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THE FALL FASHION ISSUE The Great Suit Revival Is Here Justin Theroux in Tokyo The NFL’s Swaggiest Young QB THE TENACIOUS HUSTLE OF

Rami Malek

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dior boutiques 800.929.dior (3467)

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NEW E-BOUTIQUE. DIOR.COM

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TOMFORD.COM

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GUCCI

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A PORTFOLIO BY GUS POWELL IN COLL ABORATION WITH JOEL MEYEROWITZ CELEBRATING THE OPENING OF OUR NEWEST NORDSTROM FL AGSHIP AT 57 T H & BROADWAY, NYC

EX P ER T TAILORING IN EVERY STORE EASY ONLINE ORDER PICKUP & RETURNS ST YLE ADVICE IN STORES & ONLINE

BALENCIAGA

A N O P E N MI N D I S T H E B E ST LO O K

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CONTENTS

GQ September The Fix

Behind the Scenes With the People Who Make GQ

The Wild-Style Suit Revival. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Fashion Drops...... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

Contributor

How THOM BROWNE ’s Radical Suit Found Its Way to L e B R O N JA M E S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 A Q&A With TOM FORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 WE S L AN G

Grooming Gods: J OHN S TAMOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 GQ Legend JIM MO ORE Just Wrote the Book on Suiting............ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Monsieur KIM J ONE S , Dior Men’s Artistic Director... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

Young, who wrote this month’s cover story on Rami Malek, is fond of his role as Elliot on Mr. Robot. “Elliot and I are both tough cookies on the outside and tender muffins on the inside,” she says. But Young and the actual Malek don’t share the same predisposition for tripping in public. (Malek famously took a spill at the 2019 Oscars.) As Young describes it: “I’m physically agile but emotionally clumsy.”

Office Grails

Features

→ MARI UYEHARA

Culture editor

Cover Story: R AMI MAL EK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 FA SHION :

MOLLY YOUNG Contributing writer

on the Patek Philippe Nautilus. . . . . . . . 92

Strength of Character. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

“I grew up in the woods, so I feel a spiritual connection with the wooden buttons on this vintage Saint Laurent jacket.”

↓ KEIR NOVESKY

Design director

“There’s nothing cooler than wearing a classic piece that’s been passed down to you. Miss you, Grandpa!”

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF MOLLY YOUNG; MAT T MARTIN (3)

Missionary J OHN CHAU’ s Fatal Encounter With the Sentinelese Tribe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Artist K ATHERIN E BERNHARDT . … … … … . . . . . . . . . . . 148 BAKER MAYFIEL D

Is Feeling Dangerous. . . . . . . . . . . 154

JUS TIN THEROUX

in Japan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

On the Cover Photograph by Ryan McGinley. Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu. Jacket (price upon request), shirt, $890, and pants, $990, by Saint Laurent

by Anthony Vaccarello. Watch, $9,900,

by Cartier. Ring, $2,960, by Tiffany & Co. Hair by Thomas Dunkin using Sebastian Professional. Grooming by Cheri Keating using Dior. Produced by Hen’s Tooth Productions.

market editor

“I don’t usually wear a lot of color, but I very much needed to own this sweater.”

S E P T E M B E R

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R A LPH L AUR EN

ralphlauren.com

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CONTENTS

STYLIST: MOBOLAJI DAWODU

GQ September

For our cover story on actor Rami Malek, see page 116.

Sweater, $920, by Hermès. Pants, $348, by Boss. Watch, $8,100, by Rolex. Ring, $2,430, by Cartier.

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CONTENTS

STYLIST: GEORGE CORTINA

GQ September

Model Matthew Noszka. For our fall fashion portfolio, titled “Strength of Character,” see page 128.

Coat, $12,395, by Dsquared2. Shirt, $32, by Tripp NYC.

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J A C K S O N

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CONTENTS

The wild-style suit revival, featuring actor Charlie Plummer. See page 59.

Jacket, $2,300, shirt, $445, and pants, $1,390, by Bode. Necklace (top), his own. Necklace (bottom), $150, by Miansai.

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R E E N B E R G

STYLIST: JON TIETZ

GQ September

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BEST

GET YOURS AT GQ.COM/BESTSTUFFBOX

STUFF

Every man needs a clean pair of white sneakers, so we’re glad to bring you these beauties from New Republic in our Fall 2019 Best Stuff Box. Wear ’em with anything you want—but if you’re stuck for style inspiration, try them with a pair of bright ribbed socks.

(We put a pair of those in the box, too.)

In the Fall 2019 box you’ll also find goods from: Rains

by Humankind CB2 + GQ Grown Alchemist & More

$200+ VALUE FOR ONLY $49 Learn more at gq.com/beststuffbox

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR ↓ The suit will never lose its edge as long as Atlanta-based tailor extraordinaire Sid Mashburn is on the case.

The Suit

↓ Mashburn’s “Virgil No. 3” suit style single-handedly gave me my mojo back.

(Sid makes the boots and shirt, too, BTW.)

↓ Sid tells me he’s got 12 different sports jackets and six different suits, all in the Virgil style, hitting his stores this fall.

← Sidney Poitier as detective Virgil Tibbs in the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night. The way he wore this suit gave Mashburn the inspiration for the Virgil—his “updated, sexier” sack suit.

Suitless Era I do it between two and four days a week.

Not because I have to, but because I want to. I get dressed faster on days when I wear a suit. I feel grown-up, handsome, even a little glamorous, on suit days.

I LIKE WEARING SUITS.

But recently I began to feel at odds with my suit wardrobe. Some of my older suits suddenly felt uncomfortably tight.

Constricting. Dorky. Ugh. And I know it’s not just me: The suit has been in a tricky place for the past few years. Silicon Valley rejected the suit as a symbol of a whole global infrastructure that needed disrupting. The corporate world abandoned it. Fashion, too. My generation’s love of the sneaker and the T-shirt has evolved into an all-consuming obsession with product and brands.

And yet!

And yet the suit stays in the picture— you just have to know where to look.

Well, here at GQ, we know where to look. And that’s what a lot of the fashion pages in this big fall fashion issue are all about: suits that feel on point, even in this strange, almost suitless moment. Some of the suits in this issue are wild. Some are tame. But they’re all unfussy. They are

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suits for the era of the slash and the side hustle. Suits that were designed not for the corporate o∞ce but for the street, the co≠ee meeting, the linkup at the bar.

For me this new suit energy just recently clicked into place. I was in Atlanta for my 20th high school reunion, and some friends and I stopped by Atlanta’s great men’s shop, Sid Mashburn. The fabric of a certain suit caught my eye. I pulled it o≠ the rack. The tag noted that the style was called the “Virgil No. 3.” I tried it on.

It fit like a dream—a new dream. It was loose, easygoing, chill. The closer I looked, the more I noticed that this suit had no details. No chest darts, no ticket pocket, no side vents, no sharp tapering, no working buttons, no “interesting” lining. It just hung o≠ my frame…perfectly. It didn’t even need tailoring. For the first time in my entire life, I had them leave the jacket as is, right o≠ the rack. Since that day, I’ve been wearing it twice a week.

The Virgil was a revelation. To better understand its origins, I called up the man who designed it. “The Virgil is named for Sidney Poitier’s character in In the Heat of the Night,” Sid Mashburn tells me in his smooth Mississippi accent. “It’s the sexier, cooler sack suit. It’s got tracing without too much shaping. There’s no pinch at the waist or anything—it just follows the line of your body. It’s clean, unfussy, almost minimal. I’m wearing one today!”

If you’re wondering, legend has it that the sack suit got that name because it fits you like a potato sack. In a good way.

It is as chilled out and un-sartorial as a suit can get. It’s for the guy who loves being the only one at the table wearing a suit—but doesn’t want to feel like an out-of-touch dorkus doing it.

Sure, the sneaker rules the menswear world right now. But thanks to guys like Sid Mashburn—and me, and hopefully you—the suit abides.

Will Welch EDITOR IN CHIEF

CLOCKWISE FROM LEF T: COURTESY OF MASHBURN; MAT TEO MOBILIO; COURTESY OF MASHBURN; THE MIRISCH CORPORATION/RONALD GRANT ARCHIVE/AL AMY

for the

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Chief Business Officer

®

Editor in Chief

Susan D. Plagemann Visuals

Will Welch

Victoria Graham

e x e c u t i v e d e s i g n d i r e cto r

Matt Martin

b o o k i n g s d i r e cto r

s e n i o r v i s u a l s e d i to r

Robert Vargas

v i s u a l s e d i to r s

Sarah Schmidt

Jennifer Aborn, Andie Diemer, Jared Schwartz

v i s u a l s d i r e cto r

b o o k i n g s a s s i s ta n t

d i r e cto r o f e d i to r i a l o p e r at i o n s

Roxanne Behr

fa s h i o n d i r e cto r

Mobolaji Dawodu

d i g i ta l d i r e cto r

Jonathan Wilde a rt i c l e s e d i to r

Geoffrey Gagnon f e at u r e s e d i to r

Daniel Riley

Stephanie Hurtado

Video

vice president, video

Eric Leffler

s u p e rv i s i n g v i d e o p r o d u c e r

James Pettigrew

senior video producer

Noel Howard

e n t e rta i n m e n t d i r e cto r

Art & Production

s p e c i a l p r oj e ct s e d i to r

Keir Novesky

Dana Mathews

Mark Anthony Green s t y l e e d i to r

Noah Johnson

d e s i g n d i r e cto r

d e p u t y a rt d i r e cto r

Simon Abranowicz

p r o d u ct i o n d i r e cto r

s i t e e d i to r

Jim Gomez

s e n i o r s ta f f w r i t e r

John Markic

Chris Gayomali Zach Baron

s e n i o r e d i to r

Sam Schube

d e p u t y m a n a g i n g e d i to r

Codie Steensma

c u lt u r e e d i to r

Mari Uyehara

e n t e rta i n m e n t e d i to r

Eugene Shevertalov

s e n i o r a s s o c i at e e d i to r

Benjy Hansen-Bundy s ta f f w r i t e r s

Gabriella Paiella, Clay Skipper, Rachel Tashjian, Jay Willis, Cam Wolf

a s s o c i at e e d i to r s

Brennan Carley, Samuel Hine

s e n i o r p r o d u ct i o n m a n a g e r

p r o d u ct i o n m a n a g e r

Timothy Meneely

lead web producer

Ben Pardee

Copy & Research

head of marketing

Kimberly Fasting-Berg h e a d o f s a l e s , fa s h i o n – i n t e r n at i o n a l David Stuckey h e a d o f s a l e s , fa s h i o n – a m e r i c a n Amy Oelkers he ad of sales, be aut y Lucy Kriz h e a d o f s a l e s , a u to Tracey Baldwin h e a d o f s a l e s , m e d i a / e n t e rta i n m e n t Bill Mulvihill h e a d o f sa l es , b i z /f i /t ec h Doug Grinspan head of sales, vice Laura Sequenzia h e a d o f s a l e s , lu x u ry Risa Aronson head of sales, cpg Jordana Pransky head of sales, home Jeff Barish h e a d o f s a l e s , h e a lt h Carrie Moore h e a d o f s a l e s , t r av e l Beth Lusko-Gunderman h e a d o f o p e r at i o n s

Deborah Brett

v p , f i n a n c e & b u s i n e s s d e v e lo p m e n t

Sylvia W. Chan

v p , fa s h i o n & b r a n d m a r k e t i n g

Rachael Klein

a s s o c i at e m a n a g i n g e d i to r

e x e c u t i v e b u s i n e s s d i r e cto r

Laura L. Vitale

Jennifer Jackson

s e n i o r c o p y e d i to r

Published by Condé Nast

r e s e a r c h d i r e cto r

Roger Lynch

research manager

United States

Rebecca O’Connor Jordan Reed

Mick Rouse

l e g a l a f fa i r s e d i to r , content integrit y group

chief executive officer

chief financial officer

David E. Geithner

a s s i s ta n t to t h e e d i to r i n c h i e f

Lucas Zaleski

chief revenue & marketing officer

e d i to r i a l b u s i n e s s a s s i s ta n t

Contributors

chief people officer

Colin Groundwater Danielle Cohen

e d i to r i a l a s s i s ta n t

c r e at i v e d i r e cto r - at - l a r g e

Jim Moore

Alex Shultz

contributing st ylists

Fashion

corresp ondents

Matthew Henson, Simon Rasmussen

Pamela Drucker Mann JoAnn Murray

c h i e f c o m m u n i c at i o n s o f f i c e r

Joseph Libonati c h i e f o f s ta f f

Samantha Morgan

Karthic Bala

Taryn Bensky

Doug Bock Clark, Robert Draper, Sean Flynn, Alice Gregory, Chris Heath, Julia Ioffe, Jeanne Marie Laskas, Drew Magary, Brett Martin, Michael Paterniti, Nathaniel Penn, Wells Tower, Amy Wallace, Jason Zengerle

a s s o c i at e fa s h i o n m a r k e t e d i to r

c o lu m n i s t s

evp–consumer revenue

d e p u t y fa s h i o n d i r e cto r

Matt Sebra

s e n i o r fa s h i o n e d i to r

Jon Tietz

s e n i o r fa s h i o n m a r k e t e d i to r

Miles Pope

fa s h i o n a s s i s ta n t

Joe Holder, Wes Lang

Haley Gilbreath

Communications

Audience Development

Carly Holden

d i r e cto r , a u d i e n c e d e v e lo p m e n t

Joel Pavelski

senior manager, social media

Luke Leifeste

e x e c u t i v e c o m m u n i c at i o n s d i r e cto r

m a n a g e r , n e w s l e t t e r s t r at e gy

Stephanie Talmadge

a s s o c i at e m a n a g e r , s o c i a l m e d i a

Artistic Director

Anna Wintour S E

R E C

Y

P L E

A

C L E

commerce writers

Yang-Yi Goh, Daniel Varghese

Monica Ray evp–research,

a n a ly t i c s

& a u d i e n c e d e v e lo p m e n t

Stephanie Fried

h e a d c r e at i v e d i r e cto r

president

Wolfgang Blau

E

N

IS

H

Megan Gustashaw

Craig Kostelic

International

Alex Pisauro

T

c o n t e n t p r oj e ct m a n a g e r , b e s t s t u f f b ox

chief business officer, a d v e rt i s i n g r e v e n u e

c o m m u n i c at i o n s a s s o c i at e

c o m m e r c e e d i to r

Martin Mulkeen

c h i e f d ata o f f i c e r

Raúl Martinez

Ashlee Bobb

Nicole Bae

Commerce

Edward Cudahy

c o m m u n i c at i o n s m a n a g e r

s e n i o r a n a lys t

Alex Wedel

c h i e f t e c h n o lo gy o f f i c e r

M A G A Z

I

Those submitting manuscripts, photographs, artwork, or other materials to Gentlemen’s Quarterly for consideration should not send originals unless specifically requested to do so by Gentlemen’s Quarterly in writing. Unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, and other submitted materials must be accompanied by a self-addressed overnight-delivery return envelope, postage prepaid. However, Gentlemen’s Quarterly is not responsible for any unsolicited submissions.

Condé Nast Entertainment president

Oren Katzeff e v p – m ot i o n p i ct u r e s Jeremy Steckler e v p – a lt e r n at i v e p r o g r a m m i n g Joe LaBracio evp–cné studios Al Edgington

Chairman of the Board Jonathan Newhouse

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Bal Harbour

South Coast Plaza

j o h nv a r v a t o s . c o m

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Luc ky Blue S m it h Brook ly n , N Y 2019

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1 8 - PAG E S U I T S P E C TAC U L A R

The suit is back in some of its wildest, weirdest, most expressive forms ever.

Here, rising Hollywood star CHARLIE PLUMMER and NFL Pro Bowler D e ANDRE H O PKIN S flex in eight different suits that are every bit as fly as your favorite streetwear.

T h e F i x

By SAMUEL HINE

Welcome To The Wild 1

GROOMING: BENJAMIN THIGPEN USING RÉVIVE SKINCARE

The Official Suit of the Suitless Era…

Style

…which suddenly means that wearing a traditional American sack suit

by Sid Mashburn (our favorite southerngentleman tailor) with a peach shirt and a fat silk tie is as offbeat and rebellious as dressing like Sid Vicious. The thing that makes a sack suit so 2019? That loose, chill, almost shapeless fit.

Suit Revival

Suit, $1,650, by Sid Mashburn.

Shirt, $1,050,

by Brioni. Tie, $185, by Drake’s.

Beanie, $67,

by Frenn.

P H O T O G R A P H S S T Y L E D

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The 2019 Suit Revival

The F i x

A Word About NFL Star

DeAndre Hopkins

arena-tunnel outfit starts as a dream. One that, as dreams so often do, leads to Paris.

Last summer DeAndre Hopkins, the Houston Texans wide receiver, went to the Maison Margiela boutique to find something special. The sales clerk rooted around the back room, then emerged with a $6,000 vest constructed entirely of belts—one of only three in the world. Hopkins remembers the feeling: “I got to have it.” Four months later, a photographer waiting in the stadium in Houston before a Cowboys-Texans game snaps a picture of him wearing the vest.

The dream becomes a fit.

During his first four years in the league, Hopkins plowed through franchise receiving records while playing with an assembly line of mediocre quarterbacks who came and went faster than Trump cabinet members. NFL wide receivers often get credit for the numbers they rack up: receiving yards, touchdowns, catches. But Hopkins’s most impressive achievements are the goose eggs on his résumé. Take last season, when he tied a team record for catches, but only by dropping exactly zero of the balls thrown his way.

When it leaked that late Texans owner Bob McNair compared players kneeling during the national anthem to “inmates running the prison,” Hopkins left practice—and almost sat out the game entirely. “It feels like I’m a slave again,” he says. “Listen to the master, go to work.” It was a clarifying moment for him and his teammates. “We realize now what goes on above us,” he says. “You can’t sugarcoat that.”

But growing up in South Carolina, Hopkins learned to make the most of whatever was thrown his way. Money was tight, and while his siblings went for toys, Hopkins went to Macy’s to inspect fabrics for durability. He earned the nickname Ralph because he wore so much Polo. He’s already anointed himself the best receiver in the league. And now, with a GQ reporter sitting in front of him, he awards himself another title: “I’m the best-dressed player,” he says, “shit, I think, in all of sports.” — C A M W O L F A TRULY TRANSCENDENT

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Rebirth of the Black Suit The black suit is generally prescribed for those who want to blend in. But this one—with a flamboyant, molto Italian doublebreasted peak lapel—is for those who want to flex.

GROOMING: BARRY WHITE FOR BARRYWHITEMENSGROOMING.COM

Suit, $3,645, by Dolce & Gabbana.

Turtleneck, $1,365,

by Loro Piana.

Loafers, $975, by Bally. Sunglasses, $1,075, by Jacques Marie Mage. His own watch by Rolex.

Rings (on right hand, from left), $400 and $175,

by Love Adorned Vintage. Ring (on left hand), his own.

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The F i x

The Reverse David Byrne Dries Van Noten’s fall collection was inspired by his personal heroes, including the Talking Heads frontman. In the hands of the Belgian fashion legend, Byrne’s infamous Stop Making Sense suit gets flipped, with exaggerated trousers instead of oversized shoulders. My God, Dries, what have you done?!

The 2019 Suit Revival

Jacket, $1,310, and pants, $985, by Dries Van Noten.

Shirt, $700, by Gucci.

Tie, $205, by Drake’s. Loafers, $645, by Tod’s.

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When the World Is Your Office London designer Craig Green’s elaborately layered suit recalls functional clothing of a different sort: chore coats, hospital scrubs, and tae kwon do doboks.

Think of it as the new uniform for our post-work future.

Coat, $2,190, shirt (price upon request), and pants, $880, by Craig Green. Shoes, $10, by Pearl River Mart. Socks, $30, by Pantherella.

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The F i x

The 2019 Suit Revival

A Word About Actor

Charlie Plummer

thinks about the role that got away. It was last summer, and the then 19-year-old actor, whose star seems to have risen overnight, wanted it so bad he wrote to the director, begging for the spot. “I was like, ‘Please…,’ ” Plummer recalls, postbrunch at the Bowery Hotel.

The initial response was positive.

“My agent was like, ‘Yeah, the producers are big fans.… They haven’t started hiring assistants yet, but when they do, they’ll let you know for sure,’ ” he says, laughing. The job was P.A. on the set of Joker. He got passed over. Plummer knows it’s weird for a breakout teenage movie star, who has been compared to a young Leonardo DiCaprio by the likes of Ridley Scott, to try to score a gig grabbing Todd Phillips’s co≠ee. But he’s also utterly serious: “Joaquin Phoenix is my favorite actor working today, and he’s playing my favorite character in all of pop culture, and it’s shooting in the city that I live in. How could I not be there?”

Plummer was raised in Cold Spring, New York, and did the child-actor thing against his parents’ advice. Perhaps his mom and dad, who both work in the industry, sensed that if he made it through the child-role gantlet, he would be expected to play a series of teenagers put in bad situations by their fathers, which is exactly what happened in Lean on Pete (alcoholic dad), All the Money in the World (heroin-addicted Getty dad), and The Clovehitch Killer (serial-killer dad).

In October, Plummer will star in Hulu’s Looking for Alaska, the series based on John Green’s cult classic Y.A. novel. (His dad in the show, he notes with relief, is not a major character.)

Plummer’s Buddhist faith helps him keep a level head—fanboying his idols notwithstanding—as he ascends toward heartthrob status. But he admits it’s still a challenge. “If you’re like, ‘Wow, man, I am the next fucking Leo, let’s fucking go,’ or you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I’ll never be that, I’m such a fraud,’ either way you’re kind of in trouble,” Plummer says. “I’m making sure 100 percent of my focus is just on the work. Nothing is guaranteed, and all you’ve got is what’s right in front of you.” — S A M U E L H I N E CHARLIE PLUMMER STILL

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The Italian Tuck Here’s proof that the suiting world is fully inside out: For her fall collection, Miuccia Prada made doublebreasted jackets that are meant to be tucked in—with a cardigan on top (and two belts). If that seems a little too experimental for you, we get it. Just go for the eyepopping blue shoes instead.

Jacket, $2,690, cardigan, $890, pants, $980, belts, $440 (for nylon) and $525 (for leather), and shoes (price upon request) by Prada.

