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Luxury London Magazine Spring 2024 issue

Spring 2024

Issue 35

There’s a watch on page 91 that will tell you how long it takes light to travel to each planet in our solar system. The watch costs north of £60,000, so I’ll save you the money. From the Sun to the closest planet, Mercury, it takes 3.2 minutes. To Earth, 8.3 minutes. To Neptune, the furthest away planet, 4.1 hours. You can look up the rest yourself.Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei, the watch’s creators, are fascinated by space and time. Their watch, the UR-100V LightSpeed, invites us to consider the out-of-sync relationship we have with the ‘present’. The light we see today, they and their watch points out, is an echo of a past that no longer exists. Light travels to us from a point we haven’t yet experienced. Which was a long and winding way of introducing the theme of our 2024 spring issue: that wispy hypothetical that is the future.In the not too distant past, Lucien Laviscount, our physically impoverished cover star, was a jobbing actor constantly in search of work. And then came Emily in Paris. And suddenly the erstwhile soap star was being invited to Oscar parties and hearing his name swirling in the James Bond rumour mill. With the attention of Hollywood piqued, the future is something the Burnley boy plans on grabbing with both hands (p48).Mauro Colagreco, the much-garlanded three-Michelin-star chef behind 2019’s World’s Best Restaurant (Mirazur in Menton), believes the future of food, and the health of our planet, relies on a shift to local produce, particularly fruits and vegetables. Discover how that commitment is manifested at Colagreco’s eponymous restaurant at the new Raffles hotel on page 30. On the subject of food, did you know that almost 50 per cent of the mass-market products we eat today weren’t invented five years ago? Meet Marije Vogelzang, one of a growing number of ‘food designers’ concocting the dishes of tomorrow, on page 38.Who else? Art gallerist Alison Jacques, who is on a mission to provide overlooked artists of the past with a platform in the present (p42); eight rising star fashion designers changing the way we dress (p82); and a cohort of space-age watchmakers experimenting with the very way we measure time (p90).Plus: is artificial intelligence the future of art (p66)? Are algae trousers the future of fashion (p94)? Will, and should, Saudi Arabia’s sci-fi vision of the future, Neom, ever be built (p16)? And, now that it’s open to international travellers, will AlUla, the country’s ancient World Heritage region, become the new Petra (p114)?Make your own predictions. Enjoy tomorrow’s issue.

Richard Brown

Editorial Director

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