The House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power by Tom Bower / VIDEO: 'BECKHAM' Documentary Series | Official Trailer | Netflix

The House of Beckham: The explosive new 2024 biography of the Beckhams from the bestselling author of Revenge Hardcover – 20 Jun. 2024

by Tom Bower (Author)

 

The explosive new book from Britain’s leading investigative biographer, Tom Bower

 

As one of the most famous and influential couples in the world, David and Victoria Beckham have attained iconic status. The ultimate power couple have together built a multi-billion-dollar global brand. For decades, adoring fans have been captivated by the glamorous world they have created, while their unrivalled fusion of showbiz, fashion, football and celebrity has been cultivated alongside the image of a strong marriage.

 

When the much-trailed Netflix documentary Beckham aired in 2023, viewers were offered an even more intimate insight into their private lives. Produced by the Beckhams themselves, the series raised many questions, not only about their success and personal relationship, but also about the ruthlessly successful management of their image in the media. Are their lives really as perfect as the Beckhams would like the world to believe?

 

Through extensive research, expert sourcing and interviews with insiders, Britain’s most celebrated investigative biographer, Tom Bower, has unearthed a succession of revelations that give surprising insight into the reality of ‘Brand Beckham’. Exploring the couple’s relationship, and the truth about their football and fashion careers, their finances and their new life in Miami, The House of Beckham unravels the extraordinary reality of the business-savvy cultural icons to tell an engrossing, often astonishing story of money, sex and power.

 

The House of Beckham by Tom Bower review – a sex-obsessed hatchet job

 

The journalist’s supposed exposé of David and Victoria Beckham’s gilded lives is a hilariously bitter hybrid of tabloid gossip, old news and sloppy writing

 

Anthony Cummins

Sun 23 Jun 2024 07.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/23/the-house-of-beckham-by-tom-bower-review-a-sex-obsessed-hatchet-job

 

Nobody imagined that last autumn’s Netflix series Beckham was a warts-and-all confessional. “There were some horrible stories that were difficult to deal with,” said David, alluding coyly to reports in 2004 that he’d done the dirty with Rebecca Loos, not named in the film. “It was the first time that me and Victoria had been put under that kind of pressure in our marriage. Ultimately, it’s our private life.”

 

This new book from renowned investigative journalist Tom Bower exists simply to say: “No, it isn’t.” Forget the summer-hazed scenes of amateur beekeeping and opening up about OCD: Bower’s top line is that we should see David as a tax-avoiding serial shagger who was never even that good at football – and as for Victoria, she’s a talentless nonentity who’d probably be divorced if she didn’t need to monetise their marriage and feed her addiction to the limelight.

 

Such is the gist of this hilariously bitter book, best understood as a silent howl of rage for the litigation-muzzled dogs of Fleet Street; Bower might as well have scrawled “not fair” in crayon when he tells us that Beckham’s lawyers put paid to the Sun’s interest in a long-lens snap of him on the Med with “a beautiful unnamed blonde” in his lap.

 

As a tale of dosh and sex, the emphasis is firmly on the latter. Bower tries gamely to nose his way through the cul-de-sacs of Beckham’s accounts, truffling through earnings and investments in Madrid, Miami and Dubai, but the best he has on the tax stuff simply recycles a seven-year-old scoop in Der Spiegel, when hacked emails revealed the extent of Beckham’s ire once concern from HMRC nobbled his longed-for knighthood (“unappreciative cunts”).

 

The book’s main purpose is to piggyback on the Netflix doc while spewing all over it the regurgitated contents of every tabloid story ever to print Beckham’s name beside that of another woman, whether decades-old tabloid kiss-and-tells or nudge-wink gossip about him attending parties with models Helena Christensen and Bella Hadid. “True or not, the report was damaging” is the kind of formulation Bower appears to favour, which muddies the waters somewhat. Kate Beckinsale was “suspected of getting too close to David, although no evidence ever emerged”. Beckham and Charlize Theron “barely took their eyes off each other” at the draw for the 2010 World Cup. He’s even been “at parties where others enjoyed cocaine”, which no journalist would ever do.

 

Another source confirms that Beckham once advertised fish fingers: hardly a clandestine activity, by definition

 

Even if you think celebrities are fair game, The House of Beckham fails on its own grubby terms, because it’s all old news. I’ll admit that when I first heard of this book I was cynically wondering what skeleton in the closet might have made Beckham queue so long to see the Queen in pre-emptive atonement. But fresh dirt is conspicuous by its absence, despite Bower vaunting the “previously untold aspects of this extraordinary story” – which are what, exactly? Of more than 1,000 endnote references, all but four point to sources in the public domain (overwhelmingly, old tabloid tales) and of those four “confidential sources”, well… One of them is used to stand up a quote that Victoria’s early dress-making relied on “fabrics, seamstresses and pattern makers” from the designer Roland Mouret – which is something Vogue reported in 2008 after, er, her own PR team put it out. Another source informs Bower that Beckham, filming his first ad in 1997, was “quiet. There was nothing polished about him at all” (hold the front page). Another confirms that Beckham once advertised fish fingers: hardly a clandestine activity, by definition.

