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Hiding Out in Woodstock With

TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET

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CONTENTS

GQ November The Fix

Behind the Scenes With the People Who Make GQ

Winter’s Essential Fashion Gear. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Supreme’s Young Skate King, SE AN PABLO ........ 20

Contributor

on Glorious Gold Chronographs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 B ENJA MIN C LY ME R

Hall of Fame: Vintage Campaign Style. . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 The 2020 GQ Grooming Awards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Introduces Intergenerational Health............................... 41

J O E HOL DER

Features

RENELL MEDRANO Photographer For GQ’s November cover, Medrano shot Timothée Chalamet in upstate New York, where the actor is preparing to play Bob Dylan in an upcoming biopic. Though they’d never met before, Medrano thought their creative attitudes meshed well. “He’s a real free spirit, but he also knows exactly what he wants,” she says. “I just had to be a fly on a wall.”

Cover Story: TIM OTHÉ E CHAL AME T . ................ 44 The Big Pivot: How Seven Businesses Have Survived and Thrived During the Pandemic.... . ... ... . .. . . . .. . .. . .. . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . 60

Conquering the Legendary Cannonball Run............................................ 74

←

Everybody Has a Crush on PAUL ME SCAL .......... 78

editor

my fall cozy fits to…the supermarket.”

On the Cover Photograph by Renell Medrano. Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu. Coat, $4,550, his own pants, and boots (price upon request) by Prada. Tank top, $42 for pack of three, by Calvin Klein Underwear. Rings, $1,650 (on index finger) and $6,300 (on middle finger), by Cartier. Tailoring by Ksenia Golub. Produced by Wei-Li Wang at Hudson Hill Production.

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manager

“Veteran- and

MEDRANO AND “OFFICE GRAILS”: COURTESY OF THE SUBJECTS.

Fear of God’s New Americana......................... 68

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CONTENTS

Take a trip to Woodstock, New York, with Timothée Chalamet on page 44. His own hoodie by Juicy Couture. Tank top, $42 for pack of three, by Calvin Klein Underwear. Pants, $850, by Hermès.

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ST YLIST, MOBOL A JI DAWODU.

GQ November

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Let’s All Go Vote You handle your business.

I’ll handle mine.

And we’ll see each other back here next month.

Will Welch EDITOR IN CHIEF

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The artistry of Japanese craftsmanship

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SUEDE COMBAT BOOTS What do you do after a design collaboration with LeBron for Nike? If youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re John Elliott, you create your own made-in-Italy footwear line from scratch. Consider these beefy Vibram-soled suede lace-ups the foundation for your flyest winter fits (pants, $1,498; boots, $648; socks, $38).

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ELECTION DAY DRIP Union Los Angeles is more than a store: It’s a voice for America’s young and diverse street-fashion community. This homage to David Hammons’s seminal African American Flag represents just that ($158).

MARLED WINTER SOCKS Meet your new favorite boot socks, which are made by Thunders Love in family workshops in northwestern Portugal using recycled cotton yarn ($30).

by Moncler ($565).

RECLAIMED FABRIC OVERCOAT A leader in the slowfashion movement, Stòffa teamed up with India’s 11.11 to source this indigo chindi fabric, which has been embroidered to sublime effect out of textile scraps collected for a decade ($1,600).

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JOCKEY POLO This Needles pullover makes the case for horse racing—and graphic jockey silks— as menswear’s next great infatuation ($415).

ESSENTIAL DENIM SHIRT Not all denim is created equal. This AG shirt might look like a simple wardrobe staple, but behind the scenes the brand invests in cuttingedge water-recycling systems to transform the wasteful business of making jeans ($245).

Vintage Clothing plumbs a Levi’s-obsessed subculture for inspiration. This jacquard-knit sweatshirt is straight from the ’80s Louisville hardcore scene ($115).

WEARABLE ART PIECE Artist and filmmaker Rashid Johnson has partnered with jeweler Lizworks on a gold-and-ruby cuff emblazoned with his newly relevant Anxious Men drawings—and his proceeds are going to charity ($18,500).

PROP ST YLIST, CL AIRE TEDALDI FOR HALLEY RESOURCES.

OVERSIZED ARGYLE SWEATER Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele tears down and redefines menswear staples as well as he perfects them, as he did with this archetypal argyle mohair cardigan ($1,400).

DEEP BLUE DIVE WATCH A new addition to the cult-favorite Tudor Black Bay Fifty-Eight lineup, this navy blue colorway is a throwback to the dive watches the company once supplied to the French navy ($3,700).

SPIT-SHINED WALLET Two things to buy when you’ve made it: a fat gold watch and a Ralph Lauren gator wallet so shiny you can see your reflection in it ($3,200).

THE RE AC OFF FIELD.

AL TION IS THE WAT C H AT

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The F i x

Being a young superstar pro skater, and one of downtown NYC’s dreamiest heartthrobs, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just kidding—it’s amazing. Sean Pablo Murphy is living proof.

Fashion

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Juelz Santana, Sean Pablo is 23 and lives a crazy life. He’s the heartthrob of Supreme’s skate team, known for his balletic 360 flip and badass grimace; he also rides for Jason Dill’s skate brand, Fucking Awesome. He travels all around the world with Supreme, having his photograph taken and filming for the next skate video; hangs in New York with his pal Chloë Sevigny (“He’s a charmer,” she tells me by phone), secretly making “emo-rap rock” (his words) music on the side; and hunts for vintage in the world’s coolest flea markets—both for his own collection and for his brand of hoodies and tees, Paradise NYC. Yet somehow for this languid pro skater, all this isn’t quite enough. Over the past two or three years, he’s grown from the boy in 2014’s “Cherry” with “Take My Virginity Away” written on his deck into a young if hesitant superstar, but big aspirations for a creative life beyond what he can do on a board still loom large for him. When we meet, in Tompkins Square Park, Supreme had just dropped its fall look book—a veritable holiday for hypebeasts. “I definitely have a mean mug,” he says. “A lot of people in the comments section were like, ‘Cheer up, man!’ ” In person, though, he is sweet and open about TO PARAPHRASE

The F i x

Fashion

Coat, $5,195, and pants, $1,295, by Giorgio Armani. Turtleneck, $2,125, by Brunello Cucinelli. Boots, $1,445, by Dolce & Gabbana.

p r e v i o u s pa g e

Coat, $5,950, and sweater, $1,290, by Ermenegildo Zegna XXX. Vintage jewelry (throughout), his own. t h i s pa g e, r i g h t

Sweater, $595, by Z Zegna. Pants, $1,295, by Giorgio Armani. Socks, $20, by Tabio. Watch, $7,900, by Rolex.

everything except where and how he does his hair. “I can’t disclose that,” he says with a laugh. He’s boyish and almost shy. “I always smile. Even when I don’t want to.” Whether he’s smiling or not, though, his mad coiffure and his ’90s-inﬂected style make him look like he should have been hanging out in the Viper Room with Johnny Depp and Christian Slater two decades ago, not in the East Village in 2020. Jason Dill discovered Sean Pablo (he chooses to use his middle name in place of his more genericsounding last name, Murphy) and his close friend, fellow Supreme and Fucking Awesome rider Sage Elsesser, skating together when Sean Pablo was just 10 years old. “For being a good-looking kid and being in his position, he wasn’t ready for none of this,” Dill says, calling from somewhere in Utah. “He was a young duckling who turned into a swan.”

Sean Pablo is part of a tradition of handsome skateboarders, Sevigny says, like Dylan Rieder and Alex Olson, “that offer something more— that have a charisma. People just crush out on them. There’s a mystery and a nuance, and obviously the beauty is captivating as well.” Skaters like Dill and Mark Gonzales spent the ’90s and early 2000s sketching out what a professional skateboarding career looks like, mixing skating for Supreme with art and building larger-than-life personas. But they never could have imagined that the next generation would achieve this freaky level of fame. “Skateboarding wasn’t what it was, and Supreme wasn’t what it was,” Dill says. Sean Pablo tells me he grew up idolizing guys like Dill and Rieder. He emulated what he calls Dill’s “old cholo” style, in particular—Dickies, a tank top, and an unbuttoned quilted jacket with Vans. Now Sean Pablo is the one

H A I R, K R I ST I A N K A N I K A ; M A K E U P, R AC H E L L E I D I G ; P RO P ST Y L I ST, V I K I RU TS C H .

the kids are emulating, which feels surreal, he says, because it’s not just the crispy way he wears high-water trousers and cardigans that people are copying. One kid showed up to a meet and greet with Sean Pablo’s exact same hand tattoos. “I feel for these guys,” says Dill, “because on the one hand, it’s cool, you’re really well known, but you got a lot of pressures and odd feelings from being that well known outside of skateboarding.” To understand Sean Pablo’s thing, you have to go back to his father, a surfer, computer scientist, and painter, who raised his family in Los Angeles. He homeschooled Sean Pablo for 11th and 12th grades. (Parents unexpectedly homeschooling their children due to COVID-19, take note!) “All I learned about was art and philosophy. I just read a bunch of books,” he says. His dad would hand him Last Exit to Brooklyn, say, or lecture him about Raymond Pettibon. It sparked a spirit of constant curiosity that remains crucial to Sean Pablo’s precise but catholic style. While we’re sitting near the notorious Tompkins wood bench overlooking the paved ball field that has become New York’s preeminent skate meetup spot, he excitedly pulls out Cookie Mueller’s whiz-bang memoir, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, from his tote bag. “It’s all her adventures!” he says. Sean Pablo is cool, but it’s the kind of cool that comes from having a lot of heart, not from being aloof. He seems like he might want to try anything, or even everything. Sean Pablo began his clothing line at the encouragement of his dad—Paradise NYC started as “a project to take the place of being in regular school.” Now the brand is something of a collaboration between the two of them. “My dad is just crazy,” he says. “He’s seen every image on the internet.” What drives Sean Pablo these days is not style, or even skating, exactly. “There’s so much stuff I want to be doing,” he says. “I want to make films. I definitely want to make music. I mean, I have. It’s just kind of a secret.” Sean Pablo is quick to turn thoughtful, philosophical—one of his best traits. “People could be like, ‘That was the worst thing he’s ever done.’ But the next day you can just start over and do something new. I don’t think there’s really a way to make mistakes when it comes to being creative. I think you have to constantly be making stuff.” Sevigny muses that Sean Pablo probably has a bright future ahead of him off the board. “He is one of

the few who can really parlay it into something else,” she explains. “He has a lot of interests.” And she says the bar for the Supreme design team is “Would Sean Pablo wear this?” All skaters are conscious of style, but Sean Pablo lives and breathes it. “That’s what skating is,” he says. “It’s just the way you look doing tricks.” As a teen he developed his own aesthetic through trial and error. But now, he says, “I don’t really think about it. It’s just autopilot. As time goes by, you

become more comfortable just being yourself.” But what about all those kids at the skate park now who are doing their best Sean Pablo? “It’s cute,” he says of the mimicry. “It’s always little kids that are just discovering skating and all the videos that we’ve been doing. It’s ﬂattering.” Well, except for the kid who copied his hand tattoos: “I was like, ‘That’s too much.’ ”

The F i x

Fashion

rachel tashjian is a gq staff writer.

Coat, $3,995, by Dolce & Gabbana. Turtleneck, $535, pants, $280, and boots, $520, by Officine Générale.

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The Golden Age of Chronographs

The F i x

Hodinkee founder and CEO Benjamin Clymer explains how the ultimate tool timepiece became the most rarefied status symbol in the watch world.

Watches

CIN

INT

DU RO OUR NEW WATCH COLUMNIST, BENJAMIN CLYMER

A R E T H R E E chronographs that really matter: the Rolex Daytona, the Omega Speedmaster, and the Heuer Carrera. That’s not to say others aren’t great, but these three represent entire categories of collecting and scholarship unto themselves, and over the past seven decades they have rightly reached a level of appreciation that in some cases surpasses even the brands that produce them. The problem with this echelon of success is, of course, ubiquity. Every year more

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chronographs are made, more people wear them and obsess over them, and suddenly objects that were conceived as fully realized expressions of unique senses of design and function start feeling blasé. And so among serious watch collectors, that class of aﬁcionado born with an innate, King Midas–like desire for next-level grails, the only versions of the Daytona, the Speedmaster, and the Carrera worth having are the versions that are rarely seen—those crafted not in steel but in solid yellow gold.

It’s no coincidence that the gold Daytona, Speedmaster, and Carrera were introduced around the same time the first quartz wristwatch hit the market, in 1969. With the advent of quartz, the Swiss could no longer claim to make the most precise watches, so they doubled down on luxury and prestige. And exclusivity. The 18-karat-gold Rolex Daytona reference 6263 was produced from the early ’70s through the mid ’80s in shockingly small numbers—some estimate them to be far rarer than even the “Paul Newman” Daytonas in steel, which many view as the ultimate in Daytona collecting. More than just a watch, the gold 6263 was a declaration of purpose and represented Rolex’s shift from watchmaker to luxury watchmaker. Gold watches are synonymous with milestones and celebrations, and none more so than the reference BA145.022 Speedmaster, created to mark the Apollo 11 lunar landing. The very first few of the 1,014 pieces created—the limited-edition version of the watch worn by Buzz Aldrin on the moon— were given to the Apollo astronauts and to President Nixon, who had to return his due to ethics rules. Omega has produced dozens of Speedmaster variations since, but the finest came in 2019, when, to celebrate 50 years, the company released a remarkable tribute to this watch, with the same burgundy bezel and onyx hour markers and a new gold alloy dubbed “Moonshine” that quite literally gives it an otherworldly gleam. Again, only 1,014 watches were made, and they quickly went to the most important Omega collectors in the world. (Fans of The Daily Show might catch a glimpse of one from time to time.) But the rarest of all the great golden chronographs is the Heuer Carrera reference 1158. Unlike the other two, it is self-winding—Heuer was an early adopter of the technology in chronographs—and it has perhaps the purest and most exhilarating connection to the chrono’s motorsports origins one could dream of. These solid 18-karat-gold watches were given to members of the Ferrari Formula 1 team during the sport’s mid-’70s heyday, when racing drivers were among the most famous people in the world. On the back were the driver’s initials and, just in case, his blood type. Paul Newman’s personal Daytona, the watch that stoked chrono frenzy more than any other, bore the inscription “Drive Carefully.” You might say these gold Carreras—and gold chronographs in general—are for those who would rather drive fast.

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Hall of Fam e

When They Go Low, We Go Fly

Before our gaffe-obsessed political horse race era, the thinking goes, presidential campaigns used to have substance. More importantly: They used to have a whole lot of style too. By SAM SCHUBE

Texas, 1978 Every modern political dynasty starts with a really good T-shirt. (This one comes from George W.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s failed congressional bid.)

DIRCK HALSTEAD/LIAISON/GETTY IMAGES

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GEORGE AND BARBARA BUSH

POLOGIES TO GRANDMAS

D U K A K I S : ST E V E L I S S / T H E L I F E I M A G E S C O L L E CT I O N . K E N N E DY: D AV I D H U M E K E N N E R LY. C L I N TO N A N D C A RV I L L E : C Y N T H I A J O H N S O N / T H E L I F E IMAGES COLLECTION. JACKSON: BET TMANN. OBAMA: SCOT T OLSON. RONALD AND NANCY REAGAN: PAUL HARRIS. ALL: GET T Y IMAGES.

everywhere: Joe Biden, even in his favorite slim navy polo, is nobody’s style icon. Neither, it goes without saying, is Donald Trump. The 2020 presidential race’s concerted lack of style might suggest that there is no room in politics for expressive clothing—that when even the smallest ga≠e gets memed into oblivion, there is simply too much risk in dressing up. But recent history suggests that personal style doesn’t have to be a political liability. And as a rich vein of campaigners shows, the right sartorial move can say more about a campaign than even the most soaring speech. The Kennedys wore Ivy-approved two-button suits like the strivers they were, ties askew as if to emphasize their relentless work ethic. George H.W. Bush’s seersucker suits, thigh-baring jogging shorts, and self-e≠acing tees proved him funnier than your average stu≠ed shirt. While running for the Democratic nomination in 1984, Jesse Jackson traded in his striped shirts for three-piece suits and their accompanying professional sheen. And Ronald Reagan wore ranch-ready boot-cut jeans that look filched from a Hollywood costume closet. None of these men dressed with abundant self-expression, but they didn’t run from it, either. And it wasn’t just the candidates who weaponized their closets. James Carville, Bill Clinton’s legendary campaign manager, was perhaps best known for his aphorisms (“It’s the economy, stupid”), but his outfits helped communicate his approach. He had a uniform: a colorful rugby shirt or a blue oxford, tee peeking out; sneakers or loafers; stick-straight blue-sky jeans. He is the picture of go-go global optimism, a sartorial Third Way incarnate. Clinton’s own attire broadcast Everyman approachability: Arkansas sweatshirts, Timex watches, the occasional McDonald’s cup. But he could dress up too—a louche double-breasted suit showed him ready for a G8 summit. These days we have a fixed image of Barack Obama, the new-era statesman in a no-frills navy suit. But when he ran for Senate in 2004, he did so in a billowing short-sleeve shirt, many-pleated khakis, and a belt-holstered cell phone. He did not look like a future leader of the free world. Instead, he broadcast a more relatable message: that while he might be a generationally talented politician, he was also just like you, at least in the bad-khakis department. Even presidents, it turns out, put their pleated pants on one leg at a time.

sam schube is gq’s senior editor.

1. MICHAEL DUKAKIS Illinois, 1988 For a Massachusetts governor on the campaign trail, a suede jacket—on a hay bale, no less—is just the right amount of folksy. 2. TED KENNEDY On a plane, 1980 Classic Kennedy prep at altitude. 3. BILL CLINTON AND JAMES CARVILLE

Georgia, 1992 Bubba and the Ragin’ Cajun updated a tired political cliché: Campaign in blue jeans, govern in tailoring. 4. JESSE JACKSON At a Democratic National Committee meeting, 1984 Jackson captured both the tie-pin and pocket-square delegations in one fell swoop. 5. BARACK OBAMA Chicago, 2004 A baggy shirt we can all find approachable; a flip phone we can all believe in. 6. RONALD AND NANCY REAGAN Santa Ynez, CA, 1980 Sure, holding hands is nice—but nothing signals a strong marriage like matching belt buckles.

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COVID lockdown has been a great time to do something new with your hairâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or just try to relax. Clockwise from top left: Tallulah Willis and Dillon Buss share a face mask; Tyler, the Creator, tries a mustache; Tan France goes long and messy; J Balvin goes blond.

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GR O O MIN G AWA R D S 2020 WINNERS

The 2020 GQ Grooming Awards

Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve tested them all, and these are the 49 products keeping us buzzed, moisturized, and glowing through quarantine. By PHILLIP PICARDI

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THE BEST FOR THE SHOWER

The F i x

Scrub yourself clean. GR O O MIN G AWA R D S 2020 WINNERS

UPGRADE

SPA IN A BOT TLE Disco Body Wash $20

Body Cleanser $45

Turn a YMCA shower into a woodpaneled sauna somewhere north of the Arctic Circle.

