The Art edition of Quintesentially Asia magazine explored the issue of time, found beauty in numbers and questioned how we survive the crushing impersonality of space, all while featuring some of the season\'s most beautiful fashion and collectibles.  With stories about Julian Schnabel, the new wave of Thai art, Dinos and Jake Chapman, Marc Chagall and Takeshimi Murakami the magazine placed art in a fresh and surprising perspective, examined the legacy of punk rock in fashion and offered inspiring ideas about collecting, couture and travel.

There is something about Furla’s CEO Eraldo Poletto that
reminds me of José Mourinho, the manager of Chelsea FC.
They are both elegant guys, with an air of toughness. They
both perform on a world stage and are very ambitious.
Mourinho wants to win this season’s European Champions
League and English Premier League trophies. Poletto
wants to open 100 new Furla stores in China

The latest edition of Quintessentially Asia magazine was released on Friday at Quintessentially’s fab Christmas Party in The Space on Hong Kong’s Hollywood Road, where a cool crowd enjoyed Christmas Carols, mince pies, brilliant British Cheeses and fine products from Berry Bros and Rudd, Gentelman’s Tonic, Timothy Oulton, Relish Kitchen, Jo Malone and Thomas Pink with support from Grosvenor.  

In the magazine;s cover story \\\\\\\'Space Invaders\\\\\\\' we check out the work of Hu Sheguang, Nicole Zhang and Ji Wenbo who are breaking new ground for the resurgent Chinese design community with their exquisite styling, use of materials and world class craftsmanship. 

\\\\\\\'The F-Word\\\\\\\' harks back to the old world of Italian fashion and tells the story of Silvia Venturini at Fendi and what it meant to be born in to the \\\\\\\'Fendi\\\\\\\' family, where she revolutionised the way women think about accessories with her baguette-inspired handbag.

Italian tailoring is a bench-mark for all those who aspire to sartorial elegance and in this issue we feature Pheres and Corneliani, who have established new standards of quality and élan in an industry where only the best survive.

A great suit looks just dandy with a glass of champagne and one of the finest cuvees is made by Herve Deschamps, the Perrier-Jouët cellar master. He told Quintessentially magazine about the importance of season variations in creating a pure elegant beginning and complex finish with their unique champagnes. 

When the time comes to trade in your work attire for the latest beach wear the Aman Resorts have proven they can live up to their name, which translates to \\\\\\\'Peace\\\\\\\' in Urdu, creating the perfect place to relax with Amanoi, their newest masterpiece located on Vietnam\\\\\\\'s Vinh Hy Bay.

And, best of all, for the first time Quintessentially Magazine will be available on new stands in Hong Kong and can be found exclusively at Bookazine from December 18.

The 8th edition of Quintessentially Asia magazine has VOYAGE as its theme. This is the magazine\'s second anniversary issue and in the two years since Quintessentially Asia was launched it has travelled a long way, both literally and metaphorically. Copies have been seen in Beijing, Shanghai, Budapest, Lake Como, Ulan-Bator, Venice, the Scottish Highlands and the back of a car parked on the Champs Elysee. And we have sent the magazine to the outer reaches of the galaxy and back as we imagined ways in which it could be made more surprising and insightful. Our experience has taught us that to “Voyage” is an act of integration not separation. Thus this edition is not a travel magazine but an exploration of the voyage we take each time our synapses pop. In The Great Revival we chart Karl Lagerfeld’s journey at the helm of Chanel, in The Art of Travel we trek through the mind of Japanese artist Shinji Ogawa and his beguiling recreations of places he has never been to (or has he?) while in My Fair Lady and Religious Indulgence we are given a tour of fashion that challenges our sense of style and beauty.  In each of these stories the magazine has travelled beyond Hong Kong but its heart has always been in the same place. As the 18th century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rosseau said on his travels between Paris and London, “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” This magazine is a means of travelling between Rousseau’s two worlds, without being marooned in either one. So enjoy, and send us a post card from wherever you think are.

The dragon has had his season, and now the snake comes to take his place. A new lunar year begins, and the earth spins closer to its fate. For sentient beings, there was once great fear about the future. Famines, floods and eclipses seemed to be the work of magic; a volcano the mouth of an enraged dragon, an earthquake the product of an ogre’s fist. And then came science, and with it rationality and logic. The Gods who had once been revered in the hope they would protect humanity from evil now seem, to most, like comic relics of a superstitious age. And yet the human worship gene has not been turned off and thus the dedication we once reserved for deities is now showered on unobtainable bags, couture dresses, privileged royalty, powerful politicians and even the c-list winners of minor talent competitions like Strictly Got Factors, or whatever it’s called. Is it just coincidence that advisers (or is that acolytes?) to the chief executive at the world’s most successful luxury conglomerate call him Jupiter Stator behind his back? And thus, because we know luxury is not worth having unless it’s explored with some measure of intellectual rigour we devote this sixth edition of Quintessentially Asia magazine to the concept of worship. As a theme this might seem an odd choice for a periodical that’s devoted to sybaritic pursuits but that’s the point. Many of our modern day pleasures seem to stray into worshipful territory. Thus in The Second Coming we explore the new spiritual leader at Dior and ask whether his work will raise the game at the most august Parisian fashion house to Jovian heights. In Cave Crusade we consider why so many non-religious millionaires from Hong Kong and elsewhere are suddenly making pilgrimages to the remote Buddhist grottoes of Dunhuang and in Root and Branch we consider one artist’s pious devotion to the making of transcendent wooden sculptures.  Beyond physical artefacts of dedication, we enter the temple of high fashion in the company of a chrysalis in Chimera Time, a bold visual essay on the transference of power, a process that is at the heart of all worship. Believe what you will, the Gods are still among us. It’s just that these days they are much better dressed. Come, enter our temple.

