Crossing countries in Patagaonia (The Independent)

As car-ferry crossings go, my trip from Puerto Fuy to Puerto Pirihueico was infinitely more appealing than the usual mix of slot machines, duty-free opportunities and chips with everything in the buffet. There was no gift shop; no one was the worse for wear after sampling rather too much on a booze cruise. In fact, there were no below-deck attractions at all.

Huilo Huilo, Chile

And if, like me, you weren’t in a car, then you were hemmed in along a narrow, shade-free, open-air gangway either side of the boat. Comfort was in short supply, the potential for sunburn high. But what this ferry crossing offers for the length of its 90-minute duration is some of the most spectacular scenery in South America, coasting through the Patagonian Andes from Chile towards the Argentinian border. There’s a lush, green-velvet rainforest portside and a gleaming glacier-capped volcano to starboard. It can be cold here, and it can rain, but on my journey the air was clear and warm. The cloudless sky – which felt somehow so much bigger than usual – was a startling shade of electric blue.

The trip across Lake Pirihueico is one leg of one of the greatest, but also the easiest, journeys you can make through the Andes. From Temuco in Chile to Bariloche in Argentina, you can (if you have the time, are adventurous enough, and are willing to take minor detours) go white-water rafting, ski, sunbathe or hike through cracks in glaciers so pronounced that they form maze-like corridors. All of these things are possible, depending on the time of year.

Before you pass Go, you have to get to Chile. In my case, this involved an epic 14-hour night-flight from Heathrow, via Paris. Rather than risk a fresh-off-the-red-eye transfer time in Santiago for a flight to Temuco that I wouldn’t, as it turned out, have made, I holed up at the W hotel, drank blueberry caipirinhas by the rooftop pool and snoozed away the effects of last night’s flight.

Normally I’d seek out the most offbeat, locals-only, not-in-a-guide-book restaurant, but I discovered that there was a Jean-Paul Bondoux restaurant off the hotel lobby and a new branch of Osaka across the hall, so I stayed put with superlative ceviche from both.

After a short-hop flight the next day, my tour operator arranged a transfer from Temuco to Huilo Huilo, an astonishing, Tolkienesque version of Center Parcs, fashioned entirely from logs and branches. (One of the lodges is a wild, plant-covered cone that has a constant stream of water gushing from its apex.)

The road trip started out drab but became spectacular, as motorways, mooching cows and the occasional rusted pioneer-town rail bridge gave way to high-impact nature. We passed mountains with soaring trees clustered together in patterns that looked as if they’d uprooted themselves to climb higher. I saw tumultuous rivers and a distant volcano issuing a long, elegant doodle of smoke. We rushed through tiny towns that looked more Alpine than South American. Then, 68km before Liquiñe, as the sunset became particularly golden, we passed an unlikely looking, peculiarly remote disco called The City. This rotunda structure on the edge of a lake looked as if it had landed from space, in the midst of the most striking, gorgeous vista.

Two nights at Huilo Huilo are enough to drive those undelighted by groups of four or five squawking toddlers into a frenzy, but the facilities and myriad rainforest excursions – from birdwatching to ziplining through the canopy – are fantastic and the architecture curious enough to distract your attention from the tots. And for children, of course, it’s an awe-inspiring, adventure-filled wonderland. It’s also mere hiking distance from here to the ferry, which makes it an appealing pit stop before crossing the border into Argentina.

On the other side of Lake Pirihueico, I was picked up by taxi and driven at speed through clouds of dust and a cascade of flying pebbles down an unpaved road to the border. Once in Argentina – via two mildly confusing passport checks – all became Disney-beautiful. This is the Patagonian Lake District at its most wonderful. It’s little wonder that half the Argentinian population want to retire to San Martín de los Andes, possibly the most beautiful lakeside town in the country. The main street is full of varnished log cabins and chocolate shops while the road around the lake itself is a grand widescreen collage of the Great Outdoors: sparkling water and campsites, young couples hitch-hiking, girls in expensive sunglasses swimming and jogging, shirtless boys glistening as they skateboard and perform stomach crunches at the side of the road. Everything and everyone glows with health and energy.

With a fairly long drive behind me, I’d hoped that my next stop, Río Hermoso, would have a decent pool: a dip, a glass of vino rosado and a couple of paperback hours would be just the ticket. However, the eponymous hotel on the river turned out to be a pretty, very modern take on an Alpine mountain cabin, stuck in the middle of Lanín National Park and staffed by women in chic, beige gaucho pants. There was no pool. Instead, there was something so very much better. The hotel sits on a dramatic, painterly bend of Evian-clear river, flanked by soaring, lush green mountains. If any resort has a better view from what is effectively its back garden, I haven’t seen it. As I ran into the water, a condor glided above, drifting from side to side as if being worked by a balletically minded puppeteer.

There are several ways to travel from Río Hermoso to Bariloche, the tourist capital of the Argentinian Lake District. My guide advised that we avoid the well-travelled Road of the Seven Lakes, as coaches churn up so much dust that views become almost invisible, while other traffic moves at a snail’s pace.

Instead, we took Route 63, which was more a riverbed of pebbles, rocks and boulders that just happened to be arranged in the direction we wanted to go in. Forty-five minutes in, as we juddered past a battered traffic sign that had clearly been subject to repeated drive-by shootings, I wondered how far I was from chronic whiplash. And yet, the scenery was a soother, and my attention was soon diverted to my guide and her stories of the local Mapuche people, who speak a language that cannot be written and name their children at the age of three, when the town’s designated wise woman decides on what it is to be.

Bariloche is the most obviously populated town in the area, and locals bemoan the ever-increasing tourist numbers, but with so much space around an immense body of water, it absorbs its visitors fairly easily. As I looked out beyond the figures diving elegantly off the pier behind the El Casco Art Hotel, silhouetted by the sun, things seemed as idyllic as you could hope for. Across the road, at Alberto’s – the best-known parrilla (grill) in town – dinner was served amid waves of deafening holiday excitement as Flintstone-large slabs of medium-rare bife de chorizo landed on tables accompanied by black pudding and bottles of delicious local red. I may love the most fancified suppers, with complex reductions, amuses-bouches and palate cleansers, but fundamentally, you can’t beat a great steak and a few bangers. And Alberto’s does it better than anywhere else in the world, with rustic aplomb, and for about a 10th of the price of a visit to Hawksmoor in London. Weeks later, I was still hankering after a return visit.

