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The Technicolour Universe of Bobo Calcutta

The 50 Holy Grails of Modern Menswear

Introducing The New Batman

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How Virgil Abloh Architected a New Golden Age of Creativity

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March

ON THE COVER THE

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The Technicolour Universe of Bobo Calcutta How Virgil Abloh Architected a New Golden Age of Creativity The 50 Holy Grails of Modern Menswear

Introducing The New Batman

Jacket by Dior Men. Necklace (top) and wallet chain (worn as necklace) by Martine Ali.

For our cover story on Robert Pattinson, see page 62.

Jacket by Dior Men. Necklace (top) and wallet chain (worn as necklace) by Martine Ali.

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MEN OF THE YEAR AWARDS 2019

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AYUSHMANN KHURRANA PHOTOGRAPHED BY ERRIKOS ANDREOU

PHOTOGRAPHED BY PRASAD NAIK

PHOTOS: BIKRAMJIT BOSE (OCTOBER 2018); TARUN KHIWAL (SEPTEMBER 2018); R BURMAN (FEBRUARY 2019); PRASAD NAIK (AUGUST 2019); ERRIKOS ANDREOU (OCTOBER 2019); TARUN VISHWA (MARCH 2019); ALL COURTESY OF GQ INDIA

IT'S WHAT'S NEW NOW

“RAINWATER HARVESTING IS THE SOLUTION”

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ST YLIST: SELMAN FAZIL. MODEL: JOAN DOMINIC RAI.

March

For our story on fashion designer Ayushman “Bobo” Mitra, see page 38.

Jacket and trousers by Bobo Calcutta.

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For our story on spring fashion, see page 50.

Jumper and socks by Theorem. Shorts by Shriks. Sneakers by New Balance. Sunglasses by Balenciaga.

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EDITOR

CHIEF BUSINESS OFFICER Arjun

Che Kurrien

ART PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Mihir COPY DIRECTOR Tyrel DEPUTY EDITOR

Shah

Rodricks

Shikha Sethi

LIFESTYLE EDITOR Saumyaa

Vohra

CO-DIGITAL EDITOR & MANAGING EDITOR Shabdita STYLE EDITOR Selman DIGITAL WRITER Yash

Fazil

Bharati

SENIOR DESIGNER Anita VISUALS EDITOR

Pareek

Dake

Shivanjana Nigam

DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS Renuka ASSOCIATE OPERATIONS Shalini ART PRODUCTION MANAGER

Modi

Kanojia

Yogesh Jadhav

ENTERTAINMENT DIRECTOR Megha

AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT MANAGER

Mehta

Samiksha Pattanaik

PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Sunil

Nayak

SENIOR MANAGER – COMMERCIAL PRODUCTION Sudeep PRODUCTION MANAGER

Pawar

Mangesh Pawar

SENIOR PRODUCTION CONTROLLER

Abhishek Mithbaokar

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS & PHOTOGRAPHERS

Abhishek Bali, Abhishek Mande Bhot, Adil Hasan, Anish Trivedi, Annie Zaidi, Arun Janardhan, Bhanuj Kappal, Bikramjit Bose, Errikos Andreou, Jignesh Jhaveri, Kerry Harwin, Lindsay Pereira, Manasi Sawant, Manish Mansinh, Max Vadukul, Parth Charan, Phyllida Jay, Prakash Amritraj, Prasad Naik, Rahul Bose, R Burman, Sameer Kulavoor, Tarun Khiwal, Tarun Vishwa, Uday Benegal, Vikram Raizada

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PUBLISHER Armaity Amaria ADVERTISING DIRECTORS Kapil Kapoor (New Delhi); Charu Adajania ASSOCIATE ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Salman Haroon Shaikh SENIOR ADVERTISING MANAGER Dipti Dani ADVERTISING MANAGER Ankita Saxena (New Delhi) ASSISTANT PLANNING MANAGER Nishant Shetty ADVERTISING SALES COORDINATOR Vriti Malhotra (New Delhi) ITALY SALES REPRESENTATIVE Angelo Carredu US ADVERTISING MANAGER Alessandro Cremona CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER – SALES Jabir Merchant DIRECTOR ADVERTISING – DIGITAL SALES Niti Bathija ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR – DATA STRATEGY Himanshu Nagrecha ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR – BRAND PARTNERSHIPS Aalaap Roy MANAGER – DIGITAL SALES Sana Fatima ASSISTANT MANAGERS – DIGITAL SALES Rachit Jawarani (New Delhi); Mihika Vaswani MARKETING DIRECTOR Madhura Phadnis ASSOCIATE MARKETING DIRECTOR Pooja Jaggi MARKETING MANAGER Christel Anthony ASSOCIATE PROMOTIONS EDITOR Sneha Mahadevan ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR Varun Patil SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER Atul Hirijagner PROMOTIONS WRITER Ritika Saundh ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR – COMMERCIAL PLANNING Alisha Goriawala CNX DIRECTOR – CNX Richard Mascarenhas CREATIVE LEAD – BRANDED CONTENT (VIDEO) Devika Luniya DIRECTOR – CLIENT SERVICING & PROJECT MANAGEMENT Neha Dhanani SENIOR MANAGER – DIGITAL BRAND SOLUTIONS Shweta Mehta Sen MANAGER – DIGITAL BRAND SOLUTIONS Esha Singh CREATIVE STRATEGIST Shreya Baid ASSOCIATE EDITOR Andrea Pinto SENIOR COPY EDITOR – BRAND SOLUTIONS Tanuj Kumar (New Delhi) ASSISTANT MANAGER – INFLUENCER MARKETING Preeti Perla DIGITAL WRITER Vanshika Jain COMMERCIAL TALENT DIRECTOR Devika Patne HEAD – AD OPERATIONS Sachin Pujari MANAGERS – AD OPERATIONS Shivangi Shinde, Rahul Chintakindi AD OPERATIONS COORDINATOR Akanksha Malik DIRECTOR – COMMUNICATIONS Swati Katakam MANAGER – COMMUNICATIONS Waheeda Machiwala HEAD – EVENTS Fritz Fernandes SENIOR MANAGER – EVENTS Khushnaz Daruwala MANAGER – CIRCULATION OPERATIONS Jeeson Kollannur FIELD ASSISTANT Tirupati Dudam CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Amrit Bardhan FINANCIAL CONTROLLER Viral Desai ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR – FINANCE Dattaprasanna Bhagwat ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR – REVENUE SUPPORT Vinayak Shetye SENIOR FINANCE ANALYST Yogesh Potnis MANAGER – TAXATION Ankit Pansari SENIOR MANAGER – GENERAL ACCOUNTING Sanket Deshpande SENIOR ASSOCIATE – DISBURSEMENT Nikhil Rane SENIOR ASSOCIATE – BILLING Mandar Naik MANAGER – GENERAL ACCOUNTING Yogesh Gawde MANAGER – DISBURSEMENT Ameya Namjoshi ASSISTANT MANAGER – TAXATION Pranav Shah ASSOCIATE – BILLING Shailesh Koli HEAD – WORKPLACE SERVICES Boniface D’Souza MANAGER – LOGISTICS & FACILITIES Zain Shaikh HEAD – ENTERPRISE IT Nilesh Shah MANAGER – IT Madankumar Thapa BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP MANAGER – GLOBAL PRODUCT & TECHNOLOGY Vishal Ingale DIRECTOR – VIDEO Anita Horam ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR – VIDEO COMMERCIAL Rahul Vetkar MANAGER – PROCUREMENT Anubhuti Sharma SENIOR DIRECTOR – GLOBAL AUDIENCE PLANNING & OPERATIONS Saurabh Garg CONSUMER MARKETING LEAD Priyanka Shivdasani MANAGER – CRM & MARKETING AUTOMATION Manali Survase MANAGER – AUDIENCE ACQUISITION Rasika Samak SENIOR DIGITAL GRAPHIC DESIGNER Deep Shikha PEOPLE DIRECTOR – HR Coralie Ansari SENIOR ASSOCIATE & BUSINESS PARTNER Sumairah Ansari TALENT ACQUISITION SPECIALIST Sonal Shah EA TO MANAGING DIRECTOR Karen Contractor Avari

MANAGING DIRECTOR Alex

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Published By Condé Nast Chief Executive Officer Roger Lynch Global Chief Revenue Officer & President, U.S. Revenue Pamela Drucker Mann Global Chief Content Officer Anna Wintour President, Condé Nast Entertainment Agnes Chu Chief Financial Officer Jackie Marks Chief Marketing Officer Deirdre Findlay Chief People Officer Stan Duncan Chief Communications Officer Danielle Carrig Chief of Staff Elizabeth Minshaw Chief Product & Technology Officer Sanjay Bhakta Chief Data Officer Karthic Bala Chief Client Officer Jamie Jouning Chief Content Operations Officer Christiane Mack

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ISSUE INDIA

The Technicolour Universe of Bobo Calcutta How Virgil Abloh Architected a New Golden Age of Creativity The 50 Holy Grails of Modern Menswear

Introducing The New Batman

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All New Season

BOMBER: TROY COSTA. SHOES: NIKE. WATCH: PANER AI. EYEWEAR: TOM FORD.

I VISITED THE MERCEDES FORMULA ONE factory near the historic Silverstone racetrack just before the Silver Arrow’s first championship win eight years ago. Even though it was a sweltering day, the steel-and-glass facility felt immediately cool inside, alive with purpose and vitality: engineers buzzing around the shop floor fabricating gleaming new parts, analysts refining race strategies on supercomputers, and soon-to-be champion Nico Rosberg going for broke on a mammoth simulator. It was like a science lab on steroids. Cut to the end of 2020, and I found myself at the other end of a Zoom call with Mercedes icon Lewis Hamilton, who was on the cusp of winning his 7th title. Lewis was upbeat—speaking at length about his activism, the relationship he shares with his father, and how much he missed racing in India. As soon as the interview was over, I changed into pyjamas, switched off my living room lights, and got into bed—reflecting on just how much the world had changed since my visit to the factory.

What has also changed is the amount of hype around the sport—spurred by Netflix’s superhit Drive to Survive series, which has drawn in a new legion of fans across the globe; fresh episodes drop this month. March also marks the beginning of the 2022 Formula One season, coming on the back of what was, hands down, the greatest one ever. Max Verstappen is now champion, and Hamilton the hunter. Mercedes’s dashing new driver, George Russel, is bursting with promise and potential.

Verstappen’s wingman at Red Bull, Sergio Pérez, will be pushing hard to be more than the perfect teammate. Yet it’s the pack of drivers further down the grid that I’m most excited about: goofy but brave Lando Norris, now fired up by an eye-watering £80-million contract from McLaren; or Pierre Gasly, who continues to make a indignant point to his former bosses at Red Bull; or Renault’s Esteban Ocon with his rags-to-riches story.

Yet if I have to pick a dark horse, it’s Carlos Sainz Jr., Ferrari’s Spanish driver, who stealthily crept into fifth place in 2021. With all the seismic changes in car regulations kicking in this year, it promises to be a far more level playing field than in the past— with driver skill trumping constructor clout.

@chekurriengq

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CONAN GR AY: GROOMING, MELISSA DEZ AR ATE FOR ORIBE AND TATA HARPER; TAILORING, ALBERTO RIVER A AT L ARS NORD STUDIO.

Drops

32 Fresh Colours,

Daring Prints, and Big Vibes

HEAVENLY BOMBER Few designers have a knack for making couture-level craftsmanship feel as chilled-out as Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli.

Jacket, shorts, and shorts (worn underneath) by Valentino.

Shirt, stylist’s own. Tank top by Calvin Klein Underwear.

Sneakers by Vans. Socks, his own. Necklace by Mikimoto.

Ring, vintage.

for Spring Take it from TikTok phenom Conan Gray: Bolder is better this season.

By SAMUEL HINE

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TOP-SHELF GLASS The best-kept interiortaste-god-secret in NYC is Nalata Nalata, where artisanal glassware—like this hand-blown cup from a 90-year-old Japanese studio (Sugahara)— sit alongside soulful ceramics and leather goods.

GUNS-OUT BLAZER At Burberry, Riccardo Tisci is remixing British dress codes for the hip-hop generation.

BOTANICAL BOILER SUIT Erdem’s first menswear collection, anchored by toile de Jouy–printed tailoring, is an answered prayer for fans of the designer’s dreamy women’s line.

BEACH COAT Under designer Bruno Sialelli, Lanvin has tapped into early noughties cultural touchstones like Osiris skate shoes and the classic Leo flick The Beach, which inspired this season’s wavy knit coat.

CLUB-KID BOOTIES The unexpected grail shoe of the season?

Loewe’s Balearic rave boot, crafted out of fluorescent look-at-me leather.

AWNING-STRIPE BUCKET In the Raf Simons era, a new essential Prada bucket hat drops every season. Start your collection with the beachy version from the house’s fun, flirty spring-summer collection.

FUR TEE There are T-shirts, and then there are Fendi’s sublime watercolour intarsia mink T-shirts (Fendi Men’s).

TWO-IN-ONE BELT Nick Fouquet’s leather belts are infused with the same potent peyoteshaman vibe as the beaver felt hats that put the Venice Beach milliner on the map.

FASHION HISTORY Published by the V&A, Fashioning Masculinities traces how masculinity has been negotiated via clothing for centuries, from the Victorian codpiece to Harry Styles’s dandified Gucci suits.

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KILLER PINKIE RING Painter John Copeland linked up with fine jeweller Rebecca Elbek to give the posh signet ring a badass (and very-limited-edition— only 30 will be made) update.

ENORMOUS SHORTS The five-inch-inseam wave has crested, and voluminous, flowy shorts—like this acid paisley pair from the twisted mind of S.S. Daley—are due for a resurgence.

COLLECTABLE COFFEE-TABLE BOOK Robert Nava’s abstract paintings of primordial dragons and mystical leviathans have a way of inspiring creative contemplation (Vito Schnabel Gallery).

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BLUE BLAZER The O.G. of East-meetsWest menswear, Junya Watanabe is still designing righteous mash-ups like this reversible silk-brocade blazer.

E R D E M , P R A D A , S . S . D A L E Y, D I O R M E N , J U N YA WATA N A B E , N A N U S H K A : P R O P S T Y L I ST, S O L A N G E S I N G E R AT M A R K E DWA R D I N C. B U R B E R RY, SUGAHAR A, FENDI MEN’S, LOEWE, L ANVIN, NICK FOUQUE T, RICK OWENS, DOLCE & GABBANA, BOT TEGA VENE TA, HERMÈS, TOM DIXON: P R O P ST Y L I ST, S H A R O N RYA N AT H A L L E Y R E S O U R C E S . R O B E RT N AVA : P H OTO BY A R G E N I S A P O L I N A R I O, C O U RT E SY O F V I TO S C H N A B E L G A L L E RY. FASHIONING MASCULINITIES: COURTESY OF V&A. COPEL AND/ELBEK: COURTESY OF BRAND.

HI-VIS LEATHER PUFFER Alongside the nowfamous parakeet green, consider swimming pool blue and fluorescent orange the newest essential colours in Bottega Veneta’s wheel of viral hues.

BEDAZZLED JEANS When you want your jeans as glammed-out as a red-carpet-ready gown, you go to Dolce & Gabbana.

BIG-SNAKE SHIRT If Dior Men’s Kim Jones has anything to do with it, silky snake prints are going to be the Realtree camo of 2022.

’GRAMMABLE CANDELABRA Vanity vases, viral mirrors—add flex-worthy candleholders, like this recycled-marble sculpture by Tom Dixon, to the list of home status objects.

THE ROLLS-ROYCE OF TRAYS Consider expanding your collection of Hermès trays beyond its famous porcelain dishes to this advanced version in enamelled copper.

BRUTALIST BOOTS Both brutally medieval and sleekly futuristic, the latest iteration of Rick Owens’s infamous Kiss boots are not for the faint of heart or wardrobe.

FAUX-CHET SHIRT Thanks to Nanushka, you can rock a crochetstyle shirt without having to pick up a new hobby.

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Meet the New Crown Prince of Sad Songs VERY GENERATION

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has its Bright Eyes, and for Gen Z, one of the leading contenders is 23-year-old singer Conan Gray, whose knack for writing sad music has turned him into one of the most popular young stars in the world. His parents split up when he was three, although they stayed in proximity to one another to raise their children. The Grays moved all over the place—including two years in Japan shortly after Conan was born—before settling in Georgetown, Texas, a quiet suburb known for its booming community of retirees.

“All the thrift stores were awesome,” Gray tells me over coffee in Manhattan. “I just love dressing like an old man who’s on a walk with his wife of 70 years.”

As a teen surrounded by elders, Gray did feel isolated, but he found space to express himself on the internet, where he would listen to Taylor Swift and upload self-shot music videos for the moody love songs he wrote in his bedroom. (“If you don’t force me to go outside, I won’t go outside. I love alone time.”) In 2017, during his senior year of high school, he went viral on YouTube for the first time with “Idle Town”, an earnest, nostalgic tribute to home with lo-fi visuals that

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GALLERY-WORTHY COLLAB Matthew Williams’s aesthetic was more Matrix than MoMA— and then he struck up a creative dialogue with NYC artist Josh Smith, whose spooky abstractions animate the new Givenchy collection (see page 105 for more).

Hoodie and mock neck T-shirt by Givenchy Men’s.

Pants by Willy Chavarria.

look like they were shot on a Sony Handycam. (One of the top comments: “Y’all don’t understand how badly I wanna be his friend.”)

After graduating high school, Gray moved to California and attended UCLA—and quickly dropped out to focus on music.

“I feel like I’m a different person every six months,” he says. “I think maybe that’s just something about being young: you’re just always kind of changing.” The gamble paid off. Gray landed a record deal and

built a loyal army of online followers, including his nearly 5 million “besties” on TikTok, where he posts videos with his good friend (and fellow Swiftie) Olivia Rodrigo. Fans adore Gray because he wears his emotions openly. He says he feels everything “super intensely” even though sometimes he wishes he didn’t.

“But I feel like the people who listen to my music are the same way,” he says. “So, I don’t feel alone.” — W I L L A B E N N E T T

TOKYO JAMES, SALVATORE FERR AGAMO, SAINT L AURENT, ALEX ANDER MCQUEEN, NAMACHEKO, DIESEL: PROP ST YLIST, SHARON RYAN AT HALLEY RESOURCES. SHANE GABIER, LOUIS VUIT TON MEN’S: PROP ST YLIST, SOL ANGE SINGER AT MARK EDWARD INC. DRIES VAN NOTEN, BLUM & POE: COURTESY OF BR ANDS.

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FAR-OUT SHADES Nowhere is nostalgia for the ’00s quite so apparent as in the realm of eyewear design, with bug-eyed goggle shades dominating the runways (Dries Van Noten).

CUT-OFF BLOUSE In the past few seasons, Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello has quietly built a bulletproof case for the necessity of the male blouse.

LACEY FLARES If the Beatles were working today, one imagines they’d be wearing trousers by the emerging Londonborn, Lagos-based designer Tokyo James, whose groovy, cross-cultural vision is catching fire.

3D SWEATER The siblings behind emerging Antwerp-based label Namacheko have firmly established themselves as heirs to the city’s tradition of high-concept knitwear.

AN ICONIC SUIT Before his tragic passing, Virgil Abloh was inventing a tailoring vernacular all his own (Louis Vuitton Men’s).

REFINED BIT LOAFERS A romantic take on the iconic Ferragamo loafer rocked by power brokers of yore (Salvatore Ferragamo).

CERAMIC SCULPTURE After years of collecting ceramics, Creatures of the Wind co-founder Shane Gabier walked away from fashion to pursue his craft at the pottery wheel (at 180 the Store).

ONE MORE ESSENTIAL ART BOOK Snippets of lyrics and a sense of musical melancholy have long suffused German-born painter Friedrich Kunath’s oeuvre; this new book marks his watershed 2019 show of works made in collaboration with the late Silver Jews frontman David Berman (Blum & Poe).

TOP-STITCHED TRUCKER Designer Glenn Martens has revived the radical denim house of Diesel with the freaky highfashion sensibilities that made his Y/Project a smash success .

BRAND-NEW BUCKET If the new Alexander McQueen Curve bag tickles a memory deep in your sartorial brain, it’s because the shape is inspired by the legendary designer’s iconic harness silhouette.

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PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF SABYASACHI.

The 25

Shopping

Best Stores

Sabyasachi’s flaghip store in New Delhi.

Whether you go for the pants, to sip a matcha, or just to soak up some rarefied ambience, these 25 stores from around the world demand a visit.

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now that shopping online is just another aspect of everyday life (and copping for the

metaverse is part of our inevitable future), it’s never been more interesting and satisfying to buy clothes the old-fashioned way. But the brick-and-mortar experience has changed. It’s taken on new meaning, and become essential in all kinds of fantastic, radical ways. We get it. Going in to browse and try stuff on is a lot more demanding than simply clicking “add to cart”, but these 25 stores do something that no website or virtual world can: They engage all of the senses, including your sense of discovery.

Alára Lagos, Nigeria What’s in stock? High fashion with an emphasis on African and Africa-inspired designers like Kenneth Ize, Post-Imperial, and Ahluwalia.

What’s the vibe? Founded in 2014 by fashion entrepreneur Reni Folawiyo—and housed in a building designed by world-famous Ghanaian British architect David Adjaye—Alára is West Africa’s first fashion concept store. Think Dover Street Market or 10 Corso Como with a pan-African elegance.

Why visit? Located in the posh Victoria Island district of Lagos, this is an essential stop on the global fashion train for a glimpse inside the thriving, vibrant world of African design.

Atelier Solarshop Antwerp, Belgium

Evan Kinori in San Francisco.

What’s in stock? Wares from Belgian designer Jan-Jan Van Essche (who founded the shop with his partner, Pietro Celestina) in addition to collections by a handful of other independent brands and antiques culled from flea markets around the world.

What’s the vibe? “An oasis of harmony,” says Celestina.

Located in the centre of Antwerp’s most diverse district, Solarshop feels both timeless and placeless, like an amalgamation of global cultures.

Why visit? Where else can you buy a pair of mud-dyed silk trousers, an antique Dogon stool from Mali, and woven-gold and -silver pieces by celebrated German jeweller Stephanie Schneider?

Bode New York What’s in stock? Antique quilt jackets, hand-drawn tees, lace shirts, and other treasures from the mind of the designer who made craft the hottest thing in fashion.

What’s the vibe? You’ll want to move into the cosy Chinatown space by the interior-design vibemasters at Green River Project. The lighting is warm and inviting, the walls are clad in coffee-stained wood, the furniture is teak and upholstered in Bode fabrics.

Why visit? You’ll leave with a reinvigorated sense of curiosity—and maybe a one-off patchwork shirt.

Boontheshop Seoul What’s in stock? Boon is Korea’s premier retailer of elite international luxury labels like Celine, Bottega Veneta, and Vetements, alongside a range of local designers like 99%IS and Post Archive Faction.

What’s the vibe? Designed by the high priest of luxury retail Peter Marino, Boontheshop’s 55,000-square-foot Cheongdam district flagship is a modern architectural masterpiece.

Why visit? To experience the best high-end retail in the coolest fashion city in the world—and to see your favourite K-pop group’s stylists pulling for their clients.

Brechó do Futebol Porto Alegre, Brazil What’s in stock? Football jerseys. Lots of them. New and vintage ones from everywhere in the world. Founder Carlos Caloghero started out in 2007 with his personal collection of a few hundred; now his shop is jam-packed with over 14,000.

What’s the vibe? Part thrift store, part private archive, Brechó do Futebol has the atmosphere of a vintage book or record store.

Why visit? With the World Cup taking place this year, this is the time to start building your arsenal of football kits. Not a fan of futebol? Football shirts have become a fashion staple in recent years, so just choose one that looks best with your fit.

The Broken Arm Paris What’s in stock? High-fashion grails from the avantgarde establishment (Margiela, Raf Simons) and the next big things (Kiko Kostadinov, Arnar Már Jónsson)—and an excellent tuna sandwich at the adjoining café.

What’s the vibe? On a quiet street in the heart of the Marais, the store—with sleek furnishings designed

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EVAN KINORI: ALLEN DANZE. HERMÈS: LUIS MOLINA-PANTIN, ST. MORIT Z (HERMÈS), 2006, C-PRINT, 35.4 X 29.5 IN. (90 x 75 CM), EDITION OF 6, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HENRIQUE FARIA, NEW YORK.

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Why visit? Catch a dose of designer history—and be sure to try on some ’90s Yohji Yamamoto while you’re at it. You might just experience a personalstyle awakening.

Dover Street Market New York What’s in stock? All of the Comme des Garçons goods: DSM is the label’s multi-brand retail empire. Plus, a killer range of high fashion from Rick Owens, Marni, and Gucci, and the extended DSM family that includes ERL and Sky High Farm.

What’s the vibe? All DSM stores are designed by Comme des Garçons visionary founder Rei Kawakubo.

So prepare to get lost in her mind garden over eight floors of high-concept fashion installations.

Why visit? Go to cop the latest CdG Homme Plus Nikes, for the soft scrambled eggs and smoked salmon at Rose Bakery on the ground floor, or just to take notes on the style of the sales staff—who are some of the bestdressed people in all of NYC.

Evan Kinori San Francisco

Hermès in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

by the shop’s fashion-obsessed founders Guillaume Steinmetz, Anaïs Lafarge, and Romain Joste—feels like a hushed temple to high design.

Why visit? To buy that one Prada piece that lesser retailers didn’t get, and to see what glorious garms the Parisian fashion elite are after.

Chenjingkai Office Taipei, Taiwan What’s in stock? Chenjingkai produces perfect versions of every type of footwear you’ll ever need, from beefy commando-sole loafers to sleek Mary Jane derbies to faithfully reproduced German army trainers.

What’s the vibe? Like the high-minded design studio it is: Blond-wood fixtures, iMacs, and echoes of Dieter Rams abound.

Why visit? Chenjingkai sells plenty of its most popular styles online, but at the store visitors can design their own bespoke models, choosing from a range of uppers, leathers, and soles. Customers are encouraged to get as creative as possible.

Dot Comme Melbourne, Australia What’s in stock? Archival gems by Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Issey Miyake, and other avant-garde fashion legends.

What’s the vibe? You might think the place is an art gallery, but there’s nothing stuffy or intimidating about this freak-fashion funhouse where Japanese electronica plays and radical furnishings by Memphis Milano and Gaetano Pesce blend in seamlessly.

What’s in stock? Current editions of Kinori’s handnumbered clothes, furniture from Copenhagen design team Frama, vintage lamps, wooden stools, and blankets woven in the studio behind the shop by artist Marina Contro.

What’s the vibe? The long, narrow space invites a leisurely, thoughtful shopping experience in which you can appreciate that no detail was overlooked by Kinori, right down to the Austrian brass wall hooks from the 1950s and the Santa Maria Novella potpourri in the dressing room.

Why visit? Kinori spent years selling his collection online (and through his stockists) and to customers during private appointments to his studio. Now’s your chance to get the full immersion, without the pressure of a one-on-one encounter.

