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THE BODY ISSUE Fashion and the Modern Physique How to Design a Better Body

THE PRETTIEST

Decadent Veganism The Athletes to Watch at the Olympics Johnny Knoxville’s Last Rodeo

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

A Different Kind of Body Issue Let’s get one thing clear up front: If you are looking to get sandblasted abs in 15 minutes ﬂat, you are holding the wrong magazine. This is a body issue for people who lost touch with their bodies during lockdown and are looking for a simple way to reconnect. This is a body issue for people who want to know what long strands of Chanel pearls feel like against bare skin. This is a body issue for people who intended to meditate this morning but didn’t. This is a body issue for people whose beach bodies are the same as their This is a body issue land bodies. for people with an on-again, o≠-again relationship with eating meat.

This is a body issue for boys who are pretty and girls who are tough.

This is a body issue for binge-watchers.

This is a body issue for jackasses. This is a body issue for people who don’t do gym selﬁes.

This is a body issue for people who count walking as cardio.

This is a body issue for people with ass tattoos.

This is a body issue for people who use their favorite jeans instead of a scale.

This is a body issue for people who exercise to exorcise their problems.

This is a body issue for people who skate shirtless after top surgery.

This is a body issue for people whose church is the climbing gym.

This is a body issue for people who have never tasted creatine.

This is a body issue for people who aren’t perfect but keep improving. This is a body issue for anyone. This is a body issue for you.

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Will Welch EDITOR IN CHIEF

JASON NOCITO.

This is a body issue for people who hoop on wheels.

What else can we do for our children? Help make the world more sustainable? And our portfolio too?

For some of life’s questions, you’re not alone. Together we can find an answer. ubs.com/lifegoals

Sustainable investing strategies aim to incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations into investment process and portfolio construction. Strategies across geographies and styles approach ESG analysis and incorporate the findings in a variety of ways. The returns on portfolios consisting primarily of sustainable investments may be lower or higher than portfolios where ESG factors, exclusions, or other sustainability issues are not considered, and the investment opportunities available to such portfolios may also differ. As a firm providing wealth management services to clients, UBS Financial Services Inc. offers investment advisory services in its capacity as an SEC-registered investment adviser and brokerage services in its capacity as an SEC-registered broker-dealer. Investment advisory services and brokerage services are separate and distinct, differ in material ways and are governed by different laws and separate arrangements. It is important that clients understand the ways in which we conduct business, that they carefully read the agreements and disclosures that we provide to them about the products or services we offer. For more information, please review the PDF document at ubs.com/relationshipsummary. © UBS 2021. All rights reserved. UBS Financial Services Inc. is a subsidiary of UBS AG. Member FINRA/SIPC.

CONTENTS

GQ Summer Behind the Scenes With the People Who Make GQ

The Fix

Contributor

Wild Patterns, Huge Prints, and DJ KHAL E D . . . . . . 17 B ENJA MIN C LY ME R

on E-Watches. . . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . 26

As Body Ideals Change, So Does Men’s Fashion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Features Cover Story: A $AP RO CK Y . . . . .. . . .. . .. . . . .. .. . . . . . . . . . 40

JOE HOLDER Wellness correspondent As GQ’s wellness correspondent, Holder frequently breaks down health and fitness for our readers. For the Body Issue, he was excited to write about “designing” a better body because it was an opportunity to talk about wellness in a way that was holistic but not esoteric. “Less ‘woo-woo’ and more ‘just do,’ ” he said. “It’s a refreshing guide to championing your own health.”

The 2021 Olympics Dream Team. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Office Grails

How to Design a Better Body. . . . . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . . . . . 62 The Stylish Crews of NYC Athletics... ... ...... . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 70 Vegan for Pleasure. .... . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . . .. . . . . .. . . 82 J O HN NY KN OX V IL L E ’ S

Last Rodeo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

On the Cover Photograph by Inez and Vinoodh. Styled by George Cortina. Vintage telnyashka shirt from Raggedy Threads. Kilt, $950, by Vivienne Westwood. Pants, $5,900, by Loewe. Belt, $1,195, by Artemas Quibble. Boots (price upon request) by John Lobb. Earrings and chain necklace (worn as belt), his own. Vintage necklace by Chanel from Janet Mandell. Cuffs, $56,500 (on left wrist) and $72,000 (on right wrist), by Verdura. Hair by Ty Mosby. Skin by Dick Page for Statement Artists. Manicure by Naomi Yasuda for MA World Group. Tailoring by Martin Keehn. Produced by VLM Productions.

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→ T YLER T YNES

Staff writer

about these delightful Gucci glasses.”

JOE HOLDER: MAT THEW MARTIN. “OFFICE GRAILS”: COURTESY OF SUBJECTS.

FA SHI ON:

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CONTENTS

ST YLIST, GEORGE CORTINA.

GQ Summer

For our cover story on A$AP Rocky, see page 40. Cape, $2,550, and pants (price upon request) by Celine Homme by Hedi Slimane. Earring, his own. Necklace (longest), $28,500, by Verdura. Vintage necklaces (others) by Chanel from Kentshire.

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Luxury is where you are.

CONTENTS

GQ Summer

For our story on Caeleb Dressel and three other Olympic hopefuls to watch, see page 56.

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P H O T O G R A P H

B Y

I R I N A

R O Z O V S K Y

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DJ KHALED, CENTER PHOTOGRAPH: ST YLIST, TERRELL JONES; GROOMING, NELSON MARQUES; PRODUCER, GABY SCHUE T Z AT SELECT SERVICES PRODUCTION. ALL OTHER PHOTOGRAPHS: SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS, PAGE 101.

D R O P S

Wild All kicked off by DJ Khaled and his insane new collaboration with Dolce & Gabbana.

That

Summer

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GALLERY-WORTHY SHORTS Two years after flooding America’s beaches with Verner Panton– emblazoned shorts, Dries Van Noten has incorporated experimental filmmaker Len Lye’s celluloid prints into another round of Bermudas ($340).

WESTERN BUCKET Think of Acne Studios’ cactus-covered cap as a cowboy hat you can wear poolside ($179).

UNDER-THE-SEA SET Donatella Versace has been heavily mining the house’s archive for inspiration—to Medusa fans’ delight. The oceanic print on this plissé shirtand-shorts kit is adapted from her brother Gianni’s iconic spring 1992 “Trésor de la Mer” collection (shirt and shorts, $1,895 each, by Versace).

CERAMIC SWEATER In case there was any doubt that pottery is the fashion world’s next big obsession, Berluti’s Kris Van Assche collaborated with L.A.-based ceramist Brian Rochefort on a collection inspired by the artist’s oozy, primordial sculptures ($1,550).

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BOXY BLOUSON Those who think “beautiful business suits” when they think Ermenegildo Zegna haven’t checked in lately on Alessandro Sartori, who has introduced an exquisite sense of casual elegance into the brand with pieces like this cropped tie-dyed blouson ($1,495).

THE SHADES OF SUMMER When it comes to sunglasses that’ll break necks at the summer barbecue, go to Alain Mikli, the man who made Kanye West’s iconic shutter shades back in 2007 ($400 per pair).

TROUSERS AS ART Basquiat and Haring contemporary Kenny Scharf dipped a toe into fashion in 1992, when the O.G. East Village painter teamed up with Stephen Sprouse. Almost 30 years later, Dior Men’s Kim Jones turned Scharf’s bugged-out dreamworld into a pair of collectible trousers ($2,900).

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NEW HAWAIIAN SHIRT Throw on one of Marni’s oversized psychedelic floral shirts to instantly fall down the rabbit hole of Francesco Risso’s fashion wonderland ($490).

P H O T O G R A P H S

B Y

M A R T I N

B R O W N

PROP ST YLIST: DUSTIN HUBBS AT MARK EDWARD INC.

The

SAFARI JACKET This season, Ralph Lauren—who is sartorially at home on the ranch, at sea, or at the opera—went on safari with a line of Purple Label linen jackets (and matching accessories) in a wild, exclusive zebra print (jacket, $2,995, and shirt, $495).

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SUMMER SUIT Thom Browne alum Kozaburo Akasaka takes a futuristic approach to his suits: They’re made in Japan out of breathable polyester and emblazoned with what he calls Galactic Camo (shirt, $465, and pants, $345, by Kozaburo).

FLORAL DAD HAT American designer Ken Scott lived in Milan in the ’60s, becoming known there as the “fashion gardener” for his sublime floral prints, which this season are blossoming all over these Gucci lids ($530).

STREET-LEVEL BOXERS For his latest collection, Gypsy Sport designer Rio Uribe turned boxer shorts into a love letter to the evocative artistry of Chicano tattoo culture ($75).

WOVEN VARSITY London-based Qasimi uses sharp sportswear to promote Middle Eastern sartorial codes. This cropped bomber is made with al sadu fabric, which is traditionally woven by Bedouin women ($931).

CHECKERBOARD TANK Handmade in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Judy Turner’s cotton-silk sweater proves that the sleeveless knit is the most crucial piece in your summer rotation ($495).

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SWEDISH SURF TRUNKS You don’t have to live in Sweden to join the Stockholm Surfboard Club, which was founded by a couple of former Acne employees. You just have to pick up a pair of the brand’s perfectly short swim shorts ($155).

MESH DINNER JACKET The perfect summer blazer is a maddeningly hard thing to find. Or it was until Emporio Armani unveiled this argyle-checked jacket constructed from a delicate breathable mesh (jacket, $1,995, and tank top, $475).

HUGE CARGOS There are big pants, and then there are Needles’ downright enormous BDU H.D. pants, which have achieved grail status due to the styling possibilities unlocked by their outrageous volume and multiple cinch points ($390).

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TRIPPY OVERSHIRT Junya Watanabe protégé Yosuke Aizawa has established White Mountaineering as one of Japan’s great avant-garde outdoor brands, thanks to pieces like this teched-out tie-dyed shirt ($320).

FLORAL SNEAKS In 2017, Undercover joined forces with Vans to make a cult-favorite sneaker covered with tiny blossoms. At long last, the brand has birthed its own follow-up, and this time the flowers are thriving ($409).

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S H O P. G Q . C O M

The Analog Lover’s Guide to Smartwatches

The F i x BY OUR MONTHLY WATCH COLUMNIST, BENJAMIN CLYMER

Hodinkee founder Benjamin Clymer argues that you don’t need to take sides in the great analog-versusdigital debate when you can just have both.

Watches

HAVE A CONFESSION TO

make: I, one of the foremost evangelists for mechanical watches, wear an Apple Watch. I don’t brag about it or post it on social media, but I strap on my Apple Watch three or four times a week, making it one of the most trusty pieces in my entire collection. Back in 2014, when the Apple Watch was launched, many of my fellow mechanicalwatch enthusiasts turned up their noses, perhaps hoping that it would go the way of smart glasses. I get it: I’m not sure I’ll ever find a wrist instrument as soulful as, say, my Vacheron Constantin Historiques Cornes de Vache chronograph. But I also enjoy working out and playing golf, and my precious Vacheron, though a mind-blowing feat of engineering in its own right, can’t track my heart rate or calories burned. It also can’t replace my iPhone—which the Series 3 Apple Watch started doing when it was released in 2017. The Series 3 introduced cellular capability, allowing me to leave my phone at home. Paradoxically, the most advanced e-watch in the world untethered me from the digital realm. The more I wore it, the less time I spent obsessively checking email and wasting time on social media and the more I felt connected to what was actually happening around me. How’s that for an analog experience? Apple is thought to be one of the world’s largest watchmakers by revenue, but I don’t think it poses an existential threat to the Swiss watchmaking industry the same way quartz technology once did. In my opinion the Apple Watch and other relatively affordable pieces of wearable tech, like those from Fitbit and Whoop, have actually brought more people into the mechanical sphere than ever before. Once you see your wrist as real estate, you begin to recognize all the occasions—lunch at Sant Ambroeus, perhaps—when you’d rather be wearing a Speedmaster than an e-watch. The luxury space is starting to adapt. TAG Heuer and Louis Vuitton, for instance, are making incredibly beautiful smart devices (powered by Google’s Android operating system) with the artisanal

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ingenuity the companies are known for: The TAG Heuer Connected boasts a Swiss-made ceramic bezel and a scratch-resistant sapphire crystal, and the LV Tambour Horizon has dozens of interchangeable monogram straps and constantly updating interactive faces— when Virgil Abloh drops a new collection, you can get a matching watch face. Tissot, on the other hand, has established itself in the e-watch category by integrating smart features into a fixed dial with the T-Touch Connect Solar. The hour and minute hands tell the time, but when you use the touch-enabled crystal on the watch face to select the

compass, the hands snap into a needle that swings to true north—adding a surprisingly cool new dimension to a watch that looks mechanical. At the end of the day, the Apple Watch itself is a historic contribution to horology, but its greatest triumph just may be what Apple has done across categories for so many years—rethinking an entire vertical in such a way that it has forced everyone else to do better. Just as when wristwatches replaced pocket watches, the traditionalists will eventually come around, and we mechanical-watch people won’t have to be so bashful when we take our digital timepieces out for a spin.

P H O T O G R A P H

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A N G E L A S T R O

SMARTEN UP TO SHRINK YOUR GUT

Protein Shake Can Help You Lose Weight By Chris Hansen Being a trainer, bodybuilder, and nutrition expert means that companies frequently send me their products and ask for my stamp of approval. Most of the time I dive into research, test the product out, and send the company honest feedback. Sometimes, however, I refuse to give the product a try, because frankly, the ingredients inside aren’t real food. And I’d rather drink diesel fuel than torture my body with a chemical concoction. Like my father always said, “What you put inside your body always shows up on the outside.” One protein shake that I received, that will remain nameless, was touted as ‘the next big shake’ but really had a list of gut destroying ingredients. Everywhere I read I saw harmful artificial ingredients, added sugars, synthetic dyes, preservatives and cheap proteins; the kind of proteins that keep you fat no matter how hard you hit the gym, sap your energy and do nothing for your muscles. Disappointed after reviewing this “new” shake, I hit the gym and bumped into my favorite bodybuilding coach. This guy is pushing 50, has the energy of a college kid, and is ripped. So are his clients. While I firmly believe that the gym is a notalk focus zone, I had to ask, “Hey Zee, what protein shake are you recommending to your clients these days?”

Zee looked at me, and shook his head. “Protein shakes are old news and loaded with junk. I don’t recommend protein shakes, I tell my clients to drink INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake because it’s the only all natural meal replacement that works and has a taste so good that it’s addicting.” Being skeptical of what Zee told me, I decided to investigate this superfood shake called INVIGOR8. Turns out INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake has a near 5-star rating on Amazon. The creators are actual scientists and personal trainers who set out to create a complete meal replacement shake chocked full of superfoods that—get this— actually accelerate how quickly and easily you lose belly fat and builds even more lean, calorie burning muscle. We all know that the more muscle you build, the more calories you burn. The more fat you melt away the more definition you get in your arms, pecs and abs. The makers of INVIGOR8 were determined to make the first complete, natural, non-GMO superfood shake that helps you lose fat and build lean muscle. The result is a shake that contains 100% grass-fed whey that has a superior nutrient profile to the grain-fed whey found in most shakes, metabolism boosting raw coconut oil, hormone free colostrum to promote a healthy immune system, Omega 3, 6, 9-rich chia and

flaxseeds, superfood greens like kale, spinach, broccoli, alfalfa, and chlorella, and clinically tested cognitive enhancers for improved mood and brain function. The company even went a step further by including a balance of pre and probiotics for regularity in optimal digestive health, and digestive enzymes so your body absorbs the high-caliber nutrition you get from INVIGOR8. While there are over 2200 testimonials on Amazon about how INVIGOR8 “gave me more energy and stamina” and “melts away abdominal fat like butter on a hot sidewalk”, what really impressed me was how many customers raved about the taste. So I had to give it a try. When it arrived I gave it the sniff test. Unlike most meal replacement shakes it smelled like whole food, not a chemical factory. So far so good. Still INVIGOR8 had to pass the most important test, the taste test. And INVIGOR8 was good. Better than good. I could see what Zee meant when he said his clients found the taste addicting. I also wanted to see if Invigor8 would help me burn that body fat I’d tried to shave off for years to achieve total definition. Just a few weeks later I’m pleased to say, shaving that last abdominal fat from my midsection wasn’t just easy. It was delicious. Considering all the shakes I’ve tried I can honestly say that the results I’ve experienced from INVIGOR8 are nothing short of astonishing. A company spokesperson confirmed an exclusive offer for GQ readers: if you order INVIGOR8 this month, you’ll receive $10 off your first order by using promo code “GQ10” at checkout. If you’re in a rush to burn fat, restore lean muscle and boost your stamina and energy you can order INVIGOR8 today at drinkInvigor8.com or by calling 1-800-958-3392.

THE RE AC OFF FIELD.

AL TION IS THE WAT C H AT

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Fashion

What 50 Years of Changes in Tailoring Tell Us About the Evolving Nature of Male Body Ideals

The Suit Index

By MA X BERLINGER

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THESE PAGES: SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS, PAGE 101.

