Thvfgh

BEST

GET YOURS AT GQ.COM/BESTSTUFFBOX

STUFF

The GQ Best Stuff Box is filled with our favorite things from upstart brands and labels we’ve always loved. Inside each box is more than $200 worth of menswear, style accessories, grooming products, and exclusives. The best part: Each Best Stuff Box costs only $50.

Richer Poorer Sweatpants MVRK Skin + Beard Lotion Nalgene Water Bottle (Exclusive) Aaptiv Fitness Subscription and more

FOR ONLY $50 See what’s in the latest box at gq.com/beststuffbox

Is the Most Stylish Man in Baseball Meet the New Designer of Givenchy American Battlefield: 72 Hours in Kenosha

The Future Belongs to

STEVEN YEUN

CHRIS HEMSWORTH

HUGO BOSS FASHIONS INC. PHONE +1 800 484 6267 BOSS.COM

CONTENTS

GQ April Behind the Scenes With the People Who Make GQ

The Fix 22 Paths to Your Spring Fashion Awakening. . . . .. 17

Contributor

A Love Note to Painter SAM M C KINNI S S . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Enter the Men’s Jewelry Renaissance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 B EN JAMIN C LYM ER

on Richard Mille. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Shock Your System With J O E H O L D E R .............. 36

Features

CHRIS GAYOMALI Articles editor Gayomali wrote GQ’s April cover story on actor Steven Yeun. “Originally I had dreams to hoop with Steven somewhere in L.A. as part of the piece, but obviously COVID put a stop to all of that, which was probably to the story’s benefit,” he says.

“It forced us to have these unusually deep conversations over Zoom. Hopefully when this is over, we can get a few games in and I’ll roll up in a pair of JLIN ONEs.”

Cover Story: S T E VE N YEUN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Howl Like a S UP ERWO L F . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 M O OK IE BET TS

Can’t Stop Getting Better......... 58

American Battlefield: 72 Hours in Kenosha. . . .. . . 72 8 Ways to Dress Like a Music Legend. .. . .. .. . . .. . .. 76

On the Cover Photograph by Diana Markosian. Styled by George Cortina. Vintage vest and vintage ring (on right hand) from Melet Mercantile.

Vintage shirt from Stock Vintage. Vintage jeans by Levi’s from What Goes Around Comes Around. Belt, $985, by Artemas Quibble.

Necklace and ring (on left hand), his own.

Bracelet, $1,395, by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Hair by Anh Co Tran at The Wall Group. Grooming by Hee Soo Kwon using Dior Backstage Face & Body Foundation. Tailoring by Susie Kourinian. Set design by Heath Mattioli for Frank Reps. Produced by GE Projects.

8

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

CHRIS GAYOMALI AND “OFFICE GRAILS”: COURTESY OF SUBJECTS.

The Ascent of Givenchy’s M AT T HEW WIL L IAM S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

TRY IT

Want to look and smell your very best? Be the first to try new grooming products for your hair, skin, and beard by signing up for GQ’s new Try It Program. We’ll send you samples that match up with your own grooming routine.

Just fill out a grooming profile to qualify.*

Sign up now > GQ.com/tryit *Spaces and samples are limited. Products are targeted to skin and hair types and preferences where applicable.

CONTENTS

For our story on actor Steven Yeun, see page 40.

Shirt, $1,400, and pants, $4,600, by Gucci. Belt, $895, by Artemas Quibble. Vintage boots from Front General Store.

Hat, $700, by Wild Hats. Vintage ring (on right hand) from Melet Mercantile. Ring (on left hand), his own.

1 0

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

P H O T O G R A P H

B Y

D I A N A

M A R K O S I A N

ST YLIST, GEORGE CORTINA.

GQ April

THE RE AC OFF FIELD.

AL TION IS THE WAT C H AT

youtube.com/gqsports

CONTENTS

ST YLIST, MOBOL A JI DAWODU.

GQ April

For our story on Mookie Betts, see page 58.

Suit, $3,345, by Dolce & Gabbana. Sweater, $178, by Boss. Boots, $1,250, by Giuseppe Zanotti.

1 4

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

P H O T O G R A P H

B Y

A H M A D

B A R B E R

A N D

D O N T É

M A U R I C E

T I M E T O R E AC H YO U R S TA R A ARON RODGERS

CHRONOMASTER T H E F U T U R E O F S W I S S WATC H M A K I N G S I N C E 18 6 5

hion Awakenin

D R O P S

P

in g

Fa s

By SAMUEL HINE

r t s p h o S t Y r o u a

22

OPENING PHOTOGRAPH: GROOMING, RACHEL LEIDIG AT ART DEPARTMENT. RUNWAY PHOTOGRAPHS AND SPORTIVA, OMEGA, AND NIKE STILL-LIFE PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF BRANDS. OTHER STILL-LIFE PHOTOGRAPHS: MARTIN BROWN; PROP ST YLIST, STELL A REY AT MARK EDWARD INC.

After a long, dark winter, the flyest new fits go huge on color, pattern, and texture.

g

SPRING SWEATERAND-SANDAL KIT This season Dior Men designer Kim Jones collaborated with Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo, whose vivid palette—splashed across sweaters and painter pants—heralds better, brighter days ahead.

Sweater, $1,350, mockneck, $890, jeans, $1,500, sandals, $950, and socks (price upon request)

by Dior Men.

P H O T O G R A P H M A R T I N

B Y

B R O W N

1 7

SCRAP-QUILT SUIT When you construct sublime menswear out of antique militaria, you create a lot of leftover fabric. Greg Lauren’s studio recycles that by-product to make things—this one-of-a-kind quilted suit incorporates mixed linens from past seasons (jacket, $9,975, vest, $5,550, and pants, $9,975).

LIMONCELLO TOTE Bottega Veneta may be a leather house, but Daniel Lee isn’t scared of remixing its codes with other materials: This bag is made of squishy, durable rubber ($1,250).

MICHIGAN DUNK Back in 1985, Nike released a series of “Be True to Your School” Dunks celebrating college-basketball dynasties. The maize-andblue Michigan model has been a collectors’ favorite ever since, and the latest iteration promises to be the hottest yet ($100).

LOOSE-KNIT JUMPER At Jil Sander, Lucie and Luke Meier have established themselves as fashion’s most formidable knitwear minds, with epically good pieces like this formfitting chunky, textured linen crewneck ($990).

BOTTLE GREEN SHADES An NYC institution, Moscot found inspiration in an era of Lower East Side style so O.G. that tiny sunglasses didn’t yet exist ($310).

TOURISTCORE Enormous pants!

A lanyard wallet! A perforated leather jacket and derbies! Dolce & Gabbana has your next vacation fit on lock (jacket and pants, prices upon request; tank top, $195).

RETRO TAILORING Before Séfr was a brand, it was a Malmö-based vintage shop whose spirit still lives on in this suit: The fabric is groovy, and the trousers have a perfect 501 straight cut (blazer, $630, shirt, $195, and pants, $370).

ITALIAN-MADE HIKERS For big spring hiking trips, and big fits on rainy days, look no further than La Sportiva’s bombproof Karakorum boots ($315).

1 8

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

DISCO PANTS Let’s take a moment to appreciate how cool it is that Alessandro Michele’s Gucci—and these brocade flared trousers, embroidered all over with sequins and beads—exists ($3,900).

BETTER-THANVINTAGE LEATHER JACKET For spring, Our Legacy is serving up a potent recipe for flyness: Take one part leather jacket and one part silky shirt, unbutton, and mix well (jacket, price upon request, shirt, $267, pants, $328, and sneakers, $425).

TIMELESS DRESS WATCH The new Omega Constellation harks back to the Art Deco “Manhattan” model introduced in 1982 while taking design cues (peep the indices) from the city’s newest iconic skyscrapers ($21,400).

THE PERFECT PULLOVER There’s no better spring sweater than the V-neck vest, and there’s no better V-neck vest than Hermès’s, handmade from silvery mouliné cotton ($1,225).

IS IT DENIM? At Balenciaga, clothes don’t exist to look cool but to say something about other clothes. Case in point: This oversized Canadian tuxedo is actually leather with a trompe l’oeil denim print (jacket $4,390, pants, $3,290, sneakers, $1,190, sunglasses, $630, and necklace, $5,190).

EASY HOUSE SHOE The ideal spring loafer,

by Loewe, has the construction of a dress shoe but looks and feels like a slipper ($650).

Drops

KNOCK-AROUND BUCKET HAT Call it the spring beanie— Soraya Hennessy’s rollable crochet hats, handmade in Colombia, are a park-hang essential ($85 each).

OFF-COURT SUIT The NBA’s favorite tailor, Waraire Boswell, makes a trippy sweat set that’s just as tunnel-ready as any custom suit (sweatshirt, $160, and sweatpants, $150).

SPACE-AGE SHIRT The pleating at the core of Homme Plissé Issey Miyake’s funky, architectural menswear feels as wacky and innovative as it did on its debut in 1988 ($715).

CHUNKY MULE Tokyo-based Hender Scheme remixes classic footwear motifs in fresh ways. This mule is part clog, part brogue, and part combat boot ($620).

POLO’S PREPPIEST KNIT The classic Polo Ralph Lauren cricket sweater might look precious, but the design has a storied sporting pedigree. Wear it like you would a favorite sweatshirt: hard ($298).

EMBROIDERED OVERSHIRT S. S. Daley’s oversized shirts—this one’s constructed from embroidered deadstock French linen—became practically synonymous with warm weather and good vibes when Harry Styles wore one in his “Golden” music video ($397).

PLAID-ON-PLAIDON-PLAID SET The best fashion news of 2020? That Lamine Kouyaté, a star designer of women’s fashion in the ’90s, was reviving his radically original brand, XULY.Bët. Even better? That his eye for old and unexpected fabrics would also be expressed in menswear (long-sleeve shirt, $179, short-sleeve shirt, $149, and pants, $299).

The F i x

Read

To Painter Sam McKinniss, With Love 2 0

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

P H O T O G R A P H S

B Y

D A V I D

GQ’s Rachel Tashjian sends a letter of adoration to the New York artist who’s turning celebrity fandom on its head.

B R A N D O N

G E E T I N G

The F i x

Read

Dear Sam, When I was first assigned to write a profile of you for America’s premier men’s magazine, I was already impressed with your sophisticated nature and red-hot career. But as I spoke with your friends, professional partners, and admirers and gazed at your work, I realized something.

I love you.

To talk about you in the ordinary magazine way—to describe you picking at a salad, explaining your vision—would inadequately encapsulate you, this brilliant artist who is so for and of our time. The only way for me to talk about you is to talk to you. Because I understand you better than anyone else does.

Just keep reading and you’ll see.

I know you as funny and biting, the life of any party. But I felt, during our Zoom conversations and

2 2

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

hangout at your studio last fall— thank you for the Pellegrino; I still have the bottle—that you wanted this to go a certain way. That thrilled me even more, to get a new angle on you. Sam McKinniss: serious artist, at a serious time.

Indeed, this past year has been crazy for you. While the rest of the world was somehow both on pause and in decline, you were working on your biggest commission ever: nearly three dozen paintings for a solo show in Beverly Hills at the private in-home gallery of Michael Ovitz, the cofounder of Creative Artists Agency, the former Disney president, and one of the world’s preeminent American art collectors.

“We collect contemporary art, we collect modern art, we collect Chinese furniture, African antiquities, Rembrandt etchings, Japanese bronze flower vases,”

Michael told me. (I called him— I hope that’s okay?) By showing in Michael’s enormous gallery, you’re following in the footsteps of luminaries like Sterling Ruby, conceptual sculptor Carol Bove, and photographer Roe Ethridge.

Michael said he had you out to Beverly Hills for lunch and then took you to the space. He told me, “He can do whatever he wants, period.”

My eyes became hearts.

Of course Michael took a liking to you. “Sam and I share a very interesting common denominator,” he said. “We’re both film bu≠s.”

That’s putting it mildly, Michael Ovitz! Because like him, you aren’t merely a “bu≠,” you are a loving obsessive. But the di≠erence is you render venerated paparazzi shots, promotional images, and film stills of pop culture superstars—Justin Bieber, Serena Williams, Prince,

In McKinniss’s Brooklyn studio: a finished painting of his friend the writer Sarah Nicole Prickett, left; iconic images from film and television, many of which became works for his Michael Ovitz show.

The F i x

McKinniss dresses the way he paints: with a cool, classic elegance that shows he is in complete control.

Read

Princess Diana—in painted portraiture. Your ability to exalt the familiar in glossy pigments has a supernatural e≠ect on people. Just listen to what Michael had to say about the first painting he bought from you, a still of Julianne Moore in Magnolia, the Paul Thomas Anderson movie. “He does imagery of things that I was involved with!”

Michael practically sang. But “they’re injected with a little bit more feeling than normal.”

You reduced one of the most feared men in Hollywood to a groupie. Or maybe you elevated him to the highest possible state of existence: fandom.

Apparently your paintings have this fanatical e≠ect on everyone.

Your friend and former gallery rep Alissa Bennett, who showed your work at the now defunct Team Gallery, said people have “intensely personal” reactions to your art.

Your pieces spur viewers into a supernatural communion with their idols. She said witnessing this made her think about the phenomenon of celebrity as a circuit: “When fandom is really complete and perfect, it creates the circuit between the image and the admirer.”

Can you feel us growing closer?

In addition to the show at the Ovitz gallery, you’re opening one at the prestigious Almine Rech, in London, in April. (All this, plus you’re now being represented by JTT in New York!) I guess you meant it when you tweeted that bon mot in response to Billie Eilish bragging about finishing one song during quarantine: “I made like thirty paintings.” So funny!

Because I consider you the #1 painter in my life, I asked Alissa, who now works at Gladstone Gallery in New York, to explain where you are in your career. You will be pleased to know she believes you’re in a great place. “It’s really a moment where there’s excitement,” she said, adding, “and with that excitement, always comes scrutiny.” (Don’t worry: I’ll make sure nothing bad happens to you.)

But I believe showing your art in a place like Michael’s home gallery adds a whole new meaning to what you do, and I know you agree. “It’s

2 4

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

The F i x

going to be interesting to put my work—nestle it very firmly, very comfortably—within a Hollywood sphere,” you said last year (remember?). You were vaping in your studio in what you call “prime Williamsburg,” perched in front of a painting in progress of the promo shot for Little Women—the 1994 Winona Ryder version. “So the context will be very in the know, it’ll be very business. That’s a level of access that I wasn’t expecting.” You paused. “I wasn’t expecting to be given that ever.”

My darling, you deserve it.

“Those are exciting moments, and they don’t happen very often,” you said, reflecting on your showbiz bona fides, like painting Lorde for her 2017 album cover. “And when they do, it feels like a snake eating its own tail. I think I have a flair for the obvious.”

I moved to New York with big dreams of meeting someone just like you: handsome, sharply dressed, talented, and 35. The image you cut makes an impression. “He’s very, very antique,” Cooke Maroney, another Gladstone Gallery director (what’s in the water there?!), told me. “He’s as close as I’ve gotten to meeting someone in a Proust novel.” Alissa said you’re like a Frank O’Hara or Truman Capote character.

“I think that he somehow has been able to reconstitute all of these old-fashioned kinds of identities into something that’s incredibly contemporary in a special way,” she said. “He’s such a strange amalgamation of familiar things, which is what I think the work is also—and that’s why people connect to it.” Michael said you were the “nicest, smartest guy to be around.”

It’s almost like you’re the antithesis of the tortured, asshole genius painter. You are the kind artist. The polite artist. The elegant artist. “Elegance, I think, is important,” you told me once, your delivery dry as a Communion wafer. “I think that’s one of my core values.” I wrote down your other core values and drew smileys around them: gratitude, love, friendship. Cosmopolitanism.

“Having good posture. Propriety.

Things like that. All this leads to

situations or circumstances where you can transgress or when you can bend rules,” you said.

“When you can ask for more than you think you deserve.”

I love the way you wear simple American clothes—button-downs, slacks, penny loafers, corduroy suits—with a pure, modest beauty.

You treat appearance as a fine art.

“It behooves me and any other member of cosmopolitan society to dress nicely and to present mindfully, thoughtfully,” you said.

“I don’t want to dress in order to raise eyebrows or turn heads, but I do think it’s important to be memorable. I would like to leave the room and remain in your thoughts.”

I remember one day last year, when I asked how your paintings begin. The prime Williamsburg sun was streaming through the

Read

For example, I asked Michael if he thought Leonardo DiCaprio would want the portrait you made of him in Romeo + Juliet. “If I was Leo, I’d want to own that picture,” Michael said. “So I don’t see anything strange about that at all.”

Cooke told me that when he first encountered your work, “for some reason, I liked the idea—or I thought it would please Sam— for the person in the painting to own the painting. It makes no sense to me now.” Cooke o≠ered Cam’ron your painting of Cam’ron, he said, “and Cam’ron was like, Yeah, I’m not into art.” (You told me that you really appreciated that: “Why should he like it?”)

“The painting subject matter is them, but it’s not about them,” Cooke said, laughing. “It’s about us.

It’s about the outsiders, really,

“I don’t want to dress in order to raise eyebrows or turn heads, but I do think it’s important to be memorable. I would like to leave the room and remain in your thoughts.” windows of your studio and onto your handsome face as you revealed your inner process. “What I set out to do is to present a gathering of images, of pictures, that establish a mood, an attempt at telling a story,” you said. “But before I can do that, it’s like I have to try to take the temperature of the air of the culture, basically, of my constituency.… I want to be able to tap into and access emotional wells that are often sublimated into that drama of entertainment and theater and pageantry and presentation, fashion and glamour. Trying to know the mood of the world seems inherently political to me.”

But here’s the thing: I feel like everything is going your way, so what happens when the celebrity painter becomes not just a painter of celebrities but a celebrity who paints? What if you become an insider? Can you still play the role of loving observer of celebrity culture?

who remember these images from our lives. The memory we have of the image is not really that person.”

Alissa went even further, and I’d never felt so alive. “It goes back to this idea of people forging these intensely personal connections with his work in a way that I think is pretty uncommon,” she said.

And yet, “It’s not even rooted in ownership. It’s really the thing where people are like, ‘No one will understand this the way that I do.’ It’s like the narcissism of the fan, where you look at this thing and somehow those surfaces become reflective on people in a way that’s very complicated.”

Maybe I sound crazy. But I knew if I could just get this letter to you and lay it all out, you’d understand.

After all, doesn’t your work make you the ultimate fan?

With adoration, Rachel

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

2 5

w

Je

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

B Y

B Y

M A R T I N

M O B O L A J I

B R O W N

D A W O D U

GROOMING, RACHEL LEIDIG AT ART DEPARTMENT.

el ry

n’s Me

Ren aissance

Enter the The best part of getting dressed in 2021? Deciding which pearls to wear.

The F i x

Beepy Bella designer Isabella Lalonde with some of the characters that inform her mind-expanding aesthetics.

Fashion

How Jewelry Took Over Men’s Fashion

3 0

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

Beepy Bella

rity fans including Bella Hadid, Lalonde still makes almost every item by hand and scours flea markets

Fantasy-World Pearls PEARLS COME FROM

oys-

O P E N I N G PA G E

Coat, $780, by Homme Plissé Issey Miyake.

Earring, $1,540, by Foundrae.

NECKL ACES

Beaded: $165 by éliou.

Gold fist: $150 by Johnny Nelson.

Chain link: $4,000 by Louis Vuitton Men’s.

Paper chain: $12,200

by Chrome Hearts.