Bariloche’s other must-visit restaurant is Cassis, run by German émigré Ernesto Wolf and his chef wife, Mariana. While the view back at Alberto’s consists of the grill and some passing traffic, at Cassis you sip local Chandon on an elevated wooden platform overlooking moss-banked hills, a placid lake and canoeists cutting across the horizon through butterfly-like ripples. It’s dreamy – as is the romantic dining room, which serves a Patagonian lamb strudel that rates as the best use of any wool-clad creature of all time.

My journey across Patagonia came to an end at Llao Llao, a rambling 228-room Swiss cuckoo-clock of a hotel, with an astonishing aspect over a lake and snow-capped mountains. Río Hermoso may still beat it for its privacy and intimacy, but the sweeping views across the valley at Llao Llao are nothing short of amazing. They resemble an almost too-perfect painted Alpine backdrop, unreal and intense. Neck-deep in water, looking out from the infinity pool, it was easy to imagine that this was the absolute edge of the world. Then the sun disappeared, black clouds gathered as if conjured by sorcery, and great gusts of wind sent parasols hurtling over that edge and on to the lawn below.

It was a reminder that all of this isn’t laid on just to prettify Facebook photographs, or as accompaniment to an al fresco club salad. This is Patagonia: real, wild, beautiful and a humbling privilege to be a part of.

Travel Essential

Getting there

Mark C O’Flaherty travelled as a guest of Air France (0871 663 3777; airfrance.co.uk), which flies daily from various UK airports  to Paris and on to Santiago and  Buenos Aires.

l Exsus (020-7337 9010; exsus.com) has a 10-night package taking in a similar route, from £2,450pp, including flights, transfers and board.

Visiting there

W Hotel, Isidora Goyenechea 3000 Las Condes, Santiago, Chile (00 56 2 770 0000; starwoodhotels.com). Doubles from US$249 (£155), room only.

Huilo Huilo, Km 55 Camino Internacional Panguipulli, Neltume, Región de Los Ríos, Chile (00 56 2 335 59 38; huilohuilo.com). Doubles from US$144 (£90), with breakfast.

Río Hermoso, Ruta 63 km 67, Paraje Rio Hermoso, Parque Nacional Lanín, San Martín de los Andes, Argentina (00 54 2 972 410 485; riohermoso.com). Doubles from  US$320 (£200), with breakfast.

El Casco Art Hotel, Avenida Bustillo Km 11.5, Bariloche, Argentina (00 54 11 4815 6952; hotelelcasco.com). Doubles from US$208 (£130), with breakfast.

Llao Llao, Avenida Ezequiel Bustillo Km 25, Bariloche, Argentina (00 54 2944 448 530; llaollao.com). Doubles from US$184 (£115), with breakfast.

Eating and drinking

El Boliche de Alberto, Av Bustillo Km 5,800, Bariloche, Argentina (00 54 29 44 462 285; elbolichedealberto.com).

Cassis, Ruta 82, Lago Gutiérrez, Peñón de Arelauquen, Bariloche, Argentina (00 54 294 447 6167; cassis.com.ar).

More information

For ferry info in Los Ríos see barcazas.cl; chile.travel; argentina.travel

New London restaurants: La Bodega Negra (Elle)

Despite every intention, I’ve never made it to Le Esquina, Serge Becker’s notorious SoHo Mexican restaurant, accessed via secret door and clipboard patrol. Like all such scenester spots, it’s no longer the impossible-to-book place it once was, so of course, I don’t want to go anymore. But then, his beyond-hot MK nightclub was the first place I ever went in New York, about 1000 years ago, so, kudos to me. Yay. La Bodega Negra is a Soho reinvention of SoHo’s La Esquina – right down to a more overt, no-reservations cantina around the corner. From the outside the main restaurant looks like a sex shop, albeit an unnervingly pristine one. Its neon is more Tim Noble and Sue Webster than the Old Compton Street of pornier days now past. Once you’ve made it inside, past two check-in desks, and a lady in a polka dot shorts-suit with feathered trilby, you’re in what might be the prettiest, buzziest basement in London.

It’s very dark, very sexy and very 2012. The décor is all vintage-looking estancia tiling, rough plaster, reclaimed shopfront letters, upturned pianos, taxidermy and curtained-off alcoves. Despite a few buttoned-down banker types and a single baseball cap sighting (with blazer and shirt too, people!), everyone looks like they “might be someone”. The bar staff have Alex James/Nuno Mendes flicks and the punters are rake-thin blondes throwing their heads back to pour another grapefruit margarita in. The music – a fastidiously hip mix of Carly Simon, Ice Cube and Depeche Mode covers by Johnny Cash – gets louder and louder and – “what’s that you say!?” – louder. As much as you might want to hate it, it’s quite fabulous. Becker knows his stuff. It’s such a great party, the food is perhaps a moot point.

After working my way through the menu, I’d say that this isn’t really somewhere you want to come for a full-on dinner, it’s somewhere to book and rock up to as late as possible, for a casual mix of nibbles, liquor and nightlife. As Mexican food goes, it’s not half bad. I bastardise the cuisine at home to decent, cosy, sludgy effect, but frankly, London’s Mexican restaurants – most notably Mercado in Stoke Newington – are uniformly crap. Only retro Greek seems like a less appealing option. This is a big step up, but is it really what you want for dinner? With a heavily policed two-hour table turning policy? At these prices? Yes and no. With a bit of maybe.

