For many national leaders attending their first United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), it’s probably possible to mill unobtrusively around in the background, get to know the place a bit, figure out which table not to be seen at during lunch and so on. A UK prime minister does not have this option. Andy Burnham arrives in New York for his first UNGA this week as the leader of a G7 economy, a nuclear-armed power and one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. His first meeting with Donald Trump is rightly one of the most closely scrutinised encounters of this entire event.
The UNGA’s general debate sessions are a punishing diplomatic ordeal. The leaders or representatives of all 193 members of the UN are given the opportunity to speak to the UN chamber from the same green marble podium from which Fidel Castro droned on for four-and-a-half hours in 1960, to which Yasser Arafat might have worn a loaded pistol in 1974 and at which Muammar Gaddafi complained at length about his jet lag in 2009 (he would shortly have bigger problems).
The complaint that these sessions are a colossal waste of time is neither new nor original. Everyone basically knows what the other representatives will say; it’s also well understood that the real audience is usually people back home, who might appreciate a little melodramatic grievance-pitching in the direction of treacherous neighbours, repressive hegemons or whichever excuse for your own nation’s self-inflicted failings you have chosen. There is also sometimes the opportunity to grandstand from the stalls. In 1960, Nikita Khrushchev, the then Soviet premier, demonstrated his objections to a speech by Filipino senator Lorenzo Sumulong by reportedly thrashing his desk with a shoe. Last year 77 countries staged a walkout during a speech by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Despite all of this – and the spectacle of people beating up on the UN as an institution, which is also a ritual component of these events – the UNGA remains important. It is, in its most crucial respect, like any other conference. The real value is almost never in the speeches, panels or other events listed on the schedule in your souvenir tote bag but in who you get to speak to – informally, in person. And when those potential interlocutors are the (other) people who govern the world, it would be daft not to show up. Even North Korea sends someone. This year it’s the country’s vice-foreign minister, Kim Son-gyong, who also spoke last year and ticked all of the usual boxes. (He blamed the US for everything and complained about the domination of the UN by the West but assured his audience that “the completion of the five-year plan of national economic development set forth by the Eighth Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea is definitely within reach” – which was a load off everyone’s mind.)
Discussions in the corridors and cafés around the UNGA can have real-world effects, especially when they bring together countries that generally avoid each other. In 2004, India’s then-prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and Pakistan’s then-president, Pervez Musharraf, had a conversation that lent momentum to a tentative peace process in Kashmir. In 2019, Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, corralled his Somalian and Kenyan counterparts – Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed and Uhuru Kenyatta, respectively – into a meeting that restored diplomatic ties between Mogadishu and Nairobi. In 2013, John Kerry, then serving as the US secretary of state, and Iran’s then foreign minister, Mohammad Javid Zarif, had a chat that helped to clear the path towards an eventual deal on limiting Iran’s nuclear programme.
Things can be done at UNGA, even if they might later be undone. The question that hangs over every UNGA (and over the UN generally) is: how can more get done? A sweeping reform of the Security Council to reduce the power of the permanent five is unlikely, on the basis that those five would need to agree to it. A rigorous enforcement of the voluntary 15-minute limit for UNGA speeches has appeal but the practicalities are daunting: who is prepared to wield the shepherd’s crook at the president of a superpower?
The most plausible solution, at the risk of prompting screaming fits from attendees, might be to extend the UNGA by a few days to allow more time for informal discussions on the fringes – or perhaps even, given the general state of the world, to lock the building from the outside until those within come up with some better ideas.
The army of waiters descending on our table makes me choke on my very dry, very dirty vodka martini. Hundreds of them are marching in arm-tucked formation just to fillet a Dover sole. One splinters off to portion the carrots and peas. Another tilts a napkin-draped silver boat until its dill-flecked contents forms a little puddle on my plate.
I’m at Oslo Court, St John’s Wood institution and flag bearer for a bygone age of silver-service, where lunch is a state visit and nobody asks you to scan a QR code. By contemporary standards, its hospitality ought to have atrophied – antiquated at best and Last Night of the Proms at worst. But as another spotless waiter refills a glass I had barely noticed finishing, I can’t lie – I’m having a fabulous time.
