Oct 13 17

13.10.17 MEN’S EDITION STARRING

The style staples no man should be without

James Franco

Porn, politics and trying to grow up

* yes, really

OFF THE RAILS

Virgil Abloh Blondey McCoy Loyle Carner Arnaud Valois and style icon* Jeremy Clarkson

CONTENTS 8 Roitfeld frights and Tom Hanks writes in CAPITAL GAINS 10 Laura Craik on why it’s nice to be nice in UPFRONT 13 Our MOST WANTED are Louis Vuitton’s neon knit kicks 14 Looking fly, it’s Stephen Fry in FLASHBULB 17 Suit up and Swatch out in TRENDWATCH

MEN’S STYLE is all about Berluti’s booties 25 Well hello, VIRGIL ABLOH 32 How to be a FATHER 35 JEREMY CLARKSON, global style icon 37 Strap on the new breed of TIMEKEEPERS 41 Ooh la la, it’s ARNAUD VALOIS 44 To be perfectly JAMES FRANCO 51 BOTOX and the City 53 GANT-ily clad 54 Who the hell is BLONDEY MCCOY? 63 The lovely Loyle Carner in BEAUTY 71 GRACE & FLAVOUR on James Cochran N1 73 The TART girls steak their claim 75 Inside Anthony Kendal’s pad in HOMEWORK 81 ESCAPE to Paris 82 Tommy Hilfiger’s MY LONDON 22

Getty. Cover: James Franco photographed by Victor Demarchelier. Styled by Jenny Kennedy. COACH coat, £2,050; jumper, £475 (uk.coach.com). Trousers James’s own

EDITOR Laura Weir

Here are the ES team’s top five male icons of the moment

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2

DICK WOLF ‘Dick Wolf, the prolific creator of Law & Order, which first aired in 1990.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every episode across each franchise, and I’ve started on his latest spin-off, Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders. Dun dun.’ Katrina Israel, fashion features director

MARILYN MANSON ‘Recent cheater of death and flicker of reporter’s testicles — what else do you need to know?’

Jenny Kennedy, fashion editor

Visit us online: standard.co.uk/esmagazine • Follow us:

@eveningstandardmagazine

5

STORMZY ‘I’m going with Stormzy, not just because he’s had a No1 album, a Brit and a Mercury nom, but also because of his decision to open up about his depression on Channel 4 news — a brilliant way to dismantle the stigma of mental illness.’

Alice-Azania Jarvis, features director

4

GRAYSON PERRY ‘Astute cultural commentator, brilliant brain, gifted artist, challenger of convention; these are just a few of the reasons why Grayson is my pick.’

Laura Weir, editor

3

TOM PETTY ‘I lost one of my all-time heroes last week: Tom Petty, an inspiration in music, style and, most of all, attitude.

Two months ago I saw him play in Hyde Park and he looked in great shape. I was waiting for a not-outrageouslybrilliant song to go to the bar. For two hours, it never came.’ Hamish MacBain, associate features editor

@ESmagofficial

@ESmagofficial

Editor Laura Weir Deputy editor Anna van Praagh Features director Alice-Azania Jarvis Acting art director Emma Woodroofe Fashion features director Katrina Israel Commissioning editor Dipal Acharya Associate features editor Hamish MacBain Features writer Frankie McCoy

Acting art editor Andy Taylor Art editor Jessica Landon Picture editor Helen Gibson Picture desk assistant Clara Dorrington

Beauty editor Katie Service Deputy beauty and lifestyle editor Lily Worcester

Social media editor Natalie Salmon Office administrator/editor’s PA Niamh O’Keeffe

Merchandise editor Sophie Paxton Fashion editor Jenny Kennedy Fashion assistant Eniola Dare Chief sub editor Matt Hryciw Deputy chief sub editor Nick Howells

Contributing editors Lucy Carr-Ellison, Tony Chambers, James Corden, Hermione Eyre, Richard Godwin, Daisy Hoppen, Jemima Jones, Anthony Kendal, David Lane, Mandi Lennard, Annabel Rivkin, Teo van den Broeke, Nicky Yates (style editor at large), Hikari Yokoyama Group client strategy director Deborah Rosenegk Head of magazines Christina Irvine

ES Magazine is published weekly and is available only with the London Evening Standard. ES Magazine is published by Evening Standard Ltd, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, Kensington, London W8 5TT. ES is printed web offset by Wyndeham Bicester. Paper supplied by Perlen Paper AG. Colour transparencies or any other material submitted to ES Magazine are sent at owner’s risk. Neither Evening Standard Ltd nor their agents accept any liability for loss or damage. © Evening Standard Ltd 2016. Reproduction in whole or part of any contents of ES Magazine without prior permission of the editor is strictly prohibited

13.10.17 ES MAGAZINE 7

capital gains What to do in London

by FRANKIE M c COY

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1

Stroke of genius

Magnanimous manicures

Fingers at the ready for London Grace’s charity manicurathon, where from 8am to midnight you can get your digits polished while nailing the rhubarb gin cocktails on offer, all in aid of Breast Cancer Haven.

13 Oct. 11 West Street, WC2 (londongrace.co.uk)

Forrest Gump does fiction — and it’s brilliant. Tom Hanks’s debut, Uncommon Type, is a beautiful collection of short stories, all of which contain a typewriter in some role or other. £16.99.

Out 17 Oct (penguin.co.uk)

2

Boogie wonderland

5

4

Bacchus bash

Know your Assyrtiko from your Malagousia? Hit the London Greek Wine Festival, with tutored tastings and lashings of booze-soaking pitta. What could be feta? Tickets £15. 13-14 Oct (londongreekwinefestival.co.uk)

last chance: Tate Modern’s epic and important

exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power closes 22 October. (tate.org.uk)

es magazine 13.10.17

Back of the leg

It’s all about those gains, yo, and the latest muscle to get its own dedicated workout is the old gluteus maximus. Glute Gains at Fitness First blends HIIT with smart resistance bands and a hell of a lot of glute bridges. Launches 16 Oct (dwfitnessfirst.com)

6

On Rome turf

Exceptionally cool new art space alert: the Rome-based Dorothy Circus Gallery, dedicated to pop surrealism, is opening in Notting Hill, featuring art from Leonardo DiCaprio’s fave, Mark Ryden (above). Opens 13 Oct (dorothycircusgallery.it)

7

Join the Clique

The Widow Series, Veuve Clicquot’s wickedly dark performance art show, returns. Seven, curated

by Carine Roitfeld, is an immersive journey through all seven deadly sins. Tickets £35.

20-21 Oct (veuveclicquot widowseries.co.uk)

look ahead: sack off your Sunday roast as Kristian

Baumann of Copenhagen’s brilliant Restaurant 108 flies over to cook a one-off dinner at Portland on 22 October (portlandrestaurant.co.uk)

Illustration by Jonathan Calugi @ Machas; Getty; Alamy

Pull on your raving boots and head east as Hackney Wonderland kicks off with an eclectic line-up, five venues to dart between, and music from psychedelic dance crew Jagwar Ma (above) and indie band The Rifles. Tickets £22.50.

14 Oct (facebook.com/hackneywonderland)

upfront Laura Craik on modern manners,

premature RIPs and television rage

L

rip-offs Feeling a bit under the weather?

Chest aching after those ill-advised Friday night fags? Be careful who you share this information with — before you know it, someone will be posting on Twitter that you’re dead. Such is everyone’s thirst to be first with the news these days that they are sometimes ill-advisedly premature: witness the demise of poor Tom Petty, whose ‘death’ was widely announced — when

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Males and manners: from left, Redknapp, Trump and Johnson

“Once your bad manners have been exposed, you’ll be lodged in the imagination as a wrong ’un” he was still very much alive, albeit in hospital having suffered a heart attack. Petty did, very sadly, die — just many hours after various news outlets claimed he had. BREAKING: being #first to write a load of made-up bollocks means nothing. fostering anger I get that we’re all angry, and that we can’t tell the people we’re angry with because we don’t have Kim Jong-un’s mobile number, nor has Robert Mugabe ever surfaced on one of our 642 different WhatsApp groups, though give it time. Nonetheless, don’t take it out on the poor telly. The great British tradition of being disappointed by the final episode of whichever crime drama/psychological thriller you’ve been emotionally invested in for weeks surely reached its nadir with the finale of Doctor Foster, which seemed to have the whole of London (those without a life, anyway) going fully nuclear because she didn’t kill Simon/she nearly killed Simon/she tried to abet Simon’s suicide. No, really: feel free to tweet your preferred ending in forensic detail. If ever there was a reason not to expand Twitter to 280 characters, this is it.

HOT Croc Wars People losing their s*** about Balenciaga’s platforms... If you don’t like Crocs, go buy another pair of black ankle boots.

NOT Pesto ‘Saltier than the sea,’ apparently. And there was me thinking it was healthy just because it was green.

Rex; Getty; Alamy

ast night, my husband wiped his avocado-y hands on the white dishtowel, and it was all I could do not to lamp him. For sure, there are things I do that make him want to lamp me, too. So far, neither of us has lamped each other and it’s been almost 10 years.

Living together is hard. Whether in the same house, the same street or the same city, sometimes living together can make even the most imperturbable among us want to run for the hills, or at least google ‘sparsely populated islands with decent coffeeshops’.

Given that we all do have to live together, it makes sense that common courtesies are adhered to. Sure, men feel a bit ‘damned if they do and damned if they don’t’ about the etiquette surrounding issues such as holding doors open/giving up their Tube seat/paying for dinner — but there are social niceties on which the jury is definitely not out.

Amber Rudd, for example, should not have had to (seemingly) hiss ‘stand up’ when Boris Johnson was slow to rise to his feet after Theresa May’s Tory Party Conference speech. Jamie Redknapp probably shouldn’t have cropped out his wife Louise from the family photo he used as his avatar on Instagram (thankfully since replaced) — whatever is going on between them, this wasn’t very kind. And Donald Trump really, really needs to think before making comments such as the relief efforts to help hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico have put the US budget ‘a little out of whack’.

The problem with bad manners is that they stick: once yours have been exposed, inevitably, you’ll be lodged in the imagination as a wrong ’un. Good manners cost nothing, yet they make life — especially overcrowded London life — so much easier for everyone.

Without wishing to state the obvious, it’s always better to act like a gentleman than a twit.

THE most WANTED

Duplo ,£44.95, at harrods.com

Louis Vuitton VNR sneaker, £715 (louisvuitton.com)

Footloose: the fashion trainer takes a leap forward with Louis Vuitton’s first full-knit sneaker PHOTOGRAPH BY natasha pszenicki STYLED BY sophie paxton

13.10.17 es magazine 13

FLASHBULB! Party pictures from around town

by FRANKIE McCOY photographs by james peltekian Meredith Ostrom Sheherazade Goldsmith Alex Gore Browne

Tania Fares

Sophia Hesketh

Simon de Pury

Martha Ward Marc Quinn

Sweater soirée Mayfair

Laura Bailey

As the autumn chill set in, Laura Bailey, Isabel Spearman and a host of other dyed-in-the-wool fans of Alex Gore Browne’s knitwear cosied up in oh-so-chic restaurant Isabel for an epic Italian feast (shout out to the short-rib ravioli).

What could be sweater?

Alistair Guy

We go to the gallery Around town

The post-Frieze shindigs kicked off in style with Simon and Michaela de Pury’s bash at Maison Assouline, where Vanessa Kirby, Peter Dundas and Meredith Ostrom sipped vodka and stared at Austin Lee’s new exhibition while Hugo Nathan, Lauren Santo Domingo and Wentworth Beaumont kept everyone well fed at their espresso Martini-fuelled supper.

Tallia Storm

Mario Testino and Lauren Santo Domingo Austin Lee Bill Collins and Dame Joan Collins

Megha Mittal

Camilla Al Fayed and Derek Blasberg

Valentino Garavani

Percy Gibson

Light up Guildhall Tilda Swinton

Hollywood must have been empty as everyone from Baz Luhrmann to Tom Hiddleston brightened up the BFI Luminous fundraising gala in partnership with IWC Schaffhausen, where auction prizes of a private screening with Mel Brooks and Martin Scorsese’s director’s chair raised nearly £500,000.

A golden night indeed.

Name Here

Boris Johnson

Daisy Dunn

Joanne Froggatt

Mich Turner and Philiip Turner Nicola Broke and Rosalind O’Shaughnessy

Stephen Fry Dermot O’Leary

Name Here

Fit for a king Mayfair

To the suitably regal surrounds of Ralph Lauren for the launch of Charles Spencer’s new book, To Catch a King: Charles II’s Great Escape, where chicken Dianne Buswell liver parfait and port and the Rev cocktails provided history Richard Coles buffs Dame Joan Collins, Daisy Dunn and Edward St Aubyn with ample restoration.

