nineties. In his adopted coun-try, he found his way into the garment trade. He knocked on doors in New York’s garment district, buying canceled orders from import-ers and licensees and then relabeling and selling them out of a set of red luggage. The company he founded, Magic Kids, was a family business by necessity. The staff included any and all relatives who happened to be around: his kids, his in-laws. After school, Ariel and Shimon would tag orders in their family living room until bedtime.

The company grew, and before the boys were out of high school, they were working like mid-level executives. In their teens, they were flying around the country to pitch their busi-ness to Walmart and JC Penney. “Our father was like, ‘If you want to go to college, you’re going to be a doctor or a lawyer,’ ” says Shimon. So they didn’t. They officially joined the company.

The apparel Magic Kids manufactures and distributes is both mass-produced and mass-market. Ovadia & Sons runs more to luxury: a line tailored not to mass tastes, but to their own. Theirs is a story of crossing the aisle from

Menswear

h o w a Pa i r o f B r o o k ly n u n d e r d o g s m a d e t h e m ov e f r o m g a r m e n t o t o d e s i g n e r


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creo

Two’s Company ariel and shimon

ovadia, wearing their own collection, at

their soho showroom and office.

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: holiday 2013

garmento to designer—or, put another way, how two kids without a college education or any de-sign experience launched themselves from the observant Jewish enclave of Flatbush, Brooklyn, to a Vogue-sponsored fashion show at the Cha-teau Marmont. And did it without working on the Sabbath.

to hear the Brothers tell it, they loved fashion from the beginning. “When we had the day off from school, we used to go with my fa-ther to work,” says Ariel. “We would walk in, and there would be bolts and bolts and bolts of fabric everywhere, mountains of it. Shimon and I would jump on it.”

“Even when we would walk around, we would always touch fabrics,” Shimon chimes in. “People thought we were nuts. I would just walk in a store and touch everything.”

At their yeshiva, the dress code was rigid: gray trousers and a light blue shirt or, on holidays, navy trousers and a white shirt. (Even so, they managed to sneak in the occasional Polo sweater.) Stifled by the restrictions, they lobbied for permission to go to public school and enrolled at James Madison High School on Bedford Avenue. “It was like a fashion show,” Shimon says.

There, they went through a rotation of the usual teenage style phases: streetwear, band T-shirts, punk-rock regalia. They spent week-

ends in Manhattan, shopping in Soho or on Mad-ison Avenue, and shared a wardrobe, which they kept meticulously organized and arranged. “Ev-ery time he used to borrow something, it would come back with a stain,” Ariel laughs. “We’d yell at each other, ‘Put it back how you found it! Is that how I had it in the closet?’ ”

Meanwhile, their father’s business was ex-panding with the nineties boom. His original benefactor, who sold him his first canceled or-ders on credit, had acquired a host of lucrative licenses for children’s sportswear: jerseys from the NBA, NFL, MLB, and more. Ariel and Shi-mon continued to sell (if pressed, they will ad-mit they still work on key accounts to this day). To modernize the operation, they pushed their father to open a showroom, got the company onto e-mail, took their wares to trade shows, and sent digital updates to regular clients in be-

tween. “My father’s super old-school,” Ariel says. “I said, ‘Dad, you can’t send Walmart a handwritten invoice. It’s not even an option.’ ”

“We were passionate about being suc-cessful and making our father proud of us,” Shimon adds. “I think that same passion relates to the passion we have for clothing. I don’t know why—who knows?”

By their late teens, Ariel and Shimon had begun to develop their own children’s clothes but outsourced all the patterning and produc-tion. Design seems slightly too strong a word. “We would put a bunny here, a teddy bear there,” says Shimon.

The clothing was made in China, where fac-tories handled every detail without question. “I could send them this table and tell them to copy it for me, and they’d do it,” says Ariel, rapping his desk. “It was a one-stop shop. Who knew about patterns? They get the zippers for you, they get the snaps, they make your woven label, the size label, the care instructions, the boxes….”

