Branded Male

When Rubens had it ruff

Peter Paul Rubens was a colourful character. Just drop into the Flemish master's old house in Antwerp - as I did last weekend - and you'll see what I mean. Artist, entrepreneur and diplomat, he founded a "school" of apprentices to turn out paintings on an almost industrial basis (just like Damien Hirst) and married a vivacious 16-year-old when he was 52. His life was almost as baroque as his work.

He was also something of a snappy dresser. Rubens considered himself a professional rather than a bohemian, and he dressed accordingly. The southern Low Countries were ruled by the Spanish at the time, and this influenced fashion. Men wore dark, close-fitting doublets and a contrasting white ruff - a wheel of pleated cloth that looks very odd today but was all the rage at the time. As well as preventing the doublet from becoming soiled at the neckline, it forced the chin up, conferring a dignified appearance.

The folds of these ruffs became so complicated that they were often supported by a scaffolding of thin wire called a supportasse. The wire was abandoned after the discovery of starch - and as time wore on the ruff became more streamlined. Eventually it lost its stiffness and drooped to the shoulders, looking less vulture and more Saturday Night Fever.

Ruff or no ruff, with his pointy beard and piercing gaze, Rubens had the effortless style of a man with a heightened visual sense. His beautiful Italian-influenced palazzo adds to that impression: as does his orderly garden, with its wooden lattice structures and tended plots. Last Sunday, in soft autumn sunlight, it was full of rust, brown and ochre shades, faintly melancholy and yet deeply pleasurable. Much like gazing at one of his paintings.

Eastern promise at the Tate

Long before the Sartorialist and the Gothamist, long before the internet and blogs, when even typewriters were considered new technology, there were the Orientalists.

These young men and women travelled to North Africa, Turkey and the Middle East in the 18th and 19th centuries, in search of adventure and exoticism. They were lured by dreams of gilded minarets and sensual harems. Many of them were artists. Some, like Byron (top left), were poets. And the images they brought back with them were a curious blend of fantasy and reality.

I very much enjoyed The Lure of the East, an exhibition of British orientalist painting at the Tate Britain in London. (It ends on August 31, so hurry if you want to catch it.) A great exhibition is like a good book: it informs you, inspires you, and floats on the edges of your imagination long after you've left it behind.

And who could fail to be inspired by the orientalists? It must have been wonderful to share a shisha pipe with members of The Divan Club, a group of adventurers who met regularly in London to discuss their travels around the Ottoman Empire. And I would no doubt have been enchanted by Mary Wortley Montagu, who spent long periods of her life in Constantinople, where she adopted local dress and investigated the hidden world of the harem. (This was a more domesticated arrangement than that imagined by her drooling male counterparts, who had bordellos on their brain. Simply change its name to "the ladies' wing" and you get the idea.)

It would have been less wise to get close to Richard Dadd, who went mad in the desert and, on his return, killed his own father in a bizarre fit of nominative predestination. But I wouldn't have minded interviewing the artist John Federick Lewis (right), who lived in Cairo and regularly painted himself in Arab dress. And what dress it is! The complex whirls of the turban, the crackling blue tunic, the broad magenta sash, the voluminous sarouel pants - baggy at the crotch and tight at the ankles - completed by soft turn-toed slippers.

The orientalists may have filtered the east through their fevered imaginations - the word fabulous springs to mind - but their impressions were generally positive. Too often, today, the western media associates the Arab world with upheaval and terrorism. Through the fascination of the orientalists, we see the allure of these rich cultures.

In praise of Parisiennes

"I found a long blonde hair on his jacket, but I didn't say anything in case it belonged to a friend."

Despite the fact that I've now officially lived in Paris for eight years (I arrived on May 11 2000, hardly expecting to stay much longer than a year) there are still huge gaps in my knowledge of French culture. Particularly in terms of popular culture, which is why I was delighted to discover an exhibition devoted to the illustrator Kiraz at the Paris history museum, the Musée Carnavalet.