Name Here

Dee Koppang

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GO TO eveningstandard.co.uk / ESMAGAZINE FOR MORE PARTY PICTURES

trendwatch The shearling jacket

ADIEU shoe, £290, at ln-cc.com

Get carded Featuring traditional Sicilian crest motifs, you’ll never misplace your credit line again.

edited BY eniola dare

IN THE MIX Introducing the hybrid brogue-creeper. As smart as it is directional.

FENDI jacket, £4,710 (020 7927 4172)

DOLCE & GABBANA cardholder, £175, at harvey nichols.com

PERFECT TIMING Clearly it’s hip to be square.

PRADA cardigan, £560, at matchesfashion.com BELL & ROSS watch, £1,900, at mrporter.com

SEEING RED Button up in this postbox-red cardigan.

JOSEPH trousers, £195 (joseph.com)

TOPMAN jumper, £25 (topman.com)

Natasha Pszenicki

DOWN TO A T Trim and neat, this cycling-style top is a take on the polo.

Jog on These Kill Billesque trackies will have you looking super trendy with zero effort.

When it comes to sartorial slogans, Fendi’s winter messenger jacket is a gentle reminder to look on the bright side of life POWER OF THE PEOPLE Meet this season’s amber-lensed shades — an aviator update.

THE KOOPLES sport hat, £45 (thekooples.co.uk)

RUSSELL & BROMLEY trainers, £155 (russellandbromley.co.uk)

OLIVER PEOPLES sunglasses, £282 (oliverpeoples.com)

MIANSAI bracelet, £205, at mrporter.com

GET CUFFED This bracelet goes with just about everything — a true multitasker.

BALENCIAGA bag, £1,295, at brownsfashion.com

SPRINT IN STYLE In pursuit of the perfect white sneaker? This one hits all the right style notes.

FINISH LINE The laundry bag gets a deluxe reboot.

Head first The beanie is back in play.

RAIN MAN Orange is the new black when it comes to staying dry this autumn.

LONDON UNDERCOVER umbrella, £145 (londonundercover.co.uk)

13.10.17 es magazine 17

trendwatch The statement cap

HUNTER jacket, £155 (hunterboots.com)

KURT GEIGER trainer, £119 (kurtgeiger.com)

BURBERRY cap, £195 (burberry.com)

THE CHASE Further proof that the smart streetwear trend is going nowhere.

Wallet worship Ditch basic black for rich mahogany.

Eternal SUNSHINE This waterproof warrior will brighten any day.

PIQUADRO wallet, £109 (piquadro.com)

WATCH OUT This sleek piece will ensure that you always arrive in a stylish and timely fashion.

PUT A RING ON IT Add a little gothic spin to your finger.

TUDOR watch, £2,710 (tudorwatch.com)

STONE PARIS ring, POA (stoneparis.com)

A FINE LINE Part shirt, part jacket, we love a good all-rounder.

IN THE JEANS Think distressed and oversized: denim is once again loosening up its act.

COS shirt, £89 (cosstores.com)

Christopher Bailey has rebooted Burberry’s signature check with the catwalk seal of approval MULBERRY cufflink, £125 (mulberry.com)

EYE SPY Harry Potter-esque specs never looked so cool.

REISS blazer, £350; trouser, £145 (reiss.com)

GOODY TWO SHOES Look smart without even trying in this handsome pair.

TIMBERLAND T-shirt, £25 (timberland.co.uk)

CUTLER AND GROSS gold-plated frames, £405 (cutlerand gross.com)

GEOX shoe, £100 (geox.com)

18 es magazine 13.10.17

LINK UP The finishing touch when you’re suited and booted.

TEE PARTY The white T-shirt may be a staple, but we’re also sticklers for a great cut.

DOUBLE TROUBLE Sharp, sophisticated, classy — a triple threat.

MONTBLANC bag, £1,370 (montblanc.com)

BRIEF ENCOUNTER This is a true gentleman’s man bag if ever we saw one.

Natasha Pszenicki

CHIMALA jeans, £445, at mrporter.com

trendwatch The art-house knit

DAKS scarf, £225 (daks.com)

IT’S A WRAP Stay cosy in camel with this fringed scarf around your neck.

PRADA jumper, £810 (prada.com)

LOAFING AROUND There’s no doubt that the loafer is having a moment. But riffs aside, this is the original.

CHURCH’S loafers, £320, at harvey nichols.com

LOAKE belt, £65 (loake.co.uk)

REIN IT IN Add class and comfort to any waistline.

DRIES VAN NOTEN trousers, £465, at harveynichols.com

go WIDE Experiment with roomier silhouettes in these cool culottes.

JONES BOOT MAKER shoe kit, £14 (jonesboot maker.com)

shoe shine Every dandy needs his own boot-cleaning kit.

WATCH THIS SPACE The Seamaster is also a dry land classic.

OMEGA Seamaster watch, £4,000 (omegawatches.com)

PURR-FECT Flash a stripe and let your ankles do the talking.

THE MAC STORE Function vs fashion?

Find both in this nifty mac.

LEADER OF THE PACK Further proof that the bumbag isn’t just for festival season.

JIMMY CHOO shoulder bag, £550 (jimmychoo.com)

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KNIT PICK Mustard is not just for munching. It’s also winter’s new neutral.

ECCO boots, £145 (eccoshoesuk.com)

SANDRO coat, £399 (uk.sandro-paris.com)

BDG jeans, £55, at urbanout fitters.com

GOOD JEANS Denim update: the dad jean still rules.

THE QUIET CLASSIC Zip up this autumn wardrobe staple.

MAISON MARGIELA rollneck, £495, at stylebop.com

Natasha Pszenicki

STELLA McCARTNEY socks, £75 (stella mcartney.com)

prada aw17

Time to bring the art off the wall and on to your chest with Prada’s angora sweater

MEN’S STYLE What to buy now

Big Ben’s bit on the side

by TEO VAN DEN BROEKE, style director OF esquire UK

Amazing shade

Salle Privée Todd aviator sunglasses in brown tortoise, £318

Salle Privée Brett square sunglasses, £247

Salle Privée Joseph sunglasses in amber, £318

Designs on your book shelf

Barber Osgerby, Projects, Phaidon, £59.95, is out now

Perhaps best known for designing the London 2012 Olympic torch (it looked a bit like a gold baseball bat), British duo Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have, over the past two decades, produced some of the most important designs to come out of the UK. From the Tip Ton chair, conceived to tip back without sending you flying, to the ultra-understated Tab lamp, projects past, present and future are all covered in this retrospective tome.

On Point

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Berluti Keith Austin leather boot, £1,540 (berluti.com)

berluti aw17

Parisian bootmaker Berluti is best known for producing immaculately crafted, hand-patinated footwear for the world’s wealthy. For AW17, the LVMH brand has taken its sex appeal up a notch with the appointment of Colombian creative director Haider Ackermann. Known for his drapey, ultra-hip aesthetic, Ackermann’s first collection for Berluti is suitably louche — soft cashmere trackpants, oversized shearling coats and rich corduroy suits abound. It also includes a thumping array of pointy cowboy boots.

Could we be witnessing the return of the winkle-picker? If Ackermann has anything to do with it, we may well be.

Ben Machell steps up to the mic for a round of stag do karaoke

S

o, last time, I was halfway through telling you about a mate’s stag do in London. What had begun with me being trapped in a centrifugal death spiral at the Olympic velodrome will now end with me doing karaoke in town. The cycling was traumatic. But karaoke? Karaoke I can manage.

In fact, over the years, I have developed into a quietly confident karaoke artist. It’s not that I can sing, not as such, but more what I consider my ability to interpret, convey and connect. And making that connection with the audience is key. You have to look at the other people in the room — properly stare at them — for the duration of the whole song. It also helps, I have found, to grip the microphone as tightly as possible. Do not allow it to be prised from your hands until you’ve finished. You have rights. I really can’t stress that enough.

“I was going to unleash Barbra Streisand’s ‘Woman in Love’ on a group of lagered-up thirty-somethings” I knew what I was going to sing. Barbra Streisand’s ‘Woman in Love’ remains one of the most hauntingly erotic songs ever recorded and I’d been giving some pretty big talk about how I was going to unleash it on our group of eight lagered-up thirty-somethings.

Only then we got to the venue and a quiet doubt took hold. As each of us took the mic to perform a string of modern classics — Avril Lavigne’s ‘Sk8er Boi’, R Kelly’s ‘Ignition (Remix)’, anything by Will Smith — I felt increasingly self-conscious about doing my Streisand number. Why? Perhaps it was the crowd. I mean, half of the guys were from Norwich, so I thought that maybe they weren’t the massive Babs fans that most red-blooded metropolitan males are.

Anyway, by the time the groom had downed a dirty pint, we were all singing Rage Against the Machine, so I knew my chance had passed.

Afterwards, I felt sheepish. I felt like I’d not just let myself down but also Streisand and, to a lesser extent, Barry and Robin Gibb, who had originally written the track. Why hadn’t I just sung it? The next week was a vortex of self-doubt until, the following weekend, I was at my friend Laura’s wedding party when I saw she had hired a mobile karaoke booth.

Immediately, I knew what I had to do. I gripped the mic, shut my eyes tight and gave ‘Woman in Love’ absolutely everything. And as I hit the high notes, I was myself once more. I was redeemed.

Jonny Cochrane; Josh Shinner

Founded by Patrick Munster, former creative director of Euro megabrand Scotch & Soda, Salle Privée is dedicated to producing functional, stylish menswear.

Though the pima cotton T-shirts and perfectly cut trench coats are second to none, it’s the new range of sunglasses that really stuns.

Consisting of eight minimalist styles, including an opaque round keyhole frame and a block bridge aviator, they’re available exclusively from Salle Privée. (salle-privee.com)

Nike Air Jordan 1, £160, from The Ten collaboration with Abloh

Virgil PhotographS BY rosaline shahnavaz

active

Grooming by Terri Capon at Stella Creative Artists using Dr Hauschka

He was the toast of Paris Fashion Week and is the man Kanye West keeps on speed dial. Katrina Israel meets Virgil Abloh, the fashion polymath that everybody wants a piece of

I

t is the eve of London Fashion Week and Virgil Abloh, founder of cult label OffWhite, has just flown in from San Francisco — where he attended Apple’s iPhone X launch — making stops on the way in New York, Paris and Mexico. ‘That’s all in 40 hours,’ the peripatetic 37-yearold smiles, somehow looking as fresh as a daisy, kitted out in his uniform black graphic T-shirt, Supreme boxer shorts, black Levi’s Made & Crafted x Off-White jeans and Nike Air Presto x Virgil Abloh trainers. He’s here to launch the second phase of ‘The Ten’ collection’s Off Campus workshop event celebrating his blockbuster Nike collaboration, which deconstructs 10 of its most iconic trainers.

The result has had sneaker freaks swooning, but it is far from Abloh’s only current concern.

For example: when I ask, in the context of his forthcoming furniture project with Ikea, if he’s seen what Tom Dixon recently did with the home retailer, he pauses, taps out of the WhatsApp convo that he’s currently approving menswear design skews on, and searches through his inbox. ‘You’ve reminded me,’ he replies in his rhythmic Chicago inflection, fishing out an email from the man himself about yet another possible partnership.

Working with collaborators is how Abloh does things. In London alone his creative sounding board includes art director Peter Saville, DJ and radio presenter Benji B, SHOWStudio’s Nick and Charlotte Knight, and super snapper Juergen Teller. For his latest SS18 runway kicks he enlisted Jimmy Choo’s Sandra Choi after bonding over a

Fash friends: Virgil Abloh and Kanye West on the frow in NYC

13.10.17 es magazine 25

OFF-WHITE SS18 OFF-WHITE SS18

thought, like, “Hey, I’m not a fashion designer, but I can be a fashion designer,” and, “Hey, I don’t know high art, but I can make music.”

Think about his influence on musicians but also every kid that’s outside wearing their outfit trying to be photographed. It was his idea to go to fashion week, you know.’

The pair interned together at Fendi in 2009. ‘Fashion [week] has now become like a thing that regular people know about,’ he says of the once closed industry event that’s now streamed live via smartphones. ‘It has opened up this T boy: Abloh at the conversation with the word Off Campus workshop “influencer”.’ Is he a fan of the in London term? ‘I like it!’ he smiles, ‘Because it acknowledges. “because you’re a celebrity do esn’t mean we just call it celebrity, but you’re an influencer. Just because you’re an Usually [just] because you’re a celebrity influencer do esn’t mean you’re a celebrity” doesn’t mean you’re an influencer.

