A TOUCH OF BRILLIANCE
Inventors, creators, artists and thinkers gathered for conversation and celebration at Cartier’s Social Lab symposium. Zara Wong reports from the San Francisco event.
Inventors, creators, artists and thinkers gathered for conversation and celebration at Cartier’s Social Lab symposium.
This is the best table in San Francisco!” exclaims food pioneer Alice Waters, alongside French-English chef Daniel de la Falaise. In a spotless white kitchen with an unobstructed view of the water from San Francisco’s famed pier, the pair hold court. Waters, the farm-to-table activist, is telling us about the wonders of San Francisco’s bakeries (“there’s a real renaissance with bread here”) while de la Falaise is prepping the incoming dishes – making a light chicken broth to be poured over fresh oysters and trimming bolting leek to reveal its sweetest, most tender part for the vegetable dish. “Cooking, to me, is like structured improvisation,” he says.
Waters is one of the leading voices of the slow food movement and was one of the first to acknowledge the role of the producer. She says evolution can happen with a plate of food, and has shown as much with her work like the Edible Schoolyard Project in nearby Berkeley, which provides a practical context for subjects like maths and science.
Echoing the pair’s mission statement, the lunch spotlights the origin of the produce, with place settings include a map detailing where in northern California each of the main ingredients are from.
“Fennel is one of my favourite vegetables,” says Waters. “It tastes of spring, and brings a sense of time and place to the menu. That’s how we know where we are.”
We are eating alongside South Korean mega-star actor and celebrity Yoo Ah-in and French actress Mélanie Laurent. Laurent is unaware of her natural elegance, and shows no evidence of the trappings of celebrity save for her luminous complexion and her wrists, merry with the tinkling of Cartier pieces: a Panthère watch, its 80s-era chain link band glinting in the sun; and a Juste Un Clou bracelet, the ingeniously iconic bracelet designed by Aldo Cipullo which creates the illusion of a nail wrapped delicately around the wrist. It is an extraordinary design out of an ordinary object, and melds polarities: the hard and the soft, the precious and the normal.
Chef de la Falaise is the nephew of Loulou de la Falaise – as a teenager he modelled for Vogue Paris, and in his food career has catered for Kate Moss’s 24-hour wedding and a 125-person dinner for Ashley Olsen and Mary-Kate Olsen’s label The Row, for which he produced a saffron risotto. He wears the Cartier Santos watch designed in 1904 specifically for Louis Cartier’s aviator friend Alberto Santos-Dumont so that he could tell the time safely while flying (the pocket watch would not do, and thus, the wristwatch with its clearly seen face was born) making people like chef de la Falaise all the more grateful to only need cast an eye over his watch when in the kitchen.
We are all attending a three-day symposium, Social Lab, hosted by Cartier to celebrate its Santos watch for men and Panthère watch for women, bringing together the brightest and most interesting minds to discuss and debate in a series of intimate sessions curated by Neville Wakefield. It would later end with a spectacle of a party where Phoenix, Jamie XX and Hot Chip performed to revellers who run the gamut from social entrepreneur and Vogue Codes alumni Leila Janah to Sienna Miller, friend-of-the-brand Sofia Coppola and face-of-the-Panthère-watch actress Annabelle Wallis. The dashing and friendly Henry Golding is already creating buzz, not just for his impending films, but for cutting up the dance floor ahead of his Crazy Rich Asians press schedule.
The first day of panels sees architect Rafael de Cárdenas speak with Wakefield and photographer and film-maker Alex Prager on the topic of ‘ intrepid design’. The architect’s references are varied, from Hitchcock films to Roman churches – examples of drama in space and narrative. Indeed, multidisciplinary and broad variety is the undercurrent to the Social Lab, as conversations and examples bounce from contemporary to past and from science to art. And as can be seen in the line-up of actors, artists, entrepreneurs and more, there are no strict boundaries between categories or genres.
De Cárdenas himself was a former fashion designer at Calvin Klein before launching his architectural firm in 2006, and his own aesthetic is renowned for not being entrenched in a particular style or era. He has worked with Cartier as a designer for exhibitions and events for the past five years. “They’re an exciting client – challenging in the best way, and fun,” he says of his relationship with the French house. On his thoughts of design, “doubt is important”, he says. “You need to feel unsure, insecure. If designing something makes me feel uncomfortable, I have to overcome it, I have to do it.”
It is an extraordinary design out of an ordinary object, and melds polarities: the hard and the soft, the precious and the normal
“San Francisco, the city, is relentless, and that’s the theme of this Cartier event, isn’t it? This city doesn’t understand the meaning of no!”
When he spoke later to Vogue about his experience of leaving his fashion design career, the notion of unease re-appeared. “It’s difficult to walk away from success. Every decision is difficult, everything is hard.”
Prager, who went from participating in discussions to ardently observing them too, pram and baby in tow, spoke about the need to feel terrified to create the most interesting work.
In a panel entitled ‘mind over matter’, surfer Laird Hamilton discussed his own approach to fear. “My relationship with fear started at such a young age that I developed a relationship with it.
Eventually I used it as a tool. Fear can make you smart and fast, quickly.”
But the underlying theme of the three days of events was really about disruption and innovation, especially with San Francisco in the background. It is, after all, the city of gay liberation and the forefront of counterculture. “There’s a nonstop flow of youth here in San Francisco as well as an ageing anarchist generation,” says graffiti artist Barry McGee, who grew up in the area.
The city and its surroundings is renowned too for the world’s most celebrated tech hub, the Silicon Valley, home to the headquarters of companies like Uber, Airbnb and Dropbox in San Francisco, not to mention Google (Mountain View) and Apple (Cupertino).
“The Bay area is one of the most powerful places on the planet now, with Silicon Valley,” reflects McGee. But San Francisco’s experiences with booms aren’t just from contemporary times: during the gold rush in the 1800s, its population from 1848 to 1849 increased from 1,000 to 25,000, cultivating a culture that encouraged entrepreneurial persistence in the face of failure. “To this day this tolerance of failure sets California apart,” writes Edward Dolnick in the book on the gold-rush period, The Rush.
Persistence is also embodied by conference guest Privahini Bradoo, a charismatic clean-tech entrepreneur who exemplifies the global mindset of the event: born in India, schooled in the Middle East, she went to university in New Zealand before winning a Fulbright Scholarship to complete an MBA at Harvard. Like other ambitious individuals, she found her way to San Francisco. She has been involved with Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, which recognises and provides significant financial prizes to six female entrepreneurs annually.
“My interactions with Cartier has shown a philosophy of boldness and audaciousness. With something like the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, they really put their money where their mouth is, which, at least to my knowledge, others in their industry aren’t doing,” she says passionately. “San Francisco, the city, is relentless, and that’s the theme of this Cartier event, isn’t it?” she says, gesturing around us. “This city doesn’t understand the meaning of no! There are companies like Lyft and Airbnb here that completely groundbreaking in terms of how they’ve impacted societies. If there is something that world needs, it will happen here. That kind of irreverence and audaciousness is what I absolutely love.”