By contrast, from its first days, Ovadia & Sons has been made in the U.S.A., using fabrics sourced from France, Italy, and Japan. What one-stop shops had done before, several differ-ent factories are now required to handle. In the current business, up to eight different producers contribute to a single jacket, from trims to but-tons, and all the patterns are custom-developed. (Increasingly, the fabrics are, too.)

The line began small, focusing mainly on shirting and some tailored pieces, all of which recalled an earlier, more formal style of mens-wear. (The brothers say they look to their grandfather, who loved to dress up, for style in-spiration; their father tends to wear track pants and T-shirts unless under duress. Even so, pic-tures of both men are tacked to the brothers’ mood board in their office.) Their ties borrowed patterns from the British Royal Artillery; their shirts had the slightly starchy finesse of Savile Row, filtered through Ralph Lauren.

“For me, the tailored element of dressing

“i would Put on a suit and a shirt and tie to go out to dinner. my

friends would show uP in t-shirts,” shimon says.

They’ve GoT a Repp To pRoTeCT striped ties, printed pocket squares, beaded brace-lets, and more of ovadia & sons’ accessories.

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creo

was exciting because no one was doing it,” Shi-mon says. “I would put on a suit and a shirt and tie to go out to dinner. My friends would show up in T-shirts.”

the 34th street childrenswear dis-trict might as well have been a continent away from the fashion establishment. They entered the business with no connections whatsoever, armed only with chutzpah (and, it must be said, the backing of Magic Kids). “No one helped us,” says Ariel. “Nobody. I tried. I went to people who had successful womenswear brands. They said, ‘I don’t know how to help you.’ We didn’t know where to make anything, who to contact. Zero.”

It’s not exactly fair to say the Ovadias had no support early on. Just from cold calls and e-mails—skills honed as Magic Kids salesmen—they managed to garner crucial early support from mainstream publications like GQ and ma-jor retailers such as Bloomingdale’s and, later, Barneys. But the key push for Ovadia & Sons occurred online, in the then-nascent menswear blogosphere, where there were no barriers to entry or industry connections to leverage.

The turning point, the brothers say, was when they were mentioned by Lawrence Schlossman, the blogger behind both Sartori-ally Inclined and How to Talk to Girls at Parties. In 2010, he wrote his first post about Ovadia & Sons, borrowing images from Women’s Wear Daily and linking to the Ovadias’ own Tumblr. “All of a sudden, any picture we put up had a thousand comments,” says Ariel.

Ovadia & Sons became one of the first brands to benefit from this groundswell of blogger support. The online menswear com-munity was expanding rapidly—so rapidly, it ultimately spawned parodies of itself—and the Ovadias were primed, by accident or design, to take advantage. “Whether it’s coincidental that the Internet menswear [boom] was happening at the time they came up or whether they’re symptomatic of each other, I don’t really know,” says Schlossman. “But it seems like there’s a cor-relation between the two, for sure.”

The digital world created acolytes who grew with the brand and sought out its wares. It’s im-possible to calculate exactly how this translates into dollars—though the Ovadias do run their own successful e-commerce site—but in terms of perception and recognition, it’s hard to over-state the influence. Schlossman jokes that Ova-dia & Sons is on “the Mount Rushmore of the #menswear-endorsed brands.” Their strength in the digital space hasn’t diminished, he adds. “Now, when one of their new lookbooks comes

out, if someone puts it on Tumblr—explosion.”Industry players admit that suggestions from

outlets such as Tumblr can be influential. “I don’t think it’s possible to work independently of that anymore,” says Sam Lobban, senior buyer at Mr. Porter, the e-tail site that began carrying Ovadia & Sons this fall. “There’s three or four menswear blogs that I check once or twice a day. I think it’s natural now for everyone to consume that kind of information online. To say that didn’t influence us would be kind of unfair, really.” (He hastens to add that it wasn’t as simple as seeing something on a blog and rushing to buy it. He had become aware of the line through several different points of contact, including GQ and outreach from the brothers themselves.)