 

Those fish fingers really bother Bower. “As a child, announced the advertisers, Beckham had eaten fish fingers. That was disputable. Neither Beckham nor his mother had ever mentioned him eating that particular food.” The lying bastard! He once said he didn’t use a body double in a Guy Ritchie-directed H&M ad – but he did! Visiting Victoria in hospital after his third son was born, he drank Coca-Cola, “despite being paid to promote Pepsi”! In the end, Bower has to resort to telling us three times over that, by agreeing to become an ambassador for Qatar’s World Cup, Beckham “ignored its funding for Hamas”.

 

Beckham exploited his appeal to gay men, “big spenders on underwear”, says Bower, nothing if not a man of the world. His fame apparently stems from our “nostalgia for a tattooed lad enjoying his manly bravado” – what? – yet he and Victoria failed to comprehend that “there was a limit to the public’s fascination with two aspiring people from Essex” – a tin-eared self-own if ever there was one.

 

Bower isn’t incapable of conjuring a nicely feline phrase capturing the absurdity of his subjects’ lives (“On one critical matchday he was in London having dinner with Geri Halliwell after another miserable attempt to relaunch Findus”), but for the most part his writing is ludicrously bad here: “Famous among music fans as a June weekend of drink, dance, dalliance and a great deal more, David Beckham was enjoying three days of hectic partying at the Glastonbury festival.” That chapter ends with the suggestion that the Beckhams were there in 2017 to cynically stage their coupledom for the press – but when he says “rekindling memories of the Darkness in 2003 was forbidden”, he means Rebecca Loos, not Justin Hawkins opening the Pyramid stage.

 

A failure of research and craft, it’s also a failure of humanity. He’s constantly needling Victoria, “never the prettiest”, for her acne and “Cuprinol tan”, for how it was intolerable to be among other players’ wives, “many better looking than her”. “Few men would have resisted Rebecca Loos,” Bower writes. I shudder to imagine just how much pleasure he got from solemnly reporting that, in 2003, Victoria was voted “the world’s best-dressed woman for the second year running” – by readers of Prima. It’s ugly stuff: the reunited Spice Girls might have been renamed the Geriatrics because they were “all over-30 mums with boob jobs”. No doubt Bower would say Victoria plays the press, but never does he pause to reflect that she’s operating in a world in which a guy nudging 80 years of age can feel securely on the high ground peddling innuendo about eating disorders.

 

Bower, whose previous subjects include Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie and the fraudsters Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black, is absurdly unreflective here. He recounts how Andy Coulson, then editing the News of the World, “relying on a variety of sources” (lol) was “fired up against the Beckhams still selling the image of their happy marriage”. Coulson, another Essex lad who coincidentally happened to be cheating on his own wife at the time he broke the Rebecca Loos story, was later jailed for conspiracy to hack phones; Neville Thurlbeck, the reporter who brought him the scoop, was also jailed; as was the story’s broker, Max Clifford, later imprisoned for sex offences. Bower tells us that Coulson’s team celebrated an early splash with a knees-up in Mayfair: “First editions of the newspaper had long been on sale outside King’s Cross station when the celebrating journalists staggered into the dawn.”

 

That kiosk doesn’t even sell newspapers any more; meanwhile, Beckham’s dog has a devoted following on Instagram. I might, instinctively, have found that cause for regret, somehow – but then I read the petty, nonsensical, slipshod crap Bower gives us here. Then again, it probably isn’t meant for anyone but the Beckhams themselves, as a kind of bad-minded re-edit of the Netflix film, left gift-wrapped on the door of their $5m Burj Khalifa condo. When Bower devotes a paragraph to reciting the testimony of a Bosnian woman who claimed to have slept with Beckham five times in 2007 – “utterly untrue”, Bower adds – it can be there for no other reason than to annoy them. It’s the trajectory every investigative hack dreams of: start by writing about fugitive Nazis, end by trying to piss off Victoria Beckham.

 

Beatrix Ost on Being Yourself is the Ultimate Style | Racked | Artist in Residence: Beatrix Ost’s Virginia Estate

HOMEPLACE

Artist in Residence: Beatrix Ost’s Virginia Estate

At this fairy-tale home, magic awaits behind every door

 

By DANIEL WALLACE

https://gardenandgun.com/feature/artist-residence-beatrix-osts-virginia-estate/

December 2017/January 2018

 

Beatrix Ost has lived many lives. The seventy-seven-year-old Virginia resident’s grand and evocative paintings and sculptures have been exhibited all over the world, and she’s also been a screenwriter, a model, and an actress. She’s published several big, beautiful books; her most recent, The Philosopher’s Style, is a compendium of her photographs, paintings, bons mots, and stories. She designs jewelry, and other artists and designers have made her their muse, for years. But she has become best known for being Beatrix, for how she looks, the clothes she wears, the way she conducts herself in the world—in other words, her style, her very way of being. For better or worse, she has become her art, and the rest of it—her painting, design, sculpture, and writing—orbits her like many smaller moons.

 

The first time I met her was in September. Fall had just arrived, and she was sitting on a bench outside of Estouteville, the home she’s lived in for the last thirty-five years, applying a fresh coat of bright red lipstick. She wore a straw-yellow turban; beneath it I could see wisps of her violet hair. She draped a dark shawl over her shoulders. Her blouse was ivory lace, and her skirt, black, reached almost all the way to the grassy drive—her look is often a cunning combination of both vintage and designer pieces. Pearled and golden rings decorated her fingers, and she wore a necklace she designed, made from bomb scrap metal by Laotian artists with an engraving that reads, “In your body is a good place to be.”

