"It was ME pally! How's your bird?"Thursday, 8 October 2009
Thursday, 1 October 2009
Groucho or not Groucho, That is The Question.
Earlier in the year RL’s Glasgow store had a relaunch party after an substantial refurbishment. The after-show was held at Glasgow’s prestigious One Devonshire Gardens, which had been transformed for the occasion by Ralph’s interior design team. At the party I was accosted (twice) by a pleasant enough chap who urged me to join his Private Members Club. I declined on the Marxist (Groucho, not Karl) principal that I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.
Recently the present Mrs. Cyclo and I were invited to the Ralph Lauren launch nights for Fall 2009. On both occasions there was a do in the shop where you could have a bit of a try on followed by an after show at a nearby private members club. All very nice, except we never attended the after show as we were both famished. We attended instead upon the nearest Bistro for a bit of a nosebag.
Tonight we’ve been invited to a dinner by Mulberry, the luxury handbag people, coincidentally at the same private members club... what price a BIG membership drive? I’m guessing although the management and staff of these establishments are receiving free membership I’m not going to.
29 Royal Exchange SquareThis particular club is called 29. It is not the first attempt at the venture. Glasgow had three private clubs that I knew of as a boy, The Carrick (which sank in about 1987- it was on a boat, Carrick, which was sister ship of Cutty Sark’s ) the old established Royal Scottish Automobile Club, in Blythswood Square which went out of business in 2002 and the Western, which is still open and faces 29 across Royal Exchange Square. In more recent times, the Corinthian in Ingram Street, closed its private members' club in 2003 and Groucho St Judes in Bath Street went the way of all flesh two years ago, it’s private members club never getting off the ground (although the Corinthian itself still operates as a nightclub). The Hallion Club opened in Glasgow in 2005 and tried to attract private members from Scotland's celebrity market, with the promise of exclusivity, their most high profile member reputedly being the actor Billy Boyd. The limited company which ran the club put the business into liquidation in 2007, only six months after Edinburgh's Hallion Club, which had no direct connection, was sold off amid rumours of financial difficulties. Walter Barratt, the geezer behind the Hallion was also the owner of Groucho St Judes. 29 is owned by James Mortimer who previously owned Victoria’s, the first Glasgow Superclub. Mortimer also owns Glasgow’s restaurant deluxe, Rogano to which 29 is adjacent (in fact he owns the block, which houses several other Mortimer enterprises, including a nightclub and mid price eatery). Presumably he knows what he’s about and if all else fails he’ll open the place as a standard if up market nightspot.
RoganoThese ventures never work in a town like Glasgow, the target market is too small. The population of footballers and their wives tend to gravitate to the leafy suburbs of Thorntonhall and Bothwell and there they stay. Actors and musicians from Glasgow bugger off south as soon as the PRS cheques or film roles start coming in. Ordinary folks signing up for membership of so called exclusive clubs then find themselves rubbing shoulders not with the footballing, star of film and screen Beau Monde that they had envisaged but rather the hoi polloi they themselves comprise. Imagine your disappointment having stumped up your subs to find that far from being the exclusive perfumed garden of your dreams, the bar is stacked four deep with freeloading businessmen with no intention of signing anything and the only other geezer that’s actually signed up is a slobbering oik in an ill fitting Slater’s suit circa 1986 with whom you would not want to share an elevator let alone the long watches of the martini drenched night. You can easily see these places thriving (as the Groucho has, in London) in any city where there’s a pool of affluent young people, networking heavy-petting style and bumping Bluetooth devices off each other but most of Glasgow society is closer to effluent than affluent. Any business venture that depends for its clientele almost exclusively on the small player pool of the Scottish Professional Football League’s not gonna last, even one that charges an astonishing £40 for a surf’n’ turf (extra for chips) and sells what they claim to be “Scotland’s Most Expensive Cocktail” (how quaint!)
I’ll report back after tonights party.
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Last Train to Glasgow Central
“You’d better catch this wan and you’d better have a ticket cos here’s the man”
As performed to the tune of Marty Robbins's "Last Train to San Fernando" by the estimable Mr. William Connelly Esquire, erstwhile Laird of Strathdon. The song ends in a rambling story called "Going Camping" in which our hero and friends go up to Balloch for the weekend and spend all their money on wine.
Well, summer is here and my thoughts have turned to a few nights under canvas (a few nights being the optimal amount in my experience. Any more than three and you can include me out). In recent years it’s become modish to refer to our style of camping as Glamping, that’s Glamorous Camping to the uninitiated. It involves a certain amount of style and what passes for luxury on the average campsite, where Gore-Tex rules and clogs are de rigueur. 