Just because you’re an influencer shared love of Comme des Garçons at NYFW. ‘The doesn’t mean you’re a celebrity. But now, at least there creative process was a WhatsApp journey where we is a term to say this brand, this product, in this person’s bounced ideas back and forth,’ Choi says of his hands, is that same 1+1 = 3.’ collaborative style. The match yielded Instabait gold, On that score, Abloh himself is no slouch. Instagram, from ‘glass slipper’ stilettos wrapped in cling film to which he likens to ‘a window into the world’, is his quilted, 1980s-issue boots. preferred social media channel, and it loves him right back to the tune of some 985K followers. He’s got the ff-White, the four-year-old independent type of cool-factor pull that has editor-in-chiefs fashion brand that is known for its bold postponing their dinner plans to watch his 9pm show use of text and street sensibility, is slot (sometimes served with a Kardashian/West clan st o cke d f rom My Ther e s a t o sighting). In fact, the dichotomy of Abloh’s interests Matchesfashion.com, sported by A$AP and inner circle (from mentor and artist Tom Sachs to Rocky and Kendall Jenner — while hip-hop star Lil Uzi Vert) has made him something of Naomi Campbell closed its latest show. Its SS18 season an expert in what the post-Tumblr generation wants. was an ode to Princess Diana, broadcasting her style Born on the border of Gen X and Y in 1980, he sees legacy to Abloh’s legions of fans, many of whom are too himself as a go-between who can relate to those who young to remember her. ‘Off-White is not a clothing experienced life before email as well as the digital native brand, it’s more of a vehicle to express ideas,’ he says of Snapchat crowd. ‘I’m going to do a dissertation on the the ‘open source’ concept that rose to acclaim in 2015 as [blurred] cuts,’ he laughs of the generational divide, a finalist for the prestigious LVMH Prize. while sipping on a ginger juice shot.

‘My idea is to collaborate with the best in a category Now a married father of two, Abloh grew up the son and then, almost similar to DuPont [he paraphrases the of Ghanaian immigrants in Rockford, Illinois. ‘I was just American science conglomerate’s old slogan]: “We don’t an average middle of America, stable, DJing, suburban make the products you buy, we make the products you kid, playing soccer, you know, no plans, never took an buy better”,’ he smiles. Abloh’s first fashion project, art class,’ he reflects. ‘My Pyrex Vision, saw him screen-print the word ‘Pyrex’ on parents were from West Africa, to dead stock Rugby Ralph Lauren flannels and sell them their dream was to move to the for £410 a pop. Today the disruptor’s high/low hoodies US, and they did that so that I retail from £369. ‘Off-White is meant to be an additive could have a better life. I just quality that almost highlights the importance of whatever grasped on to it…’ he trails off. brand we’re working with,’ he adds.

When I ask him whether he The polymath, who studied architecture and has always had such a strong engineering, and DJs under the moniker Flat White, has sense of purpose and selfalso been Kanye West’s creative director for the past 15 belief, he says that ‘ in years, overseeing everything from tour merch to album hindsight my motivation covers. ‘We’re workers from the same sort of spirit, I comes from the belief that I think,’ he says of their shared Chicago upbringing. didn’t have the potential’.

‘Kanye West represents this independent train of He recalls an architecture

O

26 es magazine 13.10.17

Keeping up with Virgil: Kanye with Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, and Kris Jenner at an Off-White show in Paris

Abloh and Kaia Gerber backstage at Off-White SS18

28 es magazine 13.10.17

“It’s not enough for me to do a victory lap for doing 10 sho es.

What’s interesting is thousands of kids leaving with the impression that they too can design sneakers” So just how would Abloh like to be remembered in the history books… or Wiki, as it may be?

‘It’s easy,’ he smiles. ‘I’m leaving evidence in the work. That’s the hieroglyphics,’ he says of his design legacy that’s already archived between storage units and hard drives, in preparation for an exhibition at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art in 2019 (which should catalogue some 950 of his projects and counting).

‘They see my practice as something that is generational,’ he says of the planned showcase, which also explains why he’s currently ‘skim’ reading Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist. It’s also why he’s archiving the audio from this interview. ‘It’s a thought pattern over time,’ he smiles, ‘so I’ll know what I was discovering at a particular point.’

The full ‘The Ten’ collection will be available in November at NikeLab stores and select retailers worldwide

Rex Features; Fabien Montique

professor who said he’d never be a designer, and is not fazed by Raf Simons’ recent remarks that his work is unoriginal. ‘Nah, that’s the greatest,’ he smiles, clearly not p er t u rb e d . ‘I a m a l re a dy motivated. Imagine how one more ounce of motivation sends me off to another sphere. I’m Walk the talk: the Off-White SS18 men’s ready for 10 more years based on one perspective. That’s show. Top, a trainer what that does to my psyche,’ he smiles. ‘My main from The Ten collection message now is to tell young people that this idea of failure is false.’

In the next room hundreds of millennials are customising their own pairs of Nike Air Force 1s with spray paint. This interactive element was really important to Abloh, and it’s why the Off Campus NY and London pop-ups were key to the project’s marketing plan. ‘It’s not enough for me to do a victory lap for doing 10 shoes,’ he continues. ‘It doesn’t even sound interesting coming out of my mouth. What’s interesting is having thousands of kids leave with this impression that they too can design sneakers.’

Abloh is also increasingly using his influence to shine a light on more serious issues. For his June men’s presentation at Florence’s Pitti Uomo fair, he was inspired by the international women’s marches, and teamed up with American artist Jenny Holzer, whose work harnesses the power of words. ‘I needed a strong female voice,’ he says of their collaboration, which saw poetry from Anna Świrszczyńska penned during the 1944 Warsaw uprising fused with voices from the present day conflict in Syria, and Naomi projected across the show space. The Campbell clothes themselves were inspired by the and Abloh on the Off-White inflated safety vests, protective hoodies SS18 catwalk and waterproof anoraks worn by the real-time flood of young refugees washing up on the shores of Italy in the spring.

The plight of youth is particularly at the top of Abloh’s mind. ‘I look at how the votes would have gone had it just been the younger generation,’ he says of the Brexit vote. ‘Social media leads us to believe that the world is more like a homogeneous, caring, sort

of open-minded place, and then these issues are decided by the older generation, you know, like how the young people should live,’ he pauses.

‘My style is not meant to be polarising, but it’s still meant to make a stand.’

He is, he says, a man with a core belief that design can unite and uplift. ‘I think of Nike as a tech company,’ he maintains of his experience at Nike’s high-spec Oregon campus. ‘I don’t think of it as frivolous design.’ He pauses, adding, ‘You know, the team that I was with yesterday designed this phone,’ he says, holding up one of his two iPhones — the first is labelled ‘Here’ for domestic use, the second ‘There’ for international. ‘People that hate each other still meet at this design, or a pair of shoes. Then they have something in common. That is the central ethos with my art,’ he explains of his mission to unite the world that he grew up in with the one he inhabits now, and beyond.

OFF-WHITE SS18

Nike Air Max 97 OG, £150

DADDY issues

Hopeless at DIY and allergic to football, for years Sarfraz Manzoor was haunted by a fear that he wasn’t ‘manly’ enough to be a dad. Then he became one — and realised there was so much more to fatherhood than he’d realised

I

used be frightened of children — my greatest fear was that I might one day have them. It wasn’t an allergic reaction to responsibility and commitment that deterred me from rushing towards fatherhood. It was the suspicion that I did not have what it takes to be a great dad.

‘Anyone can be a father,’ the saying goes, ‘but it takes a real man to be a dad.’ The trouble was that as far back as I could remember I had never felt I was a ‘real’ man. Real men were strong and silent; they watched football down the pub and exchanged banter with the lads; they could assemble flat-pack furniture and they loved cars. I admit it: this list reads as absurdly reductive, but throughout my 20s and 30s this was genuinely what I associated

32 es magazine 13.10.17

with maleness. I didn’t drink, couldn’t care less about football or cars, preferred cafés to pubs and most of my friends were female — all of which made me doubt how much of a man I really was.

There is a brilliant scene in Blackadder Goes Forth when Mary, played by Miranda Richardson, asks Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, ‘Tell me Edmund, do you have someone special in your life?’ Blackadder replies: ‘Well yes, as a matter of fact I do.’ ‘Who?’ asks Mary. Edmund answers, ‘Me.’ ‘No, I mean someone you love, cherish and want to keep safe from all the horror and the hurt,’ clarifies Mary. Edmund thinks for a moment and then says: ‘Erm… still me, really.’ That scene is very funny, but for me particularly so. I was a selfish and self-

Dad’s the word: Manzoor with baby son, Ezra, and left, with six-year-old daughter, Laila

absorbed person (my wife might quibble with the past tense here) and having a child seemed to be about sacrificing one’s own hopes, dreams and sleep in return for… well I wasn’t really certain what the rewards were.

What I did know was that fatherhood was a role for which I did not seem well-suited.

My own father, inevitably, shaped some of my ideas about fatherhood. He was one of those working-class men who demanded respect and commanded authority. He worked all day on the production line of a car factory and by the time he returned home he was often angry and exhausted. He wasn’t one for hugs or telling his children he loved them and he had a temper. He worked hard, accepting all the overtime he was offered, so wasn’t always around, and when he was around we sometimes wished he wasn’t. I don’t judge him for those things. He was a man of his time and he fulfilled his most important duties: he provided and he protected. My father died suddenly from a heart attack when he was 62 and I was 23. It remains the most shattering event in my life and the one that shaped all that has happened afterwards.

That perhaps is another reason why I feared being a dad, because to have children means that I might do to them what my own dad did to me: die too soon.

“the worry that gnawed at me when i was childless evaporated on the day laila was born”

Manzoor, right, with his father and sister

My ideas about fatherhood weren’t only based on my own dad, they were also inspired by the films I would watch and seeing the fathers of my friends. A great dad was, based on what I saw on screen and in my friends’ families, someone who was physically robust and financially solid. He was strong and capable and he didn’t need to call an electrician when a light bulb went out in the living room. I wasn’t any of these things so why should I believe I could be a great dad? And yet even though fatherhood frightened me, I was also plagued by another parallel fear: that by not experiencing parenthood I might miss out on its unknown pleasures.

In the end the decision was taken out of my hands. In the summer of 2008 I met an extraordinarily wonderful woman and two years later we were married. I knew Bridget wanted children and the fact I knew she would be a spectacular mother made me less nervous about the prospect of becoming a father. On 11 August 2011, Bridget gave birth to our daughter, Laila, and last November she was joined by her new baby brother, Ezra. I am now 46, Laila is six and Ezra not quite one, and in the past six years everything I had assumed about fatherhood was revealed to be nonsense and I was freshly reminded of just how little I knew.

I had always associated fatherhood with loss — the loss of freedom, the loss of sleep, the loss of time just with Bridget — but I had not appreciated what I would gain. It was only when I had children that I realised that fatherhood isn’t a mould into which every man must pour themselves, but rather it offers the chance to create your own unique mould. My version of fatherhood is rooted in who I was before I had children. I am still not into football or pubs and in my family it is my wife who drives and mostly assembles furniture and has the job with the predictable income. But I can offer other things.

I’m still not great at unfolding the pram but my daughter can sing along to ‘Dancing in the Dark’, ‘Jolene’ and ‘Moonlight Shadow’, and that has to count for something. I can give my time and I can be present in their lives. I don’t want to be one of those men who hardly sees their children grow up and later regrets it. I would rather accept that I might not be as successful as my single or childless peers, but I get to enjoy other compensations, which are worth more than money. The worry that gnawed at me when I was childless — that for all the striving and outward successes there really was no great purpose to my life — evaporated on the day Laila was born.

Fatherhood has offered me the opportunity to not repeat the mistakes my father made and the chance to make fresh mistakes of my own. Where my own dad was too strict with me I am possibly too much of a soft touch with my own children. I wouldn’t have dared defy my father but my daughter barely listens to a word I say. I make my share of mistakes but these days I worry less about whether I have what it takes to be a father because I am blessed to have two rather brilliant little teachers.

They haven’t just taught me how to be a better dad, they have shown me how to become a better human being; more patient, empathetic and tolerant than I once was.

They say that 90 per cent of being a dad is just showing up. The magical thing about fatherhood is that if you just keep showing up — for school drop-offs and dinnertime, for birthdays and bath times — if you just put in the time, you can learn everything you need to be a dad. Laila and Ezra are reminders that in life, if you are lucky, real happiness comes not when you get what you want, but when you get what you need.

