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GQApril PAGE 1/3

Departments 20

Letter from the Editor 24

GQHQ 144

Backstory Tiffany Haddish makes everything better

The Fix 47

It Takes a Big Man to Wear a Small Watch The era of oversize watches is ending B Y S A M U E L H I N E 50

Don’t Leave Home Without Your Shopping Buddy The wingman gets a new duty: retail consultant BY SAM SCHUBE

Giant Leap for Mankind Why the hottest womenswear designers on the planet are moving into menswear B Y M AT T S E B R A

The Murse Is No Joke The cross-body bag is essential and old-school BY MARK ANTHONY GREEN

Me Smile Pretty One Day L A U R E N L A R S O N dives into the cottage industry of Tinder portraitists to steal their secrets

Gentlemen, It’s Time to Talk About Your Face A PSA from GQ grooming director G A R R E T T M U N C E 74

Patagonia vs. Evil How the outerwear company joined the fight against the assault on the environment BY ROSECRANS BALDWIN

Are Kids the Enemy of Writing? M I C H A E L C H A B O N confronts the possibility that each child is a novel not published

→ Clothing is Wes Anderson’s own, except for the Tom Ford tie that Bill Murray put on him. (See page 114.)

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DANIEL JACKSON

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Fashion

88 Cover: Diddy For nearly three decades, no one has lived larger than Sean Combs. Spend some time inside the beautiful bubble created by a hip-hop legend BY JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

Dressed to Chill Breakout British actor James Norton shows just how unfussy the suit has become 110

Not Normal: High Fashion Gets Serious About Regular Clothes The fashion spectrum is a glorious mess of people, labels, and trends. Let us map it all out for you 114

Wes World We shot the cast of Isle of Dogs—Tilda Swinton, Greta Gerwig, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum—and the director himself, Wes Anderson B Y A N N A P E E L E

T H E C OV E R Maciek Kobielski

Jacket, $3,900, by Tom Ford. Turtleneck, $850, by Bally. Pants, $595, by Ralph Lauren. Sunglasses, watch, and jewelry, his own. Styling by Mobolaji Dawodu. Produced by Tommy Romersa for Joy Asbury Productions. Makeup by Maira Gonzalez. Hair by Marcus P Hatch. Props and set design by Andy Henbest.

← The artist formerly known as Puff Daddy. Jacket, $1,450, and pants, $895, by Valentino. Sunglasses, jewelry, and custom watch, his own.

All prices quoted in this issue are approximate and subject to change.

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MACIEK KOBIELSKI

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Features ← The name’s Norton, James Norton.

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The Excessive Vision of Donatella Versace An afternoon in Milan with the fashion and pop-culture icon B Y M O L LY Y O U N G 128

Jacket, $2,295, shirt, $550, and pants, $595, by Ralph Lauren. Bracelet, $625, by The Great Frog.

There’s Something Funny About Tiffany Haddish It took a minute for everyone to realize that the Girls Trip star is frickin’ hilarious BY CAITY WEAVER

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Things You Do with 38 Minutes to Live The real story of the Hawaiian missile crisis B Y S E A N F LY N N

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ALASDAIR MCLELLAN

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

The Chief of Grief

of my head since the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. I don’t mean the sheer terror of it or the realization that since Columbine, mass shootings in high schools have become literally as normalized as fire drills. I don’t mean the steeliness of those student protesters who, in the weeks after, did what adult politicians were too milk-livered to do: forced us all to go to our rooms and talk about gun control. And I don’t mean the inanity of President Trump—a barely concealed weapon of the NRA himself—calling for a militia of well-armed teachers. No, I’m talking about the president’s strange and stilted “grief speech” to the nation the day after the shooting, the hollowed-out way he spoke and tried to soothe us. It was…spooky. It did not work. There’s been a lot gushingly said about the role of Comforter in Chief, and perhaps too much pressure placed upon it—how the hugging, mugging manner

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healing the country he seemed, quite explicitly, to be trying to light it on fire. The shocking thing is how many grievous moments he’s had to practice empathy. You might have already forgotten that just three months before the incident at Stoneman Douglas, there was another shooting, at a First Baptist Church in Texas, where 26 people were killed by a lone gunman. On that occasion, Trump had refused to pause his trip to Japan to address the nation, merely tweeting instead: May God be w/ the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The FBI & law enforcement are on the scene. I am monitoring the situation from Japan.

(I’m pretty sure “monitoring the situation from Japan” means watching cable news.) Nine days later, when yet another mass shooting occurred—five dead in Northern California, the killer having tried to enter an elementary school— Trump accidentally sent out a version of the same dutiful tweet. (“May God be with the people of Sutherland Springs…”) Nice sentiment, wrong shooting. The president has even had to be coached to e≠ectuate simple human feelings. When he held a listening session with gun-violence survivors, he had to hold a note card with empathy tips written down for easy emotional access. (His checklist of things to say included “No. 5. I hear you.” I really thought he was going to say it just like that: “Well, number five, I hear you.”) It was like a botched A.I. experiment, as if engineers had nobly endeavored to implant feelings into the cold-metal heart of a robotron. Who knows if the president will ever be able, in highly controlled circumstances, to simulate emotions like sympathy and compassion. But one thing’s painfully clear: It’s gonna take another election before someone feels our pain.

JIM NELSON EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ERIC RAY DAVIDSON

T H E R E ’ S S O M E T H I N G I can’t get out

of Bill Clinton set the gold standard for national grief-easing. George W. seemed to struggle with that part of the job, feeling more comfortable with backslaps and bullhorns than hugs and homilies. Obama was a natural. But I don’t think we understood just how bad Trump is at it, or how sorely we miss the skill set, until now. If Clinton’s emotive principle was “I feel your pain,” Trump’s so far has been “I cannot feel your pain, I’m not really interested in your pain, but remember this: Only I can cure pain.” On this day, however, Trump, perhaps sensing a change in the emotional weather, was trying something new. Empathy. But it was empathy with a mission, to sling a little compassion around so as to quickly change the subject, and that’s why it failed so miserably. You’ll remember the speech. The hushed Mister-Rogers-reads-from-a-teleprompter way he addressed victims and other traumatized kids. “I want to speak now directly to America’s children, especially those who feel lost, alone, confused, [pause] or even scared”—and here his eyebrows did a weird pop-up thing, as if he were channeling the fears of a toddler or reading from an illustrated storybook. Soon we were in the land of make-believe: “I want you to know that you are never alone and you never will be.” Okay, if you say so, but what should we do about guns and scary people in our schools? “If you need help,” he telepromptered, “turn to a teacher, a family member, a local police o∞cer, or a faith leader. Answer hate with love.” Huh? So we’re just supposed to love more? Is that where the armed teachers come in? And so it was that the horror of Stoneman Douglas High led to a further chilling thought: the impossibility of ever being comforted by this president. It may have been the first time, as a nation, that the magnitude of that simple, psychic truth—our inability to ever be hugged, shoulder-patted, or speechified into feeling one iota better by Donald J. Trump—fully registered. No, wait. There was the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, where instead of comforting a traumatized community, he congratu-tweeted himself for being “right on radical Islamic terrorism.” There was Charlottesville, where instead of

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Meet Molly Young

1 What’s the most Donatella Versace thing you’ve done? Reckless sunbathing. 2 Donatella is to fashion as

you are to . Solving crossword puzzles. 3 Describe yourself in an

angry Yelp review. “ZERO STARS! Terrible vibes, overly expensive, no vegan options.”

5 What are you doing when your name flashes across the screen in the opening credits of your teen soap opera? Reading an upside-down copy of War and Peace in the bath. 6 What’s on your rider? Three jars of peanut butter. One spoon. 7 What’s your number one road-trip rule? No road trips.

4 We’ve read that you enjoy

micro-dosing. What else do you micro-do? Manage.

8 What’s the most useless

thing you own? My sense of propriety.

Introducing: u up? Let us put our dating advice in your in-box. Every Thursday night, we’ll be bringing you ‘u up?,’ a newsletter with all our best sex advice and funniest dating essays. We’ll also be answering one reader-submitted question a week, so e-mail us at AskaRealLive Lady@GQ.com.

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→ At 1 a.m. on a sultry February night in Los Angeles, as the NBA All-Star weekend hit its crest, a wave of beautiful people pushed toward the stage at the NoMad Hotel, phones in the air: They were trying to take videos of an extremely lit performance by Cardi B (above left), hoping to make the night last a little longer in the Instagram ether. Among those beautiful people were James Harden, Common, Christian Combs (above right), and Metro Boomin, shown here with GQ editor-in-chief Jim Nelson (top).

less me Sha P‘lug!

Once More into the Storm → In our November 2016 issue, Tristram Korten told the harrowing story of the Coast Guard rescue squad that headed into one of America’s deadliest maritime disasters. On April 24, you’ll be able to read even more about this gripping rescue mission in Korten’s new book, Into the Storm: Two Ships, a Deadly Hurricane, and an Epic Battle for Survival. Writer Lee Child calls it “nonfiction at its very best.” We call it “a book we’ll read on land.”

→ In December 2012, noted weirdo and icon Christopher Walken was a GQ Man of the Year, yielding this mantelworthy portrait and some immortal words about acid (“I’d get on the bus, all the people would be big black birds”) as well as a withering assessment of our magazine: “Do you ever read it? It’s all just photographs of belts.”

This Holds Up

gq prefers that letters to the editor be sent to letters@gq .com. letters may be edited.

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PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM TOP: DEVIN CHRISTOPHER (3); PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE; MARCO GROB. PORTRAIT ILLUSTRATION: ALEXANDRA COMPAIN-TISSIER.

→ When she’s not hanging out with Donatella Versace (page 104), Molly Young is an artist, a veteran branding genius, and an author: D C-T!, written with illustrator Joana Avillez in a truly weird phonetic language, hits shelves in May. Below, she fields the big questions.

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Chris Gayomali, news editor “This coat has so many extraneous zippers on it. I’ve never owned anything like this before. Being able to spin around in the rain is just so appealing.” 2 6

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Sam Schube, deputy style editor “I like that it’s a coat that looks like a robe. It’s definitely more coat. It only took me wearing it while naked and sopping wet once to figure that out.”

OFFICE GRAILS What we’re wearing to work in the last gasps of winter

Jon Tietz, fashion editor “If I’m going to do an animal print, it has to be discreet. Everything else has to be simple so that that’s the only thing talking.”

AJ Gibbson, associate social-media manager “I’m from Texas, where it’s never cold. This is the warmest coat that I have, and I wear it anytime it drops below 30 degrees.”

Specia Style B l ible Edition

Will Welch, creative director “I hate blue, but I like these because they’re rich, inky, and royal. These are really flashy shoes for me. I have them in brown, and I have two pairs of black ones.”

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A NEW SECTION FOR A NEW ERA

Watch, $395, by Bulova. Jacket, $5,990, by Tom Ford. Polo shirt, $595, by Canali. Pants, $595, by Ralph Lauren. Necklace (worn as bracelet), $120, by A.P.C. Ring, $495, by Miansai.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY RYAN SEGEDI

It Takes a Big Man to Wear a Small Watch You can stop lugging around that wristmounted nautical gauge, because the era of oversize timepieces is coming to an end A P R I L

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A funny thing happened when the smartphone took over all of our time-keeping needs: Men got really into watches. Aesthetics (as opposed to pure horological utility) became everything. Some guys went the über-macho route, strapping on pieces reminiscent of the wrist cannons Sylvester Stallone was fond of wearing in the ’90s. Others went for pure blingedout maximalism, which peaked around the time Beyoncé gave Jay-Z a $5 million icy Hublot for his 43rd birthday. But along the way, an undercurrent of enthusiasts sought to correct course with quieter, smaller vintage timepieces— and all of a sudden, the status-symbol watch shrank. That’s because for most of history men’s watches have measured less than 40 millimeters in diameter, from World

War I trench watches right up to the iconic pieces from the 1950s like the Rolex Explorer. Now that men are getting used to smaller, dressier watches again, watchmakers (Hublot among them) are cutting weight. And once you put on one of these low-profile mechanical beauties, anything larger will feel downright gauche. The four you see here all clock in at 36 millimeters or less— and since “subtle” is synonymous with “versatile” in watchspeak, you’ll be able to wear any one of them till the end of time.— S A M U E L H I N E

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I ’S

6 L’ E G 0 M M IZIANO

↑ ACTUAL SIZE Here’s how the dials measure up IRL.

1. Watch, $2,850, by Tudor. Shirt, $695, by Lanvin. Pants, $695, by Off-White. 2. Watch, $14,600, by Piaget. Suit, $945, Strong Suit by Ilaria Urbinati at Nordstrom. Tie, $145, by BOSS. Glasses, $260, by Moscot. 3. Watch, $6,600, by Hublot. Jacket, $1,510, shirt, $690, and pants, $640, by Prada.

FRIENDSHIP

Don’t Leave Home Without Your Shopping Buddy What is friendship for, if not gut-checking your wardrobe? by Sam Schube

A few weeks back, I met my buddy Chris at Nepenthes, an unusually adventurous men’s boutique on a nondescript block in New York City’s Garment District. He tried on some fivepound wool pants, and I gave my advice: I’m not letting you leave without those. I tried on a red fringed coat seemingly made from an old blanket, and he gave his advice: You can’t live without it, $3,000 price tag be damned. We left the store 5 0

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(he bought the pants; I didn’t buy the coat), headed to a bar, and chatted over a couple of beers. It was a great hang. I don’t want to pretend that this was some sort of radical activity. The mangoes-shopping caricature— the boyfriend posted up on the couch at Anthropologie, scrolling through Instagram and praying to be anywhere but there—is blessedly long dead. I know guys who are

Hall of Fame online shoppers and others who include dudes from the Barneys sales floor in their wedding party. But shopping is still largely a clandestine activity, conducted like a solo military raid: Get in, get jeans, get out. But you wouldn’t put $1,000 on the Jets to cover without talking it through with a pal. So why would you buy a pair of high-waisted trousers, the kind that might completely change

your life but also might make you look like Pee-wee Herman, without consulting an equivalent authority? I’m not talking about a sales associate, who, despite his genial demeanor, has a vested interest in your walking out of his store with a pair of pants you definitely won’t wear. I’m talking about someone whose opinion you can trust. I’m talking about a shopping buddy. Think of him as an insurance policy. Shopping alone is fraught: Do I look good in these jeans? Maybe, but I’m also trying to figure out the answer before I have to engage in light banter with the staff. If I’m with a friend? He’ll tell me if I’m making a mistake. But this isn’t just about risk avoidance—it’s about having a sounding board and an egger-on. The joy of shopping is in conjuring an imaginary version of yourself, the version that has the stones to rock a referee-stripe cardigan. It’s hard to summon that guy when all you have to go on is your own sad reflection in a warped store mirror. When you have a friend telling you that vertical stripes are slimming? Meet me at the cash register. This doesn’t always work perfectly: Nothing I could say would have swayed Colin from buying that pair of sea-foam green jeans. He really liked them. But I wouldn’t have bought that preposterous gold chain—the one that makes me look like a low-grade member of the Jewish Mafia—if he hadn’t been there to spur me along. And now I get to carry myself with the air of a dude named Chaim who just might be sitting on significant gold reserves. It’s all about trust and encouragement. It’s about learning to laugh at yourself and at your friend’s belief that he can pull off clown pants. It’s about faith in the fraternal bond and in the almighty power of the turtleneck. And if that’s not the point of friendship, I’m not sure what is. SAM SCHUBE IS GQ’S DEPUT Y ST YLE EDITOR.

PETER YANG/AUGUST

The Fix

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LABELS WE LOVE

→ The crossovers: Vaccarello, Marant, McCartney, and Waight Keller.

Giant Leap for Mankind:

The Hottest Womenswear Designers Move into Menswear

Thanks to a more adventurous fashion landscape—and men who are willing to spend—top designers known first for womenswear are now coming our way by Matt Sebra

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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY VALERO DOVAL

CENTER, FROM LEFT: BERTRAND RINDOFF PETROFF/GET T Y IMAGES; SWAN GALLET/WWD/REX BY SHUT TERSTOCK; KARWAI TANG/WIREIMAGE/GET T Y IMAGES; JACOPO RAULE/ GET T Y IMAGES. OTHER PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: THEO WARGO/WIREIMAGE/GET T Y IMAGES; KIM WESTON ARNOLD/INDIGITAL; COURTESY OF ISABEL MARANT (2); COURTESY OF STELLA MCCARTNEY (2); MIKE MARSLAND/WIREIMAGE/GET T Y IMAGES; MONICA FEUDI/INDIGITAL. ILLUSTRATION FOR EDITORIAL PURPOSES.

The Fix 1 of 3 →

sabel marant’s decision to add menswear to her successful 24-yearold women’s-only label was an easy, if long overdue, one. “For years all the guys around me—my friends, boyfriends, boyfriends of my girlfriends— said they want to wear my clothes,” she says. And who would want to turn down those droves of fashion-hungry men? Especially when they’ve got cash to spend and they’re eager for fresh ways to make waves with what they wear. She’s not the only one out there tapping into the lucrative, not-so-little market of men’s high-fashion gear, either. The French designer is the latest member of an elite crew of creatives—which also includes Stella McCartney, Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent, and Clare Waight Keller at Givenchy—who are bringing their talents (and special abilities to separate people from their money) in women’s fashion to the menswear game. You don’t have to be a speculator to see the story here. Hawks and Bloomberg analysts would suggest that you go bullish on menswear right now, so pass on the latest crypto trend. If you want to talk about real #gains: For the past five years, the men’s fashion business has grown faster than women’s and is estimated to swell to a $460 billion (with a capital B) industry in the next two years. Designer menswear is going to make up $33 billion (that’s a capital B, too) of that. Menswear’s not just doing well—it’s thriving, and that data is hard to ignore if you’re a global fashion brand that’s only catering to half of the population. Meanwhile, the tectonic plates of menswear aesthetics have shifted from the elemental to the extra in recent years (see: Gucci’s maximalist tracksuits, Balenciaga’s mammoth Triple S sneakers), meaning guys are ready to go beyond the same rehashed “wardrobe staples” and willing to take bigger, bolder stylistic risks. If the hoodie has matched proper tailoring as a hallmark of the modern fashion-minded man, we’re o∞cially primed to see design in its most innovative and refined form go big. Which is exactly why designers like Marant, McCartney, Vaccarello, and Waight Keller are here for this moment: Not only to bump their bottom lines, but because they’ve already built reputations creating premium, advanced garms for everyday life, and now they can expand their visions without compromising their credibility. Menswear shoppers aren’t just being catered to in 2018. With all of their basic needs met, they’re actually being designed for. That’s a distinction that says a lot about the state of menswear today, but mostly that it’s never been more promising—whether you’re wearing the clothes or making them—than right now.

ISABEL MARANT

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Since 1994, the French designer has been a go-to for uncommonly cool clothes, and her men’s debut is no different, including jeans with tribal-esque embroidery and the waviest puffer vest out there.

Jeans, $520, and vest, $775, by Isabel Marant

CLARE WAIGHT KELLER

Waight Keller put in time at Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Gucci, and, most recently, the women’sonly brand Chloé before landing at Givenchy, which means there’s just about nothing she can’t design damn well— including this tri-color moto jacket.

Jacket, $4,390, by Givenchy

THESE PAGES, STILL LIFES: MAT T MARTIN. PROP ST YLIST: TRINA ONG AT HALLEY RESOURCES. PORTRAIT ILLUSTRATIONS: ERIC CHI.

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LABELS WE LOVE

STELLA McCARTNEY

FRANCE’S GLOBAL AMBASSADOR Isabel Marant may not be the first designer to channel the irresistible style you see on the streets of Paris, but she is unquestionably the one who has brought it to the masses. Her philosophy of “something easy and comfortable, but with an attitude” drives the brand’s first shot at menswear, which includes slouchy fisherman’s sweaters, surf-gear-inspired jackets, and bold-colored denim. “For me there’s no gap between women’s and men’s,” she says. “It’s the same way something should be worn, but the neckline is di≠erent or the sleeves are longer; it’s just an adaptation to a man’s body.”

Everything McCartney designs is produced sustainably and ethically (vegan and PVC-free), from next-level knitwear (i.e., this gnarly Fair Isle number) to sneakers made without a single drop of glue.

Sweater, $985, and shoes, $725, by Stella McCartney

A WARDROBE PARADOX Stella McCartney can cut a suit as well as she can design psychedelic sneakers and sweaters, a dual skill set that reflects her unique background, which includes graduating from London’s Central Saint Martins (the Harvard of fashion schools), working on Savile Row, and a lifetime being the daughter of Paul McCartney (on whose eclectic closet some of her pieces are based). “There is an element to the menswear that has some humor and lightness to it,” she says. In McCartney’s universe, fitted doublebreasted jackets go with loose pleated pants. “You don’t just say one thing when you’re wearing a Stella McCartney suit.”