Increasingly, the online world is bleeding into the off-line world. The second comment on Schlossman’s original 2010 Sartorially Inclined post on Ovadia & Sons is from a newly minted fan named Nicolas Lazaro. He now handles the company’s press. Schlossman has moved from independent blogger to editor in chief of Com-plex magazine’s men’s Web site, Four Pins. “A lot of people were paying attention to the In-ternet, what the bloggers were doing,” Shimon says. “Fast-forward a few seasons later, the blog-gers are working at magazines, or they’re sitting front-row, or they’re editors or even buyers.”

Meanwhile, establishment accolades con-tinue to roll in. In 2012, GQ named them one of its Best New Menswear Designers in Amer-ica; later that year, the 111-year-old collegiate label J. Press named them creative directors of its new secondary collection, York Street. This past July, their own line was announced as one of ten finalists for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, a sponsorship competition that includes a cash prize and business mentorship.

On the heels of that announcement, the brothers launched themselves into the New

York fashion week schedule with a presenta-tion. The collection was by far their largest yet, and the most pronounced departure from their all-tailored look: Besides the usual double-breasted jackets and monk-strap shoes were emerald-green Hawaiian-print shirts and neo-prene biker jackets. It was looks from this collec-tion that they presented as part of the Fashion Fund group show at the Chateau Marmont, in L.A. They were a long way from Flatbush. David Beckham was overheard enthusing about their suiting; The Wire actor Michael B. Jordan was tweeting with them in the days after the show.

By the time this magazine reaches you, the winner will have been announced, and the odds for the Ovadias, to be frank, are long. But the momentum isn’t slowing, and though they ac-knowledge help and supporters along the way, the two have a way of making their own luck, not depending on outside forces.

“I was looking at the companies in the Fash-ion Fund, and, from what I know about the oth-er brands, the other designers, they worked over here, they worked over there. It’s easier to have your voice heard if you’ve been in the business,” Ariel says.

“We’re really the only company that just came into this business, calling people on the phone with just the entrepreneurial spirit. Where we come from, everyone has this spirit, every-one has their own business. I called Barneys or Bloomingdale’s, and I said, ‘Hi, my name is Ariel Ovadia. I have a new brand that’s called Ovadia & Sons, and you have to come see it, because it’s the best collection you’ll see this season.’ ”

Their father, they report, thinks it is crazy that his sons sell shirts for more than $200 apiece, though he will wear one if they send it to him. And what it means for the future of the business they couldn’t say, but six months ago, Shimon had his first son.

spRinG GReen looks from ovadia & sons’ spring ’14 collection, its brightest and sporti-est yet, tacked up in the brothers’ office.

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: holiday 2013

Nick Lowe has maNaged to age gracefully in an industry that makes a fetish of youth. Maybe his secret lies in not taking himself or his career too seriously. Even at age 64, the singer-songwriter remains on good terms with his muse, un-like the majority of his more overt-ly ambitious colleagues who, with the exception of Bob Dylan and a few others, seem to lose the creative spark not long after they hit forty.

Over the past twenty years, Lowe has made one casually great album after another, work that is equal to the stuff he turned out in the seventies, when he had a moment in the pop-music sun. In keeping with his easygoing ap-proach to life and art, he is not do-

ing all that much to push his latest release, Quality Street: A Seasonal Selection for All the Family. When I asked what inspired him to make a holiday album, he replied, “I wasn’t inspired to do it at all—I was com-missioned to do it by my record company. They called me up and asked me about it, and my initial reaction was snobby and snotty: ‘Oooh, I don’t think that sort of thing is for me! I’m way too arty and farty to soil my hard-won rep-utation with this sort of vulgar carrying-on!’ It wasn’t until the af-ternoon of that day that I started thinking about why that was my immediate reaction. And that’s when I thought: No! Sod it! We might—we might—be able to come

up with something good that could work on more than one level. And so it turned out to be.”

