M: Britain’s Unconventional Playboy, Chris Reynolds Gordon

On a cold December day in 2007, Chris Reynolds Gordon went to his attic to get a rope and a box. Before his properties investments crashed, he had been one of the most successful 22-year-olds in the world. He drove an AC Cobra, owned an apartment in the South Kensington area of London, hopped first-class flights to Las Vegas at a moment’s notice, and had spent New Year’s traveling with a girlfriend from Paris to Istanbul on the Orient Express. But after a sudden loss of more than £3.2 million and the untimely death of his mother, he had gone from everything to nothing. “I was devastated,” he says. “My bank account read £3,000.”

As his stepfather worked in a home office on the ground floor, Chris wrote a note, left it on his bed, fled out the back door of their house in Chigwell, England, and headed to a forest behind a nearby high school. He found a tree and tied the rope around a high, sturdy branch. The day was windy, and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. He worked the other end of the rope into a noose and slid it around his neck. “I felt that I always wanted to have a significant meaning in life,” he says. “I would rather show people how not to live your life and end it than continue as a failure.” He stood atop the box and grasped the noose. He estimates he stood like that for 40 minutes. Finally, he pushed the rope off his neck and stepped off the box.

When he got back inside, he tore off a piece of paper and found a black ballpoint pen. On it, he wrote, “£360 million, aged 31.” Seven years later, Chris still has the piece of paper in his wallet. The figure he scrawled was a thousand times the amount of money his mother had bequeathed him in 2006. He had used that money to bet against the foreign exchange market and a variety of companies on the FTSE 100 (the share index of the top 100 companies on the London Stock Exchange), just before the recession, and he made an “astronomical sum.” But then he went big again, sinking his winnings into construction projects in Morocco, Dubai, and Egypt that went bust. On the day he wore the noose around his neck, the money was almost gone: from £3.2 million to £3,000 in mere days.

“I knew I needed to get it all back. I just didn’t know how.”

I meet Chris, now 29 years old, at a friend’s house in south London. He is deciding between a leather kilt and a pair of assless chaps for the evening’s Halloween sex fetish party. His friends have a laugh when he holds up the chaps, but he shakes his head and goes with the kilt instead.

Upstairs, he changes out of his standard blue crewneck and jeans into the kilt. He takes off his shirt and slips into a black velvet blazer. His hair is short, with a touch of gel. I help him tie up two silver armbands with blunted spikes to complete the costume.

“Thanks, mate,” he says.

He pulls out his gold-plated iPhone 4. The background screen is a picture of his 24-year-old girlfriend, a lingerie model named Lauren Bea, seated on a bed next to a female friend. Both are wearing lingerie and blindfolds, heads tilted upward. Chris opens WhatsApp and sends a text. “I’m looking forward to tonight,” he says. “It’s actually nice I won’t to have to fuck a ton of people.”

The plan is for him and Lauren to join seven friends at the Coronet Theatre, a club in central London, for a Halloween party called Torture Garden. He expects he’ll have sex with a few women but nowhere near the number he would expect to sleep with at one of his own sex parties, where a ratio of three “superhot” women to every two men gives him “pretty good odds,” he says. Chris’ sex party business is what has skyrocketed him to success. He has been hailed by Vice as “Britain’s answer to Dan Bilzerian,” and England’s Channel 4 is making a documentary on his wild life.

Lauren walks downstairs confidently. Her costume is a Le Petit Secret black thong and black string brassiere that goes around, rather than over, her breasts. She has blonde hair with light brown highlights and a tattoo of three butterflies on her lower right abdomen. Chris adjusts his velvet blazer and looks her up and down. “I love your makeup,” he says. The two of them have been dating for seven months, in an open relationship. “It wouldn’t work for everyone, but it works for us,” he says.

From afar, Chris Reynolds Gordon might seem like the playboy type. He’s handsome, his net assets exceed hundreds of millions of pounds, he just purchased a seven-bedroom villa in Ibiza, he’s an athlete (he was a junior champion 800-meter runner), he has sex with women of his choosing essentially whenever he wants, and he is a savvy businessman.

But he isn’t a traditional playboy. He couldn’t care less for perfectly sized lapels, ski trips, or other old-money hallmarks. He says he plans to buy a house in Monaco within the next two years, but he laughs when I ask if he will keep a yacht or sailboat in the Monte Carlo harbor. “I just have a lot of friends there,” he says, “and it’s good for business.”

He also has an unorthodox cleverness. After his mother died, he knew he wanted to be financially independent so that he wouldn’t have to rely on his stepfather, with whom he has a tenuous relationship. (Throughout our conversations, he referred to his relationship with his stepfather as “frosty” but sometimes called him “my father.”)

