How Millennials Learned To Love Old-Money Aesthetics
Younger generations are giving the penny-loafered, chintz-upholstered old-money vibe a 21st-century reboot.
On any given midsummer Saturday night, New York’s Upper East Side is a social wasteland. The neighbourhood’s wealthy habitués flee the city for breezier country homes, leaving their tony stomping ground deserted. Aside from the hum of taxis passing by and the random Pomeranian bark, the streets are all but silent. On a recent July evening, however, rumblings can be heard from a crowd lingering in front of the stately Carlyle hotel. Inside, an earpiece-wearing security guard politely organizes a line snaking through the lobby—a scene more often found outside clubs below 14th Street. They aren’t waiting to hear some mononymous DJ or even to dance; they’re just hoping to snag a table at Bemelmans Bar—the circa 1947 boîte known for piano standards and stiff martinis.
Named after Ludwig Bemelmans, the Madeline author whose whimsical murals adorn the 672-square-foot canteen, the bar is a vestige of Old New York seemingly frozen in time. Waiters in white dinner jackets and bow ties ferry silver bowls of potato chips to every table while a jazz trio plays tunes from the Great American Songbook, just as they have for 75 years. Bemelmans’s consistently gracious service and genteel environs have made it a favourite neighbourhood watering hole for generations of Upper East Siders, from Jackie O and Brooke Astor to the average Park Avenue prince.
The line of this Sunday night, however, isn’t composed of locals roughing it in town for the weekend, though some of them can be found among the bar’s candlelit banquettes. Along with the expected patrons in their Van Cleef & Arpels jewellery and Tom Ford suits, there are Gen Z women taking selfies, a man-bun-sporting dude slipping the pianist a twenty and a hipster carrying a Machado de Assis paperback. They’re all part of a new demographic, coming from downtown, Brooklyn and beyond, that defines such throwback civility as an ideal night out.
Since Bemelmans reopened post-lockdown, there has been a surge of younger clients coming for a taste of bygone Manhattan (and the highly Instagrammable setting). “We never had lines prior to the pandemic,” says Tony Mosca, the Carlyle’s food and beverage director. “Now there are lines out to Madison Avenue on a nightly basis.” The crowds start arriving as early as 3 pm and keep going strong until last call.
“People are able to connect with each other a lot more in this environment than, say, a nightclub,” Mosca observes of the bar’s popularity after months of social distancing. And while Bemelmans has emerged as the city’s hottest new (old) spot, similar influxes have been reported at the St. Regis’s King Cole Bar and the Plaza’s Palm Court, two other haunts of the Social Register set.
Despite the threat of recession and all the talk of inflation’s havoc, wealth—or at least the look of it—is on the rise. And not just any kind of wealth: blue-blooded, Ivy-educated, Newport-summering affluence. Sneakers are being swapped for penny loafers, modernist interiors are being swaddled in chintz and chinoiserie, Hamptons vets are decamping to Palm Beach. All the traditional trappings of WASP-dom, a sensibility that has been upheld by generations of the one percent of the one percent, are striking a chord with many who don’t know Andover from Exeter and couldn’t care less. It’s about the image of affluence, not the cultural baggage.
The Gen Z influencers of TikTok have dubbed it #oldmoneyaesthetic, a term that began trending last spring and that, together with the hashtag #oldmoney, has garnered over 1.8 billion views as of writing. These digital arbiters have devoted countless videos to the topic—primarily stock-photo montages of boiserie-clad châteaux, manicured tennis lawns, models in crisp white shirts and so on—celebrating it as the ultimate lifestyle goal. Often, this world is contrasted with what has been deemed “California rich”: a version of affluence quickly amassed and oft associated with Hollywood glamour. “Why be California rich,” @eileen_darling asks, “when you could be Connecticut rich?”
This strain of discreet wealth has never really been out of fashion—it’s not like Ralph Lauren was ever hurting—but since the pandemic, it has entered the zeitgeist anew. As the adage goes, everything comes back around eventually. So if you’d written yourself off as a fuddy-duddy, we have good news: Your time is now.
The concept of “old money” has been around far longer than polo matches and prep schools, but the phrase really entered the conversation during the late 19th century. The industrial revolution saw merchants and tradesmen attain wealth with unprecedented speed, amassing fortunes to rival those that had been built, and handed down, over generations. Particularly in America, the Puritan tastes of prominent Mayflower descendants were starkly contrasted by the baroque excesses of arrivistes—a conflict central to HBO’s The Gilded Age, which, uncoincidentally, has brought this cosseted class war to prime time.
Illustration of golf-course style Illustration by Marcos Montiel
In Mrs. Astor’s day, the line between old and new money was as clear as an Edison bulb. Now, however, things are considerably murkier. The Gilded Age’s gatecrashers—Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Morgans—are today’s gatekeepers, not to mention that cryptocurrency can make even tech fortunes look quaint. (The very concept of this article, it should be noted, is decidedly not old money. Such wealth is a bit like Fight Club—the first rule is you don’t talk about it.)