Not that Oslo Court gives a toss about how anyone thinks a dining room should operate. When Tony and José Sánchez took over the cream-drenched dining room of an art deco tower block in 1982, they dug their heels into the plush pink carpet and declined every invitation into “the future”. Even as London’s restaurants cycled through competing ideas of modernity, Oslo Court’s dessert trolley trundled on, past the chic River Café of the 1990s, the communal-table Ottolenghi-ism of the noughties and the post-recession Jamie Oliverfication of the waiter-diner relationship. Eventually it was the city that made a U-turn, returning to Oslo Court in a dinner jacket to be asked, “Would sir like another martini?”
Now the hallmarks of what you might call “formal” service are so ubiquitous that I keep having to check the dress code before a night out. White tablecloths are back. So too are sommeliers, whom the job search website Reed recently listed among the country’s “roles on the rise”. At 45 Jermyn St, caviar and beef Wellington arrive on wheels; at Maison François, diners went so feral for the pudding trolley that it now has a steak-tartare sibling. And then, inevitably, there’s Simpson’s in the Strand where the return of its much-vaunted master carvers has been met with critical fanfare.
The chatterati’s precipitous embrace of yesteryear’s service is more than a little about-face. In 2014 one story declared the era of “haughty waiters, hushed rooms and starched tablecloths” over, relics of a time restaurants would be wise to forget. Jay Rayner even asked why anyone would waste money on “battalions of waiters”, before signing off, “It’s called progress.”
And who’s not for progress? Especially when core tenets of formal British hospitality are inexorably linked to a shameful past of empire and exclusion. Simpson’s, lest we forget, barred women from the Grand Divan until 1984. But I’m less keen on the critics who once proclaimed “modernity!” only to return to the past in their droves, swooning over the “properness and regalness” of a passing beef chariot. Their oscillation is, however, reflective of British culture’s dysfunctional relationship with nostalgia, and of a much deeper failure to reconcile the pleasure of service with the society that created it. But instead of a real reckoning, we lurch between the simpler – and impermanent – moral positions of repudiation and restoration. We strip off the tablecloth for the sins of everything that happened above it, then lay it back out with a cheeky wink to a bygone world.
It occurred to me, squeezed into a booth on East 60th Street in New York, that there may be a third way through this impasse. Le Veau d’Or reopened in 2024 after Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr – the men behind Frenchette and Le Rock – took over the nearly century-old bistro. Like the Sánchez brothers, they talk about ownership as stewardship and as such have resisted the restaurateur’s urge to transform everything within reach, from the lipstick-red banquettes and offal-led menu to the gleaming Upper East Side service.
Almost preposterously present, it’s the kind of unabashed hospitality that could only belong to a culture in which the question of service is all but settled. Which is not to say that the American restaurant has a spotless past; quite the opposite. It has grown out of a labour system riven by inequality, traces of which remain visible in who serves whom. But because the US at its best has always believed that the circumstances of one’s birth ought not to define your place in the world, its restaurants have proven more adept at prising apart the art of service from the class hierarchy it once reinforced. There is less guilt and more enjoyment, which is why tremendous care will be lavished upon you – from Bucksnort, Tennessee to Park Avenue – without any pretence that it makes you superior. Because, as one waiter put it to me, “the pursuit of hospitality is a commendable one.”
It’s a simple statement, but in the context of London’s neurotic relationship with service, a rather prescient one. Instead of treating each new fashion as an absolute moral correction of everything that came before, New York suggests that the cycle can be broken. That you can reckon with a complicated history, then decide once and for all what’s worth carrying forward. To me, that’s closer to progress.
Ben Drinkwater is a culture, food and travel writer and editor based in London. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
Further reading:
– Five classic restaurants proving that great food, service and tradition never go out of style
– In an industry with a novelty addiction, restaurants need to stick to the recipe
– It’s time to bring the literary café back to the heart of European society
Pedro Vargas David has a request for the Middle East’s rival capitals: stop trying to settle scores through the newsroom. The chairman of Euronews argues that attempts to damage a neighbour’s reputation leave the whole region looking worse to European audiences. His own industry could also do with less infighting. Broadcasters, he says, have allowed technology companies to “eat their lunch”.
Speaking to Monocle Radio at Dubai’s Arab Media Summit, the television executive makes the case for a more curious European media and explains why television still has plenty of life left in it – provided that it learns to spend less. He is unabashedly open about the industry’s blind spots, sharing that if he’s in a room expecting questions about Iran, it’s the conflict in Sudan – largely ignored by the European media – that dominates the discussion instead.