“I started at Traders University,” he says. “Just something I had seen in my e-mail. It was really shit—taking your money and promising you the world.” Then, in 2006, he met Paul Wallace, an independent trader and a performance coach, at a house party in Shoreditch. Wallace introduced Chris to a former Goldman Sachs trader, who took him under his wing for “thousands of pounds an hour.” (Chris requested that the trader not be named.) “You’re trading at the perfect time,” he recalls the trader telling him. “The world is in crisis. You can do a lot by going short.”

Over the next year, Chris and his mentor spoke over Skype as often as every other day, looking for quick changes in the marketplace that they could exploit using technical analysis chart patterns. Many of the financial tools that Chris used, he innovated himself, he says. He recalls making £80,000 in a single day while sitting at his laptop. “I was on cloud nine.”

His decision to work under the tutelage of a successful trader rather than spend time in school (he dropped out of Swansea University after one term) suggests a street-smart practicality lacking in the typical young person raised amid the trappings of wealth.

“I could have just gone for the normal path—a lot in my year went to either Oxford or Cambridge,” he says. “It went school, university, banking job…but I get up whenever the fuck I want; I go to bed whenever the fuck I want; I travel whenever the fuck I want; I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

While his go-for-broke attitude is partly what allowed him to make a quick fortune, it also led him to invest in those ill-advised construction projects—which brings us back to those 40 minutes in the woods.

Sometime after that cold December day, Chris had a new idea: diamonds. He decided to pursue a job at Alrosa, a Russian state-owned diamond trading and mining company, but the industry proved difficult to crack. “No one took me seriously,” he says. “Everyone knows everyone, and I’m just a new kid who has no fucking clue.”

He flew to Moscow, where Alrosa is headquartered, and stayed in the President Hotel. He says he met with State Secretary Pavel Borodin, all the while pretending, at age 23, to be one of the richest men in the world, not to mention a knowledgeable diamond trader. Chris left Moscow thinking he had the job, but perhaps his bluff wasn’t entirely credible: A week later he learned he wouldn’t be hired. “I had no idea why,” he says.

There followed a stint as a part-time model (“shorts and calendars, mainly”) and an attempt to get back into running shape, with the idea of trying out for the British Olympic team, which didn’t pan out. “When I decided to stop running, I cried a lot, but I knew that dream was never going to happen,” he says. “My parents loved me running. When it was going well, they came to everything.”

He got back into trading but without the success he had known selling short in the volatile days leading up to the recession. Low on cash, down on his luck, he moved into a youth hostel in the outskirts of Swansea, where he slept free of charge on a changing-room floor. He was 25. He took a job packing boxes.

NEXT PAGE: Continue Reading

Share and Enjoy

The Victoria’s Secret Angels: What Candy Are They On?

The annual Victoria’s Secret runway show aired Tuesday night, and it was the typical procession of lingerie’d models, impossibly tall and lean, marching like pegasus-gazelles, emboldened by gold-encrusted wings. Fly, fly away, beautiful models. Be free.

Taylor Swift performed, as did Ariana Grande; Ed Sheeran and Hozier were the token boys, sensitive and perhaps a little frightened in the context. Though Swift is best friends with every top-tier model and high-fived many of them homoerotically through her set, it was Grande who seemed the most comfortable among the models and, perhaps, with displays of sexuality overall.

But in my mind, what CBS viewers saw was only half the story. Watching all of these gorgeously tanned, perfectly taut humans waltz down the runway in their underwear as though it were the most natural, happy thing on earth—these humans who, in Western culture, are essentially lifted up as the ideal of ideals—I tried to imagine the grossest, gauchest thing they would ever do, the thing that makes them just like everyone else. Just like me, in fact, sitting there in sweatpants, a grey lump on my couch. What would make these women at all similar to all the super-cool but comparatively regular-ass women that I know? Shitting was the obvious choice but, not one to be entertained by scatological humor (everyone makes caca!), I went for the most verboten of indulgences.

I imagined that, backstage, the models were squirreling away candy. Hoarding little bits of crunchy toffee and suckers until every last bit was hidden. Shoveling the likes of Bassetts Allsorts and Maynard’s Wine Gums into their faces at every chance, rushing backstage as soon as they retreated from the runway to just have one more taste. The smile, kiss, or wink each model gave at the end of the runway was on paper meant to convey personality and titillate viewers. But to the models, it was the halfway mark: halfway before they were back in the dressing rooms, where they could eat candy once more while changing into their next looks.

This is my model-candy fanfic.

