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Mark Smith

@amancalledmark

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Freelance writer & editor 📚 👨‍💻 🗞 . NL & UK. Digital editor @the_gentlewoman. Making a podcast, slowly.
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Slam! Issue n° 34 of The Gentlewoman is fronted by Coco Gauff, the 22-year-old American champion reshaping women’s tennis. Two majors in, and with her game rebuilt from scratch, Coco is playing the best tennis of her life, resplendent in her signature kit and making sure the game’s Black pioneers are not forgotten. She’s a joy to behold. Joining Coco are the reunited Sugababes — Mutya, Keisha and Siobhán — who talk candidly about maintaining harmony; Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the first woman to win the Oscar for best cinematography, on shooting Sinners; and the architect Sophie Hicks on four decades of building for Chloé, Acne and herself. The oceanic pioneer Sylvia Earle, 91, shares tales of days and nights living underwater. Fashions-wise, colour-drenched knitwear takes to the South Downs, and rugged shearling and rubber pitch up for autumn. There’s writing addiction with the musician and poet John Glacier, and a sporting death stare with Hollie Davidson, who referees men’s top-flight rugby. We meet Vivien Wong, the mochi mastermind behind Little Moons, and Lira Valencia, the birdwatcher on a mission to get Londoners looking up. Plus: Celia Celebrity Traitors Imrie on becoming a youth sensation after 60 years in showbiz, and the screenwriting duo behind KPop Demon Hunters: Danya Jimenez and Hannah McMechan. Elsewhere, a forensic ode to peeling, and the case for multilingualism. Lots to talk about, then! by @amancalledmark
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10 days ago
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Taking their rightful place alongside Kim Jones(!)’s new venture in today’s HTSI menswear special in Financial Times Weekend — the men of MARTAN, a very special circular brand from Amsterdam. Diek Pothoven and Douwe de Boer procure the fine linens (bedsheets, tablecloths) discarded by five star hotels and turn them into five star garments whose details — rope fastenings, reed prints and circular buckles — draw on their childhoods in watery landscapes. My ‘Selin’ jacket (last slide) is hands down the best thing I’ve bought this decade. But don’t take my word for it. The actual Rijksmuseum saw fit to host their SS27 show (thanks @spicepr) — how’s that for an endorsement? And from now until 4 October, MARTAN has a pop-up on the Prinsengracht. Altogether now: “What, this old thing?” etc… @martan.official @fthtsi by @amancalledmark
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16 days ago
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Seven candles by @amancalledmark
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21 days ago
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In today’s @fthtsi, the quietly glorious Dutch duo behind @rohe_frames have their sights set on the Big Apple with a new SoHo flagship that’s the toast of New York Fashion Week. ALSO NOT TO BE COMPETITIVE BUT WHO WORE THE TRADITIONAL HEADPIECE BETTER: THE DIVINE SUPERMODEL @martemei OR YOURS TRULY? “On the Golden Bend of the Herengracht, the grandest stretch of the most prestigious canal in the Netherlands, sits Huis de Vicq, a double-width mansion built in 1670 for a physician and councillor of Amsterdam. One room on the piano nobile boasts ceiling frescoes by the master painter Jacob de Wit depicting allegorical figures dissolving into clouds. In the baroque garden at the back, a relief of Mercury, god of trade, adorns the pavilion. Mercury appears to have looked kindly on the latest tenants. Today, Huis de Vicq is alive with the business of clothes: a consignment of bespoke Italian fabrics is making its way up the grand Louis XIV staircase beneath a domed cupola; a pattern-cutter works from a raspberry-pink room overlooking the canal. The garden house is now a fabric archive. This is the HQ of Róhe (pronounced “ROH-uh”), a womenswear label that has established itself as a quietly compelling voice in European fashion. Founded in 2021 by designer Marieke Meulendijks and her husband Maickel Weyers, it is a contemporary luxury brand – Italian mills, exclusive fabric development – with a minimalist aesthetic: leather blouson jackets (from about £850) and sculptural midi dresses (from about £680); tailored trousers in interesting cuts and plenty of cashmere knitwear to pile on top. Jennifer Lawrence and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley have worn it; stockists include Liberty London, Net-a-Porter and Velour in Amsterdam.” Read the whole thing via link in my bio. taken in Amsterdam Golden Bend by @amancalledmark
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23 days ago
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Can YOU bench press and quote Kierkegaard? I dove shirtless into the world of “bro-science” for today’s profile in the Times Magazine. Specifically (and less misleadingly) Chris Williamson spoke to me about the astounding and sometimes controversial success of his podcast, Modern Wisdom. The former nightclub promoter from Teeside appeared on the first season of Love Island (and even smuggled some contraband into the “Basra”-like villa). Now his own show — whose preoccupations are male self-improvement and evolutionary psychology — has been downloaded more than a billion times, with the likes of Bernie Sanders, Matthew McConaughey and Bonnie Blue appearing as guests. There’s a live tour in the works. Chris also talked candidly about the so-called curse of Love Island, specifically his friendship with the late Sophie Gradon and his prophetic observation that the show would generate casualties. “The environment of mass social media exposure for people who are not prepared for it — it’s so unreal, so surreal if you’re the kind of person who actually takes things to heart.” Read on, in your paper and online. by @amancalledmark