THE BEST DEODORANT Everyone is on their own journey when it comes to staying fresh. Here are three paths to smelling good all day.

THE BEST FOR YOUR HANDS Keep your mitts trimmed, moisturized, and scrubbed of virus. PANDEMIC PROTECTOR D.S. & Durga Big Sur After Rain Spray Hand Sanitizer $30 This fragrance was already a modern classic in candles and hand soap; now it kills pathogens on the go.

THE BEST NATURAL DEODORANT

AN UPDATE TO THE O.G.

Schmidt’s Sandalwood + Citrus Natural Deodorant $8

Old Spice Ultra Smooth Clean Slate Antiperspirant $6

It has hippie bona fides but smells more like camping in a forest than living in a van.

A grown-up take on the ur-antiperspirant, with the scent dialed back a bit.

THE SWEAT STOPPER Hiki Body Powder $14 This is odor-fighting, moisture-sapping magic for everywhere you don’t put deodorant in the morning.

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THE HAND SOF TENER THE BEST NAIL TOOLS The Art of Shaving 7-Piece Manicure Set $160 Unfold this kit like you’re an operator with a very particular set of skills (clipping and buffing your nails).

Byredo Blanche Hand Cream $43 Pandemic-era handwashing leaves your skin parched and rough—this is the most luxurious way to reverse the damage.

Jamie Foxx grew a truly impressive beard.

Adam Scott chopped off half his quar scruff. It was that kind of year.

The Jared Leto method: clear skin, messy beard.

Maluma buzzed it off himself.

Even 2020 couldn’t stop Pharrell’s glow.

No shaves or haircuts really worked for Joe Jonas.

THE BEST BODY LOTION Banish itchy, flaky, ashy skin—forever.

THE BEST SCENTS FOR YOUR HOME Get your quarantine cave smelling right.

Boy Smells Slow Burn $39 Skaters have pro-model boards; this country star has the year’s always-sold-out candle.

THE BEST LOTION Nivea Men Breathable Body Lotion $6 No grease, no residue, no need to wait before getting dressed.

Nécessaire The Body Serum $45 A fast-absorbing gel of powerful ingredients (ceramide NP, hyaluronic acid), it’s the kind of hydrator you would use on your face, but for your entire body.

Frédéric Malle Jurassic Flower Perfume Gun $195

Dedcool Dedtergent 05 “Spring” $32 L.A.’s coolest nontoxic and gender-neutral indie fragrance company now makes leveled-up detergent.

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Fire off a few blasts of peach and magnolia to subtly elevate your living space.

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GR O O MIN G AWA R D S 2020

THE BEST SCENTS FOR YOU The right cologne will transport you—even if you’re just headed downstairs to your WFH battle station.

WINNERS Calvin Klein CK Everyone $67, 3.4 oz

Dior Homme Eau de Toilette $95, 3.4 oz

Versace Atelier Versace Cédrat de Diamante $330, 3.4 oz.

A bright and woody take on the classic hypermasculine scent.

An exuberant pop of cedar, with a frothy lemon opening.

Louis Vuitton Météore $265, 3.4 oz.

Like the brand’s underwear, this could be worn by anyone for a hit of gender-neutral sex appeal.

A high-toned, long-lasting kick of pepper and Sicilian mandarin.

THE INTERESTING ONE

THE ODDBALL

Gucci The Alchemist’s Garden A Midnight Stroll $370, 3.4 oz.

Le Labo Baie 19 $192, 1.7 oz.

This wearable incense smells like you’ve been out all night somewhere smoky and mysterious.

A mix of medicinal notes and petrichor (the aroma of rain hitting dry soil)—what Icy Hot smells like on Mount Olympus.

Ricky Martin nailed the beard-buzz ratio.

Once again, Marc Jacobs wins Instagram.

Brooklyn rapper Meechy Darko with a sorbet dye job from colorist Daniel Moon.

Kid Cudi got a key lime dye.

Chris Noth combined a gray goatee with a DIY shave.

Moses Sumney: moisturized and mustached.

THE BEST SKIN CARE

THE BEST EXFOLIATOR

The F i x

Herbivore Prism Exfoliating Glow Facial $58

Whether you’re copping your first serum or honing a six-step routine, there’s

Take 10 minutes to banish blackheads and get a fresh-from-a-facial glow.

GR O O MIN G AWA R D S 2020 WINNERS

THE ACNE FIGHTER Dr. Jart+ Teatreement Cleansing Foam $28 Salicylic acid cuts through gunk like dish soap in TV commercials.

Dermalogica Retinol Clearing Oil $80 For all of us at the awkward intersection of having acne and having wrinkles. This’ll tackle both.

Fenty Skin Fat Water Pore-Refining Toner Serum $28

Kiehl’s Powerful-Strength Vitamin C Eye Serum $50

Don’t know a toner from a serum? No worries: Rihanna has both bases covered.

Everything in the dark must come to the light—including

SUNSCREEN Dr. Dennis Gross Hyaluronic Marine Hydration Booster $68 Apply this serum directly or mix with your go-to moisturizer for mighty, all-day hydration.

THE BEST MAKEUP It’s time to take the leap and get a little more handsome.

Supergoop Glow Oil SPF 50 $15 Most sunscreen makes you look chalky. This SPF oil makes you look like you’ve been moisturizing daily since birth.

Beneath Your Mask Illuminate Clarifying Face Mask $70

Ole Henriksen Banana Bright Vitamin C Serum $65

A classic mix-your-own mask for relaxing evenings and intensely clear results.

If David Blaine wanted to make the dark spots on your mug disappear, this is what he’d use.

THE BEST FOR YOUR HAIR After this year we’ll never take our barber for granted again.

CONDITIONER Glossier Futuredew $24 You don’t even have to call it makeup—Glossier doesn’t. But this stuff is glow in a bottle, like a real-life Instagram filter.

Shiseido Synchro Skin Self-Refreshing Concealer $31

Scotch Porter Hydrating Hair Wash $12

Tired of seeing that pimple every morning on Zoom? We have the technology to fix that.

This sulfate-free wash is the gentler, healthier alternative to daily shampooing.

Briogeo Be Gentle, Be Kind Aloe + Oat Milk Ultra Soothing Conditioner $26 A super-gentle, fragrance-free balm for dyed or fried hair.

GUARANTEED GOOD HAIR DAY Rahua Smoothing Hair Balm $30 It’s product for anyone who doesn’t want to look like they’re wearing product.

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The F i x

GR O O MIN G AWA R D S 2020 WINNERS

THE MOST ADVANCED TOOTHBRUSH YET Oral-B iO9 Toothbrush $300 A magnetic charger, an OLED screen, and a gentle, effective clean.

Sisley Hair Rituel Serum $195 Use the same level of skin care on your scalp as on your face.

THE SOOTHER F. Miller Hair Oil $42 A deliciously heady mixture of 15 different oils; two drops is an immediate remedy for frizzy hair.

BET TER BREATH, ANYWHERE

WHITENER

By Humankind Mouthwash $10

Crest Whitening Emulsions With Wand Applicator $60

Genius tablets that dissolve into great-tasting mouthwash.

No strips, no trays, no timers: Just rub it on your teeth and go.

THE BEST FOR YOUR BEARD Whether you’re after robust scruff or a smooth shave.

A BET TER POMADE Head & Shoulders Anti-Dandruff Shaping Pomade $10 Most styling products are itchy, flaky hell on your scalp. This one actually helps it.

FOR CLEAN CURLS Bread Beauty Supply Hair-Wash $20

Lactic acid gets under the skin and to the root of deep acne and ingrown hairs.

THE BEST RAZOR

FOR DIY BUZZ CUTS Andis Master Cordless Lithium Ion Clipper, $300 It’s what your barber uses—or wishes he were using.

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MAKES YOUR HAIR COOPERATE Axe Texturizing Cream $7 Mess it up, slick it back—no way to use this stuff that won’t look good. (Maybe not spikes.)

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Acqua di Parma Barbiere Beard Serum $63 Goes on thick but then just disappears. You’d never know it was there if your face wasn’t now soft and great-smelling.

FOR ROUGH STUBBLE AND BEYOND

Oui the People The Single Sensitive Skin Razor $75

King C. Gillette Soft Beard Balm $13

Pop an old-school blade into this futuristic rose-gold safety razor—we’ve come a long way from Ye Olde Barber Shoppe.

The best calming ointment for your beard, at day 5 or 500.

Phillip Picardi is GQ’s grooming columnist.

PROP ST YLIST, JOSEPHINE SCHIELE. FOR COLL AGE SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS, SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS, PAGE 93.

Renée Rouleau Anti Bump Solution $50

This foamy cleanser was created specifically for curly, textured hair—but its gentle hydration is ideal for any scalp in need of a shampoo break.

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What You

Really Should Be

Our fitness columnist explains how true wellness is about helping other people in your community be well tooâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;for the long haul.

The F i x

Fitne s s

Building Is

Intergenerational Health

By JOE HOLDER

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The F i x

Fitness

Improving access to fresh food is one key to unlocking intergenerational health.

E GENERALLY THINK OF

wellness as a bunch of stu≠ we do as individuals. It’s self-care, right? What does running a 10K or getting eight hours of sleep have to do with anyone but yourself ? I’d argue, however, that it’s time we start thinking about health and wellness as something more communal—a set of commitments that can actually be a force for collective action and positive social impact. That’s never been easier to understand than it has this year, when police violence and the pandemic have made our country’s inequalities, particularly around health and well-being, harder to ignore than ever. If social justice is about creating a more equitable distribution of rights and opportunities, how could that not include the right to good food, good health, and good living? And if you’re living well, you have a responsibility to help others live well too. If you’re thinking, Dude, Joe, I’m just not really into politics, I’ve got bad news: Your life is inherently political. What you eat, where you work out, the brands you wear—none of these choices are neutral. I understand that might be uncomfortable to hear. But that doesn’t mean it should scare you. In fact, it should give you hope. Because your wellness can be a form of activism. I’m passionate about creating what I call intergenerational health, and that comes from addressing the structural and systemic disadvantages

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within ecosystems so that more people can thrive in the long haul. The ﬁrst thing we need to realize and accept is that no one is self-made. You can’t demonize others for appearing unhealthy. People are ultimately products of their environment, and if you’re placed in an environment where you’re just trying to get by, it’s going to be hard to ﬂourish. I’m in shape, but it’s not because I’m some kind of freak of nature—I’m privileged to have a life that allows me to eat well and move my body. But if you’re in a situation where your basic needs aren’t met, you don’t have a lot of time to sit back and think, How can I design my environment so that I can be healthy and well? You hear a lot of talk about the racial wealth gap in the United States, but there’s also a huge health gap. One of the reasons Black and Latinx people

are so disproportionately a≠ected by COVID-19 is their environments. Racist and discriminatory health and housing policies have made it so that these populations have less access to high-quality and preventative health care, to parks and other green spaces, to good supermarkets, to gyms and recreational facilities. They’re more likely to be subjected to noise and air pollution, and to live in crowded environments—all things that put a body under constant stress, especially during a pandemic. That’s a wellness problem, and it’s all interconnected. WELLNESS MEANS BUILDING COMMUNITY

If you have the luxury to take care of yourself and you are doing so— exercising regularly, eating right, being mindful—you’re on your way

If you change your behaviors, maybe that energizes someone around you to do the same thing.

toward moving beyond self-care. I want your wellness practice to give you energy to help others, to wake you up to the world, to ask why things are the way they are. Let’s use food scarcity as an example. Say I’m enjoying an apple after a workout. Riding that wave of post-workout clarity, I wonder: Why doesn’t everybody have access to fresh fruits? I dig a little deeper and find out that where I live in New York City, poor neighborhoods often lack access to fresh, locally sourced food. So maybe then I volunteer somewhere that has a food bank—like LSA Family Health Service in East Harlem—that helps distribute fruits and vegetables to the community and use my platform to solicit more volunteers. It might not feel like much in the moment, but in the aggregate these acts of service add up. So ask yourself: What is it that I care about? How can I use my own skills and expertise to help those around me? There are psychological rewards here as well. A recent long-term study of 70,000 people in the U.K. showed that volunteering improves your mental health—participants likened their service work to having an extra $1,100 in the bank. For Instagram influencers hoping to build clout, wellness can often be a selfish act. But for those who aren’t

The F i x

Fitness

given the luxury of good health, wellness is an act of revolution: It’s taking care of yourself in a society and country that won’t. This is why some of the most inﬂuential social justice movements have included wellness initiatives. As an example, in 1969, the Black Panthers launched a program in Oakland to provide free, nutritious meals for kids living in underserved communities who didn’t have access to healthy (or any) food. It ended up feeding tens of thousands of kids in more than 20 cities, and many people believe it was the Panthers’ e≠orts that ultimately helped shape the federally funded breakfast programs that feed more than 14 million kids in the United States today. It’s not just that those kids now have food; it’s that the energy they would have spent securing a meal can be used toward creativity. And innovation. And yes, even activism. That’s how I believe we build intergenerational health that impacts not just ourselves but our communities, especially the children of the people in our communities. If we can change the environment in which someone lives—giving them access to clean water, nourishing food, proper medical access—and we make wellness available to all, we can change the future. It starts with you and expands outward.

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TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET FOUND SUPERSTARDOM AND ARTISTIC ACCLAIM INSTANTANEOUSLY. SINCE THEN HE’S BEEN PLAYING A CAT-AND-MOUSE GAME WITH FAME AND WRESTLING WITH WHAT KIND OF MAN HE WANTS TO BECOME—WHILE DELIVERING ASTONISHING PERFORMANCES FOR THE WORLD’S BEST DIRECTORS. NOW, WITH UNIQUE CANDOR, THE ACTOR OF A GENERATION REVEALS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO COME OF AGE IN OUR VERY UPSIDE-DOWN ERA. BY DANIEL RILEY PHOTOGRAPHS BY RENELL MEDRANO STYLED BY MOBOLAJI DAWODU

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the Oscars in 2018, everything that had changed, changed back again. Timothée Chalamet had spent the previous months becoming known. He had acted in a film, Call Me by Your Name, which was critically acclaimed as well as an instant object of cultish admiration—and his performance had made him, at 22, the youngest person nominated for best actor in 80 years. He had, simultaneously, been transformed into the rarest of pop confections—fawned over by younger women, older men, and every demographic in between. And he had traveled without pause on the awards circuit since early autumn, back and forth from New York and Los Angeles, practically living out of the first-class lounge and the lobbies of the Bowery Hotel and the Sunset Tower. But the day after the Oscars, the moment the clock struck midnight and his carriage turned into a pumpkin, Chalamet was right back where he’d been before the whole fantasy had begun: in New York, with no credit card, no apartment, and no longer any structured demands on his time and attention. Outsiders who had witnessed the arrival may have regarded this 22-year-old as being in possession of wealth and clout, but he was suddenly back on his own dime, which amounted to maybe five or six dimes, reticent to stay with family and friends whose lives he felt he was disrupting with all his new baggage. Of course they couldn’t possibly comprehend the chemical reaction that had just transpired. They were still hydrogen and oxygen, and Timothée Chalamet was all of a sudden water. And so, for three weeks, he disappeared into the wallpaper of the Lower East Side. Specifically, the wallpaper of a little apartment that the French street artist JR kept for visiting collaborators. Chalamet holed

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up against the ugly New York weather of late winter, and did the only thing he could think to do: learn lines. The King would be his first film since his pivot into fame, and he was anxious to get back to acting after such a long stretch of merely talking about acting. Even more, he needed to blot out the unrecognizable icon the internet was already beginning to make of Timothée Chalamet. I met Timothée for the first time at the onset of that initial blush of fame, when all of us were being introduced to an actor who had both rare talent and the un-engineerable it that chings like an audible sparkle off a jewel in a cartoon. I wrote a story for this magazine about that first chapter in the arrival of a film star. This is the second chapter, the story of what’s happened since. It wasn’t evident yet, but those three weeks in New York in 2018 were the starting line of what would amount to a 30-month stretch of four new films, two new Oscar campaigns, some refreshing romance, an incessant awareness of the confusing image of himself as—what else to call it?—an emerging global movie star, and a constant concerted effort to figure himself out as both a young actor and a young person in the unceasing spotlight. This summer, we were talking about all this on a little screened porch out back of a modest cabin in Woodstock when Chalamet recalled those three weeks. “My world had flipped,” he said. “But if I kicked it with my friends, things could still feel the same. I was trying to marry these two realities. But I don’t even think I knew that was what I was doing. That dissonance was real. And thank God. Because I feel like if I’d caught up to it immediately, I would’ve been a psychopath or something.” Out on that porch, I asked him a version of the same question over and over: What had

the little screened porch, hands tugging at his mane, I could feel the gears grinding to the point of smoke. He wanted so desperately to get this right, to express what he really meant, to feel the right feelings, to live the right way, to be the right kind of man for the people in his life that he knows he can and should be, despite everything else, despite the noise. He’s doing his best. Timothée had rented the house for the month of July, as a little escape but also as an opportunity. He was slated to play Bob Dylan in a new biopic. No telling when it might film, given everything, but for now he had more time to himself than he’d had in years, which meant time to maybe huff the vapors of some Woodstock Dylanalia. “It’s not like I’m suffering from lack of connection otherwise,” he said, “but it just really feels like I’m connecting to something here.” When he arrived, he discovered that his little house had a wall devoted to Dylan—to the albums he’d recorded in the run-up to his timeout in Woodstock in the late ’60s. Timothée relished happening upon that wall his first day in the Airbnb. The universe offered signs if you nudged it toward coherence. He knew what the cabin might seem like— like some young actor taking himself way too seriously, “treating himself like an artist.” But he was back and forth between Woodstock and New York all month, bombing up and down the interstate in the Honda sedan he’d rented from Enterprise. (He learned how to drive on Beautiful Boy.) All the while Dylan was top of mind. Timothée was late to the party but helplessly obsessed. He quoted him generously. He fixated on both the art and the persona. He marveled at the way the artist could be out there so much, making such an impact, while also keeping the real person obscured behind the music, the characters in the songs, the (text continued on page 50)

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sweater $890 Gucci → THIS PAGE

his own hoodie Juicy Couture ring $6,300 Cartier

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language. In the city, we spent time walking around Greenwich Village, Timothée in an identity-concealing face mask and bucket hat and sunglasses, able to search out old Dylan addresses in an invisibility cloak. He ran from site to site, with notes he’d kept while reading Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, barreling up stairs and peering into windows. He was a 24-year-old actor, taking advantage of the pause between the second phase of his career and the third and thinking hard, daily, about how to play the next few years. He rented the house in Woodstock, too, so that he could have a little space all to himself. He craved the privacy to try things and to fuck up. To make small mistakes now, out of view, when it was just him, when he was still young, so that he didn’t have to worry about it later. At one point, he stood up and slapped an empty water bottle off the table

of the 30-month run that led to Woodstock, Timothée turned over the keys to JR’s studio and went to Europe to shoot The King. The role was like none of the films he’d just received notice for. “Here I am on set with all these Hungarian men with scars on their faces, and they’re like, ‘You’re the center of the shot, you’re the badass! And we know you tried to put on all this weight, but like: You’re wearing all the chain mail.’ If they took the chain mail off, my throat is still this big…” There he was trying to keep in perspective this new fame, this new validation, this new temptation toward ego, all while being thrust into the center of “something called The motherfucking King.” When he returned to New York that summer, he skipped off the atmosphere again with another awkward reentry. One moment he was on the battlefield of the biggest-budget BACK AT THE START

“I WANT TO GET BACK TO THE SPACE AGAIN. I’M CHASING A FEELING.” so that it clattered against the screen of the porch. “I want to know what that sounds like!” he shouted. He hadn’t taken many missteps yet, and it made him uncomfortable, wary, that he would someday. The month felt like a controlled burn. In the most innocent way, that was what Woodstock was about. He got to practice his guitar and harmonica in peace, cook himself his “shitty pasta” without judgment, permit himself space to keep growing up. So much was in the spotlight now. But in that cabin, he could sit on the couch for a while and re-familiarize himself with “the crease in the cushion” that he’d lost touch with over the past few years. The quiet. The stillness. That sunlight there coming through the trees. He could breathe a little. Sleep a little. It had all been so good for him so far. But the goodness made him anxious. When will the other shoe drop? Not there. He’d deleted Instagram off his phone. He’d stopped posting on Twitter. He was reading again. Listening to albums all the way through. Slowing down. What was it like to have lived these past two and a half years? It was like a lot of things, but here at the end of it, it just felt good to sleep.

