Features Archives - The Chap (2025)

Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe on the startling discovery of a perfectly preserved belle epoque apartment in Paris. In 2010, auctioneer Maitre Olivier Choppin de Janvry discovered a 1900 Bonbonnière (a bijou apartment) in Paris at the Square La Bruyère. Under a thick layer of dust, he was entering a 140-metre square apartment untouched by human hand for… … Keep Reading

In an excerpt from CHAP Spring 24, Torquil Arbuthnot provides a chronology of the publication from 1999 to 2012. 1999 A chance meeting in the Portobello Road leads to the founding of The Chap magazine, when penniless artist Vic Darkwood chances upon boulevardier Gustav Temple’s market stall. Temple is selling “genuine” pieces of celebrity masonry,… … Keep Reading

The costume designer for multiple oscar winning Oppenheimer travelled halfway around the world to get the right hat for Cillian Murphy. The recent release of Oppenheimer grabbed slightly more attention than a summer film release, partly by bizarrely being lumped in with simultaneous release Barbie, to the point where cinephiles were attending both films as… … Keep Reading

Chris Sullivan follows in the footsteps of James Brooke to discover the lost secrets of Sarawak on a truly incredible journey to Borneo. M first sight of Borneo was in a David Attenborough retrospective special. He visited the world’s third largest island in 1956, met tribes who seemed from another century and rescued a baby… … Keep Reading

A rainy day in Worthing seemed like the perfect setting in which to meet a young fashion designer whose new collection evokes a 1950s French Riviera. John Minns spoke to Scott Simpson about how vintage is the backbone of all his designs, his early mod influences, his views on the paucity of youth subcultures and… … Keep Reading

Paolo Sorrentino’s autobiographical new film reviewed by Gustav Temple. Diego Maradona appears in Paolo Sorrentino’s earlier film Youth, in which the bloated, ageing footballer is still viewed with awe by those who glimpse him at the gates of the Swiss sanatorium where he’s staying. His presence in Sorrentino’s latest, The Hand of God, is less… … Keep Reading

Gustav Temple reviews Edgar Wright’s new psychological thriller set in the swinging sixties Fans of Edgar Wright’s trilogy of comedies Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and World’s End expecting this film to feature amusing fast-edit shots of Simon Pegg getting drunk and losing his girlfriend will find something rather different. The British director, whose… … Keep Reading

Chris Sullivan on how the end of WWI and the Spanish Flu pandemic brought about the birth of nightclub culture in 1920s London. The nightclub ethos as we now perceive it, with bars and dance floors on which men and women actually dance together, began in the 1920s. Before the era, aptly named the Jazz… … Keep Reading

As a tribute to the late actress, who died aged 52 on 16th April, Gustav Temple recalls an inspiring encounter with Helen McCrory in 2019, on the eve of Series 5 of Peaky Blinders. I interviewed Helen McCrory when the fifth season of Peaky Blinders was about to air in 2019. From such a huge… … Keep Reading

On the bicentenary of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s birth, Chris Sullivan gallops through the extraordinary life of the notorious explorer,soldier, translator, writer, cartographer,orientalist, ethnologist, spy, diplomat, poet, geographer, expert fencer and sex obsessive. Can you imagine that, in the not too distant past, a thoroughgoing rogue might stand up in his club in the Haymarket… … Keep Reading

Sophie Gargett of The Dilettante explores the concept of the flâneur and asks what we can learn from it during the age of walking in lockdown “My former ennui had returned and I felt its weight even more heavily than I had before. I doubted whether further attempts at sociability would ever relieve me of… … Keep Reading

In the centenary of her birth, Gustav Temple provides a top five reading list for Patricia Highsmith, plus a reader advisory warning. This year marks the centenary of the birth of Patricia Highsmith, born on 19th January, 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas. It is impossible to guess how she would have reacted to recent political… … Keep Reading