Hermès St. Moritz, Switzerland What’s in stock? H-branded blankets, its famous silk scarves, and leather-wrapped home goods that will go perfectly in your ski chalet. (And, if you’re lucky, a Birkin with your name on it.)

What’s the vibe? Nestled at the base of Europe’s glitziest ski resort, the cosy boutique is located within a turreted alpine house that looks straight out of a fairy tale.

Why visit? Hermès has long been associated with the Alps-loving jet set, and the St. Moritz store is practically their headquarters.

Husbands Paris What’s in stock? Gainsbourg-esque suits, Scottishtweed jackets, Japanese denim western shirts, and Cuban-heel boots—a full wardrobe from the sexy French tailoring brand.

What’s the vibe? Like a debonair art dealer’s apartment, filled with Gio Ponti and Giovanni Tommaso Garattoni chairs, Muller Van Severen lamps, and brass fixtures that echo those in the nearby Palais Royal.

Why visit? To get measured for a suit in one of the sophisticated fabrics from Husbands’ extensive woollens library.

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Kapital Soho Kurashiki, Japan

Nepenthes London

What’s in stock? Factory-fresh goods from Kapital.

The Soho store is located within the brand’s H.Q. complex where all of the clothes are designed, and within a few miles of where they’re made.

What’s the vibe? Like a bunch of maverick hippie designers took over an abandoned municipal building (the space was once a public hall and library) and converted it into a fashion workshop.

Why visit? To dig through crates of the folksy-artisanal goods and browse the adjoining bandana museum and bookstore full of rare editions.

What’s in stock? Everything from the Nepenthes brand universe—Needles; Engineered Garments; South2 West8; and collab shoes made with Hoka, Sebago, and Tricker’s.

What’s the vibe? A historic, 1800s building, full of French antique lighting and cabinetry, scented by Nepenthes’s in-house Purple Haze incense made on Awaji Island in Japan (definitely buy a box if you visit).

Why visit? One of the newest Nepenthes outposts is an essential stop for fans of Americana, Japanese craftsmanship, and Old World charm.

Leform Moscow

Persuade Bilbao, Spain

What’s in stock? Leform was the first fashion concept store in Eastern Europe when it opened in 1997, and it introduced the region to many of the brands still carried today, including Dries Van Noten, Maison Margiela, Comme des Garçons, and Helmut Lang.

What’s the vibe? A world-class fashion boutique that’s practically overflowing with tchotchkes like a great antiques shop.

Why visit? Leform’s three locations in the centre of Moscow carry more than 200 brands, representing a nearly comprehensive survey of the best in contemporary fashion.

What’s in stock? Cult-fashion heroes like Paul Harnden and John Alexander Skelton, avant-garde greats like Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake.

What’s the vibe? A delightful wonderland of madcap clothing, staffed by a uniquely stylish crew. Persuade makes the most elite echelons of radical fashion seem accessible and fun.

Why visit? Bilbao is on the map for its Frank Gehry– designed Guggenheim Museum and myriad Michelinstarred restaurants, but Persuade just may be the most surprising and inspiring spot in the Basque Country city.

Louis Vuitton Men’s Miami What’s in stock? As the only standalone LV Men’s store in the U.S., it’s the best place to go to get your hands on exclusive and rare pieces from Virgil Abloh’s final collections.

What’s the vibe? Inside the raw 3,500-square-foot space there’s a 27-foot statue of Kai-Isaiah Jamal, the first Black trans model to walk for Louis Vuitton, which serves as a totem to Abloh’s inclusive vision.

Why visit? Before his death, Abloh, who famously studied architecture, helped design the store, which continues to be a rich window into his polymathic mind.

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Prada Epicenter Tokyo Tokyo What’s in stock? Inside the incredible six-storey glass palace is a cornucopia of Prada’s latest, the fruits of the partnership between Miuccia Prada and her co–creative director, Raf Simons.

What’s the vibe? Imagine going to a museum, but instead of walking around to look at art, you enter into the art directly, and inside you find an impeccable selection of Prada gear.

Why visit? In a city full of transportive retail experiences, Prada’s distinctive architectural wonder—designed by famed Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron—is a standout.

K APITAL: YAMA TAKEHIKO YAMA ZOE. ZIGGY CHEN: COURTESY OF ZIGGY CHEN.

Kapital Soho in Kurashiki, Japan.

Ralph Lauren Aspen, Colorado What’s in stock? The full Ralph universe: Purple Label, Polo, and RRL, plus a healthy dose of vintage silver-andturquoise accessories.

What’s the vibe? Ralph practically invented the concept of immersive retail, and the Aspen store is a particularly rich example, with merchandising geared toward the luxurious après-ski lifestyle and antique fixtures that conjure the town’s mining history.

Why visit? Short of getting invited to Ralph’s RRL Ranch, this is the best place to experience his intriguing obsession with the Mountain West.

Sabyasachi New Delhi What’s in stock? Sabyasachi Mukherjee is the Ralph Lauren of India. He’s dedicated an entire floor of his New Delhi flagship to his opulent line of Indian menswear.

You’ll find heavily embroidered sherwanis and bundis in a range of colours, and custom-made shoes bearing the signature “Sabyasachi Calcutta” insignia.

What’s the vibe? Hundreds of decorative plates, crystal chandeliers, mounted deer heads, and clouds of heady incense—Sabyasachi’s world is rich and intoxicating.

Why visit? Like Ralph, Sabyasachi is a builder of aspirational worlds. “I don’t like fussing over clothes,” he says, preferring to wear vintage Levi’s and cowboy boots he finds in New York. Step into his kingdom and you’ll enter a new realm of style.

Santa Fe Vintage Santa Fe, Mexico What’s in stock? Over 4,000 square feet of mindblowingly beautiful pieces of workwear, western-wear, militaria, and jewellery sourced by an army of expert vintage pickers.

What’s the vibe? Visits are scheduled by appointment only, and customers are given the place to themselves.

Listen to Merle Haggard and have a beer while spending a few hours sifting through what feels like the most wellorganized flea market on the planet.

Why visit? Now that vintage is a full-blown fashion trend, you want to shop with the O.G.s who know how to curate clothes that can tell a story.

Slam Jam Milan What’s in stock? Streetwear in all of its many glorious iterations. From Alyx and Needles to Dickies and Patagonia.

What’s the vibe? Italy’s—and Europe’s—premier streetwear destination is found inside a slick and industrial bunker. The elegant Brera district location is a perfect juxtaposition with the bold attitude of the shop.

Why visit? Luca Benini started the business back in 1989 as an early distributor for then unknown brands like Stüssy. Today, many of the brands Slam Jam carries are world-renowned, thanks in no small part to his efforts. You’re still likely to make a new discovery on any visit here—or just to go re-up on some tasty Kuumba incense.

Très Bien Malmö, Sweden What’s in stock? All-stars of international fashion: Auralee from Japan, 4S Designs from the U.S., Lemaire from France, Margaret Howell from the U.K., and of course Très Bien’s own in-house collection.

What’s the vibe? Scandinavian to the max—Swedish drill and ABBA on the sound system, Alvar Aalto furniture on the floor, and a slick interior renovation done by Stockholm-based MP12.

Why visit? Brothers Simon and Hannes Hogeman, who founded the shop back in 2006, were early menswear pioneers for mixing sportswear with highconcept fashion and fine tailoring. You won’t find the widest range of brands here, but trust that every piece is considered and worthy of a spot on the rack.

Voo Store Berlin What’s in stock? Consider Voo’s selection your ticket past Berghain’s velvet rope: 2,000-euro Jil Sander coats, 20-euro Nike hats, and pre-owned high-fashion treasures from the store’s intensely stylish clientele.

What’s the vibe? A respite from Berlin’s chaotic Kreuzberg neighbourhood, Voo is situated in a quiet courtyard and housed in an unassuming industrial space that’s been stripped down and packed full of clothes.

Why visit? With an in-house coffee shop and an unbeatable news stand full of indie fashion mags, Voo is as much a clubhouse for Berlin’s culty fashion tribes as it is a boutique.

Ziggy Chen Depository Shanghai What’s in stock? Handmade dark fashion from the mind of one of China’s most intriguing designers.

What’s the vibe? Enter the century-old civic house in the former French Concession and take a trip back in time. Beneath a warm skylight, the antique furniture, retro jazz music, and hand-painted cement walls get you in the mood for some equally transportive fashion.

Why visit? Ziggy Chen has over 40 stockists around the world, but there’s only one place where you can fully submit yourself to his uncompromising artisanal vision.

Ziggy Chen Depository in Shanghai.

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DFC (Days for Clothing) VIBE: Genderless streetwear with some serious ’90s qi There’s retro and there’s dated—and the clean, simple slogan tees; printed denim; and oversized lumberjack shirts of DFC are definitely the former. Every piece you’ll find on their pages is fluid, working across genders, sizes, and body types.

If you’re looking for streetwear that will age well (think nostalgic classics versus trend-driven pieces), the breathable silhouettes and time-honoured colour palette of this brand will be your Mecca.

THE ONE THING YOU DO BEST: “Our range of denim— it’s varied and expansive,” say co-founders Arjun Thapa and Rohit Mane.

“The other would be our size-inclusive pieces.

It’s something we pride ourselves on getting right.”

Prxkhxr VIBE: Unfussy, relaxed lines; heavy on the print Most of the achingly chill T-shirts, amorphous buttondowns, and roomy graphic jackets that come out of Prxkhxr are made from hand-spun and -woven fabrics from a multitude of small clusters across the country. The undeterred, concentred view on prints is this two-year-old brand’s USP, with none that induce a sense of déjà vu. The brand is set to be the big kahuna of global streetwear in some years, and with a cool collab often around the corner (The Hundreds was their most recent), it seems a dream within reach.

WHAT OUGHT TO CHANGE ABOUT THE INDIAN FASHION INDUSTRY: “Giving more opportunities to younger creatives, for instance, would be great,” founder Prakhar Chauhan believes. “It would level the playing field, and that would be a good place to start to help more voices be heard.”

PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF BRANDS.

Whether it’s streetwear with a nod to the ’90s or genderless silhouettes in the finest printed silk, these indie brands are getting it right.

Here are the four that any curious enthusiast ought to have on their radar right now.

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VIBE: Sporty meets tailored, with a whole lot of colourblocking A product of the pandemic, this 2020 brand has fast found its voice—and word of mouth about its easy, well-cut lines has rippled through the engaged fashion community. Contemporary silhouettes reign, with abstract patterns and hues colliding across carefully tailored canvases like happy accidents.

Expect a lot of zipper-work, hand-embroidery, and imaginative hemming.

Fresh Out

IT ALL STARTED BECAUSE: “I was 10 years old and my cousin, Yukta Mookhey, was crowned Miss World 1999—and the beautiful, blue Hemant Trivedi gown she was wearing stayed with me,” says founder Deepit Chugh. “That, and we realized the number of local tailors and craftsmen going out of business in the first lockdown. This let me give these local tailors a healthy number of orders, along with teaching them better finishing. We supported each other.”

Triune VIBE: Art-forward prints all over inventive silhouettes The fits you’ll find at this “season-less” brand are, in a word, refreshing. They don’t need to have layered backstories for why they’re relevant and original—because they simply are. Made mostly with modal silk, these anti-fit, genderneutral pieces are anything but shy, revelling in colour, contrast, and a comforting sense of “the clash”. Think everything from big puffy bombers to co-ords to balloon jeans that make a statement wherever they go.

THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN: “We’re currently at six multi-designer stores, and we have had the luxury to be selective about the stores we collaborate with thus far,” says creative head Prasoon Sharma. “But we definitely plan to be available at all key fashion stores in India.

And five years down the line, to be available at international stores—with one flagship experiential store in the heart of Jaipur for art and fashion aficionados.”

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At Your Service These are the fashion heroes that work behind the scenes to keep your sartorial game on point—so all you have to do is serve the looks.

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Above: The dry-cleaning and accessorycare services at Pressto.

Below: The Source store in Bandra, Mumbai.

Service: The Customizers A minimalist monogram on a luggage tag or bespoke shoes that fit to the contours of your cuneiforms, personalization has the power to instantly elevate your look. Brands like the Initial Studio can add your initials—in a sharp, classic way— on anything from toiletry kits to nightwear, while bespoke brands can do you anything from custom athleisure (NoughtOne) to custom formalwear (Philocaly). All it takes is one tasteful custom-made piece to take you from unremarkable to well put together.

In Focus: Bombay Shirt Company The Mumbai-origin brand is more than its simplistic moniker. You’ll find more than the humble buttondown on this brand’s shelves—think jeans, shorts, T-shirts, sweatshirts, and a whole host of womenswear.

While you go for their minimal vibe, the rest can be tailored to a T, letting you craft a printed shirt or pair of mid-rises till they’re your version of perfect.

Service: The Thrift Stores While the fashion trend graph matters, individual aesthetic matters just as much when you don an outfit each morning. The noble thrift store not only functions outside of the seasonal universe, housing pre-loved clothing and accessories that adhere to no trend timeline, it is fashion sustainability at its purest.

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From art-forward (Folkpants) and ’90s-esque oversize (Bodements) to non-binary (Disco.very.culture) and big prints (Copper Boom Vintage), you can always find a thrift tribe that syncs with your style.

In Focus: Paradime Thrift Ideal for vintage enthusiasts, this store is perfect for finding bygone edits and styles they don’t make anymore. Think varsity jackets, tiedye hoodies, old-school cable-knits, and dual-toned puffers. They’ll soon expand into shoes and accessories, and hope to have on-ground workshops and flea markets if you want to be part of the action IRL. Service: The Fashion Caretakers Getting those carefully curated pieces is one thing. Keeping them in mint condition is a whole other ball game. It’s often impossible to find a replica of a unique sartorial find—and the secret to an eclectic collection is, more than anything, in the upkeep. Which is why an A-team—one that cleans, presses, repairs, and restores your favourites—is common-fashionsense 101.

In Focus: Pressto The widely spread services of this fashion-care brand are accessible, a solid speed-dial if you believe in looking after the contents of your closet. Split into two chapters— Pressto Dry Cleaning and Cobbler

by Pressto—you can pretty much

Service: The Renters There’s no law that says you have to own a piece to own a look. Enter the renters, a brigade of people democratizing fashion by giving you temporary ownership of it. Think of it as a fashion library, if you will, letting you take anything from wedding wear and designer suits to accessories out for a temporary spin. There’s no dearth of designer wedding wear for rent; Flyrobe, Swishlist, and Rent-A-Closet are all good bets. But look carefully and you’ll find ones that cater to more streamlined vibes as well. The Clothing Rental is great for tuxes, and the Dress Bank for accessories.

In Focus: The Source Set in the chlorophyll-green bylanes of Bandra is The Source, a fivestorey smorgasbord of all things vêtements—with a smattering of accessories too. Curated, sourced, and designed by former fashion and film stylists Surbhi Gupta and Thotreichan Sasa, you’re given a certain guarantee of taste you wouldn’t get with the average rental platform. The range is another big sell; you’ll find anything from an embellished military jacket to blockprinted streetwear within its walls.

PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF PRESSTO AND THE SOURCE.

have anything in that closet tended to. Their dry-cleaning arm includes laundry, hand-finished steam pressing, darning, alterations, designer-wear service, and an express two-hour service for days when you’ve left things to the last minute. Cobbler sorts out your shoes, bags, and leather accessories with anything from a polishing to repair to a total restoration. Think recolouring and making scratches disappear.

PHOTO: JIGNESH JHAVERI/AD INDIA

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL HOMES IN THE WORLD

GQ World

Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey Is Giving Us the Vapours

For English actor Jonathan Bailey, becoming a leading man seemed like a long shot.

Until he fell into the role of a lifetime as a charming womanizer on a little show called Bridgerton.

By DOUGLAS GREENWOOD P H O T O G R A P H S

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ONATHAN BAILEY FELT

lost and didn’t know what to do with himself. It was March 2020, and for nearly a year, the British actor had been immersed on the set of Bridgerton, Netflix’s horny and ornate period drama set in a fictional and fantastical 19thcentury London. The show’s debut was months away, but working on it was consuming just about every conscious moment of Bailey’s life; his usually modern, slicked-back hair had been permed into the style of his character, Lord Anthony Bridgerton, a lothario of landed gentry, with two sharp mutton chops stroked against his cheek. It was like being a part of some social experiment, he thought.

A wonderful abduction in which he’d be lifted from his normal life and sent tumbling like a stray astronaut into space, crashing into a new planet.

Here, on Planet Bridgerton, gracious ringlet-haired women danced in ball gowns to string quartet covers of Billie Eilish, charming potential suitors who were flirting and sleeping their way through the city, while an anonymous columnist would chronicle everybody’s secrets and stir up drama for London’s aristocracy.

Until Bridgerton, Bailey’s own modest fame had stemmed from nearly three decades in British theatre and television: popular prime time detective drama Broadchurch, shows from prestige talents like Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum and Phoebe WallerBridge’s Crashing, as well as prolific spells on London’s West End stages, most notably in a gender-swapped reimagining of Stephen Sondheim’s classic Company, for which he won a best supporting actor Olivier Award.

“When you do a play, you share it with the audience every night,” says Bailey of his fondness for the stage.

But then you’re done. Working on a period set like Bridgerton was all- enveloping. After season one wrapped, Bailey should have been able to rest and recharge. But weeks later, the pandemic shut down Britain and, like everyone else, he found himself stuck in that gloomy malaise.

And then Bridgerton landed like a confetti bomb posted through his front door when it hit Netflix on Christmas morning. Suddenly, Bailey

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was on video calls with E! News and British breakfast television from his bedroom. The first season of the Shonda Rhimes production went massive: Some 82 million households watched the show over the holiday period into January 2021, a chart-topping figure only recently surpassed by Squid Game. The show’s second season, out in March, will be loaded with the expectation of a large and attentive audience, and for Bailey, there’s an added layer of pressure: Anthony will take centre stage as the season’s main character.

“The idea that [Bridgerton] is coming out again is a bit of a rug pull,” he says. “It’s quite scary.”

Bailey and I meet in London’s Hyde Park during the strange limbo week between Christmas and the New Year.

He blends in well with his surroundings, wearing a black Gore-Tex jacket and green corduroy slacks. The signature mutton chops, which he grew himself for the show’s first season, are dialled down this time around—“a glow-up” for the character, he says with a laugh. Bailey had just returned to London after a vacation in Switzerland, though he’s spent much

of his free time recently in a quiet spot in Sussex. It shielded him somewhat from the hysteria of the show’s success, which propelled its last two leads into new spheres of fame: Phoebe Dynevor, who plays Bailey’s on-screen sister, Daphne Bridgerton, will executive produce and star in the buzzy Amazon series Exciting Times.

(Tabloids suggest she also dated Pete Davidson last year, shortly before his headline-stirring relationship with Kim Kardashian.) And the man who played her on-screen lover Simon Basset, Regé-Jean Page, will appear in 2023’s Dungeons & Dragons reboot.

We sit with our coffees on a bench by the Italian Gardens. At 33, Bailey doesn’t seem eager to get noticed on the street. Dispositionally, he’s one of those actors who’d rather work than be famous, who is more comfortable reciting Dickens for a small audience than he is wearing designer on the red carpet. That he’s in this position at all feels both like a fluke and completely serendipitous.

Bailey grew up in Benson, a South Oxfordshire village of fewer than 5,000 people. When Bailey was a child, his parents put him in dance

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Jacket and pants by Louis Vuitton Men’s.

Sweater by Dsquared2.

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classes after he was inspired by a stage version of Oliver! he’d seen at age four. He won his first part three years later, playing Tiny Tim in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Christmas Carol. (When reached for comment, the show’s director, Ian Judge, admired his success but couldn’t really remember him.

“Humbling! Put that in there,” Bailey says.) Around the same time, his older sisters who’d left home for university would return some weekends, armed with stories of city nightlife. They would play Bailey pop and disco classics from a compilation CD called Dance to the Max—“queer anthems”— by artists like Freddie Mercury and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. “I’d have to go up to my room and perfect the performance,” he says, before coming downstairs to sing and dance for his family.

Historically, he’s played valuable supporting roles that bolster a show’s narrative but has rarely occupied the main spotlight. Until this season of Bridgerton, one of his only other lead television roles was in a BBC children’s show based on the life of Leonardo da Vinci. “I’ve never gone into a screen test and had the ‘That’s him!’ reaction,” says Bailey.

“I’ve always crept round through the back door.”

sexuality have stood in direct opposition to each other—if he ever felt the need to suppress that side of himself I T W A S D U R I N G his teen years that to get ahead. He recalls a story conBailey learned how to perform as cerning a callous word of advice that someone he wasn’t, as many queer someone once gave an actor friend people growing up outside of big during pilot season. “At the time he cities do. He attended Magdalen was told, ‘There’s two things we don’t College School in Oxford, a nearly want to know: if you’re an alcoholic 550-year-old institution or if you’re gay.’ ” The words stuck with Bailey. that counts saints, sirs, and above “All it takes is for one of the composer Ivor Novello Jacket by Ami those people in that posias past alumni. Bailey came Paris. Sweater by Dsquared2. tion of power to say that, out to family and friends in Pants by his early 20s and is, today, and it ripples through,” he Vivienne one of the few gay British says. “So, yeah, of course Westwood. actors working on-screen I thought that. Of course l ef t whose roles don’t seem I thought that in order Coat by John defined wholly by their to be happy I needed to Lawrence sexuality. Bridgerton has be straight.” The thing Sullivan. Shirt made him a sex symbol to that’s always led Bailey’s

by S.S. Daley. many men and women, decision-making in his Pants by Paul Smith. Belt by but he doesn’t like to talk career has been his own Elliot Rhodes. about it. “Any actor who happiness, which is why Chain necklace thinks they’re a sex symit took so long for him to

by Dsquared2. talk publicly about his bol? Cringe,” he says.

Pendant own sexuality: “I reached I wonder whether his necklaces by Bleue Burnham. a point where I thought, career decisions and his

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Jacket and pants by Giorgio Armani.

Turtleneck by Boss. Shoes by Salvatore Ferragamo.

Socks by Falke.

Belt by Elliot Rhodes.

Fuck this, I’d much prefer to hold my boyfriend’s hand in public or be able to put my own face picture on Tinder and not be so concerned about that than getting a part.”

That instinct to stay true to himself is part of what makes him good at his job. “Jonny operates at a different voltage,” says Phoebe Waller-Bridge, his Crashing co-star. “He’s a meteorite of fun with an incredible amount of energy and playfulness.

Smouldering at one turn and then utterly innocent at the next, but all the time playing with this sense of untapped danger. That is the quality I love most about Jonny as a person and as a performer: his danger.”

Bridgerton is based on a series of New York Times best-selling romance novels by American author Julia Quinn, and Bailey treats the source material with the same level of tact and seriousness as he would King Lear. What might seem like a straightforward, frothy show about scandal

and romance in Regency-era England harbours a deeper meaning to Bailey, specifically in playing a philanderer like Anthony. As a teenager, period dramas were a Bailey household staple, but “you never really get behind the men”, Bailey observed, “or know why they’re avoidant and toxic”. This season, Bailey gets to dig into the show’s narrative, exploring exactly why the show’s men are avoidant and toxic. Anthony yearns to settle down, but struggles to find a woman deserving of the title of Lady Bridgerton.

The shots of Anthony’s post-coital buttocks and his flippant remarks about women’s inadequacies could be seen as signs of a crass and shallow character. But Bailey sees them as symptoms of a man grieving the loss of his father, and who is struggling to assume the patriarchal position. “Going into the first season, I wanted to fully break Anthony,” show creator Chris Van Dusen says, “so that we could put him back together in the second.”

Bailey, meanwhile, says that he “started to think about [Anthony’s] charm”, and specifically “what it means to be a rake, and how his anxiety and self-hatred plays into that”.

Anthony also forced Bailey to, in his words, “think about love a lot”. It’s one of the few allusions to his personal life that Bailey seems to drop, almost by accident: “You put your life experiences into [the work]. What’s most interesting is not necessarily having to talk about what that is, and keeping a sense of privacy.” He’s navigated that carefully, the balance between being affable and guarded when the circumstances call for it.

His Company co-star, Broadway legend Patti LuPone, remembers the former most fondly. “He’s quite open as a human being,” she tells me. “I love him.”

After Bridgerton’s release, an old friend, Company’s Tony Award– winning director Marianne Elliott, reached out and gave Bailey what he considers one of the greatest holy-shit moments of his career: an opportunity for them to work together again. “We’d read many scripts with the specific task of finding something for Jonny Bailey,” she tells me. Eventually, they settled on Cock, premiering this spring, a scintillating, dialogue-heavy, and stage-direction-less Mike Bartlett text about a man named John, his exboyfriend (played by Taron Egerton), and the woman that he’s fallen for.

That side of things, the awardwinning work, has helped catalyse Bailey’s other holy-shit moments, which seem to be happening with more frequency. These days, producers approach him to offer roles, the days of creeping through the back door over. Oftentimes, these projects clash with Bailey’s Bridgerton schedule, and some producers will say, “No, don’t worry.

We’ll wait.” I joke that it must be strange to have people waiting for him now, and Bailey retreats inside himself. Hands in his pockets, a little embarrassed. But smiling.

“Yeah…I mean…that sounds…I can say that now but, you always think they’re going to move on—and it’s only for a moment!” he says sheepishly. Bridgerton is wonderful, he adds, “but in 20 years, you don’t want to be famous. You want a sustained career.” douglas greenwood is a writer based in London who covers queerness, film, and pop culture.

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GQ World Poster

The best film posters in history are more than marketing material, often becoming pop art when they elevate a film-maker’s vision. Meet three artists working with some of south India’s most avant-garde storytellers and evolving the craft of illustrated and handmade posters. B y A R M A N K H A N

Oldmonks Design

Jallikattu (2019), Thuramukham (2022)

In Lijo Jose Pellissery’s 2019 film Jallikattu, a bull escapes a butcher’s hold and goes on a bloody rampage in a hilly Kerala village. Over two years after it was sent as India’s entry to the Oscars, its climax scene remains one of the most visceral endings in modern cinema.

Men clash and scramble atop each other, their anxieties and animosities flaring up to form a bloody human pyramid, as the terribly bruised bull drowns in the lake.

What is less known, perhaps, is that Pellissery was inspired by the announcement poster for his creative direction on that scene. “Lijo’s brief was that this is a story about three elements: the beast, the man, and the earth,” says Sreejith N., creative director and co-founder of Oldmonks Design, a Kochi-based poster-design company that has worked on films like Carbon (2018) and Lilli (2018) among others.

“More than anything, it’s the story of the beast inside the man. But the idea for the announcement poster came from his two-line brief about the climax,” says Sreejith.

The brief was simple: They had to portray the idea of the beast inside the man, shown through the entire village charging at the bull. “It had to capture the animalistic fury of that scene,” says Sreejith.

The Oldmonks team worked for a month on the poster, led by R. Mahesh, a painter who passed away later that year. Every element—the bull, bloodthirsty villagers, the title—was hand-drawn separately with clay and sand

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JALLIK AT TU: COURTESY OF OLDMONKS DESIGN. SUPER DELUXE: GOPI PR ASANNA A.