Gold link: $15,500 by Tiffany & Co. Sunflower pendants: $690 each

by Bottega Veneta.

with funky freshwater pearls, glass beads, and tiny frogs, strawberries, and ’shrooms. Since then, Lalonde’s work has been worn by Hunter Schafer on Euphoria and TikTok-ers like Chase Hudson all over the internet, elevating it to bona fide Gen Z grail status.

For a relatively young brand, Beepy Bella communicates in a visual language that is a lush world unto itself, a testament to Lalonde’s fertile imagination and radical personal style. “My art form has always been characterbuilding and world-building,” says Lalonde, who last year announced a new collection via a Times Square

P H O T O G R A P H

necklace covered in ladybug beads and topped o≠ with a heady glass pendant, it has a way of opening the mind to previously unfathomable aesthetic possibilities. “I want my pieces to enhance your style and maybe inspire you to wear an outfit you wouldn’t usually wear,” says Lalonde, who is currently working on a collaboration with Marc Jacobs’s ’90s-flavored Heaven line. “My favorite photos of people styling my jewelry are the weirder ones, when they wear colorful, funky things that match the necklace colors. Whenever I see someone do that, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. I’m so honored.’ ”

B Y

K E N Y O N

A N D E R S O N

STILL-LIFE PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF BRAND.

accessories upon your reentry into society. Hey, you might ask a passerby as they hustled along in their N95 mask and face shield, what’s up with all these dudes in pearl necklaces and dangly earrings?

Pandemic notwithstanding, in any American city in 2021 you’re likely to see a sudden riot of men sporting gem-encrusted tennis bracelets, baroque gold rings, and handmade beaded chokers. Just as men’s fashion has become increasingly fluid and animated by womenswear flourishes, the jewelry universe has also undergone a profound shift. Whereas once there was a clear line separating traditionally feminine and masculine jewelry, that line hasn’t been blurred so much as it’s been completely destroyed.

Hip-hop has long pushed the boundaries of embellishment—from Run-D.M.C.’s bulbous dookie ropes to the bling era of the early aughts. And in the past few years, guys like Pharrell and Lil Uzi Vert have led a shift toward a more sensitive—but no less fly— approach to adornment. Back when pink diamond forehead implants were just a twinkle in Uzi’s imagination, he was boldly layering delicate diamond chokers, and Pharrell was turning Chanel brooches and pearls into style fixtures. Before Pharrell, famous men hadn’t regularly worn pearls since the reign of Charles I, who wore his beloved pearl earring to his execution in 1649.

Young style adventurers are nostalgic for a more recent era: the ’90s, a time rife with hemp puka-shell necklaces and rave chokers. They know the flex of jewelry isn’t measured in carat size anymore—it’s measured in novelty and imagination. Like fashion, it’s all about grabbing references from di≠erent subcultures to concoct your own unique aesthetic cocktail. So layer craftsy beaded necklaces with fat Cuban links. Crash together antique and novelty rings. Dangle some charms from your Chrome Hearts bracelet. It’s a brave new world of style: jump in at your nearest piercing studio.

The F i x

Fashion

Jacket, $9,200, and shirt, $1,090, by Saint Laurent

by Anthony Vaccarello.

B R A C EL E T S

On left arm (from top): $145 by éliou and $15,200

by Bulgari.

On right arm (from top): $2,044 by Tom Wood, $7,300 by Tiffany & Co., and $650 by A. Sauvage.

RINGS

On left hand, on thumb: $580 by Bottega Veneta.

On index finger and ring finger: $650 and $510

by The Great Frog. On middle finger: $450

by A. Sauvage.

On pinkie (from top): $260

by Alighieri, $4,700 and $5,000

by Cartier, and $1,830 (gold cap)

by L’Enchanteur.

On right hand, on index finger: $2,350 by L’Enchanteur.

On middle finger (from top): $1,590 by Young in the Mountains and $2,770 by Bulgari. On ring finger: $6,370

by Tom Wood.

On pinkie (from top): $4,500

by O Thongthai and $3,300 by David Yurman.

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

3 1

Fashion

Johnny Nelson Rings for the Revolution to jewelry back when he was a punk rapper known as Johnny Matchsticks, a nickname he earned by stabbing a match into his pierced earlobe before shows. When he wanted to upgrade to a matchstick earring made out of gold, he couldn’t find one—so he decided to figure out JOHNNY NELSON CAME

-

to his nascent

Jean Prounis started creating jewelry after taking a class in ancient goldsmithery in college.

Johnny Nelson wears one of his “Women’s History” rings, featuring Harriet Tubman, Shirley Chisholm, Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells.

Prounis Ancient Forms, Modern Heirlooms

pick up a Prounis pinkie ring or bangle, you might think you’re handling a pristine ancient treasure. The high-karat gold designer Jean Prounis uses has a deep and ethereal luster, meant to evoke the tone of jewelry found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Greco-Roman galleries. The forms, too, appear smoothed by generations of touch, and the WHEN YOU FIRST

extensive library on ancient Greek art, architecture, and antiquities.

“When I was younger, he would show me his books,” she says. “Whether I was listening or not, I’m not sure, but it definitely came pouring out when I started making jewelry.” A delicate woven chain, for instance, is secured with a clasp that echoes the design of a Mycenaean-era safety pin, and a gold granulated pyramid stud takes its inspiration from second-century Roman earrings unearthed on Cyprus.

Though Jean uses precious materials like 22-karat recycled gold and emerald and sapphire stones, her made-in-NYC jewelry is meant to be worn-in and patinated like a leather jacket, the solid-gold bracelets molded to the body like a pair of 501s. There’s a

ity than perfection.

Jean’s curatorial approach is informed by her family’s Greek heritage and her g r a n d f a t h e r ’s

3 2

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

P H O T O G R A P H S

used,” says Jean of her designs, which, after years of daily wear and tear, only look more museum-worthy—your own personal treasure.

B Y

K E N Y O N

A N D E R S O N

JOHNNY NELSON NECKLACE: KENYON ANDERSON. OTHER STILL-LIFE PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF BRANDS.

The F i x

line: razor blade rings, All Power Fist studs, and civil-rights-hero-portrait pendants, pieces informed by his experience in the underground music scene and as a victim of police brutality. “I knew that I wanted to use my platform to spread awareness of the injustices we face, but I wanted to do it through the powerful statement of something like a four-finger ring,” he says.

When the Black Lives Matter protests erupted last spring, orders for Nelson’s work went through the roof, so he spent his days biking between his studio in Brooklyn, protests, and the diamond district, all the while producing pieces that were later worn by the likes of Colin Kaepernick.

“I realized that people need this,” he says. “People going to fight on the front lines want their Malcolm X ring to give them that extra push.” It was an extremely emotionally taxing period for Nelson, but it also galvanized a renewed sense of purpose: “The work that I do is inspiring others to fight their fight. To fight our fight.”

Turtleneck, $194, by Bianca Saunders.

The F i x

Fashion

NECKL ACES

Beaded: $2,090

by Chrome Hearts.

Link chain: $1,000 by David Yurman. Pendant: $15,500 by Rashid Johnson x Lizworks.

B R A C EL E T S

(F R O M T O P )

$275 by L.Jardim, $1,550 by Tiffany & Co., and $675 by Chrome Hearts.

R I N G S ( F R O M L EF T )

$542 and $250

by Tom Wood, $5,000 by Rashid Johnson x Lizworks, and $680 by The Great Frog.

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

3 3

How Richard Mille Made a $250,000 Watch Ubiquitous

The F i x

BY OUR MONTHLY WATCH COLUMNIST, BENJAMIN CLYMER

His timepieces weigh less than an ounce, cost more than a house, look like candy, and have shaken the watch industry to its core.

Watches

watches used to be considered an insider’s secret in the horology world— so scarce, in fact, that they were often described as “the secret billionaire’s handshake” on account of their six-to-seven-digit price tags.

Fast-forward to 2021, and the very thing that once made the watch so rare—the eye-popping price—has contributed to its becoming a staple on the wrists of stars from Jay-Z and Drake to Rafael Nadal and Odell Beckham Jr. Seemingly overnight, a brand that was considered a curio among watch nuts has instead become one of the hottest and most recognizable watchmakers on earth.

Richard Mille, a French entrepreneur and designer, cut his teeth at Parisian jeweler to the stars Mauboussin before launching his watch brand in 2001. His first product, the RM 001 Tourbillon, was inspired by Formula One race cars, and its signature Tonneau-shaped case and incorporation of engineering methods developed for F1 immediately caught collectors’ attention.

The price back then was $135,000, which caused the watch world to raise ICHARD MILLE

R

3 4

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

an eyebrow. Here was an unknown name offering a timepiece more expensive than some of the most important Patek Philippes. The splashy debut spawned the first of many apocryphal Richard Mille stories. Rumor has it that the origins of Mille’s extravagant prices can be traced to his first advertisement, in the Financial Times, when a copywriter inadvertently added an extra “0” to the MSRP. Mille received so many inquiries that the number remained as advertised. (It’s a rumor the brand denies.) Needless to say, many eyebrows are still arched, but RM can’t keep its watches in stock—the exorbitant pricing has, ironically, become one of the brand’s strongest selling points. To the ultra-online watch aficionado, the flex is as important as anything. But RMs aren’t all flash.

Pictured here are two recent men’s releases, the RM 11-05 Automatic Flyback Chronograph GMT and the RM 12-01 Tourbillon. The RM 11’s case is forged out of gray cermet, an aerospace material that approaches the hardness of diamond. Only 140 were made, and each will set you back a cool $239,000. The RM 12 has a unibody

Carbon TPT baseplate, a design feature normally seen in racing cars. As a result, the movement and case can withstand a mind-bending 5,000 g’s of force—for the equally mind-bending price of $1,111,000.

The lightness and durability of Richard Mille’s tourbillons have allowed the likes of Nadal, Beckham Jr., and Yohan Blake to wear them in competition—thanks to space-age technology, Nadal’s original RM 027 is so light it floats on water.

The most innovative part of Richard Mille’s legacy might be knocking the stuffiness out of luxury watchmaking. Why, he seems to ask, do expensive watches have to be so staid and serious? At the 2019 Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH), the brand unveiled a new “Bonbon” collection of watches designed with citrus fruits and marshmallows dancing on the dials. These sugary wrist ornaments cost north of $120,000, and Frank Ocean was among the first to wear one. Mille might invite controversy and debate among traditional watch collectors, but it’s hard to deny that he is having the most fun in the watch world—and that he now knows exactly what he’s doing.

P H O T O G R A P H S

B Y

E V A N

A N G E L A S T R O

OUTLIER. NOT OUTLAW.

STARTING AT $8,799* CANAMONROAD.COM

© 2021 Bombardier Recreational Products Inc. (BRP). All rights reserved. ®, TM and the BRP logo are trademarks of BRP or its affiliates. Some models depicted may include optional equipment. *BRP reserves the right to discontinue or change specifications, prices, designs, features, models or equipment without incurring obligation. Carefully read the operator’s guide and safety instructions. Observe applicable laws and regulations. Riding, alcohol and drugs don’t mix. See your authorized BRP dealer for details and visit canamonroad.com.

The F i x

Fitness

Our wellness columnist says embracing stress is the key to getting fitter, healthier—and even more serene. Why? Because all personal growth is rooted in cycles of strain and recovery.

By JOE HOLDER

3 6

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

P H O T O G R A P H S

B Y

T O R S O

BEST

GET YOURS AT GQ.COM/BESTSTUFFBOX

STUFF

The GQ Best Stuff Box is filled with our favorite things from upstart brands and labels we’ve always loved. Inside each box is more than $200 worth of menswear, style accessories, grooming products, and exclusives. The best part: Each Best Stuff Box costs only $50.

Richer Poorer Sweatpants MVRK Skin + Beard Lotion Nalgene Water Bottle (Exclusive) Aaptiv Fitness Subscription and more

FOR ONLY $50 See what’s in the latest box at gq.com/beststuffbox

The F i x

Fitness

has been stressful, right? Many of us are feeling tense, anxious, overworked, and under-recovered.

So as we’re finally inching toward a post-pandemic world, what if I told you that one of the best ways to transcend the constant churn of low-level stress is to intentionally bring more stress into your life? I know, I know— hear me out.

First, I want to be clear what I mean by stress. To the body, it’s anything that presents as a challenge or a demand. You are hardwired to respond to threats, both physically and mentally. A big one is the fightor-flight response. Whenever you perceive potential harm, your body automatically readies itself to face it: Your bloodstream is flooded with the hormones cortisol and adrenaline, your heart rate rises, your mind focuses. Other responses are slower but just as powerful—if you’ve ever done physical labor, think about how your hands toughen up after a few days of hard work.

Stress can be harmful, but it isn’t inherently. What’s damaging is stress without rest. (When someone says, “I’m so stressed out,” they really mean they are experiencing chronic stress— they’re under stress that they’re not recovering from.) But with proper rest, stress can be more like a vaccine: Subjecting yourself to small doses of HE PAST YEAR

T

No pain, no gain?

There’s some deeper wisdom in that kind of locker-room cliché.

3 8

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

intentional, controlled strain is a powerful way to improve your health and strengthen your mind and body.

This dynamic is at the root of why exercise even works. We stress our bodies to make them stronger. In sports science, this is known as the supercompensation e≠ect. Over the course of a grueling workout, your performance decreases—you can’t run as fast or lift as much as you could when you began. But if you give yourself a period of rest, you eventually bounce back faster or stronger.

Think about what can happen to your

muscles when you work out: If you do a particularly strenuous set of sprints or push-ups, you’ve ripped countless tiny tears in your muscle fibers.

Sounds horrible, right? But your body automatically mounts a healing response, delivering increased blood flow to the injured muscles, and they grow larger and stronger.

Pushing through a challenging workout is something we’re probably all familiar with, but I want you to take that same logic and apply it to other areas of your life. What are the things that you don’t like to do

SPECIAL THANKS TO PALM HEIGHTS, GRAND CAYMAN.

Lying on the beach just feels better if you work your body first.

because they’re di∞cult or uncomfortable but you know will benefit you? Personally, that could be my meditation practice. We often think of this as pure relaxation, as a way to simply unwind, but sitting and holding stillness can be unbelievably di∞cult. That’s because your body likes to stay in its “normal” state of being, and in a world where we’re always on, our “normal” is go, go, go. Sitting down and trying to turn o≠ your thoughts can be very uncomfortable. But in the same way that your body’s muscles get stronger through stress, parts of your neurological system—your involuntary patterns of breathing and thinking—will slowly adapt to the strain of stillness.

Another truly uncomfortable practice that I know is good for me is immersion in cold water. It’s linked to both pain relief and improved moods, but it’s not pleasant, and that’s the point. You’re not lost at sea in the Arctic, but your body kind of responds like it is. Controlled, safe doses of that

biological panic response can have real benefits. They can reset things so that your survival instinct isn’t as likely to be triggered when you don’t want it to be. You’ll be less likely to panic when you hit a tra∞c jam or get an email from your boss or experience any of the other low-level stressors of everyday life. Last year I took a cold shower every day for a month. At first it was awful, but over time I’ve learned that you can breathe through the discomfort and handle things you didn’t think you could.

Sharpening your response to intentional stress will also help you with life’s inevitable discomforts. Take work. It’s exciting when you make progress or meet a goal, but most days aren’t like that. Most days are a grind.

Maybe you’re just sitting in meetings or doing expense reports or struggling to communicate ideas in an email. Or you’re dealing with rude customers or doing repetitive physical labor. It can be overwhelming—work stress can easily trigger your body’s threatresponse state. But I’ve learned how to handle that reaction in a productive way. For example, the slow, steady breathing that I use to regulate my nervous system when I’m soaking myself in freezing water also helps me get ready to respond constructively to tough feedback. In fact, since I’m used to dealing with stress in discrete intervals in the gym, that’s also how I try to structure my work. I’ll use a timer to mark a sustained chunk of productivity and then take a moment to recover afterward. The diligence that your job requires is stress on your mind and body, just like push-ups or freezing water, and there’s power in acknowledging that.

Once you make an honest accounting of the sources of stress in your life, you’ll know to balance all of that strain with rest. This is important! It’s easy to see how only doing strenuous

The F i x

workouts without any time o≠ is not a good way to get stronger, right? You’ll just be exhausted. But this pattern happens too often in our daily lives, in a society that pushes us to be constantly productive. Too many of us are consistently in a state of low-level aggravation and threat response. This takes a toll on the body. It makes us sick; it shortens our lives. Thinking about your life in cycles of stress and rest—welcoming the hard parts but committing to real recovery—is a way to break out of this pattern.

In this way, embracing stress is not about living a life of discomfort. It’s about balance. Be sure you’re bouncing back. But also know that you can never rest your body to greatness: Whether we want to admit it or not, all growth starts with stress.

Fitness

Meditation is not as relaxing as it looks. Quieting the mind can be hard work.

Subjecting yourself to small doses of intentional, controlled strain is a powerful way to improve your health and strengthen your mind and body.

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

3 9

S T E V E N Y E U N’S

STEVEN YEUN GOT FAMOUS A DECADE AGO ON THE WALKING DEAD. BUT HOW WELL DO WE REALLY KNOW HIM? BY

Chris Gayomali

ON THE O C CASION OF HIS OSCAR-WORTHY NEW FILM, MINARI, WE GO INSIDE THE MIND OF ONE OF HOLLY WO OD’S BES T ACTORS. P H OTO G R A P H S BY

Diana Markosian

S T Y L E D BY

George Cortina

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

4 1

Some of Yeun’s friends had told me, specifically, to ask the actor about his fondness for something called primal astrology. Primal astrology is a quasi-evolved version of its more popular zodiac cousin, with a little more spiritual razzle-dazzle—the main di≠erence being that, instead of, say, Scorpios or Sagittarii, the birth signs are meerkats or bees. According to Primalastrology.com, the system is designed to help people “discover far, far more about your path in life than was previously possible” by combining their Eastern and Western zodiac signs along with “past lives” and “karmic balancing.” (According to a female colleague, “It sounds like astrology, but for dudes.”)

Steven Yeun’s spirit animal is a camel—an assessment he agrees with.

Per the site, a camel is always “up for an adventure. Like their animal namesake, Camels will not only trek through harsh conditions for you, they will carry you on their back while they do it.… They are highly self-reliant and very lucky, which is why they don’t always look before they leap.”

So it’s a little bit of a Rorschach test in that the heart sees what it wants to see. Whether it’s useful or not, primal astrology is the exact kind of silly distraction that registers in Yeun’s bones—that opens his mind to new modes of thinking. Growing up in suburban Michigan, Yeun spent his time absorbed in X-Men trading cards, which spelled out a character’s traits, like STRENGTH, ENERGY PROJECTION, FIGHTING ABILITY, and whether this guy’s adamantium claws could cut through so-and-so’s gamma-irradiated skin. “I wonder if that’s an Asian thing?” Yeun said. “We love pattern recognition and stats and knowing what someone’s makeup is. You know what I mean?” His favorite thing about primal astrology, though, is “the merging of East and West”—the convergence of worlds.

He’s deeply focused on those ambiguous, in-between spaces. “That, to me, is maybe the future—if you can balance the ideologies of both sides. That’s a good balance.”

These days Yeun finds himself very much in a hazy in-between space of his own, on the precipice, it seems, of something bigger, something special. It’s not the first time, either. He became famous, basically overnight, as a beloved character on a popular

4 2

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

same clothes every day. It’s like one day there hurt, either. Boots Riley told me that in casting was no Steven Yeun in the culture, and then Yeun for the role of Squeeze in Sorry to Bother out of thin air: There’s Steven Yeun, the Asian You, he needed someone “handsome enough guy from The Walking Dead, skinny-dipping that you thought that Tessa Thompson was at Wi Spa with Conan O’Brien. going to want to go after him.”

