In recent years, many affluent folk have traded the glamour of city life for their own version of Never-Never Land. With just their wanderlust instinct for a compass, they are part of a new counter culture that prefers ocean foam to the platitude of a manor lake and wild scrub to svelte lawns. Such Byronic indifference is often sniggered at when you’ve got a honey-pot in Zurich to fall back on. But New York Times and Vogue editor/author Julia Chaplin finds it all rather inspiring.
These wondering outlaws follow in the footsteps of the Romantics and Beatniks before them, riding the Chaplin-coined phrase ‘Gypstream’ as they put a new twist on the jet set lifestyle. Theirs isn’t the 5 * spa in Dubai, the villa and pool in Ibiza, the usual New York fanfare but the star-infused finca on an isolated patch of wood with no name, that art-nouveau paradise on Bali’s forgotten shore, that rundown mansion on a dirtrack in Goa (where you trade cocoa for gritty tobacco). Chaplin calls it the ‘Gypset Style’, an aesthetic she illustrates in a pioneering volume of the same name, a hardback glossy that is all sun-kissed model-fresh nomads in rainbow tunics, smiling mariachis, bona-fide dancing gypsies, and more redolently, Paul Getty on a starlit terrace in Marrakech.
Jade Jagger would rather squat on a yacht than buy one, the Mignot sisters don’t wear designer clothes and Alice Temperley drinks aguardiente, definitely not Cristal. If you want to go ‘Gypset’ then you have to have standards. G5’s bad, Cessna’s good. They don’t do ‘tacky’, don’t mind falling asleep with salty hair and if you like Neil Young’s After The Gold Rush……but what am I saying? After all, if you are a true Gypset, you make your own rules. And as for new-age glamour….well, that’s something you discover for yourself.
Buy Julia Chaplin’s Gypset Style online at www.assouline.com
