IAN SCHRAGER
Mischief Maker
The scene is almost Gatsby-esque, though set in the heart of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan centre, a few streets from the majestic Bund. Free-flow champagne (aggressively topped up) and great music make for an intoxicating atmosphere. The crowd is interesting: international jet-set types and the city’s well heeled swarm the lobby of the newly opened Shanghai Edition, inside the club and along the many bars of the building. We spot models and influencers alongside cultural mavens, the fashion and art set, and even spy a couple of Mick Jagger’s daughters, all game and glam in figure-hugging dresses, smoking outside the lobby. In what’s been a year of big openings for gleaming luxury hotels in the Chinese city, this would be the most spectacular – perhaps no surprise, considering Editions are among the hippest properties on the planet, brainchild brand of the legendary Studio 54 co-founder Ian Schrager, in partnership with Marriott International hotel group. “It’s a great city,” Schrager says, surveying the skyline as we talk that morning. “You don’t know what it’s going to be like in five years. Doing a project here is like running on a comet … you gotta stay true to yourself but you can feel the energy in the air. I look out the window in the mornings and I just feel it.” This is Schrager’s fourth visit to the city at the spear tip of China’s modernisation. And just as he’s done over the last five decades – first in nightlife and then with boutique hotels – Schrager gets a kick out of creating the magic that surrounds him, especially on opening night. “Creative people do the kind of things they themselves like and then they’re kind of so surprised that other people like it. I think fashion designers do the clothes they like, movie directors do the kind of films they like and I’ve always done the kind of bars, clubs, hotels and apartments that I would wanna be in. “Some people just enjoy upsetting the status quo, and that’s me – I do,” says the 72-year-old Brooklyn native in his mellow voice. By reputation, he’s quieter and more cerebral than was his Studio 54 co-founder and partner, the late Steve Rubell. But underneath that gentle demeanour are signs of mischief and the maverick entrepreneur’s relentless appetite for pushing the envelope. “Luxury has changed and it should change,” he drawls. “Everything else changes – fashions change, automobiles change, refrigerators change, everything does – so why shouldn’t the very notion of luxury change? “It’s different now, it’s not the status symbol tied to how much something costs – it’s more a status symbol that people in the know respond to a certain place. The status is going to that place, being in that place.” Just as Studio 54, which ran from 1977 until 1980, wasn’t just a club, Schrager’s hotels aren’t just places to crash. They’ve been likened to cultural institutions, no matter how commercial in nature – energetic, sexy and vibrant – a seductive pulse point of the city. Before the Editions, just think of the cult line-up of properties – the Sanderson and Saint Martin’s Lane in London, Miami’s Shore Club, The Mondrian in LA – all cementing his reputation as the visionary don of hotels. Although so adept at attracting the rich and famous, Schrager grew up with a relatively unassuming background in Brooklyn, studied at Syracuse in upstate New York and trained in law before he and Rubell – whom he met at university – got into the nightclub business. They opened discos in Boston and Queens before Studio 54 burst on to the scene in the late ’70s; it fast became a quasi-mythical hotbed of music, money, drugs, disco and debauchery. The pair had created the most famous nightclub in the world. “I was never mesmerised by people with wealth. Never! There’s nothing more boring than a room full of wealthy people,” Schrager says, smiling. “I passed that age when everybody was fixated on wealthy people. They went through movie stars, sports stars, artists and media editors, models; I never went for any of that.”
