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I have a little 1930s cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles where my main source of music is a player piano: an old Yamaha Disklavier upright that uses floppy discs. Over the years I have steadily built a col-lection of self-playing floppy-disc music comprising classical, jazz standards and rock songs that I listen to when I’m up in the moun-tains. The piano also has the abil-ity to record people playing, and I was lucky enough to record my

great friend LIAM HAYES (also known as PLUSH) when I hosted him on a recent visit. PLUSH is my favourite musician by far, a song-writer whose sensibility and sen-sitivity resonate precisely on my wavelength. So now, on an autumn afternoon, I hit play and can recall that wonderful visit. It is such a pleasure listening to his songbook, with all his greatest hits – as well as all the flubs and retakes, which are hugely enjoyable too. I’m so taken with the recording that I’m

hoping to invite my friend TOM WAITS over next to tinker around on the player and curate my col-lection further. After that, if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll get PAUL Mc-CARTNEY, PAUL WILLIAMS and RANDY NEWMAN.

(At the time of going to print, there were five Yamaha Disklavier upright pianos for sale on eBay, priced between £3,495 and £5,495. ROMAN’s most recent venture as a producer was ‘The Beguiled’, di-rected by his sister SOFIA.)

The wizardry of a totally self-sufficient instrument — by ROMAN COPPOLA

The lure of the round number is undeniable, so neat and complete. Our society is shaped by whole numbers, and it’s natural to be at-tracted to their sheer comforting simplicity and handy memorabil-ity. But where everyone is doing one thing, there are often prizes

to be gained from doing the oth-er. Don’t meet at a gallery on the hour, as that’s when everyone else will be arriving. Meet at eleven minutes before the hour instead. Poor souls that bid round numbers on eBay are doomed to be trumped by the savvy shopper offering

The INNUMERABLE blessings of avoiding neat but unhelpful digits

Although he’s known for his mas-terpieces of white minimalism, architect JOHN PAWSON has a shocking soft spot for a more vi-brant hue. “I love real imperial purple – Tyrian purple – invent-ed in ancient Phoenicia, where they’d crush mollusc shells to make it,” he says. “A conquering

Roman general would be given one of these togas that took more than 10,000 mollusc shells just to dye. Maybe it’s the story, it’s hard to know, but that proper purple, there’s something very ultimate about it. You can’t go any further; it’s unsurpassable within the pur-ples. It’s the bollocks. I like things

which are the absolute best of any-thing and if I’m going to use a col-our it has to be the best.”

(At 352 pages long, JOHN PAWSON’s new book ‘Spectrum’ is a vast collection of the archi-tect’s photography arranged by colour. It is to be published by PHAIDON in November.)

Magnificent minimalist architect JOHN PAWSON craves a particularly ballsy colour

A free exchange of knowledge and ideas from those who are keen to share what they know.

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TIP CINDY SIJMONS, the beloved f lorist of family-run Bloemen-handel Sijmons on Amsterdam’s Albert Cuypmarkt, insists that to prolong the life of a newly bought bunch of flowers, one must leave them wrapped up for a few hours while they adjust to the tempera-ture inside the home. The logic be-ing that the sudden transition from outdoors to indoors can shock an already fragile bouquet, causing the flowers to wilt and drop pet-als more quickly. Rather than leav-ing her new blooms in a vase while they acclimatise, CINDY grabs her tulips, chrysanthemums and ranunculuses, heads straight to

the bathroom and places them di-rectly into the toilet (stems only, of course). Not only does this un-conventional porcelain recepta-cle keep them hydrated, but the bleach found in the toilet’s bowl also serves to kill any bacteria in the flowers’ stems that might cause them to rot prematurely. Once they’ve been sitting for a few hours in the lavvy, they’ll be fresh as a daisy for days.

(The Bloemenhandel Sijmons stall is open from Monday to Sat-urday and can be found on the corner of Albert Cuypstraat and Eerste van der Helststraat, in front of café De Groene Vlinder.)

Where to stick cut FLOWERS, courtesy of Amsterdam’s most knowledgeable florist

€40.08. Take the pressure off a big round birthday and instead throw a huge party for a 27th or 41st. The ‘Harvard Business Review’ warns strongly against proposing a round number when negotiating your sal-ary and the ‘Journal of Experimen-tal Social Psychology’ reports that the key to successful haggling

often lies in beginning with a wildly specific figure, but never a round one. Whilst slightly ungain-ly compared to something with a nice round zero at the end, an un-expectedly precise number, rightly or wrongly, implies a level of fore-thought and confidence that can make a world of difference.

