Friday 25 November 2016

Hubert de Givenchy - To Audrey with Love / exhibition Den Haag – 26 November 2016 / 26 March 2017 --- Audrey: The 50s by David Wills



Hubert de Givenchy - To Audrey with Love / exhibition
Den Haag – 26 November 2016 / 26 March 2017



Some of Hubert de Givenchy's most beautiful creations were born from his wonderful friendship with Audrey Hepburn. On and off the big screen, Audrey Hepburn brought to these clothes her exceptional charm: Sabrina (1954), Funny Face (1957), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), How to Steal a Million (1966). Hubert de Givenchy's drawings dance on the pages, inviting us to embark upon an exclusive retrospective of his most beautiful designs, accompanied by his annotations, from the famous Bettina blouse of 1952 to the wedding dress of his last collection in 1995. We also find his creations for the Empress of Iran, HRH Princess Grace of Monaco, the princess Caroline of Monaco, the Duchess of Windsor, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich and many other iconic personalities. This book promises to be a formidable source of inspiration for all the fashion addicts and the lovers of the incomparable Givenchy style, that incarnates French elegance and taste at their summit.


 Audrey: The 50s
by David Wills
About the Book

A stunning photographic compilation showcasing Audrey Hepburn’s iconic career in the 1950s—the decade that solidified her place as one of the world’s greatest stars in film and fashion.
Devoted to her most influential decade, Audrey: The 50s brings together in one volume the allure and elegance that made Audrey Hepburn the most iconic figure in modern fashion history. Photographed during the early days of her career, both on the sets of Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, and other classic films, and in fashion photo shoots by top photographers who adored and immortalized her, these beautiful black-and-white and color images radiate with Audrey’s waifish charm, ethereal beauty, and effortless style.
Renowned author, curator and photographic preservationist David Wills has carefully selected this collection of two hundred museum-quality photos that capture Audrey in her prime as never before. Audrey: The 50s displays this star at her brightest, and brings her legacy into perfect focus.
Among the highlights:
Rare and classic images digitally restored from vintage photographic prints, original studio negatives and transparencies.
Never-before-seen publicity photos, scene stills and work shots from the sets of Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, Love in the Afternoon, and The Nun’s Story.
Previously unpublished "posed candids" of Audrey at home.
Beautifully restored advertisements, fan magazine layouts, international film posters and lobby cards.
Quotes from photographers, directors, and costars, including William Holden, Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Billy Wilder, King Vidor, William Wyler, Edith Head, Hubert de Givenchy, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, and Audrey herself.





BECK 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder Replica




Inspired by the Porsche 356 which was created by Ferry Porsche, and some spyder prototypes built and raced by Walter Glöckler starting in 1951, the factory decided to build a car designed for use in auto racing.[1] The model Porsche 550 Spyder was introduced at the 1953 Paris Auto Show.[2] The 550 was very low to the ground, in order to be efficient for racing. In fact, former German Formula One racer Hans Herrmann drove it under closed railroad crossing gates during the 1954 Mille Miglia
.


Racing history
The first three hand built prototypes came in a coupé with a removable hardtop. The first (550-03) raced as a roadster at the Nurburgring Eifel Race in May 1953 winning its first race. Over the next couple of years, the Werks Porsche team evolved and raced the 550 with outstanding success and was recognized wherever it appeared. The Werks cars were provided with differently painted tail fins to aid recognition from the pits. Hans Herrmann’s particularly famous ‘red-tail’ car No 41 went from victory to victory. Porsche was the first car manufacturer to get race sponsorship which was through Fletcher Aviation, who Porsche was working with to design a light aircraft engine and then later adding Telefunken and Castrol.

For such a limited number of 90 prototype and customer builds, the 550 Spyder was always in a winning position, usually finishing in the top three results in its class. The beauty of the 550 was that it could be driven to the track, raced and then driven home, which showed the flexibility of being both a road and track car. Each Spyder was individually designed and customised to be raced and although from the pits it was difficult to identify the sometimes six 550s in the race, the aid of colouring tail spears along the rear wheel fenders, enabled the teams to see their cars. The racing Spyders were predominantly silver in colour, similar to the factory colour of the Mercedes, but there were other splashes of blue, red, yellow and green in the tail spears making up the Porsche palette on the circuit.

Each Spyder was assigned a number for the race and had gumballs positioned on doors, front and rear, to be seen from any angle. On some 550s owned by privateers, a crude hand written number scrawled in house paint usually served the purpose. Cars with high numbers assigned such as 351, raced in the 1000 mile Mille Miglia, where the number represented the start time of 3.51am. On most occasions, numbers on each Spyder would change for each race entered, which today helps identify each 550 by chassis number and driver in period black and white photos.

The later 1956 evolution version of the model, the 550A, which had a lighter and more rigid spaceframe chassis, gave Porsche its first overall win in a major sports car racing event, the 1956 Targa Florio.

Its successor from 1957 onwards, the Porsche 718, commonly known as the RSK was even more successful. The Spyder variations continued through the early 1960s, the RS 60 and RS 61. A descendant of the Porsche 550 is generally considered to be the Porsche Boxster S 550 Spyder; the Spyder name was effectively resurrected with the RS Spyder Le Mans Prototype.



James Dean's "Little Bastard"
Perhaps the most famous of the first 90 Porsche 550's built was James Dean's "Little Bastard", numbered 130 (VIN 550-0055), which Dean fatally crashed into Donald Turnupseed's 1950 Ford Custom at the CA Rte. 46/41 Cholame Junction on September 30, 1955.

As Dean was finishing up Giant’s filming in September, 1955, he suddenly traded in his 356 Porsche Super Speedster at Competition Motors, for a new 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder on September 21st, and immediately entered the upcoming Salinas Road Race event scheduled for October 1 and 2.