The son of a Royal Air Force of-ficer who was a veteran of the Sec-ond World War, Lowe grew up on military bases and spent his child-hood Christmases in places such as Jordan and Cyprus. “It would have been 104 degrees outside,” he said by phone from London, “but it wouldn’t stop us from eat-ing a gigantic Christmas lunch—turkey and potatoes, even though the turkey might possibly come out of a tin. There were three toys—three for the boys and three for the girls—and we all got the same three presents.”

Christmas became a little less

wonderful once he was grown up and on the road, back in the days of drinks and drugs. “Everything would be closed,” he said, “and I would spend it in some kind of stu-por.” The shows he played at that time of year were hard slogs. So much so that, these days, he avoids the road during holiday season. “It’s impossible, really,” Lowe said. “It’s always a rowdy crowd. They’ve al-ways had too much to drink. You don’t lay any art on them at all. You won’t get thanked for it. You’ve got to keep the beat strong.”

You can hear the mix of season-al joy and disappointment in the new album, which has three new original songs sprinkled among holiday classics and oddities. One

T h e s t y l e a n d s u b s t a n c e

o f n i c k l o w e , a g e l e s s p o p -m u s i c g e n i u s .

By Jim windolfPhotograph by nathan pask

ROLEMODEL

Second Wind

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Second Wind

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: summer 2013

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of the new ones, “Christmas at the Airport,” has the Lowe hall-mark—an underlying melancholy not quite masked by an easy mel-ody and witty lyrics.

Even Lowe’s most famous songs don’t announce their own greatness. “Cruel to Be Kind,” his hit single from 1979, wraps a Shakespearean allusion in three minutes and thirty-one seconds of pop hooks. (He rerecorded the track, backed by Wilco, last year, during a quick break from the Wilco–Nick Lowe summer tour.) “Heart of the City,” his jo-vial take on punk’s primitivism, is almost comically simple—if it has more than two chords, it’s hard to tell. In 1974, Lowe came up with a satirical number that has turned out to be something of a pop-rock standard: “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Under-standing.” Narrated by an old hip-pie who finds himself at odds with the post-hippie world, it settles on a genuine sentiment that is the key to its staying power. In a less frisky mood, Lowe wrote the plain and bleak “The Beast in Me” especially for Johnny Cash, who recorded the definitive (and first commercially released) version in 1994.

Lowe’s lack of self-importance and his accompanying distaste for the machinations of stardom stretch back to an incident that took place in 1970. The whole thing started when a couple of charming but slightly shady would-be moguls decided that Lowe was their ticket to pop-music riches. As the main singer and song-writer of the band Brinsley Schwarz at the time, Lowe was young, good-looking, and willing enough to play the game. Thinking big, the would-be moguls booked him and his bandmates for an engagement at the Fillmore East, a prime venue in Manhattan’s East Village.

The madcap businessmen went so far as to pack a London-to-New York Aer Lingus Boeing 707 with journalists and contest winners for a weekend spree during which they were to witness the American debut of pop music’s Next Big Thing. But the flight was miserably delayed, and the reporters and critics passed the hours by getting drunk and stoned. After a late arrival, a fleet of twenty-two stretch limousines, hired for the occasion by the would-be moguls and stuffed with the inebriated jour-nalists, battled the traffic all the way from John F. Kennedy International Airport to the club.

Lowe and the boys played in less-than-stellar fashion at the Fill-more, only to be followed by Van Morrison, who blew them off the stage. The journalists soon shed their hangovers and lit into the band and the publicity stunt. A headline in Melody Maker summed up the response: THE BIGGEST HYPE OF ALL TIME. Even the London Sun-day Times weighed in with a piece on the dangers of hype. And so the great gambit had backfired, rendering Brinsley Schwarz some-thing of a laughingstock. (You can read the full version of this cau-tionary tale in the book No Sleep Till Canvey Island: The Great Pub Rock Revolution, by Will Birch.)

