Luxury magazine: June 2019

One hundred years ago, as Europe emerged from the horrors of the First World War, a British social reformer, Eglantyne Jebb, came up with a radical proposition. As a result of Allied blockades, millions of children in enemy territories such as Austria and Germany were starving to death. Jebb set up Save the Children to try to alleviate some of their suffering.

“The cause she was fighting for was extremely unpopular,” reflects Claudio Tesauro, a member of the board of Save the Children International, when we meet in Dubai. “She was asking British people who had lost lots of young men in the conflict to assist the sons of their enemies, who were dying.

“The idea of assisting the son of your enemy is certainly visionary. But she always argued that there is nothing more international, in terms of language, than the cry of a baby.”

This year, Save the Children is celebrating its centenary – an occasion that is, in many ways, bittersweet. “My wish for Save the Children is that we only celebrate one centenary; that in 100 years, we will no longer exist, that the world won’t need us [anymore],” says Tesauro.

At present, the need for the organisation is as great as it was in Jebb’s lifetime. As Tesauro points out: “The challenges that children face today are unfortunately very similar to those that they faced 100 years ago. Maybe from a geographical point of view, a few things have changed but, still, an incredible number of children under the age of five die for reasons that are unacceptable.”

According to Save the Children’s 2018 annual report, an estimated 5.4 million children under the age of five still die each year from preventable causes – that’s about 15,000 everyday. Ill health, malnutrition, exclusion from education, child labour, child marriage, early pregnancy and violent death are just some of the many issues that Save the Children is trying to combat.

Immigration patterns are bringing many of these issues back to Europe – and creating a series of other complex challenges, Tesauro highlights. “How to help people at home? How to distinguish between immigration and human trafficking? How to make sure that those immigrants, once they reach a country, become a resource for that country, and not a problem to be dealt with?

“The argument has become very political. Politicians all over the world have leveraged people’s fear of immigrants to support their political manifesto and propaganda. Certainly it is a very complex argument and needs great attention, but I don’t think the answer of any civilised country can be to just close the door to people who have risked their lives to reach a better future,” he says.

In 2018, the charity helped 134 million children in 120 countries. Its campaign promise is “every last child” and its aim is for all children “to learn, survive and be protected” by 2030. Is this feasible? “Yes,” Tesauro responds, without hesitation. “We have to.”

In the meantime, Save the Children will also have to help rebuild trust in the NGO sector, which has been tarnished in recent years by reports of inappropriate, unethical and even illegal activities. NGOs have come under increasing scrutiny, with calls for greater transparency and accountability.  

“Our founder was the first to say that an NGO has to be run like a company,” says Tesauro. “It has to have a transparent and clear balance sheet; you have to prove the origin of the money you receive and how you spend it. The success of the organisation is not actually the success of the organisation itself – it is the success of the action and scope you are trying to achieve.”

And this cannot be achieved in isolation, Tesauro maintains. “We know we cannot do it alone. We need to work with institutions; we will never be able to replace government action; and we need private stakeholders to support what we do.”
One private stakeholder that has supported the organisation’s efforts over the past decade is Roman jewellery brand Bulgari, which, through sales of its dedicated Save the Children jewellery collection, has raised almost $90 million (Dh330.5m) globally since 2009. This has been invested in 114 projects in 34 countries, primarily in the field of education.

Last month, Bulgari added a new piece to the collection – a disc-like pendant in sterling silver and onyx, topped with a red ruby from Mozambique. This fourth addition to the line retails at $770, with $100 from each sale going directly to Save the Children.  

With the aim of boosting its overall donations to the charity to $100m within a year, Bulgari also unveiled a local campaign called Give Hope, featuring celebrities, influencers and community figures such as Lebanese actress Nadine Nassib Njeim, Saudi singer Aseel Omran, Tunisian model Rym Saidi and TV personality Diala Makki, shot by British photographer Rankin. It was also announced that, starting in Dubai this year, Bulgari Hotels and Resorts will be introducing a fundraising programme, encouraging hotel guests to make a donation upon checking out. “The relationship with Bulgari is historical,” Tesauro explains. “In 10 years, we have done an incredible number of things.”

He acknowledges that the partnership had to be handled delicately in the beginning – that an NGO and luxury brand do not immediately appear to be obvious bedfellows. “I mean, combining a fashion brand with a non-profit organisation was not an easy issue. It could have opened us up to the criticism that this large luxury brand just wanted to do something to make its image more acceptable. The true story is that the commitment of Bulgari has been unique since the very beginning – in terms of support, money, activities, flexibility and the people in charge.”