“Those times are gone,” says Nick Mele, a Palm Beach–based photographer and lifelong Newport summer-er who documents the modern beau monde in the tradition of Slim Aarons. “When we talk about old money, we’re not talking about where your money comes from or how old it actually is. We’re talking about a mindset.” Where you went to school or what clubs you belong to may still have cachet, but they’re not the price of entry. “We’re in a meritocracy for the most part,” he continues. “It’s about an appreciation for traditional values.”
That phrase may often be thrown out as a dog whistle by conservative politicians, but when it comes to this new embrace of old aesthetics, it’s used in a literal sense. “Old money” now has less to do with the origins of one’s bank account and more to do with what its contents are spent on. There are countless TikToks devoted specifically to this concept; many are apt (Brunello Cucinelli, Hermès, horses) while some have a questionable definition of what constitutes sophistication (Banana Republic, reading, continental breakfasts).
“Some people think it’s just about one thing: the money or the brands or the look,” says DW, a self-described European teen behind @oldmoneyaddicted who declined to provide his name, exact age or geographic location. He claims to have been born into a family with a long, well-documented history, which inspired him to share his insights on old money with his 68,900 TikTok followers. “It’s a lot more: your education, how you behave, how you may go unnoticed with a Patek Philippe on your wrist… Being a gentleman has meaning.” At least as far as style goes, the internet’s general consensus is: Old money is unaffected understatement.
Edith Wharton, who could be considered the Robin Leach of her day, spells out this idea in 1897’s The Decoration of Houses, a kind of Victorian equivalent of “how to get the look” TikToks. Written as a riposte to “the vulgarity of current decoration” employed by parvenus, the book traces interiors of the wealthy back to the Renaissance making a case that good taste is about certain timeless principles: proportion, practicality, quality.
“The simplest and most cheaply furnished room (provided the furniture be good of its kind, and the walls and carpet unobjectionable in color),” she writes, “will be more pleasing to the fastidious eye than one in which gilded consoles and cabinets of buhl stand side by side with cheap machine-made furniture, and delicate old marquetry tables are covered with trashy china ornaments.”
Mimi McMakin, an interior designer and fourth-generation Palm Beach native, sums up the look as “clean, very simple and looks good with a tan.” McMakin, who along with her daughter Celerie Kemble, recently renovated the Colony Hotel—a much Instagrammed rhapsody of wicker, de Gournay palms and flamingo pink that has become the Floridian answer to Bemelmans—seconds Wharton in that old-money decor isn’t so much a specific style as it is an ideology.
“Most important of all is comfort,” she says. Rattling off a list of quintessential elements—tailored slipcovers, Portuguese floor tiles, lacquered coffee tables—she stops herself mid-sentence. “Did I mention down? Down! Down! We are known for the sound when you sit in one of our pieces: oomph. That’s luxury.” Face it: A plush armchair will always be more inviting than some mid-mod design in plywood and polycarbonate.
Which brings us back to the aesthetic’s governing principle: Wealth whispers. In fashion, this rule translates to relatively simple designs—oxford-cloth button-downs, blue blazers, Shetland-wool sweaters—that, more or less, have remained unchanged since they first turned up on Ivy League greens a century ago. “It’s always going to be classic,” says Zachary Weiss, a 30-year-old branding consultant and bon vivant whose 38,100 Instagram followers tune in to see his patchwork madras and “go to hell” pants living the good life from Antibes to Aspen. “You’re not going to look back at a photo and regret putting on this outfit,” he continues, describing the style’s enduring appeal. “There’s this idea of quiet luxury that is emerging with a younger set.”
Even fashion’s cool kids have taken to tinkering with the staid codes of preppy style. For spring 2022, Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu collection went viral with low-slung chinos, pleated skirts and cable knits slashed to dangerously short lengths. For fall, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele riffed on tweedy balmacaans and sweater-vests, while Celine’s Hedi Slimane gave polo coats and Fair Isle sweaters a dose of punk-rock irreverence. Thom Browne, fashion’s most dedicated preppy, took subversion to the extreme in his most recent collection, with boys in repp ties, grosgrain jockstraps and ladies-who-lunch bouclé skirt suits—a look that one imagines wouldn’t fly at any country club, except maybe one on Fire Island.
“We’re seeing a resurgence of what I would call neo-preppy,” says Justin Berkowitz, menswear director at Bloomingdale’s. “It’s not the classic you would have read about in The Preppy Handbook.” He points to designers Mike Amiri and Rhude’s Rhuigi Villaseñor, who are cross-pollinating canonical designs such as rugby shirts and varsity jackets with the swagger of streetwear. While preppy style makes a comeback almost every 10 years, Berkowitz notes that “what’s more interesting about this iteration is that we’re seeing a more diverse ideology incorporated into [the classics].”