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drama he’d yet experienced, the next he was “back in New York, on the A/C/E at Port Authority, just like, What the fuck is going on?” It was a pattern over the past few years. The calmly intense immersion into work, the “thud of lost purpose,” as he called it, when the work ended. It happened the same way in the fall of 2018 with Little Women—reunited with Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan and the crew from Lady Bird. There was just an ease with which he plugged in with them, “a vocabulary of friendship” that existed there. Timothée’s career thus far has been filled with these sorts of friendships, notably those across generational lines. Even a casual observer may have picked up on it. Those glommings-on to older people in his life. Armie Hammer. Kid Cudi. Greta Gerwig. When I asked Gerwig to comment on the arc she’s witnessed up close, from Lady Bird to Little Women, she wrote a note about “my friend Timmy”: “It’s hard for me now, because I’m his friend, to see him strategically.… I love talking to him. We can get on the phone and talk for an hour or more without even realizing it, just skipping from subject to subject, making jokes, me feeling old and happy and

him being funny and anxious and delightfully all over the place.” It’s an odd gap he finds himself in—forced to be more accelerated than most 24-year-olds while also having not lived enough life yet to fit in absolutely with the people he enjoys spending time with most. On a recent visit with his grandmother in New York, she surprised him by saying, “I wish you would hang out with people your own age more often. It must be so weird.” It made him chuckle. Even she’d noticed. She might be right. But how could he resist the orbit of these creative geniuses he’d so long admired and who were filled with so much knowingness? In the winter of 2019, another Oscar campaign left him feeling disoriented all over again. Everything, Timothée said, was exactly the same as the first time except him. He’d put in this undeniable performance, but maybe one that sparked a little less for Oscar voters than that first kiss with a stranger. Now he was in all the same rooms as before, the same lunches and dinners and cocktail parties, shaking hands with the same Academy members who showed up at everything to get a little nibble of the freshest biscuit, growling ominous things at him, like: You don’t have my vote yet.… “I really don’t know how to talk about this stuff, man,” he told me, “because my experience of it is at the center of it. There’s just some dark energy at these things, and this time around I felt like I could see it. And yet I’m thinking, Why isn’t this going the exact same way?” He wasn’t nominated for Beautiful Boy, but the fresh air came, as it always seemed to, on the set of the next film: Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. The movie is about a fictional English-language magazine (based on The New Yorker of the midcentury) and is structurally organized like the magazine itself, featuring short pieces at the “front” of the movie and a triptych of long features at the back. Timothée costars in the second feature, about a May ’68–style student-protest leader named Zeffirelli and the middle-aged magazine journalist (Frances McDormand) assigned to report on his cause. “I had seen Timmy in Lady Bird and Call Me by Your Name,” Anderson wrote to me, “and I never had the inconvenience of ever thinking of anybody else for this role even for a second. I knew he was exactly right, and plus: He speaks French and looks like he might actually have walked right out of an Éric Rohmer movie. Some time around 1985. A slow train from Paris, a backpack, a beach for 10 days in bad weather. He’s not any kind of type—but the New Wave would have had a happy place for him.” The privilege of early fame that Timothée most appreciates is the ability to choose the directors he works with. His role in The French Dispatch is a minor one, but it’s a Wes Anderson (text continued on page 54)

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movie—it’s as simple as that. Due to the episodic nature of the film, some of the other “stories” were already being shot when Timothée arrived in Angoulême, a town that reminded him of the one he spent time in growing up, “so French it was like a caricature,” he said. Timothée had the opportunity, then, to hang with some of the elders he doesn’t act with, like Jeffrey Wright, Bill Murray, and other seasoned members of the Wes Anderson troupe. “It was immediately as if it wasn’t his first time with our group,” Anderson explained. “He was somehow already part of the family. The youngest member.” Timothée had seen McDormand around for years, but he’d never felt like she was someone he could approach. “We’d shared an agent,” he said. “And it was no disrespect to me, but I hadn’t been in any movies yet. What business do I have talking to Frances McDormand? But now, and this is the gift of acting, I really feel myself coming into my own as a community of thespians, as opposed to actors. And man, that sounds pretentious, but I just mean it’s not about the fucked-up ladder of success and un-success, and being the guy or the girl, and then being off the list… That’s not what I’m talking about with her on set, that’s not what she’s espousing to me. She’s talking about a long career. She’s talking about marriage with a creative partner and consultant. So to be able to have conversations like that and then a story line in the movie where they’re kind of on an equal field? Even if she’s an experienced, wise woman and he’s an idealistic, naive boy? That’s the exact relationship of exchange I want with my intergenerational peers.” There’s a particularly memorable scene in The French Dispatch, reporter and subject having fallen into bed together, when there’s a knock at the door. Timothée looks at McDormand, anxious about who’s there, mortified when McDormand informs him it’s his mother. There, in that scene, we see all the desire of Zeffirelli—this energetic young man with all the right intentions, who strains to be intellectually and emotionally riper—clash with the reality of his age. It felt familiar to me, and no doubt to Timothée. It was some of my favorite acting in the film. I asked McDormand if there was anything in their scenes that struck her as particularly mature for someone his age. “Maturity is not something a fellow actor is the most concerned with,” she said. “Playfulness, discipline, and rigor. I do recall, during our scene in bed, the crew responding to his work with true respect for his focus. He was bringing it and we sat up and paid attention.” Anderson added: “I think my favorite moments with Timmy during a scene were the ones where I saw him pause and find a new attack. A new angle, which he does very clearly and

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assertively. What I love is how he will surprise you with something new, completely unexpected and perfect.” One night, while McDormand was shooting a scene without Timothée, her husband, Joel Coen—he of the Brothers— asked Timothée if he wanted to go out for a steak. Over dinner, Timothée grilled Coen

“

I GET HIT BY A TRUCK NEXT WEEK, I’M LOOKING AT 20 TO 23, I DON’T KNOW IF YOU CAN TOP THAT.”

about Dylan. He knew Coen was a fan and had steeped in it on Inside Llewyn Davis. “He almost seemed weary of even talking about this stuff, it was so big and potent,” Timothée told me. But Coen noted that the truly incredible thing about Dylan was not so much the quality, which was obvious, but the quantity—the rapid amount of work in short succession, one groundbreaking album after another, in those early years. That takeaway resonated deeply with Timothée. Especially as he reflected on it from summer 2020, during the pause, during the moment of no work. That gush from Dylan made him want to work—harder, longer, better, more. our conversation in Woodstock, Timothée and I were in New York City, sitting on a bench along the Hudson, talking about what he’s looking for when work resumes. “I want to get back to the undefined space again,” he said. “I’m chasing a feeling. When you think you’re doing some great thing, it’s probably something you’ve done before, and when you really fucking have no clue, that’s when you’re doing something on the edge, good or bad.” Timothée’s mask had slipped down his face as he was saying this, and two young women, about his age, approached cautiously. “Would you mind if we got a…,” they asked, and he hopped up without hesitation. “How’d you recognize me?” he said, friendly, but genuinely curious, as if he hadn’t just been shouting about art in a voice that sounded a lot like Laurie from Little Women or Timmy from late-night shows. A

“Was it the scrawny limbs or the hair?” I asked him as he sat back down. “Definitely the first.” From France, last spring, it was straight to Hungary—right back to the exact apartment in Budapest he’d stayed in while shooting The King—to start work on Dune. Very few actors had become as famous without a

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blockbuster. And while he’d really gotten it down how to act on an indie set, how to make every second and every take count, he knew this would be something altogether different. It wasn’t just the shoot that would prove taxing. A film of Dune’s scale would likely be the can opener to a whole other stratum of Hollywood prominence. Director Denis Villeneuve told me Timothée was his “first and only choice” to play Paul Atreides, “the one name on the page.” When they met to discuss the prospect, Villeneuve told Timothée how happy he was to finally meet the young actor. And Timothée had to remind him that they’d met before, when Timothée read for Villeneuve’s Prisoners. “ ‘Of course!’ ” Villeneuve remembered. “He did a great audition, but he didn’t physically fit the part. He was probably swearing at me because I didn’t take him.” Timothée was party to so many stories like that one—glancing interactions with these heroes of his before he’d broken through. It reminded me of the relationship between freshmen and seniors in high school. The freshmen remember everything about the seniors; the seniors hardly notice the freshmen. But we all become peers eventually. “I felt there was one being on this planet right now that would be able to portray Paul Atreides,” Villeneuve said—referring to the hero of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel, who transforms from an unassuming heir into a messiah figure, a charismatic outsider and commander of men and women (and sandworms). I read Dune for the first time this summer and was shocked by the source

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material, how much I’d consumed in culture that had borrowed from it. Star Wars. Alien. The Matrix. Game of Thrones. Paul, therefore, is a type we’re familiar with but also possessing singular characteristics Villeneuve wanted Timothée for: “He has a deep, deep intelligence in the eyes. Something you cannot fake. The kid is brilliant. Very intellectual, very strong. And you see that in the eyes. He also has a very old soul. You feel that he has already lived through several lives. And at the same time, he looks so young on camera. Sometimes he’d look almost 14 years old. He has this kind of general youth in his features and the contrast with the old-soul quality in his eyes—it’s a kid that knows more about life than his age. Finally: He has that beautiful charisma, the charisma of a rock star. That Paul will lead the whole population of a planet later. Timothée has that kind of instant charisma onscreen that you can find only sometimes in the Old Hollywood stars from the ’20s. There’s something of a romantic beauty to him. A cross of aristocracy and being a bum at the same time. I mean, Timothée is Paul Atreides for me. It was a big relief that he agreed, because I had no plan b.” I asked Villeneuve if he noticed Timothée struggling at all to adjust to the larger-scale production. “It didn’t show when he was on set, but I think for him the big thing was to learn how to create his own bubble on set. So that he would not have to try to be the friend of everyone. When you’re on a smaller set, when there’s 25 people, you can be friendly with 25 people. When there’s 800 people around, you cannot be friends with 800 people.” He chuckled. “It’s too much. So how to

this open, vulnerable way about his concerns, his fears, how to deal with certain pressures. Villeneuve also described for me Timothée’s relationships with his fellow actors, particularly the trio of Josh Brolin, Oscar Isaac, and Jason Momoa. “I felt like Timothée was deeply seduced—or maybe not seduced, but I just felt it was like a kid being with older brothers,” Villeneuve said. “He was younger, he was the little one on set, and everybody loved him. There’s a scene in the movie where Timothée runs into the arms of Jason Momoa, and Jason grabs him like a puppy and lifts him into the air like he was a feather. And that’s real! They really loved each other. It was very beautiful to see this young man being influenced by these people he admires.” “His positive energy is infectious,” Zendaya, his nearest peer in the film, told me. “He really is so much fun to be around. We have very similar humor, and we can keep a joke going for a long time, but when the cameras start rolling and it’s time to work, you can see it’s game time, and he just taps into this brilliant intensity. It’s awesome to witness.” Villeneuve underlined the energy as well, describing for me just having seen Timothée the night before we spoke, and marveling at “that beautiful, strong candor.” “I will say that looking at Timothée working, I had a deep feeling that I was watching the birth of something,” Villeneuve added. “Not that it’s for me—I say that with humility, because I feel that birth in all the movies he’s done so far. I’m feeling it’s someone that has insane potential. When I say potential, I don’t want to reduce what he’s doing right now, not at all. It’s just that sometimes you

“I’M IN THE WAY I’M TRYING TO APPROACH THINGS NOW, HOW I’M SETTING UP THE ANGLES.” save your energy, how to focus, how to give himself permission to be in his bubble and make sure that his bubble is respected.” As ever, Timothée had a special affinity with those people on set who were a little older, a little wiser. Villeneuve said Timothée was constantly speaking with him and his wife in

are in front of somebody and you have the feeling you are in contact with a strong artist and that artist, his identity is still growing, building itself, learning its boundaries, learning how to protect some part of it. I think that we are witnessing something beautiful right now.”

of summer 2019, Timothée finally resurfaced from Planet Dune. He had been on social media only sporadically while shooting for most of 2019, and so, for his vast base of fans, it was an overdue glimpse of the object of their affection. First up was the Venice Film Festival and the premiere of The King. There were clothes and Kid Cudi cameos and charming red-carpet interviews. It was an example of the sort of stretch, in the gaps between shoots, when Timothée could indulge his passions for hip-hop and fashion and all these things he’d loved all his life that were suddenly accessible. It was another of the delirious disorientations of the past few years—the way that people who were once subjects of his intense fandom were suddenly a part of his life as friends or acquaintances happy to have him around. He might still embarrass himself at times, helplessly rapping back lyrics to his hip-hop heroes or gushing like a broken dam about new music or clothes or art made by the makers in his life, but they were cool with him so long as he actually kept his cool. Timothée also spent the end of last summer promoting The King, alongside his costar Lily-Rose Depp, whom he’d been dating for about a year. He is serious about keeping his former relationship with Depp to himself, but he did share one very sweet, very funny, very sad anecdote that encapsulates the spectrum of great and terrible that accompanies the private life of someone new to mega-fame like Timothée. After Venice, he and Lily-Rose took a few days for themselves in Capri, where they were photographed by paparazzi. One image, in particular, circulated in which they were making out on the deck of a boat. Timothée is contorting himself into the kiss and looks a little awkward. Many people had their laughs. And some even suggested that the photo was staged for publicity. “I went to bed that night thinking that was one of the best days of my life,” Timothée told me. “I was on this boat all day with someone I really loved, and closing my eyes, I was like, indisputably, ‘That was great.’ And then waking up to all these pictures, and feeling embarrassed, and looking like a real nob? All pale? And then people are like: This is a P.R. stunt. A P.R. stunt?! Do you think I’d want to look like that in front of all of you?!” This was how things worked now. He’d disappeared into those four straight films and emerged into a new paradigm—one that followed him into the holiday season of last year and a whole new level of exposure with Little Women. Here was this film about sisterhood, female intimacy, and a feminist critique of art and commerce. And yet Timothée was still the shiniest object in the set for so many fans. “I’m very used to answering questions about Timothée’s hair from 15-year-old girls,” Saoirse AT

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Ronan joked with me. “I imagine that’s probably what you’re going to ask me about?” Ronan has the unique perspective of having filmed and then promoted two movies with Chalamet during the past three years, and has as clear an eye as anyone onto this early phase of his career. “He’s had such incredible opportunities, and he doesn’t let the reality of that pass him by,” she said. “He’s incredibly gracious and grateful in relation to his work and the people he works with. I think he’s become more open as an actor. He knows his instrument more. I think he works even harder now because there are projects that are on his shoulders in a way that they weren’t before. And of course he’s been totally catapulted into this whole other realm of attention and notoriety. So he’s also having to balance the incredible fame and

attention, which would completely freak me out if it was something I had to go through.” When Timothée and I were sitting by the Hudson that afternoon back in summer, there were those two young women who approached him for a photo. But there were also two other young women who caught an eyeful of his profile as they strolled by and then surreptitiously positioned themselves out of his sight line but still in mine. They did that thing where one pretends to take a picture of the other while actually shooting back over her shoulder in selfie mode. That charade went on for five minutes or so while Timothée exercised his guts about reuniting with Gerwig and Ronan on Little Women, and though I was nodding along, I was also marveling at the lengths to which those two fans were willing to go to get a picture of him.

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I asked Ronan what she’s noticed about that level of attention, sitting beside him for so much of it. “I’m always kind of shocked by those things—when any one person can just completely take over people’s lives so much,” she said, laughing a little incredulously. “But I’m also not surprised. There just aren’t many other young male actors out there like him, who are able to hold an audience in the way that he does. His look is so magnetic and beautiful. One of the things that we spoke about a lot when we were doing Little Women, in terms of our characters, but also in terms of myself and him as people, is that we both have this masculinity and femininity equally. And I think that that’s one of his strengths, is that he can be incredibly sort of feminine and sensitive and sensual, and also he’s a guy that, you know, girls fancy. So he covers so much ground in terms of popularity. But at the end of the day, he’s always gonna have this skill. He can be cute, but that only gets you so far.… And so I’ve seen him learn how to separate himself from all that other stuff when he’s on set, when he’s working.” In Woodstock, Timothée had described to me with greatest admiration the way that Ronan can act in these films, at this highest level of acclaim and attention, but also remove herself, uncomplicatedly, from all the fuss: “She is like a superhero when it comes to this sort of thing, going through it so healthy—with the asterisk being excellent work across the board and four Oscar nominations. I think her, like, DNA of self is really morally right.” She knows herself extremely well, he said, and has the confidence to give up only so much of herself. Whereas he feels he is calibrating constantly how much of his true self to reveal. “Saoirse’s one of my best friends in the world—at least I think we’re best friends. And she’s never judged me for… the Coachella of it all.” That is, the part of him that can’t resist fanning out backstage with his favorite musicians or occasionally allowing himself to be in the spotlight even as he talks about preserving his privacy. “He’s 24, and he’s gonna have a great time, and I would never judge him. I’ve been to Coachella; I just never got photographed at Coachella,” Ronan said, chuckling. “But yeah, we talk about that sort of stuff all the time. We’ve weirdly gone through this together for the last few years. We’ve both become more accessible. But he’s had one sort of attention—I do feel like boys get it on a whole other level. I know that ultimately what he wants is to be good at his job. And that will always steer him on the right path. I’ve always let him know, and he’s always let me know, we can talk to each other, and we do. He has good people around him, and I’m one of them, and Greta as well—we all kind of look out for one another.” (continued on page 86)

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The multiplatinum Verzuz brain trust: Timbaland, at home in Miami, and Swizz Beatz, opposite, at home in San Diego.

