I did not set out to become a casino person. I set out to photograph well-dressed men, and over a decade of fashion weeks the best-dressed men kept turning up in the same three cities after dark. So here is the notebook: three casino capitals, what they look like, how they dress, and what a style editor noticed that a travel writer would not.
Monte Carlo
The Casino de Monte-Carlo is a Garnier building, which tells you everything: it was designed by the architect of the Paris Opéra, and it still behaves like a theatre. The public rooms are for looking; the Salles Privées are for playing. Jacket after eight, no sportswear, no sneakers, and a doorman who can tell the difference between a Loro Piana blazer and a copy from across the square. The crowd in June is the Grand Prix crowd, in October it is the people who live there, and the second is better dressed. Stay at the Hôtel de Paris if you can and the Hermitage if you are sensible. The best table is the one by the window in the Salle Blanche, for the view, not the odds.
Macau
Everything in Macau is bigger than you expect, including the stakes. The Venetian and the Wynn are small cities; the Morpheus by Zaha Hadid is the most beautiful building any casino operator has ever paid for. Baccarat is the game, played fast and seriously by men in dark suits who do not talk, and the dress code is less a rule than a consensus. Nobody wears a dinner jacket. Everybody wears a very good navy suit. The old town, with its Portuguese tiles and egg tarts, is where to spend the daylight hours, and the tailors on the Hong Kong side are where to spend the winnings.
Las Vegas
Las Vegas has no dress code and therefore the most interesting dressing. The poker rooms at the Bellagio and the Wynn are full of men in cashmere hoodies and ten-thousand-dollar watches, which is its own uniform. Go to the Strip for the shows, to Fremont Street for the old neon, and to a poker room for the only honest game in town, in the sense that you are playing the people and not the house. The best-dressed man I saw in a year of travelling was at a Bellagio poker table at four in the morning in a navy Caraceni jacket and a white T-shirt, playing very slowly and winning.
The notebook's last page
In all three cities the same thing was true. The men who looked best were not the ones who won most; they were the ones who had decided before dinner what the evening was going to cost and dressed for the evening they had decided on. Everything else, from the jacket to the hotel, follows from that. Like any pleasure, it is only elegant in moderation.