The F i x

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The F i x

Fashion

O MATTER HOW

beautiful the fabric, how painstaking the construction, how steep the price, the suit is designed to create an image of the body. Traditionally, this image is one of masculinity and strength—a powerful shoulder, a trim waist, an elongated torso. But over the past 50 years, designers have found new and surprising ways to reveal and discover something deeper about the male physique. The revolution advanced by the maestro of men’s tailoring, Giorgio Armani, was that the body could simply be revealed by the suit, rather than constricted and exaggerated and reshaped. So it should be no surprise that before Armani became a fashion titan he was a medical student. With surgical precision, the designer ripped out the suit’s fusty innards and rearranged the jacket’s gorge, stance, and lapels, for instance, to yield something new, a silhouette that draped elegantly from the shoulders and fluidly from the hips. Before, men in suits were serious, dull, inconspicuous; in an Armani suit they transformed into something di≠erent: an object of desire. Armani founded his company in 1975, and a mere five years later he was enshrined in the pop culture canon as the costume designer for American Gigolo. You know the scene: Richard Gere gyrating as he’s getting dressed. It was as much about Gere’s sex appeal as it was about Armani’s. “By making the suit unconstructed and from lighter, tactile materials, he made the suit more erotic and emphasized the body moving in the clothes,” says Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. “The suit became almost like a skin; it almost gives o≠ an aura of nakedness.” The softer the suit, the harder the body—that was the Armani revelation. By removing the broad, rigid architecture of the shoulders and chest, he encouraged the figure underneath to be more structured, more muscular. It was counterintuitive in a sense, but

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Giorgio Armani Spring 1992 By unstuffing the suit and letting it drape, Armani told us more about the body beneath than a structured shoulder and a thick chest piece ever could.

Gucci Fall 1995 As creative director of Gucci, Tom Ford put the body—and male vanity—on full display and cut his suits to reward a carefully sculpted physique.

Ford’s Gucci suit Dior Homme Spring 2007 Hedi Slimane’s Dior Homme suit was a revolution— skinny, moody, and painfully cool. He established a new paradigm for the hip suit—and the gaunt physique it required.

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demanded that you get a build worthy of its carnal cling. “Every man was getting in shape to wear Tom Ford,” Scully says. “Everyone believed they could be that guy.” All of this was a slap in the face to the prevailing ’90s aesthetic: frumpy khakis, thrift-store grunge, and lazy business casual dressing. Ford’s jewel-toned-velvet tailoring blazed the trail for a new male archetype: the metrosexual, a presentational man for whom a chiseled body was merely an extension of good hygiene. The body wasn’t just something for the suit to hang on; it was meant to be flaunted, as Ford himself did with his signature shirts worn unbuttoned to the navel. Not all designers wanted to beef up men with bulk and libido, though. Hedi Slimane, who took over as creative director of Dior Homme in 2000, aimed to reduce it radically. Thought to be inspired by surfers’ wet suits, Slimane’s signature design was the skinny black suit, cut to fit the waifish saplings from the street the designer cast to model for him. This slimmed-down silhouette resonated powerfully—so much so that Karl Lagerfeld famously dropped 91 pounds so he could wear it. “Hedi’s suits were a reaction to the opulence of the ’80s and ’90s,” says Clarissa Esguerra, an associate curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art who in 2016 helped oversee the exhibition “Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear, 1715– 2015.” Slimane’s designs were a shift away from muscle and strength as the sources of male power. “There was a big move toward introspection and angst.” Those minimalist black suits were a swerve from Ford’s corporeal delights toward something more self-reflective, somber, and cerebral. “It was like we were done showing our bodies to be manly,” says Esguerra. “It’s about how one thinks. Your emotions.” Slimane proposed sullen adolescence in place of adult masculinity. His scrawny lads embodied the existential dread of a more cynical generation dealing with the profound cultural upheaval

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after 9/11. By whittling the body to its bones, Slimane transferred the focus of the suit from the physical to the emotional. At the same time, another insurrection was afoot, this one from Thom Browne. Launched as an appointmentonly tailoring shop in 2001, his eponymous brand transformed the quotidian suit into something jarringly idiosyncratic. Thom Browne Browne’s too-small Spring 2018 jacket, with its high No one subverts armholes and narrow tradition like shoulders, constricted Browne. First he the torso; his highturned the sack waisted ﬂoodwater suit into a radical, pants fully exposed the body-morphing ankles. His suit was the

Gucci 2019–2020 Perhaps the greatest impact Alessandro Michele has made with his sensual, genderfluid tailoring has been with the stars who have flaunted it. Jared Leto (left) and Harry Styles are just a couple of them.

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EST. 1957

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Odell Beckham Jr. in his sleeveless suit jacket and pleated skirt at the 2019 Met gala. Prior to that Browne had spent years subverting gender norms in his runway collections. He put men in heeled brogues, attached wedding gowns to the backs of tuxedos, and made the skirt a wardrobe staple for some men. So in a sense it was Browne who passed the baton to Alessandro Michele, who took over Gucci in 2015 and injected an immediate jolt of androgynous romance. Michele’s sylph-like tailoring blended masculine and feminine archetypes—strong padded shoulders that curve to a slender waistline, oversized lapels, the wild ﬂare of a pair of bellbottoms—to help express a new generation’s searching, openminded approach to gender identity and body image. It’s no accident his nerdy-whimsical designs have a ’70s feel—it instantly infuses them with that era’s free-love approach to sexuality. The body is

a playground, his lanky suits say, more mysterious and glamorous than we could ever imagine. That’s forward-thinking for Gucci, but in London the emerging designer Harris Reed pushes the suit as a Ermenegildo platform for genderﬂuidity Zegna x even further, if on a Fear of God smaller scale. Last year, 2020 one of Reed’s designs—a Jerry Lorenzo and broad-shoulder suit worn Alessandro Sartori under a crinoline cage cut a suit that accentuates not a draped with tulle and body’s appearance, satin—was worn by Harry but rather how one Styles in the pages of feels when it’s Vogue to much acclaim luxuriously relaxed. and, of course, outrage. “Bring back manly men,” the right-wing provocateur Candace Owens tweeted in reaction to the images. Reed, who is British American, presented a six-piece collection this year that featured, among other garments, a dapper black tailored two-piece that spouts a waterfall of pleated organza from its side.

Harris Reed 2021 Up-and-coming designer Harris Reed has exploded all pretense of tailoring to fit the gender binary. Suits are like people: They can be whatever you want them to be.

This strange hybrid perfectly encapsulates how a lot of young people see the body today: mutable, not a place for rigid certainties but for all the beautiful ambiguities and contradictions of the human experience. “I love to use suiting and gowns and open people’s eyes to this idea that we are not fixed to one box,” Reed says. “You don’t have to wear one specific thing.” You don’t have to be one specific thing, either. Ironically, the most compelling post-COVID-19 suit was introduced right as the world went into lockdown. In early March of last year, the Italian brand Ermenegildo Zegna collaborated with the L.A.based label Fear of God, designed by Jerry Lorenzo. Zegna’s Alessandro Sartori and Lorenzo married elegance with comfort just days before we would all retreat for a year into soft clothes. Ra∞sh jackets had structured shoulders that gave way to a luxurious, lazy drape. Carrot-cut pants had zip-leg closures. These were suits drained of formality but not of sophistication. They were meant to encourage a feeling, an attitude, not a physique. In the light of a lockdown, they looked designed for bodies in repose. max berlinger is a writer based in Los Angeles.

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was in a Swedish jail, the sun never really set. It was July 2019, and Rocky was being held in pretrial detention on an assault charge stemming from a street fight in Stockholm with a few young men who had been following and harassing him and his crew. For a month, he was, he says, confined to a single-person cell for 23 and a half hours a day. He found it hard to sleep. During the high summer in Stockholm, the sun is out for about 18 hours a day. For the other six, dusk melts into dawn. At night, as this eerie twilight spilled through his cell window, Rocky kept the TV on; the background noise of Swedish-language news helped lull him to sleep. But about a week before he expected to get out, a sound on the TV jolted Rocky awake. “Even though it was in Swedish, I heard ‘President Donald Trump’ and ‘A$AP Rocky,’ and I woke up out of my sleep,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, fuck!’ ” That’s how Rocky learned that the president had become the most prominent supporter of the #FreeRocky cause. The news was reporting that Trump tweeted that he had spoken with Kanye West about Rocky’s incarceration and that he would be calling the Swedish prime minister about the situation. The following day, the president tweeted that he would personally vouch for Rocky’s bail. On the list of Trump’s priorities, freeing Rocky seemed to be somewhere up there with building the wall and complaining about CNN. Suddenly, A$AP Rocky—a relentlessly charismatic artist whose favorite canvas is the mosh pit, a norm-busting style icon, a singularly charming man who could tease a smile out of a gargoyle—had been inadvertently thrust into the center of an international diplomatic incident. Of course, one had to wonder about the president’s motives for embroiling himself in the plight of the jailed rapper. To many of Rocky’s fans and supporters, Trump’s opportunistic interest felt like a ploy to win over Black voters. (“Sweden has let our African American Community down in the United States,” Trump tweeted at one point.) They weren’t wrong: According to an American diplomat who later testified about an exchange he heard between Trump and Gordon WHEN A$AP ROCKY

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Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the E.U. at the time, Sondland advised the president to sit tight until Rocky was sentenced to a Swedish jail term, then take action. “Let him get sentenced, play the racism card, give him a ticker-tape when he comes home,” Sondland allegedly told Trump. Rocky, meanwhile, knew nothing of the behind-thescenes machinations. He was alone in a tiny cell, in a Midsommar dusk, following along on a TV he could hardly understand. He may have been restricted, but A$AP Rocky possesses an energy that can’t be contained. Before his arrest, he had been on tour, which is where he feels the most alive. His shows are designed to smash people together, to make them dance and fight and lose themselves in oblivion, and Rocky feeds o≠ the madness, frequently diving from the stage into the chaos he has created, slam dancing and crowd surfing with the kids who show up to rave with him. Putting him in a prison cell is like trying to harness an out-of-control nuclear reaction. He’s not good at sitting still. So he kept himself busy. He worked out. He prayed. And true to form as one of music’s most advanced fashion tastemakers, he designed a collection on spec for buzzy Parisian designer Marine Serre. Rocky had been a fan of Serre’s conceptual regenerative streetwear for a few years, and one day in his cell, he began to conceive the outline for a collaboration. He got a pen and paper, which he used to sketch out the idea of a dress that looks imported from a dystopian future: Picture a vintage T-shirt, stretched and elongated, then finished with a kilt-like hem and a Jedi master hood. He didn’t know if the discerning Parisian designer would agree to work with AWGE, Rocky’s creative agency that functions as a platform for his fashion projects. However, he had nothing but time, so he sat in his cell and sketched away. If being stuck in a Swedish jail and suddenly part of Trump’s agenda sounds to you like an unusual position for someone to be in, it wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar scenario to Rocky. Throughout his life he has faced sporadic violence, heartbreaking loss, and the specter of incarceration. When Rocky was 11, while he and his mother were living in various homeless shelters in New York City, his father went to jail for selling drugs. A year later, his elder brother was shot dead. At the age of 16, he spent two weeks in the notorious Rikers Island jail for firing a gun at a neighborhood bully in Harlem. In 2011, when Rocky was 23, he signed a $3 million major-label deal after dropping his breakout mixtape, Live. Love. A$AP., but tragedy lurked around the corner. Rocky’s best friend and mentor, A$AP Yams, who cofounded the A$AP Mob crew and pioneered a new kind of very online rap movement, died in 2015 of an accidental overdose. Rocky has learned to wear his scars well. In fact, he bears two actual scars on his otherwise flawless face: He received the tiny one on his left cheek at the age of 15, when he was pistol-whipped during a fight. The origin of the scar on the right side, a spindly tear that stretches from the corner of his mouth to his jawline—Rocky used to hide it under silk Gucci scarves, launching a “babushka boy” trend—is murkier. When asked how he got the scar, he often made up stories, like falling o≠ his scooter or being slapped by an auntie with long nails, but in Swedish court, when explaining why he has a security detail, Rocky

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mentioned he had been slashed the previous year. Even now, he’s cryptic about the incident. “I think shit happens,” he tells me. “And that night, shit happened.” Sweden represented the pinnacle of shit happening, but Rocky took his overnight transformation from adored entertainer to prisoner with remarkable ease. “I’ve been locked up,” he says with a shrug when I ask if incarceration was one of his greatest fears. The Nordic prison food was “trash,” according to Rocky, and the experience of being in near total isolation for a month was “probably the most boring thing you could think of.” But Rocky prefers to look on the bright side: Kronoberg remand prison, he recalls, was much cleaner than Rikers. After a three-day trial, he was released pending a verdict. (He was eventually found guilty and given a two-year conditional sentence that imposed no further jail time.) The trial featured an unlikely guest at the behest of Trump: one of the administration’s top hostage envoys, who was otherwise tasked with freeing Americans held in places like Afghanistan and Syria. But Rocky thinks Trump’s involvement was a sideshow that could have easily become detrimental. That Trump helped him get out, Rocky says, is a “misperception. He didn’t help—he made e≠orts and he rooted for me to come home, but he didn’t free me.” When Trump started tweeting, Rocky says, the Swedes had told him he’d likely be out in about a week, and he worried the president’s messages would make them find a reason to keep him locked up even longer, “because they felt like they had a point to prove because he kept saying stu≠.… We knew what was going to happen, and it happened the same way they said it would weeks prior,” he says. But when Rocky saw Trump on the news that night in his cell, “I was hoping it wouldn’t turn for the worse.” In the ensuing weeks, allies of the president started complaining that Rocky didn’t deliver a public statement of gratitude. Despite his perceived silence, and his fears that he’d be punished due to Trump’s ham-fisted Twitter diplomacy, Rocky was indeed grateful. He called Trump to say so privately. “I was mad thankful that he did that, because he didn’t have to!” Rocky says of Trump. “He took the time out of his day.” The support he received from the president and others, he says, “made me happy while being in there, because when you in jail, you feel like nobody cares. You can get lost, and you feel soulless. Like, you feel low, bro.” When Rocky got out, he flew home to L.A., and then soon after, rather than take a victory lap or do what most Americans imprisoned abroad tend to do upon their release, which is to stay put in the States for a little while, he jetted to Paris to have co≠ee with Serre so he could propose turning his jailhouse dream of a collaboration into a reality. “I was not expecting anything,” says Serre of their meeting, but the 29-year-old designer was immediately struck by Rocky’s familiarity with garment construction. “He brought me some scarves that he did himself, and I liked the fact that he really knew how to stitch and how to understand the material. And then basically it was just an exchange—ego was not really there,” Serre says. So they got to work. “It was quite natural and easy, and clearly not all collaborations are like that today.” The collection, which includes clingy nylon tops encrusted with upcycled chains, an oversized pu≠er made with deadstock leather, and those dark, frilly dresses, each constructed from 11 di≠erent vintage graphic tees, came out at the end of last year.

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When Rocky was locked up, Tyler, the Creator, declared that from then on Sweden was o≠-limits: “no more Sweden for me, ever” he tweeted. The likes of Schoolboy Q and Lil Yachty agreed. Rocky, on the other hand, stayed away for all of four months after his release. In December he returned to Stockholm, intending to perform for the inmates at the jail he was previously housed in. After being rebu≠ed by the authorities, he had to settle for an arena show that people from the city’s immigrant neighborhoods could attend for free. When I ask if he’d be down to go back to Sweden on his next tour, Rocky sco≠s. “I’d be down to go back in general!” at a rooftop bar in West Hollywood on a sunny afternoon in April, pandemic restrictions are starting to loosen and Rocky has just returned to L.A. after several weeks away. He’s spent the past year or so mostly out of the public eye, but his style—today he’s in an AWGE x Needles track jacket, Kapital Kountry jeans, Nike Dunks, and a pearl-studded belt (text continued on page 49) WHEN WE MEET

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he found at a tiny shop on Ludlow Street in New York City—is as prominent as ever. A vintage Esso trucker hat covers his short braids, and when he smiles, as he does often, he flashes a gold cap on a canine that’s emblazoned with a tooth-size Mickey Mouse. A waiter, not recognizing Rocky, asks him if he’s a rock star. He’s had a place in L.A. since 2012, the year after “Purple Swag” and “Peso” established him as the next big thing from NYC. He carried himself like a rock star back then too: He certainly partied like one, and he looked like one, with a Hendrix-like slinkiness and a taste for the avantgarde fashion worlds of Rick Owens and Raf Simons. His musical output was similarly curated. Though today hip-hop is a post-regional genre, at the time Rocky was a radical and controversial artist for the way, under Yams’s guidance, he mixed sounds and styles from New York and down south. Atlanta and Houston were hot. New York’s hip-hop scene was tepid. Rakim Mayers set things on fire. Even when he’s in L.A., Rocky still moves like a New Yorker. He has a Ferrari and two Mercedes, but he prefers walking, taking Ubers, and riding an e-bike. He spins around his neighborhood to relax, to clear his mind, to see what people are wearing. In NYC, all he has to do to see what styles are popping in the streets is step outside; in L.A., he hops on his bike to seek it out. Rocky’s lockdown year was spent seeking out something even more important: himself. “I’ve been experimenting in every field,” he says over chamomile tea with honey. “I’ve been experimenting with style, with rhythm, with sonics, film, food, health, love, life—for real.” As the world slowed down, he finally had time to “find out more about me,” he says. He discovered that he’s changing: “I’m converted to the change. New-world shit.” After a stint with sobriety in 2019, last year Rocky returned to smoking copious amounts of kush and dropping LSD, which aided this journey of mind expansion and self-discovery. “I’m stoned as fuck,” he adds with a sheepish grin soon after sinking deep into the couch next to me. His dream blunt rotation? Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor. “I wanna laugh with Richard Pryor,” he says. “You smoke with him, it’s over. It’s over.” Change, Rocky is saying, is good. In his love life, though, the change Rocky has experienced is drastic. It’s change in the same way that a Mega Millions lottery winner experiences change. Because A$AP Rocky is dating Rihanna. Rocky knows he probably shouldn’t talk about Rihanna, the triple-A-list pop star, wildly successful fashion and beauty entrepreneur, and Category 5 cultural hurricane, but he can’t help himself. As soon as I bring her up, he starts beaming like a teenager whose crush just accepted his prom invite. I could practically hear the angels singing. “The love of my life,” he calls her. “My lady.” The exact timeline of their relationship is uncertain, and Rocky won’t divulge many details. Rumors about their status began circulating as early as 2013, when Rocky opened for Rihanna’s Diamonds World Tour. You can see why the global pop culture apparatus and the duo’s combined hundred million fans—most of them hers, to be fair—have been attempting to speak their union into existence. They’re both insanely hot. They’ve both got culture-shifting side hustles. They’re both fashion oracles. Their coupling feels predestined.