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IN A BRUTAL YEAR FOR COMPANIES LARGE AND SMALL, THESE NIMBLE ENTREPRENEURS FOUND SUCCESS BY BUILDING COMMUNITIES AT A TIME WHEN WE NEEDED THEM MOST. FROM A BOOKSELLER IN ATLANTA DEDICATED TO BLACK LITERATURE TO SWIZZ BEATZ AND TIMBALANDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S JOYFUL VERZUZ PLATFORM, THESE ARE THE CREATIVE BUSINESSPEOPLE GIVING US HOPE DURING THE PANDEMIC.

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THE INSTAGRAM LIVE SHOW PITTING ARTIST VERSUS ARTIST—AND DELIVERING AN IRRESISTIBLE DOSE OF MUSICAL NOSTALGIA “Tim, this is a good time to call JT.” I’m on a Zoom call with Swizz Beatz and Timbaland, the multiplatinum super-producers and creators of Verzuz, when Swizz casually throws the suggestion out there. For those unfamiliar with early-aughts pop music, that’s “JT” as in “Justin Timberlake,” and Timbaland is flashing a mischievous grin. “I’m already on it,” he says, reaching for his phone to shoot a text to his friend and collaborator. That’s how a lot of Verzuz matchups begin. As happy accidents. The original Verzuz got its start back in March, when stay-at-home orders effectively shut down clubs everywhere and we found ourselves scrolling through Instagram to see who was on Live doing what. One night, Timbaland popped up on his account, dancing and teasing the records that he’d been holed up in his studio making, when he called out for his brother Swizz: “Where you at?!” The invitation led to them going Live together the following night for an epic five-hour soundclash in which they took turns playing their biggest hits and swapping stories. The format felt novel—part night out at the club, part Behind the Music documentary—and it apparently had some legs: Over 20,000 fans tuned in, and by spring Verzuz was trademarked as a stand-alone brand. The Instagram show quickly became one of the pandemic’s biggest success stories—appointment viewing for the culture— as Swizz and Tim leveraged their connections to put together increasingly preposterous dream battles across R&B, hip-hop, gospel, and dancehall. Legends like Jill Scott vs. Erykah Badu. Nelly vs. Ludacris. Snoop Dogg vs. DMX. Gladys Knight vs. Patti LaBelle, in a firecracker showcase that Twitter users affectionately dubbed #AuntieChella. In a world where nightlife isn’t viable, folks are planning Verzuz watch parties online, filling out brackets to rank their favorite songs, and openly fantasizing on Twitter about the period-appropriate cosplay they would wear if they were to leave their living rooms. (NBA jerseys and fitted caps for Fabolous vs. Jadakiss, Steve Madden platforms for Brandy vs. Monica.) A few days before I connect with Swizz and Timbaland, Verzuz hit

Timbaland, left, and Swizz Beatz.

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a new milestone: More than 6 million people tuned in across Instagram and Apple Music (which signed on to help produce and broadcast the battles in June) to watch longtime R&B rivals Brandy and Monica—two artists who peaked during the Clinton administration—reunite after a yearslong feud that allegedly involved the latter punching the former. (More on that in a bit.) It’s the kind of viewership that awards shows would kill for, lockdown or not. And with the boost to the artists’ catalog streams that follows each match, Verzuz has emerged in the streaming era as the most potent music platform that’s not actually selling any music. As we’ve eased into varying stages of pandemic life, so Verzuz has evolved too. What started as casual, lo-fi affairs with artists playing tracks from their laptops or phones while praying that the Wi-Fi holds up has blossomed into full-on productions. Participants now perform together in person against a lavish backdrop of DJs, surprise guests (like Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris), and artfully placed bottles of Cîroc (which came aboard in May as a sponsor). And you never know who will be tuning in. “The greatest thing about Verzuz is that you can see Michelle Obama or whoever in the comments,” says Lil Jon, whose April showdown with T-Pain was the first to hit more than 250,000 viewers. “Everybody and anybody in pop culture, sports, fashion, politics, is in those Verzuzes. I think that’s one reason why the average person connects to Verzuz so well. Because they’re basically in the VIP room.” Lil Jon’s battle with T-Pain marked a critical turning point for the brand. Rather than playfully talking shit to each other—as with, say, the boast-filled slog between The-Dream and Sean Garrett—Lil Jon and T-Pain used the opportunity to gas each other up, effectively transforming the night into a feel-good party. Reframing Verzuz as a mutual celebration instead of a battle proved crucial. For starters, it helped persuade shy, reclusive veteran acts like Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds to sign on. (He went up against Teddy Riley.) And the new emphasis on positivity helped secure the participation of female artists, who have historically been pitted against one another by the public—as was the case for Brandy and Monica, who used their reunion to clear the air and bury the hatchet. (Their appearance, however, wasn’t without some spiciness: “There was a time,” Monica recalled on the broadcast, “when I was kicking in doors and smacking chicks—” Which prompted Brandy to interrupt her: “You sure was!”) “We know what the people want to see,” Swizz says. “It’s about us keeping the pulse on the culture and the people.… People put a lot of big names together, but their sounds don’t go together. Their vibes don’t go together.” Even though they see Verzuz as an “educational celebration” of the Black music diaspora, they plan on expanding into other genres, like Latin and pop music, soon enough. It’s an endlessly repeatable formula. But the real magic of Verzuz is the spontaneity, the sense that anything can happen. When Bounty Killer went up against Beenie Man for an in-person battle in Jamaica, for instance, their performance was so lit that the police showed up and tried to shut it down. “Come oooonnnn officer,” Rihanna pleaded in the comments as half a million viewers watched in suspense. “Tell the police go hooommeeee.” The police soon relented, and the party continued. — G E R R I C K D . K E N N E D Y

18 EAST: PHOTOGRAPHS, CAROLINE TOMPKINS (3).

THE CLOTHES YOU WANT TO WEAR WHEN YOU CAN WEAR WHATEVER YOU WANT

The extended 18 East family outside the studio in NYC. Back row (from left): Andrew Sun, Ravi Barua, creative director Antonio Ciongoli, Cameron Booth, and Sudan Green. Front row: Jon Santana, Saeed Ferguson, and Leon Xu.

Sales were strong for 18 East before COVID-19 hit. But when life screeched to a halt in March, it became clear that designer Antonio Ciongoli’s baggy cargo pants, camp shirts, and hoodies built for skateboarding and hiking were perfectly fit for the moment: As of September, sales were up more than 200 percent year over year. Making that leap required some adjustments. The 18 East store-slash-office in NYC’s Nolita was shuttered for a few months, and Ciongoli packed and shipped orders from his home in New Jersey. Clothing production in India, where most of the cut-andsewn pieces are made, was halted, so he pivoted to graphic tees and hoodies whipped up by a local mom-and-pop printer. “It is the most runand-gun operation you could possibly imagine,” he says. “But it feels good.” Ciongoli also doubled down on his small creative community, working with designer Saeed Ferguson’s

label, ALL CAPS STUDIO, in the wake of George Floyd’s death on a T-shirt that raised money for bail funds. By the time the initial shock of the pandemic wore off and shipments started moving through customs again, 18 East was prepped for blastoff. “The amount of orders we have per drop has tripled,” Ciongoli says. New releases launch biweekly at 11 a.m. and routinely sell through by 11:01. Good for business, sure, but for Ciongoli it has meant more than that: Returning to his roots, fully embracing skate culture and his native Vermont crunchiness, has reconnected him with what he loves about making clothes. “For a long time, the job as a designer of a small brand felt like a ton of grind without a lot of upside,” he says. “You start doing this because it’s fun, and I forgot about that. And now it’s back to being fun.” — S A M S C H U B E

CREATING THEIR OWN CHANNEL TO TELL BLACK STORIES

CHILD WINES THE NATURALWINE SHOP SERVING UP PERFECTLY PAIRED SIPS AND SLICES

Denny and Katie Culbert with their daughter, Kitt.

COVID-19 has been many things, but a sobriety event is not one of them. So a shop like Wild Child Wines may have always had a leg up on other businesses. That doesn’t mean it’s been easy, though. Denny and Katie Culbert opened their wine store just after New Year’s in downtown Lafayette, Louisiana—not exactly a hot spot for the funky, all-natural, small-producer wines that the couple intended to offer. “We opened the shop because we wanted to drink these wines and nobody else was going to sell them,” says Denny. The project was just ramping up when the pandemic hit. Wild Child’s ensuing shift from measured planning to frantic improvisation is emblematic of thousands of small food businesses across the country—as is their intuition that the way through the great unknown lay in simple pleasures and the leanings of their own hearts. When the first shutdown orders came, Denny stayed up all night, photographing every bottle. By morning, Wild Child was ready to launch an online shop. But that still left hours to fill, and Denny, like many others, found himself going down a rabbit hole into the arcane art of baking sourdough. That led to the sub-warren of pizza making and a quest to produce the ideal Detroit-style pie—a cousin of deep-dish, with a lighter, spongy crust. When Wild Child reopened, customers were enticed back with a free slice accompanying each bottle—and the pizza has been as big a hit as the wine selection. Natural wine might require education, but as Denny says, “Pizza is easy.” Next they’ll take over the space next door, vacated by a bike shop, for a combination vintage-furniture shop and art gallery. Whatever happens, Katie says there’s no reason to go back to being open all day when they can count on online orders. For her, this time has been a lesson in the importance of tending one’s own garden. “Right now the idea of being a tiny wine shop in a tiny town sounds pretty good,” she says. “And if there’s a little focacceria serving pizza next door, all the better.” — B R E T T M A R T I N

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In the days following George Floyd’s murder, photographers Joshua Kissi and Micaiah Carter started talking about how the popular consciousness sees Black lives. “My skin color is weaponized and radicalized in so many different ways,” Kissi says. But “I’m also a son, I’m a brother, I’m a husband.” So Kissi and Carter invited fellow Black photographers Anthony Coleman, Florian Koenigsberger, Andre D. Wagner, and Dani Kwateng to join them in a collective called See In Black. “We wanted to do something for our own community,” Carter says, “to show that we are unified. We have power in numbers.” Their first initiative was a two-week print sale, launched on June 19, to raise money for organizations that support Black lives. They reached out to more than 80 artists from all over the country, from established photographers to younger up-and-comers— many of whom hadn’t worked in months because of pandemic restrictions— including celebrated fashion photographer Renell Medrano and street-style O.G. Jamel Shabazz.

WILD CHILD WINES: PHOTOGRAPHS, AKASHA RABUT (2). SEE IN BLACK: PHOTO BOOTH SELF-P ORTR AITS COURTESY OF THE SUBJECTS. THE BLUE STARLITE: PHOTOGR APH, CINDY ELIZ ABE TH; FOR LOCATIONS, SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS, PAGE 93.

THE BLUE STARLITE THE DRIVE-IN THEATER WHERE PERFORMANCES GO BEYOND THE BIG SCREEN

The founders of See In Black (from left): Anthony Coleman, Joshua Kissi, Dani Kwateng, Micaiah Carter, Andre D. Wagner, and Florian Koenigsberger.

When the South by Southwest festival was called off in March due to COVID-19, Josh Frank knew the decision spelled trouble, both for the city of Austin and the filmmakers whose work was scheduled to premiere there. “It was like if the universe canceled the sunset,” Frank says. “I was just heartbroken for all these artists when it hit me: ‘Wait a minute, I have a fucking drive-in movie theater.’ ” Since 2010 Frank has run Austin’s Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive-in Theater, which began as a date-night screening of Grease in a back alley and has grown to include three locations in and around town and one in the Colorado Rockies. “At first it was like an art installation,” he says, recalling a time when his maximum capacity was 12 cars. “People would come and watch old silent films that were in the public domain and have this very personal, intimate experience.” During the pandemic, Frank found that people were craving exactly that kind of evening—a quick hit of communal culture—and that he was uniquely equipped to provide it in a socially distant way. Perhaps he could help a few filmmakers in the process too. Starting in March, the Blue Starlite hosted 12 sold-out nights of SXSW short films. “That’s when the movie theaters started closing,” Frank says. “So a month into the pandemic, I was the only one showing new movies in the entire town of Austin.” Drive-ins across the country have seen business boom during lockdown, but the Blue Starlite responded with something more dynamic: a quirky collection of performances that reflect the spirit of Austin itself. It’s become a place to take in not just cult films but also stand-up comedy, aerialist acrobatics, and, most recently, virtual performances by lo-fi rocker Lou Barlow and the Austin Opera. The author of a book on the Pixies, Frank is hosting those concerts alongside a series of music-themed movies at two of his Austin locations, including his newest, downtown, atop the parking garage for the Texas Capitol. The theater is just the kind of funky civic fantasy he feels has always thrived in Austin: “It’s a place where you can have an idea and very little money. And as long as you have voicemail and you find a cool space, you can make things happen here.” For all the heady experiments, Frank is also offering something simpler—a vision of America from a less fraught time. “One of the things that my customers would say Blue Starlite regularly each night,” he says, “was ‘Thank you for employees before an giving me a little piece of normal.’ ” evening screening.

— C O L I N G R O U N D W AT E R

BOOKSTORE THAT’S DOUBLING DOWN ON THE MAGIC OF COMMUNITY

The artist at work in his Williamsburg, Brooklyn, studio.

MASON SALTARRELLI THE ABSTRACT PAINTER MAKING ACCESSIBLE ART FOR EMOTIONALLY TURBULENT TIMES When lockdown forced 41-year-old artist Mason Saltarrelli to set up his easel at home, he began painting a series of abstract hairdos. By early May he had completed 15 of them, all displaying the deceptive simplicity and economy of color that has made the former Julian Schnabel assistant a star among New York’s emerging abstractionists. Then the canvases piled up and he ran out of space in his apartment. So he ordered some sketchbooks and turned his attention to a series of strange and enigmatic colored-pencil drawings, a project he calls Paper Fables. “It was a way to stay busy,” he says, “but not be producing so much stuff around me.” Every few weekends he posts new works on the Instagram account @paper_fables, where he sells them via DM for $333 each. The project may have started as a way to reduce clutter around the house, but Saltarrelli is also subverting the gallery system, bypassing the elitism and exclusiveness and creating a more accessible path. At a time when inequality and privilege are increasingly dividing people, this simple act can have a profound, unifying impact. “A lot of the people that reach out don’t necessarily have the funds to buy something through the gallery,” Saltarrelli says, noting that a nurse in New Jersey recently bought two of his Paper Fables drawings. “People are lost in stresses and anxieties,” he says. “I don’t want to add to it. I would rather give someone a break.” — S A M U E L H I N E

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Owner Rosa Duffy in front of her two-year-old bookstore.

Before the pandemic, a visit to For Keeps, a bookstore and reading room in Atlanta, was like going to a crowded kickback. A crew of regulars assembled around the tables to discuss the curated selection of books (mostly rare early editions by Black writers like Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez) and hang out with its founder, 29-year-old Rosa Duffy. Her customers include Kathleen Cleaver

and Ta-Nahesi Coates, and it’s no accident that the shop attracts the clientele that it does. “I’m an artist,” Duffy insists. She lovingly calls For Keeps an “installation,” an intentionally small space designed to put readers in conversation with ideas they’d never find elsewhere. The physical store is closed for now. And Duffy is using the time to rest, experiment, and focus on community: While

M AS O N S A LTA R R E L L I I N ST U D I O : P H OTO G R A P H S, I K E E D E A N I ( 2) . D R AW I N G S : C O U RT ESY O F M AS O N S A LTA R R E L L I ( 2) . ROSA DUFFY: PHOTOGRAPH, JOSIAH RUNDLES.

booksellers across the country are rushing to put their entire inventories online, Duffy has instead made only a handful of rare titles accessible on the shop’s website. There’s also a Patreon, where For Keeps’ devoted following gets first dibs on fresh books and merch, for $5 a month. For Duffy, it’s about finding creative ways to keep the magic of the place alive: On the first anniversary

of Toni Morrison’s death, she constructed an altar of flowers and candles in front of the store and posted a 1977 interview with the author on Instagram. In it, the interviewer asks Morrison why her work focused on myths and magic. “It’s not possible to constantly hone on the crisis,” said Morrison. “You have to have the love, and you have to have the magic.” — D O N OVA N X . R A M S E Y

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JERRY LORENZOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S L.A. LABEL FEAR OF GOD MADE HIM A KING OF STREETWEAR. BUT HIS NEW COLLECTION IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A REIMAGINING OF LUXURY AMERICAN MENSWEAR. SUDDENLY HIS GOAL OF BEING THE NEXT RALPH LAUREN IS IN SIGHT. By Zach Baron Photographs by Mason Poole

MANY

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AGO,

the designer Jerry Lorenzo was in Paris when he was introduced to the buyers at Barneys, the now bankrupt, then essential retailer. At the time, Lorenzo had just begun working on a clothing line he was calling Fear of God, but he didn’t yet know much about how fashion houses and aspiring fashion houses operated, which is on a rigid, seasonal calendar: men’s and women’s collections, released only at a few agreed-upon times a year. When he met the folks at Barneys, he eagerly o≠ered to show them the clothes he’d created, only to ﬁnd out that he’d missed his window: “They’re like, ‘Well, it’s not our buying calendar, currently, but we can meet you in New York in like a week or so if you just want to come show it to us.’ ” A courtesy meeting, in other words. Disappointed but undeterred, Lorenzo said: “All right.” At the time, he was mostly known, if he was known at all, for throwing parties in Los Angeles. The clothing he was

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designing—T-shirts, sweatshirts, flannels, and tank tops in exaggerated vertical proportions—looked, at first glance, like streetwear, the slightly pejorative term for the casual wave that was just then building and has now long since overtaken men’s fashion. The man who introduced Lorenzo to the Barneys buyers was Virgil Abloh, who is now the artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton but who was then launching his own fashion brand, O≠-White, and working as the creative director for Kanye West. Abloh, too, was being taken less than entirely seriously at the time, he told me, referring to the “streetwear” designation their clothing had received. “To call it streetwear,” Abloh said, “is in some ways to say: That’s not fashion design, what you guys do.” Lorenzo wasn’t yet sure if what he was doing could be considered fashion design, but after Paris he flew to New York and showed his collection to the department store anyway. What were the rules, the norms, the right way to do things? “I had no idea,” Lorenzo recalled. But he believed in the clothes, which channeled the disheveled suburban chic of The Breakfast Club and