This page: Designer Gopi Prasannaa used 12 different layers in the poster of Super Deluxe and bound them together using a UVlamination technique.

Opposite page: The Jallikattu poster was handmade using mud, shaped with ropes, knives, and glass shards.

sourced from a tile factory, using knives, ropes, glass shards, and stones, and finally stitched together digitally.

Oldmonks’ work for Rajeev Ravi’s film Thuramukham, released earlier this year, also takes the heavily illustrated route. The film is based on the metal workers’ protest against oppressive labour regimes at a Kochi harbour in the 1940s. For the film’s poster, Oldmonks focused on capturing the “sheer chaos and revolutionary spirit of the workers”.

“When we came to the industry, we could see how only actors took centre stage in all the posters,” says Sreejith.

“It helps that all of us in the team come from art colleges.

If we want to work with film-makers like Lijo Jose Pellissery and Rajeev Ravi and convey their visions to the world, our posters can’t afford to be rooted in clichés.”

Gopi Prasannaa

Super Deluxe (2019), Navarasa (2020), Vikram (2022)

Gopi Prasannaa’s earliest memory of cinema is watching Kamal Haasan’s 1983 hit Sagara Sangamam. For as long

as he could remember, Haasan’s characters “affirmed my faith in the power of cinema”. So when Haasan called Prasannaa to tell him that he “understood the language of [his] posters”, he was speechless.

“Because of the pandemic, we couldn’t have any photo shoots for the poster,” says Prasannaa, of Vikram, Haasan’s upcoming film that also stars Vijay Sethupathi and Fahadh Faasil. “I decided to use pistols and rifles to shape Haasan’s face, with a blood-red background and the line ‘Once upon a time there lived a ghost’. I came up with that.”

Prasannaa’s last project, Super Deluxe, catapulted him into the spotlight in the design fraternity. Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s 2019 blockbuster—following the story of an unfaithful life, a trans woman, a man obsessed with faith, and the roller-coaster life of four teenagers—was widely acclaimed for breaking new ground for Tamil cinema.

Prasannaa used gold water for Shilpa’s jewellery and superimposed actual pictures of the actors on their hand-drawn ones. In some areas, newspaper collages were used with matt-finished layers. Prasannaa used a

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UV-based spot-lamination technique to bind some 12-odd layers together.

To demonstrate the spiritual force of the “Tsunami god” in the film, the Chennai-based artist referenced the famous woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese artist Hokusai. The black cat in the centre of the poster represents Schrödinger’s cat—a metaphor for the paradoxical situations some of the characters find themselves in.

In the Netflix miniseries Navarasa—the Mani Ratnam–backed project that deals with nine stories modelled after the nine human emotions—Prasannaa used a different technique for each poster. For “Edhiri”, he used oil on canvas; for “Payasam”, he used pencil sketches to convey the essence of the period drama; and to capture the ruggedness of “Roudhram”, he opted for metallic paint.

“Fans get upset if their star’s face doesn’t appear on announcement posters or is hidden under too many design elements,” says Prasannaa. “But if the director’s vision is strong enough, you can go all out.”

Kabilan Chelliah

Karnan, the 2021 film starring Dhanush, is essentially a battle between two villages—one inhabited by members of a privileged caste while the other is not. The film’s 50-day celebration poster—posters that are created to celebrate 50 days of sold-out shows in theatres for a film—features a hand holding a sword. If you look closely, the sword is also a road, signifying the opening scene of the film where Karnan’s sister dies on the road as people pass by, indifferent.

“Usually, for such 50-day celebration posters, you’d have a hero smiling,” says Kabilan Chelliah, who has designed four posters for the movie. “This was not that kind of a film. Here, the sword is a character in itself: It represents the resolve of a community that will no longer keep quiet.”

In another poster, we see the titular character (Dhanush) surrounded by a sea of girls wearing goddess-like masks. “In certain communities, it is believed that if a girl dies young, she attains the status of a goddess,” explains Chelliah.

For Chelliah, an assistant film director turned poster designer based in Chennai, the posters for Karnan had to consciously defy two central stereotypes associated with a film like this: “If Karnan can be called an action flick, I knew I couldn’t possibly show a ‘hero’ in action. Secondly, [writer-director] Mari Selvaraj was clear from day one that the story

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and the film’s crucial metaphors are more important than any star.”

Chelliah has also designed the poster for Pebbles— which is India’s official entry for the best international film category at the 2022 Oscars—a pared-down yet heartfelt story of a father-son relationship unfolding across the hot Tamil terrain, as they search for the mother.

“The heat in the film is both emotional and physical,” says Chelliah. “I’ve used hot yellow tones to convey the same. In another poster, a smiling girl is playing with flowers in the air because, in those areas, they can’t afford anything else as toys.”

He believes it is important in films such as Karnan and Pebbles—the kind that spotlight social issues—to minimize the title and logos as much as possible. “They need to be restrained, and only through the judicious use of colour and local cultural references can we convey universal truths to a global audience.”

For the posters of Karnan, designer Kabilan Chelliah heavily relied on highlighting the local folk references in the film as opposed to the actor.

KARNAN AND PEBBLES: COURTESY OF KABILAN CHELLIAH.

Karnan (2021), Sarpatta Parambarai (2021), Pebbles (2021)

PHOTO: ATHUL PRASAD/CONDÉ NAST TRAVELLER INDIA

THE LAST WORD IN TRAVEL

Where GQ’s Eating

CAFE MEZ | DELHI NCR

Helmed by star chef Megha Kohli (formerly of Lavaash by Saby) and restaurateur Ashish Kapur (Whisky Samba, the Wine Company), this is the capital’s newest Middle Eastern eatery. The cosy Cyber Hub space begs to be brunched at on a sunny afternoon, preferably al fresco. A table loaded with their fluffy appleand-cinnamon skillet pancakes, beetroot hummus, lamb kibbeh, and delectable crispy bacon pide is a harbinger of a splendid Sunday.

THE WHISKY | AMRUT SPECTRUM

With a claim to being the world’s “first-ever multiwood barrel single malt”, the home-grown brand gives the firewater habitué plenty to be excited about with Spectrum. Aged in custom-built barrels made with new American oak, new French Limousin oak, ex–oloroso sherry staves, and ex–P.X. sherry staves, whisky nerds will be kicked to acquire this one—partly for its spice, sultana, and sticky-toffeepudding notes, and partly as a talking piece. The limited edit has only 600 bottles on Indian shelves, so let the tracking begin.

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EKAA | MUMBAI

Fine dining in Fort that finds its roots in nostalgia, Ekaa is the brainchild of restaurateur Sagar Neve and chef Niyati Rao. Her pedigree from years at the Taj Hotels and Copenhagen luminary René Redzepi’s Noma informs the menu—genrehopping and laced with thoughtful backstories. The 10-course tasting menu serves the novice best, giving you a smattering of Rao’s culinary vision in morsels that’ll disappear faster than you can say: My God, that’s fantastic.

THE DESSERT | GOURMET CHOCOLATES BY THE ROSEATE | DELHI

The group of hotels has always understood the assignment when it comes to creating luxury, and their chocolaterie—whose oeuvre runs the gamut from decadent bars to almond rocks and hot chocolate—is no exception.

The chocolate bars include Belgian, roasted almond, caramel, and white varieties, while the almond rocks can be found in milk-, white-, and darkchocolate options. The hot chocolate bombs, however, are ideal for the ebbing days of cold: Just pop one of these chocolate spheres (filled with a hot-chocolate mix and marshmallows) into a steaming mug of milk and you have yourself decadence incarnate.

GQ World

O’AIDO | GOA

Taste

BY SAUMYA A VOHRA. CAFE MEZ, EKA A, O’AIDO, VEGAN VOGUE, AND FORSY TH LODGE: COURTESY OF THE BRANDS. AMRUT SPECTRUM: AMRUT DISTILLERIES. THE ROSEATE: ROSEATE HOTELS & RESORTS. T WO TAILED TIPPLES: STR ANGER & SONS X HIDEAWAY GOA.

Feniland has fast overtaken Delhi and Mumbai as the culinary capital of the country in a post-pandemic world—and Anjuna’s O’Aido is a great case study for why. The storybook setting in the historical Om Rose Garden hotel serves locally inspired food with imagination; think charred red snapper recheado or dill-and-coconut sardines. The cocktails—like the bebinca old-fashioned and chorizo Bloody Mary—make for the perfect accompaniments because, like the authentic, unpretentious fare, they’re also Goan at heart.

VEGAN VOGUE | BENGALURU

This year kick-started with Veganuary, and if the lifestyle change stuck, this Indiranagar newbie will be an absolute godsend.

The plant-based menu features pan-Asian and African fare—an unlikely combination, but one that marries well in this scenario. We hear their butternut squash ravioli, polenta cakes with creamed mushrooms, and Rwandan speciality “agatogo” (seared plantains, roasted pumpkin, and kale served with quinoa) are wonderful enough to make you consider renouncing meat.

THE PRE-MIXED COCKTAIL | TWO TAILED TIPPLES BY STRANGER & SONS | MUMBAI & GOA

It’s been the decade of the collab, and our favourite of the season is between gin gurus Stranger & Sons and two of the most exciting bars in the country—The Daily All Day (Mumbai) and Hideaway (Goa). The collabs between the maximum city stalwart and the burgeoning social omphalos of Anjuna create ready-to-pour, single-serve cocktails to reflect the individual ethos of each bar. Hideaway serves two: Reviver, rife with cucumber, vetiver vermouth, and white chocolate; and the jamun-and-rocksalt-punctuated Inkspill. The Daily boasts four: the apricot-laced Pickler’s Prescription; the Two Tailed Gimlet, with black cardamom and vanilla cordial; the tropical passion fruit–forward Stop the Press; and the citrus-herbal Front Page. If you find yourself in either city, take some back; we reckon these are the kinds of souvenirs people actually like.

THE GETAWAY | FORSYTH LODGE | SATPURA NATIONAL PARK, MADHYA PRADESH

If ever there was a time to leave the din of the city for the forest, it’s now. As city life goes back to full swing, the quiet of this retreat is ideal. Named after James Forsyth, to honour the naturalist renowned for his keen fervour to preserve the last remaining ancient teak forests of India, the lodge has eight Gondia and four Machaan cottages that let you partake of the luxuries to which you’re accustomed (think: swimming pool, spa, library, bar, and fantastic food) while truly being at one with the forest and its creatures. You could catch sightings of anything from leopards, dholes, and langurs to sloth bears in fruiting season— not to mention the chital and wild pigs that live on the property. If you’re a nature-first person when you travel, this is your Mecca.

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In Focus

Spirited Away A shift is coming in the spirit world. One where gin, the sweetheart of the mid 2010s, could be relegated to second cult favourite. As drinkers turn to the agave spirit in all its premium forms, we investigate the hype behind Pistola—the country’s first aged agave spirit—to get a taste of the transition.

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was a pivotal moment in alcohol history. From conjuring the immediate association of bridge-playing 70-something ladies at a country club, the juniper-led spirit became infinitesimally cool, siring one craft rendition after another. Whisky and rum always had their unswerving loyalists, but the curiosity of the experimental drinker was roused. In India, the revolution arguably began in 2016, with Greater Than, which made a home-grown craft gin accessible to the IMFL vodka–drinking public and soon made converts of them.

In 2020–21, the revolution took on another colour. While the gin market in India exploded to saturation point with a new distillation popping forth every few weeks, the discerning drinker began to prefer a different aqua vitae: the agave spirit. Tequila, the unfair victim of a party-girl reputation, began to emerge in premium forms; enough for a legion of Hollywood magnates to invest in brands of their own. George Clooney’s Casamigos, Dwayne “The Rock”

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Johnson’s Teremana, Nick Jonas’s Villa One, Rita Ora’s Próspero— the list of celebrity-owned tequila and mezcal outfits is long and evergrowing. And then, there is the far less mainstream imprint of agave, one that is on the precipice of the big time; the agave spirit.

It seemed the right place to start for serial restaurateur Rakshay Dhariwal, known for his “boutique” hospitality firm Pass Code Hospitality and its staggering 17 restaurants spread across the country. “There was a restlessness I had in lockdown that led me to experimenting with making alcohol,” he says, pouring me a tulip of the freshly launched agave spirit that brings me here: Pistola. “I realized any average Joe with a few square feet of space can make a gin; unless you’re a real pioneer like Stranger & Sons or Hapusa. But an agave spirit is a whole different ball game.” A trickier one with a greater reward it would seem, given that home-grown agave is an unplumbed goldmine.

“You won’t find it in the history books, but the origins of the agave plant in India can be traced back to Queen Victoria; ask the farmers and they’ll tell you,” Dhariwal says, and explains that, unbeknownst to most, India is actually the perfect breeding ground for agave. “She ordered that it be planted along the railway tracks in India, because the spiky plant kept cows from crossing over.”

With ideal conditions and plentiful supply, it seems odd that agave spirits are such an untapped market here. Only one other company has ever really attempted it: DesmondJi, with their 51% and 100% agave spirits. And Pistola, being an aged agave, takes about 10 years to transform into the impossibly smooth sipping spirit I’m drinking right now. The deterrent, Dhariwal demystifies, is the process—the arduousness and longevity of it all. “It starts with sourcing the right plants: We use Agave americana, the same sort you use to make mezcal. You acquire it, chop off all its thorny leaves, and get to the piña, or the heart. When it gets to the distillery, we open it up just a touch and steam it. After you cook it, you shred and mash it till the juices come out—which we then bio-ferment in a wooden vessel. Then the distillation part comes—done twice till it’s a 55% ABV blanco. That’s when we transport it to our barrels in Goa—some ex-bourbon, some new American white oak. It ages for about four to five months, and then, it’s ready to bottle.” I’m still waiting for the part that takes 10 years when he takes a sip, saving the kicker for the end. “The hiccup is the plant itself; it takes a decade to grow.”

It’s categorically cheaper to import agave from Mexico—and loop around the ageing hindrance as a bonus—but Dhariwal sees it being a completely home-grown brand. “It can’t be thoroughbred if I’m importing the plant, can it?” And it is, indeed, from top to toe.

The bottle-closure factory is in Gujarat; the bottles from Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh; the labels from Delhi; the cartons that pack them up from Goa; and the spirit itself distilled in Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh.

Indian, born and raised. As I sip on it with just a cube of ice for company, it definitely doesn’t seem like a novice attempt at a burgeoning trend. It tastes like a brand that’s found its footing. And, you know, a damn good drink.

HOW TO DRINK IT STRAIGHT UP Just a cube of ice and you’re good to go.

MARGARITA Like your “Tequila Tuesday” staple, only much smoother, courtesy of the pure agave.

OLD-FASHIONED The fixings of this classic whisky drink marry perfectly with an aged-agave base.

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PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF PISTOLA.

GQ World

GQGQ World World Rubric Must Have

Classic Comeback The iconic Cartier Tank Must has returned with a fresh set of colours and sizes to enthrall a whole new generation of admirers. B y PA R T H C H A R A N the new Cartier Tank Must is nothing more than a routine reissue of a classic dress watch.

However, the story of the Cartier Tank is also the story of how Cartier came to be the third-largest watchmaker in Switzerland. Simple, elegant, and iconic: the quartz-powered Tank Must was the first major sales success from the French brand, selling in high volumes and putting Cartier on the map at a time when the quartz crisis was threatening to devour traditional watchmakers whole. The Tank born in the late 1970s wasn’t the original. To trace its legacy, we must travel back to 1919, when creating a rectangular wristwatch was a revolutionary act.

The original Cartier Tank watch, launched in 1919, carried the indelible mark of Louis Cartier, who designed watches to be as resplendent as the jewellery for which Cartier was renowned. But for the Tank, Louis decided to model the design on the structure of an actual military tank when viewed from above. That’s right, one of the most fashionable watch designs in history actually took cues from a crude World War I military vessel, proving just how large the war loomed T FIRST GLANCE,

PHOTOGR APHS: COURTESY OF CARTIER. MUST DE CARTIER TANK VERMEIL: E. SAUVAGE @ CARTIER.

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over every aspect of life at the time.

What worked for a ground assault vehicle also worked for a wristwatch. The Tank’s fundamental design has remained unchanged for decades, altering ever so slightly when the more accessible Must de Cartier was introduced in the late ’70s. This was also the time when Cartier decided to ditch precious metals in favour of the more affordable gold-plated silver. Suddenly a wider pool of people could hope to own a Cartier, and a hero watch was born. At a time when quartz watches were more about function than form, the Tank Must brought some much-needed fashionability to the space. It was chic, well-finished, and for everyone.

The freshly relaunched Tank collection does just that and more.

Now available in quartz-powered and automatic versions—the former available in three monochromatic models and the latter in an extra-large stainless-steel case—it covers both spectrums of horological luxury. As far as faithful tributes go, the new collection has it all. Signature sword-shaped hands, Roman numerals, railtrack minute chapters, and a blue synthetic stone cabochon set into the crown—it’s hard to tell the new

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ones apart from the Tank Must of yesteryear. The key difference is the exclusive use of stainless steel across both the quartz and the automatic versions instead of the gold-plated silver found on earlier models.

The Tank Must Steel collection is available in three sizes: a 41-mm extra-large dial, a large one at 33 mm, and the smallest at 29.5 mm.

All models are accompanied either by a black leather strap or a steel bracelet but only the extra-large version features a self-winding mechanical calibre—the 1847 MC. It’s also the only watch in the collection to feature a date aperture at 6 o’clock. All the other watches in the collection are quartz-powered with roughly eight years of run time in them.

The highlight of the collection, however, is the monochromatic trio featuring lacquered dials in green, blue, and burgundy with matching alligator straps. In true retro-reissue style, the watches feature the Cartier logo from the ’80s.

With the dial design stripped of its embellishments, the “large-sized” monochromatic trio encapsulates the essence of the Tank: a watch that’s rich in texture, elemental in form, instantly recognizable, and perennially in fashion.

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Above: The 41-mm Cartier Tank Must in stainless steel.

Below: A Must de Cartier Tank Vermeil from the 1970s.

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Watches

Introducing our new watch columnist, Nick Foulkes

“Excuse Me, Is That a Murakami on Your Wrist?”

These days, you can buy a painting for your wall, or one that keeps time, says GQ watch columnist Nick Foulkes.

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important artists of the 20th century were inveterate watch fiends.

Picasso had a collection that any Hodinkee reader would drool over; it included, among others, a Rolex GMT-Master, a JaegerLeCoultre Triple Date Moonphase, and, for good measure, a Patek Philippe Triple Date Moonphase.

Warhol was even more obsessed: He amassed a collection of 313 watches, including Rolexes, Patek Philippes, Piagets, and the various Cartiers he was known to wear (but not wind).

Even today, Hockney is rarely pictured without one of several slim gold wristwatches poking out from under his cardigan sleeves.

And yet, for many years, aside from artists dabbling as connoisseurs, the worlds of fine art and mechanical timepieces rarely crossed orbits.

But that’s changing rapidly as a new

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cultural and aesthetic convergence gains momentum. Jaeger-LeCoultre, for example, paid tribute a few years ago to none other than Vincent van Gogh, adorning the dials of specialissue Reversos with painstakingly rendered enamel reproductions of the Dutch post-impressionist’s works. (The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam even sold some in its gift shop.) Luminaries like Georges Seurat, Xu Beihong, and Ferdinand Hodler were similarly celebrated on Reversos.

Now, some watchmakers are collaborating directly with artists—a move that seemed downright revolutionary back in 1986, when Keith Haring worked with Swatch to create four custom pieces for his Pop Shop. Today, we’re not just talking about $100 Swatches but rather sixfigure creations that rise to the level of contemporary art themselves.

Hublot has worked with Takashi

P H OTO G R A P H S : C O U RT ESY O F S WATC H , H U B LOT, A N D JA E G E R- L EC O U LT R E .

GQ World

Murakami, Richard Orlinski, and Shepard Fairey, among others, on limited- edition reinterpretations of the brand’s iconic timepieces.

Murakami’s latest creation features a transparent sapphire-crystal case and a rotating smiling-flower-motif dial executed with 384 coloured gemstones, at a cost of $106,000 (approximately `80 lakh)—a bargain, in a way, considering what the artist’s works have fetched at auction over the years.

Luckily, you don’t need that kind of money to afford a piece of wearable art. Swatch now collaborates with MoMA on affordable quartz-powered timepieces emblazoned with works from the likes of Klimt and Mondrian.

Haring’s original Swatch models are sadly out of production, but vintage examples on eBay can go for anywhere from several hundred to a few thousand dollars each.

Art lovers and watch lovers are, of course, kindred spirits. The mediums might be different, but, as the noted international art collector and adviser Fabien Fryns explains it, both instil a unique admiration for the creator. “You can see the hand of the craftsman in a watch, just as you can see the hand of the artist in a painting,” he told me. “I don’t know of a substantial car collector who also has a great art collection; I’m sure there are some, but I often encounter art lovers who collect watches, and vice versa.”

In the ultimate sign of true convergence, there is a new appetite to display watches as art, bringing them from wrists to the vitrines of major cultural institutions. I speak from experience. I was recently approached to help a leading collector prepare his collection—mainly Patek Philippes—for an exhibition.

The show would not be at a hotel or private club, as many watch-world gatherings often are, but at the Design Museum in London, where the watches would be displayed as the objets d’art that they are.

While Patek Philippe has staged international exhibitions, this will be the first time a private collection mostly comprising wristwatches by the blue-chip maker will be put on show at a museum. I hope it will not be the last. As the collector pointed out, “People have been exhibiting their art collections for years, centuries, so why not watch collections?”

To put it another way: Don’t be surprised if, in a few years’ time, you’ ll be asking for directions at The Met to find the Hall of Hyped-Up Horology.

GQ GQ World World

RICHARD MILLE RM 35-03: COURTESY OF BR AND. R AFAEL NADAL: MATHIEU CESAR.

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Rubric Star Attraction

Richard Mille’s latest tribute watch for its most famous patron is the best way to commemorate Rafael Nadal’s recent comeback.

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that’s been in development for the last three years, the Richard Mille RM 35-03 could not have picked a better time to surface. Its muse, the formidable Rafael Nadal, recently returned to the court, kicking off 2022 with his 89th career win in the Melbourne Summer Set, followed by a championship-winning performance at the Australian Open. The 35-yearold tennis champion had been out of action for nearly four months owing to a foot injury. Richard Mille’s latest tribute, it would appear, arrived just in time to commemorate not only his return to form but also his 21st Grand Slam title.

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The design of the RM 35-03 was inspired by the RM 027 Tourbillon worn by Rafa on the court. The fourth watch in the RM 035 collection, it debuts a new, in-house winding mechanism called the “butterfly rotor”, which gives the wearer “direct control over the automatic movement’s winding mechanism”.

Essentially, it allows you to control the winding speed depending on your sporting activity. A push button located at two o’clock allows the wearer to select the winding, neutral, and hand-setting functions.

Sporting Richard Mille’s trademark tonneau shape, it houses a skeletonized movement that uses grade 5 titanium componentry

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coupled with black PVD and electroplasma usage. This makes the whole structure far more rigid and therefore deserving of Richard Mille’s legendary seal of resilience.

Even the case band is made of either white quartz or carbon TPT, depending on which version you opt for.

In its almost 14-year-long association with Nadal, Richard Mille has always ensured that its watches are lightweight, comfortable, and G-force-resistant enough to warrant the tennis champ wearing them on court. The RM 35-03 builds on the legacy of those select few watches that are light to the point of being imperceptible and near invincible.

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Above: Rafael Nadal is presently the only tennis player to wear a wristwatch on the court.

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Were you expecting a proper studio?

With mannequins and all?

, I m so sorry.

Above: Ayushman Mitra, artist, designer, and founder of Bobo Calcutta.

Opposite page: A 2018 mixed media on canvas by Mitra, titled Heart Slit.

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Ayushman Mitra—the fashion designer best known as “Bobo”—says as he sets down steaming tea in cups chosen from his grandparents’ porcelain collection. “I don’t own a mannequin,” he whispers. “I know almost nothing about the fashion world; I have no idea about what’s happening,” he smiles. “I am obsessed with Jacquemus, though,” he says, holding up a cross-body micro bag as proof.

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His Salt Lake bungalow in Kolkata is a bit of a scattered mess. The house is his grandfather’s, and now doubles as his studio. It is steeped in jamunpurple hues, family photos, and his bouncy puppy Niall’s chew toys. Save for a few neatly folded denim shirts and silk dresses with abstract, sequinned faces on the living room table. Large linen canvases stand in various stages of completion with Bobo’s signature Jamini Roy–esque eyes and vibrant indigos and electric purples. Every room has evidence of that work, from paintings commissioned by veteran designer Sandeep Khosla behind the kitchen dining table to a glistening canvas propped up to dry under a fan near the balcony.

There’s no other fashion designer in India who does what Bobo does. He is an anomaly. There’s no dearth of designers inspired by art or artists that have created clothing as a singular project. But to paint on canvas, and then print and embroider that piece of art onto a one-off piece of clothing is a process unique to this son of Calcutta—arguably India’s most creatively imbued city. One that allows the wearer of his clothing to both own a piece of his modernist art and make a fashion statement, all in one stroke.

Bobo is also emblematic of fashion’s “new guard”, for whom silhouettes are second fiddle to story. Luxury fashion houses have ramped up collabs with artists in the last year: GucciGhost x Gucci, Ming Smith x Nike, KAWS x Comme des Garçons. The boundaries between art (in its myriad forms) and fashion have been further blurred, navigating cinema, visual art, and portraiture, all stemming from the need to create.

It is the best phrase to describe Bobo: someone who needs to create without any real idea of the outcome.

Over the course of the day, I become privy to poems he’s written, films he’s made, songs he might write. There’s always a work in progress. “The first time I met Bobo, I saw the rushes for a film he was making, called Guide Gufraan,” says designer Navonil Das. “It was a stunning trailer, and I was in charge of the Dialogues film festival at the time, which was the oldest LGBTQIA+ film festival in the country. I sought him out and asked if he would be ready to screen the film a month from then, and he said, with classic Bobo confidence, that it would be ready in a week.” It wasn’t. Das describes the lead-up to the festival—which Guide Gufraan was opening—with anxiety mounting, with the film still on the cutting floor at 6 p.m. while Bobo’s friends and family gathered on the red carpet for a 7 p.m. screening time. “We made it by the skin of our teeth,” he chuckles.

Between an erratic persona, a challenged business sense, and the fact that most pieces are one of a kind, how scalable is a brand like his? “Not very,” says Bobo.

“I’ve been lucky to have family financial support—it allows me to take the purely creative decisions I do. It’s only over the last two years that I’ve been making real money; before that, they were supporting me, letting me do what I love.”

That support extended to his sexuality. “I didn’t come out for years because I was afraid—but it was completely internal. When I did, I got all the acceptance I could’ve dreamed of. My friends and family knew, and were waiting for me to be comfortable enough to tell them, and I was given so much support. It’s a luxury many queer people don’t get, and I’m blessed.”