Pedro, what should international broadcasters still be learning from local media?
We don’t fully understand what concerns the population and the media in this part of the world. I thought that we would be talking about Iran throughout the session that I was in yesterday but the questions were all about Sudan, Libya and Egypt. I thought, “Where do you live?” Then I thought, “Wait, where do I live?”
I only wanted to talk about Iran but they wanted to talk about Sudan. I have to respect that. It’s sad that we don’t cover Sudan properly in Europe. We don’t know what’s happening. We honestly don’t really care.
Middle Eastern countries have to stop bad-mouthing each other and using all the tools available to attack each other. Don’t use us to attack your neighbours. At the end of the day, you all lose. Do European audiences really distinguish between country A and country B in the region? The elites, yes. The vast majority, no.
Why has Euronews been expanding its presence in the Middle East?
At Euronews, we see ourselves as the voice of Europeans. But we also have a big presence beyond the continent, including an Arabic service. The Middle East is Europe’s close neighbour. It has always been part of our DNA.
We have expanded our offices and our editorial presence in the Middle East, becoming much more active on the ground. During the conflict, we have had permanent staff in almost all of the relevant capitals. Why? Because this matters for our audiences. What happens in the region has a direct impact on our petrol prices and on our tourism. We need to know what’s happening in this part of the world.
If I take my chairman’s hat off and put my citizen’s hat on, I recognise that we also need to understand these countries better and engage with them differently. We have perhaps had a bit of a colonial mindset for too long.
As the UAE became part of the story, did your reporters face constraints?
Our reporters didn’t give us any indication of constraints. At the same time, we are a responsible media channel. It’s not our place to show the location of strategic targets so that potential enemies can come and shoot at them. Are we going to pretend that the Gulf countries are the only ones that put restrictions on journalists during wartime? Every nation does that. It’s a matter of national security, which takes precedence over other interests.
We were not influenced. We were not asked to say this or say that, to put out a certain narrative. Our journalists reported freely on the conflict, with the limitations that any war scenario would bring.
Has covering this war differed from reporting on Ukraine?
I don’t think it has. And I don’t think it should. A death in Ukraine is tragic. A death in the Middle East is just as tragic. We were broadcasting live during bombings in the region. Our staff in Doha had to get down on the ground as missiles flew overhead. We report on reality: the destruction and the consequences.
Isn’t television increasingly a screen for Netflix and Amazon Prime?
The device is still there. How Euronews makes its money – whether from carriage fees or from Netflix – is a discussion that we’ll have.
The only reason that we’re not getting the money that we should from the likes of Google and Netflix is because the media has not organised itself properly. We spend too much time fighting each other rather than creating a united front and saying, “Enough. You’ve eaten our lunch.” It’s much easier to attack a rival and criticise an opponent. I would make the same recommendation to my sector as I would to the Middle East.
Your reporters are now broadcasting from mobile phones. How lean does TV news need to become?
I believe that traditional TV still occupies a huge space. Most people still organise their living rooms around it, with their TV in the centre.
At the same time, we have to be efficient with costs. We can’t just say, “Bring back my carriage fees. Bring back all my money.” We have to live in the future. We have to control costs and be tough on investment decisions. You don’t need €10m or €20m studios to broadcast the news. You can do amazing things at lower costs. With a low cost base and an intelligent approach to generating revenue, there are 20 or 50 years of business ahead of us. Of course, we have to reinvent the business every day but the opportunity is there.
Listen to the full interview with Pedro Vargas David on ‘The Monocle Daily’.
The hotel lobby might be the most misunderstood space in hospitality. Everyone agrees that it matters but nobody seems to agree on what it should be. In recent years, the lobby has been asked to shoulder an exhausting number of roles at once: reception desk, living room, co-working hub, cocktail bar, social condenser, pop-up retail floor and, increasingly, an upholstered waiting room for guests to take Zoom calls.
In an anxious attempt to please everyone, many hotels end up pleasing no one. The irony is that the brief is not especially complicated. A good lobby follows one simple rule: make an entrance without making a fuss. Designers say that it takes about seven seconds to form a first impression of a room. A successful lobby uses those seconds to reassure guests – quickly and quietly – that they are in the right place.
The best hotels do this with disarming ease: clear sightlines, confident proportions, a sense of calm authority. Take Aman Tokyo. Suspended high above the city, its scale is monumental but its palette is hushed, with stone, timber and washi-paper lights. Low-slung sofas are placed with near-ceremonial symmetry and their dramatic contrast to the soaring ceiling heightens the sense of space.