I first became aware of the concept a few years back when Mrs Cyclo and I used to go up to Oban every weekend, camping at the now defunct site out at Ganavan Sands. A French couple arrived on site in an old Peugeot Estate. They unpacked a huge canvas tent and piles of cushions. They had a carpet and some old oil lamps. It took the fellow an hour to set up and after he’d finished their tent resembled a Bedouin camp. His significant other then emerged from the car and went into the tent where with the flaps of the doors wide open she proceeded to strip stark naked. She slipped into a kaftan in front of my astonished but appreciative gaze, lay down on the cushions and there remained for the rest of the evening, sipping wine while Mr Frenchman barbecued at the door (and one supposes worshiped at her feet).
I first became aware of the concept a few years back when Mrs Cyclo and I used to go up to Oban every weekend, camping at the now defunct site out at Ganavan Sands. A French couple arrived on site in an old Peugeot Estate. They unpacked a huge canvas tent and piles of cushions. They had a carpet and some old oil lamps. It took the fellow an hour to set up and after he’d finished their tent resembled a Bedouin camp. His significant other then emerged from the car and went into the tent where with the flaps of the doors wide open she proceeded to strip stark naked. She slipped into a kaftan in front of my astonished but appreciative gaze, lay down on the cushions and there remained for the rest of the evening, sipping wine while Mr Frenchman barbecued at the door (and one supposes worshiped at her feet).Mrs. Cyclo and I looked at our poor wee tent (with which we had previously been delighted) our mismatched sleeping bags (one of which I’d had since the Scouts) and threadbare, itchy travel blankets and despaired. The following weekend we arrived with one brand new sleeping bag to replace the oldest one we’d had, nicer blankets and a few wee cushions. The rot had set in. Before long we’d amassed tables and chairs, storm lanterns and firepits, old canvas rucksacks and wicker baskets and a luxurious languor as we desported ourselves around the toilet blocks. (Camping is only ever glamorous in a relative sense).
Last year we finally decided the time had come to upgrade our tent. After a long search we decided on the Outdoor Revolution Starcamper 3 pictured above. We wanted a tent that was small enough for wild camping but just big enough in the porch area to allow a couple to sit inside on wet evenings without developing a dowager's hump. Money was an issue, but at RRP £133.44 this tent fitted the bill perfectly.In an ideal world I’d like the Outwell Indian Lake Tepee below but I can’t justify the outlay when we really only go camping for a few days a couple of times a summer. 
Last year we finally decided the time had come to upgrade our tent. After a long search we decided on the Outdoor Revolution Starcamper 3 pictured above. We wanted a tent that was small enough for wild camping but just big enough in the porch area to allow a couple to sit inside on wet evenings without developing a dowager's hump. Money was an issue, but at RRP £133.44 this tent fitted the bill perfectly.In an ideal world I’d like the Outwell Indian Lake Tepee below but I can’t justify the outlay when we really only go camping for a few days a couple of times a summer. Tuesday, 15 September 2009
and I'm back in the room!
It's as though I never left, isn't it? Found this fascinating article about RL in Vanity Fair's site and thought I'd copy it here in honour of the launch show for the Autumn/Winter range that takes place here in Glasgow on the 17th.
"Not since Walt Disney has one man persuaded so many to buy into his personal fantasy. Ralph Lauren's vision of Wasp perfection—the silver cocktail shaker without the drunken bickering, the shingled beach house without the shoreline erosion—is a $4.3 billion global business and an exquisitely detailed expression of the American Dream, free from cynicism or edge. As Lauren enters decade five as a design superpower, the author explores his re-creation of a world that never was. "
American Dreamer
by Paul Goldberger September 2007
There is no irony to Ralph Lauren. That may be the most important thing to know about him. As Lauren enters his fifth decade in business, it is increasingly clear that he makes those beautiful clothes and perfect leather chairs and voluptuous quilts not to comment on the culture but to wallow in it. The man who has built a $4.3 billion company by replicating preppy fashions, Art Deco sophistication, and Adirondack ease isn't motivated by skepticism, and, no, he isn't driven by nostalgia either. Lauren isn't trying to live in the past. He's trying to get the past to live in the present, which takes a lot more chutzpah, because to make it work you have to get other people to sign on to your fantasies. No one—well, no one since Walt Disney—has done a better job of that than Ralph Lauren.