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The F i x

If You’re Feeling Dangerous When Rick Owens sets his mind to building a suit, one thing’s for sure: It’s not gonna be inspired by Fred Astaire or Cary Grant. Instead, the goth godhead has developed an iconic silhouette all his own, combining a cropped single-button blazer with long, drapey shorts. Go try one on—you’ll be surprised how easy it is to pull off, especially if you’re on the tall side.

The 2019 Suit Revival

Blazer, $2,320, sweater, $620, and pants, $1,020, by Rick Owens. Shoes, $920,

by Sacai. Socks, $18 (for three pairs), by Gold Toe. Watch, $11,500, by Hublot.

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The New Hue Let’s face it: We all need at least one suit with a slim fit.

That doesn’t mean it has to be predictable. Sprezzatura king Brunello Cucinelli’s classic cut comes in a Lambrusco colorway with unlikely brass buttons.

Suit, $5,445, by Brunello Cucinelli.

Shirt, $408, by Bode. Shoes, $795,

by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.

Necklace (top), his own. Necklace (bottom), $150,

by Miansai.

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The F i x

The 2019 Suit Revival

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It’s Not Goodwill, It’s Gucci For Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele, the golden era of the power suit wasn’t the Wall Street ’80s—it was the 1970s, when vast lapels and gargantuan plaids ruled. Through the magic of fashion, Michele has airlifted this look out of thriftstore bins and landed it right back on the runway. And we gotta say, it looks bossier than ever.

Jacket, $3,500, sweater, $980, shirt, $780, pants, $1,200, and tie, $360,

by Gucci.

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The F i x

17 Ways to

Expand Your Suiting Universe

Versace Invents Baroque Business Casual Once symbols of conformity, the shirt ($795) and tie ($225) are now a ticket to your tailored-clothing renaissance.

B y SAMUEL HINE

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PROP ST YLIST: DUSTIN HUBBS AT MARK EDWARD INC.

The 2019 Suit Revival

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The 2019 Suit Revival

The F i x

Corneliani’s Pipe Dream

A Proper Party Suit

Yes, you can wear a pajama shirt with a suit. And in one of fashion’s great paradoxes, a piped shirt will actually look more formal than most dress shirts ($375).

Stella McCartney’s louche velvet suit recalls the psychedelic style of the “Strawberry Fields Forever”–era Beatles (jacket, $1,640, and pants, $1,090).

Hermès Earns Its Stripes For a fresh twist on its iconic patterned ties, Hermès cooked up these schoolboy stripes featuring a bridle belt—a nod to the house’s equestrian heritage ($195).

Ami Redefines “White Shoe”

Gucci’s New Wrist Heat

Worried that your navy suit looks too staid? Right this way, sir, to Alexandre Mattiussi’s derbycreeper hybrids, which put the hard in hard-bottoms ($585).

If you want a watch that’s as much a conversation starter (it has 40 straps to choose from) as a timekeeper, look no further than the super-’70s Gucci Grip (watch, $1,650, and strap, $220).

A Cold Collab Reservoir Dogs proved that every suit needs a striking pair of shades. A-Cold-Wall* teamed up with Retrosuperfuture on these sunnies, which have the perfect

A Boss Move for the Planet Boss’s newest tailoring uses traceable wool, which helps ensure this two-piece is made with the highest ethical standards from sheep to suit ($1,395).

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($4,160).

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PRESENTED BY

October 11-13, 2019 New York City newyorker.com/festival @NewYorkerFest #NewYorkerFest

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The F i x The 2019 Suit Revival

Celine’s Bourgeois Bit Hedi Slimane’s latest must-have shoe is a refined loafer with an archival C-logo bit on the vamp ($890).

Buckle Up With Saint Laurent If your suit calls for a belt, you should strap on something that’s equally luxurious and exciting ($495).

Herno’s Big Mood You know those guys who think a suit jacket counts as outerwear?

Don’t be like them; wear something that will keep you warm and your kit dry ($1,035).

Polo Goes West

Gatorade for Your Fit All other Chelsea boots can officially retire now that Giuseppe Zanotti’s “Abbey” model is here. Wear with a tux to really turn heads ($995).

SSS World Corp Gets Ritzy Justin O’Shea’s hosiery shouts out his Parisian home away from home ($50).

Lemaire’s Dad Shirt The easiest way to tank a killer suit is with a boring button-down.

Go for this groovy shirt

by Lemaire instead ($524).

PROP ST YLIST (HERNO COAT ): STELL A REY AT MARK EDWARD INC.

Ralph Lauren has long been fascinated by cowboy culture.

Think of the graphics on this cord suit as his yee-haw! mood board (sport coat, $998, and pants, $298).

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The F i x

How

The 2019 Suit Revival

HEN THOM BROWNE

debuted his signature shrunken suit in 2001, he had five made for himself and wore the schoolboysize blazers and tailored shorts every day. Reactions were not promising.

“The initial reception was: ‘What are you doing?’ ” Browne recalls.

Needless to say, his fortunes soon changed. Now you can’t swing a Thom Browne dachshund bag in Brooklyn without hitting a grown man wearing high-water pants. But the true legacy of the Thom Browne suit may only just be coming into focus. It has become the unexpected uniform for some of the world’s biggest athletes.

Literally the biggest. Check out LeBron James’s personal Thom Browne kit here. Several years ago, perhaps in a quest to solidify his rep as the NBA’s menswear classicist in a league of radically dressed Westbrooks and Hardens, James began ordering custom Thom Browne. “It happened very naturally,” Browne says. “LeBron just started buying the collection—I didn’t even know that he was, initially.”

James’s former teammate Dwyane Wade was also a fan, showing up at Paris Fashion Week in Thom Browne, carrying one of the designer’s dogshaped bags. Then, for the 2018 playoffs, James got the entire Cleveland Cavaliers squad in custom Thom Browne. Lionel Messi and FC Barcelona embraced the shrunken suit as an off-field uniform shortly thereafter.

Odell Beckham Jr. took the look a step further for the 2019 Met gala, wearing a sleeveless Thom Browne tuxedo jacket and a pleated skirt.

It’s a delightful paradox that a gray flannel suit has so much cultural purchase in the Drip Era. But as James and Beckham Jr. proved, the most exciting thing you can wear in our riotous fashion moment is a suit with personality. And by pushing his very conservative vision to the extreme, Browne created one of the boldest and most distinctive statements in men’s style—even if that wasn’t his intention.

“I guess the fashion world turned it into fashion,” he says.

After 18 years, the design of the suit hasn’t really changed, nor has Browne’s devotion to it. His latest suit is here next to James’s—and he still has five of them made for himself every season.

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THE FABRIC A slim-fitting gray flannel two-piece is basically the Platonic ideal of the conservative American suit. It became fashion when Browne shrank it to its radical proportions.

Thom Browne’s

M A R T I N

THE CARDIGAN Browne started wearing a midcentury universityinspired cardigan under his suit so he wouldn’t have to wear a coat on a cold day.

THE TRIM Browne found his brand’s signature tricolor grosgrain trim at a shop in Manhattan’s garment district.

Radical Suit THE SOCKS Browne has said that bare ankles are the new male cleavage.

THE SHORTS Browne says the ideal spot on the leg for the shorts to hit is right above the knee.

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THE STYLE When the Cavs debuted their Thom Browne suits, “they all had their own little interpretation of it, and that made it even more interesting,” Browne says.

THE PROPORTIONS James wears a customized U.S. size 46 jacket. The proportions are essentially the same as those of Browne’s suit, just graded up.

THE SIGNATURE When you buy a Thom Browne shirt in the New York store, an employee handwrites your name and the date on the tag. James bought this one on October 30, 2015.

PROP ST YLIST: STELL A REY AT MARK EDWARD INC.

THE CUTOFFS Even before he started his label, Browne chopped a pair of trousers into shorts, and he did the same for James.

Found Its Way to

LeBron James

By SAMUEL HINE

THE BOOTS James’s boots are size 15.

(Browne also made him a custom pair of black pebble Nike Air Maxes.)

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The F i x

How do you wear a shirt and tie in 2019 without looking too stiff?

The 2019 Suit Revival

When I wear a tie, I wear a tie pin.

It’s that one little fashion detail that makes me not look like a lawyer or agent. It’s just

Do you have any advice for people who live in places where suits are rare, like L.A.?

I like wearing a suit in L.A. because you really stand out. I was dropping [my six-year-old son] Jack o≠ at school this morning, and three or four people complimented me. I feel good in a suit.

Plus it’s easy. It’s a kind of armor. It gives you a shape. It gives you a shoulder. It gives you a chest and a waist. You look better in a suit. It’s all one color, so you look taller. It’s still, for me, the most

Wants You to Dance in The man who’s kept menswear sexy for over 25 years explains why tailoring is resurgent—and offers a few smart rules for how to suit up with elegance and poise.

By MARK ANTHONY GREEN

of the suit happening today?

Kids who grew up in an era when there were no suits all of a sudden want to

But for me personally—and for certain occasions—suits never leave.

Each season, when it seems like Ford has already turned over every swanky stone of suiting, he manages to find a new kind of glamour for tailoring.

What makes a Tom Ford suit so sexy?

I fit them on myself, and of course I’m sexy. [laughs] I am still an absolute sample size, and I’m very, very conscious. Do I look slim in this?

Does it make my shoulders look good?

Does it make my arms look good?

How does it feel? Do the pants make my butt look good? Does it make me look tall? I’m extremely conscious of those things. Who doesn’t want to look great and sexy?

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As creative director for Gucci from 1994 to 2004, Ford slimmed down and sexed up the staid suit.

We’ve seen a lot of people start to wear tux jackets and tuxedos to non-black-tie events. Are you in favor of this?

No. Never, ever. You look like a fool. And you shouldn’t have on a tuxedo before six o’clock. A tuxedo in the daytime?

That’s not right. Not even for a wedding. If you’re going to have a daytime wedding, you should wear a suit and tie. Or if you want to wait until the evening, then you can get married in a tux.

But those are old fashion rules.

People don’t even know those rules anymore. I’m probably in one of the last generations that will even care about those rules.

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The F i x

The 2019 Suit Revival

Three good examples of why Ford says that he’s dressed every man he would ever want to: Tom, Hov, and Bond.

What’s the Tom Ford ruling on how much shirt cuff to show?

And on cuffing pants?

If you’re wearing a classic jacket, whether it’s a suit jacket or sports jacket, I think you have to have a cu≠. I like the weight it gives the bottom of the pant. I like the way it makes the pants break. I like the classic reference. When I see a man with no cu≠ to his suit, I just sort of think, Aw, poor guy.

What do you think about the criticism that suiting up for a party or club is uncomfortable or restricting?

When should you get a made-to-measure suit versus one off the rack?

If you don’t find the fabric you want or you want something slightly outlandish, then do a madeto-measure suit for the fabric. If you’re extra-wide or extra-tall, do a madeto-measure suit for your body. Because everybody’s body will look better in a beautifully cut suit. If you’re short, we can make you look taller with the right cut of the suit.

If you’re really tall, we can make you look more in proportion by fitting the suit to your body.

What’s your earliest fond memory of wearing a suit?

In the mid-1960s, we still wore a suit on a plane. If we were going somewhere on a plane, you had to put on a suit and a jacket and a tie. That’s just how people traveled then. You tried to look really great when you went into the airport. So often, putting on a suit for me meant getting on a plane and going somewhere.

Lucas Hedges in made-forHollywood velvet

by Tom Ford.

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But you can definitely dance in a suit. When I used to go to clubs in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I always had a suit jacket on. And I kept it buttoned. And I could dance with a drink and a cigarette in my hand as well. Look at Bryan Ferry!

Are you a good dancer?

I’m a very good dancer.

People are surprised because they think I’m so restrained, but I have to say I’m a very good dancer.

Go-to dance song?

“Stayin’ Alive.” I listen to Studio 54 Radio on Sirius when I drive Jack to school, because I want him to know those hits. He listens to it now and knows all of them. He’s like, “That’s Donna Summer!”

How’s Jack’s suit game?

He doesn’t wear them a lot. He did the cutest thing the other day.

He dressed himself in a black suit, shirt, and tie and some sneakers. He got my gardenia that I had worn the night before for the Met out of the trash and put it in his lapel—he had seen me doing that. He wanted to wear that to go home on the plane.

Jack’s right! The flower-lapel move should come back in general.

If you flip our lapel over, there’s a thread loop. That is meant for the stem of a flower. I hate seeing pictures of people at weddings with boutonnieres with a bunch of silly stu≠ or a gigantic rose that’s pinned on the lapel with the stem sticking out. You’re supposed to stick the stem through the hole. That’s the whole point. Sometimes people say to me: “I wish I lived in the ’30s”—or “I wish I lived in the ’50s”—“that was such a more elegant era.”

But there’s no reason you can’t live in the world you want. All you have to do is dress the way you want and live the way you want.

FROM LEF T: PAUL BRUINOOGE /PATRICK MCMULL AN/GE T T Y IMAGES; KE VIN MA ZUR / WIREIMAGE /GE T T Y IMAGES; STEPHEN LOVEKIN/GE T T Y IMAGES; VICTOR CHAVEZ / WIREIMAGE /GE T T Y IMAGES

I like to show a lot of shirt cu≠. I probably show a good inch of shirt cu≠. It just gives you a kind of pop.

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OUR MONTHLY WATCH COLUMN

The Patek Philippe Nautilus, the most hyped watch of the decade, has a years-long waiting list. But getting a Tiffany-stamped version requires an entirely different level of commitment, says L.A. artist WES LANG. THE DESIGN The Nautilus was created by the modernist Gérald Genta, who sketched out the design on a restaurant napkin in five minutes over lunch.

THE PARTNERSHIP In 1851, Antoine Norbert de Patek and Charles Tiffany met in New York.

They parted with a handshake that launched a historic partnership.

THE STAMP As soon as a Nautilus gets stamped, Tiffany knows who’s buying it. Then the store takes a photo of it on the owner’s wrist.

THE HISTORY The Nautilus was built to be a status symbol. When the first model was released, in 1976, it cost $3,100—an enormous price for a steel watch at the time.

THE DIAL The blue-dial 5711 is more valuable on the secondary market because it’s a bit easier to pull off. Personally I prefer the white.

your Nautilus is ready.

Which is why this pair of Ti≠any-stamped 5711s are extra special.

Ti≠any & Co. has been selling Patek Philippe watches since the two companies first partnered in 1851, and almost every modern model of Patek it o≠ers receives a small mark of approval. If the regular 5711 is practically impossible to get, the Ti≠any-stamped versions might as well not exist. It’s thought that Ti≠any sells only two or three blue-dial 5711s and one or two white-dials per year.

So why would a sane person go through the e≠ort to get a 5711, let alone a Ti≠any-stamped one? There’s a reason it’s one of the only timepieces CEOs and rappers can agree on:

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one did come up for auction, it hammered for an astronomical $125,000.) You can only buy them from one of Ti≠any’s four Patek boutiques, and in order to do that, you need to know a guy. The stores reserve the few they get for the clients who spend time (and plenty of money) developing friendships with the salespeople.

The watch world is weird. Two timepieces may be completely identical, save for a minuscule dial stamp. That stamp can raise the value by four times because it means something—that you were willing to invest more than just money in a special piece. If you put in the work, then you stand a chance of getting one someday. You could wait 15 years. But it’s time well spent.

P H O T O G R A P H

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PROP ST YLIST: K AITLYN DARBY

P

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Take it from one of television’s all-time grooming gods: Your suit isn’t complete until your hair is in place and you smell like a million bucks. Here the man forever known as Uncle Jesse—and now in the midst of a Netflix resurgence—shows us how it’s done.

The F i x The 2019 Suit Revival

By DEVIN FRIEDMAN

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How to Get Your Suit and Your Grooming in Sync

The F i x The 2019 Suit Revival

1.

When you’re going for…

RETRO AND SWANKY The suit (on previous page): With its bodybuilder-size shoulders and lapels so wide you can land a plane on them, this Dolce suit is brash.

A good scent: You can’t go wrong when your suit and your cologne come from the same designer. We like K from D&G ($95, 100 ml) because the citrus is lightweight and won’t overpower your neighbors.

Hair tip: Slick back your hair with an R+Co Motorcycle flexible gel ($28) and you’ll have that fresh-out-of-theshower look for the rest of the night.

Jacket, $2,545, vest, $945, shirt, $545, and pants, $1,145, by Dolce & Gabbana.

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recently appearing on Netflix in both You and Fuller House—comes o≠ as thoughtful. Maybe even perspicacious?

Possibly even wistful? Slightly? He is 55 now, and we sit together in the o∞ce of his house o≠ Mulholland Drive, in L.A., among the artifacts of a life worth being kind of wistful about: his drum kit, platinum albums from the Beach Boys (with whom he’s played on and o≠ for more than three decades), a Sonos speaker from which the sounds of “Rubber Duckie” will sometimes spontaneously issue because his son, Billy, is having his bath. Could it be, I asked, that this was his first time in GQ? “It has always taken longer for me to get in anywhere for some reason,” he says.

“I think you were too good-looking,” I o≠er. I don’t mean it in a fakeinsult-that’s-actually-ass-kissing way.

Or not merely that. He was boringly good-looking. He looked like the picture Michael Jackson showed to his plastic (continued on page 103) surgeon.

2.

When you’re going for…

MODERN AND SOPHISTICATED The suit: Crispy peak lapels, iridescent fabric—that’s the recipe for elevated nighttime activities.

A good scent: Tom Ford has a full range of gender-neutral fragrances.

The one we like to match the attention-grabbing shine of this suit is Soleil Blanc ($325, 100 ml), which smells warm and beachy and expensive.

Hair tip: Use a matte pomade like Rudy’s ($18) and then hit it with a blow-dryer to get the high pompadour.

Suit, $6,650, and sweater, $1,540, by Tom Ford. Glasses, $455, by Oliver Peoples.

STILL LIFES THROUGHOUT: MAT TEO MOBILIO

P R O B A B L Y wondering about whether John Stamos made love to Heather Locklear in Detroit, after an auto show, in the ’90s. Back then the car people would fly the John Stamoses and the Heather Locklears into town for junket weekends. And sometimes they’d find each other—just two television idols standing suggestively near Ford Tempos. And things would happen, as they sometimes do, among consenting former soap stars with aerated hair and great bone structure. I won’t tell you yet if that relationship was consummated on the banks of Lake St. Clair. This is known as withholding information, a kind of narrative cheat familiar to anyone who watched network television between 1980 and 2003.

In person John Stamos—also known as Uncle Jesse from Full House, earlier known as Blackie Parrish during his two years on General Hospital, more OU’RE

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“P≠t,” he says. “It’s always been a fight. To get into talk shows or television shows.”

“Why?” I ask.

“I think the Full House thing has been a blessing and a curse. I think sometimes I don’t conduct myself as a serious person. But I am. I mean, I can be.”

I ask him a bit about his fellow icon of nostalgia Lori Loughlin, who played his wife on Full House and now stars in an unscripted drama of moral indignation after being charged in a bribery scheme to get her daughters into college. (Loughlin has pleaded not guilty.)

“I gotta be careful,” he says. “I want to wait until the trial happens, if it does, or whatever the result is, and then talk about it.”

Are you close with her?

“Yes. And I’ll tell you one thing that has been strange is: Honestly I can’t figure it out. It doesn’t make sense. I talked to her the morning everything hit. I just can’t process it still.”

He’s decided not to speculate on the case. “Whatever happened,” he says, “I’m pretty sure that the punishment is not equal to the crime, if there was a crime.”

Gravitas. I’m saying that Stamos has gravitas now. A charming, reflective quality. He recently got sober, got married, had a kid. But it took a minute to get to this place. “Everybody has their own bottoms,” he said. “I haven’t been through anything more than anyone else has. In fact I’ve had a beautifully charmed life. I think it was a fear of growing up. I mean, you throw a stick in this town and you’ll hit six guys with Peter Pan syndrome.”

I ask whether he’d include himself.

“I’m a poster boy for it,” he says. “I shoulda had six months as a free fall, but I dragged it out about 10 years.”

Why is he in GQ now? Because he kind of grew into his face. Because he spent the past decade being a working actor, like lots of working actors you’ve never heard of—a pilot, roles on shortlived series with names like Thieves and Jake in Progress. Only he did all that while also being Stamos. Because I tend to think we’re on the brink of a Stamossaissance. You heard it here first.

“Was it fun?” I ask. “All those years you should have been more grown-up?”

“Yeah,” he concedes. “Some of it was a lot of fun.”

Like that time in Detroit. A lonely car show. A roomful of people interested in cloth interiors and odometer design.

The souls of two soap stars connect across the room. Later, they meet at the bar. The way he remembers it, she could handle her liquor better than he could.

Does Stamos detect a spark? She gives him her room number. Only the next

thing he remembers, someone’s banging on his hotel door. He’d stopped by his room, thrown up, passed out, and never made it out again.

Did that kind of thing happen a lot?

“I have 50 of those stories,” he says.

He’s not bragging. But maybe bragging a little.

The F i x

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3.

When you’re going for…

IDIOSYNCRATIC AND INTELLECTUAL The suit: The velvet dinner jacket is never a casual move. But it is, like Ermenegildo Zegna, timeless.

A good scent: The rich texture of the velvet jacket calls for a rich, layered fragrance. Versace’s Oud Noir ($155, 100 ml) is the cologne equivalent of a negroni.

Stubble tip: Add a little grit to this polished look. The Panasonic Precision Power trimmer ($150) will give you the perfect scruff.

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4.

When you’re going for…

BOLD AND MINIMAL The suit: This blazer from Berluti— slim lapels, red that would make Chuck Berry proud—doesn’t need a tie. Throw on a mockneck instead.

A good scent: The high-end indie fragrance maker Byredo—we like Gypsy Water ($260, 100 ml)— specializes in scents without any of the cloying sweetness you find in mall colognes.

Shaving tip: Shaving every day is harsh on your skin. Make it less so with Kiehl’s cannabis-based face oil ($49).

Blazer, $3,050, by Berluti.

Turtleneck, $990, by Ermenegildo Zegna XXX.

The 2019 Suit Revival

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“In an era of big shoulders and power ties, we imagined something more relaxed in this 1987 shoot.”

The F i x The 2019 Suit Revival

A GQ Legend Just Wrote the Book on Suiting

↓ “Ryan Reynolds in superhero character felt to me like the perfect cover.”

“I’m amazed by how modern this mid-’80s look feels today: the perfect summer suit and tee.”