Since his departure from the show five years Of course, in a place as white and retroago, Yeun, 37, has been in pursuit of that good grade as Hollywood, changing the notions of balance, taking on a series of challenging roles who gets let in and who gets taken seriously in indie films with some of the more cerebral doesn’t happen easily. Yeun is particularly and gonzo directors of his era, beginning thoughtful about this stu≠, which has made with Okja (by Parasite director and Academy him something of an ideal ombudsman on the Award winner Bong Joon Ho), then Sorry to issues of parity and representation, which crop Bother You (Boots Riley) and Burning (Lee up in sometimes strange ways. Take Minari, Chang-dong). Last year he starred in Lee Isaac for example. It’s a critically adored prairie film Chung’s Minari, which hoovered up the major from a Colorado-born director that takes place awards at Sundance and was declared by judge in the South. It’s as American as Baja Blast Ethan Hawke to be “damn close to perfect.” and “Dipset Anthem.” Yet instead of honoring By the beginning of 2021, the film—and Yeun’s the film in the best-picture category, the role in it—was being talked about again, as a Golden Globes this year relegated it to best forlikely Oscar-nominee for best picture. eign picture, thanks to a byzantine set of rules Set in a sun-dappled version of the ’80s, the that, in part, require a best-picture nominee to film features Yeun as Jacob Yi, an obstinate be “exclusively for English-language motion Korean father who uproots his wife and two pictures”—which critics have pointed out young children from California to start a farm didn’t seem to apply to, say, Inglourious in rural Arkansas, which might as well be an Basterds. In a way, the Minari controversy alien exoplanet thousands of parsecs away. At forced us to confront the thorny question its heart, Minari is an optimistic film about about who gets to be seen as American—and family and the di≠erent frequenmore crucially who doesn’t. cies that love can manifest. Unlike ←← “I wasn’t surprised,” Yeun OPENING PAGES other immigrant narratives, it said when I asked him about the poncho centers the Koreanness of the Yi Globes. “I have no desire to try to (throughout) $145 family while presenting their new massage both sides in this situaRTH white neighbors as an at-times tion, but it really just comes down shirt $249 annoying but ultimately benign to the idea that rules and instituDouble RL—Ralph Other, like the Yis had crashtions can never capture real life.

Lauren landed among the Jar Jar Binkses.

And it can never really undervintage jeans stand that what builds a place Race is an ambient specter, but Levi’s from What it doesn’t cast a shadow over the Goes Around Comes like America and what makes it great is all the people that are characters or predetermine what Around contributing to it.” Yeun said he they do; they’re allowed to just be boots (throughout), who they are, fuckups and all. And views the Golden Globes slight— vintage no one fucks up more than Jacob, annoying as it is—as something → of an opportunity: to open new whose existential turmoil gives OPPOSITE PAGE doors, to put others on his back.

Yeun the fodder to deliver his shirt $249 “If this is the thing that helps to most multilayered performance Double RL—Ralph Lauren expand these institutions and yet. Maybe not surprisingly, the role has ushered him toward a rules? Cool,” he said. “That’s why chaps new, rarefied space: a leading (price upon request) we make this stu≠.”

RTH man who, through some alchemy Before jumping into Jacob’s necklace, his own high-waisted brown trousers in of determination, curiosity, charisma, and luck, is expanding in Minari, Yeun faced the burden of vintage ring from Melet Mercantile the American imagination the (text continued on page 46)

jacket $1,050 shirt $640 Celine Homme by Hedi Slimane vintage pants from Melet Mercantile hat $230 Stetson

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

4 5

portraying Korean fatherhood for a wide audience without falling into old stereotypes.

It was eating away at him. “I was more terrified than I’d been doing any other thing,” he said. Here, an opportunity: How do you show audiences a three-dimensional character, full of anger, ambition, and a frightening inability to read his wife’s love language? “All these thoughts were racing through my mind, like ‘What do I do?’ ‘Do I play a caricature of our fathers?’ ‘Are people going to want me to play a larger, catchall idea of what a Korean ajusshi is?’ ” In some ways it’s an unenviable task: You’re simultaneously resisting old tropes and trying to remain authentic to what you know, all while inventing new molds that someone else can break in the future. You’re jumping o≠ a cli≠ and building the plane on the way down, except the plane has to use rechargeable lithium-ion batteries to meet evolving emission standards.

“There’s this built-in Voltron image of what an Asian dad is supposed to be, and to break through that is kind of di∞cult,” he

an almost melatonin e≠ect. If this once-in-ageneration-actor thing doesn’t work out, he’d make a great hostage negotiator.

“He thinks about things deeply,” Boots Riley told me when describing his own long conversations with the actor. He cast Yeun in Sorry to Bother You after the two shared a languid night out at a restaurant. Some weed was smoked, and a friendship blossomed from there. “If I’m going to call him on the phone, I have to have a few hours set aside,” Riley added, “because we’re going to run the gamut of everything in existence that needs to be talked about.”

In the two-plus years since I’d last spoken with Yeun, a lot had changed—namely, it’s boom times for Asian American film and television. You have rich and tasteless Asians with six-packs on reality TV (Bling Empire). You have hyper-violent Chinatown wars, where the gangsters also have six-packs (Warrior). And you have artful indie films such as Lulu Wang’s 2019 feature, The Farewell, for which Awkwafina (six-pack unconfirmed) became the first

people would literally get his face tattooed on their chests and LARP as him in forums.

(In 2017, a year after he left the show, he was filming a night scene for Sorry to Bother You in Oakland, scrunched inside a Toyota Tercel with movie stars including Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson. Yeun was the first one to get recognized…from the back seat. People waiting in line outside a bar were like, “Hey! It’s the Asian guy from The Walking Dead!”)

The instant notoriety was surreal—and slightly dehumanizing. Yeun had to stop leading worship at his church after parishioners began asking for selfies. Compounding the chaos was the fact that Glenn was romantically paired up with Maggie, a brave and unswerving white woman, played by Lauren Cohan. “It was important for both of us, but Steven always knew that the relationship had to feel real, because it was one of the first really major Asian-white relationships portrayed on TV,” Cohan told me. The actors did such a laudable job that YouTube is now lousy with fan montages in which Glenn and

“WE PROFESS THAT WE’RE CAUGHT IN THE WHITE AMERICAN GAZE, AND THAT’S TRUE. BUT WE FORGET THAT WE ARE ALSO THAT GAZE. THAT GAZE IS ENCODED INTO US, AND THE LAST BOSS IS YOURSELF.” added. “To not just break through the expectations of others, but also to break through the gaze in your own mind.

“We profess that we’re caught in the white American gaze, and that’s true. But we forget that we are also that gaze. That gaze is encoded into us, and the last boss is yourself.”

F I R S T M E T Steven Yeun in New York, where I live, in 2018 on assignment for GQ. Over Scarr’s pizza we had an oddly lifea∞rming conversation about everything from growing up in our respective churches to evolving ideas of masculinity to Jeremy Lin’s run with the Knicks. It was…strange!

I left in such a daze that I got lost walking back to the o∞ce. Part of what made that conversation so comfortable was the fact that we were both Asian guys around the same age. (I’m Filipino.) Still, it’s rare to talk to a stranger and find yourself so easily locked onto the same frequency. “It feels cool to talk to you, and dangerous,” Yeun said this time around, laughing. “We can share so much perspective, so I just puke.”

Over a series of long Zoom calls this winter, Yeun was candid and philosophical, the kind of talker whose thoughts balloon into long, floaty paragraphs stippled with the occasional “duuuude.” Earlier in his career, he had flittier, eager-to-please energy, but these days he’s mellowed out; his speaking cadence has I

4 6

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

Asian American to win a Golden Globe for best actress. Not everything being produced right now is “good” necessarily, which is in itself good. That’s how this should work. Representation, practically speaking, requires some latitude to suck.

Few people have thought about their place in all of this with as much care and attention as Yeun, even as he acknowledges that when it comes to the topic of authenticity, conversations can quickly become circular. “It’s like you get tricked into representing your entire culture, and then the game becomes policing your authenticity to each other,” he said. “But how can you be authentic? What’s actually authentic to you is just being this middle person—Korean and American. This third culture.”

Yeun moved to Los Angeles in 2009.

Drove across the country and tried out for a handful of acting gigs, including one he didn’t get, for a “plucky assistant” on an illfated sitcom called Awkward Situations for Men—and then, just five months after crossing the county line, was cast on AMC’s The Walking Dead. At its peak, the show was the most watched thing on television, trouncing Game of Thrones and even The Big Bang Theory. His role as Glenn Rhee, a Korean American pizza-delivery guy with great hair and a big heart, quickly transformed Yeun into an object of fan obsession—like,

Maggie are smeared in blood while “All of Me”

by John Legend plays in the background.

Then, after seven seasons, Glenn’s skull was pounded into the dirt by a guy with a baseball bat. Brains everywhere, fingers still twitching. Even by Thrones-ian standards, his death was a lot, and more than a few diehards stopped watching the show afterward.

I’ve always wondered: Could Yeun have kept Glenn alive if he’d wanted to?

“If I would have campaigned for it, maybe?” Yeun said. Still, he had a “nagging feeling” that the ride was done. Glenn was tied to Yeun in such a “meta way,” and he was feeling limited by the character’s lack of dimensions. “Like, it’s kayfabe, you know what I mean?” Yeun began to explain by way of a wrestling analogy. “I’m like ‘Hacksaw’ Jim Duggan or Ricky ‘the Dragon’ Steamboat or something. Wrestling is for the people: There’s ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ But I felt I had expanded beyond that and I was internally frustrated. I felt like I was servicing a concept of goodness, as opposed to engaging with Glenn’s humanity.”

Yeun wanted Glenn to be “more conflicted,” to have the same opportunities for interiority as the other characters. “Glenn has evil thoughts, I’m sure,” said Yeun. “I remember season three, when Glenn thinks that the governor assaulted Maggie, and I remember I campaigned (text continued on page 50)

vintage jacket from Stock Vintage shirt $265 jeans $425 Double RL—Ralph Lauren belt $985 Artemas Quibble vintage bandana from Palace Costume bracelet $1,395 Saint Laurent

by Anthony Vaccarello

4 8

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

vintage jacket and pants from Front General Store vintage shirt from Palace Costume vintage bolo tie from Melet Mercantile belt $1,094 Artemas Quibble ring, his own

hard. I was like, ‘Yo! Give me a story line where I go to kill this guy.’ ” That didn’t happen, and it was the first moment that Yeun knew his time on the series was coming to an end. “To be quite honest, as an Asian person, sometimes accessing your own humanity when you’re outside in the world is not that easy. Because you’re usually kind of just shrunken down into your label. To not have that in my real life and to not have that in my show life was frustrating. And so I think it just started this journey of just, like…dude, I can’t. I’ve got to feel full. I’ve got to feel real.”

What do you mean you weren’t feeling full in your real life?

“I didn’t know it while I was living through it, but you’re constantly code-switching,” he said. “You’re constantly trying to fit into a situation so that you don’t disturb it.” I suspect this is something a lot of Asian Americans of our generation can relate to, career- and otherwise. You feel thankful to be in these rooms, to have a seat at the table, whether you’re a creative or a hedge-funder or a beloved actor who marries a cool white

you put something into it, it’ll come back to you.” He furthered the point with an observation about the workplace: “We get stuck in middle management so much, and I wonder why that is. Probably because we’re glue people. We’re the ones that keep the companies afloat, because we’re managing all this shit, because we’re thinking about everything.

And then they keep us there because no other person’s going to do that.”

The term Asian American is a fairly recent invention, younger than bubble wrap and even the computer mouse. It was coined in the late 1960s by two Berkeley activists who wanted to lasso disparate immigrant groups into a potentially powerful political identity, inspired by the Black Power movement that preceded it. Obviously, the phrase has its limitations: The cultural experience of, say, a Filipino idiot who works at GQ and grew up in a West Coast town like Long Beach surrounded by Cambodians—who on average experience higher poverty rates than other Americans—is going be radically di≠erent from that of a Korean immigrant

by the same things,” Yeun said, “and so he kind of blossomed and was able to be a part of life, while I kind of held on to this weird, nebulous middle space.”

So Steven retreated into himself. He found some comfort in Nintendo and X-Men cards, and he befriended “other weird gap-life kids,” the kind predisposed to sitting alone at the lunch table. “I realized I did a lot of things to look smart,” said Yeun. “Secretly, I’m mad dumb!” An example: If someone asked him what his favorite type of music was, he’d blurt out, “Classical!” (“But I don’t know anything about classical music. I would just say shit.”) He played in the school orchestra—“first violin, last chair”—but felt like the most realized version of himself at his Korean church, where he didn’t have to code-switch.

In his youth group, everyone could just move through their little contained world in the fullness of who they were.

Yeun finally began to break out of his shell as a teenager, when he got himself a guitar: a Taylor 710ce with Elixir strings. “I remember the day that my dad bought it for me at

“AMERICA IS STILL NOT EQUIPPED TO SUPPORT THE FLYNESS OF WHO WE ACTUALLY ARE. WE’RE CARVING OUT OUR OWN SPACE. IT’S FRONTIER TERRITORY RIGHT NOW—STILL.” woman on a zombie show. Things are going well for you. Why rock the boat?

“But I think I was tired of not letting people know that I could have dark thoughts,” Yeun continued. “That I could also have anger. I would hear all my life from other people who are like, ‘Whoa, are you getting pissed? No way!’ Early on in my life, I took that as a compliment because I was like, ‘Oh, I’m playing the game right. Like, I’m being a nice guy.’ But then you get older and you’re like, ‘Fuck that, man. That’s an insult.’ And that’s what I mean about my humanity. We all feel human. But I just wanted to feel all the feelings.”

So he leapt into roles that allowed for space to feel those feelings. To find answers to the question of who Steven Yeun could become.

Yeun was more of a people pleaser, someone who went out of his way to meet strangers where they were.

To a certain extent he still tries to make other people feel comfortable, but as he’s gotten older he’s become more protective of that accommodating mental energy. He suspects that being hyperaware of what everyone else around you is doing might be another Asian thing. “If you’re from a collectivist environment or family, you’re constantly thinking about other people,” he said. “You grow to trust that system because at least if EARLIER IN HIS CAREER,

5 0

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

growing up in an overwhelmingly white Michigan suburb. Still, it’s a term that captures something useful about a cohort of people who share, if nothing else, a similar sort of middle space—an area in between that we’re constantly aware of.

Yeun’s family emigrated from Seoul, where his father had been an architect at a big firm, when Steven was four. His parents and younger brother touched down Stateside in Taylor, Michigan—a working-class neighborhood with “gangs, rat tails, and BMX bikes”— living in a green house behind an uncle’s store. Mom and Dad’s first job in the States was stu∞ng chopsticks into paper sleeves. “[My dad was like,] ‘When I first came here, I was so angry,’ ” Yeun said. “He said he was so angry because he realized that he threw away all the safety of everything and had to start back up from zero.”

Eventually the family put down roots in the suburb of Troy, a half hour north of Detroit. As a kid, Yeun just sort of osmosed his way into learning English and was often the only Asian kid in school. “I was pretty iso,” he said. “I think immigration, if I’m going to be honest, it fucked me up a little bit.” It was Yeun’s younger brother, three years his junior, who had an easier time assimilating—who made friends and got Steven into the NBA and the Detroit Pistons.

“He was young enough to not be messed up

Guitar Center,” Yeun recalled. Young Steven was euphoric; Dad was pained by the fourfigure price tag. “I think he felt like he was just birthing another child. He was so sad, putting down that money.” The guitar quickly unlocked something in Yeun, who would transform himself into the band leader of his praise group. He had grown to love singing, and the guitar, by extension, made singing easier. He especially loved the worship music of songwriter Chris Tomlin—“Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)” was extremely his shit—and would occasionally perform outside the context of the church. The easy John Mayer stu≠. Jason Mraz. Those folk-adjacent acoustic tabs that sensitive straight guys of a certain age bracket foolishly thought would help them land girlfriends.

“I did a really good… Whoa, I’m blanking on it. Man, what’s that song.…”

And here, after quickly searching the recesses of his memory and failing to come up with the correct answer, Steven Yeun starts to sing: “Whatever tomorrow brings I’ll be there.…”

The song is “Drive,” by Incubus, a fact that I o≠er a little too quickly.

“Yeah! I did a good cover of that at a church talent show, and I won,” he said, laughing.

After high school, Yeun attended Kalamazoo College, a tiny liberal arts school where he eventually (continued on page 84)

shirt $1,090 Saint Laurent

by Anthony Vaccarello vintage jeans Levi’s from What Goes Around Comes Around hat $215 Stetson scarf $95 RTH

Self–Portraits

by Will Oldham and Matt Sweeney

5 2

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

Back in 2005, Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham quietly put out an album called Superwolf and watched it become a cult classic. Now, at long last, they’re releasing the follow-up—and repping old-fashioned virtues like friendship, collaboration, and the reckless pursuit of life-changing art.

By Chris Heath

sweater $500 Canali pants $895 S.R. Studio. LA. CA. hat, his own –– ON SWEENEY

overalls $40 Dickies

–– ON SWEENEY

sweater $1,490 Louis Vuitton Men’s

shirt $635 Dries Van Noten

shoes $190 Clarks Originals

pants $428 Stan

his own socks and sunglasses (throughout) Supreme

his own boots Lucchese his own watch Rolex

watch $30,800 Hublot

––

––

ON OLDHAM

ON OLDHAM

sweater $765 AGR

suit $6,900 Ermenegildo Zegna XXX

pants (price upon request) Palomo Spain

shoes $190 Clarks Originals

boots $690 Alexander McQueen

his own sunglasses Ray-Ban necklace, his own

––

––

ON SWEENEY

ON SWEENEY

jumpsuit (price upon request) Études

jacket $3,295 Dunhill shirt $1,090 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello

–– ON SWEENEY

coat $2,429 Gucci

pants $1,525 The Elder Statesman

shirt $830 Rick Owens

shoes $265 Clarks Originals x Aimé Leon Dore

pants $850 Bode

––

his own shoes Broadland

ON OLDHAM

overalls $238 Carhartt WIP

his own hat Supreme his own necklace (throughout) Popular Jewelry ––

turtleneck $1,340 Louis Vuitton Men’s → THIS PAGE, RIGHT ON OLDHAM

jacket $2,025 pants $1,185 Moschino Couture

ON OLDHAM

jacket $410 pants $280 Needles

shirt $935 Louis Vuitton Men’s

shirt $1,015 Undercover boots $1,395 Christian Louboutin hat, his own

5 4

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

bolo tie and hat, his own shoes $650 Jimmy Choo

2 0 2 1

They briefly entertained Cabin Boy. Oldham proposed Music Inspired by the Passion of the Christ. Sweeney put forward the Bully Boys, which Oldham liked until they ruminated on its associations with a skinhead gang in the South.

Meanwhile, Sweeney played some of the songs to a friend, Marc Razo. One, “Lift Us Up,” contained the lines “And the creature, form of superwolf / Will meet you eye to eye.”

“That superwolf song is killer,” Razo told him.

Hearing the phrase “superwolf song” out of his friend’s mouth, Sweeney realized that the word just fit.

He told Oldham, who agreed. When their album was released, in January 2005, it was titled Superwolf, and although the artist name was formally given as Matt Sweeney and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Superwolf also became the de facto name of the whole project. That first album would come to be considered a revered semisecret classic. After a gap of 16 years, a second will be released on April 30. This belated sequel is called Superwolves.

