For His Next Adventure, a Rothschild Explores Fashion [or Models For Jesus' Second Coming]
By CODY DELISTRATY AUG. 5, 2015
David de Rothschild, center, in Los
Angeles with, from left, Brent Radewald, Jonathan Kirby and Len Peltier, his
partners in the Lost Explorer, a clothing company. CreditJake
Michaels for The New York Times
On a warm day in London, David de
Rothschild, an heir to a centuries-old banking fortune, was pointing
at a butterfly with translucent blue wings.
“Look, look at that,” he said with awe. “Nature has four and
a half billion years of R&D. Incredible.”
He was walking through a butterfly exhibition in a white
tent on the grounds of the Natural History Museum. Mr. de Rothschild, 36 years
old and 6-foot-4, was the tallest person in a space filled with families and
squealing schoolchildren.
“That one’s huge!” Mr. de Rothschild said, pointing at a
brown butterfly that had come to rest in front of his eyes. “Can you imagine
what the world was like before we came and messed it all up?”
He left the tent and strolled down nearby Exhibition Road.
His mood seemed to go sour when he spotted plants in a window.
“That’s nature now,” he said. “When did this happen?
Everything is so premeditated and formulaic. Our idea of nature is a window box
with plants in it.”
Mr. de Rothschild has grown tired of the modern world: the
disconnection with nature, the urban grid, the digital life.
Photo
David de Rothschild, a member of a
centuries-old banking family, has traversed Antarctica and the North and South
Poles, and has sailed from San Francisco to Sydney on a boat made of recycled
plastic bottles.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times
“We’re hyperconnected and we’re
hyperdisconnected,” he said. “We’re losing a sense of wonder; we’re losing a
sense of stimulation from the natural world; we’re losing that interaction with
nature. Nature is not ‘out there.’ ‘Out there’ is here.”
David Mayer de Rothschild was born to
the banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and his second wife, Victoria Lou Schott.
His father, now 83, was the chairman of N M Rothschild & Sons bank in
London.
In his teens and early 20s, David was a
skilled equestrian, bungee jumper and kite skier. At 26, he traversed
Antarctica by foot, ski and kite. A year later, he crossed the North Pole with
a dog sled and skis, making him the youngest Briton ever to ski both the North
and South Poles.
In 2010, he sailed the Plastiki — a
boat made of 12,500 two-liter recycled plastic bottles and other flotsam — on
an 8,000-mile journey, from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia, to raise
awareness of ocean pollution.
Paradoxically, part of what made it
possible for Mr. de Rothschild to escape the grid is what has kept him tethered
to it. Although he prefers not to talk about it, Mr. de Rothschild is, after
all, a Rothschild.
His lineage leads back to Mayer Amschel
Rothschild, who was born in the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt in 1744 and went on
to serve as the financial overseer to Crown Prince Wilhelm, who later became
Wilhelm IX. Mayer taught his five sons the banking business and dispatched them
across Europe. The family bank financed the Duke of Wellington’s defeat of
Napoleon at Waterloo and, later in the 19th century, the railways and
mining businesses at the heart of the Industrial Revolution.
In many ways, David’s own life came as
premeditated as that of a window plant. He was a Rothschild. Great expectations
were implicit.
He attended the all-boys Harrow School
in London, but when it came time for college, he did not go the Oxbridge or Ivy
League route, settling on the less heralded Oxford Brookes University. He
subsequently received a master’s degree in natural medicine from the College of
Naturopathic Medicine in London.
When he was 22, he bought a farm near
Christchurch, New Zealand, and lived and worked in Australia for three years.
He said it never crossed his mind to go into banking.
In 2003, when it was time to choose a
successor to head the family business, Sir Evelyn went with a cousin from the
French branch of the family, Baron David René de Rothschild.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Well, surely, you
should just be a banker,’ ” David Mayer de Rothschild said, “and I’m like,
‘Well, it could be an obvious route, but if I have a choice, which I’m
fortunate enough that I do, do I want to sit in an office all day with a tie on,
doing things that I might not necessarily believe in or be in 100 percent
emotionally; or, do I want to follow the things to which I’m really connected
and passionate and maybe have an impact?’ ”
He faced an enviable but existentially
dreadful conundrum: What would you do if you could do almost anything?
With minimal experience, he went on the
Antarctica trip. Ever since, his life has revolved around adventuring and
eco-entrepreneurship.
In addition to the adventures that
earned him comparisons to the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton in The New
Yorker, he has written books like “The Live Earth Global
Warming Survival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills to Stop Climate
Change” and hosted a Sundance television show, “Eco-Trip:
The Real Cost of Living.”