In reaction to the public failure, Lowe went in the opposite direc-tion. He and his bandmates rented an old house and lived communally over the next few years, much like their heroes in The Band. They toured relentlessly and played reg-ular shows, for a much-reduced fee, in humble London pubs such as the Tally Ho. While other acts of the day were conquering au-diences with bombast and flash, Lowe and his bandmates turned down their amps and won a repu-tation as the quietest group on the

circuit. Little by little, they earned back their integrity.

Even with his band today, Lowe favors a low-volume approach. “We’re so into the idea of mak-ing stuff swing,” he said. “People may think it’s a bit comedic, but we really like that element. It’s im-possible to swing loud. We’re not inaudible, but it’s something you can do only if you can hear one an-other. It sounds great, to be playing a rock ’n’ roll song kind of quiet.”

Throughout his low-key ca-reer—with the exception of his early-seventies communal years, when he went all shaggy—Lowe has maintained an elegant look. And unlike some other rockers of his generation, who hit the stage in tight garments similar to what they wore in their hey-day, he now cuts a refined figure when he performs.

“People don’t really take dressing seriously anymore,” he says. “They dress for comfort nowadays, but it’s perfectly possible to dress smartly and be comfortable, without looking like what I describe as ‘dadsy.’ Most of the time, I do try to put in a bit of effort and look well turned out.”

When he was starting in the six-ties, before the ill-fated New York jaunt, he was a fashionable young man, indeed. “I was an enthusiastic mod,” he says. “Someone we really admired was [jazz musician] Gerry Mulligan. His look was just fantas-tic. It was an Ivy League look, polo shirts with three-button collars or a knitted sweater. That kind of garment, worn with loafers. And it was incorporated with a Euro-pean style—French- and Italian-style suits with thin lapels, slopy shoulders, and not much padding. It took quite a chunk out of your wage packet. I still like it, though. It’s an ageless look. I find I still like that smart, casual look—and now, of course, I can afford to buy clothes of that quality.”

The style matches the man: understated, casually elegant, and immune to passing trends.

ALL-TIME LOWES Previous page: Nick Lowe takes a stroll near

his home outside London. Left: Ready to rock, in the seventies.

“It’s perfectly possible to dress smartly and be comfortable, without looking like what I describe as ‘dadsy.’ ”

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HER FOR HIM Recent blockbusters have presented moviegoers with a grim sci-fi tomorrow. With Her, director Spike Jonze and costume designer Casey Storm have built a more interesting world. By MATTHEW LYNCH

IN MOVIE AFTER MOVIE, the fu-ture is brutal, strewn with rubble, and often populated with the res-urrected dead. Those filmmakers who channel their existential dread into dreams of annihilation tend to have more success than those brave enough to present that other idea of the day after tomorrow—the one in which the world keeps spinning and technology continues to creep along.

Her, the new movie from Spike Jonze, is in the latter camp, a not-too-far-off tale of a mustachioed misanthrope, Theodore Twombly ( Joaquin Phoenix), in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. It comes with big expec-tations, partly because it is the fourth studio film in fourteen years from the king of cool-guy cinema. Think Gattaca or Brazil brought to you by the still-boyish imagineer who shot Being John Malkovich and Adapta-tion in between directing art-school skate videos for his pals and running around with the Vice set. But I’d like to think that the enthusiasm for Her is driven, to some degree, by its pro-duction design, which pulls off the trick of being subtle and arresting at the same time. Take Twombly’s wardrobe, which includes a pair of pants that look to be belted some-where around Phoenix’s navel.

“The high-waisted thing is kind of referencing things decades past,” said Casey Storm, the film’s costume designer. “Maybe some Humphrey Bogart played into it.”