According to Lee Raskin, Porsche historian and author of James Dean At Speed, Dean asked custom car painter and pin striper Dean Jeffries to paint "Little Bastard" on the car:

"Dean Jeffries, who had a paint shop next to Barris did the customizing work which consisted of: painting '130' in black non-permanent paint on the front hood, doors and rear deck lid. He also painted 'Little Bastard' in script across the rear cowling. The red leather bucket seats and red tail stripes were original. The tail stripes were painted by the Stuttgart factory, which was customary on the Spyders for long distance endurance racing identification."
Purportedly, James Dean had been nicknamed "Little Bastard" by Bill Hickman, a Warner Bros. stunt driver who became friendly with him. (Previous references to Hickman say he was Dean's dialogue coach on Giant, though Bob Hinkle, a Texan, was actually Dean's Giant dialogue coach.) Hickman was part of Dean's group driving to the Salinas Road Races on September 30, 1955. Hickman says he called Dean, "Little Bastard", and Dean called Hickman, "Big Bastard."

Another origin story of the "Little Bastard" monicker has been corroborated by two of Dean's close friends, Lew Bracker and photographer Phil Stern. They believe Jack L. Warner of Warner Bros. had once referred to Dean as a "little bastard" after Dean refused to vacate his temporary East of Eden trailer on the studio's lot, and Dean wanted to get "even" with Warner by naming his race car "Little Bastard" and to show Warner that despite his sports car racing ban during all filming, Dean was going to be racing the "Little Bastard" in between making movies for Warner Bros.



RCH 550 SPYDER Part 1 ( www.replicarhellas.com )

Tuesday 22 November 2016

WIND IN MY HAIR A Kaleidoscope of Memories by Josephine Loewenstein



WIND IN MY HAIR
A Kaleidoscope of Memories
Josephine Loewenstein

‘Josephine Loewenstein has lived most of her life in the whirlwind wake of husband Rupert, amidst high society, the Rolling Stones, royalty and the fast lane of the 20th century. But here is a surprisingly dispassionate and acute observer of this passing show, by no means mesmerised or dazzled by it. There is a lot to read between the lines.’
HUGO VICKERS
In Wind In My Hair, Josephine Loewenstein captures the rich kaleidoscope of a life lived to the full. Many of the worlds she has been part of have vanished, or are fast disappearing. By breathing new life into them, she has created a collage of memories in which autobiography and a sharp ear share the page with cameos of the larger-than-life characters whose paths have crossed hers – many of them famous, others who cast a brief, but occasionally notorious, glow on their age, and are now shadowy footnotes.
Happily she maintains a sense of distance, even when she is at the heart of the story. Privilege and austerity punctuated her childhood. She spent much of the Second World War at Ledbury Park, her grandparents’ ancient half-timbered house in Herefordshire. Later she trained at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School under the formidable Ninette de Valois, appearing in the opening performance at Covent Garden in 1946.
Forced to give up her career because of her height, Josephine escaped to Rome, a city bursting with colour and vitality in contrast to the shortages and gloom of post-war London. Marriage to Prince Rupert Loewenstein introduced her to a dolce vita lifestyle, in which she somehow successfully contrived to be both participant and observer.
Throughout, Princess Josephine casts an often funny, occasionally moving sideways look at this patchwork of parties, people and places. Yet for all the wealth and glamour, there is a poignancy about her observations, a sense of the transience behind the glitter and bravura, that makes Wind in My Hair refreshingly different to many other memoirs.
Sewn hardback with jacket, 185 x 244 mms
196 pages, illustrated throughout in colour and black and white

ISBN 978-0-9929151-7-9



Josephine Loewenstein Remembers the Heyday of High Society

Ahead of her memoir, socialite Josephine Loewenstein reminisces with old friend (and V.F. contributing editor) Reinaldo Herrera about their joyful antics in Rome and St. Moritz—before paparazzi and the Daily Mail were even a concern.

BY REINALDO HERRERA
NOVEMBER 18, 2016 5:03 PM

Josephine Loewenstein— jet-setter, high-society fixture, and former wife of Rolling Stones manager Prince Rupert Loewenstein—has never been short of good personal anecdotes to tell at a party. So, one day, she decided to write them all down.

The result is Wind in My Hair: A Kaleidoscope of Memories, an autobiography that chronicles everything from her childhood in W.W. II era London, to her café society days in Rome, to her rock ’n’ roll life with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Ahead of the book’s publication by Dovecote Press this week, the author reminisces with old friend and V.F. contributing editor Reinaldo Herrera about time gone by.

Vanity Fair: Josephine, it’s wonderful to be together. What gave you the idea for your book?

Josephine Loewenstein: Well, I started by writing short stories. Just jotting down interesting things, anecdotes, funny things the children said, and trips abroad.

Did you always have this interest in art?

Well, before the war, I went to the De Basil ballet school in Covent Garden.

That was the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo?

That’s right. I always thought, “I have got to be a ballet dancer.” I had the audition with Ninette de Valois [at Sadler’s Wells ballet school] when I was 12 or 13. This was when the Opera House reopened in 1946. It had been a dance hall in the war.

When did your ballet career last until?

Til about ’49, ’50. I was very unhappy with my mother and my health went right down, so my father said he would buy a house in London in Montpelier Square and I could live with him. But one of my friends said, “I’m going to Rome, why don’t you travel with me?” Nine pounds for a one-way ticket on the train. Can you imagine?

That was the beginning of the Rome years. The dolce vita!

The dolce vita! What a wonderful mixture of vita and “grand” life! People who don’t know that generation cannot imagine Roman palaces, filled with footmen in full livery and white wigs and silk socks.

It was a very interesting mixture of times, because you had Americans who had come to Europe, and then you had Europeans that were living in America. You had film stars, and duchesses who didn’t know what a film star was.

And who would never consort with them in a social way, at all.

I think café society was brilliant and democratizing because it was the first time that everybody, from all strata of society, went out together. In 1958 or 1959 Mr. Badrutt [who was one of the owners of the Palace Hotel] told me, “This is the greatest year St. Moritz has had since before the Second World War.” It was an incredible mixture of the Agnellis, who were the kings of everything, and Princess Pallavicini, and Mr. Niarchos and that entire group . . .