ANTHONY VACCARELLO

Vaccarello only dabbled in menswear at Versus Versace before joining Saint Laurent in 2016, but he’s got the touch. Case in point: this Peruvianpatterned drug-rughoodie mash-up.

Hoodie, $3,290, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello

NEW BLOOD IN AN OLD HOUSE Rainbow tie-dye varsity jackets, sheer shirts overlaid with gold-foil patterns, and suede trousers are essentials at Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent. Despite being a menswear novice, the BelgianItalian nabbed the top job at the brand with the razor-sharp, nearly NSFW clothes he designed at his namesake women’s label. His men’s line for Saint Laurent upholds the house’s luxe ethos, but with a slightly more approachable sensibility (more pattern, more color, more embroidery) and a more relaxed silhouette (you can now exhale fully when you wear Saint Laurent). MAXIMALISM FOR ONE For her Givenchy debut, Clare Waight Keller designed elegantly badass Johnny Cash–meets–Mick Jagger men’s clothes (fancy blazers, western coats, worn black denim). Then she introduced couture for men, a.k.a. clothes made for the .001 percent that are produced in one-of-one runs to customers’ exact specifications and usually start at a face-screaming-emoji five figures. So if you’re in the market for a pair of made-toorder snakeskin pants or a hand-beaded fringe vest and have the bank account of a Qatari prince, you now know where to go. matt sebra is gq’s deputy fashion director.

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ASK M.A.G.

STYLE EDITOR MARK ANTHONY GREEN HAS YOUR ANSWER

@A S K M AG

The Murse Is No Joke The cross-body bag may seem like a frivolous accessory, but it’s as essential and old-school as it gets Hey, M.A.G., I like to think I’m a pretty open-minded guy when it comes to clothes and accessories, but man purses? Really? How is this a thing? Sorry to disappoint you, my squarejawed all-American compadre, but my name is Mark Anthony Green, and [takes a deep breath] I proudly wear a cross-body bag, which is occasionally known as a small man bag and sometimes referred to (mostly by time travelers from 2006) as a murse. 6 0

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You’re probably cursing me out in a pair of Red Wings, right? (I’m wearing Red Wings, too, by the way. And a crossbody bag.) What if we called these small “strappy” bags that all the kids are wearing by their original name, utility bags, just like the soldiers and fishermen and lumberjacks who’ve always worn them to store the tools of their trade. Would that make them more palatable? In a time when you can buy a shortsleeve parka, fashion needs more useful

clothing, and no one can argue that these bags aren’t. Sometimes you need to carry more than the pocket can handle but less than what a backpack allows. A camera and some film. An Almond Joy. Whatever. You can splurge on a Prada crossbody bag (as seen at left on designer Virgil Abloh, if you look hard enough) or wait in line half a day for Supreme’s version or spend 20 bucks on one from the army-surplus store. Anyone can participate—which is another testament to its utility. About the word “murse”: It’s not that it’s inaccurate. It’s that it’s the worst type of old-fashioned. Some of us, even the really rakish, are still so afraid of anything that seems traditionally “feminine” that we draw a line we tell ourselves never to cross. But the only line that has ever mattered is the one that separates what you like from what you don’t like. I’m not a fan of double-breasted blazers without peak lapels, but that doesn’t mean the notch-lapel versions are sissy suits. They’re just not my mix. The most important thing I’ve learned from capital-F fashion kids—the ones who pull o≠ fishnet cargo pants or some other high-di∞culty moves that even I would never attempt—is that you don’t go to Barneys to roll your eyes at what’s trending. You go to discover the limits of your own style landscape, even if you just end up buying another pair of Red Wings.

FROM LEFT: DON ARNOLD/WIREIMAGE/GET T Y IMAGES; PHIL OH

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WHAT SHE SAID

Me Smile Pretty One Day It was only a matter of time. But an economy within an economy of photographers who specialize in making ordinary folks look sexier, flirtier, and Instagram-ier for their Tinder bios has emerged. No model license required! Lauren Larson dives into the world of Tinder portraitists to steal their smizing secrets

i photographed well until the age of 7. Most children do. Then, circa second grade, three things happened simultaneously: Titanic came out, I became aware of my own mortality, and my photo smile stopped being cute. I developed a self-conscious, clenched grimace that has only worsened in my later years. When I smile for photos, I do not look flirty and fun. I look like I’ve been sitting for an old-timey portrait for eight hours in a whalebone corset and a hoopskirt. My face scrunches and distorts, and I look like the bottom critter on a totem pole. When MySpace was born, and my peers started curating photos of themselves into profiles, I knew my Squidward smile would be a problem. Then Tinder arrived, and it became an even bigger problem. In the real world, I’m an 8—an 8.5 if I’m really dehydrated and a little tan. On Tinder I’m a 4. I am clinically un-photogenic at a time when 6 6

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the ability to pose for a photo can actually determine the quality of my suitors. If mating preferences drive evolution, then the next round of humans will be born with photo-ready angles, faces heavily contoured with a flattering Valencia-filter flush. If Kim Kardashian is the stunning bird with elaborate plumage for attracting a mate in the canopy, then I’m the bird crusted in mud, stress-eating star fruit on the forest floor. The most important part of photographing well is looking breezy and relaxed, which is why I’m standing on the stoop of an apartment building in Brooklyn in early February, stressing. I’ve arrived at photographer Max Schwartz’s apartmentslash-studio as Plan Z in my quest for one good photo of myself. Almost four years ago, he built a website called TinderHeadshots.com. In its early days, the site got some press from bewildered

media, and Schwartz started shooting about six people a week in addition to his full-time job. Since then, a competitive industry has popped up around him. Tinder photographers don’t have the easy word-of-mouth marketing of, say, wedding photography. A lot of people are embarrassed about paying to have photos taken for dating apps. Another photographer, Charlie Grosso, told me that men are particularly reluctant to admit that they paid for a service, but 90 percent of her clients are men. This is due less to a gender-based dysmorphia than it is to the cultural rules surrounding who gets to take photos and who gets to be in them: On certain photogenic streets in New York, you can’t walk a block without tripping over a fashion blogger’s boyfriend army-crawling on the sidewalk trying to get a photo of his girlfriend in a fun hat, but you rarely see the reverse. “Men are in this weird situation,” Grosso explains. “They can’t ask their buddies to do it for them, because their buddies will make fun of them.” My embarrassment about being photographed comes from within, from the chorus of sneering bros inside me who govern my self-esteem, but I sympathize. Which is why I’m about to spend $150 on a head shot for a dating app. Schwartz’s $150 rate is actually pretty cheap. One Tinder photographer I spoke to charges $650, though for a much more comprehensive service that involves several location changes. Schwartz’s sessions appeal to people like me, who are willing to pay to look good without totally defeating the purpose of a free app. I compose myself just as he opens the door. I trust him immediately because of his “cool photographer” haircut—long on top, freshly sheared on the sides. I bet he has 100 Tinder wives. Schwartz tells me that people are rarely as un-photogenic as they think they are and that many of the grinning model types I see on Instagram are actually Photoshop chimeras. (This soothes me until he pauses from taking my photos, looks at his camera, and tells me, “You definitely look better when you’re not doing that smile.”) He has a very good camera-side manner. On professional sets, photographers don’t usually exchange small talk with their models, but for our short time together—Schwartz calls these “expedited portrait sessions”—he asks questions the whole time, like a nurse who’s giving a kid a tetanus vaccine. His objective is to catch you o≠ guard a bit, so that you don’t fall into whatever crazed smile you’ve practiced in front of the mirror. Photos in which you’re genuinely happy and smiling, he says, are much better for Tinder. I find

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WHAT SHE SAID

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it very di∞cult to appear genuinely happy when I am doing the thing I hate the most— posing for photos—but Schwartz asks me innocuous date-y questions about my hometown (“So what are the best restaurants in Seattle?”) and I squeeze out a few normal faces in between my horrific defaults. As Schwartz gives me tips, I catalog them like an alien gathering background on humans: Lean into the photo a little bit, like you would when you’re listening to someone on a date. Don’t face the camera head-on, turn your head to the side—but not too much! And never, ever wear a wrinkled shirt, because a wrinkled shirt ruins even the best photos. Schwartz’s button-up shirt, I notice now, is virtually wrinkle-free. In a Tinder photo, you should look like the warmest, safest version of yourself. Only a serial killer would wear a wrinkled shirt. I’d hoped Schwartz would bless me with Photoshop sorcery, but he tells me he doesn’t do dramatic retouching. He’ll edit out stray hairs and blemishes, but he won’t give me an Emily Ratajkowski bod. When clients ask him to make them look slimmer or to add more hair to a balding pate, he declines. “I don’t want you to show up somewhere and have to explain to someone why you don’t look the way you do. You’re starting that date o≠ negatively.” When I 6 8

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consider this, my situation seems preferable: My Tinder dates are always pleasantly surprised when I arrive. When he sends me his selections, I am surprised to find several that I don’t hate. Schwartz says that when given the choice, people will pick a photo of themselves in which they’re making a face they’d make in a mirror. “If you ever stare at yourself in front of the mirror, you’re not going to laugh and smile normally. If you are, it’s a little creepy,” he says. “But if you’re at dinner with friends and they make you laugh, that reaction is very genuine. And your friends are going to pick out the photos where you look like that.” So I send four photos to everyone I know, demanding that they select their favorites. Every Tinder user should lay their photos out for a platonic jury, because it is revelatory. My friends and family are uniformly torn between a photo where I’m laughing and one where I look a little bit sneaky— neither of which was a favorite of mine initially. I pick the close-mouthed, sneaky smile and upload it to my Tinder, which has been languishing since the summer. And then, as is so rarely the case with self-help services, it works. Overnight, every man on Tinder swipes right. All the men I approve of approve of me right back. Instead of careless “wut r u up to”

messages, I get “What are you up to?” I feel like the nerd in a high school rom-com who, after whipping o≠ her glasses and letting down her hair, gets to date Freddie Prinze Jr. I am mad with power, swiping over breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I get so many Tinder matches that I become overwhelmed and retreat to a convent to live out my days in chaste peace. Just kidding—I keep swiping. I change my Twitter photo to the sex portrait, then my LinkedIn photo, then my Facebook, and then the little photo that appears next to my e-mails. My ex-boyfriend messages me on Facebook to tell me it is a “bomb” photo. I feel like I’ve found the real secret to confidence. This must be why Instagram stars, with all their perfect photos, are insu≠erable. I haven’t overcome the humiliation of paying for a Tinder head shot. When Schwartz asks me why I fall back on my “cheesy smile” in photos, I tell him it’s because I get uncomfortable when I do anything earnest, which might be the most honest thing I’ve ever said to a person. Voluntarily having your portrait taken by a stranger is the most earnest thing ever, but I think it’s worth it to have even just one good photo of yourself. Just like in the olden days. lauren larson is a gq associate editor.

MAX SCHWARTZ. CONTACT SHEET: GET T Y IMAGES. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION FOR EDITORIAL PURPOSES.

↑ The author, doing her damnedest not to look like a serial killer.

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GROOMING

futuristic gadgets like LED lights (for killing acne-causing bacteria) and electric stimulation (for tightening skin). Then there’s Skin Laundry, a global chain with locations in Los Angeles, London, and Hong Kong, which lasers your face clean in 15 minutes— something my crammed schedule appreciates. If lasers and LED lights (or leaving your house) aren’t your thing, a new service called the Ritualist will send an aesthetician to your home or office or hotel, as long as you’re in New York or San Francisco. Elsewhere, and in general, you can usually get a good facial at the nicest hotel in town.

Gentlemen, It’s Time to Talk About Your Face We interrupt this magazine to bring you a PSA from GQ grooming director Garrett Munce: It’s time for a skin-care intervention You wash your face. You moisturize. You might even use an eye cream. All of that is great—but allowing your regimen to subsist on the bare minimum is like buying a Bentley and filling it up with regular. Your face is your most valuable asset! And like an overpriced foreign car, it needs a tune-up every now and then. We’re not talking about Botox and fillers (though if you want

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to discuss those, DM me). We’re talking about facials. B UT WHAT, EXACT LY, I S A FACI A L? Even though it’s really an everyday treatment experienced by untold thousands, the facial retains a shroud of luxurious mystery— something only people with pieds-à-terre do. That is not the case. All that happens is this: A trained professional

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gives your face a full-on deep clean. They cleanse, exfoliate, and extract—getting all that grime from inside your pores. Then they hydrate your skin, hydrate some more, and seal in the moisture before you leave the room. Basically, you lie back in a zoned-out reverie for about an hour while a nice person goops up your

face. That’s it. And then you walk out of there glowing like a damn cherub. Plus, a good aesthetician might identify and treat skin-care issues you didn’t know you had. They’re able to look under the hood in ways you simply can’t on your own. So along with the superficial improvement, a facial’s got dermatological bona fides.

S OUNDS GREAT, BUT W HERE DO YOU GET ONE? There’s a new crop of facial bars popping up that specifically cater to a unisex crowd. Heyday—which has five locations in Manhattan—is very un-spa-like. No robes, no cucumber slices, and no excessive pampering. I liked it so much that I left with a monthly membership and a fistful of takehome products. Like many other cutting-edge developments in the skin-care world, this new strippeddown philosophy comes from South Korea, where the multi-billiondollar cosmetics market is fueled by an insatiable appetite for technological development, not frills. Silver Mirror, for instance, applies

CONS IDER IT A CONTRIBUTION TO YOUR S ILVERFOX 4 0 1(K) Celebrity aesthetician Joanna Vargas told me to go get a facial every time the seasons change: “Your skin has different needs, depending on what’s happening outside.” You get a haircut more than four times a year—the cognitive leap to getting seasonal facials just isn’t that crazy. But look, I get it. It’s stressful to add yet another concern to your Excel spreadsheet of anxiety. But think of it as the reverse: an easy cure to whatever low-level anxieties you’ve lived with—like annoyingly dry skin, acne, or a general lack of camerareadiness. At about $95 a pop, depending on where you go, a facial treatment is significantly cheaper than neglecting the problem until it requires a major intervention. The beauty is, if you invest in your face now, it’ll start paying off immediately. So man up and get a facial.

KURT RUSSELL: SUNSET BOULEVARD/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES. CUCUMBER: GETTY IMAGES. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION FOR EDITORIAL PURPOSES.

← Another way to escape New York: Get a relaxing facial.

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Auto • Home • Rent • Cycle • Boat geico.com | 1-800-947-AUTO (2886) | local office Some discounts, coverages, payment plans and features are not available in all states or all GEICO companies. Homeowners and renters coverages are written through non-affiliated insurance companies and are secured through the GEICO Insurance Agency, Inc. Boat and PWC coverages are underwritten by GEICO Marine Insurance Company. Motorcycle and ATV coverages are underwritten by GEICO Indemnity Company. GEICO is a registered service mark of Government Employees Insurance Company, Washington, D.C. 20076; a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. subsidiary. © 2017 GEICO

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Patagonia vs. Evil We all knew the legendary outerwear company Patagonia lived and breathed the adventurous life. We knew they cared about the environment. But it wasn’t till Trump came along that we realized they were ready to fight by Rosecrans Baldwin

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atagonia was built in the image of its founder, Yvon Chouinard. In late January, when we met for the first time, that image included a flannel shirt, beat-up trousers, and flip-flops. Chouinard is an unlikely nominee for wealthiest man in the room. He walks with an air of deflection, as if to duck attention. “It’s funny, the first time I met him,” the celebrated mountain climber Tommy Caldwell told me, “I walked into the cafeteria at Patagonia, and I was like, ‘That guy looks like a homeless dude.’ ” Chouinard is both a beatnik dropout and a renegade capitalist. A revolutionary rock climber in his day, who still disappears regularly to surf and fly-fish, he oversees a corporation that did $800 million in sales last year. At 79, Chouinard looks like a recovering

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mountain troll who enjoys sunshine, food, and wine but will probably outlast the rest of us if the apocalypse hits tomorrow. “I’ve spent enough time in the mountains,” he told me, “that I can get from point A to point B safely and e∞ciently. If shit hits the fan, I could feed my family o≠ the coast. But I’m totally lost in the desert. I don’t understand the desert at all.” In the months leading up to our meeting, Chouinard and Patagonia had seen a few disasters. The Thomas wildfire, the largest in California history, torched the hills around the company’s Ventura headquarters. Five employees lost their homes, and then came the mudslides. All of which took place while Patagonia dealt with a crisis back east: a decision by President Trump, the great un-doer, to shrink some of his predecessor’s national monuments. The pledge was a first for an American president; limiting the size of monuments like Bears Ears in Utah would mean the largest reduction of protected land in U.S. history. Which is what led Patagonia, in early December, to change its home page to a stark message: “The President Stole Your Land.” In response, the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources sent out an e-mail with the subject line “Patagonia: don’t buy it.” This wasn’t just Trump whining on Twitter that Nordstrom wasn’t supporting his daughter’s fashion line. The federal government, run by allegedly pro-business Republicans, basically called for the boycott of a privately held company—provoking a former director of the O∞ce of Government Ethics to label the action “a bizarre and dangerous departure from civic norms.” Chouinard has been known to be a prickly contrarian. He doesn’t do e-mail. His cell phone goes largely untouched. But he’s adept at delivering powerful sound bites. In December, Chouinard went on CNN—wearing what looked to be the same flannel shirt from the day we met—and said, “I think the only thing this administration understands is lawsuits. We’re losing this planet. We have an evil government.… And I’m not going to stand back and just let evil win.” Which explains why Patagonia is presently suing the White House in federal court.

his is not your parents’ fleece-maker. We’re past the old jokes about Patagucci or Fratagonia. Sure, you still see a Synchilla vest on every venture capitalist in Palo Alto; not for nothing does the Jared Dunn character on Silicon Valley possess a Patagonia collection supreme. But the vest also crisscrosses popular culture: DeRay Mckesson, one of the faces of Black Lives Matter, 7 6

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wears Patagonia so often his vest has its own Twitter feed. A$AP Rocky shows up in Snap-T sweaters. Louis Vuitton cribbed its Classic Retro-X jacket for a mountaineering look. Universities from Oregon to Ole Miss are Patagonia-saturated, and meanwhile, vintage finds—the rarest featuring the original “big label” logo—fetch a premium on eBay. The company’s HQ looks like a cross between a college campus and a recycling center. Solar panels everywhere. Wet suits drying on the roofs of cars—the five-acre spread is a short walk from the beach. The company has an on-site school where employees can enroll their kids

↑ Yvon Chouinard started out making gear for himself and his climbing buddies, including Tom Brokaw (bottom photo, right).

through second grade, one of the reasons that Patagonia has near gender parity among employees. Many of its CEOs have been female, including the current one, Rose Marcario. Chouinard writes in his memoir–cum–business bible, Let My People Go Surfing, “I was brought up surrounded by women. I have ever since preferred that accommodation.” Chouinard was born in Maine but formed in California. The son of a hardworking French-Canadian carpenter,

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ANDY HAYT/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED/GET T Y IMAGES; JACQUES PAVLOVSKY/SYGMA/CORBIS/SYGMA VIA GET T Y IMAGES; COURTESY OF RICK RIDGEWAY/PATAGONIA

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POLITICS OF STYLE

he moved with his family to Burbank, just north of Los Angeles, in 1946, when Chouinard was 8; it was his mother’s idea, to improve his dad’s asthma. In California, Chouinard stood out, not in a good way. He was short, spoke French, and had a name like a girl. He hated school. High school history class was for practicing holding his breath, so he could free-dive deeper to catch wild lobster o≠ Malibu. “I learned a long time ago that if you want to be a winner,” he told me, “you invent your own games.” So he ran away, to Gri∞th Park to hunt rabbits, the Los Angeles River to catch crawdads. It was a funny wilderness in the Valley—his favorite swimming hole was fed by a movie studio’s film-development lab. “Yeah, I used to swim in the outfall,” he said, cracking up. Then he discovered climbing. In the 1950s, age 16, Chouinard drove to Wyoming and climbed Gannett Peak, the state’s highest mountain. Soon he met other young climbers, like Royal Robbins and Tom Frost, and migrated to Yosemite, where he lived o≠ scraps—at one point, tins of cat food—and made first ascents up the granite walls. “In the ’60s, it was kind of the height of the fossil-fuel age,” he said. “You could get a part-time job anytime you felt like it. Gas was 25 cents a gallon. You could buy a used car for 20 bucks. Camping was free. It was pretty easygoing.” Chouinard and his friends would transform rock climbing, helping to bring about the modern “clean” version, where you no longer hammer iron spikes into the cracks to aid your progress. This led to athletes like Caldwell, a Patagonia “climbing ambassador,” pulling o≠ accomplishments no one thought possible—like the first free climb of Yosemite’s Dawn Wall. Chouinard

also met his wife of 47 years, Malinda, in Yosemite. At the time, she was a climber who worked as a weekend cabin maid. According to Chouinard, the moment that clinched it was a day they were hanging out and Malinda saw some women pull up and throw a beer can out the window. She told them to pick it up. They gave her the finger. Malinda went over, tore the license plate o≠ their car with her bare hands, and turned it in to the rangers’ o∞ce. Chouinard was in love. Patagonia got its start as Chouinard Equipment, selling the climbing gear that Yvon was making for his friends. The first apparel was equally functional, designed to resist rock: sturdy corduroy trousers, sti≠ rugby shirts like the ones Yvon brought back from a climbing trip in Scotland. When the clothing started to take o≠, they decided to separate the garments from the gear; they just needed a good name. As Chouinard explained: “To most people, especially then, Patagonia was a name like Timbuktu or Shangri-la—far-o≠, interesting, not quite on the map.” These days, that “far-o≠ ” land is thriving. With Marcario at the company, revenue and profits have quadrupled. In addition to clothing, the company produces films, runs a food business, even has a venture-capital fund to invest in eco-friendly start-ups; one, Bureo, makes skateboards and sunglasses from former fishing nets. Along the way, Patagonia began donating 1 percent of its sales to environmental groups—$89 million as of April 2017—and led the garment industry in cleaning up its supply chains, demanding better practices from factories overseas. (Chouinard, his wife, and their two adult children remain the sole owners of Patagonia.)