On the phone from Los Ange-les, Storm said that he and Jonze arrived at their vision of a future that takes place “almost two cycles of fashion from now.” The designer’s collaborations with Jonze go back to the director’s 1994 instant-classic music video for the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” Storm went on to help transform Cameron Diaz into an eccentric mess who keeps a chimp

for a pet in Being John Malkovich and translate Max’s much-cherished wolf suit to the screen for the movie version of Where the Wild Things Are. But he faced probably his greatest challenge with Her, which demand-ed that the costume designer and director work together to fill every frame with a fully formed notion of an imaginary future.

“It’s a lot easier to follow the rules if someone else was giving you the rule book,” Storm said, “but we were making the rule book and then following the rules.”

Twombly’s world, concocted

from shoots in Los Ange-les and China, is a place of natural fibers and soft-

ly rounded edges. It also verges on overpopulation. The commuting masses move through this distinc-tive setting garbed in bright organics and alien cuts. There’s color-block-ing and precious few inches of fabric spent on collars.

“One of us, I don’t remember who, was like, ‘Every future mov-ie has that Dr. Evil collarless band-collar shirt. This is such a cheesy de-cision to do this,’ ” Storm recalled. “But there’s a reason every sci-fi movie uses that…. There is some-

thing to it, selling the future. The problem is that it is usually done in, like, a Bruce Willis leather jacket, and it just looks like a bad idea of what the future is supposed to be.”

The future perfect extended to the film’s color palette, which is al-most devoid of blue and contains no metallics or silvers. Her does not, however, shy away from primaries entirely. Take the film’s poster, which features a forlorn Phoenix in a bright red collarless shirt, a change in tone for Jonze and Storm, previously culti-vators of a more muted world.

The execution of their vision had Storm nervous deep into pro-duction. Its first extra-heavy scene, shot in a Hollywood subway station, induced an anxiety attack. “It was the first time I was dressing our world and dressing different people in our world,” Storm said. “People had dif-ferent jobs and people had different socioeconomic levels and ages, and we dressed them all, and I lined them up along the subway, and I went down the line one by one. I was like, ‘Oh, fuck! This is a disaster.’ Every-body’s in crazy patterns and colors, and the shapes are so fucked-up. And it just looked like everyone was just a weirdo. I just made a weirdo world.

“I watched playback on the mon-itor,” Storm went on. “Everything in motion, in a group—it just made ev-erything dilute enough that you were aware there was something that was different and odd happening, but your eye didn’t go to any one thing.”

The result was pleasing enough to induce retail outfit Opening Cer-emony to base a menswear capsule collection on the Her look. It is on sale this holiday season for those brave enough to shop a few seasons ahead. The collection comprises but-ton-front shirts, panel-blocked sweat-shirts, patch-pocket jackets, quilted shearling coats, printed knits, and, yes, Twombly’s high-waisted pants.

THEFUTURE

TOMORROWLAND Joaquin Phoenix, in high-waisted pants, stars in the new Spike Jonze joint.

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: holiday 2013

By pola deBevoise | I l lu st ratI o n by katherine streeter

There are Two shockingly expensive forms of written communication in the contempo-rary world. There is the bar mitzvah invitation. I have seen those in Plexiglas, with their own power sources; and there was the wonderfully insane instance of David H. Brooks, the onetime defense-company CEO who spent $40,000 on his son’s leather-bound bar mitzvah invitations. (Brooks is now in prison for fraud.)

The other is the Billionaire’s Christmas card. I’ll posit from here, basing my estimates on

the many hundreds of holiday cards my hus-band and I have received from billionaires over the years.

This is how it goes:In June, the Billionaire’s wife prepares him

for the Photo. He should have a light tan and a haircut. His eyebrows have been trimmed, his nose hairs waxed, and his children outfit-ted in polo shirts and dresses that coordinate mellifluously—not matching, which is a bit too Awkward Family Photos, but merely harmoni-ously echoing one another. And the Billionaire smiles into the camera, a look of benign sover-eignty fixed on his face, his hand (wedding ring showing) resting on his wife’s honeyed shoul-der. Everyone has been professionally dusted and primped. Obviously, a name photographer shoots the images. (Including hair and makeup, photographer and assistants, and stylist, the shoot requires: six people.)