Importantly, Bulgari offered the NGO an immediate minimum guarantee – if sales of its Save the Children jewellery collection did not reach the pledged amount, it would cover the shortfall. It was also able to leverage its relationships with celebrities and influencers, to help spread the word about Save the Children’s initiatives worldwide – enlisting about 300 high-profile individuals to become involved on a pro-bono basis.  

“Those people can make the world aware of what we are doing,” says Tesauro. “They have a capacity that is unique, to speak to a vast number of people around the world. That is very strong.”

www.savethechildren.org; www.bulgari.com

Not since Alfred Hitchcock has a filmmaker channelled such an impeccable sense of aesthetics as a means of telling stories on the big screen. And in his latest film, a venture with fashion brand Valentino, produced by the maison’s creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli, Luca Guadagnino turns that concept up a notch.

The Staggering Girl premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, in the Directors’ Fortnight section, and stars Americans Julianne Moore and Kyle MacLachlan, along with Swiss actress Marthe Keller. It is everything we crave in a movie – intriguing storyline, glamorous characters and spellbinding images – packed into a minimalist 37-minute package. I walk away from the screening yearning for an all-new wardrobe and a trip to Rome.

I meet Guadagnino, Piccioli and their leading ladies at the JW Marriott hotel in Cannes, during a mini press conference. The event is being held inside a nightclub, which in the daylight looks anticlimactically kitsch, complete with large potted plants and a baroque-inspired carpet stamped with an oversized fern pattern. Yet, the cast and filmmakers still manage to look perfectly elegant within that setting, the men in essential black, Keller wearing a black suit and a T-shirt featuring the famed “VLTN” letters, and Moore in a short, silver, sequinned Valentino number.  

“I’m so interested in the fact that we feel compelled to decorate our bodies and our surroundings,” the actress admits. “We don’t have to… but we have this compulsion. I mean, I feel like wearing a short, sequinned Valentino dress at four o’clock in the afternoon, and so I’m going to!”

Fellow actress Keller chimes in with her own interesting take on fashion. “My mother always said: ‘We are not rich enough to buy cheap stuff.’ It stayed with me, and if I open my closet, I have things from 40 years ago, still lovely because of the way they are cut and their quality.”

The Staggering Girl is a story told across continents – in New York City and Rome – about a complicated mother-daughter relationship that also travels across time. The film stars only one male actor, MacLachlan, who is surrounded by all these exceptional women. “It is very unusual that you get to have a story with only one man, one guy playing all the parts,” Moore acknowledges.

Guadagnino is an interesting blend of cultures. Born in Palermo, Sicily, his mother is Algerian and his father Italian. He spent his childhood in Ethiopia, studied film history and literature at La Sapienza University in Rome and now lives in an ancient palazzo outside Milan. He speaks various languages, but always regretted not learning Arabic. Piccioli says of the talented director: “I’m a big admirer of Luca and his power, because for me, he possesses a kind of beauty that already has a story.”

One only needs to watch the film that first put him on the cinematic map, I Am Love starring Tilda Swinton, to realise that Guadagnino has a special relationship with beauty. The austere grey-toned architecture that is typical of Milan and its surroundings, the clothing worn by the film’s bourgeois heroine, designed by Raf Simons for Jil Sander, and the men’s chiselled Italian good looks, all conspire to tell a compelling tale of missed passions and an unfulfilled life.

In the films that followed, features like A Bigger Splash (where Guadagnino also called on Simons, then at Dior, to outfit his favourite leading lady Swinton), Call Me by Your Name and Suspiria, fashion also plays a starring role. It is a delicate balance between style and substance – and no one does it quite as well as Luca Guadagnino.

Famously, Suspiria costume designer Giulia Piersanti had to recreate a mixture of 1970s-inspired patchwork, prints and outfits straight out of the West German period magazine Sibylle – think “a socialist version of Vogue” – for the 2018 retelling of Dario Argento’s supernatural vintage horror flick. The result was visually stunning, a sort of Rosemary’s Baby meets the films of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, all dyed in maroon Rajneesh cult-inspired hues. There were even dresses made of hair extensions.