 

The aphorism is appended to all of her emails as well.

 

I drove from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to Estouteville to see her, and though it’s three hours away, a half hour or so from Charlottesville, I made it there exactly when she had asked for me: 3:00 p.m. Neither of us could believe it. “You knew you were coming to see a very punctual German woman,” she said, and smiled warmly.

 

She pointed to a huge wooden structure that looked like a tree house, but without the tree. “Shall we talk up there?”

 

Scattered all around the estate are homemade pieces like this, made of sticks and vines and slats of wood found on the property, built by the farmers and gardeners who take care of the place. Benches, gazebos, little altars. Almost everyone who works at Estouteville eventually becomes an artist of some kind, which Ost encourages; but the inclination is also something that might arise naturally from time spent immersed in the beauty and history of this place.

 

We made our way to the top of the structure, brushing away the leggy stems of a wild rosebush, where we had a gorgeous view of the house. The building of Estouteville began in 1827, in what you would call Palladian, Roman Revival, or Jeffersonian style, or perhaps all three. James Dinsmore, Thomas Jefferson’s master carpenter, who helped him construct Monticello and the University of Virginia, designed the home. Made of brick, wood, and stucco, Estouteville from the outside could not be statelier, or more serious, or more awesome. But giant Tuscan porticoes always have that effect on me.

 

Ost and I sat there and talked about various kinds of magic for a while, because magic is what brought her and her husband, Ludwig Kuttner, here.

 

“We had a house on the Hudson, in New York, but it burned down,” she said. “To find a new home, we held a pendulum above a map of America and let it swing and swing, and it came to rest on this area of Virginia. Sothe-by’s took us to some other houses, but when we came here, we knew this was the place.”

 

After years creating art and acting in her native Germany, Ost came to New York City with Kuttner in 1975 “for fun,” she has said, and they loved it so much they moved there. She was a part of the thriving eighties art explosion but never felt entirely accepted by the scene: A flamboyant young European woman with the charming but somewhat aristocratic mien of a dispossessed heiress did not fit in with the urban edge in vogue in New York at the time. In 1982, they moved to Estouteville, the seat of her expression ever since.

 

From our perch in this treeless tree house, I could see that Beatrix touch: the bronze sculptures standing on

the lawn, the marble orbs, and the trunks of dead oaks painted bright green, blue, and red. “When trees die, we paint them,” she said. “But the one we painted green, after we painted that one, it came back to life.” She shrugged. Behind us wound a hedge maze she designed herself.

 

A small village of outbuildings also surrounds the main house. The hay barn has been repurposed as an office; the former slave quarters, a guesthouse. Estouteville was a stop on the Underground Railroad. When Ost and Kuttner fixed it up, they found a secret space beneath the house where people on their way to freedom would hide.

 

The sun took an angle on us, and we headed inside. “I’ll make us some tea,” she said, and left me alone in the Great Hall. I feel certain now that this was her plan, allowing me a few minutes alone to absorb everything around me, this new world I’d been welcomed into, which was unlike any I’d been in before. Ost and Kuttner spent years repairing and refurbishing Estouteville but changed none of its architecture: Everything there is original to the house, including the haunting bucrania—a frieze of ox skulls, dozens of them—that line the metope. But there is no place your eye can rest without seeing something astonishing, beautiful, or engaging, much of the astonishment created by Ost herself. Surrealistic paintings, heads made of wax, fiber sculptures, a collection of pewter, wooden hands. Everything in it could be in a museum, but being there doesn’t feel like being in a museum: It feels like I’ve walked into the dream of someone dreaming about a museum.

 

She brought back some tea, and we sat in the Great Hall and talked about Estouteville, where she has lived for almost half of her life. She loves this house, the history of it and the myth of their arrival. And she’s drawn to its symmetries: The rooms off the Great Hall are identical in size but filled with different and wondrous objets, glass owls and crystal balls, gifts from friends, from other artists, mementos from a peripatetic life—a vast, exotic, and haphazard collection.

 

“The rooms are like a Rorschach test,” she said. But the charm also lies in how the house flows from the inside out, the outside in, with porticoes in the back and the front, one for watching the sun rise, the other for watching it set. The pool, one of the many improvements she and Kuttner brought to the estate, looks like a giant’s teardrop, and she uses it almost every day. She told me she always has a deep sense of wonder and surprise at being where she is, in this house, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of Virginia acres. “It is a gift to me.”

 

Architecture, art, and magic. What else is there? Numbers. We talked about numbers, too. The number seven is an important one, because things seem to happen to her in sevens. She had a vision of her seven-year-old self recently, and the girl said, “Remember when you were seven? You knew everything.” She found love for the first time at fourteen. It goes on like that for her. This year—2017—she’s seventy-seven, so it was bound to be, if not a good year, at least an important one, an interesting one. She even found a pied-à-terre in Charlottesville she’s begun fixing up, for when she doesn’t want to come back to the too-quiet country after a night on the town. She is a vital woman, and, who knows, possibly immortal. “I feel like I’m entering the next third of my life,” she said.

