The Rake

I’ve never been someone to invite change. When I was little, a few things happened that scrambled my comprehension that life was reliable and happy, and that things would follow a linear, if not uneventful, path until I perhaps fell in love, got marr

“The best-known American in the world” was how Paul Robeson was described without irony or argument by a journalist in 1964. Yet today, among the Instagram generation, his name is mostly forgotten. That is set to change, as the Academy Award-winning

This is something of a landmark for The Rake — actually, it could be an avant-garde moment for modern magazine-ing. The image opposite, ladies and gents, is the first image shot for The Rake by the subjects in the image, on a timer. Yes, i-D magazine

To watch the television series Game of Thrones, one might all too easily believe that the interbreeding — or, indeed, the incestuous inbreeding — of noble bloodlines results in offspring of rare beauty. However, in real life, the great and good maint

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives”; the film producer Robert Evans would beg to differ. The life of Evans, who died aged 89 in October last year, had a pristine Hollywood three-act structure, full of twis

The real names of some celebrities were always going to need a makeover. For clanging no-brainers with all the glamour and savoir faire of an impacted molar, Frances Ethel Gumm (Judy Garland), Olivia Cockburn (Olivia Wilde), and Edda van Heemstra Hep

Handsome as a matinee idol from boyhood through old age, Peter Beard looked like a Ralph Lauren model. And lending substance to style, a narrative to the aesthetic, he lived like a Ralph Lauren muse. Beard’s family background and exotic, peripatetic

Alexander Kraft, the style icon, entrepreneur, owner and Chief Executive of such companies as the luxury-real-estate behemoth Sotheby’s International Realty and the ultra-charming hotel-restaurant La Maison Bleue in Provence — and the world’s greates

When The Rake asked me if I wanted to write a guide to Milanese tailoring, I didn’t think twice before agreeing — and not only because I’ve been a faithful reader of the magazine for years and a passionate observer of classic men’s style. No, my chie

They’re gloriously impractical, have a questionable cumbersomeness-to-storage ratio, and were manifestly designed for a time when all human interaction took place via mailbags or insulated copper conductors — but consider them obsolete at your peril.

There is a story about a man stuck down a hole, unable to get out. A priest walks by, and the man asks the priest for help: the priest dutifully throws down a prayer and walks on. Then a doctor walks by, and responds to the call for help by throwing

Intriguingly, the word we use for a shoe that was invented for la dolce vita derives from a verb relating to the Italian phrase il dolce far niente (‘for pleasantly doing nothing’). For the earliest iteration of what we today call the loafer was crea

Put yourself in the shoes of Wei Koh and me for a second. There is a global pandemic, and the pressure is on to create a magazine that reflects the reality of the times while also providing some much-needed escapism. The desire to feel uplifted and i

Those still labouring under the notion that ‘bold’ and ‘discreet’ are mutually exclusive concepts would surely change their minds should they make the pilgrimage — a bucket-list-topping experience for anyone with even a passing interest in watches —

It’s a brand that has spent more than a century and a half responding to and shaping the zeitgeist of British style: from the fabled Blitz spirit (it rose from the ashes six years after being decimated by the Luftwaffe in 1940) and the literal old-sc