First, a word on those prices: A small plate of red snapper ceviche at £13.50 and a seabass in alternate green and red seasoning for £26 is spendy. With a few tacos, salads and bits and bobs, you’ll blow £50, or much more, with ease. This is London-small-plate-hazard-red-alert territory. But then, some of it’s very good. From the starter list, BBQ octopus is dark, tender and tasty, and a seared tuna starter near perfect. Grilled corn with cream would be better off the cob and with less herb on it. The steak tacos (£6.50 for two) were much-moreish but the chorizo version was so spiced that I needed an emergency glass of milk. A single tuna tostaditas was light, tasty and creamy, but a side of white beans with chorizo was anaemic and lacked seasoning. A plate of roasted vegetables looked dark, leaden and unappealing, with aggressive chunks of onion. It didn’t taste much better. The main problem at La Bodega Negra is that everything tastes curiously similar, and everyone at my table hankered for at least one thing a little lighter.

Come to La Bodega Negra for lashings of margarita-based cocktails and trays of tacos to soak them up, or have some ceviche and a main (the chicken paillard or slow roasted lamb for two are stand-outs). It’s such a shame about the two-hour turnaround, because this would be a great place to linger, revelling in the candlelit funk and glitz, running up a ridiculous bill on drinks and finger food. It’s such a fun room. But then, hey, at least you can book – and let’s face it, most London restaurateurs choose to insult you one of two ways these days: make you wait in the rain for a table or ask for you chip and PIN while your halfway through your pudding. And if the main restaurant at La Bodega Negra was “no reservations” there’d be a very weird, very long unlikely-looking queue outside of Soho’s most salubrious sex shop.

The future’s so bright… (Financial Times Weekend)

The world of luxury is divided into those who like a logo, and those who don’t. For every woman who covets the gold chain, quilting and distinctive double C of a Chanel handbag, there’s another who wants a less showy, but no less statement-making Hermès Birkin. Over the last few years, the accessories market has become polarised: discreet branding accompanied by distinctive but subtle styling details, versus maximalist bells, whistles and prominent trademarks. The look of that essential summer purchase – a new pair of shades – has gone the same way. Whether you buy Vivienne Westwood’s, with her orb insignia emblazoned in crystals on the arm, or a pair of Cutler & Gross’s logo-free titanium aviators, your choice speaks volumes. “Customers at our Selfridges concessions are asking for timeless glamour and large frames,” says Richard Peck, MD of David Clulow. “Those who prefer a small logo browse Persol and Prada and those who don’t want to pass unnoticed will go for Chanel or Versace, or perhaps a Bulgari frame with Austrian crystals on the arm.”

Brioni 2012

Oliver Peoples – which celebrates 25 years in business this year – was one of the first brands to embrace the no-logo ethos. When its shades first appeared, the market was saturated with post-Risky Business Wayfarers; Ray Ban, with its distinctive script, was a household name. Though Ray Ban has plenty of chic, timeless frames in its canon, it was the Wayfarer that resurfaced in a big way some years ago, tinged with heavy 1980s irony. While the joke has worn paper thin, many irony-loving Rubik’s Cube fixated youths remain enthralled by the shorthand kitsch of the coloured-framed varieties. Oliver Peoples, however, has never been self consciously trendy, so never went out of fashion. It’s designs are classic, while being in tune with the vogue for all things mid century modern. “The influence in fashion of the 1950s era is driving fashion away from the big logo,” says Oliver Peoples founder Larry Leight. “I have always wanted our frames to speak for themselves. And our discreet branding keeps the brand discoverable.” Their classic designs, including the Sheldrake and the Benedict, are luxurious style perennials.

Discreet branding is more apparent than the bold logo right now. Some of it stems from a stealth approach to wealth during recession. The rest is to do with the revival of the 1970s Henry Kissinger and 1950s Clark Kent look, forged, in part, by Lower East Side opticians Moscot. “We’ve been selling that mid century mod-style look for decades,” says the company’s president, Harvey Moscot. “We’ve never chased trends. And our customers like to spot other customers in Moscot. It’s like a secret handshake.”

Moscot trades on its establishment image, but is hardwired into the New York fashion scene. They recently created a limited edition frame, The TERRY, with Terry Richardson. They’ve also worked with minimalist luxe-sneaker brand Common Projects. That particular collaboration nods to a parallel sea change in the style of men’s trainers. There are the heavily branded Technicolor sports brands, and the likes of Gucci – with all-over GG-web patterning – and then there is Common Projects’ minimally branded monochrome shoe, identifiable to insiders by a small, prosaic, product number on the side of the heel.

That kind of pared down, knowing branding is growing in popularity. Thom Browne’s collaboration with optical company Dita led to a range of shades – riffing on Browne’s skewed 1950s tailoring sensibilities – which replicate the tri-colour stripe from the labels on Browne’s garments, on the tip of each arm. When worn, it is barely visible. “Discreet, but detail heavy,” says Jeff Solorio, co-founder of Dita.

Then there are the companies that eschew any exterior motif. British brand Oliver Goldsmith was founded in 1926 and much of its style is embedded in the sharply tailored cinematic 1960s.  The Renzo – a swinging London Michael Caine favourite – is an understated classic. “Branding through design is much smarter,” says the company’s current owner, Claire Goldsmith “One of the design features of the collection is the contoured temple. People in the know recognise it as Goldsmith. New customers are so happy to find something without diamante and branding scribbled all over it.”

Where a logo does appear in 2012, it often has a modernist, matter of fact, Muji style to it. Jack Spade makes a virtue of its simple, low-key, upper case, san serif logo. The range of sunglasses the company has produced with Selima Optique bears it on the inside of the arms. “The new product is stylish because it fills a need and has a timeless appeal,” says Jack Spade’s designer Cuan Hanly. “Likewise, military issue chinos aren’t stylish because of a logo.”

The new range of shades from Brioni, in 15 variants, are as luxurious as they are stylish – taking aviator and rectangular shapes and refining them with Zeiss crystal lenses, deerskin cases, and hand finished horn arms that bend 180 degrees. The Brioni logo is discreetly etched in the corner of a lens. “We didn’t want to put the logo on the horn arms,” says artistic director Jason Basmajian. “We wanted to give the product a signature, but Brioni is about a man’s personal expression of style, and doesn’t need a major logo to justify it.”