 

And then there’s this: “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”

 

She could have said that, but she didn’t: Thomas Jefferson did. He would have loved her.

The Stormtrooper Scandal

 

The Stormtrooper Scandal

Ben Moore

Pictured: Ben Moore. Image credit: Stuart Bernard

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2024/25/the-stormtrooper-scandal

 

This stranger-than-fiction new documentary uncovers the tale of an audacious get-rich-quick scheme from inside the art world.

 

When a London-based curator and artist called Ben Moore announced in 2021 that he was about to launch a sale of digital artworks known as NFTs, with images based on the iconic stormtrooper helmets from Star Wars, interest was sky-high. Buyers and investors around the world competed to own one of these prestigious artworks, many customised by leading contemporary artists. When the sale went live on 6 November 2021, every piece sold out within seconds and Ben and his colleagues became instant millionaires.

 

But within days, it became clear that all was not what it seemed…

 

The film has access to key figures at the heart of the story, including Ben Moore, the charismatic London curator at the centre of the apparent con-job, as well as artists who had their work featured without their knowledge, including Jake Chapman, D*Face and Chemical X, as well as the collectors who were caught up in the frenzy - before being left with nothing.

 

The Stormtrooper Scandal is a story of speculation, greed and betrayal that took place on a new digital frontier - an unregulated world where appearances can be deceptive. But was this a scam, or a well-intentioned bid to make a fast fortune that spiralled out of control?

 

The Stormtrooper Scandal is a DSP production (part of Banijay UK) for BBC Two and BBC iPlayer. The Producer is Isabelle Rogers, the Director is Stuart Bernard and the Executive Producer is Magnus Temple. The commissioning editor for BBC Arts is Alistair Pegg.

 

Publicity contact: CB

 

Review

The Stormtrooper Scandal review – inside the Star Wars art sale that wrecked lives

 

This look at how a charmless impressario and a bevy of cryptobros made millions from an NFT scheme – only for it to collapse into a legal nightmare – is just mind warping

 

Lucy Mangan

Thu 20 Jun 2024 22.30 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/article/2024/jun/20/the-stormtrooper-scandal-review-inside-the-star-wars-art-sale-that-wrecked-lives

 

Here’s a tricky ethical conundrum – how much can you command yourself to care about the suffering of a monumental dickhead? Do you say a breezy “Not at all!” and move on with your day? Do you say “I have limited resources and prefer to expend them on non-dickhead entities, ta?” Do you say “No dickhead is all dickhead, just as none of us is entirely free of dickheadery ourselves – thus our common humanity demands of us always a degree of empathy and compassion?” Have a think, then test yourself again at the end of 90 minutes of The Stormtrooper Scandal. Send the results on a postcard to the usual address.

 

The Stormtrooper Scandal tells the tale of West London art curator Ben Moore, who came a cropper when he moved into the shadowy world of NFTs (non-fungible tokens, here in the form of digital art) and cryptocurrency without, apparently, knowing a damn thing about NFTs, cryptocurrency or the intellectual property that inheres to art of various kinds.

 

Moore had been putting on Art Wars shows – assemblies of Star Wars stormtrooper helmets customised by various artists, including big names like Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers and Anish Kapoor – for several years since 2013 for charity. They improved his profile but didn’t bring him in any decent money. What to do, what to do?

 

Artist Bran Symondson, a friend of Moore’s, introduced him to the idea of selling as NFTs pictures of the helmets he had accrued over the years. As far as I understand it – and the film does such a good job of trying to explain it that if I haven’t then I can only apologise and/or suspect that trying to understand it is a fool’s game – this means taking a picture of a customised Stormtrooper helmet and giving that picture a unique digital identifier on a blockchain (think of it as an invisible watermark) so only one person can “own” it. The owner – or “owner” – can then trade it on the NFT open market with people who also understand or purport to understand what’s going on, what they’re getting and why it’s worth anything at all.

 

Anyway. Moore finds some “cryptobros” online who can help him with this, commissioning further artists to create non-physical customised helmets (and here I confess, I really do begin to part ways with an understanding of events). He then announces a massive “drop” of these items/non-items, and the hype starts building.

 

Come the day, the entire collection sells out in five seconds. Furious trading ensues and Moore and the cryptobros take a cut of everything and make (estimated) millions. Then some of the artists become aware that pictures of their work have been taken and sold without permission. To the apparent total surprise of Moore, this matters and ultimately ends in the NFTs becoming worthless. Irate artists, investors – including some ordinary people who can ill afford to lose their money – and lawyers start, and continue to this very day, to make his life a misery.

 

The question of whether Moore was unlucky, thick, neglectful, incompetent – or worse – is the question that pervades the film. Artist Chemical X calls him “a posh boy chancer”, which is a description that certainly seems to match the vaguely shambolic yet complacent figure who is interviewed about his failures and possible transgressions on screen. Perhaps he was at least partly duped by the crypto team, who disappeared back into the cybershadows without leaving him any way of tracing them (he never learned their real names). Perhaps the greed of investors and their lack of due diligence played their parts. But the idea that Moore didn’t know he was sailing close to the wind seems highly improbable.