And Sunny Auersperg . . .

Life in St. Moritz was special. There was no paparazzi; no press. You could do anything. I remember playing sardines in the dining room of the Palace Hotel. You’d get underneath tables of people you’d never met, and hide, and they were delighted! It was a very simple and free life because of the lack of newspapers.

Nobody bothered you, nor did you bother them. How it has changed.

And you didn’t know if so-and-so was rich or poor. Nowadays, they immediately introduce someone to you and they say, “He’s a billionaire” or “He’s a millionaire.”

That would have been thought very vulgar.

And in this fascinating time in your life, when did you meet Rupert, your husband?

Oh, much later on: ’55-ish. I think I met him at Oxford. We married in ’57. He met the Rolling Stones through Christopher Gibbs, who was friends with Mick Jagger

Mick had asked Christopher “Who can help us run the business, because we’re making a lot of money but we’re not seeing anything.” And Christopher said, “This is just the man you want: Rupert Loewenstein.” From then on, he ran the Stones for about 34 years.

They loved him and he loved them. To see Rupert Loewenstein and the Stones together is like seeing oil on one side and vinegar on the other. And yet they melded, and made the best salad dressing in the world.

Mind you, it was a very hard life for him, because the Stones lived only at night. He was up all night telephoning Los Angeles and the lawyers. Rupert was unbelievably patient. He had to be. Those were difficult times, when everyone did what they fancied, really. I won’t say more than that!

There are some interesting anecdotes about Keith Richards in the book.

He’s a very amusing person. Very kind, very charming, and brilliant. Mick and Keith are both good company. They’re interested in everything, whatever the subject!

Quite wild lives?

It was very wild. Less so now!


How late pop-hating Bavarian prince became 'Rupie the Groupie' and made penniless Rolling Stones billions in tax exile (while also keeping them out of jail for drugs)

Prince Rupert Loewenstein has just died aged 80
He was the man who kept the world’s most famous rock band from jail
The merchant banker could trace his family back to the 10th century
He turned the near-bankrupt British group into one of the most efficient money-making machines in the business

By CHRISTOPHER WILSON
PUBLISHED: 00:34 GMT, 23 May 2014

His epitaph should read ‘It’s only rock ’n’ roll . . . but I loathe it’.
Yet it was this unlikely figure — a portly, pop-hating Bavarian nobleman — who saved the Rolling Stones from extinction.
Prince Rupert Loewenstein, who has just died aged 80, was the man who kept the world’s most famous rock band from jail and bankruptcy, using his expertise in tax-avoidance.

In full, it was His Serene Highness Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, Count of Loewenstein-Scharffeneck.
Keith Richards was more cautious.
‘He didn’t like rock and roll. He thought "composing" was something done with a pen and paper, like Mozart,’ said the Stones’ guitarist.
‘He’d never even heard of Mick Jagger when he met him.’
Yet the merchant banker, who could trace his family back to the 10th century, turned a near-bankrupt British group into one of the most efficient money-making machines the music industry has ever known.
The Rolling Stones are often labelled the ‘Billion Pound Band’, but that’s a massive understatement — since 1989 they’ve grossed twice that.
Their last tour pulled in £341 million. Mick Jagger is worth £200 million, Keith Richards almost as much.

No surprise, then, that their aristocratic eminence grise was once dubbed ‘the human calculator’.
But what drew an Oxford-educated, Savile Row-suited princeling into the orbit of the Rolling Stones?
The catalyst was Old Etonian Christopher Gibbs, a wayward art dealer ‘usually three feet off the ground on acid’, according to Richards, who’d adopted him as a mentor as they navigated their way through the drug-crazed Sixties.
Gibbs’s bohemian-toff credentials gave him access not only to the princes in town — including Rupert — but also to the paupers, as the Stones then were.

The band had parted company with their first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, and fallen into the rapacious grip of the man who split the Beatles, Allen Klein.
Klein had leeched the Stones’ already depleted finances, and the relationship ended in tears and a set of lawsuits that were to last the next 18 years.
‘Chrissie’ Gibbs cornered Loewenstein, who part-owned a merchant bank, and told him his friends needed help.
It was in 1968 that Loewenstein first walked into Jagger’s house in Chelsea.
The Stones were already a global phenomenon but, Loewenstein recalled: ‘There was no furniture in the house.’
Jagger admitted that the band, though working its socks off, had no money.
Initially, Loewenstein had grave doubts. He wondered whether he wanted to deal with a group of people he considered ‘degenerate, long-haired and, worst of all, unprofitable layabouts’.
Loewenstein, a devout Catholic, had developed a very different set of life-values from the Stones in his 35 years. Sex? Not for Rupert. Drugs? No way. Rock ’n’ roll? He abhorred it.
He attended the Stones’ legendary Hyde Park concert in 1969 — no doubt pinching his princely nose at all those idlers and wastrels lounging about on the grass — later describing it as being ‘like a Nuremberg Rally’.
It took some time for him to come down from his moral high horse, but his banker’s instincts told him the Stones could, one day, earn billions.
What’s more, he came to find the band, particularly Jagger who also had a sharp business brain, intriguing.
Loewenstein realised that with a top UK tax rate of 98 per cent at the time, a mountain of debt and years of litigation ahead, he simply had to get the Stones out of the country.
‘I selected the South of France as a suitable location,’ he said.
The group duly relocated, though Keith Richards admits they feared the move would kill the band’s popularity.
But it was in France, while recording Exile On Main Street (Loewenstein claimed the title was a reference to the group’s tax-exile status), that the band really got its commercial act together.
It was the beginning of the huge tours which were to give the Stones their special place in rock history. Loewenstein sanctioned the expenditure of vast sums on sets, trucks, lawyers, backstage personnel, dancers and singers.