“I think I’d be an incredible, remarkably, overall amazing dad. I would have a very fly child. Very.”

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“So much better,” Rocky replies without hesitation. “So much better when you got the One. She amounts to probably, like, a million of the other ones.” Newworld shit, indeed. Rocky is among our culture’s most unabashed ladies’ men, but he says he’s comfortable embracing monogamy: “I think when you know, you know. She’s the One.” A sure sign things were getting serious last year was when Rihanna invited Rocky to spend Christmas with her family in Barbados, where Rocky—whose father emigrated from Barbados to the U.S.—immediately felt a sense of belonging. “It was like a homecoming thing,” he says. “It was crazy. I always imagined what it would be like for my dad, before he came to America. And I got to visit those places, and believe it or not, there was something nostalgic about it. It was foreign but familiar.” Rihanna has said in an interview that she sees herself having three or four children in the next 10 years. I ask A$AP Rocky if he’s ready to be a father. “If that’s in my destiny, absolutely,” he replies. “I think I’m already a dad! All these motherfuckers are already my sons—whatchu talkin’ ’bout!” He laughs and then starts choosing his words carefully: “Nah, but like, I think I’d be an incredible, remarkably, overall amazing dad. I would have a very fly child. Very.” In a way, the COVID year was a blessing for Rocky and Rihanna, because without their usual full schedules of tours, film and fashion shoots, product launches, and meetings, they could be in the same place for more than a week at a time. But Rocky lives to tour. So last summer, for the first time together since 2013, Rocky and Rihanna went on a tour of sorts together. They commandeered a massive tour bus and drove from L.A. to NYC, swinging south through Texas and stopping in Memphis and a half dozen other cities along the way. But they didn’t play any shows. Instead, they threw themselves into the tradition of the Great American Road Trip. They listened to the Stones, the Grateful Dead, and Curtis Mayfield. They stopped in a few national parks. Rocky dropped acid and made his own clothes, beatnik-style—sewing, patching, and tie-dyeing shirts and pants on the bus. When I ask Rocky whom he met while on the road, he takes a moment to think. “I met myself,” he says. One can understand why: Not since (text continued on page 52)

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Sweden had Rocky had this much time for himself. And he’d never been able to be so free and unburdened while with his lady. “Being able to drive and do a tour without feeling like it was an occupation or an obligated job agreement, I feel like that experience is like none other,” Rocky recalls. “I never experienced nothing like it.” Most enticingly for A$AP Rocky fans, he recorded new music along the way. He says he’s over working in proper recording studios, which he considers too big and boring. On the road, he had a mobile setup so he could make music as inspiration struck. “Work with what you got,” Rocky says of his scrappy DIY approach, a style of composing that has only increased his confidence that what he’s creating is the best music of his career. “God blessed me with a lot, so I’m working with that, and that’s enough to make some fuckin’ fire.” Rocky’s growth as an artist in the past decade has been all about chasing new sounds, often by working with unexpected collaborators and occasionally at the expense of fans who think a Harlem MC named after Rakim should be rapping over rap beats. His last album, 2018’s Testing, reflected a heady period of musical experimentation and included a sample of Moby’s proto-chillwave track “Porcelain,” a duet with FKA Twigs, and a very Frank Ocean–y track featuring Frank Ocean. After two albums that reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts, Testing only reached No. 6 and was met with mixed reviews, and while on tour back in January 2019, Rocky told me he was “emotionally discouraged” because he felt like listeners didn’t get it. But rather than resorting to calling up the surefire producers of the moment

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Rocky’s resolve to continue confounding expectations has only increased in the ensuing years. “It’s all about the evolution,” he says of his approach to his long-anticipated new record, tentatively titled All Smiles. “If I’m still doing the same shit with the same sounds and the same bars and the same visuals from years ago, what’s the point? You got that catalog. You can go revisit that.” He says he occasionally reads what critics say about his music but tries not to pay attention to it: “I don’t think that’s really my concern. I’d be confused, man. I just want to make some good music, that’s all. I want to feel great about doing it, and I want people to feel great about hearing it.” Two new important creative partners are likely to be found on All Smiles. The first is Morrissey. Morrissey! Rocky, it turns out, is a huge fan, and he’s been working remotely with the Pope of Mope over the past year. The former Smiths frontman has been writing, producing, and contributing vocals to the new record, Rocky says. “Anything you need him to do, he show up and do.” The second is his road trip companion. Morrissey may be great, but in Rihanna, Rocky has found his most inspiring partner. Though hesitant to reveal the extent of their collaboration, Rocky hints that Rihanna is listening to and responding to his new work: “I think it’s important to have somebody that you can bounce those creative juices and ideas o≠ of.” Whether All Smiles is going to reflect Rihanna’s pop sensibilities, Rocky won’t say. But Rihanna, he assures, has “absolutely” influenced the new music. “It’s just a di≠erent point of view.” Rocky hints that the very fact of his being in a relationship has defined the vibe of the new material. He calls All Smiles a “ghetto love tale” and says that it’s “way more mature” compared with his previous work, which in content is about as mature as anything coming from a 20-something who brags about their sexual conquests and sick outfits can be. When Rocky decides to drop the album, which he estimates is about 90 percent complete his life: Rocky the romantic.

exactly when he discovered that style was in his blood. “I was probably ﬁve or six, and I started crying because my mom wanted to dress me for Easter and I wanted to pick out the clothes myself,” he recalls. “I ain’t like how I looked. I was crying ’cause I was mad there was nothing I could do.” His family knew better than to try to put the genie back in the A$AP ROCKY REMEMBERS

own thing.” Rocky likes to tells stories like this when his childhood in New York comes up, about his parents buying him pint-size Jordans when he was barely old enough to party. He describes his style as completely innate, more like an instinct than a set of well-developed aesthetic he found that immersing himself into the worlds of luxury fashion and streetwear presented a powerful form of escapism. In high school, in the early 2000s, Rocky became a regular presence at downtown boutiques like Prohibit, which sold Japanese denim to (text continued on page 98)

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Photograph by Irina Rozovsky

What do you do at the beginning of the end of a global pandemic? Why, you get the whole world together to compete for precious medals, of course. Here we present four superstar Americans whose performances you won’t want to miss—including two who plan to represent their sports’ long-awaited debuts at the Games. J U N E / J U L Y

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Swimmer Micanopy, Florida D R E S S E L , a Florida native who might just be the fastest-swimming bipedal mammal on the planet, believes that if you want to unlock greatness—true, record-breaking greatness—you have to start with the boring things. “Like making your bed,” he says. Swim races are often decided by fractions of a second, and every detail matters: from how each individual ﬁnger is placed as it enters the water to how pointed each toe is out behind the body. Because he focuses on the small stu≠ (and is believed to possess an NBA-esque 40-inch vertical), Dressel, 24, is faster to 15 meters than anyone else in the world. Once he has a lead, he rarely loses it, especially if he’s swimming freestyle or butterﬂy. Some people are even speculating that this summer Dressel might be able to repeat what is arguably the greatest feat in Olympic history: CAELEB

Michael Phelps’s eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Games. But going for gold abroad means making the bed here at home (unless he’s up before his wife, in which case she makes it). He takes copious notes in two separate black-and-white composition books: one where he records anything that might be on his mind, which he calls his life journal but admits is “basically a diary,” and a swim logbook where he logs notes on practices, how he swam, how he was feeling, who beat him, and a pass-fail grade for the day. (Lately it’s about 95 percent passes and 5 percent fails.) He also tries to pick up a piece of trash every single day. “I know this stu≠ really does sound stupid, but it’s one of the reasons why I think I’ve seen some success in this sport— the tiny little habits,” he says. “I really consider being successful in this sport as just dropping pennies in the bank. And that’s what I’m doing every day when I do these stupid, mundane little tasks.” — C L AY S K I P P E R

— C H R I S G AY O M A L I

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NYJAH HUSTON: GROOMING, RANDI PETERSEN USING DR. BRANDT SKINCARE AND L AURA MERCIER.

With any luck, this summer’s Olympic Games, which will see 11,000 athletes from around the world descend upon Tokyo, are going to look a little bit different than they have in previous years, and not just because of stringent COVID protocols. For the first time since the inception of the Games, surfing and skateboarding are going to be Olympic events, which means some of the planet’s most daring athletes will be in the once implausible position of competing for gold. And sure, given what we’ve been through, it’s a weird time to be rooting against other countries, but one could argue that this year’s crop of athletes—individuals who’ve worked their tails off to get ready for global prime time and then had to put those dreams on hold for a year—are some of the most exciting and refreshingly idiosyncratic competitors we’ve seen in a generation. In other words: The red, white, and blue is offering some athletes to believe in. Take the men’s side, for example. There’s Caeleb Dressel, a swimmer who brings a brainy rigor to his approach that can seem like a breath of fresh air after a few years of, say, Ryan Lochte. (Jeah!) There’s Nyjah Huston, the prodigious skateboarder with 4.6 million Instagram followers who’s already won more prize money from competing than any of his contemporaries. (He estimates that 90 percent of Dressel at a his body is covered in tattoos.) YMCA in Meanwhile, Noah Lyles is a Gainesville, sprinter who seems to have Florida. more fun than anyone else and isn’t afraid to use his platform to advocate for Black lives mattering. And then, of course, there’s John John Florence, an accomplished (if still young) veteran from Hawaii who is widely considered the best competitive surfer in the world. These are the four male Olympic athletes who are, to our minds, worthy of your attention. Not necessarily because they are going to crush the competition (this year more than ever, the Games happening at all is a win for humanity). But because in the aggregate they represent all the groovy multitudinousness of what this country can offer.

Huston at his skate park in Orange County, California.

P H OTO G R A P H BY M A R K M A H A N E Y

found himself taking an unholy beating trying to land a trick he should have been able to nail. The trick, he tells me over Zoom a few days later, was a “back 270 noseblunt”—an impossible, blind-shoulder balletic spin over a handrail that, if executed correctly, would see the nose end of his board kiss the metal before rolling away cleanly. But on this day, he just couldn’t land it. (Most skaters couldn’t.) He walked away with a sprained wrist and a moderately bruised ego. “I won a lot of contests with that trick,” says Huston, 26, and now it’s like, “Damn, apparently I’m not as good anymore because I’m out here getting smoked.” Most skaters don’t get smoked on tricks they landed before they got their learner’s permits, but Huston isn’t most skaters. He won the skate world’s biggest amateur contest at age 10, turned pro at 11. He is a veteran of the sport, with the battered body to show for it, and is the favorite to win gold when skateboarding makes its Olympic debut. But he’s still young, and he’s embracing the freedoms—sometimes too eagerly—that come with being the most successful skater of his generation: In February, he was charged by Los Angeles prosecutors after throwing a large party at his home. He wants to apologize for that—he was trying to host a birthday dinner for a friend, and things got out of hand. “Obviously, I have a lot of friends and stuff,” he says, grinning. Lately, though, he’s had an eye on the future. When we spoke in March, he was about ready to lock it down to guard against injury—not the fun choice, but the smart one. “I think I got another five years in me,” he says, “which means I will be able to make it to a second Olympics when I’m 29.” — S A M S C H U B E

Sprinter Clermont, Florida S P R I N T E R Noah Lyles blitzed his way to 200-meter gold at the 2019 World Athletics Championships, his hair was spiked in silver, a nod to Goku’s WHEN

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for another.… A lot of Black kids out there think that their hair is nappy and ugly and stu≠ like that. But I love my hair.” That he was racking up win after win on the pro circuit with such joyful irreverence invited a slew of inevitable (and, if you ask him, unwelcome) Usain

Bolt comparisons. Whatever the case, the World Championships gold capped o≠ a three-year whirlwind in which the Virginia native cemented himself as the track world’s Next Big Thing. And then, last August, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, before a race at the Monaco Diamond League, Lyles nervously bowed his head and thrust a single gloved fist into the air as his name was announced—a nod to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who iconically raised their fists on the podium in 1968. Lyles then proceeded to torch the field, clocking the fastest 200-meter time of 2020. “As athletes, we feel like we have to keep it in—to not be political,” says Lyles. He believes that the future of the sport depends on track athletes—most of whom are Black—making their voices heard. “Do you not want the sport to do well? Do you not want the sport to keep thriving or have a safe place for your athletes to go? Being able to get that o≠ my chest and knowing that once I do this there’s no going back—it was freeing.” —YA N G -Y I G O H

P H OTO G R A P H BY M A LC O L M JAC KS O N

N O A H LY L E S : G R O O M I N G , L AU R A R E Y N O L D S F O R L AU R A R E Y N O L D S A RT I ST RY.

Lyles at the National Training Center in Clermont, Florida.

Surfer Oahu, Hawaii

S U M M E R , surfing will make its first-ever appearance in the Olympics, and John John Florence, who is probably the best surfer alive, will represent America. “Surfing is a very singular sport,” he says, trying to wrap his head around the idea of competing. “You don’t get that feeling of, like, ‘Go, Brazil!’ or ‘Go, America!’ ” It’s just a few guys in the water, usually. And Florence is usually the most gifted of them. The story of how he actually made it to the Olympics is an interesting, unexpected one. In 2018, he sustained an ACL tear in Bali. After healing up he got re-injured in Brazil the following year and required surgery. THIS

Florence in Newcastle, Australia.

P H O T O G R A P H B Y Z A C B AY LY

the couch and a host of other American surfers chasing his World Surf League points and a chance at one of the two Olympics slots given to each country. Florence went home to forget about the tour. He tended to his bees. Took a big sailing trip. Avoided surfboards. But as the fall went on, Florence realized that he wasn’t quite out of the running: He’d built a big lead in the WSL standings that refused to totally dwindle.

It eventually became apparent to Florence that the Olympics spot would probably come down to the Billabong Pipeline Masters, in December, the event that runs across just a few feet of sand from where he grew up and where he still lives now. The day came, and he paddled out in “windy and bumpy” conditions. “Just forget about the knee,” he told himself.

“I borderline couldn’t really turn very well,” Florence recalls. “Straight lines were kind of like my thing to go do there.” But that’s what Pipe calls for: a brave, straight line. He got barreled and made it to the quarterﬁnals—far enough in the tournament to hold o≠ his main competition, Kelly Slater, and hold on to one of the top two qualifying spots. “It is scary,” Florence says, “because when you’re in those big barrels, you have no control over what the wave’s going to do.” But Florence has a way of knowing anyway. His knee survived. So did he. On to the Olympics. —Z ACH BARON

GQ fitness and wellness columnist Joe Holder says this summer is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create the body you want. 6 2

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Illustrations by Serwah Attafuah

PREPARE

You have to get your head right first. And what’s wonderful is how this can create a positive feedback loop: A healthy mindset leads to the consistent physical activity that quite literally makes you happier and smarter—and ready to make even more good decisions for your body.

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We’re building a body equipped to deal with life, and I want you to think of a workout as anything that will improve your resilience. Good sleep improves your ability to bounce back from stress. Meditation sharpens your mind. Maybe today you plan a week of healthy eating and then go to the store. Congrats—you just worked out.

RETHINK WHAT COUNTS AS A WORKOUT.

. s l a

It’s not easy, but it is simple, and if you buy in, you will see results.

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A better body starts with a better mindset.

oal is to make bette g t r go irs f r

Even if you didn’t get COVID, the pandemic probably changed your body, whether you found yourself locked out of the gym or you wrecked your posture working from home or you simply weren’t able to sleep. But now we have a rare opportunity, because the pandemic also scrambled everything else about life. As we rebuild how we work, socialize, and travel, we can completely reimagine our relationship with our bodies. Which is where I come in. I’ve trained a long list of clients with a wide range of goals. Some wanted to get through a 5K—others were about to walk down a runway in Paris. No matter where you’re at, I believe there is a universal baseline that every person’s body should be primed for: to feel great moving through the world and to be resilient in the face of whatever life throws our way. This isn’t a workout program. Yes, it incorporates physical movement, but it’s also about your emotional well-being and all the ways, big and small, that you nourish yourself. The plan is built around consistency, helping you make lasting changes to live just a little healthier, eat a bit better, and move your body regularly. That’s far more powerful than any

A well-designed body needs welldesigned goals, and that means goals that are concrete enough

Get registered for your race Make a training plan

Finish a 10K

Complete your training plan

Run a half-marathon

Yo u

Right now—this very moment!—is your chance to design, then create, the body you want.

can hold yourself accountable. “I want to run more” is not a good goal. Try for something more like “I want to run my first half-marathon in November.” Then work backward, breaking your big goal into the a Russian nesting doll.

5 THINK MEDIUMTERM.

S P O T

The idea is to create a mental framework that allows you to pile up small wins and bounce back quickly from minor losses. Take that halfmarathon: Getting in shape to drop the hammer for 13.1 miles is a big, long-term project—

I L L U S T R A T I O N S

B Y

S I M O N

A B R A N O W I C Z

REMEMBER THIS THREE-QUESTION PLAN TO OVERCOME SELF-DOUBT.

At some point you might think, I can’t do this. That’s only a problem if you stop there—and most people do. But the next time your inner critic chimes in, ask yourself three follow-up questions.

Why do I think I can’t do it? Is that reason true? If it is true, how can I work on that?

Be patient at first—you are where you are.