Crucially, laptops don’t take over the tables; no ambient buzz masquerades as atmosphere. The recent obsession with turning lobbies into all-day “social hubs” has produced a form of low-grade acoustic fatigue. There’s nothing wrong with good coffee but there is something exhausting about the permanent hiss of milk steamers and the nervous shuffle of people hunting for power sockets. A lobby should offer refuge from the city, not replicate its most irritating traits.
A lobby is not a living room and it shouldn’t pretend to be one unless it has the space, the choreography and the crowd to pull it off. The Manner in New York, for example, channels a kind of Italianate grandezza. The atmosphere is generous, not busy, which is partly because check-in happens discreetly one level below, leaving the main lounge free from the constant stream of arrivals.
The best lobbies share a certain restraint. At The Okura Tokyo, carpets absorb sound, crystal-like lanterns hover beneath a timber ceiling and chairs are arranged like plum blossoms. However busy the gold-toned space becomes, it remains serene. When the hotel’s 1962 modernist landmark building was demolished in 2015 to make way for a less distinguished replacement, the lobby was reconstructed with forensic care as a result of public protest. Its proportions were laser scanned and its light, temperature and acoustic properties were meticulously measured to create an exact replica.
A lobby is a threshold, not a destination. It isn’t there to entertain you, to distract you or to sell you scented candles and cold-brew subscriptions. At its best, a lobby is a pause, an intake of breath. It doesn’t insist that you stay (though you might) and gives you enough composure to move on. In an age of perpetual stimulation, that sense of composure might be the most convincing first impression of all.
Florian Siebeck is Monocle’s Frankfurt correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
The grand Paris flea, Marché aux Puces in the little town of Saint-Ouen, is a defiantly grubby, un-air-conditioned counterpoint to the instant gratification of online purchases and chain-store homogeneity. Shopping here is a gamble – there are 16 acres of clothing, furniture, art and every kind of memorabilia waiting, and there’s no AI search function that will substitute for walking the dusty aisles, pawing through piles of old and very old things, and conversing with the eclectic shopkeepers selling their wares. I have shown up hell-bent on finding a mid-century end table and instead left with a 1940s skirt that made me feel like a movie star. I browsed and fell in love. A flea market coup de cœur.
The world’s largest flea market is a maze of human history that answers to no algorithm. Where else would you seriously consider buying 16 tiny silver dachshunds on which your guests could rest their knives so they don’t stain the tablecloth, even though you live in a 400 sq ft apartment? And how else would you ever meet Laila, a vendor with a collection of embroidered French Revolution-era waistcoats so beautiful that it’s worth risking your life on the Périphérique just to touch one? Here you can visit the merchant who dresses like Steve McQueen (a perplexingly beloved figure in France) and sells McQueen-style clothing displayed on odd McQueen mannequins of varying stature. None of this is rational – and therein lies the delight. The experience is the opposite of frictionless online shopping, in which every barrier between you and exactly what you want – or what someone wants you to want – has been erased.
The digital virus that has decimated bricks-and-mortar shops in cities across the US and Europe hasn’t killed the appeal of the world’s largest vintage and antiques market. Au contraire: five million people arrive at the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen every year, making it the fifth most visited site in France (the most visited country in the world).
Whatever I buy at the flea feels more valuable because of the effort, not despite it. It’s the Ikea effect: we place more value on things that we have worked for – assembled, hunted down, bargained for – than on items that magically appear at our door. In-app purchases are now so seamless that I have ordered the same hair-curling device twice because the experience was so slick and so forgettable. These are the one-night stands of material fulfillment, offering the briefest and most hollow of dopamine hits in return.
Businesses today have started to figure out that we’re craving connections and experiences more like the flea and less like instant transactions and a concept unfortunately dubbed “retailtainment” is being presented as the alternative to online shopping. Many US malls are turning into full-blown theme parks: the American Dream mall in New Jersey opened an indoor ski slope alongside cold rooms where you can try on winter coats. Some also offer virtual fittings (which would seem to defy the point of going to the shop but why quibble). There are restaurants inside furniture ateliers and immersive art installations inside restaurants. But the scheme is working: people spend more time and money in physical shops when “retailtained”. Saks Fifth Avenue, which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, is hoping to make a comeback with a focus on personalised white-glove experiences.