While some people are shameless label whores, it’s more often the case that someone favours just one or two particular brands enough to sport their insignia. They feel an affinity with a label, whether it be Prada, Brioni or Versace, whose Medusa-emblazoned shades remain as maximalist as their other accessories. “We’re about sex and glamour,” says Donatella Versace. “We can dial our branding up, or dial it down, but it’s part of our look. Versace must always be Versace, and branding through graphic motifs, log and key colours like gold, is very much what people like us for.” Sometimes, more is definitely more and only more will do.

 

http://www.brioni.com

www.chanel.com

www.davidclulow.com

http://www.jackspade.com

http://www.moscot.com

http://www.olivergoldsmith.com

http://www.oliverpeoples.com

http://www.versace.com

 

New aged (Financial Times Weekend)

Sometimes in fashion, wear and tear is the best accessory. Of all the items on display at Hermès’ Leather Forever exhibition, opening this week in London as part of the label’s 175th anniversary, it’s the vintage pieces that capture the attention most. Next to contemporary flights of fantasy, including a brightly coloured, winged horse’s saddle, there is luggage commissioned by the Duke of Windsor that has the handsome patina of decades of use. Many of the pieces, including belts, hats and a leather wheelbarrow used by Wallis Simpson to house her glove collection, tell a story beyond ‘royal appointment’ – there is depth, integrity and a little mystery. These are elements that no new chain store item could possibly emulate, but which some designers are now trying to weave into their work before it makes it to the point of first sale.

Paul Harndnen Shoemakers S/S 2012

For many niche brands, this is partly about distancing themselves from the mainstream – when everyone’s saying the same things with black jeans and a double breasted sports coat, you need to have your own voice. “These producers are the antithesis of big brand, big thinking,” says Mark Quinn of the Shoreditch menswear boutique Hostem, one of several stores that trades on the aesthetic. “They are driven by a dedication to craft.”

Not to be confused with fads for distressed-denim, faux aged leather and clumsy patchwork stitching that appear every few fashion cycles, the current move toward the “new aged” has more to do with the fact that spending over four figures on a jacket in a quality hide is an investment and for men, in particular, its gradual softening and scuffing suggests a life well lived and a certain insousiance. Many men don’t have a buttoned-down existence. They want to feel that they are the masters of their wardrobes, away from the tyranny of box-fresh, crease-free dressing. The architect and the art director have their own notions of what constitutes well dressed. The fashion designer too: “I will never, as long as I live wear a tie”, declares Yohji Yamamoto.

Indeed, the allure of the “old” is not limited to leather. A handful of contemporary designers have pioneered a similar approach to other textiles. Comme des Garçons Homme Plus suits, for example, are often made in boiled wool or polyester, with both options looking as good plucked from an overhead bin after a 12 hour flight as they do on boarding. Then there are the sneakers by Maison Martin Margiela that have been artfully whitewashed; for men who remember having box-fresh trainers stamped on by classmates at school to “christen them”, there’s something reassuringly “ready” about these shoes. And at Belstaff, “Antique Black” is the new black – certain boots are available in the former, but not the latter.

This is, of course, a matter of taste. Many men – particularly those who would never consider vintage – will not succumb to what they see as pretention in fashion. Mark Quinn of Hostem disagrees: “These labels are actually a refuge for the unpretentious. It’s not showy and it’s not the instant ageing of All Saints or Levis. What might be perceived as imperfections are highly desirable – the result of fabrication sourced from the few family run mills left in business.”

These clothes aren’t meant to look preworn or distressed, merely relaxed and luxurious, with subtle of evidence of their artisan craft. It less as about an attempt to age, and more to do with painstaking construction and extraordinary detail. “Brands like A1923 and Lost &Found produce clothing that has a story to tell,” says Michael Takkou of Mayfair boutique Layers. “We recently stocked a collaboration between LAYER-0 and Avantindietro where footwear was constructed with leather that had been buried for 10 years.” Such avant-garde techniques can only be employed by small design houses. “These designers don’t follow trends,” says Mark Quinn. “Geoffrey B. Small hand makes his buttons and Carol Christian Poell dyes his leather in ox blood. Customers buy their clothes for decades, not seasons.”

Some labels, like Casey Vidalenc – known for their boiled wools and what they call “tight and tough fabrics” – aren’t even produced via traditionally structured collections. “We just make things when we want to wear them ourselves,” says Gareth Casey. “If clients want to buy them, then fine.” Much of what’s currently on sale at Dover Street Market and Hostem features fabrics that have been dyed, shrunk, laundered and distressed; many one-off Casey Vidalenc garments are made from short runs of textiles that Casey and his design partner Philippe Vidalenc “wash, wash and wash” and then twist by hand. The result is surprisingly subtle, and appeals to an intellectual customer who sees himself as being above the pervading smart casual look. It’s also very well made – there’s no vast production line in China, most of it comes straight from the atelier, as it would have done before the advent of prêt a porter.

The shop assistants in Rick Owens’ stores wear their proprietor’s black and “dark dust” coloured T-shirts to work, often in tatters, and serve as an instruction manual for newcomers to the brand; Owens designs some of his raw-edged items, like his sheer cotton T-shirts to distress, artfully, over time, while others such as this season’s stonewashed, buttery soft leathers are sold with a subtle weathering to the texture or a pre-worn tone. “I see it as a restrained patina,” says Owens. “Think of British gentleman who used to give their new shoes to a valet to reduce the newness. It can appear affected very easily,” acknowledges the designer, however, so “It’s best to approach it as a gentle finishing and let the client create their own authenticity” through wear.

Across the Channel, meanwhile, Brighton-based designer Paul Harnden creates tailoring that has the warped heft and, often, the weirdness, of a Joseph Beuys installation. Described as “very Greta Garbo” by long-standing customer John Galliano, Harnden makes music and underground Super-8 movies but has never produced a catwalk show. He refuses party invitations, interviews and online retail, selling exclusively at a few stores (Dover Street Market in London; IF in New York; L’Eclaireur in Paris). Much of his work resembles wrinkled, rugged, American Civil War costume, with heavy cottons and twists of Victoriana. Nevertheless, he has a slavish following amongst fans, including Galliano and Brad Pitt, prepared to pay over £1,o00 for a coat. Much of each new collection sells out on arrival because of scarcity and growing demand. As Gareth Casey says, “Quality garments, like good wine, improve with the patina of age.”