 

Moore’s lazy charmlessness and shifty equivocations on camera don’t help his cause. He was eager to get the project off the ground, he explains, and thought he would sort out “any problems” later rather than risk delay or abandonment. He thinks anyone would have been tempted to do what he did with the prospect of so much money “on the other side”.

 

Perhaps appropriately, given the heavy online dependencies of everyone involved, a popular phrase (or meme, if memes can be non-visual) from social media keeps running through my mind as the dismal story unfolds – god grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man. It seems to be a bottomless resource, but one without which we might all be better off.

 

 The Stormtrooper Scandal aired on BBC Two and is available on iPlayer.

Savile Row, A Glimpse into the World of English Tailoring . Japanese edition by Yoshimi Hasegawa (Author)

 

Savile Row, A Glimpse into the World of English Tailoring 

Japanese edition  by Yoshimi Hasegawa (Author)

 

Described as “hallowed ground” for menswear, Savile Row in London’s Mayfair district is a place unlike any other, one where skilled craftsmen draw on the world’s finest tailoring techniques to create outstanding bespoke suits. The timeless English style of tailoring has appealed to men around the world, transcending fashion trends, over a history of more than two centuries. This volume is Japan’s first visual book to pair cinematic photography and text in covering the history and background of Savile Row, the people who keep its traditions alive today, and the distinctive philosophies of each tailoring house.

 

○ Introduces 11 tailors that represent the changing face of hallowed ground today, from storied houses with Royal Warrants to newer, up-and-coming shops.

 

○ Research for the book took place over the course of two years and included interviews with more than 50 people involved with Savile Row. Nearly all the photographs were taken specifically for this volume.

 

○ Introductions to each tailoring house and the section on military tailoring are presented in both Japanese and English, while the main text is in Japanese only.

 

● Table of Contents

 

Introduction:

 

Hallowed Ground for Menswear / The Origins and History of Savile Row / What Makes Savile Row Special / The Savile Row Bespoke Association / Why Savile Row is Called Hallowed Ground / The Aesthetics of Dressing Well / Military Tailoring

 

Tailors:

 

Richard Anderson / Anderson & Sheppard / Dege & Skinner / Ede & Ravenscroft / Timothy Everest / Gieves & Hawkes / Huntsman / Norton & Sons / Henry Poole / Spencer Hart / Walsh & Jefferies

 

Directory:

 

Addresses and contact information / Bespoke tailors and related companies / Map

 

● Author: Yoshimi Hasegawa

Hasegawa is a journalist who covers the cultural appeal of Europe, and particularly Britain. Her articles on topics such as Bespoke tailoring, Bespoke shoes,Harris Tweed, Aran sweaters, and single malts whisky have appeared in numerous magazines such as GQ JAPAN and other media. Recent publications include Eikoku oshitsu goyotatsu shirarezaru roiyaru waranto no sekai [Purveyors to the Royal Household: The Lesser-known World of Royal Warrants] (Heibonsha Ltd.).

A Gentleman's London, Episode Ten: Dunhill

Dunhill Bourdon House, London

Alfred Dunhill Limited (known and stylised as dunhill) is a British luxury goods brand, specialising in ready-to-wear, custom and bespoke menswear, leather goods, and accessories.The company is based in London, where it also owns and operates a leather workshop. The company is currently owned by Richemont Holdings (UK) Limited and managed by CEO Andrew Maag.

Early history

The business was developed by Alfred Dunhill after he inherited his father's saddlery business on London's Euston Road at the age of 21 in 1893. Alfred Dunhill, responding to the growing demand for automobiles at this time, developed a line of accessories called "Dunhill's Motorities". This first collection included car horns and lamps, leather overcoats, goggles, picnic sets and timepieces, which provided the company with the strap line of "Everything But The Motor".

Within a few years, the business moved towards the luxury market with the opening of two Dunhill Motorities stores in Mayfair. By this time, Dunhill's had become known not only for motoring accessories but also for motoring attire. The Dunhill Motorities catalogue featured over 1,300 items.

The launch of the Dunhill pipe was a logical step from Motorities; in 1904 Alfred had patented a "Windshield Pipe" to help a driver combat the effects of wind and weather in his open top car. Alfred's first tobacconist and pipe shop opened in 1907 on Duke Street.

Alfred retired from the business in the 1920s. In the position of managing director and President were his brother Alfred-Henry, then daughter Mary and finally his grandson Richard and with the interests of the Dunhill family at heart, the business continued to embody the attributes and characteristics of Alfred's personality.

Alfred summarised his retail philosophy in an article written in the summer in 1923: "My experience in the motorists' trade has convinced me that, if one can exactly meet the desires of a good class of public, time alone is necessary to make it profitable. Compared with quality, price is relatively important."

Later history

By the late 1970s, Alfred Dunhill was offering a range of 3,500 luxury products in more than 20 stores round the world. The brand had expanded into offering a full range of men's ready to wear clothing.

In the 1990s, Alfred Dunhill's store on Jermyn Street was renovated to evoke the atmosphere of a private club, complete with a marble-floored humidor and a barber's shop.

