The Monocle Minute

One man who’s not worried about AI taking his job or Instagram uprooting his industry is Toru Machida, the current president of The Society of the Golden Keys, a UK chapter of top global concierges. Tokyo-born Machida started his hospitality career at the bottom in London during the early 2000s (first by cleaning out the staff toilets, since you ask). He then became a porter before eventually manning the concierge desks at the Marriott on Park Lane, The Savoy and now The Cadogan in Chelsea.

During an event this week in a low-lit snug at members’ club and hotel The Ned, Machida joined me and my colleagues Andrew Tuck and Sophie Grove for a lively discussion on hospitality, travel and the importance of getting out into the world. While I hope that our team held its own and offered the 100 or so guests some inspiration from Monocle’s take on travel, I was rather taken by Machida’s masterful, understated read of the industry from the inside out.

He told us how, when a restaurant said that there was nowhere for his guest to sit, he’d packed a table and chairs into a London taxi. He also shared the story of a two-month assignment to track down a customer’s old friend with only the name “Roy” to go on (he managed, of course). He also stressed the importance of being humorous and humane – his love of the hospitality industry stems from the BBC TV series Fawlty Towers, about a dysfunctional hotel. In short, Machida-san was a treat to share a stage with.

As the panel discussion drew to a close, guests chimed in with comments about where the travel industry is moving – from “good tourists” to the faint absurdities of paying to be deprived of your phone or be exposed to subzero temperatures in extreme spa treatments. One question, however, really stuck. A guest, perhaps with her tongue firmly planted in her cheek (it was hard to tell in the dimness of The Parlour bar), asked Machida a doozy. Did he mind “rich, powerful and privileged people making unreasonable requests” of him? The room seemed still for a moment as mental calculations were made. Was the interlocutor angry? Was service itself suddenly wrong or exploitative and in the crosshairs of cancel culture? Was asking a hotel concierge for a restaurant booking now an unseemly act of oppression or a misuse of power by a heartless elite? Please. All the same, the room seemed to roil for a moment in anticipation of an answer.

Machida smiled and politely said that he didn’t see things that way. He cares about guests and helping to make their stays special. That’s his job and he relishes a challenge. He has enough respect for himself and others to do his best to help.

Machida’s calm, decorous demeanour posed a new question in my mind. Haven’t quite a lot of companies and staff fallen for the false logic that good service is demeaning for the server? When did it become OK for people in shops, bars and even boardrooms to overlook the fundamentals of a polite interaction? And when did we become too important or proud to hang up a guest’s coat, field a request or fetch someone a drink?

Good service requires a balance between pride in a job well done and the humility to want to help. Machida has this much right: serving others, whether it’s your job or not, is important. What’s more, being hospitable – let’s call it kind – doesn’t destroy our dignity. It’s a rare opportunity to share it.

Josh Fehnert is Monocle’s editor. For invites to Monocle events, plus more on travel, hospitality and top tables, subscribe to Monocle today.

The ink is still drying on the executive order to roll back Joe Biden’s target for 50 per cent of new cars in the US to be electric by 2030. But Michael Lohscheller, CEO of Swedish EV-maker Polestar, remains upbeat. “Global markets for EVs aren’t growing at the speed that we were hoping for but they are growing and that includes the US,” he tells The Monocle Minute. “So I’m optimistic. People want emissions-free mobility and excitement. Polestar is putting those things together with performance and design. I’m sure that customers will vote for us.”

Polestar, which is headquartered in Gothenburg, is no stranger to adapting to changes in the US market. When the company launched in 2017, it made all of its vehicles in China; today it’s bringing manufacturing as close to its key markets as possible. Last August it started production of its Polestar 3 at a Volvo plant in Ridgeville, South Carolina, partly in a bid to get around punishing US tariffs on Chinese-made products. As the brand enters France this year, it is scoping out contenders for a factory somewhere in Europe to build its new compact SUV, the Polestar 7. Would the company consider a site in western Europe in the old heartlands of Renault and Citroën? “It’s not so difficult to find factory capacity these days,” says Lohscheller.

At every Prada runway show, amid the backstage pandemonium of models cheering, photographers snapping pictures and waiters serving cannoli, co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons come together to share some of the thinking that goes into a collection. With their latest autumn/winter menswear event, presented on raised metal scaffolding at Fondazione Prada last Sunday as part of Milan Men’s Fashion Week, they wanted to break the rules, forget about seasonal themes and set their imaginations free by mixing and matching ideas and genres. Monocle caught up with them after the show.

What was this collection’s starting point?
Raf Simons: We didn’t want to have any specific references. A lot of movies might come to mind when you see the show but we wanted to leave it up to the audience. It’s important for us to work in an instinctive way. Maybe there was some folklore in the mix, something from the late David Lynch, something from 1960s America. We didn’t limit ourselves to a few ideas [that we decided on] at the beginning of the season, which is what designers tend to do. Instead, we wanted to let everything in.

Why do you work in that way?
Miuccia Prada: It’s about liberating or protecting the instinct. It’s also an answer to what’s going on in the world. We have to resist with our humanity, our work and our passion. People expect designers to be revolutionaries but what’s happening [in the industry] at the moment is not really revolutionary.

Tell us about the show’s set.
RS: Sets are usually open, with a specific type of music being played. We wanted to reverse that and make you think about several references and contrasts. The carpet is very art nouveau, the scaffolding suggests that this is a work in progress and the lighting is cinematic. We want you to wonder, “Is this Blade Runner or a 1920s ballroom?”

In January, kiosks all over France are stacked with titles that have the tricky task of distilling an entire year of French news into a single publication. Standing out from the crowd is Le Bilan du Monde. This year’s iteration of Le Monde’s take on the format features thoughtful analysis on events throughout 2024 that made up what the journal has dubbed an “annus horribilis” for France.

But the publication also dedicates many of its pages to coverage of the rest of the world, using an atlas to track the challenges facing 197 countries, plus Palestine. “The picture we tell has to be as comprehensive as possible,” Gaïdz Minassian, editor of Le Monde’s special editions, tells The Monocle Minute. “We live in an open and globalised world, where every news item has an immediate effect elsewhere.” It’s a further sign of Le Monde’s increasing reach: the news outlet’s English-language content is gathering steam – and the quality and granularity of Le Bilan du Monde suggests that it might find an audience beyond France’s borders.

This week we wander the canals of De Baarsjes in west Amsterdam. With an abundance of specialty cafés, bakeries and global culinary outposts, this area of the Netherlands’s capital is fast becoming the preferred choice of hungry visitors. Ilze Vitola takes us on a tour.