A guy

trolling me

on social media called me

a satrangi gandu

(rainbow-hued

asshole) and

even though the phrase was

offensive, I loved , it. That s what

I wanted to

name my next collection!"

—AYUSHMAN “BOBO” MITRA

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A N D Y O G A practi­ tioner Sneha Ghosh, a face laced through Bobo’s brand campaigns, bel­ ieves the vibrant colours he’s associated with burst forth when he finally came out. “Once he did, it was like he lived in technicolour.”

Furniture designer Jaya Shekhawat, a school friend, believes it began in his boyhood. “I think it may have had its seeds in his Rajasthan years. I think the colours come from there,” she tells me, recalling Bobo’s ado­ lescence as head boy of Ajmer’s storied Mayo College.

“I was the only head boy who didn’t play sports, by the way,” Bobo declares, draining his glass of water triumphantly. Being an artistic queer kid at an all­ boys boarding school seems a phase of life ripe with tragic backstories, but Bobo remembers it fondly. “I cried for the first week when I arrived as a fifth grader, and I was teased. But I knew from a young age who I was—and who I wasn’t. I did my first school play, I was Marjina in Alibaba Aur 40 Chor, belly dancing as an overweight kid. I really didn’t care. I found my space in debating, art, theatre. I had a lot of fun.” Art was still the linchpin of his schoolboy identity. “My teacher picked up the first painting I made in art class and took me straight to the headmaster. He put it beneath the glass tabletop on his desk, and it was still there when I passed out in the 12th grade.”

Bobo’s sunny, positive exterior belies a world of pain—from lovers who have hurt him to the early struggle with himself. He tells me he “used to only sketch in black and white” until his heart was broken.

A fat, fading folder of his earlier work is pulled out from a shelf, filled with line drawings from when he was 16. There isn’t a hue beyond charcoal until there is a rainbow. “I was in post­break­up grief when I threw red on a canvas in anger…. Then, I couldn’t go back.”

That first heartbreak—and the subsequent throwing of “red on a canvas”—created his most personal paint­ ing: a picture of an adolescent boy shaving his chest and cutting into his heart, opening his veins, haem­ orrhaging crimson. It hangs proudly in his hall, and “will never be for sale”, he declares. The piece is an example of the heart of Bobo’s work—trying to create visuals of love while being perforated by pain. Most significantly, by the loss of both his parents in the span of three years.

Bobo’s mother passed away when he was 28, and his father when he was 31, both from liver cirrhosis.

“One of the most distinct memories I have was Lakmé [Fashion Week],” Ghosh recalls. “His mother was in her last days right before the show, and he still had to do it. It was such a bittersweet moment.” Bobo’s eyes well up as he recalls the time. “I had missed all the dress rehearsals, because I was with my mother. And all I could think was, She hasn’t seen it.”

There were also happy parts of that summer­resort 2018 opening day show, he remembers. The director, Lubna Adam, decided that Bobo’s models should enter ODEL

the show last, from the back. “The other designers I was opening LFW with were very clean, minimal. My clothes came out from the back and surprised every­ one,” he grins. That shock value was part of his cachet.

“He was maximalist at a time when the aesthetic of Kolkata was more synonymous with softer tones, muted subtlety,” says digital creator Joan Dominic Rai. “Bobo wasn’t for everyone, but that was exactly the point.”

Too maximalist for some, Bobo grins, as he remem­ bers a piece about his work by French digital­media house Brut that was “trolled immensely” in the com­ ments, he claims. “This one guy called me a ‘satrangi gandu’ (rainbow­hued asshole) and even though the phrase was offensive, I loved it. That’s what I wanted to name my next collection!” he grins.

Bobo retails through social media and select multi­ designer set­ups. “Forty percent of my client base isn’t from India; they’re from Bangladesh, Qatar, Dubai, the U.K., and America. About 30 percent of my client base is queer, for whom being able to share a gar­ ment is part of its appeal.” He also adds, thoughtfully, that one statement piece from him is likely the limit.

While you could score a printed muslin muscle tee just upwards of `8,500, a true Bobo original—hand­ embroidered on printed cotton, with his trademark hot­pink satin lining—will set you back anywhere from `90,000–1,20,000. “People have one Bobo piece in their closets, rarely two,” he muses.

He ushers me into his kitchen for a late lunch. As I spear a piece of home­cooked bhetki fry on a plate

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The city is more than home turf; it is his

universe. From his

karigars to his network to his fabrics and

inspiration, it begins and ends with the City of Joy.

that Bobo refills the minute it starts to empty, he breaks from the interview to give me random nuggets of celebrity gossip. He is obsessed with Bollywood. “It was a big moment for me when Deepika Padukone wore this long, embroidered jacket I’d made in 2018 as a dress.” He hadn’t even realized it had been sent to her until the image appeared in a film magazine.

“Demand for that jacket skyrocketed,” he recalls, “especially because it was versatile. You could throw it over anything.” Since then, Kiara Advani, Jim Sarbh, Mira Rajput Kapoor, and Amyra Dastur have worn his art. The celebrity endorsements are not really part of his brand strategy—barring the odd Insta post lost in the mix. But it does feed his love for the industry, which harkens back to being a creative kid absolutely obsessed with cinema.

Over post-supper nimbu pani on a balcony that overlooks his family dhobi—who shouts his hellos in Bengali—he plays me homemade music videos from his youth. The walls are bursting with colour and costumery that pay homage to vintage Bollywood, with murals that he painted offhandedly to play backdrop for his singing friends. His connection with art is easy, transient—free of the deep attachment that most artists suffer from. “I painted this cab for my first campaign,” he says, showing me a picture of a

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cheery-yellow Kolkata Ambassador taxi transformed by his abstract figures and kaleidoscopic hues for his fall-winter ’17 collection, The Hybrid Story. When I ask where it is now, he shrugs with the ease of someone who simply returned a library book. “I had leased it, na? I had to paint it yellow again and give it back.”

It’s a go-with-the-flow perspective that works for him when it comes to making money as well—which is why you won’t always find collections bound by seasons. He’s also been open to collaborations: a wrapper for All Things chocolates here, some jewellery for Dhora there, a capsule collection of tableware with a local pottery studio. As long as he can do it from where he is: Kolkata.

The city is more than home turf; it is his universe.

From his karigars to his network to his fabrics and inspiration, it begins and ends with the City of Joy. “The brand started as a project when I was at Condé Nast College [of Fashion & Design, London], in 2013, and my advisor asked me a simple question: ‘Why do you want to run around looking for internships in London when you have such a strong base in Cal?’ She was right.” And so, Bobo came home. “I’d love to have stores in London and Paris one day,” he says, “but I’d still be based out of Calcutta. My whole world is here.”

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ALL GARMENTS AND ART WORKS: BOBO CALCUT TA. MODELS: JOAN DOMINIC R AI AND K ARUNA EZ AR A PARIKH. HAIR AND MAKE-UP: KIR AN DENZONGPA. PRODUCTION: SHIVANJANA NIGAM.

The 2022 Formula One season is all about facilitating wheel-to-wheel racing.

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he 2021 Formula One season may have ended on a wildly controversial note but it managed to do the one thing the sport had been struggling to do in the past few years: bring F1 back into mainstream consciousness.

And while it took more than a few crashes, collisions, and suspensions of rules to get there, the overlords of F1 have decided that the sport is in dire need of an overhaul. So, come 18 March, we are all poised to witness the biggest set of regulatory changes in the last 40 years of the sport.

The mandate is a clear one: Reduce costs and make sure that the racing is closer than it has been in recent years. This means reducing the technological gap between cars and the massive advantage that factory teams, flush with cash, have had on the circuit.

THE CAR The most crucial differentiator between this season and the last is the all-new F1 car. Developed by Formula One’s in-house motor sport

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team, in collaboration with the FIA, the car channels far more downforce than before and is designed to be safer, more reliable, and cheaper to run. According to designer extraordinaire and chief technology officer at Red Bull Racing, Adrian Newey, “The only thing that stays the same is the power unit, everything else is different.” This means major structural changes to the car’s bodywork, including 18-inch, low-profile tyres; completely redesigned front and rear wings; and a more energy-absorbing, impact-resistant chassis.

WHAT’S NEW? In a word: hubcaps. Also, the new car has been designed to generate far more downforce than last year’s car.

The prototype has been subjected to some mind-boggling number crunching, with 7,500 simulations creating several hundred terabytes of data.

With its significantly higher levels of downforce, the car works like an inverted airplane, in that it’s sucked closer to the ground the faster it goes, allowing it to enter and exit mediumand high-speed corners much faster.

The new cars will employ something called the “ground-floor effect”, which hasn’t been in use in F1 for 40 years. Two long underfloor tunnels under the cars will help provide greater stability and traction, generating downforce under the car. The downforce will be amplified by the completely redesigned front and rear wings, channelling airflow into the rear wing instead of outside it. Even a Haas driver would break a sweat trying to get this car to spin-out.

The bigger, and more importantly, hubcap-equipped wheels now feature winglets that, apart from looking cooler, add to the car’s stability. Those and the new redesigned nose make the 2022 prototype arguably the best-looking F1 car in decades.

THE RULES Let’s face it, F1’s increasingly plutocratic nature has only alienated its fan base, and made the sport more predictable—the 2021 season finale notwithstanding. And while the last season brought a fair amount

2 0 2 2 F 1 C A R S : A L A M Y. L E W I S H A M I LTO N , M A X V E R STA P P E N , A N D B A H R A I N INTERNATIONAL CIRCUIT: SHUT TERSTOCK. GEORGE RUSSELL: GE T T Y IMAGES.

Lewis Hamilton

of excitement and unpredictability to the sport, it was largely due to extraneous reasons, and, often, not for the best. In order to close the technology gap and not have juggernauts like Mercedes dominate the season, F1 organizers have decided to introduce a cost cap that will limit the total amount of spending done by a team over the season to $142.4 million.

Then there’s the fact that all power units have been frozen until 2026. Not literally, but manufacturers are not allowed to tinker with the unit and make any mechanical changes until a totally new power unit arrives in 2026. The only caveat is that manufacturers can apply to the FIA to make modifications “for the sole purposes of reliability, safety, cost saving, or minimal incidental changes”. How that plays out is anybody’s guess.

Given that there will be much for the drivers and teams to familiarize themselves with, F1 is returning to a two-part pre-season test format, with a low-key test in Barcelona preceding the main one in Bahrain before the season opener.

Max Verstappen

THE DRIVERS AND TEAMS TO WATCH OUT FOR Mercedes lost one formidable driver in Valtteri Bottas and found another one in the young George Russell. While Bottas heads over to Alfa Romeo to join the grid’s sole rookie Zhou Guanyu, Russell’s spot at Williams will be taken by ex–Red Bull racer Alex Albon. While this rounds up the changes to the F1 grid, there is no telling what the final grid order will look like at the Bahrain circuit—considering the impact a change in rules can have on team performance.

While all eyes will be on incumbent World Champion Max Verstappen and arch-rival Lewis Hamilton, it’s Scuderia Ferrari that remains the team to watch out for. The team’s car, dubbed the F1-75, has benefitted from longer aerodynamic testing than those of its rivals and has reportedly made some crucial tweaks to its power unit. This means it’s faster in a straight line and could very well return to the top three spots on the Constructors’ charts.

George Russell

The 2022 F1 season will kick off in Bahrain on 18 March.

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Kimono and shirt

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Shorts by Triune.

Sunglasses by Balenciaga.

Bag by Hermès.

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As the days get sunnier, your style ought to match.

It’s officially time for playful prints, statement accessories, and silhouettes that are anything but standard.

There are no wrong answers.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NEHA CHANDRAKANT STYLED BY SELMAN FAZIL

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“Fashion is more art than art is.”

—ANDY WARHOL

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Ring by Misho. ← OPPOSITE PAGE

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—MARC JACOBS

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MODEL: R AVI GOSWAMI. HAIR AND MAKE-UP: SAHER A. GANDHI. ENTERTAINMENT DIRECTOR: MEGHA MEHTA. PRODUCTION: SHIVANJANA NIGAM.

“I always find beauty in things that are odd and imperfect. They are much more interesting.”

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Stealthy, sophisticated, and sublimely comfortable — the Lexus ES300h is the sedan you want at the end of a hard day’s work. B y PA R T H C H A R A N

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here’s a level of placidity that has come to be the most endearing attribute of the Lexus ES300h. In an age where luxury sedans are forced to bear the indignity of doing hot laps around the Nürburgring, the ES is very comfortable trundling along at cruising speeds, doing what it’s designed to: be a soothing balm of comfort and quietude. This is a car that has its priorities right. There is an allure in its purity of purpose

and that’s probably why it has been Lexus India’s highest-selling product in the market. The fact that it’s the sole beneficiary of local assembly from the Lexus stables, doesn’t hurt its prospects either.

And neither does a cosmetic facelift. The 2022 ES300h continues to be available exclusively in hybrid form, much like every other Lexus in the country except the LX. It also continues to be a mild-mannered grown-up in a pool of infantile sedans still playing at being sports

PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF LEXUS.

2022 LEXUS ES300H ENGINE 2.4-litre, petrol-hybrid POWER 214.5 bhp TORQUE 221 Nm TRANSMISSION e-CVT PRICE `56.65 lakh (ex-showroom)

cars. Sure, the competition might have an edge in terms of driving dynamics, but the ES is quite literally tailor-made for Indian roads.

For the updated version, Lexus India has tweaked the suspension to be even more well-suited to the ever-changing topography of city roads.

The changes to the car’s overall appearance are subtle but effective.

The large spindle grille is now made entirely of inverted “L-shaped” pieces and the 18-inch alloys bear a different design. The bigger changes lie inside, with a lavishly appointed dashboard that finally sports a 12.3-inch touchscreen console. With the former ES’s innards in dire need of refurbishment, Lexus has utilized open-pore walnut inlays and faux-brushed aluminium swatches to spiff up the cabin. The rear half of the cabin is also sufficiently spruced-up with three-zone climate control, reclining seats and multimedia controls placed in the central armrest.

The powertrain remains un changed, with the same faithful Atkinson-cycle, four-cylinder, turbo-petrol hybrid producing a combined power output of 215 bhp.

The engine is still mated to an electronically controlled continuously variable transmission (e-CVT) and gets supplementary power from a 1.6 kWh nickel-hydride battery, which, among other things, sorts out the more routine aspects of daily driving. The battery continues to remain incapable of going reasonably long distances using its rapidly depleting electric power.

However, at a time when fossil fuels are being taxed into oblivion, its efficiency- enhancing powers are highly welcome. In fact, it’s the combination of comfort, economy, and ease of maintenance that make the ES300h such a sensible choice.

Lexus would have you believe that the dealer remembering your kid’s birthday is among the many things that keeps customers coming back to the stylized confines of its showrooms. But it’s the ES300h’s genteel mannerisms, low maintenance costs, and perfectly insulated ride that ultimately bring out the cheque book.

Power delivery remains unhurried and linear, with the e-CVT continuing to miss a beat when pushed hard. In fact, it’s the only time that the ES300h’s impeccable manners give way to a strained growl, with the gearbox doing its best to catch-up. There is greater torsional rigidity here that has improved the car’s dynamism, but don’t go throwing it around a curved section of a mountain road just yet.

This is still a very comfort-oriented, front-wheel-drive sedan that will forever err on the side of sensibility.

What’s lamentable is that ubersophisticated hybrids like the ES300h continue to remain besieged by policies that overlook hybrid technology in favour of EVs. And so, the ES300h remains deprived of much needed rebates. Despite this, it still manages to be all the car you’ll ever need in a city. The ES300h’s combination of superlative comfort, frugality and style isn’t about to go out of vogue anytime soon.

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The ES300h has sold 2.3 million units worldwide.

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shirt Helmut Lang pants Balmain

is exceptionally handsome. Wide, wild eyes.

Large facial features arranged where a sculptor might have put them in 16th-century Italy.

He is, unlike some actors, taller than people suppose. (“A lot of Batman fans are like, He’s tiny, he’s tiny! I’m not fucking tiny!” he says.

“I’m, like, a large person. About half the time, I’m trying to get skinnier.”) He has that ability to look convincingly different, by meaningful degrees, in many different things. It’s not just hair and weight.

It’s the way he can lower or raise an internal dimmer switch to dial the eyes and mouth along a spectrum from, like, American scuzzbucket to French aristocrat. It permits him to work effectively as both a leading bat and a 12-minute scenestealer. “He’s a chameleon,” Matt Reeves, director of

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shoes (throughout) Eytys sunglasses Balenciaga watch Vacheron Constantin necklace and bracelet (throughout) Chrome Hearts ring (on right hand, throughout) Alighieri ring (on left hand, throughout) Cartier

The Batman, says. “Recently, Rob was telling me that he never plays a character with exactly his voice. The voice is one of his ways in.”

In London today, his natural accent is crisp and his words are prudent. But his laughter is freewheeling and he can’t help but start things off by saying precisely what he feels: “I’m so fucking jet-lagged!” He is underdressed: “It’s cold! Fuck!” And he is feeling his age (35): “I can’t do anything anymore!” The effect is something like: English art dealer after a week-long fair in Hong Kong. He looks like he was maybe at his shiniest six days ago.

We’re walking through Holland Park, at the base of Notting Hill. Not 18 hours earlier, the plan had been for us to visit the London Zoo, but he’d suddenly thought better of it. “I was talking to my girlfriend”—the model and actress Suki Waterhouse—“last night and she was, like, ‘You know, people don’t really like zoos.…’ I’d been thinking about a metaphorical thing. But then I was thinking that’s very wrong, a sad bear walking in circles.” He’d talked himself out of it.

“I just can’t help it,” he says. “I’ll do it for every single element, every decision, in my life. What is the worstcase scenario for this decision?”

His career to this point has been shaped by a combination of talent, desire, luck, attendant fame, and bold choices. The fame came quickly, with Twilight, the teen-vampire saga that grossed billions of dollars and set Pattinson up for a particular kind of path.

The choices—smaller movies with singular filmmakers—came as part of his masterfully planned, decade-long prison break out of that one particular career. “I’m constantly doing risk assessments, which drives everybody crazy, trying to predict every single element that could possibly happen. And then, at the end of it, just being like: Ah, fuck it! I’ll just play a lighthouse keeper who fucks a mermaid!

I think this is the right move!”

His reputational swerve away from blockbuster moviemaking had taken such a firm hold in recent years that Reeves, who had been thinking of Pattinson while writing The Batman, wasn’t sure Pattinson would be interested in ever returning from his art-house walkabout. But a little mainstream exposure, by way of The Batman, was just as deliberate a choice as turning away in the first place. Get into the bat cave, bank some gains, then charter a new voyage out into riskier film waters again. It was a plan.

Things got off to an auspicious enough start when shooting began at the end of 2019. “Then I broke my wrist at the beginning of it all, doing a stunt, even before COVID. So the whole first section was trying to keep working out—looking like a penguin. I remember when that seemed like the worst thing that could go wrong.” Soon, of course, there were far greater obstacles brought on by the unprecedented global pandemic, which triggered production shutdowns, including the one precipitated by his own “very embarrassing” positive in September 2020, right as everyone was due back from the first interminable break. The delays ultimately stretched the shoot to 18 months—approximately the total time on set of every other Robert Pattinson movie of late combined.

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And yet, when the enormous production was full steam amid the raging pandemic, he felt grateful— and even guilty at times—for having a distraction that demanded every bit of his attention. “I just always had this anchor of Batman. Rather than thinking you’re flotsam to the news, you could feel engaged without being paralysed by it. Everyone I know, if you had a little momentum going in your career or your life, then stopping, you had to have a reckoning with yourself.

Whereas I was so incredibly busy the whole time, doing something that was also super high pressure, by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done.... I was still playing Batman at the end of the day, even though the world might end. But just on the off chance that it doesn’t end….” He puts it another way later: “Even if the world burns down, I’ve just got to get this fucking thing out!”

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The set, on the outskirts of London, manifested as a “bubble within a bubble”, he says. “And the nature of the shoot was so kind of insular, always shooting at night, just really dark all the time, and I felt very much alone. Even just being in the suit all the time. You’re not really allowed out of the studio with the suit on, so I barely knew what was going on at all outside.” They built him a little tent off to the side of the set where he could go to decompress. And mostly he would pass the time getting weird in the bat suit. “I’d be in the tent just making ambient electronic music in the suit, looking over the cowl. There’s something about the construction of the cowl that makes it very difficult to read books, so you have to kind of almost lean forward to see out of the cowl.”

He’d said it a few times, and I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. The cowl?

“The mask thing. The bat mask. The cowl!” Hours, days, weeks, months, in the dark, in the suit, in the cowl. “I kept calling it a mask. But I learned, no, no, it’s the cowl.”

Though they finished shooting The Batman in April, Pattinson seems to have still only just mentally emerged from the cave. He laughs maniacally when he recalls those solitary hours in the dark: “I mean, I was really, really, really dead afterward. I just looked at a photo of myself from April and I looked green.”

At one point, as we enter a half-crowded res taurant together, his eyes zero in on a private cubby meant to accommodate a discrete party of diners. He’s told that it’s reserved for another guest. You really want back in a cave, I say, and he laughs a laugh of post-traumatic stress.

“I watched a rough cut of the movie by myself,” he tells me in the not-cave, while eating together. “And the first shot is so jarring from any other Batman movie that it’s just kind of a totally different pace.

It was what Matt was saying from the first meeting I had with him: ‘I want to do a ’70s noir detective story, like The Conversation.’ And I kind of assumed that meant the mood board or something, the look of it. But from the first shot, it’s, Oh, this actually is a detective story. And I feel like an idiot, because I didn’t even know that Batman was ‘the world’s greatest detective’; I hadn’t heard that in my life before—but it really plays. Just ’cause there’s a lot of stuff where he’s in amongst the cops. Normally, when you see Batman he arrives and beats people up. But he’s having conversations, and there are emotional scenes between them, which I don’t think have been in any of the other movies.”

I remind Pattinson that the last time he was in GQ, he was just getting started on The Batman, searching for what he called “the gap” in a character that has been played every which way for decades now. I ask if he achieved that.

“I’ve definitely found a little interesting thread. He doesn’t have a playboy persona at all, so he’s kind of a weirdo as Bruce and a weirdo as Batman, and I kept thinking there’s a more nihilistic slant to it. ’Cause, normally, in all the other movies, Bruce goes away, trains, and returns to Gotham believing in himself, thinking, I’m gonna change things here. But in this, it’s sort of implied that he’s had a bit of a breakdown. But this

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thing he’s doing, it’s not even working. Like, it’s two years into it, and the crime has gotten worse since Bruce started being Batman. The people of Gotham think that he’s just another symptom of how shit everything is.

There’s this scene where he’s beating everyone up on this train platform, and I just love that there’s a bit in the script where the guy he’s saving is also just like: Ahh! It’s worse! You’re either being mugged by some gang members, or a monster comes and, like, fucking beats everybody up! The guy has no idea that Batman’s come to save him. It just looks like this werewolf.”

Pattinson laughs hard. “And I kept trying to play into that, I kept trying to think, and I’m going to express this so badly, but there’s this thing with addressing trauma.… All the other stories say the death of his parents is why Bruce becomes Batman, but I was trying to break that down in what I thought was a real way, instead of trying to rationalize it. He’s created this intricate construction for years and years and years, which has culminated in this Batman persona. But it’s not like a healthy thing that he’s done.” It’s like an extended crack-up. “Almost like a drug addiction,” he says. There’s a moment when Alfred asks Bruce what his family would think of him tarnishing the family legacy with his new side hustle. “And Bruce says: ‘This is my family legacy.

If I don’t do this, then there’s nothing else for me.’

I always read that as not like, ‘There’s nothing else,’ like, ‘I don’t have a purpose.’ But like: ‘I’m checking out.’ And I think that makes it a lot sadder. Like, it’s a sad movie. It’s kind of about him trying to find some element of hope, in himself, and not just the city. Normally, Bruce never questions his own ability; he questions the city’s ability to change.

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“I used to think I had a relatively long-term plan, the one I made after the first Twilight. But trying to make a plan now... Well, there are wolves everywhere.”

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But I mean, it’s kind of such an insane thing to do: The only way I can live is to dress up as a bat.

“DC is the kind of emo comic,” he continues, laughing. “There’s a nihilistic side to it. Even the artwork is really, really different. So, hopefully, there are a lot of sad people in the world.”

Outside, it is cold, dark, and covidly nihilistic (in other words, all vaguely DC), and the weather reminds Pattinson about how his boiler recently needed fixing.

“The guy came around the other day,” he says, “and he just randomly started talking about what a DC fan he is.

And I’m sitting there facing the other direction, and my girlfriend just keeps continuing the conversation with him. And I’m looking at her like: Shut the fuck up!” He cracks up. “Why are you doing this to me? She was very entertaining. Just talking to an obsessive fan.”

I ask him if he’s anxious at all about how this multi-year endeavour will land. With the superfans.

With those who know what a cowl is.

“It all depends. If people like the movie, it’s great. All of it.” But if not, I suggest, you’re answering for people’s anguish. “You never really know until it happens.” around Holland Park in the early afternoon—the sky seems to just barely clear the tops of our heads—Pattinson’s eyes scan reflexively for threats.

He has been incomprehensibly famous since he was 22, and around every corner for the past 13 years has lurked a fan or a camera or a fan with a camera. The park, on this winter day, seems harmless to these untrained eyes, but Pattinson knows better.

There are some tables outside the park’s coffee shop that seem like a nice enough place to sit and talk, but there are some old ladies chatting close by, and a path that passes near enough to potentially expose him.

“Hmm,” he says, “how about….” He leads us in a different direction, towards an abandoned heap of construction materials, where a bench faces some fencing. He says it faux-ponderous: “Let’s just find the most dull area, hidden in a corner.”

I ask him if this is how he experiences the world: as a constant search for dull areas hidden in corners.

“Oh, a hundred percent. Actually, like, if I see a bar that’s empty, and it has no vibe at all, I’m like, Oooo!”

Masks have been a godsend, he says. “It’s funny with all these anti-mask things, because I’m like, I will be wearing a mask for the rest of my life. I think I’ve gained a few years of life from lack of stress. It’s ideal when everyone else is wearing one as well, so it’s not like I’m standing out. It’s incredible.”

Since wrapping The Batman, Pattinson has made his first definitive move behind the camera, pleasantly concealed, having set up a production deal at Warner Bros. He says he’s a “terrible writer” but “moulding stuff I find really, really, really satisfying”. First up are a few projects he’s been conceiving for a while, long enough at least that he’s no longer right to star in them, and instead “wants to find an unknown”.

He likes HBO Max, with whom he’s working as part of the Warner Bros. deal, because “they’re not afraid”, he says. “I feel like they’re so new and still trying to establish their identity. And there’s space for it.”

Development work was under way while he was still filming The Batman: “I’d have my burst of energy in AS WE WALK

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the mornings. I’d go do a workout, and I’d have about 15 minutes before I had to get into the suit. And so I’d literally be, like, for seven minutes on the toilet in the morning when I’d scramble out a stream-of-consciousness email to the writers.”