As a result, people who once dismissed Ivy style as a white-bread uniform for upper-crust bores are reappraising it. Against all odds, old-school might actually be cool. One of New York nightlife’s buzziest recent openings was the Nines, a downtown approximation of Bemelmans (complete with baby grand and martini sidecars) that replaced a former see-and-be-seen spot frequented by the fashion pack. Even if the gilt ceiling is wallpaper and the red-velvet upholstery skews bordello, the Nines has proven that scenesters can get into Cole Porter. Paradoxically, Weiss says this shift has been most apparent at nightclubs of the disco-ball and DJ variety. “An ‘old money’ look will get you in much faster than, you know, a bunch of Balenciaga,” he says of the most discriminating door policies. “At one point in my life, if I showed up in my normal look, they would be like, ‘No way, nerd.’ Now, it works.”
Casual style illustration Illustration by Marcos Montiel
Lockdown’s closures and social distancing provided prime conditions for old money’s preferred hobbies to find a new audience. Research firm NPD found that last year’s sales of golf-club sets in the US—a good indicator of new players taking up the sport—increased 37 percent year-over-year, and a study of golfers with an average age of 30 showed that the number of rounds played by younger people reached a record high. Similar upticks have been reported in tennis and in sailing, which for the only year in over a decade saw an increase in first-time boat buyers.
Accordingly, the popularity of yacht and country clubs has boomed. The National Club Association, a lobbying group representing 420 private clubs, including such pedigreed institutions as the Everglades and Winged Foot, has found that the number operating at full membership more than doubled since the pandemic’s onset. In moneyed locales across the country, there are tales of couples who, two years ago, would’ve been a shoo-in at any club but now have been wait-listed everywhere. Although the NCA doesn’t track the age of club members, the group’s president, Joe Trauger, reports that at his own Washington, D.C., club, “demographics have definitely been getting younger, and that’s something we’re seeing emerges as a trend in quite a few places.”
The life of leisure speaks to many who took the pandemic as an opportunity to reconsider their relationship with the office. As Weiss observes, “these clothes, this imagery show that you live beyond the workplace.” The Great Resignation’s mass exodus from conventional careers—a recent McKinsey survey estimates that 40 percent of workers are considering quitting their jobs—makes conspicuous enjoyment of the finer things, or what the kids call self-care, less taboo. Hustle culture has given way to pleasure culture.
A similar reassessment happened at home. Lockdown life made people realize they want their interiors to be a sanctuary, but not one so monastic that they can’t actually live in it. “If you have an all-white room, you cannot put a picture of your dog out. Heaven forbid that there’s a magazine or book on a table,” says Bunny Williams, a Sister Parish protégé revered for translating “traditional” to today. Unlike the Scandi-minimalist style that has dominated popular design in recent years, old-money decor accommodates life’s messiness.
“People think that it’s stuffy,” says Miles Redd, a designer who marries WASP-ish taste with a punchy colour sense that would make Wharton blush. “It is all comfort- and practicality-driven: Persian rugs hold up and don’t show dirt, as does chintz; canopied beds keep out a draft and are cozy to sleep in.”
Such pragmatism is a side effect of generational wealth’s dirty little secret: “The WASP world, it was old money,” Williams reflects. “But, a lot of the time, that money didn’t last.” Houses and furniture were often inherited; the spare funds to redecorate, however, were not. So Granny’s sofa got a slipcover instead of being replaced, the old oak floors were painted rather than refinished—layers were added, but nothing got tossed.
Old money’s thriftiness makes the style surprisingly democratic and, particularly for a generation that has inherited only a planet in decline, sustainable. Williams says that antiques dealers she knows have had their best year ever, noting that younger people are now a fixture when she goes antiquing in Connecticut or Atlanta. Redd, too, reports that his younger clients are getting into serious collecting, buying at auction or at Masterpiece, TEFAF and other fairs. “The bottom line is: Things made in the 18th century have craftsmanship you don’t see today,” he says. “And, if you are clever, you can get it for a lot less than something new.”
“In Newport, a beat-up old beach car is appreciated more than a shiny new Porsche or Range Rover,” says Mele, the photographer. To him, the difference between old and new money is embracing cracks in the walls and chips in the china. “There has been a real trend for everything to appear perfect, especially with Instagram. Everybody wants to put forth this idea that their lives are pristine and there isn’t a pillow out of place. That really wasn’t the old-money aesthetic.”
Richard Thompson Ford, a Stanford University law professor and author of Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History, suspects that this embrace of the old school is partly a reaction to the fast fashion and influencers that have proliferated online.
“On the one hand, there’s snobbery involved,” he says of the patrician concept of a “proper” way of appearing. “On the other hand, there’s arguably a critique of the crass overconsumption that we might associate with the Kardashians—that is maybe not so bad.”
Casual was the status quo even before the pandemic, but, especially after the forced sweats-and-sofa routine, formality has novelty. “Menswear was dominated by streetwear for the past, say, 10 years; we’re starting to see that idea change,” says Berkowitz of Bloomingdale’s, noting that customers are increasingly spending more on polish, figuratively and literally. “We’ve seen a huge resurgence of dress shoes… loafers are becoming cool.” Even among hoodie devotees, there’s an urge to get spiffed up and go out on the town.