Wearing clothes inside out, such as this Fair Isle jumper by NORSE PRO-JECTS. From a new series of highly detailed suggestions, to be found on the revamped Fantastic Man website and the @manfantastic Instagram account. (Photography by MÁTÉ MORO, styling by STUART WILLIAMSON)

On being UFO accessible, with receptive Happy Mondays figurehead SHAUN RYDERThe affable HAPPY MONDAYS and BLACK GRAPE frontman, SHAUN RYDER, f irmly be-lieves that we are not alone in the universe. “Absolutely no chance. That idea always seemed so ridicu-lous to me, even as a kid,” he says. Ever since spotting a flying craft while out on an early-morning post round as a schoolboy in Salford, UK, SHAUN has been obsessed with UFOs – so much so that he has even recorded a television

show on the subject, visiting UFO hotspots such as the Nazca Lines in Chile and Roswell in New Mex-ico. Should anyone be bent on hav-ing an extraterrestrial encounter, SHAUN advises looking inwards first, rather than out into the night skies. “People ask me about the best places to look for UFOs and the answer is your mind. It’s got-ta come from the mind,” explains SHAUN. “I know this all sounds like crap, but thoughts can be

My transportable Haçienda, by VIRGIL ABLOH

“A year ago I got in touch with BEN KELLY, the architect who designed the HAÇIENDA nightclub in Manchester, and we decided to collaborate on a mobile HAÇIENDA that I can set up wherever I want. I have a mas-ter’s degree in architecture and I am still very interested in making things at the human scale, so I often use my label OFF-WHITE to explore projects that sit outside fashion. The mobile HAÇIENDA is made up of a sound system, eight pillars and a DJ booth, all designed by BEN with classic hazard-stripe designs. The pillars are wooden, about three metres tall and modular, so they can be

disassembled and packed into travel cases. When I’m not using it I keep it in a warehouse lock-up in Milan. The whole idea of the project was to make something that could sit just as easily in an exhibition or a club. You can walk around it as an installation or have a party in it. So far we have toured it at Design Miami and a carpark in London. In November, it will be in Somerset House as part of the ‘North: Fashioning Identity’ exhibition. I’m speaking to Somerset House about whether we can do a party. That’s something I want to do, for sure. I’m from Chicago and I DJ a lot, so acid house has always been a big thing for me

and I’ve always felt there’s a link between the music and culture of Chicago and that of Man-chester. Both cities are industrial and their socio-economics have influenced their cul-ture: their warehouses birthed house music. It literally came from warehouse parties. The HAÇIENDA and Factory Records, what was coming out of Manchester at the time, that’s one of my foundations.”

•As told to ELIOT HAWORTH. Portrait by DANIEL RIERA. VIRGIL is wearing a T-shirt by SUPREME for HANES, a jacket and jeans, both by OFF-WHITE for LEVI’S, and bracelets by CARTIER and CHROME HEARTS.

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“KEELEY TRAVEL is a series of brochures that I publish on trips to places that might not seem worthy of a visit. I bill it as ‘The travel agency that doesn’t sell travel,’ as I’m the only one really going anywhere. The first one is out in September, available through my website tom-keeley.com, and there will be new ones every couple of months following that. When I was a kid I was obsessed by travel brochures and guidebooks and by how you could imagine a faraway place through writ-ing. Part of me has remained fascinated by all these different shades of tourism, and my work as an architectural historian has repeat-edly returned to the idea of exploring places

through the gaze of a tourist. The main idea is that even the most ordinary place can be extraordinary depending on your individual viewpoint. What would happen if we viewed the everyday world through the eyes of a tourist? What do they see that we take for granted? It’s a chance to break out of your own bubble and see the world anew. The ‘holidays’ could be a vacation on the motorways of Britain, a tour around Beni-dorm of holiday villas owned by Brexit voters, or a visit to a city using extremely outdated guidebooks. Actually, I’d love to have a holi-day at home, to begin exploring my postcode through an extreme staycation.

Although KEELEY TRAVEL is strictly a pub-lication for now, I do think there is potential for me one day rebelling against my compa-ny motto and actively organising holidays for people. The idea of doing walks, tours, open-top bus trips or maybe even a full package holiday is certainly appealing. Imagine a holi-day rep taking you around a multistorey car-park in Croydon or the Westfield shopping centre. Get your selfie-sticks ready!”