I don’t care how fit you were in high school or even at the beginning of lockdown. Start where you are, not where you were, and certainly not where you want to be. Doing too much too fast is the number one cause of both injury and simply getting overwhelmed and giving up.

9 BEFORE WE BEGIN A PROGRAM, I PUT MY CLIENTS THROUGH A WELLNESS “AUDIT.”

I’ve found that almost everyone has a strong innate sense of how they’re doing; it just takes some prompting with a few basic questions.

Am I able to work out—or play with my kids—for 30 minutes without getting excessively fatigued? Am I able to recover from temporary setbacks in my life?

Be realistic with (and kind to) yourself.

Maybe you’ve got some insecurity about your body—how it looks or how it functions. First, understand that you can probably achieve much more than you think you can—but it will take time. Second, accept that no matter how hard you work, you probably can’t transform yourself into LeBron or The Rock. But if you aim toward maximizing your potential—without comparing yourself with anybody else—I promise you’re going to like the results.

thinking about it in its entirety can be overwhelming. And in the day-to-day grind (short term), you may not feel like you’re making much progress. But at the end of each week (medium term), you’ll see that you got your

miles in—and those weeks add up. Thinking medium-term will also help you constructively rebound from setbacks: If you miss your run one day, don’t beat yourself up—you have six more to get back on track.

Do I have more fresh foods than processed foods in the kitchen? Do I have access to nature or green space? Do I spend enough time there? What has caused me to fail when I have tried to commit to a movement program in the past?

No grades here. But once you’re aware of where you are, you can start the work.

TRAIN

Start with your foundation.

Build a body that moves.

When we say we’re “out of shape,” we’re usually talking about our cardiovascular health. But when you’ve been sedentary for a while, your whole body stiffens up. So before you even think about getting your wind back or building muscle, I want you to start by focusing on a few often overlooked body parts: feet, hips and glutes, and spine. This will help you with your posture, stability, body control, and spatial awareness—all of which you’ll need when you get into more complex movements. If you’re starting from scratch, spend at least a few days shaking off the cobwebs with these moves, then keep them as part of your daily T FEE maintenance.

Athletes train for specific sports. You’re an athlete, and your sport is life! The movement patterns of daily living should be a joy, from bending over to tie your shoes to hoisting your suitcase into an overhead bin to jogging for the bus. And whether you’re a marathoner or a weight lifter or a pickup hooper or just want to crawl around and play with your grandkids in 25 years, better movement is where you begin. If you feel like this process is slow-going, just remember: You’re building a body for the rest of your life—start slowly to make sure you get it right.

2. GLUTE BRIDGE While on your back, bring your feet toward your hips and push

11 AND A BODY THAT LOOKS GOOD TOO.

SPINE 1. T-SPINE SWEEP

Some vanity is completely natural—and building a base is the first step. It doesn’t matter if you want to add muscle, shed weight, or go all out for a chiseled six-pack—your body needs to be in basic shape. Otherwise you won’t have the strength to do the reps to gain muscle or the endurance to go long enough to lose pounds. It’s the reverse of what Deion Sanders said: Your body has to feel good before it can look good.

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2. PRONE PRESS-UPS Lying facedown, put your hands under your shoulders and push your torso up.

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13 BUILD A FOUR-WEEK BASE.

A SAMPLE WEEK.

Get the heart rate up: boxing, jogging, Peloton, HIIT, bodyweight circuits.

No matter your preferred training activity—boxing, basketball, or jogging in the park—it’s important to start from a base level of fitness. (And it’s always good to reconnect with the fundamentals, no matter the shape you think you’re in!) So for the next four weeks, focus on some of the basic biomotor building blocks: strength, endurance, and flexibility. Starting with this general preparation phase will set you up for whatever specific discipline you want to move into next.

Three or four times a week for 20 to 45 minutes.

Yoga, Pilates, simple stretching. Every day, for at least 10 minutes. Anything load-bearing: machines, dumbbells, or barbells. One or two times a week for 30 to 45 minutes.

M O N

A 30-minute jog followed by 10 minutes of stretching

T U E

A 10-minute morning wake-up stretch

W E D

40 minutes of weights at the gym and a 10-minute evening wind-down stretch

T H U

20 minutes of YouTube yoga

F R I

A 45-minute boxing class and a 10-minute stretch

S A T

A 20-minute HIIT workout and a 10-minute mobility routine

S U N

An hour-long Pilates class

Next, change one variable.

Often, when people are getting back into working out or starting a new program, they try to do too many things too quickly. I always stress nuance over novelty. Once you’ve established a baseline level of general fitness, for the next two weeks, I want you to change just one variable. It could be intensity (if you were going 70 percent in your workouts, up it to 90 percent for one of them), Reddit volume (your 20 minutes of HIIT work becomes 30), or frequency (push strength to two times a week or endurance to four). by Mark Rippetoe See what feels good and how your body responds. FREE+STYLE

A former elite gymnast completely your body moves through space. THE ART OF RUNNING FASTER by Julian Goater and Don Melvin Even if you’re content with your pace, there’s more to running than just putting one foot in front of the other.

16 IF ALL ELSE FAILS, GIVE YOURSELF 20 MINUTES. Sometimes the day goes sideways and your program falls apart. No stress! Just take 20 minutes and move. I don’t care what you do—moving at all is so much better than nothing. But if you want a foolproof 20-minute workout, follow this formula. Three minutes to elevate your heart rate: Jump rope or jog in place. Three minutes of dynamic movement: Leg swings, knee tucks, hip circles. Do each for one minute. Nine minutes of strength work: Push-ups, air squats, crunches. Do each for 30 seconds. Repeat six times. Three minutes of conditioning: High knees, squat jumps, mountain climbers. Do each for 20 seconds, with 10 seconds of rest in between. Repeat twice. Two minutes of breath work: Inhale three seconds, hold three seconds, exhale five seconds, hold three seconds. Repeat eight times.

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SUSTAIN

ke your bo

y d

a b r le. u d Design selfreinforcing habits so that once you’ve created your new body, maintaining it becomes automatic. Opportunities to reset, like this summer, don’t come around very often—

18 You can’t know how you’re doing if you don’t know what you’re doing—and if you don’t track your progress. At the beginning of every day, make a plan. At the end of every day, review it. Judge yourself the way you would judge anyone else: on your actions, not your intent.

Plan the day. Review the day.

BECAUSE THERE’S NO SINGLE IDEAL FOOD PYRAMID ANYMORE. Try to think less about which foods are “good” or “bad” and think more about what you need and what matters to you. Consider these three exemplary dinners.

A PLANT-BASED GUY WHO WANTS TO ADD MUSCLE Collards

Bean salad

Brown rice

Tofu

Broccoli

you just have to put in a little effort: Eat beans, leafy greens, and (gasp) some minimally processed products, like tofu.

A 60-YEAR-OLD WHO CARES ABOUT THE CLIMATE Sardines

3 QUESTIONS TO BEGIN YOUR DAY

3 QUESTIONS TO END YOUR DAY

How am I feeling today? (Be concrete: Rate your energy levels, mental clarity, and mood.)

What’s something that worked today?

What is a distinct health goal to accomplish today?

What’s something that went wrong?

What am I grateful for? Banana with peanut butter

Build an eating practice. Yoga and meditation are practices, and I talk a lot about fitness as a holistic practice. But I want you to approach eating the same way: We have to move beyond the idea of a single diet, because there is no one “right” way to eat. Of course, you have to know the general ground rules: Get your nourishment from fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and high-quality protein—and avoid, as much as possible, added sugars, refined carbs, and anything highly processed. But beyond that, what you eat will depend on your life and your body.

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It’s not just about your body: Your diet can (and should) reflect your values. Although caring about the climate means eating less meat, animal protein can be a good choice if it’s sustainably sourced.

A FIVE-DAYS-A-WEEK RUNNER

What am I in awe of—what makes life special?

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Grilled mushrooms

Kohlrabi slaw

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Brown rice

Salmon

Carrots cooked in olive oil

Sweet potatoes

Someone who’s extremely active needs to break a few “rules”: They need plenty of fats and a good amount of complex carbs, and they need to be sure to eat a lot.

Get to know your blood sugar.

Blood glucose is an incredibly useful biomarker, even for people who don’t have diabetes. It’s a snapshot of how daily life—not just what you eat but also how you sleep and exercise—affects your body. Here are two ways to measure it.

A HIGHTECH IMPLANT

AN OLDSCHOOL FINGER PRICK

If you’re willing to shell out $399 for a four-week program (and $199 a month if you want to keep going), a new start-up called Levels uses a continuous glucose monitor, a small medical device that you stick on your arm. It’s connected to an app that logs your meals and tracks your blood sugar in real time— simply tap your phone for an instant reading. You’ll feel like the Terminator.

For less than $30, the meters available at any drugstore will also do the trick. According to the American Diabetes Association, fasting blood sugar—measured in the morning before eating— should be under 100 mg/dL, and two hours after a meal should read below 140. But you can go much deeper than that: There’s so much to learn about how different foods (and workouts and daily habits) impact your body.

Design your environment for success.

Willpower is fickle and unreliable. So don’t rely on it! Good choices should be automatic.

THESE PAGES: SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS, PAGE 101.

REMEMBER TO BREATHE.

INCREASE OR DECREASE FRICTION Want to quit eating Butterfingers at night? Don’t keep them around. Want to get up early and run? Lay out your gear the night before.

Here are two calming breath work routines to have at the ready whenever necessary. 4-7-8 Inhale for four seconds, hold for seven, exhale for eight. Exhaling for longer than you inhale activates your parasympathetic— or “rest and digest”— nervous system. Good to use before eating, going to sleep, or firing off an inadvisable email.

SET REMINDERS Maybe an alarm on your phone that goes off every day at 3 p.m. reminding you to foam roll for 10 minutes or go outside and get some sunshine.

AlternateNostril Breathing Close the left nostril and inhale through the right nostril for a count of five. Then plug the right nostril and exhale through the left nostril. Repeat, starting with the other side. Five to 10 cycles will calm and center you.

STACK GOOD HABITS If you can get yourself to brush your teeth at night, you can get yourself to stretch for five minutes. If you can get yourself to stretch for five minutes, you can get yourself to journal for five minutes. Let momentum work for you. SCHEDULE YOUR WORKOUTS If a meeting you don’t want to go to is on your calendar, you probably go anyway. So schedule your workouts— it’s like a meeting with yourself.

NOW GET MOVING!

You have everything you need to design the fitness and wellness regimen that works for you. And if you ever get off track, just come back and start at number one.

BY CHRIS GAYOMALI

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANIELLE LEVITT STYLED BY JON TIETZ

During the isolation and upheaval of the past year, we learned something fundamental about sports: Coming together for physical activity builds vital communities and lays the groundwork for activism. Here, NYC athletic crews of all stripes—runners, skaters, surfers, climbers, and more—go deep on the purpose they find in a shared passion.

FC CLARK The rec soccer team of Chinatown’s trendy new Hokkaido-style restaurant and bar, Dr. Clark. Clockwise from left: Julien Bouguennec, Yudai Kanayama, Charlotte Williams, Charles Dorrance-King, Ron Bajrami, Malkam Saunds, Keisuke Kasagi, Noah Drysdale, Keisuke Asano, Alejandro Fernández, and David Komurek (in vehicle) “After games I offer the team dinner,” says co-owner Kanayama. “Sometimes the other team comes too. We play hard, we eat hard, we all become friends.”

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we live in Brooklyn. A few days prior, I’d come across an Instagram post for a protest in support of Black Lives Matter set to take place in the water, organized by the East Coast chapter of the Black Surfing Association, or BSA, a nonprofit dedicated to mentoring young surfers and diversifying the sport. My wife and I had participated in marches and rallies before, but the idea of a water protest sounded—I don’t know—refreshing. A part of me was curious too: Surfing is by and large a white sport, one co-opted from native Hawaiians. Who was going to show up? Admittedly, this demonstration was taking place during an especially tough stretch of the pandemic for us: Loved ones back home in California were battling COVID, friends were losing jobs left and right, and grotesque images of police brutality swirled around all of it, like phosphine fumes seeping into our chest cavities. I was experiencing frequent bouts of listlessness, zapped of all energy one moment and incandescent with white-hot rage the next. Mostly, though, I was feeling unmoored. I’d gained 10 pounds and was stuck in a fucked-up, interstitial headspace where the future was a blur on the horizon, just out of reach. In a city like New York, without social tethers to hold you down, it can be perilously easy to just float and float and float. We parked the car a few blocks from the beach. The surf was flat; there were no waves. My wife laid a blanket out on the sand as I slipped into a wetsuit, scrubbed some wax onto my single-fin, and glided out under a clear blue sky with hundreds of other people. There they were, a whole taxonomy of New York City surfing, bobbing in the water: grannies on soft-tops, Black guys with locs, Japanese guys with unnatural locs, tiny long-haired groms with the buoyancy of inflatable pool flamingos. Glorious weirdos took their spots in the lineup next to immaculate yuppies. It was an otherwise impossible triangulation of people in neoprene. The water was unusually cold. We positioned ourselves into a circle and shouted all the usual protest refrains, slightly o≠ beat. We splashed water for the dead. And despite the lack of waves, the current that day was strong, and we all had to paddle constantly to keep from drifting eastward, e≠orts that distended the circle we’d tried to form. Later I’d come across an aerial photo taken by a drone far above us. Our protest circle was more of a heart. I left the beach that day feeling not exactly recharged, but better, like my own internal computer was no longer running on lowbattery mode. There was something almost spiritual about paddling out there on the open ocean with hundreds of other people— belonging, however briefly, to an idea that was in service of something bigger. It felt like the best possible permutation of church.

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ON K ANAYAMA

his own pants South2 West8 glasses, his own ON WILLIAMS

sweatpants $375 Aries ON BA JRAMI

his own tracksuit Puma headband, stylist’s own ON SAUNDS

jacket $1,550 Balenciaga pants $1,020 Rick Owens

→ THESE PAGES ON ASHIMA SHIRAISHI

tank top $35 The North Face pants, her own her own shoes Ashima x Brain Dead Zenist for Evolv ON HISATOSHI SHIRAISHI

ON K ASAGI

jacket $445 pants $340 Homme Plissé Issey Miyake

track pants $250 Adidas Originals by Wales Bonner

sweater $1,080 Vivienne Westwood x Andreas Kronthaler

shorts $86 Jungmaven

ON DRYSDALE

shorts $450 Thom Browne ON ASANO

shorts $150 Adidas Originals by Wales Bonner sweatpants $690 Thom Browne ON FERNÁNDEZ

t-shirt $1,100 Dior Men shorts $790 Valentino hat $39 Conner Hats ON KOMUREK

his own jacket Bode

boots $165 The North Face his own socks Gold Toe glasses, his own

Over the next few months, I followed the BSA closely, curious about the community it had managed to build. One morning in April, I drove back down to the beach to meet with Lou Harris, 49, who founded the East Coast chapter of the BSA in 2016 with the goals of making Black surfers like him more visible and, together with a close-knit crew of BSA volunteers, teaching kids from the area how to surf and skate. (I arrived with an old shortboard I wanted to donate

ASHIMA AND HISATOSHI SHIRAISHI The 20-year-old rock climbing prodigy and her father, Hisatoshi, 70, who has served as one of her coaches. “There’s a strong connection between psychological wellness and climbing,” says Ashima. “A lot of it has to do with trusting other people when they’re belaying you and your life is in their hands.”

that had been gathering dust in my apartment, but more on that in a bit.) In person, Harris, who has two Wu-Tang tattoos, is bouncy and incapable of sitting still. “He has the energy of someone who’s 25,” says Kevin Amuquandoh, a graduate student who volunteers with the BSA. Until recently, Harris worked full-time as a night doorman on the Upper East Side and would schlep back down to the beach to give local kids free morning surf lessons.

