EDITOR’S LETTER
i’m not sure when exactly this transpired, but one day I woke up, and my attention span was gone. I couldn’t finish a meal without picking up my phone to check my emails. I couldn’t watch a TV show without simultaneously scrolling through Instagram and sometimes absentmindedly clicking through websites on my laptop, too. I couldn’t even finish watching an entire video that autoplayed as I scrolled through my Facebook feed.
It’s a danger both insidious and pervasive. It’s a phenomenon that we in print media deride (“Please,” we plead, “sit still and read my 1,200-word article”), yet as my own behaviour shows, we are as much perpetrators as victims. And somehow, in this issue, we’ve found people to celebrate whose dedication, persistence and perseverance has paid off in big ways.
Caroline Wozniacki is an obvious example. You don’t get to the top of the tennis world without hours of sweat paid to the courts, without trials and tribulations and tears and tenacity. In this month’s cover story, she tells Prestige how her family has been her rock throughout her sporting career, and what she looks forward to when she one day hangs up her competition racket.
We also meet one of China’s greatest realist painters, Ai Xuan, a man who is oft referred to in the context of his famously controversial half-brother, Wei Wei. But what Ai Xuan’s career lacks in sensationalism it makes up for in beauties and intricacies that are a paean to his zeal. The artist is prolific, but very few of his canvasses make it into the public eye (and at the height of his career, an Ai canvas sold at auction for more than US$28 million). He releases to the market only those pieces he feels reach his exacting standards, and hosts painfully few gallery shows in spite of a high demand for his work (and this in spite of the fact that he paints unfailingly to a salaryman’s schedule). If there’s merit in the maxim that less is more, he has proven it – as well as the power of persistence.
Then there’s Gabriela Hearst, a brand that’s been catapulted from anonymity to global success in three short years – and all thanks to its resolve to scale down production, trading speed for slower but far superior craftsmanship. Each piece is meticulously constructed by hand in Florence, and the proof is in the pudding – more than 1,000 names on the waiting list for a Gabriela Hearst bag and an invitation to set up shop for two weeks this month at Lane Crawford.
It’s easy to say that concentration and commitment are qualities that skipped the millennial generation, but these characteristics aren’t reserved purely for the wise and wizened. Flynn McGarry is but 19, and he’s taken the food world by storm – after stints at Eleven Madison Park and Alinea, he’s opened his own restaurant in cutthroat New York, and anyone who argues that this can be done on a whim hasn’t worked in the industry before. He’s poured his soul into an endeavour that’s not asked of many teenagers, and whether he were 19 or 90 it’s an accomplishment.
It’s tempting to be fast – because with a deficit in attention come volleys of ideas, interests, the ability to multi-task and time savings incalculable. It makes sense if you’re trying to get ready in the morning (more on that in The Multi-tasking Wardrobe on page 76) but hardly so when you’re trying to go farther, reach higher and just be better. Maybe the reason we’re so attention-deficit is because of this vicious circle. Nobody’s paying attention, why should we bother? I can spit out a listicle with a clickbait title in minutes, or I can equally spend days researching, interviewing, transcribing and writing a cover story. And while “7 Brunches to Brunch at this Brunch-tastic Weekend” may garner many more eyeballs keen to discover the latest innovation in eggs on toast, I have confidence that dogged effort wins out in the long run. It’s in a Wozniacki curveball, in the soulful eyes that peer out of an Ai Xuan painting, in the handstitched sculpted perfection of a Gabriela Hearst Diana bag, in the warm embrace of a Flynn McGarry meal. It’s there – you just need to have the patience to find it.