Sarfraz Manzoor is the author of ‘Greetings from Bury Park: Race. Religion. Rock ’n’ Roll’, a memoir of growing up in the 1980s, published by Bloomsbury.

Twitter: @sarfrazmanzoor

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He’s got the look

The big-ticket purchase from the superfashionable French house is what has come to be known as dad jeans. Faded a bit and ill-fitting, these mustgrab numbers have been Clarkson faves for years. Dad jeans have that certain ‘Je ne sais garden centre’ look, with more than a sprinkling of Eau de Kwik Fit.

BALENCIAGA SS18

Could Jeremy Clarkson be the most fashionable man in Britain? Stop laughing now, he’s very Balenciaga, says Richard Gray

dad denim

LEATHER LOADED

PTA PERFECTION

Never-ending tea and biscuits and yet another conversation about the school mini bus: our Jeremy is deft in the art of the parent-teacher association cream jacket.

This reassuring shoulder line and soft-to-the-touch cloth implies one is fully fluent in ‘deputy head’.

BALENCIAGA SS18

BALENCIAGA SS18

The zip-front dead cow extravaganza, seen on every man who ever went to a car boot sale, is le dernier cri, say fashion types in Paris. A leather bomber says cocktails, bar stools and a Vauxhall Chevette. But mostly it says: ‘I’ve still got it.’

The Keanu-starring cinema smash was surely the influence behind Balenciaga’s stretchedout shades. But the nation’s most famously grumpy car enthusiast has been a champion of those little lenses for seasons, darling.

Here he is looking not even the slightest bit like Laurence Fishburne as The Matrix’s Morpheus.

SAINSBURY’S CHIC

BALENCIAGA SS18

BALENCIAGA SS18

Rex Features; Barcroft Media; Eroteme; Vantage News

INTO THE MATRIX Should you still be in any doubt as to whether or not what you are looking at is, in fact, the most fashionable man in Britain, then consider this: Clarkson was doing orange man-bags way before Balenciaga... and his is plastic.

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PhotographS BY james gardiner

Above, Uniform Wares. Below, Farer Endurance

Main, Sekford.

Below, Larsson & Jennings

Right on time

They’re young, they’re hip — and they’re changing the face of watchmaking with their innovative designs. Charlie Teasdale meets the Londoners reinventing horology

A

new breed of contemporary British watchmaker is shaking up the horology world with a less-is-more approach to design and price. Based right here in our capital, these independent brands are appealing to the next generation of collector seeking a cooler, more minimal timepiece over the heavy gold badge of success that their parents’ generation aspired to own. Championing clean modern design over bold branding, they are utilising the best of Swiss and British know-how, but are for the most part priced between £250 and £1,000.

Andrew Jennings moved from banking to the watch world

LARSSON & JENNINGS

Perhaps the biggest success story of this British watchmaking resurgence, Larsson & Jennings has gone from bedroom start-up to multimillion-pound business in five years.

‘I met Joakim Larsson during a ski season in Austria,’ remembers Andrew Jennings, 33, who at the time worked in the City as an investment manager. ‘We realised there weren’t any independent, cool, affordable, Swiss-made watch brands in the UK, so we took a road trip around Switzerland and ended up going to a few factories.’

The pair used credit cards, sold their cars and saved money to fund the first 100 watches, which they sold to friends to help pay for the website. ‘I was cycling to my job in finance with watches in my backpack,’ Jennings says, ‘sending out orders from the post office.’

Then, in the December of their first year, the brand sold

1,000 two-hand quartz watches. Jennings quit his job and began Larsson & Jennings in earnest.

The business has enjoyed significant yearon-year growth and in December 2014 it opened a flagship store on Monmouth Street in Covent Garden. Larsson & Jennings watches are stocked in more than 200 toptier locations around the world.

The watches are known for their sleek, 40mm dials and matching tonal leather or chain-mesh straps that appeal to the young creative who changes bands to match their look. There is an automatic — a steal at £745 — and countless variations of the original, barnstorming Lugano dominated by its large minimal face.

There’s even talk of a smart watch to come. But for now, Jennings — the remaining founder since Larsson moved on to other projects in Sweden — is happy to be an enfant terrible of the watch world. ‘We are still the new kids on the block, and we relish that.’ (larssonandjennings.com)

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Farer co-founders Jono Holt, left, and Ben Lewin

uniform wares

FARER

Farer is run from a studio in Lancaster Gate and a farm in Ascot but speak to its four founders — all former retail and advertising whizzes with a passion for vintage watches — and you’ll see that world domination is not far from reach.

‘We recognised there was a consumer out there that no longer wanted to buy into unfounded luxury,’ says Ben Lewin, 42, of their contemporary timepieces, priced from £283 to £1,175. ‘They wanted to know more about where the product was being made and the materials that were going into them.’

Farer has moved at breakneck speed since bursting on to the British watch scene in 2015 with nine quartz watches. They’ve since unveiled three automatics, three GMT-complication automatics and three ‘Aqua Compressor’ dive watches.

Beyond the aesthetics — each watch features a bronze crown — Farer is possibly the best bang-for-buck watches on the market. The Beagle, Hopewell and Endurance feature an ETA 2824-2 movement, the same engine you’ll find in timepieces that cost three times more. The Lancaster Gate studio is the best place to sample Farer on-wrist, but with a growth rate of 400 per cent year-on-year the team is eyeing a Mayfair studio — on Brook Street no less. (farer.com)

Though still in relative infancy, Uniform Wares could be considered the torchbearer of the ‘minimal’ British watchmaking movement.

‘The aesthetic was just a by-product of considered design,’ explains creative director Michael Carr, 35, who was formerly lead designer for Braun watches. ‘As product designers that’s often the way you start — by taking away what you don’t need.’

Uniform Wares was founded in 2009 by Oliver Fowles, 36, formerly an architectural model maker for Richard Rogers and David Chipperfield. The original plan was to create a collection of useful daily tools, such as a pen, a belt, a wallet etc. The first product to emerge was a pared-back monochromatic wristwatch, the 100 Series (£100), which launched in December 2009. That first batch of 1,000 watches sold out before the new year, and by the start of 2010 Uniform Wares was stocked in design stores around the world.

Eight years later and Uniform Wares has 12 Swiss-made timepieces, a watch in San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art and a new made-to-measure service operating out of its flagship ‘atelier’ on Shoreditch’s Paul Street.

Prices range from £250 to £850 for watches featuring Milanese Napa leather or a made-to-measure strap. An appointment at the atelier will have you meeting Fowles to discuss options, while the technician assembles it. There are thousands of colour, material and design combinations. Just don’t ask them to put a logo on it. (uniformwares.com)

Sekford’s Kuchar Swara Uniform Wares’ creative director Michael Carr, left, and co-founder Oliver Fowles

SEKFORD

An aesthete rather than a watchmaker by trade, Kuchar Swara, 36, founded Sekford in 2015. ‘I’d been working in Milan in magazine art direction,’ he remembers, ‘and I thought it would be nice to sink my teeth into something physical.’

Despite being one of London’s creative minds — Kuchar is co-founder of Port magazine — watch design wasn’t his forte, so he went in search of enlightenment. At the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, Swara was inspired by the minimalism that British designers have employed since the 17th century. ‘It struck me that the dials were pure in their refinement — it was all about legibility.’ Many of those watches were made on Sekforde Street in Clerkenwell, which is how Sekford got its name. Though its watches are made in Switzerland, everything else is conceived in London.

So far there is just one Sekford watch, the elegant 1A, but more designs are in the works. And the business is ticking along nicely thanks to Kuchar’s unexpected clientele: ‘The majority of my customers work in finance and law,’ he exclaims. ‘I imagine it appeals to their sense of history and they like the story.’ (sekford.com)

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13.10.17 es magazine 38

Beat hero Arnaud Valois had given up on acting and moved to Thailand when he was cast, via Facebook, in critical darling 120 Beats per Minute. Now he’s poised for stardom. By Tom Ellen

A

PhotographS BY laurent humbert

rnaud Valois sits at the corner table of a busy 10th arrondissement café, surrounded by the holy trinity of urban French accessories: smartphone, moped helmet, packet of cigarettes. In a nondescript grey hoodie and jeans, he could be mistaken for any other young, upwardly mobile Parisian were it not for the group of mid-20s hipsters not-so-subtly gawping at him from the next table.

‘It’s strange,’ he laughs. ‘It’s like this movie has changed everything and nothing at the same time. Nothing because I am still the guy I was, but everything because now everyone wants to talk. They approach you on the street, on social media. It’s not just selfies; they want to tell you something personal, how the movie connected with them.’

The movie in question is Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats per Minute, a Nineties-set drama about ACT UP Paris, the protest group that fought for Aids sufferers’ rights via a combination of volatile debates and fake blood-filled balloons. It’s a brilliant film — toggling seamlessly between political thriller, docu-drama and love story — and Valois’ portrayal of Nathan, a shy, HIV-negative outsider among HIV-positive activists, has sent French cinema-goers and critics into a frenzy.

‘During the interviews at Cannes, journalists were crying in front of me,’ Valois recalls, in his impressively perfect English. ‘It was like a tsunami of energy. At the photocall, they were shouting, “Thank you for making this film!” and “This is the Palme d’Or!”’ The film didn’t bag that top prize in the end, but it did

13.10.17 es magazine 41

Capital Pictures; Rex. Styled by Sebastien Cambos. Grooming by Céline Exbrayat at Call My Agent

“at Cannes… It was like a tsunami of energy. they were shouting, ‘Thank you for making this film!’”

come away with numerous others, including the second-most prestigious, the Grand Prix.

Plus, it has now fought off every other French movie this year to become the nation’s entry for best foreign language film at the Oscars. It’s odd to consider, then, that Valois initially turned the project down.

‘I was done with acting,’ the 33-year-old explains. ‘I’d been doing castings for s***ty things, getting rejected and finally I thought, “I tried it, it didn’t work, let’s do something else.”’

That something else turned out to be massage therapy, and Valois had been living in Thailand, happily soothing bad backs for six years when the casting director of 120 Beats per Minute got in touch. ‘She said that Robin [Campillo] had seen my Facebook profile while searching for “faces that looked like they were from the Nineties”.’

He barks a laugh at the idea. ‘He didn’t even know I was an actor. He just thought I had a “Nineties face”.’

The ‘gay theme’ and ‘political side’ of the script were enough to tempt Valois back to France for a reading, and once he was offered the role he immersed himself in research about the Eighties and Nineties Aids epidemic.

‘I spoke to former ACT UP members,’ he tells me. ‘They’d talk about how people would come to meetings for a while and then suddenly disappear. A week later you’d find out they’re dead. This was completely normal.’

For Valois, the movie was ‘less about relating, more about working to understand’. He was never much of a youth activist and doesn’t feel he’s endured major struggles on account of his sexuality (‘I came out to my parents at 19, it was never an issue’). However, while much has been written about the film’s ‘universal’ appeal (something Valois agrees with), the actor is eager to emphasise its standing as a ‘queer movie’.

‘This is a story about homosexuals, with Aids, dying,’ he says, bluntly. ‘And don’t forget, it’s also a story that — when it was actually happening — no one wanted to hear about.’

This goes some way to explaining ACT UP’s

Minute men: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Arnaud Valois in 120 Beats per Minute

Valois with his 120 Beats per Minute co-stars, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Adèle Haenel

confrontational (to put it mildly) style. Faced with violent homophobia and complacent pharmaceutical companies — as well as ignorance and fear from the HIV-negative gay community — the group resorted to extreme measures.

In the film, we see Nathan and his cohorts storming medical offices, armed with handcuffs, placards and fake blood. ‘Those scenes were fun, but so stressful,’ Valois says. ‘We only had three takes, so we had to get it right.’

The tough subject matter — and explicit sex scenes — make the film’s commercial success in France even more remarkable, but Valois is confident that public attitudes towards LGBT issues are changing for the better.

‘Since “mariage pour tous” [the 2013 legalisation of gay marriage in France] I think there has been a change,’ he smiles. ‘In France, when a law is voted, you can’t unvote it. So, people either have to live with it, or…’ He stubs out his Marlboro and performs what can only be described as a ‘Gallic shrug’.

Valois was born in Lyon in 1984 and fell in love with acting at an early age. Such was the ‘adrenaline shot’ of his first school play that he remembers ‘nearly fainting’ on stage, and at 18 he decided to stop being ‘the kid who liked to get full marks on tests’ and pursue his dream properly. He moved to Paris and enrolled in drama school, but an initial flurry of work was soon replaced by months of despondency and rejection. ‘I was getting no offers, no calls,’ he remembers.