“Implying,” Oldham clarifies, “that we have gone forth and multiplied.”

Oldham and Sweeney have previously described their first proper meeting, one day in New York City in about 1997, when they ran into each other by chance on Houston Street. Oldham already had quite a reputation for the catalog he had released under a shifting series of artist names, rootsy but otherworldly songs that set him apart from most of what was going on in music at the time. Sweeney had made records with his high school band, Skunk, and the New York band Chavez but was then working as a music publicist. In those first moments on Houston Street, they spoke about a

but soon found plentiful common ground.

“We decided to carry on talking, right then and there,” Oldham says. “And we haven’t stopped talking since then.”

Sweeney has never mentioned to Oldham that this actually wasn’t the first

other in front of a bunch of ding-dongs in the sun.”

seriousness; Sweeney was well aware of, as he puts it, “the haunted Appalachian persona presented by the press and word of mouth.” But that wasn’t what Sweeney could see with his own eyes, here, in this moment, on the L train. This guy was having a blast: “He was with a woman, clowning around making her laugh. I was struck by how much genuine fun they were having. I remember thinking this guy seems funny and capable of making a good time anywhere.”

“I feel like maybe we’ll never get to the bottom of how Will sees music.

How Will exists with music, it’s way more of a full-contact real thing.”

gets ever more spangled and splintered, in ways both good and bad, there might seem something curiously old-fashioned—oh, perhaps “timeless” would be more tender—about the tale of Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham. Would it sound dull if I said that this was a story about nothing much more than how and why two middle-aged men have occasionally decided to make music together? Would it sound forbiddingly stu≠y if I described them as making that music out of a sense of community and kinship, doing so out of a stubborn, almost reckless conviction that if you create songs with su∞ciently distinct beauty or texture or sinew or strangeness, maybe laced with truths simple and hard, then set them loose out into the world, somehow they will find the ears that deserve them and the ears that they deserve?

Perhaps. And all of the above is broadly true. Yet this is also as contemporary a story T H E I R B O N D G R E W incrementally. In the as there can be: about how to find a space in years after Sweeney and Oldham first a world that may not easily open up to fit you met—but before they began to write music within it; about adversity and what comes together—Sweeney and his guitar would after; about cooperation and commitment; regularly accompany Oldham onstage and about how to find a path for yourself that’s on record. Sweeney also continued working worth following; and, in the end, about how, as a music publicist and had started manif you always assume you know how someaging Andrew W.K. Then a very di≠erent one else is thinking, it’s only a matter of time opportunity came his way, one that threw before you discover how wrong you were. everything up in the air. After Sweeney had handled publicity for the Smashing Pumpkins’ breakthrough album, Siamese ← Dream, Sweeney had fallen out with Billy ON SWEENEY Corgan, but now they ran into each other coat $2,429 at a party and rekindled a friendship. The Gucci Smashing Pumpkins had recently disinteshirt $635 grated, and Corgan, who had been a fan Dries Van of Sweeney’s first band, Skunk, invited Noten Sweeney to work together on what would ↓ become a new band, Zwan.

ON SWEENEY Things started well enough. But shortly shirt $1,090 after Zwan’s sole album came out, the band Saint Laurent came apart messily and acrimoniously. Spat

by Anthony Vaccarello back out into the world, Sweeney struggled to find his footing, traumatized by what watch $30,800 Hublot had happened. It was then that Oldham suggested that AS THE WORLD

ON SWEENEY

was playing in London, also sending Sweeney some lyrics and challenging him to turn them into songs to perform at that show. In other words, the primary spur toward what would become their Superwolf collaboration was an act of friendship. “It was painful watching the trajectory of that project,” Oldham says to me, about observing Sweeney’s time in Zwan. “A big part of the challenge to Matt was the seizing of the opportunity to address and alleviate that pain.”

“Will gave me a chance to make music when he could see I’d been shut down,” Sweeney concurs. “That kindness really

A P R I L

coat $1,795 Bode vest $1,825 The Elder Statesman sweater $520 Rick Owens pants (price upon request) Casablanca shoes $415 Grenson his own hat Ditch Witch

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

5 5

“The huge joy of my work with Matt has to do with knowing how deep his reserves are and how deep his experiences are and how much he cares.”

—Will Oldham

album subsequently appeared, in 2005, ON SWEENEY Sweeney and Oldham coat $2,429 didn’t do too much to Gucci let the world know: shirt $830 five shows in shops Rick Owens across New York in a pants $850 single day, some tourBode ing, a beguiling video his own shoes Broadland shot in an hour for the song “I Gave You.” No his own hat Ditch Witch interviews. “I really don’t know if Will just didn’t feel like going through the whole thing of having to explain what the fuck this thing was,” says Sweeney.

Even so, Superwolf was more than just the culmination of Oldham’s gesture to pull Sweeney back on track. It also set Sweeney on a new career course. The album may not have sold in huge numbers, but some of the ears it bent were influential ones—most famously, producer Rick Rubin’s. Because of Rubin’s appreciation of the record, and of what Sweeney did on it, Rubin first asked Sweeney to contribute to two posthumous Johnny Cash albums, and then called him up to play guitar on Rubin’s productions for a diverse and sometimes unlikely cast, including Kid Rock, Josh Groban, Neil Diamond, the Dixie Chicks, Jake Bugg, and Adele.

Sweeney tells me about another Superwolf enthusiast. One day, Rubin texted to say that he’d just played the album for Neil Young and that Young had “freaked out.”

Soon after, Young’s manager, Elliot Roberts, who had managed Zwan, took Sweeney to lunch in New York, and also gifted him “a joint of extremely powerful brain-busting weed.”

Believing himself free for the rest of the day, Sweeney went for a stroll and smoked the joint. That evening Roberts called to say that Sweeney should come right now to meet at an Italian restaurant uptown for dinner with Neil Young. “I was so fucking high,” Sweeney remembers. “I figured, ‘This is a funny situation, and I guess I just gotta go with it.’ Neil Young’s been in my head since I heard ‘Cinnamon Girl’ at age five. I can’t articulate how much his music means to me.”

So he went. “Got in a cab uptown and walked through the door of the restaurant. High as shit. As soon as I sat down at

that he had seen no press about it? What kind of fecklessness was at work here?

When Sweeney protested that they had made a video, Young said that he certainly hadn’t seen it and that maybe he should make one for them.

Eventually, as this haranguing continued, it struck Sweeney, through his haze, just how absurd it was to be on the receiving end of this particular message from this particular messenger: “He gave me such a hard time about us not promoting the album properly, finally my high ass said, ‘You’re telling me we’re being di∞cult and willfully obscure? You should fuckin’ talk!’ ”

↑

5 6

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

THE Y E A R S that followed the Superwolf album, Sweeney and Oldham periodically collaborated onstage and on some of Oldham’s other records, and there have been occasional stray recordings credited to the two of them—a 10-inch single here, a cover version there. The one thing that they didn’t do was the most obvious: make another album together. Though they both talk as though they always assumed that they someday would, Sweeney concedes that it may be his heels that dragged the most. “I am really fucking slow, obviously,” he says.

“I move slow, and Will has got an incredible work ethic and a real sense of deadlines and timelines. And I suck at them.”

Creating the new album, Superwolves, was IN

↑ ON OLDHAM

blazer (price upon request) shirt $935 pants $1,070 Louis Vuitton Men's hat and sunglasses, his own

→ ON SWEENEY

coat $4,090 jacket $2,690 shirt $580 pants $920 Alexander McQueen

he echoes his worry that people aren’t listening deeply to much of anything right now. “I think it’s the most substantial group of songs on record that I feel like I’ve been involved his own shoes with in years, in terms of original compoBroadland sitions,” he says. “And I am very curious if there’s a place for a record of substance.”

One of his concerns is that in the modern era an artist may need to make the choice between reaching people and really engaging

-

and thinks about music and how passionate he is about music, and that we find meeting points,” he says. “It’s like he owns, you know, a national park and he’s my private tour-guide ranger who can just be like, ‘Now, over here in this cave—shhh, don’t wake them—there’s a family of mammals that have never been ↓ actually cataloged or discovered.’ And I’m ON SWEENEY like, ‘Wow, Matt, thank you so much for coat $2,429 showing me this shit—this is blowing my Gucci fucking mind.’ ” jumpsuit Toward the end of the call, Sweeney (price upon request) refers to Oldham’s constant curiosity Études about people. Sweeney clearly means this his own boots as a compliment, but Oldham describes Lucchese it in a way that makes it sound like both his own hat blessing and curse.

Ditch Witch

← ON OLDHAM

robe $1,240 Wales Bonner pants $850 Lanvin shoes $1,245 Marsèll

particularly comfortable in conferring praise on his partner. “The huge joy and satisfaction and success of my work with Matt has to do with knowing how deep his reserves are and how deep his experiences are and how much he cares

I mean, I’ve always (continued on page 85)

PHOTOGRAPHS BY AHMAD BARBER AND DONTÉ MAURICE

STYLED

BY MOBOLAJI DAWODU

BUT BASEBALL’S MOST

HE HAS AN MVP AWARD AND A SHINY NEW

EXCITING STAR WOULD

WORLD SERIES

REALLY LIKE TO

TROPHY—AND

TELL YOU ABOUT

THE INK’S STILL

BY SAM SCHUBE

DRYING ON HIS $365 MILLION CONTRACT. 5 8

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

THE $300 HE JUST WON IN A BOWLING TOURNAMENT.

was an odd one for baseball: Thanks to the pandemic, teams played 60 games apiece instead of the regular 162.

And while the compressed schedule produced a number of mildly surreal anomalies—three teams failed to record a single sacrifice bunt—it also allowed for certain things easily missed by box scores and television cameras. Like this: The Los Angeles Dodgers right fielder Mookie Betts managed to spend the high-drama moments of last fall’s World Series in conversation with his girlfriend, Brianna Hammonds, who was seated in the right field stands.

COVID-19 may have thinned the crowd, but the stakes of the season hadn’t diminished a bit for the Dodgers, who despite trotting out one of the highest-paid rosters in baseball had come up short in the World Series in both 2017 and 2018. Now their new star Betts—acquired before the season started in a blockbuster deal with Boston, where he’d been an MVP and a champion and was playing like one throughout this series—was nonetheless blithely chatting through the season’s tensest moments, as though he might be treating the sport’s most pressurized event like a beer-league softball game.

When the team’s then first base coach, George Lombard, caught sight of this and suggested that maybe he focus a bit more on the game, Betts was reassuring: “I told him, ‘Don’t worry. I got it. That’s why I’m here.’ ” And without fail, the outfielder dutifully paused his discussion whenever the opportunity arose to chase down a ball or make a play. Betts, the ink still drying on a 12-year, $365 million contract extension that will make him among the highest-paid players in the sport, remained a dedicated employee. “Sure enough,” Lombard remembers, “right in the middle of these conversations, he’s making these highlight plays.” The Dodgers won the World Series—for the first time since 1988—and Betts, attuned to the moments that mattered most, homered in the first game and again in the clincher.

What were he and Brianna discussing, exactly? Oh, nothing important at all, says Betts. The day-to-day murmurings about dinner plans and childcare exchanged by couples everywhere. We’ve all gabbed with significant others when on the clock. And while Betts’s chatter may have seemed to some like a kind of dereliction of duty—a violation of some unwritten baseball code of the sort championed by the crusty ex-players who populate broadcast booths—he says distractions like that are basically the only way to stay sane. “It’s impossible to lock in for four hours, three and a half hours, however long our game is,” he says. “The more I can let my mind wander, the more I can bring it back and focus [on] each pitch, each play, each inning. If you tell me to lock in the whole time, then I’m going to be awful. I just can’t do it.” Like

6 0

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

his fellow millennials, the sport’s most exciting player has determined that baseball is best experienced while also sort of doing something else.

Betts has been playing this way—seemingly checked out but totally dialed in—his whole life. As a high school shortstop, he’d initiate game-long rap battles with his third baseman and left fielder. He kept up the habit even in the minor leagues. “In Double A, man, we would be freestyling!” he says. “But when the pitch was thrown, we would focus.” In the majors, rapping gave way to garden-variety watercooler talk. “We play video games, so we talk about video games. We talk about bowling. We talk about girls,” he says. “We talk about anything.” Including, occasionally, baseball: “We may say something about baseball, like ‘I got this guy. You got that guy.’ But that’s pretty much it.

For me, it’s just kind of overkill to watch the game and talk about it at the same time.”

Indeed, Betts has become the rare sort of player whose accomplishments speak for themselves. In addition to his MVP trophy, he’s won five Gold Glove fielding awards in his seven professional seasons. He has his new megacontract. And he’s got the unique platform that comes with being a Black star in a predominantly white sport.

All good things to have, no doubt. But they also mean that, as the first pitch of the 2021 season approaches, Betts is under no small amount of pressure. He must tend to the hopes of the Dodger faithful who expect a repeat, and to his own e≠orts to expand the game’s appeal among Black players and fans. And then there are the severe on-field expectations he sets for himself each year, increasingly di∞cult assignments that he seems to tick o≠ with ease.

It would be enough to make anyone taciturn. But as his chatty World Series heroics showed, Mookie Betts is busy charting a di≠erent kind of path. He’s something you don’t see much of in baseball anymore: a ferociously competitive athlete who refuses to let all his winning get in the way of having fun.

in January, Betts pads into an empty room in the Nashville house he and Brianna are renting for the winter. He has a few weeks’ worth of patchy beard and wears the o≠-season uniform of a young athlete in much-needed repose—turquoise graphic tee, novelty American-flag pajama pants. He and Bri got engaged earlier in the month in a lavish surprise ceremony. Lately he’s been leading the women in his life—his fiancée; his mother, Diana Collins; a few of their friends—in regular workouts. He’s trying to teach Draco, their new puppy, not to piss all over the place. This o≠-season—with the engagement, the dog—has felt di≠erent from the others.

He is 28, a young man making plans to be an older one.

Today he’s not doing all that much, which is sort of intentional: Betts’s competitive drive is such that, if not carefully tended, it’s liable to leak out in areas he’d rather it didn’t. Madden, for instance. Betts usually plays with a few friends as a way to relax. Every once in a while, though, he’ll find himself toggling over into practice mode, running plays against the computer to see how they’ll work against his friends. He’d rather not do things like this, but sometimes he can’t help himself—the impulse to get better tugs at him and brings out a side of his personality he prefers to reserve for opposing pitchers. So, he says, “I try not to turn it on.” Because “once I turn it on, I can’t turn it o≠ until I’m done.”

LATE ONE MORNING

←← OPENING PAGES

blazer $3,500 pants $1,350 Umit Benan B+ turtleneck $295 Sandro loafers (throughout) $1,495 John Lobb necklace (throughout), his own → OPPOSITE PAGE

shirt $975 Dolce & Gabbana tank top $115 Ami Paris sunglasses $895 Jacques Marie Mage

One place Betts does unleash his competitive streak is the bowling alley. He has bowled since he was a kid—his mom was obsessed, and he spent four or five days a week at the lanes with her while growing up. She took the bumpers away early on, and Betts’s fierce ambition did the rest.

“It was a challenge for me to learn,” he says. “And anytime I get some type of challenge, my brain flips and tries to solve the puzzle.”

He has remained active as a competitive bowler and is playing in a local tournament in a few days. In preparation, he’s trying to figure out which combination of six or seven bowling balls he plans to take—his selection being dependent, he tells me, on the specific oil patterns at the tournament site. An acquaintance owns a home with lanes nearby, and Betts has the run of the place. He has in his possession 30 to 40 bowling balls, by his count, so firing up the oil-pattern-laying machine and testing his balls for the tournament takes time—an hour and a half if he’s by himself, two and a half if he goes with friends, which he prefers. It happens to be fun, but fun is not the point.

“We’re just putting in work,” he says, “trying to figure out the best way to attack this pattern.”

It would be incorrect to describe Betts’s interest in, or talent for, bowling as a mere hobby. He competes in celebrity tournaments—Chris Paul throws a big one— and the odd Professional Bowlers Association event when his schedule allows. Dodgers president of baseball

← THIS PAGE

blazer $1,495 for suit Paul Smith t-shirt (price upon request) The Elder Statesman sunglasses $385 L.G.R. → OPPOSITE PAGE

jacket $5,290 shirt $495 pants $1,490 Alexander McQueen

operations Andrew Friedman remembers calling the superstar after the trade to welcome him to the team.

“I’m really sorry,” Betts answered, “but I’m in the middle of a bowling tournament. Can I call you back?” Betts says he would love to compete in more tournaments.

It’s just that the pro-bowling season overlaps with the probaseball one, and he’s got his commitments.

By now he’s posted enough perfect 300 games that he’s stopped keeping count. And anyway, he says, perfect games are “cool to people that don’t bowl.” True bowlers just want to win, and so for the past few winters Mookie Betts has entered a run of local bowling tournaments in Texas, where a bunch of pro bowlers tune up ahead of their season. This year Betts’s three-man traveling party divided his nine balls among their checked bags and carry-ons and flew to Dallas. He hit a few tournaments there, and then the group rented a minivan to drive to Houston for a few more. The competition was serious, but these were not glamorous tournaments: Betts spent much of his holiday under harsh fluorescent lighting, stationed between the pizza counter and the arcade. This just happened to be where the action was. When he started competing in tournaments, the aim was simply to not come in last. Now it’s to win money, which he managed to do on the Texas run. The $365 million man took home some cash—$300, he thinks—at one tournament. With sincerity, he calls it the best few hundred dollars he ever made.

“It’s not really about the money. Obviously it’s more just to say I did it,” Betts tells me. “It’s hard as hell to cash in a tournament like that. With professionals. I was proud of myself, for sure.”

When he was a kid, Betts suspected for a while that he might make a career out of bowling. His athletic gifts are such that he always thought he’d go pro in one sport or another. “I never really thought I was going to be a lawyer or anything,” he says. “That never even crossed my mind.

It was always some type of professional athlete.” He’d hustle from 3 p.m. bowling matches to 7 p.m. basketball games. He was less in love with baseball, which he pursued in the summertime in order to hang out with his friends who played. “I didn’t know how good I was at baseball,” he says. “Other people could hit really good, and other people could field really good, other people could run the bases, other people could do all the same things I did.” He struggled to see how he stood out. “I didn’t have a whole lot of power. I wasn’t that fast, but I was a pretty good defender. I was always one of the smallest kids.”

Still, he hit .509 his senior season of high school, and pro scouts took notice. The Red Sox used an early pick to select him in the 2011 draft, but he was expecting to attend the University of Tennessee instead. He told the Sox that he would need a signing bonus of $750,000 to go pro, and to Betts’s surprise, they met the number. He signed with them just 30 minutes before the deadline to choose between college and the bigs. The team saw something he hadn’t seen in himself: His scores on proprietary “neuroscouting” tests that measure reaction time and decision-making ability, Sports Illustrated reported, were o≠ the charts. (“I thought I sucked,” he says now.)

He signed the contract.