But Guadagnino’s own love affair with fashion has less to do with clothes and more to do with those who create them, he explains. “We have to discriminate between fashion as an industry and the creative people who make fashion and inspire it – like Pierpaolo and many others who represent, for me, the power of creativity, the power of the idea of the person.” For the Italian filmmaker, fashion has more to do with “the profundity of the character, than with the surface”.

This profound connection with the people behind the way we dress is the reason that in 2012, the filmmaker founded his company, Frenesy Film, which focuses specifically on collaborations with fashion brands. Among his best works are short films for Giorgio Armani, Sergio Rossi, Cartier and Salvatore Ferragamo – Guadagnino has directed a documentary about the iconic shoemaker to the stars that will be out later this year.

The spark for The Staggering Girl came from Piccioli himself, Guadagnino confesses. “It all started with Pierpaolo and his staggering work. I have been an admirer of his for so long and have been kindly invited to see some shows. And every time I’ve been seeing the shows, including the haute couture one, I could tell there was something so powerful and resonant that was transcending the mere beauty of the dresses,” the filmmaker says. 

The project came together when Piccioli invited the director to watch the Valentino haute couture show in Paris last July. Guadagnino took with him “a brilliant filmmaker, Michael Mitnick, who is a writer, and we sat through the show together. At the end of it, we were mind-blown and started to have so many ideas and thoughts. We really felt we [had]experienced a great novel in the shape of a great couture collection – and the same night, Pierpaolo, Michael and I said: ‘Yes, let’s try to translate this narrative into another narrative, and everything came together.’”

Piccioli’s own inspiration for the autumn/winter 2018/2019 haute couture Valentino show came from cinema. “I was working on this collection about the idea of a stream of consciousness; of how deep you can go to understand a character and I was thinking of Medea, [Italian film director, poet and writer] Pier Paolo Pasolini and Greek myths altogether,” he explains.

About making The Staggering Girl, Piccioli admits that: “I didn’t want at all to have a movie about fashion – that would have been a documentary maybe, but it’s not interesting for me.” So what is interesting to the lithe, soft-spoken Rome native? “For me, what’s important, even in fashion, is the power of dreams and emotions; that’s something that really delivers your personality, not how many hours you can use to make a dress, or how many beads.”

Piccioli was in NYC on May 21 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for a talk about the narrative power of fashion – so I ask him how clothes can tell a story. “Doing a collection, doing a show is in a way like making a movie,” he begins. “When you see a runway show, I hope you’ll get the emotions I have and the values I believe in and my idea of beauty.

“For me, fashion works when it delivers more than just clothes; when it delivers beauty and through beauty you can deliver emotions and dreams; and you can allow people to talk about something else.”

One concept that comes up time and time again with Piccioli is gracefulness. “Grace is a word that is perhaps forgotten today, because we talk about surface, the moments, but grace is something that comes from inside.”

Guadagnino elaborates on his own use of fashion within the entire narrative process: “I think when you do a movie, and particularly when you build a character with your partners, it is crucial and essential to start from the way these people look and then how they behave.”

The Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards recognise that small ideas can have an enormous impact. Sarah Maisey meets some of this year’s finalists

“Awards are a time to reflect on where we are and where we want to be, by saying these ideas will help create the world we want to see,” the Oscar winning actress Lupita Nyong’o said at the recent Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards in San Francisco. As a guest speaker at the event, Nyong’o’s words neatly encapsulated the mood of the evening: we were all there to witness dynamic entrepreneurs pitch ideas that could make the world a better place.

This year, the initiative received a record 2,900 applications from 17 countries, whittled down to 21 finalists. And although there are countless awards open to entrepreneurs around the world, what makes the Cartier Women’s Initiative so interesting is that it was unapologetically conceived to support women-led businesses. As Cyrille Vigneron, president and chief executive of Cartier says: “Cartier started this because we have mainly women customers.

“We discovered that women were having more trouble than men starting a business, with many having difficulties getting financing. Only three per cent of start-ups run by women get funding. So there was a big imbalance, and for us to help support the redressing of this inequality made sense.”

Since it was launched 13 years ago, the Cartier Women’s Initiative has had 219 winners from 51 countries. The globe is divided into seven regions, with three finalists selected from each. The seven winners each receive a $100,000 (Dh367,250) cash injection and 12 months of guidance and mentorship from industry leaders who offer expertise in the fields of business, marketing, management and finance. Partly thanks to this vital support, an impressive 80 per cent of the winning businesses are still going, despite a grim US start-up failure rate of 50 per cent within five years, and 70 per cent within 10.