"My poor husband. He just gets used to my style, and then I change my style."

Born in Cairo in 1923, Edmond Kiraz arrived in Paris in the 1950s and, like many of us, could not bring himself to leave. After dabbling in political cartoons, he was commissioned by the now defunct magazine Jours de France to create a series called Les Parisiennes. Improbably tall, forever chic and not a little seductive, these svelte fantasy figures gambolled across the magazine's pages from 1959 until 1987. Over time, they came to represent a particular type of French woman. As the photographer Dominique Issermann wryly notes: "It's as if [real] Parisian women began to resemble the illustrations of Kiraz."

"She told me so many things I can't repeat that I hardly know where to start."

This may be Art Light - and some of the humour clearly belongs to another era - but there's much to cherish about the illustrations. Kiraz obviously adores Paris, often capturing its streets and moods in a few strokes of his pen. He's also a great judge of fashion, as his girls and their boyfriends are always impeccably dressed. Christian Lacroix says Kiraz has "the eye of a couturier", and who are we to argue?

"If you're determined to take me for a drink, you won't mind if it's an aspirin."

Interestingly, Les Parisiennes have also been used in advertising for brands like Nivea and saccharine brand Canderel. Rather than hiring improbably thin real-life models, advertisers took their notion to its obvious conclusion and used cartoons.

"I see a dark and handsome young man...but I'm keeping him because I saw him first."

But I don't intend to analyze the cultural significance of Kiraz. The fact is that the exhibition made me smile on a humid afternoon, and renewed my love affair - as if that were necessary - with les Parisiennes.

Musée Carnavalet, 23 rue de Sévigné, 3ème arrondissement. Open Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm.

Playing polo in Iran

Sometimes you discover something that you suspect everybody else knows, but which sends your own eyebrows soaring. This happened to me on Saturday when I visited an exhibition at the Louvre called "The Song of the World: The Art of Safavid Iran, 1501-1736". As rich and absorbing as a great novel, the wonderful display captures the lives of the Safavids, the devout yet cheerfully hedonistic Shia dynasty that ruled over Persia for more than two centuries.
The exhibition blazes with ceramics, tableware and miniature, breathtaking illustrations that plunge the viewer into daily life at the Safavid court. This seems to have involved a great deal of singing, feasting, hunting, carousing (many wine pitchers and cups are on display) and playing polo. Yes, that was my great discovery: the Persians invented polo.
In fact, according to our friends at Wikipedia, polo began life in 6th century Persia as a training game for cavalry units, but was later adopted as a sport by the nobilty. The show at the Louvre features at least one glorious tableau of the Emperor on horseback, wielding a mallet alongside his courtiers.
But this is just one way in which the exhibition brings the Safavids vividly to life. They clearly had an immense appreciation for beauty and entertainment in all its forms, and the illustrations range from naked bathing beauties to exquisitely detailed songbirds. Iran today may not be the ideal society, in some eyes, but with the country apparently at the top of the US government's hit list, the exhibition is a timely reminder of the culture and heritage that may soon come under attack.

The missing Lynch

This morning I went to have a mooch around the David Lynch art exhibition, The Air is on Fire, at the Fondation Cartier here in Paris. It was incomprehensible, much like Lynch's film output, but patchily enjoyable for all that. A story from the catalogue illustrates what kind of artist Lynch is. A friend of his was working at a motel where one of the rooms had been closed for a long time. One day this friend was assigned to clean the room. Lying on the carpet were hundreds of dead bees, which had somehow flown in and been trapped by the closed drapes. The friend swept up the tiny bee corpses and sent them to Lynch, who of course stuck them to a canvas and turned them into a work of art.

After the Lynch exhibition I popped in to BHV Homme, the new Paris department store dedicated exclusively to men and their needs. The fashion selection was hardly breathtaking, but the ground floor was a cornucopia of accessories and gadgets. I bought a Remington trimmer for ear and nose hair. After each session I am going to sweep up the tiny hairs and send them to Lynch.