“There are so many places in New York where you can eat, but there are very few where you can actually dine,” says Angie Mar, chef and owner of Les Trois Chevaux, an intimate West Village restaurant that tips its toque to Lutèce, Le Cirque and others of that ilk, places celebrated as much for their well-heeled clientele as for their haute cuisine. Though Mar rose to fame with burgers and chops at the Beatrice Inn, when it came time to reopen post-lockdown, she decided to change tack and “bring a bit of glamour back to the city.”
Despite its quintessentially downtown location, Les Trois Chevaux is distinctly uptown in spirit. A chandelier salvaged from the old Waldorf Astoria, a discreet Picasso lithograph and arrangements by one of Anna Wintour’s preferred florists set the stage for prix fixe menus, starting at around $380, showcasing frog’s legs mousseline and hen-and-lobster ballotine—the kind of exceptionally complex French cooking that even French chefs have mostly ditched for more egalitarian fare.
Similarly, the Grill, occupying the old Four Seasons space at the Seagram Building, has brought back such midcentury indulgences as prime rib carved tableside, lobster Newberg and baked Alaska. In Los Angeles, Horses has reinvigorated a nearly century-old Sunset Boulevard staple with the clubby, put-it-on-my-tab ethos of socialite favourites Swifty’s and 21. At a recent meal there, a server described one diner’s fish as “a 1980s country club revived.”
It’s not just the food that’s gussying up: Les Trois Chevaux is one of numerous restaurants nationwide that have reinstated dress codes. Where jacket requirements could be perceived as an effort to keep the riff-raff out, Mar sees it as a way of reminding diners that a great meal isn’t just about eating. “It’s an experience,” she says. “Dining should not be any different than going to the opera.”
In interviews for this story, manners repeatedly came up as the utmost defining feature of old money. While politesse is certainly an admirable quality—and, yes, it would be nice if everyone still dressed for the opera—who decides what is impolite? Mele recounts a memory of his grandmother, Newport grande dame Oatsie Charles, at dinner one evening, lecturing his brother on the importance of manners while snatching food from his plate and eating it with her hands: “My brother looks at her and says, ‘Granny, what the hell?’ and she goes, ‘Not table manners!’” The rules aren’t so straightforward.
An illustrated dish Illustration by Marcos Montiel
Jason Jules, co-author of Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style, which traces the evolution of preppy style among Black Americans, observes: “We all use these words like ‘elegant,’ ‘sophisticated’… In the wrong hands, those words are used to judge us, classify us and divide us.” Given that this world has, historically, been the purview of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, it’s a slippery slope from the “right” shoes or shirt to, as Jules says, “you need to have straight hair, to have perfect teeth, to have light skin, to be beach blond.”
“The old-money aesthetic occupies a powerful, symbolic place in American culture,” Ford says of the tendency to romanticize the look. “There’s a nostalgia for a more innocent past…[to] imagine what it would be like to live as a privileged person at a period of time when America’s influence and moral authority were unquestioned—that’s not right now.” Of course, that idealistic picture was just a veneer even then. Today, in light of social-justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, it can be hard to reconcile the resurgence of old-money aesthetics with the moment in which we’re living. It’s especially surprising that Gen Z—the most politically correct generation yet—is so enthusiastically teeing up for croquet.
While one suspects that very few (if any) #oldmoney TikToks are created as conscious political commentary, there’s an implicit statement in virtually storming this rarefied club. That the club has, historically, been open exclusively to straight white conservative elites isn’t a deterrent—adapters aren’t trying to emulate the Mayflower Society, just taking their look and running with it. “We all know it’s the language of the establishment,” says Jules. “But we all want to be able to access that on our own terms.”
In some respects, this return to the traditional can feel like a product of “woke” fatigue. It’s not that old-money aesthetics fly in the face of political correctness; it’s rather that we’re all too tired—from the pandemic, from politics, from the pressure not to offend—to get hung up on whether tennis sweaters or delftware are problematic. Woke culture can, in its own way, be as restrictive as Emily Post. “I’m speaking as a Democratic, Asian American woman, single business owner who has no backing, and I’m into this,” Mar says of her decidedly expensive taste. “Why feel guilty about it?”
People just want to enjoy the pleasures that old money affords, and who can fault them? There’s a reason why this look has stuck around for so long: It’s pretty objectively nice. “Maybe it’s just fun to raid Granny’s wardrobe,” says Jules, dismissing concerns about the politics of it all. Regardless of race or class, he says, “there is only one right way to eat an oyster.” Mrs. Astor surely would agree.
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Forever Young
You’re born, you live, you get old—right? Well, not according to a growing legion of death-dodgers who are prepared to pay any price to reverse the ageing process.
It is, by any estimation, a meeting of strange bedfellows. Gathered here tonight, at the table of a centi-millionaire venture capitalist living in Venice, California, are Kim and Khloé Kardashian, Kris Jenner and the manfluencer-neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. And the reason this hybrid crew has assembled? Part evangelism, part investment drive, and mostly about discussing how to never, ever die.