After nearly 40 years spent crafting the GQ look, fashion oracle JIM MOORE releases a new coffee-table book about dressing some of the most stylish gentlemen on the planet. Here he revisits a few of his favorite suit-centric moments.

“In 2007 I had to convince Kanye that less was best—in this case, a Calvin Klein suit.”

→ “Sebastian Kim captured me working on set with actor James Marsden in 2016.”

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CENTER: ‘HUNKS & HEROES: FOUR DECADES OF FASHION AT GQ’ BY JIM MOORE, RIZ ZOLI NE W YORK © 2019. COVER: AL ASDAIR MCLELL AN. OTHER PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEF T: MARTIN SCHOELLER; STEVEN MEISEL (2); NATHANIEL GOLDBERG; SEBASTIAN KIM.

→ “We had this blazer made by Harlem Haberdashery for Colin Kaepernick—a true hero. One of my favorite shoots of all time.”

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Monsieur

J o n e s

Fashion

Designer KIM JONES has amassed a streetwear archive, reinvigorated the suit, and engineered a few legendary collaborations.

Now, more than a year into his term at Dior, he’s working on his grandest project yet.

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By THOM BET TRIDGE

BRETT LLOYD

The F i x

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Fashion

one block north of the arc de triomphe ,

past a neoclassical entranceway, up a spiral staircase, and through a pair of double doors, models circle in and out of a salon, sometimes in runway-grade outfits, sometimes in nothing but short black robes with a stately “DIOR” emblazoned on the back. At the rear of the room, within a tighter orbit of staff, the artistic director of Dior Men sits alone at the dead center of an American Idol–esque judges table. ¶ “You get a headache from being under these lights for so long,” Kim Jones mumbles, asking someone for an aspirin. Seventy-two hours out from his highly anticipated summer 2020 menswear presentation, the British designer is taking a final pass at the entire collection. A photo

↓ The finale of the Dior Men summer 2020 show.

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studio is set up on the opposite side of the salon, each look photographed and pinned to a board next to the designer.

Slouched yet alert, the 39-year-old Jones is dressed like a modern-day Medici on his way to the bodega: dark T-shirt, fat diamond necklace, and tailored jogging pants that taper down into a pair of deconstructed blue Air Jordans designed by his friend Virgil Abloh. “What we’re stressing out about today is finding all the models,” design director Lucy Beeden tells me. “Because Kim wants an army of 49 boys and he doesn’t like changes when we’ve got delicate fabrics like this.”

A tall model in a cream trench with what looks like a giant blue ink stain on its shoulder walks into the center of the showroom. “Do we have a bag for that?” Jones asks. “I just checked, and

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no,” a member of his retinue replies, “I didn’t think so.” When I turn to ask Jones about the blue detail on the coat, he explains: “It’s a kind of embroidery, hand-sprayed with dye and then plissé-pleated into thousands of pleats.”

Moments later someone is holding the coat in front of my face so that I can examine its meticulous detailing, likely sewn over hundreds of hours. When I ask Jones about the appeal of microscopic plissés in an era when most fashion is consumed via Instagram feed, he replies dutifully, “Couture is the brief of the house, and Dior is all I think about.”

Having consulted and designed for more than a dozen fashion brands in a career of less than two decades, Jones thinks of his work as commercial biology: the process of cloning a brand’s DNA into something more

relevant, exciting, and shoppable than ever before. “I look at things some people write about creativity, and they’re like, ‘It’s all led by marketing,’ ” Jones says. “But it’s kind of an ignorant thing when people write stuff like that. I like working to a creative brief and being commercial. It’s the path you choose, and not everyone is going to be Rei Kawakubo. She’s Rei Kawakubo, and she’s brilliant. We have targets to reach, and I find that exciting.”

call it safari eyes,” Jones told me over the phone a month earlier, attempting to describe the mentality it takes to dust off and rejuvenate a legacy fashion house. “Whenever we go away, I’m always the first one to spot an animal, even if it’s the smallest little thing.

My eye is always scanning and looking.”

It was this savanna approach—honed around the world, his family having moved constantly for his hydrogeologist father’s job—that landed Jones his first-ever gig in fashion, working for Michael Kopelman, founder of the London clothing distributor Gimme 5.

“I saw some T-shirt he had made in a strange shop in Soho,” Kopelman says.

“The graphic was from a famous kind of underground Disney poster, and Kim had taken a small part of one cartoon—I forget which—and put it on a T-shirt, like Malcolm McLaren did for Seditionaries.” (Jones: “It was a pickle.”)

Gimme 5 was the first distributor on the British Isles to import merchandise from an obscure New York skate shop called Supreme, as well as from underground Japanese labels such as Nigo’s A Bathing Ape and Jun Takahashi’s Undercover. “Everything about those brands was impressive,” Jones remembers over 20 years later with the zeal of shop boy. “I was so impressed with the detailing, the hardware, and how much went into it. And I think I still have the gray Supreme hoodie with the box logo, which was one of the first ones ever sent to England.”

In 2003, having completed the graduate program at Central Saint Martins, Jones started his own, eponymous line. But it was his string of corporate gigs—at Umbro and Hugo Boss and even working as a consultant for Pastelle, Kanye West’s pre-Yeezy fashion brand—that inevitably proved more predictive of his future. At a time when houses began relying on consultants and creative directors to give “MY FRIENDS

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The F i x

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The F i x

Fashion

their staid legacies a youth transfusion, Jones began training his safari eyes to spot the razor-thin line between what a label needed to stay fresh and what it needed to stay solvent, eventually landing at Dunhill, the über-historical British menswear house. “Out of the 40 designers they asked to do the Dunhill project,” Jones recalls, “I was the only one that referenced the archive. That’s why they chose me.”

Y E A R S I N T O his tenure at Dunhill, Jones was appointed Louis Vuitton’s menswear designer by the house’s then creative director, Marc Jacobs. He spent the next seven years churning out collections that pulled everything from Hawaiian shirts to camouflage jeans into the luxury universe of Vuitton. At the house, Jones was cultivating a vision that merged luxury men’s fashion with the copy-and-paste eclecticism of the social media era.

“With Vuitton, I worked a lot from feedback on Instagram,” says Jones, who also made a point during his tenure to drop into the LV stores in whatever city he happened to be visiting.

One might guess that the inspiration for Jones’s most famous masterstroke at Louis Vuitton—the brand’s 2017 collaboration with Supreme—came from one of these global walkabouts.

But in fact, according to Jones, it was a serendipitous leveraging of his intern-era Rolodex: “The Supreme thing came from [Louis Vuitton CEO] Michael Burke asking me for [Supreme founder] James Jebbia’s number. I knew James from Gimme 5, because they used to import Supreme into the U.K. So I said, ‘I’ll give you the number as long as we can do a collaboration.’ ” “We’d have brainstorms about who we should collaborate with,” remembers Supreme’s then brand director, Angelo Baque. “Dior? But then it was like, ‘Stop, that sounds cool, but let’s talk about something that’s actually going to happen.’ ” The collaboration, which featured red Epi leather turntables and Molly-dealer-ready hip bags, spawned eight pop-ups in June of that year, creating postapocalyptic scenes of line camping. The launch led to a boom for LVMH at large, with profits up 18 percent from the prior year.

In October the private-equity firm Carlyle Group purchased 50 percent of Supreme, valuing the skate brand at a THREE

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reported $1 billion. Jones announced his resignation from LV four months later—and, shortly after that, his appointment to the job of artistic director of men’s collections at Dior. evidence of Jones’s mastery at smashing things together is everywhere. Waiting on the table is a selection of jewelry created by Ambush cofounder and design director of men’s jewelry Yoon Ahn and artist Daniel Arsham. The designer points to the board of looks next to us, at men’s suits modeled after Dior’s “Tailleur Oblique” cut, a womenswear tailoring pattern debuted by Christian Dior himself early in his career—“I think 1950,” chimes in Lucy Beeden. In front of a nearby balcony sits a table full of soon-to-be-highly-Grailable aluminum “hand cases,” made in collaboration with LVMH’s recent luggage acquisition Rimowa.

Nearly two decades in, Jones has refined his magpie approach—to a point.

“The first time I met Kim was at his first BACK AT THE SHOWROOM,

was a study on how streetwear and couture did not have to be considered separate genres.

Jones would go on to place an artist at the center of each of his collections.

Pre-fall 2019 featured a gargantuan metallic fembot by Hajime Sorayama.

Fall 2019 was highlighted by painstakingly detailed reproductions of works by Raymond Pettibon, and summer 2020 was soon to be headlined by the artist Daniel Arsham. Ever self-effacing in the name of his brief, Jones attributes this focus on curation to Mr. Dior himself. “I’m curating what a modern Dior would be looking at,” Jones says. “For example, Raymond Pettibon’s romantic vision compared with a Jean Cocteau.

Daniel Arsham’s work in terms of Dalí.

Kaws in terms of Picasso. You have to look at those things in terms of where we are now.”

The spirit almost perfectly mirrors that of his first LVMH boss, who all but invented the mega-collaboration. “Being an American designer in Europe at Vuitton, I always thought

“I like working to a creative brief and being commercial. We have targets to reach, and I find that exciting.”—KIM JONES Dior show, and it was day-before-theshow chaos,” recalls the actor and Dior brand ambassador Robert Pattinson.

“There’s a kind of wildness that follows Kim around that’s quite fun. I love Kris [Van Assche, Jones’s predecessor at Dior] as well, but it was a big difference seeing Kris’s collection two days before his show: Everything would be completely done, hanging on the rails, completely organized.”

But it would be a mistake to confuse this wildness with laziness. Jones’s first Dior show was unabashedly bombastic—set in an amphitheater constructed around a 30-foot-tall floral statue of Christian Dior—but its true beauty came from safari-eyed details. In the spirit of pollination, the artist Kaws (who was responsible for the sculpture) had also been commissioned to redo Dior Men’s bee logo. Moreover, with details like laser-cut “Cannage” patterns and lacy tank tops, the collection

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back to the café society and this group of artists who would work with each other,” Jacobs says of collaborating with the likes of Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince. “I thought back to the days of Chanel and Schiaparelli and their association with Dalí and Cocteau and Picasso.” By turning luxury houses into large-scale commercial platforms for artwork, both designers struck upon the central cultural logic of our time: that making stuff in the age of the internet is as much about curating as it is about creating. And the rise of this thing called streetwear is inherently an extension of that idea in which elements of art, fashion, and music are freely spliced together.

In a time when artist collabs are as ubiquitous as bomber jackets, the specialness in what Jones is doing at Dior lies in the how, not the what. To start, Jones seems to prefer to work with artists who operate in an in-between

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The F i x

cultural domain. Kaws fans might read Hypebeast more often than Artforum, while Pettibon became a legend designing the artwork for the punk band Black Flag.

Being in dialogue with this type of artist allows Jones to go further than putting an installation in the center of a runway or slapping an art image onto a T-shirt. Instead his partnerships crack open an artist’s world and allow both the audience and the products themselves to live in a kind of alternate universe. As Sorayama describes it, the designer’s work with artists is a form of “fan service.” The collaborations seem engineered for the kind of giddy collector who would be in the market for a couture vest that had a Raymond Pettibon drawing beaded onto it over the course of 1,600 man-hours. Or in other words, for Kim Jones himself.

collaboration and more like an integration,” Arsham told me in the lead-up to the summer 2020 presentation, which would feature crumbling, partially 3D-printed re-creations of Mr. Dior’s personal effects. But at Dior, Jones’s powers of integration have extended beyond artwork. In arrangements that seem as friendly as they are unprecedented, Jones has uploaded fellow designers Yoon Ahn and Matthew Williams onto the couture house’s platform, sometimes incorporating their known designs into the aesthetic universe of the brand with very few changes. “I look at Dior almost like a basketball team,” Ahn says. “Kim’s not necessarily one of those types who will sit you down and tell you how to do things. But he does lead the whole team by setting an example.”

Perhaps no product serves as a better demonstration of this approach than the Saddle bag: the purse, designed by former Dior maestro John Galliano, that Jones resurrected as a menswear item. Over the course of his four seasons, the bag has been outfitted with the signature buckle of Matthew Williams’s brand, Alyx, received a metallic steampunk makeover inspired by Sorayama, and in its latest incarnation, for summer 2020, has been re-created as an eerie 3D print

by Arsham. “For me, Galliano’s Saddle bag is a very masculine thing, because it comes from gauchos or cowboys,” Jones

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says. “That’s the reason I first got Matt Williams’s buckle on it, to make it even more masculine.” For Williams, forking over the design was a no-brainer: “That buckle is my signature. It’s like my logo.

I wouldn’t just give that to a brand that just wants to pay me for a collaboration.

It comes out of Kim acknowledging the generation below him and bringing them up and validating what I do.”

As he prepares for the summer 2020 show, Jones is looking to the past once again. Bags at the showroom bear a Dior motif that had lain dormant for more than a decade before Jones brought it back for his debut at the house—“it coincided with Maria Grazia Chiuri [bringing] it back, actually,” Beeden corrects, in reference to Jones’s counterpart at the helm of Dior womenswear and couture. “We only use it on elevated pieces, so it’s not just cash, cash, cash.” So how about a callback to Hedi Slimane, the designer who in 2001 presented his first (and skinny-blacksuit-filled) menswear show for Dior?

“It’s not going to be part of the narrative, because I respect Hedi very much, and he’s got his own legacy he’s creating at Celine, so they get to look at his work,” Jones says. “I’m looking at Mr. Dior, and there’s a lot more for me to look at there than Hedi’s work, because Hedi does Hedi.” On the wall across from the bags, a rack of clothes heralds the rebirth of the “Dior Gazette,” a fictional newspaper printed on garments during the era of Galliano.

The headlines have changed; Paris Men’s Fashion Week has crossed over from industry event to pop-cultural phenomenon. Even the fact that teenagers know who the head of menswear at Dior is, is a recent development that Jones himself is still very much getting used to. “I was in New York for Marc Jacobs’s wedding with Charly [Defrancesco], and me and Kate [Moss] were walking down the street, and these three kids stopped me,” Jones tells me. “None of them asked for her picture—they asked for mine. It shows what this generation has done. My friends’ kids all want to be designers, and back in the day, they’d be like, ‘Oh, you can’t do that. That’s gay.’ Now it’s a completely acceptable job.”

Three days later, a crowd that included Kate Moss, Russell Westbrook, and a rainbow-haired J Balvin lined up to see Jones’s summer 2020 collection.

Fashion

“Paris has turned into BET Hip-Hop Awards–level fanfare,” noted attendee and friend-of-Kim Pusha T. Underneath Arsham’s crumbling clock, guests proceeded into a giant Zen garden filled with pastel-pink sand. The collection was as exquisitely tailored and full of surprises as everyone expected. But beyond the clothes, Jones managed to create a perfect mirror of the culture menswear now takes place in: an expensive stadium of the surreal.

“I’m quite good at fashion,” Jones tells me at the end of the showroom visit, still clearly suffering from a migraine. “Because I’m not nostalgic. I like to be on my toes. I like to be traveling. I like to be everywhere. There’s no time to think about anything other than what’s next with me right now. It’s not a bad thing, but when people ask me how my life has changed since I got this job, I can’t tell you.”

↑ The LV-Supreme collab in action.

thom bettridge is the editor in chief of Highsnobiety. Additional reporting by Clara Malley.

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Rami Malek

WAS AN ACC L A I M E D JO UR N E YM A N ACTO R K NOW N FOR HIS HU STLE , P RE PA R AT I ON , AND INTE N SI T Y. THE N H E PL AYE D FRE D D I E M ERC U RY, WO N A N OSCA R, AND BECA M E WO RLD -FAM OU S PR ACTI CA LLY A LL AT ON C E. NOW MALE K I S WO RK I N G T H ROU G H HI S N EWEST RO L E—AS A G LO BA L STAR.

BY MO LLY YO U N G PHOTO G R A P HS BY RYA N M c G I N LE Y ST YLE D BY M O BO L A J I DAWO D U

15 Years in the Making

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a good hair day. “This is the best his hair’s been since February,” says the young woman twirling scented oil through Malek’s strands while the actor stands obediently still, slightly bashful, like anyone who is being publicly oiled. His hair looks exactly the way it does in every episode of Mr. Robot, which is at the tail end of shooting its final season here in Brooklyn.

The hair is worth mentioning because it has spawned a mini men’s version of the Rachel, Jennifer Aniston’s hair on Friends, in that it is easily identifiable and widely imitated.

“It’s a two on the sides that’s faded to a one and a half,” says the young woman with the oil, in case anyone wants to memorize that and take it to the barber. “And it’s disconnected from the top to the sides and faded up to the parietal ridge.”

“This is GQ, not National Geographic,” Malek says.

“Disconnected is appropriate, though.”

It is. Malek had been acting for more than a decade when he got the part of Elliot Alderson on Mr. Robot, which came out in 2015 on USA, of all networks, and immediately generated a robust Reddit presence and an ardent audience of people for whom a dystopian but sensitive thriller felt appropriate in an age of deep fakes and flourishing conspiracies. Elliot works as a cybersecurity technician who gets embroiled in a hacktivist scheme to wrest financial justice from an evil corporation.

He has a rocky relationship with humanity but a lucid one with the technological reality

of the world we live in. You get the sense, in watching, that if you knew what he did, you’d microwave your SIM cards and self-medicate with morphine, too.

For three years Malek’s fame gently increased as the show’s influence grew. In 2016 he won an Emmy. Then he starred as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, which became the highest-grossing music biopic of all time, and he swept awards season, receiving a Golden Globe, a SAG Award, a BAFTA Award, and, of course, an Oscar, for which he gave a graceful acceptance speech that touched on his status as the son of immigrants. Next year he’ll play the villain in the new James Bond movie with Daniel Craig. Descriptions of his rise often involve violent metaphors (catapulting to stardom, exploding into the zeitgeist), which is inadvertently appropriate for someone who physically falls down as much as Malek.

“I’m agile, but I trip a lot,” he says, once the oiling is completed. “Did you see when I tripped at the Oscars?”

(Yes. It’s on YouTube.) “Okay, here’s some fresh footage of me tripping.” He moves over to a monitor and cues up a Mr. Robot scene they shot last week of Malek sprinting down a street. (Some details will be censored here to avoid spoilers.) The monitor shows Malek tripping, falling, and rolling into a pained ball.

Not part of the scene. “Here’s another one.” Now he’s sprinting down a staircase,

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pursued by [redacted]. He accidentally flips and crumples at the bottom, then staggers up and continues running to finish the take. “I hope they use that one.” Then a third scene of him, darting across [redacted] and tumbling down a cli≠, which was on purpose this time. “That one hurt,” he observes. He cues up a fourth scene, in which he gets hit by a car. “That one also hurt, despite the padding.” Ah, so that’s how they do it—they pad the front of the car? “Yeah, although they don’t pad it for the stuntman.”

A signal reaches Malek that it’s time to shoot, and he ducks back into a set that I will only describe as an interior. Malek’s stand-in is stationed nearby, wearing the same black pants, black shoes, and black shirt, completely indistinguishable from Malek except for the small oval of face that emerges from his hoodie.

R E Q U I R I N G A S T A N D - I N was not something that occurred before Mr. Robot, when Malek’s résumé was just a string of small roles in esteemed projects. In 2010 he played a Marine named Snafu in HBO’s The Pacific.

In 2012 he played an acolyte

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jacket $2,700 shirt (price upon request) pants $1,000 Dior Men watch $9,900 Cartier → suit $1,395 Boss

polo shirt $895 Ermenegildo Zegna shoes $435 Adieu Paris sunglasses $645 Mykita + Maison Margiela watch $2,550 Cartier

of Philip Seymour Ho≠man’s character in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. A year later he had a tiny part in Spike Lee’s remake of Oldboy, where he got murdered while solving a crossword puzzle, and a supporting role as an altruistic dweeb in Short Term 12. It looked like Malek was headed for a respectable career as a character actor—a person whose name you never quite learned but were always pleased to see for two to six minutes onscreen.

A guy who, if you passed him on the street looking vaguely familiar, you might think was someone you’d met at a party instead of pegging him as a vampire of little consequence from the fifth Twilight movie.

A steady trek along this path would have been plenty for many actors, but Malek had… not so much a chip on his shoulder as a pebble in his shoe.

His parents hadn’t necessarily emigrated from Cairo to the U.S. in 1978 so that their future child could gamble on a career in entertainment, and Malek wasn’t necessarily surrounded by a squad of cheerleaders saying Rami you can do this, it’s all gonna happen. “I mean, my parents weren’t exactly—they didn’t love the idea of me being an actor,” he says. “They came to this country from Egypt so we could have a very successful life. They put every dollar they had into our education, and to see it being thrown into this game of risk and chance that, for many, seemed destined for failure.…” He trails o≠ a little, thinks about how to put it. “It was not the best ending to the really trying aspect of them moving their entire lives, that upheaval from Cairo to Los Angeles to start anew.”

But even if their son’s ambition was aimed at a shaky target, they could recognize the ambition as formidable. Malek spent hours stuffing envelopes with headshots and résumés to hand-deliver to agencies and film schools. One day his dad got up early and saw his son with the envelopes, and he turned to Malek’s mother and said, (text continued on page 122)

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→ turtleneck $295 Sandro pants $990 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello shoes $435 Adieu Paris socks $18 (for three pairs) Gold Toe suspenders $118 Brooks Brothers

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That kid is tenacious. “I heard it and it got me emotional,” Malek says. “I couldn’t turn my back— we weren’t that family where I would ever show something like that. But it gave me a bit more of that grit to keep going.”

Malek’s collection of blink-length roles in highly credentialed properties might have felt like torture—so close, yet so far!—but in this case it was an argument that it was better to be a small fish in a big pond than the opposite.

For one thing, the bit parts o≠ered Malek an elite form of vocational training. Sets are peculiar environments. Unlike the modern white-collar office, sets do not foster illusions about a lack of hierarchy or promote a vision of utopian cooperation with everyone contributing ideas in an open

setting. Sets are more like the military. Each individual has a defined specialist role and knows exactly what is within and without his or her purview. There is a brisk formality in how people move and talk. (Malek says Copy! or Yes, sir after Mr. Robot showrunner Sam Esmail gives him direction.) This is the only way films and shows could ever get made, of course: In order for a knot of strangers to assemble and execute a complex task fast, each stranger has to plug straight into a role with no flailing or ambiguity.

On a functional set, there’s a mutual respect for all roles, which is memorialized in the fact that movie credits include every name, down to the junior associate’s assistant’s intern.