•As told to ELIOT HAWORTH. Portrait by DANIEL RIERA. TOM is wearing a cotton T-shirt by VINCE and a denim jacket by ALEX MULLINS.

My useless travel agency,by TOM KEELEY

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TIPmeasured; we’re on a wave, we’re tuned in like radio stations. In terms of where exactly on Earth, that’s not so important; they’re all over. Yeah, there are a lot of sight-ings in South America, but I think the whole planet’s busy with it. Some visit through craft and there are others that are interdimension-al. They’re everywhere. You just gotta free your own mind first.”

In addition to his childhood encounter, SHAUN has had sever-al sightings throughout his life, in-cluding a set of zig-zagging lights above Salford Rugby Club and, most recently, a 20-foot-wide grey saucer that floated above the apple tree in his back garden before dis-appearing slowly into a cloud.

“I’ve always taken my encoun-ters positively,” says SHAUN. “Researching UFOs has definite-ly encouraged me to look at all sorts of things that I would have

never been into otherwise: Ma-yan writings, quantum physics, Renaissance art.”

A notorious party animal in his youth, SHAUN is quick to clear up any scepticism about the validity of his claims. “I’ve seen all sorts of things,” he says. “I know people will say: ‘SHAUN RYDER, the drugs, the booze... I bet he sees pink elephants all the time.’ But every time I’ve seen something I’ve been stone-cold sober – not off my face, not eating mushrooms. Believe me.”

(To celebrate 30 years since the release of their debut al-bum ‘Squirrel and G-Man Twen-ty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out)’, SHAUN, BEZ and the rest of their HAPPY MONDAYS bandmates will be touring the UK and Ire-land throughout November and December of this year.)

1) Throw your silk, cashmere and other delicates into a salad spinner. 2) Fill with warm, soapy water. Spin. 3) Replace dirty water with cold, clean water. Spin. 4) Empty water, leaving the clothes in. Spin. 5) Let the clothes air dry and clean the salad spinner thoroughly.

A new lease of life for the trusty SALAD SPINNER

The discomfort of wearing tight leather shoes will be familiar to many: constricted feet, crushed toes, the inevitable blisters and the unflattering silhouette of a hoof stuffed into something too small for it. If a pair of shoes is far too small, the simple solution is to just buy some that fit properly. But for footwear that sits in that dreaded liminal zone of being neither too small nor a comfortable fit, why not try an unconventional solution courtesy of PAULA GERBASE,

the artistic director of London-based shoemakers JOHN LOBB.

“If your shoe is a bit too tight, soak your socks in water and then wear your shoes with soaking socks for the day,” says PAULA. “At the end of the day they’ll be perfectly fitted to your foot.” Al-though there are myriad shoe stretching tips that spare one from having to walk around in wet socks – such as filling shoes with Ziploc bags of water and put-ting them in the freezer or wearing

shoes with thick socks and blast-ing them with a hairdryer – these involve forcibly stretching the shoe. PAULA insists that the wet-sock method is essential for a true fit. “There’s a lot of water used in shoemaking to get the leather to fit to the last, so this is almost a continuation of the moulding pro-cess and it really gets the best fit. It sounds a bit weird, but it’s really worth it,” she explains.

This piece of esoteric advice was passed down to PAULA by

Wet socks and toothpaste — PAULA GERBASE shares some canny shoe solutions

Flashy gloves, like this one from LOEWE in navy leather with black patent leath-er panels. From a new series of highly detailed suggestions, to be found on the revamped Fantastic Man website and the @manfantastic Instagram account.

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My live action perfume, by TIMOTHY HAN

Even better than eating nuts is eat-ing activated nuts – both for their miraculous taste and for the sun-dry health benefits. The activa-tion procedure can easily be done at home, simply by soaking the de-sired amount of nuts overnight in salted water. Rinse them well the next day and devour! The process makes the kernels fresh, snappy, juicy, more flavoursome and, ap-parently, more easily digestible.

This sensationally easy tip comes courtesy of talented young private chef ANDREA ZAGAT-TI, who, as his name suggests, hails from Italy, although he is now based in London for as long as Theresa May and her Brexit fantasy allow him.

“Activating works for all va-rieties of nuts, and for seeds too,” says ANDREA. “But with cashew

nuts you’ve got to be careful. It’s best to soak them for a maximum of six hours, as they become slimy after that – it’s got something to do with the proteins of the cash-ews breaking down.”