The photographs are retouched. Billionaire’s wrinkles are digitally relaxed, Billy’s pimple expunged. In September, Wife’s personal as-sistant presents her with the array of options. Saleswoman from the stationer arrives in a taxi with card options. (Photoshop technician, stationer, cabdriver: three people.)

Wife chooses an accordion-fold card able to accommodate several photographs, featuring blind stamping and watermarks in the forty-pound vellum—no logos. Oh, it’s sad when the regular people send off their holiday greetings and on the back one reads the words minted or tiny prints or shutterfly. The wealthier you are, the less advertising you do for other people’s products.

The card will obviously feature several en-graved areas, words of joyful holiday cheer engraved into the paper with hand-chiseled dies. The more colors that are featured close togeth-er—it’s called close registration, and it requires several separate dies—the more expensive. If you see a house portrait or a family crest in three or four colors engraved into a card, know that the dies alone for the image cost about $5,000.

The edge stain will be gold leaf, applied by hand. If there are any watercolor elements, add in the fee for the work, which is also done by hand. (Printers, die etcher, gold-leaf artist, watercolor artist: ten people.)

The envelope will be custom silk moiré. Everyone is loving the custom silk moiré these days. One of my favorite Billionaire wedding in-vitations last summer came from a Billionaire marrying his third or fourth wife; the invita-tion came in a long box covered in pink silk into which his and her initials had been woven.

For the holiday card, a family crest will be woven into the fabric.

The personal assistant will order custom stamps for the postage, which will be, due to the size and heft of the envelope, $3. (Stamp manufacturer, fabric designer, fabric manufac-turer: three people.)

After the cards have been printed, they are delivered to the Wife, who takes one and exam-ines it. It will be a thing of perfection. It will feel expensive, but the average person will have no idea how much it cost to fabricate this card. (Easily $100 apiece.) Once she has seen and acknowl-edged their perfection and felt their power, the personal assistant takes them to the calligrapher. A copy editor has gone over the List of those who will receive the card. (There are 700 cards to be sent.) The calligrapher is a former artist who

now makes her living writ-ing people’s names and ad-dresses, every day, onto en-velopes and place cards. She dreams of the day when she can make art, but for now she listens to National Pub-lic Radio and inscribes the names of wealthy people onto pieces of paper, over and over again, addressed to the same people so many times she can rattle off their addresses and ZIP codes and arrondissements by heart. So-and-so? Down and out at 720 Park Avenue. Whoosie-whats? They’re in Knightsbridge. Those guys? El Vedado Road, Palm Bitch. She notes deaths and divorces by what names she is now writing. She doesn’t ever meet any of them. (Messenger, editor, callig-

rapher, Terry Gross: four people.) When they are addressed, they are returned

to the Wife. She likes to see the finished product. She shows a sample to her husband, the Billion-aire. He reflects upon this miniature masterpiece for thirty seconds, then places it on his mantel. Wife will give them to her assistant, who will give them, in their bundles tied with satin rib-bon, to the worker behind the desk at the post office, with special instructions not to “bruise” them. (Total staff: 50 people. Total hours of la-bor: 500. Cost per piece, including fabrication and calligraphy: $125 each. Total cost: $87,500.)

And they are delivered, one by one, spread-ing out over the planet, handed over desks and fed through hand-polished brass door slots and placed inside wrought-iron boxes and received by uniformed ladies and gentlemen. They are passed into the piles of cards waiting for anoth-er man and his wife to look through on a holi-day night, glasses of wine in hand, ready to pro-nounce whose kids are good-looking and whose are fat, whose new wife is the bomb, whose new beachfront house is obscene.

Another Billionaire will look at the pictures, and touch the edge of the vellum, and note the gold leaf, and feel a bit small and deflated for about four seconds, and then drop it into the pile of cards that have been read and will never be looked at again.

I M a r r I e d a B I l l I o n a I r e

the $87,500 christmas card

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