Letter from the Founder

The magazine you hold in your hands is 10 years old today. And the fact it exists at all is something of a minor miracle. The Rake is, on the surface, a magazine about clothes. But actually it is about far more. If you’ll bear with me and join me on a circuitous tour of my relationship with clothes, I’ll explain why.

I’ve always loved clothes. Growing up in New York in the 1980s, I was required to wear a jacket and necktie to school. But rather than viewing this as an obligation, I looked at it as a pleasure. I would scour vintage shops on Astor Place and in the Village for Norfolk jackets, tweed jackets, jacquard dinner jackets. I would wait for the final seasonal reduction at department stores before pulling the trigger on louche crepe-de-chine Armani or Verri Uomo deconstructed double-breasted fare. And I would fog up the window of Charivari while gazing in awe at the visionary sartorial splendour from Japanese designers like Yohji Yamamoto. Most of all I loved Ralph Lauren, his clothes a shimmering evocation of the most perfect, idealised interpretation of the American Dream. Wearing a jacket and tie, Brooks Brothers button-down in place, and invariably a pair of Marithé and François Girbaud triplepleated khakis or Levi’s 501s completing my ensemble, a crumpled pack of Marlboro Lights and $20 in my pocket, New York suddenly became open to me, my clothes a ticket to entry to innumerable bars and clubs past the doormen or doorwomen at Danceteria, the Limelight, Studio 54 (yes, I managed to get in when I was 14 years old), and that most rarefied of milieux, Nell’s. Every night was an adventure with endless possibilities and promise.

I loved clothes and the men who wore them effortlessly. I would rent