The menu that evening—black lentils over drifts of veg with berry-strewn nut pudding—nodded to what the head of the table eats every single day, albeit in separate sittings and all before 11.00 am. Bryan Johnson, who sold Braintree Venmo to PayPal for US$800 million (around $1.2 billion) in 2013, now devotes his life and fortune to winding back his biological age. What he calls his “Don’t Die Dinners” manifest a trend in health and wellbeing where the vision of living to 120, 150 and beyond, has moved from anti-ageing scientists, elite athletes and tech eccentrics to a whole new level of celebrity.
“The two futurist topics everyone is obsessed with right now are artificial intelligence and living forever,” says neuroscientist and futurist Joel Pearson. “Interest in longevity has exploded over the last eight months and that’s because of Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die campaign.”
In March, when doctors injected 300 million young Swedish bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) into Johnson’s knees, hips and shoulders, it was in a clinic in the Bahamian resort owned by Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods. The 47-year-old—that’s in chronological years; his heart has the biological age of 37—consumes 32 kg of vegetables monthly and more than 100 pills a day, hits bed strictly at 8.30 pm and will repeat the MSC therapy next year so his joints match his already youthful bone mineral density. Other biomarkers show he has the cardiovascular fitness, muscle mass and nighttime erections of a fit 18-year-old. Johnson’s waking hours are devoted to a regimen of therapies and exercises continually recalibrated by a team of more than 30 doctors, with one goal: to slow down the ageing process. Or as Johnson is fond of saying: “Is death no longer inevitable?”
One of Johnson’s July dinner guests, the charismatic Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, has helped propel this notion of extreme longevity. Huberman Lab is Apple Podcasts’ most popular health and fitness show, and the 16th most popular podcast across all categories. His self-optimisation ethos appeals to the acolytes of the show’s manly backer, former UFC fighter Joe Rogan.
“It’s that bro science,” says Pearson, who heads the Future Minds Lab at UNSW and himself adheres to a routine of saunas, kava and red-light therapy to improve sleep. “It’s the young guys in the gym with the ice baths and the hormones and the hunting.” (Because testosterone declines in men starting from their 30s, attempting to boost the hormone through abstinence has become an ideology of a particularly butch patch of anti-agers; getting good-quality protein by shooting your own is another.)
DJ Steve Aoki (46, but biologically 33) has equipped his Las Vegas home with ice plunge tubs, saunas, pulsed electromagnetic field mats, a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and a tea bar . He has “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” tattooed across his neck and says he’s signed up for “the full-body freeze”—the cryopreservation of his body for future revival.
While US-based futurist Dr Divya Chander says this euphoria around stretching longevity has not extended to women—“I think they still feel limited by their biology”—Hailey Bieber has shown that the gender divide might be shifting. On an episode of The Kardashians, the 27-year-old model (biological age unknown) underwent an intravenous infusion of NAD with her friend Kendall Jenner. NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) is a compound in the body that supports cellular process. “I’m going to NAD for the rest of my life and I’m never going to age,” Bieber said on the show. She was visibly joking yet Jennifer Aniston, 55, told the Wall Street Journal last year that she’s also used NAD+ IV drips, and Kourtney Kardashian, 45, calls her liquid form of NAD “the genetic key to longevity”.
The Sydney-based founders of UAre, an app designed to increase longevity, say that in the early years of testing, men and women responded differently to the product. “The conversation with men was more about winning,” says co-founder Marc Pasques. “‘I extended my lifespan by a year by doing more exercise’, or ‘I extended it by two’. Women talked about hanging out with grandkids.” But he goes on to admit that gap in motivation is closing.
Are has just opened a $1 million seed round and forecasts $10 million in revenue in 2025 and $30 million in 2026. There’s money to be made in extending youth, if not eternal life. Bryan Johnson sells Blueprint basics for US$333 (around $495) a month. The Harvard biologist and author of Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, David Sinclair (chronologically 55; biologically 42), who controversially advocates for resveratrol—a plant compound found in red wine and grapes—as an anti-aging drug and who says there are no limits to how long we can live, has co-patented a skincare line with Caudalie.
Professional services giant PwC argues that the oft-used estimate of the global market value of longevity therapeutics at around $65 billion by 2030 does not take into account the potential for these to replace conventional therapeutics in healthcare. Australia’s first medical facility to offer personalised longevity programs, Longevity Medicine Institute, opened in Sydney’s Double Bay in July. “People are coordinating their aesthetic care with longevity doctors,” says New York-based celebrity cosmetic dermatologist Dr Paul Jarrod Frank, whose clients include Madonna. “They’re using supplements like NAD, newer peptides and various manipulative efforts to try and look younger and live longer.”
Similarly Don Saladino, the personal trainer who’s shaped up Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, emphasises age-extending practices in his star clients’ programs as strongly as any aesthetic goals. As Ryan Reynolds readied himself to assume a “tight-as-hell” costume for this year’s Marvel movie Deadpool & Wolverine, Saladino coached the 47-year-old through better sleep practices, walking and increasing dietary fibre. He reframes strength training as not just body-sculpting but as creating “body armour” for later life, to prevent the falls so catastrophic for the elderly.