Harris tells me he made the decision to start the organization when he learned about a teenager who started a ﬁre in Coney Island that ended up killing a police o∞cer. “When the police found out it was a 16-year-old Black kid, they said to him, ‘Why did you do it?’ And he said that he was bored,” recounts Harris. “That blew my mind. This police o∞cer would be alive if only this kid had an activity.” He knows that making himself and the people around him visible—whether that’s grinding

out long days in the community or posting constantly on social media—is important if he hopes to change tired old ideas of who gets to be seen as a surfer. “When I ﬁrst started giving surf lessons, there was this one lady on the phone who didn’t know I was Black,” says Harris. “When she got to the lesson, she was looking for the instructor. I said, ‘It’s me!’ And she said, ‘No, you’re not Louis!’ ” These days, the BSA is a motley yet tightknit cluster of friends who, with Harris at

all clothing (prices upon request) Louis Vuitton x NBA Collection all shoes and watches, subjects’ own

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THE NEW YORK ROLLIN’ KNICKS New York City’s premier wheelchair basketball team. From left: Fabrizio Shao, Ryan Martin, Paul Ward, Patrick Anderson, and Kevin Grant “Basketball is like our therapy,” says Grant, a veteran player who serves as the team’s manager. “When we want to not think about our problems, we play ball.”

the forefront, gather every weekend to do the galvanizing work of nurturing the next generation of surfers, expanding imaginations, and making the sport more inclusive for everyone. And that entails welcoming outsiders like myself who trek down from Brooklyn. “We’re working from a di≠erent perspective,” says Babajide Alao, a BSA volunteer and the owner of a local West African restaurant. “That’s pretty much the main focus of us here in the Rockaways. It’s been about building community versus ‘Oh, we’re territorial over it.’ ” There’s something beautiful about physical activity as a means of connecting with other people, especially during a period of debilitating isolation. Within the past two decades, adult participation in daily sports and exercise has been trending upward, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I suspect it’s because when you create a community around an activity—running, skateboarding, soccer—almost immediately you begin to share a sense of momentum. You lock on to a communal frequency, which not only improves your physical and mental wellbeing but also creates space for you to do the important work of looking out for the people in your orbit. Activeness as a foundation for activism—that creates a lot of good in the world. And it starts with ﬁnding others who share that love for moving together. H A V E A slightly corny, purposely overgeneralized theory about making friends in New York if you’re not from here. First, you convene with acquaintances from back home, folks a few degrees removed from your usual circles. These people you mostly just tolerate because you need someone to drink with. Second, you begin making other friends— likely through work—with whom you share similar ambitions and who, like you, left their hometowns with vague aspirations of something grander for themselves. There’s a layer I

of richness to these relationships that you don’t take for granted. And third, if you’re lucky and commit to putting down roots, you eventually connect with a group of people who finally make the city feel like home, people with a shared sense of injustice and restlessness who understand where you’re coming from and all the glittery baggage that makes you you. These are people you never would have encountered anywhere else on earth, because, really: How could you have? Somewhat miraculously, these people become your people. They become your heart. They become your tribe. I was lucky enough to find my tribe here in 2014, when a friend persuaded me to join a co-ed basketball league in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that was sponsored by a local bookstore. (Our literary team name: the Slaughterhouse Five.) The team is a beautiful mishmash of players—women who hooped in high school and college and all seem to have smooth, consistent releases on their jump shots, plus a bunch of guys my age, mostly from California, who try hard on defense. We’d often practice a few times a week, and after games on the weekends, we’d spend the rest of the day drinking beer. Having a singular goal in common—trying to squeak out a win every week—made it easy to get mixed up in one another’s lives. Looking back, I think part of the reason the pandemic had made me feel so discombobulated was that I wasn’t able to hoop with that core group of friends; the weekly ritual had grounded me more than I was willing to admit to myself. For one morning, basketball, even a goofy version with the lowest possible stakes, had commanded my full attention and pushed my problems out of my field of vision. When that flow state evaporated, all that was left was to turn inward, and all those anxieties would just fold into themselves. I should note that what I was going through was by no means unique to me. The New York Rollin’ Knicks, the city’s premier wheelchair basketball team, are used to hooping all over the country, but when they were initially deprived of the ability to convene, the situation proved challenging, both mentally and physically. Zoom “wine nights” couldn’t replace what they’d lost. “We’re a band of brothers,” says Kevin Grant, a guard who also serves as the team’s manager. “And I think that we’re very supportive of one another, even in our own social, personal lives, you know what I mean? All of my guys are really good people, so it’s kind of like it makes playing basketball like icing on the cake.” Grant was injured in a car crash at 19 and has now been playing wheelchair basketball for over 20 years. (He saw others playing at an elite level and made it his goal to join them.) So when the pandemic hit and the Rollin’ Knicks weren’t able to show up for their usual twiceweekly practices, Grant was forced to find other ways to stay in competitive shape. He even bought a modified Peloton in April, which helped, but the exercise it gave him was a poor imitation of what hooping provided. “Basketball is like our therapy,” he says. “You know what I mean? When we want to not think about our problems, we play ball.” Leo Baker, the legendary skater who appeared in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video games, has a similar support network. After moving east from California, they found their tribe through the New York skate community—“this wave of people skating that are nontraditional skateboarders, like queer women, nonbinary trans,” which Baker says helped them come out as transgender and nonbinary in 2020. “There’s something about New York that makes something like this very possible and gives it way more life,” says Baker. “Back in California, everything just felt a little bland, very spread out, kind of boring. It was hard to connect with people. New York is just like… You’re just in it. I feel like there’s a certain layer of… I don’t even know what the word is. You just get the real person. No one’s really bullshitting.” Along with close friends Stephen Ostrowski and Cher Strauberry, Baker cofounded their own skate company, Glue Skateboards, in early 2020. Just a few months later, the trio launched their first products in the midst of a cresting pandemic, selling shirts and skate decks. (“We just wanted to have a place for us to be able to funnel our creativity and

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support each other and just, like, do cool shit, honestly,” says Ostrowski.) The goal was to create visibility for skaters from marginalized groups, a community that fans could imagine being a part of. Baker sees Glue as a haven for “people like me or like Cher or like Stephen, who never really felt like they had a home in skating. That’s where my heart is.” Getting the company up and running during the pandemic posed all sorts of challenges, from financial to logistical, but Baker was thankful to be in a position to work with the people they love, as well as for the downtime. It gave them an opportunity to hit pause, “figure my shit out,” and retreat upstate, where they spent two months getting sober and healthy in order to prepare for top surgery. “The very first time of getting back on my board after surgery, everything just felt so good,” says Baker. “It’s like, ‘I can feel the shirt flowing on my body. I’m not wearing, like, a fucking binder. I’m just free.’ ” They add, “I’m just really excited for my life now that I don’t have fucking tits anymore.” There was one especially magical moment for the trio that occurred during the pandemic. They were driving around upstate looking for a spot to skate, filming what would become their “Smut” video, which would be released by Thrasher. It had already been a grueling three-day stretch: Ostrowski had injured their neck, and they were struggling. It was the end of the day, just as the sun was setting, when Ostrowski noticed a rail outside an old church and pulled over to check it out. “And I just ended up skating the rail and getting a clip at sundown, and it was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” says Ostrowski. “I landed it and rolled away, and Leo and Cher were, like, freaking out. Cher cried, but out of happiness.”

necklace, his own ON COFFEY

his own tank top DeFine New York Run Club

I had dinner at Dr. Clark, a trendy Hokkaido-style bar and restauONE EVENING IN MARCH,

pants $1,250 Gucci his own sneakers Nike his own bracelets Cubannie Links armband, his own ON GRULLON

jacket $880 Herno his own t-shirt Nike x Boogie Down Bronx Runners pants $275 Eckhaus Latta his own sneakers and socks Nike his own watch Apple

NYC RUN CLUB CAPTAINS Five leaders of the clubs and crews defining the city’s new running scene. From left: Mike Saes, NYC Bridge Runners; Steve Finley, Brooklyn Track Club; Dao-Yi Chow, Old Man Run Club; Coffey, DeFine New York Run Club; and Lenny Grullon, Boogie Down Bronx Runners “For inner-city culture, running was never a thing, and now it’s a huge thing,” says Grullon. “It’s not only helping people physically; it’s helping mentally.”

LEO BAKER AND THE GLUE SKATEBOARDS CREW The trio behind the new board company championing queer skating. From left: Stephen Ostrowski, Cher Strauberry, and Leo Baker “A board company is supposed to feel like you’re at home with these folks,” says Baker. “It’s like a little family vibe. These are my people.”

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all vintage clothing, jewelry, and accessories, her own

Outside, I spotted the playwright Jeremy O. Harris having drinks with some of the cast members of the Gossip Girl reboot, one of whom ended up singing the karaoke version of “Jolene” alone at the bar after everyone else went their separate ways. Co-owner Yudai Kanayama tells me he and his partners opened the space on March 15, 2020, literally right as New York was shutting down. The restaurant has been a rare success during the COVID era. In some ways, being brandnew allowed it to quickly adapt to changing circumstances, to experiment and try new things. Which is partly how the Dr. Clark soccer squad came about: Kanayama grew up on the island of Hokkaido, has played since he was six, and always “dreamed” of sponsoring a team. (“Soccer is a big thing in Japan,” he says. “A lot of people play it!”) So when he and a couple of his employees discovered their shared love of soccer, he decided to start their own team to compete in the local Chinatown league—an activity Kanayama sees as an easy way to advertise the restaurant while having fun. (That they all have custom jerseys designed by Emily Bode, who also created their work uniforms, doesn’t hurt.) Scrimmages across the street at Columbus Park—amidst a backdrop of tai chi practitioners and mah-jongg players— can get “quite serious,” but the fact that their team has more than a few ringers doesn’t bother Kanayama, even if it cuts into his own playing time. “I’m going to come o≠ the bench for now,” he says. “I’m not ready to start yet.” That same type of energy—competitive yet mellow and deeply rooted in the downtown scene—has always been a hallmark of NYC Bridge Runners, the O.G. New York running crew founded by Mike Saes in 2003. At the time, it was the antithesis of what was then considered “running culture”: Methodical training plans were replaced with boozy latenight 5Ks, hard partying, and community built around a loose constituency of grimy Lower East Side cool. “It became kind of this little downtown (text continued on page 99)

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THE EAST COAST CHAPTER OF THE BLACK SURFING ASSOCIATION A Rockaways-based surfing nonprofit dedicated to youth mentorship, diversity, and social justice. From left: Babajide Alao, Loren Harris, Kevin Amuquandoh, Lou Harris, and Victor Locke “After George Floyd’s murder, we had 450 people at a protest paddle-out,” says Lou Harris. “People had flowers in their teeth and ‘BLM’ on their boards.”

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his own t-shirt East Coast Chapter of BSA

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hair by john ruidant using r+co. makeup by mark edio using bobbi brown. tailoring by alberto rivera and eliz diratsaoglu for lars nord studio. set design by eli metcalf for mhs artists.

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Roy Joseph III was a barber. For a while, he’d found himself with a creeping unease with eating meat—just the thought of it sitting in his stomach, with all the antibiotics that animals are fed, everything he knew about how meat was made. “All the killing…,” he said. “They’re putting all that stu≠ in the animals, and I’m putting it in me.” Alex Davis and Jas Rogers were restaurant servers when they were laid o≠ last year during the pandemic. Days later, somebody stole Davis’s moped and Rogers’s bike. They found themselves relying, each week, on a box of produce handed out by a local food-aid organization. “That really got our gears turning,” said Rogers. “We just cooked all day.” Eventually, Davis started playing around with making faux meat and a plan began to take shape. Myisha “Maya” Mastersson competed on the Food Network and ran underground supper clubs. Bernie Jolet sold spiced beef tamales—like the ones his Mexican grandfather had developed while working the railroad in Mississippi and then popularized in New Orleans. Ben Tabor worked at a vegan co-op in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Ogban Okpo owned a TV station in northern Nigeria. Most of these chefs, all of whom are now working in New Orleans, do not cook exclusively vegan food; nor are most of them vegan themselves. They came to veganism for a constellation of reasons: health, animal welfare, environmental and climate concerns, racial consciousness, entrepreneurial ambitions. They have embraced the constraints of cooking without animal products as a kind of mad science project, utilizing ingredients that are raw, organically manufactured, or lab-generated, harnessing techniques from Indigenous tradition, from molecular

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gastronomy, or from the DIY workbench. They get ideas on YouTube and spread them on Instagram. They are cooking with creativity, exuberance, intellect, and soul. All of this in service of a quality that might have seemed an improbable vegan priority just a short generation ago: deliciousness. That has hardly been the dominant mode in the history of veganism, which has long been thought of as the diet of the selfrighteous and joylessly pious. Say vegan, close your eyes, and you’re likely to see a tableau overwhelmingly brown of plate (filled with nut loaves and macrobiotic rice) and white of skin. What is most notable about the new veganism is how far it sits outside of any abstemious health food tradition. The brownness of the food remains, but it’s now more likely to be that of a vegan barbecue sauce slathered across a fake-meat cheeseburger, the glaze on a plate of bu≠alo cauliflower “wings,” or the rich cashewbased topping on a glistening bowl of mac ’n’ cheese. You find Philly cheesesteaks and Reubens, nuggets and fingers and sandwiches made from Chick’n and Chik’n and Kick’n, every other manner of plant-based junk food bristling with quotation marks and mysterious apostrophization. In a coup of culinary jujitsu, these innovations draw

their strength directly from the enemy’s playbook, using all the hyper-palatable tricks—sweet, salty, crispy, fatty—that the fast-food industry has for lighting up your pleasure cortex like a Roman candle. So pervasive is the profile that when the McRib came back around last winter, my very first thought was that it was the perfect fake fakemeat sandwich. There is, to be sure, another veganism— or should I say #veganism—out there, one of yoga pants and spirulina smoothies and overhead Instagram shots of perfectly composed fruit bowls. The Vegan Discourse is fraught terrain to say the least, filled with pointed fingers and conflicting orthodoxies and priorities: animal rights, Indigenous rights, climate change, labor equity. You could tie yourself up in knots simply following the debate between tofu-heads and anti-soy warriors. “There’s no way to make everybody happy,” says the writer Alicia Kennedy, whose popular newsletter often wades into the thorniest thickets of the conversation. As she recently wrote: “Nobody likes vegans, except other vegans, though sometimes even that is debatable.” That’s not to mention veganism’s recent enlistment in the culture wars, for which conservatives have attempted to conjure an

This new veganism is not angry and forbidding, but fun! Fluid! Inclusive! It’s a spirit that feels particularly relevant to this moment of national post-traumatic stress.

Three New Orleans Restaurants That Embody the New Veganism

COALESCE GOODS St. Roch

Chefs Jas Rogers and Alex Davis Opposite: “brisket” plate with a “boudin” ball. Below: “tuna” bowl.

apocalyptic vision of jackbooted Democratic thugs enforcing a plant-based diet on a prone and burger-less nation. I can only say that, beneath those raging storms, the scene on the ground couldn’t feel more di≠erent: not angry and forbidding, but fun! Fluid! Inclusive! It’s a spirit that feels particularly relevant to this moment of national post-traumatic stress—after a year that not only provided ample reason for any thinking eater to harbor reservations about their participation in America’s industrial food systems but also turned most of us into some degree of scrappy survivalist, standing on the edge of whatever’s next and hoping to do and be better. The paradox is that a diet

that once represented the pinnacle of ideological radicalism and asceticism has, at least for omnivores, come to o≠er, of all things, a wonderful tool of moderation. this new veganism emerging across the country for at least several years now—from the lines that form at 4 p.m. on the dot for sloppily overstu≠ed cheeseburgers at Atlanta’s Slutty Vegan to the array of vegan tacos at Brooklyn’s Xilonen, and a dozen points beyond, from Kansas City to downtown L.A. Still, it’s hard to overstate how unlikely it has been to discover this new world while spending the past year tethered to my home in New Orleans. When I moved here, a ONE COULD SEE

mere 10 years ago, it was still frequently said, more or less accurately, that the only vegetables you were bound to encounter while visiting this city were the garnish in your Bloody Mary. I remember taking a sublet o≠ Bourbon Street and the owner asking if there was anything I needed in the kitchen. When I asked if she had a salad spinner, she looked at me seriously and asked, “Are you gay?” New Orleans has, like the rest of the South, spent much of the past decade casting o≠ deep-fried stereotypes and re-embracing its region’s agricultural bounty. Still, the place that brands itself the “City of Yes” is an unlikely home for any diet predicated on

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Nadia Ogbor, a self-trained New Orleans chef, takes cooking vegan as a challenge. “It’s easy to fall back on animal fat for flavor,” she says. “No.” This is where people come to cheat on their diets (among other things), not develop new ones. If veganism can not only ﬁnd a foothold here but actually thrive, one feels, it can do so anywhere. But as soon as I tuned in to the vegan frequency in New Orleans, it seemed to be everywhere. In Treme, I ate a fried-“skrimp” (actually cremini mushroom) po’boy and crabless hearts of palm crab cake at I-tal Garden, named for the mostly vegetarian Rastafarian diet whose name is derived from the word vital. On Broad Street, at Sweet Soulfood, vegan jambalaya and okra gumbo, the vegetable taking center stage instead of its usual slime-imparting side role. In the Warehouse District, at the elegantly tropical café Carmo, Burmese fermented-tea-leaf salad and Caribbean-inﬂected beans with seitan sausage. When the L.A. food truck Vuture Food stopped at a Bywater microbrewery last December, I was stunned by the diverse

VEGAN WIT A TWIST Central Business District

lines that formed for its approximation of a Popeyes chicken sandwich. In the Lower Ninth Ward, I met Ogban Okpo, the onetime Nigerian television-station owner. From his Tanjariné Kitchen food truck, parked outside his house, Okpo served me vegan variations on moi moi (a steamed bean cake) and egusi soup, along with a Mandela Burger, an orange-hued bean-based patty he hopes to soon introduce to local supermarkets. Okpo, who came to New Orleans in 2017 to marry his wife and partner, April, became a vegan in the early 2010s. He was already an acolyte of the spiritual leader Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj, who advocates vegetarianism. When Okpo’s TV station failed, he said, all his human friends abandoned him, but his eight Boerboels, a South African masti≠-type breed, never left his side, giving him a new perspective on the human-animal bond. I visited Bernie Jolet in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, where he had stationed his

Chef Roy Joseph III Opening pages: Philly “cheesesteak.” Below: Da Pressure “cheeseburger.”