Power is mutable; it never comes in an unbreakable mass, except in the sense of a diamond, where every facet presents the world in a different light. Power has many faces, and often wears a subtle disguise, but it can scorch the soul and when it is held without legitimacy, those who wield it are likely to be incinerated when that power bursts into flames.  In choosing Power as the theme of this fifth edition of Quintessentially Asia magazine, which coincides with our first anniversary, we were not driven by a sudden interest in political economy. And even though we are a magazine of the luxury world, we do not plan to expose the abuses of power that take place in an industry where predatory behavior exists to a surprising degree inside the shiny/grimy dream machine that we call fashion, as Mr. Gigli (Romeo and Silhouette) apparently discovered to his cost. Instead we are focused upon the power of beauty, ideas, creativity, education and horses, both mechanical and four legged. In The Bright Stuff and Young Guns we showcase the power of youthful imagination and its correlate, a lack of inhibition. I guarantee you will not see more inspiring coverage of fashion anywhere else this season. With Chukka Can we explore what the power of money (and a string of horses) can do for a brand with a long shopping list upon which the acquisition of heritage sits at the top. In Back Seat Driver there is horse power made sybaritic, as Bentley wheel out a new executive version of the Mulsanne that is more comfortable than most of the palaces where it will be parked; while Forbidden Suits examines how the power of China’s money has restrained fashion designers who might otherwise try to make all men dress like cartoon characters. At the leisurely end of the scale Operation Dinner Out reveals how a Hong Kong princess has used the power of simplicity to conquer the city’s social heights, and if understanding those with a power complex is of interest, The Crucible of Love examines how the stormy relationship between Carl Gustav Jung and one of IWC’s founders led the Swiss watch company to create one of the most interesting timepieces ever made.  It is Jung who inspired our cover, or at least his work on the power of dreams. The founder of analytical psychology believed that dreams reveal the way our consciousness pulls at the puppet strings that guide our unconscious mind. But as our cover shows, we only think that we see the truth. Does the watch that covers his eye blind the young man? Or does it make him see more clearly? Maybe he is a time lord, building a machine that will take him – or us - to the future. Only our dreams can tell us what the answer might be, and without them we have no power at all.

Some of our profound thinkers might look at the world’s myriad crises and say we are living in an era of struggle but they’d be expressing a tautology. Human life and struggle are indivisible, for good or ill, between angels and demons, gods and monsters, purity and debauchery, brilliance and mediocrity. And often there is a fine line between the two. Lucifer, the prince of darkness, started out as an angel, an innocent embrace can suddenly become uncontrolled desire and a single splash of colour can transform a painting from a dud into a masterpiece. We are like border agents within our own consciousness, one foot on home turf, the other always straying toward an alien country of uncontrolled passions where the laws are made by some body else. In this fourth edition of Quintessentially Asia magazine, which completes our first cycle of four quarters and takes us to our first anniversary on September 28th, we celebrate the passion that is generated by the Gods and Monsters within us all. This theme was inspired by a visit to Indochina in April, where I stayed at Amansara in Cambodia and Amataka in Luang Pranbang. At the first the focus is on the extraordinary temples of Angkor Wat and it was among them that I encountered the bas-relief representations of the Hindu and Buddhist creation myths, which so powerfully capture the struggle between good and evil. In the English language we have the expression “They looked calm but their emotions were running deep” and we used this notion in this season’s fashion shoot, to capture the dialectical turmoil in the minds of men and women as they navigate a stormy relationship. Based on the ménage a trois at the heart of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, (which will be seen in a new cinematic treatment by Australian director Baz Luhrmann later this year) we set three characters from a formal cocktail party on a basketball court and let the physical intensity of the players speak for the feelings that burn just below the restrained demeanour of Gatsby, Daisy and Tom. And our cover picks up the theme, capturing the tragic death of Gatsby, Nicks’s betrayal and Daisy’s femme fatale insensitivity to the suffering of others in a stunning image inspired by the Roman Catholic tradition of family members wearing prayer cards at funerals and baptisms. Not that every clash of forces has such a melancholy outcome. In this edition stories on the battle to become the world’s most prestigious art collector, the triumphs of Hermès in China, Italian cashmere baron Pier Luigi Loro Piana’s love affair with the high seas, a Japanese entrepreneur’s bid to launch Hong Kong’s most interesting new restaurant venture, Royal Salute’s triumphant bonding exercise with Britain’s royal palaces and the fight to choose which is London’s best grand hotel reveal that some struggles produce marvellous results. The point about struggle is not to duck its challenge, for without it there is no life. The point is to understand its effects. Or as Friedrich Nietzsche would have it “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” So here’s looking at you kid.