In return, he sought commercial sponsorship and the Stones became the first band to do product-endorsement — making multi-million-dollar deals with Jovan perfume, Budweiser beer, Volkswagen and the Chase Manhattan Bank.
In years to come, they would get £6million for allowing Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates to use a snatch of their song Start Me Up to promote his Windows software.
All thanks to Rupert.
He was scrupulously honest and insisted on doing things by the book, less because of the inherent moral virtue in playing by the rules than because he saw it as a way of ensuring that the business would still be running next year and the year after that.
He rejected the time-honoured rock ’n’ roll custom of accepting cash in brown paper bags when the band were on the road, pointing out that one accusation of tax fraud could keep the Stones out of America, their most lucrative market, for a very long time.
In 1978, when an accountant turned up with $50,000 (£30,000) in a paper bag during a tour, he was railing at the band for continuing to jeopardise their future by encouraging unorthodox practices.
‘He taught the Stones that there is no such thing as free money,’ I was told by one former band associate. ‘But it took a lot of teaching.’

Although the rather stuffy banker gradually grew more accustomed to the weird and wonderful world of the Stones, earning himself the nickname ‘Rupie the Groupie’ from Jerry Hall, he maintained a certain distance, viewing himself as, in his words, ‘a combination of bank manager, psychiatrist, and nanny’.
His Mr Fix It skills were often tested. For example, when recording Exile On Main Street at Richards’ French house Nellcôte, the band had consumed an abundance of drugs.
Soon, Richards and his partners in crime were in deep trouble with the French drugs squad.
Jail beckoned. ‘We could be locked up for months while investigations took place.
There was no habeas corpus [a writ requiring a person to be brought before a judge or court],’ recalled the guitarist grimly.
The persuasive Loewenstein was able to get Richards off the hook in return for the band temporarily leaving the country.
In 1977, when Richards was arrested for heroin possession in Toronto, it was Loewenstein who suggested to the court that he pay his debt to society by playing a number of charity gigs to raise awareness of the dangers of drug abuse, saving his client a jail term — again.
In his autobiography, Richards describes how, when it was discovered that a soon-to-be-released Stones song called Anybody Seen My Baby? bore more than a passing resemblance to the Canadian country artist k.d. lang’s huge hit Constant Craving, Loewenstein was hauled in to troubleshoot the problem.
‘The record was about to come out . . . I had to call up Rupert . . . we had to include k.d. lang in the writing credits,’ recalled Richards.
With one call, Loewenstein had saved the reputation of the Jagger-Richards writing brand, plus perhaps several million dollars in legal fees.
Of the prince’s contribution to the band’s bank balance, Richards has said: ‘He re-ordered the finances so we didn’t get cheated out of 80 per cent of the takings.
On a $50 ticket, up till then, we’d get $3. He set up sponsorship and clawed back merchandising deals. He cleaned out the scams and the fiddles. He made us viable.’
The secret of the prince’s success was that he treated the Stones as a multi-national firm, restructuring their management company into a pyramid based on four firms headquartered in the Netherlands.
Decisions on where to record, and where to tour, were made on the basis of tax benefits.

At one point, Loewenstein became caught between Jagger and Richards in a power struggle over the direction the Stones should take — Jagger assuming complete control over tours and marketing, Richards claiming that everyone else in the band should have a say.
For a very long time, the two old friends refused to speak. It took all of Loewenstein’s diplomatic skills to stop the band breaking up altogether.
All its surviving members agree that it was Loewenstein’s enduring legacy which put the Stones back together and on the road for the money-spinning 50th anniversary concert at the 02 arena in 2012, and at Glastonbury.
But by then, after 39 years with the Stones, he’d had enough. In 2007, he parted with the band — amicably, although Jagger was angered by the publication last year of his memoir A Prince Among Stones.
‘Call me old-fashioned,’ the singer was quoted as saying, ‘but I don’t think your ex-bank manager should be discussing your financial dealings and personal information in public.’
Just how ‘old-fashioned’ it is to have one’s tax affairs cunningly arranged by a financial wizard is another matter.

In fact, despite the apparent gulf in lifestyle, language and clothing, Loewenstein and the Stones had much in common. Back in the Sixties the Stones thought of themselves as outsiders and risk-takers — and so, in his own way, did Loewenstein.
Born in Majorca, he may have come from an ancient Bavarian family, but his branch of it had lost its influence.
There are many princes in Germany, and it’s just as easy to feel you are bottom of the pile when you have a title as when you’re a penniless schoolboy from run-down Dartford like young Michael Jagger.
In 1962, when the Stones were still dreaming of storming the pop charts, Loewenstein had his own dream — of storming the City.
He’d read mediaeval history at Oxford and, with two fellow former students, went out to find the cheapest merchant bank he could buy — a snip at £600,000.
To the pompous ancients who then peopled the world of merchant banking, Loewenstein, at 29, and his friends and business partners Jonathan Guinness and Richard Cox Johnson must have seemed, with their alternative approach to money-making, just as brash and rebellious as the Rolling Stones.
The three of them worked tirelessly in one room, setting up deals and taking risks — just as, across town, the Stones were sharing a house and trying to write hits.
Yet, Loewenstein’s home life was always deeply conservative. In 1957 he married Josephine Lowry-Corry, granddaughter of the banker Lord Biddulph, and they had three children.
Extraordinarily, given the opulent life that he led from his grand house in Richmond Park, both his sons chose a different way: one becoming a Roman Catholic priest; the other a monk. His daughter Dora married an Italian aristocrat.
It might be said Loewenstein changed for ever the way the popular music industry makes its millions. Certainly, he made a handful of scruffy musicians incredibly rich.


Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein - obituary
Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein was a Bavarian aristocrat and banker who disliked rock and roll but made The Rolling Stones very rich
5:41PM BST 21 May 2014

Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein, who has died aged 80, was the Bavarian aristocrat who for decades managed the financial affairs of The Rolling Stones.
Loewenstein was a key member of the Stones’ entourage for almost 40 years. The subfusc banker’s suits and high Roman Catholic connections which made him such an incongruous figure amid a backstage ambience of sex, drugs and rock and roll were in some ways deceptive: he had a lively sense of humour, and he observed his clients’ antics with a worldly twinkle in his eye. “He’s a bit of a showman, a bit extraordinary,” one City colleague said of him. “He always lived life at a very high rate.”

It was as managing director of Leopold Joseph & Co, a small London merchant bank, that he was first introduced to Mick Jagger by a mutual friend, the art dealer Christopher Gibbs, in 1968 — though Loewenstein claimed at the time never to have heard of the band. Jagger — no slouch in financial matters himself — was increasingly angry at the handling of the Stones’ affairs by Allen Klein, the aggressive New Jersey accountant who had been the group’s manager since 1965 and whose terms included a 50 per cent slice of their recording royalties. “Half the money I’ve made has been stolen,” Jagger later told an interviewer — and his first question to Loewenstein was whether the skills of Leopold Joseph could extricate them from their contract with Klein.

“I discussed taking on the group with my partners but they were very much against any involvement, saying it would be bad for the image of the firm,” the prince recalled. “It was very hard to win them over, but I finally prevailed.”
Loewenstein later wrote that he and Jagger “clicked on a personal level. I certainly felt that [he] was a sensible, honest person. And I was equally certain that I represented a chance for him to find a way out of a difficult situation. I was intrigued. So far as the Stones’ music was concerned, however, I was not in tune with them, far from it. Rock and pop music was not something in which I was interested ... After the first two or three business meetings with Mick, I realised there was something exceptional in his make-up, that his personality was able to convert his trade as itinerant performer into something far more intriguing.”

From then on, Loewenstein was a particularly close personal adviser to Jagger, who developed a liking for rubbing shoulders with high society. Shortly after they met, Jagger helped to plan a White Ball at the Loewensteins’ home in Holland Park, which kept neighbours awake until a quarter to six in the morning. When one rang the police to complain, she was told: “We can’t do anything about it, Princess Margaret’s there.”
Loewenstein realised that a great deal more money could be made for the band from touring: “After reviewing a few of the basic documents, I realised [the money] would have gone to Klein and therefore they would have depended on what he gave them, as opposed to what the record company or the publishing company did. They were completely in his hands. What had also become apparent to me was that the band would have to abandon their UK residence. If they did not do this, they could be paying between 83 and 98 per cent of their profits in British income tax and surtax. I selected the South of France as a suitable location for them.”
By 1972 Loewenstein had managed to reach a satisfactory contract with Allen Klein (although litigation continued for a further 18 years), allowing the Stones to record with a company of their choice. He then set himself to find a new recording contract for them to replace the existing one with Decca; during their European tour of 1970 he conducted what amounted to a trade fair on their behalf from a series of hotel bedrooms.
The prince’s services extended not only to managing their money, negotiating their contracts and accompanying them on tour: he once described himself as “a combination of bank manager, psychiatrist and nanny”, while the tabloids christened him “Rupie the Groupie”. In 1978 he was called upon to provide an affidavit to a Toronto court as to the extent of Keith Richards’s casual spending — $350,000 in the previous year — as evidence that the guitarist was wealthy enough not to commit crimes in order to feed his heroin habit.
It was the prince who was most influential in persuading Jagger to go on touring through the 1980s and ’90s, as relations among the group members cooled and the wear and tear of advancing age took its toll. The prince also stood as godfather to James, Jagger’s son by Jerry Hall, in 1985 (the actress Anjelica Huston was godmother).
When Jagger and Hall parted, Loewenstein masterminded the financial settlement that followed — and remarked in a rare interview that “when families split up you have to make it absolutely clear whose side you are on at once”. It was due in large part to his wisdom that Jagger’s fortune is today estimated at more than £200 million.

Rupert Louis Ferdinand Frederick Constantine Lofredo Leopold Herbert Maximilian Hubert John Henry zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg was born at Palma, Majorca, on August 24 1933.
His father, Prince Leopold, a native of Salzburg, traced descent through the royal house of Wittelsbach from the Elector Palatine Friedrich I (1425-76), whose son Ludwig — by a mistress, Clara Tott, whom the Elector married to legitimise the child — became Count of Loewenstein, near Heilbronn in what is now Baden-Wurtemberg, in 1488. Rupert’s mother was a daughter of the Count of Treuberg, and the family’s connections could be traced throughout the Almanack de Gotha. Non-noble forebears included the Frankfurt financier Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the famous banking dynasty.
The young Rupert was brought to England in 1940 and sent to Beaumont, the Roman Catholic public school. Later he read History at Magdalen College, Oxford — where he emerged as one of the glitterati of his generation — and began his City career as a trainee with the stockbrokers Bache & Co. He and a group of friends swiftly decided that the best way to make serious money would be to own their own merchant bank.
Together with, among others, Jonathan Guinness (now Lord Moyne), the exotic French Baron Alexis de Redé, and Anthony Berry ( son of the Sunday Times proprietor Lord Kemsley and later a Conservative MP who was killed by the 1984 Brighton bomb), he arranged to buy Leopold Joseph & Co from its founding family for £600,000.
The bank had been set up in 1919 by a German-Jewish immigrant who first came to London as a reporter for the Frankfurter Zeitung; three Joseph brothers remained in the business, which had been operating on a very modest scale.
Under Loewenstein’s leadership, it rapidly made a new name for itself in lucrative corporate finance work and investment advice for very wealthy private clients. His success with the Rolling Stones’ account brought him a number of other showbusiness clients, including Pink Floyd and (before his conversion to Islam) Cat Stevens.
In 1981 the prince left Leopold Joseph to set up his own business, Rupert Loewenstein Ltd, based in St James’s. He took his best clients with him, and once explained why he enjoyed working for people who had only recently made their fortunes. New money, he said, was “much more interesting than old. People with old money are nearly always having to be adjusted downwards.”
Loewenstein’s own money, both old and new, enabled him to live in grand style in later years in a former grace-and-favour mansion, Petersham Lodge — not far from the Jagger ménage on Richmond Hill — which he bought in 1987 for around £2 million.
But in parallel with a life of money and parties, there was also a spiritual side to him. He petitioned for the preservation of the Tridentine Mass — writing to The Daily Telegraph in 1975 about its numinous beauty — and held high office in ancient Catholic orders of chivalry: he was Grand Inquisitor of the Constantinian Military Order of St George and president of the British association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.
Loewenstein’s association with The Rolling Stones ended amicably in 2007 — although his publication six years later of a memoir, A Prince Among Stones, was said to have upset Jagger.
In the book, the prince wrote of his relationship with the band: “All the time I worked with the Stones I never changed my habits, my clothes or my attitudes. I was never tempted by the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Although I enjoyed a good vintage wine, I was never a heavy drinker, nor a drug-taker. I always aimed to maintain a strict discipline backstage, for security reasons, and tried to see that the band and the entourage did not get drunk or disorderly.
“To many outsiders it must seem extraordinary that I was never a fan of the Stones’ music, or indeed of rock ’n’ roll in general. Yet I feel that precisely because I was not a fan, desperate to hang out in the studio and share in the secret alchemy of their creative processes (something I never did since I couldn’t take the noise levels), I was able to view the band and what they produced calmly, dispassionately, maybe even clinically – though never without affection.”