In the wake of 120 Beats per Minute, a lack of offers is not something he has to worry about. ‘Since Cannes, I’ve been sent 20 scripts,’ he grins. ‘One or two are interesting, so we’ll see. But I have to be sure of the project. It must be a very strong movie.’

The odd thing you realise as you talk to Valois is that he seems genuinely unfazed by his sudden bloom of fame.

Any other young actor who had just set Cannes alight would be desperately scrambling for their next role. Valois, however, has the wait-for-the-right-script confidence you’d normally associate with a seasoned Oscar-winner. Or maybe not confidence: more a sense of genuine contentment, of having nothing to prove. He’s in a steady relationship and has a second career to fall back on. If he never made another film, I ask, would he be okay?

‘Oh yeah,’ he nods. ‘I think I’d be happier. Well, not happier, but more… centred. Because acting takes so much energy — you’re very high, then very low. It’s a lot to handle. I prefer to be happy in my massage studio than unhappy on a film set.’

As our time nears its end, the conversation meanders everywhere from Emmanuel Macron (‘I voted for him, but it’s too soon to judge’) to Michael Fassbender. ‘He is a huge actor,’ Valois says. ‘He plays a working-class guy, a financial guy, a cyborg. I find this fascinating: to do intelligent, independent movies as well as big blockbusters. A small part in a blockbuster, just once… It could be fun.’

And it may well happen. Valois is off to LA next month, as part of the 120 Beats per Minute Oscars campaign.

If the film provokes the same levels of excitement over there, you can’t help feeling that those massage clients will have to wait a little longer…

‘120 Beats per Minute’ is part of the BFI London Film Festival (bfi.org.uk/lff) and is on general release in the new year

13.10.17 es magazine 43

COACH jacket, £995; necklace, POA (uk.coach. com). BURBERRY T-shirt, £150 (uk.burberry.com)

The

growing pains of

James Franco He’s the star of TV’s most talked-about new drama The Deuce, and one of Hollywood’s most prolific actors. James Franco talks to Dan Rookwood about past mistakes and life as a recovering workaholic PhotographS BY Victor Demarchelier stylED BY Jenny Kennedy

J

ames Franco settles into his armchair, takes a slurp of black coffee and smiles.

He looks pretty happy with his current lot. His new show, The Deuce — which was created by David Simon of The Wire fame and charts the rise of the porn industry in sleazy, early-1970s New York — is the most talked-about and most universally acclaimed thing on TV at the moment.

Franco, ever the prolific polymath, not only plays the leads of both Brooklyn-raised Bar stars: James Franco in twin brothers Vincent and The Deuce with Chris Coy Frankie Martino, but executive produced the series and directed two of its eight episodes. He is a key part of its instantaneous success, and he knows it.

Franco is beefier in the flesh than you might expect. He fills out his form-fitting striped

Breton sweater. He looks good, and also smells good — as he should, given that he is now the ruggedly bestubbled face of Coach for Men fragrance (he was also in the front row at the label’s SS18 show). ‘I’m wearing it right now,’ he says. It is a far cry from the first time he flogged fragrance. As a tearaway teenager growing up in the Bay Area tech town of Palo Alto, where his late father was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and his mother is a writer, he got arrested, he says, for shoplifting designer aftershave from a department store. ‘I was the big cologne guy in junior high,’ he continues. ‘We were stealing it and selling it at school. I guess that was the last time I really wore fragrance.’

That was a long while ago.

Franco turns 40 next April.

He’s changed. He used, for example, to be relentless on social media, and enjoyed using it to post provocative selfies and

13.10.17 es magazine 45

COACH jumper, £475 (uk.coach.com)

Franco stars with Kirsten Dunst in Spider-Man 3

Franco in This is the End with cast including Jonah Hill and Seth Rogan

figuring out what was meaningful. I’ve been known as a guy that just did a lot of things. I [already] went through a lot of the phases I think people go through in their midlife crisis. So for me it was really about cutting back and focusing, and figuring out what I really wanted to spend my time on.’

“Hef had his own table with a bunch of playmates. I didn’t realise I wasn’t supposed to talk to them. He just gave me a dirty look” manipulate the celebrity gossip machine, fuelling speculation around his ambiguous sexuality (as an actor he enjoys playing gay characters, he released a volume of poetry last year called Straight James/Gay James and said in an interview that he is ‘gay up until the point of intercourse’). He didn’t have much of a filter and it occasionally backfired. In 2014, then aged 35, he was caught out trying to arrange a hotel hook-up with a 17year-old Scottish girl who’d been to see his Broadway play, Of Mice and Men. But he has now deleted his accounts and says it’s ‘very liberating’ to rid himself of such a ‘time suck’. ‘It’s a whole facet of one’s public persona that I had obviously engaged with, thinking that it was a fun facetious kind of thing, and realising that it actually took up much more space in my life, in my mind, just in my total bandwidth.’

His upcoming landmark birthday, though, feels like more of a millstone than a milestone. ‘I guess it’s called a midlife crisis,’ he says. ‘I’ve certainly hit a wall this past year. It’s not like I went out and had to buy a Ferrari or anything like that. It was more about re-prioritising and

46 es magazine 13.10.17

The actor with Maggie Gyllenhaal at The Deuce premiere

Alamy; Rex Features

‘A

guy that just did a lot of things’ is a good way of describing him. Since dropping out of UCLA to pursue acting (his parents cut him off financially, so he took a job at a drive-through McDonald’s where he would practise different accents on customers) and getting his big break (Judd Apatow cast him in cult teen series Freaks and Geeks alongside partner-in-crime-to-be, Seth Rogen) Franco hasn’t stopped. The Deuce, for example, is not his first foray into the world of sleaze. It’s not even his second.

‘Hmm, I’ve done a few projects involved with the porn industry,’ he says, as if this has just occurred to him. Last year he played the role of an unhinged gay porn producer in King Cobra. And in a 2013 biopic about legendary porn star Linda Lovelace, he portrayed the recently deceased Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. ‘I met him at a tribute to George Clooney,’ says Franco. ‘I don’t know why I was there, I hardly know George Clooney. Hef had his own table with a bunch of Playmates. I knew one of them so I was like, “Heyyy!” And she was kind of like, sotto voce, “Go away! Hef’s going to get angry!” I didn’t realise I wasn’t supposed to talk to her. He just sort of gave me a dirty look.’

A sense of mischief has often characterised his work, with sometimes serious consequences.

There was, of course, The Interview, the comedy he made with Seth Rogen, in which he plays a journalist who manages to score an interview with Kim Jong-un and is then co-opted by the CIA in a plot to assassinate the North Korean dictator. The film resulted in a hack of Sony Pictures, where thousands of private emails between A-list stars and big-name producers and execs were

COACH coat, £1,595 (uk.coach.com). BURBERRY T-shirt, £150 (uk.burberry. com). STELLA McCARTNEY trousers, £290 (stellamccartney.com)

13.10.17 es magazine 47

COACH jacket, £1,250; jumper, £475; necklace, POA (uk.coach.com) Grooming by Matthew Tuozzoli using Oribe Hair Care for Atelier Management.

Fashion assistant: Eniola Dare With thanks to Moxy Times Square hotel (moxytimessquare.com) and Virgin Atlantic, which flies five times daily from London to New York from £483 (0844 209 2770; virginatlantic.com)

“I already went through a lot of the phases I think people go through in their midlife crisis” leaked to the world. It was a tiny taste of the havoc that North Korea is capable of instigating.

Fast forward a couple of years and we are now living the real-life sequel in which his Dave Skylark character is reprised by imbecilic TV host Donald Trump. ‘And Dennis Rodman!’ chimes in Franco. It’s pretty terrifying that the US’s nuclear codes are in the famously small hands of the current President. ‘Yeah, I’ll say!’ Does Franco think we’re on the precipice of all-out war? ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ he squirms as a publicist

48 es magazine 13.10.17

suddenly moves into my eyeline. ‘We made our movie, I don’t know how much more people want to hear on my take on North Korea.’

These movies are but a couple in his back catalogue.

Franco has been acting full tilt, non-stop for 20 years and has a reputation for his frenetic energy and scattergun output — not all of it good. A lot of movie stars take a ‘one for them, one for me’ approach — in other words, they do a job for the money so that they can then work on a project for the love. But as Jonah Hill put it in Comedy Central’s Roast of James Franco, ‘[James] has his own philosophy: one for them, five for nobody.’

In fact Franco currently has no fewer than 14 different acting projects listed on IMDB at varying stages of

Franco in The Disaster Artist and, below, as the stranded hiker in 127 Hours

completion, plus a further 15 as a producer or executive producer, four as a director and four as writer (admittedly with some overlap). And this is before we get to his poetry, painting and photography. He’s known for writing novels and screenplays in green rooms between scenes. He reads books voraciously — often switching between two at a time, and always has several ‘on option’ — a backlog of stories he wants to turn into movies. He’s also usually teaching students at two or three different universities and studying himself at two or three more, flying back and forth for classes (Franco himself has a reported seven degrees at the latest count). By his own admission, he spreads himself too thinly, which has made it impossible to sustain the quality of work that earned him a deserved Oscar nomination for 127 Hours in 2011. He almost didn’t get the part(s) on The Deuce because its creator, David Simon, was genuinely concerned that Franco lacked focus and would be too easily distracted.

Rex Features; Capital Pictures

B

ut having hit a crisis point this past year, he’s now facing up to being a recovering workaholic. He’s not using the term blithely. He really means it: he says he is dangerously addicted to work. He has buried himself in it for two decades. It has cost him — relationships, friendships, a sense of equilibrium. ‘Workaholicism is a huge thing, and one of the problems is that it’s really hard to see, because hard work is applauded in our culture. As it should be, but I think there’s also a line, a very thin line, that I crossed over where there were diminishing returns on the amount of work I was putting in,’ he says. ‘It was just “busy work” after a while, an escape rather than discipline that was adding up to better work.’

In addition, he has also given up porn (‘I used to watch a lot of porn when I was younger, but I actually do not watch it now. I watched it up until a year ago’).

And he is taking a break from all that teaching and studying, clearing out the backlog of projects.

‘Everything that I have that’s on IMDB is from at least a year ago, if not more,’ he explains. ‘I was teaching at three or four schools, so a lot of those things are my graduate students’ projects that I was helping get off the ground. I haven’t taught in over a year.’ The biggest change in his life is that, since wrapping on The Deuce last October, he has hardly worked. ‘I really only acted two weeks this whole year, in a Coen brothers movie’ — actually a six-episode Western series called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

Franco credits his younger brother, Dave, 32, also an actor, with helping him temper his artistic recklessness and at last discover a more sustainable approach to work: that it is better to focus on doing a few things well than pinball between umpteen projects and have to dash them off and hope for the best. The Francos have now formed their own production company, Ramona Films, and their first project, The Disaster Artist, based on the so-bad-it’s-

“I think there’s a line, a very thin line, that I crossed where there were diminishing returns on the amount of work I was putting in”

Megan Mullally, Bryan Cranston and Zoey Deutch with Franco at the Why Him? premiere last year

good movie The Room, is due for release in December.

It is generating early awards buzz after premiering to rave reviews at SXSW festival earlier this year. Big brother isn’t exactly putting his feet up: he directed it and plays the lead.

What about a relationship? Is Franco dating? ‘Yeah.’

He smiles. How long? ‘Four months.’ He won’t reveal with whom, but he has been papped recently with an LAbased TV publicist called Isabel Pakzad. He masterfully swerves further probing on the subject by launching into a rambling pseudo-intellectual analogy about what it’s like when you find the right person — something to do with The Big O and a triangle and the missing piece, it doesn’t matter — which swallows up the last 60 seconds of our interview.

And then, wearing the Hollywood actor’s cunning disguise of a baseball cap, he’s off, headed back up to the bright lights of Times Square to see a show — though a rather more highbrow one than those depicted in The Deuce. ‘I’m going to see 1984 on Broadway,’ he says. ‘I’ve heard mixed reviews.’ Quite possibly. But at least his own are now on the up and up.

James Franco is the face of Coach for Men fragrance, available now

13.10.17 es magazine 49

the rise of

illustration by joe m c laren

BONUS-tox

Forget drugs or Bollinger, botulinum toxin is the trading floor’s new vice.

Katie Service reports

M

arc works on the finance team at a law firm in the City and he has a secret.