Fashion is one of the more cynical businesses in a cynical world, which makes Lauren's long career all the more astonishing, given that he operates with the sincerity of a character in a Frank Capra movie. Lauren takes it all very, very seriously—the clothes, the furniture, the houses, the whole aura of picture-perfect Wasp life that he has developed, piece by piece, over 40 years. He figured out a long time ago that Americans, for all they may talk about diversity, don't want too much of it in their physical surroundings. They are happy to watch The Sopranos, but they want their houses to look like Leave It to Beaver. Lauren based his business on the recognition that the ideal that people carry in their heads of what life is supposed to look like hasn't changed nearly as much as the world itself has changed. He realized that you don't have to be a Republican to enjoy dressing like one.
Lauren's take on American life isn't self-consciously retro. It's not self-conscious at all, which is part of its appeal. Lauren wants to serve you America straight up. The only twist is that his version tastes better than the real thing, because he has taken out everything that would make it sour. Real Wasp life, after all, can be messy. People get drunk, they fight, they let their houses get dingy and their clothes frayed. In Lauren's world, the silver martini shaker beckons, but nobody gets soused. The house has a patina, but never a hole in the carpet. The clothes are classic, not tired. When you enter one of Ralph Lauren's stores, or even when you look at one of his magazine ads, you see the world as better than it is. But you do not see a different world. Almost every other designer's stock-in-trade is that special frisson of the new. Not so with Lauren. If he has shocked you, he has failed. When people describe things as "very Ralph Lauren," they have in mind a world of old money and relaxed style that impresses not just because it is so beautiful but because it seems at once so familiar and so effortless.
And that world is complete in itself. If you look at the windows of Lauren's stores on Madison Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side, you don't see just clothes. You see exquisitely wrought tableaux of upper-class life, stage sets made up of meticulously arranged photographs and chairs and antiques. The furnishings are so dazzling that you could almost miss the mannequins done up in the latest Lauren fashions. I suspect it's not an accident that the clothes aren't front and center. By the time you notice them, the message of the window has already registered: This is how life is supposed to be. And you know, whether or not you are willing to admit it, that you like it. These aren't just things to wear. They are elements in a bigger operation, an attempt to re-arrange the world so it looks … well, the way Ralph Lauren always thought it ought to look.
Everybody knows that Ralph Lauren grew up in the Bronx, that his name was once Lifshitz, and that he was motivated by a nose-pressed-against-the-glass love for a culture he most definitely hadn't inherited. What makes Lauren different from every other Jew with Wasp fantasies is how completely he saw Waspdom in visual terms, and how determined he was to design every bit of it, down to the last detail, and then make a living selling his fantasies to others, starting with ties and then moving on to men's wear, women's wear, accessories, perfumes, household objects, and furniture. The things that seem to have inspired him most—the movie-star aura of Fred Astaire and Cary Grant, Cedric Gibbons's classic set designs for MGM, and Slim Aarons's lavish photographs of the rich at leisure—all suggest an environment in which everything is of a piece. I think Lauren was entranced by the notion that every last detail, from the clothes to the rooms to the cars to the views, and even the people themselves, could be orchestrated to look consistent and perfect. I used to wonder why every other designer's sheets and comforters are sold at Bloomingdale's out of racks on an open floor, while Lauren's are in their own separate area with pine-paneled walls. Or why the Armani, Zegna, and Canali sections on the men's clothing floor at Saks Fifth Avenue all have crisp, modern fixtures, while the Polo Ralph Lauren section looks and feels like an English club. It's because Lauren's products promise more than just the rush of pleasure that luxurious objects provide. When you buy them, you get to enter Ralph Lauren's movie. You get a tiny slice of that whole environment from which it comes, whether it is the perfect shingled summer house by the sea, the sleek ski lodge, the western ranch, or the streamlined penthouse. Everybody loves that stuff, and whether you think of it as your birthright or as something you aspire to hardly matters.