But surely the most elusive, luxurious and entertaining experience of all is to buy something unique with a good story. Last year my daughter purchased a blue work dress from the 1930s. Made of sturdy cloth and mended in half a dozen places with careful, tight stitches in a darker thread, it shows visible evidence of thrift and survival – traces of the women who wore it almost a century ago. And its history now includes me and my two kids, how we discovered it (thanks to a rumpled lady with a Slavic accent tucked behind a stack of 19th-century French culottes), and how we hauled it and other treasures from the flea back to Paris via a grimy underpass. Now the very old French dress is in Brooklyn, a bit of fabric connecting continents, decades and the three of us.
In a world of algorithmic recommendations, one-click purchases and Instagram advertising, the joy of retail therapy can be rediscovered through the kind of shopping that slows us down.
Susanna Schrobsdorff is a former New Yorker who now lives in Paris. She writes the It’s Not Just You newsletter on Substack. She was previously an executive editor at ‘Time Magazine’.
The machinery of everyday life attracts little attention until someone tries to disrupt or, indeed, destroy it. According to Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, the head of the UAE Cyber Security Council, Iran has targeted the UAE’s power grid and sought to wipe its digital records. At the Arab Media Summit in Dubai, he tells Monocle Radio how the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has overseen a digital offensive alongside missile and drone attacks. As the conflict continues, he explains how his country’s defences are evolving and why confronting technology’s darker uses hasn’t dented his optimism about AI.
Did anything about Iran’s cyberattacks on the UAE surprise you?
We expected data leaks and spying on information; we expected theft, scams and attempts to steal data. But we didn’t anticipate someone attacking our power grid and trying to disrupt and destroy it, or targeting our database of digitised information and deleting everything. And we didn’t expect such things to happen so soon after the conflict began. We have learnt from this, which is why we are emerging more powerful.
Were these cyberattacks happening alongside the missile and drone strikes?
Whenever you heard about drone or ballistic-missile strikes on critical infrastructure such as energy, aviation or health care, there would also have been cyberwarfare, trying to add to the impact of the physical attack. We have seen this beyond the UAE: with Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Israel and Palestine. It’s not only psychological operations or misinformation and disinformation on social media.
What lessons has the UAE taken from Russia’s war in Ukraine?
We have been holding cyber drills and national exercises for the past two or three years, with every sector being tested. We cover every scenario that we can think of: AI versus humans, AI versus AI and machines versus critical infrastructure. Last year we ran a cybersecurity drill in Dubai with 133 nations coming together for one cause: to protect against cyberattacks. We will have another one this week.
What has changed when it comes to how you protect the country against these attacks?
There are three layers to this. To protect our critical infrastructure, we have changed many policies and compliance requirements. When there’s an attack, AI detects the pattern and can proactively stop it. The second is partnership. Many of these technologies are owned by third parties in the private sector. This is where we saw solidarity. Private companies came forward and showed us indicators of when something had been compromised, attack patterns and what they had been seeing in their cloud systems. They shared those indicators with us for everyone’s benefit. The most important thing is the community. Here in the UAE, we have changed the curriculum to include more about cybersecurity and AI. This goes from kindergarten all the way to the board room. We have learnt that technology is an integral part of everything that we do and we need to be ready to use it positively. Yes, there is a downside but we will prepare for it.
For those who are worried about the damage that AI could do, what reassurance can you offer?
I’m optimistic. The technology will add great value to us all. AI has saved lives and its use in medicine has changed so much. Yes, there are grey areas and risks if we don’t have the right guardrails, guidance and policies in place. But I don’t think that these will outweigh all of the good things. Ultimately, it is designed by people. Some could be evil but most use it for good. That is the message that we are sending from the UAE: we are using this technology for the best of humanity.
A region most recognised in the world for its expansive diaspora, Wenzhou – a coastal city in Zhejiang province just three hours from Shanghai by high-speed rail – is known within China as an entrepreneurial hotspot. Seen as the birthplace of the republic’s now vast private economy, it has a reputation for its hard-nosed business acumen. Over the past few years, however, there has been a wave of retail and museum openings that have begun shifting this centre of commerce into a cultural hub with the help of something even more powerful than money: food.