Mamita’s Hot Tamales cart in the parking lot of a Pizza Hut for the day. When it comes to healthy eating, St. Bernard is a place that generally makes New Orleans proper look like a Hare Krishna temple. But when Jolet and his sister resurrected their grandfather’s tamale business, they sensed enough demand to invent a vegan corn version, using an ample amount of coconut oil. “It has the look and feel of lard,” he says, a description that may not make the Coconut Oil Council’s marketing materials but does impart a satisfying lushness to the sweet corn filling. Jolet is known to sneak a few into every order of beef or chicken tamales, a way to slowly win over skeptical customers. And in Bywater I finally made it to Ben Tabor’s Sneaky Pickle, a restaurant I had foolishly avoided since it opened for no reason other than its name—a situation I think of as the Neutral Milk Hotel problem. (I feel the same way about pickleball, which, I realize, is perhaps a topic for my analyst.) It turned out that Tabor has one of the more idiosyncratic and creative culinary brains in town. Originally from Seekonk, Massachusetts, he opened Sneaky Pickle in 2012, in a ramshackle building on St. Claude Avenue because it was cheaper than starting a food truck, and the place still retains the DIY feel of a pop-up. Tabor’s menu intentionally flips the usual restaurant ratio: It

is predominantly vegan, with one or two meat dishes as a sop to pesky carnivores. He makes a more-than-credible Reuben featuring smoked tempeh on homemade rye, slicks brussels sprouts toast with a rich tofucashew “cheese,” and creates fanciful specials, like a smoked carrot “corn dog” served over grits. But the vegan star at Sneaky Pickle is Tabor’s version of mac ’n’ cheese, for which he purées whole butternut squash—seeds, skin, and all—with onions, cashews, vinegar, nutritional yeast, hot chiles, and miso. On top goes a crumble of “chorizo” made from spiced cashews. Rich and rounded, with a thrumming bass line of spice, it’s a pasta dish that moves beyond mere mimicry and sacriﬁces nothing in the name of virtue. elsewhere, this vegan moment has been propelled in New Orleans by young chefs of color, in particular African American women. This builds on a long tradition of Black veganism that identiﬁes America’s dietary and food systems as part and parcel of the country’s structural race problem and sees opting out of them as a powerful form of physical and spiritual self-determination. Black Americans make up the nation’s fastest-growing group of vegans and vegetarians, with some 8 percent of African Americans identifying as such, versus 3 percent of the general population. “Historically, African Americans eat shitty food,” says Maya Mastersson bluntly. “That’s derived from slavery, and it’s been passed down from generation to generation, to the AS IT HAS

SNEAKY PICKLE Bywater

Chef Ben Tabor Mac ’n’ “cheese”

point where people have been brainwashed into thinking that’s what African American food is: heavy, greasy, unhealthy.” The results, she points out, are disproportionately high rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and other food-related diseases. Mastersson had already competed on the Food Network’s Guy’s Grocery Games and started a company named Fancy Ass Olives when she moved to New Orleans in late 2019 and gained a following for her Black Roux Collective pop-up cooking classes. When the pandemic hit, she was forced to take a more steady job, landing at a vegan restaurant, Max Well, which had been located in a predominantly white uptown neighborhood for several years. Though an omnivore herself, she jumped at the challenge of reinventing the menu, which had tended more toward the seeds-and-smoothies end of the vegan spectrum. She creates dishes like birria tacos made with jackfruit, a common meat substitute, and dripping with a broth of porcini

mushrooms and ancho chiles, but also more beautifully straightforward vegetable dishes like carrots glazed umber in miso, with maple syrup and preserved lemon, and delicate tortellini stu≠ed with lion’s mane mushroom. There are also several dishes at Max Well that fall under the rubric of “vegan soul food.” In a recent Eater story on the long history of Black veganism, Amirah Mercer wrote movingly about her own worry that giving up meat would cut her o≠ from her family and community: “My veganism initially seemed like a rebuke of the rituals I had always known. I felt like I was revoking my own Black card.” Mastersson sees some of her job as addressing that. “I tell people, ‘You’re still going to get your plate of collard greens,’ ” she says, referring to the side dish for which she smokes the leaves of the collards themselves, to approximate the traditional addition of pork. “It might be a smaller portion, but it’s still going to taste like you’re at your grandma’s house. Having my face on a place like this, I’ve started to see more people of color make their way up here. I feel like I’m helping.” a lingering anxiety about veganism’s reputation in the way so many of these chefs and restaurants insist on being a “di≠erent kind of vegan.” (Impossible Foods, no longer content with avoiding the word vegan in favor of plant-based, actually began referring to its product straightforwardly as “meat” in a recent ad.) The notion is baked right into the name (continued on page 100) YOU

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By Sam Schube Photographs by Katy Grannan Styled by Jon Tietz

As he prepares to release his final Jackass film, Johnny Knoxville takes stock of a surprisingly long, hilariously painful, and unusually influential career.

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The catheters are remnants of the time, back in 2007, that he tore his urethra in a motorcycle stunt gone wrong. A friend was filming an MTV tribute to Evel Knievel, one of Knoxville’s heroes, so he visited the set. “I wasn’t even supposed to do anything,” he explained. “I think I just showed up that day and someone kind of threw out that I should try and backflip a motorcycle. I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, I got that.’ ” Knoxville couldn’t really ride a motorcycle. But he hadn’t become famous by saying no to things, so he hopped on the bike without a second thought. “It sounded like it could possibly be some fun—and some footage,” he said. “ ‘Let’s give it a whirl. What’s the worst that can happen? It’s not like I’m going to break my dick or something.’ ” The ensuing crash forced Knoxville to endure, for the next three years, the twicedaily self-administration of a catheter. But even in the immediate aftermath of the accident, he was looking on the bright side. “At the time, I was like, ‘I can’t wait to tell this story,’ ” he said. And indeed, for many years he’s happily plucked The Time Johnny Knoxville Broke His Penis from his archive of outrageousness. “Everybody loves a good story,” he told me. The thing about Knoxville’s adventures and mishaps, though, is that they render some of his most vulnerable moments public. “I feel like the injuries, I share with people,” he said. “Because, I mean, they kind of happen in a public way.” He’s been o≠ering up his pain in this fashion for 20 years, ever since he first flung himself, human-cannonball-style, into the center ring of the great American pop-cultural circus. Jackass, the stunts-andpranks television show that he cocreated and starred on, ran for only three seasons on MTV, but with time it came to occupy

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an unusually influential position in our collective consciousness—an improbable achievement given what the show consisted of. It was whimsical: The cast donned costume armor and jousted while riding BMX bikes. It was also grotesque: They lit firecrackers held in their butts. And it was ba±ingly, horrifyingly brave: They stood in front of walls while jai alai players whipped oranges at them and faced o≠ with a famously ornery bull named Mr. Mean. Though the show could have been expected to amount to very little, it nonetheless spawned spin-o≠s and led to three blockbuster movies, bringing wealth and fame to the eccentrics who populated the cast. And stranger still, this once seemingly frivolous spectacle that emerged from the margins of entertainment seemed to predict where a huge chunk of our culture was headed. This fall, the fourth of the Jackass films will be released, a project that Knoxville told me will be his last contribution to the franchise. When we spoke, he was finishing work on the movie, marveling at the absurdity of what he had just put his body through—and feeling fortunate to simply be upright. “You can only take so many chances before something irreversible happens,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been extremely lucky to take the chances I’ve taken and still be walking around.” The whole Jackass endeavor has always been powered by Knoxville’s obsession with getting what he calls great footage, that raw stunt material with the power to shock audiences and tickle them too. Now, at 50, and with the end of Jackass in view, he’s got a dearly earned sense of what all that footage added up to—and perhaps what it all may have cost. “I know what I signed up for,” he said at one point in our conversations. “I wrote the stunts.” 29 when Jackass hit MTV in 2000, and by then he’d already been dyeing his graying hair brown for a few years. His father had been 19 when his own head turned white, so Knoxville was prepared. And for nearly 20 years, he kept up a faithful coloring regimen that lasted until the pandemic hit. When Knoxville asked his wife to give his hair a buzz, he wasn’t entirely surprised by what it revealed. “I knew that I was gray under there,” he told me. Knoxville and I were sitting in a booth at L.A.’s Sunset Tower Hotel. “But I didn’t know how gray.” The truth, as Knoxville’s more than 3 million Instagram followers learned shortly after his wife finished up, was: very gray. But appealingly so! To the world he looked like an attractive older-man version of Johnny Knoxville, avatar of eternal youth. To himself he looked a little more like…himself. “I really liked it,” he said.

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Always trim, Knoxville is now even slimmer in person than you remember him. The punk-inflected uniform he’s been wearing for two decades—Dickies, red Chuck Taylors, vintage tee—has the charming e≠ect of underscoring his advancing age. For all the torture he’d subjected his body to over the years, he told me between bites of a burger, he feels pretty good these days: “All things considered, I walked into this interview on my own and I’m eating like a big boy. I’m pretty happy.” When he started in the line of work that would make him famous, Knoxville paid little attention to someday growing older. “Halfass stuntmen don’t really think long-term,” he said. Shattered bones, dented teeth, trashed ankles, and a litany of other medical setbacks were tolerated. In some way, they were sort of the point—trophies amassed in the pursuit of great footage. Knoxville’s longtime colleague Steve-O mentioned to me that he once heard that Knoxville “was struggling to make left turns in a car” after taking a bad fall during a skateboard stunt. In fact, Knoxville told me, this particular aftere≠ect traces back to the filming of the first Jackass movie, in 2002, when he was knocked out by the nearly 400pound boxer Butterbean. “I got vertigo after that, along with the concussion,” Knoxville said. “So when I’d drive around corners, I would just start to get the spins.” I asked if he stopped driving. “No, I just drove slower,” he told me. “They gave me some medication to correct it eventually.” For the Jackass gang, the injuries got worse with time. “Filming Jackass at this age is much the same as it ever was, with two big di≠erences,” Steve-O said. “Our bones break significantly easier. And it takes less to knock us completely unconscious. Plus longer to wake up.” For those reasons, along with the four concussions he su≠ered while shooting 2018’s Action Point, Knoxville never thought a fourth Jackass movie was in the cards. “I knew that my stunt career was winding down after that film,” he said. Nevertheless, various cast members would now and then email the rest of the squad lobbying for them all to get back into their oversized shopping cart. Each time, Knoxville resisted. “I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel the need or the desire,” he said. “It’s a real emotional thing.” There were physical concerns too. “I can’t a≠ord to have any more concussions,” he had concluded. “I can’t put my family through that.” Knoxville wasn’t alone. “I honestly thought the ship had long since sailed, and I was kind of okay with that,” Steve-O said. “Every movie that we ever made was the fucking last one. And not just the last one, but declared as the last one.”

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Still, ever since 2010’s Jackass 3D wrapped, Knoxville had been quietly turning ideas over in his head, jotting down brief descriptions of stunt concepts and emailing himself the notes with “Jackass 4 idea” in the subject line. Finally he felt himself getting the itch and asked his assistant to compile those ideas into a document. “It was thick,” he recalled. “Ten years’ worth of ideas—like, 40, 50 pages of ideas.” Knoxville met with Je≠ Tremaine, a cocreator of the Jackass franchise and the director of the previous ﬁlms, and told him that he was ﬁnally ready for another go. Tremaine, though, had his own concerns. He told me that he wondered, “How are people going to take it? Like, do people want to see a bunch of middle-aged dudes kick each other in the dicks?” Steve-O had graver reservations. “I thought going into Jackass 4, after everything we’ve been through, and everything we’ve built, all it takes is one stupid fucking accident to just erase it. Just turn it all into a negative. To be like, ‘Oh, these fucking dumb assholes. What did you fucking expect?’ ” he said. “But we went ahead and fucking did it.”

Knoxville told me that he had gotten to know Reilly in the ’90s, through Knoxville’s then neighbor Heather Graham. Thinking back to those days seemed to animate him. He had come to Los Angeles from Tennessee after high school with little more than the firm sense that he ought to be famous. Freshly arrived, he fell in with a community of striving young actors, all gunning for first successes, still unsure of what those successes would look like or lead to. “I wanted so bad to make a mark,” he remembered. “And I was trying in my acting and nothing was happening.” He started writing for magazines—not the glossies but scuzzier fare. One was Bikini; another was Big Brother, an infamously anarchic skateboarding mag. He dropped his given name, P.J. Clapp, and adopted a pen name: Johnny Knoxville. “Writing gave me confidence as a person,” he said. “It was like, I don’t have to just worry about trying to make it. I can do this and feel satisfied and engaged.” Loosened up, he started booking commercials. But it was the writing work that switched him on and allowed him to provide for his

When he started in this line of work, Knoxville paid little attention to someday growing older. “Half-ass stuntmen don’t really think long-term,” he said. our meal, Knoxville piped up. “Hello, sir!” he shouted over my shoulder, sounding exactly like the young Johnny Knoxville who once welcomed viewers to each episode of Jackass—which is to say, like a carnival barker after a weeklong bender. “Good to see you! Wow! Man, how have you been?” I swung around to ﬁnd that he was speaking to the actor John C. Reilly, seated next to us on the patio. Reilly was dressed in a powder blue three-piece suit and boots. His big hat sat beside him. After the two had exchanged pleasantries and caught up a bit, ABOUT

HALFWAY

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newborn daughter. It would also, in its own way, get him on television. He pitched the editors of Big Brother on conducting an experiment—testing the e∞cacy of pepper spray, a stun gun, a Taser, and a bulletproof vest by using them on himself. (The vest test required him to shoot himself with a pistol.) Je≠ Tremaine, the editor, assigned the story and suggested he also videotape his e≠orts. Knoxville survived and the magazine released a few videos that included his stunts. The tapes made their way around Hollywood, and Knoxville, (continued on page 96)

sittings editor: erica mer. grooming by sydney sollod using jaxon lane at the wall group. tailoring by yelena travkina. produced by viewfinders.

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Tremaine, and their director friend Spike Jonze showed a version to MTV, where executives said they wanted to build a show around this sort of thing. Jonze was stunned. “[It was] an absurd idea that somebody was going to give us money to do that,” he told me in an email. What followed, Knoxville still can’t quite believe. “It all happened so fast—I don’t know how,” Knoxville said. “We were on the air, and ratings exploded, and I’m on the cover of Rolling Stone. It just happened in an instant.”

, a dick-shaped lightning bolt arcing across the firmament of cable TV. I was 11 at the time. I cannot describe how powerfully it reordered my sense of what was funny; nor can I express how rapidly it permeated the fundamental grammar of my friendships. The first stunt that captured my attention, I told Knoxville, was a relatively simple one: Nutball, where participants strip down to their underwear, sit with their legs splayed, and take turns lobbing a racquetball at each other’s crotches. If you flinched, you lost. If you didn’t flinch, you won—but also, you lost. “Nutball!” he howled, momentarily flooded with nostalgia. “Me and my buddy Kevin Scruggs made that up when we were 10 in my parents’ living room.” In so many ways, Jackass was nothing more than that: the kind of shit boys do to make each other laugh, stretched into 22 minutes. It was a demolition derby starring human Looney Tunes. Knoxville, naturally, was Bugs Bunny, the stick of dynamite not quite hidden behind his back. His costars were a rowdy band of fuckups: skaters and stunt performers and one enormous guy and one Wee Man and, in Steve-O, one Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College graduate with an easy gag reflex. They appeared to genuinely love one another— but to only be able to show that love through increasingly baroque forms of torture. What they assembled was possibly the most e∞cient show in the history of television: Bits were rarely more than a minute or two long, and some of the strongest topped out at 15 seconds. It was wall-towall mayhem. It was easy at the time to describe Jackass as lowest-common-denominator entertainment, a feeble nadir in TV’s race to the bottom. With time, though, it became clear that the show was operating at the intersection of a number of ancient American traditions. If you squinted, you could see traces JAC K A S S P R E M I E R E D I N 2 0 0 0

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of Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges. Knoxville’s outlaw influences were present too. Spike Jonze told me that he and Tremaine and Knoxville hadn’t discussed how the stunts might be introduced on the show, so Knoxville improvised what would become a signature opening to each segment. “He started saying, ‘Hi, I’m Johnny Knoxville and this is the Cup Test,’ or whatever it was,” Jonze wrote in an email. “Only later, I remember listening to Johnny Cash Live, and hearing Johnny Cash say, ‘Hi, I’m Johnny Cash and this is “Folsom Prison Blues,” ’ and a lightbulb went o≠. I was like, damn…no wonder it’s so iconic.” At the center of it all, of course, was Knoxville, handsome and chatty and willing to both su≠er and inflict enormous indignities. “He was the first one out of all of us who was able to convey his thoughts to the camera,” Tremaine told me. Steve-O philosophized that Knoxville’s magnetism was rooted in his clumsiness. “I think that the fact that he is the least fucking coordinated guy ever is what makes his stunts

Jackass revealed that the very nature of fame was changing in early-aughts America—that you could become famous by doing whatever it took to hold an audience’s attention. so amazing,” he said. “So many of us grew up on a skateboard, sort of developing a natural instinct for falling down. Knoxville doesn’t have any of that, so when Knoxville falls down, it’s like, it’s devastating.” (To be fair, Knoxville is quite ﬂexible, which he believes helps him compensate for an admitted lack of coordination. Later, while conducting a Zoom call from his o∞ce chair, he’d pull his left leg behind his head to demonstrate.) But Knoxville brought something else to the show, Steve-O said—a kind of unimpeachable courage. “There’s nobody else on the cast who’s ever going to roll the dice with their life like that,” he said. “Fuck no. It’s so counterintuitive.… You’ve got your main guy not only not having a stunt double, not only doing his own stu≠, but putting himself in the most reckless jeopardy that you can. It’s just so fucking backwards, you know?” That the star happened to be even better at taking the abuse than his psycho castmates basically guaranteed the show’s success. It would have been hard for it not to make television history. Immediately Jackass became a cultural lightning rod. Senator Joe Lieberman called for MTV to change or cancel the show, citing a spate of teenagers who su≠ered injuries after copying notable stunts. According to Tremaine, the network responded. For instance, he says, MTV stuck the crew with an OSHA representative, who, on one shoot, insisted that a cast member’s “puke omelet”— the recipe involves vomiting the ingredients of said omelet into a frying pan—be cooked

to a safe temperature. Frustrated, Knoxville quit less than a year after the first season had aired. “It just made it impossible to move forward,” he said. They’d managed to film only 24 episodes and a special, but MTV recycled the material endlessly. (“For 10 years,” Knoxville said.) Despite its brevity, the show was able to graze, or even predict, a number of emerging cultural trends. It helped hasten MTV’s shift to reality-based content. Hollywood began to throw money at films—Old School, Step Brothers, The Hangover—about stunted, self-thwarting men. Platforms like YouTube, Vine, and TikTok, which would build billion-dollar businesses atop clips of people doing stupid things, were years away. But perhaps the most interesting thing Jackass revealed was that the very nature of fame was shifting in early-aughts America. When Kim Kardashian was barely out of high school, men like Knoxville and Steve-O and Bam Margera and Chris Pontius were proving that you could become famous by doing whatever it took to hold an audience’s attention. Steve-O and Pontius got their own show, Wildboyz, a nature-inflected take on Jackass. Margera got one too, focusing on his attempts to terrorize his suburbanPennsylvania friends. All had come by their fame honestly—by taking as much abuse as they could stomach and hoping people liked it. And people really, really liked it. After leaving MTV, Knoxville, Tremaine, and Jonze reconvened the crew for a movie. It cost $5 million. It pulled in nearly $80 million. To get it done, Knoxville says, they insured it stunt by stunt. “We wanted some silly bit,” Knoxville recounted. “I think it was, like, Pontius was going to dress like the devil and handle snakes in one of the Pentecostal churches. And it was going to be, like, $5 million to insure. We’re like, ‘Okay, we’re not doing that bit!’ You hear that we’re going to be number one, and it’s just ridiculous. What a ridiculous feeling. What a silly film to be number one.” In 2006, Jackass Number Two made nearly $85 million. By 2010, when Jackass 3D more than doubled that figure, the Jackassification of pop culture was more or less complete. If the money changed the guys, they didn’t show it. “I remember one time I went to his o∞ce,” said Jimmy Kimmel, one of Knoxville’s good friends. “It was Knoxville and Spike Jonze and a producer. And they all had black eyes. I of course wondered why they had black eyes, and they explained that they had to take their lot ID photos—the little card that gets you onto the production lot— and they wanted to make sure they had black eyes for their pictures. So they punched each other in the face. For an ID! This is not part of the movie or the show. This is just three crazy people.”