↓ Patagonia has always worn its pro-environment politics on its fleeced sleeve. The latest fight is no different.

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For all the success, an enduring thorn sticks in Chouinard’s side: A clothing company can’t help but pollute. This season’s new pu≠y jacket is tomorrow’s landfill. “The best thing you can do for the planet as far as clothing goes is to buy used clothes and wear them until you just can’t wear them anymore,” Chouinard said. “It’s like a car. If you get rid of your Chevy and buy a Prius, you’re not doing anything for the planet—you just put one more car on the road. Someone else is going to be driving your Chevy.” In 2011, on Black Friday, Patagonia ran a full-page ad in The New York Times, headlined “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” The company vowed to repair or recycle old garments while also pleading for customers to stop buying crap they didn’t need. Of course, Patagonia’s ad made headlines— and the company sold a ton of jackets. “But it also forced us to put in the largest garment-repair center in North America,” Chouinard said. “I made a commitment to our customer that we were going to put as much quality as we could into the product. If it breaks down, we were going to fix it, and if you no longer want it, we’re going to find another home for it, and then when it’s finally completely finished, we were going to recycle it into more product.” He added, “It wasn’t a way to sell more product, even though, of course, that jacket sold like crazy. It’s kind of Zen. You do the right thing and good things happen.” In the Trump era, Chouinard and his company feel galvanized. Following the election, a junior employee had the goofy idea to give away Patagonia’s Black Friday profits to hundreds of grassroots environmental organizations, the kind that often work for changes the current administration hates. But not just a share of the day’s revenue: all of it. The idea was kicked up the chain. Within days, the company had made a promise on social media. Sales started to pour in. The previous year, Patagonia had done $2.5 million on Black Friday. In 2016 it was $10 million—and they gave it all away. “It cost us a bunch of money,” Chouinard said, “because it was total revenue. But 60 percent of the customers were new buyers. Sixty percent. It was one of the best business things we’ve ever done.” In Ventura, weeks after the Thomas fire, the air still smelled of smoke. Patagonia’s headquarters had been used to house evacuees until the fires got too near. Later, the Ventura store gave away long underwear to firefighters working nights in the mountains and fishing waders to crews trying to find people in the mud. I felt a little awkward, then, considering the context, when I told Chouinard that Patagonia’s activism seemed pretty convenient when it did so

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well for the bottom line. What’s “Zen” to his mind might sound to others like “good marketing.” He conceded the point, somewhat, but strongly disagreed: “What we say we’re doing, we’re actually doing. A lot of companies are just greenwashing, and young people can see right through it. Kids are smart, so we don’t talk down to them. Our marketing philosophy is just: Tell people who we are. Which is, tell people what we do, and don’t try to be anything more than that.” I asked Chouinard about the lawsuit and his personal feelings about Trump. He thought for a moment, perhaps to contain himself. “What pisses me o≠ about this administration is that they’re all these ‘climate deniers’—well, that’s bullshit. They know what’s happening. What they’re doing is purposely not doing anything about climate for the sake of making more money.” He paused, bowed his head, and scraped his fingernails on the table. He sat up again. “That is truly evil. That’s why I call this administration evil. They know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it to make more money.” Gradually, the conversation went even darker. About Trump, Chouinard added,

“It’s like a kid who’s so frustrated he wants to break everything. That’s what we’ve got.” I asked sarcastically if any part of him was an optimist. Marcario, sitting next to him, laughed loudly. “Did you just ask Yvon if he’s an optimist?” Chouinard smiled and cocked his head. “I’m totally a pessimist. But you know, I’m a happy person. Because the cure for depression is action.” n d e c e m b e r , Chouinard was invited to Washington to testify before the House Committee on Natural Resources. He refused. In a response Patagonia made public, Chouinard wrote to the committee chairman: The American people made it clear in public comments that they want to keep the monuments intact, but they were ignored by Secretary Zinke, your committee, and the administration. We have little hope that you are working in good faith with this invitation. To me, he sco≠ed and shook his head; Washington’s the kind of desert a man like him could get lost in. “You sit down in a little chair, and they’re up on high chairs looking down at you, and they give you two

and a half minutes to give your testimony,” he said. “I’m not going to play that game.” It reminded me of how Chouinard had described his childhood, growing up in Burbank, facing o≠ against teachers and bullies. When I asked him how it felt to be attacked by the administration, he laughed. “I’m stoked. If you’re not getting attacked, you’re not trying hard enough.” Utah is currently feeling the e≠ects of one of the company’s political actions. The outdoor-retail industry gathers each winter at an enormous trade show to flaunt new gear. Traditionally, the event had been held in Salt Lake City, giving the city a roughly $20 million boost—until last February, when Patagonia led the charge to move the show. Along with companies like REI and The North Face, Patagonia had gotten fed up with Utah’s Republican governor, Gary Herbert, who was determined to roll back protections on his state’s public lands. Herbert was reportedly furious. Montana senator Jon Tester said the relocation had sent “a hell of a message.” At this year’s show, in Colorado, it was a topic of conversation everywhere I went. An industry veteran

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“That’s why I call this administration evil. They know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it to make more money.” pointed out to me how, for one example, REI has plenty more members than the NRA but no lobbying muscle to compare. Now maybe that could change. I wandered the trade show for two days. Among the tens of thousands of attendees, Patagonia was easily the uno∞cial clothier of the convention, if not the city of Denver. Backpacks, jackets, trucker hats. On the street, outside the convention center, a man selling a newspaper that benefits the homeless, the Denver Voice, was wearing a Patagonia hat and top-of-the-line down jacket. At one point, I caught a panel of executives discussing access to public lands. Corley Kenna, Patagonia’s director of global communications, mentioned that, in addition to what had happened in Utah, numerous other monuments were on the chopping block—not to mention the Arctic Refuge,

which Trump had just opened for oil drilling, or U.S. coastlines, which he’d vowed to exploit for drilling, despite resistance from the vast majority of the states themselves. Kenna pledged that the company, with its partners, would maintain its resolve: “We’re fighting an administration that lies, that flat-out lies.” Building o≠ the momentum around public lands, Patagonia is doubling down on its activist streak. In February, it launched a new online platform to connect customers with environmental groups. This spring it will announce a certification it’s spearheading for “regenerative organic agriculture,” Chouinard’s latest obsession. That’s the practice where farmers, through topsoil management, absorb carbon from the climate. As Chouinard sees it, it’s possibly our best shot against climate change—and likely

good for Patagonia’s bottom line. “In business, this is what we do here—we just break the rules,” he said. “Life is so much easier by breaking the rules than trying to conform to the rules. It’s so much easier.” For a doomsayer on the verge of becoming an octogenarian, Chouinard stays awfully busy: writing op-eds, developing new products, stoking outrage. Assuming he doesn’t get cancer from those childhood swims in photo-processing chemicals, I don’t just think he’ll outlast Trump, who’s eight years his junior; he’ll probably outlast me, and I’m only staring down 41. The solution, Yvonstyle, would appear to be to remain active, to remain engaged. In a 1992 letter to employees titled “The next hundred years,” Chouinard wrote, “I have a little di≠erent definition of evil than most people. When you have the opportunity and the ability to do good and you do nothing, that’s evil. Evil doesn’t always have to be an overt act. It can be merely the absence of good.” The cure is action. rosecrans baldwin’s latest novel, ‘The Last Kid Left,’ was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017.

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FATHERHOOD

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Are Kids the Enemy of Writing? Don’t have children, a great writer once told Michael Chabon. Each one represents a novel you’ll never publish. Here, Chabon (father of four) considers what was lost when he defiantly ignored that advice

at a literary party the summer before my first novel was published, I found myself alone with a writer I admired, on the deck of our hosts’ house along the Truckee River. People came and went with blue Mexican wineglasses and bottles of beer, but I sensed that, for whatever reason, I had the man’s attention. “I’m going to give you some advice,” he told me, a warning edge in his voice. I said I would appreciate that. I was curious to hear what he had to say, not because I felt in need of advice but as a clue to the 8 4

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mystery of the great man himself. He presented a smooth surface without chinks or toeholds, the studied amiability of someone unaccustomed to giving himself away. Advice might be the only clue I was going to get. The great man said that his advice was going to be painful—or maybe that was just in his tone—but he knew what he was talking about, and if I wanted to make a go of it as a novelist, I would do well to pay attention. The guy was nearly twice my age, but he was not old. He was young enough, for example, to wear black Chuck Taylors.

i was due to marry my future ex-wife in under a month; my book would come out the following spring. It turned out that this conjunction of circumstances, in the view of the famous writer, was cause for alarm. Now, marriage was fine—in fact, all of the guy’s books were dedicated to his wife—but if you were not careful, you would run a serious risk of damaging your career. After this novel, he patiently explained, there would be a second one to write, and second novels were notoriously thornier and more unwieldy than debuts. Following the inevitable sophomore cock-up, if I were lucky and stubborn in the proper measure, I would go on to tackle the magisterial third and fourth novels, and then the quirky fifth, the slim and elegant sixth, the seventh that, in some way, would recapitulate and ring the changes on all its predecessors, and so on, for as long as my stubbornness and luck held out. Unless, of course, I made the fatal mistake of so many young hotshots before me. “You can write great books,” the great man continued. “Or you can have kids. It’s up to you.” I nodded, reeling a little at the prophecy he had just laid down for me, a career of struggle and triumph stacked up to the heavens like Babel, book by torturous book. “I never thought about it that way,” I confessed. My future ex-wife and I had gotten as far as the usual drawing up of rotisserie-league baby-name rosters, but no further. Did I need to put an immediate halt to these playful conversations, along with any more earnest ones that might arise? She was a poet, with ambitions of her own. “Poe,” he said. “O’Connor. Welty. None of them had children.” This was a list that, by implication, included him; he was a southerner himself, and he and his beloved dedicatee were childless, too. “Chekhov. Beckett. Woolf.” I tried to muster some counter-examples, but alas, the one who came immediately to mind was my then idol, John Cheever, packed into a house in Ossining, New York, with his aggrieved wife and three children. I had just been reading the memoirs of his daughter, Susan. Her childhood had been quietly calamitous, her father’s career a farrago of alcoholism, shame, and secret homosexuality. The short stories had over time come unbuttoned, the novels proceeding with the sham dignity and slow gait of drunks trying to pass for sober, while the

JULIE BLACKMON, ‘BABY TOSS,’ 2009

He was young enough to smile ironically at himself, laying the Polonius routine on some raw hurler of metaphors out of U.C. Irvine. “Don’t have children,” he said. “That’s it. Do not.” The smile faded, but its ghost lingered a moment in his blue eyes. “That is the whole of the law.”

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children alternated between hoping desperately to be seen and trying to keep out of the way. It was at least arguable, I guessed, that the man ought never to have had children at all. I wondered how Susan Cheever would feel about that proposition. “Put it this way, Michael,” the great man said, and then he sketched out the brutal logic: Writing was a practice. The more you wrote, the better a writer you became and the more books you produced. Excellence plus productivity, that was the formula for sustained success, and time was the coe∞cient of both. Children, the great man said, were notorious thieves of time. Then

children whenever they needed me, over breakfast, doing homework, when they learned to swim, to cook, to ride a bicycle; when they cried into their pillows. I would be present in my children’s lives. In short, my door would always be open to them. Until now it had never occurred to me that this ambition might be incompatible with the practice of writing. “Richard Yates,” said the great man, preparing to deliver the golpe de gracia, like one of Hemingway’s matadors. “You know what Richard Yates said?” Oh no, I thought. I revered the bleak and gimlet-eyed Yates, for The Easter Parade

I was up to my ankles in babies and brats, the non-author of an entire shelf of great novels I would never be able to write. there was the question of subject matter, settings, experiences; books were hungry things, and if you stayed too long in any one place, they would consume everything and everyone around you. You needed to keep moving, always onward, a literary Masai driving your ravenous herd of novels. Travel, therefore, was a must, and I should take his word for it because he had made a careful study: Traveling with children was the world’s biggest pain in the ass. Anyway, writers were restless folk. They could not thrive without being able to pick up and go, wherever and whenever it suited them. Writers needed to be irresponsible, ultimately, to everything but the writing, free of commitments to everything but the daily word count. Children, by contrast, needed stability, consistency, routine, and above all, commitment. In short, he was saying, children are the opposite of writing. “Thomas Mann?” I tried. I had been racking my brain to think of a great writer who was a family man but not calamitously so, like Cheever. My enthusiasm for Mann had faded of late, but I would never forget the rapture of the summer I had spent, five years earlier, climbing The Magic Mountain. “Thomas Mann?” the great man said. He grinned; I had walked right into his trap. “Thomas Mann used to lock himself in his room! Every day! For hours! His children were forbidden to disturb him, on pain of death, and that’s barely an exaggeration. His children were a disturbance to him. When he was working, they were a source of pain. I mean, forget the question of getting your work done; is that the kind of father you want to be?” That was an easy one to answer. I knew the kind of father I wanted to be. Unlike my own father, I would be around for my 8 6

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and Revolutionary Road and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness; no way was this going to be anything but grim. “ ‘You lose a book,’ ” the great man quoted, or paraphrased, or possibly invented himself, “ ‘for every child.’ ” Now the great man smiled. He could see the e≠ect his words were having on me as I stood there trying to reckon how many books I stood, or would stand, to lose. My future ex-wife and I had settled on two names, one male, one female. This suggested a worst case of two books, two books erased, wiped away by the universal solvent of children. I supposed I could live with that. But what if, after the first two, there was an “accident,” too much wine in the afternoon, a failure of birth control; and what if, God forbid, that third pregnancy turned out to be twins? Suddenly, in my imagination, I was clinging to the base of that half-built Babel, up to my ankles in a roiling surf of babies and brats, the non-author of an entire shelf of great novels I would never be able to write, any one of them conceivably my masterpiece. ll right, michael, you think about it,” said the great man in that accent like butter on a warm biscuit. His work was done. He patted me on the shoulder, rattled the last half-inch of Dos Equis in his bottle, and went back inside the house, confident of having saved—or at least of having frightened—another lost lamb. I have a vague recollection of reporting this conversation afterward to my future ex-wife and of our laughing it o≠ as arrogant self-justification or, perhaps, more pitiably, making virtue of necessity. We got married, moved a few times, got divorced. I managed to snatch a handful of gently embittered

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short stories out of that Gilliganesque pleasure cruise, though the second novel I attempted to build and launch over the course of those years, a would-be epic, sank like a vast unseaworthy dreadnought, unsalvageable, to the bottom of my soul. Fortunately, there were no children to blame for that shipwreck. A couple of years later I married again, and over the quarter-century that has followed, while fathering four children, I’ve managed to turn out 14 books. Should there be 18? Is the creative wistfulness that sometimes comes over me after a rough night at the keyboard, that feeling of having somehow wandered by mistake into the wrong book, a kind of mourning for the loss of those other, phantom-limb novels, the ones that my children stole? It’s certainly the case that if one were to plot on a graph my declining output of short stories over the past two decades alongside my rising output of children, the resulting X would seem to mark the scene of a crime. But the reason I almost never write short stories anymore isn’t that my children are time thieves. It’s that my children are expensive, and short stories just don’t pay very well. I can’t a≠ord to write short stories anymore. And those four “lost” novels predicted by the great man’s theory all those years ago? If I had followed the great man’s advice and never burdened myself with the gift of my children, or if I had never written any novels at all, in the long run the result would have been the same as the result will be for me here, having made the choice I made: I will die; and the world in its violence and serenity will roll on, through the endless indi≠erence of space, and it will take only 100 of its circuits around the sun to turn the six of us, who loved each other, to dust, and consign to oblivion all but a scant few of the thousands upon thousands of novels and short stories written and published during our lifetimes. If none of my books turns out to be among that bright remnant because I allowed my children to steal my time, narrow my compass, and curtail my freedom, I’m all right with that. Once they’re written, my books, unlike my children, hold no wonder for me; no mystery resides in them. Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back. Anyway, if, 100 years hence, those books lie moldering and forgotten, I’ll never know. That’s the problem, in the end, with putting all your chips on posterity: You never stick around long enough to enjoy it. michael chabon is the author of nine novels. ‘Pops,’ a collection of essays, will be published in May by Harper Books.

And Now Presenting...

A SWEET LITTLE

For nearly three decades, no one has lived larger than Sean Combs—Puffy the world builder, the maximalist style guru, the impeccable spotter of talent. Spend some time inside the beautiful bubble created by a hip-hop icon BY JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

MACIEK KOBIELSKI MOBOLAJI DAWODU

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L O V E W A S G E T T I N G A H A I R C U T , they said, and could talk to me again. I was ushered upstairs. By then I had been inside the Combs compound in Beverly Hills since morning, and it seemed unremarkable that the house would include a home barbershop. He sat in the chair with his back to me. The barber was moving around his head like a big bee, sometimes with scissors, sometimes with little tiny brushes, sometimes with a looking glass. Love’s hair was already quite short and to my eyes perfectly trimmed, but there is perfect in our world and perfect in Love’s, and if the twain meet it will be by chance.