Dish Books (Pan Cai Sheng) is one such debut. The two-storey shop –named after a pickled turnip local to Wenzhou – which opened in March this year, is dedicated to culinary literature, stocking regional cookbooks, food anthropology texts, multilingual periodicals and artisanal zines. The combination of food and literature reflects the passions of the business’s two founders: Pan Xiaoyue, former chief editor of China’s largest recipe app, and Wenzhou native Du Ke, founder Nan Shi Zhao, a premium food and artisanal condiment brand. Its location, next to a boisterous wet market, adds another special ingredient.
Dish Books is a rare new building in Wenzhou’s historic city centre. The architecture by Shanghai-based Atelier Tao+c, who designed some of China’s most beloved bookshops and cafés, blends into its surroundings; a twisted roof pitched as a nod to neighbours by allowing more sunlight into their homes.
On the ground floor, culinary literature is the star of the show, while upstairs, a light-filled forum brings together food enthusiasts and casual cooks for exhibitions, talks and communal dinners. The summer show examines Chinese dessert soups with academic rigour, tracing their Cantonese roots and nationwide evolution.
Fittingly, the showcase also highlights a local dish: xing ren fu. A thrifty adaptation of Beijing’s imperial almond tofu, Wenzhou’s version substitutes milled apricot kernels with condensed milk, finishing it with a dash of mint essence for the summer heat.
The exhibition space doubles as an open kitchen for a series of collaborative cookouts, where strangers shop at the market nextdoor, cook and dine together. Spots usually book out within seconds. “Even though most people don’t really have the time to cook in their routine, they turn to cooking as a way to build relationships and community,” says Pan. Du echoes the shift: “When entertaining guests, it used to be more impressive to take them out to restaurants. Today, cooking a feast in your own kitchen carries far more weight,” he says. “The number of people who cook regularly might be declining, but cooking as a social act is becoming more meaningful.”
Across urban China, affordable and varied dining options have made home cooking less of a necessity. Why bother when freshly steamed rice topped with braised goose and liver can arrive at your door in under 30 minutes? For younger cooks, deciding when and for whom to cook has become a deliberate gesture. Preparing a meal is not merely about feeding someone but about expressing care and creating community.
The titles lining the shelves at Dish Books deepen that intention, tracing everything from the migration of tomatoes and pineapples through China to the cultural history of fermentation in Guizhou. An archival library houses recipe books from the 1970s and 1980s, out-of-print volumes and Wenzhou history. The shop invites readers to think beyond how something tastes and about how they are produced and what traditions they carry. Terroir, heritage and sustainability have begun to matter as much as flavour. But for the two founders, food is the entry point. Bringing people back into bookshops and giving the culinary-minded a place to gather is the real ambition.
Lisbon
About three blocks from my apartment, a new district is on the rise and my goodness, it’s going up fast. I can’t help but think that the partial Chinese ownership of Fidelidade – the insurance and financial group developing the new district – might have something to do with the speed with which foundations have been dug and towers erected. While it could do with some Beijing-style perimeter security overnight to deter the sprayers who deface the hoardings, the Entrecampos development looks like a promising addition to Lisbon’s cityscape despite its detractors. A new development can jar with its neighbours and this scheme, by any measure, is no small footprint – think a scaled-down version of Tokyo Midtown. But then again, it’s revitalising a long-derelict site with solid architecture, plenty of green space, a host of services and, in the process, creating a satellite city centre for the Portuguese capital. The best news? It promises to have the top gourmet food hall in the city.
London
On Monday we hosted one of our Minglers at Midori House. These in-house events are part business update, part inspiration and part extended aperitivo, bringing everyone from Monocle and its sister agency, Winkreative, up to speed on what’s happening across the world. We always hear from a sparky speaker and for this edition, Ruth Rogers of The River Café pulled up a chair and talked about everything from the basics of being a sharp entrepreneur to building a podcast business and knowing when to walk away from a deal. Most importantly, she reminded the assembled crowd about the power of hosting and getting the simple things right. Five days on, she has left me wondering what we should do for an encore in late October.
Paris
It felt as though half of Monocle was on one of the very early Eurostars on Tuesday morning and the station was rammed. Every time I take the service, I’m left thinking about all the missed opportunities to improve the offer, ease bottlenecks and deliver something simply better. I could go on but I’ll save that for another column. Meanwhile, the French capital was putting on a good show at 29C under sunny skies, with streets full of architects, decorators, journalists and brand owners all in town for Paris Design Week. As the sun dipped, we hosted cocktails for journalists and creatives at our café on Rue Bachaumont. Paris was electric, looking and feeling its best. After a summer break, it was a delight to be back.