The finalists for 2019 are a dazzling bunch. Take Ran Ma from America, for example. The founder of Siren has developed smart socks that detect fluctuations in the wearer’s temperature, pre-warning diabetes sufferers of potentially serious health issues. Or the investment platform InvestEd, set up by Carmina Bayombong when she realised that low-income students in the Philippines were being denied access to universities. The three finalists from the Mena region are equally inspiring, with each tackling pressing – and locally relevant – social issues.

Here, the three female entrepreneurs talk about their projects in their own words.

Mena finalist: NaTakallam by Aline Sara

NaTakallam, Arabic for “we speak”, was co-founded by US-born Lebanese national Aline Sara in 2015. Using Skype, it connects students eager to learn Arabic in one country, to Syrian refugees who are able to teach them in another. Students get private lessons, while refugees gain an income and a sense of purpose.

“I don’t think any of us grasp what it is to be a refugee today. One in four people in Lebanon is a Syrian refugee, and 65 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes,” Sara tells me. “The overwhelming majority of these are stuck in limbo. They are stuck at border crossings and refugee camps, often in countries bordering the violence they fled, but don’t have any form of work permit. They have no way to restart their lives.

“I graduated from Columbia in human rights, social justice and conflict resolution, at the same time as the Syrian refugees were crossing into Lebanon, an already fragile state plagued with religious tensions and complexities. I realised this combination was catastrophic, because without economic opportunity, people turn to radicalisation and violence.

“Looking for a job, I knew I had to brush up on my Arabic, and then it hit me. I had always wanted to go to Damascus to study Arabic, but now all of these Syrians were in Lebanon. I realised I could hire them as my tutors and pay them informally. It would be win-win: I would get access to affordable, flexible language practice and they would get an income and dignity.

“When I first explain this to people, though, they assume it is the refugees being tutored, because we are so used to thinking of them as passive recipients. We are trying to flip that around.

“The rest of the world didn’t wake up to the refugee crisis until Alan Kurdi, the little Syrian boy who drowned. Suddenly, our website went viral and we had 300 people signing up for Arabic classes.

“It is typically men fleeing because they have either been drafted to fight by Assad or by the militia. The regime keeps their passports, so when they flee, they have no way of proving who they are. They have been uprooted and have lost everything.

“We help a lot of middle-class refugees who aren’t served by the NGOs. These organisations have a mandate to look after the most vulnerable, so the middle class community is caught in limbo, trying to survive on their savings.

The work we are doing is urgent. We cannot just ignore displaced people, but political leaders are using refugees as scapegoats. “It is hard to wake up to that every morning, but I still have the refugees who told me I saved their life, or the students who told me they never thought they would meet a Syrian who liked Pink Floyd.

Khadija is one of our language partners and she fled [from]
Syria to Iraq, which tells you how bad the situation really is. She has been in the camp for three years, she has two kids and she has cancer, yet she is amazing. We recently did a lesson between her and nine-yearolds in New York and, at the end, the children wanted to donate to a refugee organisation. 

“In another case, one of our tutors in Brazil broke his laptop, and a student mailed him a new one. I had no idea. He never told us. It’s that sort of thing that matters. It’s the non-tangible, the non-monetary, because ultimately it’s human connection.”

Mena finalist: Spica Tech by Reine Abbas

Reine Abbas, from Lebanon, started her company Spica Tech because of her son. “He knows I produce games and have my own gaming company, and he asked me to teach him and his class. So I spoke to his teacher and created a 14-hour course in game design. We had 25 four-year-olds creating their own video games. They learnt game design, coding, storytelling, implementation and how to test it,” Abbas recalls.

“Later, one mother told the teacher her daughter could now explain how a washing machine works. Her daughter had understood the logic, the orders, the conditions and she was able to explain it all to her mother. When I heard this, I knew I had to do something bigger.

“Kids in the Mena region are the biggest digital consumers in the world; they are digital junkies, but they are consumers, not creators. As a game developer and university professor, I know the industry in this region is poor – we just Arabise existing games. “This huge industry will be worth $100 billion (Dh367.25bn) in two years, creating thousands of jobs, but in this region, there is no education to help kids get into it as a career.

