JULIO KNOW WHAT IT IS

Whilst recently scrolling, I came across this intriguing photo from 1986 of Julio Iglesias (in dark blue tank top) sitting in his private jet enjoying a bottle of Chàteau Lafite-Rothschild alongside a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a tortilla de patatas.

The somewhat unusual optics of this photo intrigued me in the way a great painting does. Here was a man who was unafraid to break down the class barriers between the street and the palace. By marrying the symbol of the elite with his bottle of 'Lafite Chat' with KFC, that most atavistic of fast food which reduces men, women and children back to the cave, eating with their hands and fingers like primates, Julio unconsciously created a genuinely punk moment of social/cultural cognitive dissonance.

If taken today, Julio's quietly revolutionary act would surely have been a viral moment to rival that of Kim Kardashian's 2014 'The Champagne Incident' where she famously (or at least for an attention deficit filled minute) balanced a champagne glass on her globular arse and filled it with the contents from a fizzing bottle of champagne in a photographically manipulated arcing fountain spray effect. The photographer Jean-Paul Goude re-created what was arguably his most iconic photograph, 'Carolina Beaumont, New York, 1976', also known as 'The Champagne Incident', which originally had the Dominican model and actress Carolina Beaumont naked in the exact same pose as Kardashian would later strike.

Of course that was pure theatre, whereas I feel that Julio's wine, chicken and tortilla is a statement about the man himself - who he is at the core of his being - a man of the people who dared to dream beyond the clouds. There is nothing contrived here, just his pure estilo de vida. Julio would be known in today's parlance as a 'Matrix-breaker', by which I mean someone who breaks an assumed conventional narrative in a natural, 'this is me eating fried chicken and drinking a fuck off expensive nobleman's luxury red wine' type of way.

Although originally from an upper middle class background himself, the fact that Julio had his career playing for Real Madrid cut short at the age of twenty by suffering a compression of the spinal cord in a near-fatal car crash suggests he understood that the privilege afforded him could be easily snatched away at any given moment. It's this dance with death that clearly gave him the ability to remain unconcerned about the optics of combining fried chicken and premier cru.

I'll raise a glass (a cheap glass) to that.