Prince Rupert married, in 1957 at the London Oratory, Josephine Lowry-Corry, a barrister’s daughter who had trained as a ballet dancer at Sadler’s Wells until she grew too tall, then retrained as an opera singer. The honeymoon included a visit to the Wagner festival at Bayreuth.
The Loewensteins had two sons, Princes Rudolf and Konrad, both of whom became priests, and a daughter, Princess Maria-Theodora (Dora), who married an Italian count, Manfredi della Gherardesca, and became a director of her father’s business.
Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein, born August 24 1933, died May 20 2014


Rupert Louis Ferdinand Frederick Constantine Lofredo Leopold Herbert Maximilian Hubert John Henry zu Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, Count of Loewenstein-Scharffeneck(24 August 1933 – 20 May 2014) was a Spanish-born Bavarian aristocrat and the longtime financial manager of the rock band The Rolling Stones. His affectionate nickname was "Rupie the Groupie". Loewenstein was named to the International Best-Dressed Hall of Fame in 2001.

A scion of the royal houses of Wittelsbach and Löwenstein-Wertheim, Loewenstein was born in Palma, Majorca, Spain, the son of Prince Felicien Leopold Friedrich Ludwig Hubertus zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg (1903–1974) and his wife, Bianca Henrietta Maria Fischler, Countess von Treuberg (1913–1984). Both were of part-Jewish descent.Henry de Worms, 1st Baron Pirbright was his father's maternal grandfather. Following his parents' separation, he and his mother arrived in England in 1940. Loewenstein was educated at the Quaker St Christopher School in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, followed by Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied medieval history.

Banking
After school, Loewenstein worked as a stockbroker for Bache & Co. In 1963, he was part of a consortium formed to buy the merchant bank Leopold Joseph & Sons, along with fellow Oxford graduates Jonathan Guinness, Richard Cox-Johnson and Louis Heyman.and he became a director of the resulting firm. Leopold Joseph had previously been family owned by the Josephs, and carried out only specialised lines of banking business.

Following the acquisition, the business was substantially expanded to include advice on issues and mergers, investment advice, and particularly currency trading. By 1971, the firm had become one of the principal dealers in London in investment dollars. That year, it undertook a capital raising with a target of a net £940,000 to enable further expansion. In 1981, Loewenstein left to start his own company, Rupert Loewenstein Ltd, where most of his clients were new money, who he described as "much more interesting than old money. People with old money are nearly always having to be adjusted downwards; those with new money are much more realistic."

The Rolling Stones
Loewenstein was the Rolling Stones' business adviser and financial manager from 1968 until 2007.
In 1968, then working in London as a merchant banker, he was introduced to Mick Jagger by a mutual friend, art dealer Christopher Gibbs. According to Keith Richards, Loewenstein had never heard of Jagger before then. Jagger was of the opinion that the Stones' then manager, Allen Klein, was not paying them everything they were due.

Loewenstein is credited with transforming the Stones into a "global brand and one of the world's richest bands", in particular by encouraging them to take into account potential tax advantages in any decisions about where to record, rehearse or perform. He managed their release from an existing contract, which paid them almost nothing, and persuaded them of the tax advantages of leaving England and moving to the south of France. He channelled their earnings through a series of companies in the Netherlands, and got them to rehearse in Canada, rather than the United States, to reduce their tax bill.Richards said, "[t]he tax rate [in the U.K.] in the early '70s on the highest earners was 83 percent, and that went up to 98 percent for investments... It was Rupert's advice that we become non-resident".Loewenstein also copyrighted the famous red tongue logo, and enlisted corporates sponsors such as General Electric for tours.

Richards described how, until they started to tour large venues in the 1980s, the Stones did not make serious money. The first important one was the 1981–82 tour which broke box office records. By then, Loewenstein had reorganised the band's finances so that they did not "get cheated out of eighty percent of the takings... On a fifty-dollar ticket, up till then, [the band got] three dollars. He set up sponsorship and clawed back merchandising deals. He cleaned out the scams and fiddles, or most of them. He made us viable." In a 2002 interview, Richards said of Loewenstein: "He is a great financial mind for the market. He plays that like I play guitar. He does things like a little oil well. And currency—you know, Swiss francs in the morning, switch to marks in the afternoon, move to the yen, and by the end of the day, how many dollars?"