Despite this, they were all part of the scene and crowd that vied to get past Studio 54’s famous velvet rope and into a realm where drag queens and the onset of a thriving gay scene rubbed shoulders with artists, musicians and celebrities – people like Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, Calvin Klein, Al Pacino, Brooke Shields and Jackie O. A just-released documentary on Studio 54 gives a glimpse of the wild nights, behind the scenes and the club’s rise and eventual downfall, which culminated in a major police raid. Rubell and Schrager were subsequently convicted of tax evasion and spent more than a year in prison. In a recent twist to the story, departing US president Barack Obama pardoned Schrager in early 2017. “That was very important to me,” he says. “It finally gave me high ground to talk to my kids and explain to them that I made a mistake. I’ve been forgiven and gone on and rectified it. But I still have a hard time with it,” he adds, drawing breath. “I told one of my kids that I’m still embarrassed by it. Yeah, I am – it still has ramifications even now.” Now in his eighth decade, his hair silver and spirits high, Schrager can reflect on an eventful and illustrious career spanning more than 40 years. It’s been a long line of radical ideas since the entrepreneur turned his attentions to hospitality, eventually upending the global business. When he introduced the boutique-hotel concept in the early ’80s and created hip, buzzing social spaces instead of stuffy old mainstream hotels, it was a time when “the realestate people couldn’t hold their business and they couldn’t figure out how to do a great bar or restaurant, so they did away with them and only did the rooms … They sanitised
“It was never just about making money for me... Nobody does it for the money – nobody good, anyway”
it and stripped it of what was important. We decided to go back and make it important again … Why not have the best that a city has to offer right downstairs in the lobby, so you never have to leave? “When I started doing hotels, people thought I was trying to do a nightclub in a hotel, which couldn’t be further from the truth,” Schrager recalls. The idea of a hotel being the epicentre of social life in a town or city “wasn’t new, it was done hundreds of years ago. That’s what the English inns were, the Roman hotels on the road.” The Shanghai property is China’s second Edition (the first being a huge resort in Sanya), and the buzz around it is undeniable. The opening would coincide with Fashion Week and morning-till-night events would bring the city’s chicest to the hotel. Schrager promises more to come: Editions in Bodrum, Barcelona, West Hollywood, Abu Dhabi and New York’s Times Square have all been announced. What seemed at first like an unlikely marriage between glamorous, rule-bending Schrager and giant hospitality stalwart Marriott has actually proven to be exceptionally fruitful and lucrative for both. “It was never just about making money for me. The money comes as a consequence. Nobody does it for the money – nobody good, anyway! We do it to do something well, that’s what’s gratifying,” he explains. “It’s been very gratifying for me and a big learning experience – very expanding,” he adds. “I learned the difference between being an entrepreneur and somebody who runs a big company that does everything by consensus. I do nothing by consensus … and so it’s been fun.” For the corporate hotel group, it was also an education of sorts: “They had to learn that every detail is a matter of life or death for me.” These details pertain to the subtleties of invisible design and experience: chic social areas, a private cinema and rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows showing expansive views of the Shanghai skyline. Moody Wing Shya works hang on the walls and there are deep, sand-coloured bathtubs to soak away the day’s sins. The roof terrace at the Shanghai Edition is spectacular, as is the Canton Disco restaurant, and Shanghai Tavern, which serves what’s perhaps the city’s best mac ’n’ cheese. Hiya – Jason Atherton’s angular modern-Japanese restaurant on the 27th floor – is a good place to dress up for cocktails overlooking a cinematic panorama of the Huangpu River. It’s important that a place makes you “feel good, feel glamorous, that there’s an excitement in the air and you don’t really know why”, Schrager adds. “That’s when design is successful, not when you’re getting hit over the head by these heavy-handed design flourishes.” While the look of Schrager projects has shifted with the times, his philosophy remains unchanged. Whether it’s the Edition hotels, trendy apartment complexes or his new “affordable-luxury” boutique venture Public hotels, the focus is on the lifestyle you choose rather than how wealthy you are or where you come from. That attitude links back to the Studio 54 days, Schrager says – as much as there was a velvet rope, inside was a celebration of unexpected, organic cultural diversity, glowing with energy. His is an instinct that’s also allowed him to outmanoeuvre others with more money and scale, serving him well with each new step. And where does he get this attitude and philosophy? Schrager says it’s borrowed “mostly from the street, from people, it’s all instinctive and sometimes you’re lucky that what you’re doing and your point of view – it’s outta the box, but it resonates with people. It’s like a gift!”