He describes the thrill of pitching shows like these, which, like acting, requires his own little personal journey to hell: “I seem to only be able to have ideas when there’s an enormous amount of adrenalin. It’s almost like my process of doing anything now. I have to really, really feel like I’ve hit rock bottom. Where right up until the moment I have to perform it’s: Wow, I’m the most empty piece of shit.” He laughs the bat-tent laugh.

“You have to feel the pain. And then suddenly it’s like God gives you a little treat: Here’s an idea you’ve never thought of before. Run with this.”

He is a voracious consumer of other people’s work.

He reads constantly, watches everything, chisels his taste, his tone, down to the sharpened points he uses to collaborate effectively with film-makers to fashion bizarrely novel characters. In 2019’s The King, he plunked a campy dauphin right smack in the middle of one of the most unsmirking movies of all time. “I’d been trying to do it seriously, but then I was talking to someone at Dior, and I started mimicking them and doing it in this funnier way,” he says. That is, transporting a figure from French fashion into Shakespeare. “I started doing it as a joke at first, but then I filmed myself and watched it back, and thought this actually kinda works.”

Pattinson threw another knuckleball into 2020’s The Devil All the Time, in which he plays a creepy, corporeal Southern preacher who seduces young parishioners and then gaslights them about their sexual encounters.

“But I thought that one was supposed to be a comedy.

I remember reading the script and it was so extreme, with such monstrous characters, I was thinking it had to be.” (It wasn’t.)

It is his way of articulating his desire to see something he’s never seen before by doing something he’s never seen before. It is his way of almost, to paraphrase Gandhi, being the change in movies and movie stardom he wants to see in the world. Here is what my version of a movie star can do—any takers? So far, post-Batman, not really. “It’s ironic that the two movies I thought were the most sure-thing movies you could do, the entire landscape of the industry shifts,” he says. “I really thought that after Batman, I’d be a lot more….” He trails off with genuine dismay. One can feel the heat coming off him from his desire to find a workable blueprint.

“I think I maybe even said it the last time I did an interview with GQ,” he says. “Before Tenet, my agents were like, Yeah, you’re just not on the list for stuff. And I just totally, by fluke, get these two massive movies. And I’m like, Okay, am I on the list now? And they’re like, Yeah, you’re on the list now, but there’s no movies.” By which he means the sort that many moviemakers and movie watchers lament not existing in excess anymore.

A movie-star movie for adults. At a scale somewhere between The Lighthouse ($11 million budget) and Tenet ($200 million). “And so it’s strange: The eye of the needle, which I was trying to thread before, gets even smaller now,” he says. “I used to think I had a relatively long-term plan, the one I made after the first Twilight to work with various different directors. But trying to

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make a plan now when you have to factor in a kind of existential doubt, as well as being like, I’m competing with teenagers for the same part.... Well, there are wolves everywhere.”

Against all those personal career concerns, he also wonders aloud about the troubles the wider industry has seizing the centre of the culture. “Even when movies try: Oh, let’s do something that captures the zeitgeist, it’s not possible if not everyone’s watching at the same time. Movies used to generate the zeitgeist. And now I just find, opposed to music or fashion, movies can’t keep up with the culture.”

There is an exception, though. A glimmer of something. And it has to do with the way certain film-makers, he says, seem to identify subcultures and curate more than just movie experiences for those who are tuned to the same frequency. He describes the scene at a screening for the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, “where there were probably 30 people in the audience wearing Elara hats”. Elara Pictures is the Safdies’ production company, but, via fashion-famous people like Timothée Chalamet (a fan) and Emily Ratajkowski (who’s married to one of the producers), also now a sort of inadvertent fashion brand. There are certain film-makers, Pattinson says, who can transform even smaller films into something much bigger—something that does rub against, or even define, the zeitgeist. Or probably more precisely: a zeitgeist. He saw it with fans at the screenings for The Lighthouse, too: “They were all dressed the same way, like fishermen.” He says director Robert Eggers understood “how you can sort of make this crossover to fashion and music”. Pattinson saw it at a screening for The French Dispatch last year, as well. “I thought it was a themed screening. But all these people, they were just Wes Anderson fans. They just dress like Wes Anderson.”

There, perhaps, is the best explanation, by a series of examples, of what Robert Pattinson has been trying to do with his career choices over the past decade. Don’t just work with directors who make good movies. Work with directors who generate so specific an energy that people want to both watch their films and be part of the subculture that they alone can cultivate. Directors who make people want to literally dress like them. “If you provide a movie which kind of provides an entire culture with it,” Pattinson says, “I think people really, really like that, and really respond to it.” it becomes clearer with each passing movie-promo cycle, one of those authentically weird, boundlessly energetic, deceptively chaotic creative types who are mixed up in 10,000 things while projecting a false sense of passivity. Here’s Pattinson, not much of a sports fan himself, romanticizing his friends’ football fandom: “There’s just something so lovely about having something every single Sunday, where it’s like, This is what I’m doing. Rather than just, when anybody asks me, What are your hobbies? I’m like: Fucking fretting. Worrying about the future.”

He says the last part in a sort of comic accent. And then he laughs. The sentiment—the anxiety, the uncertainty of what the world holds for him and anyone— feels almost too real, like sad eyes shining from behind the bat cowl. It reminds me of what Matt Reeves said about Pattinson: that he’s never played a role with PATTINSON IS,

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his own voice, that the voice is his way into different people. Pattinson tells me that sometimes he’ll just make something up in an interview, in order to say anything at all—and that it has at times come back to bite him (for instance, comments he made years ago about not washing his hair that have followed him to this day).

It all gets a little slippery when someone tells you they sometimes deliberately lie. But it feels like it adds up with several of the other stories Pattinson shares with me. There are some things that are honest, there are some things that are constructed, and in between there are just a bunch of roles Pattinson’s playing besides a movie star and celebrity. Among them: Porn peddler (formerly). He’d steal the magazines from a local news stand and sell them to classmates for a handsome profit. It got him expelled from his first prep school. The entrepreneurial spirit was organic, irrepressible.

Sham drug dealer (formerly). “I haven’t thought about this in years, but during secondary school my first proper-ish kind of girlfriend was a few years above me, and I always wanted to hang out with the cool kids, who were in the oldest year. And some of us decided that I’d pretend that I was importing drugs. But I didn’t even know what drugs looked like. So I had this idea I’d get floppy disks, open up the floppy disk, pour this kind of powder stuff inside, and then spray it with, like, some kind of cleaning product so that it’d smell chemical-y, and seal all of it in. I bought, like, 40 floppy disks, and then I’d show it to kids who were probably 15 or 16, and I’d be like: Yeah, I’m importing drugs in floppy disks.”

He says it like a real scumbag. “And everybody believed me. And I kind of got this reputation that: This kid is crazy. He’s a drug dealer! Like: Want to try some? Some sawdust with Febreze on it? ” Rap pirate (formerly). He was the only one he knew who had Noreaga albums from overseas. He and his friend would take the Noreaga lyrics, transpose their voices in a music program he had, and then send “their” raps to English hip-hop DJ Tim Westwood to try to get them on his show. “My mum would be coming into the room, and we’d be saying other people’s lyrics verbatim, thinking no one would ever find out.”

Skateboard impostor (formerly). “I could not actually skateboard, but try as hard as I could, and I’d practise by myself, and then literally anytime it was time to do anything, I was terrified of hurting myself, so I’d just sit there, dragging the skateboard around. Rolling it back and forth, hit it with things, and kind of put little gashes into it, so that it looked like I’d been riding it.

But I never got on it ever.”

Designer of chairs (ongoing). He used to have a studio in London. But now he just makes little chairs out of clay, little maquettes, takes pictures of them, and then sends them to a designer he knows who helps get them built. The first one, “an insane sofa”, is inbound soon. He is consumed by chairs. Thinks about them incessantly. When it came time to design the logo for his production company, he just kept sending people pictures of chairs.

Photographer (ongoing). And not just of the maquettes of his chairs. He was in a store recently, looking for a new camera, and scanning the internet to find out what kind photographer Daniel Arnold uses.

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Early on, casting agents worried about Pattinson’s English accent.

“So I used to always come in as a different person, an American. I’d say, ‘Hi, I’m from Michigan.’”

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his photographs,” he says, “and was ultimately like, it has nothing to do with the camera, does it? Same as anything, you can train yourself to see situations in a different way—to start to see surreality everywhere around you.”

Handheld-pasta hustler (ongoing, for now). Close readers of GQ may remember that, two years ago, Pattinson tried to demonstrate his concept for a portable pasta snack via Zoom interview, to devastating results.

The internet received the effort as a stunt, or at least as a knowing performance of ineptitude. “But I was fully, actually trying to make that pasta,” he says. “Like I was literally in talks with frozen-food factories, and hoped that that article would be the proof of concept. My manager was like: Is this really what you want to do? You want your face on handheld pasta? You know you’ve got to go to Walmart and really sell it, for potentially very little return.” He laughs as though it were someone else’s idea. “And there was a part of me that was, like: Is there a world where this works?”

All of which is to say: Pattinson seems to have long been good at being at least two things at once.

An authentic singular somebody to his core. But also someone very good at pretending to be somebody else. auditioning, anytime he’d introduce himself as English while trying out for an American role, the casting agents would act concerned. “They’d always question it: ‘We’re worried about the accent…’ ” he says. “So I used to always come in as a different WHEN HE STARTED

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person, an American. I’d say, ‘Hi, I’m from Michigan.’

But then I was doing an audition for Transformers 2, right after Twilight had come out”—in other words, precisely the moment that Pattinson became a globally famous actor—“and I went in as some guy from Denver.

And they called my agent and were like, ‘What’s wrong with him? Why was he doing an improv? A really boring improv?’ ” And so he started auditioning as Rob, for better or worse. “If I hadn’t gotten really lucky,” he says, “and had instead been forced to audition all these years, I wouldn’t have a career at all. I’m so bad at it.” He has vivid memories of having his lunch handed to him by the other actors his age. “Eddie Redmayne and Andrew Garfield were so fucking good at auditioning, it’s just unbelievable. You’d see them, and then if you were waiting outside, you would literally hear casting directors inside going, Oh, my God! Oh, my God! And you’d be like, Fucking hell, who’s inside? And Eddie would come out and be like: Hey, mate. I’d be doing something thinking it was a comedy, and suddenly hear these heaving sobs. I’m thinking, Who has managed to get a sob out of this?! And then fucking Eddie comes out, goddamnit.”

But then all of a sudden, the days of sleeping on his agent’s couch in L.A. were through. “She just told me she still has my suitcase,” he says, “filled with my dirty laundry from back then. In her garage, fossilized.”

Post-Twilight, Pattinson has worked with David Cronenberg, Werner Herzog, James Gray, Claire Denis.

But no match has seemed quite as electrified as the one with Josh and Benny Safdie, with whom he made 2017’s Good Time: “They’re very kind of anarchic. But it’s not out of control at all. They’re some of the only directors I’ve worked with who thrive on the chaos but where they’re also always just in control of the car.”

The Safdie brothers seem to relish this kind of discomfort. Their movies are powered by the high blood pressure of wrong decisions and the worst-case scenario.

And though Pattinson’s risk-assessment monitor would suggest that he avoid the kids on the block who like to play near fallen power lines, Pattinson is, naturally, thrilled by the proximity: “They’re so fun, so funny, so brave. That’s the main thing that I kind of like to gravitate towards. It’s scary when you’re putting out a movie now.

Even if no one sees it, you can still get cancelled for it.”

The air at the rare altitude of Pattinson’s celebrity can be disorienting. “It can be fucking scary,” he says. “People think you have an army kind of protecting you, but you really don’t. You’re on your own. You have to have crazy amounts of, I guess it’s some kind of mental fortitude.

Obviously, it’s this incredible life. But like anything, if you can’t turn it off.… Even the people closest to you assume that your life is probably more like the way it’s told in a magazine. Even my relatives. But then again, that’s the whole point of it: to capture people’s imaginations.”

quite a bit during the afternoon, from one zone of safe-seeming inactivity to another. His eyes really do appear to read the world like a thermal scanner. A dismal bench to an empty restroom, to a vacant path through a random park. And still, there’s a guy waiting for us with a camera. Mask up, Pattinson is undeterred. We walk past some children playing football and I ask him if he ever harboured youthful delusions of football grandeur.

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by Hensel Martinez.

Set dressing and driving by Jonathan Villalobos. Set dressing by Logan Blue. Scenic by Angel Manjarrez.

Set illustrations

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“The opposite. I still have the same terror when I’m walking past little kids, and the football rips into the path. I just have this terror of passing it back, and I go straight back to being a 10-year-old, and kicking it in the wrong direction. People being like: Wow! What an idiot! Eventually, I’m probably gonna have a child. So I’ve started training myself so that I can be somewhat… so that I can play soccer with a three-year-old.”

He feels himself getting older by the instant. “Thirtyfive was definitely the year when things changed. I really stretched out my adolescence to about 34,” he says as we jump into a black taxi and start passing through Notting Hill. “I remember a few years ago, I was talking to my friend on some pretty street up this way.

Years ago, I always thought it was so chi-chi, and now it just seems so nice. I was like, I wonder what changed about the area?…”

Growing older, while being closer, he’s starting to see his family in new ways, the “delineation between the personality types” in his parents, his father (the introvert, the cynic, the worrier) at one end of the spectrum and his mother (the extrovert, the laugher, the emotionally accessible one) at the other, and his sitting in the middle of it, or, really, as he clarifies, “swinging from one to the other. The things that used to drive me crazy about my dad, being contrarian all the time, constantly playing devil’s advocate—I’m drifting that way.”

Back home, closer to family, Pattinson seems to be setting upon some new stage of his life and career. Despite making what could be characterized as countless right decisions, they seem to have amounted to no obvious path forward. Which is a fact of life-and-career that plants Robert Pattinson firmly in his micro-generation.

He exists in that highly specific age range of people (that is, those born in the mid-’80s) who grew up to see the Old Way—saw it work from the lowest rung, from the entry level—before watching their chosen industry disassemble for the past decade, as they sort of scrambled up a heap of old rubble and new growth to reach the top of…what exactly? Many people his age, in many different professional capacities, will have encountered this existential emoji shrug and feel like barfing. Pattinson is just old enough to have really seen up close the thing he wanted—he made a plan—only to be confronted, when it was his turn, with the now obvious fact that absolutely no one has a clue what comes next. It’s thrilling. It’s terrifying. It’s what’s so hauntingly familiar about his nagging career sentiments: “I really thought that after Batman, I’d be a lot more….”

Not long ago, he was having a conversation with his manager about his paralysis and indecision about what to do next on every front—including his next movie.

“I said, ‘I don’t want to make a mistake on what to do next.’ And then my manager’s like, ‘I understand this, but the longer you wait, you’re not going to have a movie come out until 2024. And by then, no one will give a shit what you’re doing.’ It’s the strangest thing that up until three years ago, we kind of sort of had basically the same traditional career route-ish. If everything went well, it still sort of existed-ish. And now it’s like: What on earth is the direction to go in?

“You just have to kind of think: Well, my plan is maybe a miracle will happen and everything will be fine. Which is what I think everyone has been thinking for two years.

Just: Uhhh, I guess the plan is to just hope?” daniel riley is a gq correspondent.

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Men’s fashion is as big and exciting right now as it’s ever been.

Which makes it the perfect time to take a look at some of the legendary pieces from fashion history that got us here.

Photographs

by Martin Brown

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We’re living in a particularly great moment in menswear, and not just for the obvious reasons. Yes, the big fashion brands are devoting more creativity and resources than ever to the once-staid category. And yes, we’ve never had a more robust and interesting tier of independent designers, mavericks, and visionaries reinventing the business. But more than all that, there’s a new cause for excitement: A thriving network of fresh subcultures is developing around men’s style, demonstrating that fashion isn’t merely about what you buy and wear, it’s something you can participate in, something with layers of meaning and history that rewards those who lean in for a closer look. The archival scene—an informal network of vintage-fashion dealers, collectors, and superfans— has turned the masterpieces of collections past into wearable, even essential, pieces of the menswear universe of the present. Dark-fashion disciples, sneaker freaks, watch nuts—all of these communities have helped keep the best parts of their respective histories in rotation today. These 50 pieces were nearly all sourced online, and for the right price, if you’re lucky enough to stumble upon your size, you can buy and wear them all. And if these holy grails don’t move you, there are surely 50 more out there, waiting to be discovered.

← 1. CRAIG GREEN Quilted Worker Jacket Spring-Summer 2017 Craig Green emerged as a star of the London fashion scene in 2013, but what’s kept him vital and important after nearly a decade in business is his willingness to iterate and experiment with his signature worker jacket—as he has with this audacious baroque patchwork. —Yang-Yi Goh 2. UNDERCOVER 85 Denim Fall-Winter 2005 Skinny, distressed denim has been a men’s fashion staple for going on 20 years now, but no one has gone as far with the shredding, blowouts, and patches as Undercover’s punk-obsessed designer Jun Takahashi.

—Noah Johnson 3. RAF SIMONS Spiderweb Sweater Fall-Winter 1998 Simons borrowed equally from punk and techno for one of his most revered bodies of work, known as the Radioactivity collection. The destroyed spiderweb knits were his version of English designer Vivienne Westwood’s sweaters—made famous

by Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten. —N.J.

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4. TAKASHI MURAKAMI X LOUIS VUIT TON Monogramouflage Keepall 2008 One of the all-time great fashion collaborations was Louis Vuitton under the creative direction of Marc Jacobs and artist Takashi Murakami, which debuted on the runway in 2003. The rainbowprint LV monogram got the most play then, but this more subtle camo from 2008 has stood the test of time. —N.J. 5. TOM FORD Suede Patchwork Jacket Spring-Summer 2016 Tom Ford is both cowboy and cosmopolite—a reputation epitomized by this jacket made from camo blobs of red and white suede, and constructed with all the savoir faire of his exacting tailoring. The jacket, inspired by the ’60s and lava lamps, shows off Ford’s ability to turn something obvious into something worthy of forgoing rent.

—Rachel Tashjian 6. RICK OWENS Geobaskets Fall-Winter 2006 Known as the Rick Owens Dunks, rumour has it that this original iteration of the famous “monster trucks”

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for your feet, as Owens has called them, had to be revised to avoid legal trouble with Nike. —N.J. 7. NUMBER (N)INE Class Ring Fall-Winter 2005

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Japanese designer Takahiro Miyashita was heavily influenced by American grunge culture throughout his time at Number (N)ine, which he ran from 1996 until 2009. This class ring is a perfect emblem for his fascination with that era’s disenchanted youth, and Kurt Cobain, their pied piper. —N.J. 8. GIVENCHY Rottweiler Tee Fall-Winter 2011 When this design debuted, it cemented Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci firmly into the celebrity-fashion firmament. Rihanna, Kanye, Usher, Kevin Hart, Meek Mill, Rick Ross, Tyga, A$AP Rocky, Future, P!nk, and even Liv Tyler joined the cult of the canine.

The Givenchy Rottweiler is a true piece of fashion history—a marker of the coming streetwear-meetsrunway revolution—and one of the most iconic graphic tees of all time.

—Cam Wolf

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9. POLO RALPH LAUREN Sitting Bear Sweater 2002 In 1990, the employees at Ralph Lauren got the designer and his brother Jerry a pair of Steiff teddy bears dressed like them. That gift was the inspiration for the first Polo Bears, released in 1991. They sold out quickly and the mascot now fronts some of Ralph’s most collectable gear. —C.W. 10. NIKE Air Jordan 1 High Chicago 1985 Before the Jordan 1s were released in 1985, sneakers were just shoes. But after Jordan flew from the free throw line, they became so much more. Strip away all the history, though, and they’re still probably the coolest-looking pair of sneakers on earth. —C.W.

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11. ISSEY SPORT Sport Caretag Bomber 1970s Decades before sportswear and high fashion collided, Issey Miyake Inc. launched IS—a youth-focused sublabel helmed by the rising designer Tsumori Chisato.

Its signature motif was a blown up set of laundry instructions, often printed or embroidered on the back of jackets like this leathersleeve varsity. —Y.G. 12. MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA X H&M Leather Belt Jacket 2012 In a brilliant statement of fashion democracy, Martin Margiela remade some of his classics, including this jacket fashioned from leather belts, originally part of the designer’s fall 2006 collection, for the masses.

After Young Thug wore it in a 2015 Rae Sremmurd music video, it became a classic all over again. —R.T. 13. JIL SANDER Marble Sweater Fall-Winter 2008 While Raf Simons’s most sought-after pieces may be from his dystopian-punk namesake collections, the work he did for Jil Sander remains some of his most refined. The fall-winter 2008 collection featured marbled knits that blew past mere trompe l’oeil into a sublime rendering of stone. —R.T. 14. SUPREME X THE NORTH FACE Nuptse Down Jacket 2011 Supreme’s romance with The North Face started back in 2007 but just might have peaked with this leopardprint 700-fill goose down Nuptse—a jacket built for New York winters. —N.J.

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SUPREME X THE NORTH FACE, AWGE X NEEDLES: PHOTOGR APHS, COURTESY OF BR ANDS. THESE PAGES, PRODUCTS FROM: 9, THE ARCHIVE OF POLO R ALPH L AUREN; 10, JUSTIN REED INC.; 11, NATE; 12, THE ARCHIVE OF H&M; 1 3 , R E B E L _ X _ A R C H I V E ; 1 6 , I M P R É V U S T U D I O S ; 1 7, D AV I D C A S AVA N T A R C H I V E ; 1 8 , T H E A R C H I V E O F M A R N I ; 1 9 , T H E A R C H I V E O F G OYA R D ; 2 0, F E L I X B A RT L E T T.

15. AWGE X NEEDLES Track Pants Spring-Summer 2019 The Japanese brand Needles went from relative obscurity to streetwear superstardom thanks to its A$AP Rocky– approved track pants. So it was fitting when the rapper’s multifaceted creative agency AWGE dropped a Needles collab. —N.J. 16. CAROL CHRISTIAN POELL Prosthetic Drip Boots 2010

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The Austrian leather technician has spent his career dodging mainstream fashion fame, crafting totally original, meticulously made footwear and clothing for his cult of fans. The enigmatic designer’s drippy, soledipped boots are his most coveted design. —N.J. 17. HELMUT LANG Bulletproof Vest Fall-Winter 1997 Helmut Lang retired from fashion in 2005, but he just might be the reason why so much tactical military gear is incorporated into streetwear today, and the iconic “bulletproof vest” is one of his most enduring designs. —N.J. 18. MARNI Mohair Cardigan Fall-Winter 2019

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The hype in menswear that was once reserved for things like logo hoodies and sneakers has recently been channelled into…big and fuzzy mohair sweaters?

That’s right, and this version by Marni creative director Francesco Risso helped launch the wave— and remains one of the best examples. —C.W. 19. GOYARD Croisière Bag Year unknown “The Goyard so hard,” Kanye once rapped about his luggage. But this duffel from the age-old Parisian house is anything but: It’s soft and supple, which allows the monogramming along its canvas to shimmer and shine. —Y.G.

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20. PALACE Chanel Logo Sweater 2009

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When Palace founder Lev Tanju was getting the fledgling skate brand off the ground in 2009, his brash bootlegging (which, incidentally, foreshadowed the label’s ambitions in the fashion world) turned heads.

Including Rihanna’s, who, when she wore a Palace tee bearing Versace’s Medusa head logo, launched Palace into the stratosphere.

—Samuel Hine

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21. BALENCIAGA Seven-Layer Jacket Fall-Winter 2018 For his technologically innovative fall-winter 2018 collection, creative director Demna made 3D scans of models to create body moulds on the computer, which were then printed and bonded with traditional materials. Contrasting with these streamlined pieces was the seven-layer jacket, the hero piece and Demna’s sportswear magnum opus: a series of voluminous layered outerwear that echoed Cristóbal Balenciaga’s bulbous opera coats. —R.T. 22. ROLEX Cosmograph Daytona 2016 It’s no overstatement to say that the Daytona, which was first released in 1963, is the timepiece that shaped the horological taste of an entire generation and set the standard for modern Rolex collecting. Famously, Paul Newman’s Daytona briefly held the title of most expensive wristwatch in the world when it sold for nearly $17.8 million in 2017.

Collectors worldwide now devote extreme efforts to hoarding the candy-shop variety of Daytonas. —C.W. 23. RAF SIMONS STERLING RUBY Bleached Patch Coat Fall-Winter 2014

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After years of friendship, Simons and California artist Sterling Ruby finally gave high-fashion-heads what they’d been craving: a proper joint collection, featuring Simons’s signature oversized silhouettes made from bleached fabrics hand-worked by Ruby himself. —S.H. 24. DRIES VAN NOTEN Backzip Bomber Fall-Winter 2014 This overdyed, faded, washed, worn-in bomber, with beefy proportions that recall a princely blouse, features defining qualities of Van Noten’s work done in a singular way—a workwear staple reimagined with the designer’s cold and clean finesse. —R.T.

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25. MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA German Army Trainer 1999 Long before Margiela began making the Replica sneaker, a reproduction of the ’70s-era German army trainer, they reportedly sold actual vintage GATs—purchased in bulk from surplus stores, hand-painted and scrawled upon in the studio, then flipped at a monumental markup. Today the going price for these would make Martin blush. —Y.G.

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STÜSSY: PHOTOGRAPH, COURTESY OF BRAND. COMME DES GARÇONS HOMME: PHOTOGRAPH, COURTESY OF ANTHONY PETRUZ ZI/FRACTURE. THESE PAGES, PRODUCTS FROM: 21, THE ARCHIVE OF BALENCIAGA; 22, ROLEX; 2 3 , I M P R É V U S T U D I O S ; 2 4 , T H E A R C H I V E O F D R I E S VA N N OT E N ; 2 5 , A K A I B U S TO R E ; 2 7, D E E P F RY E D A R C H I V E ; 2 8 , S TA D I U M G O O D S .

26. STÜSSY Tribe Varsity Jacket 1990 The International Stüssy Tribe jacket was a rite of passage for early members of the global streetwear community.

Personalized and gifted directly by Shawn Stüssy himself, it is also the piece that solidified the varsity jacket as an essential piece of modern menswear. —N.J. 27. NUMBER (N)INE Hybrid Cargo Pants Fall-Winter 2005 One of the most sought-after pieces by men’s fashion archivists—and another garment of historical significance from designer Takahiro Miyashita—the hybrid cargos aren’t exactly based on anything Nirvana wore but are something you could imagine they would have worn had they started out in Tokyo instead of Aberdeen. —N.J. 28. NIKE Air Yeezy 2 Red October 2014 During his short stint collaborating with Nike, Kanye delivered several hit sneakers, but only the Red Octobers beguiled collectors.

The shoe was teased in the fall of 2012, but soon after, Kanye jumped ship to Adidas, casting doubt that these shoes would ever be released. Then, after collectors worked themselves up for more than a year, Nike, one random Sunday in 2014, tweeted a link to buy them. Ten minutes later, they were gone. —C.W.