He is called Love now, or Brother Love. Not Diddy or Pu≠y or Sean or any of those. He will still answer to them, though. He is not a snob about names. But he would prefer now that people call him Love, because that is what matters. “Even people like me?” I asked, meaning God knows what. “Yeah,” he said. “I like re-inventing. That’s probably why I have so many name changes. It’s why I follow David Bowie and Madonna.” Dictating what others call you is an expression of power, and the control Love exerts over his world helps explain the longevity of his career. Think of how many celebrities start clothing lines. Now think of how many of those are operating five years after they appear, forget about the 20 that Sean John has been around. Love also gets paid every time they play a Bad Boy Entertainment song on the radio or in a commercial. He is making money by the minute. He is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Get this: He was the highest-paid American musician of 2017, and he did not release any original music last year. Now he is returning to what made him famous in the first place: spotting talent. 9 0

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In the barbershop, Love was watching preedited footage from The Four, his new reality show on Fox, which is meant to be a competitor to The Voice. The footage was beautiful. Which was not what a person would necessarily expect if he or she were I and unwholesomely familiar with the genre of televised voice competitions—familiar, too, from early days, with Love’s first venture onto this field of combat, Making the Band 2. No need to get into that. Either you remember Chopper or you never knew him. But the show was how a lot of people, including me, first got an up-close feel (albeit simulated, exaggerated, packaged) of Love’s personality, his style of relating, which I would describe as friendly and sly and quiet—in a way that makes you wonder if he is cocky or shy; the quietness seems to contain both qualities—then sometimes suddenly firm and cold. Mainly, though, he seemed nice. When you are about to spend the day with a famous person, it’s one of the first things you wonder: Will he be nice? On Love’s barbershop TV was a young man named Vincint Cannady, a 26-yearold self-described “black, gay, weird” singer from Philadelphia. He was doing a sort of

torch-song version of Radiohead’s “Creep” and slaying it with a flaming sword. It was undeniable. There were about eight people in the room. Someone said, “He just took that song from Radiohead.” I knew what he meant. You felt like this was now the definitive version, or that it had been, for a moment. To have realized the song would bear this kind of operatic deconstruction had been a stroke of artistry. Now Love’s head turned a tick. “Did you hear that?” he said, referring to the remark about Radiohead, not to Cannady’s performance, though both were swept up in the question. “We gotta do something with that,” he said. “We can put that out special.” We could, or rather he could, and did, and two days later the clip went viral on Facebook, generating some ungodly number of views. The barber, who had been frozen with his hands withdrawn, drawn up like paws, the way barbers do when they’re waiting for you to stop talking, began to move and buzz again. They placed me directly in front of Love, facing him and maybe 12 feet away, but seated lower—in quite a low chair—whereas his barbershop chair had been pumped up, elevated. It was papal, this whole exchange of postures between us. Love made very direct eye contact. I started asking my questions. Love was supposed to be at a TV studio soon to tape Ellen. He maybe even should have been there already. But he appeared completely calm. Like a person whose body was heavily sedated with a drug designed to have no e≠ect on his mind or even exert a speedlike influence there. But I suppose we all sit very still in barbershop chairs. I said that people at home had told me to ask for untold Biggie stories, but that I didn’t want to send him on a nostalgia trip. Instead I asked him to go back and get the old Pu≠y and bring him forward, to imagine that he was still the hungry, young self-made exec who broke Biggie in the first place. If he were to look out on the current scene with that hungrier man’s eyes, was there anyone who gave him the same excitement? He thought about it for a solid half minute. “No,” he said. It was a good answer. He had searched his brain for it. He was not going to give me a name just to give me a name. “Kendrick Lamar,” he said finally. “But Kendrick’s already made.” He’s someone you would put on a level with Biggie, talent-wise? “Yes,” he said, again after a pause. “He gives you that feeling.” He rattled o≠ a short list of other favorite living artists: “Drake, SZA, Jay-Z, Nas, Migos, Lil Baby, Future...” He trailed o≠. Love’s seriousness of demeanor was probably the thing about him that took me the most aback. He was almost somber. Not slow to smile—he didn’t look depressed (and I know he still parties; his doctor had recently

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“I don’t believe in passiveness. At some point there has to be some kind of ﬁght. I feel like we’ve done a lot of marching. It’s time to start charging.” told him he “goes too hard”)—but there was a singularity of focus. He’s almost 50 now. It’s the age of: Give it all or retire. He seems totally uninterested in and possibly even unaware of the option of retirement. I asked what kept him hungry. “My culture,” he said. “I want to be an authentic, unapologetic warrior for black culture and the culture of the street and how it moves. My thing is most importantly to change the narrative of the black race. I can’t relate to anything that isn’t about that.” He said he wants to develop an app that will allow users to look at a given city or neighborhood and see where the black-owned and black-friendly businesses are. He didn’t want to say too much about the app. It wasn’t finished. He didn’t have a name for it yet. “This is not about taking away from any other community,” he said. “We’ll still go to Chinatown. We’ll still buy Gucci!” He laughed. “But the application will make it possible for us to have an economic community. It’s about blacks gaining economic power.” He and Jay-Z have been talking about this, he said, about moving the race forward actively, by means of: making a lot of money and putting it back into the community. “I don’t believe in passiveness,” Love said. “At some point there has to be some kind of fight. I feel like we’ve done a lot of marching. It’s time to start charging.” In his conversations with Jay-Z, they’ve been using the term “black excellence” for leaders who came forward to uplift the race by example. It was an updated incarnation of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth,” based not on class or lightness of skin tone this time but instead on getting and being extremely wealthy. And philanthropic. “We’re into psychological warfare,” he said. “The di≠erence is, we’re not trying to hurt nobody.”

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join him for a morning training session. His sons, Justin and Christian, were with us, plus 9 2

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a handful of their friends. Plus some of Love’s old and loyal friends, who all but live with him. Plus a couple of people who work for him, maybe security. Then there were the trainers, two of them. The trainers were guys who, when they got done working with Love, would go o≠ to train NFL and NBA players. Love introduced me, and each man or youth shook my hand, introducing himself. We started by running with medicine balls up

and down a sidewalk. The pool with a grotto was there. The green lawn with a basketball court. Our bodies were destined not for those things but instead to run while holding medicine balls over our shoulders. The others complimented me when I’d managed to complete some task, or more often some fairly contained and somewhat arbitrarily bracketed-o≠ section of one of the tasks. At one point we all lay next to one

LAMBORGHINI COURTESY OF GTO ENGINEERING

another on yoga mats. Love had placed me next to him, in the middle. We all sat in a line in the position of a half-completed sit-up and passed the medicine ball down the line, fire-bucket style. A bunch of di≠erent medicine balls. Some were not that heavy. Some were quite heavy. So, you’re on your back, trying to catch these balls and hand them o≠ quickly before the next one comes. And at times, especially with the really heavy

ones, it was hard for me to get it handed o≠ to Love in time, and I wouldn’t quite have brought my hands back to the catching position when the next ball came, and several times the medicine balls came close to hitting me directly in my medicine balls or did hit me somewhat before I could grab them, and Love was noticing this. He would ask the others to slow down if he’d just seen me get medicined. That’s what I mean about nice.

He was considerate. I looked over at him at one point and said, “I think my body is confused. It hasn’t experienced anything like this in a long time.” He smiled and said, “Maybe today is the day when you’ll turn it around.” When that exercise was over, I checked out for a while. I drank some ice-cold water from a big glass jug. When it came time to do the last exercise, Love called out to me from about 30 feet away. He and the others were lined

can do this, but you gotta do it yourself, no writers.’ ” He was excited because his new single with Chris Brown was about to drop. I don’t fuck with Chris Brown, neither with his music nor with his woman-battering, so I didn’t say anything much. I tried to focus on Christian’s contribution. And the song was pretty banging. I’m not sure it’ll be a hit, but certainly it was a promising start to a young rapper’s career. And who knows, maybe it will be a hit? But if it’s a hit, will it have become one because of the song or because Love has the power to say, “Make it a hit!”? I don’t know. Probably that will be one of Christian’s challenges, dealing with never being totally sure about that. Or maybe he doesn’t care, having inherited his father’s knack for complete calm, even when the Ellens of the world are calling. Doubtless he will have to crawl out from under some kind of shadow.

A B O U T A N H O U R L A T E R , the clothes arrived

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“I think I’ve developed a mentorship relationship with the world. God sent me here to inspire.” up to do something with weights. “John,” he yelled, “you started with us, you’re going to finish with us.” Everyone clapped as I jogged back in what I hoped was a game-looking way. And we all did the exercise. God has wiped the details of it from my memory. I went back to the ice-water station and talked to Love’s sons, who had uncommonly good manners that didn’t seem fake, like they had accepted that it was important to treat 9 4

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strangers with respect. Each is primed to take control of one aspect of his empire. Justin told me he wanted to become the CEO of Bad Boy when Love stepped down: “I want to be the second coming of him. Just being around my dad and seeing what he looks for in talent, that’s very exciting.” As for Christian? He said he had been writing songs for years, “trying to find my sound. My pops is always telling me, ‘You

for Love’s GQ fashion shoot. I got up and walked across the green lawn. There were walls all around, high walls. Outbuildings. And everything was so clean. I had noticed that anytime I set down a mug or a little plate or something (co≠ee and snacks had been o≠ered), a sta≠ person would sneak up behind me to take it away, that’s how quick they were. As a result, everything felt completely spotless and almost not lived-in, as if the house were being prepped for a real estate showing. The houses of extremely rich people are generally like this, and it has always given me a ghostly feeling, even there in sunny L.A. When Love said that thing about wanting to wage psychological warfare but not to hurt anybody, I had wondered out loud how that could really be. How was it warfare, then? “It’s a war to love ourselves,” he said. So I asked the only question I could think of: whether he loved himself. “Yes,” he said. “Sometimes.” In a great big open room that looked like it was possibly for parties but was really, I think, just another sitting area, Love was being fitted with various outfits. It was like watching a royal being dressed by the household sta≠. A seamstress stood ten feet away with a nubbin of chalk and a threaded needle in her lips, ready to pounce if an alteration was needed. There were maybe six people, and they were all working the entire time. Racing the clock, actually (the Ellen taping!—and he still hadn’t even gone upstairs for his haircut). He tried on a long blue Valentino jacket that both looked like something Willy Wonka would wear and was completely chic. It was wild—I wanted it, knowing I’d never even have the guts to put it on. Maybe I would show it to people. Love wandered over to near where I was standing, by the (continued on page 143)

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to CHILL Rakishly handsome actor James Norton is the star of the gangster series McMafia and the latest man rumored to be the next James Bond. Here, he shows that the suit in all of its many forms (from plaid to baggy to double-breasted) has adapted to this unfussy era of style and can be every bit as polished or relaxed as your mood Alasdair McLellan

jacket $2,200 pants $1,100 Calvin Klein 205W39NYC + tank top $280 Calvin Klein 205W39NYC watch $9,900 Cartier

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Norton, James Norton The 32-year-old star of the BBC/AMC drama McMafia knew the James Bond buzz was coming. The comparisons were inevitable—James Norton spends much of the show’s first season in a sharp suit. “I did tell the director, ‘Mate, you’re stoking the fire.’ ” Still, Norton is baffled whenever the press hails him as a possible 007 heir. “Bond on the outside, Mr. Bean on the inside,” joked an old girlfriend. Norton wasn’t offended. He describes himself as “high-strung,” “anxious”—“God, the picture I’m painting of myself.” It’s a picture of a thoughtful actor trapped in an easily objectified physique. In one scene, Norton goes swimming in the South of France. The Daily Mail praised the series for frequent shots of his “rippling abs.” Norton takes the attention in good humor, as long as it doesn’t detract from the show’s weightier ambitions. McMafia has its share of Bondish intrigue, but it’s also a brutal look at organized crime: In the second episode, a trafficking victim is shot behind the knees and left to die in the desert. But also... Norton’s rippling abs!— L A U R E N L A R S O N

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The New Age Pinstripe In the modern world of suiting, all the old signifiers of wealth and taste get turned on their heads. Exhibit A: the pinstripe that’s so chill you could almost wear it on laundry day. suit $3,100 Dior Homme + shirt $640 Tom Ford bracelet $625 The Great Frog

The Not-aSuit Suit A suit doesn’t always have to mean blazer and slacks. Don’t believe us? Throw on this matching workwear set from upstart San Francisco designer Evan Kinori. jacket $445 pants $395 Evan Kinori + t-shirt $90 Sunspel boots $590 Ami socks $100 Gucci bracelet $625 The Great Frog

Two Ways to Khaki To wear a khaki suit without looking like you’re going to a summer wedding, either: Buy it loose, like Fred Astaire (left). Or go bold and doublebreasted but skip the tie (right). « coat $1,280 pants $248 Michael Kors + shirt $155 BOSS shoes $295 Allen Edmonds » jacket $795 BOSS + shirt $155 BOSS watch $9,900 Cartier bracelet $625 The Great Frog

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The 2018 Beatles Blazer Puppytooth is— you guessed it— houndstooth, but tiny. Good news: It still has plenty of bite. jacket $1,200 Fendi + shirt $200 Budd watch $9,900 Cartier bracelet $625 The Great Frog fashion by ellie grace cumming. produced by ragi dholakia productions. hair by syd hayes for babyliss. makeup by ammy drammeh using suqqu. set design by victoria salomoni at the magnet agency.

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VERSACE, VERSACE, VERSACE, VERSACE

the EXCESSIVE VISION of

DONATELLA

The Italian house that helped establish the intersection of fashion and pop is never not in the air—but thanks to a new FX show and a fresh fixation on maximalist design, VERSACE is ever more at the center of things. How the imperious head of one of fashion’s most compelling brands maintains her influence on clothes and culture by Molly Young Elizaveta Porodina A P R I L

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T TO SAY THAT THE Medusa head is a common motif around the Palazzo Versace is like saying that Angelina Jolie dabbles in childrearing. Leather chairs are embossed with big Medusas, and espresso cups are painted with mini Medusas. Employees wear Medusa belt buckles. Medusas are carved on doors and etched in glass. The inventory of Medusas in just one of the bathrooms amounts to 14: on the inner and outer doors, on each of the multiple mirrors, on the drawer pulls, on the faucet, on the hand soap, on the toiletpaper holder, and on the toilet brush itself, which is gold. You are never alone in the Palazzo Versace. There is always a Gorgon, or 12, overlooking the scene, keeping you company, watching you pee. The palazzo at Via Gesù 12 in Milan is an 18th-century building that houses the Versace showroom and a two-bedroom apartment that once belonged to Gianni Versace. In a suite of rooms above the apartment, Donatella Versace is being photographed for this story, taking deep, patient breaths as she sits before a mirror and explains to the photographer that the left side of her face is better than the right side. The shoot is scored by a remix of “White Lines,” which seems maybe insensitive, given that Donatella was addicted to cocaine for 18 years until 2005, when Elton John urged her into rehab. Then again, she is known for her sense of irony. The irony is a complicating and redemptive layer on a woman who could easily be mistaken for a caricature of a Fashion Person. Is Donatella Versace imperious? She is! Does she have an elaborate accent? She does! Is she scandalously thin, with arms of Twizzler width and deﬁnition? Yes! And so much more, too. Her hair is glow-in-the-dark blonde. (A weave, partly.) Her heels are ﬁve inches, minimum. Her pants are tighter than the skin on an apple. She 1 0 6

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has a statement nose. Instead of nodding yes, she dips her chin one centimeter in assent. Instead of shaking her head no, she tilts her face ten degrees to the left. This is the body language of an individual who expects others to amplify and disseminate her wishes, which they do. Her blackclad attendants adjust hemlines and o≠er bottled water and generally cement the impression that their boss’s presence is permanently plural—that when a person refers to “Donatella,” he is always referring to “Donatella plus five to ten members of her squad.” These loyalists orbit their tiny queen with brisk nods and folded arms saying Si-si-si and No-no-no and We love this and There’s the drama! In early 2018, Versace is in the air for several reasons: There is the Instagrammelting 2017 show of throwback gear in stores now; the presence of people like Kendrick Lamar and Gigi Hadid wearing Versace on the Internet; and, most of all, the TV maker Ryan Murphy, whose second season of American Crime Story on FX tells the story of Gianni Versace’s murder by a spree killer named Andrew Cunanan. Murphy and Donatella are not best friends. About a week before the series premiered, the family issued a statement deploring the show as “a work of fiction.” FX responded with a statement in defense of the show. The Versace family issued a second statement repeating the gist of the first statement. Then Penélope Cruz, who plays Donatella in the show, said she received a large arrangement of flowers before the Golden Globes from Donatella herself, which added a bewildering gloss to

the whole issue. At the show’s premiere, Ryan Murphy described the family as being in “a really interesting, di∞cult situation.” The Versace family will not discuss the matter further. It’s ﬁne that Donatella is unwilling to discuss her brother’s murder or the TV show in an interview. I’d be unwilling, too. But it does make it slightly odd that she has chosen, as the location of our conversation in Milan in February, an apartment once belonging to Gianni Versace and maintained almost exactly as he left it at his death. It’s sort of like taking someone on a tour of the Lincoln Memorial while respectfully asking them not to bring up the topic of Lincoln’s death. Does it 100 percent make sense? No. Can you argue with it? Not really.

··· THE APARTMENT ITSELF is all the adjectives you’d expect: cavernous, princely, Doriccolumned, lofty-ceilinged. Not a molecule of dust has settled on the carmine sofas and cherrywood bookcases and desktop tableaux of 19th-century objets. Today it is scented with the Diptyque Baies candles that are to fashion-related spaces what Cinnabon is to food courts. Donatella keeps the apartment, an employee later explains, “as the place where she retires and meets high functionaries whenever she feels.” Part showcase, part shrine. No one lives there. From downstairs Donatella emerges with an e-cigarette, having changed from her photo-shoot garb into black jeans, a black tee, and a gold wristwatch that would look oversize on Shrek. She seems tense. A crystal Medusa-emblazoned tumbler of

Gianni with a gaggle of models in 1991. Much of Versace’s early exposure resulted from controversial campaigns and partnerships with musicians—friends, muses, and occasional models all wrapped into one.

F R O M L E F T: V I T T O R I A N O R A S T E L L I / C O R B I S / C O R B I S V I A G E T T Y I M A G E S ; E V E LY N H O F E R / G E T T Y I M A G E S

water with a straw is settled before her by— is this term problematic?—a manservant. She spots the recorder on the table and slides it closer to herself, then gestures at the vape pen sticking out of my pocket. I hand it to her, thinking for a second that she wants to use it during the interview, which seems intimate but who am I to refuse? Then it becomes clear that she believes the vape to be a tiny vape-shaped backup recorder. I gently slide it back over to myself and mime inhaling. “AHHHH!” she cackles. “I need to buy one!” Laugh laugh laugh. It’s only when she’s posing for photos that Donatella seems frostily o≠ limits. Once locked into conversation, she is e≠usive—talking about her espresso habit (“eight per day”), I, Tonya (loves it), and the proper fit of a man’s T-shirt (“not loose”). She makes fun of her “obsession with abdominals” and tells an anecdote about how even though she sleeps one floor above her home gym, she rides the elevator down to work out every morning and then back up when she’s finished. Laugh laugh laugh. Does she use a trainer? God, no. “Since right after my first child, I started to work out with trainers all the time. But then I learned what I’m supposed to do for my body. I can become very muscular.” She glances down at a biceps. “So I do it on my own.” Donatella, though, doesn’t consider herself especially fabulous. She loves to binge on Amazon Prime after work. She reads George Saunders. She invests herself in the political battles of the day, like the #MeToo movement, which she pronounces esh-tegg me too. “For harassment, this country is still—they don’t like to say it. It’s a little bit taboo,” she says. “Think about what happens in court here. If a woman says, ‘This person raped me,’ the judge and everybody asks the woman, ‘How were you dressed? You wore a miniskirt?’ It’s like the 1940s.” Before her friend Prince died, he sat her down at the Boom Boom Room in New York and made her a proposal. “He decided to be the face of the Black Lives Matter movement—that’s what he wanted—and he said, ‘You need to be with me,’ ” Donatella remembers. “I was ready to do it.” But then, alas, Prince was gone. So yes, Donatella can chat about politics and muscle mass like a normal human. This doesn’t change the fact that she is one of few people in the fashion industry regularly and non-ironically referred to with a definite article, as in “The Donatella.” It doesn’t alter the reality that she is the head of a company that had estimated sales a couple years ago of $817 million, has

Gianni and Donatella at the family palazzo at Lake Como in 1988. “I never thought of leaving the company,” she says. “I had to stay. Gianni trained me—the last two years of his life especially—Gianni trained me to do everything.”

200 boutiques worldwide, and has branded hotels in Dubai and Australia, where visitors can frolic in a Versace pool and moisturize with Versace Body Milk beneath the rosy glow of a Versace lamp. It doesn’t annul the sense that she is rendered from di≠erent raw materials than the rest of mankind; that she is pure cashmere in a sea of wool blends. “I don’t think about my personal style,” she told me. “I just know.” Of course she does. Donatella has never claimed to prize her analytic capacity over her instincts: “I’m very impulsive.” No, the intellectual was her brother Gianni, who studied Renaissance pageantry and went to bed early and owned so many books that he employed a full-time librarian. In 1978, at age 32, Gianni launched his eponymous label in Milan. A decade later his work had been the subject of more than 20 museum exhibitions. When he died in 1997,

the company was reportedly worth $807 million. During and after his reign, the brand found itself (or put itself ) in the news with dizzying frequency. Some of the exposure was the payo≠ of ingeniously campy PR moves, like dressing Kate Moss in a couture gown glittering with glass syringes when the model was fresh out of rehab. Or shooting a campaign in which two naked men appear to be simultaneously going down on supermodel Nadja Auermann. Or photographing Sylvester Stallone nude with a canapé dish over his crotch. Other moments in the Zeitgeist were of the genuinely culture-shaking variety. Versace was the first luxury label to thoroughly annex the music world. Madonna, Courtney Love, Axl Rose, Prince, Sting, Jon Bon Jovi, Elton John, K. D. Lang, Lenny Kravitz, Tupac, Mariah Carey: all friends, muses, or occasional models for A P R I L

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the brand. Decades before the imagesharing economy of the Internet arose, the company poured its resources into hiring photographers like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, Bruce Weber, Herb Ritts, and Steven Meisel. And in an age when every soda conglomerate and shaving start-up calls itself a “lifestyle brand,” Versace has been the real thing since the early ’90s, when Gianni Versace started slinging logo crockery and linens and publishing art books. In 1994 he told a slightly confused Charlie Rose that fashion was influenced by “life, people, movie, music, street.” All of culture in five nouns. After Gianni’s death, there was the anguished matter of Donatella’s role in the business. She had always been an adviser and a muse, but until Gianni’s murder she wasn’t responsible for getting clothes out the door. This is a woman who once told a 1 0 8

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reporter, “To go to sleep is the last thing I want to do.” That restlessness still explains so much today: why she avoids the temptation of joining Twitter (too risky), why she orders a shattered mirror on set swapped with a nearly-identicalbut-slightly-less-shattered mirror, why she draws a bath of scented oils every night only to spend a mere ten minutes in the tub. It seemed improbable then, as now, that an impetuous kid sister could pick up the legacy of a methodical master and run with it. In the blink of an eye, she went from being team mascot to self-elected head coach. It was a lot of pressure. The kind of pressure that can crush even people who go to bed at a reasonable hour. And yet here we are 21 years later, with Donatella running the show as artistic director and vice president. She has now helmed Versace longer than her brother did.