And Chris Hemsworth, who plays another Marvel superhero Thor, included efforts to stave off the onset of dementia through meditation and exercise alongside Arctic ice plunges in his bid to increase longevity in the TV series Limitless.
The man who was Australia’s deputy chief medical officer during the Covid-19 pandemic questions the lure of many supplements and longevity interventions. As host of the 9Network’s Do you Want To Live Forever series, Dr Nick Coatsworth visits Okinawa, a “blue zone” where an astonishing number of inhabitants live past 100 in good health. There he watches some local elderly dance to hip-hop. “All that biohacking people do, it’s just a waste of time,” he says. “To live longer, you have to spend time with good friends, keep moving and have a good diet.”
Joel Pearson, who stopped taking resveratrol and NMN supplements years ago after research showed mixed results, agrees. “If there’s compelling evidence showing frequent sauna users can get a 40 per cent drop in all-cause mortality, then why would you spend time worrying about a molecule that has very small effect?”
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Only The Good Die Young
In a future of floating
billionaire summits,
do we really want to
live forever?
Two thousand tech moguls, shamans, CEOs and DJs packed together on a cruise ship for what organisers call “invitation only, one of a kind experiences where super humans make magic”. What could go wrong? That’s the pitch for Summit at Sea, an event billed as a “floating Davos” for millennial technocrats, staged in international waters off Miami. But even if the marketing lingo sometimes threatens to sink under its own weight (“Wherever your gravitational force takes you, our constellation offers wonder”), Summit at Sea captures something about the zeitgeist of what billionaires are looking for now.
They want woo-woo; they want to microdose mushrooms, ketamine and LSD (as championed by the likes of Sergey Brin and Elon Musk), and they most certainly don’t want to die. This issue is about those issues. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel are among the squillionaires bankrolling longevity initiatives— presumably to live long enough to be able to spend all their money. But as Alison Boleyn reports in her first story for Robb Report, even those outre efforts—Thiel is said to receive blood transfusions from people under 25—pale when compared to Bryan Johnson, who reportedly spends $2 million a year on anti- ageing methods. For those of us who can’t afford eternal life, however, the good news is the world is still full of earthly delights.
Take the healthful effects of the Greek island of Tinos or driving the new Rolls-Royce around Ibiza, for example. We also check into an integrated wellness clinic in Thailand and a luxury resort in Spain that focuses on gut health—miso soup and a side of algae, anyone?—and luxuriate in Guerlain’s stunning new day spa outside of Athens. And we spend time with Rory Warnock, a breathwork practitioner and ultra-marathon runner whose tips for curing anxiety and promoting wellbeing are being sought by everyone from CEOs and Olympians to companies like Google and Bupa. And like us, he’s also partial to a well-made negroni. Oh, waiter? Maybe we’ll let the ship sail without us.
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Breathing New Life
Ancient cultures have used it for thousands of years to cure anxiety and promote wellbeing; now everyone from CEOs to Olympians are discovering the health benefits of breathwork.
Rory Warnock is not your typical new-age guy. When we meet him, he’s sipping a negroni overlooking the ocean at Casa Amor in Saint-Tropez, dressed in an open-neck shirt, expensive sunglasses and a jaunty Hermès silk scarf tied around his neck; no kombucha teas or healing-crystal necklaces here. His relaxed posture is a far cry from 10 days ago when he was preparing to run a 200 km marathon through the Tian Shan mountain range in remotest Kyrgyzstan. “I carried everything I’d need for six days in the mountains. My pack weighed 10.8 kg on day one, excluding water. And I surprisingly ended up coming third,” he says.
According to Warnock, this staggering feat of endurance was mainly down to one thing: breathwork.
Proclaimed as an all-natural wonder drug by an ever-growing chorus of scientists, doctors and fitness enthusiasts, breathwork describes the act of inhaling and exhaling in a way that brings an overwhelming, sometimes euphoric, sense of calm and balance to your body. Though it dates back thousands of years—evidence has been found to suggest the practice was adpoted in ancient India, and shamanic cultures in South America, Africa and Australia—modern-day breathwork broadly falls into two different categories.
The first is the mindful breathing that forms an essential part of yoga and meditation: alternate nostril breathing, or box breathing, are taught as simple physiological tools to downregulate the nervous system and move the brain from fight or flight mode. It’s believed these simple methods re-tune brain chemistry, by reducing the amount of noradrenaline to the organ—akin to popping Valium or taking a perfectly safe mini-tranquiliser.
The second is holotropic breathing, which is deep, transformative breathwork. Devotees says it’s more like taking a mushroom trip. Pioneered by Dr Stanislav Grof in the ’70s, it invloves laying on your back in the dark and following a sequence of breathing patterns as you’re guided by a trained facilitator—and is often set to music. It’s claimed that this more intensive work can yield powerful results by connecting to the subconscious, releasing accumulated trauma and accessing inner wisdom.
Nine years ago, Scottish-born Warnock took a risk. He traded working for a successful packaged goods company in London for a career as a breathwork coach in Sydney—long before his passion was an internet buzzword. The move, however, was not necessarily driven by financial motives. “I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression at a pretty young age, like 21 or 22 years,” he says, taking another sip of his negroni. “I was pretty much crying myself to sleep for about three years and I didn’t really understand what was going on.”