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29. COMME DES GARÇONS HOMME Split Logo Work Jacket Fall-Winter 2001 All CdG pieces that feature this asymmetrical graphic arrangement are highly collectible. But the things to appreciate about this otherwise simple work jacket are the sturdy cotton twill and durable construction. Evidence that Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons Homme designer Junya Watanabe care about quality as much as they do about concept. —N.J.

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30. RAF SIMONS Poltergeist Parka Fall-Winter 2005 Music has been the driving force behind much of Simons’s oeuvre, but for his History of My World collection the Belgian iconoclast looked to cinema, specifically Poltergeist and Fascination. Collaged with imagery from the films, this otherwise classic fishtail parka is one of the designer’s most-worshipped pieces, demanding over $15,000 (`11.3 lakh) on the secondary market. —N.J. 31. KAPITAL Boro Denim Jacket 2019

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Kapital elevates a true-blue American icon—the denim trucker jacket—to the level of art using traditional Japanese craftsmanship.

This patchwork is actually a time-honoured technique of sashiko stitching, the mending of a garment using a running stitch to resemble the look of boro, a technique in which scraps of fabric are sewn together. —Y.G. 32. TOM SACHS NIKECRAFT Mars Yard 2.0 2017

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Artist Tom Sachs originally designed this shoe to brave NASA’s Mars Yard in Pasadena, which simulates conditions on the red planet.

But galactic travel aside, real courage is pulling the trigger and actually wearing the sneakers that now sell for upwards of $10,000 (`7.5 lakh), should you locate a pair. —C.W.

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33. YOHJI YAMAMOTO Saeko Button-Down Spring-Summer 2002 While men’s fashion was focused on slick suits and constricting denim in 2002, this collection was loose and whimsical, and it established the legendary Japanese designer as one of contemporary fashion’s foremost humorists: a pin-up on a button-down is a classic Yamamoto-ism. —R.T. 34. CHROME HEARTS Customized Vintage Levi’s 2021 Rather than making its own jeans, the L.A.–based fine-jewellery-for-bikers brand Chrome Hearts takes a perfectly faded pair of vintage Levi’s 501s or 505s and turns every detail into a rock and roll riff. The zippers, button fly, and even the rivets are painstakingly remade with Chrome Hearts–grade silver, and the brand’s signature leather crosses are stitched all over. The craftsmanship turned a pair of $50 (`4,000) jeans into one of the most-coveted possessions in fashion. —C.W.

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35. JUNYA WATANABE Bondage Pants Spring-Summer 2003 Upcycling is all the rage now, but back in the 2000s, when these cargo pants were released, Junya was cutting up old military garb and stitching it back together to make freaky bondage pants, rather than trying to be green. —N.J.

THESE PAGES, PRODUCTS FROM: 30, NATE; 31, HEINEKEN HOANG; 32, STADIUM GOODS; 33, LEF THAND MARKE T; 34, JUSTIN REED INC.; 35, THE ARCHIVE OF JUNYA WATANABE; 3 6 , A K A I B U S TO R E ; 37, A G ATA E L I S E E VA ; 3 8 , T H E A R C H I V E O F O F F -W H I T E ; 3 9 , M A R K A N T H O N Y G R E E N .

36. BERLUTI Caractère Instinct Boots Fall-Winter 2018

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One of the cruellest break-ups in recent fashion memory was the parting of Haider Ackermann from Berluti after the Colombianborn French designer released only three crisp, beautiful collections. Few pieces from his tenure embody the sexy elegance he brought to the storied leather house quite like the Caractère Instinct boots, which Timothée Chalamet famously wore to the 2018 Oscars. —S.H. 37. JEAN PAUL GAULTIER Safe Sex Tattoo Top 1995–1996

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Jean Paul Gaultier was operating at the height of his creative prowess when he turned out a collection he called Pin-Up Boys.

It was a masterful merging of global fashion references and astute social commentary, and a landmark moment in queer fashion history. Released around the same time was this shirt imagining a post-AIDS world in the designer’s signature mesh, which stretches over the body like a second skin of tattoos or a muscly pantyhose. —R.T. 38. OFF-WHITE Oversized Patchwork Flannel Fall-Winter 2015 Pieces from the early days of Virgil Abloh’s Off-White, before his tenure at Louis Vuitton, are tough to find.

Especially rare are gems like this one from his third collection. Abloh said that the line was inspired by mountain climbers in Jackson Hole—he admired their ambition to get to the top. —N.J. 39. KID CUDI X SURFACE TO AIR Fire Jacket V1 2011

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Before the great merch revolution swept through music and film and food and every other industry, there was this “Thriller”-inspired jacket designed by Kid Cudi for Parisian brand Surface to Air. Its popularity was a sign of things to come for Cudi and for merch but not so much for the brand, which went dormant in 2015. —N.J.

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40. UNDERCOVER Klaus Leather Jacket Spring-Summer 2006 Fans of German prog rock and esoteric Japanese fashion are going to love Undercover’s The Amazing Tale of Zamiang collection, which features this jacket made from leather and scraps of fictitious rock band T-shirts. —N.J. 41. ANN DEMEULEMEESTER Backlace Boots Fall-Winter 2010 From the undisputed queen of combat boots, Ann D’s unique take on utility footwear is one for the history books. These are still in production, but the older pairs with bigger lugs are the most desirable. —N.J.

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42. KAPITAL Sashiko Boa Fleece Fall-Winter 2018 Members of the cult of Kapital will travel across many seas to reach Kojima, Japan, in order to shop for far-out remixes of outdoor and military garb at the label’s HQ. The Boa fleece is an especially desired prize.

With finger-deep pile and a traditional Japanese sashiko pattern, it’s like something out of a Yosemite climber’s waviest acid trip. —S.H.

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43. GUCCI Horsebit Loafer 1953 There is still no better way to let people know you live a life swaddled in luxury and elegance than with a pair of Gucci horsebit loafers. The originals were released in the ’50s and quickly became an upper crust staple. Now, thanks to designer Alessandro Michele, they’ve been revived and reinvented as an international symbol of cool. —C.W. 44. WALTER VAN BEIRENDONCK Lightning Bracelet Spring-Summer 2022

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The Antwerp Six were a band of radical Belgian designers who have had an outsize influence on fashion since the ’80s, and the surrealist among their ranks, Van Beirendonck, has always found surprising ways to make his mark—like with this blinged-out embroidered bracelet. —N.J. 45. HAIDER ACKERMANN Velvet Bomber Fall-Winter 2015 Kanye wore this bomber just after it was released back in 2015 and suddenly everyone in the world wanted one. Demand was so great that Ackermann rereleased it in 2020. —N.J.

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46. PRADA Impossible True Love Shirt Fall-Winter 2016

T H ES E PAG ES , P RO D U CTS F RO M : 4 0, K R I ST U PAS K A P T U R AU S K AS ; 41 , A N N D E M E U L E M E EST E R ; 4 2 , D E E P F RY E D A RC H I V E ; 4 3, G U C C I ; 4 4 , T H E A RC H I V E O F WA LT E R VA N B E I R E N D O N C K ; 4 5 , H O R R O R VA C U O ; 4 6 , T H E A R C H I V E O F P R A D A ; 4 7, A A R O N M I L L E R ; 4 8 , O L D B OY V I N TA G E ; 4 9 , O BTA I N D ; 5 0, D AV I D C A S AVA N T A R C H I V E .

Miuccia Prada introduced her now-standard printed bowling shirts by enlisting French artist Christophe Chemin to portray mash-ups of art-historical masterworks and pop-culture ephemera. His image of Elvis locking lips with Cleopatra in the foreground of a work

by Renaissance miniaturist Cristoforo de Predis was one of 2016’s most popular streetstyle garms. —R.T. 47. TAKAHIROMIYASHITA THE SOLOIST Face Mask Bag Fall-Winter 2018 Grocery tote? Or full-on apocalypse face mask? This unique and prescient piece from The Soloist is both.

Designer Takahiro Miyashita makes a compelling case for fashion that is inventive, unusual, and fun. —N.J. 48. LEVI’S Type II Jacket 1953

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Check your closet—if you’ve got a Levi’s denim jacket, it’s probably the Type III. But real heads know that it’s all about the Type II, which was first sold in 1953 and discontinued in 1961.

Its boxy fit and pleated front were immortalized on Martin Sheen’s back in Badlands, and now original versions can sell for thousands to Americana nuts and vintage completists. —S.H. 49. NIKE X MMW Technical Shorts 2018

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Debuted in 2018 amid a glut of fashion-sportswear crossover collabs, Nike x MMW stood out for its tactical silhouettes, hard-core colourways, and obsessively fine-tuned fits. Worn by a legion of celebrities and models from boutique fitness classes to the streets of Paris during Fashion Week, the collection established 1017 Alyx 9SM designer Matthew Williams as a major creative force, and positioned him to take the reins at a prestigious fashion house, as he did with Givenchy in 2020. —S.H. 50. HELMUT LANG Astro Jacket Fall-Winter 1999

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Helmut Lang’s archive is full of bona fide holy grails.

The Astro Jacket came in many iterations—short, long, metallic, with fur or without— and has become an essential piece for any respectable collector. The designer had thousands of pieces in his archive shredded as part of a 2011 art project.

Which has made the current craze for his work that much more feverish—and the prices that much more jaw-dropping. —N.J.

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BY A N T WAU N SARGENT

P H OTO G R A P H S BY T Y L E R M I TC H E L L

I spent two years trying to bottle up the genius of our greatest multi-hyphenate for a museum show.

But only when I travelled to Chicago for his memorial service did I realize the full extent of his talent and influence.

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At the memorial, I sat a few rows behind his family, next to the artists Arthur Jafa and Theaster Gates.

It was Monday, the sixth of December, at noon, and we were gathered in the two-storey glass atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, to pay our respects to the artist Virgil Abloh, who had, a week earlier, died of a rare heart cancer at the age of 41. Inside, it was like a sombre Met gala; the assembled crowd included Rihanna, Frank Ocean, Drake, models Karlie Kloss and Bella Hadid, and young designers Kerby-Jean Raymond and Rhuigi Villaseñor.

We sat in white chairs in a large light-filled, modernist room that looked out on the city’s skyline. Outside it was cloudy and cold, which mirrored the mood in the room.

The service began with a sermon by Pastor Rich Wilkerson Jr., who had officiated Kim and Kanye’s wedding and first met V, as he was known to those who worked closely with him, during the years he served as Kanye’s creative director. In the wake of V’s diagnosis, in 2019, Rich had become a kind of spiritual adviser, helping him reckon with the work he would leave undone, and here he functioned as a master of ceremonies, inviting V’s wife, Shannon Abloh, to eulogize him. She wore a black silk robe that V had designed, with the word woman emblazoned across the back, and was followed at the podium by some of V’s closest collaborators—Don C, the streetwear designer; Benji B, the British DJ and producer; Mahfuz Sultan, the architect and writer; Tyler, the Creator, the rapper. They recalled the sacrifices V made for his art, the endless flights and far-flung DJ sets, the constant WhatsApp messaging, the Instagram account he used as an open studio where he shared “cheat codes” to beat the game that is our culture. They were awed by the disparate assemblage of people he gathered into a constellation that lit up a new aesthetic universe. They mourned the dashed potential of the years lost.

And I mourned V too. For me, this service represented a coda—the epilogue to my twoyear journey to package the work of this most unorthodox genius into a museum exhibition. I had tried to get to the heart of what drove V as a creator, to understand his impulses and concerns, to catalogue his prolific output. I had wrestled with the

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seemingly impossible task of curating one of the most polymathic artists of our time.

And yet, as I listened to his friends and collaborators and protégés, I realized that the truest gesture he made was to inspire acts of creation from nearly everyone he, and his objects, came in contact with. The depth of that desire—to usher us into a new age of creativity—wasn’t completely clear to me until that very moment. We had known V was working hard to get his ideas into the world. But his greatest ideas were the ones he had cultivated in the procession of artists taking the lectern—the youth who had seen what he made and decided that they, too, could create art of their own.

I F I R S T M E T V on a call arranged by the Brooklyn Museum director, Anne Pasternak, in the fall of 2019. She told me that she wanted to bring Virgil’s “explosive creativity” to the museum. At the time, he had a travelling exhibition, “Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech”, and she told me that V wanted me to guest-curate the show’s final iteration. “He was doing something where there was a gap,” Pasternak recently told me. “He was putting a spotlight on a gap, kicking the gates open, to make it possible for other young Black creatives to see themselves in these positions.” She added, “I think that there is a wave of creative excellence that’s been coming at us, that maybe would not have existed had Virgil not torn down those gates.”

At that point, V’s show had opened in Chicago and would go on to Atlanta, Boston, and Doha before reaching Brooklyn. But he told me, on our first call, that he wanted to say something new in New York. With a deep fondness, he recalled his time in the city, just over a decade ago, as a member of the streetwear fashion and art collective #BEEN #TRILL; he reminisced about friendships with young downtown creatives like Venus X, the DJ and founder of the underground party GHE20G0TH1K, and Shayne Oliver, the co-founder and design director of Hood

by Air. Together V and Shayne had shared notes on culture, trying to make noise as Black designers on the outside of the fashion and art worlds looking in. To memorialize that time, they created In Conversation With

Shayne (2019), an installation consisting of T-shirts folded inside cardboard boxes labelled “virgil abloh official files”. A comment on their upstart spirit and their staying power, the work also showed, as Shayne has said, that they “had ideas to bring to fashion, but not specifically for fashion”.

After that initial meeting, V’s long-time chief of staff, Athiththan Selvendran, known as Athi, created a WhatsApp group chat so that we could all communicate in real time.

Also in the chat was Sultan, who had studied architecture at Harvard and would help us conceptualize the show. From the beginning the ideas flew. What struck me immediately is that V was as focused on other artists’ work as he was on his own. We were curating a man who was constantly curating the culture around him, sampling ideas, making them his, ceding space to those who inspired him. There was, for instance, the idea to incorporate into the show works of his choosing from the museum’s collection of 1.5 million objects—a gesture that alluded to installation artist and sculptor Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Museum”, a seminal 1992 show in which the artist used the Maryland Historical Society’s collection to expose the beauty, contradictions, and erasures of art institutions. Other ideas were more radical.

One day, V dropped into the chat a sketch of large-scale neon signs that spelled out, in his loopy handwriting, words like “IRAK”, a reference to the legendary late-’90s downtown New York graffiti crew. V suggested we install them across the Beaux-Arts façade of the museum to make a statement: This wasn’t going to be an ordinary exhibition.

One early idea I had was to create an exhibition where everything was for sale—a show where you could buy the chairs, paintings, sneakers, jewellery, speakers, sculptures, bags, and everything else off the walls and pedestals as a critique of art world consumption and consumer culture. As the ready-made objects were bought, messages, written in V’s signature quotation style, would reveal themselves in the emptied-out galleries of the museum’s Great Hall. After some research, though, we abandoned the plan. Takashi Murakami, the acclaimed Japanese Pop artist who collaborated with V most recently on a trio of shows at Gagosian Gallery, had explored a similar premise with former Louis Vuitton creative director Marc Jacobs at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008. V had no problem sampling ideas, but this approach had to be fresh.

Over time, the chat became a stream of reference images for the exhibition design, a place for V to share old and new work, and a space to think together about the relationships between, say, billboard advertisement and painting, garments and architecture.

In January 2020, I visited V in his large and messy Louis Vuitton atelier in Paris, a sprawling, maze-like laboratory that was

THESE PAGES, PHOTOGRAPHS: ART PARTNER.

Virgil Abloh in Paris, 2018.

like an entryway to the artist’s brain. There was DJ equipment for impromptu office sets, bags and racks of his LV clothing, a large mirror framed with the red Time magazine logo. In between fittings for his fashion presentations, V shared ideas for our show. On an orange table was a foam model of the Brooklyn Museum’s Great Hall and, displayed inside, the objects he wanted to present—shoes from his Nike collaborations; his first ad campaign for LV; mannequins wearing his designs; sculptures he’d built; chairs he’d designed; silk screens from Pyrex Vision, his first fashion label. It was a survey representing every chapter of his career as a maker.

This was right before the pandemic and the racial protests, which would make us rethink the show. By July of that year, we realized it needed to be more responsive, have a more direct social dimension. We started thinking about the idea of a social sculpture, a contemporary take on what V called “a Trojan horse”. It would be a Black space, populated with V’s work, designed with the principles of what the artist David Hammons once termed “negritude architecture”, which he defined as “the way Black people make things, houses or magazine stands in Harlem, for instance.

Just the way we use carpentry. Nothing fits, but everything works. The door closes, it keeps things from coming through. But

it doesn’t have that neatness about it, the way white people put things together; everything is a thirty-second of an inch off.”

The idea became concrete in October 2020, when V dropped into the chat a rendering of a one-storey black house with exaggerated proportions that lightly took direction from the Herzog & de Meuron–designed furniture museum Vitra Schaudepot, in Weil am Rhein, Germany.

The building would occupy the centre space of the exhibition hall. As visitors moved around it, they would encounter a black tactical ladder—a metaphor for the way V was storming the museum, with metal steps etched with the names of various “figures of speech”, from the pan-Africanist musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti to the rapper Ghostface Killah. One side of the house would be lined with pedestals displaying, say, a shoe or a bag or a kite V had designed, as a way to elevate objects of culture (whether low or mass or luxury) into the realm of sculpture, which is to say art. At the entrance would be a black-and-white sign that said “colored people only”. The interior would have dark wood flooring, conveying a note of intimacy and history. It was a living sculpture that would double as a house museum, a nod to Black interiority and a reminder that before museums let Black folks into them, we used our living rooms as places to show off our art and our histories. Above all, the

space would be autonomous; V and his collaborators would set the rules for what was displayed and why.

It was a way for V to play with the dynamics of power and history that had largely kept Black art off the white walls of art institutions.

It was also a way to show that V did everything along what Hans Ulrich Obrist, the art historian and artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, in London, calls a “DIY path”. Obrist, who collaborated with V on a series of talks that considered everything from the modern city to bookmaking, tells me that V’s “postmedium condition” is the result of “this idea of DIY, that the artist or designer could do something as a way to provide instructions so then anyone could just do it.” V “had a very concrete connection to utopia”, Obrist explains. “What he meant by utopia is ‘something is missing’, as he would say. I always had the feeling that he was also interested in producing and making things happen that were missing.” What was missing to V was real Black space—a place to dream, ideate, and create—and the structure he proposed for the Brooklyn Museum was a way to make it real.

As our dialogue went on, it became clear that we were particularly interested in, as V put it in one Zoom call, “what three Black kids”—V, Sultan, and myself—could get away with in a museum. That for him was “our North Star”. The “dope” part of planning the exhibition was the rare opportunity for a Black artist, architect, and curator to make their concerns known in the halls of one of America’s most distinguished museums. When V was not into an idea, as Benji B recalled at his memorial, he would politely pause, turn his head sideways, scratch it, and say, in his professorial drawl, “Yeaaaaah.”

I told him I wanted more fashion in the show, because I thought the audience would appreciate it. Yeaaaaah. This is not to say he wasn’t incredibly open in our conversations. “I’m siked on this new sculpture I just made—and just shot images of it, will toss it in here in case it sparks any ideas,” he wrote in the chat, in December 2019, referencing a monogrammed LV Coffret Trésor treasure case he had refashioned into an old-school “boom box”, mounted with horns, feathers, and bike mirrors—a work that would later appear in the Louis Vuitton Men’s fall-winter 2022 show at Paris Fashion Week. He didn’t want the show to privilege one form of making over another. It was not to be a fashion show masquerading as an art exhibition.

The initial instalment of the show, V’s first at a museum, had been curated by Michael Darling and mounted, in 2019, at the MCA Chicago before travelling to the High Museum in Atlanta, the ICA Boston, and Doha’s Fire Station. As Darling wrote, it focused on how V’s “approach to conceptual art relies on the most impactful tools contemporary culture

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has to offer—music, fashion, social media, celebrity—filling his work with borrowings, rebrandings, claimings, critiques, and deconstructions that have all the hallmarks of Duchampian irony”. Darling presented objects like V’s 2006 grad-school thesis, which imagined a Chicago skyscraper bending, like a tree in the wind, towards Lake Michigan; the gold plate he made to press Jay-Z and Kanye’s Watch the Throne; the black “Queen” tennis skirt with a tutu-like silhouette he designed for Serena Williams; and The Reality (2016), an Off-White showroom rug that quoted a critical review of a collection from his first label, Pyrex Vision. “Pyrex simply bought a bunch of Rugby flannels, slapped ‘Pyrex 23’ on the back, and resold them for an astonishing markup of about 700%,” the text read. He had named Pyrex for the glassware used to cook crack cocaine, and The Reality subtly suggested the convergence of two buyers: drug addicts and hypebeasts in need of a fashion fix. It was a provocative point about race and class and consumerism. Here he was, a Black man pushing a highly desirable product, not unlike the dope boys he saw on the streets of Chicago— only he wasn’t being arrested but celebrated.

Using Darling’s framing, I was intent that our Brooklyn show reveal the creative process of a Black artist who had taken the seemingly disconnected cultural codes of hip-hop, high fashion, design, architecture, and art, and, using a can of spray paint, a Sharpie, and Helvetica Neue Bold, scrambled them into a unique visual language. You go to war with the army you got. By writing on mundane objects like office supplies, zip ties, flags, kites, belts, handbags (which he called sculpture), and Nike Air Force 1’s (which he called icons), he lifted them into the realm of metaphor, shot through with questions about identity, labour, and value. These artistically elevated everyday objects were a nod to art history— Duchamp, Warhol, Hammons—as well as an homage to hip-hop-inflected graffiti writers like Futura, Zephyr, and Jim Joe, who wrote wherever they saw fit. But V was also interested in the essence of objects, and would often strip traditional luxury items down to their utilitarian purposes (“FOR WALKING” he wrote on a pair of Off-White black leather boots). It was all a way to make us reconsider contemporary culture. For me, that ethos was best encapsulated by one piece in particular.

PSA (2019) is a black nylon flag with two white words in quotes that now read like an urgent warning: “QUESTION EVERYTHING.” of signs and symbols, and spent his career upending long-settled cultural hierarchies with playful irony. He also raised questions about what art even was: He reminded us, for instance, that to some an expensive bag is a sculpture, equal in weight and stature. Very few Black men V WAS A MASTER

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have exercised that level of power in our culture. To me that was worth investigating. But the real reason I decided to curate the exhibition was because of his central creative subject: Black boyhood.

I had come of age in Chicago, in the same neighbourhood where V would move with his wife to create his work and start a family. And until V, I had never encountered a Black creative person who spoke so openly to the next generation of Black makers.

Born the son of Ghanaian immigrants in the suburb of Rockford, Illinois, V always remained motivated by the curiosity and dreams of what he called his “17-year-old self ”. As a suburban teenage aesthete, he loved hip-hop, graffiti, low and high design, and skateboarding; everything he created flowed from those obsessions.

When he went off to college, that love of design grew into a fascination with engineering, and then architecture, which he studied at the Mies van der Rohe– designed campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in the early noughties. And then he graduated into a totally different world—Kanye’s burgeoning new chapter of hip-hop, where he became a kind of prophet of the power of youth. First as Ye’s creative director, then as the founder and designer of two fashion labels, Pyrex Vision

collaborated with on the designs of several Off-White stores, invited him to speak at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Before V, she tells me, an architect and historian named Kenneth Frampton gave a short talk.

“He’s five decades almost to the day older than Virgil,” Stănescu says, “and he’s the guy who wrote the modern history of architecture, like he’s super known.” Frampton’s talk, she recalls, was incredibly bleak. “It was dark as fuck,” she says. He told the bright minds of tomorrow, between politics and the environment, you guys are fucked. “I remember asking him, ‘Any opportunities in this?’

And he’s like, ‘no.’ And then one hour later, Virgil comes, and he is like, ‘This is a great time to be alive.’ ” The brief, she remembers V telling them, was to reimagine the world they inherited.

One way V reimagined the world was through his rule of three percent, which he considered the exact amount of creative reworking needed to transform an everyday object into a work of art. This controversial dogma led him to sample everything from Caravaggio’s The Entombment of Christ to the United Nations logo (until the U.N. asked him to desist). His slight modifications left some critics feeling he wasn’t particularly innovative. “I’m inspired by people who bring something that I think has not been seen, that

“What we want in the 21st century are different models of being in the world. Virgil decided he was going to make a space for himself, and he took no prisoners.” —SIR DAVID ADJAYE and Off-White, and finally as the first Black artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, he patiently prodded other young artists, activists, architects, rappers, and designers to action. Samuel Ross and Luka Sabbat, Tyler, the Creator, and Heron Preston have all acknowledged that V helped clarify their visions and make them real. He understood, as the old African American adage goes, that you lift as you climb.

One way V did that lifting was by telling young people to simply do what he did: try out every idea that came to their minds, without stressing about whether they’d be successful. In our conversations he was always pushing for what he called “some big shifts.” He once said to me, after sharing a project he was working on, “If kids you come across are special for this mission, send thru and let’s all do a project.”

A few years back, V’s friend Oana Stănescu, an architect he bonded with while working on Ye’s Cruel Summer and later

is original,” designer Raf Simons said of OffWhite in a 2017 interview with this magazine.

Those critiques didn’t matter to V, though.

You couldn’t break that Black man’s spirit.

V told me that when he asked the industry group Cotton Incorporated to use their famed logo for merch, the company declined because, as he recalled a representative saying, they thought it would “portray cotton in a bad light”. We laughed at the thought of a Black man being able to portray cotton in a bad light. He used it anyway, making Cotton (2019), an acrylic painting that featured the white logo sharply juxtaposed against a mattblack background. In V’s mind, anything he took and altered was “7.0’d”, elevated to the ultimate degree.

V often said he pursued these projects to satisfy the curiosities of his younger self. But he also had another, more transgressive motivation. He wanted to wag a finger in the faces of those he called the “purists”, members of high culture’s self-serious establishment,

even as he became accepted among their ranks. As the celebrated Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas said in a 2019 panel discussion, V used architecture as “an alibi to enter territories to which it has not been invited”. He was, Koolhaas continued, part of a generation of “self-declared wunderkinds amplified by self-organized social media,” a new guard who have accelerated the break-up of borders around professions. V, for his part, explained his disruptive spirit as a way to help the “tourists”, as he termed the younger generation, learn from and get past the older cultural gatekeepers.

As the Ghanaian British architect Sir David Adjaye tells me, “Virgil used his training as an architect, knowing he wasn’t going to build buildings, to imagine different possibilities. What we want in the 21st century are different models of being in the world.

He decided he was going to make a space for himself, and he took no prisoners.” For Stănescu, his energy was more anarchic. “In a way, I think it was chaos that he thrived on,” she explains. “He wasn’t interested in a slick, clean narrative.” V had “this kind of healthy disrespect towards authority and anyone in that position”, she says. “So any gesture then, whether with a museum, whether with galleries…was like a constant fuck you.” to get some advice on a photographer he wanted to hire for a fashion campaign. He was after the kind of freedom of expression found by Black creatives in, say, the Vibe magazine of the 1990s. And he felt stifled.