“I never thought of leaving the company,” she says, referring to the period following Gianni’s death when, at least to outsiders, the company’s leadership was an open question. “I had to stay. Gianni trained me— the last two years of his life especially— Gianni trained me to do everything.” Her brother had been diagnosed earlier with a rare form of inner-ear cancer and became convinced he was going to die. To keep the business going, he taught his sister how to carry on while he recovered in the apartment where we’re sitting. For two years she communicated approvals and brought designs back and forth from the o∞ce to the sickbed. Gianni told her he expected she’d run the house without him one day. Three months before he died, the cancer was cured. A miracle! “There was champagne. Yes! The ear was okay!” Donatella says. “And then it happened.”

“VERSACE IS A DREAM,”

P R O D U C E D B Y W W W. S O L O P R O D . I T. S T Y L I N G B Y E L I S A B E T T A D A L BELLO AT W-MMANAGEMENT. HAIR BY DAVIDE DIODOVICH AT W-MMANAGEMENT. MAKEUP BY SILVANA BELLI AT W-MMANAGEMENT.

Donatella says. “It’s a dream that people want to be part of.”

On a summer morning in Miami, Gianni was shot twice on the steps of his home and pronounced dead 20 minutes later. The killer, Andrew Cunanan, was discovered dead of a self-inflected gunshot wound a week after the murder. As stories go, it has all the ingredients of a Ryan Murphy project: glamour, gore, irony, the tackling of broad social issues (specifically homophobia in law enforcement). As the defining personal catastrophe of Donatella’s life, it is not something she is eager to see in operatic tracking shots on a screen. But there’s more to the Murphy-Versace skirmish than a principle. The Assassination of Gianni Versace is based on a book called Vulgar Favors by Vanity Fair journalist Maureen Orth. The book is an account of Cunanan’s life and transgressions, and it is a work of reporting that has been thoroughly vetted in the 19 years since it

was published. I found it almost comically well-sourced and jammed with credible specificity. The Versace family rejects the book outright, claiming that it is “full of gossip and speculation.” From what I can tell, their anger stems from two of Orth’s reported findings. One is that Gianni Versace had apparently met Andrew Cunanan before their fatal encounter. In Vulgar Favors, Orth tracks down and interviews self-proclaimed eyewitnesses to the interactions. The Versace family denies that the two ever crossed paths—though, to be honest, it’s hard to imagine how they (or anyone) could be sure. The second quandary is Orth’s revelation that Gianni Versace had been HIV-positive at the time of his death. Her source is the Miami Beach lead detective on the case, who told Orth that a medical examiner’s blood tests indicated HIV infection. That detective died in 2006. The Versace family has always denied that Gianni Versace had HIV. That’s all we know. There’s also the compound tragedy bound up in any celebrity death, which is that its emotional toll on the family recurs after the event, endlessly and at unpredictable intervals. First there’s the death itself, which is trauma enough. Then a corny TV docudrama comes out, followed by a 500-page book. Then another TV show, this time with a terrible pun of a title (Fashion Victim: The Killing of Gianni Versace). Then another book and a third TV movie and the reissuing of a previous book. For decades it keeps coming—a campaign of jolts and reminders and randomly inflicted sorrows. The deceased might rest in peace, but his family can’t. So when Ryan Murphy gets his hands on the whole saga, it’s hard to blame Donatella for slamming her door on him.

···

AFTER THE MURDER , Donatella flew to Miami with her elder brother Santo on a private jet. Gianni’s body was cremated and the ashes placed in a gold box. According to Orth, the gold box was festooned with white orchids, placed inside a larger wooden box wrapped with o∞cial seals, and speedily returned to Italy by plane. The will bequeathed half of the company to Donatella’s daughter, Allegra, who was 11 at the time. When the siblings returned home, Donatella shared her plans to take over the

design side of the company: “Because I was there, talking for Gianni for two years, I thought people would look at me after, like, ‘Oh, she knows what she’s doing.’ But it wasn’t like that. Everybody was shocked.” Still, it wasn’t as though Gianni’s death left the company utterly marooned. He’d invented a design vocabulary that his successor could use to write plenty of new sentences: printed silks, kink-inspired leather, Pop-art graphics, metal mesh, the Greek-key motif, the studs, the bias cuts, the leggings, the Medusa head. “I had handfuls of people telling me, You have to follow in Gianni’s steps. He knew how to do it. But myself, I was not sure I had to follow Gianni’s style,” Donatella says. There was a rough patch as she figured out what that meant. “I made a lot of mistake. I know. I did a lot of mistakes for a few years.” By this she is possibly referring to her first solo collections, which received polite but subdued reviews, and possibly also to her escalating drug use at the time. “I really don’t remember what I did,” she says. “It was like a storm. Everything was rubble.” But by 2000 she had hit her stride, design-wise. That was the year Jennifer Lopez wore the plunging sheer jungle-print Versace gown to the Grammys—a dress not only in possession of its own Wikipedia page (“Green Versace dress of Jennifer Lopez”) but also responsible, according to Eric Schmidt, for the invention of Google Images. The people wanted JPEGs. In a post-Gianni world, Donatella’s collections became “more feminine, less aggressive, still sexy and seductive,” Donatella says. She figured out how to run a corporation. Her first principle of management was to cultivate dissent. “I want people to feel free to talk, to tell their thoughts, even if I don’t like it,” she says. “I push people to do that to me because I like to be challenged.” She is comfortable with conflict in a way that might be an Italian thing or a Versace thing or just a Donatella specialty. People close to the brand have commented on this quality. Donatella herself has commented on this quality. (Reminiscing in 2010: “I would directly contradict Gianni most of the time. I’d go, ‘I don’t like that at all, it’s not good.’ And he would scream, ‘Whaaat?!’ ”) They fought over skirt lengths and supermodels and how to merchandise a new boutique. (continued on page 142) A P R I L

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.. Hate. Don't te! a p i c Parti

Not Normal HIGH FASHION GETS SERIOUS ABOUT REGULAR CLOTHES

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Rapper Style Doesn’t Mean What You Think A L L D U E R E S P E C T to Migos, but you don’t need a second mortgage and a bodyguard to look ﬂy. Elevated streetgeezer steeze from Tyler, the Creator, is one part fresh grandpa, one part SoCal skate rat, summed up perfectly by the yellow crewneck and green Paul Smith suit you see here. What’s more regular than rapper style so advanced anyone can pull it of ?

< The Most Humble Pieces Are the Most Glorified

Far-out designs from cult labels Some Ware, Come Tees, and Online Ceramics have re-invigorated the graphic T-shirt.

Heritage Is Heating Up Nothing is more essential than affordable, durable, unflashy clothes that say “I’m no pawn of late capitalism!” That’s why Carhartt, label of choice when not-so-regular guys like Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Pattinson want to blend in stylishly, is flying so high. And it’s been given a major upgrade thanks to new collabs with young design stars Gosha Rubchinskiy and Heron Preston (see above).

PROP ST YLIST: AMY HENRY

Legs Get Looser The high-volume silhouettes of decades gone by—from ’70s pimp to ’90s raver—are on the come up. They may look difficult, but that’s just because formfitting jeans and trousers have dominated the past few years. We’re living in a golden age of pants now, and baggy is just one move you should have in your rotation. And remember, these guys put their pants on just like you do: one oversize leg at a time. A P R I L

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M O S T FA M O U S P E O P L E

The Unexpected Style Star Shines Bright

Big Sneakers Gain Clout

pay powerful stylists to mitigate the high risk of getting roasted for wearing a bunk outfit. But the Internet’s chosen style beacons— actors Jonah Hill and Shia LaBeouf —have turned their unique and very personal styles into one of their greatest assets. The two unlikely arbiters have inspired entire movements online— browse @ShiasOutfits on Instagram or the numerous “Jonah Hill Fit Watch” posts on Twitter for proof. Here’s why: Both guys appear to be doing exactly the thing that everyone who is interested in style craves the most right now—wearing whatever they feel like wearing despite which runway trends and big-money brands are topping your local influencer’s feed. Jonah is tight with the most hyped skate brands and knows how to nail a proper pant fit. Shia, always the nonconformist, does art-weirdo well, with perfectly oddball, thrifty taste. (Some suspect he’s the main inspiration for Kanye West’s Yeezy line.) The point is not that you want to emulate what they wear, it’s the whole approach—dress for you and no one else.

New Balance 990s and Nike Air Monarchs aren’t just for the podiatrically challenged now that monster trainers from high-fashion heavyweights Balenciaga and Dior Homme have taken over.

GUCCI SLIPPERS $730

RICK OWENS BIRKENSTOCKS $420

Comfort Is King Where do the world’s edgiest designers find new ideas for boundarypushing footwear? The sensible-shoe store, apparently.

The New Suit Fit Is Not So Fitted at All Most men know exactly how their suits should fit: slim and sharp. But lately we’ve been reaching for something else—call it the easy-fit suit. As long as the shoulder seam hits and the jacket tapers at the midsection, you can loosen the rest without looking like a White House press flack. Take it from Brunello Cucinelli, who designs suits guys actually get excited to wear every day: “I believe in creating a suit that allows the man to feel well-dressed but always relaxed.” So the next time your tailor goes in for the kill, tell him just that: Relax.

< Honor Thy Father’s Hat

The dad cap is the only cap that matters. Is the flat-brim finished?

The Prep Flag Flies High “ W H E N C A P I TA L I S M went haywire in the ’80s, the people who were running ﬁnance were essentially preppies,” says Noah founder Brendon Babenzien, who is currently leading a prep-style revival from his club-like shop in N.Y.C.’s Nolita. “And because those people were uncool, they gave prep a bad name.” His update to the trend favors tasteful madras outerwear and above-theknee shorts over triplepopped collars and all-pink everything. “To us, prep is simple, elegant, and fun. And anyone can do it.”

SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS.

Some Fashion Still Feels Special While brands across the style spectrum find new ways to turn normal gear into bold statements, thoughtful collections from craft-focused labels Dries Van Noten, Lanvin, and Valentino look better than ever.

A Look into the Future

DRIES VAN NOTEN

LANVIN

VALENTINO

No, you’re not living in the Matrix: Today’s fashion visionaries Zayn Malik, Bella Hadid, and Rihanna all see the world through tiny, Neo-inspired sunglasses. A P R I L

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Wes Anderson “We tried to get Bill to be in the first movie, Bottle Rocket. We couldn’t even reach him. Owen [Wilson] and I loved him in his dramatic roles as much as his comedy roles—and in those days there weren’t many dramatic roles. You couldn’t ask for a better actor. And also, if you happen to need a guru today, we do have one of the best.”

Bible Style 18 20 o ays t New W Up t i Su II Part

wES wORLD Anna Peele

Daniel Jackson

Tony Irvine

Bill Mu

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Nothing looks quite like Wes Anderson movies. Even if they are often hilariously parodied, they’re never successfully imitated. Because the secret to Anderson’s work isn’t in its meticulous set design or soundtrack: It’s the humor, warmth, and strangeness he brings out in his actors, even if it’s just in their voices. That’s why we gathered Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum, and more— of the new Anderson animated opus Isle of Dogs—for a stylish homage to the director himself

Bill Murray CUCKOLDED IN AT LEAST FOUR OF ANDERSON’S FILMS

“Wes must have known someone [who was cuckolded] that he loved very much. Cuckolding is always sort of a sympathetic situation. Rarely is a cuckold a hated person—usually sort of a victim. You feel sorry for him, you know? You feel: ‘Why? He was a good one.’ Maybe it’s sort of an armoring against it ever happening to himself. I think that’s what it is.”

Greta Gerwig ISLE OF DOGS

“Wes always knows exactly how he wants the lines said, even down to the rhythms and the intonations. It is wonderfully freeing, and you know it when you’ve got it.” ← THIS PAGE

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Own Your Style WES ANDERSON In Paris, I often take an umbrella. Or London. Even if it’s not going to rain, you tap it while you walk. KUNICHI NOMURA Isle of Dogs I remember when I saw you in Paris in early summer—it was the most beautiful blue-sky day. You showed up with an umbrella as a stick, but you never opened it. It looked really cool. WES ANDERSON When I was a kid, the thing I remember is pretending to be someone who I wasn’t. I remember saying, “Well, my dad could technically have a Rolls-Royce, but he chooses not to,” which I don’t think was a very accurate thing. And we kind of used that in Rushmore because he pretends his father is a neurosurgeon. JASON SCHWARTZMAN When I was 8, I made up a lie to these people that I was trying to be in a band with that I had a drum set but it was too big to take out of the garage: “I’ll just play some of your pillows and pots and pans. It’s much easier for me.” But you’re playing with identity, trying to figure it out. WES ANDERSON That is what it is.

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Jason Schwartzman RUSHMORE, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, THE DARJEELING LIMITED, MOONRISE KINGDOM, ISLE OF DOGS

“Shooting the first movie, Rushmore, we all lived down the hall from each other. Afterward, I felt such a vacancy.”

AKIRA TAKAYAMA ISLE OF DOGS

“At times, his characters look like they have been painted into the scenes.”

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YOJIRO NODA ISLE OF DOGS

“His movies always make me want to go on a trip.”

LIEV SCHREIBER ISLE OF DOGS

“He’s just such a kind person. I think that was part of what inspired my [Isle of Dogs] character, Spots. He’s genuinely benevolent and a decent dog. Loyal and true.”

Hotel Adlon. Mitte District, Berlin The second month of the Year of our Lord, 2018. The eve of the Year of the Dog, Chinese zodiac. Given the meticulousness of Isle of Dogs’ Divine Creator, Wes Anderson, could it really be by chance that the dawning of annum canis coincides with the film’s premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival? The stop-motion film’s stars have come from Japan and Los Angeles and Scotland and New York to be at the five-star hotel in which presidents (Clinton, B.; Obama, B.; and Bush, G.H.W. and G.W.) have slept and Blanket Jackson was dangled o≠ a balcony by Michael. Tilda Swinton in Chanel, Je≠ Goldblum in a fedora, Bill Murray in flared floral golf pants of his own design. Bob Balaban, Greta Gerwig, the 11-year-old who plays Isle of Dogs’ hero—a boy who takes down a corrupt government to save his pup. Anderson’s creative partners Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, Kunichi Nomura, the puppet-maker who knows precisely where every one of the 321 freckles on each version of Gerwig’s puppet need to be hand-painted… Almost all have worked with Anderson before. The swarm is a tiny fraction of the more than 600 people it took to make his newest—and possibly greatest—movie.

TILDA SWINTON MOONRISE KINGDOM, THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, ISLE OF DOGS

“We were all kind of on holiday in Venice, and while we were together, Wes said, ‘Shall we record your character [Oracle, for Isle of Dogs]?’ And it just so happened there were a bunch of noisy people downstairs. Wes dressed in a pale pink dressing gown and calling down the stairs to our reveling house party below to be quieter while we roll is a pretty perfect image of him at work.”

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BRYAN CRANSTON ISLE OF DOGS

“Wes is very erudite and fashionable and soft in his features, soft in his manner, in his kindness and his generosity and his openness. He is the most un-Texas-like Texan I’ve ever met.”

The Character Suit It’s time to Wes Anderson–ize your wardrobe. No, you don’t need to bring a bolt of caramel corduroy to your local suitmaker—you just need to look up the designers in these pages, who are all turning out suits with special silhouettes, unconventional colors, and huge amounts of personality. It’s the kind of quirky, character-defining tailoring that fills Mr. Anderson’s world, like Richie Tenenbaum’s iconic camel twopiece and Mr. Fox’s puppet-size doublebreasted corduroy. So instead of asking yourself, “What should I wear today?” think, “Who should I play today?”— S A M U E L H I N E

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MARI NATSUKI ISLE OF DOGS

WES ANDERSON Kunichi has a casting-director credit because he spent quite a lot of time quite carefully choosing who ought to play different roles that we were casting in Japan. [Like Mari Natsuki, right, the famous Japanese actress who plays Auntie in the film.—Ed.] We never go through the agent. KUNICHI NOMURA They’re going to charge a lot. It’s like, fuck that.

JEFF GOLDBLUM THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU, THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, ISLE OF DOGS

“In Görlitz, Germany [where we shot The Grand Budapest Hotel], we took over this whole hotel. It was a kind of winter wonderland. One snowy evening, Wes and I and Ed Norton and a few people go to walk across the bridge from Görlitz to Poland—they didn’t require a passport checkpoint. And because Wes seeks out the most amazing places on earth, we ate in this indigenous sort of basement Polish place. The communal enjoyment of all these actors and artisans getting together is an art piece in itself.”

BOB BALABAN MOONRISE KINGDOM, THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, ISLE OF DOGS

“Wes is kind of an incredibly kind, patient slave driver. He called and asked if I would be the narrator in Moonrise Kingdom, and I spent about a week with Wes before anyone else got there. The first thing he did was show me some pictures of these locations I’d be going to. And he had put himself as the narrator into all of the shots, just so I could get an idea of what it would look like and what it would feel like. I was in a trance of Wes.”

KOYU RANKIN ISLE OF DOGS

“He just helps you out. It feels like it’s so easy after he tells you to, like, be softer.”

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ROMAN COPPOLA THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU, THE DARJEELING LIMITED, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, MOONRISE KINGDOM, THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, ISLE OF DOGS

“There’s a—I don’t want to say instinct, but a pleasure taken in having a group. [Wes is] a pack animal.” FOR MUCH MORE—BILL MURRAY AND BOB BALABAN ON THE AUTOBAHN, HOW ANDERSON SEDUCED HARVEY KEITEL, AND LOTS OF PINK-PAJAMA ACTION—LOOK FOR THE EXTENDED FEATURE ON GQ.COM

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RE’S SOMETHING

It took the world a ridiculously long time to realize the obvious: The breakout star of Girls Trip is f—king hilarious

BY CAITY WEAVER PHOTOGRAPHS BY ART STREIBER

0418 GQ PG 130

Indeed, over the course of the day, Haddish proves a rigorous, insatiably curious observer—perhaps why she preferred to take the tour, rather than lead it. “They have this—this kind of stu≠,” a guide says, struggling to explain the physiology of a whale’s mouth. “Like brushes?” Haddish suggests. “Exactly, like brushes, thank you,” says the guide. Haddish nods. “That’s a fisherman’s boat, right?” Haddish asks, pointing at another vessel. “What they fishing for?” “Why is some of the water super ripply and some of it not?” Haddish asks, and, along with everyone on the boat, is visibly disappointed when no one can exactly tell her. “Now jump out the water, whale!” she yells at a whale. “Let me see that body!” The January morning is sparklingly sunny and dreamily warm, even by Haddish’s standards as a Southern California native. Though most people on the voyage have never heard of Ti≠any Haddish, the details of her presence surely suggest to them that she is someone exciting. Flung on the deck is her large Gucci shoulder bag containing a full gallon jug of water with lipstick on the rim— Haddish’s water bottle. Her denim jacket bears marks of intentional spray paint, and she’s also wearing intentional Uggs. Her hair is a glossy panel of pristine, shoulder-length black—a wig, explains Haddish. It gleams in the sun as she dances in the breeze at the bow of the boat. “It’s pinned in!” she exclaims. “Let the wind blow!” By the end of the tour, the white women on the boat will feel so close to Ti≠any that one of them will simply reach over and feel her hair without asking permission. Haddish will handle this sudden invasion of her space with charm and grace. “I just appreciate who you are,” another white lady tells her now. She has not seen Girls Trip, last summer’s film that launched Haddish, who’d been steadily if unobtrusively working in comedy for years, suddenly onto the A-list—but she finds herself lost in a reverie of Ti≠any. “It’s the real deal,” the woman adds, “and I love it.” “I just could only be myself,” says Haddish quietly, as if taking the passenger into her confidence. Everyone smiles.

SOME PEOPLE ARE B E T T E R AT B E I N G T H E M S E LV E S T H A N OT H E R S A R E . They’re the ones at

home instantly in any untried environment, the way a cloud looks just right no matter where it is in the sky. They seem to keep slightly better rhythm with the beat of the universe than other people—noticing things faster, making connections more quickly. They’re people like Ti≠any Haddish, who has been on this whale-watching expedition for ten minutes and is already its undisputed captain—a turn of events no doubt surprising to the disputed captain, i.e., the man commanding the vessel and ostensibly hired to lead the tour. Gleeful in mutiny, Haddish’s fellow passengers beseech her to hijack microphone duties from Captain Nick. Only one or two of them recognize her as a professional comedian and newly minted movie star; to the majority of middle-aged white people on this boat, she is simply a confident woman with three free hours to search for whales o≠ the coast of Los Angeles. A woman whose commentary they enjoy. “I don’t know that much about whales!” Haddish protests. Her voice is pleasingly scratchy, with a low hum underneath—the auditory equivalent of a palliative scalp massage. She declines the o≠er of the mic, but she doesn’t need it anyway. Strangers on the boat are clustering near her to catch pearls of observation as they drop from her lips. “AAH, THERE’S A WHAAAALE! THERE’S A WHAAAALE! RIGHT THERE!” she shrieks, at a decibel level appropriate to signal the start of Armageddon. Haddish is the first person on the boat to spot the 40-foot gray mass emerging from the abyss of Santa Monica Bay. “I’m always paying attention,” she declares as passengers compliment her lookout skills—another disgrace for the captain.