Once every couple of months, he waves goodbye to his secretary at the end of the day, saying he is heading out to the gym. But instead of Fitness First, he in fact makes his way to Bury Street. Buzzing himself in through an unmarked doorway, he checks in for his appointment with Sarah, his dermatologist.

Marc, who is 40 and single, has been having Botox injections for three years. He is one of the growing number of men in London’s financial district who are, postbonus, succumbing to the drug that in her new book, Botox Nation, sociologist Dana Berkowitz PhD has said is as addictive as cocaine.

Needless to say, men are no strangers to Botox, now making up a solid 10 per cent of all users. But ‘bonus-tox’, the rise of injectables undertaken by financiers, specifically spiking around bonus season, is a whole new area of growth. ‘It’s common for people to wait for their bonuses and celebrate with a bit of facial rejuvenation,’ confirms Dr David Jack, one of Harley Street’s premier aesthetic doctors. ‘I quite often have City workers who wait to see what level of bonus they get before having a bigger tweak than usual.’

City men are increasingly under the same pressures that women have always felt to look youthful in the workplace. ‘I spend between £200 and £600 per treatment,’ confesses Marc, who started researching Botox after he visited a dermatologist for dermal fillers to straighten up a broken nose.

After one session, he was hooked, going for top-up skin peels at Dr Sarah Shah’s clinic near The Gherkin in between Botox sessions.

‘We’re all getting older in the City and for me, it’s about staying fresh. You know what it’s like, you look in the mirror one day and you see things that weren’t there before.’

Over on Harley Street at The Studio Clinic, cosmetic specialist Dr Tatiana Lapa

has been watching a steady rise in the number of City suits filling her waiting room: now 20 per cent of her clientele. ‘It’s a sector where youth, vitality and vibrancy are important.

My clients tell me they feel their jobs have a time limit. They’re no longer energetic gogetters and this is helping them stay in the game for longer.’ Lapa’s clinic consciously markets itself towards the financial sector with discounts and offers. ‘They jump at it.

They like to work with us as they feel they can offer their staff exciting and new things to motivate them.’ Suddenly the phrase ‘banker’s perks’ takes on new meaning.

“I often have City workers who wait to see what level of bonus they get before having a bigger tweak than usual” A quick scour of Google picks up a legion of Botox clinics in the financial district, from fully qualified medical dermatologists such as Cosmedics near Fenchurch Street to high street ‘clinics’ in Liverpool Street specialising in ‘lunch-break facelifts’. Hard-working, fast-living bankers want convenience after all. So what treatments are favoured by the FTSE 100 set?

‘The main thing is they don’t want their masculine characteristics to be altered, they

just want to stop the ageing process,’ says plastic surgeon George Samouris from the Hospital Group on Weymouth Street.

Samouris regularly performs ‘Baby Botox’ on city slicker clients, where considerably tinier amounts of the toxin are injected to ensure the lines of expression are kept but simply softened.

Stealth placement is also key. The money shot is around the frown lines, which doesn’t restrict the movement in the brow and won’t give that frozen look — but works wonders releasing tension in the brow so that you don’t look so confused or angry in board meetings. Botox peppered around the eye area, which relaxes the crow’s feet, is also an efficient way to subtly refresh the face and make you look younger without people being able to pinpoint how.

‘These men are really jawline obsessed, too,’ explains Dr Frances Prenna Jones, a medical dermatologist based in Mayfair who was once told by a woman that she was the only person for whom her husband had ever skipped a board meeting. ‘I inject into the platysmal bands, which run down the neck.

This adds lift and definition to the chin. In women it’s called the Nefertiti lift.’

Let’s face it, when it comes to playing the alpha male in the office, nobody in the City wants to be told they have a weak chin.

13.10.17 es magazine 51

Gant guys: from left, Ryan Gosling, Ryan Reynolds, Adam Levine and Ben Affleck

Gant’s

on fire Looking for understated, elegant menswear?

Look no further than Gant, the label taking over the fashion world by stealth, says Richard Gray

INF photo, Matrix pictures, Rex features, Fame Flynet

W

e’ve all seen that welldressed man in the street; he’s got the perfect pair of chinos, a classic jumper, crew neck (not too tight in smart navy blue) and a bag casually slung across his chest. He looks great and effortless and you think: where the hell do I buy that stuff? How does he do it? The answer, invariably, is Gant.

‘Gant just gets what a man wants from his outfit,’ says Luke Day, editor of GQ Style. ‘It’s so easy to shop and sits on the right side of fashion. Not too in your face, not too look-atme. It’s reliable, smart fashion. It’s modular.’

Front row members like Day and smart celebrities such as Ryan Gosling, Ashton Kutcher, Ben Affleck and Ryan Reynolds all rely on Gant’s easy look.

By ‘modular’, Day means that just like, say, an Ikea kitchen slots together with everything else with relative ease, Gant’s menswear slots together too. Those trousers with that shirt; that cardigan with those dark blue jeans. It’s cool, organised and dead simple.

Everything works with everything else over and over again for so many different occasions, which has been the secret weapon for best-dressed men since Gant first appeared 60-odd years ago. And it has been reinventing and honing the formula ever since. It’s this lot who created that little loop on the back of your shirt — they call it the ‘locker loop’ — to stop your shirt creasing when you hang it in the locker. And it’s the locker loop Oxford cotton shirts, specifically, that Gant fans buy every single season. All colours, all occasions. For more of that smart casual thing, wear your Oxford loop back shirt with a knitted tie (use a school knot —

it sits more neatly) plus camel cotton trousers (again). Roll back the sleeves of your shirt and wear with jeans and New Balance 373s in grey, navy or red and you’ll never shop another weekend shirt again.

Also bear in mind that Gant was the choice of American students in the 1950s, so there will always be a preppy sort of look in everything it does. This was a time when men were, arguably, never as well-dressed, and ‘smart casual’ was pretty much everything.

What else is there to like? Well, you could try the jeans (I like the ‘regular straight fit’).

And you don’t need to wash them every day either. As long you’re not going out paintballing, raving or rolling in manure,

denim experts will tell you: if you can get away with it, spray them with Febreze and let them air. The colour is so good you don’t want to lose it by banging them on ‘fast coloureds’ cycle.

After a few weeks Gant denim develops a shine and looks even better.

Need a new knit? Remember those halfzip jumpers we used to wear in the 1990s?

Well, they’re back. So back, in fact, they’re not in the shops yet and due out next spring.

But Gant, clued-up as usual, has them in stock now. Pull these beauties on for when it’s too warm to wear a coat but ‘that bit nippy’, and for those who don’t live in London (poor loves) everything’s online. (gant.co.uk)

the theory of everything: Gant’s modular formula rugby shirt, £100 (they wash and wash)

OXFORD light blue cotton shirt, £85

+

tartan scarf, £55

Denim Oxford shirt, £85

+

orange jumper, £95

+

+

camel cotton chino, £85

+

Grey marl joggers, £32

+

jeans, £130

+

dead easy sneaker, £125

deck shoes, £105

=

autumn Saturday afternoon boozathon sorted

=

next door’s BBQ sorted

=

the boss’s wife’s charity do, where the invite said ‘smart casual’ (and nobody knew what it meant), now sorted

13.10.17 es magazine 53

Blondey McCoy showing off his skills

B

londey McCoy is lounging on a beaten-up leather sofa in his Covent Garden flat, wolfing down a jam-covered crumpet in between puffs of a cigarette, which he smokes like an old-fashioned movie star, rolling it between his thumb and index finger. A fish tank bubbles away in the opposite corner while Linder Sterling dinner plates adorn one wall and, on another, a towering spin painting by Damien Hirst looms over us.

It’s quite the collection for a 20-year-old skaterboy — but then McCoy isn’t your average 20-year-old. Aside from being a pro skater for Adidas (a role that involves travelling the world to film skate videos), he is also creative director of five-year-old fashion brand Thames, has modelled for the likes of Burberry and Valentino, and is the face of Palace Skateboards, the brand with the triangle logo that is the hottest streetwear label in the world right now (today he’s wearing a pair of its white jeans teamed with Adidas trainers, a crocodile belt by Supreme, polo shirt bearing the emblem of Soho greasy spoon Bar Bruno, cardigan by Prada and Burberry check scarf).

Oh — and then there’s his art. In 2015 he held his first exhibition, Thames AD, a collection of 34 collages at Soho’s Heni Gallery. He’s held four others including this summer’s Us and Chem at the Heni. It included a collaborative painting between him and the aforementioned Hirst, whom McCoy met in Venice earlier this year at the opening of Hirst’s current Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable show.

54 es magazine 13.10.17

blondey a

He’s modelled for Burberry, collaborated with Damien Hirst and has who is skateboarder-turned-designer-turned-artist Blondey McCoy? Ben

y ambition

and has his own streetwear label. But just Coy? Ben Reardon finds out

PhotographS BY mike o’meally

13.10.17 es magazine 55

Clothing and jewellery, all Blondey’s own

father and a British mother, McCoy grey up in New Malden and describes his heritage as ‘half and half, chips and cheese’. His parents divorced when he was around 12, an event that he saw as a fast pass to freedom. ‘I just remember thinking “This is me completely free, I can do whatever the f*** I want!”’ He mooched through Westminster School for a couple of years before being forced out due to lack of attendance, waving a final ta-ra to the school system at 16, having collected a grand total of five GCSEs.

H “I FEEL MY LIFE DIDN’T BEGIN BEFORE SKATEBOARDING. IT INTRODUCED ME TO EVERYTHING I KNOW AND LOVE” Following a handful of lunches and studio visits they decided to work together on a giant glass spin painting titled Beautiful, Chemically Imbalanced Painting. ‘Damien is amazing,’ says McCoy, warmly. ‘He is a living legend who will be remembered forever for what he has achieved. He’s engineered his life in such a way that he can make whatever idea he wakes up with a reality by lunchtime. He is also outstandingly charming, totally genius and like a cheeky schoolboy in every way.’ More recently, Burberry commissioned McCoy to create a 50 ft-tall, 3D mural celebrating Britain, in conjunction with the label’s Here We Are exhibition on Clerkenwell Road last month.

The youngest of three, born to a Lebanese Beautiful, Chemically Imbalanced Painting, 2017, by Blondey McCoy and Damien Hirst

56 es magazine 13.10.17

e discovered skateboarding around the time of his parents’ divorce through the MTV show Jackass and taught himself by watching American videos on YouTube. ‘I have always felt as if my life didn’t begin before skateboarding… it introduced me to everything I know and love and everything else quickly disappeared.’ For a shy teenager who had spent his childhood drawing copies of Disney films (a favourite being Peter Pan) it was perfect: ‘It’s a solitary sport. You can do it on your own for hours and hours at a time; essentially it’s exercise and a form of escapism.’ Before long, he could be found every morning from 8am skating Southbank skate park in his school uniform.

‘Everyone had a nickname, you had Rozza, Nugget, Chewy — it was like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys.’

When he wasn’t at Southbank, he’d be hanging around the legendary Slam City Skates, then located in Neal’s Yard. A melting pot of anyone beguiled by brattish skate culture, this was the go-to spot for a retail shot of covetable cool, pre-Supreme and pre-Palace.

‘It was a real hub. It was a timekiller but by no means a waste of time; it was one of the best times in my life.’

It was at Southbank that he met Great Yarmouth skateboarding hero Chewy Cannon, who first encouraged fellow skater and Palace founder, Lev Tanju, to gift the young upstart with some clobber from the newly launched brand. Tanju went on to become something of a mentor to McCoy, first encouraging the teenager to become a pro skater, then in 2013 choosing him to be the face of Palace. In 2015, he, along with

McCoy’s 3D mural on Clerkenwell Road, commissioned

by Burberry

‘Looking back it was clear I was going to become an addict as soon as I could get my hands on anything harder than a multipack of Dairy Milk. Drugs took over a bit and I spent the majority of 2013 indoors and wide awake doing little else apart from them.’ He managed to ‘put a cork in’ the drug a dd iction follow i ng a conversation with his business partner after a Palace skate trip Palace and Slam co-owner, went pear-shaped, but then Gareth Skewis, joined as ‘started drinking more — and partner at Thames, which soon enough the time between McCoy had founded three waking up hungover to drinking years earlier after he started again minimised to almost making stickers and T-shirts nothing’. He remembers out of collages he had created drinking bottles of Prosecco as from newspaper clippings, and if they were bottles of beer, and selling them. going out in a particular coat His other collaborations and with pockets big enough to endeavours appear to have accommodate bottles when come about with a similar jaunting ‘to, from and around degree of serendipity. Last c ou nt le s s s* * * p a r t ie s’. month McCoy unveiled his Something had to give. j e we l le r y c ol le c t i on i n Since New Year’s Day, he collaboration with Stephen has been sober, having replaced “It was clear I was going to Webster, whom he had met in Prosecco with green tea 2013 via the L ong Live and fags, wine with walking, become an addict as soon as I could Southbank campaign for the and drugs with dinners, get my hands on anything harder famous skatepark to stay put accompanied by his setthan a multipack of Dairy Milk” (the campaign had reached out designer girlfriend. ‘If you have to creatives nationwide for an addictive personality you support). After the pair ran into one another Alasdair McLellan. ‘I’m very inspired by have to accept that is the way you are and on subsequent nights out, they decided to him. He creates beautiful images and become addicted to something that isn’t work together, producing a 12-piece capsule documents moments in fashion, which in detrimental to your physical and mental jewellery collection, Thames by Stephen itself can be quite vacuous, but he always health. Now I feel that same compulsion to Webster — a series of bold, Instagramseems to get something iconic out of it.’ create art.’ friendly designs.