He was sent to play in Lowell, Massachusetts. His first full season, in 2012, looked fine from the outside—he got on base often enough and played strong defense—but he’d entered fearsome new territory. “I didn’t even hit a ball that hit the fence,” he recalls. “I had one ball all year

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

6 3

The delay proved providential. He spent a few days tinkering in the batting cage. The previous season, he’d used an exaggerated leg kick to generate power, to little e≠ect. He was bigger now but still using his old swing, and it wasn’t working: “I was trying to supply power with my leg kicking, instead of just stepping and letting the strength that I had built over that o≠-season work.” He junked the leg kick. In his first game with the new swing, he bagged three hits—including a home run. A switch was flipped. “I just started hitting,” he says, “and a year later I was in the big leagues. Life happened really fast.” pro baseball coincided with a moment of great upheaval about how the game should be played. When he showed up in 2011, the sport was moving into a post-Moneyball phase—valuing players with unloved abilities was no longer the hot idea. Suddenly there was a newer new idea afoot: Advanced forms of statistical analysis could be harnessed to turn good players into superstars.

Betts was the perfect test case. He began his career as a light-hitting speed-demon second baseman, the sort of player encouraged to put the ball on the ground and use his legs to eke out hits. But you can’t homer on even the best-struck grounder, so the Red Sox taught him to use his unique combination of hand-eye coordination and athleticism to put the ball in the air—in the process molding him, at a slight five feet nine and 170 pounds, into an unlikely power hitter. Betts hit five home runs his rookie year and upped it to 18 the next. Then 31. “It’s not like I hit it far,” Betts notes. But he’d begun to hit it far enough.

Some parts of the sport, though, were slower to change. Betts, a midseason call-up, was the new guy on the 2014 Red Sox, a veteran club that had won the World Series the previous year. With that crew, rookies shared a number of hazing-adjacent tasks: They had to pick up bottled water and beer for bus rides and schlep the team’s luggage. They couldn’t use the elevator at the hotel until all the vets had gotten up to their rooms.

It ate at him. One episode, where he was razzed over the team bus’s intercom for forgetting the beer, crystallized two things: First, that when he was in charge of the clubhouse, he’d set di≠erent rules. And second, that in order to win the influence to someday rewrite the rules, he needed to excel under them for the time being. “My motivation was I’m going to be so good that I’m not going to get you any more fucking beer,” he says. “I’m going to be the best player on this team, so when I have to get the beer, I don’t. That was when my tunnel vision kicked in and I was ready to go.” By 2016, his second full season in the bigs, he was the runner-up for the AL MVP award.

In 2018, it was his.

Quietly, and then all of a sudden, Mookie Betts had become a star—and one with the good sense to appreciate how unique that made him. Early on Betts determined that he would turn down whatever contract extension he was o≠ered in order to make it to free agency, where he’d be able to earn something closer to his true market value. He just as soon would have re-signed in Boston, he says—but only if they made the right o≠er.

Just like learning to lay o≠ outer-half curveballs, turning down big dollars took practice. “The very first contract extension I ever saw was super hard to turn down,” he says. “It was like $90 million or something.

They slid over the sheet of (continued on page 86) B E T T S’S A R R I V A L I N

that one-hopped the fence. I had zero power. The competition was completely di≠erent.” He started working with a trainer during the o≠-season, feverish in pursuit of a target that now seems quaint: “Obviously the goal was to hit a homer.”

He managed one in spring training the next year, but then the wheels came o≠. He struggled for his first six weeks in Greenville, South Carolina. “I was just trash,” he says. The line between success and failure in baseball can be maddeningly thin, but he knew which side he was on.

“That was the first time in my life, really, that I failed miserably.” It hurt. Doubt crept in. A career in baseball could mean years struggling to climb the minor-league ladder.

Monthslong stretches between home runs. He started to consider alternatives. “I know I can be successful in basketball,” he recalls thinking. “I know I can be successful bowling. Why am I going to sit here and waste my time doing this?” And so, five years before winning the 2018 American League MVP award, Mookie Betts signed up to take the ACT college admissions test. “I pretty much almost quit baseball,” he says.

The baseball gods had other plans. He had scheduled the test for early one Saturday morning, after a Fridaynight game—not technically his last, but spiritually the end of the line. When that game went into extra innings, he decided to reschedule the ACT—the team was playing the next night, too, and he didn’t want to tire himself out with hours of multiple-choice questions.

6 4

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

← THIS PAGE

sweater $178 Boss → OPPOSITE PAGE

blazer $3,395 for suit Frère shirt $1,190 Berluti sittings editor: josh owen for amax talent. hair by david hiland for forty ten barber studio. skin by sherita leslie for amax talent. tailoring by brooke hagaman for amax talent. set design by elise lacret. produced by agency mj.

ASCENT

ALMOST OVERNIGHT HE WENT FROM WORKING FOR KANYE

THE

AND GAGA

VERY TACTICAL

TO RUNNING HIS OWN BRAND,

OF

ALYX. NOW THE SELF-TAUGHT DESIGNER—WITH HIS CELEBRITY CONNECTIONS AND IMPECCABLY MILITARISTIC BAGS—HAS

BY

GIVENCHY DESIGNER

SCRAMBLED TO THE HEIGHTS OF THE FASHION INDUSTRY. QUESTION CARRIE

IS: IF

BATTAN

GETTING THE JOB IS THE

PHOTOGRAPHS

DREAM, WHAT

BY

DO YOU DO

ARNAUD PYVKA

ONCE YOU’VE MATTHEW WILLIAMS

GOT IT?

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

6 7

MATTHEW WILLIAMS IS

STANDING in front of a mirrored wall in Givenchy’s Paris headquarters on Avenue George V, staring intently at his outfit. His eyes are locked on a bag: a black leather crossbody number, its strap adorned with metal rings.

Williams turns, then glances over his shoulder back at the mirror. He is, like everyone else in the room, tall, slender, and dressed in black with a protective face mask. The only thing that helps distinguish him on my end of the Zoom window that I’m watching through is his signature tattoo, a giant black cross on the nape of his neck and skull, creeping over the top of his shirt. He gives the bag one last examination.

“Pretty cool,” he says, then takes it o≠.

Unlike his more outspoken counterparts in fashion, Williams is calm, nonchalant, and collaborative. He asks those around him what they think so often that, in a meeting like this, it’s easy to forget that he’s in charge—that he’s the person now responsible for one of the biggest platforms in fashion and that the most important moment of his career is imminent.

After his appointment as creative director of Givenchy last June, Williams gathered up the various tentacles of his life in Italy and New York, moved to Paris, and, given the constraints of the pandemic, did the only thing he was really permitted to do: work.

The 35-year-old American launched a first collection just over a hundred days after his arrival at the house, quietly unveiling the clothes with an orchestrated push from dozens of famous friends who shared images of the pieces on social media. But he made clear at the time that his upcoming collection—the one he’s preparing now and plans to unveil to the world digitally, at an arena outside Paris on March 7—would constitute a louder and more o∞cial debut into the big leagues. It will be, as he describes it, a spectacle. As a former creative director for Lady Gaga and collaborator of Kanye West’s, Williams has a natural facility with spectacle-making. “I feel really comfortable doing live experience,” he tells me, collected and unfazed.

But first he must produce the clothes.

At the Givenchy o∞ce, his crew of design employees continue to supply bags for his inspection. They are of varying sizes, styles, and functions, ranging from understated to

6 8

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

ostentatious—rucksacks, chest rigs, fanny packs, saddlebags. Like so many of Williams’s signature designs, the bags are not merely functional—they scream functionality, with their elaborate networks of straps, hardware, and compartments. These bags would be appropriate for an elite military squadron or a troop of well-heeled goth Boy Scouts.

Williams takes hold of one and, while studying it, sits down. “That’s crazy, how much workmanship is in here,” he marvels to one of the atelier’s designers. In a manner that might surprise the maison’s founder, Hubert de Givenchy—who was known for making his handiwork virtually invisible— Williams prefers his clothes to broadcast the craft that went into constructing them. He tries on a few more, discussing their merits and weaknesses with the five employees in the room, and he gives a vote of approval.

“I like how all these bags are looking today with my outfit,” he tells the group. “I would wear them.”

Like Michelin-starred chefs who arrive home at 2 a.m. and eat bowls of cereal, there’s a brand of fashion designer generally known for their aggressively neutral personal styles.

Immersed in the process of creating fantasies for other people, these types tend to have practical and understated closets themselves.

Dries Van Noten almost always wears a dress shirt under a crewneck sweater; Kim Jones seems adventurous when he throws a black trench coat over a similar ensemble. And even if designers do take pride in their personal wardrobes, many deliberately shy away from wearing their own pieces. Raf Simons recently told The New York Times that he wore mostly Prada for 15 years while designing for Calvin Klein and Dior because “I always felt it weird to walk around in my own clothes.” But for Williams, designing is a process that can look a lot like shopping—even now, as he’s ensconced atop one of Europe’s most historic fashion houses. If you were to drop in on this meeting without any context, it might actually appear as though Williams is here for a fitting. The model he often seems to be envisioning is himself.

“I’m always saying, ‘I’m designing for me and what I want,’ ” he tells me. Whatever he’s making, he wants to do more than simply see it. “I always try on the clothes myself, and I feel them,” Williams says. “I wear them, I live in them, to understand them.”

This must certainly be part of the reason that Williams—a self-taught designer whose application to Parsons School of Design was rejected—has climbed the ranks of fashion in such an unlikely and rapid manner. Roughly a decade ago, Williams leveraged his time in the Los Angeles party scene into doing design work for Lady Gaga and Kanye West.

A soft-spoken but naturally social guy, he was recognized early on for his work with Virgil Abloh and Heron Preston as the streetwear collective Been Trill—a casual experiment formed loosely around DJ’ing and designing T-shirts that eventually became a critical touchstone in streetwear’s trajectory.

By 2015, Williams had opened up a studio on St. Marks Place in New York City and launched his own label, Alyx, named after one of his daughters. Williams quickly earned a list of impressive accolades and space on the racks at many high-end retailers. He built a production studio in Italy and snagged the approval of a gaggle of influential admirers. Kim Jones called upon him to contribute hardware—most famously, his Six Flags buckle—for Dior Men. Nike and Moncler tapped him for collaborations as well.

Then, last June, his outsider-turned-insider transformation was made complete when Givenchy announced that Williams would replace Clare Waight Keller as the house’s creative director, a job that has previously been held by heavyweights like John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, and Riccardo Tisci.

There are, of course, many factors that contribute to an ascent like this. Williams is industrious, scrappy, and passionate; he’s obsessively focused on innovating with fabric and construction. “The reason Alyx became successful and the reason [his work at] Givenchy will hopefully become successful is because he cares,” says Nick Knight, a visual artist and photographer who began working with Williams during the Gaga era and recently shot a campaign for Givenchy.

“He cares about the materials he’s using and where they’re sourced from. He’s interested in all the sciences. He’s a Renaissance man in the way that he’s very excited by science as much as art and fashion.” This seems evident in the design meetings I witness, where the language used to describe fabrication—3D-printed prototypes, foam molds, silkworm-spun jewelry—gets technical and science-lab-y. Of course, it helps that he’s

THE MODEL MATTHEW WILLIAMS OFTEN SEEMS TO BE ENVISIONING IS HIMSELF: “I’M ALWAYS SAYING, ‘I’M DESIGNING FOR ME AND WHAT I WANT.’ I ALWAYS TRY ON THE CLOTHES MYSELF, AND I FEEL THEM. I WEAR THEM, I LIVE IN THEM, TO UNDERSTAND THEM.”

←← OPENING PAGES AND RIGHT

F O U X A N D W I L L I A M S : C O U RT E SY O F G I V E N C H Y.

All clothes, jewelry, and accessories Givenchy

well-connected in the zeitgeistiest of social universes and counts Kanye West, Playboi Carti, and Bella Hadid among his closest friends. (“I love him,” Carti told me by email.

“He’s the greatest, end of discussion!”)

Williams is also a perfect avatar for a demographic that carries more significance with each passing year. The most passionate fashion consumer of today, in fact, looks a lot like Williams. He represents a menswear audience with highly specific tastes and a pop-culture literacy, with an emphasis on hip-hop. Men (many of them straight) who proudly keep up with the latest runway collections and who are willing to dabble in flamboyance, men who are not jocks but who are probably quite interested in the idea of sport. Men with the desire to spend $800 on a hooded sweatshirt or $1,500 on a pair of outlandish sneakers. These men used to account for 30 percent of Givenchy’s sales, but now they make up at least half. Williams has demonstrated that if he likes an object he has designed—if he would wear it—that means many other discerning men with disposable income are probably going to like it too.

At least, this is the bet that Givenchy’s parent company, LVMH, has made on the young American. But it’s also a return to form for the house. After all, it was Riccardo Tisci’s 12-year tenure (2005 to 2017) that imbued Givenchy with a reputation for viral iconography and demonstrated that there was luxury-label money to be made with the most basic of garments. (Long live the Rottweiler T-shirt.)

Like Williams, Tisci was one of Kanye West’s strongest creative allies, and the rapport supercharged Givenchy’s connection to the hip-hop world. Tisci’s success helped forge a path for LVMH’s current stars—designers like Kim Jones, now running Dior Men and designing womenswear at Fendi, who

was responsible for bringing Supreme to the Louis Vuitton runway. There’s also, of course, Jones’s replacement at Vuitton, Virgil Abloh—a friend of Williams’s and another key figure in the greater Kanye ecosystem who charted a course from music to streetwear to European fashion. If Abloh’s appointment in 2018 marked a sea change in fashion, a sign that legacy houses were ready to shake things up, Williams’s hiring showed that they’re doubling down, continuing to draw on a young, hyper-relevant talent pool that understands a newly viral, highly online, image-forward fashion universe.

Williams’s post at Givenchy is not just another design job. The role itself is a kind of megaphone that will enable him to share his boldest ideas with a massive audience. But in another sense, the position could ultimately become an audition for even grander things: It’s a chance to determine whether Williams can become one of The Greats. Given how quickly these houses can switch up leadership—Keller lasted three years in the job— anything can happen.

A critical component in Williams’s quick rise has been his talent for understanding accessories—namely hardware and bags for men. When Jones wanted to revitalize John Galliano’s trademark Saddle bag and transform it into a menswear item at Dior, he called upon Williams to collaborate on it, making it, as Jones said, “even more masculine.” The items that Williams is examining with his design team today—the bags—are essentially his bread and butter.

Everyone here, it seems, is still getting a feel for Williams’s creative vision, and they’re all eager to please, eager to hear what he thinks.

At one point a Givenchy employee models a piece. The man tugs hard on the straps. “These things are working, I think,” he tells Williams,

who studies what he sees. Williams claims that he’s not a savvy businessman—he will happily leave the global matrix of consumer demographics and merchandising strategies to his colleagues. (“Sometimes it’s not about selling things. It’s about it existing for the mood,” he explains.) Still, his focus is naturally trained on the characteristics that make an item sellable.

At the design meeting, he is quick to invoke the context of the store, how a certain piece will be presented to the consumer (should a piece be sold separately or as a set?), or how something is going to come across in an image. Fashion is increasingly a market where pieces go viral just like hit singles or memes; they live and die by their shareability.

Williams gestures toward his colleague, who is sagging under the weight of that rucksack, and it becomes clear that the designer’s mind has moved beyond straps and buckles, beyond notions of craftsmanship and fit.

He’s working ahead of all that, thinking now about how he can lodge the product into the consumer’s brain. Calling it the “Givenchy backpack,” he seems to realize, simply won’t do. “Can we give that thing a name?” he asks. of Williams and Kanye West from Alyx’s debut runway show that still floats around the internet. It’s a generic image taken during Fashion Week a few years ago and not particularly remarkable unless you look closely at Williams’s hands, which are gripping, inconspicuously, a pair of forearm crutches. The crutches are pretty chic, as far as medical equipment goes: Jet-black and minimalistic, with an air of absurdity, THERE’S

A

PHOTOGRAPH

Williams with the musician and model Lancey Foux last fall during the launch of the designer’s first Givenchy collection.

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

6 9

All clothes, jewelry, and accessories Givenchy

they almost enhance Williams’s outfit. In fact, when he sported these crutches on the runway following his first Alyx show, some spectators thought that they were a design object—yet another document of his obsession with the space where high function intersects with fantasy. They were of a piece with the techedout, accessory-minded sphere of his aesthetic vision. One can imagine them styled in a glass display case at Barneys (R.I.P.) next to elaborate water bottles and leather fanny packs, with a retail price of $1,295.

But in fact, Williams had an urgent, reallife need for the crutches. In 2018, as he was working in Milan and growing Alyx, he played in a charity soccer match. During the game, he remembers, “my mind thought I was still 18 years old. I was running really fast, and I changed direction in a quick way.” His femur slammed into his tibial plateau, and his leg shattered in five places. He had two metal plates and a handful of screws put into his leg and was rendered immobile for three months.

“I had to learn to walk again,” Williams says.

“It was a really di∞cult experience.” When I suggest that perhaps this ordeal may have inspired some of the hyper-functional Alyx ethos that generated items such as a chest pack, Williams demurs. “No,” he says, “but the chest rig was a helpful accessory during the time of my crutches, though. Definitely.”

7 0

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

If a soccer injury defined the time leading up to Williams’s first major runway show, the sport was also his entrée to fashion to begin with. As a teenager growing up in Pismo Beach, California, Williams was an accomplished soccer player. When he was 16, he spent the summer in Europe, training with professional teams in Vienna and Oslo and touring various major cities. It was his first visit to the Continent, and the trip exposed him to the kinds of cultural wonders that existed outside California. He heard techno music for the first time and, more importantly, witnessed his peers dancing to it. He saw them wearing what he describes as “crazy jeans,” rather than the typical skate gear he was accustomed to back home. “It was really eye-opening,” he says.

Because of his a∞liations with Kanye, Been Trill, and Virgil Abloh, and his tendency to release items in hotly anticipated drops, Williams is often thought of as a child of streetwear. His business partner at Alyx, Luca Benini, is frequently credited with bringing streetwear to Europe in the ’90s, but he says Williams was always interested in more. “I felt that fashion, luxury, and streetwear—even if looking distant from each other—had many interesting points of contact to build something great on,” Benini explains. “Matthew to me embodied and

embodies the link among these souls, coexisting with no conflict as part of his background and life.”

Truthfully, Williams’s more recent solo work has little connection to the streetwear universe as it’s commonly understood; he is not known for his T-shirts or hoodies and rarely uses graphics. In fact, the work he’s done with Alyx and Givenchy is a kind of repudiation of California skate casual and an embrace of gothic European urbanism—an ethos seeded during that first summer he spent overseas as a teenager. “He’s not the same figure as a Virgil or a Ye,” says Don C, a designer and longtime member of West’s and Abloh’s inner circles. “He’s not a streetwear guy. He’s more of an artist. He’s connected to that, and he can apply that, but he’s an artist.”

As a teenager newly enamored with Europe, Williams thought that soccer was his future. He played Division I at UC Santa Barbara. “That’s what I thought I was going to do with my life,” he says, laughing. “I’d play and then just be a coach or something when I got older.”

Around this time, Williams started interning for a former soccer coach who also ran a clothing brand. He was allowed to take part in the nitty-gritty of actually making the clothes and, crucially, talking out creative ideas with like-minded people. “I think,

more than anything, the dialogue with other creatives is the thing that I’ve been maybe most addicted to,” he says. “There’s a creative discourse about things that are sometimes kind of abstract or emotional.”

For Williams, fashion became another team sport. It’s an approach he’s carried along to Givenchy, a company with around 1,000 employees. It’s the first time Williams has had access to the services of an atelier and its legions of specialized production experts, which has been a long-held fantasy. On day one, Williams asked to be taken to each floor of the company and personally introduced to everybody there.

fashion’s stage has shrunk dramatically. Opportunities to generate a splash have grown scarce. This makes the handful of grand-scale events that are still taking place even more momentous for a designer. Williams has dominated these events: At the Super Bowl, The Weeknd sported a crystal-embroidered red Givenchy suit jacket that he later claimed weighed “44 pounds,” custom-designed by Williams.