In these photos, Jerry Lorenzo wears his breakthrough Fear of God seventh collection, featuring pieces that combine his precise approach to proportion and fit with his newly introduced take on tailoring. ←←

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Kurt Cobain and Lorenzo’s own nomadic American childhood, and as it turned out, so did Barneys. The store made an exception to its own seasonal rule and, despite what they’d told Lorenzo in Paris about how things were done, bought the collection on the spot. “I had the faith from that moment on that I didn’t need to play this game,” Lorenzo said. Over the next six years, Barneys would go on to buy five of his collections as his reputation and business grew. Kanye West, on Abloh’s recommendation, hired Lorenzo as a design consultant, a relationship that would last three and a half years and encompass West’s Yeezus tour, West’s first collection for the French fashion label A.P.C., and Yeezy season one and season two. Celebrities like Jay-Z, Rihanna, and John Mayer regularly wore Fear of God, and certain Fear of God pieces and silhouettes—bomber jackets, long-sleeve tees and short-sleeve hoodies, jeans riddled with zippers and holes, track pants that flare at the ankle—became ubiquitous, frequently copied by everyone from Lorenzo’s peers to Zara and H&M. “He is often credited as being a pioneer in

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even that.” Fear of God may have seemed, for a time, like it was merely part of a trend—“luxury streetwear”—but as the industry has changed and mutated, Lorenzo’s clothes have come to represent the center, rather than the margins, of men’s fashion. Today, Barneys and much of the old establishment it represented are gone, but Fear of God remains. “I think it’s our fault,” Lorenzo told me, only half-jokingly, about the end of the Barneys era. Fear of God and O≠-White and other brands founded by Black designers that combined elements of streetwear and high fashion—labels like Hood By Air—may have been gate-crashers when they started, but they were unusually talented gate-crashers. Their success opened the door for hundreds of other streetwear brands and designers, most of whom did not possess either the talent or the drive that Lorenzo and Abloh did. The mistake that stores like Barneys made, Lorenzo said, was in assuming that what he did was easy or repeatable by (continued on page 87)

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jacket $1,950 t-shirt $395 sweatpants $695 shoes $495 Fear of God styled by mindy le brock. grooming by eliven quiros. produced by natalie campbell

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BY ALEX W. PALMER PHOTOGRAPHS BY PELLE CASS

WHEN THE COUNTRY SHUT DOWN AND THE HIGHWAYS THINNED OUT, A STEALTHY GROUP OF AMATEUR CAR OBSESSIVES GLIMPSED AN OPPORTUNITY TO REVIVE THE FABLED CANNONBALL RUNâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;THE HIGHLY DARING, ABSURDLY ILLEGAL CROSS-COUNTRY ENDURANCE RACE. AND IN THE RECORD-BREAKING FRENZY THAT FOLLOWED, 7 4

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THEY BECAME LEGENDS OF THE UNLIKELIEST PASTIME OF THE PANDEMIC AGE.

The Ford Mustang that Fred Ashmore rented, modified, and then drove to Cannonball glory.

melting into panic. He was exhausted, which he knew was making everything worse. It was about 1 a.m., and he’d been at the wheel for almost 24 hours now, rocketing west at speeds well over 100 miles per hour. For lucky stretches, when the road opened up and Ashmore punched the throttle, he could get his silver Ford Mustang GT up to 159 mph— the car’s top speed, he’d discovered. Now, ahead of him in the inky-black night, he could see the ﬂash of brake lights, a river of travelers funneling into a slow-moving line. Before long, Ashmore was inching along the desert highway, feeling crucial minutes tick by and craning to see what was ahead. That’s when he noticed trunks popping open and a new fear took hold. O∞cials from the California Department of Food and Agriculture were searching vehicles entering the state. He watched a car in front of him stop and then get looked over from top to bottom. If they do that to my car, Ashmore thought, I’m probably not getting it back. On the outside, his Mustang looked pretty much like any other car on the road. Inside was another story. Splayed across Ashmore’s dashboard was an array of devices, including a CB radio, a mounted tablet operating Waze and Google Maps, and an iPhone running a timer. Stuck to the inside of the windshield was a radar detector; on the front grille and back bumper were the sensors for a laser jammer. Even more conspicuously, strapped beside and behind Ashmore, where the front and rear passenger seats should have been, huge fuel tanks sloshed with gasoline. A series of hoses connected them—along with another enormous tank, this one in the

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In fact, it was a vehicle customized for a single purpose: to complete the “Cannonball Run,” one of the great underground feats in American car culture—and to do it faster than anyone in history. Uno∞cial, unsanctioned, and spectacularly illegal, the Cannonball had been a staple of automotive lore for almost a half century before Ashmore’s attempt late last spring. The rules are simple: Drivers start in Manhattan, at the Red Ball Garage on East 31st Street, and ﬁnish at the Portoﬁno, a hotel in Redondo Beach, California. What happens in between is up to them. Not surprisingly, the race requires an almost astonishing—and endlessly creative—disregard for tra∞c laws.

bic dread of sleep deprivation. As he waited his turn in the slow-moving line, he imagined what was coming next: He was headed to jail, no doubt about it. But Ashmore had even prepared for that: He’d packed cash for bail. The o∞cer tapped on the driver’s side window and then noted the Texas plates on the Mustang. He asked what Ashmore’s business was in California. “I just took a job here,” he replied. “I’m moving.” Without so much as a second glance inside the vehicle, the o∞cer adopted a perfunctory tone and rattled through a list of fruits and vegetables, asking if Ashmore was bringing any of them across the border. That’s when Ashmore realized his worrying had been for naught. He

“DRIVING CROSS-COUNTRY IS ABOUT THE MOST AMERICAN THING YOU CAN DO. DRIVING IT AT SPEED, I FEEL, IS JUST THE EMBODIMENT Over the decades, teams had been chipping away at the time needed to cover the 2,800 miles—cutting the record by nearly 10 hours since 1971, until it rested at 27 hours and 25 minutes. But among the clique of Cannonball devotees who kept tabs on the sport, a refrain of conventional wisdom had set in: The record could hardly fall much lower. There were simply too many cars on the road, and every innovation in engineering and technology—better fuel economy, more horsepower, the advent of digital navigation—seemed only to increase the problem.

was going to avoid a night in jail. In fact, he ﬁgured the speed record might still be possible. His half-hour delay had been costly, but as Ashmore was waved along, his fear gave way to an adrenalized sense of urgency. He hammered the throttle and the speedometer quickly topped out. The desert opened ﬂat in front of him; he was desperate to make up for lost time. T H E R O M A N C E O F T H E American road trip is rooted in a simple, time-honored notion: Only by driving—ideally slow, meandering

Fred Ashmore crossed America in just under 26 hours.

driving—can we fully appreciate the vastness of this country. Fly overhead and you’ll reach your destination more quickly, but you’ll also miss everything in between. The Cannonball run ﬂips that idea on its head, inviting us to see that even when experienced on four wheels, the country can be made to seem quite small, conquerable even—something you can wrap your arms around. The Cannonball is the ultimate road trip, even as it jettisons the usual conventions of the road trip: There are no stops for photos, no detours to sample the World’s Greatest Pancakes, no putting the top down to shout

Yates set out from New York City, bound for Los Angeles. At the time that he conceived of the trip, the country was in the grips of a panic over automotive safety, sparked in part by the consumer advocate Ralph Nader and his famous book, Unsafe at Any Speed. The alarm helped catalyze the creation of the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Tra∞c Safety Administration and prompted the passage of seat belt laws in dozens of states. A push for a national speed limit of 55 mph—justified on the grounds of both safety and fuel conservation—was gaining traction as well. Yates, a lifelong champion of civil disobedience and libertarian ideas, had a di≠erent vision of America’s roads. Yates wanted to show that it was possible for Americans to drive safely at high speeds on the interstate, just as Germans did on the Autobahn. “Yes, make high-speed travel by car a reality!” Yates wrote. “Truth and justice a∞rmed by an overtly illegal act.” Forty hours and 51 minutes after Yates— along with two friends and his 14-year-old son—set o≠, he reached Los Angeles. The nonstop drive was a test run for an audacious plan that Yates had hatched: a multicar race across America that would prove, once and for all, that capable drivers in capable cars could cross the country faster and more safely than anyone imagined. Or, as Yates put it: “a ballsout, shoot-the-moon, fuck-the-establishment rumble from New York to Los Angeles.” The starting point of the race would be the Red Ball Garage, on East 31st Street in Manhattan, where Yates’s employer, Car and Driver magazine, kept a test fleet of cars. The destination, the Portofino Inn, in Redondo Beach, California, was owned by a friend of Yates’s. He called the race the Cannonball Baker Seato-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. The name was an homage to Erwin “Cannon Ball” Baker, the father of American endurance racing and the holder, for almost 40 years, of the transcontinental record, with

But by 1979, the Cannonball was more carnival than competition, with teams masquerading as EMTs, o≠-duty cops, and even a crew of satellite tracking-and-recovery specialists. Though Yates seemed to relish the mayhem as much as anyone—he drove the fake ambulance, after all—he also got tired of it, and feared what it might produce. “I stopped the race, because I knew sooner or later that somebody was going to get killed,” he said years later. His disillusionment only increased when, in 1981, Burt Reynolds immortalized the race on film as a slapstick comedy. Critics savaged The Cannonball Run. “The whole movie thing has never been a source of great pride for me,” Yates later wrote in Car and Driver. After Yates pulled the plug, the event began to peter out and the record setting went largely dormant. In 1983, a new record of 32 hours and seven minutes was set in a successor event called the U.S. Express, but after that, there were no verified attempts for nearly a quarter century. Of course, during that same period, the movie—much to Yates’s consternation—became a cult hit, circulating among new generations of car enthusiasts like a relic of a lost time and indoctrinating scores of would-be Cannonballers into the gospel of speed. All they needed was for someone to make the first move.

by the Cannonball was Ed Bolian, a car-crazed teenager in suburban Atlanta. In 2004 he reached out to Yates, who was cordial but insistent: With the number of cars now on the road, not to mention the number of cops, it was impossible to beat the old records or to push beyond the 30-hour wall. But the Cannonball wasn’t dead yet. In May 2006 the event got a jolt of energy when Alex Roy, a rally driver, and Dave Maher, a Wall Street banker, drove a souped-up 2000 BMW M5 from the Red Ball Garage to the Santa AMONG THOSE INFATUATED

OF THE AMERICAN OUTLAW SPIRIT, KIND OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AT ITS FINEST.” along to the radio as the wind whips by. These trips are thrillingly tactical, planned down to the minute—built, for instance, around tra∞c light cycles in Manhattan and peak usage times at rural gas stations. A competitor spends hours prepping with satellite maps and complex spreadsheets, constructing timetables that break the country into ﬁve-mile increments. All that work, designed to avoid spontaneity. And yet it was a kind of spontaneity that birthed the race back in 1971, when a 37-yearold automotive journalist named Brock

a time of 53 hours and 30 minutes. The inaugural Cannonball run was held six months after Yates’s initial cross-country journey and featured eight teams and 23 participants. Among the entrants were a ﬂight attendant, two restaurateurs, and a Union Oil public relations professional in a Travco Motor Home. Driving a Ferrari Daytona, Yates and his teammate, a professional racer named Dan Gurney, smashed Baker’s record with a time of 35 hours and 54 minutes. When Yates’s tonguein-cheek chronicle of the race appeared in Car and Driver, the event became a sensation.

Monica Pier in 31 hours and four minutes. Roy and Maher’s run brought the race into the modern era—but it did very little to make the record seem attainable for an average car guy like Bolian. Roy’s pursuit of the record had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and was even aided by a rented spotter plane that ﬂew ahead of him to look out for cops. In subsequent interviews, Roy described the run in daunting terms—you will fail, you will get arrested, you will die—perhaps in the hope of scaring o≠ any would-be followers who might try for his new record. (continued on page 90)

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billionaires” and “babies, who have no idea what’s happening in the world,” you’ll find Paul Mescal. Mescalmania first took hold as April turned into May and we were, by then, fully entrenched in the reality of a global catastrophe. As we were shut in our homes for weeks on end with limited human contact, the prevailing mood was “sad,” trailed closely by “horny.” Then along came Normal People, a show that was profoundly, excessively both. Adapted from the wildly popular novel of the same name by Sally Rooney, the BBC and Hulu series follows the on-again, o≠-again relationship between two Irish millennials named Connell (Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) during their final year of high school and throughout college. Over the course of 12 episodes, there’s abundant, well-lit sex, a fair amount of crying, and an intensifying sense that you’re witnessing the making of a leading man, one who will be appearing on our screens for years and years to come. It’s all the more impressive when you realize this is Mescal’s television debut. He embodies Connell, an erudite and sensitive jock from a working-class family, so thoroughly as to be uncanny: Rooney, who is also an executive producer and writer on the show, even told the actor that he was exactly who she was imagining when she wrote the book. Audiences were captivated, and Normal People catapulted the 24-year-old from unknown Irish lad to international sensation in the span of a binge watch. The breadth of the phenomenon is such that Mescal is both the subject of teenagers fawning “i want paul mescal to crush me with his thighs” on Twitter and esteemed author Lorrie Moore writing that he “strongly resembles Michelangelo’s David” in The New York Review of Books. More than 185,000 people, including several adults I know, now follow an Instagram account that is solely devoted to posting photos of Connell’s chain necklace. Part of this can be chalked up to his palpable moviestar magnetism, the kind that makes you picture an old-timey studio exec chomping on a cigar and barking, “Either you have it or you don’t, kid.” (He has it.) Lenny Abrahamson, who directed six episodes of Normal People, ventures a guess that Mescal’s appeal stems from

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his specific brand of masculinity. “You can see phases in the movie industry where leading men were very broad-chested, big and strong. And then you can see phases where they became slighter and more delicate. Paul is an interesting combination,” Abrahamson tells me. “I think what people fell in love with was that beautiful combination of sensitivity and power. It’s such an unusual combination.” When Mescal and I talk one afternoon in late August, he’s wearing a plain white T-shirt and chugging a can of Coke as his Zoom flickers on. Based on my limited view of his space—a gray couch against an unadorned wall—I can confirm that his interior-decor scheme is 24-Year-Old Guy’s Apartment. (He shares his London flat with a roommate, the actress India Mullen, whom he befriended when she played Peggy on Normal People.) “It’s weird. I know that when I look back, I’ll remember COVID and how awful this year has been generally,” he tells me. “But then, personally? It’s been pretty, pretty good.” How good? In the lead-up to Normal People, he signed with a big-league Hollywood agency. (CAA.) Afterward he nabbed a best-lead-actor Emmy nomination for, again, his first television role ever. (“So beyond thrilled.”) Followed that up by starring in a music video for a littleknown band called the Rolling Stones. (“So fun.”) Then topped it all o≠ by being cast in his first feature film, alongside Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, another literary adaptation of a work by a lauded contemporary writer—this time, Elena Ferrante. (“Absolutely surreal.”) So yeah. Pretty, pretty good.

he was suddenly famous came to Mescal while he was indoors and scrolling through his phone as a newcomer to a city he had moved to just before it went into lockdown. “Maybe it’s just my algorithm on Twitter, but it seemed like my demographic was kind of going mad for the show,” he says. “And that was a moment for a big exhale and ‘Okay. Thank God people don’t hate it. In fact, people kind of like it a lot.’ ” Since that big exhale, he’s been spending his time reading incoming scripts, boxing, and appeasing the press demands that come with being the year’s hot new breakout. (When we talk there seems to be a slight undercurrent of Zoom fatigue.) Then, as Europe began to reopen in July, he ventured back out into the world and got a tangible grasp of just how much everything had really changed for him. Abrahamson recalls catching up with Mescal in Ireland after the show premiered and seeing people “coming out of pubs and houses” when they realized the actor was among them. “That’s very un-Irish. Irish people pride themselves on not bothering famous people,” says Abrahamson. “It was a bit like some kind of zombie apocalypse, with people walking towards the prize with their arms outstretched.” Although Mescal looks like he sprang fully formed from Sally Rooney’s head, he grew up the eldest of three children in a small town in County Kildare and had what he calls a “pretty wonderfully normal” childhood. “I was good in school. I didn’t particularly like getting in trouble. I wasn’t particularly rebellious,” Mescal says. “I think I may have spoiled it for my younger siblings.” Mom worked as a (text continued on page 84) THE REALIZATION THAT

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garda, or police o∞cer, while Dad was an elementary school teacher—and yes, they’ve both seen Normal People. “They love it,” Mescal says. “Probably a bit weird seeing their son or whatever naked, but they got over that quickly.” Mescal’s muscular thighs, a topic that is discussed frequently and with great enthusiasm by his fandom, were built playing Gaelic football. Defense, specifically. “I was definitely not the most skilled,” he tells me. “I was good at getting in the way of people, annoying people, throwing my body around. I was quite diligent. I trained and I worked really hard because I didn’t have the skill set that other people possessed.” Brendan Hackett, his old football coach, remembers it di≠erently. “I would say he is being humble there, in my opinion,” he says. A good Gaelic football player, Hackett explains, has to possess four qualities: physical fitness, mental fitness, technical ability, and tactical awareness. “I would say that Paul had a balance right across the four areas, which is very unusual to come across,” he says. “Very mature and very grounded.” Abrahamson,

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too, singles out Mescal’s “maturity” as the one word that comes to mind: “Given somebody who is very young and hadn’t been on set before, he was neither intimidated nor was he cocky,” he says. Despite Mescal’s age, this does not manifest onscreen as precociousness but as a sense of ease and self-possession. As a teenager, Mescal always thought that he would pursue a practical career path—law, for instance—that would allow him to play Gaelic football on the side. Then, at 16, he had his ﬁrst experience on the stage, as the Phantom in a high school production of The Phantom of the Opera. “I’ve never gotten a buzz or a high like that ever in my life,” he told me earlier this year. “I’d been chasing that to some degree.” The closer he got to making his original plan a reality, the less he wanted it. And so he applied and got in to the Lir Academy at Trinity College, in Dublin, where, for a while, he tried to juggle both acting and football. (A broken jaw sustained during a match made him realize the latter wasn’t compatible with the former.) Postcollege, he starred in a couple of plays, including a production of The Great Gatsby, before vaulting to Normal People. When a gifted young actor shows up seemingly out of nowhere, there can be a sense that they possess an inexplicable talent. Mescal understands this but, as with football, credits his practice. “I know for a fact that if I hadn’t gone to drama school or if I hadn’t worked in the theater for two years, I wouldn’t have been able to do the job that I wanted to do on Normal People,” he says. After the show was released, he watched it all the way through once and then “put it to bed.” But that’s not to say that he’s done with Connell by any means. “For as long as I get to act, I will feel very attached to him,” he says. (The main di≠erences between him and Connell, by the way, are “how emotionally unavailable” and “how unsure and insecure” the character is.) And he is, for better or worse, intertwined with Connell in the public eye while he adjusts to his newfound level of fame. His Normal People costar Daisy Edgar-Jones tells me in an email that she and Mescal “are both still so in the midst of processing it, as now we are able to leave the house and see the change in real life, not just online.” I wonder if Normal People would have resonated to the extent that it did if it hadn’t entered the ether during the early days of coronavirus isolation, and I pose the question to Mescal. “I think there would have been an appetite for the show, pandemic or no pandemic, but it has deﬁnitely brought an audience to it faster than it would in ordinary circumstances,” he concedes. Lord knows that Rooney’s book has its own cottage industry of discourse at this point, but the fact that it had such mass appeal with, well, normal people probably guaranteed the adaptation some measure of success. Throw in two extraordinary young leads, honest depictions of intimacy, and a global pandemic keeping everyone glued to their television and laptop screen, and you’ve got all the trappings of a hit. “The fandom on the show has been amazing, and seeing people have articulate discussions about character is so satisfying,” says Mescal, who notes that “99 percent” of his interactions with fans have been “really positive.” And that’s not even mentioning the praise he’s received from veteran actors, from Hugh Jackman to Richard E. Grant. (continued on page 86)

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Some aspects of celebrity are a bit stranger. Getting photographed wearing short shorts on the way back from the corner shop, for instance. Or going for a jog. Or simply walking down the street looking at his phone. “I just find the whole thing a little bit toxic,” he says of the paparazzi. He underwent his first round of relationship speculation in the tabloids this summer, when reports emerged that he and the indie musician Phoebe Bridgers ate breakfast together in Ireland. (He declined to talk about the particulars.) And how does he feel about Connell’s chain—the chain that launched a thousand posts and think pieces and shopping guides?