T TO O K L E S S T H A N O N E M I N U T E on the boat to confirm

that Haddish connects with people very easily—a quality that led to her being cast in Girls Trip. She learned of the script—which follows four college friends as they re-unite at ESSENCE Festival, an annual African-American music festival—not from producers, or her agent, but through a grapevine of behind-the-scenes crew members who remembered her fondly from the set of 2016’s Keanu, in which Haddish starred opposite Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. “The transportation department, set [decoration], props,” she lists. “Who else sent me something? Sound. People was sending me the script like, ‘Don’t tell anybody I sent you the script. I read it and it’s just like you.’ ” Haddish recalls that she was the only lead actress required to audition for her character, who, in contrast with the others boasting first and last names, is listed in the credits merely as “Dina.” And yet it is immediately evident upon viewing that Haddish is the spark that caused the movie to explode into the biggest comedy hit of 2017. Her performance is so good it is jarring. The skill with which she inhabits comedy-cherry-bomb Dina is uncanny—almost as if Haddish really is Dina, and the other actresses have been hired to portray her “friends” in an elaborate Truman Show–style hidden-camera documentary. Her delivery is so natural that her fellow actors can sound stilted by comparison, like they are reciting lines from a fable. You learn quickly to seek her out at every moment, even in the background. In one early scene, she remains the center point even as she walks out of frame—stomping angrily,

ST Y L I ST: VA N E S S A S H O K R I A N. H A I R : P R E C I O U S J A C K S O N U S I N G S C H WA R Z KO P F. M A K E U P: D I O N N E W Y N N U S I N G T O M F O R D. P R O P ST Y L I ST: A N T H O N Y A . A LT O M A R E . O N - S E T P R O D U C E R : E L A I N E B R O W N E . D R E S S : D O L C E & G A B B A N A .

muttering to herself, and completely out of focus, with her back turned to the camera. Ti≠any Haddish is to Girls Trip as Daniel Day-Lewis is to There Will Be Blood. But it’s what Haddish did after the film’s release in July that made her a phenomenon. She demolished its promotional tour with unprecedented skill. Take, for instance, her appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It begins like every five-minute interview segment: The celebrity emerges from backstage and walks to her seat as the house band plays a fleeting introductory fanfare. But when Haddish arrives at the chair next to Colbert’s desk, she does not sit; she begins dancing. She sways, and bops, and thrusts her hips in time to cymbal smacks. She does the running man in stilettos. The warm smile on Haddish’s face suggests to viewers that this is not Kaufmanesque performance art but a woman experiencing joy. She dances uninterrupted for nearly 30 seconds, which is way longer on TV than it sounds. Stephen Colbert visibly falls in love with her, and then has no idea what to do with himself, because the only thing conservatively dressed white men can do around Haddish is smile and clap somewhat nervously. Colbert does that. Just when it seems like Haddish might not ever stop dancing—like CBS Corporation executives might be forced to fire Colbert and change the name of the program to The Late Show with Ti≠any Dancing— Haddish points at the band and takes her seat. The crowd cheers. And they aren’t cheering for Girls Trip—they’re cheering for Ti≠any Haddish. Being this very much yourself can be incredibly lucrative if you’re really, really good at it. Oprah good at it. Ellen good. Stern good. Propelled by the success of the movie, Haddish’s winning personality spontaneously generated new opportunities for her to display it. An appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where she shared an anecdote about taking Will and Jada Smith on a Groupon swamp tour, spawned a partnership with the coupon website, which led to Haddish starring in a Super Bowl commercial as herself. The problem with becoming famous for being yourself is that you can never step out of the role. “The thing that builds and builds is exhaustion,” says Haddish, leaning on the boat’s ta≠rail and scanning the bay for bottlenose dolphins. “Giving so much of yourself to so many di≠erent people—and then people love you. They want to hug, they want to talk to you, and sometimes you just feel like, man, sleep.” Ti≠any Haddish may, in fact, be too good at being Ti≠any Haddish. Too good at seeming like one of your friends who became famous. At times, she treats her new fame like she is on a group text with the world. Part of her wants to abide by the celebrity code of discretion, but a much more irrepressible part of her loves to tell good stories.

Like this balls-to-the-wall insane story she can no longer stop herself from telling about Beyoncé. Last December, Haddish met Beyoncé Knowles-Carter at a party. Beyoncé walked up and said, “I’m Beyoncé”—the understatement of the century—and the two women had a brief, pleasant exchange. But that’s not the story. “There was this actress there,” continues Haddish, keeping her voice low, “that’s just, like, doing the mostest.” One of the most things she did? “She bit Beyoncé in the face.” Haddish declines to name the actress. (“I absolutely cannot comment on any of this, as I have no knowledge,” said Beyoncé’s representative, Yvette Noel-Schure, when GQ sought confirmation from the singer.) (continued on page 140)

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safest part, where his wife and his grandchildren should be. “But go ahead and hunker down anyway.”

hris Luan rolls over in bed, reaches

her phone. It’s making an odd C for sound, not the normal tuch tuch of

JANUARY 13, 8:07 A.M.

There is a white box on both screens filled with black text. emergency alert is in bold letters at the top. Below that, in regular text but all in capital letters, it reads: ballistic missile threat inbound to hawaii. seek immediate shelter. this is not a drill. Vern is startled but not alarmed. He is the administrator of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, which means people who work for him sent the alert. Yet no one has called him. Nor does he hear an undulating wail from the sirens staked around Oahu, a tone his agency began testing only the month before to di≠erentiate a missile alert from the flat squeal of a tsunami warning. His people are supposed to push the button for the sirens, too. Vern was in the army for 37 years, retired as a major general, last posted to the Pacific Command. He can di≠erentiate, by training and habit, realistic threats from wildly improbable ones, and he can do so quickly. The only belligerently nuclear nation is 1 3 4

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North Korea. It has missiles capable of hitting Hawaii—and the mainland—but the odds of a warhead surviving re-entry into the atmosphere aren’t clear, and the targeting technology is probably primitive enough to make any attack less of a precise strike and more of a horseshoes-and-handgrenades toss. True, Hawaii would be the most obvious target, considering it is more than 2,000 miles closer to Pyongyang than Washington, D.C., is. But lobbing a missile at Honolulu would all but guarantee Kim Jong-un’s annihilation, and he has shown no recent signs of suicidal insanity. Just five days ago, in fact, Kim agreed to send athletes to the Olympics. Vern hears footsteps behind him, his wife padding down the stairs. “Honey, honey,” she says, a hint of panic in her voice. Two of their grandchildren are in the house with them. She’s holding her phone so Vern can see the screen. “Is this real?” “Let me check,” Vern says. He pauses, motions toward the center of the house, the

a text. She reads the black letters in the white box, starts to read it again. Chris rolls back the other way. Her daughter, 18 years old, is standing near the bed. She’s holding her phone. Then her son, 14, is behind his sister, and he’s holding his phone. “What is this?” her daughter asks. “I don’t know,” Chris says. “A missile alert, apparently.” Water. Chris grew up in California, where an earthquake or a mudslide was always waiting to wreck the place, and her father always told her to gather water if anything bad was happening. “Go fill some jugs,” she tells her daughter. “You,” she says to her son, “get pillows and blankets and put them in the pantry.” The pantry is in the middle of the house, no windows, might survive a blast, stocked well enough to keep them alive for a week, maybe longer. Chris goes to the bathroom, plugs up the tub, turns on the tap. More water. She gathers all the cash in the house, identification for her and the kids. She sends the dogs out to pee. She thinks: I’ve got 15 minutes. Chris is good in an emergency, methodical, practical, believes that one creates her own circumstances. She used to be a paramedic, before she moved to a dispatcher’s chair, soothing traumatized callers while she routes ambulances around the island. Her work requires her to be calm when others are not. Shit. Work. I’ve got to get to work. She believes she might die, and very soon, but her first reaction is what she’s practiced. She’s trained for mass-casualty events, and the first rule is to be ready to report to work. The first rule is to leave your family. The first rule is to override instinct.

athleen French is holding her phone,

Pandora stations to K switching something she wants to listen to at

the gym. The ringer is o≠, so there is no alert sound: A white box suddenly overrides Pandora, takes over the screen. I’m going to die. Kathleen believes this, immediately and viscerally. Or she will survive and su≠er horribly. She does not, in that moment, weigh the relative merits of either outcome. She does not hear any sirens, which she finds odd because she always hears the tsunami warnings, even in her apartment 25 floors above the Ala Wai Canal. But is

Officials scrambled to issue “false alarm” notices around the island—including on Interstate H-1 in Honolulu—in the immediate aftermath of the early-morning alert.

that any odder than getting tweeted into a nuclear war? She believes that has happened, too. There had been reports all last week that Donald Trump wanted to attack North Korea. There had been no threat of fire and fury, like last summer, but jabbering about a limited strike, a “bloody nose” assault, as if the nuclear-armed world was a middle-school playground. This is what it comes to, Kathleen thinks. It’s not a fully coherent thought, more of an instinctual recognition, utterly confusing yet perfectly rational. Fire and fury to bloody nose to whatever got tweeted overnight. She’s trying not to panic. Think. She has to call Je≠ Judd, her husband. He’s gone for a run, down along the canal, exposed. He never takes his phone. She dials his number anyway.

hree people had worked the over-

CORY LUM/HONOLULU CIVIL BEAT

shift at the State Warning T night Point (SWP), which is exactly what the name suggests: the point from which warnings about bad things are sent through a statewide alert system. Physically, it’s a room of monitoring equipment within the headquarters of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, which is a bunker dug into the side of Diamond Head Crater, and it’s sta≠ed around the clock, watching for storms and tsunamis and, because this is 2018, inbound nuclear missiles.

If North Korea did launch an ICBM toward Hawaii, the military’s Pacific Command would notify the SWP, where the sta≠ would tick through a checklist 20 steps long. War gamers and analysts consider an attack to be vanishingly unlikely, but the people in charge of issuing warnings still need to be well practiced. At the end of the overnight shift, the supervisor decided to run a drill, a pretend attack, to make sure everyone knew how to react. The morning shift—three fresh, rested bodies—came on at 8 a.m. One of the nightshifters stepped out and at 8:06 called the secure phone in the SWP. Another worker put the call on loudspeaker, so everyone could hear the drill message. It began with “exercise, exercise, exercise,” continued through a script that sounded like a real warning, then concluded with “exercise, exercise, exercise.” The sta≠ followed the checklist. Anticipated time of impact recorded. Clock counting down to that time activated. Wailing sirens activated. Computer system ordered to send an alert to cell phones and broadcast stations. Steel doors to the bunker sealed. All of that was simulated. No one actually pushed the siren button or sealed up the bunker. But at 8:07, every cell phone in the SWP begins to chirp and ping and vibrate. Each has a message with black text in a white box.

The SWP has issued a live ballistic-missile alert to the entire state. There is a moment of shock, followed by controlled panic. They have to stop the alert, undo it. Except they can’t. The system doesn’t work that way. It’s an odd, Strangelove moment: Just as a nuclear war can’t be called o≠ once it starts, neither can the warning of one. 8:08 A.M. 1 MINUTE SINCE ALERT

ern Miyagi calls the number for the

Warning Point. A voice V State answers, spits out two words—false alarm—then hangs up. Already Vern’s moving toward his car. He’ll drive to Diamond Head, wait in the bunker with the people who work for him who’ve just scared the shit out of a million civilians. He knows the alert can’t be immediately undone, and he doesn’t know how long it’ll take to figure out how. This has never happened before.

man is bent over a microphone.

balding. Andrew A Middle-aged, Canonico recognizes him: same guy who does the announcing at all the wrestling meets. He seems nervous. “We need everyone to file into the locker rooms,” the man says. Andrew’s on a wrestling mat in the Hemmeter Field House at Punahou School,

8:14 A.M. 7 MINUTES SINCE ALERT

ade Hargrove III has left his phone

the shelf by his bed, next to the W onMatchbox cars he collects with his

waiting to weigh in, and he doesn’t feel like getting up, let alone filing o≠ anywhere. He’s 15 years old, and he’s been cutting weight for days, trying to make 160. He showed up this morning a half-pound over, had to run six laps to sweat out the last few ounces. He’s tired and he’s hungry and he’d rather stay on the mat. The weigh-in is already taking too long: Some of the boys wrestling at 106 missed the skin check for ringworm, and it’s slowing everything down. “Now,” the man with the microphone says. “Everyone into the locker rooms now.” Andrew gets up. His brother, Mason, three years older and wrestling ten pounds heavier, gets up, too. So do all the other boys, more than a hundred of them. Andrew knows the reason must be important, because no one is supposed to leave the gym until the weigh-in is complete. But the adults aren’t telling them why they’re moving. Andrew starts down the stairs. He’s awake now, still hungry but twitchy with adrenaline. He tells himself he is not afraid. He triages all the reasons so many schoolchildren would be ordered quickly into a sheltered space. Fire? No, whenever there’s a drill, everyone gathers outside. Why would they remain in a burning building? He turns the corner, moves down the second flight. He is an American teenager in an American high school. There is only one other reason. It happened in Rockford, Washington, in September, and just the

month before in a little New Mexico town called Aztec, and it happened at Sandy Hook and Columbine and all the other ones, too many to remember the names. Active shooter. The adults are locking down the place. He tells himself again he’s not afraid, and maybe he even believes it, and he keeps moving toward safety.

son, Lucas. The ringer is o≠ and he hasn’t checked it all morning because he’s been making breakfast, cinnamon pancakes with a touch of nutmeg. He splurged on the real maple syrup, too, even though Lucas likes the fake stu≠ better. Wade lives in a midcentury condominium on the western slope of Diamond Head. He bought it after he and Daphne divorced so that Lucas would be zoned for Waikiki Elementary School. Lucas is working on a project about American symbols, and he’s chosen the World Trade Center, which is a much di≠erent symbol from the one it was 20 years ago. On Monday, Wade and Lucas will walk his project down the hill to school. They’re still very close, Wade and Daphne, raising Lucas together yet apart. Lucas has baseball practice on Saturday mornings, but he left all his gear with Daphne. Wade has to call her, make arrangements to pick it up. He goes to the bedroom, grabs his iPhone. He missed three calls from Daphne and he has a 13-second voice mail from his friend Hans. He doesn’t waste time playing it, just reads the transcription. “Hey man Daphne is trying to get a hold of you and me there’s a notice we got about an incoming missile and it’s on the news—maybe it with yet so all right get a hold of us…” It’s mostly accurate. But there are glitches in syntax perhaps because there were glitches in Hans’s words. In the recording, his voice wobbles and he swallows hard. He sounds afraid.

8:13 A.M. 6 MINUTES SINCE ALERT

ans Nielsen has been up since 5:30,

he people in the bunker cancel the alert going to cell phones. This is essentially pointless: It means only that any phone that was o≠ or out of range at 8:07 will not, from this moment on, get the warning. The Honolulu police know it’s a false alarm. The county administrators do, too. But the system isn’t set up to send a second cell-phone alert saying that the first was erroneous. The software is not equipped to do so. It’s the same system used to warn of hurricanes and tsunamis and the like, and to warn of other threats in other states. No one ever programmed in a “false alert” code because why would one be needed? A tornado warning mistakenly sent in Kansas is, for example, at worst a brief inconvenience. And most warnings are simply that, a heads-up that an unfortunate thing might happen. Only in Hawaii does the list of alerts include the threat of nuclear annihilation and, with that, existential panic.

than an hour before the sun H more rose over the Ko‘olau Mountains.

He’s always woken early. When he was a boy, there were chores on his family’s little Wyoming ranch, horses and cows to look after; and when he was a sailor in the navy, he liked to sit on deck at dawn with co≠ee and a smoke, watch the sky blush over the ocean. He was on a guided-missile destroyer enforcing the no-fly zone after the first Iraq war, a few dozen Tomahawks belowdecks, some of them tipped with nuclear warheads. He never had the security clearance to know how many, though. His girls, 7 and almost 3, were up not long after the sun. The three of them sat on the couch, the girls watching cartoons, Hans texting friends in Canada. The alert popped up. He had to wake his wife, Becca. He went into the bedroom, said her name, held his phone close to her face. She opened her eyes, confused, the phone blurry.

JENNIFER SINCO KELLEHER/AP PHOTO

Hans never wakes her up like that, abrupt, adamant. He’s only done that once, on 9/11. She pushed Hans’s hand back so she could read without her glasses on. Becca went to the bathroom, came back. She did not think to retrieve the survival kit, which consists primarily of a transistor radio with possibly dead batteries in a Tupperware tub in the hall closet. She did not consider where best to shelter. She’s a psychologist and reflexively thought in psychological terms: If this is real, she and her family were not going to survive it, and it could be real because Donald Trump is impulsive enough to spook North Korea into lobbing a missile at Hawaii. And if they were all going to die, she’d rather her children didn’t do so screaming. She called them into the bedroom, piled them on the bed, and played, tickling and laughing and not saying anything about a missile. Hans went out to the balcony. They live on the third floor, and when the rain falls in the right place at the right time, they can see the mountains rising up to meet a rainbow. He wondered, briefly, if Honolulu would look like The Day After, a television movie about a nuclear attack on a small Kansas town that 100 million people watched when it aired in 1983. Honolulu was quiet. A commercial airliner banked out over the Pacific, and another one was coming in behind it, a white dot against the Wai‘anae Range. No sirens wailed. He turned on the local CBS a∞liate. Ole Miss was a point up on Florida. A red banner stretched across the top of the screen, words scrolling right to left. The play-by-play cut out, replaced by three tones and then a man’s calm voice reading the words. “A missile may impact on land or sea within minutes. This is not a drill.” Those last three were in all caps. Hans’s phone rang. Daphne, panicky. She can’t reach Wade. Her whole family is in Hawaii. Her parents from New York, who watched the towers come down, her mom choking on dust that pushed up to 49th Street, are with her on the 31st floor of a high-rise downtown. Her brother is on his honeymoon in Maui. She hates that they’re all there. She’s relieved that her mom and dad are with her. She wants Lucas and Wade there, too. “Please,” she tells Hans, “you’ve got to reach Wade.” Hans hangs up, calls Wade. He starts toward the bedroom, stops, picks up his guitar, carries it with him, sets it against the wall just outside the bedroom door. He suspects he might need it later, and he wants it to be within arm’s reach of the bedroom. He has no idea why he thinks this, and he never will. Then he goes in the bedroom, shuts the door, and plays with his girls and his wife.

8:15 A.M. 8 MINUTES SINCE ALERT

ade tells himself this must be a

He’s read the alert, but it W mistake. doesn’t make sense. North Korea has been a long-shot threat since the Bush years. Why now? There is no reason. It’s a test, has to be, one of Kim’s ICBMs that overshot Japan and is careering back to earth on a path no one can predict, and, hell, better to spook everyone with a warning just in case. On the other hand, it is possible Oahu is going to be destroyed by a nuclear warhead, even if only by accident. He calls Daphne, but the connection drops. That does not concern him: Cell reception in her condo is spotty. He calls back. “I need you to bring Lucas here,” Daphne says. “I want you with me.”

Wade understands that as a practical matter of survival, this makes no sense, driving from Diamond Head to downtown, closer to Pearl Harbor, which probably is the intended target if, in fact, anything at all has been targeted. But maybe it’d be better. Wade’s not afraid of dying, only of doing so slowly and horrifically. And if they’re all going to die, shouldn’t they do it together? Death, a good death, always seems to involve loved ones gathered around, doesn’t it? “Deathbed” is supposed to be a comforting word. Lucas is brushing his teeth, a ritual he does carefully, conscientiously, with a batterypowered Spider-Man brush. Getting out of the house in the morning always takes a while. Lucas needs his socks to be perfectly aligned, his heels swaddled, the seam flat across his toes. (continued on next page)

Vern Miyagi addressed the press days after the inadvertent crisis. He explained that an employee had issued the alert in error and stressed preparedness for future catastrophic events.

