Tempting Fado

Fate is more than just a concept in Lisbon: It’s a lifestyle for the city’s new creative class.

By Ilana Weitzman

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Arco Triunfal, Baixa

Photo by Osvaldo Gago

The cobblestone sidewalks in Lisbon are model-skinny, which explains why our little group is standing out on the street at midnight. Jorge Moita, a local designer, is claiming that Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69” was inspired by the summer the singer spent in Lisbon’s Lapa neighbourhood, when his father, a Canadian diplomat, was posted to Portugal. Jorge’s apartment is behind us, perched atop one of Lisbon’s grand old Italianate buildings. His design partner, Daniela, is supposed to be at a party at a nearby nightclub to celebrate their latest collection. My partner and I are in town for ModaLisboa, the city’s fashion week, and should really be getting more sleep. We have been huddled on this intersection for a while, but no one seems to want to leave. Each time the headlights of oncoming cars swing dangerously close, Daniela says, with quiet acquiescence, “Oh, it’s now.” It’s as though every near-death experience is an eventuality to be accepted here – call it fate – but, at the last minute, we always pull each other out of the way.

Jorge and Daniela are local design duo Krv Kurva, which roughly translates from the Bosnian as “blood prostitute.” (They liked the phonetics.) They’re part of the new guard of Portuguese product and fashion designers who are taking the country’s strong craft heritage – lace, glass, ceramics – for, well, a spin. Design has implanted itself here in the last decade with the same ferocity that seafaring once held in the 1400s. “Maybe designers can now assume that Portuguese attitude that we had so strongly in the past, to find that feeling of discovery again,” Jorge offered earlier in the day over coffee. The two do what they call “fado with a twist,” taking the old-school Portuguese idea of fate and integrating it into their design. “We have a deep history, so to create something new, we have to change history for the right side. Even if God controls everything, we can make fado interesting.”

Fado, we learn, is Portuguese shorthand for fate – and complaining about that destiny, a theme that is most famously put to song in fado clubs that still dot the city. But it’s more than just a concept here; it is a lifestyle. “There is a sadness in the Portuguese people,” fashion up-and-comer Nuno Baltazar told me backstage before parading his models down the catwalk in full fado-singer kit, their hair tied back in elaborate buns. We’d heard the Portuguese were a nation of hypochondriacs, which we would have shrugged off had the local channel not played old episodes of ER on a nearly continual basis. Griping might just be the unofficial national pastime here.

I can see where they’re coming from: Lisbon is a city of accidents. The whole place was demolished in an earthquake in 1755, which sparked a city-wide fire and tsunami that took care of anything that survived the original shakedown. The cobblestones turn into wet banana peels the moment it rains. The taxis are ridiculously cheap – you can drive from one end of the city to the other for under $10 – but it’s a kind of tourist danger pay: Cabbies don’t even pause at intersections to catch their breath. Every fashion designer I arrange to meet is either late or cancels, so I have become accustomed to sitting in bars, accepting phone calls from shrugging waitresses and bartenders. And I nearly meet my own ironic fate, jumping out of the path of an oncoming ambulance as it inexplicably hurtles down a pedestrian laneway.

Being a control freak in Lisbon just doesn’t work. We get used to going with the fado. At Olivier Café, the thirtysomething owner, Nathalie, tells us, as though we are her children, “You eat what I put in front of you.” Which is not a problem, really, as she carries out plates of paper-thin octopus carpaccio, marinated cheese and cherry tomato kebabs and arugula drizzled with truffle oil. We let fate take its course and begin to understand why the waiter pulled up an extra table, now that we have enough food to feed a Little League team. “My brother, Olivier, puts things in a pan, and when it has the right flavour, we serve it to the client,” she says by way of explanation. The decor in the 25-seat boîte is high-design womb: dark wood and neo-chandeliers and aubergine walls, created by their sister, Sofia Costa, a designer from Querido, mudei a casa! (Honey, I changed the house!), which we figure out is the Portuguese version of While You Were Out. For a city of 600,000, design is piled as high here as our plates.

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