"Not since Walt Disney has one man persuaded so many to buy into his personal fantasy. Ralph Lauren's vision of Wasp perfection—the silver cocktail shaker without the drunken bickering, the shingled beach house without the shoreline erosion—is a $4.3 billion global business and an exquisitely detailed expression of the American Dream, free from cynicism or edge. As Lauren enters decade five as a design superpower, the author explores his re-creation of a world that never was. "
American Dreamer
by Paul Goldberger September 2007
There is no irony to Ralph Lauren. That may be the most important thing to know about him. As Lauren enters his fifth decade in business, it is increasingly clear that he makes those beautiful clothes and perfect leather chairs and voluptuous quilts not to comment on the culture but to wallow in it. The man who has built a $4.3 billion company by replicating preppy fashions, Art Deco sophistication, and Adirondack ease isn't motivated by skepticism, and, no, he isn't driven by nostalgia either. Lauren isn't trying to live in the past. He's trying to get the past to live in the present, which takes a lot more chutzpah, because to make it work you have to get other people to sign on to your fantasies. No one—well, no one since Walt Disney—has done a better job of that than Ralph Lauren.
Fashion is one of the more cynical businesses in a cynical world, which makes Lauren's long career all the more astonishing, given that he operates with the sincerity of a character in a Frank Capra movie. Lauren takes it all very, very seriously—the clothes, the furniture, the houses, the whole aura of picture-perfect Wasp life that he has developed, piece by piece, over 40 years. He figured out a long time ago that Americans, for all they may talk about diversity, don't want too much of it in their physical surroundings. They are happy to watch The Sopranos, but they want their houses to look like Leave It to Beaver. Lauren based his business on the recognition that the ideal that people carry in their heads of what life is supposed to look like hasn't changed nearly as much as the world itself has changed. He realized that you don't have to be a Republican to enjoy dressing like one.
Lauren's take on American life isn't self-consciously retro. It's not self-conscious at all, which is part of its appeal. Lauren wants to serve you America straight up. The only twist is that his version tastes better than the real thing, because he has taken out everything that would make it sour. Real Wasp life, after all, can be messy. People get drunk, they fight, they let their houses get dingy and their clothes frayed. In Lauren's world, the silver martini shaker beckons, but nobody gets soused. The house has a patina, but never a hole in the carpet. The clothes are classic, not tired. When you enter one of Ralph Lauren's stores, or even when you look at one of his magazine ads, you see the world as better than it is. But you do not see a different world. Almost every other designer's stock-in-trade is that special frisson of the new. Not so with Lauren. If he has shocked you, he has failed. When people describe things as "very Ralph Lauren," they have in mind a world of old money and relaxed style that impresses not just because it is so beautiful but because it seems at once so familiar and so effortless.
And that world is complete in itself. If you look at the windows of Lauren's stores on Madison Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side, you don't see just clothes. You see exquisitely wrought tableaux of upper-class life, stage sets made up of meticulously arranged photographs and chairs and antiques. The furnishings are so dazzling that you could almost miss the mannequins done up in the latest Lauren fashions. I suspect it's not an accident that the clothes aren't front and center. By the time you notice them, the message of the window has already registered: This is how life is supposed to be. And you know, whether or not you are willing to admit it, that you like it. These aren't just things to wear. They are elements in a bigger operation, an attempt to re-arrange the world so it looks … well, the way Ralph Lauren always thought it ought to look.
Everybody knows that Ralph Lauren grew up in the Bronx, that his name was once Lifshitz, and that he was motivated by a nose-pressed-against-the-glass love for a culture he most definitely hadn't inherited. What makes Lauren different from every other Jew with Wasp fantasies is how completely he saw Waspdom in visual terms, and how determined he was to design every bit of it, down to the last detail, and then make a living selling his fantasies to others, starting with ties and then moving on to men's wear, women's wear, accessories, perfumes, household objects, and furniture. The things that seem to have inspired him most—the movie-star aura of Fred Astaire and Cary Grant, Cedric Gibbons's classic set designs for MGM, and Slim Aarons's lavish photographs of the rich at leisure—all suggest an environment in which everything is of a piece. I think Lauren was entranced by the notion that every last detail, from the clothes to the rooms to the cars to the views, and even the people themselves, could be orchestrated to look consistent and perfect. I used to wonder why every other designer's sheets and comforters are sold at Bloomingdale's out of racks on an open floor, while Lauren's are in their own separate area with pine-paneled walls. Or why the Armani, Zegna, and Canali sections on the men's clothing floor at Saks Fifth Avenue all have crisp, modern fixtures, while the Polo Ralph Lauren section looks and feels like an English club. It's because Lauren's products promise more than just the rush of pleasure that luxurious objects provide. When you buy them, you get to enter Ralph Lauren's movie. You get a tiny slice of that whole environment from which it comes, whether it is the perfect shingled summer house by the sea, the sleek ski lodge, the western ranch, or the streamlined penthouse. Everybody loves that stuff, and whether you think of it as your birthright or as something you aspire to hardly matters.
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