Aesop: the stuff of fables (Financial Times How to Spend it)

The area around Silver Place in London’s Soho has become a satellite to some of Australia’s most fashionable neighbourhoods. The most luscious flat white coffees in the city are served at Fernandez & Wells, there’s a neon-dinosaur in the window of the Zero10 Gallery and The Society Club next door identifies itself via a chalkboard outside as a “bookshop serving tea and coffee and toast with jam.” These are typical elements of Melbourne’s bohemian laneways. The arrival of a new store for Australian skincare brand Aesop, with untreated-wood floors and row upon row of the brand’s now iconic brown apothecary bottles on enamel shelves, has completed the scene.

Aesop is one of the biggest international success stories in skincare today. At the end of this year, in which the brand celebrates its 25^th anniversary, there will be 45 stores across the world – Soho’s being the first new opening of 2012.  Founder Dennis Paphitis started out as a hairdresser with a salon, an idea and a few bottles of his own formulation of rosemary and sage oil in 1987. Inspired by an architectural firm he’d encountered three years earlier in Florence, which had switched from working with buildings to experimental design with recycled paper, he honed Aesop’s imagery. Since then, Aesop has become a creative pioneer in its own right. Despite its determination to fly just a fraction above the radar, its influence on the look and ethos of other skincare brands has also crossed over into fashion retail, restaurants, print media and advertising agency strategy.

Paphitis’s masterstroke is his very visible collaboration with architects and artists. Earlier this year he worked with filmmaker Lucy McRae, who describes herself as a “body architect”, on a serious and arresting short film that mixes offbeat beauty imagery with plasma packs and syringes within the milieu of an operating theatre. It has some of the unsettling body-conscious essence of vintage David Cronenberg. “It’s inspired by physicist Herman Ludwig Helmholtz and his research on human perception,” says McRae. “As he said, ‘Everything is an event on the skin’.” As a visual artist, McRae feels empathy with the historical resonance of Aesop’s presentation. “It feels pre-digital,” she says. “Like a relic from the past that might always have been there.”

Much of the appeal of Aesop is the matter-of-fact nature of the brand’s product. Less is more. As Suzanne Santos, Aesop’s long standing “product advocate” explains: “the very first products that Dennis formulated self-sold themselves because of their difference to what was available. There was no colour or artificial fragrance. The formulation was startlingly new.” Similarly, today, there is no quasi-religious experience promised with your morning toilette, no comparison with the results of surgical procedure and no airbrushed advertising. As Ed Burstell, buying director at key Aesop stockist Liberty, who also introduced the brand to the US at Henri Bendel says: “They launched at a time when there was a general trend for anti-ageing products to make statements that weren’t backed by science.” Instead, Aesop’s focus is on preventative measures, and is transparently scientific. The two main Vitamin C types they use are empirically quantified anti-oxidant free radical scavengers. Free radicals sit at the start of a chain-reaction commonly believed to damage skin, and they are generated in abundance in polluted urban environments. “They were one of the first brands to talk about anti-oxidants,” says Sarah Lerfel from Colette in Paris, the brand’s first French stockist. The Perfect Facial Hydrating Cream (£73) and B Triple C Balancing Gel (£67) are two of Aesop’s most premium anti-oxidant products. Along with perfect form and persuasive function, the Aesop aromas of orange, rose, parsley seed and frankincense are consistently seductive; the house style never veers from a fragrance axis of herbal and citrus, with touches of incense that evoke chapels, Byzantium and stately libraries.

Aesop Paris, design by March Studios

Aesop’s products are cruelty free: they aren’t tested on animals and – with the exception of one shaving brush containing badger hair – 100% vegan. Their ethics make them surprisingly unusual in the modern marketplace. While an EU-wide ban on the marketing of any new beauty products tested on animals is imminent, PETA’s current online directory of the guilty – even if the guilt is by association, as a subsidiary – still reads like an audit of many bathroom cabinets, including well loved brands like Kiehl’s and Aveeno. Big companies are working their way off the list via sizeable investment into alternatives, but Aesop has never been anywhere it. At the same time, Aesop’s formulation shuns the fashionable but arguably shallow marketing drive of “100% organic” – after all, you could, theoretically, formulate organic poison. Aveda-founder Horst Rechelbacher, who now runs the edible body product range Intelligent Nutrients believes there are red herrings aplenty: “It is toxins that count, not whether something is labelled organic or natural”.

The presence of parabens in skincare products has been a major industry and consumer issue, after ongoing studies pointed towards possible carcinogenic properties. Some highly credible companies that cheerlead for antioxidants contain pareabens. Aesop’s range is 100% paraben free, while mixing toxin-free synthetics and botanics, for very specific aims, for a distinct urban consumer who has now developed affinity with the range. A case in point: the Oil Free Facial Hydrating Serum with aloe vera juice (£39) has been formulated to moisturise skin in particularly humid cities. When you’re on your way to your first meeting of the day in Bangkok, it doesn’t slide off your face.

Laboratory dynamism aside, Aesop’s presentation has provoked a quiet but visible revolution within a sector of retail. “There are now over 15 companies that use those brown bottles,” says CEO Michael O’Keefe. Aesop’s creative collaborations are similarly influential. Companies like REN now produce provocative, adult-oriented short films, distributed via their website and social media, to support their products. Fragrance company Le Labo echoes the lo-fi Aesop style with its typewriter and rubber-stamp typefaces, and the new Heliocosm store in Paris could, if you squint, be a new branch of Aesop, with its sparse but bold high-concept wood-tunnel interior, bare bulbs and dark refillable flaçons.