Dissatisfied with being prescribed “a little white pill” by his doctor and given a “pat on the back”, Warnock began to look for new ways to heal his condition. “I tried to do everything I could to improve myself in a more holistic way and so I got into running,” he says. “I changed my lifestyle.”
And more significantly, he discovered breathwork, giving him a new mission in life. “When I first heard about it, I thought ‘breathwork’, that sounds a bit ridiculous. Someone is going to tell me how to breathe in a certain way and it is going to change how I think and feel and ultimately perform day-to-day? But I went along to one session and that one hour changed the direction of my whole life. I was hooked on the feeling. I was hooked on the immediate effects, hooked on feeling joyful, happy, strong, empowered.”
In person, Rory’s enthusiasm is infectious, but his testimonials are, increasingly, backed up by science. A 2014 study by the Stanford Research Unit found breathing exercises to be effective for treating PTSD in combat veterans; and by 2016, US Navy seals started using breathwork to achieve calm and focus before battle. British neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson calls it the “the most precise pharmaceutical you could ever give yourself, side-effect free”, while some researchers claim breathing exercises are an effective, low-cost treatment for PTSD, bi-polar, insomnia, and can even help combat grief.
The general public are buying into the movement, too; according to a report by the Global Wellness Institute, breathwork has experienced a 400 percent uptick in popularity since 2019. And, unsurprisingly, billionaire technology titans, who are always looking for the next big health panacea, are buying in. “It’s all very steeped in Silicon Valley tech culture,” said Jag Gill, a New York-based banker turned tech CEO in a recent interview with The Washington Post.
Dr Smita Dsilva is an ayurvedic doctor (ayurveda being an ancient Indian alternative medicine) at the RAKxa Integrative Wellness in Bangkok, Thailand, a clinic that received celebrity patronage in July when supermodel Kate Moss passed through. “Breathing exercises have been used for centuries as a powerful tool to manage stress and anxiety, increase focus, and improve overall wellbeing. In the high-pressure business world, this is a simple yet effective practice, she says. “Giving attention to the breath promotes the purification of both the mind and body, while also raising the energy. It also frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts that promote anxiety… regular practice can release up to 80 percent of the body’s toxins through the breath.”
And breathwork is not just an elixir for various negative mood states. According to Dsilva, the practise can also help with aesthetic issues: “Kapalbhati pranayama is a specific breathing technique in yoga that involves forceful exhalations and passive inhalations, engaging the abdominal muscles throughout the practice. The vigorous breathing and abdominal contractions help reduce bloating and support the removal of toxins, potentially leading to reduced belly bloating and weight loss.”
These findings will not be news to the clients who flock to Rory Warnock’s breathwork school in Sydney’s Bondi suburb. Or to the Olympic athletes, AFL players and CEOs who are huffing and puffing his studio door down on a regular basis. Most likely due to his soft Scottish accent and self-effacing manner, Rory has been adpoted by a raft of high-calibre companies, including Google, Amazon, BUPA and Energy Australia, eagre to learn how mindful breathing can bring better productivity to the workplace. He’s an ambassador for Apple and Lululemon, and has evolved into a seasoned conference speaker. Warnock’s brave career-change gamble has clearly paid off.
When he’s not teaching the world’s movers and shakers how to harness the power of something that we all do around 20,000 times a day without even thinking, Rory has gotten into the habit of bookending his year with long-distance races; for him, breathwork and ultra-marathon running are intimately linked. But he insists that mental issues can be addressed on a more prosaic level.
“You don’t have to go for a 45-minute yoga class or a run,” he insists. “You can just do a few minutes or even a few seconds of breathwork and you can move from a low state, to a better mood state. And it is exactly the same with anxiety; if you are feeling stressed and overwhelmed, there are breathing exercises you can do in real time to shift how you feel.” Negronis are allowed, too.
Rory Wornock, discover Rory Wornock’s breath lessons on Spotify.
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The Bird Man
Neil Perry returns to the Cantonese coop
with a sensational new Sydney eatery.
When Neil Perry was casing a potential venue for a new restaurant, a heritage-listed, modernist masterpiece in Double Bay designed by the architect and former Woollahra mayor Neville Gruzman, it reminded the celebrated chef of a birdcage. The image of the columbary building, all windows and dramatic vertical panels, captivated him. A year later, it has inspired the opening of Sydney’s most hotly anticipated new restaurant, Song Bird.
The three-level, 230-seater joins Perry’s other joints in the swank block —the award-winning seafood restaurant Margaret, the adjacent bar Next Door and the Baker Bleu bakery two doors up. It also marks a return to Cantonese fare for Perry, who made his name partly on the success of renowned Sydney eateries Wokpool and Spice Temple, and a welcome coming home for quality Chinese in the area.