Three weeks prior, Williams also made his mark during the presidential-inauguration festivities in Washington.

On the same day that Williams and his team were reviewing bags, Lady Gaga arrived at the Capitol to rehearse for her role in the ceremony, singing the national anthem. At the run-through, she wore a custom outfit

by Williams: a pristine white cashmere sheath coat with arm openings, a specifically requested twist on a look he’d shown in his prefall collection. With his womenswear designs, Williams has been able to play more with softness and romanticism, and underneath Gaga’s cape was a white knit turtleneck, also custom.

Around her neck rested a chunky padlock necklace, a creation of Williams’s that has already become his Givenchy signature. (He developed the padlock in his earliest days at the maison, inspired by the tradition of attaching a lock to the fence on the Pont des Arts and throwing its key into the Seine.) Gaga’s platinum-blond hair was braided into a halo crown. On Instagram, where she has 46 million followers, Gaga captioned a photo of herself posed under the Capitol rotunda’s fresco painting with a message of hope and high drama: “I pray tomorrow will be a day of peace for all Americans…. A day for dreaming of our future joy as a country.”

For Williams, the occasion wasn’t just a chance to show o≠ his new work; it was a moment that neatly tied o≠ a decade of his professional and personal life. Ten years or so ago, Gaga and Williams used to date, around the period he was working with her creatively. They haven’t had much contact since.

But enough time has gone by, and Williams has achieved enough in the past few years, that when he collaborates with Gaga as the DURING THE PANDEMIC,

head of a legacy fashion house, that’s the headline. Not that the pop star is working with her ex-boyfriend.

Later that week, Williams and I connect again over Zoom, and I ask him if this feels like a full-circle moment. He seems a bit bashful, and he deflects. “Yeah,” he says. “There’s been a lot of those recently. There’s a lot of synchronicity.” I ask him to elaborate.

“Where my o∞ce is, I can look into the first apartment that I ever stayed in when I came to Paris 15 years ago. Right here,” he says, walking over to the window. “It’s funny in life, the choices you make and the experiences you have. A negative thing becomes a positive thing in the future, or vice versa. When I met Gaga, I would never have guessed that I’d make something for the 2021 inauguration.”

More than with any other house, the power of celebrity is baked into Givenchy’s DNA, dating back to Hubert de Givenchy’s storybook friendship with Audrey Hepburn. It’s

scooped so perilously low in the back that it exposed a jeweled G-string. This first collection was filled with winking fashion references (devil horns harking back to McQueen, mesh overlays that nodded to peak Margiela) as well as Williams’s penchant for fabric innovation. But the sheer magnitude of the celebrities in the campaign seemed to overwhelm the actual clothes: Look at these famous people wearing Matthew Williams’s new line, the headlines screamed.

I ask Williams what it means to have someone like Kim Kardashian display one of his Givenchy designs so prominently to 200 million followers. “I’m a little bit nervous of that being the focus of it,” he admits. “It was a huge group, a family, a community that I’ve built relationships with.”

The story line can frustrate him. “If you know me, it’s funny,” he says. “Everybody is always like, ‘You know so many celebrities.

You’re connected to so many celebrities.’ But

“I’M KNOWN AS THIS CELEBRITY-CONNECTED DESIGNER, BUT I DON’T REALLY HANG OUT WITH CELEBRITIES THAT MUCH,” WILLIAMS SAYS. “AND THEN I’M CATEGORIZED AS A STREETWEAR DESIGNER, BUT I DON’T DO GRAPHICS IN MY COLLECTIONS AT ALL. WHERE DID THIS STUFF COME FROM?” been argued that their partnership laid the groundwork for the now intractable relationship fashion has with Hollywood. It’s another reason why Williams is a fitting choice for the house. “Not only does he put forward a modern, sleek, characterful vision of beauty for both genders,” Givenchy president and CEO Renaud de Lesquen says of Williams, “he also, just like our founder did, comes with a community that supports him and embodies his work in the most authentic way.”

And yet Williams seems conflicted about being known as the guy who hangs out with celebrities. When he debuted his first looks for Givenchy in October, he handselected a group of 54 influential people, sent them pieces, and invited them to interpret and photograph the items as they pleased.

Because Givenchy does not, as a rule, pay for this kind of marketing, the subsequent Instagram blitz was a labor of love. It was also a testament to the star power that can result when an iconic brand joins forces with a designer who happens to be well liked in the greater Calabasas region.

That week on Instagram, images of Williams’s new designs were hard to avoid: Julianne Moore, Maria Sharapova, Kylie Jenner, and many others shared photos. But it was Kim Kardashian who posed in the wow piece of the women’s line: a black gown

like, I hang out with my kids, or I work. When do I ever talk about celebrities? Never.

“I guess maybe I’m friends with so many celebrities because I treat them normal,” he says.

Williams developed such nonchalance about fame in his teens and early 20s, when he was couch surfing in Los Angeles, picking up random creative gigs. This was before the specter of cell phone cameras had put a damper on nightlife. Williams was partying every night, which meant he witnessed a lot.

“People were getting so loose. It would be like celebrities with musicians and artists and cool kids,” he remembers. “I would go out every single night, and I was friends with a few promoters.” The nightclub floor was a great equalizer.

“That was my first time when I was actually meeting celebrities and hanging out and dancing with them,” he says. “It felt more normal.”

Williams recalls crashing with one of Janet Jackson’s choreographers and the experience of just bumming around town and linking up with whoever happened to be there.

“I would just…be around,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t know what that is saying about me or my life path.” Nick Knight sees it a bit di≠erently: Williams wasn’t just “hanging around.” He was sponging up ideas and then cycling them back to the celebrities he worked with. (continued on page 87)

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

7 1

AUGUST 23, 2020 EARLY EVENING Crowds amass after police shoot Jacob Blake in the back.

7 2

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

AUGUST 25, 2020 MIDDAY Rittenhouse scrubs graffiti after a night of demonstrations.

By Doug Bock Clark

AUGUST 25, 2020 APPROX. 11 P.M. Rittenhouse and armed militiamen patrol the streets.

Last summer, in a small Wisconsin city, the country’s fiercest differences collided in the streets—and a teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire, shooting three people.

In the aftermath, a disquieting question loomed: Were these among the first shots in a new kind of civil war?

AUGUST 25, 2020 JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT. Bystanders reach Gaige Grosskreutz just after he was shot.

AUGUST 26, 2020 APPROX. 1:30 A.M. Rittenhouse is booked by police in Antioch, Illinois.

out, “I just killed somebody. I had to shoot him.” Then he hung up. Men in masks kept running, his heavy cowboy boots clomping against the pavement, uncertain if he’d have to fire his gun again.

He was 17, and for much of his life he’d toyed around with guns and dreamed of being a cop—of keeping order. That was what he’d been seeking to do last August when he carried an assault rifle into downtown Kenosha, Wisconsin, swaths of which had been razed during previous nights of rioting. That was what he’d been doing moments earlier, as midnight neared, when he’d confronted a group of vandals and arsonists wrecking a car dealership. He had been trying to get them to stop. One, with a red T-shirt wrapped around his head so that his eyes showed through a slit, had charged the teenager, and Rittenhouse had fled.

“Fuck you!” the man had yelled. Rittenhouse turned to face his pursuer. The man lunged, and Rittenhouse fired at point-blank range.

Then he stood over the twitching body, his first aid bag dangling unused at his side. Even before bystanders began futilely trying to plug the dying man’s wounds with a T-shirt, Rittenhouse took o≠ up Kenosha’s main drag.

Three blocks to the north, he could see a line of four armored police personnel carriers: safety, it seemed to him. Rittenhouse hu≠ed along for a block and a half until he encountered a group of racial-justice protesters streaming south, drawn by his gunshots.

At first, the throng didn’t pay much attention to the kid weaving through them: With his baby face and his backward American-flag baseball cap, he looked even younger than he was. But soon shouts relayed news of the shooting through the crowd. The Smith & Wesson AR-15-style assault rifle slung over Rittenhouse’s shoulder was still hot.

“Get that dude!”

“What’d he do?”

“He shot someone!”

“Get his ass!”

By the time Rittenhouse was within a block of reaching the police, roughly a dozen men were chasing him. One threw a right haymaker, knocking o≠ the teenager’s baseball cap, before peeling away, perhaps intimidated by the rifle. Rittenhouse was a few steps ahead of the pack when he tripped. He slammed down on the asphalt and rolled onto his back, whipping his weapon toward his pursuers.

A tall Black man tried unsuccessfully to drop-kick him, then dashed onward. Rittenhouse seems to have fired twice as the man hurdled over him—and somehow missed, despite their proximity.

Then a white man in a dark sweatshirt, hood up, smashed Rittenhouse with a skateboard gripped in one hand as he tried to grab the rifle with the other. That time, Rittenhouse couldn’t

7 4

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

miss—the muzzle of his gun was practically jabbed into the man’s belly. After the blast, the skateboarder staggered a few steps, clutching his chest, trying to keep his life from pouring out.

Now a tall white man loomed over Rittenhouse. His baseball cap read “PARAMEDIC.” In his right hand, he held a pistol. But Rittenhouse, with the bigger weapon, had the drop on him. The man backed up, hands in the air, the pistol’s muzzle pointing skyward. Abruptly the man stepped forward. Rittenhouse squeezed the trigger. The biceps of the arm holding the pistol exploded into gore.

The handgun clattered to the street.

A fourth man was backing away, hands raised. Others were ducking behind trees and cars. The hooded skateboarder lay facedown in the street. The man whose arm had been blown open was kneeling nearby, shrieking for help.

As Rittenhouse stood, the lights of the police vehicles illuminated his face—red, white, and blue—and he hustled toward them. He had some minor cuts and scrapes, but he was essentially unhurt. He approached the hulking personnel carriers with his surgical-gloved hands held high and his rifle dangling from a military-style body sling. He wasn’t sure how many people he might have just killed.

Certainly, one. Probably, more.

Though portions of the shootings had been captured on at least eight video recordings, Americans who dissected the footage in the coming days wouldn’t agree on what they saw—and the question of what had truly happened that night would become a point of bitter debate in a divided country. Many conservatives would lionize Rittenhouse as a hero, defending property and then himself against a mob. Many on the left would villify him as a murderous white supremacist. The truth, however, was even more tragic than either side allowed.

This story draws on dozens of hours of video footage, including a comprehensive timeline of crucial events created by syncing 11 livestreams; countless photos; dozens of interviews, including some with participants speaking for the first time; previous reportage; and extensive police and court records. It is the most complete investigation and reconstruction yet of how American order imploded for three nights in Kenosha, until citizens were warring in the streets, and what that breakdown might tell us about the United States’ intensifying divisions.

Two days before Kyle Rittenhouse fired his weapon of war, Kenosha police responded to a call from a woman

OPENING PAGES, COURTHOUSE PROTEST AND RIT TENHOUSE WITH GRAFFITI VOLUNTEERS: SCOT T OLSON/GET T Y IMAGES. RIT TENHOUSE ARMED: ADAM ROGAN/ THE JOURNAL TIMES/GET T Y IMAGES. THESE PAGES, GROSSKREUTZ: BEN HENDREN/SHUT TERSTOCK. RIT TENHOUSE AT A N T I O C H P O L I C E D E PA RT M E N T: A P/ S H U T T E R STO C K . R I T T E N H O U S E AT A R R A I G N M E N T: N A M Y. H U H /A P P H OTO.

Kyle Rittenhouse was sprinting away from the scene of an apparent crime

reporting that the father of her children, Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was causing a disturbance at her home. When a white o∞cer named Rusten Sheskey arrived, he saw Blake put a child into an SUV; the o∞cer’s lawyer later said that Sheskey believed that the boy was being abducted. A warrant for third-degree felony sexual assault was out for Blake, stemming from allegations made by the same woman earlier that summer, and so Sheskey tried to arrest him. Within minutes, Blake, Sheskey, and two other o∞cers were wrestling on the lawn as a crowd gathered. Videos captured Blake struggling free and limping around the front of the SUV. Sheskey followed a step behind, his service pistol aimed between Blake’s shoulder blades. As Blake opened the driver’s-side door, Sheskey grabbed a fistful of his white tank top. The fabric stretched as Blake leaned inside the vehicle, still facing away. Sheskey fired seven times. The vehicle’s horn blared unrelentingly as Blake’s body draped across the steering wheel. In the back seat, Blake’s three young children screamed.

According to the police, Sheskey fired his gun after seeing Blake twist toward him, short-bladed knife in hand. (Blake would later tell investigators that he was putting the knife away when Sheskey shot him.) The aggressive action that Sheskey alleges isn’t discernible on the videos, however, in which Blake is partly obscured by the car door. Indeed, what many people saw was a retreating Black man gunned in the back by a white police o∞cer. “You did not have to shoot him, bro. He was getting in his fucking car,” a bystander who’d been filming the altercation shouted at Sheskey. “I’m posting this shit on Facebook.”

A few minutes later, that video popped onto the Facebook feed of Nick Dennis, a 37-year-old Black Kenoshan who lived nearby. He

OCTOBER 30, 2020 MIDDAY Rittenhouse appears in court before eventually pleading not guilty.

immediately drove to where Blake had been shot. Soon the normally quiet stretch of low-rent apartment buildings became crowded with locals chanting for justice. By evening, several hundred people, Black, white, and brown, surrounded police o∞cers cordoning o≠ the crime scene, and some began challenging the o∞cers to take o≠ their badges, put down their guns, and fight.

For most of Dennis’s life, he’d tried to avoid confronting the police.

He’d started out on the wrong track, racking up multiple charges for dealing marijuana in his 20s. But after finishing an 18-month stay in prison in 2013, he trained as a machinist, got a good job, and focused on his sons. He received only tra∞c violations from then on, and even if he felt like the stops were petty harassment, he endured them, believing that a tall and muscular Black man like himself was always one misinterpreted gesture away from having his life derailed.

He felt powerless to challenge the system. But earlier that summer, the death of George Floyd beneath the knee of a white police o∞cer, and the subsequent nationwide racial-justice protests, catalyzed a profound transformation in him. “I felt myself crying,” Dennis said of watching video of Floyd’s murder. “I hadn’t cried in years. I could only think if it was my sons.” That’s when Dennis began joining Black Lives Matter marches.

Now he’d come to the site of Blake’s shooting, hoping to join a peaceful demonstration. But as the evening dimmed into night, he watched as people pushed past flimsy police tape and men began

jumping on the hood and windshield of a police cruiser. When the cops retreated after one was knocked out by a thrown brick, Dennis marched with the crowd through residential neighborhoods toward police headquarters, chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” As the protesters neared the police station, they found the roads crammed with cars bearing still more protesters, some waving Black Lives Matter signs. Authorities had parked unmanned municipal garbage trucks sideways in the streets, creating a hasty barricade, but the masses overran them and made their way to the three-story station.

Wearing a black face mask decorated with a fist raising its middle finger, Dennis recorded himself on his phone amid throngs of protesters, declaring, “We’re gonna turn this bitch up!”

In front of the police building, several dozen cops in riot gear, most of them white, formed a wall with shields and batons. At first the crowd only insulted them; then someone got to throwing small firecrackers. Soon people began to lob bigger incendiaries, which made explosions that sounded to Dennis like artillery fire, and the police retreated inside. He was furious, too, but wouldn’t participate in violence.

With the police bottled up, there was no one to check the crowd.

It rampaged into the neighboring Civic Center, a square of neoclassical governmental edifices arranged around a tree-filled park, built before Kenosha’s once prosperous factories had been decimated by o≠shoring. People busted windows at the courthouse. They tried to set the Register of Deeds building on fire. They tore down a statue of a dinosaur outside a natural history museum. It seems a young white man set the garbage truck barricades on fire with rolled towels soaked in gasoline.

Dennis livestreamed much of what was happening from his cell phone. In immersing himself in the next three nights of chaos, he would regard himself as a witness and an activist. When he could, he tried to prevent illegal acts and keep others safe; he warned people away from the burning garbage trucks, afraid they might explode.

But he realized that something more powerful than himself had been unleashed.

Videos showed hundreds of people of diverse ethnicities and ages packing the park. Though probably dozens of them engaged in

The unrest that began with a Kenosha police officer shooting a Black man in the back ended with the department letting an armed white youth who had just killed two people and grievously wounded another walk free. vandalism and arson, most, like Dennis, were simply bearing witness; some were even cheering, seemingly celebrating. It wasn’t just fury at the shooting of a single man that fueled the destruction: It was rage at a country in which African Americans die, on average, four years earlier than white people—having been a≠orded only a fraction of the wealth and opportunity. It was fury at globalization reducing the city’s factories to weedy lots, and at a generation-long widening of the chasm between the nation’s rich and poor. It was the grief and uncertainty produced by a once-in-a-century pandemic. It was the partisan anger stoked by a historically divisive presidency and a scorched-earth election. It was the passing of collective judgment on America’s broken promises. There was solidarity as the people tore their community apart. (continued on page 87)

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

7 5

K

1990

RT OBA N

Ten minutes before going on for a show at Hampshire College, Kurt asked Nirvana’s publicist if he could borrow her dress.

“There’s nothing more comfortable,” the grunge king turned fluid-fashion icon would later say, “than a cozy flower pattern.”

Dress, $5,500,

by Gucci.

T-shirt, $20,

by Gap. Sneakers, $55,

by Converse.

Socks, $29 for three pairs,

by Nice Laundry.

PRING S 2021 No designer has channeled the promise of Kurt’s radically attitudinal, madcap style quite like Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, who grew up idolizing Nirvana.

Now he’s at the forefront of fashion’s gender-fluid movement, creating dresses fit for rock stars.

(Harry Styles even wore one on the cover of Vogue.)

B ITE

T H IS

S TY LE

SPRING 2021

RAF SI M ON S

This season Raf Simons celebrated a quarter century in fashion, a tenure animated by the intoxicating touchstones of youth style.

The fitted leather vest he created has a style legacy that stretches from outlaw biker gangs to the ’80s post-punk scenes of Simons’s teenage years.

Vest (price upon request) by Raf Simons.

Shirt, $595,

by Tom Ford.

T-shirt, $7,

by H&M. Jeans, $1,150, by Balenciaga.

Boots, $1,250,

by Ralph Lauren.

Necklace, stylist’s own.

1994

T PAC

Tupac’s relentlessly authentic style laid the groundwork for the nascent streetwear industry, and he helped kick off fashion’s obsession with hip-hop culture when he walked in a Versace show in 1995. He remains a steadfast reference point for contemporary designers: His fits—for instance, mixing the swagger of workaday denim with the power of a leather vest—are as relevant as ever.

BY SAMUEL HINE STILL-LIFE PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARTIN BROWN STYLED BY JON TIETZ COLLAGES BY SIMON ABRANOWICZ

THE BEST THINGS ON THE SPRING 2021 RUNWAYS? CLOTHES THAT CHANNEL THE SPIRITS OF KURT COBAIN, TUPAC, TOM PETTY, AND EVEN PAVAROTTI.

SPRING 2021

I N L CE ME M E HO

Hedi Slimane introduced a revolutionary Strokes-y silhouette to men’s fashion in the early aughts; now he designs his collections around sexy music subcultures. This season he looked to the fearless dressers, dancers, and musicians of TikTok, whose freaky style syncs perfectly with that of cult-music legends of the past.

O L GE

1993

AN MO O RE

Jacket (price upon request)

by Celine Homme by Hedi Slimane.