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“I just ﬁnd the whole thing a little bit toxic,” Mescal says of the paparazzi. “It wasn’t something that we put any focus on during filming. I think there has been a kind of leaning on the sexualizing of it, which has been a little bit di∞cult to adjust to,” Mescal says. “I don’t really have a response to it, because I don’t know what to say other than it’s a chain, and it’s a chain that’s referenced in the book, and it’s a chain that Connell wears. It’s not something I lie in bed thinking about at night.” (Mescal did seize on the momentum and ra±e o≠ his own, similar chain, raising 70,000 euros for a suicide-prevention organization in Ireland. He gave Edgar-Jones the original from the show as a gift.) The attention swirling around the chain does get at something deeper: the reality of coming to prominence in the middle of an era when over-the-top male objectification is par for the course. I ask if it bothers him. “Honest answer? Yes,” he tells me. “It’s not something that I try to lean into. But I put it down to the audience’s associations with Connell rather than with me.” He is quick to say that, of course, he is not ambivalent about his fame. That he feels “totally privileged” to be in the position that he’s in. He is, after all, having a great year. One of the best, even. And if anyone didn’t expect it to all happen so quickly for Paul Mescal, it was Paul Mescal. “To be thrust into the spotlight in a time when everyone’s living in these really stressful environments of fucking COVID and trying to survive…” He takes a deep sigh. “It’s just been the most adrenaline-fueled, stressful, exciting time of my life.” gabriella paiella is a gq sta≠ writer. 8 6

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and early June asking questions of himself: What can I do? What is my role in all this? He felt conflicted when he sprang to action and conflicted when he stood still. But never did things feel less uncertain, less self-conscious, than when he was marching, anonymously, alongside hundreds or thousands of others in Los Angeles in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. It was an active way to participate—meaningful action, without being showy, without flexing any of the levers of fame or power. He was going to get hit no matter what he did, so he tried to follow his instincts of what felt humble, responsible, right. “This idea,” he said, “that power is the mass body politic organized—and how many bodies can you get together—that makes sense to me.” He didn’t disappear but, rather, stripped himself of his him-ness and became one body, among many, taking up space and participating in an unequivocal statement. “With a mask, a hood, a hat, glasses—my face is deleted,” he explained, “and I’m literally presenting a physical form, you know?” A single body in space that, like a vote cast in an election, is democracy embodied, but anonymous. The same unit of power as anyone else. “People might find it disingenuous, but I found it really grounding,” he said. “It was Oh shit, I don’t feel out of place—and yet I haven’t been in a crowd like this for years.” He spent much of the summer talking with others about how a person should be in a cultural and political moment such as this one. “After a day of protests,” he said, “I’d ask friends if they ‘felt good.’ If we do, is it a good thing to feel good, or does that mean we’re doing it for the wrong reasons? How much do I want to put on social media? Is it a virtue signal to put it on social media? But all social media is performative, right?” I heard him ask dozens of self-interrogating questions like these. He cares so genuinely about doing the right thing, about doing well by his family, his friends, and his fans. But he didn’t want to misuse his privilege or his platform, to overreach so that the gravity of his fame sucked up anything from anyone else whose moment it was to speak. He didn’t want to take up room; he wanted to help center other voices. On Instagram, he posted videos each day during the first week of marches in Los Angeles—no directives into camera, just an implicit charge to his followers: Show up. Listen. Be a body. “I have so many thoughts on so much of it,” he said, “but I don’t see the benefit of putting it down for consumption until I’ve really worked out exactly how I feel about it all. Who benefits from my half-baked ideas?” Who cannot relate

to this in 2020? Who would want any of their dinnertime conversations with family and friends these past months chiseled into the stone of the internet? “I care so much about this stuff. But I would never want my caring to be misconstrued. I don’t want my caring to be about me in any way.” God, this stuff twisted him up. He knows how much has gone his way. But from the summit of good fortune and power, is it better to speak constantly—or to shut up, put on the glasses, pull down the hood, and live and act according to one’s convictions as one individual among many individuals? To march. To vote. To speak through action rather than words. Staying in motion, showing up, being a body—it’s a good place to start while he works out the rest of how he’s meant to live a life true to his values with everyone watching. He’s seeking out the right path, the right people—with help from his “intergenerational peers” and Dylan and anyone else he can find. He wants the benefit of their knowledge and experience, and he’s okay if it’s slow going to accrue it. He’s open to playing the role of the novice still. But there have also been things in his life these past of couple years that have made him realize, as he puts it, “adults are just kids a little bit older.” When he returned to New York from Los Angeles this summer, it wasn’t to his childhood apartment or to a borrowed living space of an acquaintance. It was to his very own apartment, his first, in a little wedge of Manhattan he loved for being nowhere, but on the edge of several somewheres. He relished the mundanity of setting up his own place. To hear him talk about a first trip to CB2 was like hearing another person talk about their first trip to a movie set. “But I think if people saw what my apartment looked like, they’d be like, ‘Oh! This kid has no fucking clue what he’s doing.’ ” He is so young and he is so old. It is his gift. He is so patient when he can suppress being so restless. So careful with

“I’ve realized that as much as these heroes of mine mean to me, and as grateful as I am when they o≠er me advice, even they acknowledge it’s just a di≠erent thing now.” the long arc of a career when he can resist obsessing over the instant. He is so confident when he centers on the work and so searching when he gets sucked down into questions about the rest of his life. Will he always be this way? This pliable and open? This self-reflective and intentional? He trusted so little of his new life, but he trusted his talent. That was the key. He knew he was as good as anyone at playing other people, even if he was still figuring out how to play himself.

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take him from here. With great humility, he acknowledges his skill. But he has been thinking a lot about the difference between preternatural talent and mastery—the work that’s required to ascend from that floor of young greatness to the ceiling of realized potential. That said, he’s wise enough to know that his career could pivot in an entirely different direction—that the world could change or the opportunities could dry up or “eventually there’s gonna be an Oscar Isaac in his 30s who’s gonna bust out of Juilliard who’s gonna be the next great actor and make me feel like a piece of shit. But right now…” He told me, “If I get hit by a truck next week, I’m looking at 20 to 23, I don’t know if you can top that.” To show up with Call Me by Your Name—he knows that that film was a unicorn, the sort an actor works his whole life to find. And the immediate Oscar nomination had freed him up to not spend the rest of his career chasing a certain kind of role that might lead to a certain kind of validation. “I’m not gonna be bashing my head against a wall trying to prove that I’m an actor,” he said. “The train can run over my leg and leave a track forever, and yet the point of entry for me…,” he said, trailing. “That’s a good feeling.” He looks at all these careers—all the careers you might expect: DiCaprio, Bale, Phoenix, Depp. And he does his best to separate the strands of each of their careers that might still apply to his. But all of the rules for acting success that those performers played by, for how to be in the public eye, for career arcs and longevity—those rules are irrelevant now. Hollywood is different, the media is different, fans are different, movies are different, the world is different. “I’ve realized that as much as these heroes of mine mean to me, and as grateful as I am when they offer me advice, even they acknowledge it’s just a different thing now.” And so it’s occurring to him that the next few years will be Timothée finding the path that’s right for him. Lately, he’s thought about this next phase as shining a flashlight into the dark. There are potential projects that excite him considerably, some of which he’s had a greater hand in engineering. There is, of course, the Dylan movie. But there’s the question of how to spend the rest of the year, when most Hollywood productions are still paused. “The rest of the year,” he says, “I’m just thinking about Trump, man.” But after that…maybe Europe for a while? The Woodstock experiment did what he’d hoped it would—a little space, somewhere else. He would love to just breathe some different air again. He was at another pivot point, as he had been when he and I were first together for Chapter 1. In the winter of 2018, the work had been validated, the public profile had developed suddenly. But the temptations, the confusion, the money—those were all lagging indicators. By mid-2020, all had caught up. And the money, in particular, was on his mind one afternoon in New York. We were talking about how a person might stay true to one’s roots with that sort of thing when the reality, for him at least, had changed with Dune. I told him that one of the things that seemed to differentiate him from young stars of the past, and perhaps was a feature of his

generation, was the way that material possessions didn’t consume him. He didn’t buy much stuff. He didn’t own a car or a house. He liked borrowing clothes, but not necessarily keeping them. He agreed with the characterization, but then got immediately twisted up about a potential future hypocrisy: “But Dan, what if I do grow to like fancy shit?!” Boomeranging back home after the surreal adventures out in the world—that was a good and grounding thing for him. Over the weeks we were talking, he spent time with his folks, delivered some COVID groceries to his grandma, and was in touch with his sister daily. And in New York, he and I kept running into ghosts. One afternoon, when we crossed the West Side Highway at Houston Street, he gestured at the athletic complex at Pier 40, where he played soccer growing up. He scampered over to a vending machine there to grab a bottle of water. When he pulled open his wallet to pay, he had only twenties. “Bad metaphor! Bad metaphor!” he screamed, jumping away from the vending machine, as though it were one of the great threats to his selfhood. This was the sort of innocuous moment that will hum with outsize resonance for me when I think about Chapter 2 from the future. All the things that one would expect to happen had happened in the first two and a half years since the arrival of a comet, and yet he was suspicious of so much of it. Here is another way I will remember him from this moment: sitting on that porch in Woodstock—breeze and birds in the trees, sunlight in the leaves—looking for a higher power. Or at least expressing openness, as a nonreligious person, to the idea of some central organizing force in the universe— because, given everything lately, there has to be or we’re fucked, right? Some of these searching things he said to me could be mistaken as a person spinning out a little. But that wasn’t it at all. There was such calm. There was such contentment with the grace that had been afforded his life and career thus far, and where each might take him next. He was questing, yes—but he was firmly at the controls. The flashlight in the dark. Someone moving forward with great confidence into the unknown, with eyes wide, mouth shut, and ears listening more than they ever had before. There were no models for how a person like him should be anymore. There were no longer any adults who weren’t just kids a little bit older. There were no blueprints for how to shape a career—so much had changed. There was only a head and a heart, his, and a feeling for the moment. “Maybe I’ll never do a great work of art again, but I just feel like I’m confident in the way I’m trying to approach things now, how I’m setting up the angles,” he said on that porch in Woodstock. “When you think about Dylan. When you think about what Joel Coen said about the rapidness of the art, I’m just like: Trust the beat of your own drum. Give this its best shot. Give your artistry its best shot.”

daniel riley is a gq correspondent and the author of ‘Barcelona Days,’ which was published this past summer.

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someone else who might have happened to look like him. “And I just feel like Barneys went in this direction, like, ‘Oh, there must be so many other brands like this,’ ” Lorenzo said. “And the reality is, no, there’s not. You’ve got a few people that have strong points of view in this space. But I feel like after we broke through it was just like all types of brands were in there shortly after that. And I was like, ‘Maybe we’re responsible for the death of Barneys in some indirect way.’ ” Lorenzo, who is tattooed and handsome, with the compact build of the second baseman that he used to be, was telling me this story in Fear of God’s suite of temporary o∞ces in downtown Los Angeles, where the company is currently at work constructing a new permanent space. He sat at a long table, surrounded by pieces from his seventh and most recent collection. Fear of God employs a few manufacturers in Italy now, to make the tailoring and knitwear that are increasingly part of the label, but most of its clothing is made here, in Los Angeles, where the company works with 13 di≠erent factories. Remaining rooted in America, and in Southern California, has been a purposeful choice for Lorenzo. Abloh, after the success of O≠-White, eventually went to Europe, the traditional center of power in the fashion world. So did Matthew Williams, another former Kanye West employee, now ensconced as the creative director of Givenchy. But Lorenzo has stayed. Partly, he told me, this is because “in my heart of hearts, I have felt like no matter how good I am—and this is maybe the Blackness in me—but I’m not really wanted there anyhow.” But mostly Lorenzo has remained in America because here is where his ambitions lie. “My gifts and talents aren’t in the artistic, conceptual expression of fashion,” he told me. “It’s more in like: How do you make something sophisticated for everyday reality?” Fear of God may have seemed, at the outset, like something trivial or rarefied, for cool kids to wear, but Lorenzo has always had his sights on something bigger and more universal. He wants, he told me, to build what a key predecessor in American fashion, Ralph Lauren, has built— clothes for more or less everyone. “That’s the only comparison that I see,” Lorenzo said. To cynics, or to those who understand the truly vast scale of what Ralph Lauren encompasses, this might sound ridiculous, but Lorenzo believes it. He believes that the uniquely American circumstances that birthed him and brought him up have made him the man to succeed the most accomplished American fashion designer of the past 50 years. “There was an American point of

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view that I think he landed on,” Lorenzo told me about Lauren. “But I think now, 50 years post that, the world’s a little bit more mixed and the style cues are coming from all over now. Where I feel like his style cues came from maybe one demographic or one aspiration, I think mine are coming from a little bit more of a wider range of American aspirations.” Lorenzo still doesn’t adhere to the dictates of the traditional fashion calendar—he puts out a new Fear of God collection only when he’s ready, usually once every years or so. His seventh collection includes denim and sneakers and a classical, graphic homage to the Negro Leagues, but for the ﬁrst time, it also contains elevated knitwear, louche suiting, even loafers: e≠ortless but expertly tailored clothes made to be worn from inside, rather than outside, the gates. Since its unveiling in August, the collection has been hailed by publications from the Los Angeles Times to Vogue as a breakthrough— “a transitional punctuation mark between ‘emerging’ and ‘emerged,’ ” as the latter put it. The collection takes the same energy Lorenzo had once put behind reinventing streetwear and turns it toward the entirety of the male wardrobe. The statement is as clear as the graphic he might have once a∞xed to a hoodie: Fear of God doesn’t just make T-shirts anymore. It makes anything you might think to put on. “He is very sophisticated,” said Alessandro Sartori, the artistic director of Zegna, with whom Lorenzo collaborated on a collection earlier this year. “It’s not just about one element. It’s the combination of materials, of colors, of attitude, of mood—everything is very chic and sophisticated.” Abloh was more direct: “To me, Jerry’s latest collection is proof that he’s producing, generationally, the pinnacle of new American luxury.” The particular mix of inspirations behind Fear of God—God and baseball, Nirvana and rap, suburban malls and rare, deadstock vintage—is something that Lorenzo comes by honestly. Born Jerry Lorenzo Manuel, he is the son of former Major League Baseball manager Jerry Manuel and grew up traveling the country as his father changed jobs, showing up every few years as the new kid in a new place. “I’ve been crossing worlds my whole life, going to an all-white school and trying to hang out with the small group of Black kids, and also trying to ﬁt in with the punk kids and the skaters,” he said. “And I think one of the things Fear of God has been able to do is take all those cues but just say one thing. We’re not saying hip-hop, we’re not saying grunge, we’re not saying Wall Street. We’re just saying: This is American fashion.”

his creative director peers, Jerry Lorenzo actually wears what he designs, and Fear of God’s most iconic silhouettes have often come o≠ his own back. The typical style (track pants, jerseys, cozy sweatshirts) and proportion of a Fear of God outﬁt—slim on the bottom, oversize on top, and frequently layered inside out, short on top of long, as if the wearer got dressed in reverse—are, in Lorenzo’s telling, straightforwardly autobiographical. “My whole life, even though my dad’s been in baseball, we never had money,” UNLIKE MANY OF