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Wade is standing in the bathroom doorway, waiting, trying not to disrupt the routine. If this is a mistake, he doesn’t want to panic his son. If it’s not, he doesn’t want Lucas’s last moments to be ones of utter terror. But the clock is ticking. Wade can feel frustration rising. He doesn’t say anything, but drops his head into his hand. Lucas startles at that. “What’s wrong, Dad?” Wade has never lied to his son. It’s one of his personal rules, to answer every question as honestly and appropriately as he can. Like that time when Lucas was in preschool and he asked, “Why does the earth never stop spinning?” Wade has no idea why the earth never stops spinning, so he improvised a child’s version of the Big Bang theory. Lucas was so thrilled by how smart his dad was that for weeks after he’d ask, “Tell me the Big Bang story again. C’mon, please, tell me the Big Bang story.” Except Santa Claus. Wade lies about Santa Claus because the truth would be traumatic, and that’s his other rule, not to traumatize his kid. Those two rules, he realizes, are at the moment in direct conflict. Wade sighs. “There’s been an alert.…” “What kind of alert?” “Look, it’s a missile warning, probably just a test, but Mom wants us to go over there, so, c’mon, let’s get moving.” Lucas does not move noticeably faster. It’s about a 12-minute drive from Wade’s condo to Daphne’s. It’s Saturday morning, so tra∞c probably won’t be too bad. Still, Wade thinks, dying on Interstate H-1 would be a pitiful way to go. The only thing worse would be yelling at his son when the sky flashed.

8:17 a.m.: 10 Minutes Since Alert J E F F J U D D R U S H E S into the apartment,

wraps Kathleen in a hug. He’s sweaty because he sprinted all the way back. For once, he’d taken his phone with him, was listening to Zero 7 on Pandora when Kathleen called, told him about the alert. He checked his phone. No alert. But Kathleen was scared, near tears. He believed her more than he believed his phone. He’d started running, then stopped. He saw an old woman with a very small dog. “Did you hear about the alert?” The old woman looked at him quizzically, as if he might be a loon. “There’s a missile coming.” Pause. “I think.” Then he ran home. Now, Je≠ checks Kathleen’s phone. The alert came in ten minutes ago, which means they have ten minutes left. Maybe. He has a vague memory of “20 minutes from launch to impact,” a number he’d heard in a publicservice announcement or a safety briefing or G Q . C O M

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some such. Not that the safety briefings meant much. The protocol sent out by the university where they both teach seemed to them to come down to don’t stay in your car; get out; go into a building, or just lie down in the street. That didn’t seem like much of a plan. Weren’t all those cars going to clog up the streets? Tra∞c is horrible enough without abandoned cars littering the roads. Kathleen is figuring out more practical measures. She’s thinking calmly, deliberately, and, she believes, rationally. “If we survive the blast,” she tells herself, “there will be fallout. I should wear long sleeves. And closed-toe shoes.” She suspects ChapStick and eye drops will be essential. Je≠ watches the clock. He doesn’t want to walk down 25 flights, but he doesn’t want to be trapped in an elevator, either. They have to move, get down from a fragile, collapsible high-rise, get as low as possible. There’s a parking deck on the ground floor, walled in, a door exiting to the street. It’s the safest place they can think of. Water, Je≠ thinks, we’ll need water. He grabs two bottles from the refrigerator, neither of them full. But between his rations and Kathleen’s sensible clothing, they believe they are prepared. No one is ever prepared. The elevators stop in the teens. A man gets on with a surfboard and a young boy, maybe 8 years old. “Did you get the alert?” Kathleen says to the man. He looks at her blankly. He doesn’t appear to speak English, so Kathleen shows him her phone. He understands, nods, points to the boy, indicating his son had explained it to him. The man shrugs. Kathleen says nothing, but feels a flash of anger, resentment. If everyone’s going to die, he could at least be a little spooked. It seems rude not to be. They get o≠ on the fourth floor, decide to walk the last flights down to the parking garage at street level. There is a girl there, alone and weeping, holding her phone as if it were a wounded bird. She seems properly terrified, and that’s even worse. Her mother appears from around a corner, hurries her away.

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so the boys have space to spread out, high school wrestlers on one side, younger boys on the other. They know there is no shooter by now: Enough kids have phones that word has gotten around about a missile streaking toward Hawaii. A few boys are crying, but as a group they are calm. There’s nothing to do but wait. Some of them stand near the cage where the guy who passes out towels is eating fried rice and watching a basketball game, like it was no more or less boring than any other Saturday morning in a locker room.

Mason Canonico checks the time, does the arithmetic in his head. If the alert buzzed on cell phones at 8:07, the missile probably had been launched at least two minutes earlier, maybe three or four. The nearest active American missile-defense batteries are in California and Alaska, which he knows from research he’d done a few weeks earlier for his class European History Through Russian Eyes. It was a group project, each student studying one topic to include in a letter to Mazie Hirono, Hawaii’s junior senator. Mason’s contribution was a suggestion that the state prioritize missile defense because, as he understands it, interceptor missiles from Alaska would take 15 minutes to reach Hawaii, which means the actual intercepting would happen uncomfortably close to the islands. That also means that he expects to hear some noise by now, an explosion, or at least a good, loud whoosh. Nothing. Another minute passes. Some kids are already saying it was a false alarm, that they’d heard it from a family friend in military intelligence or the National Guard. Mason isn’t sure he believes any of them. But he’s less scared than he was, which was pretty badly when he first heard there was a missile inbound, when kids were talking about the island getting nuked. “No,” one of his friends had told him. He’d showed Mason his phone. “See, it’s a ballistic missile, not a nuclear one. A ballistic missile is di≠erent.” Mason felt a little better after that. There’s no reason a high school kid, even a bright one, should know the di≠erence between a delivery vehicle and a warhead. Another minute ticks o≠. No explosions. • • •

8:22 a.m.: 15 Minutes Since Alert C H R I S L U A N ’ S P H O N E chirps again, this time

the tuch tuch of a normal text. It’s her supervisor telling her not to go to work, to stay where she is. She’s relieved for a moment. Then her stomach knots. What the fuck, she thinks. I was going to leave my kids. That’s what she’ll remember most, the first thing she’ll mention when she tells the story later. Her daughter is looking at her phone. “It’s a false alarm,” she says. Chris looks hard at her. “Who said that?” A friend, her daughter says, who heard it from another friend. “Don’t you believe it,” Chris says. She knows that friend, the same one who thought a lunatic was going to shoot up Waikiki on Halloween night. “Just stay together and wait.” • • •

8:27 a.m.: 20 Minutes Since Alert J E F F A N D K A T H L E E N A R E in the stairwell,

“Did you hear about the alert?” The old woman looked at him quizzically, as if he might be a loon. “There’s a missile coming.” Pause. “I think.”

near the door that leads out to the street. They’re one flight up, sitting close to each other, Kathleen in her sensible long sleeves, staring at the door. Figuring out where to wait was an exercise in risk management. If they were too close to the door, the pressure wave of the explosion might tear it open, suck them into a firestorm. Right? That seems a reasonable interpretation of the physics of a thermonuclear blast. But if they were too far away

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and the building collapsed—they were pretty sure the building would collapse—they might get buried in the rubble. Kathleen’s closed-toe shoes might not be su∞cient to climb out, and Je≠ ’s water, he realized, wasn’t going to last until the rescuers dug them out. Where was close enough but not too close? A maddening puzzle. But if they stop thinking about surviving, they’ll think about dying. No, they’re still thinking about dying. Kathleen had texted her brother at 8:22. “We got an alert about a missile coming,” she’d said. “I don’t know what’s happening. I love you so much. Thank you for being my brother.” The phones aren’t working. Did it already happen? Kathleen wonders if she should open the door, if the street will look di≠erent, like in one of those movies where some guy is the last man on earth. She decides to wait on the stairs. Twenty-one minutes now. Every second is excruciating. “If we’re going to die,” Je≠ says, “at least we’re together.” He knows it’s a cliché, but it’s true, and what else is there to say? • • •

8:30 a.m.: 23 Minutes Since Alert D A P H N E D I A L S Wade’s number. She’s in the

lobby, where she’d waited with her parents, close to the stairs down below street level. But she knows there is no missile coming: She saw the tweet Tulsi Gabbard, one of Hawaii’s representatives in Congress, put out at 8:19: hawaii—this is a false alarm. there is no incoming missile to hawaii. i have confirmed with officials there is no incoming missile. But Wade should have been there three minutes ago, maybe sooner if he’d stepped on the gas. Wade answers. Daphne hears noise in the background. A car door closing. “You haven’t left yet?” “I’m trying not to traumatize our child,” Wade says. “We’re hurrying.” Daphne tells him it’s a false alarm but to get there anyway, she wants Lucas with her. But Wade only registers the last part. He will remember the drive. He will remember what song was playing on his iPod plugged into his Ford—the Black Keys, “When the Lights Go Out.” He will remember being relieved that tra∞c was light on the H-1, because he also will remember thinking he does not want to be vaporized on the H-1. He will remember the sense of being on a mission—get Lucas to Daphne—and that nothing else was ever more important. But he will not remember that Daphne told him there was no missile flying toward Honolulu. He will not be able to explain that, either, except to remark that the mind and memory can be curious things. He also will not arrive at Daphne’s until 8:54. • • •

8:32 a.m.: 25 Minutes Since Alert T H E R E A R E V O I C E S in the stairwell above,

doors opening, footsteps. Je≠ stands, trots up a flight. There is a small knot of people standing around a man with a yellow phone pressed to his ear. He appears to be repeating what he’s hearing on the phone to the people around him.

The man says: “False alarm.” Je≠ wants to be certain. He moves quickly up three more steps, close to the man with the yellow phone. “False alarm?” A short, firm nod. “False alarm.” Je≠ slumps with relief, hurries back down to Kathleen. She’s standing, wide-eyed, expectant. He hugs her. “False alarm,” he says. “It was a false alarm.” Kathleen sobs, and he holds her tighter. • • •

8:45 a.m.: 38 Minutes Since Alert H U N D R E D S O F T H O U S A N D S of phones get

another alert. “There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii,” it reads. “Repeat. False Alarm.” The 15-word message seems like it had been hastily written, judging by the odd capitalization and that the word “repeat” does not, in fact, precede anything being repeated in the cell-phone version. But it took 38 minutes to send out because a template had to be designed and then coded into the system and the state thought it needed permission from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to send the message (which it didn’t). And all of that happened early on a Saturday morning, when the tech people weren’t at work. The man who sent the original alert has never been publicly identified. He is referred to only as Employee 1 in a report issued by the state after an investigation into the incident. That report claims that he has “been a source of concern…for over 10 years” and that he “has confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions.” Employee 1 disputes all of that and told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that he was a scapegoat for a chaotic and badly supervised drill. He says he did not hear “exercise, exercise, exercise” but that he did hear “this is not a drill”—language that, unsurprisingly, is not typically included in a drill. He maintains, in fact, that he believed a missile really was inbound. So when he opened a drop-down menu on his computer, he deliberately clicked the line for the live alert and not the line that was nearly identical except for the word “test” in it. And when a box popped up asking him to confirm his choice, he clicked yes. It’s certainly possible this was an honest mistake. But no one else present was confused. Either way, he was fired in late January. He’s appealing, and his attorney says he might sue the state, too. • • • N O O N E W A S reported to have died that

morning, not from the nuclear panic, anyway. One man started vomiting on Sandy Beach, drove himself to a clinic, and promptly went into cardiac arrest. A surgeon put four stents in his chest after that, though, so correlation isn’t necessarily causation. There was security footage of students scrambling around a college quad that the cable networks seemed to play on a loop, if only because there wasn’t much panic-in-the-streets imagery to be found. Everyone also knows about panicky people driving 100 miles an hour on the H-1, but they all seem to have heard it from a guy whose cousin saw it. That is not completely surprising. Every minute believing a nuclear missile is inbound is a minute spent preparing to die or to

desperately survive. There is not solely, or even mostly, panic. There is slow-motion shock, and no one knows how he will react until he is forced to. Maybe he’ll open that bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue he won in a ra±e four years ago, toast the bill collectors who won’t be calling anymore, get half-drunk before the terror is called o≠. Or he might sit mute in a chair at Supercuts, pretty sure he should be terrified—the man on the radio said to move away from windows, and Supercuts has huge windows—but no one else seems worried, so he sits very still and hopes the woman with the scissors by his head has steady hands. Maybe he’ll try to drive far away, across the mountains, and he’ll call his family to say goodbye, but they won’t believe him, and when they finally do, he has to spend his last moments on earth calming his parents. Maybe he’ll be a little more patient with his son. Maybe he’ll tickle his daughters. Maybe she’ll think very, very hard about what to wear to the apocalypse, and she will laugh about it later, but in the moment it is the most important decision she will ever make.

“But people talk about PTSD,” he said. Vern was in the military for almost four decades. He knows about PTSD. “My personal view is we had 38 minutes of inconvenience.” And it is funny, in hindsight. That said, the false alarm revealed weaknesses in preparation and, in some people, instincts for how to best protect themselves. One widely circulated video, for instance, showed a man helping his child down a manhole. “Putting kids in manholes is not a good idea,” Vern Miyagi told a few dozen people six days after the fact. “The sewers are full of methane. Please, don’t do that.” Vern was in the cafeteria of the Pearl City Highlands Elementary School on a Friday night in late January, ostensibly as part of a public-awareness campaign. There were handouts, including one showing the relative safety of various structures (the building techniques of the three little pigs are a reasonable guide) and rooms within them—low is better than high, interior is better than not. He ran through a slide presentation, a major point of which was to keep threats in perspective. A hurricane is exponentially more likely to wreak havoc than a North Korean nuclear attack, unless and until Kim Jong-un becomes suicidal. Andrew Canonico wasn’t being irrational: A month and a day later, a student killed 17 people in his former high school in Florida. And even if Kim detonated his biggest nuke directly over Pearl Harbor, most people on Oahu, 80 or even 90 percent, would survive it. Hans and Becca, Chris Luan, Wade if he stayed put—they’d all be stumbling through the wreckage, unless they had two weeks of provisions to wait out the fallout. Mostly, though, Vern was there to answer questions, of which many were quite hostile. “You keep saying ‘human error,’ ” a woman in A P R I L

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the back half-shouted at him. “I don’t understand what ‘human error’ even means.” Vern waited her out, let her finish. “That’s on me,” he said. He told me the same thing a few days later in his o∞ce in the bunker. He’s a soft-spoken man, but in a way that suggests he’s confident in the few things he says rather than afraid to say the wrong thing. He wouldn’t give up the name of Employee 1. He admitted there are problems that need to be fixed and that it is his job to fix them. He was probably a very good general. He seemed mildly annoyed by only one thing. That Saturday morning, he agrees, was surely terrifying for a great many people. “But people talk about PTSD,” he said. Vern was in the military for almost four decades. He knows about PTSD. “My personal view,” he said, “is we had 38 minutes of inconvenience.” Six days after he told me that, he resigned. • • • A B U N C H O F K I D S decided they didn’t feel much like wrestling that day, but the tournament at Punahou still went on, albeit behind schedule. Andrew made weight by a tenth of a pound at 9:15, then immediately gobbled a ham sandwich and a peanut-butter one after that. But he got bumped up to 170, drew a bye in the first round, lost the second, and his opponent was injured for the third. “So I cut weight to lose one match I didn’t have to lose weight for,” he said. Mason went two and one, came in third. Chris Luan sent her kids to a baseball tournament, a fund-raiser for school, where they’d been scheduled to volunteer. She thought getting them out of the house, back to normal life as quickly as possible, was the best thing for them. She’d wait until Sunday to figure out a plan for the next emergency, decide how to keep everyone safe and together. Then she went upstairs to the bathroom. She realized she’d made a mistake, that she’d filled the tub with hot water. Her father always told her to use cold, leave the hot tank full, a big, pre-filled container of potable water. It was still warm, though, and there was no sense wasting it. She took a long soak. Hans asked his eldest daughter if she wanted to break out the Spam she got for Christmas, Spam being an entirely appropriate gift in Hawaii. He fried it up for breakfast, and between that and playing with Mom and Dad, maybe the morning would end up a happy memory. Hans grew up surrounded by dozens of silos loaded with missiles that could destroy the planet at a time when that was not unthinkable. The reason he remembers The Day After is because he was aware, even as a boy, that he was living in the days before. But that was a long time ago. His kids weren’t growing up that way, and he believed they would never have to. An hour after breakfast, his daughter, the 7-year-old, was packing for a sleepover. She had her backpack open, and she was stu∞ng it with blankets, more than she could ever reasonably need. Hans watched her for a moment, curious, bemused. “Why are you taking those?” he finally asked. She looked at him as if it should be perfectly obvious. “In case there’s another missile alert,” she said. “That’s why.”

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TIFFANY H A D D I S H that Cup O’ Noodles was only two dollars.) Right now Ti≠any Haddish is too happy to keep a tale this juicy bottled up inside her any longer. “There’s people out here biting Beyoncé!” she says, incredulous. • • • H A D D I S H D O E S a lot of things no other celeb-

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“So Beyoncé stormed away,” Haddish says, “went up to Jay-Z, and was like, ‘Jay! Come here! This bitch—’ and snatched him. They went to the back of the room. I was like, ‘What just happened?’ And Beyoncé’s friend walked up and was like, ‘Can you believe this bitch just bit Beyoncé?’ ” “And so then…,” she continues, “a lot of things happened.” According to Haddish, she and the actress continued to cross paths throughout the night, culminating in a brief stando≠. The actress, at one point, told Haddish to stop dancing, which—good luck making that happen. “And then Beyoncé and Jay-Z walked by me, and I tapped Beyoncé.” Haddish says she told Beyoncé, “I’m going to beat somebody ass at your party. I just want to let you know that.” Beyoncé asked her not to— told her to “have fun” instead. (Haddish leveraged this moment into a selfie with Beyoncé.)

“Beyoncé’s at the bar, so I said to Beyoncé, ‘Did she really bite you?’ She was like, ‘Yeah.’ I was like, ‘She gonna get her ass beat tonight.’ ” “Near the end of the party,” says Haddish, describing her final run-in with Mrs. Carter sometime later, “Beyoncé’s at the bar, so I said to Beyoncé, ‘Did she really bite you?’ She was like, ‘Yeah.’ I was like, ‘She gonna get her ass beat tonight.’ She was like, ‘Ti≠any, no. Don’t do that. That bitch is on drugs. She not even drunk. The bitch is on drugs. She not like that all the time. Just chill.’ ” Haddish held this story in for as long as she could. Weeks. When people asked about what happened when she met Beyoncé, she tried to remain vague: “I’m not at liberty to say,” she would explain. But Haddish is feeling good in this particular moment on this particular whale watch, and because her personality is perilously infectious, when Ti≠any is feeling good, the whole world in her immediate vicinity gets better. She’s exploring the open water with no cell service. (Later, on land, Haddish will open her phone to realize it has logged hundreds of text messages and missed calls.) She’s already seen some whales, more dolphins, and tons of sea lions, to whom she called, “Arf arf!” The sun is intoxicating, and the wind is ri±ing her wig and gently cooling the piping hot Cup O’ Noodles in her hand. (“Cup O’ Noodles is only two dollars!” Haddish whisper-gasped when she saw

rity does, that everyone loves when Ti≠any does them, and one of those things is regularly thank Americans for paying their taxes. “I wanna say thank you to anyone who paid taxes between 1990 and 1999,” gushed Haddish, arms outstretched, one minute into her host monologue on Saturday Night Live in November, “because if you wouldn’t have paid your taxes, I wouldn’t have been standing here today.” Haddish’s birth father, an Eritrean immigrant, left Haddish’s family when she was 3. Her mother remarried but, when Haddish was 8, su≠ered a traumatic brain injury after being involved in a serious car accident. Haddish’s mother spent three months in the hospital. She returned home, Ti≠any says, with an entirely di≠erent personality: mean, volatile, and abusive. “I swore she had a demon in her. It’s so scary.” When Haddish was 13, she and her siblings were placed in foster care; she spent almost two years living in group homes and with foster families until her grandmother gained custody of the kids. Money remained tight, so they technically remained in the fostercare system (hence the taxes line). When her foster-care subsidy ran out, Haddish left home. As a young adult, she became homeless three times, living in her car. “I think that was God teaching me a lesson over and over,” she says. And, as often happens when Haddish reflects on the profound hardships of her life, she cuts up, laughing. “I wasn’t paying attention the first two times.” Perhaps as a consequence of these periods of insolvency, Haddish has an incredible memory for dollar amounts—money coming in, money going out—and she speaks about finances frankly. When I ask about her paycheck for a 2005 appearance on an episode of That’s So Raven, she recalls the amount instantly. “That only paid like 795 bucks. But the residual checks are certainly nice. I got one for two cents the other day. They could’ve just held on to that till it accumulated at least to 35 cents.” She brings up residuals again when our conversation turns to Netflix—specifically Mo’Nique’s call for a boycott of the streaming service in light of what the comedian described as “gender bias and color bias” in the paychecks o≠ered to various comics for their stand-up specials. (A reported $20 million for Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock. A reported $11 million for Amy Schumer. And $500,000 for Mo’Nique, she says.) “My business run di≠erent than her business,” says Haddish. “I don’t live her life. I don’t have that husband of hers. I’m looking at how [Netflix has] opened up so many opportunities for black females and comedy. When my people are dying, that’s when you gonna catch me protesting. I’m not gonna protest because somebody got o≠ered not the amount of money they wanted to get o≠ered. If you don’t like what they’re o≠ering you, just no longer do