There are certain online spe-cialists on the act of kernel acti-vation who suggest that soaked nuts should then be subjected to a lengthy drying time inside a luke-warm oven or professional dehy-drator, but that’s only if one would want to store said treated nuts for a much longer period of time. “Don’t bother,” is ANDREA’s honest ad-vice. “I find that it’s much bet-ter, and tastier, to activate and eat them straight away.”

(When this magazine went to print, the top-3 nut-producing countries were the United States, Turkey and China.)

Better nuts with this simple trick from chef ANDREA ZAGATTI

her colleagues at JOHN LOBB, who are never shy with dispensing counsel. “I get most of my shoe tips from the artisans I work with. They are absolute shoe freaks and always have a solution to a prob-lem,” she says. “Just after I first started at JOHN LOBB, I visit-ed our Paris atelier and came in

wearing trainers with white soles. PATRICK VERDILLON, the head of bespoke, took one look and told me that my soles were too dirty and that I should try using tooth-paste. I still clean my soles re-ligiously with a toothbrush and toothpaste every week. It’s the only thing that gets them looking

totally brand new again!”(London-based PAULA, who

was born in southern Brazil and grew up in Baltimore and Swit-zerland, insists that she has quite large feet, men’s UK size 7, and that this comes with the distinct advantage of being able to wear men’s shoes if she so pleases.)

Given the heated political climate in the United States and the con-tinued attacks of a certain orange bigot on the print media in particu-lar, architect and New York City native RAFAEL DE CÁRDE-NAS is unwavering on the impor-tance of newspaper subscriptions. “If you’re a New Yorker and you don’t subscribe to ‘The New York

Times’, you suck. You just suck,” he says. A long-time subscriber to ‘The New York Times’, Rafael has recently also taken out a ‘Wash-ington Post’ subscription. “I feel like the ‘Washington Post’ goes after Trump a bit harder than any other publication,” he says. “‘The Times’ has these posters around New York saying ‘The Truth,’ but

Newspapers and subversion — architect RAFAEL DE CÁRDENAS’ doable activism

A leather skipping rope, from WILLIAM & SON. From a new series of highly de-tailed suggestions, to be found on the re-vamped Fantastic Man website and the @manfantastic Instagram account.

“A few years ago I was talking to the French singer-songwriter ROMAN RAPPAK, and I said, “I’ve started making fragrances and want to move more towards doing event-type fragrances.” He was, like, “Oh my god, I need somebody who can do that. I’m starting a group and I want to have fragrance heavily involved in it.” That was the start of the band, which is called MIRO SHOT. We’re signed to two big electro labels: Believe in Paris, who do BJÖRK and CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS, and Warp in London, who do APHEX TWIN. Our first album, ‘Content’, comes out early in 2018. At the moment, it’s much more about the gig. It sounds a bit pretentious to say, but it’s the world’s first live immersive virtual real-ity concert. You’ve got this headset on, and

it swaps between placing you in a live-action music video and having you sitting in the actu-al concert, where you can see the members of the real band but then in a kind of augmented reality. All of your senses are being assault-ed, whether it’s feeling heat on your face or wind on your skin. The visuals are based on the work of a Danish illustrator called OLIVER HARUD, who just got optioned by STEVEN SPIELBERG for a film. They’re kind of west-ernised Japanese manga. THOMAS TAIT has agreed in principle to do our clothing designs. I’m controlling the fragrance. ROMAN’s treating what I’m doing like I was playing an instrument. Fragrance, like music, is described using terms like top notes, mid notes and bass notes. When you stick those notes together,

you have a chord. As with the bottled, liter-ature-inspired perfumes I make through my company TIMOTHY HAN / EDITION, it’s about making new ways to create and experience fragrance. Technology is always changing: we’re trying to build a synthesiser which is hooked up to speakers that pump out fra-grance rather than sound. We’re also look-ing at the possibility of having the album itself be scented, of creating a record where the scent is embedded and the needle releases the scent as it’s played.”

•As told to SEB EMINA. Portrait by DANIEL RIERA. TIM-OTHY is seen here with his dog BALTO, a husky.

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KINDLY PITCHING: Photographic assistance by Scott Archibald. Digital operation by Matt Lain. Styling assistance by Calum Paterson. Grooming by Alexander Soltermann us-ing Aesop. Production by Rosco Production.