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he said, referring to his father’s years coaching in the minor leagues. “So, being in certain circles and not having dollars to buy the things that you wanted to represent, I really tried to utilize what I had in the best way possible to have a point of view—whether that’s turning my T-shirt inside out to kind of show that I’m not caring, or if that’s playing on proportions, with a jacket that says hip-hop and your jeans that say Hedi Slimane.” Jared Leto said, “His work creates stories based on his personal experience, his passions, and his dreams. When you’re wearing Fear of God, you’re sharing in that personal vision.” Jerry Manuel coached for the Montreal Expos and the Florida Marlins before becoming the manager of the Chicago White Sox and then the New York Mets, and Lorenzo grew up immersed in baseball. “I think that’s where he gets his inspiration from, from those players he was around all the time, that had that kind of swagger,” Manuel told me. “It’s funny, he never looked at the strategy of the sport. He looked at the swag. My other kids, they know more about the strategy than he does. But he was looking at the uniform and the combination with the ballpark and how it was built and what should be on the uniform: ‘The logo should be over here, Dad, and not over there.’ I’d say: ‘I’m trying to win games. I don’t care where the logo is!’ ” The Manuel household was a place of deep faith—the name Fear of God, Lorenzo says, is literal—high expectations, and abiding self-confidence. “There is a scripture that says, in Him we live, move, and have our being,” Lorenzo’s mother, Renette, said. “So when you’re confident in who you are, you live and you move in that.” She told me that as a child, Lorenzo “was easygoing but extremely intentional with what he wanted to do.” For years, though, what Lorenzo wanted to do was not obvious, even to him. He tried his hand at the family trade, playing baseball as a walk-on at Oral Roberts before transferring to Florida A&M. “I was all right,” he said, “but I wasn’t… If I would’ve gotten drafted, I would’ve maybe spent four or five years just in the minor leagues, never would’ve made it to the big leagues.” So instead he went to graduate school, getting an MBA from Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, and then going to work in the Dodgers’ front o∞ce. Thinking he might become a sports agent, he moved to Chicago for a year to work as one, then came back to Los Angeles in 2008. He worked as a manager for the former Dodgers star Matt Kemp and, for a while, dated the actress Meagan Good, which exposed him to the city’s nightlife scene. “We were out every night,” Lorenzo said. “And so I had this Rolodex of, like, not only promoters but nightclubs, and I knew all the socialites just from being out with this Hollywood girlfriend.” Lorenzo decided to begin promoting parties of his own. “In the same way that I noticed a gap in the market between luxury and streetwear,” he told me, “there was a hole in nightlife where it was either you were going to an A-list Hollywood party and it was all techno music, or if you wanted to hear hip-hop, it was kinda like a hood party. There wasn’t an in-between. And me and my buddy were like, ‘Yo, our friends are the in-between. Let’s create

something where we can all come and have a good time and hear what we want and people are dressed like us and look like us.’ ” The parties were successful, but they also took a toll. He was drinking a lot and keeping odd hours. Lorenzo was ambivalent enough about the work that he started going only by his first and middle names. “Some of the things that he went through, that got him to the place where he is now, weren’t really things that were satisfying for me,” his father told me. “You know, the parties, those types of things. And to be honest with you, I think that’s why he used the name Lorenzo instead of my name.” Lorenzo began to notice that a disproportionate number of people who were coming to his parties were kids who owned their own brands and that they all seemingly had plenty of money to spend. He told me, “I was like, ‘Nothing against y’all, but if I can dress better than y’all, then I think I should be able to figure this out too.’ ” Plus, the economics made sense to the former MBA student: “I’m leaving, like, making a couple grand a night, and I’m like, ‘Nah, I can sell two jackets and beat that. Let me change my plan.’ You know what I mean?” So he scraped the money together to have some T-shirts made and came up with the name Fear of God, an acknowledgment of both the faith he was steeped in growing up and his departures from it along the way. Virgil Abloh told me he remembers going to Lorenzo’s garage to look at some of the first Fear of God pieces—Lorenzo just pulling samples from cardboard boxes. What happened next was lucky, but it was also validation of what Fear of God was supposed to be from the outset, which was simple, practical, solutions-based. Abloh “left with a bunch of long tanks and long tees, and one thing led to another,” Lorenzo recalled. “He gave it to Kanye, and I got a call shortly after that. But it just came from this conviction of, like, ‘I can’t find the perfect T-shirt. Someone else has gotta be struggling with this, you know?’ ”

F E A R O F G O D C L O T H I N G is expensive: An Italian-made knit hoodie from the brand’s most recent collection retails for $1,100; a track pant, one of the most inﬂuential and consistently knocked-o≠ Fear of God pieces, sells for $795. Fear of God prices have always been high, a reﬂection of the quality of both the materials and the fabrication and also of the fact there is an allure to things that are hard to come by, something Lorenzo knows well from personal experience. “When I used to buy Rick Owens, 12 years ago, I couldn’t a≠ord it,” he told me. “But it was dope enough, so I found the money.” More recently, as Barneys has failed and Fear of God has moved some of its retail operation online, Lorenzo has found that his customers actually prefer a certain level of inaccessibility. “I think the way our customers shop, there’s something about a store that gets stale to them,” he told me. “It’s like, ‘Oh, God, why are these jeans still here?’ Well, because we replenished them because they sold out. ‘But I didn’t want them to be available. I wanted them to be sold out.’ ”

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Even so, Lorenzo’s instincts are generally more populist than those of many of his peers. “I’m a regular dude,” he told me. “I’m an athlete. I’m not into fashion in that way—I don’t follow creative directors or seasons or di≠erent houses and geek out over certain things.” Throughout the years, Fear of God has collaborated with Nike, on a very successful sneaker; Justin Bieber, on a line of tour merch; and Disney, on custom jackets for the cast of Black Panther. “If I’m honest about my influences, they’ve been larger-scale influences,” Lorenzo said. “They’ve been films, movies, platforms that I feel like most of the world has access to. My style isn’t from this obscure world of nuanced fashion. So much of what informs Fear of God is, like, mass-available product. It’s more in how we put it together and this American point of view that we have on everything.” Lorenzo’s gift is less in creating the new and more in elevating the familiar—a useful skill for companies and individuals who want to speak to, and be heard by, as many people as possible. Lorenzo’s fascination with mass-available product led him, early on, to attempt a version of his own: a more a≠ordable and less rarefied version of Fear of God, called F.O.G., that was sold at PacSun stores. “I have more family members that shop in the mall than go to Barneys,” Lorenzo told me. F.O.G. did not work—in practice, it was simply a lesser and cheaper version of Lorenzo’s main line, and looked like it—and Lorenzo eventually replaced F.O.G. with what he now calls Essentials: a streamlined but more intentional “little brother” to Fear of God, featuring stripped-down hoodies and T-shirts with prominent logos on them that retail for as little as $40 and sell out almost instantly. One day in early September, Lorenzo invited me to attend a fitting for an upcoming photo shoot for the most recent Essentials collection. When I arrived at the photo studio, in Hollywood, he was shu±ing through a stack of photos his assistant had printed out, points of reference for the styling and the shoot, which would take place the next day—photos of Andre Agassi in his wild ’90s on-court glory, vintage Hilfiger ads, decadesold paparazzi photos of dressed-down stars in airports. Two fit models, on whom Lorenzo would try out and perfect various combinations of the clothes, arrived. Fear of God has grown over the years—the company now has more than 30 employees—but Lorenzo still does a good deal of the work himself. As I watched, he pinned the reference photos to a whiteboard, hit play on a Spotify playlist— OutKast, Michael McDonald, Mase, Simply Red—assembled a clothing rack, and wheeled it into a fitting room that had been improvised in the corner of the studio, where he began styling the models. The pieces came in Fear of God’s regular color palette—worn-out denim and comfortable sweatshirts in earthy pale greens and sandy grays and gray sands and gray blacks and actual grays, colors to escape notice in but that photograph well—and unbalanced silhouette. As I watched, I thought of something Alessandro Sartori told me about Fear of God. “It’s very languid and fluid and romantic, which feels very American,” he said. “That

is not a European taste, those colors, that feel and proportion. It’s coming from a speciﬁcally American color palette and character. It’s that California type of feeling.” After Lorenzo styled the models, they would pose, and his assistant would photograph the look for reference. One model emerged wearing black biker shorts and a baggy green sweatshirt with white sneakers and o≠-white wool socks, looking like Julia Roberts out for a run in a ’90s rom-com. The other model followed, styled in jeans and a gray sweatshirt under a light blue denim jacket with the sleeves rolled up. For a moment, I could smell the suburban-mall Gap stores I had frequented as a teenager. Lorenzo worked quickly and with a minimum of drama. For a former party promoter, Lorenzo is surprisingly quiet, even vulnerable. It is hard to imagine him raising his voice in a nightclub. He is straightforward and honest about his insecurities and fears and the fact that his time in the white-hot center of popular culture has left him with more than a few bruises. The early rise of Fear of God was inextricable from Lorenzo’s years working with Kanye West, whose personal style, for a time, seemed to merge with Lorenzo’s own. “I started working for him because he liked Fear of God,” Lorenzo told me. “I started designing with him on A.P.C., and then he was starting Yeezy, and I was working on Yeezy. At the same time, I’m self-taught, I’m teaching myself how to design Fear of God at the same time, so I’m giving ideas and then keeping ideas, and trying to keep what I was proposing separate from what we were doing together with Yeezy and A.P.C. and the Kanye merch and everything else that I was working on.” Eventually, the two men fell out. “It just got really tough trying to hold on to my point of view and also share my point of view across everything else that he was doing,” Lorenzo recalled. “And to his defense, I think he was over my point of view after a while. You can see he’s constantly evolving in the way he sees things, and I think I ran out of ideas too at the same time, so it’s like, ‘Man, I don’t have anything else to give you.’ And so it maybe ended weird.” Not long after Lorenzo and West parted ways, Lorenzo was approached by Justin Bieber’s camp to work with the young pop star on his Purpose tour, doing styling and merchandise. In retrospect, this was a crucial moment for Fear of God: Many people ﬁrst became aware of the brand when they saw Bieber wearing the clothes on- and o≠stage, and the popularity of the merch pieces Lorenzo helped conceive for Bieber and West would spark an industry-wide trend of merging increasingly coveted tour merchandise with trappings borrowed from more elevated fashion design. But at the time, it was far from obvious that this was something Lorenzo should do, and he agonized about it. “The Bieber thing was on the heels of working with Kanye for like three and a half years,” he told me. “And I was concerned that the Bieber association was gonna hurt our brand and our positioning, because as much as I love Justin and his music, he just wasn’t known for his fashion.”

But in Bieber, Lorenzo recognized a fellow person of faith and saw someone he could help. “And so there was a challenge in that, but at the same time, there was a little bit of fear and, like, you know: Is this the beginning of the end of Fear of God? It’s like, you were just rocking with Ye a second ago, and now it’s like, ‘What happened to this dude?’ ” Lorenzo ultimately decided to work with Beiber anyway. It was a lesson in humility and in trusting his own instincts. “I was in a vulnerable place, post working with Ye, but I was just like, ‘I know I can help this guy.’ And I’m no longer in this cool-kid club, but I never wanted to be in that club anyhow. So it was just like, ‘I’m just gonna do me, and let the associations fall where they fall.’ ” The gambit worked; Fear of God took o≠. And Lorenzo and West have since reconciled, he told me. “We text every other day now. We’re in a really strong place as far as our friendship now,” he said. “But I think it took us moving in di≠erent directions and us being able to stand solely on our own propositions to say, ‘Hey, with or without me, you would’ve been ﬁne.’ Either way, you know what I mean?”

when Fear of God released its capsule collection with Zegna, the pieces were regarded and hailed as polished sportswear: collarless jackets and relaxed trousers, clothes to be worn to a nice party and then onto the plane afterward, for maximum style and comfort at the event and on the red-eye too. The collection was well reviewed and received by many as a sign that the pendulum in men’s fashion—recently dominated by graphic tees and giant sneakers and a pervasive informality, even in theoretically formal spaces—was swinging back toward something more dressed up, or at least more tailored. The pandemic, which arrived shortly afterward, does not seem to have changed anyone’s mind about this trend, in part because Lorenzo’s innovation was to remove “some of those elements that make those pieces intimidating,” as he put it, and make them “comfortable and e≠ortless.” In other words: more like the shorts and sweatpants we’ve all been wearing the past eight months. Still, the irony that Lorenzo (who arrived arguing that the neckline of a T-shirt be taken as seriously as the cut of an Italian-made suit) and Abloh (who told me in 2016 that “the hoodie is the new suit jacket” but who showed his own aggressively tailored collection, LV², earlier this year) are the ones pushing this particular old trend forward again is not lost on either man. “When we started, our silhouettes or our graphic design or our way of presenting the ideas was maybe a step or two ahead of what we were seeing on the streets,” Abloh said. “And I think as you see us evolve, also the culture of fashion has evolved. It’s a circle. The circle always has to go back and reject things that it once adopted as fact and o≠er something new.” For Lorenzo, the shift toward tailoring and more grown-up clothes—Fear of God’s most recent collection, which came out in August, continues the work Lorenzo began presenting with Sartori at Zegna—has come naturally, if slowly. (It took him two years to design the IN MARCH,

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clothes, an affront to the usual, novelty-driven pace of fashion.) Lorenzo’s seventh collection has its origins in the same American practicality that has motivated the design of Fear of God from its earliest days. “I think as I’m maturing, I wanna look a little bit more like my age, without compromising or looking older than my age,” Lorenzo, who is now married with three children, said. “And you gotta create that. You gotta design into that.” As with his hero Ralph Lauren, there is nothing conceptual about the way Lorenzo designs; everything Fear of God does is oriented toward ﬁnding answers to the problems that men face in the natural course of wandering around on this earth, trying not to look out of place. “I like to think that those are solutions that people are looking for,” Lorenzo told me. “I think my guy is getting invited to a wedding. I think he has a hard time ﬁnding the suit that speaks to him. I think my guy that wants to put on a hoodie and go on a date maybe wants to put on a cashmere or a knit hoodie or something but still have the right proportion that speaks to him.” As Lorenzo has brought tailoring into his seventh collection, he’s done it on his terms, taking everything stiff and uncomfortable out of the garments, which wear as easy and casually as the sweatpants he still makes. Lorenzo trained a generation of men to value comfort and informality; as Fear of God’s clothing has

gotten more formal, “the idea’s still the same,” he said. “I still wanna be just as comfortable. So regardless of what the piece is, whether it’s a blazer or a hoodie, the point of view is the same. It’s landing the plane between sophistication and comfortability—you know, that could live in a suit, that could live in a hoodie, that could live in a T-shirt with the perfect neckline.” And that could live in all three garments, on the same person, at the same time. It is a frankly autobiographical way of designing that also extends to the rest of Fear of God’s most recent collection, which features a series of minimal, elegant, and reﬁned graphic pieces based on the logos and uniforms of the Negro Leagues, in which Lorenzo’s grandfather, Lorenzo Manuel, once played as a pitcher for the Atlanta Black Crackers. Lorenzo grew up around Negro Leagues posters and memorabilia, and the idea came to him early in the work on his seventh collection, that he might pay homage to the league and his own past. Jerry Manuel told me he saw a clear lineage between himself—one of a relatively few Black men to ever manage in the major leagues—and his son, whose Fear of God remains one of a relatively few successful Black-owned fashion brands. “In my line of work, I didn’t feel that I needed to be validated by someone else,” Manuel said. “I knew what God had put in me.

And I felt Jerry kind of paralleled the same way.” Manuel said he particularly appreciated the Negro Leagues pieces in his son’s current collection. “He has brought along a piece of our history,” he said, “and still made it look cool.” Lorenzo told me that lately he’d been thinking of Fear of God’s seventh collection as his ﬁrst. “It’s taken me this long to get to a place where I understand what I’m saying from a design standpoint,” he said. “I understand where I’m pulling from. And I’m more and more comfortable with my point of view and where my point of view comes from. And as proud as I am of my background, I don’t know that I would be as comfortable as I am today, celebrating the Negro Leagues and having the understanding from a design perspective in how to use only what translates to American luxury.” Lorenzo continued: “The pure acknowledgment of the Negro Leagues, and acknowledging people that were never given a chance—there’s a responsibility of acknowledging them, but there’s also the responsibility of taking your opportunity to the highest level, because you know that some people were never even given this chance. So now that I have this chance, I’m responsible to take it to Ralph Lauren heights. That’s the goal.”

zach baron is gq’s senior staff writer.

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Bolian was undeterred. He spent years breaking the Cannonball down into a series of subproblems that he could analyze and solve: tra∞c, timing, route, fuel consumption, and more. The pursuit of that singular goal carried him through his 20s, even as he struggled to ﬁnd co-drivers and people to support him—or just to assure him that he wasn’t crazy. The rush of attention brought by Roy’s run had evaporated just as quickly as it arrived. As far as Bolian could tell, there was no one else out there who was even remotely interested in the Cannonball anymore. Eventually, Bolian was ready to take his shot. In 2013, after a decade of research and $45,000 in investment—“every penny I had”—he made a run in a modiﬁed 2004 Mercedes-Benz CL55 AMG. Along with his co-driver, Dave Black, and their navigator and lookout, Dan Huang, Bolian broke the record and the 30-hour mark, with a time of 28 hours and 50 minutes. Bolian had changed the game. “It was the attitude more than anything,” another

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Cannonballer told me. “ ‘We’re going to go out and run this fast, and we might get arrested, but we’re going to take that chance.’ No one had really done that before.” If they’d been caught, Bolian and his team wouldn’t just have received lots of expensive tickets. In many states there’s a distinction between simple speeding infractions and the more egregious crimes of racing and recklessness, which carry the possibility of serious jail time. If all the counties that Bolian had sped through had decided to prosecute him—94 in total—he could have gone to jail for the rest of his life. “Everyone else had been going ticket speeds,” the Cannonballer said. “Ed was going ‘Arrest me now’ speeds.” As soon as word got out about Bolian’s achievement, he was inundated with messages. He started a private Facebook group that grew to more than 50 members, all of them swapping notes, comparing cars, and prepping for runs of their own. “Anything I could do to ﬁnd other crazy people like me and get them in the same room, I did,” Bolian told me. He’s a lanky, a≠able, and unceasingly polite 35-year-old with a languorous Southern accent and a soothing baritone voice. In his free time, he teaches Sunday school. He also just happens to be the uno∞cial-but-o∞cial godfather, gatekeeper, and preserver of modern Cannonballing. Bolian organized events, hosted dinners at his own home, and founded an app called VINwiki with a corresponding YouTube channel that has become the most authoritative repository of modern Cannonball lore. When drivers are thinking of doing a Cannonball, they ask Bolian for advice; when

they need an impartial timekeeper to track their progress across the country and verify their attempt, they send their data and evidence to Bolian. He knew that by fostering this small, strange community—“a fraternity of lunatics,” as Bolian called them—he was seeding the ground for his own eventual dethroning. For a kid who spent years thinking he was alone in his fervor for the Cannonball, the risk seemed worth it. “Not only was I a record holder,” he said, “but I cared much, much more about the history of it than anyone who had come before me.” And people did try to take him down: Between 2013 and late 2019, there were dozens of well-planned, all-out attempts to claim the record. They all failed until November 2019, when drivers Doug Tabbutt and Arne Toman, with spotter Berkeley Chadwick, recorded a time of 27 hours and 25 minutes in a tricked-out 2015 Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG. The team’s average speed was 103 mph; their top speed was 193. Now that record, everyone ﬁgured, was truly unbeatable—until COVID-19 cleared the roads and set o≠ a mad scramble to be the fastest of all time.

