Paul Feig
MR. PAUL FEIG TALKS US THROUGH HIS PERSONAL STYLE AND HIS GEORGE CLEVERLEY COLLECTION. MANY THANKS TO @MRPORTERLIVE. HEAD TO THE MR PORTER JOURNAL TO WATCH THE FULL VIDEO.
It’s 90ºF in the shade in Los Angeles and Mr Paul Feig is in full fig: light grey three-piece suit from Anderson & Sheppard, Turnbull & Asser shirt, George Cleverley shoes, purple tie from Charvet and a little lilac Lanvin flower in his lapel – not that you’d ever see him sweat. The director of Bridesmaids, Spy and Ghostbusters, to name just a few, seems to have mind control over the mercury. Or at least his response to its rise. “My feeling is that you can make yourself as hot or as coolas you want to be,” he says. “In the old days, everybody wore wool all the time, even when it was like 100 degrees out – wool suits with ties and top hats – and they were probably dying of heat, but just went, ‘Well I guess I’ll be fine.’ I think people fall back on the idea of, ‘It’s too hot, I can’t dress up.’ I call BS. Just go, ‘OK, I’m just going to take it easy. But I know I look good.’ Maybe looking good can get you past the heat.”
Looking good, of course, is a passion of Mr Feig’s – but only one of the many with which he positively effervesces, overflows, and about which he is wildly ebullient, borderline evangelical. In fact, his new movie, A Simple Favor, out this month, is, among other things, a fervent love letter to one of those passions: the Dukes martini, named for Mr Feig’s beloved bar in Dukes hotel, London, where they make it. (As Ms Blake Lively demonstrates in the film, and Mr Feig does in this one, the Dukes spin is simply frozen gin poured into a frozen glass, which has beforehand been rinsed with vermouth – vermouth which is then tossed onto the carpet… and voilà! A firestarter of a beverage and super-flammable footing.)
About this drink, and the romance behind it, Mr Feig waxes poetic: “I like to look at the martini as sort of the three-piece suit of the drink world,” he says, rhapsodising. “First of all look at the glass. I mean it’s the most elegant glass design in all of drink-dom. Just look at it… to me it says class.” Drinking, he adds, “is all sort of about pageantry”.