Knoxville celebrated his 50th birthday at his home in L.A. It was a low-key day, spent with his wife, Naomi, and their two children, Rocko and Arlo. (Madison, his adult daughter with his ﬁrst wife, lives in Austin.) Naomi whipped up a playlist of their favorite songs, heavy on Willie Nelson. T H I S PA S T S P R I N G ,

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They all ate out on the patio, near the pool they’d made happy use of during the pandemic summer. This is the Knoxville his friends, most of whom call him P.J., know. He surfs. He is notably attentive to the physical safety of his children. He is diligent about sending gifts. “I hesitate to use the word sweetheart, but he’s been a kind and gentle person since the day I met him,” Kimmel told me. “He really surprised me—he is not at all what I expected.” Life at home has become one blissful domestic scene after another. Lately, Knoxville has been spending much of his time in his o∞ce, where he’s been working on ﬁnishing the movie. The workspace features photos of his heroes, Evel Knievel and Hunter S. Thompson. He met Thompson

Knoxville told his therapist he wasn’t interested in exploring the part of him that wanted to do stunts. “I know that needs looking at,” he said. “But I didn’t want to break the machine.” once, years back. At the time, Knoxville was fresh o≠ the success of the first Jackass film; a few producers thought they’d turn him into the next great American movie star. It was a heady time to be Johnny Knoxville. Temptation abounded. At one point—Knoxville thinks it was while he was filming 2005’s The Dukes of Hazzard—he found himself in a hotel room in New Orleans with Thompson, as well as Sean Penn, Jude Law, and Sienna Miller. They were taking turns reading from Thompson’s The Curse of Lono, and Knoxville was, as he said, “well into his cups.” “It was late and I didn’t want to read, because I was so well oiled, you know? But everyone got their turn,” he said. “I remember Hunter reaching in his medical bag, his doctor’s bag, and throwing me a big bottle of pills. And I just took the cap o≠ and I ate a couple, and I didn’t look at the label and I was like, ‘Vicodin?’ ” Knoxville aced his blind taste test; Thompson was impressed. His first marriage ended. A new relationship with an old friend straightened him out. “I realized that I can’t live like I was and be with Naomi,” he said. “I wanted to become a better man for her. At first. Then it was for myself too.” He started seeing a therapist. There were limits: He told her he wasn’t interested in exploring the part of him that wanted to do stunts. “I know that needs looking at,” he said. “But I didn’t want to break the machine.” It wasn’t just about jeopardizing his livelihood, he explained. Doing stunts “was exciting. It’s something that I did with my friends. And I was decent at it.” It wasn’t so much about the stunts themselves, which were terrifying, as about how completing them made him feel. He loved, he said, “the exhilaration and relief, once you get on the other side of the stunt. Or when you come to. You wake up,

you’re like, ‘Oh, was that good?’ And they’re like, ‘That was great.’ You got a good bit when there’s seven people standing over you, snapping their fingers.” When we spoke, he still hadn’t broached the topic in therapy. “I’ll talk about it eventually,” he said. “It’s not something I need to know this second.” Other members of the cast had more trouble adjusting to fame. Steve-O very publicly battled drug addiction. In recent years worrying signs have come from Bam Margera, who has entered and exited rehab a number of times. Cast member Ryan Dunn died in 2011 in a drunk-driving accident. Watching his friends struggle has been immensely challenging for Knoxville. “It’s di∞cult when your friends are…” He trailed o≠ and quieted to nearly a whisper. “It was heartbreaking, losing Ryan. And it was tough when Steve-O was going o≠ the rails. But he has completely, completely turned his life around and is doing just—I mean, he’s doing terrific. He’s a di≠erent, di≠erent man.” I asked if he ever felt that the show, or the lifestyle around it, was responsible for exacerbating his friends’ struggles. “I think each of us was responsible for his own actions,” he said, measured. “And when someone’s struggling, everyone tries to help that person. And at the end of the day, that person has to want help. Sometimes they don’t. Yet.” I asked him if he was speaking about anyone specifically. He looked away, visibly emotional. Half a minute passed. “We want Bam to be happy and healthy and get the help he needs,” he said. “We tried to push that along. I think that’s all I really want to say about it.” A few days after I had lunch with Knoxville, Margera asserted to TMZ that he’d been fired from Jackass 4 for refusing to follow through with Knoxville-mandated rehab, an experience he likened to “torture.” (Over the phone, Margera confirmed to me that he’d been fired from the movie for breaking his contract. “It hurts my heart,” he said, “because I’ve waited 10 years for this.”) “I don’t want to get into public back-andforth with Bam,” Knoxville said when I later brought up Margera’s claim. “I just want him to get better.”

L A S T Y E A R , S H O R T LY before Christmas, as ﬁlming was winding down, Knoxville and the crew drove out to the ranch of longtime Hollywood bull wrangler Gary Le≠ew. Knoxville has a long, painful, and unusually intimate history with the animals—he started doing stunts with them back in the Big Brother days, and they’ve featured heavily in many of his most iconic Jackass stunts. So it stood to reason that he wouldn’t limp o≠ into the sunset without one last appointment with a bull. “You know exactly what you’re going to get with bulls,” Knoxville told me with a sort of reverence. “They hate you. They hate anything that moves. If you’re moving, they get very angry. And whether you’re a person or an inanimate object, if it moves, bulls want to make it stop moving. Which is great for us.”

Steve-O tried to object. “Before he even got in the bullring,” Steve-O said, “I’m thinking, ‘Look, everything’s been going really well. We arguably have a great movie in the can. We don’t need to be doing this, and why the fuck are we doing this?’ ” He was ultimately unpersuasive. The bit they’d worked out called for Knoxville to perform a magic trick for the bull, which would then send him flying. But the hit the animal delivered was unusually violent, and as Knoxville was tossed skyward, he did one and a half rotations in the air. “His head was the first thing to stop all that momentum. So it was a bad one,” Tremaine recalled. “I’ll never fucking unsee it,” Steve-O said. Knoxville lay in the dirt, unconscious in the bullring for over a minute. “I think he was snoring,” Tremaine said. When Knoxville came to, he asked what had happened. The assembled crew filled him in. “Well,” Knoxville said, “I guess that bull just didn’t like magic.” An ambulance ferried him to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a broken rib, a broken wrist, a concussion, and a hemorrhage on his brain. It was, he told me, “definitely the most intense bull hit I’ve ever taken.” The headaches, he said, were excruciating. While he was laid up, his phone beeped with a text message from Steve-O, addressed to Knoxville and sent to the whole cast. It was a sort of love letter: Knox, while it’s actually happening, watching you play with bulls (and yaks) has always been my very least favorite part of this thing called Jackass. But watching the footage after the fact has always made me profoundly grateful. The ultimate risks you have always taken for this team truly set you apart, on your own, as the backbone of it. You’re not just a shockingly pretty face. You are the craziest fucking stuntman ever to live.

Knoxville was discharged after two days, fully aware that he had su≠ered precisely the injury he’d hoped to avoid. “I wanted the footage,” he told me. That had always been the motivation. With time he learned what comes with his insatiable desire for stunts. “I have to take responsibility,” he said, “for wanting the footage.” The ability to confront this state of a≠airs— certain injury married to certain glory; cost and beneﬁt in almost holy alignment—was what made Knoxville, after all these years, king of the Jackasses. “It wasn’t hard,” he said of his job. “Because I honestly enjoyed it.” He wasn’t even mad at the bull. How could he be? After all these years, Knoxville was left with a wistful, grudging respect for the creature that had done him such harm. “I love bulls,” he said, sighing. “God help me. God help me, I love bulls.” Perhaps it was appropriate that the thing he adored most about them was the same quality that had turned P.J. Clapp into Johnny Knoxville, the craziest fucking stuntman ever to live. “They are,” he said, “absolutely dying to perform.”

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the hip-hop stars of the day, and the shop for the dark streetwear brand Black Scale, which helped outﬁt the A$AP Mob for his “Peso” music video—spots where it wasn’t weird to be a pretty boy who rocked skinny jeans. Rocky’s taste in fashion is what got him into the Mob in the ﬁrst place. A buddy of his from high school, A$AP Relli, was an early Mob member who rocked Margiela and Gucci thanks to the proceeds from a successful drug-dealing operation. Rocky recognized a fellow traveler and befriended him, and Relli started bringing him to Mob hangouts. Once he was in, Rocky proceeded to transform the crew into a potent force in the fashion world. One of their earliest statements was making purses look hard, over a decade before bright Birkins and Louis Vuitton crossbodies became hip-hop’s most ubiquitous accessories. “People weren’t wearing satchels when I came in the game, I can promise you that,” Rocky says. “But we was wearing those, because that’s what you trap in. You put your weed in there, you put your money in there, you put your pistol in there, you put your MetroCard in there, you put your lean in

“This shit is more than just rap to me. I’m into design, I’m into detail, I’m into elevated taste value.” there.” At a time when the rise of social media was scrambling menswear’s signals, Rocky knew of a way to seize control: “Anything that’s supposed to be considered something to emasculate you, we figured out how to make it macho.” Before Harry Styles started sporting intricate manicures, Rocky was getting his nails tricked out with smiley faces and messages to his haters (“FUCK” and “OFF” are recurring motifs) and encouraging other men to give it a shot. Rocky’s red-carpet get-down, meanwhile, was to show up dripping like a rich grandmother, with a silk scarf jauntily knotted around his head as casually as a hoodie, a pile of pearls swinging from his neck, and a lacy blouse, buttoned low. If that doesn’t sound particularly radical today, that’s because Rocky’s been carrying the flag at the front of menswear’s charge toward more fluid silhouettes and accessories since Instagram was invented. In fact, a decade before he wore a kilt on the cover of GQ, he wore one in Harlem. “I got called the worst of the worst,” he recalls about his skirted debut in 2011. Did he care? “C’mon!” he replies with a sneer. Guys in his

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neighborhood might have made fun of him, but as he once recalled, he was sleeping with their girlfriends. “The nails, the kilts, the pretty-boy swag, the pearls—I think it’s just being comfortable,” he says. “I just express myself with fashion, and what’s fly is fly. I do it on some punk shit.” Like the similarly fashion-obsessed Kanye West and Frank Ocean, Rocky has parlayed his status and fame and style into a gate-crashing multidimensional artistic practice. He is an actor, having appeared in 2018’s Monster, which follows a 17-year-old honor student on trial for involvement in a murder in Harlem. He is a designer who is as comfortable overhauling his favorite Needles track pants as he is creating stilettos with Amina Muaddi, as he did last year. His dream collaboration, he tells me, would not be in music or fashion but with A24, the cool-guy Hollywood film distributor behind 2019’s Waves, one of Rocky’s favorite films—a relentlessly gripping and profoundly vibey picture that vividly reflects Rocky’s own creative priorities. “This shit is more than just rap for me,” he says. “I’m into design, I’m into detail, I’m into elevated taste value.” Nothing—not money, not fame, not the prospect of top chart positions or gold Grammys or other traditional metrics of musical success—gets Rocky out of bed like the pursuit of elevated taste value. Anything can have elevated taste value, and to Rocky, it’s painfully obvious when something, especially an outfit, does not. “It’s a lot of tacky motherfuckers out here,” he says about his jawnz-obsessed peers in the hip-hop world. “Just ’cause shit be costing a tag on it and all that, that shit don’t make it jiggy, bro. That shit don’t make that shit fleek.” To Rocky, whose closet is full of “pieces” rather than mere clothes, fashion is a competitive sport, and he’s well on his way to the Hall of Fame. If you wear a good fit around Rocky, he’ll remember it for the rest of his life. Ask him to tell a story from a night out in Harlem a decade ago and he’ll start by listing what everyone wore, down to the shoelaces. “I never really met too many people who can do that,” he says. “It’s kind of odd.” If your fit is wack, though, it won’t get any real estate in his brain. “I look right past people if there’s nothing enticing.” Rocky’s fashion projects have a much smaller audience than his music does, but his impact on the fashion world has arguably been more profound. He claims to be the inspiration behind DJ collective turned streetwear brand Been Trill, which helped launch the fashion careers of Matthew Williams, Virgil Abloh, and Heron Preston, the first two of which are now among the most powerful American designers in Paris, and the third has a new creative directorship at Calvin Klein. He was an early booster of Shayne Oliver’s provocative Hood By Air label, which continues to influence avant-garde streetwear. He has impeccable taste in collaborators to this day, often working with designers and brands— Marine Serre, Jonathan Anderson, Japanese hippie-streetwear label Needles—just before they blast o≠ into the stratosphere.

As a result, Rocky’s imprimatur on a garment instantly makes fashion insiders pay attention, and designers look to him for approval and endorsement. He was the ﬁrst Black face of Dior Homme, helped to lead the rollout of Raf Simons’s collections for Calvin Klein, and, as I write this, is all over the internet in Gucci ads with Iggy Pop and Tyler, the Creator. Given his style-god status among late-millennial and Gen Z fashion freaks, Rocky’s co-sign is downright crucial. After the successes of Kanye West’s Yeezy imprint and the pastel-hued Golf Wang label belonging to Tyler, the Creator, is Rocky planning to launch a full-ﬂedged brand of his own? “Right now I’m not eager to do that,” he says, citing the impact of the COVID pandemic on

“Honestly, I never thought that things that I imagined while I was in jail would come true. And everything that I envisioned in prison came to fruition.” retail. “Maybe next year, but who knows?” At the moment he’s content being one of the industry’s most bankable collaborators. “I really wanted to put myself in a position where I made a collaborative brand as opposed to being a brand that puts out shit just for the sake of accumulating capital,” he says. Again: elevated taste value. “I’m all about making money!” he says. “But I want to do it in the right, ﬂy way.” Save for a collaboration with Guess, most of Rocky’s fashion projects have been niche—like “custom Prada nylon tracksuits for a tour” niche—and expensive, to the point where Rocky is worried his fans are left out of a hugely important side of his artistry. Soon, he says, there will be a release with Vans that should satisfy that concern, though he’s not at all interested in making it for the masses. He speaks of the new sneakers like he’s completely reinvented the slip-on and says that the quantity released is going to be “exclusive.” When I ask if that means he’s not interested in trying to replicate the most successful and far-reaching rapper-brand collab in recent history—last year’s Travis Scott x McDonalds takeover—with something like, say, AWGE x Burger King, Rocky laughs: “Not in a million years.” (Elevated! Taste! Value!)

try not to be photographed together by the paparazzi. No problem when they’re road-tripping through Texas, but in L.A. these things are unavoidable. A few nights after we talked, Rocky joined Rihanna at West Hollywood celebrity hang Delilah, his first trip to a club since before the pandemic started. Rihanna arrived first, slipping into a private dining room as her former flame Drake looked on from a VIP section of his own. Rocky followed several minutes later, as if perhaps his presence was coincidental. Well after the rest of L.A. had gone to sleep, he and Rihanna left separately but got in the same car. ROCKY AND RIHANNA

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On a Zoom call a few days later, I ask Rocky about the outﬁt he wore that night—a black leather trucker jacket, black Rick Owens boots, and black leather pants from his Marine Serre collaboration. A ﬁt that originated during one of his bleakest moments, it was now worn during one of his happiest and most triumphant, waltzing out of a club with one of the coolest, most beautiful and successful women in the world, all while half pretending he isn’t really living this particular dream at all. What’s it like to now wear pieces of clothing that you dreamed up in jail? Rocky’s sitting in his garden in front of a fountain. He takes a drag from a joint the size

of a Cohiba and leans back. “I was deﬁnitely on that cot just thinking, How will this ever come to fruition? How will I execute this? I hope I can execute this,” he says. “And God is good, bro. God is good. For real. “Honestly,” he continues, “I never thought that things that I imagined while I was in jail would come true. And everything that I envisioned in prison came to fruition. ’Cause I guess I manifested it. And I prayed! I really wanted to bless that situation and move on from it in a positive way. I was praying to stay strong, and God got me through shit like it was nothing! That shit was nothing.” It was nothing, and now it’s everything. When not even a month in solitary can

suppress your creative zeal, your irrepressible confidence, your deep faith, the world on the other side looks like yours for the taking. Things that might have terrified Rocky a few years ago—like a relationship—are new opportunities to embrace change, to discover who he really is. Every morning when he gets dressed, Rocky can remember how he turned one of his lowest moments into one of his highest. He pu≠s on the joint and pauses, his face bathed in the golden afternoon light. In solitary confinement, he says, “I was thinking ’bout designs. And to see the clothes when I’m out—that shit is beautiful, bro.”