But things weren’t always so gilded for Acclaimed artist, pro skateboarder, McCoy. He spent the majority of his teenage designer — is anything off limits to him? ‘As t sounds like a charmed existence: years seeking escapism not only through corny as it sounds… skateboarding most days start with a trip to the skateboarding but also through drink introduced me to a very free way of life,’ local spa in Piccadilly and are and drugs.

McCoy reflects. ‘Among skateboarders I felt then spent making art or that anything was possible, McCoy, Bee Shaffer and Anna sketching fashion designs whether you were trained to do Wintour on the Burberry frow in his Soho studio — or it or not… I make art because it heading off on modelling keeps me sane and I will always shoots. In his spare time, love it and I skateboard for the McCoy takes piano lessons same reason. I see all of my and eats almost every day in “careers” as interconnected.

Bar Bruno or Soho House, The skating scene made it more often than not with his possible for me to make clothes best mate, the photographer and I like to wear those clothes to my art shows. I just want to create something new McCoy with Bella Freud at the Thames by Stephen Webster launch every day.’

Rex Features

I

13.10.17 es magazine 59

beauty by katie service

Eau, boy!

Spicy new season scents to fall for this autumn

From left, YVES SAINT LAURENT Y eau de toilette, £72 for 100ml (yslbeauty.co.uk).

BOSS BOTTLED eau de toilette, £62 for 100ml, at debenhams.com.

COACH for Men eau de toilette, £62 for 100ml (uk.coach.com).

COMME DES GARÇONS Concrete eau de parfum, £115 for 80ml, at doverstreetmarket.com.

ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA Talent, £180 for 50ml, at harrods.com.

CLIVE CHRISTIAN Green Fougere eau de parfum, £275 for 50ml (clivechristian.com)

PHOTOGRAPH BY Tobi Jenkins STYLED BY Lily Worcester

13.10.17 es magazine 61

Fresh

He’s conquered the music world with his Mercury-nominated album — now Loyle Carner is the face of YSL’s new fragrance. Here he models the new season’s low-key grooming looks

PhotographS BY Benjamin Madgewick beauty editor Katie Service fashion BY Jenny Kennedy

FACE

AMI T-shirt, £80 (ami.com).

STELLA McCARTNEY jumper, £585 (stellamccartney.com).

Jewellery, Loyle’s own

Read your stars by Shelley von Strunckel at standard.co.uk / horoscopes /today

13.10.17 es magazine 63

Left, FILA polo shirt, £40 (fila.co.uk).

Jewellery, Loyle’s own Below and bottom, BAND OF OUTSIDERS shirt, £164 (bandof outsiders.com)

L

oyle Carner’s Mercurynominated debut album, Yesterday’s Gone, ends with his mum reading a poem about him, in which she concludes that he ‘was and is a complete joy’. Plenty of people agree. Carner has amassed a huge, ever-growing army of devotees, drawn to the raw openness that characterises his songs.

London through and through, he grew up in south Croydon. ‘I’ve spent my whole life in south London,’ he smiles. ‘It’s beautiful. I don’t see the point in leaving. My friends are there, it feels like home. It’s diverse, there’s not much of a hierarchy, it feels like everyone’s in it together, which is rare in this world.’

Carner was raised by his single mother, Jean, a teacher for kids with special needs, and spent his teenage years coming to terms with his ADHD, all of which he writes about.

He credits Jean with helping him through it.

‘She helped me gain a deeper understanding of myself from a young age,’ he says, ‘which was good because I had her there to explain what was going on inside my head, and what would be good to channel it into. She introduced me to music, cooking and sport, all the things that are easy for someone like me to take all that energy and put it into something positive instead of just getting into fights and getting into trouble.

‘For a while it was just my mum and me at home; it was always me and her against the world. And then my little brother was born and it was the three of us against the world. We’re a little team.’ Part-time, he runs a

13.10.17 es magazine 65

“I don’t care about how I look, I care about what will be there tomorrow, when I’m not there”

Clockwise from top, jumper and jeans, Loyle’s own. FILA shirt, as before.

AMI check shirt, POA; T-shirt, as before.

Jewellery, Loyle’s own

cooking school, Chilli Con Carner, for kids with the disorder (‘I found this unparalleled peace when I was cooking. It takes up all of your brain and there’s no space to get distracted’).

‘I’m making a lot of Korean food at the moment and ramen,’ he says. ‘I’m not very good at baking, mainly because it’s too mathematical for me, it’s too precise.’

The 22-year-old admits he is more of a ‘wake up, get in the shower, leave the house’ guy, but that hasn’t stopped YSL asking him to front its new men’s fragrance, ‘Y’. It’s a spicy ginger twist on a classic aftershave citrus.

When pushed he admits, motioning to his chin, that the one grooming ritual he might spend time on is ‘tidying up my little Shakespeare fuzz thing’. But with bard-like eloquence he concludes: ‘I don’t care about how I look, I care about what will be there tomorrow, when I’m not there.’ You can almost hear his audience — and of course his mother — swooning in agreement.

Interview by Katie Service

13.10.17 es magazine 67

YSL Touche Éclat, £22.50; All Hours Foundation Primer, £29.50; All Hours Blender, £14; Souffle d’Éclat, £38; Y EDT by Yves Saint Laurent, £53 for 60ml (all yslbeauty.co.uk) VALENTINO suit £2,050 (valentino.com). AMI T-shirt, as before.

Ring, Loyle’s own Make-up by Crystabel Riley using YSL Beauty. Hair by Johnnie Biles at Frank Agency. Nails by Julia Wren at Carol Hayes Management

13.10.17 es magazine 69

feast

grace & flavour James Cochran’s food may be heaven — its Angel

Shopping Centre premises isn’t, finds Grace Dent

“We grazed on the lemony pudding for hours without impact before accepting it may be growing bigger”

Ambience food

Jessica Jill; Jonny Cochrane; illustration by Jonathan Calugi @ Machas

D

oing anything other than shopping in a shopping centre is, frankly, a little common, which is why I’m often happiest in Westfield having my nails done. Life is hard and endless, and sometimes I just want a stranger to hold my hand and paint it OPI ‘I’m Not Really A Waitress’ crimson while we listen to ‘White Flag’ by Dido. Other nonshopping things I recommend include eating a giant pretzel and enjoying the vibrating massage chairs – but never, ever drinking champagne on a tall stool. I’m a bit common; I’m not a savage.

So, this said, James Cochran opening his second place, serving his lauded and heavily distinctive Scottish/Jamaican menu, in the Angel Central Shopping Centre, N1, is not a problem to me. It becomes one when the address is given as Unit R7, Parkfield Street, in a bid to fudge the fact, meaning my taxi bunged me out by the bins in a dark delivery bay at 8pm.

Opening restaurants and driving taxis are still a man’s world. Anyway, I located James Cochran N1 eventually despite the ground-floor entry being confusingly home to the takeaway counter, which one must walk past. On a Friday night, in spite of remarkably decent cooking at the original James Cochran EC3, the place was deserted. I’m not saying this is due to the premises, but I’m writing this wearing the same expression as Kevin McCloud being told Tarquin and Chloe are building their Grand Designs multimillion-pound papier-mâché eco-wigwam next to a river.

Ok, so that’s the kvetching. The flipside is that there’s great food happening here, such as the

james cochran n1 Unit R7, 35 Parkfield Street, N1 (020 3489 2090; jamescochran.co.uk)

1

Estrella

2

Glasses of White Edition

1

Cauliflower croquettes

1

Jerk chicken

£7

1

Rabbit cigars

£7.50

1

Beef flatbread

£15

1

Monkfish flatbread

£18

1

Bottle of Mapachi

£27

1

Buttermilk pudding

£6.50

2

Glasses of Mapachi

£14.40

Total

£4.20 £13 £4.50

£117.10

highly inhalable Jamaican jerk buttermilk chicken with sweet, devilish Scotch Bonnet jam.

Cochran’s food rocks with both Kingston conviviality and a Glasgow end-of-the-night Munchy Box order. I could live for one week happily on endless plates of the cauliflower cheese and marmite croquettes. Everything on the ‘snacks’ side of this abstemious, single-sheet menu is glorious tapas for the tipsy. Sourdough bread with smoked bone-marrow butter sit alongside crispy chicken skin with padrón pepper mayonnaise. Despite Watership Down ruining the eating of bunnies for me decades ago, I managed to clear a plate of ‘cigars’ made from rabbit, fennel, stem ginger and smoked paprika.

The mains are, well, flatbreads with toppings, starting at about £14, although the toppings are fancy. Haunch of Berkshire venison, for example, on a Douglas Fir flatbread with pear. Or wild mushrooms on truffle. We chose treacle-glazed shin of beef on smoked sour cream with pickled chilli and ‘turnip marmalade’ which, yes, sounds like something desperate one might be surviving on in the Hebrides 12 years after a zombie apocalypse, but tasted sweetly delicious. The Cornish monkfish (£18) with satay sauce and aubergine yoghurt flatbread was underwhelming.

And can I say again that, even after two glasses of Mapachi Cabernet Sauvignon, this still is a strange restaurant? Do the staff realise how strange it is? Have they been in any other restaurants? They’re selling flatbreads for £14 in a badly lit room, upstairs in a shopping centre.

The only thing dragging people in is James Cochran’s name and he’s not here. We ordered a buttermilk lemon curd pudding to share. It transpired to be an enormous wine glass full of sugary gunk. The sort of glass you buy your Auntie Susan who has ‘only one drink a night’, but you all know that’s a two-litre bottle of vin de table. Two of us grazed on the lemony gloop for what felt like hours making little impact before accepting it may be growing bigger. We left in a faintly hysterical mood. I was flummoxed but definitely fed, and that’s the main thing.

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feast

tart london Jemima Jones and Lucy Carr-Ellison sear grass-fed rib-eye steak with chanterelles and a fennel purée

The sweetest Tartlets: new baby Arlo joins Eliza, Jemima and Lucy for breakfast

Jemima Jones (left) and Lucy Carr-Ellison

Josh Shinner

W

e have been cooking a lot of beef recently, as it’s the season to eat Lucy’s family’s grass-fed cattle.

Both her farm in Northumberland and Jemima’s in Somerset rear grass-fed cows. At Lucy’s you will find Galloways, one of the world’s oldest breeds of beef cattle, while at Jemima’s there are White Parks, a rare breed of ancient horned cows.

‘Grass-fed’ means that the cows have spent their whole lives grazing outside and were born in spring when lush grass and good weather give them the best start to life. Two and a half years later they’re fully grown and ready for slaughter at the end of summer. In the years before refrigeration, the beef would have then been salted in barrels, to be eaten throughout the winter.

This is our favourite way to serve steak. A glorious big hunk of rib-eye, seared until crisp on the outside and juicy in the middle, then sliced up to share with some greens and good bread. It’s very South American and we’ve had great fun this summer holding our own asados — Argentinian barbecues, a celebration of beef washed down with plenty of Malbec.

This dish is great, as everything is prepared in the same pan. After searing the beef, the mushrooms are cooked in the delicious leftover fat. This is just the time of year for chanterelles, which are found growing in woodlands all over England. You can substitute a different kind of mushroom if necessary. We’d recommend something meaty, such as chestnut or shiitake.

Make sure you leave the beef to rest so that it retains all its juices, and serve with a watercress salad.