“If the world collectively worked

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↑ shirt $1,395 Giorgio Armani pants $1,295 Versace → blazer $990 Michael Kors Collection shirt $425 Brunello Cucinelli pants $490 Michael Kors Collection shoes $435 Adieu Paris watch $2,550 Cartier

in a similar fashion to the way a film set operates, we would be much more efficient and much more considerate of one another,” Malek tells me.

All of which is to say, learning the mechanics of a set is as valuable as anything else in an actor’s education.

Success depends not just on talent but on knowing how to comport yourself in a power structure. “There are actors who come in and greet everyone in the morning, take everyone in,” Malek says.

“And there are other actors that walk in, do the take, and get out without having said a word to anyone.” You know who’s the first kind of actor?

Tom Hanks. Malek learned this on the set of The Pacific, the World War II miniseries that Hanks coproduced. For his part, Hanks told me that Malek barely had to speak before he had the part: “First, there are those eyes—not like any other pair of eyes—wide and sleepy at the same time. Does the guy ever blink? Then, the physicality was exactly what we needed.

He was—and is—a skinny kid.

Though the Marines back then were muscled and well-fed when they invaded those Pacific Islands, three days, three weeks, two months of battle later, they were exhausted, emaciated, hollowed-out teenagers somewhere between 16 and as old as life itself. Just like Rami.”

You can’t ascribe moral qualities to a person’s appearance without sounding like a 4chan eugenicist, but you can draw connections between how something looks and how it makes other people feel. For example, a study recently came out that explained why dogs appear sympathetic to humans. (It’s because they have eyebrow muscles: levator anguli oculi medialis.) Evidence suggests that dogs who use their eyebrow muscles are more likely to get adopted from shelters and elicit “Aww”-type sounds. Malek’s equivalent are “those eyes,” as Tom Hanks pointed out. “Rami possesses (text continued on page 126)

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a magnetism and physical presence unlike any other actor I know,” Cary Fukunaga, director of the new Bond film, added.

“He has this rare ability to tap into that live wire that makes us human.”

There are other features that distinguish him from the Ryans and Chrises of Hollywood, as well. He has, for example, permanent undereye circles, which can make him look like he’s carrying the weight of Society on his shoulders (Elliot) or a wrenching internal conflict (Freddie Mercury).

He also has a jawline so sharp it inspired a meme implying that a person could slice her finger on it. But mostly it is his voice. The voice is deeper than

expected and subtly forceful in the manner of a man who is holding a weapon that he won’t use but knows is there.

Sometimes it narrows into a paranoid whisper. Sometimes it crumbles like a cookie. It can be hard or soft. During his audition for Mr. Robot, Malek ran a scene in which Elliot confronts a pedophile.

Most actors would take the performance in a cold and calculating and To Catch a Predator direction, but Malek did the opposite, Sam Esmail told me, giving Elliot warmth and vulnerability. “It was such a brave and unusual choice to play it that way, to show empathy for a monster instead of going for showy badassery,”

↓ shirt (price upon request) Giorgio Armani pants $1,025 Emporio Armani → jacket $3,400 shirt $590 pants $1,100 tie $210 shoes $1,060 Celine by Hedi Slimane

Esmail said. “I think that’s what’s so special about Rami as an actor and a person— he’s heroic without being on a pedestal.”

On the set of Mr. Robot, there are two important acronyms, both frequently deployed

by Esmail. One of the acronyms is OTT and the other is TM. OTT means “over the top.” TM means “too much.” The terms are related but not synonymous.

When Esmail gives the TM note, it means Let’s soften that performance a bit. When he gives the OTT note, it means We are entering ridiculous territory, let’s take it down 10 notches. The shorthand is a helpful barometer for finetuning a scene. “If we try this here, is that TM?” Esmail might ask. It is also useful in civilian life. For example, Malek’s favorite clothing item on earth, which he’d shown me earlier, is a pair of vintage Levi’s 510s that are objectively the perfect jeans: a true watercolor blue that is neither powdery nor oversaturated; tight-fitting but not OTT in a way that forces you to confront Malek’s anatomy.

Just a strong, classic pant. “They do have this, which isn’t great,” he’d said, gesturing at a mark on the right inner leg that looked like brownie batter.

How did that happen?

He didn’t know.

Was it chocolate?

He hoped it was chocolate.

If you can’t tell, there’s a Hanks-like good cheer to Malek’s presence. Shooting a TV show is wild! A whole network of rooms has been constructed for just four days in this random building! “Look, this wall is fake,” Malek says, knocking a wall. “Oh, wait—this one’s real.” He finds another wall and knocks. It sounds hollow. “These doors weren’t here last week, either.” And that hiccuping fog machine in the corner? It is quietly responsible for the show’s eerie ambience! Also, by the way, there’s a toy store across the street from the building—is anyone interested in exploring it during a break? Yeah? Let’s go. (continued on page 168)

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Photographs by Daniel Jackson Styled by George Cortina

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By Samuel Hine

IN THIS NEW FASHION ERA, YOU CAN BE WHOEVER YOU WANT—THE CLOTHES ARE JUST TOOLS TO HELP YOU GET YOU THERE.

TO PROVE IT, WE GATHERED SOME OF THE MOST INTERESTING CHARACTERS IN THE MODELING WORLD AND REIMAGINED THEIR LOOKS. S E P T E M B E R

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Dustin Heath

←←←

Evan Mock

AGE: 24 HOMETOWN: Waialua, Hawaii

AGE: 22 HOMETOWN: North Shore of Oahu

Heath works for Ward Stegerhoek, the hairstylist for this shoot, who advised Heath to go for “sweet mint” hair dye for the occasion.

After Frank Ocean posted a video on Instagram of Mock—with brand-new bubblegum pink hair— shredding a skate park in Hawaii, the skater-surferphotographer became a certified It boy in the blink of an eye. “If I knew Frank was gonna post it,” Mock says, “I would’ve gone way harder!”

jacket $3,200 shirt $690 pants $1,100 tie $200 boots $1,300 Celine by Hedi Slimane sunglasses $895 Jacques Marie Mage

vintage jacket, stylist’s own Levi’s pants $248 Levi’s Authorized Vintage vintage boots Early Halloween bracelet $7,200 Tiffany & Co. ring, stylist’s own

←←

Matthew Later AGE: 24 HOMETOWN: Wilmette, Illinois A writer on the side—with bylines in Out and Hero—Later is currently penning a literary account about his time spent modeling in Tokyo. jacket $4,275 shirt $620 pants $1,025 bag $10,900 Hermès vintage bow tie Early Halloween glasses $385 Selima for Dusan watch $5,200 Cartier ring $1,350 Tiffany & Co.

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Baba Diop & Cheikh Tall AGES: 23 and 22 HOMETOWNS: Diop is from NYC; Tall is from L.A. Though they’re from opposite sides of the country—and Tall’s a Gucci guy while Diop’s a new face of Louis Vuitton— when they met at Paris Fashion Week last year, there was “an instant connection,” Tall says. Then they learned that their parents emigrated from the same part of Senegal. “And now Cheikh and I are here in one place,” says Diop.

ON DIOP (LEF T)

jacket $4,950 Celine by Hedi Slimane ON TALL (RIGHT)

jacket $800 Schott NYC ON BOTH

shirt $350 pants $600 belt $125 David Samuel Menkes vintage hats Early Halloween

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Parker van Noord AGE: 21 HOMETOWN: Amsterdam Van Noord learned the trade of modeling from his father, the legendary Andre van Noord, who passed away last year. “He taught me to be yourself and to keep both your feet on the ground,” says van Noord. dress The Row

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Hannah Ferguson AGE: 25 HOMETOWN: San Angelo, Texas After growing up on a farm in Texas, Ferguson conquered the Chanel runway, a reality-TV show (E!’s Model Squad), and every magazine from Sports Illustrated to CR Fashion Book. jacket $3,060 Louis Vuitton shirt $850 The Row

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Levon Panek & Christian Fattore AGES: 32 and 26 HOMETOWNS: Panek (left) is from outside Boston; Fattore is from suburban Philadelphia What are the keys to getting huge?

“Heavy weight, high volume, and high intensity,” says Fattore.

ON BOTH

shorts $13 H&M

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Jordan Barrett AGE: 22, “but the internet says I’m 23, 24, and 21.”

HOMETOWN: Currumbin Valley, Australia Ever since he was discovered as a 14-year-old in Australia (while stealing matches from a convenience store, true story), Barrett has brought a dose of ’90s-supermodel swagger to the dozens of campaigns he’s appeared in. tank top $890 cummerbund $490 Tom Ford pants $925 Giorgio Armani shoes $990 Celine by Hedi Slimane watch $1,385 Pippin Vintage Jewelry

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Mark Vanderloo AGE: 51 HOMETOWN: Eindhoven, Netherlands Back in the ’90s, when supermodels were household names, Vanderloo was practically the pope—his face fronted seemingly every global campaign, and he regularly walked in as many as 75 shows a year. (The phonetic similarity between his name and Derek Zoolander’s is not a coincidence.) He’s now raising his kids in Amsterdam, but his historic career continues. jacket $3,470 pants (price upon request) Givenchy shirt $590 The Row belt $595 Martin Dingman

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Mahmoud Alhumoz AGE: 23 HOMETOWN: Marrakech, Morocco Four years ago, Alhumoz— born in Staten Island and raised in Morocco— was working full-time at the cosmetics counter at Saks Fifth Avenue.

“For some reason there

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was one week when all my clients were telling me to try being a model,” he says. “I was just like, Damn, a lot of these people are fashionable; they might know what they’re talking about!” jacket $2,410 Prada tank top $190 Thom Browne

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Oliver Kumbi AGE: 23 HOMETOWN: Stockholm Kumbi comes from a Swedish basketball family—he and his four siblings all played for the teenage national team.

But the face of Ralph Lauren Purple Label found his real calling while working at a music festival one weekend. “These two model scouts asked me if I wanted to become a model,” Kumbi says.

“I said no at first, but then they kept coming back, so I said, ‘Why not?’ ” jacket $3,950 The Row shirt $250 New & Lingwood tie $195 Charvet sunglasses $555 Jacques Marie Mage

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Salomon Diaz AGE: 23 HOMETOWN: Cali, Colombia As a kid growing up in Colombia, Diaz thought he would one day be a doctor or a lawyer. Then he accompanied his sister to a casting in Mexico City, and the agent asked him to try a runway walk. Diaz nailed it, and now he’s the face of Versace fragrance alongside Gigi Hadid. coat $2,295 Ring Jacket sweater $248 shirt $90 shorts $65 Polo Ralph Lauren

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Jordan Legessa AGE: 26 HOMETOWN: “Paris is where I became a man.

Paris is where I fell in love. But I do not really have a hometown.�

Born in France, Legessa raised himself since the age of 14, after leaving the home of his adoptive parents. He now lives in Williamsburg, where M train riders often spot him playing the saxophone or trumpet on the roof of his building. overalls $920 Dries Van Noten

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Jeremy Ruehlemann AGE: 24 HOMETOWN: Mahwah, New Jersey For a guy with that kind of jawline, Ruehlemann has a surprising opinion about modeling: “To me,” he says, “it isn’t about being attractive. I like when people make me look different.

Looking handsome is boring to me at this point in my modeling career, you know?” sweater $1,886 Ann Demeulemeester jewelry, his own

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Alton Mason AGE: 21 HOMETOWN: Phoenix When he was growing up, Mason says, “my family loved Naomi Campbell.” Now that he’s one of the flyest, smoothest, and most in-demand models in men’s fashion, Mason’s gotten the opportunity to break bread with the woman he refers to as his “mom.”

And it’s helped him take his own work to the next level.

“Being able to work alongside Naomi and just learn from her,” he says, “is like Michael Jordan inviting you to play one-on-one and schooling you.” pants (price upon request) Givenchy boxers $30 (for pack of two) Calvin Klein hair by ward at the wall group. grooming and makeup by romy soleimani using bobbi brown. set design by piers hanmer.

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When a 26-year-old American missionary set out for a lush island in the Indian Ocean last year, it was with one objective in

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mind: to convert the uncontacted Sentinelese tribe, who had lived for centuries in isolation, free from modern technology, disease, and religion.

John Chau’s mission had ambitions for a great awakening, but what awaited instead was tragedy.

By Doug Bock Clark

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From his kayak, Chau yelled in English: “My name is John. I love you, and Jesus loves you. Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you.” Then, o≠ering a tuna most likely caught by the fishermen on the journey to the island, Chau declared: “Here is some fish!” In response, the Sentinelese socketed bamboo arrows onto bark-fiber bowstrings. Chau panicked. He flung the gift into the bay. As the tribesmen gathered it, he turned and paddled “like I never have in my life, back to the boat.”

By the time he reached safety, though, his fear was already turning to disappointment. He swore to himself that he would return later that day. He had, after all, been planning for this moment since high school. It was his divine calling, he believed, to save the lost souls of North Sentinel Island.

FIRST CONTACT For 11 days in November 2018, John Chau lived mostly in darkness.

While a cyclone thrashed the Bay of Bengal, Chau quarantined himself inside a safe house in the tropical backwater of Port Blair, India, never stepping outside to enjoy sunlight. The 26-year-old American missionary was hoping his body would finish o≠ any lingering infections so that he wouldn’t sicken the Sentinelese, a hunter-gatherer tribe that he dreamed of converting to Christianity. They’d been isolated on their remote island for enough centuries that they’d never developed modern antibodies. Even the common cold could devastate them.

During this retreat Chau kept his mountain climber’s body hard with triangle push-ups, leg tucks, and body squats. But it was his soul that he primarily fortified, with prayer and by reading a history of the tribulations faced by pioneering American missionaries in Southeast Asia, who were an inspiration to him. “God, I thank you for choosing me, before I was even yet formed in my mother’s womb, to be Your messenger of Your Good News,” he wrote in his diary. “May Your Kingdom, Your Rule and Reign come now to North Sentinel Island.”

After the storm finally passed, a crew of local Christians hid Chau on their 30-foot open wooden boat and struck out under darkness for the most extreme outcrop of the Andaman archipelago, on a route presumably meant to resemble that of a normal fishing expedition. As they dodged other craft, Chau recorded, “The Milky Way was above and God Himself was shielding us from the Coast Guard and Navy patrols.” The Indian government bans contact with the Sentinelese as a way of protecting them from outsiders—and outsiders from them. The Sentinelese have maintained their independence by frequently repelling foreigners from their shoreline with eight-foot-long arrows.

Bioluminescent plankton illuminated fish jumping “like darting mermaids” as the boat motored more than 60 miles. Sometime before 4:30 a.m., the crew noted three bonfires on a distant beach and then anchored outside the island’s barrier reef. While resting, eyes shut but not asleep, Chau had “a vision as I’ve never had one before,” of a meteorite—possibly representing himself—streaking toward a “frightening city with jagged spires,” seemingly Sentinel Island. Then “a whitish light filled [the city] and all the frightening bits melted away.” He couldn’t help wondering in his diary: “LORD is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had a chance to hear Your Name?”

Dawn soon revealed a hut on a white-sand beach, As posted on backed by primordial jungle. Chau o≠-loaded from his Instagram: the fishermen’s boat a kayak and two waterproof cases Chau took jammed with wilderness survival supplies. He paddled public ferries to several a half mile in shallow water over dead coral, and as he outlying approached shore, he heard women “looing and chatterislands to test ing.” Then two dark-skinned men, wearing little, if anyhis kayak for thing, ran onto the beach, shouting in a language spoken his final trip to by no one on earth besides their tribe. They clutched bows, North Sentinel though they hadn’t yet strung arrows onto them.

Island.

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2. THE CALLING On the surface, John Chau enjoyed a normal 1990s childhood in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, playing soccer and performing charitable work with his church. Family photos show a chubby-cheeked boy grinning with his Chinese psychiatrist father in national parks, his American lawyer mother presumably behind the camera. But it wasn’t just those vacations that inspired his love of the wild. One day, while still in elementary school, Chau found a book in his dad’s downstairs study and wiped dust o≠ its cover to reveal: Robinson Crusoe. The story of a solitary castaway on a tropical island hooked him on adventure tales.

As Chau matured, he mastered the skills necessary to strike o≠ on his own adventures in the rugged mountains just outside Portland, earning the equivalent of an Eagle Scout award from an evangelical version of the Boy Scouts. It wasn’t just a love of exploration that drove him. Wandering through mossy forests caused him to marvel at “the beautiful creation around us that we are all called to care for” and connected him to God, like the Old Testament prophets who found the Lord while alone in the wilderness.

Chau grew up Pentecostal, a charismatic Christian movement that is generally considered intensely evangelical and conservative.

His mother wrote that she worked as a fund-raiser for organizations like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which describes itself as “Washington, D.C.’s premier institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy,” and then for many years on the faculty at Oral Roberts University, a historically Pentecostal institution. It was during

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his junior year at a small Christian high school that he underwent that American evangelical rite of passage: a mission trip to Mexico. Sermonizing months later, as seen in a video uploaded to YouTube, Chau said the trip helped him realize, “We can’t just call ourselves Christians and then the next day just be like, Yeah, you know, let’s go to a party and get drunk and get high, whatever, get wasted, and live a lifestyle that’s totally against what Christ has called us to do.

We actually have to do something.” The skinny teenager in an American Eagle polo reminds his listeners that one of Jesus’s commands was: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” This passage comes from what is known as the Great Commission, and it is a primary biblical justification for missionary work.

Though overseas missions might seem a relic of the British Empire, America dispatches a significant number of missionaries abroad each year—approximately 127,000 in 2010, for example, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. This number grew for decades because of American Protestantism’s emphasis on every believer’s responsibility to proselytize and the increasing ease of air travel, which has meant that spreading the Word internationally can be done over spring break. These factors have contributed to an explosion of self-regulated missionary groups that can seem practically freelance compared with the bureaucratized Catholic missionary orders of old. Chau would have likely believed missionary work “to be a divine obligation,” said Joshua Chen, a friend raised in a household with similar beliefs.

Among some evangelicals, few missionaries are as celebrated as those who work with remote tribes. After returning from his high school trip to Mexico, Chau was surfing JoshuaProject.net, a website that catalogs unconverted peoples, and stumbled upon an entry for the Sentinelese. Today the site describes them as a “hostile” tribe that “need to know the Creator God exists.” Before long he was conjuring the islet on Google Maps, promising that he was going to bring the Sentinelese the Good News. His father, Patrick Chau, overheard him telling others this was his “calling,” but Patrick later wrote, “I hoped that he would be matured enough to rectify the fantasy before too late.”

3. SATAN’S LAST STRONGHOLD The Andamanese tribes, of which the Sentinelese are one, are “arguably the most enigmatic people on our planet,” according to a team of geneticists who published a paper in 2003 about trying to track their origins. The scientists found some evidence that they were part of the first wave of humans to reach Asia, more than 50,000 years ago— which makes sense, as their appearance is similar to that of Africans.

But if that theory holds true, Asiatic peoples, who arrived later, eradicated their forebears, except for a remnant in the Andamans. This would mean that the estimated 50 to 200 surviving Sentinelese have been refugees since prehistory.

Records from Roman, Arab, and Chinese traders, dating from the second century A.D., tell of Andamanese murdering sailors who put to shore looking for fresh water. In the 13th century, Marco Polo passed nearby and recorded from secondhand accounts that “they are a most cruel generation, and eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race,” though he was almost certainly wrong about the cannibalism. Consequently, most people who even knew about the Sentinelese were happy to avoid them until the British Empire established Port Blair, a penal colony for rebellious Indians, on nearby South Andaman Island.

In 1879, the 19-year-old aristocrat Maurice Vidal Portman was charged with overseeing the Andamanese and—drawn by whatever impulse has moved young men across the ages—soon led an expedition

to Sentinel Island. At first he and his soldiers Indian anthropologists freely roamed a jungle that was “in many places pass coconuts open and park like,” he wrote, and filled with to the “beautiful groves of bullet-wood trees.” Eventually Sentinelese in they discovered some recently abandoned lean1991—one of the tos and evidence that their inhabitants survived most notable attempts at by hunting sea turtles, wild pigs, and fish, as well contact to date. as by foraging fruits and roots. Portman, however, was not satisfied.

After scouring the Manhattan-size island, and having glancing contact with the Sentinelese, the outsiders finally stumbled across an old Sentinelese man with his wife and child. The old man was tackled before he could fire his bow, and the whole family, along with three other Sentinelese children captured about the same time, was abducted back to Port Blair where Portman kept all of them in his house. (Over two ensuing decades of ostensibly civilizing the natives, Portman habitually photographed naked Andamanese captives, though it doesn’t seem that any of the disturbing pictures that survive are of the Sentinelese.) The old Sentinelese man and his wife rapidly died of sickness, and Portman eventually released the surviving children back to the island with gifts—and, perhaps, pathogens.

“This expedition was not a success,” Portman wrote. “We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers. It would have been better to have left the Islanders alone.”

Some have speculated that Portman turned the Sentinelese against outsiders. Certainly his misadventures couldn’t have helped. But historical records suggest that the Sentinelese had isolated themselves long before Portman, perhaps because Southeast Asian kingdoms had raided them for slaves. Regardless, the Sentinelese violently maintained their independence until the British Empire collapsed, shortly after World War II, and the new Indian government eventually realized that some of its citizens didn’t even comprehend they were Indian.

Consequently, in March 1974, a team of Indian anthropologists attempted to befriend the Sentinelese. As they approached the island, the anthropologists were guarded by policemen equipped with shields and shadowed by a film crew. The Indians had brought three Andamanese from a friendly tribe to interpret. “We are friends!” they shouted through a loudspeaker from a boat o≠shore. “We come in peace!” Evidence suggests the Sentinelese’s language has diverged from those of nearby tribes so much they are mutually unintelligible. But from about 80 yards away, one archer bent so far back that he seemed to aim at the sun, then launched an unmistakable reply. In a recording of that moment, an eight-foot bamboo shaft, with an iron nail lashed to its tip, plunges out of the heavens, ricochets o≠ the boat’s railing, and into the water. When the camera refocuses, (continued on page 171)

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Meet Katherine Bernhardt, the so-called “female bad-boy” of contemporary art.

By Scott Indrisek

Photographs by Dina Litovsky

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made no sense,” says Katherine Bernhardt.

“That was the goal: nothingness. And what were the brightest, craziest color combinations I could come up with, that would clash?”