Loewenstein never got involved in the music. He said he preferred classical music and never played a Stones recording by choice; if he had to listen to rock and roll, he preferred The Beatles. Richards confirmed: "Rupert didn't like rock and roll; he thought 'composing' was something done with a pen and paper, like Mozart."

Loewenstein's daughter, Princess Dora Loewenstein (Maria Theodora Marjorie Loewenstein), wrote several first-hand accounts of life with the Rolling Stones, whom she had known since she was a child.

Personal life and family
On 18 July 1957, Loewenstein married Josephine Clare Lowry-Corry (born 26 January 1931). She is the daughter of Montagu William Lowry-Corry (1907–1977), who was a grandson of Edward O'Brien, 14th Baron Inchiquin and Hon. Mary Constance Biddulph (1906–1991), who was a daughter of John Michael Gordon Biddulph, 2nd Baron Biddulph.

The couple had three children:

Rudolf Amadeus Joseph Karl Ludwig Emmanuel (born 17 November 1957) who became a Roman Catholic priest in the Dominican Order.
Konrad Friedrich Ferdinand Johannes Ottakar Sylvester (born 26 November 1958) who also became a Roman Catholic priest.He belongs to the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter.
Maria Theodora Marjorie (born 11 July 1966) who has been married since 1998 to Conte Manfredi della Gherardesca. Her godfather was Alexis von Rosenberg, Baron de Redé (1922–2004).
They lived in Petersham Lodge in River Lane, Petersham, London, a former grace-and-favour mansion, purchased for about £2 million in 1987. It is an early-18th-century house, built for the Duchess of Queensberry, and Grade II listed by Historic England.

Monday 21 November 2016

False Image Fashion Podcast Episode #23: Photographer & Filmmaker Rose Callahan.



Featured this week on the False Image Fashion Podcast is Photographer & Filmmaker Rose Callahan. Rose assisted many notable photographers before establishing herself as a commercial photographer, and more recently, filmmaker, in collaboration with her husband Kelly Desmond Bray.In 2008, Rose began The Dandy Portraits blog to tell the nuanced story of extreme masculine elegance alive today. In 2013, I am Dandy: The Return of the Elegant Gentleman, a coffee table book of Rose's dandy portraits, with profiles written by Nathaniel Adams, was published by Gestalten Press.The book profiles a diverse group of 57 men for whom dressing - and by extension their home and lifestyle - is elevated to an art. In addition to working with commercial clients, Rose is the exclusive photographer for the Metropolitan Opera’s style blog Last Night at the Met since 2013, for which she documents the diverse personal style of the audience as they mingle and strut in the iconic opera house. Rose is on the brink of releasing her second published book entitled We Are Dandy which includes 56 profiles of extraordinary gentlemen from Italy, Japan, South Africa, France, and much more. We are excited to have Rose Callahan join the False Image Fashion Podcast Experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_YPIlHpCYU


Thanks to Glenn Wiggins of the False Image Podcast for dropping by to ask me (and Kelly!) about my work and our work together and letting me give very long answers! When we met Glenn after the Advanced Style Older and Wiser book launch we invited him along with us to see Dandy Wellington at his weekly show and had a good time talking about his love of in depth stories about people's lives. He was seeking to find the details about how certain achievements happen...the missing links that people often just gloss over in the story of "oh I was just making my own clothes and then Anna Wintour called me up!", etc, etc. I share this fascination. So if you ever wanted to know more about my story...here is an hour long conversation! (My mother will love it!)

Rose Callahan is a photographer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn, New York. Rose is the creator of The Dandy Portraits blog and photographer/co-author of I am Dandy: The Return of the Elegant Gentleman (Gestalten 2013), and the upcoming We are Dandy: The Elegant Gentleman Around the World (Gestalten 2016). In addition to working for editorial, corporate, and advertising clients, Rose is the exclusive photographer for the Met Opera’s style blog Last Night at the Met.

You can contact her for assignments, to license images, or just say hi at rosecallahanphoto@gmail.com, or follow her via instagram & twitter @rcallahanphoto.

Thursday 17 November 2016

Resurrecting Jaguar XKSS | The World’s First Supercar


Jaguar Classic announces that it will build the nine stunning XKSS models that were lost in the Browns Lane fire. Often referred to by experts as the world’s first supercar, the XKSS occupies a unique place in Jaguar’s history. It is a car coveted by collectors the world over for its exclusivity and unmistakable design, and will be built to the exact same specification as those made in 1957.

Photographs:
 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/jaguar-xkss-supercar-the-1957-steve-mcqueen-legend-reborn








Tuesday 15 November 2016

Remembering: First female master tailor opens Savile Row shop / VIDEO below.





A cut above: first female master tailor opens shop on Savile Row
Kathryn Sargent, who has dressed royalty, actors and politicians, opens tailoring house in Mayfair, central London

Press Association
Wednesday 6 April 2016 15.36 BST

A tailor has made history by becoming the first woman to open a tailoring house in Savile Row.

Kathryn Sargent, who has dressed royalty, actors, politicians and business leaders, opened her premises in Mayfair, central London, on Wednesday.

The 41-year-old master tailor, who is originally from Leeds, spent 15 years at Gieves & Hawkes, rising through the ranks to head cutter before opening her first store in Brook Street in 2012.

She said: “It feels wonderful to be on Savile Row, and like a real sense of achievement. It is just great to have your shop and your garments on display for people to see.”

With a career spanning 20 years in the west London district, Sargent said she was delighted at the prospect of being an inspiration to other women.

“I am thrilled to be making history, although for me being a woman is incidental, I am a tailor first and foremost. There’s more and more women coming through now and doing the training. Sixty-five percent of the newly-qualified tailors last year were women. It is more diverse,” she said.

“But Savile Row has always been diverse. People from all over the world work in Savile Row and clients are from all over the world as well. It is a global destination for tailoring and it is the best in the world.”

Sargent said she discovered her passion for the trade while studying at a fashion college in Epsom, Surrey. She said the new store would showcase the trade and her garments. “We will be cutting suits out in the window and also we have done a display to explain the process of having a suit made.

