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

• Up in the Air

Tags: Dubai, Van Cleef, watch

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Nick Foulkes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There I was lounging on my day bed when a call came through from Bernard Arnault. OK it was not from Bernie himself, rather one of his palanquin bearers, inviting me to Paris to cast my eye over the new Christian Dior collection. I wavered. My visits to the various outposts of Bernardo’s empire have not always gone that smoothly, in fact I don’t recall one that has yet run without trammel. I wavered and my interlocutor, clearly sensing my indecision, asked whether, while I was flaneuring around Gay Paree doing my impression of Maurice Chevalier, I wanted to see Victoire de Castellane.

The answer was an immediate yes. You see while Mr Galliano is indeed a very talented fashion designer and, so I understand, a fellow worshipper at the shrine to shirting that is Charvet (any friend of Charvet and all that…); Victoire de Castellane, the creative force behind Dior jewellery and watches, is a genius and what is more she is a descendant of one of my great heroes Boniface de Castellane.

Boni was one of the greatest Frenchmen ever to utter the language of Molière and Racine; he married the daughter of one of late 19th century New York’s most colourful Gordon Gekkos, a man called Jay Gould, and did his best to empty the Gould coffers by entertaining on a scale that made even the shindigs of Emperor Nero seem sotto voce. Boni raised conspicuous consumption, a term invented around this time by Thorstein Veblen, to artistic levels that few have since been able to match.

His descendant Victoire is a chip off the old block; with more taste in the smallest of her ringed fingers that many soi-disant creative directors. Ever since I had spoken to her on Mr Alexander Graham Bell’s new-fangled ‘telephone’ about the beauty of Tiger’s Eye watchdials (and there are very few people with whom one can have that sort of conversation these days) I have been looking forward to making her acquaintance.

And so, having given Mr Galliano’s frocks the once over, having signalled my approval to the chief, and having paid my respects to my new best friend the Sartorialist who was busy snapping away at the various types attending the dėfilė I was in the back of a mafia-spec Mercedes flying over the Parisian cobbles to Victoire’s studio, where I enjoyed a delightful hour’s conversation about everything from the design of cowboy boots during the 1950s to the difficulty in getting woven gold ‘Milanese’ watch bracelets of sufficient suppleness these days. I am pleased to say that we agreed on all important matters such as the exigency of the work of Gay Frères and the whimsical charm of Meisner’s architecture. Moreover she was sweet enough to compliment me on my rough turquoise and textured gold cufflinks from Nardi.

And then, with the satisfaction of a man who has put in a good honest day’s toil, I headed for supper at the Relais of the Plaza Athenee – the Relais is a little piece of the 1920s and 1930s on the Avenue Montaigne where it is possible to eat great classic food that has not been rendered overly fashionable. Then, pausing only for an hour or so to enjoy a Cohiba Siglo VI on the hotel’s charming cigar terrace (every hotel should have one), I called it a night. I needed to be well-rested and in tip-top condition for the busy morning ahead of me. As luck would have it the charming Anne-Marie Colban of Charvet had called to say that my shirts were ready and as I happened to be in Paris I wanted to see how the new monogram we had selected on my last visit to the City of Light, had turned out. You can understand that I wanted to be in full possession of my faculties; although such was the sense of mounting expectation that I found that I could hardly sleep a wink.

• Stardust Memories, Future Dreams

Tags: Charvet, Dior, Paris

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Nick Foulkes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.