Bernhardt—44 years old, sporting a Daisy Duck T-shirt, enormous earrings from a local fabric store, and flashy neon-pink-laced Nike Air Zoom Pegasus 35s with a floral print— is holding court in her studio, a converted auto-repair shop in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. She pegs her personal style as “tropical, futuristic hippie,” and that’s not far o≠ from some of the paintings she makes; the space is brimming with huge works that exude an eye-popping swagger.

In one, a spray-painted Pink Panther hangs out with two high-speed bullet trains modeled on the Shinkansen that Bernhardt rode with her son during a recent trip to Japan.

A wobbly painting of the infamous oversized Triple S sneaker by Balenciaga outs her as a sneakerhead. (She’s also enough of a Nike fanatic that she has her own hand-drawn swoosh tattoo.) There’s a massive pile of softsculpture gummy worms stacked up in one corner, leftovers from Concrete Jungle Jungle Love, a 2017 takeover of New York’s Lever House, for which Bernhardt created a sprawling environment. “Now that I look back at it, it was kind of too much,” she reflects. “Too much color, too much of everything.…”

Bernhardt’s slight regret is amusing, given that these days she’s always putting too much of everything into her work. A typical Bernhardt might measure up to 10 feet long, its surface swimming with spray-painted oddities: hammerhead sharks, hamburgers, Windex bottles, cigarettes, watermelons, Garfields, stormtroopers, bananas. A lot of what draws her to things is simply their color: the bright bright pink of the Pink Panther; Garfield’s orange tone; the chemical blue of that Windex bottle. They’re unabashedly fun and proudly illogical, fast and silly yet executed with thoughtful, painterly chops.

And in 2019, Bernhardt is at the top of her game, beloved by her fellow artists and coveted by private collectors and museums alike. Meanwhile, she’s got countless creative side hustles—selling imported Moroccan rugs, as well as a series of hand-painted, tie-dyed T-shirts ornamented with bootleg logos—all while juggling the demands of

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“Newspapers, ice cream molds, Scottish terrier paraphernalia,” she says, as though rattling o≠ an inventory of one of her own paintings. “All the furniture from people’s estates that died. Just everything.

I remember we had a playroom that was really full of stu≠—my dad got mad, he came and raked it out.”

She left home to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, accepted with a portfolio of watercolors she’d made based on photos she took as a high school exchange student in Portugal. From there she moved to New York for the master’s program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). Her knowledge of contemporary art, until that point, basically ended with Georgia O’Keefe, although she had been turned on to the work of Laura Owens and Mary Heilmann in Chicago.

Their impact on her own future paintings makes sense: Owens is known for irreverent appropriation of pop-culture imagery, and Heilmann’s abstract paintings are explosions of bright color, rendered with a loose hand.

In New York, Bernhardt hit the Chelsea gallery scene hard and found her stride as an artist. She was a sensation before she’d even finished her degree, in 2000. Her early output included messy still lifes of common objects, as well as ri≠s on pop-culture touchstones like E.T. and the McDonald’s arches. Shortly after graduation, she landed a solo show at Team Gallery, home at the time to a dudeheavy roster of artists like Slater Bradley and Steven Parrino. “There was a rampant disrespect for painting going on that I really responded to,” says Team cofounder José Freire, who visited Bernhardt’s SVA studio along with his then gallery partner, Francis Ruyter. “It’s taken time for people to see that the work has this romantic, abiding respect for the traditions of painting—that the lowbrow subject matter is not the be-all and endall of what she’s doing.”

Bernhardt’s star was lifted further by a glowing Village Voice review from future Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Jerry Saltz. (“She’s a natural, even if I can’t say exactly what kind of natural that is,” he proclaimed in 2001.) At the time, Bernhardt was making drippy, purposefully inelegant images of fashion models, all based directly on photos from magazines. She painted them as if

she were a fan who simultaneously wanted to destroy her icons. Hair transformed into a tangled nest of angry brushstrokes; clothing dissolved into colorful smears and blotches. Some may have read it as a vicious attack on a superficial industry, though that was never Bernhardt’s intent. She’d cross paths with supermodels at parties or openings and excitedly ask them to take pictures with her.

“I was painting them because I loved them—I was obsessed with them,” she tells me now. “Gisele! Kate Moss!” she exclaims, with true fangirl enthusiasm, while flipping through a 2008 book on the series, The Magnificent Excess of Snoop Dogg (which, somewhat confusingly, does not actually contain any paintings of Snoop Dogg).

“What’s amazing about her is that she defies so many rules,” says longtime friend and fellow artist Brian Belott. Her insistence

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Katherine Bernhardt at her Brooklyn studio in June 2019.

on working from photographs, for instance, was a flippant transgression. Belott was impressed by how Bernhardt turned slick fashion images into portraits akin to those of David Park or Egon Schiele. Spindly bodies, oversized heads, a sense of the human form as something strange and uncomfortable.

Bernhardt eventually left Team behind, shifting her allegiances to the CANADA gallery. The ethos at CANADA, which was founded in 1999, was fresh and fairly DIY, as all four cofounders were artists themselves.

Belott was part of the broader crew showing there, as were Brendan Cass, Joe Bradley, and Josh Smith. “It was a den of like-minded artists,” Belott recalls, “who were interested in burping up objects and things, not cleaning them o≠, showing them for all their punky theatricality.” Despite gaining critical buzz

for her supermodel paintings, Bernhardt had never fully felt at home with Team, and CANADA was something of a revelation. “I liked the vibe and the niceness,” she says. “I fit in there—part of a family.”

When CANADA cofounders Phil Grauer and Sarah Braman first visited Bernhardt, she was working out of her bedroom in a modest apartment on 27th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan. Braman says the visit was a mutual laugh-in; Grauer recalls “a snowdrift of paintings everywhere,” a sense of the impossible being pulled o≠, somehow, in such a tight space. CANADA included her in its 2005 show New York’s Finest, a sly flipping of the bird to MoMA PS1’s Greater New York survey. At this point Bernhardt was “notorious and famous, in a weird little way,” and her inclusion on the roster brought fresh attention to the gallery.

“She was a celebrity of some kind,” Grauer jokes, “compared to the losers that we were.”

Painter Wallace Whitney, another CANADA cofounder, recalls meeting Bernhardt at an opening, circa 2001, where she was sporting a Captain Morgan T-shirt that she’d shredded and ornamented with beads. “She had this enormous presence, this megawatt energy,” Whitney says, “this reputation of a sort of ‘bad girl’ painter.…

There was a certain punk ethos around that, an early second-wave feminist attack on painting that was bubbling up again.”

Not everyone was sold on Bernhardt’s devil-may-care attitude toward painting’s rules, or toward the art world itself. Braman, looking back on those early days, notes a persistent prejudice that still lingers. Bernhardt was headstrong, unconcerned with playing the traditional careerist games. She painted what she felt like painting and wasn’t afraid

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of the occasional collaboration with brands like Chanel or Miss Sixty. “The curators could smell that on her—that her practice didn’t allow for her caring about them anointing her,” Braman says. “It felt overtly sexist.… A woman that isn’t going to need the acknowledgment of the museum class, that’s too scary.

They don’t want to see that. When she was doing the model paintings, they’d use words like thin and vapid when they’re totally, intensely beautiful paintings, an intensely complex, subtle critique and translation of the American experience as a woman.”

“Someone—a dealer—told me that I’ll never make it as a female unless I make big paintings,” Bernhardt says today. “So I was like, ‘Okay…I’ll make big paintings!’ ”

“I guess that’s my aesthetic,” Bernhardt says, “raw, stained, messy, using-your-handin-it art.”

at those big, big paintings. One of the things about that group of artists is the sketch, taken to a monumental scale,” Whitney says.

“Katherine was doing fast watercolors of just anything that would pop into her head—a Popsicle, a burrito, a Sharpie, a cigarette— and then somehow she was able to transpose this energy onto an 8-by-10-foot canvas.”

B E R N H A R D T ’ S P R A C T I C E —and life—took a These so-called “pattern paintings” were wild detour in her mid-30s, when she visited a synthesis of so much that had come before, a friend in Morocco who was working with a way to mingle the logic of Moroccan carnative weavers in the Valley of the Roses. She pet design with signs and symbols of her fell in love with the country’s carpets, and own. “These rugs had repeating elements,” with Youssef Jdia, a rug seller who would Grauer says. “She was going to do that, too: eventually become her husband and the Cigarettes, basketballs, or hamburgers were father of her child, Khalifa. (They’re now going to get woven and repeated and placed.”

The eureka moment that further kicked o≠ this shift was a gra∞ti mural Bernhardt saw get all of them?’ in Manhattan one day. “It was a smiley face, a heart, a dollar sign, an ice cream, stu≠ like that, kind of random, all over the wall,” she says. “I was like, ‘I want to paint like that.’

So I stole that idea.” Her first version of the concept mixed images of emoji with a few bananas. “I was scared of it,” she admits. “The colors Bernhardt pegs her personal style as were weird. It didn’t feel “tropical, futuristic comfortable.” hippie”—just like much of her work.

controversy. “ who somehow winds up in North Africa and is painting these rugs—how appropriate is that?’ ” CANADA’s Grauer says, channeling the criticism. “Katherine lifted the rugs the same way she lifted E.T. It was all part of the same stu≠—the stu≠ outside of her body. She was not going to discriminate around those things, and she never has: ‘There’s me, and the world.’ In some ways that could be understood as insensitivity, but in another way it’s very beautifully open and democratic.”

Bernhardt’s practice has always been voracious, swallowing up objects and influences around her. Those who know her well describe her as someone who lacks the cutthroat, competitive edge so common to the art world—and yet she’s a keen study, attuned to the tactics and techniques of those around her, like fellow CANADA artists Michael Williams and Matt Connors. “She was looking

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And yet something about that awkward experiment stuck with her. The stylistic rebirth—in your face, heavy on the spray paint, drippy and wild—debuted at the Roberto Paradise gallery in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2013. Bernhardt had been traveling to the island since 1998. Intentionally or not, the paintings she showed there popped with a new, vibrant, specifically tropical energy.

They were fast, silly, and joyous. Bernhardt has never been one for enigmatic or pretentious titles: Anyone visiting Watermelon, Smiley Faces, Ice Cream, Popsicles, Avocado and Sun knew exactly what they were getting.

“When she was making these paintings, she started thinking less,” says Francisco Rovira Rullán, owner of Roberto Paradise. “She relaxed her brain.”

The patterns kept coming. Hamburgers, cell phones, Lisa Simpson, sharks, and cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes. (Don’t expect any vapes; Bernhardt still smokes old-school Newport 100s.) A painter who had made her mark with moody, expressionistic portraits of Kate Moss was now letting overstu≠ed tacos dance against a sunflower yellow background. The new works refused to take themselves seriously; a 2014 show at CANADA

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was called Stupid, Crazy, Ridiculous, Funny Patterns. And although Bernhardt certainly takes the act of painting seriously, its intensity and physicality, she’s a bit more elusive when it comes to making sense out of all this stu≠. A further influence, she says, was contemporary Dutch wax fabrics, which similarly jumble together patterned images that have no relation to one another: the head of Barack Obama, for instance, with a punch of pencils.

“Dumb things, dumb objects,” she muses in her studio. “What is stupid?”

T E M P T I N G T O connect her current faux-naive, sugar-overload style with the fact that she became a mother in 2011. Certainly the pattern paintings have a childlike energy about them, and they’re littered with cartooncharacter cameos. (Despite how often she returns to both the Pink Panther and Garfield, the artist stresses that she “[doesn’t] even like cats.” She’s allergic.) If anything, Bernhardt seems to lean in to any tired, “my kid could do that” criticisms.

Her son, Khalifa, now eight, is a constant companion and an occasional collaborator, even if she tries to keep him out of the studio these days. “He trashes the place,” she says.

“He likes to make box forts there. He likes to squirt tons of paint out on this palette that I have and then not use it. Or paint all over the floor.” When I visit, there’s an array of small canvases on the floor, some of them destined for a Hamptons art fair. They’re all variations on the motif of the Lacoste alligator logo. (Does she own Lacoste or Chanel items? “No. Don’t care. I’d rather make fake ones.”) One of the paintings is a joint e≠ort IT’S

between her and Khalifa, a murky green fantasia that has a distinct Peter Doig vibe. It’s Bernhardt’s favorite of the bunch.

Later in the day, we head to Bernhardt’s two-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, on the edge of Prospect Park. It’s a cozy nest, the floor piled with Moroccan rugs, the walls hand-painted with similar motifs. Every inch of space is crowded with art, much of it trades from friends and peers: a David Shrigley of a woman licking a frog; a Brian Belott, composed of crumpled and painted aluminum-foil balls; a glittery Chris Martin, leaning against the wall; a bulbous, wonky Katie Stout sculpture, repurposed as a toy shelf; a trio of Jason Foxes hanging in the bedroom that, she says, sometimes scare Khalifa. Near the bed slumps an enormous soft sculpture of a lighter by Al Freeman; it’s paired with a similarly scaled cigarette, which Rob Pruitt made for her as a gift. While we talk in the living room, surrounded by the art of all those and so many others—Alicia Gibson, Misaki Kawai, Joanne Greenbaum—I ask her if there’s a general style she responds to. Unlike so many artists, Bernhardt doesn’t come with a ready-made shtick, a rote speech about what it all means; she’s clearly enamored of painting, but less so of talking about painting. “I guess that’s my aesthetic: raw, stained, messy, using-your-hand-in-it art,” Bernhardt says. She’s not a fan of “perfect, realistic cartoons” (the Chicago Imagists), but she’s a sucker for the “smeared, gross” ceramics of Sterling Ruby, a favorite artist. Precious

own work has gotten looser with time; she’ll add a bit of water to freshly sprayed paint, let a Pink Panther’s head melt a bit. Speed is the order of the day.

But when it comes to her own practice, Bernhardt is reserved, if not mildly uncomfortable. She seems uninterested in unpacking the hows and whys of her paintings: the meaning of an oversized Star Wars stormtrooper, her thoughts on Jerry Saltz dubbing her a “female bad-boy painter.” It seems enough that Bernhardt has made these things, launched them out into the world, let them speak in their own self-assured, proudly doofy way. She’d rather bitch about the way crypto-bros have driven up rents in San Juan, or tell me about how obsessed she is with the emo rapper Juice WRLD (Shout your name in hills in the valley, goes her current favorite track, “Desire.” Whole world’s gonna know you love me.) And while she does read her own reviews, Bernhardt puts more faith in a di≠erent audience. Recently she had a solo show at upstate New York’s Art Omi—Pink Panthers posing with cigarettes, Scotchtape rolls, clusters of bananas—and she was psyched to learn that the center’s youngest visitors were responding to the work. Classes were being held. A future generation was learning that art can be as weird, scuzzy, and funny as you dare it to be. “When kids like it,” she says, “I know that it’s good.”

Over the years, Bernhardt’s practice has also been driven by a series of infatuations: art crushes, style crushes. “She has actual male muses,” Rovira Rullán of Roberto Paradise tells me. For instance, there were Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro, identical twins from Puerto Rico who helm the aggressive, puppet-based performance collective Poncili Creación; Bernhardt befriended the duo and named a 2015 solo show at Venus Over Manhattan in their honor.

More recently, she’s been stuck on Francesco D’Angelo, a 27-year-old Peruvian who was an in-house anthropologist, researching local culinary traditions for the chic restaurant Mil, outside Cuzco. Bernhardt met him when she was in the country for a museum exhibition, and the two started a prolific WhatsApp correspondence. She’s been making him his own bootleg Balenciaga Bernhardt’s paintings sweatshirts. This month Karma are unabashedly will publish an obsessive, reverent fun and proudly book of drawings that Bernhardt illogical, yet executed has made of Francesco, many of with thoughtful, them based on his selfies. painterly chops.

Travel—chasing those inspirations—has been a constant in Bernhardt’s life, and becoming a mother hasn’t slowed her down a bit. Shortly after our meeting, she and Khalifa were flying to Guadalajara, Mexico, where Bernhardt would make ceramics as part of a residency at the Cerámica Suro factory. She’s bought (continued on page 171)

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He may not look like he’d be the NFL’s scariest young quarterback, but in just one jaw-dropping season, that’s what Baker Mayfield has become—all while turning the woebegone Browns into the league’s most talkedabout team.

By Clay Skipper Photographs by Thomas Whiteside Styled by Jon Tietz

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body a f o l e barre ouse just l b a r e consid at a steak h onight s i h s ld slide ather booth unces that t to say e i f y a M wn le anno This is not o r d n b a a into veland himself. ¶ quarterback e e l C e —ther outsid not feeling confident r e g g a w st st he’s ju planet’s mo s signature s dallion of e hi me eck. n d s e i d h that th ed without d d-stu anging from riv n r o a m s a a i h all, a d number, 6, h r e t f a is, jersey ’s d l e i Mayf

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shirt $3,065 Bottega Veneta tank top $40 (for pack of three) Calvin Klein Underwear necklace, his own

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No, he means, simply, that he won’t be ordering the Baker Mayfield Steak, a hallmark dish here at the tastefully suburban Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse. The handsome cut of beef that bears Mayfield’s name—a filet mignon topped with a spicy cracked-peppercorn-andcognac bordelaise sauce—appears on the menu, squeezed between the Steak LeBron and the Urban Meyer Steak.

When the restaurant first floated the idea of an honorific steak, Mayfield considered the o≠er premature. This was last fall, roughly midway through his rookie season.

“We had barely won any games,” he says. “I didn’t think I deserved it yet.” He might not have, but getting listed there on the menu with the sainted sports icons of northern Ohio after just one NFL season tells you something about how god-awful the Browns have been—and how lofty the expectations are now.

Before Mayfield unexpectedly took over as the Browns’ quarterback, in week three of last season, Cleveland had won only a single game in the previous 37 tries. With Mayfield running the show, the Browns proceeded to win that game—and 6 of their next 13. Along the way, Mayfield—Cleveland’s Mayfield!—threw for 27 touchdowns, an NFL rookie record.

Asked if he thinks he deserves the steak now, Mayfield hesitates before saying yes. “Just because I know where we’re headed,” he adds. Where exactly that may be is a subject of fevered conjecture, in Cleveland and across the NFL. After this spring’s addition of wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. to a roster that already features explosive talents like wide receiver Jarvis Landry, pass rusher Myles Garrett, and running back Nick Chubb, the good money says the Browns are likely to win their division, the AFC North, which they haven’t done since 1989. Mayfield figures that would take 10 or more wins.

As he tells me this, he pokes at his plate of chicken milanese, his bulky arms testing the stretch of his pale green hoodie. At six one, he’s among the NFL’s shortest starting quarterbacks, and he says he’s put on weight— reaching a stout 220-ish—to protect himself from the hits he takes. Mayfield is built like a water heater. He’s compact but hardly looks vulnerable. On the underside

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of his left wrist he’s got a tattoo that reads, “Believe in Yourself.” And those three words are at the heart of the Baker Mayfield story—even if a tornado of doubt and criticism tends to tail in his wake.

When he arrived in Cleveland one year ago, Mayfield was a Heisman Trophy–winning number one draft pick.

Critics pounced on his supposed shortcomings anyway.

He wasn’t tall enough, or mature enough, or not-JohnnyManziel enough to accomplish what 20 starting quarterbacks in the past 11 seasons never could: restore optimism to a franchise that had gotten so bleak that its stadium became known as the “factory of sadness.”

Near our booth, a SportsCenter segment about the New York Giants catches Mayfield’s eye. “I cannot believe the Giants took Daniel Jones,” Mayfield says, about New York’s much-maligned draft-day decision to spend the sixth pick on the quarterback from Duke (whose college record was a measly 17-19). “Blows my mind.”

I tell Mayfield that I’m mystified that so many supposedly expert quarterback scouts seem unable to predict what makes a good NFL quarterback.

“Some people overthink it,” Mayfield says. “That’s where people go wrong. They forget you’ve gotta win.”

It’s not hard to sense that Mayfield is reflecting on his own history now. Despite compiling a 39-9 record in college, he faced a chorus of criticism before the draft. Those past slights are buried in a shallow grave. (A Browns teammate, Joel Bitonio, tells me that Mayfield plays with “the mentality of proving everybody who’s ever said something negative about him wrong.”)

To Mayfield, the characteristics of a great quarterback are simple. “Either you have a history of winning and being that guy for your team,” he says, “or you don’t.”

Mayfield, of course, has always been that guy. Winning might be new for Cleveland, but it’s not for Mayfield,

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↑ coat $1,795 Paul Smith sweater $1,250 Bottega Veneta pants $775 Giorgio Armani belt (price upon request) Prada watch $32,100 Omega grooming by hee soo kwon using malin+goetz. produced by joy asbury productions. location: college of the canyons, santa clarita, california.

← Mayfield celebrates in the end zone during his pictureperfect rookie season.

whose stories have, to this point, all involved him breathing his faith—and a bit of that swaggering self-belief—into the people close enough to feel it.

T H E R E ’ S A M O M E N T from Mayfield’s rookie season that displays his charming brand of confidence. After leading the Browns to a 28–16 victory, Mayfield is asked by a reporter what clicked for him on that particular afternoon.

Mayfield, with a subtle tilt of his head, says simply, “When I woke up this morning, I was feeling pretty dangerous.”

He stands stone-faced for a moment, one corner of his lips turning ever so slightly upward, his eyes glistening with a knowing twinkle.

“Feeling dangerous” became his calling card, the slogan for his truly breakout season. The night after enjoying my Baker Mayfield steak at Hyde Park, I was able to sample a Feeling Dangerous beer downtown.

Another local establishment announced a Feelin’ Dangerous burger, complete with kielbasa and pierogies. In Cleveland, the energy in Baker’s catchphrase seems contagious and helps explain why the Browns’ losing season—they finished 7-8-1—seemed so damn winning. For the first time in a long time, Mayfield had the Cleveland Browns feeling dangerous. As Mayfield’s own history shows, that shift in mind-set is powerful: You’ve often got to start believing you’re a threat long before others can begin to see it.

Coming out of high school in Austin, Mayfield received only a handful of scholarship o≠ers. Despite an

impressive 25-2 record at Lake Travis, he couldn’t shake the perception that he was too small to play at a truly big-time college program. His friends back home joke that he’s still 12 years old, because he was the smallest in the group. Mayfield’s own candor about his scrawny size takes me by surprise. “Looking back on it, I kind of was built like a little bitch,” he concedes of his pre-waterheater days.