How do you feel? When was the last time you cried? Laughed? I am not being funny. We live in a world where the emotions are everywhere and nowhere, where more of our lives than ever are on public display through social networks, but where authentic emotions often seem rare and remote, like streetlights seen from the air: we know what they are but we can’t touch them, only when we land, and by then it’s too late. In this, the third edition of Quintessentially Asia, we explore the role of emotions in art, fashion, love and sport. It has become a nostrum of all luxury brands that they seek to make an emotional connection between their products and clients. There’s no surprise about this, as Donatella Versace once told me, “Why would anyone pay so much for a dress if it was just fabric? They want tears and thrills as well.” Indeed they do, which is why the luxury and art worlds have progressed beyond being kissing cousins and now lay entwined in a marital embrace that sometimes seems a little incestuous. Thus when we laid bare the empty canvass of this edition, we decided to paint it with stories about the succession crisis at Dior (where emotions have been at the heart of the drama), Polo, that most passionate of sports, which is enjoying extraordinary success in Mainland China, the harrowing hunt for a child that has driven many wealthy Chinese with fertility issues into the arms of surrogacy brokers, the forced marriage of rich hunters and battling conservationists on a mission to save China’s most beautiful wild places, Gilbert & George’s doll’s house dalliance and Biologique Recherche’s romance with human skin. At the core of this emotional outpouring is our fashion shoot, Dragoncholia Rising. Inspired by Lars Von Trier’s sumptuous Melancholia, starring Kirsten Dunst. This movie brought me tears and smiles when I first saw it, and I was inspired by its exploration of human emotion in the face of extinction. I re-imagined Von Trier’s killer blue planet as a red giant wreathed in dragon-shaped clouds with the power to bestow beauty upon any woman touched by its rosy glow. Gareth Brown and Dennis Chan, two genies with camera and CGI did the rest. The poetic images that were the end-result we offer as a silk wrap for those raw emotions that none of us quite know how to handle. So how do you feel now?

Greek Dressing : Why did actress and model gaile lai spend her birthday on an island in the aegean seap was she sending a message to her cantopop husband leon lai?...

DISCREET is the theme for the launch edition of Quintessentially Asia. Within its covers you will find well-hidden restaurants, bars, islands, hotels and all sorts of treats. As befits a magazine that has ambitions to be a new and authoritative voice in Asia we reveal the secrets of an emerging class, the Hanistocrats, the men and women who are reshaping tastes in China. We spend time sifting through the soon-to-be-auctioned jewellery collection of Elizabeth Taylor and unveil for the first time some of the mysteries that surround this iconic star.  And we dig deep to reveal how China’s new found and seemingly insatiable appetite for gold has helped to cause a spike in illegal mining, part of this magazine’s mission to raise social issues and change Asia for the better. But we don’t stop there – technological wonders reveal themselves in the Bentley Continental that took us to a mysterious Estonian island and we have fun sifting through the treasures of watchmaker IWC and fashion house Pringle of Scotland. And finally, our cover image: Who is that girl? Is she a ballerina fresh from an epic performance, wearing masterpiece jewellery given by a wealthy admirer? Or is she a Cinderella, playing dressup as she asks the cards to say what her future will hold?  For us the image is iconic. The cards, some of them depicting emperors, some empresses, some Mao’s medals and some old Chinese trademarks are echoes of China’s past, while emerging from them is a young, rich, confident woman with her eye on a bright future. And so the cover reveals a great deal, about who we are and what this magazine will be – an insider’s bible exploring Asia’s cutting-edge themes with ears and eyes in the places that count. So now the secret is out. And you are holding it in your hands. But don’t tell anybody.

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The most exclusive and insightful luxury magazine in Asia, Quintessentially offers the first and last word on fashion, travel, art, culture, lifestyle and glamour. The magazine is famous for its stunning fashion photography and gorgeous layouts. From its facilities in Hong Kong and Shanghai, the China based Quintessentially Asia magazine consistently publishes groundbreaking stories on the world's most fascinating and fastest-growing region. Our fashion stories are sourced from deep within the ateliers of Paris, Milan, London and New York, while our arts and culture coverage is derived from the magazine's extensive contacts with artists and curators. Quintessentially Asia's sister business, Quintessentially Lifestyle, the globally renowned concierge service, gives the magazine access to the most exclusive travel and lifestyle experiences, ensuring that no other publication offers better or more intimate coverage of glamour and elegance. Quintessentially is published by deluxewords, a unique media company that delivers world-class magazines, produces exceptional books and provides consultancy services to leading global brands with an interest in Asia.

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QUINTESSENTIALLY ASIA - Summer 2013

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