Dubai, faring well
by Nick Foulkes17 March 2010
I don’t know much about art, but I know that the Dubai Art Fair comes with a watch exhibition attached and that was enough to have me boarding an Emirates flight to the UAE to view the watches that Van Cleef & Arpels had put on display here. With the inclusion of an enameller, complete with mini kiln to fire watch dials, and celebrity watchmaker Jean Marc Wiederrecht fiddling about with wheels and pinions, it promised to be almost as good as going to Switzerland.
Any way, I was curious to see what Dubai looked like after the battering it has taken in the recent financial storm. I took fifty quid in cash with me in case one of those unsold luxury arpartments on the world-palm-Posh-Beckham island caught my fancy, packed a few suitcases of Rubinacci linen and set off.
First a word about the 8pm Emirates flight – don’t. You arrive at about half past six in the morning local time, roughly 2.30 am in the UK.
If I had expected tumbleweed to be rolling down the noble boulevards of this proud Arabian state, I was disappointed. As far as I could tell Dubai was very much up, running and open for business. Certainly the local telly is busy, I read with interest in the paper on the way out that the ruler was having some of his poems made into a TV series of 30 episodes. And far from being deserted, my ‘boutique’ hotel that looked like the entire East River frontage of New York, echoed with the melodic sound of the language of Pushkin and Trifonov, as the citizens of Mr Putin’s superstate enjoyed some respite from the harsh Russian winter.
Another surprise was that instead of being mildly appalled by the whole thing I found myself rather liking the experience. As you long as you stick to the script (don’t order off the menu, don’t swim over the invisible line in the sea demarcated by the lifeguards standing sentry-like every 50 metres or so along the beach, do spend a lot money on very yellow gold etc etc) you will find much to recommend Dubai. It is also very clean, in fact there is probably a minister for cleanliness and he is obviously doing a bang up job. This is the only place where I have seen someone vacuuming the pavement outside the hotel and when, after half an hour’s breast-stroke between the invisible lines in the sea, I encountered a small leaf floating in ‘my’ bit of the Persian Gulf I almost felt like firing off a letter of complaint.
However, I was deterred from this by the arrival at the international buffet (which wisely warned lunchers that the walnut tart contained nuts) of the super cerebral Nicolas Bos. Nicolas is the creative director of Van Cleef & Arpels. As soon as I saw him, all thoughts of complaining to Dubai’s minister in charge of keeping leaves out of the sea vanished as I sought Nicolas’s opinion on the burning issue of the day, what jewellery to wear to his watch exhibition. I was not asking for the women you understand, rather for me. You see Van Cleef has brought out a range of male bangles and there was one in particular the Perlee, composed of little spheres of gold, that caught my eye.
So pre-occupied was I with this issue of etiquette vis-à-vis bijouterie de l’homme that I completely forgot to seek his opinion on a set of Van Cleef links and studs coming up at auction and while writing this it has only just occurred to me that I also omitted to commission a gold belt buckle recreating my 1970s Van Cleef astrological pendant…I blame the jet lag and I am considering writing a stiff letter to Dubai’s minister in charge of reminding forgetful tourists to buy stuff from Van Cleef & Arpels on the subject.
- Nick Foulkes is editorial director of the FQ Group of Publications