“I really wanted to present all the elements of the craft so people can walk through the story. It is a real visual display and I want people to come away feeling energised by that and understanding a bit more about it.”

The store will open for spring and summer as a seasonal residency and tailor for both sexes. Bespoke two-piece suits made by Sargent cost from £4,200, with made-to-measure suits from £1,500.


Savile Row’s first female tailor, Kathryn Sargent, on smashing the “windowpane check ceiling
Stephen Doig
10 APRIL 2016 • 10:10AM

“It’s taken a lot of hard work to get here, you really have to earn your stripes on this street. Or, should I say, pinstripes,” says Kathryn Sargent. It’s an appropriate analogy; this week the 41-year-old from Yorkshire made history as the first woman to open her own namesake store on Savile Row. The fact that this is an area defined by a patrician sense of heritage and tradition, where tailors’ shops evoke the feel of a gentleman’s club, makes Sargent’s achievement all the more remarkable.

Savile Row isn’t famed for its acceptance of change. When tailor Tommy Nutter opened his boutique in the 1960s he caused outcry by breaking with the tradition of velvet curtains shielding the shop inside, and placing mannequins wearing the clothes on display in the windows. When Ozwald Boateng and Richard James came to Savile Row in the 1990s, their defiant, apparently unseemly act of opening their stores on the weekend caused many a colonel to choke on his kippers.

So how has the world reacted to the first woman opening up shop on London’s most traditional street? “Yes, it’s quite surreal," she admits. “There’s an incredibly long history to Savile Row. But I have been trained here and I’ve been part of this tailoring community my whole working life. If I hadn’t had that background, opening a shop with a woman’s name above the door might not have been as warmly received as it has.”

It’s true that women have always played an integral, if discreet, behind-the-scenes role in Savile Row’s story; nipping, pinning, cutting and sculpting the suits that have made this street the pinnacle of tailoring. “I trained as an apprentice at Gieves & Hawkes for five years, and had two amazing women who looked after me. One was a military tailor who did all the lacing on military uniforms, the other was a finisher who did all the lining and buttonholes, and they really ran the show. They ruled the roost and showed me that there were strong women within these teams, despite being outnumbered.”

Such formidable presences helped give Sargent the confidence to shatter what she terms the “windowpane check ceiling.”

“Have I felt like a woman in a man’s world? Initially yes, but nowadays I realise that I’m a woman in a diverse world,” she says diplomatically. “Traditionally there’s been an expectation that if you went to see your tailor, he’d be an older gentleman in a suit, but you soon realise that what matters is being able to communicate with the client and developing your expertise. Having said that, my father wouldn’t ever let me measure him!”

The handsome, panelled environs of her emporium at 22 Savile Row are a long way from Leeds, where Sargent grew up, but it was another pioneering Yorkshire woman who prompted her to attend fashion school at Epsom college. “I always thought that Vivienne Westwood was wonderful, I really wanted to follow in her footsteps,” she says.

Yet while Westwood’s fashion identity is defined by a renegade sense of experimentalism, for Sargent the draw was technique and tradition. “I was obsessed with construction and would buy old Burberry suits in charity shops just so I could take them apart and put them back together again, to see how they were made,” she explains.

Years of training in how to make the cut, so to speak, followed before Sargent started picking up accolades for her work. In 2000 she won the esteemed Golden Shears Award, a hallmark of excellence awarded to newcomers in the industry. And two years ago she launched a bespoke tailoring service in Mayfair, which proved so successful she felt the time was right to launch into “the Row” with a standalone store.

“There really is no quick fix in this line of work,” she says of an industry where every stitch of the needle is measured, every cuff sleeve considered, and apprentices can train for years before being deemed to have reached a standard sufficient to be let loose on a customer’s cloth. “There’s no one person on this street who knows everything, you’re constantly learning.”

I cater to women who have worked hard to get to where they are and need high performance tailoring to help them look professional
Kathryn Sargent on women now shopping on Savile Row

Sargent, herself sharply attired in an impeccable black suit with crimson neck scarf, believes part of her success is due to the fact that it’s no longer just men who want to shop on Savile Row. “I work a great deal with global business leaders and CEOs, and they are women as well as men. I cater to women who have worked hard to get to where they are and need high performance tailoring to help them look professional. My clothes aren’t fashion pieces, they are there to do a job. A suit can do a huge amount for a man or a woman.”

Top divorce barrister Baroness Fiona Shackleton is know for buying her suits on Savile Row but, of course, Sargent is far too discreet to name her clients. Instead, she cites the Queen and the Prince of Wales as prime examples of elegance and masters of the art of looking appropriate, alongside Sean Connery’s Bond and Fred Astaire. “He’s one of the most enigmatic suit wearers of all time,” she says of the latter. “He showed how you can move in a suit, and of course he had most of them made on the Row”.

For anyone else seeking to join the esteemed ranks of gentlemanly outfitters on this most revered street in men’s style, Sargent has only one piece of advice: “Find out as much as you can, seek advice and be patient. Don’t expect it to happen overnight.”

Watching her guide clients through cloth swatches and sweep through the heavy curtains to her fitting rooms, it’s clear that Sargent’s patience has most certainly paid off.


SARGENT’S FIVE SECRETS OF THE PERFECT SUIT

1. A suit has to sit comfortably around the neck

"A good tailored jacket should frame the face, if it doesn’t fit properly there it won’t anywhere else."

2. Pay attention to colour

"See what the cloth does for your complexion. If you opt for a bold statement shade or check, think about how it will fit in your wardrobe day to day."

3. Make sure you get the right sleeve length

"Consider the shirt you’re going to wear with it, whether a single or double cuff, and allow for that in the length."

4. Avoid extreme trends

"If you’re having something made bespoke, it must have longevity."

5. Accessorise with contemporary pieces


"The suit itself should always err on the side of classic."