Nor the show nor the candy eating began with Behati Prinsloo, but she was certainly one of the vessels through which the candy was made possible. A known candy aficionado and daughter of the legendary Prinsloo clan, South Africa’s first family of confectioners, it was Prinsloo who had the access to the candy, unhindered by meddling managers or personal trainers who desire for her to maintain a certain level of waistline. As a descendent of candy heirs, her metabolism has evolved with the food her ancestors ate, making all levels of candy edible to her. Because it is known that she eats candy almost entirely, except for two times a year on Easter and Christmas, none of Victoria’s Secret security stopped her from bringing in bags of sweets—sour tarts, chocolate covered cherries, bars of nougat. Prinsloo was ground zero of the candy hoarding of the Victoria’s Secret 2014 show. Sometimes, back at home, her husband Adam Lambert refers to her as Candy as a term of endearment, though never in mixed company.

Jourdan Dunn was one of the first to imbibe the candy, choosing a few packages of Haribo from Behati’s pile, dipping beneath the makeup table as Roberto was doing her face and popping a few into her mouth when he reached for a new brush or eyelash curler. She was juiced off that gummy, and before taking the runway for the first time that night, had sent a flurry of text messages to friends and former boyfriends describing to them the immense privilege she felt to be able to walk this hallowed runway, to be bestowed with the glamorous wings that finally transformed her from a mortal being to a transcendent creature walking among men. One of them was a wrong number.

Maria Borges is really into halva, which was great for her because it was the least popular candy among the Angels. (Behati didn’t even mean to bring it; it was wedged at the bottom of a plastic baggie between a movie theater-size package of Red Hots and some applicator-free tampons.) She finds halva to be soothing while simultaneously giving her the slight sugar rush she so craves. Shy for a model, halva loosens her up in a way that, to her, seems preternatural. She does not even enjoy the music of Taylor Swift, but that night, she seemed to know all the words, lip-syncing as she took the catwalk—lip-syncing just as surely as the rest of her peers.

Taylor Swift does not eat candy.

Joan Smalls does not eat candy, and thinks what was going on backstage is despicable. She’s just here to do her job and maintain her glucose at a respectable level.

Lily Aldridge quit candy for a brief period in the mid-2000s but soon realized she was contributing to a culture of deprivation, and realized by doing so she was being anti-woman, and therefore anti-herself. A deeply spiritual person, she began consuming candy as part of a daily meditation ritual, and it disturbs her when others consume candy in excess at non-regimented time intervals. Because she must also time her ritual to the rigors of her daily schedule as a supermodel, she often works the candy meditation into her work. The Victoria’s Secret designers agreed that she would walk better and more determinedly if she did so in a lucid state of mediation and candy consumption, and so they fashioned for her a shrug comprised entirely of spun sugar. It was the best runway walk of Lily Aldridge’s life.

Ed Westwick was responsible for sneaking in 23 percent of the total candy haul. He hid it in enormous pockets, pockets he requested be made “roomy,” but which Ed’s bespoke tailor
Alistair knew as code. He created the pockets so that they flowed the length of his pants leg, into his sock where a body-hugging auxiliary pocket existed unnoticed. It was in this pocket that Ed Westwick stored more of the candy.

In mid-November, anticipating the candy, Karlie Kloss fashioned herself a small pouch that could be attached to the inside of her brastrap, just beneath her golden wings. She knitted it herself. It had the capacity to store a total of four Mike Ikes, or two small generic jawbreakers, just enough to power her through the end of the runway, before she could scurry backstage and score some more. In this photograph, she is contorting her right arm behind her back and reaching into the pouch, at which point she will seize the candy and pop it surreptitiously into her mouth as she blows the camera a kiss. The cringe upon her face is due to the contortion. It is slight, however, because she is a ballerina, a sport which allows her to express every bit of her creativity, like modeling. Squirreling candy is just a hobby.

Constance Jablonski is 100% high on grade-A English sucrose. She is thinking about the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk she has stuffed at the bottom of her Victorias Secret PINK duffel bag, given to her as a complimentary gift on the airplane. She is thankful that, because the Angels are famous fashion models, they do not have to proceed through regular TSA.

Candace Swanepoel is wavy as fuck.

Adriana Lima is disappointed by Ed Sheeran’s inability to pass her candy as she walks down the runway. Even though later he will blame it on his guitar, Lima knows that the Brits have never been famous for their hand-to-hands. Luckily, she and Alessandra Ambrosio have a secret that no one else knows: this year, the fantasy bras are made of both diamonds and candy buttons. The candy has been polished to a sheen, so that it’s difficult to discern which bits of the bra are edible, but it doesn’t much matter because Ambrosio and Lima are used to eating both.

A good time was had by all.

Images via Getty.

Share and Enjoy