Serves 4

Rib-eye with chanterelles and fennel purée

For the fennel purée 2 fennel bulbs, quartered 3 sprigs of rosemary, chopped 1 tsp dried chilli 5 garlic cloves 2 tbsp olive oil 1 tbsp crème fraîche 1 tbsp finely grated Parmesan 1 tbsp butter 1 heaped tsp English mustard 3 anchovies, from a tin Zest and juice of 1 lemon

Preheat oven to 200C. First make the fennel purée. Place the fennel in a lined baking tray and scatter over the rosemary, chilli and garlic.

Drizzle over the olive oil and season. Roast for 20 minutes. Cool slightly and squeeze the garlic out of its skins, then blitz in a food processor with the remaining ingredients for the purée until smooth. Set to one side.

Drizzle a generous amount of olive oil over the beef, sprinkle with salt and pepper and rub everything in. Place a heavy-based pan over a high heat and when it starts smoking, sear the beef for 7 to 10 minutes on each side. Remove from heat, cover with tin foil and leave to rest for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, add the garlic, rosemary, sage and coriander to the steak pan with the mushrooms and wine and cook for 2-3 minutes. Season to taste. When the beef is well rested, place on a wooden board and spoon over the mushrooms, with the fennel purée served on the side.

For the steak 1 bone-in rib-eye (approx 1.5kg) Olive oil Sea salt and pepper For the mushrooms 4 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced 4 springs of rosemary, chopped Small bunch of sage, chopped 2 tsp coriander seeds, crushed 400g chanterelles 125ml Marsala wine

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‘Having a lot of cupboards means you can keep your aesthetic clean.

Where possible, have floor-to-ceiling cupboards’

HOMEWORK

Style guys: Anthony Kendal, left, and husband, Rossa Prendergast

The White HOusE

The Bloomsbury home of Anthony Kendal, founder of Kendal and Partners, has a clean, refined character — and an art collection to swoon over, discovers Lily Worcester PHOTOGRAPHs BY helen abraham

‘I

t was like someone had done a really cheap makeover in the Eighties,’ laughs Anthony Kendal. It’s a crisp autumn morning and the 41-year-old founder of brand agency Kendal and Partners is showing me around the Bloomsbury apartment he shares with his husband, Rossa Prendergast, an architect.

In contrast to the property’s historic exterior (a mansion block that dates back to the late 1800s), the interior is all new. ‘It wasn’t in the best condition ‘We are lucky to have a when we bought it five years ago,’ florist that comes here a explains Kendal. ‘It was a whole lot, who punctuates the series of interconnecting rooms, so calmness with somewe knocked through them to make thing more living’ it open-plan. There’s not a surface or wall that is original. Everything, apart from the front door, has been stripped back. I think Rossa has done an amazing job.’

The couple drew their inspiration for the eight-month renovation from

the architect John Pawson and his signature style of minimalism. First they knocked out the restrictive walls to create a free-flowing, open-plan kitchen, dining and living space. As the home also doubles up as a slick HQ for Kendal and Partners (the agency’s client roster includes fashion megabrands such as MyTheresa, Acne Studios and Prada), one of the bedrooms was transformed into a workspace, furnished with the occasional accent pieces (‘We like modernist Italian furniture and there is a lot of German, Bauhaus stuff here, too’).

In an age of Pinterest-worthy maximalist interiors, creating a space that is minimal without feeling devoid of character is a skill in itself. The couple has a strict ‘one-in, one-out rule’ when it comes to belongings and they’ve installed floor-to-ceiling cupboards to maximise storage. There are no personal family pictures on the walls: ‘You spend so much time on social media that actually we don’t need photographs of our closest friends and family. They’re there on a constant instant basis and it almost feels more poignant to keep up on that than to have photographs everywhere.’

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Instead, the clean, white-painted walls (an arctic Dulux White Mist) provides the perfect canvas to offset Kendal’s impressive collection of artwork, which runs the gamut from a drawing of Kate Moss by Tracey Emin to a bronze water feature by Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. ‘I’m quite in love with it but my husband thinks it looks like something from a Seventies Chinese restaurant,’ he giggles.

The couple’s hero piece, however, is a large black-andwhite photograph of Isabella Blow taken by Lucy Ferry shot through a stocking, giving the image a beautiful mottled effect. ‘I met Isabella at a party when I was 20. I remember going back to her hotel suite, [where] she decided she was going to take all her clothes off, get in the bath and clean her teeth. It was an interesting experience.’

Years later Kendal spotted the photograph at one of Ferry’s exhibitions and he had to have it.

Elsewhere in the all-white space is a corner-sized shrine to colour. ‘It’s a celebration of primaries. We call it the Memphis room.’ There are also other meaningful

‘We asked a friend to do a reading at our wedding but I had no idea that he would write the prose himself nor how beautiful it would be’

‘The table and vases are by Dinosaur Designs, which is an Australian brand. It has been going for about 40 years and made some of the jewellery Kylie Minogue wore in “Better The Devil You Know”, and the two ceramics on the left I did at a pottery’

‘A collection of blackand-white images from my personal and professional collection hangs in the Kendal and Partners office space, ranging from pieces from Herb Ritts to Tracey Emin and Daniel Jackson’

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objects that punctuate the space. Take the handwritten poem, for example, given pride of place in a living room cabinet, suspended in a clear glass frame. Written for the couple by a close friend, it was read at their wedding last year at Lismore Castle in Ireland. The friend later had it framed as a gift. ‘We asked our friend Justin to do a reading but I had no idea that he would write the prose himself nor how beautiful it would be.’

Kendal was born and brought up in Perth, Australia, and fashion has always been a central part of his life. His mother was an ex-model turned finance director and many of his early memories include her ‘wearing YSL and Giorgio Armani on the school run. I suppose fashion was always something my sister and I were exposed to and loved.’ He also did his homework, first studying business and marketing at Murdoch University in Perth (it was there that he first met Prendergast ‘drunk in a nightclub’) followed by fashion design at Sydney’s prestigious National Art School.

His first big break in London, having moved here in 2004, was working for Anya Hindmarch, packing boxes.

He took the position with a pinch of salt: ‘It’s about positive energy and working hard and not being afraid to get your hands dirty.’

The rest is history, but the frenetic pace of fashion makes coming back to a temple of serenity all the more comforting. ‘There is so much noise that goes on in the world; it’s nice to have something calm to come home to.’

‘The sofa is from Poliform, the cushions are Hermès, the chairs are by Marcel Breuer and The Bauhaus pieces were bought in Berlin’

‘The office hosts a reconditioned German army table and 1950s chairs.

The photo of a man is by Prem Sahib’

get the look

the pendant lamp Mini Crescent by Lee Broom, £485 (leebroom.com)

the side table Bergen oak bench, £275 (coxandcox.co.uk)

the sofa Mendini two-seater sofa, £599 (made.com)

the chair Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer, £1,333, at conranshop.co.uk

the houseplant Swiss cheese potted plant, £235 (outthere interiors.com)

the statement table Sienna table in marble and gold leaf, £399 (swooneditions.com)

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escape

EDITED by dipal acharya Boutique chic: Hôtel National des Arts & Métiers. Right, Paris rooftops

WHERE TO STAY

Hôtel National des Arts & Métiers

WHAT TO EAT Located just off Rue Saint-Honoré, Balagan is Paris’s answer to London’s Nopi. Headed by Israeli chefs Assaf Granit and Uri Navon, and owned by the Experimental Group, it’s a cosmopolitan cultural clash: think Jerusalem-style sea bass and Moroccan-Israeli artichoke ragu washed down with pisco-infused cocktails.

Another fashionable dining spot is Le Grand Bain on Rue Dénoyez — the same street as the new Hoxton Hotel — by former Au Passage chef Edward Delling Williams, which serves an ever-changing mix of small plates. Over in the Marais, Carbón, at 14 Rue Charlot, is brilliant for lunch or dinner.

PARIS CALLING

It’s a perennial favourite of the fashion set, and with a rush of hot openings and exhibitions, Katrina Israel says this autumn is the perfect time to make your Paris sojourn Artful: Louis Vuitton in Place Vendôme

is the latest boutique hotel from the super-stylish La Clé Group. This 70-room property, designed by Raphael Navot and spread across six floors of two Haussmann buildings, is the Marais apartment you always dreamed of, while downstairs L’Herbarium bar and Julien Cohen’s modern spin on the traditional trattoria was buzzing every night of the week during the recent shows. (hotelnational.paris). Meanwhile, by the Champs Élysées, the Amastan has teamed up with luggage brand Away to launch the pop-up hotel, Chez Away, which features rooms decked out with Diptyque and daily detox deliveries from Dirty Lemon.

To 31 Oct (awaytravel.com/chezaway)

A room at The Hoxton.

Right, Balagan

WHERE TO SHOP MoMA/Andy Warhol; Alamy; Studio l’Eliquette; Jerome Galland

Louis Vuitton,

WHAT TO SEE

The Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton is hosting Etre Moderne: Le MoMa à Paris, a new show of 200 works on loan from New York’s MoMA, including art

by Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder and Yayoi Kusama. If you fancy a few more frocks thrown Andy in, Dior is celebrating its 70th Warhol’s Double anniversary with Christian Dior, Elvis Couturier du Rêve at the Musée Des Arts Décoratifs, while the Grand Palais is hosting another sartorial retrospective honouring US fashion photographer Irving Penn.

Place Vendôme. The luxury maison how to PAMPER has opened just a stone’s throw from Caroline de Maigret’s favourite where a young Vuitton opened spa, Ladda, designed by Olivia his first shop in 1854.

Putman, is an oasis of calm Designed by Peter Marino, with a 180-degree view of the new store houses the Paris. (laddaparis.com) superbrand’s full repertoire over four floors.

WHAT TO DRINK Back on Rue Saint-Honoré, Giving the Hemingway Les Ambassadeurs take one last selfie outside Bar at the Ritz Paris a run Colette before it closes in for its gilt decor is the newly December, then head to the Marais reopened Hôtel de Crillon’s bar, Les for alternative multi-brand meccas Ambassadeurs. Pull up a chair Tom Greyhound and Merci. for some serious people watching.

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my london

tommy hilfiger as told to katrina israel

Where do you stay in London?

I always stay at Claridge’s.

It’s an art deco gem and I love its old world charm and outstanding service.

Favourite shops?

London’s famous department stores: Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Liberty, Fenwick and Fortnum & Mason. I always stock up on Fortnum & Mason’s worldrenowned tea (above). No one does afternoon tea better than the British.

Best piece of advice you have been given?

When I once asked Andy Warhol (right) why he did what he did, he replied, ‘Because I like it.’ I’ve never forgotten this; it shows how important it is to do what you love.

What’s the first thing you do when you arrive in London?

Some of the world’s best art collections are in London.

My wife Dee and I always enjoy going to Sotheby’s S|2 gallery, where I previously co-curated the Rock Style exhibition that celebrated the unique style of my favourite music artists. In many cases, musicians like The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Madonna have been more influential in the world of fashion than designers.

Earliest memory?

I remember visiting Savile Row in the 1970s and seeing the incredible designs of Tommy Nutter, who was dressing a lot of the rock groups. His irreverent approach to tailoring has always inspired me.

82 es magazine 13.10.17

The American fashion designer buys his tea from Fortnum & Mason and gets his art fix at Sotheby’s Best meal you have had?

The sushi at Zuma (below) in Knightsbridge. The presentation is as good as the taste.

Favourite members club?

I love 5 Hertford Street. Robin Birley has done a remarkable job creating an amazing atmosphere.

Last album you downloaded?

I recently bought Memories… Do Not Open by The Chainsmokers. They have a unique style and I am

proud that they are the new brand ambassadors for Tommy Hilfiger menswear.

Best place to let your hair down?

Chiltern Firehouse. André Balazs put his magic into it.

What would you do if you were Mayor for the day?

I would ask The Rolling Stones to do a concert in Hyde Park for free, with Led Zeppelin (Robert Plant, left) as opening act.

Biggest extravagance?

My yacht Flag, which I love to sail along the coast of Italy and the south of France with Dee and the children. I really value the time I get to spend with my family.

What do you collect?

Pop and contemporary art from fun and irreverent artists like Warhol and Keith Haring (left), with which we decorate our Miami home.

Who’s your hero?

I have always admired Martin Luther King Jr, and in 2007 I teamed up with Quincy Jones and Russell Simmons, among others, to produce the Dream Concert in his honour. All funds raised went to the Martin Luther King Jr memorial site in Washington, DC. Tommy Hilfiger, 138 Regent Street, W1 (uk.tommy.com)

Getty; Alamy; Rex Features

What are you up to at the moment?

We’ve just showed a collection at the Roundhouse (above) in Camden. London’s inspiring heritage of fashion and music created the perfect place to celebrate our TOMMYNOW event.