“Mixing my experience with my child’s education, I founded Spica Tech. It is an academy for children and teenagers to learn how to make their own video games. I am not teaching them coding – everyone is teaching coding – instead, I am giving them professional knowhow of highly complex production, using real industry software. In two years, we have taught more than 500 kids, and had more than 50 of their games published online, which is so empowering for them.

“We work with NGOs to also give an opportunity to refugee children, girls in particular. Only 15 per cent of this industry worldwide is female, so I really want to encourage them, because for many refugee girls, marriage is their only future. But I know that if we can give them the skills with coding and design, they will be able to do anything.

“We use the same software the industry uses, so I am creating real game developers, with real skills. I have created an online platform with a game engine to reach more kids, and have also designed a system for artists and developers to submit their courses. We have just signed a deal with the App Store and Google store, so our children can submit their games for free. Apple really believes in us, so Spica kids can publish their games without review.

“Our secret is project-based learning, and offering courses in three languages. Arabic, to teach refugee children and at Lebanese government schools; French, because there are more than a thousand French schools across the region; and English because it is the main language.

“The name Spica means two stars that exist in the solar system, but are seen as only one. This is exactly what Spica Tech is; it is art and science together. We are giving these children a lifelong gift, because too many kids in the Middle East have low self-esteem. We have had kids with dyslexia and ADHD who didn’t notice they were coding, because we were using their passion for video games. The same for kids with cancer. We are helping to change lives. 

“We help kids become resilient and creative because too often, the education system blocks and boxes children. Spica gives them confidence and instils entrepreneurship. I see how it opens their minds.”

Mena winner: Maharat Learning Centre by Dr Hibah Shata

Dr Hibah Shata scooped the top honour for the Mena region at the Cartier Women’s Initiative 2019 Awards. The Saudi Arabian national, who lives in the UAE, founded the Maharat Learning Centre after discovering that her youngest child had austim.

“My daughter Sarah was one-and-half years old when we discovered she was autistic. The doctors suggested a special needs school – but I had heard successful stories of parents being told their child would never have friends, would never learn, would never go to school, but who are now professors and founders of organisations. I wanted that for my daughter and for other children. I wanted to remove them from special needs centres and let them live a normal life, supported by peers and friends.

“Early intervention and applied behavioural analysis therapy were not available in the UAE, so I had two choices. Either immigrate to a new country, or do something myself.

“I started the first medical centre in 2008 for early intervention, with individualised programmes to help the kids go to mainstream school. By 2010, we had 10 students ready, but schools refused to take them. So I set up a child learning and medical enrichment centre as an alternative.

“To have an academic programme, I knew I had to engage the government, so we started the ‘I want to go to school’ campaign, which brought in the government for discussions on inclusion. “We started focusing on what was needed to bring children to school, like assessments, working with behavioural problems, modifying the curriculum and communication skills. And for every autistic child a school accepts, we give the school free training.

“The beginning was not easy. There were so many barriers and every time we achieved a milestone, we still had to build a bridge to the next step. In Dubai, we now have 150 students, 70 per cent of whom are in mainstream schools. For those children who cannot access mainstream education, we have programmes in technology, and app or graphic design, so young adults can find jobs later. Now Dewa is hiring adults with autism, and we are in negotiations to train, coach and support them, so they can have a career. 

“The problem with autism is that it is increasing; when we started 20 years ago, it was one in 1,000. Now it is one in 59. In 2015, the American government spent $265bn on treatment, with the majority going to adult services because these kids didn’t have early intervention, they didn’t go to school and they now need lifelong support.

“I have seen families give up on their children and that hurts me. I know these children can do much better if their parents engage with them, but some parents feel it is hopeless and just give up. My daughter spoke her first words when she was five, she first told me she loved me when she was eight, and first hugged and played with me when she was nine. 

“I called her this morning and she said: ‘Mummy, I really miss you,’ and now I am starting to feel I have a daughter. It is hard to have a disconnection between you and your child, and even now, I will ask her something, and she will say: ‘It’s too hard to talk, I want to sleep.’ It’s hard for her to connect the words and make a sentence, but she is doing well, and I am very proud of her. She is now 13, is in grade 7, speaks Arabic and English, and is doing her Royal Academy exams in May.

“She still has challenges, but she inspires me, and I hope she inspires other families. We want to connect with all the families to tell them, all they need is to know how to work with their kids.”