“Bizarrely, there were two really great Chinese restaurants in Double Bay,” Perry recalls. “The Imperial Peking, just upstairs from where Scanlan Theodore is now, was terrific, and the nearby Cleveland was probably the best Chinese restaurant in Sydney in the early ’90s. That’s what I’m aspiring to.” What made these two erstwhile locations so good, Perry adds, was that they didn’t overreach: “Just beautiful Chinese food and great service. That’s the secret sauce.” It won’t be all Spencer Gulf king prawn dumplings, Peking duck, and steamed ginger and shallot coral trout. Rebel-rousing is also on the menu. Downstairs, in the old Pelicano space, will house Bobbie’s, a speakeasy in conjunction with Linden Pride and Nathalie Hudson of New York’s renowned Caffe Dante, named after Pride’s grandfather, the legendary Australian broadcaster Bob Rogers.
The good times will also be rolling on September 17, when Robb Report takes over Song Bird to serenade Perry, our Culinary Master of the Year. When it came time to select the year’s standout gastronomic talent, the choice was easy. Ditto the avian-esque venue. As such, be sure to pick up our next issue for a special section devoted to Culinary Masters. It’s bound to make gourmands chirp with delight.
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Shooting Star
As her four-decade retrospective embarks on a national tour, convention-challenging Australian photographer Anne Zahalka is looking backwards to move forward.
Anne Zahalka’s office is a museum-worthy cabinet of curiosities. Located on the first floor of the photographer’s terrace in Sydney’s inner city, next to a room that serves as a makeshift studio, it is replete with the standard ephemera and clutter of an artist’s lair. On the wall in front of her desk hangs a portrait (taken by Zahalka’s aunt, a fellow photographer) of her mother as a young woman and a shelf filled with CDs, floppy disks and other outdated technology; on another, mounted shelves heave under the weight of 40 years of project folders.
“Maybe it’s because I’m getting older,” Zahalka, now 68, says over tea while flicking through the pages of documentation from her first show in 1981, “but I’m feeling increasingly nostalgic, and these folders are invaluable. Being able to go back to the year the works were made and looking at the documentation and research is beyond helpful. I turn to them all the time.” Behind Zahalka’s desk, a bookshelf teems with magazines and publications she has been featured in and go-to reference books on everything from trompe l’oeil to Goya and portraiture.
The curated miscellany is not only an invaluable source of daily inspiration, but as a maquette on top of a filing cabinet suggests, it is also a focal point of a new exhibition. Running through October 19 at Sydney’s National Arts School (NAS) before a national tour, Zahalkaworld—An Artist’s Archive is the most comprehensive survey of the photographer’s work since she emerged in the early 1980s and bloomed into one of Australia’s most thought-provoking artists. At the heart of the exhibition is Kunstkammer, a life-size immersive recreation of Zahalka’s office—albeit a bit tidier than in reality. “It’s the centrepiece of the show,” says the softly spoken artist. “I like to be generous about how my work is made and the thinking behind it. People don’t get to see that often, and this is an opportunity to open that up and share where I have lived and worked.”
Staged over the two floors of the NAS Gallery, Zahalkaworld, which debuted at the Museum of Australian Photography in 2023, presents more than 100 original prints from 15 series over the years, and assorted curios and collectibles from her office and studio. Her initial reworkings of Old Master and Early Australian paintings presaged a fondness for collage and photomontage, working with found historical images to tell new stories about underrepresented members of society. In one of her most famous works, The Bathers (1989), a recreation of Charles Meere’s Australian Beach Pattern (1940), she recasts the all-white original with a diverse cast of characters she encountered in the late ’80s after returning to Australia from a Berlin residency. “I’m interested in how we are represented and in our national image,” she says. “My work often tries to decode and untangle that and come up with other figures not represented in the culture.”
The exhibition marks a poignant homecoming of sorts for Zahalka, having studied at the NAS in the late ’70s before returning a few years later to teach photo-media. Sharing pride of place alongside six of her works from the gallery’s collection are five recent works that deal with natural history and incorporate images of old museum dioramas in her sharp, often humorous criticisms of tourism and other environmental interferences wreaking havoc on the planet. Cast aways (2024) is set against the background of a 1939 diorama of Lord Howe Island at the Australian Museum. But in Zahalka’s reworking, pioneering conservationists (lifted from another painting) examine plastic pollution while planes fly overhead, and contrails replace clouds.
Something is comforting, she adds, about recreating and reimagining these historical scenarios, even if it is to comment on the consequences of ocean pollution. As for revisiting her past, what has looking in the rearview mirror revealed about herself and her work? “Some things, like making these disruptions on history to speak about the current place we’re in, have remained the same,” she says. “But if this whole process of preparing for the show has taught me anything, it’s that there are a lot of parts to me.” The studio may be messy, but nostalgia has never looked so fresh.
Visit NAS Gallery for all ZAHALKAWORLD showing until 19 October.
Top image: Anne ZAHALKA, The Artist (self portrait) 1988, taken from the series Resemblance II. Silver dye bleach print, 50.0 x 50.0 cm. Image supplied courtesy of the artist, represented by ARC ONE Gallery (Melbourne) and Dominik Mersch Gallery (Sydney).
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