3
2 months ago
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An air-conditioned caravan park with cutesy ‘rooms’ in a former meat-processing plant in Amsterdam is attracting the cool crowd. Just leave your hairspray at home⁠ ⁠ Read more from @amancalledmark via the link in bio 🔗⁠ by @amancalledmark
11
2 months ago
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Thrilled with my last-day-of-term posy thanking me for being “class rep” at my kid’s Amsterdam primary school — and tickled to read about Ashley Baker’s contrasting experiences across the North Sea in today’s Times (“Who has a direct line to Labour or Jonathan Haidt?” is a sample demand from her London school’s group chat). I wrote about the Dutch approach to no-frills, no-flex, no-fraz parenting and speculated about why their children are habitually found to be the happiest in the world a month ago for the same newspaper. H/t Nicola Jeal and team. taken in Amsterdam, Netherlands by @amancalledmark
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3 months ago
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With a sequel 20 years in the making, The Devil Wears Prada franchise has morphed from a movie about the horrors of working for a magazine into a movie about the horrors of NOT working for a magazine. That’s how NPR’s Linda Holmes put it, aptly. In 2008, humming ‘Suddenly I See’ and driven by an urgent desire to escape the Dubai heat during Ramadan (handily simultaneous with the Venice Film Festival), I made a solemn but vague and reckless promise to bring editorial attention to Emirates airline’s new daily route featuring BUSINESS CLASS WATER LIMOUSINE SERVICE. Fortunately for me, Andy Sachs herself came to the rescue, and DXB’s very own Miranda Priestly, Louise Nichol, made space in Grazia Middle East’s 10 (very) Hot Stories for this mildly intrusive but sincere fan encounter complete with all-important promotional end line. My personal water limo (“take me to your Lido”) was excellent — quite the way to make an absurdly over-grand entrance, with one misdirected autograph hunter asking what he’d “seen me in” — and certainly more comfortable than the bench I slept on one night. Summer of glam indeed. That’s all. @tdwp2 by @amancalledmark
6
5 months ago
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TODAY. I know it sounds like the kind of bobbins people put on Instagram for the purposes of self-promotion(!) but in my household the visual shorthand for “Dad” was always to mime “person engrossed in the Financial Times” — so it’s a thrill to have my first story for the esteemed organ’s @fthtsi magazine appear on its cover. And what an assignment! (thanks, @katefinnigan__ @craftacularuk @jellison22 and @louisquinze ). The Dutch designer and model Marte Mei Haaster welcomed me into her beautiful home for a preview of the furniture collection she’s made through the process of phytoremediation — drawing PFAS (aka “forever chemicals”) out of polluted soil using hemp supercharged with mushrooms. 🌱🍄. How Amsterdam is that? And how genuinely optimism-inducing, too. Not many side tables do that. It’s part of the issue’s wider consideration of multi hyphenate talents, dontchaknow. Exquisite photography by Amélie Ambroise, who I note resisted the temptation to do “mirror selfie with the talent”. Unlike yours truly (last slide). That’s a pro. Link in bio. by @amancalledmark
17
5 months ago
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by @amancalledmark
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5 months ago
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TIME WARP. 17(!) years ago I interviewed Juliette Lewis backstage at the Paradiso as she toured Europe with the Licks. Now she’s (far, far) away from home again, playing Magenta in The Rocky Show at Studio 54. “She’s an alien pretending to be a human who loves to throw wild parties and bring new specimens into her freak orbit.” Hope to meet in another 17 years, by which point Juliette assures us she will be a committed horticulturalist to boot. 🌱Sign up for The Gentlewoman Club newsletter today! by @amancalledmark
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6 months ago
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“I look at you and go, ‘Right, what’s the back of your head? That’s going to be the shot. Your ear, it’ll be here, your glasses, it will be from the side, then we’ll go underneath your feet.’” This imaginary shot list, made outside the Goldborne Deli in peak Christmassy Notting Hill, is as close as I’ll get to being filmed by LYNNE (ACTUAL) RAMSAY, director of Die My Love and We Need to Talk About Kevin and Ratcatcher and You Were Never Really Here. But I did get to spend hours picking Lynne’s amazing brain for The Gentlewoman, who commissioned these stunning portraits by Jamie Hawkesworth (ably butchered here by me, soz). You can read the profile online in the Library section of The Gentlewoman website. Thank you, Penny Martin and Co. What a joy. Also: Toblerones. #LynneActually #TheGentlewoman #TGW33 by @amancalledmark
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6 months ago
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