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business with them. If I protest Netflix—what about all the black shows that are on there? What about all the other actors that are working on there? All the Indians, the Hispanics, the Asians. My show, The Carmichael Show, airs on there right now. It ain’t on NBC.” Haddish was a series regular on the three-season NBC sitcom, created by comedian Jerrod Carmichael. “I play Carmichael Show on a repeating basis. I just turn it on and let it play. I’m like, ‘Hey, let’s collect that residual check.’ ”

She is as conﬁdent and speciﬁc with her counsel as a spam e-mail, and she can be unnervingly persuasive—even when her advice is to drink poison. Curiously, for someone so willing to discuss deeply personal topics like childhood trauma (Haddish estimates that the stories told in her stand-up act are “75 percent” autobiographically true—“like the movie Big Fish”), virtually no information is known about Haddish’s life now that she has, by all accounts, made it. She is 38. She makes frequent reference to the fact she is single—a maneuver equal parts joking and evasive. Her Instagram posts, while lively, are almost entirely work-related and thus fail to answer the question: What happens after you get everything you’ve ever wanted? “I’m mostly taking care of my family right now,” she says, and then breaks down exactly how: “I just got my mom out the mental institution. Once you start making it in the business, you start meeting all kinds of people that”—she leans in conspiratorially—“definitely have mental problems. And they link you up with the best psychiatrists. Literally all my money goes into my grandmother and my mother. I got a two-bedroom apartment and moved my sister in so she could be monitoring [our mom]. I got nurses for my mom. My grandma bumped her head and had to have her brain drained, and she’s dealing with Alzheimer’s. I’ve got meal services coming to the house for her and for my mom.” She mentions receiving food-service recommendations from stars “like Barbra Streisand, Rosanna Arquette, all these really famous people.” “When you order three meals a day, and they’re all organic, all natural, good food, that shit is expensive as fuck.” How much does a celebrity-approved meal service cost? “Five hundred dollars a week. For one person.” One of the most striking parallels between Haddish’s personal and professional lives involves her newest TV role, opposite Tracy Morgan on The Last O.G., airing on TBS this April. Co-created by Jordan Peele, the series stars Morgan as an ex-con who returns to his Brooklyn neighborhood to find his girlfriend, Shay—now going by Shannon, portrayed by Haddish—living in a bougie renovated brownstone with a white man and 15-yearold twins. It’s Morgan’s TV homecoming—his

first full-time network gig since a violent 2014 automobile crash that killed his friend, comedian Uncle Jimmy Mack, and left Morgan comatose with a traumatic brain injury. “Tracy told me about his therapist and how he’s helped him so much,” says Haddish. She asked Morgan’s doctor to recommend a West Coast colleague “who can help my mom, who has the same kind of brain injuries and damage that Tracy has. He was like, ‘This one is the best one.’ Guess where my mama going?”

I send Haddish information from the U.S. National Library of Medicine outlining the dangers of turpentine poisoning, but when we talk again a few days after our whale watch, she is unconcerned. “The government wrote it,” she says of the research. “Honey.” She vows to update me on her health following her next doctor’s appointment. The other thing Haddish says about turpentine: It will make your body pass “the best doo-doo of your fucking life.”

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H A D D I S H L O V E S G O A L S like Pelé loves goals.

H A D D I S H ’ S P E R F O R M A N C E I N Girls Trip was

She derives comfort and purpose from explicitly designating them. “One day I’ma jump o≠ one of those into a beautiful ocean,” she avows to our boat as it chugs past a so-called superyacht that our guide says belongs to the owner of the L.A. Rams. “Superyacht, gotta remember that. Setting it right now.” “Everything I said I wanted to do, I’m literally doing,” she says of her private life. “My goal,” wrote Haddish in her memoir, The Last Black Unicorn, “is to get enough money to buy a duplex. I want to put [my mother] in one of the units and hire a full-time nurse to take care of her.” “But I never said I wanted to have a bunch of babies and have a husband,” she says in person. “Never heard me say that in the book!” An o≠shoot of Haddish’s goal-oriented nature is that she enjoys soliciting and giving life-improvement tips—a trait that makes her a captivating, natural spokeswoman. She is as confident and specific with her counsel as a spam e-mail, and she can be unnervingly persuasive—even when her advice is to drink poison. “A teaspoon of turpentine will not kill you,” says Haddish with the breezy confidence of an unlicensed doctor. “The government doesn’t want you to know that if you have a cold, just take some turpentine with some sugar or castor oil or honey and it’ll go away the next day.” I didn’t think humans could consume turpentine. “Honey,” begins Haddish, “back during slavery—let me teach you something, okay?” Per Haddish, in the absence of 19th-century medical care, slaves drank turpentine—an oil distilled from pine resin, today commonly used as a paint thinner—as a cure-all for various ailments. When I note that slaves were not known for their excellent health, Haddish flips my argument into evidence: That’s because not all the slaves had access to turpentine. “There’s worms inside your body,” says Haddish. How— “There are worms inside your body.” Haddish explains that she learned about the alleged medical benefits of turpentine on YouTube and purchased some on Amazon a few months ago. After her first dose, she says, “everything just felt so much better, clarity-wise.” You were light-headed from drinking poison. “But I was killing the game onstage!” she says, laughing. “My thought patterns was coming quick, quick, quick. Girl, you just look it up. Just do the research.” I do look it up, because I’m genuinely worried America’s brightest new star may be inadvertently poisoning herself to death.

so strong it generated Oscar buzz—rare for a role in a pure comedy. She was not nominated. She was, however, called on to announce the nominees in a live pre-dawn telecast. It did not go as planned. Clips of Haddish reading o≠ the event’s teleprompter went viral, as she bungled several names. (In Ti≠any’s mouth, Daniel Kaluuya’s surname was “Koolyay,” “Kahlua,” and, finally, “Kalellujah.”) “That’s my natural reading skills right there,” says Haddish, watching the water from behind sunglasses. “I felt so bad. ’Cause I have feelings.” As if her climb to success weren’t remarkable enough, Haddish estimates that up until about age 16, she remained at a “first- or second-grade reading level”—an experience she recounts in The Last Black Unicorn. The mega-best-selling book made headlines after it was published, when it was revealed Haddish worked on it with a surprising collaborator: controversial writer Tucker Max, known for his breezy accounts of lewd, misogynist behavior. While it’s commonplace for celebrity memoirs to be written with the assistance of a silent ghostwriter, Max—who co-founded a self-publishing business that, for a fee of $25,000, allows aspiring authors to dictate their books through a series of phone interviews—touted his involvement, going so far as to publicly call the memoir “My first new book of short stories in years.”

“You know how white people do,” Ti≠any writes in her memoir. “They just encourage and cheer anybody who lets it all hang out and just don’t give a f—k.” Haddish participated in multiple interviews with Max, though much of the book’s content was familiar to fans of her comedy, overlapping as it does with her 2017 stand-up special. She says she had been attempting to write her life story for years but had trouble translating the hyper-fluidity of her speech to the page. “I do have esteem issues when it comes to reading and writing,” she says. “I always feel kind of self-conscious about letting people read something that I wrote, because the last thing I wanna hear is ‘You spelled everything wrong.’ ” She laughs. “Tucker Max helps fix those types of situations.” Haddish says that Max recorded conversations with her and helped “organize [the book] and make it make sense.” A P R I L

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While it’s obvious from conversing with Haddish that she is a verbalist of well-above-average skill, even now she speaks of mastering reading in the present tense: “the better I get at reading…” She says she used to be able to recount long passages of text verbatim—“like a stenographer”—but the aptitude is fading in inverse proportion to her literacy. (“Like, ‘Oh, I can read this? I don’t have to know it that well.’ ”) She credits her still “pretty damn good” memory with helping her internalize dialogue in scripts. Incidentally, Haddish admits that despite her faltered reading, one of the Academy event organizers immediately asked if she would be willing to reveal nominations again in the future. (She garnered praise online for her honey-dripping pronunciation of Call Me by Your Name.) The nominees did not seem o≠ended by Haddish’s errors. In the words of one, tweeted after the ceremony: “Ti≠any Haddish can mispronounce my name any way she wants! WOOOOOOO.” • • • H A D D I S H I S O B S E R V A N T , perceptive, and no fool. When she appears in public as the biggest, loudest, dancingest version of herself, it’s not because she knows no other way to be but because she knows that this is the version that makes people happy. Those looking for the secret formula behind Haddish’s charm o≠ensive might find it in these lines from her book: “You know how white people do. They just encourage and cheer anybody who lets it all hang out and just don’t give a fuck.” She has made herself aspirational not for her wealth but for her delight. Actors devote such e≠ort to emphasizing the di∞cult aspects of their job that when Ti≠any behaves in a way that suggests what the public has always believed—Being a movie star is fun!—is true, it feels like bold, suspicion-validating candor. People do not begrudge her success, because she visibly relishes it. (And if Haddish should ever discover that she’s coming on a little too strong—too loud, too happy, too out of control—she’s equipped for that, too. She turns on the calm voice she learned working in customer service for Alaska Airlines, shifts smoothly into a lower gear until equilibrium is restored.) The truth is that Haddish’s work is just as demanding as her counterparts’, and her counterparts enjoy at least as high a quality of life as Haddish. They’re just emphasizing di≠erent aspects of the job. The trick now is for Haddish to sustain authentic-seeming wonderment as her career enters turbo drive. She has a first-look deal with HBO. She’s taking meetings with Paul Thomas Anderson and Judd Apatow. She’s in talks to do a Mob movie with Melissa McCarthy. Even Dorothy got used to Oz by the end of the second act. Back on the boat, a woman asks Haddish her name. “Nice to meet you!” says Haddish to the stranger. “Give me a hug.” “What a pleasure to have you on this boat,” says the woman. “It’s a pleasure to be on this boat,” says Haddish, initiating eye contact and smiling. And the bankable thing about Ti≠any Haddish is that she seems to really mean it.

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Her second principle of management is heeding her native velocity. “I don’t like ‘Maybe tomorrow.’ No. I want result NOW,” she says. Laugh laugh laugh. Her favorite word is adesso, which means “right now.” The breakneck metabolism helps explain why she adores millennials so much: “One day they’re gothic, one day they’re rock ’n’ roll, one day they’re classic. They say, ‘I’m a millennial, I wear this.’ That’s what I love about them.” What they love about Donatella is precisely the opposite. The brand never breaks character. The clothes may change from season to season, but they always radiate the same fantasy of fuck-you money. There are hundreds of places to shop if you want to project intelligence or sophistication or authority. But if you want to look rich, you go straight to Versace. Young people also love risk, and the danger of looking like an idiot in Versace is significant. If you don’t inhabit your tiger-striped velvet with su∞cient confidence, you will be severely defeated by your own clothes. Now that the rest of menswear is tilting in a florid direction—crocodile skins! vicuña coats! Technicolor suede! chain mail!—Versacean excess is pertinent once more. Not that it matters. In a year or two, fashion will dart o≠ in a new direction and the brand will remain just as popular.

“You can’t do my job—or any job—if you don’t know how they think, how they talk, and what they’re looking for,” Donatella says, “they” meaning “the youth.” “When I was young, Versace was iconic,” says 2 Chainz, who’s friendly with Donatella and has been dressed regularly by Versace. “When I started rapping, Versace was iconic. And today it’s iconic. Legends are associated with Versace, and I’m now a part of that legacy.” At the moment, Donatella has 2.4 million followers on Instagram and fans in Gigi Hadid and Kylie Jenner. Lady Gaga and Migos and Bruno Mars have written songs about her brand. She’s on their platforms and involved in their causes. “You can’t do my job—or any job—if you don’t know how they think, how they talk, and what they’re looking for,” she says, “they” meaning “the youth.” It is Donatella’s wish to bring on some younger design talent—she won’t say who, in particular, just “new talent, young talent. So that Versace stays in the future.” (Another

way it stays in the future—perhaps surprising given the fierce manner in which Versace has remained a family business all these years: “Bring the company public.”) Fashion labels live and die on momentum, so it’s easy to see why Donatella would keep her eye on the youngest of her customers. But it’s also easy to see why they might worship her back. Decades ago she predicted the era of the personal brand, with its mandate that we distill our messy selves into a handful of recognizable signifiers. In Donatella’s case, it’s the hair, the cigarette (analog or digital), the filial piety, the lack of other kinds of piety, the fact that she’s never merely clothed but always wearing an Outfit. It’s the fact that she struts like she’s on a runway and tans her skin to the color of a crostino. And the fact that when asked about Donald Trump, she responds with an icy “Next question.” What designer has been parodied on Saturday Night Live more? What other designer could you dress up as for Halloween with the reasonable expectation that a civilian would recognize you? Her brand is old-school “fabulous,” but she’s fluent in modernity; she sends handwritten notes in gold ink and collaborates with rappers. In this way, she is a perfect reflection of her surroundings. Milan has its hard-edged industrial aspects, but it’s also a place where you can see a man in a fur coat singing on a bicycle or a fully operative 15th-century church next door to a Foot Locker. The city is a layer cake of opulence and industry, and so is the brand that was born there. “Versace is a dream. It’s a dream that people want to be part of,” Donatella says, balancing her crystal tumbler in gold-drenched hands. “To be part of a dream, you don’t need to have the outfit to wear. You can have also a little thing. An ashtray. A little thing for the house. And you’re a part of Versace.” Just like Donatella, in every last way. Afloat on a velvet couch with her regal lidded gaze and arch expression, she looks a lot like her own company’s logo. If you’ve read a myth or been to a museum, you know that Medusa is a figure of ancient Greece, not Northern Italy, which prompts the question of how this snake-haired she-devil became the emblem of the most Italian brand on earth. The answer is rooted in the geographical novelty that is Magna Graecia, a stripe of Southern Italy colonized by roaming Greeks in the eighth century bce. Included in this stripe is the city of Reggio Calabria, where the siblings Versace grew up amid archaeological ruins and pockets of people who still speak a dialect descended from ancient Greek. It seems logical that Medusa—a woman capable of literally stunning anyone who looked at her into submission—might have appealed to the young Gianni, who would, in fact, go on to define his entire company on that premise. If you think about it, the whole Versace DNA is contained in the Medusa image: classicism and sex and power and confrontation and, of course, fiercely meaningful hair. Swap out the serpents for platinum waves and suddenly the Palazzo Versace is covered in little Donatellas. molly young is a writer living in New York City. Her book, ‘D C-T!,’ written with Joana Avillez, will be published in May.

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clothing racks. “Love,” I said, “they tell me you are re-imagining the Sean John line. How do you see the new look? What’s it like?” “A lot of black and white,” he said. We were sort of whispering. I’m not sure why. “It’ll have a street cool,” he said, “but it can’t be too geechie.” “Geechie?” I said. I had heard that word before, but I didn’t know what it meant in a fashion context. “What does a geechie piece of clothing look like?” “Just...too much,” he said, running his hands over the jacket he had on. “You know, embroidery, buckles, just shit everywhere.” “Like...too country?” I asked. “Not really,” he said, and for a second I thought we were about to go deep, but just then he was called back to the mirror. I think maybe by “geechie,” Love had been describing the quality I grew up hearing called “tacky.” Which sort of meant: fanciness wielded by people with no taste. I never hear people say “tacky” anymore, but it’s a good word, as useful as “nice.” In his unwillingness to let me get away with a shoddy definition, I saw his earnestness in wanting to figure it out. It reminded me that, even if he no longer defines cool the way he did in the late ’90s and part of the aughts, he has remained a barometer of taste. He is evidently moving toward: sleek and clean. I mentioned I’d spent a couple of hours the night before looking at his Instagram, and a lot of the “inspirational quotes” that Love had chosen to feature in his feed seemed like the kind of quotations a man would choose if he had been doing “some work on himself.” An example is this, from Maya Angelou: “Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand.” I brought up Biggie again, saying that in all the things I had read about Big’s murder—a murder that was committed 21 years ago in the middle of the street near a huge industry party, by a shooter multiple people saw, but which somehow remains unsolved—Love hadn’t said much about the fundamental horror of having lost one of his closest friends, of having been there in the vehicle just in front of Big’s, in front of his best friend when they shot him. Surely those were scarring memories. He has spoken in a previous interview of guilty feelings relating to the night of Big’s murder. If he hadn’t made Big big, the rapper would not have been there to take those bullets, although given Big’s reality in Brooklyn, he could have died sooner, for all we know. But they weren’t even supposed to have been in L.A. that night. They were supposed to have flown to London. Love had tried to talk him into keeping with the plan, but Biggie had wanted to stay—which is strange,

ADDITIONAL CREDITS because he knew that he was in danger out there. Possibly that was the reason, his wanting to show that he would party in California when he felt like it, that he wasn’t afraid. At times Love fell prey to the feeling he didn’t try hard enough to persuade Biggie to leave. I asked if he talked to a therapist about this stu≠. “Nah,” Love said, “I haven’t dealt with any of that yet. I try to get into it, but...that’s something that just hurts so bad. That’s a time that’s still suppressed.” He said that two and half years ago, he had become depressed. He’d developed an addiction to his phone. He felt “far away from God.” He went to Sedona, Arizona. “Where the vortexes are?” I asked. “Exactly,” he said, smiling. In Sedona he reconnected with his magic. He was hearing new songs in his head. “I’m not 100 percent knowing how to come up with the sounds yet,” he said, but he felt almost ready to compete on the radio again. • • • A T T H E E N D of the day, in the car on the way

to Ellen, I got to squeak a few more questions through. I asked how he felt about the fitting. “When I was growing up,” he said, “there were four magazines I wanted to be on the cover of: Essence, Ebony, and Jet. And GQ. When I’m there today and doing a fitting for GQ , I’m like, ‘Wow...dreams really do come true.’ ” This was a moment for Love. It slapped me into realizing I’d been viewing the day thus far with a jaded eye, or not jaded but feeling like we were all in on a joke or performance together, but it had been more real than that. I said I’d noticed that as the day had progressed, as we were hanging out, the most common theme, the one real consistency from the medicine balling to the haircut, was mentorship. We had talked about his gift for talent spotting at Bad Boy. We had talked about the way he was teaching his sons. We had talked about black excellence and setting a personal example of financial success and communitymindedness. So, with The Four, did he see those as extensions of this role? Did he plan to mentor the artists he discovered? “Yes,” he said. A few seconds of silence followed. Then he turned to me—we were sitting side by side—and said, “I think I’ve developed a mentorship relationship with the world.” I had nothing for that. I sat beside him and let myself be mentored. “God sent me here to inspire,” he said. Then he jumped out of the car without saying anything. He was so late for Ellen that she had decided to weave his lateness into the narrative of that day’s show. A camera crew was waiting for him in the alley to film his entrance into the studio. If you watch the sequence on YouTube, you can see me. It’s funny, because in the two seconds I spend on-screen, I look like I work for the show or something. I’m talking at someone you can’t see, who’s 12 feet away, and it looks like I’m giving a command. But really what I’m saying is, “Wait, my suitcase is still in the trunk!” They handed it to me, and when I turned, Love was gone. john jeremiah sullivan is a contributing writer for ‘The New York Times Magazine’ and the author of the books ‘Blood Horses’ and ‘Pulphead.’

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art. She makes her movies better. She makes her movies better for herself. Take, for instance, her fifth viewing of Girls Trip: “I went to a movie theater to watch the movie alone, just chill, sit near the front, listen to people laughing. I’d seen it like four times by then, but I’m laughing, too. I ain’t gonna lie, I had smoked a little weed because I wanted to see what it’d feel like to watch the movie high, because I hadn’t watched it high, right? So I’m laughing my ass o≠, and I’m like, ‘Dang, aw…this movie popping.’ People were talking through the credits, just waiting for bloopers, and I’m waiting for the bloopers, too, but I forgot there’s no bloopers! As we’re walking outta there, I just hear these women: ‘Oh, my gosh, that girl. That girl, who is it? Google her right now! Who is it, because that girl was so funny—oh, my goodness, I think I peed on myself! Oh, she’s just amazing. She’s so nice, she got a good spirit about her.’ And I turned around and was like: ‘Thank you!’ And they started screaming: ‘OH, MY GOD!’ ”

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Jim Beam Black® Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, 43% Alc./Vol. ©2018 James B. Beam Distilling Co., Clermont, KY. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Awarded International Wine & Spirit Competition’s 2016 Bourbon Trophy.