Downeast Maine in the early 1980s, Fred Ashmore discovered the Cannonball the same way many others did: He watched the movie when it came out on home video. For a long time he didn’t even know the story was real. The family had only three TV channels, and in those days, Ashmore said, “if it wasn’t in your local

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newspaper, it didn’t exist.” Only years later, as a teen flipping through old copies of Road & Track magazine in the high school library, did he discover that people actually used to run the Cannonball. He was too late, he figured: The Cannonball was dead. Throughout high school and college, Ashmore worked as a mechanic and spent his spare time racing anything he could find, like stock cars and drag racers. Nothing seemed to satisfy his automotive itch—not until he began pondering the notion of a cross-country run. Part of the attraction was cultural and nostalgic. “It’s Americana, like driving Route 66,” Ashmore told me. But the race also o≠ered the ultimate test of testosterone-fueled, speeddrenched lunacy—a chance to beat almost 50 years’ worth of other drivers. In 2014, after posting an ad on Facebook for a muscle car he’d fixed up, Ashmore got to chatting with a New Zealander named Ben “Charlie Safari” Wilson and learned about an upcoming cross-country race requiring entrants to use only cars built before 1980 and purchased for less than $3,000. Ashmore was tired of racing around the same track against the same people night after night, and a coast-to-coast run seemed just crazy enough to try. He entered, had fun, and entered again in 2018 and 2019, setting speed records for the race on both runs. He eschewed most of the sophisticated technology that other cross-country racers embraced, like aircraft-collision-avoidance systems (to check for police planes overhead), thermal scopes, and military-style gyro-stabilized binoculars. He also avoided the more conventional performance enhancers that other competitors relied on to stay alert. “I’ve never drank co≠ee in my life,” he said. He didn’t listen to music. Instead he kept himself awake by doing math in his head: calculating his mileage per gallon, the distance to his next city, and his expected arrival time. He never had an accident or even a fender bender. Not until last year, when he was blindsided by a driver who, he says, ran a stop sign. He was unfazed. “Shit happens,” he told me. “I’ve been very lucky. My number probably should’ve been called before that.” But his car—a 1979 Mustang Cobra that he, his brother, and his dad had rebuilt by hand—was wrecked. Earlier this year, as the country went into lockdown, there wasn’t much for Ashmore to do other than think about Cannonball. “COVID was weird,” he said. “Once the sun went down, there was nowhere to go.” He was biding his time in Oklahoma, where he’d gone to help a friend clean up a recently acquired car collection, and spending his nights analyzing the new tra∞c patterns, watching tra∞c cams in New York City and Los Angeles, and toying with possible routes on Google Maps. Ashmore knew that the sudden disappearance of most car tra∞c represented an obvious and enticing advantage. But in the earliest days of the pandemic, it wasn’t clear that driving across the country was even possible— could you get into New York City or California? Maybe gas stations would be closed, or the Army would get called in to control tra∞c or close roads near COVID hot spots. Other Cannonballers were hunkered down across

the country, wondering the same thing. What if I’m in the middle of Nebraska and they start shutting down state borders? The lockdown might be the perfect time to make a run—or maybe the worst.

wasn’t alone in wondering if the global catastrophe was creating an unlikely opportunity. What he would soon discover, though, was that the lockdown was spawning a frenzy. One of the drivers who toyed with making a run was Carl “Yumi” Dietz, who drove up to New York from South Carolina on April 3 and decided to give it a shot. Almost instantly he discovered that conditions were ideal. Manhattan had long been regarded as “the ASHMORE KNEW HE

Without a car of his own, Fred Ashmore decided to attempt the Cannonball in a rental. He went to the Tulsa airport and spotted the Mustang in the lot. “What about that one?” he asked. destroyer of Cannonball dreams,” as one race veteran put it: On a normal run in typical tra∞c, it can take more than an hour to get out of the city; under 20 minutes is considered lucky. Dietz set o≠ from the Red Ball at 4 p.m., when New York is usually jammed with tra∞c, but the streets were deserted, and he blasted o≠ the island in five minutes. “I may or may not have hit triple-digit speed in the Lincoln Tunnel,” he said. “Who can say that?” It was an idyllic run, start to finish: the stu≠ of every Cannonballer’s dreams. The roads felt empty, and there were almost no cops in sight. “Even though I was running 100 mph the whole way, it was so relaxing,” Dietz said. “Usually you’re beating your head against the steering wheel, going, ‘Get the heck out of the way!’ But it wasn’t like that this time.” He spent the night with his cruise control set between 100 and 119 mph, relishing every moment of the drive. “Every time you hit a turn at 110 mph in the Rocky Mountains or the hills of Pennsylvania, the birds are chirping, it’s like there are unicorns on the road. It’s just blissful,” Dietz said. “Literally blissful.” Twenty-seven hours and 54 minutes after Dietz left the Red Ball, he pulled into the Portofino as the new solo record holder. He felt unconquerable. “This,” a friend told him, “is a record that will never be broken.” Plenty were trying, though. In fact, just before Dietz crossed the finish line, another car had reached the Portofino, setting a record of its own for the fastest run in a diesel-engine vehicle. As Dietz and the crew from the diesel car were hanging out, toasting to their success, one of the guys got a call. It was Ed Bolian, monitoring progress from afar. “Another team is about to pull in,” he said. Before long, a white 2019 Audi A8 zoomed into the parking lot, and three young men

hopped out. In the small, tight-knit community of Cannonball devotees, where everyone knows everyone, the guys in the A8 were complete unknowns—and they’d just smashed Tabbutt and Toman’s overall record. A day earlier, before leaving from the Red Ball, the trio had dubbed their team Captain Chaos, in honor of a character from the 1981 movie. Now, 26 hours and 38 minutes after unwittingly setting out on Dietz’s tail, the three were cracking open beers to celebrate with Dietz and the diesel guys. Almost immediately, a police car rolled up to the parking lot entrance. A cop came on the loudspeaker: “You are not social distancing,” he said. “Leave.” News of the Captain Chaos run blew up on the internet, especially when it was reported that the team made the run in a car belonging to one of their fathers, with no planning and little more than a couple of marine fuel tanks in the trunk and a tablet running Waze. Before the details of the run were conﬁrmed, Car and Driver published a piece calling them “three (or possibly four) of this country’s biggest assholes.” For Chris (who asked that his last name not be used), one the team members, this felt like a bit much—there are, after all, a lot of assholes in this country. Yes, the run had been hastily conceived but not totally unplanned, he said—the crew had spent about 10 days in a mad rush to prep the car, plot their route, and test out strategies. “I would love to tell you we were going white-knuckle the whole time,” he said. “But we were trying to be safe, trying to be conservative. There’s no reason to risk it—we weren’t passing on the shoulder, and we were even limiting our passing on the right-hand side.” Across almost a half century of attempts, the Cannonball has a near-miraculous safety history, with only one recorded accident: In 1972 a team veered o≠ the road after the driver fell asleep at the wheel. She su≠ered a broken arm, but no other vehicles were involved. Chris and his teammates, James and Kale, didn’t want to be the ones to tarnish that legacy. (“We did hit a raccoon while doing 130 mph on the Pennsylvania Turnpike,” Chris said. “I’ll admit that.”) Then it was a free-for-all: Within a few months, the previous year’s record had been bested ﬁve di≠erent times. Bolian’s old 2013 mark, which had stood for six years, was beaten in seven instances. There seemed to be a new record almost every week.

from his camper parked in Oklahoma, Ashmore was inspired by what felt like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a run with almost no other cars on the road. “Doing the most dangerous thing at the safest time,” he said. He had tracked the Captain Chaos run on Glympse, a realtime location-sharing app popular among Cannonballers. He took note of what they did well and where they had trouble; he began concocting a plan to put into action every minor advantage that a solo driver would have over a team. The most obvious was fuel. “If I could take those two other people out and replace them with fuel,” Ashmore said, “I could do it.” More gas meant fewer stops and thus fewer opportunities for something WAT C H I N G A L L T H I S

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to go wrong—a credit card getting declined, a broken gas pump, a line to use the restroom. “I won’t say what I did was ingenious,” Ashmore said. “But what I did was capitalize on the places where everyone else had left an opening.” There was just one problem: He didn’t have a car capable of making a serious run. After the accident, his Cobra was still just a twisted scrap of metal. He decided to use a rental car. “I thought it was laughable,” Ashmore said, but with a little engineering, there was no reason it couldn’t work. He went to the Tulsa airport and spotted the silver Mustang GT in the parking lot. “What about that one?” he asked. He knew the Mustang had a top speed of more than 150 mph and figured its suspension would be good enough to handle a few extra gas tanks. He rented it for two and a half weeks, at a price of $700. He declined the rental agency’s supplemental insurance. Ashmore took the car to a friend’s truck shop and started tearing it apart. He took out the front and rear passenger seats and seat belts, the spare tire and jack, trunk trim pieces, and anything else he could to lighten the car and create extra space. In their place he installed three mammoth fuel tanks: a 52-gallon in the trunk, a 27-gallon in the back seat, and a 32-gallon beside him. Combined with the car’s built-in 16-gallon tank, that gave him almost 130 gallons to work with. He did the math. If he maintained a speed consistent with just over 11 miles per gallon, he could cover 1,403 miles between stops. The key would be refueling; he’d make one stop, he decided. And then he took the fuel question a step further. Instead of inviting variables and delays at a gas station, Ashmore would have two friends meet him o≠ the interstate in Oklahoma, where they’d be waiting with a Chevy pickup outfitted with two huge gas tanks and multiple hoses that could pump 20 gallons per minute— twice the government-mandated limit on commercial pumps. The whole thing would take less than eight minutes. “Cannonballing is about being smart,” Ashmore said. “Anybody can go out and hold the pedal down until they get pulled over.” As a finishing touch, Ashmore installed a light bar across the front of the car and put an antenna on the back, to make the Mustang look like an undercover cop car. He figured it would help with navigating around truckers and make it less likely that another driver would call the police on him. Then came the route. As with Everest, the Cannonball has a northern and a southern route: the northern cutting through the Rocky Mountains, Utah, and Nevada, the southern through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Ashmore distrusted the northern route. The weather in the Rockies was too unpredictable, and the thin air in the mountains was hard on a car’s fuel system. He would go south. Finally, there was the question of bathroom stops. Ashmore wouldn’t take any. He bought a cache of Pringles, beef jerky, Cheez-Its, and other salty foods and a few bottles of Powerade and lemon water. The emptied Powerade bottles would become his urinals, for use on the road. “It’s a project,” he said. “You have to focus the entire time. Nothing else matters.”

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He set o≠ without a hitch and flew across the eastern half of the country. The fuel stop went as smoothly as hoped, and by the time he got to Texas, Ashmore knew he had a shot at the record. He estimates that he did a total of five or six hours at the car’s absolute top speed of 159 mph. Of course, then Ashmore hit the California border and his trip nearly fell apart. Barreling through the desert after getting hung up at the checkpoint, Ashmore was exhausted. He sailed up and over one last hill, took a hard left, and swept down into the San Bernardino Valley. Los Angeles was in sight. Soon, in his rearview mirror, he saw a pair of lights, flashing red and blue, coming up behind him. “If I did get stopped, it was inevitably over,” Ashmore said. He made a splitsecond decision. Ashmore flipped on his blinker and exited the freeway, then looped under the overpass and took o≠ in the opposite direction on the freeway he’d just exited. He did the same thing at the next exit, “cloverleafing” the cop and shaking him o≠ his tail in the process. Somewhere, the o∞cer had taken a wrong turn. Relieved, Ashmore drove on. The last five miles felt like an eternity, an endless series of sub-interstates and local roads that seemed to be going nowhere at all. He sneaked gingerly through stop signs and red lights until he reached the final intersection, where he peeped for any waiting police cars and finally zipped into the hotel parking lot. He looked at the iPhone timer mounted on the dash: 25 hours and 55 minutes—the fastest time in history. There was no one at the Portofino to congratulate him, no brass band, no fawning fans. He didn’t have time to celebrate, anyway; he needed to get out of there. Ashmore took time-stamped photos as evidence of his feat, turned o≠ all the equipment, and threw the radar detector and rear jammer sensor in the trunk. He had about 30 miles of gas left, and he wanted to refuel as far away as possible before beginning the drive back home, this time at the speed limit. It was only then, as he headed east in the early-morning light, that Ashmore had time to consider his accomplishment. His thoughts crystallized around a single, bewildering question: What the hell did you just do?

same way. “Did I have a good time?” asked Sam Lurie, a member of one of the COVIDera teams. “No, not really. Am I glad I did it? Yes, absolutely.” To many of those who attempt it, the motivations can be almost spiritual. “To me, driving cross-country is about the most American thing you can do,” Dietz told me. “Driving it at speed, I feel, is just the embodiment of the American outlaw spirit, kind of civil disobedience at its finest, albeit its most immature and selfish state. That’s a very alluring part of it.” Dietz got his start in cross-country driving when he was in college in the early 1990s, after a friend of his read Kerouac and they decided to point their car west and go looking for adventure. He estimates he’s been cross-country probably 50 times now. “It’s my favorite pastime,” he said. “Seeing the landscape change and thinking about the old wagon trains and the Manifest Destiny of ‘Go west, young man’—the good and the bad of it—and the modern stu≠ of the Cannonball and thinking what the guys in the ’70s and ’80s went through when the roads still weren’t finished.” Driving the Cannonball also forces you to recognize how miraculous it is to be able to drive from one coast to another in little more than a day, without danger or fear. Not so long ago, the Donner Party was reduced to cannibalism while attempting to reach the Pacific coast. Now that great expanse can be crossed with simplicity. “Time is the only currency,” said Alex Roy, who broke the Cannonball record in 2006. “The first settlers paid a much higher price to get there, in the same way that the first sailors who crossed the Atlantic did.” For the “fraternity of lunatics” who care about the Cannonball, the race is a last chance to be part of that legacy of exploration and adventure. “What compels these people to get in these cars and drive like madmen and then get out at the end and be like, ‘That was cool’?” asked Travis Bell, a longtime Cannonballer and a friend of Yates’s. “There’s no parade for Fred Ashmore; he’s not getting the key to any cities. But no one else has done it. There aren’t a lot of ‘no one else has done its’ left in the world.”

Ashmore broke the record, I was sitting beside him in the Mustang GT, in the passenger seat that had once been just a giant fuel tank. After returning the car to the Tulsa airport, Ashmore managed to buy it and bring it home to Maine. “So,” he said, turning to me, “what’s the fastest you’ve ever gone?” We were cruising down a flat, unencumbered stretch of interstate in eastern Maine. A hurricane had passed through the previous night, and it looked like the world had been made anew: a field of flu≠y, milky-white clouds in a pastel blue sky, the forest around us radiant and green, the road seemingly scrubbed clean. Ashmore is 45, stout and barrel-chested with a ruddy, sunburned face, close-cropped brown hair, and an eager, boyish smile. Behind the wheel, he knows he’s di≠erent from other drivers. “Most people want to go 100 mph, and then they’re on to the next thought,” he said. “They lose interest. A FEW MONTHS AFTER

T H E R E C E P T I O N F O R a new record holder is often underwhelming. The day after he set the record, Doug Tabbutt ﬂew back home. His friend picked him up at the airport and took him to a bar to celebrate. After a few drinks, the friend got up and called for everyone’s attention: “Hey, you’ve all heard of the Cannonball run? Well, this guy just set a new record!” A few people turned from the football game they were watching to o≠er half-hearted congratulations. A young man sitting alone at the bar, nursing a drink, shouted toward Tabbutt and his friend. “You know there’s a thing called airplanes, right?” And yet, a few months later, Tabbutt was back in the car with Toman, chasing the record again. “You get to Nevada and say, ‘I’m never doing this again,’ ” Tabbutt said. “And then two days after you ﬁnish, you say, ‘I’m doing it again.’ ” Other drivers felt the

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It’s something di≠erent to stay locked in for 20 hours.” Ashmore has been driving long stretches without sleep all his life; even other Cannonballers think he’s unique, in a good way. “Only Fred can just go out and do that,” said Toman. “It’s not advisable for anyone else to try. If you knew Fred, you’d understand: That’s not for me; that’s a Fred thing.” Doug Tabbutt compared Ashmore to Michael Phelps. “God gave him a body that’s made for swimming,” Tabbutt said. “Together with his skill, that makes him unbeatable.” More than anything, Ashmore’s gift is mental: He’s heard of people buckling under the strain near the end of a Cannonball—they start shouting, convinced they’re going to die, and demand to be let out of the car immediately. Ashmore is di≠erent. “I’ve been upside down in cars, on fire, almost bled to death,” he said. “I just don’t freak out in cars.” The COVID lockdown was simply his Olympics. We were in the left-hand lane, driving at a comfortable speed—a little over the 75-mph speed limit—but you could already hear the rumble of the exhaust coming from the back of the car, sounding like a pack of growling pit bulls. Ashmore started pressing down on the accelerator: 110 mph, 120 mph, 130 mph. What had been a pleasant blur of forest outside my window became an indistinguishable mass of green. Ashmore kept pushing: 140 mph, 150 mph, and the car’s top speed of 159 mph. The hood started to shake, the mirrors rattled, and the rush of wind outside mixed with the sound of the engine to produce an overpowering roar. “It’s getting lovely,” Ashmore said. We passed by cars doing 80 mph that looked like they were parked. Ashmore had spent five or six hours at this speed, during a stretch of more than 30 hours in which he barely slept. It was intoxicating. Two days earlier, I’d been on a flight to Portland, Maine, wearing an N95 mask, a face shield, and surgical gloves—afraid to breathe because of an invisible virus that had shut down the entire world, eyeing the other passengers as if their exhalations might poison me. The dangers felt bewildering, almost unfathomable. But now the thrill of flying down the road in a Mustang was pure, visceral, liberating, and

comprehensible. The perils were obvious; the exhilaration made sense. I looked over at Ashmore and he was smiling. “The road is my o∞ce. It’s a spot to take time and think about what I want,” he said. “It’s my peaceful time. It’s just at a high rate of speed.” A few weeks later, Toman and Tabbutt announced that they had made another run, in the last tra∞c-free window provided by the lockdown, and reclaimed their overall record. They’d put everything they had into the run: a nationwide network of spotters and pace cars, extensive police countermeasures, and the experience of a combined 10 previous Cannonball runs. Like Ashmore, they’d made a series of adjustments to the car—including adding a Ford logo to their Audi and painting the center caps of the wheels silver—so that it might look like an o≠-duty police cruiser. They beat Ashmore’s solo record time by 16 minutes. Ashmore was disappointed, but he wasn’t following other drivers in predicting the end of the Cannonball as a result of the ridiculous times that COVID had made possible. “It’s an Americana thing, just like people always want to go to Mount Rushmore,” he said. “Cannonball is just a thing that people will always do.” The record, however satisfying, was never really the point. More than anything, Ashmore, Bolian, and the other drivers who’d dedicated years of their lives to Cannonball wanted a chance to etch their names in the legacy of the only race that never ends—the only race in America that could be happening any day, at any time, with almost no one on the planet being any the wiser. It was a chance to partake in something that has helped generations of guys like them ﬁnd some meaning, even in the worst and strangest of times—a wonderful, suicidally foolish dream they’d held since boyhood. “I hope my son can ﬁnd a pursuit like this that can help the tough times make sense and that can carry you through them,” Bolian said. “I just hope it’s not Cannonballing.”

alex w. palmer wrote about a Chinese art-crime conspiracy in the August 2018 issue of gq.

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Single Issue nearest to filing date

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852,947

(3) Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS® (4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS

22,295

24,457

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838,759

877,404

78,080

58,868

5,655

3,687

83,735 922,494 41,699 964,195 90.92% 36,772 875,531

62,555 939,960 15,022 954,982 93.34% 30,257 907,661

959,265

970,216

91.27%

93.55%

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954,982

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ST YLIST, MOBOL A JI DAWODU.

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