With some encouragement from his dad, Mayfield turned down his scholarship o≠ers. He instead enrolled at Texas Tech, determined to make the team as a walk-on.

But he didn’t just walk on, he swaggered on and somehow won the starting job. During an impressive freshman season, though, he injured his knee. With his status as the starter in jeopardy, he says he wasn’t o≠ered a scholarship for his sophomore season. So Baker made an even bigger bet. He decided to transfer to Oklahoma, the blue-chip program he grew up rooting for.

“It helped that I was emotionally attached to that school, just being a fan growing up,” he says. “I’m like, ‘This is where I dreamed of playing, but I also know that I can go play there. I believe in myself, so why not go do it?’ ” Mind you: Oklahoma wasn’t exactly in need of Baker Mayfield. The Sooners had just beaten Alabama in the 2014 Sugar Bowl, where their sensational young quarterback, Trevor Knight, had starred. Mayfield was undeterred. After just one semester at Texas Tech, he drove with his mom to Norman to enroll for the spring classes.

He wasted no time seeking out head coach Bob Stoops, providing the coach with an early introduction to that Mayfield moxie.

“When he comes up to me, he hadn’t bothered to call anybody about transferring,” Stoops remembers now.

“You’re not just transferring anywhere. We just ended up somewhere in the top five, six, in the country the year before, beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl, and our redshirt freshman quarterback was the MVP of the game.

He’s gonna come and transfer to Oklahoma to play quarterback? So it just tells you all you need to know right there. That this guy, he came up and introduced himself, had a big smile and serious look on his face like, ‘I’m gonna do this.’ ” Per NCAA rules, he had to sit out the upcoming season. He managed to excel at that, too. “I loved that year,” Mayfield says. He played intramural softball. “Two-time intramural champions. One of my biggest accomplishments,” he says. He also tried to play intramural football but was told, after one game, that this wouldn’t be allowed.

(He points out that his team won the game.)

By the time he was eligible to compete, for the 2015–16 season, he had won the starting job. At the end of that year, he finished fourth in Heisman voting. The next season, his junior year, he finished third.

But as a myth grows, so does national scrutiny. And in the o≠-season after his junior year, a slipup. Outside a bar in Fayetteville, Arkansas, cops asked Mayfield to provide a statement about an altercation he’d witnessed. Rather than stay put, he tried to make a run for it. Mayfield couldn’t quite get around the edge. The o∞cers tackled and arrested him. Making matters worse, the botched scramble was captured on the cops’ dashcam video and lit up the internet. “I thought I was sneaking away. Look at the video: I put my hood on,” he says now, before breaking into mock commentary of the clip. “And he’s o≠.… No, he’s not.… Annnd he’s caught.” (continued on page 169)

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Here’s what happened when one of TV and film’s most stylish stars flew to Japan with a bag full of the season’s most covetable clothes. Photographs by Mark Seliger Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu

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not into sea urchin, you would probably dig this restaurant,” Justin Theroux says, as if he’s letting me in on a secret. “Everyone knows Jiro Dreams of Sushi”—the Netflix documentary about the slavishly devoted sushi chef Jiro Ono—“but this place is billed as the place that Jiro likes to go.”

It’s hidden where all the best places in Tokyo are: through a back alley and past an unremarkable building that leads to an unmarked door. And the sea urchin. Oh, man— the sea urchin! The dish requires surgical precision from the chef: The spiny shells are split open; then the meat is scooped out and whipped into a rice that’s been vinegared and cured for a few days. The whole thing is garnished with a couple more ounces of the spineless creature for good measure. “The trick to that place is giving you just enough to make you want it so much more,” Theroux says fondly. It’s a dish so good you want seconds, thirds, fourths, and fifths.

You see, Theroux loves Tokyo. Not because he has his familiar spots, his favorite hangs, or the one restaurant he always goes back to.

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It’s just the opposite. “It always feels like it’s too brief, being in Tokyo. The draw that keeps you going back is that it’s a very hard place to tack down,” he says. “Tokyo is an organism that keeps growing and evolving.”

As a city, Tokyo makes absolute sense to him. When someone has a runny nose, they wear a surgical mask instead of greeting you with a hug. The 7-Elevens have outlines of footprints on the floor to shape the polite, orderly queue of people waiting for egg sandwiches. There are rules everywhere, but if you give in to them, you’re “like a leaf in a stream,” he says.

“I’m glad I’m not remembering the names of a lot of these places, because they’ll immediately get put in a Time Out guidebook and then become savaged by tourists,” Theroux says. “It ruins the place you went to. You can’t go back to it again, because you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s now a bunch of Australians.’ ” When Theroux returned from his trip, we got him on the phone and asked him for the stories behind the many stops he made alongside photographer Mark Seliger. — C A M W O L F

←←

is, obviously, sort of famous for that Lost in Translation shot, with hoards of people crossing at intervals— it’s still an incredible spectacle. It’s like watching this big 3,000-person ballet every three minutes.

Sadly, the best view of it is from Starbucks on the second floor, directly above it.” coat $7,395 Dunhill shirt $590 pants $1,100 Celine by Hedi Slimane necklace and mask, his own

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was probably the most difficult photo for us to get, because you have to basically sit facing forward, sit on your haunches, or sit crosslegged. It’s a place you have to respect for obvious reasons. You can’t speak, talk, or communicate. You feel like you’re just sort of lucky to be there, watching them work. It’s an intense workout too. Bizarrely silent and punctuated by big outbursts of sound.

The slapping of thighs and legs, then incredible exertions of energy.

I almost thought it was more interesting than going to an actual sumo match.” coat $790 3.1 Phillip Lim location: Azumazeki-beya Sumo Stable

to hook up with this one famous girl who has this bike, which has the Imperial Japanese flag on the tank with a big, tall banana seat on the back. I had seen photos of it, and I sent a photo of it from the early ’90s to Mark.

Lo and behold, that same bike showed up with her!

It was sort of a dreamscome-true moment, where I was like, ‘Oh, my God. This is the actual bike that I’ve seen pictures of for years—and I get to ride it!’ The motorcycle itself rides pretty crap. It was a very old bike, so it had a lot of rattle on it and not the best brakes.” vintage leather jacket (price upon request) David Samuel Menkes pants $2,950 Celine by Hedi Slimane boots, his own

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me to go back there and make a piece of sushi with him. He gave me a small lesson on how to palm the rice, roll it in your hand, place your thumb over it, then the tuna, place it over that, and compact the whole thing and brush it with this special soy sauce.

I think he was chuffed that we were in there.� jacket $1,898 Michael Kors sweater $920 Hermès pants $1,000 Dior Men glasses, his own location: Koraku Sushi

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going to this thing with Eliot Sumner [editor’s note: Sting’s daughter!] called teamLab, which was this virtual experience. It was pretty rad. It’s one of those places that’s sort of designed for Instagram.

[Looking at] the pictures, you think, Oh, that would be such a wonderful place to walk around by myself.

But they shuttle you into these gorgeous rooms at three-minute intervals, 15 people at a time, and it’s 15 people holding iPhones at a 45-degree angle above their head and walking around and trying not to bump into things.

Then they kick you out.” jacket $11,190 Tom Ford pants $450 3.1 Phillip Lim his own boots R13 watch and jewelry, his own location: teamLab Borderless Museum

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→

of big cities. I love New York; it’s my first love. But it always feels like it’s too brief being in Tokyo. The things that were there three years ago don’t exist anymore, but now there’s something that’s replaced it. Things that were there 10 years ago absolutely don’t exist, but you have a fond memory of it. It’s one of those places that’s its own living thing, one of those places that keeps opening itself up to you.”

blush has this very futuristic and orderly [feeling], but once you embrace that, it makes an enormous amount of sense. You go into restaurants, there’s no loud music. And because there’s no loud music, people speak in softer tones. You can actually unwind in Tokyo, whereas I don’t think you can in New York, because space is so limited and because people are so absolutely inconsiderate of one another.”

shirt $98 Michael Kors

coat $5,400 Celine by Hedi Slimane

pants $450 3.1 Phillip Lim

turtleneck $350 Canali

his own boots R13

pants, his own

watch and glasses, his own

sunglasses (price upon request) Moscot

location: Tokyo Station

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it’s a brutal time change.

You get that flu-y, sweatyback-of-the-neck sort of feeling. It starts to feel like a dream for a minute.

My strategy [for jet lag] is to sleep on planes as much as humanly possible. Just go to bed.

Eat before you get on the plane. It’s usually a struggle through the first day, but then you feel like a morning person for a couple of days.” robe $1,300 Triple RRR boxers $30 (for pack of two) Calvin Klein Underwear watch and jewelry, his own location: Park Hyatt Hotel

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this bamboo forest that was just stunning. Wide, tall bamboo trees. You feel like you’re just on a different planet altogether. You walk up a very small footpath, and it diverges into this gorgeous stone staircase that’s covered in moss that diverges again onto white pebbles that diverges again into the bamboo forest. You realize you probably only walked 150 yards, but you feel like you’ve gone through four seasons. It was of those places where you just think, How does this even exist?” jacket $2,750 Savas shirt $395 Dolce & Gabbana pants $525 Ring Jacket his own boots R13 sunglasses, jewelry, and bag, his own location: Jomyoji, Kamakura grooming by akiko carrie ishitani and ana cano. produced by coco knudson. locally produced by david dicembre. special thanks to sony.

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R A M I M A L EK

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 1 26

Malek leads the way to the toy store, which turns out to be a wholesale-only cavern of plastic crap that feels somewhat like a money-laundering venue. “Some of these items seem less like toys than fetish objects,” Malek says while browsing the putty and slime section (it’s a whole category now). Between buckets of mermaid slime and color-changing volcano slime, a Brooklyn dad approaches to ask for a photo with his tween daughter. The dad, presumably a Freddie Mercury fan, asks what Malek is doing in the neighborhood, if he’s making a movie or what. “We’re filming the TV show Mr. Robot. Check it out!” Malek responds. The dad is not familiar with the show. There is some overlap among Rhapsody and Robot fans, but not here.

people ask when they learn you’ve encountered a celebrity is “What’s he like?” Most celebrities have sanded their personalities to a frictionless sheen that causes all adjectives to slide o≠, so the answer is usually something like “Pretty nice. Has small pores.” Malek is unsanded (so far), and although he is nice and small-pored, he is also a blazing embodiment of three adjectives that become the tacit theme of every conversation, and which are worth documenting as insurance against the possibility of future frictionless-ness.

Trait one: He is prepared. Extreme preparedness is something Malek has in common with survivalists and Eagle Scouts. It manifests in ways that he thinks will be boring to readers, but I don’t think it is boring that he nailed Freddie Mercury’s accent by locating footage of Mercury’s mother speaking in her Gujarati accent and then mastering a Gujarati accent, which sounded nothing like Mercury, and then mastering an accent that was 80 percent Gujarati and 20 percent British, which still sounded nothing like Mercury, and then mastering an accent that was half and half, which was closer, and finally working his way up to an accent that was almost entirely British but with the faintest smidge of Gujarati intonation, like 98 percent to 2 percent, and, voilà, that was Mercury. The process was a secret between Malek and his dialect coach. On the first day of shooting, a confused producer came up after the first scene and said, “I know you do an incredible Freddie accent, but it’s starting to sound a little Indian.” Malek smiled to himself. “The work was there, it was underneath, and I just had to back o≠ a bit.” TM. To prepare for Mr. Robot, he learned about cybersecurity and read textbooks on THE FIRST QUESTION

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schizophrenia and watched all the relevant TED Talks and took typing lessons for hacker verisimilitude and found a psychologist who assigned him homework. “There were times when I would go to Sam and say, ‘This doesn’t quite match up for me,’ and I would have a reason why the psychology didn’t feel accurate, and I would reference some book on dissociative disorder by Elyn Saks,” Malek says. Or he’d cite something the psychologist had told him during one of their many phone calls. Instead of being annoyed at Malek’s conspicuous overachieving, Esmail hired the psychologist onto the show as a consultant. Re-learning to type and conducting a forensic analysis of Freddie Mercury’s mom’s speech patterns is a level of prep that goes far beyond, like, building lean muscle mass and dabbling in a mustache, or whatever other actors do, and the mountains of research that Malek assembles don’t always map directly onto the screen. But it’s all ammunition. “It is a confidence builder,” he says. “That feeling that I am equipped.”

Trait two: He is observant. “I remember always feeling like I could see people’s agendas a mile away, even at five or six years old,” he says. “Do you think that’s a common thing with children? Isn’t that how we define who our friends are?” Maybe some children. Malek thinks his watchfulness stems from the fact that he has an identical twin brother, Sami.

(Spelled like Rami but rhymes with Tammy.)

As kids Rami and Sami would look at each other in any given situation and simultaneously pick up on exactly the minute detail that everyone else in the room had ignored.

Malek’s powers of observation waned a little in high school—possibly they were blunted by the forces of hormones and social fears—and then picked up again in his young adulthood.

Here’s a demonstrative anecdote. In his mid20s, Malek was sleeping in the living room of his parents’ two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, driving a beat-up Camry, and working at a restaurant while going on auditions and searching for an agent. “If I saw someone who looked in any way producer-like, because the restaurant was in the middle of Hollywood, I would stick a headshot and a résumé into their to-go order.”

How did he gauge whether someone was “producer-like”?

“I could tell if they were picking up a company order if the name said Hollywood This or Production This or Something Pictures. And then you’d see the person come in and you’d think, Oh, that’s not just an assistant.” It was in their age, the way they dressed. One of these people turned out to be a guy named Frank Samuel, who gave Malek his card and told him not to abuse it. “Something to the e≠ect of Don’t pester me,” Malek says. “He laid out the terms, and I followed the terms.” Samuel gave Malek an audition for an M&M’s commercial, which Malek flubbed, and which led to a brief period of feeling frozen and destroyed.

But it taught him to stay alert to opportunities. To watch the door in case a person from Something Pictures walked in, and to be prepared with a spare headshot when it happened.

Which brings us to trait three. The kind of person who sneaks a folder of headshots into a commercial kitchen is a person with

a certain intensity. Intense is a great quality for flavors and music and fashion, but when used as a descriptor of people, it’s usually a euphemism for something bad, like “hyperactive” or “unnerving.” Malek isn’t hyperactive or unnerving, but he applies the kind of focus to his work that other people apply to studying for the LSAT. When he was living at home, he kept his scripts hidden away from other eyes.

“I never wrote in them,” he says. “I wanted them to have this religious quality to them.

If I could put them in a special box, I would.”

Being able to flip a switch and access acute concentration is a useful skill for an actor.

Whether on a noisy set or in a chaotic restaurant, Malek can carve out a nook of engagement in which eye contact is direct, pauses are thoughtful, and sentences are complete.

Maybe every interaction was like this before the internet existed.

“If I saw someone who looked in any way producerlike,” Malek says of his time working at a restaurant in Hollywood, “I would stick a headshot and a résumé into their to-go order.”

Or maybe, another theory: The focus is also related to the twinship. As children, Rami and Sami were constantly mistaken for each other.

When you grow up as an identical twin, the whole world conditions you to see yourself as— literally!—interchangeable. Surely this forces a person to have a healthily low ego from a young age, no? And if you’re not constantly fixating on yourself, you learn to focus on everything else, right? “I’m pretty good in that respect, but who wouldn’t say that?” Malek says. “Who’s going to admit that they’re egotistical?”

was going to spoil Rami Malek, it would have happened already. To date Bohemian Rhapsody is Fox’s third-biggest movie after Avatar and Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace. In Europe, a territory naturally rich in Queen fans, it was last year’s number one release in 13 nations. In a period of weeks, Malek’s global recognizability went from a mellow buzz to a full-blown psychedelic trip. Imagine that you woke up one day with your usual morning breath and customary bed head and left your apartment to discover that nobody looked at you the same way and all of your interactions were altered and strangers texted their friends when you walked past on the street. And random ladies groped you. The other day, Malek was going about his business when an inebriated woman suddenly “had her hands all over my butt.” He politely turned to the groper and said, “Can you not?” Even if you’re able to posit the causal link between winning an Oscar and being fondled by a drunk lady, it’s still a sequence that doesn’t track. “People’s perception might be altered, but when you sit down and talk to me, there’s nothing that’s mystifying. I’m not fucking covered in gold,” he says.

A N Y W AY, I F FA M E

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BA K ER M AYFI EL D

R A M I M A L E K C O N T I N UE D

Malek is at a peculiar point in his fame trajectory: He hasn’t fully exited the reality of normal people and entered the new stasis of celebrity. In practice this means he is still conversationally accessible, still enters interactions instead of “managing” them, is still surprised when strangers gawk, and still says things that would make his agent’s head explode and then wonders out loud whether those things should be on or o≠ the record.

When Malek was developing his role as Elliot, he practiced going undetected in public spaces. He clocked where the cameras were in every restaurant and elevator and store he entered. He wore all gray or all black, to be indecipherable from the pavement. He walked head down with his body hugging whatever wall or building was nearest, to avoid at least one side of having any human contact. These days, in the thick of new ultrafame, he will find himself walking around New York City in Elliot invisibility mode, hugging surfaces in a hoodie, which strikes him as slightly sad but mostly funny. To avoid being recognized, the actor now mimics one of the characters that made him recognizable.

And it works!

After lunch one day, he walks outside, unnoticed, and spots a Goop store nearby.

“Is that related to Gwyneth Paltrow?” he asks.

Yes. (“Related.”)

Malek discovers a lot of places by poking his head in. If he’s walking somewhere, time needs to be factored in for poking. Today he has the idea to go inside Goop and see if he can find a gift for his girlfriend, Lucy Boynton, who costarred with him in Bohemian Rhapsody. No special occasion, just a token of appreciation. We enter the store, which is stocked with superpowders and calming mists. Immediately Malek’s girlfriend meter is beeping. He definitely thinks he can find something in here for her.

“How about these?” he asks, examining a set of Champagne coupes. It’s always nice to

“People’s perception might be altered,” Malek says, in the wake of his Oscar win, “but when you sit down and talk to me, there’s nothing that’s mystifying. I’m not fucking covered in gold.” have a gift they can share and enjoy together, he reasons, though it might be annoying to carry delicate glassware around town until he sees her later.

Is Lucy a bath taker? I ask.

“She’s British, so all she takes is baths.”

How about a 24-ounce sack of “soak” formulated according to both Eastern and Western herbal traditions?

“What is it, bath salts?”

Yes, it contains “pharmaceutical-grade” Epsom salts. On the downside, it’s nearly as big as the Champagne coupes.

“Yeah, I might not want to carry that around, either.”

He moves into a section of exclusive deodorants, and I recognize a container of Schmidt’s Jasmine Tea deodorant.

“Smell this smell,” I say, unsheathing the tester. “It’s a deodorant, but it smells so good I would wear it as a perfume.”

He smells. He likes. A thought takes hold.

“Actually, she wants deodorant. Does it have aluminum in it?”

Obviously not. This is Goop, baby.

He selects a fresh tube of deodorant and slides it into his jacket pocket, then makes eye contact with a salesperson mid-slide.

“Oh, I realize how this looks. I’m just seeing if it will fit into my pocket so I can carry it around.”

“We can hold on to that for you,” the salesperson suggests.

Malek is pleased with the deodorant. “She’ll be so ‘chu≠ed,’ ” he says, sticking the word in air quotes. It’s a Britishism that he harvested from London and continues to find useful.

Next he winds into the store’s jewelry section, skipping over a ring embossed with the word karma (whew) and zeroing in on a gold chain, no wider than spider’s silk, with a crescent-shaped pendant. The word for it is lovely.

Necklace approved.

Then another idea strikes. Malek asks the salesperson to take the deodorant and wrap it painstakingly in black cloth in a jewelry box and then to throw the necklace into a deceptively informal Goop shopping bag. That way, when Lucy opens the deodorant, she’ll think she’s being mildly punked, and then he’ll hit her with the hidden necklace.

“Do you think this gift requires a card?” he wonders aloud.

No, I think it’s cooler if it’s just a random “thinking of you” gift.

“I agree. Is this boring for you?”

What, running errands with Academy Award® winner Rami Malek? No. Anyway, nothing is more fun than colluding on gifts for someone, especially when I’m not paying for the gifts.

“Good. This will be funny. She’ll think I’m being goofy.”

Mission accomplished. He leaves the store and heads north. Lucy is at a restaurant on the west side; the plan is to walk across town and meet her there with the presents. Malek swings the bag in hand. The sun is shining.

He is upbeat.

“Hollywood gets this rap of a lot of lascivious, nasty things that take place within the confines of preproduction to postproduction and studios and agents and whatnot,” he had said earlier.

It can be a bleak zone of rejection and slammed doors, a place where months of spamming people with headshots gets you a single M&M’s audition, which you proceed to blow. But there are outrageous moments of fortune, too, like getting cast as Freddie Mercury, and there are fine people to emulate, like Tom Hanks, and people to fall in love with, like Lucy, and so Malek sums up his theory of the business like this: “If you can find any type of happiness in it, latch on.”

molly young is a contributing writer for ‘The New York Times Magazine’ and a frequent contributor to gq.

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He can laugh about the moment now, but it didn’t seem as humorous at the time.

It was the first in a series of incidents that would earn him a reputation. Heading into his senior season, he was hyped as one of the nation’s best quarterbacks, but critics began to wonder about his maturity. People were watching carefully.

More viral clips piled up. Some showcased his game-breaking performances, others became referendums on his personality.

One, captured before a game against Baylor, showed him in a Karate Kid headband and a cuto≠ T-shirt, sauntering like a peacock and taunting the opposing players: “You forgot who Daddy is. I’m going to have to spank you today.” (Daddy threw three touchdowns in the win.)

Then there was the video culled from a game against Kansas, whose captains refused to shake Mayfield’s hand at the pregame coin toss. He won the game handily, 41–3, but not before being caught on camera grabbing his man zone and o≠ering the Jayhawks sideline some adult words you might generously characterize as “unsportsmanlike.” (Mayfield was told by his mother that his grandma watched the game and figured her grandson simply “had an itch on his crotch.” When I ask if she still thinks that, he says, “I hope so.”)

Of course there was also the flag plant heard round the Sports World. After a muchhyped matchup in which Oklahoma beat number two Ohio State in Columbus, an exuberant Mayfield tried to plant a giant O.U. flag into the center logo at Ohio Stadium.