Toward the end of the call, almost as an aside, he said, “The world wasn’t designed for us.”

As a six-foot-three Black man, he felt that the world didn’t take him into account, physically or spiritually. So he created another world that did—blowing up Black boys into large-scale, fashionable sculptures; making graffiti-laden paintings; designing gold- and diamondencrusted paper clip necklaces. Remaking objects in his own image was a message to any young Black kid that their desires and tastes mattered, that had they not been ignored, the world’s cultural hierarchies would look different. Like Michael Jordan, V’s home-town hero who inspired his long-running collaboration with Nike, and Michael Jackson, the subject of his sophomore fall 2019 outing at Louis Vuitton, he was his own genre.

Even at the end of his life, V kept working.

He didn’t go public with his battle against cancer. I think he didn’t want his art to be pitied. About two weeks before his death, a PDF appeared in our WhatsApp chat with a series of works he wanted added to the show: his typographic collaborations with the conceptualist Lawrence Weiner, a pair of Louis Vuitton films, his Rocawear painting, a bronze chair and bench. “Phase one,” he said. “If more works ONCE V CALLED ME

in the archive come to mind I will package and send.” I wrote that I’d review the objects and update the exhibition checklist.

It was our last exchange. I received news of his death as I was heading to the airport to fly to Miami, where, the week of Art Basel, he was to stage his LV spring-summer 2022 spin-off show. I was meant to meet him for the first in a series of interviews that would form a profile for this magazine.

The Miami show, held on a makeshift barge docked off Miami Marine Stadium, a deteriorating 60-year-old structure marooned in Biscayne Bay, was supposed to celebrate the work V made during the first two years of the pandemic that hadn’t been presented to a live audience. Instead, it became a sombre tribute to the artist’s life, lit up, somewhat jarringly, with fireworks.

Ye, Pharrell, A$AP Rocky, Rihanna, and the Arnault family were all in attendance, as were droves of stylists, designers, and friends. A monumental multicoloured sculpture of V, dressed in jeans, an LV sweater, and his singular oversized glasses, and holding what appears to be a large portfolio, was erected at the entrance of the show.

I sat in the front row, in shock, watching two men sob uncontrollably as a procession of young male models came down the runway, each representing a different archetype of boyish masculinity—skater, rapper, jock, gender queer, all dressed in the palette of the rainbow. The collection, which featured tulle shirts; bright furs; chicly unconventional, slightly baggy suiting; and spirited leather goods, was as optimistic as ever.

At the end of the show, the artisans from V’s atelier came to the runway dressed in white and took a bow. The Black designer best positioned to create fashion’s first Black heritage brand was gone.

V never mentioned his battle with cancer to me, but a mutual friend told me the news. Just before we began our collaboration, V had taken a three-month break, presumably to undergo treatment. When he returned and I first saw him on Zoom, I was stunned. I hardly knew him and didn’t want to ask about his health, but I was concerned. Although he had publicly said that his constant travelling and multitasking had taken a toll on his health, I realized that that wasn’t the full story.

I wanted to know whether he would be okay. Yet I refrained from asking. He wanted privacy to focus on his work, and I gave it to him.

Regardless, the signs of his struggle were apparent in his art: An Alexander Calder– inspired anvil, made around the time he received the news of his illness, in 2019, was fabricated in pink, the colour of breast cancer awareness, and titled Pink Panther.

V was suffering from cardiac angiosarcoma,

a rare form of heart cancer, but to my mind the allusion was clear: It was his way of acknowledging that he was living with the weight of death. His surrealist use of clouds in his fall 2020 presentation— “cloudification”, in V’s vocabulary—was, I think, a pondering of the heavens. The kite motif in his work was, it seems, a symbol of boyhood. The matt grey-on-grey LV clock he gave guests at that show, hands wound anticlockwise, moving back in time, suggested he was an artist nearing the end.

The only quote from V in his memorial brochure, designed by Sultan to reference an old John Cage poster and evoke the minimalism of the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, was a reminder of his joie de vivre and childlike curiosity: “I’m exploring the self-endowed freedom to create. Everyday language, grammar, and my own personal philosophies are equal territory to mine as the art canon.”

Towards the end of the service, after a musical tribute from Lauryn Hill, Arthur Jafa and Theaster Gates rose from their seats flanking me and walked to the podium.

Framed by white roses, Jafa took out his iPhone and read an elegy he’d written, a poem titled “Virgil”. One line in particular struck me: “He showed us what god looks like, not in the / heavens, not in our dreams, but god in the / flesh, in the body, in this life.”

In the wake of his death, I came to understand what Jafa may have meant by “god in the flesh”. There was something divinely inspired about the urgency of V’s output.

He wanted to show us what was possible with a youthful vision. Yet as prolific as he was, V was not in a race against time; he watched and worked the clock better than most. Perhaps he was never racing to create objects because art-making was such a natural process for him, so inherently a part of who he was. I have always been struck by the title of a series of light-box portraits he made in London with the German fashion photographer Juergen Teller. One image shows V sitting on a pink stability ball posing alongside some of his art—a large inflatable T. rex, a paint-covered yellow jacket, a United Nations flag taped to the white wall. “What is Virgil Abloh?” the title asks. The use of “what” and not “who” suggests the artist saw himself as an object. As I continue to curate his exhibition, which is scheduled to open this summer, that’s how I’ve come to see him. To me, V is the kite he so often referenced, adroitly sailing through a pristine blue sky. As I picture it, I can make out a message, written in Helvetica Neue: Virgil Abloh was here. antwaun sargent is the curator of “Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech”, which will open at the Brooklyn Museum this summer.

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Every year, the art and fashion worlds collide in Miami Beach for a week of high-culture madness. We spent a few days with the insiders, outsiders, and party animals at the centre of the scene.

By Samuel Hine Photographs and Artwork by Charlie Engman Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu and Jon Tietz

and fashion have been in conversation as long as either has existed (can you imagine the Renaissance occurring without resplendent fits?), but as branches of global pop culture, it seems the two have never been more powerful. And for a week every December, Miami becomes the epicentre of it all, where both worlds fully collapse into each other and take over all of our feeds.

For many years, Miami Art Week—technically a constellation of major art fairs like Art Basel, NADA, and Design Miami—was an industry event, a venue for blue-chip galleries to move six- and seven-figure works to their wealthiest collectors, and for art insiders to take a vacation from winter in New York and London. And then art became the hottest thing in fashion. Since taking over Dior Men’s in 2018, Kim Jones has launched splashy artist collaborations with the likes of KAWS, Raymond Pettibon, and Amoako Boafo. Hedi Slimane turned Celine’s stores into the coolest galleries in any given city, merchandising his latest collections with the work of buzzy contemporary artists. Bottega Veneta replaced its Instagram with a vibey art zine. By the time Matthew Williams spent a year developing a Givenchy collection with Josh Smith, an NYC-based artist on David Zwirner’s roster, it felt weirdly normal that the head of one of Paris’s biggest luxury houses would be 3D-scanning ceramic basketballs in a Bushwick art studio to come up with the next It bag. And because Miami Art Week is a world away from the traditional fashion circuit, it became the perfect venue for these brands to showcase new ideas and unveil crossculture collaborations.

Now, Art Week is for art about as much as Coachella is for music. This past December, the hottest ticket in town was not Art Basel’s VIP day but a seat at Virgil Abloh’s Louis Vuitton springsummer 2022 runway show, a multimillion-dollar production on a barge in Biscayne Bay. After Abloh, the groundbreaking Vuitton men’s designer, tragically passed away just days before, the show became just about the only thing anyone in Miami seemed to talk (or care) about.

Abloh had a keen sense of just how much art and fashion could amplify each other when they crashed together, which is why he was a ubiquitous presence at

Miami Art Week over the years. “It was his favourite thing, being here in Basel, because everyone was here,” Denim Tears founder Tremaine Emory told me after the Vuitton show. Even though he wasn’t present in Miami, Abloh’s influence on a new generation of crosspollinating creative directors could be felt. “This week, we’re here to embrace Virgil and his dream and his vision,” said A-Cold-Wall* designer and Abloh protégé Samuel Ross, who was following in his mentor’s footsteps by showing a collection of conceptual furniture at Design Miami.

Abloh also knew better than anyone that art insiders can be unwelcoming to interlopers. Once upon a time, the fashion crowd were the party crashers during Art Week. This year, they were the party.

“When did it become Fashion Week?” asked model Jordan Barrett, who was in town to celebrate his 25th birthday with a function at Gitano. Saint Laurent designer Anthony Vaccarello kicked things off with the sexiest art fete since the reign of Louis XIV, a candlelit dinner attended by the likes of Hailey Bieber, Zoë Kravitz, and Olivia Rodrigo. The rest of the week saw enough bashes to make a club rat’s head spin, with Givenchy, Loewe, Chanel, Valentino, Kering, Gucci, Balmain, Dior, Chrome Hearts, Burberry, Ferragamo, and Moncler flying in their own roster of A-listers for big-budget parties.

With all the energy in the air, it’s no surprise that Miami Art Week can still blow up a new name or two. Even the most committed partygoers made it over to the ICA to see Hugh Hayden’s show of large-scale sculptures that have firmly established him as a rising star. Hayden, who ditched his architecture career in 2018, is an Art Week veteran having his first major solo show. “It’s funny to be at Art Basel now that I’m really participating in it,” he told me. “It’s surreal.”

And then there was film-maker, photographer, and poet Sky Hopinka, who was exhibiting a three-channel video installation, In Dreams and Autumn, at Broadway gallery’s Art Basel booth.

Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, whose work centres on Indigenous stories of loss, had never been to Miami Art Week before. “I still don’t necessarily know where I fit into all of this, what my role is here, or what to make of the spectacle of this event in this city,” he said. That might soon change. As the fair wrapped up, ArtNews reported that celebrity curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a friend of Abloh’s who serves as a bridge to the fashion world for young artists, had been seen admiring Hopinka’s installation. Reiterating that, at the end of the day, Art Week wouldn’t be much without the art.

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Anthony Vaccarello Creative director, Saint Laurent “Saint Laurent was always linked to art,” says Anthony Vaccarello. At the helm of the historic house, Vaccarello has brought a sense of big, juicy romance to his menswear—and reconnected Saint Laurent to the art world, working with the likes of Doug Aitken and Sho Shibuya, whose Instagram-viral paintings Vaccarello curated for a gallery show on the beach during Art Week. “It’s a kind of selfish thing,” he says, “for me to approach those who I admire, and have them in the Saint Laurent family.”

his own clothing Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello shoes and accessories, his own

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Antwaun Sargent, Awol Erizku ON SARGENT

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Director, Gagosian; artist

coat and pants Fendi Men’s

jacket and pants Dior Men

When writer and curator Antwaun Sargent was appointed as a director at Gagosian, his stated aim was to promote more artists of colour. And the first person he called was multidiscipline artist Awol Erizku, whose show “Memories of the Lost Sphinx” opens at Gagosian on Park Avenue in New York on 10 March. “I want to do exciting and ambitious shows with artists who are not only defining their medium but are also some of the defining voices of their generation,” Sargent says, “and Awol is one of those artists.”

boots Giuseppe Zanotti

shirt Dolce & Gabbana

his own hat Esenshel

custom boots Lucchese

watch, his own bracelet (on left arm), and ring Cartier

belt Anderson’s

necklaces, his own

gold chain necklaces, his own

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cuff (on right arm) Bulgari bracelet (on right arm) Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello

necklace (top) Chrome Hearts

Michèle Lamy Fashion icon A designer, musician, boxer, restaurateur, and fashion icon (and collaborator with her husband, Rick Owens), Michèle Lamy is one of the original multi-hyphenate artistic visionaries—and, as she nears 80, she has no intention of slowing down. What’s her secret

to creative longevity?

Lamy compares the life of an artist to the life of a smoker: “When you pass a certain age, everybody says, ‘Keep going. It’s good for you. That is the right drug for you.’ ”

her own clothing and shoes Rick Owens jewellery, her own

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Raul Lopez Founder and designer, Luar Miami Beach fixture Raul Lopez developed a knack for sending up mainstream fashion culture at Hood by Air, which he co-founded in 2006. Now, he’s back on the scene with his own label, Luar. Armed with photoshopped celebrity ad campaigns and an

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aesthetic motto he calls “premium trash”, he’s ready to troll the system once again.

coat, turtleneck, pants, and gloves Balenciaga sunglasses Maison Alaïa watch Jacob & Co necklace, his own

Fernando Casablancas, Jordan Barrett Models (and partners) Jordan Barrett’s path to model stardom started early, when he was scouted at the tender age of 14 in Australia.

Fernando Casablancas’s

route was more zigzaggy; the Rio native had to fit modelling gigs in between experimental theatre studies at Tisch, New York. When they met at a party last year, the connection was instant, and they pledged their love soon after in Ibiza in a spiritual ceremony overseen by Kate Moss.

“I love watching Jordan work,” says Casablancas.

“Once he steps in front of the camera, it’s like energy pours out of him.

It’s beautiful to watch.”

necklace Bulgari rings, his own ON BARRET T

ON CASABL ANCAS

shirt, pants, and shorts Prada

jacket and pants Dries Van Noten

watch Bulgari

belt Maximum Henry

necklace Chrome Hearts

his own rings and bracelets Jordan Barrett for Eli Halili

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Hugh Hayden Artist “All of my work is interested in camouflage,” says Hugh Hayden, who drapes tree bark on trench coats and zebra hides on La-Z-Boy chairs to explore metaphors of cultural assimilation in America. When he had extra zebra hides after finishing his ICA Miami show, he had New York fashion brand Bode use them to make the coat and bucket hat he wears here.

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custom jacket and custom hat Bode pants, his own his own glasses Micromega Eyewear link bracelet Jacob & Co bangle Tiffany & Co. ring Bulgari

Matthew Williams Creative director, Givenchy and 1017 Alyx 9SM For his most ambitious Givenchy collection yet, Matthew Williams spent weeks in the studio with spooky painter Josh Smith, incorporating his off-tone colour palette and ceramic finishes into the clothes.

“There’s something to be said for consistency, and then there’s something to be said for being fearless enough to explore something uncomfortable and find a new space and a new dialogue,” Williams says, “and I’m in that place now.”

coat, hood, bag, jeans, and his own shoes Givenchy

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Samuel Ross Artist and creative director, A-Cold-Wall* “It’s so bittersweet,” says Samuel Ross about presenting his growing line of conceptual furniture at Design Miami without his mentor Virgil Abloh, who hired him as an intern in 2012. “There’s a duty, man.

We talk about carrying on his

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lineage. We need to be wearing the garments.

We need to be reflecting the optimism and grace and elasticity that he brought forward…. That’s what made me.”

jacket, shirt, and pants Louis Vuitton Men’s sneakers Converse

Sky Hopinka Artist and film-maker Following the release of several critically acclaimed short films, Sky Hopinka is shooting a new featurelength this summer—and thinking about how his rising profile can lift other Indigenous artists with him.

“I feel such a strong pull to try and help others out or to figure out how to make space for other Indigenous film-makers, other

Indigenous artists,” he says.

“I feel really fortunate to have my work recognized and to be shown, but there are a lot of Indigenous artists out there that have been doing it for a long time that haven’t been recognized.”

blazer Dunhill T-shirt, his own sunglasses Moscot

Erizku, Sargent, Vaccarello, and Williams: Hair by Nina Alcantara for Creative Management. Barrett, Casablancas, Hayden, Hopinka, Lamy, Lopez, and Ross: Hair by Daniel Pazos for Creative Management. Skin by Claudia Lake for Chanel.

Set design by Kate Stein for 11th House Agency.

Produced by Gaby Schuetz for Select Services.

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Fifty years after f he h gave us The Godfather, the iconic director is chasing his grandest project yet— and putting up over $100 million of his own money to prove his best work is still ahead of him.

BY ZACH BARON

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JIM GOLDBERG

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Ford Coppola lives—as he has in one way or another since directing 1972’s The Godfather—in splendour. Loosely held splendour: In the ensuing five decades, Coppola has filed for bankruptcy at least once and has been expelled from Hollywood more than once. But splendour nonetheless. His primary residence is in Napa Valley, on the grounds of a once-great vineyard, Inglenook, that Coppola has spent the past 47 years making great again. There is a grand old château here, where the wine used to be made, and a state-of-the-art facility where wine is made now. There is a carriage house that holds a film-editing suite and Coppola’s personal film archive—shooting scripts for The Cotton Club and Jack and The Outsiders; the written score for Bram Stoker’s Dracula; research material for The Godfather Part III. There is a twostorey guest barn on a mossy edge of the property, where his children often stay, and an old Victorian house built by a sea captain, where the Coppolas raised their family and where they still entertain, though they have since built themselves another house to live in. There are roaming gangs of wild turkeys among the trees and creeping vines and an outdoor fountain designed

by Dean Tavoularis, the set designer of The Godfather. There is, in almost every corner of this place, something beautiful: a first edition of Leaves of Grass; a painting by Akira Kurosawa or Robert De Niro Sr.; a photo of Coppola’s daughter, Sofia, embracing Coppola’s old friend George Lucas.

Coppola, who is 82, moves between these various buildings in a Tesla or a Nissan Leaf that he drives at alarming speed, or on foot, bent over at the waist as if walking into a powerful wind. He has already told me that I’m too impressed with what he owns, what he’s had and lost and gained again. “That’s what you’re having trouble with, really,” he said. “You are meeting a guy who basically can tell you quite honestly my motive in doing what I did in my life was never to make a lot of money.” He grinned. “Ironically, I did what I wanted to do and I also made a lot of money.” A brief pause. “That’s a joke.”

But he has made a lot of money: first in the film business and then, spectacularly, in the wine business. His second fortune has allowed him to spend most of his time here now, he said, reading things like the 18th-century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the longest books ever written. “They spend their time inventing poetic names for things,” Coppola told me about the characters in the novel. “For example, if I were to say hello to you, I should have met you on the Steps of

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Friendly Greetings and greeted you there. And when I say goodbye to you, I should take you into the Pavilion of Parting. And it’s the sort of attitude of making everything in life beautiful and a ritual of a kind. And you can do it! I’ll say goodbye to you in the Pavilion of Parting— you’ll never forget it.”

Coppola likes to describe himself as a “second-rate film director”, paraphrasing the composer Richard Strauss: “But I’m a first-rate second-rate film director.” In reality, of course, Coppola has directed more than one of the greatest movies ever made. Anyone who has worked on a film will tell you that luck plays a role, that it’s a collaborative medium, that art and commerce and dead-eyed executives and feckless actors all come together to make something beyond the director’s control, sometimes for better, often for worse. But Coppola, for a time, played by other rules entirely. After winning an Academy Award for the screenplay for 1970’s Patton, Coppola went on to make, consecutively, The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979). To

point out that Coppola won five Oscars by the time he was 36 is to understate what was going on at this time; better to just say that for a while he saw something like the face of God, and leave it at that.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Godfather’s release. Nominally, this is why I’ve been invited here, to discuss the film and participate in what has become a familiar ritual for Coppola as past anniversaries have come and gone. But Coppola’s relationship to The Godfather is complicated. “That film ruined me,” he told me, “in the sense that it was so successful that everything I did was compared to it.” Coppola still has fascinating things to say about the movie and will do so in the course of our conversations. But what he’s really interested in talking about is something else. Something new.

It is a film called Megalopolis, and Coppola has been trying to make it, intermittently, for more than 40 years. If I could summarize the plot for you in a concise way, I would, but I can’t, because Coppola can’t either. Ask him.

“It’s very simple,” he’ll say. “The premise of Megalopolis? Well, it’s basically… I would ask you a question, first of all: Do you know much about utopia?”

The best I can do, after literally hours talking about it with him, is this: It’s a love story that is also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man; it’s set in New York, but a New York steeped in echoes of ancient Rome; its scale and ambition are vast enough that Coppola has estimated that it will cost $120 million to make. What he dreams about, he said, is creating something like It’s a Wonderful Life—a movie everyone goes to see, once a year, forever. “On New Year’s, instead of talking about the fact that you’re going to give up carbohydrates, I’d like this one question to be discussed, which is: Is the society we live in the only one available to us? And discuss it.”

Somehow, Megalopolis will provoke exactly this discussion, Coppola hopes.

Annually.

You may be wondering at this point: What Hollywood studio, in the age of Marvel, will fund such a grand, ambitious, impossible-to-summarize project? How do executives at these companies react when he describes the film to them?

“Same way they did,” Coppola answered, “when I had won five Oscars and was the hottest film director in town and walked in with Apocalypse Now and said, ‘I’d like to make this next.’ I own Apocalypse Now. Do you know why I own Apocalypse Now? Because no one else wanted it. So imagine, if that was the case when I was 33 or whatever the age and I had won every award and had broken every record and still absolutely no one wanted to join me”—imagine how they’re reacting now, to present-day Francis Ford Coppola.

But, he said, “I know that Megalopolis, the

more personal I make it, and the more like a dream in me that I do it, the harder it will be to finance. And the longer it will earn money because people will be spending the next 50 years trying to think: What’s really in Megalopolis? What is he saying? My God, what does that mean when that happens?”

And so this is Coppola’s plan. He is going to take $120 million of his own fortune, at 82 years of age, and make the damn movie himself. we met, it was for lunch in the solarium of Coppola’s old home. I’d come over from the rambling house he’d invited me to stay in on a remote part of his property. This is Coppola’s way: a hospitality that is so total it feels like intimacy. And so I’d woken that morning to the sound of a creek roaring and watched the sun dawn sleepily above the grapevines Coppola spends much of his time these days obsessing over. Coppola arrived for lunch in a yellow shirt, an ascot, and a zip-up sweater, his hair rakishly pushed THE

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back. He removed from his pocket a pair of hearing aids—“I did a lot of research,” he said.

“Eventually, I came up with the fact that the best hearing aid of all was the one that you could get from Costco”—but otherwise seemed almost frighteningly youthful. The wilful stamina you see exhibited by Coppola in old documentaries like Hearts of Darkness or Filmmaker is still exactly what you see now: like he’s going to talk and talk and talk until everything makes sense and everyone gets in line. Coppola was noticeably thin, the result, he said, of a sustained stay a few years ago at a place in North Carolina called the Duke Health & Fitness Center. He scrutinized me carefully.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Thirty-nine,” I told him.

“Right. So, when I was your age, I was quite successful. But I was very overweight. So you are fortunate. Now, are you married?”

“I am,” I told him.

“So you’re lucky that you’re that trim,” he said, earnestly.

Coppola, at 82, feels closer than ever to finally commencing work on Megalopolis, an audacious film project he’s been chasing for 40 years.

Coppola told me that as part of preparing to make Megalopolis—and after seeing himself on TV during an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s show—he’d made a concerted effort to lose weight. “I realized that there are not a lot of 85-year-old, 300-pound men—not that I was ever that weight, but I was always in that vicinity—walking around. So I understood that my weight was going to be the factor limiting my life.” It had been three years since his trip to Duke, he said, and his body was just now getting used to what it had become.

During the worst of COVID, his whole family had been here: his two film-maker children, Roman and Sofia, and their children, all of them having dinner together every night.

The kids had left again, but Coppola said he hadn’t travelled much, despite the fact that he and his wife own hotels in Belize and Italy, among other places. “I find that as I get older, I become much more of a hermit,” he said.

“It’s what I am. I was always alone as a kid.”

If you know anything about Coppola’s busy life, this statement seems improbable. But it is true he had a lonely childhood. Coppola was born in Detroit but grew up around New York City, where he spent some time bedridden and isolated with polio. His father was a musician who moved the family constantly as he pursued work. By the time Coppola had graduated high school, he had gone to more than 20 different schools. “I was always the new kid,” he said. “I never had any friends. I was pretty much a loner and an outsider. And it made my big desire to be one of the group, which is why I like theatre.”

He is a big personality from a family of big personalities. “My mother was very beautiful,” Coppola recalled. “My mother looked like Hedy Lamarr. Everyone would say, ‘Oh, what a beautiful mother you are! She looks like a movie star.’ My father was a concert flautist.

Which was sort of like, for years I thought he was a magician—but he was a musician! So I had a very charismatic family.” He worshipped his older brother, August Floyd Coppola, and styled his name the same way in imitation.

His younger sister is the actress Talia Shire.

Growing up, Coppola was always the ordinary one in his family, he said, and his success, when it came, had a somewhat destabilizing effect on his parents and siblings—particularly his father, who was ambitious but thwarted, creatively. “My father used to go in the city and work as a musician,” Coppola told me. “And apparently he had a mystic he would see, and he came home happy one day. Totally happy.

Because his mystic had said that one day he would be a household word, his name. And we all had cannoli. My brother later laughed.

He said: ‘Yes, [Coppola] would be a household word, but it wasn’t him, it was you!’ ” Coppola went to Hofstra to study theatre, and then to UCLA for film school. But he was disappointed by Hollywood almost

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immediately: “I got the number pretty fast in L.A. that it wasn’t like the theatre troupe that I dreamed of being part of. It was extremely hierarchical. You couldn’t even get into the studio if your father didn’t have a job there.”

Still, Coppola found ways to make movies right away: nudie pictures, films for legendary producer and talent-spotter Roger Corman, and his first two studio projects— You’re a Big Boy Now, his UCLA thesis project that was released by Warner Bros. in 1966 and garnered Geraldine Page an Oscar nomination; and 1968’s Finian’s Rainbow, a Broadway adaptation that starred Fred Astaire and Petula Clark. Neither film was a hit, and it was while shooting 1969’s The Rain People, a movie Coppola wrote and directed, that he first began to dream of a way of working outside the Hollywood system entirely. “The whole movie was made on the road—I remember when we were in Ogallala, Nebraska, we were shooting there.

The city fathers of Ogallala said, ‘If you kids stay here, we voted that we’ll help you and we’ll make some sort of a movie studio.’ In Ogallala, Nebraska. I realized: Why did it all just have to be in Hollywood? The equipment was lightweight. It was cheaper. We knew how to work it.”

Soon after, Coppola led a caravan of film students and film-makers north, to San Francisco: the future creator of Star Wars, George Lucas; the future Academy Award– winning editor Walter Murch; the famous wild man and future screenwriter of Apocalypse Now John Milius. “It was a whole crowd of us.

No one had any money. Being five years older, I had a little. I was married. I had a house. So, I was able to sell my house and take that money.

I even had a little summer house, which I sold, and I used that money to buy film equipment, editing equipment, and sound-mixing equipment.” They called their studio Zoetrope, and they had grand dreams of setting up their own, more artist-friendly system.

But The Rain People was not a commercial success any more than Coppola’s previous films had been, and the director swiftly learned that it was neither money nor equipment nor an improbably talented group of colleagues that made Hollywood Hollywood.

“You could have all the money, but there’s more to it than that, because distribution depends on networks of friends,” Coppola said. “It’s a kind of influence that you have by being part of an old friends network. So, little by little, I began to realize even when I had amassed some money and I owned the equipment, there’s still more. You can’t release the film yourself because releasing a film requires that, to be in on that network that you’re not in on, so what can you do? It always seemed that the cure to be able to just make movies from your heart was always one step more elusive than I had thought.”