Now Mr. de Rothschild has started a
business. It is called, aptly,the Lost Explorer.
“I’ve been an adventurer for 15 years,”
he said. “I’ve done loads of expeditions with loads of different partners,
loads of different brands, and I’m always getting approached by brands where
I’m like, ‘Oh, I could do it with them, but I’m not sure if I’m really aligned
with their ethos.’ So why wouldn’t I build my own conversation, my own company,
my own brand that comes from the things that I believe in, the things that I
want to do, and I can trust the process?”
The Lost Explorer is in the Venice
neighborhood of Los Angeles. Among the eight people who work for the company
are Jonathan Kirby, a former Levi’s designer, and Len Peltier, who was Levi’s
creative director. Also on board is Chris Spira, a luxury goods consultant and
a partner at True Capital, a London asset management firm.
The company plans to release its first
line of outerwear in October: a wool-based collection that includes two
mountain jackets, a pair of trousers and a shirt. Shortly afterward, if things
go according to schedule, it will follow with two more pieces, a
merino-cashmere shirt and a merino-Ventile shirt. Most of the collection
reimagines pieces of clothing that Mr. de Rothschild has collected on his
travels.
“There’s a very English side of David,
and so he tends to pull things from late 1800s, early 1900s,” Mr. Peltier said.
“He also has beautiful things from other countries. When he was in Mongolia, he
picked up some pieces. It’s quite a variety. We have a closet we jokingly call
‘the cabinet of curiosities.’ ”
Mr. de Rothschild has opted not to
create a lookbook for his pieces, and he will sell them online or via pop-up
shops in London and New York. The idea is to group the pieces by fabric and
material rather than by season or style.
“We don’t want to tell you how to wear
it,” Mr. Peltier said. “You can mix these things with your jeans, with your
shorts, with whatever you wear.”
Most of the Lost Explorer’s apparel is
made with materials that integrate what Mr. de Rothschild called “bio-mimicry,”
like a heat-wicking technology that imitates the action of a pine cone, with
fibers that open when it senses you are hot and close when it senses you are
chilly. For the technological side of things, the Lost Explorer has teamed up
with Schoeller, a Swiss textile and fabric manufacturer.
The Lost Explorer also intends to
“curate adventures” with smartphone apps that will help travelers find
like-minded sorts for possible expeditions.
“Anything that helps better integrate
nature into people’s lives,” Mr. de Rothschild said.
There is an inherent irony in Mr. de
Rothschild’s recent turn from adventurer to entrepreneur: He has gone from
experiencing nature and advocating on its behalf to making money from it. But
he does not see it that way.
“If someone were to say you’re just
commodifying nature,” he said, “I would say, ‘You can’t.’ If you’re doing
anything, if you’re using nature, it’s becoming a commodity.”
Originally, beneath his company’s logo
on its website were
the words “Est. 1978,” a reference to the year Mr. de Rothschild was born. The
newest iteration has “Est. 2025” to signal that, in his words, “We’re always in
progress.”
“There’s no such thing really as an
original idea anymore,” Mr. de Rothschild said. “It’s just looking at it
through a different lens and presenting it in a different way. The Lost
Explorer is the David lens. But I also respect the people around me. I respect
the refining of that lens.”
Paradoxically, the work and time
involved in creating and running a company meant to celebrate adventure may
narrow the escape routes that Mr. de Rothschild once followed to the ends of
the world.
“There is a dream of going and
disappearing and having a little shack on the beach and not having to do
interviews and engage with people and, you know, be off the radar,” he said
over a lunch of pea soup and salad at Little House, a members-only restaurant
in the Mayfair area of London.
But would he ever really drop
everything to go live on a beach?
“No,” he said. “There’s a fluctuation
in my psyche. I can sleep on the floor for a month at a time — and I have — and
I can travel on the back of a motorbike or a horse or a donkey, and I can sleep
in a tent, and I cannot wash for two months, but then I come back and I’ll come
in and I’ll sit here and I’ll have white napkins and a nice fizzy drink.”
At the ticket counter to the butterfly
exhibition, Mr. de Rothschild had been talking excitedly of his studio in
California when the clerk asked for his first initial.
“D,” he said.
“And your surname?”
Mr. de Rothschild paused. “Rothschild.
R-O-T-H ——”
The clerk stopped him before he could
finish spelling it out. “It’s O.K.,” he said, smiling. “I know it.”
The days of a
possible escape — if they were ever there at all — appear to be over.
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