The “less is more” approach – reductionist stores that bring the product to the fore; the simple, bookish, sans-serif typography – fits snugly into the lifestyle Zeitgeist, between Camper’s shoes and hotels and the concrete stairwells of Dover Street Market. It’s a self-aware modernism. Like a heavy-twill navy French workman’s jacket, or dinner within the whitewashed walls of St John, it speaks to an intellectual customer who feels they are above artifice and the glossy hard sell. They want functionality, authenticity and restrained luxury. “The Italian design firm that inspired me in the 1980s, called &A, were working with recycled paper as a reaction against decorative Florentine marbled stationery,” says Paphitis. “Aesop is now part of a small movement that’s best described as the Muji-Hermes paradigm. That’s design with the simplicity and utility of Muji and the luxury and materiality of Hermes. They are healthy contradictions. The best examples can be evidenced by the way many serious chefs now treat foraged produce with a sense of preciousness.” That lifestyle Zeitgeist and paradigm is expanding: There’s even Aesop-branded Yarra Valley Cabernet Shiraz and chocolate – “for customers and friends – not for sale”. Both would, no doubt, be a roaring success if made commercially available.

Aesop Singapore, design by March Studios

Paphitis is nothing if not a perfectionist. The Aesop HQ in Melbourne – housed within an immaculate, industrial building with blacked-out brickwork – is mission control for a team of 300 worldwide. The scores of Melbourne employees sit on black Herman Miller chairs in all-white rooms, at pale wood desks, with black PCs, communicate via email exclusively in Arial Narrow and use only one single style of black pen – a classic Bic. “The least significant details and those that are less publically visible still matter,” says Paphitis, pointing out the empty seats at midday. “We prohibit the consumption of lunches at desks,” he says. “Because people should see the sun, take a break, eat good food and not be tapping out emails simultaneously.”

Aesop’s style of modernism can be habit forming. Many customers use only Aesop products. “I don’t like to see brands or logos in my home,” says Jean Luc Colonna, the managing director of the concept store Merci, in Paris. “I feel better seeing an Aesop bottle every morning in my bathroom than an over-marketed brand.” Sarah Temple, an influential voice in graphic design in the UK and a course director at the University of Arts enjoys Aesop’s alignment with intellect and creativity: “I’ve never been treated to quotes from Hunter S Thompson or directed to art movies before by a face cream. And there’s a strange other-worldliness about the stores, with the dark liquid and stark interiors.” Aesop is playful, but doesn’t play on their customer’s anxieties. As Jo Nagasaka, the architect behind the brands stores in Aoyama and Ginza, says: “The Aesop approach is liked by real women for whom the fantasy of the traditional beauty industry is too extreme.”

Nagasaka is one of a handful of creatives with whom Paphitis has worked to elaborate on Aesop’s visibility. The new Soho store is by designers Ciguë, who also created an installation at Merci in Paris and the standalone Aesop store in the Marais, creating shelving from 427 steel caps from the French capital’s plumbing network. Within Grand Central Station, Brooklyn-based designers Tacklebox fashioned an Aesop booth from stacks of copies of the New York Times; in Singapore, March Studio hung 30km of coconut-husk string in strands from the ceiling – the effect was more art installation than retail space. “They have an earthy, vernacular approach that has more in common with hotel, restaurant or bar design,” says Marcus Fairs, the editor of influential design blog Dezeen. “You can see the same philosophy of earthiness and modesty in other brands, such as Cowshed. And if you walk down Redchurch Street in London, where Aesop have a store, you’ll see many cutting edge fashion brands starting to use the same combination of raw display materials and nostalgic marketing.”

Aesop is intrepid with its openings, arriving in areas before any of their peers would see them as viable. They moved into Redchurch Street after Shoreditch House and Boundary opened there, but while there was still just tumbleweed in terms of retail. “Now the big Italian brands are desperate for space there,” says O’Keefe. “So we’re looking at areas like Dalston.”

As well as having a nose for the next place to be, Aesop pinpoint on-message hotels, cafes and restaurants. In the past that has included Claska in Tokyo, London’s Rochelle Canteen and Hakkasan and, back home in Melbourne, the cavernous Seven Seeds coffee shop, with its exposed pipework and sliding factory doors. It’s also in the toilets of the upstairs, VIP, private tailoring consultation room at Brioni on Old Bond Street. Many loyal customers have come to the brand via a trip to the bathroom during a meal, where they’ve discovered the Resurrection Duet of Aromatique Handwash (£27) and Balm (£67). Even if they aren’t the first brand to make handwash sexy, it’s now their pump dispensers that punctuate the sleekest interiors shoots and showrooms.

Aesop New York City, design by Tacklebox

The rise of Aesop has gone hand in hand with a mainstream interest in typography: The font Helvetica inspired a feature length documentary and Simon Garfield’s Just My Type, “a book about fonts”, is a best seller. Many customers love Aesop for its simple, modern mix of serif and sans-serif fonts: Aesop doesn’t have a logo per se, it’s just “Aesop” in Optima Medium. “You can communicate as much with a font as a photograph now,” says Rasmus Ibfelt, Managing Director of the e-Type design agency, which also runs the typography store Playtype in Copenhagen. “Aesop’s labelling takes everything that is usually on the back side of a product and puts it on the front. It’s a strong reference to pharmacy products.” It’s a style that sits comfortably with the brown glass and rubber and glass pipette of the best selling Parsley Seed Anti-Oxidant Serum (£39). It’s about simplicity, authenticity and credibility.

Whatever the connotations, Aesop has become a runaway success. It speaks to a well-travelled, urbane customer. Tellingly, there is only one set of Aesop treatments offered outside of the Aesop stores in Melbourne, Sydney and Hong Kong, and they are three men’s treatments at the Park Hyatt in Tokyo. It’s that kind of a brand – one that collaborates with A.P.C to create the perfect Fine Fabric Care detergent for clothing (£23), calls one of its gift sets Celestial Mechanics, and produces a Ginger Flight Therapy stick (£19) to apply to your pulse points on that long-haul journey at the front of an A380. It represents a new kind of modernism, with a keen sense of play as much as business aptitude. Lying on your back in the treatment room in the basement of Aesop’s South Yarra store, all is serene and white, apart from a single line of text written on the ceiling above your head, a quote attributed to Janis Joplin: ‘Don’t compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got.’

www.aesop.com

Life through a lens (Financial Times Weekend)

Take a walk around any major gallery this weekend and observe how in love with the digital image we all are. Forget what’s on the walls and count the people snapping exhibits with their iPhones. For some, it’s a way to own an aspect of the environment, for others it’s a distraction from the truth that they’d rather be having lunch. From holidays to food blogs, the digital image now serves as our brain’s external hard drive – a visual diary. For fashion designers working with photo prints it’s also a way to incorporate intimate experiences and personalise their work.