When he advertised his first run with the Boogie Down—posting on social media, taping up flyers—to his great surprise, no one showed up. It was just him and his cofounder, Jean-Paul Fontana. Eventually he started tricking a few homies into coming; they snapped photos for Facebook and Instagram, and then—ta-da!—one night two total newbies appeared and things just sort of exploded from there. Now the crew has hit a critical mass with dozens of regulars, and Grullon is getting active in several senses of the word: One recent group run involved dashing between local community fridges to refill them. For Grullon, good health is about consistency over everything else—a club is just a mechanism that makes you want to show up, thereby making consistency easier. “I always tell people, ‘It’s stronger if you run one mile every other day than if you try to run six miles in one day,’ ” says Grullon. “That’s how you can adjust, the body will adjust, and it becomes easier and easier and easier.” He sees himself as a proof of concept that anyone can get active and transform themselves into a runner. That anyone can do this. “The people that we have in our running community, these are guys and gals who are not inspired by elite runners, right?” he says. “It has to come from someone that they can feel like, ‘Okay, this person did it. I can do it too.’ And they see that in me. They know I believe in them.”

does to this day—from bright, bold-patterned fabric selected by her father. Despite her abilities, Shiraishi was an outlier in the climbing world, which was, and still is, overwhelmingly made up of well-o≠ white people. “When I started climbing, there was not a lot of diversity,” she says. “I think in New York, it’s special because it’s a diverse hub of di≠erent people. But when I started, it was still mostly people who were rich and could a≠ord to go to the climbing gyms. Who even knew what climbing was.” Over Zoom one afternoon in April, Shiraishi, wearing a coveted Bernie Sanders bootleg tee, recounts one story from when she was only seven or eight and competing for the ﬁrst time—the moment she became keenly aware of the class disparities in the sport she loves. “My parents couldn’t a≠ord to get me to

samuel hine is gq’s senior associate editor.

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cult thing in the summertime, because we were running at midnight and drinking frozen margaritas at The Hat on Stanton and Ludlow,” says Saes. “We would run after parties at like two in the morning, and we just started running the bridges. So that was this kind of organic thing, where people were running in, like, Air Force 1s and Vans, and we’d be running on ’shrooms.” These days Saes is more wellness-conscious. At the start of the pandemic, he began a regimen of intermittent fasting—which helped him drop his training pace to under seven minutes per mile—and will happily talk your ear o≠ about the health beneﬁts of sea moss and alkaline water. He plans to open several health clubs in the city—places he sees as “part GNC, part Soho House,” where people can chill out with vegan soft serve while recovering in infrared saunas. NYC Bridge Runners provided the template, and soon a slew of other New York running cliques would follow. Dao-Yi Chow’s Old Man Run Club. Co≠ey’s DeFine New York Run Club. Steve Finley’s Brooklyn Track Club. And more recently, Lenny Grullon’s Boogie Down Bronx Runners. Grullon started the Boogie Down in 2017, only two years after he had begun running to lose some weight. “Literally, you can start running at 40 and become a great runner,” he says, “whereas basketball, you can’t start at 40 and become a great basketball player. It doesn’t work like that in other sports, but it does in running.” He wanted to change the perception of what being a runner could mean for a community like the Bronx, which is “probably last place of all the counties in New York State as being the unhealthiest.”

A F T E R E X P L O R I N G A L L kinds of clubs and crews, I wondered if there were lessons to be gleaned from a smaller collective. A tightknit family. So I sought out the rock climber Ashima Shiraishi, 20, a prodigy among prodigies who has long been coached by her father. Shiraishi’s own athletic journey is well documented (she was the subject of a 2016 proﬁle in The New Yorker in which she was described as “possibly the best female rock climber ever”), but in brief: She started climbing at age six in Central Park, where her father brought her to play. Her parents, both artists who emigrated from Japan, quickly realized that their young daughter possessed a rare talent and sought to nurture her gifts. Her mother would even sew all of Ashima’s climbing pants—which she still

For Grullon, good health is about consistency over everything else—a club is just a mechanism that makes you want to show up, thereby making consistency easier. the nationals, even though I qualiﬁed for it,” she says. “I did the regionals, the divisionals, and all of these competitions that lead to these big championships and all that. My parents couldn’t a≠ord to get me a trip down there.” Luckily, some folks at a local gym, Brooklyn Boulders, decided to sponsor her trip if she wore a T-shirt with the establishment’s logo on it. “After that event, I went there and I won nationals,” she says. “And that was the ﬁrst time I put my name on the stage.” Now Shiraishi’s paying that same generosity forward and intends to use her platform to achieve dreams bigger than climbing. She was just accepted to both UCLA and Berkeley and wants to start a clothing line, inspired by the pants her parents made for her. (She’s kicking around a few monikers for the line, either her own name or Tamashii, from the Japanese word that means “soul.”) But mostly she wants to use her popularity to make

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climbing more inclusive. Less white. She recently launched a nonprofit called All Rise, along with Kyle Ng and Gavin Dogan of the brand Brain Dead and Grayston Leonard of Long Beach Rising. This spring they built a free-to-access climbing wall at the Long Beach Rising gym in Long Beach, California—which happens to be my hometown. The goal is to give people from the local community greater access to climbing by providing a free space to practice and take part in a new activity. I tell Shiraishi that her initiative is something that my childhood friends and I would have loved when we were younger. Even though Shiraishi is a ferocious competitor, the pandemic helped her recalibrate her impression of what it means to be a professional athlete. “I think it gave me perspective that climbing isn’t the only thing in the world,” she says. “So I’m actually grateful for that. And it reminded me that climbing can be taken away from me anytime. I could get injured and not be climbing, but I’ll be okay. You can find joy through other things.” Finding little joys. Taking up space where someone like you previously hadn’t been able to. So many of these folks were, in their own ways, living examples of how you change existing frameworks and solve real problems. It’s an idea laid out by activist and author Grace Lee Boggs in her autobiography, Living for Change, in which she argued that building a healthy, dynamic collective starts with children: “While they are working and absorbing naturally and normally the values of social responsibility and cooperation, they will also be stimulated to learn the skills and acquire information that are necessary to solve real problems.” I witnessed the idea in action myself that April morning in the Rockaways. When I pulled out my shortboard to donate it to the BSA, Lou Harris said, “Are you sure? This is a nice-ass board!” I told him I was sure, and he immediately gave it to a shy young skater in an orange hoodie. “Bro, thank you!” he said, coming over to dap me up. His name was Jack, and it was his first time out with the BSA. His mother, who was watching him skate with a worried look on her face, said thank you and started to get misty-eyed. The family had recently moved here, and she seemed to realize, all at once, that her son was going to be in good hands. (Later, Harris would post about the moment on BSA’s Instagram account. “Our newest member in the BSA Jack just moved here to Rockaway back in January,” he wrote. “It’s only fair that we welcome him to the neighborhood with a Surfboard!”) For Harris, it isn’t so much about putting in work or feeling a sense of purpose as it is a way to live. “Ever since we started the BSA and all the TV I’ve done, I see a lot of Black people coming out to Rockaway to surf,” he says. “People I don’t remember seeing out there before. But they’re here now, and that’s a beautiful thing.” The way Harris was e≠ecting change in his community was kinetic, and the swirl of people around him seemed to be feeding o≠ his energy. If you’re constantly on the move, you never feel unmoored. You’re just free.

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nuts and seeds and oils from every continent, fermentations from an encyclopedia of cultures, miso and mushrooms and chile crisp, the moment’s most ubiquitous ﬂavor booster. Science has given them a larder ﬁlled with engineered milk and butter and meat substitutes while YouTube puts the most esoteric technique within reach. The truth is that vegans can eat better today because just about all of us eat better today.

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of Vegan Wit A Twist, the restaurant Roy Joseph III started after he quit cutting hair, opening first in an old sno-ball stand on St. Bernard Avenue and then, mid-pandemic, in a swanker spot in the Central Business District. Joseph leans hard into the fast-food palate, using Beyond meat for his Da Pressure cheeseburger and faux Philly cheesesteak and wheat gluten for a formidably spicy version of a New Orleans hot-sausage patty. But his cooking skills are nowhere more evident than in two fried dishes—one, pieces of cauliflower encased in a batter as crisp as tempura; the other, oyster mushrooms with a crust that immediately made me think of the legendary calamari I grew up eating at Randazzo’s Clam Bar in Brooklyn. Both are reminders that simple fried vegetables are a beautiful thing—and not necessarily the better for being labeled wings or oysters or shrimp. Still, the future of the movement seems to be in the hands of a generation for whom those preconceptions are falling away. This is the post-carob generation, raised on Annie’s mac ’n’ cheese and trips to Whole Foods, soy milk and tofu in the fridge, gluten-free cupcakes at the birthday party, a cohort to which individual dietary preferences and restrictions are as much a given as gender fluidity, whose goal seems to be less about changing minds than it is about making everybody feel welcome. “I like to feed people. I want everybody to be able to eat my food,” says 30-year-old Nadia Ogbor, who operates a one-woman pop-up, which she calls Little Kitchen, out of a rotating roster of New Orleans bars, breweries, and shared kitchens. “When I don’t have a vegan option, it’s like I can imagine their poor little faces: ‘What if they come out tonight and have nothing to eat!’ ” Ogbor, who is self-trained, takes cooking vegan as a challenge. “It’s easy to fall back on animal fat for flavor,” she says. For the soups that are her specialty—a fiery red pozole, a Nigerian okra stew—she uses coconut oil to reproduce some of that richness. In search of all-important funk, she turns to white miso, fermented locust beans, tomato paste, and caramelized vegetables. It’s a reminder of how much creativity vegan cooking demands but also of the vast advantage today’s vegan cooks have over their predecessors. Twenty years into an era when American cooking has been fixated on umami—the elusive “fifth flavor” associated with meat—a young cook now has, at their fingertips, an astonishing arsenal of global ingredients and techniques to achieve it. They draw from both ancient tradition and molecular gastronomy. They smoke and they caramelize and they emulsify. They reach for

consequential, and most controversial tool in the vegan cooking toolbox is, of course, fake meat—by which I mean the stu≠ engineered in a lab by companies like Impossible and Beyond. These products use an array of isolated plant proteins, from sources like soy and peas, to unsettlingly mimic meat, right down to how it can be cooked, passing through the recognizable stages of raw to well-done. The stu≠ is uncanny. It smells funny raw. It could not be more a more diametric move away from traditional health food’s rejection of plastic factory food. I love it. I say that not entirely unabashedly but with complete sincerity. I love fake meat. And while this might be a strange thing for a sometime food critic to say, I love fake meat speciﬁcally because it’s not that great. What Impossible and Beyond simulate so perfectly isn’t ground beef so much as cheap ground beef—which is to say, precisely the industrially produced meat that I most want to remove from my diet because of its cost to animal, human, and planetary welT H E S P L A S H I E S T, M O S T

Lab meat, the skeptics say, is what the moon landing was to the serious exploration of space—big, splashy, and great P.R., but ultimately a dead end. fare. To eat an Impossible burger is to realize how relatively small a factor the flavor of beef is in the experience of eating most real burgers, compared with toppings, texture, and temperature (an aspect of eating that is rarely talked about enough). The laboratory meats provide just enough beefy characteristics to bring those other elements to the fore, and the job it does is…well, just enough. The first time I made an Impossible smashburger at home, I knew with absolute conviction that I would thenceforth eat maybe two or three beef burgers a year. And I mean max! If that strikes you as something less than a profile in ethical courage, well, it does put a fine point on whom all this wonderful animal-free bounty may be serving best. Many vegans are rightly skeptical of the techstart-up culture surrounding fake meat. (Impossible Foods is said to be preparing for a multibillion-dollar IPO; in 2020 alone, “alt-protein” companies, which also include such ventures as 3D-printed steak and cultured seafood, raised some $3.1 billion in global investment.) They point out fake meat’s

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shortcomings as a long-term agent of sustainable eating—an Impossible or Beyond burger, while environmentally superior to beef, is said to have ﬁve times the carbon footprint of a classic bean burger—and lament the space that alternative proteins take up both in the food conversation and on menus. “If I’m going into a restaurant and I see an Impossible or Beyond burger, I’m going to be a little sad,” says Alicia Kennedy, who gave up eating meat 10 years ago. “I want to see creativity, even in that restaurant’s approach to a veggie burger. A veggie burger can be anything!” As a Twitter user named Jazzy Pizzle, M.D., put it: “Can y’all stop eating plant based things that ‘look and taste like meat!!!!’ and just learn how to cook a vegetable damn.” Lab meat, these skeptics say, is what the moon landing was to the serious exploration of space—big, splashy, and great P.R., but ultimately a dead end. This is all more or less fair. Fake meat will probably make some people very rich before it saves the world. And of course even the expanded options of the new veganism don’t replicate some people’s ideal of a meatless world. But it’s possible to like a product without being on board with its investor deck. For most of us, living in late-stage capitalism means a constant search for at least small ways to extricate ourselves from society’s most hideous systems. In this battle, fake meat is that rarest and most wondrous of things: an easy, if only partial, win.

matter of pleasure, I can understand if the thought of Impossible’s and Beyond’s engineered origins turns people o≠. Already other companies are using it to di≠erentiate themselves, echoing old hippie salvos: “Made with Love, Not in Lab” is a favorite catchphrase at Akua, a start-up that produces burger patties from farmed kelp. (They are very good, but I wish the company’s otter mascot didn’t make me think of them as otter burgers.) Learning recently of a British start-up called Peafu, which simulates tofu using peas rather than soy beans, did make me wonder if the future will just be a pile of alt- upon alt-, until it’s imitations all the way down. The lab meats work for me, no matter how weird they may be to think about. On the other hand, I’m mildly revolted by jackfruit, with its trace scent of decay. Meanwhile, I find myself hungering for seitan specifically because its sponginess reminds me of trashy processed meat products like bologna and fish balls. Taste rarely follows orderly lines. If there’s a problem with the new vegan bounty, it’s the overwhelming tendency— perhaps based on the old apprehension that vegan food is necessarily bland—for chefs to throw the entire abundance at their disposal at every dish, piling sweet on salt on umami, and repeat and repeat and repeat. Were I to o≠er any advice to these cooks, it would be to follow some version of Coco Chanel’s famous admonition to always take one thing o≠ before going out to meet your public. I often found I could only discern exactly what was going on in a dish when I returned to it as leftovers, at room temperature. Rarely have I experienced more palate fatigue than AS TO T H E

I did in the weeks I explored the vegan world. By the end, I didn’t crave a steak so much as I needed a salad. But I also, after a year of often intense ambivalence about the restaurant world, felt strangely invigorated. I met Alex Davis and Jas Rogers, the onetime servers who had gone on a vegetable-cooking jag after being laid o≠ last year during the pandemic, at Coalesce Goods, their newly opened stall in the St. Roch Market food hall. Rogers, who is 28, had been a food-service specialist in the Army; Davis, 23, had been exposed to vegan cuisine while studying yoga in Bali. Like so many of the other vegan chefs I met in New Orleans, the couple, who are originally from Houston, are themselves omnivorous. “We believe in a plant-based diet,” says Davis. “But everything in moderation.”

Rarely have I experienced more palate fatigue than I did in the weeks I explored the vegan world. By the end, I didn’t crave a steak so much as I needed a salad.

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Last April, they spent $47, Rogers’s last paycheck, on chickpeas and vital wheat gluten—the sticky flour used to make seitan— and started experimenting. It turned out that Davis is something of a faux-meat savant. She adds beans to seitan to mold “brisket” that is surprisingly meaty and fibrous in all the right briskety ways. She and Rogers (the pair have yet to hire an employee) smoke the “meat” for eight hours, then braise it in wine and tomatoes before finally grilling it with a beet-based sauce that imparts a pretty credible barbecue bark. They use the same seitan blend mixed with Cajun spices to create spicy faux-boudin balls and fashion strikingly realistic-looking slices of tuna sashimi by slicing skinned tomatoes and marinating them in kombu, tamari, and other Japanese seasonings. On each takeout order, Rogers or Davis writes an a∞rmation in marker: “FOOD IS LOVE” or “YOU ARE LIGHT.” I’m not usually susceptible to such platitudes, but right now I am. Much as I worried and mourned, this past year, for all those I admire and care about who work in dining, it was hard at times not to think of restaurants as a kind of grotesque undead manifestation of American capitalism, a creature—like Disney World or college football—that we simply accepted must lurch dumbly forward, though we knew that the sanest and safest thing was for it to lie down and stay buried for a while. (And to get the support it needed to do so.) Talking to Rogers and Davis, and Tabor and Mastersson, and all the other vegan chefs of New Orleans, I found myself picturing, for the first time in a long while, not a zombie but delicate, hopeful—even tasty—tendrils of green, pushing their way out of the soil and up toward the sky.

brett martin is a gq correspondent.

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Shirt, $770, by Celine Homme by Hedi Slimane. Earrings, his own. Necklace (top), $93,500, by Verdura. Vintage necklace (bottom) by Chanel from Kentshire.

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