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By 1970, Coppola was in debt to Warner Bros., and had young children at home, with no real plan for how to provide for them.

Paramount owned the rights to a novel called The Godfather, which was then climbing the bestseller list, and though no one had particularly high hopes for an adaptation, the studio asked Coppola, now somewhat humbled, if he’d direct it. At first he said no. “I never wanted to do The Godfather,” he told me. He had dreams of making more personal films, dreams he retains. Movies from his heart. Stuff he wrote himself, about things that preoccupy his mind—things like Megalopolis. But eventually he was persuaded by his family and friends to take The Godfather on.

What happened next is nearly as wellknown as the film itself: The production of The Godfather was fraught—Robert Evans and the studio initially hated the cast, particularly Al Pacino; they hated the dark, murky cinematography, by Gordon Willis; and they hated Coppola himself, who seemed to them to be both slow and indecisive. Coppola will dutifully tell you how the studio conspired to replace him with Elia Kazan. He will recount how he had to fight for Marlon Brando to be cast in the role of Vito Corleone. He will talk about how unhappy and full of doubt he was while making the movie. Coppola has told these stories many times and will do so again if he is asked, and these stories are indeed fascinating, because the only thing more tantalizing than greatness itself is the idea that greatness can remain hidden even from the artist who is calling it forth.

But there is another story about The Godfather that Coppola volunteers without prompting. The first part of it is familiar too—I’d heard Coppola tell it before—and involves Coppola’s time in Los Angeles, editing the film. Coppola by then had run out of confidence in himself and the movie and was full of dread. One day, Coppola recalled, a young editing assistant rode his bike to work and told everyone there in the editing room how great this new film The French Connection was. At the time, Coppola was staying at the house of one of his actors, James Caan. “I decided to walk home. I was so poor that I had to send all the money I had to my family. I had kids and I was living in Jimmy Caan’s maid’s room. So I walked home with this kid and he was walking his bike, and as we walked, I said to him, and I shouldn’t have done this, but I was so curious, I said, ‘Well, I guess if everyone thinks The French Connection is such an exciting, thrilling movie, maybe they’ll just think The Godfather is this dark, boring, dull movie.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’ ” What Coppola told me next, however, he says less frequently, and it perhaps reveals something more true, and less valedictory,

about his ultimate feelings about the film and the effect it had on its maker. “I joke about this,” Coppola said, “but to hell what people think. The only way what happened could have happened is if, on that night, after the kid said, ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ and got on his bike, out of the bush, there was smoke and a little guy in a red suit who said, ‘How would you like The Godfather to be one of the most successful movies in history?’... And I said, ‘Well, what do I have to give?’ And he said, ‘You know what you have to give.’ And then he went away and I went to bed in Jimmy Caan’s maid’s room.”

Coppola stared at me with an expectant look, but I’m a little slow, I guess.

“What did you have to give?” I asked.

“What do you give the devil?” Coppola asked in return.

“Your soul?”

Coppola nodded. “Doesn’t he always want your soul?”

“That’s a joke,” he said, finally. during our conversations, Coppola became concerned that he had become too digressive, that he had wandered away from the point, which is something he does, after a fashion: He will be reminded of something that can only be explained in reference to the history of North Korea, or humankind’s first king (Sargon, according to Coppola), or the work of Hermann Hesse. Few men in history have done more for audiences than Coppola, and so he’s used to a certain amount of leeway: He will get to the point when he’s ready. But he also knows time is finite, that I can’t stay on his property forever.

“So, here’s what we’re going to do now, if I may,” he said, trying to get us back on task.

“Let’s do the format where you just ask me questions and I’ll try to answer them without talking too much. Because I’m a friendly guy, and I’ll just talk to you about stuff.”

“Great,” I said.

“But I want you to get what you came here to get.”

I’m getting what I came here to get, I said.

“Okay, well you ask me questions, and I’ll answer them.”

Okay, I said. The Godfather started off as a studio project that had nothing to do with you. Did it become personal to you in the end?

“Well, I believe that. I believe…I’m going to have to say this fast. I once read a Balzac article—I wish I could find it, but it’s not published, and I don’t know where the book is.” (I think this was Coppola’s way of telling me he owns, or once owned, an unpublished work by Balzac.) “But people said, ‘Oh, these young people are stealing your stuff.’ To Balzac. And Balzac said, ‘That’s why I wrote it. I want them to take everything, whatever I have, they’re welcome, these young authors. Take all you want. One, because it AT ONE POINT

can’t really come out like me because each one of them is an individual and it’s going to come out like them, so they can’t steal it.

They can appropriate it, but it’s going to come out through them. And number two, it gives me immortality, so whatever I do, if young people take it, are influenced by it, and so and so, it’s great. Because that then makes me part of their work. And I go on.’ So what was your question?”

At another point, Coppola decided I had been too easy on him: “Ask me the most provocative question you think you could possibly ask me.”

I thought about it for a moment.

In certain histories of the movie industry in the ’70s, such as Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, you are depicted as a sybaritic king: pasting up million-dollar royalty checks from The Godfather around the San Francisco editing suite you shared with George Lucas; flying around on a private jet; gathering more houses, and more women, to

industry. “There used to be studio films,” he said. “Now there are Marvel pictures. And what is a Marvel picture? A Marvel picture is one prototype movie that is made over and over and over and over and over again to look different. Even the talented people—you could take Dune, made by Denis Villeneuve, an extremely talented, gifted artist, and you could take No Time to Die, directed by…Gary?”

Cary Fukunaga.

“Cary Fukunaga—extremely gifted, talented, beautiful artists, and you could take both those movies, and you and I could go and pull the same sequence out of both of them and put them together. The same sequence where the cars all crash into each other. They all have that stuff in it, and they almost have to have it, if they’re going to justify their budget. And that’s the good films, and the talented film-makers.”

Unlike most people who complain about the current state of Hollywood, Coppola

“If I just had made a career of 15 mafioso movies, I would be very rich, but I wouldn’t know as much as I do now.

Now I’m still rich, but I learned more.” yourself with each titanically successful year.

Does that depiction ring true for you?

“I didn’t have a life like that,” Coppola answered. “I didn’t have a private plane at that time. I got a private plane later and it was only because of money I had made from something other than movies.”

So you were not like some Roman emperor in the ’70s?

“No, never, and even now I’m not like that.

I wasn’t a lot different than I am now. I always liked kids. I was a good camp counsellor.” He grinned. “I was a great camp counsellor.” when we talked, and Steven Spielberg was about to open his newest film, West Side Story, in theatres across the country. Coppola had not seen the movie, he told me. But he was so excited to do so that he was planning on not just going to his local Napa movie theatre to see it when it opened on Friday, but also speaking in front of whoever was there before the film, to convey his enthusiasm. “To remind them of the thrill about going to a movie theatre,” Coppola said.

“I want West Side Story to do incredible business, to remind people that the theatre debut is much more important than the so-called streaming. Streaming is just home video.”

Coppola loves movies but does not particularly recognize or enjoy the modern movie IT WAS DECEMBER

has tried many times over the years to actually change it, or even escape it entirely.

At the end of the ’70s, after he successfully financed Apocalypse Now himself and the movie proved to be a hit, Coppola decided to purchase a lot in Los Angeles and open his own studio, which he once again called Zoetrope. The plan was to have actors on contract—“who were taught how to fence and how to dance and how to everything”—and to use the newest possible digital technology; Coppola would cut out the studios and their financing and do it himself. But the very first film he made for Zoetrope Studios, 1982’s One From the Heart, was a commercial debacle: Coppola spent $26 million of his own money to make it and lost every cent. The lot was sold. “Dreams are not long,” Coppola told me. “I’ll tell you something about dreams.

Dreams don’t have time.”

This was a dark period in Coppola’s life. “It was traumatic,” he said. “I was very depressed. I was very heartbroken.

I was embarrassed for my wife because she couldn’t get credit at the grocery store. I felt I had fallen from grace, that I was a failure.” He spent the rest of the decade working on the studio fare he’d been trying to liberate himself from in order to pay back debt that he’d accrued, with varied success. Some of these movies—the pair of S.E. Hinton adaptations

Coppola directed, Rumble Fish and The Outsiders; 1986’s Peggy Sue Got Married— have aged better than others. But he kept working, even, improbably, through 1987’s Gardens of Stone, during which Coppola lost his eldest son, Gian-Carlo, in a freak accident.

“Nothing that I have ever experienced in my life comes even close to that profound thing,” he said.

Still, Coppola finished Gardens of Stone, and kept going all the way through 1997’s The Rainmaker before finally stepping back from film-making for a time. “I always felt that I didn’t leave the movie business,” he said.

“The movie business left me. It went another direction”—toward sequels and pre-existing I.P., and away from brand-name directors like Coppola. “So, the movie business changed.

As it changed, it was less interesting to me.

I began to focus more on my own personal cinema dreams.”

This, of course, is the paradox of Coppola’s career: that for all his success, he has, to some extent, been waiting to make his own films, rather than someone else’s, for practically his entire life. “I always tell my kids, like Sofia— ‘Let your films be personal. Always make it as personal as you can because you are a miracle, that you’re even alive. Then your art will be a miracle because it reflects stuff from someone who there is no other one like that.’

Whereas if you’re part of a school or ‘Yeah, I’m going to make a Marvel picture, and that’s the formula and I get it and I’ll do my best,’ sure it will still have your individuality, but as art, do that and do something else. But if you’re going to make art, let it be personal. Let it be very personal to you.”

As for Coppola and his break from moviemaking, well: He’d paid back the bank. He found himself increasingly invested in making wine; he’d owned vineyards in Napa for years, but over time the business became less and less like a hobby and more and more like another career itself as he became fascinated with how to improve and further build on what he already had. He didn’t have to work for a living. “So, I became very interested in other topics,” he told me. “Where could cinema go? I knew it was going to go somewhere.” at Inglenook, there are tasting rooms on the first floor, where at Christmas during non-pandemic times the Coppolas host a holiday reception for the town, like benevolent nobles. There is what used to be called the Library and is now called the Athenaeum. Coppola’s extensive jazz record collection is in one corner, where a painting of his also hangs. There is framed sheet music from Coppola’s maternal grandfather, Francesco Pennino, and there are many cosy armchairs, where Coppola and I sat one morning and talked. I was still trying to figure IN THE OLD CHÂTEAU

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out, among other things, what Megalopolis was actually about, and whether he was really actually going to make it.

“It’s a love story,” Coppola said, trying again. “A woman is divided between loyalties to two men. But not only two men. Each man comes with a philosophical principle.

One is her father who raised her, who taught her Latin on his lap and is devoted to a much more classical view of society, the Marcus Aurelius kind of view. The other one, who is the lover, is the enemy of the father but is dedicated to a much more progressive ‘Let’s leap into the future, let’s leap over all of this garbage that has contaminated humanity for 10,000 years. Let’s find what we really are, which is an enlightened, friendly, joyous species.’ ” I suggested to Coppola that his ambitions for the film, along with its subject matter, sounded notably optimistic for a film-maker who is best known for a quartet of films about various human failings: greed, paranoia, corruption, war.

Coppola agreed. But he said he could never really remember a time in his moviemaking career when he was making exactly the kind of thing he really wanted to make. Back when he was directing his most renowned films, he said, “I was so busy trying to survive and support my family, and have a successful career as a movie director, and not have the profound fall from grace that I saw myself as. I made this big movie, The Godfather, and the next thing I know, I’m making all these pictures that maybe are embarrassing. And of course I criticized myself.” But he also sought out challenges—“pictures I didn’t know how to make”, as he puts it now, in order to learn.

“If I just had made a career of 15 mafioso movies,” Coppola said, “I would be very rich, but I wouldn’t know as much as I do now. Now I’m still rich, but I learned more.”

When Coppola came back from his filmmaking hiatus, it was to make the kind of idiosyncratic, personal movies he’d been talking about making from the beginning: 2007’s nearly incomprehensible Youth Without Youth, an investigation of two of Coppola’s long-term fascinations, consciousness and time; a charming noir, in 2009’s Tetro; and a 2011 Roger Corman–style horror film he shot in part right here in Napa called Twixt.

None of them demanded the budget, or commensurate audience, that Megalopolis would seem to demand to be successful.

So…was he really going to spend all that money? I wondered. Where would it actually come from?

“Well, if I were Disney, or if I were Paramount, or if I were Netflix,” Coppola said, “and I had to raise $120 million, and I had to start saying yes and paying people, how would I do it? They all do it one way. You have a line of credit, okay? I have a line of credit.”

You spent years paying the bank back for

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One From the Heart. It’s a gamble, right, to go into debt to make a movie?

“A gamble for what? What’s at stake for me?”

I don’t know! That’s what I’m asking.

“Even One From the Heart, you’d be amazed at how many people are still looking at it.

And how many films did One From the Heart influence?”

I meant more of the financial impact it had on you. You lost a lot.

“I couldn’t care less about the financial impact whatsoever. It means nothing to me.”

You have a big family. Is everyone on board with this plan?

“Well, it’s not as if $120 million is the extent of what I have. I have bequeathed much to all my children. And then they themselves, the greatest thing I bequeathed to my children is their know-how and their talent. Sofia is not going to have a problem. Roman’s not going to have a problem. They’re all very capable. And they have Inglenook, where we are. There’s no debt on this place. None.

So, no.”

Last year, he sold a significant piece of his wine empire so that he could use a percentage of the sale as collateral for the line of credit

“I think the biggest thrill in life is to have a dream or imagine something and then get to see it be real. There’s nothing like that.” to finally make Megalopolis: “If I’m going to invest $120 million of my own money—which I’ve already done basically, I have it there, waiting to be written to make it—I want it to have a good result for humanity.”

Do you think of this film as the next film you’ll make or the last film you’ll make?

“I have no idea. I had an uncle who died, my father’s brother died at 103 almost. He had all his marbles. He was writing operas.

He was reading in French all of Proust.

You could talk to him. He was 102, and you could talk to him on any subject. He had a great memory. He had lived a life and knew everything about music. So, I’m 82. I could well live to be 100 or thereabouts. Say that means roughly I could well have 20 years of productivity.”

Coppola started doing maths in his chair.

“Say I’ve got another 20 years of productive life, well, if I was an insurance company I’d say, ‘Well, just for the hell of it, let’s cut that in half.’ Okay: I have 10 years of active life. That means I’m going to die at 92. Well, that would be a wonderful long life. No one could complain. So, what can I accomplish? This movie is going to take me easily three years to make.”

So, figure that takes us to 2025, he said.

“Now, if I’m still kicking, I’ll no doubt want to do this movie that I had abandoned before

this, called Distant Vision”—a “live cinema project” Coppola started around 2015, about three generations of an Italian American family not unlike his own, told in parallel with the story of the birth of television and what followed.

That’s what you would do after.

“Yeah. And what would I do after that? Well, how much time do I have?”

I don’t know!

“You want to give me another five years? I’m sure I’ll dream of something to do.”

BEFORE I LEFT, Coppola wanted to show me something—a different project, one that he’s been working on for a few years now.

Coppola is a film-maker first, of course, but the business of making wine has taken up more and more of his time over the years.

There are, he told me, 120 distinct growing areas of grapes on his property. On most vineyards, the fruit from these unique parcels of grapes go into far fewer fermenters, where they mix. But what if, Coppola wondered, you could build 120 fermenters, one for each growing area, and in doing so, learn which ones are truly great, which are average, and so on? The only limit was space and the neighbours, who probably would not take kindly to a giant fermenter plant being built anywhere they could see it. So, Coppola decided: We’ll build it underground.

He loaded me into the Leaf and drove over to the entrance of what is still a construction site. Guys in hard hats stood out front on a patch of dusty concrete. Inside it looked like the Hadron Collider—tanks and tunnels stretching out as far as the eye could see.

“If you imagine this was a baseball stadium here,” Coppola said, orienting me, “this is home plate. So you would have home plate, first base, second base, third base. So the 120 fermenters are going to all go on either side.”

The space was cavernous; it boggled the mind. We stood there taking it in. And then he walked me back to the car.

“I’m so proud of this because I think the biggest thrill in life is to have a dream or imagine something and then get to see it be real,” Coppola said. “There’s nothing like that.”

You’ve had that happen more often than most people have.

“Yeah. But the more far out it is, the more thrilling it is. I mean this was such a crazy idea. When I said we’d do it this way, I can’t tell you the reaction.”

It was not positive?

“Well, it was the other one I get: ‘It sounds great. But how are you going to really do it?’ ” Which is something you’ve heard a lot in life.

Coppola threw the car in reverse.

“I hear it all the time,” he said.

zach baron

is gq ’s senior staff writer.

WHERE TO BUY The products featured editorially have been ordered from the following stores.

Prices and availability were checked at the time of going to press.

A Alexander McQueen alexandermcqueen.com Alighieri alighieri.com Amaare Delhi, 011-2461 9098 Ami Paris amiparis.fr Amit Aggarwal Delhi, 88606 78622 Anderson anderson.it Ann Demeulemeester anndemeulemeester.com Apple apple.com B Balenciaga balenciaga.com Balmain balmain.com Blum & Poe blumandpoe.com Bleue Burnham bleueburnham.com Bobo Calcutta Kolkata, 98311 78543 Bode bodenewyork.com Boss Mumbai, Palladium, 022-2491 2210; Delhi, DLF Emporio, 011-4604 0773 Bottega Veneta Mumbai, Palladium 022-6615 2291; Delhi, DLF Emporio, 011-4609 8262 Bulgari Delhi, 011-4053 8620 Burberry Mumbai, Palladium, 022-4080 1994; Delhi, DLF Emporio, 011-4652 9850; Bengaluru, UB City, 080-4173 8825

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF SABYASACHI.

C Calvin Klein Underwear Mumbai, 022-2648 4794; Delhi, 011-4108 9582; Bengaluru, 080-4098 6229 Cartier Delhi, 011-4678 8888 Chrome Hearts chromehearts.com Converse Mumbai, Phoenix Marketcity, 022-6236 2583; Gurugram, 0124-466 5406 D DFC daysforclothing.com Diesel Mumbai, Palladium, 022-4004 6050; Delhi, DLF Emporio, 011-4087 0072; Bengaluru, UB City, 080-4173 8001 Dior Men Delhi, DLF Emporio, 011-4600 5900 Dolce & Gabbana dolcegabbana.com Dries Van Noten driesvannoten.be Dsquared2 dsquared2.com Dunhill dunhill.com

F Falke falke.com Fendi fendi.com G Giorgio Armani Delhi, DLF Emporio, 011-4102 7122 Giuseppe Zanotti giuseppezanottidesign.com Givenchy givenchy.com H Helmut Lang helmutlang.com Hermès Mumbai, 022-2271 7400; Delhi, 011-2688 5501 Heron Preston heronpreston.com J Jacob & Co. jacobandco.com John Lawrence Sullivan john-lawrence-sullivan.com Junya Watanabe instagram.com/junyawatanabe L Lanvin lanvin.com Lexus Mumbai, 022-6255 6565; Delhi, 1800-300-53987; Bengaluru, 80677 02202 Line Out Line lineoutline.in Loewe loewe.com Louis Vuitton Mumbai, 022-6664 4134; Delhi, DLF Emporio, 011-4669 0000; Bengaluru, UB City, 080-4246 0000 Lucchese lucchese.com M Maison Alaïa maison-alaia.com Martine Ali martineali.com Maximum Henry maximumhenry.com

Micromega Eyewear micromegaeyewear.com Mikimoto mikimotoamerica.com Misho mishodesigns.com Moscot moscot.com N Namacheko namacheko.com Nanushka nanushka.com New Balance Delhi, 011-4233 4077 Nick Fouquet nickfouquet.com O Omega Mumbai, 022-6655 0351; Delhi, 011-4151 3255; Bengaluru, 080-4098 2106 Onitsuka Tiger Mumbai, Palladium, 022-6237 7512; Delhi, Select Citywalk, 011-4015 8204 Outhouse outhouse-jewellery.com P Paul Smith Mumbai, Palladium, 022-4006 5089; Delhi, DLF Emporio, 011-4604 0734; Bengaluru, UB City, 080-4173 8882 Prada prada.com Prxkhxr prxkhxr.com R Raf Simons rafsimons.com Rebecca Elbek rebeccaelbek.com Richard Mille richardmille.com Reiss reiss.com Rick Owens rickowens.eu Rolex Mumbai, DiA, 022-2204 2299; Delhi, Kapoor Watch Co., 011-4134 5678; Bengaluru, 080-2211 3976 RR Blue rathore.com S S&N by Shantnu Nikhil shantanunikhil.com

Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello Delhi, The Chanakya, 78771 23123 Salvatore Ferragamo Mumbai, 022-3062 1018; Delhi, DLF Emporio, 011-4660 9084; Bengaluru, UB City, 080-4302 0456 Shane Gabier instagram.com/shanegabier Shriks shriks.in S. S. Daley ssdaley.com Sugahara sugahara.com T Tasva tasva.com Theorem Delhi, 011-4107 5344 Tiffany & Co. tiffany.co.in Tokyo James tokyojames.co.uk Tom Dixon tomdixon.net Triune triune.store U Urvashi Kaur Delhi, 98738 00720 V V&A vam.ac.uk Vacheron Constantin vacheron-constantin.com Valentino valentino.com Vans Mumbai, Phoenix Skyzone, 022-6615 3152; Delhi, Ambience Mall, 011-4087 0151; Bengaluru, Phoenix Marketcity, 080-6726 6158 Versace versace.com Vetements vetementswebsite.com Vito Schnabel Gallery vitoschnabel.com Vivienne Westwood viviennewestwood.com W Willy Chavarria willychavarria.com

E Elliot Rhodes elliotrhodes.com Elli Halili ellihalili.com Erdem erdem.com Esenshel esenshel.com Eytys eytys.com

The Sabyasachi flaghip store in New Delhi.

GQ Top Shelf Fashion, Grooming and Luxury in standout style

For Those Glorious Greys

A Statement Worth Remembering

Grey hair — slick, stylish and here to stay. But pollution and other stressors can make grey hair look yellowish. The Schwarzkopf Professional’s Goodbye Yellow Sulphate Free Shampoo is a pigmented neutralising shampoo that cleanses and neutralises underlying warm tones. Integrated with Bonding technology, it helps strengthen the hair, and is the perfect aid to achieve the grey-haired, chic, and sophisticated look.

Few things are magnificent enough to be timeless pieces that are able to withstand the tribulations of time and trends. Since 1860, TAG Heuer has embodied avant-garde, precision and bold styles that have made an indelible mark in the watch industry. Built for diving, the new TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 200 with a black sunray brushed dial is the ultimate everyday watch. Updated with a new case and bracelet and powered by the automatic Calibre 5, the Aquaracer raises the bar for performance and style, and is a must-have masterpiece.

₹1000. Available on all leading ecommerce platforms

₹229500. Available at all authorised retail across India

Sustainability Meets Aesthetic

For the Debonair Charm

Your home is your sacred space, and it deserves to look the part while reflecting who you are. With individually handcrafted pieces and hand-cut designs, FabIndia creates products that are visually appealing and practical to use. Their new collection, made with the highest level of craftsmanship and quality, is sure to make entertainment at home more enjoyable. Explore the alluring edit of wall decor, and transform your space in a wink with a variety of designs, mix-match of different styles, or even your very own unique wall installation. A brand built on artisanal heritage and tradition, their products are natural, craft based, contemporary, and affordable, ensuring a great value for your money.

For more information, visit fabindia.com or follow @fabindiahome on Instagram

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A clean and fresh attire not only helps elevate your look, but also gives you a boost of confidence. Designed to be quick, powerful, and safe, the Philips Garment Steamer is the perfect gadget for everything, from quick touch-ups to delicate steaming. It removes creases easily, and is safe for intricately designed garments and all ironable fabrics including ethnic, formal or designer wear.

It is the perfect appliance to help achieve the ideal debonair charm.

For more information, visit phillips.co.in

Only the Best Quality, vintage, and heritage — Maison Mumm, known for its capacity for innovation takes to heart their motto, “Only the Best”. The Mumm Cordon Rouge, Mumm’s heartbeat, is the perfect beverage for those opulent, high-brow events, epitomising the brand’s outstanding craftsmanship and the avant-garde style, and their want to further their expertise in their quest for excellence. ₹4600 (Delhi), ₹6300 (Mumbai).

For more information, follow @ghmumm on Instagram

FORM IV (See Rule 8 of The Registration Of Newspapers (Central) Rules, 1956) Statement about ownership and other particulars about newspaper GQ (English) as required to be published in the first issue every year after the last day of February.

1. Place of Publication

Conde Nast (India) Private Limited 2nd Floor, Darabshaw House Shoorji Vallabhdas Marg Ballard Estate, Mumbai 400 001

2. Periodicity of its Publication

Monthly

3. Printer’s Name

Armaity Amaria for Conde Nast (India) Private Limited

Nationality

Indian

Whether a citizen of India?

Yes

Address:

A-20, Rustom Baug, Sant Savata Marg, Byculla East, Mumbai-400 027

Our Favourite Plus-One This new year, plunge into the unfailing pool of layering and enjoy the company of the season’s favourite plus one. A partner-instyle that will accompany you to downtown dinners and family gatherings — we’re talking about Levi’s smart range of trucker jackets;, the perfect additional garment is uniquely crafted to complement you. With traditional and unconventional styles, the dynamic collection has something for all.

For more information, visit levi.com

4. Publisher’s Name

Nationality

Indian

Whether a citizen of India?

Yes

Address:

A-20, Rustom Baug, Sant Savata Marg, Byculla East, Mumbai-400 027

5. Editor’s Name

The Perfect Time Manner maketh man, but a dapper attire completes him — and a watch can exude enough opulence to elevate your look and innovate it completely. Inspired by American creativity and ingenuity, Fossil is a brand that is committed to making quality, fashionable timepieces that exude taste and class. Polished, sophisticated and timelessly chic, Fossil’s Bronson Automatic is an outstanding demonstration of watchmaking. A mechanical timepiece powered by a user’s natural movements, this selfwinding wristwatch is a work of art to be adorned on your wrist.

The exposed skeleton dial displays the intricate mechanisms at play, encased in a smokey grey stainless-steel strap. The stateof-the-art features coupled with a masterfully crafted design makes this timepiece a stellar one to add to your collection.

For more information, visit fossil.in

Armaity Amaria for Conde Nast (India) Private Limited

CJ Kurrien

Nationality

Indian

Whether a citizen of India?

Yes

Address:

35 A Usha Sadan SB Singh Road Mumbai 400 005

6. Names and addresses of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than one per cent of the total capital.

Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. One World Trade Centre, New York, NY 10007-0090

I, Armaity Amaria, hereby declare that the particulars given above a true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Sd/Signature of Publisher Date: March 1, 2022

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GQ World

BY TRACEY K. BERGLUND.

Humour

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IT'S WHAT'S NEW NOW PHOTO: TARUN VISHWA/GQ INDIA

WHAT A MAN'S GOT TO DO

PHOTO: R BURMAN/GQ INDIA