The field—carpeted with artificial turf— wasn’t exactly receptive to flag planting, and the banner promptly fell over. The event was pretty spontaneous, he says. “A lot of things I do are orchestrated, but things like [that], in the moment, emotionally, I’m just being me,” he remembers. “I worked so hard to beat them after they beat us at home the year before that I was so excited and overcome with emotion that one thing led to another.

But a lot of Ohio people didn’t like me after that one.”

Not just in Ohio. Across the country, people shook their heads. The flag planting had became another thing. Mayfield says he knew it was a big deal when he heard from the “higher-ups” at Oklahoma that he needed to apologize, which he says was “just jawdropping” to him. “I won’t even get into it,” he says. Then he gets into it.

Mayfield begins to recount how he was told that that type of display was not what Oklahoma football was about. As he does, you can see him getting worked up. “Actually

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we won. That’s what we’re about. I had done so much and worked so hard to play for that school, I was just kinda”—here he pauses to find the words, careful but not too careful—“almost embarrassed for them to tell me to apologize.”

But of course Mayfield did say he was sorry.

I begin to ask him how heartfelt that apology actually was, on a scale of 1 to 10, but I can barely get the question out before he answers.

“Zero,” he says. He repeats himself forcefully, looking me right in the eye so that I don’t miss the point. “Zero. Absolutely not.”

Then the moment cools and the storm passes. “Which might hurt some Ohio fans’ feelings,” he says. “But I think we’re all good now.”

indeed “good” with Mayfield now—at least in the northeast sliver of the state that he now calls home. Clevelanders are a resolutely faithful people, and in Mayfield— the quintessence of self-belief—they’ve found not just a plug for the LeBron-size hole in their collective heart but a replacement who personifies their chip-on-the-shoulder mentality.

I mean, what’s more Cleveland than possessing the blustering self-confidence to plant a cheerleader’s giant flag into a turf field?

At a charity auction not long ago, a pair of dinner dates with Mayfield and his then fiancée, Emily Wilkinson, raised $96,000. One of his cleats fetched $14,000.

In November a Browns fan announced on Twitter that if Mayfield re-tweeted his message, his wife would consent to his desire to name their forthcoming kid Baker.

Mayfield did, and thus was born Michael Baker Tramel, photographed soon thereafter wearing a truly adorable onesie that said, “I came out feeling dangerous.”

Natural as the fit has become, it was not always obvious that Mayfield would end up here. The Browns had the number one pick, but the draft was loaded with quarterback talent. Even Mayfield doubted he’d be selected first overall. “I just didn’t think anybody would take a chance on a little-over-sixfoot quarterback,” he says. There were also the matters of his drunken arrest, his flag planting, and his itchy crotch.

Over and over, in his pre-draft meetings with NFL teams, Mayfield was quizzed about his character, about whether he was the type of guy who could shoulder the leadership burden of being a quarterback and the face of a franchise.

“Oh, God, it was sickening,” he remembers, sounding tired just thinking about it. “What were you thinking when you got arrested?

What were you thinking when you played Kansas and grabbed your crotch? Are you gonna mature? Blah blah blah. If I could see the future, I’d tell you what’s gonna fucking happen. But I think that was the best part about that process. I got to answer those questions for the first time, instead of the media putting it all out there. I got to answer it and say it in my own words.”

Though he figured he wouldn’t go first, Mayfield was confident that he’d be selected quite high. So certain in fact that when teams with late draft picks sent him playbooks to O H I O FA N S A R E

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review, he politely declined to study the material. “They hated it,” he recalls of a meeting with the San Diego Chargers. “They’re like, ‘Are you serious?’ I go, ‘Yeah, you guys have the 17th pick.’ ” If this sort of thing strikes some as blunt or discourteous, Mayfield might say that he’s just being honest and genuine. Consider what Browns head coach Freddie Kitchens remembers as his first interaction with Mayfield: “The first thing I ever said to him was ‘Well, hell, you’re not that short.’ He kind

Baker Mayfield says and does what he believes to be true: “Quarterbacks, by the textbook, are supposed to be reserved, cool, calm, and collected,” he tells me.

“I do it my own way.” of looked at me like I was crazy and started laughing. He’s like, ‘Well, you’re not as bald as I thought you were.’ You knew that he had some fire about him.”

There’s a real di≠erence, Mayfield contends, between being arrogant and being certain.

“I’m not going to act like I have it all figured out,” Mayfield says. “I believe in myself. Some people think that’s cocky, but if you don’t believe you’re any good, then I don’t think you’re gonna have any success. If you go out there thinking you’re gonna fail, you’re gonna fail. Which is just the truth.”

Mayfield says and does what he believes to be true, even when it’s against the QB’s boring-above-all ethos. “Quarterbacks, by the textbook, are supposed to be reserved, cool, calm, and collected,” says Mayfield.

“I do it my own way.” At one point last season, Mayfield said, “I’m not a cookie-cutter quarterback. Never have been. Never will be.”

“A lot of people in the world today, they don’t like the truth,” says Kitchens. “They’d rather you just tell them something that they want to hear. Baker’s not going to be like that.

He’s just going to tell you like it is. It’s your problem if you don’t like it. It’s not his.”

C L E V E L A N D . It’s a steamy Thursday in June, after a third week of summer practice. Baker Mayfield is holding court at a long wooden table at TownHall, a trendy Cleveland restaurant and bar.

It seems as if the whole city is rolling through the place, stray filings drawn to the magnet that is Mayfield. There’s the rapper Machine Gun Kelly, a Cleveland native who credits the quarterback with setting o≠ an extraordinary new excitement in the city.

“Baker Mayfield is the most charismatic player to touch the fuckin’ field, ever, in the history of the Browns,” he says. “He gave us hope—brought the fuckin’ flame back to the city!”

There are also about 15 or so of Mayfield’s teammates, moving through the bar. At one point Mayfield tells me that if he “tried to make everybody happy, that would drive me D OWNTOWN

nuts.” It makes me wonder how that calculus works in the locker room: Does he care if his teammates like him? “I truly care about my teammates,” he o≠ers. “And I know that if they don’t care about me, then we’re not gonna be worth a damn.”

Still, Mayfield suggests that being respected is more important than being liked. He may not be trying to be everyone’s friend, but he is trying to inspire something in them.

Mayfield’s true magic isn’t just that he believes in himself. It’s that his confidence vibrates on such a high frequency that it infects those around him. “I’ve heard it over time,” Mayfield says. “ ‘When he’s in there, the o≠ense plays better.’ Or: ‘When he’s in there, you can tell the team feeds o≠ his energy.’ To me, that’s the sign of leadership or being able to get the best out of your teammates.”

Oklahoma head coach Lincoln Riley saw Mayfield lead in this way in Norman. He’s not surprised by what’s taking place in northern Ohio. “I think people, teammates, even potentially the city of Cleveland, say, ‘Shit, if a guy that’s a six-foot guy, that’s not very athletic, that wasn’t recruited out of college, can win the Heisman, be the number one overall draft pick, do all this stu≠, then why can’t he help Cleveland win? Why can’t he take Cleveland to the Super Bowl? Why can’t he do this?’ And then,” Riley says, “maybe even his teammates within that locker room say, ‘Well, if he can do this, why can I not do it, too?’ And there’s some of that belief, because his story, honestly, is so improbable.

And if you talk to him or watch him, you would think that he’s known it’s going to happen all along.”

While his teammates mingle around him at the bar, Baker sits near Wilkinson, whom he’ll marry in a few weeks. The two connected Mayfield’s senior year at Oklahoma, when he tried unsuccessfully to woo her via Instagram.

(He sent her DMs, but he also followed and unfollowed her in an attempt to attract her attention.) After some e≠ort, she finally relented, and he invited her to the Rose Bowl to watch him play, gifting her an Oklahoma jersey and a seat next to his parents. Four days later, Mayfield moved in with Wilkinson (and her two brothers). Six months later, he proposed. (Mayfield says the courtship was characterized by him being “stubborn” or a “little persistent.” Wilkinson says, “I think he didn’t want to lose.”)

Tonight, Mayfield looks relaxed. Doubt and expectation often weigh the same, and Mayfield’s been carrying some combination of both for a long time. He’s undeterred by the commotion that swirls around.

Wilkinson has a memory that sticks with her, a moment right after Mayfield’s NFL debut in that week-three game against the Jets, just as he was beginning to orient Cleveland in the right direction.

After the game, Wilkinson remembers, she greeted him with excitement—“ ‘Oh, my God! You just won the game! Like, the first game in two years!’ ” She was thrilled. Mayfield, she says, was calm. “ ‘That’s why I came here,’ ” she says he told her. “ ‘That’s what I’m supposed to do.’ ”

clay skipper is a gq sta≠ writer.

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and renovated a massive former car dealership in her hometown of St. Louis that will double as a storage facility for her own work and an alternative exhibition space. (Any artists on view will have to compete with the custom floor mural she’s planning, which will feature a wild pattern of Xanax pills and Scotch-tape dispensers.)

And after more than two decades, Bernhardt is now thinking hard about trading New York for Puerto Rico. “I’m just sick of living in cities,” she says. “I want to do something di≠erent.” Though it’s a big deal to uproot herself, the move likely won’t prove much of a culture shock. Rovira Rullán says that he already thinks of Bernhardt as an honorary Puerto Rican. “She’s kind of a blunt and open person, and Puerto Ricans are also that way,” he tells me. “Every time she comes here, the first thing she does is rent a car, and every day she goes to a di≠erent town or beach. She knows more places in Puerto Rico than I do.”

This despite the fact that Bernhardt doesn’t really speak Spanish. “Poquito,” she says.

“Spanglish.” She’s working with an architect to convert an epic property in the heart of Old San Juan. It’ll boast a 40-by-8-foot indoor pool, which Bernhardt is outfitting with custom tiles that she’ll produce in Guadalajara; she hasn’t yet decided between a watermelon and a Pink Panther motif. “I can’t really stand another year here in New York,” says the woman whom many see as a quintessential fixture of the New York art world. She happily imagines her future life in the Caribbean: “Swimming a lot. Living in a house—not an apartment in Brooklyn that looks at a brick wall.”

Maybe it’ll jump-start a whole new way of seeing, a whole new Bernhardt. She’s always absorbed the distinct flavor of her surroundings. A long-ago residency in Vienna, she tells me, temporarily saturated her paintings with an Art Deco flair; while working on portraits in Greece, “everything was super whitewashed [with] light,” and her subjects began to resemble statuesque goddesses. For this new chapter in her life, she’s been psyching herself up in the studio by blaring Latin pop on Z100, overseeing the renovations on the San Juan home she refers to as the Secret Magic Pool Garden. Down on the island, there’s all sorts of stu≠ that could find its way into her paintings, from that boozy beach staple Gasolina (“Party in a Pouch!”) to the surfboards of Rincon and the parrots of the El Yunque rain forest.

Bernhardt’s wild-eyed tropical fantasia is only about to get brighter, hotter, and louder. scott indrisek is a writer and occasional artist living in Brooklyn.

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a Sentinelese man is pumping both fists in what is obviously a victory dance as the boat retreats.

The anthropologists then motored up the coast, leaving coconuts, bananas, and plastic buckets on a deserted beach, and then watched as the Sentinelese carried away the o≠erings. But even that did not win over the tribe: The gift-dropping expedition was halted when the film director was wounded in the thigh by an arrow. When the anthropologists later tried to leave even more o≠erings, the tribe immediately speared a bound live pig with their long arrows and buried it in the sand. A cotton doll left to test if they would let a human-shaped object cross their beach into the island’s interior su≠ered a similar fate.

After that, anthropologists continued to make intermittent and unsuccessful visits to the island, and sometimes the outside world washed up on its shores. In 1981, a Panamanian freighter ran aground on the barrier reef during a storm. A few days later, a lookout spotted about 50 naked “wild men” waving bows and arrows on the beach. As described in The American Scholar, the crew then radioed the Regent Shipping Company’s Hong Kong o∞ce and begged for an airdrop of guns: “Worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members’ lives not guaranteed.” Robert Fore, an American pilot who was working nearby, ended up landing a helicopter on the ship’s deck in high winds and plucking more than 30 sailors and their dog to safety. Fore had flown combat missions in Vietnam, he said, “but this was unique.” They left behind a ship’s worth of iron to be hammered into arrowheads, as well as tons of less useful chicken feed.

The most recent contact of note was in 2006, when two Indian fishermen, believed to be drunk on palm wine, drifted ashore. Other poachers watched from outside the barrier reef as the Sentinelese hacked them to death with what were probably adzes, which an anthropologist has speculated that the tribe “must have endowed with magical power, to keep away the evil spirits.” When a helicopter investigated the deaths, archers drove it away, but not before rotor wind whipped sand o≠ shallow graves—revealing a pair of corpses.

After some time, the bodies were reportedly dug up and hung like scarecrows on bamboo poles, facing the sea.

4. God’s University Chau learned this violent history while researching the tribe on his laptop. As he read on a missionary’s blog the summer after his freshman year of college: “The Sentinelese may be the greatest missions challenge

anywhere!” Instead of being daunted, though, he appears to have tried to strike up a correspondence with the missionary, writing, “Hi! I genuinely believe that God has called me to go to the Sentinelese.”

Chau was attending Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oral Roberts, nicknamed “God’s University,” is one of the nation’s most conservative colleges and has the stated goal of fostering “evangelistic capability” in its students. In 2018, Oral Roberts sent about a seventh of its student body abroad on missions.

It wasn’t long before Chau was working with the university’s Missions and Outreach department, under Bobby Parks, a boyishly handsome and enthusiastic 30-something.

Chau helped Parks coach refugee children in soccer for Park’s not-for-profit organization and perform local missions. Parks would later describe on social media his mentorship of Chau as similar to how the older apostle Paul guided the younger Timothy. While at Oral Roberts University, Chau traveled twice to South Africa—once with Parks’s department and later to coach and teach “life values” at a Christian soccer academy, one of the countless institutions that accept short-term missionaries in the world-spanning evangelical travel industry. After these experiences, Chau wrote, “ORU missions gave me direction in my life.”

Other than his dedication to missions, Chau was basically a typical college student, albeit at a school without frat parties. He had an a∞nity for root beer, discussed Jesus for hours, and signed a pledge to abstain from “unscriptural sexual acts, which include any homosexual activity and sexual intercourse with one who is not my spouse.” Even in such a God-fearing environment, Chau stood out for his piety, making his friend Nicole Hopkins “question whether or not I was as sold out for Christ as I claimed to be,” as she later wrote on social media. Despite his conservative background, he was “hardly the stereotypical, Bible-thumping ‘fundamentalist,’ ” said a friend, who came out to him as homosexual. In a message responding to that revelation, Chau wrote, “I see people as people, sons and daughters of God as their identity,” and said he would be willing to bless his queer brothers as much as his straight brothers. Chau was “an introverted social butterfly,” said another friend—reserved at first, but forging many deep relationships over time.

Hopkins wrote me: “I’ve never met a man who loved others so selflessly.” And yet whenever Chau could, he left the city of Tulsa—which he described as “relatively devoid of natural beauty”—for the spiritual solitude of the woods.

He cultivated a backpacker vibe, sprinkling his speech with “stoked” and “rad,” and bulked up through constant athletic activity.

Upon graduating with a degree in exercise science, in 2014, Chau led a third mission trip to South Africa for the department run by Parks. Then, according to his personal blog, it was o≠ to an autonomous region in northern Iraq to organize soccer games in refugee camps for Parks’s organization. After the high of adventures like these, Chau settled into a one-year AmeriCorps contract on a disasterpreparedness team back in Oklahoma.

Staring at the gray felt walls of his workspace in October, he Instagrammed, “Never thought I’d be working in a cubicle. #reallife

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#whereisthebreeze #tooquiet.” But as he waited out the dreary winter, Chau laid plans for the following summer that would eventually take him to the Andaman archipelago.

When June arrived, Chau road-tripped across the States, anthems from the likes of Angels & Airwaves shaking his rattletrap car.

In California he passed a month-long course to become a wilderness emergency medical technician that involved simulations with actors employing “tons of (fake) blood” and actual helicopters, which jazzed him with a “flood of adrenaline,” he wrote.

Then, in August, as a final test to harden himself before India, he embarked on an ambitious 120-mile trek through the Northwest’s Cascade mountains with two friends. Chau had plotted a route through backcountry that proved impractical, so they ended up trailblazing for two days over mountains—until they found themselves with no way forward except downclimbing a dry yet slippery waterfall. He later said that as he descended, “I remember thinking about how strong the contrast was between the vibrant beauty and life seen in view,” referring to the mountainous panorama below, “and the stark potentiality of death lingering at every misstep.” It was the “scariest” thing he had ever done. But the realization of “how fragile life is” inspired his personal motto: “Make the most of every good opportunity today because you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow!”

Soon after making it out of the woods, Chau boarded a plane for the Andaman archipelago.

5. Giant Seeds Improbable as Chau’s calling seemed, there was an outside chance that he might befriend the Sentinelese, for it had almost happened once before. In 1967, Triloknath Pandit became the lead government anthropologist for the Andamans and promptly started depositing gifts on Sentinel’s beaches. Pandit said his project “wasn’t idle curiosity. Whatever knowledge we were able to obtain could help us protect [the Sentinelese]” and fight ignorant myths.

For years the Sentinelese had remained hostile, as in 1974, when the film director was struck by the arrow. But after more semiannual o≠erings, Pandit observed, in 1988, a “Sentinelese [who] started dancing with an adze in his hand” after gifts were dropped.

The next month, as Pandit and other anthropologists deposited bags of coconuts, some Sentinelese approached as close as ten yards. “All the Sentinelese took the gifts and expressed their joy through gestures,” he later wrote. “We reciprocated in kind.”

In January 1991, expecting nothing unusual, Pandit dispatched a junior anthropologist, Madhumala Chattopadhyay, to help lead a gift drop—and was stunned when she reported that Sentinelese had waded out to the boat to accept the o≠erings. Perhaps, she suggested to me, her female presence had signaled that the researchers didn’t have warlike intentions. The next month, the horn of Pandit and Chattopadhyay’s boat blew at dawn. Later that day, about a dozen Sentinelese splashed out to them. Soon, Pandit and others were standing in the water and passing out coconuts. There exists a photo in which Pandit, in sunglasses

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and a tank top, holds out a coconut to a naked Sentinelese man, who accepts it with a single hand. For a moment, modern citizen and hunter-gatherer, both, held the giant seed.

Pandit was so exhilarated that he didn’t notice the lifeboat drifting o≠, making it look as if he intended to stay. Suddenly a Sentinelese youth pulled a knife from his bark belt and drew a circle with his other hand, as if saying, “I’m going to carve out your heart.”

Pandit retreated and threw back an ornament of green leaves that had been given to him.

The Sentinelese man tossed him a lifeboat oar that was floating nearby. The two worlds had once more separated. But Pandit was greatly encouraged and wrote in a trip report, “We felt we must carry a lot more coconuts on our future visits.”

The next year, however, Pandit says, he struck mandatory retirement age. Perhaps feeling the Sentinelese were more trouble than they were worth, the government decided to forgo any future visits. “I regret not visiting them again,” Pandit told me in his apartment on the mainland. He was now in his 80s, and health problems meant that he was unlikely to ever return. “I think had we continued for another year or so, maybe they would have extended an invitation to come ashore.”

6. An Incredible Adventure “My life becomes an incredible adventure when I follow the call of God,” Chau captioned an Instagram photo of himself riding a motorbike down a hectic street in October 2015, soon after arriving in the Andaman Islands.

“I’m excited to see where He leads!” Foreigners are primarily allowed to shuttle between seedy Port Blair and a handful of resort beaches, as much of the island chain is reserved for four hunter-gatherer tribes, including the Sentinelese. But Chau quickly began testing the archipelago’s security. “John knew it was illegal,” said John Ramsey, a friend. “His facade was just that he was a traveling adventure tourist.” As Dependra Pathak, the director general of the Andaman police said, “He built the logistical support and friendships he needed during those trips.”

Chau stayed in a $13-a-night hotel, with only a fan to stir the tropically hot air, and rode packed public buses to scuba-diving excursions, where he would question guides for more information that might help him get to Sentinel. Acquaintances of Chau’s—whose identities I have withheld, since the Indian police have asked them not to speak to journalists—described him as “enthusiastic” and “friendly.” He cultivated a wide network of contacts, from tourist guides to fishermen, and strove unsuccessfully to learn the Hindi language. Most importantly, he connected with the local Christian community, a minority in the Hindu nation. He preached at a local church and in social media posts thanked Oral Roberts’s Missions and Outreach department for teaching him to always have a sermon handy, tagging one of them “#relationshipbuilding #missions.” Parks, his former boss there, responded: “Praying for you Chau boy.

Proud of you. Keep loving big.” (Parks did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Chau was correct in his assumption that locals

would eventually show him the way to Sentinel Island, but after several weeks his path there wasn’t yet clear. He would have to return the next year.

For four years, Chau made annual visits to the Andamans, bringing gifts for a widening circle of friends until it felt like a “home away from home.” According to the Indian police and two local sources, he became close to “Alex,” a 28-year-old engineer who lived in Port Blair. Alex is Keralese, descended from a small sect of intensely Christian Indians who, tradition has it, were converted about two decades after the Crucifixion by the apostle Thomas, who’d sailed on a spice trader to southern India. At first, Alex warned Chau against his mission, but according to Indian police, Chau eventually won him over. (A lawyer for Alex said that charges had not yet been proven in court, and so the narrative of him helping Chau was “false for now.”) Alex introduced Chau to a small community of Karen, an ethnic minority from Myanmar who’d been converted to Christianity by American missionaries. During Chau’s second visit to the Andamans, in late 2016, he likely bused through the jungle reserve of a friendlier hunter-gatherer tribe, the Jarawa, to reach the remote Karen village on its outskirts. There lived the fishermen who would eventually ferry him to Sentinel Island. On returning home, Chau had an argument with his father about whether he was following the Scriptures in pursuing his missionary work. After that, they decided to “agree to disagree.”

Now that he had an idea about how to get to Sentinel Island, Chau had to prepare for what he might do once he set foot on shore. One friend said Chau showed him a list of around 200 missionary and anthropological books that Chau reviewed to ready himself. And Chau even discussed with a missionary engineer using a drone to make contact, but eventually decided it had to be done face-to-face.