San Francisco
On Wednesday I landed in San Francisco just after midday. As the plane’s wheels kissed the tarmac (nice landing, monsieur Air France 777 captain!), I was bracing myself for the queues and chaos of US immigration. How wrong I was! I made it from the aircraft door to the back seat of the car in seven minutes. Count ‘em! Seven! It helped that the immigration hall was empty but it wasn’t as though there were no international flights arriving. Do we have the current administration to thank for this efficiency? Or is SFO an example of a well-managed airport doing its own thing to be friendly and efficient? Either way, thank you.
Tokyo
The SFO to HND (Tokyo Haneda) flight on ANA got in at about 03.00. As I arrived on a Saturday morning, much of Tokyo was still awake and moving on to the next bar, lounge or club. It has taken a while but Tokyo’s nightlife felt as though it was back in full swing, despite it being a long weekend in Japan. Was I tempted to have the car stop in Ginza and meet up with some of my POTN (people of the night) at a tiny bar for a song or two? Briefly. My sensible side got the better of me and whispered that five cities across three continents in 96 hours was enough for one week and that a proper sleep, in a real bed, might be the more sensible thing to do. I believe that I made the right decision but I’ll never know the delights that I might have missed. Thankfully, I’ve already got a trip planned for October when it’s that little bit cooler, when the leaves turn and when Tokyo’s retailers stock their autumn collections. Can’t wait.
Enjoying life in ‘The Faster Lane’? Click here to browse all of Tyler’s past columns.
When thinking about the much-discussed concepts of personal style and taste, Neelam Ahooja’s name springs to mind. The Toronto-based accountant-turned-stylist has built a loyal audience thanks to her ability to cut through the noise and dress for herself. She is a proponent of minimalism and frequently turns to the 1990s for inspiration yet she manages to make every look her own with personal touches, such as with one-of-a-kind vintage pieces or embellished accessories that hark back to her East Indian heritage.
Here she breaks down her signature look – achieved through years of collecting and confidence-building – and offers advice on how to find yours.
How did you develop your sense of style?
I was never really conventional with my style and I think a lot of it has to do with the way I look. I felt I could never look aristocratic because of my [curly] hair; it has a life of its own most days. I spent a lot of time fighting what was naturally given to me but at some point I decided to work around it. Now, after a long time, I’ve embraced it and it has become very much an extension of my personality and style. My hair is as important, if not more important, than the clothes I wear. Depending on what kind of hair day I’m having, it dictates what I wear.
Were you always a minimalist?
For a long time [my style] was a lot busier: I wore a lot of patterns, prints and colours. There were many pieces by Dries Van Noten, Victorian-inspired jackets and big skirts. Part of that came from having East Indian heritage: our culture is so rich in details, from collars and beading to embellishment. But around the [coronavirus] pandemic, I felt a little fatigued from having so much on the body. I’m ageing and I want things to be easy. I don’t feel the need to have as many accessories. Plus, I have always had minimalism in my heart; I [came of age] in the 1990s with images of Kate Moss and Carolyn Bessette.
What is it about the 1990s that feels so relevant today?
I spent many years in the 1990s as an accountant going to the office every day in suiting. One of the reasons I went into finance was because I wanted to wear a suit and carry a briefcase. I have never wanted to return to the profession but since the coronavirus pandemic, I began wanting to dress like I did back then. If I look back at the decade when I felt really good, really empowered, really confident, it was the 1990s – whether I was at the office or with my friends at a bar. I came all the way back to that style and who you’re seeing now. This is who I am.
Style has become quite homogenous because of the access that everyone has to social media. How do you avoid falling into that trap?
We all influence each other in every industry, in every corner of life. My father influenced me when I was young to be a good person and to read more; my children teach me to live more lightly through them. In fashion too: everyone is influenced to a certain extent if we’re seeing the same images. But with age it becomes much easier for me to ignore the noise.
You can follow the trend of the decade – oversized blazers and suiting in this case – but within that very big box, you have the liberty to make the look your own. I might have a vintage Prada bag thrown in with a [contemporary] outfit, so it’s never a replica of the runway look.
Any other tips for people trying to dress in a way that feels more individualist?