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then the ‘Washington Post’ started putting ‘Democracy Dies in Dark-ness’ as their front-page motto and I just thought that was so major. I had to support them.” RAFAEL subscribes online to the ‘Washing-ton Post’ and receives his copies of ‘The New York Times’ in print, al-though he admits he only has time to read the print editions at the weekends. Rather than be waste-ful, he has a generous solution for his unused weekday papers: “I do-nate my copies to the library of my local school,” he says. “They just deliver straight to the school dur-ing the week and I get the weekend editions.” Although it is logical to start with a subscription to a pa-per closer to home, for anyone in-terested in New York’s print news, RAFAEL suggests a classic sub-scription combination. “What

my mum does, which is a very old Jewish New Yorker thing: she subscribes to both ‘The New York Times’ and ‘New York Post’. It’s like high and low. ‘The Times’ is very global and liberal and the ‘Post’ is totally trashy. It has got-ten a reputation as being right-wing recently, but I’m not sure it’s actually that right-wing. I think it’s just because it’s so salacious. I have to say: whenever I pick it up, I’m thoroughly entertained.”

(The first-ever monograph on RAFAEL’s practice, ‘Architec-ture at Large’, is to be published by RIZZOLI in October. It is ar-ranged into four chapters, loose-ly inspired by four diverse films that have been highly influential in RAFAEL’s work: ‘Flashdance’, ‘The Hunger’, ‘Dune’ and ‘Pee-wee’s Big Adventure’.)

It’s the quintessential 21st-century habit: taking thousands of photos with our smartphones, then never acutally bothering to look at them again. A ridiculous cat on an in-teresting wall. A loved-one with a hilarious dessert. Some, it’s true, will have a brief moment in the limelight if we deign them worthy enough of the “share” button. But a large proportion will sink, for-gotten, into the hard-drive abyss, because most of us have a wild compulsion to take new photos while having all but lost the in-stinct to look at old ones.

We all know that we would be more likely to look at our pho-tos again if only we had them in printed form, but who has time to pore through them all, root-ing out those unworthy of such

an elevation? A radical but really quite satisfying solution is to for-get all your dearly held curatori-al instincts and print the entire photo-stream on your phone as a one-off paperback, every so often. Literally: print everything. An ac-cidental shot of a discarded pile of ringbinders near a streetside bin? Five almost-identical shots of your nether regions? Who cares! The phone photo book ritual is quick, it’s honest and it has a welcome regulatory impact on the instinct to take hundreds upon hundreds of entirely pointless pics.

(SEB EMINA is deputy editor of Fantastic Man as well as editor-in-chief of ‘The Happy Reader’. He prints his phone photo books using the handy online book print-ing service www.blurb.com.)

Resolutely printing off the whole shebang — by SEB EMINA

The fluffiest pillow, from the house of KVADRAT. From a new series of highly detailed suggestions, to be found on the revamped Fantastic Man website and the @manfantastic Instagram account.

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My third collection, by KIKO KOSTADINOV

“I’m wearing pieces from my Spring and Sum-mer 2018 collection, which won’t be in shops for a little while. It’s been a big season. My show in London and then MACKINTOSH in Paris both happened in June. That’s less than twelve months since graduating from Central Saint Martins, which is a bit crazy. I think peo-ple don’t always realise that, actually. Or they forget. They think I’ve been around for longer, but really I haven’t. Each season I archive all of my designs and start again from scratch. It’s a painful process but it’s worth it. It keeps the innova-tion going and forces me to keep trying new things. I felt that with my previous collections

the detail and high level of work were there, but you couldn’t always see them. So this season I decided to make more of the details visible. On this jacket there’s prominent dart-ing at the front that, instead of being stitched down, is held in place by snap fastenings so you can wear them open or closed, depend-ing on whether you want a more streamlined or loose silhouette. There’s an idea in my work of having multiple options in one garment. You get more value for your money, I suppose! I’m very comfortable talking about my work. I don’t need to lie about it; there’s no fluff around it. I think that a lot of people do just chat shit about their stuff at the moment.

They have really weak work but they talk about it well. I don’t want to be that type of person. Of course there is theory underpinning what I do – the snap fastenings are inspired by the upholstery pins that the American artist TOM BURR uses, for example – but I don’t rely on that too much. It’s just a long, intensive work process. I’m confident you can’t buy my kind of clothing anywhere else, mainly because nobody else is stupid enough to spend the amount of time that I do making it.”

•As told to ELIOT HAWORTH. Portrait by DANIEL RIERA. KIKO is in a full look by KIKO KOSTADINOV.

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