Homes of Alfred Dunhill

Alfred Dunhill have built a series of retail emporiums for men around the world, referred to as the Homes of Alfred Dunhill. These Homes aim to represent the experience of luxury, allowing the customer to live the brand. The retail environment is distinguished by a range of services – which include a bespoke tailoring service, dunhill barbers, bar or restaurant and screening room. The Homes are located in London and Tokyo.

The London home, Bourdon House, was mentioned as one of Georgia Barretta-Whiteley's (Head of Design at Saatchi & Saatchi) top retail experiences, "Committed to advancing the pursuit of male indulgence', Alfred Dunhill has here presented us with a unique global concept that embraces an ultimate in masculine luxury and retail lifestyle – the Homes of Alfred Dunhill."

ALFRED DUNHILL

Alfred Dunhill has been resident at 48 Jermyn Street since 1906, welcoming iconic customers such as Winston Churchill. The brand has become synonymous as the ultimate British luxury brand for men; defined by elegance and innovation, Alfred Dunhill is committed to using the finest materials and world’s greatest artisans to create its uncompromising products.

https://www.jermynstreet.net/shop/dunhill/

Princess of Wales Appears in Public for First Time Since Cancer Diagnosis

 

Princess of Wales Appears in Public for First Time Since Cancer Diagnosis

 

Catherine took part in a ceremonial parade to celebrate the birthday of her father-in-law, King Charles III.

 

Stephen Castle

By Stephen Castle

Reporting from London

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/world/europe/uk-princess-kate-middleton-king-charles.html

 

June 15, 2024

Updated 8:39 a.m. ET

 

Catherine, Princess of Wales, appeared in public on Saturday for the first time since her cancer diagnosis, smiling while riding in a carriage with her three children as she took part in a ceremonial parade to celebrate the birthday of her father-in-law, King Charles III.

 

Crowds gathered in central London to watch as the princess and her family participated in an event full of military tradition, music and pageantry, dampened only slightly by a light rain that turned into a downpour as the ceremonies concluded.

 

Her appearance was welcomed as a sign of improvement in her medical condition and a significant moment for the British royal family, which suffered another blow this year when King Charles announced that he, too, had cancer.

 

However, when announcing late on Friday that she was well enough to attend the events on Saturday, the princess made it clear that her recovery still had some way to go.

 

“I am making good progress, but as anyone going through chemotherapy will know, there are good days and bad days,” Catherine, 42, said in a statement released to the news media. “On those bad days you feel weak, tired and you have to give in to your body resting,” she added. “But on the good days, when you feel stronger, you want to make the most of feeling well.”

 

Officially a U.S. Resident: For years, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, have considered California home. Recently, he updated his residency in a corporate filing.

 

An Explosive TV Interview: When Prince Andrew agreed to be interviewed on the BBC in November 2019, he likely didn’t expect it would one day inspire a feature film. Here’s what to know about “Scoop” on Netflix.

 

Catherine rode with her three children — Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis — in a state carriage to watch the military parade. She waved occasionally on the short carriage ride before moving to watch the ceremony from an indoor vantage point. Later, there were cheers from the crowd when she appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace alongside her children and other members of the royal family to watch a Royal Air Force flyby.

 

Earlier, her husband, William, Prince of Wales, who is colonel of the Welsh Guards, wore their ceremonial uniform and was on horseback. The princess, who is colonel of the Irish Guards, which played a prominent role in the parade, wore a white dress with black trim by Jenny Packham, a hat by Philip Treacy and the Irish Guards Regimental Brooch.

 

Catherine was hospitalized for abdominal surgery in January, and until Saturday she had not been seen at an official event this year. In March, she said publicly that she was undergoing a course of preventative chemotherapy.

 

In another sign of her progress, her office said she had started to work occasionally from home and was meeting with her official teams when she felt able. The princess also said in her statement that she hoped to join some public engagements during the summer, while adding that she “is not out of the woods yet.”

 

Evidence of her recovery will be especially welcome to Britain’s royal family, given that her health issues coincided with those of King Charles, who was treated for cancer in January. He has started his return to public life, and last week he attended ceremonies in France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings that presaged the end of World War II.

 

On Saturday, Charles, who celebrated his 75th birthday in November, rode in a carriage rather than on horseback, as is typical during the procession, which is known as the Trooping the Color.

 

The event, which has been an official celebration of the monarch’s birthday for more than 260 years, is based around a parade that starts at Buckingham Palace and then travels along the Mall, decorated by flags, to Horse Guards Parade, a ceremonial parade ground by St. James’s Park, before heading back to the palace.

 

After arriving at Horse Guards Parade, the king inspected the troops, who wore the ceremonial uniform of red tunics and bearskin hats. Among the spectators watching the intricate military ceremony were Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife, Akshata Murty.

 

The celebration also featured a 41-gun salute in Green Park.

 

The parade included about 1,400 soldiers, 400 musicians and 200 horses — including three from the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment that ran away and were injured in April during a rehearsal.

 

Stephen Castle is a London correspondent of The Times, writing widely about Britain, its politics and the country’s relationship with Europe. More about Stephen Castle

A France in Turmoil Mourns Françoise Hardy, Its Voice of Melancholy Cool

 

A France in Turmoil Mourns Françoise Hardy, Its Voice of Melancholy Cool

 

An overwhelming outpouring of tributes felt like a quest for some anchor in shared memory.