To avoid trends you have to stick to what looks good on you. For instance, high-waisted trousers on someone with my height and proportions don’t work. Also, always choose comfort over anything else. You’ll rarely see me in high heels. If something feels itchy, I won’t wear it. I like things to be oversized and a little sloppy so that I can sit in my car and drive around.
What are some of the brands you keep returning to?
There’s a handful of brands whose aesthetic I really love. La Collection, designed by Florence Cools in Amsterdam, is one of them. I live in her designs and appreciate how in touch she is with her audience. I think that comes from the fact that she started small with her husband. They built the brand up and she is still close to the ground. If I want to play around with embellishment, I’ll wear my Dries Van Noten scarves – I have a whole collection and I love them.
What is your take on dress codes?
I don’t care what anybody else is doing. I was at an event recently and I wore a very classic white shirt with a black maxi skirt and boots, while my friend showed up in a bright floral tunic that was so vibrant. Someone else was wearing denim at the same event. We need to allow others to express themselves in their own way.
I believe that with fashion you need to leave the rules behind and do what feels good. You can’t be dogmatic about it: getting dressed is a form of expression and it’s ever changing.
Further reading: Three exceptionally stylish people on the art of dressing well
I marvel at the CVs that land on my desk. People in their twenties who have had more life experiences than Scott of the Antarctic, speak more languages than Duolingo can muster and who, in their summer holidays, have saved large chunks of the planet – or at least fostered a gibbon for a few weeks (“gave me a greater appreciation of the challenges of having very long arms”). And I’m not just talking about people whose names feature more barrels than a bank robber’s shotgun or whose home address mentions the words Schloss or The Manor.
I went to a very rare gathering of my entirely normal – well, sort of – family the other day and met lots of distant teenage relatives whom, like the older people I used to loathe, I quizzed in detail about their lives. One, aged 16 and something of a mathematics prodigy, is already attached to a prestigious university where he’s looking at new ways of generating energy from wave power (no smoking behind the bike shed). Another was using his gap year to do a business diploma and I quote, “for fun”. I asked him whether he might be able to find the time for an ayahuasca trip in Colombia or at least start sleeping around with some unsuitable partners? Despite him looking a little rock’n’roll, he said that he preferred to use his spare time to prepare himself for the world of work.
Then I had dinner with friends in Hampstead, where their youngest son was preparing to start at a new sixth-form college (the final two years in the UK before university) that encourages students to take time off each week to assist on community projects. I imagine that senior citizens in their part of north London must fear leaving their homes in case yet another teenager insists on carrying their shopping bags or giving them a fireman’s lift up the steep incline of Hampstead High Street.
Often, after I have read a pile of these extraordinary CVs, I am left with one worry. Today, right now, would I interview my younger self? If my CV when I was 21 slipped into the pile, would I scrawl “must see” on the covering letter?
I certainly lacked any hobbies that would catch a recruiter’s attention today, let alone some AI-powered CV scraper (nowadays you need a few eye-catchers: Ethiopian cinema, putting on West End shows, the electronic lute – ideally all three). And there was no second language to boast about (my German being barely proficient enough to secure a bratwurst in an emergency). And as for volunteering? I was too busy playing records.
But I did have a lot of work experience. How about that summer job washing dishes (only, problem: I was fired after one day for being too chatty). I had another holiday job in a toy factory where my friend Nick and I had to sort through returned products to discover the problem – “Bucking Bronco refuses to buck” being our go-to explanation with that particular game. I had also been a barman in a theatre, which was mostly fun, though being in a fairly Irish part of the city, there were endless unhelpful commentaries on my Guinness-pouring skills. And I was a waiter, which I loved, especially when we would finish off the wine that guests had left in their bottles after service. Then I hit my stride and, for several university holidays, worked in Liberty’s fabric department where I became a little over-confident at assessing how much fabric, say, a stout lady might need for a knee-length summer smock. But none of it was quite the stuff of a recruiter’s dreams.
And yet, while CVs are, of course, powerful tools, I still think it’s hard to beat a good cover letter. It’s here that you can shine, allow your personality a chance to do the heavy lifting. Be enthusiastic. Not sound too much like the Pope but kinder. I must have written a couple of persuasive ones along the way because occasionally people called me in for an interview.
But when I look at the CVs of young people today and I see the slog that people have put into preparing themselves for a hard-to-enter job market, I return to that question: would I have interviewed me at 21? Or would I be destined for a life of trying to determine what ails the Bucking Bronco?