Zero + Maria Cornejo S/S 2012

Zero + Maria Cornejo’s spring collection is full of electric-bright, draped abstracts that began life as candid images shot in the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris. For an earlier collection, Maria Cornejo used her iPhone to capture details of the Bosphorus from the deck of a ferry. “Taking pictures has become my starting point,” she says. “I am always looking for patterns and colour – it’s how I look at the world and it lends a more personal narrative to the collection. We’ve started creating tags that go with each printed garment so that clients can read the story and feel connected to the clothes.”

For Cornejo, travel is vital for inspiration. Like Cornejo, Christopher De Vos and Peter Pilotto of the Peter Pilotto label shoot images while on a journey and then abstract the results until they are nearly unrecognisable. Still, an emotional connection to the source material remains. “We took many photos on a recent trip to Indonesia,” says Pilotto. “Some images went on the mood board and some began as a starting for a print. But we always rework everything.” Like those gallery and museum visitors with their iPhones, they are staking a very personal claim on an experience and a captured image.

Last summer, Bruno Basso of the London design duo Basso & Brooke drove across Siberia with two friends, a couple of smart phones and two cameras. The new spring collection that stemmed from it features a mix of images from Russia, manipulated with unlikely tropical colours. “I shot water, forests and skies,” says Basso, “The countryside was beautiful but very bleak; it’s hypnotic and never changes. I found myself fantasising about my childhood and luscious Brazilian flora for comfort, and I put the elements together.” Chris Brooke received the prints back in London and worked them into garments: “There was a clear and emotional feeling to them from Bruno’s unique experience of the journey.”

Basso & Brooke S/S 2012 © Fernanda Calfat

Many designers manipulate photographs out of all recognition, but some reproduce them faithfully and directly. Dries Van Noten discovered the work of James Reeve while judging at the Hyères Festival of International Fashion and Photography and reproduced some of his unpopulated nighttime landscapes on dresses this season. Reeve’s work is quiet and dark. Distant light sources punctuate his landscapes in a way that makes them work as abstract patterns, but on Van Noten’s garments they remain works of art in their own right. “I liked them for their urban and modern sentiment,” says Van Noten. “Although they are dark, I hope they lend the clothes an optimistic mood.” Fellow Belgian Ann Demeulemeester has used a monochrome photograph of a bird in flight as a T-shirt print this season.  It’s been blurred through Photoshop, but it’s still clearly figurative. “It’s an image that my husband shot,” she says. “I have adapted it to represent the memory of a bird; something that has faded away. I like the mystery and freedom of birds – you can’t own them.” Both Van Noten and Demeulemeester embrace photography as a fine art form in a traditional sense, with respect for the integrity of the original image. Demeulemeester’s first experiment with recontextualising imagery was via the painter Jim Dine. She put photo prints of his raven paintings onto dresses in over a decade ago. “I saw the original image and fell in love with it,” she says. “I got in touch with Dine and told him that I wanted to wear the image as a photograph, not just make a garment with it.”

Demeulemeester works predominantly in monochrome, which takes an image one step away from the obvious Kodak moment and two steps in the direction of wearability. Designers working with identifiable images, in colour, have to walk a more perilous tight rope; to wrong-foot would be to land in the realm of 1970s kitsch. “Mary Katrantzou and Erdem both use digital prints that are immediately recognisable,” says Samantha Lewis, one of the head buyers for the influential Italian store and online portal Luisa Via Roma. “But both have a feminine touch that doesn’t limit wearability. Erdem’s floral prints are soft, often with delicately embroidered overlayers.”

As with any graphic, a photo print lends a garment an often dramatic new level of style and meaning – from Maria Grachvogal and her pretty eveningwear florals to Mary Katrantzou and her edgy metal flowers. The democracy of the camera phone and the immense capacity of digital memory have now changed the kind of imagery that designers are experimenting with. It’s now less obvious, more intimate. “There’s a line in the film One Hour Photo about analog photography,” says Bruno Basso. “It’s about how most people don’t take snapshots of the little things – the used Band-Aid and the guy at the gas station, the wasp on the Jell-O, and how these are the things that make up the true picture of our lives. But now, with digital, they do.”

http://www.anndemeulemeester.be

www.bassoandbrooke.com

http://www.driesvannoten.be

www.erdem.co.uk

http://www.luisaviaroma.com

http://www.marykatrantzou.com

www.peterpilotto.com

http://www.zeromariacornejo.com

Mid century modernismo (Privatair)

In the heart of the well-groomed Jardins district of Sao Paulo, tucked away in the shadows of an otherwise non descript street, is South America’s most celebrated restaurant. Dinner at Alex Atala’s D.O.M is a Really Big Deal. Reservations are highly prized, and everything about a visit suggests an extraordinary event, from the double-height, Disney-theatrical front-door to the couples frantically taking pictures of their pretty, floral, green tomato gel salads. Instead of a granita palate cleanser, a waiter spins potato and Gruyere dough over each table, and unfurls it into a perfect swirl on each plate. This is the new Brazil: luxe, a little avant-garde, with incredible attention to detail. And when you visit this new Brazil, you dine on vintage, modernist Sergio Rodrigues chairs, with hexagonal split cane panels. They’re the same chairs that chef Atala has at home, and the same chairs that the first dignitaries to visit the sci-fi white concrete domes of Brasilia sat on. 21^st century Brazil is passionately embracing its modernist design heritage. And there’s a lot to love, from the work of Gregori Warchavchik, who built the first modernist house in the country in the 1920s, to Etel Carmona’s meticulous licensed reproductions of pieces originally created by the architects behind the seminal Branco & Preto store in Sao Paulo at the start of the 1950s.