Any plans to make an attempt in 2017 may have been scuttled when he stepped too close to a large rattlesnake near the cabin he lived in while working at an environmental-science school in the California mountains. From his hospital bed he Instagrammed numerous shots of his grotesquely swollen foot, smeared in blood, tagging one of them #selfrescue.

Chau was still rehabbing when he arrived that summer at the Canada Institute of Linguistics, which runs an intensive twomonth training in how to translate the Bible into new languages. Fellow participant Kaleb Graves remembered, “[Chau] was the center of just about every conversation when he was comfortable,” and other aspiring missionaries were drawn to his “sense that every second was an adventure.” And yet Graves remembered that Chau also seemed “outside the norm” of the class, and they bonded while avoiding communal chapel and discussing how “all chapels feel exactly the same—you’ve heard that sermon, you’ve sung those songs— and you know time alone is the best way to encounter God.” Graves noted that Chau would often take long solitary hikes. “He seemed sort of lonely, despite everything,” Graves said. “If you think you have this one monumental divine task, but you can’t share it, you’ve got to cover up that loneliness, and

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maybe that’s why he was so friendly with everyone.” Chau’s friend Ramsey said, “John received a fair amount of attention from girls,” but “he didn’t want any romantic attachments because he was focused on his mission—and he was afraid that a heart could get broken.”

Since Chau had acquired some basic tools to try to crack the Sentinelese language, there was just one more form of training he would undergo. Later that summer, when Chau visited Ramsey’s home, the two friends had a heart-to-heart. Ramsey asked him, “What are you going to do with your life, bro?” Though Chau had previously described his missionary hopes in general terms, now he explained his specific calling to the Sentinelese. Even more, he asked Ramsey and Ramsey’s mother, who was a trained editor, to look over his application to All Nations, an organization that supports missionaries targeting “neglected peoples” in places where such work can be illegal or dangerous. Chau had long known of All Nations: The organization had sometimes shared volunteers with the Oral Roberts missions in South Africa. Ramsey said there wasn’t any point in trying to dissuade Chau from going: “He’d already made the decision.”

In the fall of 2017, Chau attended an All Nations program, one of the many unregulated missionary courses in America. As the New York Times reported, Chau’s training culminated with him hiking several hours through an area south of Kansas City. When he managed to track down a mocked-up tribal village, Americans dressed in secondhand clothes threatened him with spears and babbled an unintelligible language to simulate what he might experience on Sentinel Island.

Chau distinguished himself as “one of the best participants in this experience that we have ever had,” the international executive leader of All Nations told the Times. (All Nations disputed the Times’ description of the event, explaining that no weapons were used and that it trained participants “to share the Good News of Jesus in a way that is cross-culturally sensitive,” but said that it had not raised its concerns directly with the newspaper.) Then he took one more preparatory trip to the Andamans, in early 2018.

Finally, as autumn arrived that year, Chau said goodbye to his siblings and parents, knowing it could be for the last time. Since he first began to speak of going to Sentinel Island while in his teens, his parents had encouraged him to pursue medicine instead, or, failing that, to save souls in a less dangerous location.

His father, Patrick, wrote in an essay about him, the existence of which was first reported

by Outside, “John became the victim when my [influence],” of a more moderate Christianity, “failed to counter the irrational religious and glamorized ambition of adventures of exploration.” Patrick blamed John’s immersion in the “fanatical evangelical extreme” on professional troubles that damaged his ability to be a role model for Chau during his high school years. Chau’s elder brother and sister seem to have happily followed their father’s path into medicine and a moderate Christianity, but Patrick noted that John was always di≠erent from the more obedient pair. Chau may have also sought his own path outside the home because of his parents’ disharmony. Elkanah

Jebasingh, an Indian friend, said that during visits Chau prayed for his parents’ strained marriage. Chau’s social media was replete with pictures of him hiking with his mother and fishing with his father, along with loving testimonies about both—but by the time of his final visit, after years of arguments, each side had become entrenched in their views.

Patrick wrote me that before saying goodbye, John “did not have a sustained argument with me, but only a few words.” Then Patrick cited a Chinese proverb that translates as “When words get sour, adding words is useless.”

On his way to India, Chau stopped in South Africa to see Casey Prince, an American ex– pro soccer player who ran the academy where Chau had coached during his first Oral Roberts missions. Chau had stayed in Prince’s house on two previous visits to South Africa, and the two became so close that Casey’s wife, Sarah Prince, claimed him as “family.” He admired the Princes for spending nearly a decade living in and ministering to Cape Town’s poorer communities, and now he sought their advice on integrating with the Sentinelese. When Chau had described his calling during previous visits, Casey had privately doubted whether his plan was possible, but “I now saw [John] was totally serious,” he said. They discussed how Chau would need to spend years learning the tribe’s language and culture, and then sensitively introduce them to the gospel. “The bestcase scenario would be ‘I’ll see you and all my friends and family in ten years,’ ” Casey said.

“Success would still be a huge sacrifice.” Chau also received counsel from a South African missionary, whom he calls “Pieter V.” in his diary, who regaled him with stories of eluding Indian authorities and successfully preaching to the Jarawa tribe in the Andamans.

John’s month of respite was finished. “It was weird, to have your hugs and part ways with him saying, ‘I could arrive on the island and get shot with arrows,’ ” Casey said. “It makes you think of what it was like for people going o≠ to war in the past.” Before Chau left, Sarah said, they had several conversations about how he had tried to “check his motives with God, asking ‘if I’m just being an adventure junkie, or rebelling, or a religious extremist.’ But he just kept feeling that this is what God was calling him to do.” They also discussed the fact that though “he loved and respected his family,” he was going against the wishes of his parents.

“He knew they weren’t at peace,” said Sarah, “but he had peace at the end, leaving them—he had given it to God in his heart.” When they separated, Sarah felt divinely inspired to share a psalm with Chau: “I will not die, but live, and will proclaim what the Lord has done.”

When Chau landed in Port Blair, in October, he likely already carried with him most of what he needed to go all the way: a collapsible kayak, two waterproof cases full of equipment—including fishing gear, medicine, multivitamins, and picture cards to help communicate—as well as gifts, like safety pins, that the Andaman police believe he chose by researching what o≠erings other hunter-gatherers had appreciated. Shortly after Chau’s own arrival, Parks, Chau’s former boss at Oral Roberts, and another evangelical friend from college met him at Alex’s “safe house” apartment.

Police director Pathak believes the other Americans were there to “encourage [Chau] to feel enthusiasm” about the mission. They had timed their trip to see Chau o≠ to North Sentinel, but once the cyclone spun up, they had to leave before the seas calmed. Chau waited out the bad weather. According to Pathak, Chau then paid the five Karen fishermen about $350, a windfall in a country where a billion people survive on less than $5.50 a day, to sneak him out to sea at night. The next morning the Sentinelese rebu≠ed Chau’s first attempt to save them.

7. The Biblical Shield “I felt some fear, but mainly was disappointed they didn’t accept me right away,” Chau wrote in his diary on returning to the Karen’s boat. But after a quick meal of fresh-caught fish, rice, and dal, he paddled about a mile up the coast. Once he was out of sight of the Sentinelese, he buried his larger waterproof case so he would have a secret stash of supplies should the tribe accept him. Then he outfitted his kayak with two more gift fish; his waterproof Bible; his second, smaller waterproof case; and his “initial contact response kit”—which included dental forceps, to pull arrows from his body, and a chest-seal bandage. Then he paddled back to the island.

Eventually they spotted something on the beach.

It was a body in black underpants. And it was being dragged by the Sentinelese, with a rope tied around its neck.

As he neared the beach, he heard shouts and drumming. From the sand, about six Sentinelese began yelling at him in a language full of high-pitched b, p, l, and s sounds, seemingly led by a man wearing a crown of flowers and standing on a tall coral rock. Chau stayed o≠shore, trying to keep out of arrow range, and parroted their words. They burst out laughing most of the time, meaning the phrases were probably bad or insulting, Chau thought.

Eventually, two men traded their bows for paddles and approached him in a dugout canoe. He dropped the fish into the waves and backed away. The men detoured to grab them.

Chau discerned increasing friendliness from the tribespeople, and so he paddled very close to land as more Sentinelese arrived—most unarmed, though one boy wielded a bow with a knocked arrow. Chau kept waving his hands to signal, unsuccessfully, for the kid to disarm. The wind had Chau’s kayak into the shallows. The canoe slid in behind Chau, cutting o≠ his escape. Chau threw the two paddlers a shovel as a gift, but one of them still clutched his bamboo knife. The kid with the bow and knocked arrow approached. Chau figured this was it. So he disembarked to show that he, too, had two legs. Then he preached to them from Genesis, likely reading from his waterproof Bible.

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Chau found himself inches from the Sentinelese man who didn’t have a knife. The hunter-gatherer stood about Chau’s height— five feet six—and had yellowish clay smeared in circles on his face. Chau noted a fly land on the man’s cheek. Hastily, Chau handed over his gifts and, in his rush, gave the tribespeople essentially everything he had. Surely, the Sentinelese couldn’t help but be moved by his good intentions?

Then things started happening confusingly fast. The men grabbed the kayak and made o≠ with it. The boy suddenly fired his bow.

Miraculously, the arrow struck the waterproof Bible that Chau was holding, saving him.

Chau grabbed the arrow and felt the sharpness of the nail-like arrowhead. He retreated, shouting and stumbling. The Sentinelese let him wade over the submerged dead coral. He swam nearly a mile back to the boat, thinking in his panic that rocks in the bay were pursuing canoes. Back on board, he confronted the fact that he had lost his kayak and had no access to any of his supplies. Though, he journaled, “I’m grateful that I still have the written Word of God.” Chau now had to make a momentous choice alone. “It’s weird—actually no, it’s natural: I’m scared. There, I said it,” he wrote in his diary, his handwriting becoming increasingly agitated. “I DON’T WANT to Die! Would it be wiser to leave and let someone else continue?”

8. The First One to Heaven The sun smoldered on the waves. Chau prayed.

Practically anyone else would have asked the fishermen to return to Port Blair, but judge the situation from Chau’s point of view. He considered the Sentinelese to be living in “Satan’s last stronghold” and destined for hell unless he rescued them for heaven. Even more, according to police director Pathak, he indicated to the fishermen that the arrow striking the Bible was a sign of God’s protection. “John assumed that they wouldn’t automatically welcome him and that the only way to win them over was to be like, ‘I’m here, and I’m not going away,’ ” said Casey Prince, his mentor in South Africa.

And if Chau gave up now, he was unlikely to get another chance.

Chau knew he could perish if he returned to shore, and he seems to have been prepared for that. As Jim Elliot, a missionary whom Chau idolized, said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Like many evangelicals, Chau grew up celebrating Elliot, whose widely publicized story helped launch, in the late 1950s, the missionary boom that is still ongoing today. It is uncanny how closely Chau followed Elliot’s footsteps. They grew up miles from each other, hiked the same mountains, and formed convictions as teenagers that they were called to uncontacted tribes. Shortly after graduating from college, Elliot was lanced to death by an Ecuadoran tribe infamous for killing outsiders. However, after a few years, Elliot’s widow and other missionaries converted some of the tribesmen who slew Elliot—leading many American evangelicals to declare the original mission a success.

Should he die at the hands of the Sentinelese, Chau may have reasoned, he would simply be following Elliot’s example—and that of the original missionary, Jesus Christ.

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But it’s also not clear that Chau viewed confronting the Sentinelese again as seeking martyrdom; not long before he had still imagined a future extending beyond his mission. He told Sarah Prince that he would like to have children and a family like hers, “if God wants it for me.”

After overcoming so many previous challenges, he may have thought he could beat this one, too, by himself. Or he may have hoped for a miracle.

Pentecostalism, the Christian movement Chau grew up in, gets its name from the miracle of the Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit empowered the apostles to convert foreigners by preaching in their languages. After baptism, many Pentecostalists speak in what they believe are similarly divinely inspired “tongues,” and they celebrate stories of modern missionaries performing Pentecost-like miracles—so Chau may have yearned for a similar event.

Whatever Chau’s final reasoning, as afternoon descended into evening, he wrote in his diary, “LORD let Your will be done. If you want me to get actually shot or even killed with an arrow, then so be it. I think I could be more useful alive though, but to You, God, I give all the glory of whatever happens.”

Watching the sun burn out, Chau was moved to tears and wondered if “it’ll be the last sunset I see before being in the place where the sun never sets.” He described intensely missing his family, friends, and Parks, and wished there was “someone I can talk to and be understood.” He finished his thoughts for the day: “Perfect LOVE casts out fear. LORD Jesus, fill me with Your perfect love for these people!”

The next morning, after a “fairly restful sleep” on the boat, he wrote, “I hope this isn’t my last notes but if it is, to God be the glory.”

He stripped down to his black underpants, as Pandit had taken o≠ his clothes so as not to spook the naked Andaman tribes. Then he stroked toward land.

The fishermen motored out to sea, as Chau had requested. Pieter V., the missionary whom Chau had consulted in South Africa, had told him that he believed that the Jarawa tribe didn’t kill him when he landed because he had no boat. Chau also didn’t want the fishermen to have to witness him possibly being slaughtered. The fishermen carried away Chau’s diary and two letters, one of which was to Alex. “I think I might die,” Chau confessed in it. But he comforted his friend: “I’ll see you again, bro—and remember, the first one to heaven wins.”

The next day, the fishermen returned to the island. They motored along the coast, searching for signs of Chau.

Eventually they spotted something on the beach. They looked closer. It was a body in black underpants. And it was being dragged by the Sentinelese, with a rope tied around its neck.

9. A Strenuous Case When I met police director Pathak in his o∞ce this summer, he described the situation as “a very, very strenuous case.” According to him, after discovering the body, the fishermen had rushed back to Port Blair and, crying, turned over Chau’s journal and letters to Alex. Alex then contacted Parks, who in turn informed Chau’s mother. Chau’s mother then alerted the

U.S. Consulate General in India, which contacted the Andaman police. In the subsequent investigation, Pathak had to decide: Could a people who didn’t recognize laws be prosecuted under them? Should Chau’s remains be recovered? Chau had written, “don’t retrieve my body,” and Chau’s family posted on his Instagram account, “We forgive those supposedly responsible for his death.” So Pathak decided the rights of the “uncontacted group needed to be respected.”

But though Chau was beyond the laws of this world, the fishermen and Alex were soon imprisoned, before being released on bail. The lawyer representing them said that the punishment of his clients was “not fair,” as Chau went to the island of his own free will, and noted that Chau must not have thought about how the subsequent legal troubles would “badly a≠ect” their lives. According to Pathak, the Indian police had also begun the bureaucratic process to request American assistance to talk to Parks.

Meanwhile, in the days following Chau’s death in November 2018, the story spread worldwide, and criticism of Chau was fierce.

Pandit, the anthropologist, said, “I felt sad that the young man should lose his life, but this was a foolish thing to do.” In the news, some commentators characterized his attitude as “puritanical, prejudiced, and patronizing.”

Survival International, an NGO that advocates for uncontacted tribes, declared, “The Sentinelese have shown again and again that they want to be left alone, and their wishes should be respected.” The organization warned that by supposedly saving the tribe, Chau might have ended up destroying them.

The Andaman tribes numbered about 5,000 people when the British arrived, but today only a few hundred remain. These survivors are wracked with measles and consumed by alcohol, subjected to “human safaris” by tourists, and have increasingly become dependent on government handouts. When I joined a hundred-car convoy through the jungle reserve of the Jarawa tribe, crossing between Port Blair and another town, I saw 11 Jarawa squatting on the roadside and staring at the tra∞c as if watching TV. This was “the danger of contact” that had made Pandit “worried about the future” when he first handed the coconut to the Sentinelese back in 1991, despite his simultaneous excitement at the meeting. Pandit knew the poisonous fruit that seed could bear, because he had already led the acculturation of a Jarawa clan. In the mid-1970s he felt he had no choice; they were fatally ambushing settlers on the outskirts of Port Blair. He won their trust with gifts and then lived with them for stints before imposing government oversight.

When I interviewed him this year, however, he clearly thought they had su≠ered from the decades of contact. “Once, they laughed so much more than us,” he said. He thinks that the Sentinelese probably have had a happy life, similar to that of the Jarawa, before his arrival, easily fulfilling their needs in their tropical Eden. Hunter-gatherers are often called “the original a±uent society,” as anthropologists have found they average only three to five hours of work a day, are more egalitarian, and have fewer mental health issues.

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(Although this does not take into account their shorter life spans and other disadvantages.) Ultimately it’s not that Pandit thinks the Sentinelese should be barred from modernizing, only that they have the human right to choose whether to do so—and they have conscientiously objected. “Change should be for the better,” Pandit said. “But if we as an external force bring the change, are we sure we are helping?”

Though the Sentinelese have no knowledge of what has happened outside their barrier reef, they seem to have intuited Pandit’s fears. And they have adopted a defensive strategy that has preserved them as one of the approximately 100 uncontacted groups still abiding on earth.

10. A Rebellious People As harshly as some individuals criticized Chau, I was struck by how often people who knew him described him as a considerate, capable young man. Even those who didn’t agree with his final actions grieved. As Nathan Fairchild, his boss at the environmental camp in California, told me through tears: “There’s a tendency when people pass away to knight them, but even when John was living, everyone would have praised him the same way.”

Many evangelicals were outspoken in celebrating his sacrifice. “There was no colonial intention,” said Ramsey, Chau’s friend. “[John’s] motivation was love for these people.… I think he’s up there in heaven.” Oral Roberts University released a statement that concluded: “We are not surprised that John would try to reach out to these isolated people in order to share God’s love. We are deeply saddened to hear of his death.” Parks, Chau’s boss, wrote on social media that Chau was “one of the best and most selfless human beings there ever was.”

Many Christians spoke of being inspired to do missions themselves. Ramsey said, “I could see John as a modern Jim Elliot, someone who made a greater impact in death than life.” At All Nations’ annual fund-raiser in April 2019, the organization celebrated Chau and featured as the keynote speaker the grandson of a missionary pilot who perished alongside Elliot.

And yet not all Christians supported his actions, including many prominent evangelicals, such as the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “Christian missionary work has evolved over the ages, and it is now profoundly important for missionaries to be sensitive to the culture of the people they are sent to,” said Ben Witherington III, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky.

“Chau is a pretty classic example of how not to do missions in the 21st century.” Some field missionaries criticized Chau as insensitive, ine≠ective, and even ignorant of biblical directives. As Mark 6:11 commands: “And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust o≠ your feet as a testimony against them.” The detractors and supporters of Chau often seemed to be screaming past one another about di≠erent realities. Where some people saw a competent missionary, others saw an overconfident, underprepared young American cheered to his death by his mentors, who should have known better.

One recent afternoon, while I was pondering Chau’s motivations, I flipped open an edition of the waterproof Bible that had stopped

the arrow the Sentinelese boy had fired at him. Chau recorded the verses that the shaft broke on, which conclude in Isaiah 65:1–65:2: “I am sought of them that asked not for me; I am found of them that sought me not: I said, Behold me, behold me, unto a nation that was not called by my name. I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people, which walketh in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts.”

While Chau didn’t record if he interpreted the “rebellious people” as the Sentinelese, it’s telling he swam ashore the next morning.

And yet Witherington, the Asbury seminary theologian, who has written a book about interpreting Isaiah, said, “I don’t dismiss Chau’s sincerity or sacrifice, but the question is whether he interpreted Isaiah rightly—and the answer for that, I think, is clearly no.”

In all my months of reporting, I never found any evidence that John Chau even once questioned his calling. His certainty was so absolute that he was willing to bet not only his life on it but the lives of the Sentinelese. (Multiple doctors have stated that his self-quarantine wouldn’t have worked.) But the inscrutable thing about religion is that while it o≠ers definitive answers, believers draw di≠erent answers from the same words, and often di≠erent answers throughout their lives.

Patrick Chau, John’s father, was born in China, endured six years of forced labor harvesting rice during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, escaped to the United States, studied medicine at Oral Roberts University, which John would attend, and eventually brought John up evangelical. But during a weeks-long correspondence with me, Patrick described how over the past decade he had begun to find biblical truths in the Confucianism of his youth. He came to believe that the commonalities undergirding world religions meant that people “not following Western religious terms could still be following the teachings of the Bible.” In this context, he decided, “the theology of the Great Commission”—of missions—“is the byproduct of Western colonization and imperialization, and not Biblical teaching at all.” He wrote, “I have no common opinion in faith with my youngest.” John “was not there yet.”

I wrote back: “But it seems you think that he would have come to that realization, in time?”

“Eventually,” Patrick answered. “I hoped.”

The central message of Jesus and Confucius that he tried to get his son to accept was:

“Fairness. Do unto others as you would have done unto you. It is the only standard of right and wrong in the whole Bible.”

The morning of his death, Chau wrote his final letter, addressed to his parents and siblings: “You guys might think I’m crazy in all this but I think it’s worth it to declare Jesus to these people. Please do not be angry at them or at God if I get killed.” He concluded: “I love you all and I pray none of you love anything in this world more than Jesus Christ.” He signed it with a scrawl that looks a lot like “JC.”

11. Christlike Love We can’t know precisely what happened when Chau encountered the Sentinelese for the final time. Shortly after reports of Chau’s death, his mother told the Washington Post that she still believed he was alive because of “my prayers.”

She later declined my interview requests, explaining to an acquaintance that she preferred to let Chau tell his own story when he returned. Patrick concluded his essay memorializing John: “This is [the] riddle of life I cannot see through now,” and then paraphrased a verse from the Book of Job: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Chattopadhyay, the anthropologist, speculated that when Chau emerged from the lagoon, the tribe would have likely warned him with “utterances and hand gestures” to go away, fearing “he would try to enslave them.”

Pandit added, “The Sentinelese don’t go out of their way to do violence.… But of course he couldn’t understand.”

And so Chau crossed the line in the sand that the Sentinelese hadn’t even let a foreign doll transgress all those years ago. And of course they shot him.

A skilled hunter doesn’t aim for an instant kill with a relatively fragile bamboo arrow tipped with an iron nail—the human brain and heart are small targets and encased in bone.

No, the projectile would have been aimed at Chau’s large and soft gut. Once he was crippled, the Sentinelese would have charged in, wielding their long arrows like spears.

But before then, Chau would have had time to confront the fact that he was going to die.

And I have faith that he welcomed his killers with Christlike love.

doug bock clark is a gq correspondent.

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FINAL SHOT Rami Malek wades into fall. For more, see the cover story on page 116.

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