 

Roger Cohen

By Roger Cohen

Reporting from Paris

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/world/europe/france-francoise-hardy-tributes.html

June 14, 2024, 9:05 a.m. ET

 

It was like Françoise Hardy, the wistful singer and songwriter of a certain French melancholy and style, to slip away in the midst of a political storm, for it was never the clamor of power struggles that interested her, but rather an inner world of solitude, love betrayed and loss.

 

With France in turmoil after President Emmanuel Macron’s sudden plunging of the nation into an unexpected legislative election campaign, the country’s leading newspapers nevertheless devoted much of their front pages to Ms. Hardy’s death this week at the age of 80, hailing “the icon” of French music.

 

For Gabriel Attal, the prime minister, it was the loss of “this singular voice of a fierce tranquillity that cradled generations of French people” that felt overwhelming. For Brigitte Bardot, “France has lost with her a little of that nobility, of that beauty and that luminous talent, of that elegance that she conveyed all through her life.”

 

It was as if the country through Ms. Hardy’s life had come full circle, from her birth during an air raid in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944, seven months before the city’s liberation, to a moment when a far-right party once led by a man who belittled the Holocaust is now possibly on the brink of power.

 

The Nouvel Obs magazine caught a general atmosphere of disorientation in the country as it wrote of Ms. Hardy “wandering the road of lost hearts” at the “end of the summer, the end of the afternoon.” It continued: “As you are leaving on a voyage, how to say goodbye to you?”

 

This was a play on her 1968 hit “Comment Te Dire Adieu?” (“How Can I Say Goodbye to You?”), a riff also reprised by Mr. Macron in a tribute to her. The real question that hovered in the air seemed to be: What might France be saying goodbye to?

 

A snap election called by Mr. Macron after a heavy defeat to Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally in European Parliament election could lead to her emerging as the dominant force in the National Assembly, which might in turn oblige Mr. Macron to break a taboo of the Fifth Republic by naming a prime minister from Ms. Le Pen’s party in early July.

 

Ms. Hardy, distinguished by the knowing look in her glittering eyes and a delivery that was often deadpan and borderline detached, never had any illusions about life’s bitter surprises. She grew up with a single mother; her father was married to another woman. Success intrigued her but never bewitched her, as she retained a reserve and fragility that was part of her fascination.

 

Chic, willowy, elegant and tantalizingly elusive, she burst on the scene at the age of 18 with her 1962 hit “Tous les Garçons et les Filles” (“All the Boys and Girls”), which went on to sell 2.5 million copies and landed her on the cover of Paris Match in early 1963.

 

Of a breathtaking lyrical simplicity, with a minimalist guitar accompaniment, the song told of a young woman’s loneliness watching young couples “their eyes in their eyes, hand in hand” walking heedlessly toward their tomorrows as she suffered and pined.

 

If ever there was proof that some things just sound better in French, this song provided it. “Les yeux dans les yeux, la main dans la main” is translatable as above, but only at great cost.

 

Bob Dylan was entranced; Mick Jagger was fascinated. The world beckoned. So, too, did movie roles. She toured widely. Fashion designers and great photographers dedicated themselves to capturing her reticent, teasing beauty. In 1968 she appeared in a golden metal minidress by the Spanish designer Paco Rabanne that, like so much in her life, summoned the word “iconic.”

 

Yet, to the last, Ms. Hardy trod a lonesome road. Passion was possessive, she came to believe, and so inevitably destructive. In her 2004 song “Le Jardinier Bénévole” (“The Volunteer Gardener”) she wrote, “I’ll open my arms wide so you can take flight,” words that caught her view of the deeper love found in maturity.

 

She once said, “The melodies that move me most, that are the most beautiful, inevitably have an element of melancholy that links us to the divine.”

 

Her 1981 marriage to the singer and songwriter Jacques Dutronc was marked, she observed, by more absence than presence, yet through all the pain evident in many songs, they never divorced and remained on good terms.

 

It was perhaps her 1973 song “Message Personnel” (“Personal Message”), written the same year as the birth of her son Thomas Dutronc, that reached most deeply into her loneliness, contradictions, dignity and elusive search for love:

 

I am afraid you are deaf

I am afraid you may be a coward

I am afraid to be indiscreet

I cannot tell you I love you perhaps

But if one day you think you love me

Do not think your memories disturb me

And run, run until you are out of breath

Come and find me again.

 

A France on the brink lost some essence of itself with Ms. Hardy’s dignified disappearance and in the overwhelming outpouring of tributes to her seemed to be searching across acute division for some anchor in shared memory.

 

Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist. More about Roger Cohen

A Gentleman's London, Episode One: Emma Willis

Emma Willis

Launched: 1999

https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/discover-extraordinary/cutting-it-the-female-tailors-shaking-up-savile-row-b963100.html

 

 The story: Having worked for other menswear brands, Willis launched her own label in 1989, focusing on bespoke shirts made in England from the finest materials. Initially she sold her bespoke shirts in City offices before putting down roots on Jermyn Street in St James in 1999.

 

 All her shirts are designed, cut, stitched and finished at Bearland House in the centre of Gloucester – “British bespoke shirt making is rare as is having one’s own manufacturing employing and training locally,” says Willis, who also established a charity Style for Soldiers in 2008, which provides smart clothing to injured service personnel.