Shorts, $473, by 4SDesigns.

Boots, $200,

by Chippewa.

Socks, $24,

by RoToTo.

With his perpetually unbuttoned graphic shirts and fiery shorts—a practical uniform for his intensely aerobic stage-diving performances—the frontman of ska-punk band Fishbone became an altstyle icon for a generation of politically minded West Coast rebels.

1995

OPENING PAGES, LEFT COLL AGE, RUG: PHILIP CACKA. HILLS: JAMES RANDKLEV. KURT COBAIN: STEVE DOUBLE. OPENING PAGES, RIGHT COLL AGE, PALM TREES: KEVIN SHORT/EYEEM. CIT YSCAPE: ALEX ANDER SPATARI. TUPAC SHAKUR: RON GALELL A. OPPOSITE PAGE, SINGER: FRANS SCHELLEKENS. ANGELO MOORE: STEVE EICHNER. THIS PAGE, BL ACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPH: DAVE TONGE. JARVIS COCKER: MICK HUTSON. ALL EXCEPT KURT COBAIN: GET T Y IMAGES.

JARVIS CO CKER

Jacket, $2,995, and pants, $595, by Ralph Lauren.

Shirt, $950, and tie (price upon request)

by Versace.

Sunglasses, $640, by Jacques Marie Mage.

Pulp slept in tents after accepting a Glastonbury headline slot at the last minute, but the frontman of the legendary Brit-pop band, Jarvis Cocker, still pulled up in a velvet double-breasted pinstripe suit and coordinating awning-striped shirt and tie.

“I couldn’t live like that, to be honest,” he said of the hippiedippie Glasto lifestyle.

S P RING 2021

RALPH

L AURE N

The secret to Ralph Lauren’s success is that the prep god has always been a rule breaker.

You might not want to wear this razor-sharp suit to a mud-pit music festival, but nothing should stop you from defying convention and pairing it with a Cocker-esque candy-striped shirt and tonal tie.

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

7 9

1987

M I LE DAVI S S

In the ’80s, Miles Davis’s style shifted thanks to Prince’s paradigm-disrupting influence: Out were the Sunday-best suits and in were the piles of gold jewelry, slinky silk shirts, and canary yellow jackets. (The Prince of Darkness bought a yellow Ferrari to match.)

RING P S 2021

LOUIS V UI T T ON MENS Designer Virgil Abloh is a master of multilayered references, his Louis Vuitton shows brimming with nods to great Black sartorialists of yore. This season Abloh paid tribute to his pops, a Ghanaian immigrant who proudly dressed in the jazzy tradition of cats like Miles.

Jacket, $3,400, and pants, $935,

by Louis Vuitton Men’s. Shirt, $245,

by Post-Imperial.

Jewelry, stylist’s own.

1977

TOM PET

I NG

Jacket, $2,550, shirt, $835, and pants, $1,060,

by Prada. Boots, $1,950, by Celine Homme by Hedi Slimane. Scarf, $145, by Ralph Lauren.

PR

OPPOSITE PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEF T: IMAGES PRESS; GILLES PE TARD; DAVID WARNER ELLIS; EBE T ROBERTS; MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES; NE W YORK DAILY NE WS ARCHIVES. THIS PAGE, RED ROCKS: ARTURBO. SNAKESKIN: ZEN RIAL . TOM PE T T Y: MICHAEL OCHS. ALL: GE T T Y IMAGES.

TY

With his matchstick trousers, silk cravat, and epically heeled snakeskin boots (procured, according to a fellow Heartbreaker, in London), Tom Petty took the rail-thin-rocker aesthetic of Dylan and updated it for the post–Summer of Love generation.

SP R 2021

AD

A

You can find the spirit of Petty alive and well in the back of vintage rock-and-roll stores, or you can go to Prada, where his sleek drip has been reimagined for 2021 in a suit made from ultra-comfortable techno-stretch fabric.

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

8 1

RI N G 2021 SP

BOTT EGA V E NE TA At Bottega Veneta, achingly luxurious materials speak louder than logos, and this season designer Daniel Lee married the power of the jumpsuit (a uniform for generations of iconoclastic artists) with the gorgeous tactility of a lightweight striped bouclé fabric.

1986

FELA K UT

For the Black President, who did rock star style his own way, wearing traditional Ankara jumpsuits (and occasionally nothing more than his underwear) was as revolutionary a statement as his sublime Afrobeat sound.

I

Jacket, $2,050, pants, $1,850, and shoes, $990,

by Bottega Veneta.

SPRING 2021

L SMIT H U PA

OPPOSITE PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEF T: DIDIER CONTANT (2); ULLSTEIN BILD (2); ECHOES; DIDIER CONTANT (2); MICHAEL PUTL AND. THIS PAGE, LUCIANO PAVAROT TI: VIT TORIANO RASTELLI (2). OTHER PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ROSEMARY CALVERT; GARY YEOWELL; IMAGES SAY MORE ABOUT ME THAN WORDS; ROSEMARY CALVERT; PRIMIPIL; TORRIPHOTO. ALL: GET T Y IMAGES.

With its gothic rose print, Sir Paul Smith’s floral shirt speaks to the current moment but retains the best part of the ’90s Hawaiian essential: that loose-and-flowy Pavarotti fit.

Shirt, $359,

by Paul Smith.

1991

LU CIAN O PAVAROT T I

The larger-than-life tenor was best known for flourishing a white handkerchief onstage, but he also had an extensive collection of flamboyant Hawaiian shirts, which became his off-duty uniform when cruising around his villa on the Adriatic Sea.

PROP ST YLIST, LIZ SERWIN FOR JUDY CASEY INC.

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

8 3

S T E V E N YE UN

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 5 0

lived in a “disgusting” party house with a few of the basketball players and once lit a couch on fire. It was there he fell into improv comedy, which gave him a new medium with which to express himself. He graduated with degrees in psychology and befriending white people and decided to move to Chicago, following in the footsteps of comedian and fellow Kalamazoo alum Jordan Klepper, whose younger sister had been Yeun’s neighbor in the dorms. It wasn’t long before Yeun landed a gig performing for The Second City, the improv incubator that launched the careers of Amy Poehler, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, and generations of other stars. A fun thought exercise is to imagine a parallel universe in which a bizarro Steven Yeun gets butterfly-e≠ected onto the cast of Saturday Night Live.

Faith remains a big part of his life. He fell o≠ during college before finding his way back to it, which strengthened his convictions. “I think faith gets a weird connotation these days, that it’s so directly tied with the religious church,” said Yeun. “But faith is just a will to live, right? Just the will to be, and be here, and do the work, and do the thing.”

He knows religion is not for everyone, but he says he’s “lucky” that it’s a part of his life.

“That’s a gift,” he said. “People search their whole life for something to say and something to really mean.”

Grace surprises him in unlikely moments, like when he was preparing for Minari.

“This is an embarrassing admission,” he said.

Two days before filming was set to begin, Yeun broke down in the shower. He got in, started running through his lines, and out of nowhere was overcome with emotion.

“I started crying,” he said. “It was like all these feelings hit me at the same time, and it was a mixture of fear, awe, gratitude, submission, and joy. And when I thought about it and I put all those feelings together, I was like, ‘Maybe this is faith? Maybe this feeling…is faith?’ ”

I T ’ S N O T C L E A R to me if his faith and ideas about community inform his own politics, or if it’s the other way around. Yeun is a big Bernie guy—supported him over Hillary in 2016—but was one of the first celebrities to come out publicly in support of Andrew Yang’s presidential bid, along with Donald Glover and Dave Chappelle. (“My dream ticket was Bernie-Yang,” he said. “I would have been so stoked, dude. I had the merch all in my head.”) When I asked if the Yang campaign reached out to him for his endorsement, Yeun said he actually contacted the campaign first, which started a series of

8 4

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

conversations. Yeun said he understands the frustrations with Yang and has plenty himself—particularly with Yang’s inartful navigation of identity politics—but ultimately, he saw in the candidate someone who cared deeply about the working class and wanted to further a radical notion of providing people with cash so they could make their own choices. “I was like, that guy’s willing to take the hits because he just wants people to get money in their hands, to have safety,” said Yeun. “And it’s not about how cool we look or how cool he looks. I’m like, yo, how many selfless people like that do you know? How many people are willing to eat crow on all sides, just to get the thing done?”

To be completely honest, Yeun doesn’t know what’s next for him after his star turn in Minari, especially with the virus still ambient.

Yeun said he “wants to do everything”—which he knows is a vague answer, especially now that he’s on the brink of a di≠erent stratum of fame. Superhero movies, maybe even going behind the camera—nothing’s o≠ the table.

“I mean, Steven’s going to direct. I don’t know if that’s completely in the cards, but he really should,” Cohan told me. “He’s very emotionally intuitive, and focused, and forward moving.”

Yeun said he’s been getting scripts to consider, but he doesn’t “really gravitate towards the things that feel obvious” and is resistant to roles that box him in. (“I’m sure I’m super annoying to represent,” he added.)

But because this is Steven Yeun, he sees the other side of the conundrum too: “You know what’s tough, man? I can see why people that are on the outside of us get confused.” He proceeded to lay out a slightly disorienting metaphor: You say you don’t want to play the kung fu guy, but then a few months later, maybe you do want to be the kung fu guy because, oh wow, some of these new kung fu roles they’re writing are actually pretty sick. “And that’s really the core condition that I think we’re always at tension with, which is when we’re always stuck in this white gaze, there’s also this expectation to service it.… America is still not equipped to support the flyness of who we actually are,” he added. “We’re carving out our own space. It’s frontier territory right now—still.”

That all this success is happening against the backdrop of the pandemic has been its own journey. A conversation we shared one Friday night in February sticks with me.

Things had already been on the heavy side, and we both were opening up about everything: how hard this past year has been, the friends and family we’ve lost to COVID, the health scares our loved ones are enduring.

I noted how weird it must be to have the most critically acclaimed year of your career coincide with, well…all of this. “Life is mad real right now,” he said, and his words just sort of lingered there as he stared o≠ to the side. He didn’t want to sound ungrateful, but he was trying to keep perspective. “We had a couple of COVID deaths in our families, and I mean… everyone’s been touched by that. And I’m not saying who gives a shit about these [awards], like, anybody would want them.…” He said he’s been trying to lean into the gratitude, to be accepting of the honorifics as they come. But it’s been tough, especially with everything else going on in the world.

The weekend after that call, a series of graphic videos begin to make the rounds online in which elderly Asians are ambushed on the streets—attacks that seemed to be happening with more frequency, metastasizing from coast to coast, as if Asians are to blame for the ongoing virus. The footage is brutal, paralyzing—a swift punch to the gut. But the news, for whatever reason, is slow to break out beyond Asian American circles. I text my parents and ask them not to go on their walks without my younger brother present.

Yeun sent a text that Monday to ask how I was doing—how I was feeling about the attacks. I tell him that while I was heartened by how the community was organizing to protect its elders, it’s odd that the news hadn’t yet reached the mainstream media, especially considering how visceral the videos were. It felt as if everyone I knew was shouting into the void again, the su≠ering rendered invisible.

“I think it’s also something to realize,” he replied. “That we can’t really count on others to step in for us. A lot of the discussion asks why others don’t always see us, and I wonder if the prescription for the time being is to start seeing ourselves. We need to reach back and help our own communities.” Fundraising for the victims, for example, is “something we can galvanize ourselves around.” Yeun was worried about sounding too prescriptive here, but he’s interested in finding actionable solutions that help break the cycle of Asian Americans talking about the same issues—representation, emasculation, etc.—over and over again into perpetuity. (I floated a slightly cynical and 15-percent-joking take: that perhaps we were expecting too much when it was only last summer that white people finally got comfortable saying Black Lives Matter, and it’s like, wait a minute, now we gotta care about Asians too?)

I wondered if, on some level, he thought that the inability to break through was due to a dearth of leadership. Perhaps this was a downside of a collectivist approach. “I don’t think that’s a wrong thought,” he replied. “But I think maybe it’s more to do with the form that that leadership takes. I think the leadership needs to be pretty balanced, and that’s hard. It has to be confident in itself. In Korean, the word for ‘confidence’ is jashin-gam. And jashin means ‘self.’ And gam means ‘sense.’

I think we don’t know ourselves, but we are starting to.

“It can really only come from accepting who we are,” he added. “And I think most of us spent a lifetime running away from that.”

Tulsa, as the sun was retreating into the horizon, the Minari crew was wrapping up another long day of filming.

Some of the camera crew were shooting B-roll, cows grazing against a chemical-washed sky, when an assistant nudged director Chung.

Hey, look at Steve.

“Steven just had like the most grueling day ever on set, and his shirt is untucked and he comes out and he starts smoking a cigarette,” Chung recalls. “And I look over and Steven just looks so worn down, he’s just contemplating and looking at the sunset.” Without saying anything, the crew decided to quietly start ONE EVENING OUTSIDE

S T E V E N YE UN C O NT IN U E D

filming Yeun from behind some tall grass; he was squatting as he gazed o≠ into the distance.

The shot was so perfect, so elegant in its quietude, that they were able to cut the next scene from the script altogether. A small moment of good fortune.

“Later I asked Steven, ‘So what were you doing in that scene when we were filming you?’ ” recounts Chung. “And he said, ‘I was praying.’ ” A few days later, I asked Yeun if he remembered what he was praying about.

“I think I was just…in it,” he said. “I was just there. There’s this—It’s so corny, but I have it right here.…” Yeun rummaged through his things and unearthed a faded old poetry book called The Farm, by Wendell Berry. He found it at a used-book store in Tulsa while filming Minari, “on a bored weekend, just sifting through stu≠,” and the literalness of the title as it related to his life caught his eye.

“And then I found this passage,” he said, flipping through the pages. “And it says…

Where is it? This is wild.…”

And here, Steven Yeun began to read his favorite part of the poem: “And so you make the farm, and so you disappear into your days, your days into the ground. Before you start each day, the place is as it is, and at the day’s end, it is as it is, a little changed by work, but still itself, having included you and everything you’ve done.

And it is who you are, and you are what it is.

You will work many days no one will ever see; their record is the place. This way you come to know that something moves in time that time does not contain. For by this timely work you keep yourself alive as you came into time, and as you’ll leave: God’s dust, God’s breath, a little Light.”

Yeun explained that while he was staring o≠ into the sunset, he once again found himself in that liminal headspace, trying to snap back to reality while letting go of Jacob, who at that point was “truly wrestling with God, trying to extricate himself from God, just being like, ‘I am my own man.’ ” He was giving so much of himself to the role, submitting to it, and in return the work was subtly rearranging his molecules and changing, little by little, who Steven Yeun was.

“I hope we can all see that we don’t exist without the other person,” he told me once, optimistically. “Even if you don’t know that person, that person validates your existence. They uphold your existence with their existence. And hopefully in understanding that, we’ll be kinder to each other and appreciate each other more.” In spending all this time with him for this story, I feel myself a little changed, too, with a small but abiding desire to use my time to be more generous, more open, more protective of the things that matter, more willing to choose gratitude when other, more seductive options might be readily accessible. “I’m here now and I don’t know how I got here,” he added.

“In my head, it just feels like sheer luck.

Hard work is in there, but mostly, it’s just fucking luck.”

He’s working many days that no one will ever see; his record is the place. chris gayomali is a gq articles editor.

MAT T SW E EN E Y AN D WI L L O L D H A M

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 57

wanted to know—like, people who don’t listen to a lot of music, what are the five CDs or 10 cassettes or 11 LPs, or now what’s on their playlists? What is it? What’s sitting on their shelf ? What do they listen to and why? And how do they choose to put it on, and how do they choose to spend their money on it?”

“That’s the Will brain,” Sweeney observes.

Oldham suggests that this is just how he finds himself wired to think: We live in a world of mysteries that, if one applies oneself with su∞cient care and persistence, can be solved. “There are clues everywhere,” he says. “Maybe there’s not a final one way of solving things. But you do find enough, like, victorious moments of ‘I understand this now—I understand now why people act this way. I understand why this music that doesn’t move me in the slightest is popular among a certain group of people.’ And rather than being frustrated—you know, ‘Why do people listen to this garbage?’—go spend time with them while they’re listening to it and then you might understand it. And those little aha moments make life more bearable every day.”

and me, Oldham tells a story. It is a story that pivots o≠ these discussions about the puzzlements and frustrations surrounding the existence of music in the modern world; like many things that Oldham says and does, it is not, ultimately, a story that goes quite where you expect it to.

There is a recurrent subgenre in Oldham’s work where he revisits and reinterprets a catalog of music, usually music that is fairly obscure. An example is the album he released in 2013, along with singer Dawn McCarthy, of lesser-known Everly Brothers songs, What the Brothers Sang. A while after it came out, his record company let him know something odd—that one song, “Devoted to You,” was doing hugely better online than any other song on the album. Better, in fact, than pretty much anything on the label. And they couldn’t figure out why.

Oldham decided to try some experiments. Theorizing that maybe it was because “Devoted to You” was somewhat of an outlier in that it actually was a hit for the Everly Brothers, he decided to test out some other cover versions. He recorded and released his takes on modern country hits by Luke Bryan and Tim McGraw, hoping to repeat the success. Nothing. Now he was in full swing, so he turned his hand to contemporary modern pop and R&B hits by Drake, Ne-Yo, Kesha.

Still no response. On the o≠ chance that the TA L K I N G W I T H S W E E N E Y

success of “Devoted to You” might be down to a confusion with Olivia Newton-John’s Grease hit “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” he recorded “There Are Worse Things I Could Do,” another song from the Grease soundtrack. No. “Just wanted to see if folks loved buying big songs,” he says. “It was a lot of fun doing all those, but nothing worked.” And the mystery of why one song had done so well in the first place remained unsolved.

A year or two later, a neighbor in Louisville put a note on Oldham’s windshield. What she wrote was this: She was a keen practitioner of Jazzercise, and a song of his, “Devoted to You,” was part of their o∞cial warm-up routine.

She was leaving the note because there was an upcoming event for Jazzercise instructors in town, and she wondered if he was available to come and play the song.

When Oldham tells me this, I must confess that I harbor some suspicions that I am being spun some kind of yarn here. But I check into it, and I am shamed for my doubts: “Devoted to You” is indeed the final song on the Jazzercise playlist R3-13. That, it seems, is why the song had become mysteriously popular. And that, one might assume, is where this story should end: a weird tale about where music does and doesn’t find a home in this strange modern world.

Except…except if you think that Will Oldham, for all his firm ways and principled strictures, is the kind of unapproachable stuck-up alternative musician who would crumple up that note on his windshield and head back to what he was doing, then you might not understand what’s going on here.

“It’s funny, because I feel like maybe we’ll never get to the bottom of how Will sees music,” says Sweeney. “How Will exists with music, it’s way more of a full-contact real thing, you know what I mean?”

Sweeney wonders if he would have had the same reaction. “Will wasn’t upset at all, whereas I think maybe I would be like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of corny, that it came out that way.’

But for Will it was like, a whole new world opens up.”

gathered at the Jazzercise Louisville East Fitness Center, located in the Holiday Manor shopping center, Oldham went down there as requested.

Emmett Kelly, a frequent collaborator, was in town, and the two of them played “Devoted to You.” “It was so much fun,” Oldham says. “They were just super positive. It was wonderful.

They’d never had an experience like that. And that’s always really thrilling—when someone invites you to play music for a captive audience and they don’t know what to expect and you don’t know what to expect and you get to sort of test the power of music and come away thinking, ‘Wow, we kind of know what we’re doing, and music is this uniting thing that we all imagine that it is.’ And we just don’t have the opportunity to show it that often.