Brazilian modernist furniture from the middle of the last century to the 1970s has, for years, been something of an insider interiors secret. Now it’s gaining momentum and visibility, with vintage pieces by the likes of Rodrigues becoming sought after at auction, classic pieces going back into production, and new designers channelling the aesthetic. Manahttan hotelier and champion of modernist design Andre Balazs furnished his SoHo loft recently with several vintage Rodrigues pieces, which now sit next to original artwork by Bacon, Schnabal and Warhol. “I’ve become very interested in South American design,” he says. “Rodrigues’ work has incredible detail.”

Brazilian design specialists Espasso in New York City and Los Angeles, and Silvia Nayla in London, attract clients who have an attachment to the quietly flash and au courant mid-century modern aesthetic, but who want something less obvious than the usual Scandic suspects. Brazilian modernism has an organic and seductively tropical element to it that makes it unique. And unlike its international cousins, it hasn’t been done to death. If there’s an equivalent to the Eames lounge chair, it might be Rodrigues’ generously upholstered Poltrona Mole, which first appeared in 1957. When it won first prize at the Concurso Internacional do Móvel in Cantu, Italy in 1961, Arne Jacobson – one of the judges – hailed it as “the only model with up-to-date characteristics… not influenced by passing whims, and absolutely representative of its region of origin”. But even the Poltrona Mole, for all its awards and recognition, hasn’t ventured near the precipice of design cliché. There is no bargain basement “inspired by” copy available online, just the $10,150 model, made to order via Espasso. Pieces by key Brazilian designers run at a premium through their scarcity. Isay Weinfeld’s Huguinho bar sells for $20,500, while Warchavchic’s Leque magazine holder goes for $18,600. This is serious investment furniture.

You can still customer order Rodrigues’ work direct from his atelier in Rio de Janeiro, and select from myriad models, leathers and finishes. He’s still there, larger than life, with his iconic Yosemite Sam moustache, working on new designs in his Botafogo workshop. In the late 1960s, his work become more playful, and he switched from being a master of modernism, to a practitioner of post modernism. His more recent pieces – like the 2002 Diz chair, which appears on the balconies of the Hotel Fasano, the chicest beachfront property in Rio – pay homage to both movements. But it’s still all distinctively Rodrigues. “I don’t care if people say postmodern or modernist, I just do what I like,” he says. “When I create a piece, I’m my own client. I always think that if I like it, then someone else will.”

Rodrigues’ style is organic and slightly wild. It is passionate and sensual – the Mole chair invites you to spread out and sprawl. If there are shades of the sharpness of Italian modernist Gio Ponti in some of Rodrigues’ work (and indeed in the work of much of the Brazilian modernists), then there are also more savage hints of horn and tusk-shapes, and pure Amazonian spirit in their wooden frames. “I’ve always worked with wood,” he says. “When I was a child, my uncle was a carpenter, and I studied with him. We had so many types of tropical wood at our fingertips, and it became a major feature in my work. Even if I work in metal, I still add wood to it, because it changes the meaning.”

Most of Rodrigues’ early pieces were crafted from jacaranda, but from the 1980s onwards – when the sub-tropical tree neared extinction from over-logging – he shifted to eucalyptus, cinnamon, cedar and ivory palm. A walk around the Ipanema branch of Arquivo Contemporaneo, the multi-levelled store and definitive showroom for Brazilian design in Rio, confirms that wood remains the focus for most of the country’s designers. There are the svelte and bow-legged chairs by Aristeu Pires and Jader Almeida and squared-off tables and sofa decks by Bernardo Figueiredo. All are crafted in wood. Then there are the pieces from the Etel collection, produced by Etel Carmona – Warchavchik’s aforementioned 1930 magazine holder, the Poltrona MF5 from 1950 by Branco & Preto, and the beautifully ornate Cacos console by Carmona herself.

There is a strong eco-slant to much of this work. Carmona established the Aver Amazonica factory in Xapuri in 2002, founded on the principle of producing pieces from sustainable sources, in an ecologically sound manner, and in a way that was respectful and supportive of local communities. It’s an ethos shared by many of the key Brazilian brands. “Most of our current designers work in wood, and all of them use only ethically sourced materials,” says Cassidy Hughes, the manager of the Silvia Nayla store in London. “There is something magical about so much of their work, as if they’ve been pulled from an enchanted forest. Hugo França’s pieces highlight the beauty of wood in its natural state, yet each one is still a completely functional piece. And Paulo Alves’ Pedra stools combine traditional wood carving techniques with modern technology.”

The key strength of Brazilian modernism – both vintage, from the 1950s and 1960s, and the current modernism redux – is that it fits into the most contemporary of environments in such a fresh and sophisticated way, even in the case of the more directional pieces. Carlos Motta, who is one of Rodrigues’ favourite designers, is the superstar of the contemporary scene. He lives in a beach house on the Brazilian coast that he describes as “very hippie”, surfs regularly, and works entirely in wood certified by the Brazilian Forest Stewardship Council. His work has a truly Latin beauty to it: his raw-surfaced rocking chairs and lounge pieces have a recycled appearance coupled with visual heft, while his Horizonte desk is one of the stand-out pieces at Espasso. He’s one of the most in-demand brands at Arquivo Contemporaneo, and the Museu Oscar Niemeyer staged an exhibition of his work last year in Curitiba. The cover of the exhibition catalogue was a detail of his Mesa Não Me Toque (“Do Not Touch Me”), a glass coffee table with the most extraordinary wooden base consisting of a polished globe covered with immense, menacing, mace-like spikes. It’s a statement piece in more ways than one. Motta created it when he was invited by IBAMA (the Brazilian Department of Natural Resources) to create a piece for a show they were curating. They provided the wood, which Motta discovered was not certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. “I was furious,” he says. “So I created a piece that no one could touch to make a point.” While the Mesa Não Me Toque is an absolute one-off, it’s a testament to Motta’s genius that many potential customers have enquired about orders. This particular school of Brazilian design is absolutely about integrity as much as beauty.

 

 

www.arquivocontemporaneo.com.br

carlosmotta.com

espasso.com

www.etelinteriores.com.br

http://www.isayweinfeld.com

http://www.sergiorodrigues.com.br

www.silvianayla.com