 

 The service: Willis, who employs an all-female team of cutters, makes beautiful bespoke shirts using the very best Swiss and Italian fabrics in quiet, elegant designs and colours. Her clients are mainly men, and span everyone from film producers to hedge fund managers, farmers and property dealers, but she has many female customers too and a ready-to -wear collection on Net a Porter.

 

 Why she loves it: “Our shop is very social with our customers often meeting and befriending one another,” she says. “I get visitors from all over the world and post pandemic this has been even more enjoyable with the sense of relief to be able to see each other again and meet new people.”

 

 For Willis though, the best part is the people she meets in her shop. “I never know who it may be next and all those amazing contacts have enabled me to do with my charity and other initiatives.”

 

Françoise Hardy, French pop singer and fashion muse, dies aged 80 / Françoise Hardy - Tous les garçons et les filles

Françoise Hardy, French pop singer and fashion muse, dies aged 80

 

Singer and actor who wrote some of her country’s biggest pop hits had suffered with lymphatic cancer for many years

 

Remembering Françoise Hardy: France’s girlish yé-yé star was a groundbreaking musical artist

 

Ben Beaumont-Thomas

Wed 12 Jun 2024 01.19 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/jun/12/francoise-hardy-french-pop-singer-and-fashion-muse-dies-aged-80

 

Françoise Hardy, whose elegance and beautifully lilting voice made her one of France’s most successful pop stars, has died aged 80.

 

Her death was reported by her son, the fellow musician Thomas Dutronc, who wrote “Maman est partie,” (or in English, “mum is gone”) on Instagram alongside a baby photo of himself and Hardy.

 

Hardy had lymphatic cancer since 2004, and had undergone years of radiotherapy and other treatments for the illness. In 2015, she was briefly placed in an induced coma after her condition worsened, and had issues with speech, swallowing and respiration in the years since. In 2021, she had argued in favour of euthanasia, saying that France was “inhuman” for not allowing the procedure.

 

Hardy was born in the middle of an air raid in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944, and raised in the city, mostly by her mother. Aged 16, she received her first guitar as a present and began writing her own songs, performing them live and auditioning for record labels. In 1961, she signed with Disques Vogue.

 

Inspired by the French chanson style of crooned ballads as well as the emerging edgier styles of pop and rock’n’roll, Hardy became a key part of the yé-yé style that dominated mid-century French music. It was named after the predilection for English-language bands of the time to chant “yeah”, and Hardy had a hand in its coinage: an early song, La Fille Avec Toi, began with the English words: “Oh, oh, yeah, yeah.”

 

The self-penned ballad Tous les garçons et les filles was her breakthrough in 1962, and sold more than 2.5m copies; it topped the French charts, as did early singles Je Suis D’Accord and Le Temps de L’Amour. In 1963, Hardy represented Monaco at the Eurovision song contest and finished fifth.

 

Her growing European fame meant she began rerecording her repertoire in multiple languages, including English. Her 1964 song All Over the World, translated from Dans le Monde Entier, became her only UK Top 20 hit, but her fame endured in France, Italy and Germany. In 1968, Comment te Dire Adieu, a version of It Hurts to Say Goodbye (originally made famous by Vera Lynn) with lyrics by Serge Gainsbourg, became one of her biggest hits.

 

 Hardy’s beauty and deft aesthetic – which encompassed cleanly silhouetted tailoring alongside more casual looks, including knitwear and rock-leaning denim and leather – defined the seeming effortlessness of 20th-century French cool. She became a muse to designers including Yves Saint Laurent and Paco Rabanne, and was also a frequent subject for fashion photography, shot by the likes of Richard Avedon, David Bailey and William Klein. Later, designer Rei Kawakubo would name her label Comme des Garçons after a line in a Hardy song.

 

Hardy was an object of adoration to many male stars of 60s pop including the Rolling Stones and David Bowie. Bob Dylan wrote a poem about her for the liner notes of his 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan, beginning: “For Françoise Hardy, at the Seine’s edge, a giant shadow of Notre Dame seeks t’ grab my foot …”

 

She was also courted by directors, appearing in films by Jean-Luc Godard, Roger Vadim, John Frankenheimer and more.

 

Hardy left Disques Vogue amid financial disputes, and signed a three-year deal with Sonopresse in 1970. This creatively rich period saw her record with Brazilian musician Tuca on 1971’s highly acclaimed La Question, and continue her multi-lingual releases, but by the contract’s end her stardom had waned and it was not renewed.

 

She spent the mid-1970s chiefly focused on raising her son Thomas with her partner, musician and actor Jacques Dutronc. Releases restarted with 1977’s Star, and Hardy embraced – not always enthusiastically – the sounds of funk, disco and electronic pop. A longer hiatus in the 1980s was punctuated by 1988’s Décalages, billed as her final album, though she returned in 1996 with Le Danger, switching her palette to moody contemporary rock. She released six further albums, ending with Personne D’Autre in 2018.

 

Having first met in 1967, she and Jacques Dutronc married in 1981 – “an uninteresting formality”, she later said of marriage in general – and separated in 1988, though they remained friends. She is survived by him and their son.