Because everybody thinks ‘this song goes here,’ and they put it there, and that’s the end of the story.”

WHEN THE INSTRU CTORS

chris heath is a gq correspondent.

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

8 5

MO O KI E BE T TS

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 6 4

paper, and I saw the number, and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ I had never seen that before, so that was hard to turn down. But once you can figure out how to say no, then it becomes easy as anything. Saying no the first time is the hardest thing.”

It got easier—but also stranger. He couldn’t wrap his head around asking for anything less than what he knew he deserved. “I don’t care if you’re working at Wa±e House or for the Red Sox or for the Dodgers,” he says. “You should just get paid what you’re worth.” Ultimately the Red Sox decided they’d rather trade Betts than lose him to free agency, shipping him to Los Angeles. Dodgers executive Friedman concedes the obvious. “It’s not often that a player of his caliber is available via trade,” he says.

Dave Roberts, the team’s manager, is more blunt: “My first reaction was ‘I can’t believe it’s really going to happen.’ ” Nearly everything in Betts’s career has happened faster than he expected—including that moment when he’d be called upon to set the clubhouse’s rules. In February 2020, during his first spring training with the Dodgers, he noticed that the team seemed a little too loose in its approach to practice. “This ain’t going to work,” he remembers thinking. He called up his girlfriend. “I was like, ‘Brianna, I see why we beat them in the World Series.’ It was because we were way more prepared than they were.” So in the locker room, Betts gathered his new teammates and issued a challenge: The group was good enough to win a title, he said, but only if everyone practiced with urgency. “I thought it was going to make some people mad, but it didn’t,” he says. Instead he won the team over. “He demanded excellence from us,” Roberts says. Eight months later, the Dodgers were champs.

B E T T S ’ S S K I L L S P U T him in rare company in pro ball, but his status as a Black superstar makes him something of a unicorn: The proportion of Black MLB players peaked at around 18 percent in the 1980s and has plummeted to less than 10 percent in recent years. “I’m trying to do my part in getting guys into baseball,” Betts says. He hopes that his approach—playing the game with uncommon passion; becoming a Jordan Brand athlete— rubs o≠. But the obstacles are manifold. It’s an expensive sport, he notes. And: “It’s boring and it’s not as fun as other sports.”

Baseball is also a conservative sport, and in a way that no single player can change on his own. When the wave of civil rights protests began last summer, Major League Baseball was notably slower than the NFL and the NBA

8 6

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

in responding; its anodyne o∞cial statement was released nine days after George Floyd’s death and failed to include the words “Black Lives Matter.” By opening day, in late July, “BLM” was stenciled on mounds across the league. Betts knelt for the national anthem and said he felt that the league “did not do a good job” in meeting the moment. Asked about it now, he says, “I don’t think it was cared for enough. I feel like we just kept going as if nothing happened.”

He’d seen his peers in other sports pushing their leagues for accountability, but the demographics of those sports made protest a fundamentally di≠erent proposition.

“I don’t think the MLB was really worried about that,” Betts says of the prospect of Black baseball players refusing to play. “Because if all the Black players in the MLB sat out, they wouldn’t miss a beat.”

Last August, after Jacob Blake was shot by police in Wisconsin, NBA players huddled together in their Orlando bubble and decided they wouldn’t play. The Dodgers were in San Francisco to face the Giants, and at the time, Betts was the only African American player on either roster. After discussion with his friends and family, Betts decided he wouldn’t play, but he told his teammates that he’d understand if they didn’t join him in sitting out. “Both teams were actually okay with playing,” he says. “By myself, with 50 guys, I can’t fight that battle.”

But his teammates listened and followed his lead. The game would be postponed. “For him to have that respect, and to have that honest conversation with his teammates, and most importantly for it to be received the way it was intended, speaks to how people feel about him,” Dodgers skipper Dave Roberts, one of two Black managers in baseball, says.

(Between Betts’s abilities on the field and his sincerity o≠ it, Roberts says Betts reminds him of Jackie Robinson.)

Betts was glad to have the support of his organization, but that couldn’t fix an intractable problem. “It was lonely,” he says, “in the sense that I couldn’t look to my right or my left—just a look! Because you can look at another Black person in that situation, and just look each other in the eyes, and you know immediately how it feels. That part was lonely, that nobody else really understood how it felt.”

I ask Betts if, in the wake of his comments and the league’s mealymouthed “promise to do the work,” he’s heard from anyone at the commissioner’s o∞ce on Park Avenue. “No, I have not,” he says.

He’s hopeful for progress on the issue, if realistic about his ability to change things by himself. “I feel like I’m doing a decent job with trying to bring awareness to baseball,” he says.

“I can’t say I’m doing a great job. I don’t think I’m doing a horrible job, but it’s just going to be hard.” He’ll pick his spots. “There are some battles that I choose to fight,” he says. “That wasn’t one that I wanted to fight. I feel like we’re so outnumbered that there’s nothing that could resonate enough.”

And so Mookie Betts chooses other battles.

He demands to be paid like an elite player and then dares to turn himself into the most exciting talent in the game. He takes a body built to hustle out ground balls and teaches it to deposit home runs in the outfield bleachers.

He masters a system that hunts out ine∞ciencies and then makes brilliantly ine∞cient plays on the game’s largest stage. Those battles, of course, are inextricably linked to baseball’s struggles with race—to the way the sport has grown increasingly expensive and elitist and has struggled to make sense of a Black player who manages to make the game look fun. Betts will approach these e≠orts the same way he does any task, working things out one step at a time. By now, you’d be silly to bet against him.

was in the minors, Betts learned an invaluable lesson from one of his coaches: “Everybody has good days, and everybody has three or four hits on those good days.

That’s not the hard part,” he says. “The hard part is when you don’t feel good.”

Betts has fewer bad days than most baseball players, but they still happen every once in a while. “I can’t control that I hit a line drive at somebody,” he says. “That’s out of my control.” Even some pitchers get the best of him. (“He drives a Benz too,” Betts reminds himself of his well-compensated opposition.)

The way to deal with bad days, he has learned, is to pinpoint the things you can control—and then apply maximum intensity to achieving mastery. This means that you don’t just practice your bowling; you study the oil patterns and you put your 40-odd bowling balls through tryouts. It means that you spend hours in one-on-none mode in Madden. And it means that you approach baseball not as the sort of player you’ve become but as the light-hitting middle-of-the-road player you once might have been. “He’s got the instincts that a backup utility infielder has, that that guy has needed to get to where he’s at,” Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers executive, says. “For one of the most talented players in the game to have those instincts on top of that ability almost is unfair.”

This righteous perfectionism is second nature. For as long as Betts can remember, he says, he’s been applying the same mindset, no matter the objective. When he was in high school, his mom barred him from playing football—he was just too small, and she worried that he’d get hurt. (“He came out of high school weighing 150 [pounds],” Diana tells me.

“So you can imagine that in ninth grade he probably weighed 100.”) Still, Betts wanted to hang out with his friends on the team, so he signed up to serve as the water boy. “I was the best,” he says now. “I was the GOAT of water boys. I took pride in it.” Players would toss the bottles around, leaving them for Betts to pick up. He never held this against them. “I didn’t think, My man, don’t throw it on the ground.

Hand it to me. They’re playing their sport. The last thing they really need to think about is throwing a water bottle or whatever.”

What counts, he realized, was playing your part and remaining hell-bent on getting better. It doesn’t matter if you’re the quarterback or the water boy, an amateur bowler or the MVP right fielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“Throw that shit,” he’d tell his teammates. “I’ll get it and fill it up. I’ll have it ready.”

BACK WHEN HE

sam schube is gq’s senior editor.

MAT T H EW W I L L I AM S

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 7 1

“Matt was introducing a lot of art to Gaga and pushing her to explore the things that she was interested in. He was a very strong influence in Gaga’s life,” Knight says. “When they parted company, I became friends with Matt because he’s a very nice young man.”

Knight was so impressed with Williams, in fact, that he invited the designer to serve as the art director of SHOWstudio, his forward-thinking online art-and-fashion platform.

“It’s interesting,” says Williams, “that it’s shaken out like this. I’m known as this celebrity-connected designer, but I don’t really hang out with celebrities that much in my daily life now. And then I’m also kind of categorized as a streetwear designer, but I don’t do graphics in my collections at all.”

He smiles with exasperation. “Where did this stu≠ come from, you know?”

know the answer, I ask Williams if he was able to catch any of the inauguration ceremony: “I wasn’t,” he says.

“I was doing fittings and work during that time.” If Williams is not a celebrity-minded designer—and he is not technically a streetwear designer—he is certainly one thing: saddled (or blessed) with an extraordinary amount of creative responsibility during a very strange and anxious moment in fashion history. With retail sales waning and legacy department stores shutting down around the world, fashion has been left wondering whether to scale back or continue to churn forward. In May, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele chose the former, announcing he’d pare down Gucci’s annual calendar from five shows to two. Others are pondering the same prospect.

But Williams is becoming even more prolific, forging on with his work at Alyx, where he just debuted a fall 2021 show that included both menswear and womenswear. His portfolio at Givenchy is also more complex than it seems.

In addition to heading up the men’s and women’s lines, each of which requires seasonal, pre-seasonal, and capsule-collection looks multiple times a year, he also oversees plenty of commercial aspects of the business, like kidswear and perfume, all of which demand Williams’s input, if not his hands-on attention.

So much fuss has been made about how COVID-19 has transformed our approach to dressing, robbing us of our desire to indulge in acts of peacocking. But I wanted to know how the pandemic had shifted Williams’s approach to designing. Straddling the line between a su≠ocating present moment and an unknown future is tricky, to say nothing A LT H O U G H I A L R E A DY

72 H O URS I N KENOSHA of planning a fashion show when mass gatherings are expressly forbidden. Williams is looking ahead, but he’s also trying to honor our collective yearning for comfort. “I like this idea that fashion can give us some kind of escape, and beauty, and imagination for the future that we’ll have,” he explains, “but still have moments of reality that ground us, in terms of clothing we want to wear and use today.” To serve these needs, he’s been designing knit silk bottoms and cozy slip-on shoes made of foams and shearlings. Some of his bags also feature an attached roll blanket.

“You know, I think maybe subconsciously I’m just wanting security and comfort, knowing that there’s so much chaos all around.

Warmth, comfort, ease.”

It’s not hard to understand why Williams is longing for comfort and safety after a year that was particularly turbulent. When he was hired by Givenchy last spring, he moved to an alien version of Paris rather than the dreamy fashion landing pad he’d imagined since high school. He was fresh o≠ a divorce from his wife, Jennifer Murray, who now lives in London with their two daughters. (Williams’s eldest child, a son named Cairo, lives with his mother in America.) Quarantine restrictions and border lockdowns have disrupted his visitation schedule. “I’ve been alone for the longest amounts of time in my life. For weeks and months at a time without seeing my family, which has never happened before,” he says. As evidenced by the videos he’s posted online, his new apartment, in the 7th arrondissement, is still cavernously empty; he eats most of his meals at the o∞ce and considers the Givenchy team a new kind of family. He FaceTimes with his children daily.

His three kids—11, 8, and 5—are old enough to formulate real opinions about clothes. In conversation, as in designing, Williams can be restrained, timid even. It’s easy to imagine how such an unassuming and gentlemannered guy managed to blend in behind the scenes with A-list pop stars and models for so long. When he speaks about his kids, though, he grows enthusiastic and talkative. “My son really likes skateboarding clothes the most. His friends wear Alyx and Nike, and they’re into it,” he explains. “His favorite rapper is Playboi Carti. It’s weird that my favorite rapper and my 11-year-old’s favorite rapper are the same person,” he says self-e≠acingly. “And then my daughters, they’re still into princess-dress mode. Everything has to be a princess dress, or pink. The fact that at Givenchy, we actually really do make dresses for princesses… I am in a really good place in their eyes.”

There’s a lot of discussion about the way that Williams and his peers are shaking things up and taking a new approach, but Williams himself seems more intent on honoring tradition. When most people talk about their idea of success, they imagine getting bigger, getting better, doing di≠erent things, constantly moving on to the next stage of domination.

Williams, with his rosy vision of the European houses, has a simpler goal. “For me, just being able to be here for years,” he says, “that would be a success.” It’s a humble notion, but it sounds like a revelation.

carrie battan is a writer living in New York City.

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 75

3. The Cadet Kyle Rittenhouse’s idolization of the police had started early. As a boy—growing up about a 30-minute drive south of Kenosha, just over the state line, in Illinois—he enrolled in a cadet program, which o≠ered firearms training and the chance to ride along in patrol cars.

He posed for pictures in police uniforms and filled his Facebook page with posts that celebrated law enforcement. Rittenhouse and his mother, who was similarly fervent in her support of the police, made frequent use of the so-called thin blue line flag—a black-and-white version of the American flag, with a single blue stripe. Originally employed by some members of law enforcement to represent their concept of themselves as the wall between civilization and anarchy, the “thin blue line” has more recently been adopted by some opponents of the Black Lives Matter movement.

A primary tool of the police trade also fascinated Rittenhouse: guns. When he was nine years old, his mother shared a picture on Facebook of her boy wielding an AR-15style assault rifle, the mass-market militaryinspired weapon Americans have snapped up by the millions—sometimes for as little as a few hundred dollars from big-box retailers.

In the photo, he stands in a muddy yard, the weapon comically large in his stubby arms, its magazine well empty. He smiles with cherubic cheekiness while one finger pokes at the trigger.

Rittenhouse’s lawyers declined to provide access to him or to his mother, Wendy Lewis, to respond to my questions. But the long paper trail generated by the Rittenhouse family’s involvement with the legal system portrays a young man bu≠eted by familial and financial disorder, for whom the power and control represented by policing—and by guns themselves—could have been appealing.

Court records for 2003, the year of Rittenhouse’s birth, show that the wages earned by his father at a chain grocery store were being garnished due to his falling behind on rent. The boy’s family was evicted twice in 2005. In the summer of 2017, his mother, filling out an application for a new apartment, indicated her reason for departing her current address as “Left kids’ dad.” Within months Lewis was evicted again, and soon thereafter she filed for bankruptcy, listing $14,103 in assets—most of that represented by a heavily used Chevy sedan, along with child support she was owed—against $31,434 in debts.

Rittenhouse appeared to have had a rough time at school. In 2017, Lewis sought a restraining order to protect her 14-yearold son from a 13-year-old middle school

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

8 7

72 HO U RS I N KENOSHA C ONTIN UE D

classmate. The following year, Rittenhouse attended some high school but seems to have left without finishing ninth grade; two people told the Chicago Sun-Times that he had dropped out. (His mother would later tell police he was “homeschooled.”) Classmates later described Rittenhouse to Vice as easily angered and confrontational. They claimed that he was known for supporting Donald Trump and enjoying “triggering the libs.”

In January 2020, Rittenhouse traveled to a Trump rally and cheered for his presidential hero from the front row. Around that time, he also applied to the Marine Corps, but didn’t qualify. In March the coronavirus caused him to be furloughed from his part-time job as a YMCA lifeguard. As The Washington Post first reported, when he got his $1,200 stimulus check, he decided he wanted an assault rifle.

The only problem was that Rittenhouse, at 17, couldn’t legally buy a weapon of that kind.

Rittenhouse had a friend who was old enough, however: Dominick Black, a curlyhaired 18-year-old who hoped to join the Air Force and who was dating Rittenhouse’s younger sister. A lawyer for Black didn’t respond to requests for comment, but extensive police documents related to his later arrest, including video of an interview conducted by an investigator, were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. According to those documents, Black, who lived in Kenosha, and Rittenhouse traveled to a rural stretch of northern Wisconsin, where Black’s stepfather owned property, and purchased the Smith & Wesson 226-5.56 rifle from an Ace Hardware in a nearby town. They used Black’s name and Rittenhouse’s money.

A video posted to Rittenhouse’s TikTok account showed him firing the rifle in a wooded area while a rap song played. The account carried the subtitles “Bruh I’m just tryna be famous,” “Trump 2020,” and “BLUE LIVES MATTER.” A picture of Rittenhouse and Black, which appears to be from the same trip, showed them clutching assault rifles, the image superimposed over a thin blue line flag, as if they were already lawmen.

When they headed home, the two faced a problem: Rittenhouse lacked the paperwork required to store the gun at his family’s apartment. According to police reports, when Black’s stepfather learned what they had done, he locked the gun away in a safe in his garage in Kenosha. He would subsequently allow the boys to take it “up north,” but each time demanded the weapon back once they returned. Later that summer, as Kenosha exploded with unrest, Rittenhouse may have glimpsed an opportunity. Here was an apparent chance for him to be the law, as he’d always dreamed—and his gun was already waiting for him at Black’s stepfather’s house in the burning city.

4. The Burning The day after Blake was shot and the police department was besieged, social media and the national news focused America’s attention on “Kenowhere,” as its residents a≠ectionately call it, and an ever growing number of protesters massed there, many coming

8 8

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

from out of town. Demonstrators peacefully marched through the city, blocking tra∞c.

Someone would shout, “Say his name!”

Hundreds would roar back, “Jacob Blake!”

Major sports celebrities, faith leaders, and politicians called for justice.

That afternoon, the National Guard arrived and police shut down nearby freeway exits, trying to stem the tide of incomers. At sundown, a curfew kicked in and some protesters went home. But hundreds of others confronted riot police, hurling water bottles and firecrackers, until o∞cers responded with tear gas and flash-bang grenades.

As demonstrators left the Civic Center, they began smashing and burning their way through town. They spray-painted the city’s parole o∞ce with “convict Rusten Sheskey” and then set it on fire with vindictive good cheer. They looted a Mexican restaurant, a Hispanic grocery, a beauty-products emporium owned by Korean immigrants, and a cell phone store owned by a man of Palestinian descent, as well as a gas station and a payday lender, all of which were then burned. (The Kenosha Area Business Alliance would ultimately count about 40 businesses destroyed and at least another 40 damaged.)

When the throng attacked a two-story brick building with commercial space on the ground floor, Nick Dennis yelled at them, “Do not burn that! There’s houses at the top!” But the crowd was beyond all control. Nearby, a 70-year-old-man tried to defend the mattress store where he worked and the historic Danish Brotherhood Lodge 14, where he was a member, by spraying rioters with a fire extinguisher.

A young man slammed him in the head with a Gatorade bottle petrified with hardened concrete, breaking the older man’s jaw and leaving him unconscious in the street. “These weren’t people out to represent Black Lives Matter,” Dennis said. “They were out to burn shit.”

In the coming days, authorities in Kenosha would blame outsiders for much of the violence. But photos, videos, and arrest records show that those who destroyed Kenosha were locals and outsiders, white and Black.

These were Americans, turning first on their government and their city, and then on their fellow citizens.

5. Waiting for Night The next morning, August 25, Kyle Rittenhouse awoke in Kenosha. His sister would later tell police that he had informed their mother that he was going to spend the night at Black’s house. According to police documents, the boys decided that morning to join the volunteer e≠ort to clean up damage from the night before. They borrowed cleaning supplies from Black’s stepfather, who had already gone to work. They also took Rittenhouse’s gun, which Black’s stepfather had moved from the safe in the garage to inside the house to protect himself during the unrest. Black usually carried his own assault rifle, disassembled, in the trunk of his car.

A short time later, a photographer captured Rittenhouse scrubbing gra∞ti at a local high school, a yellow bottle of chemical cleaner in one latex-gloved hand and a brush in the other. The words he was trying to erase

were “fuck 12 bitches,” with “12” being slang for police, but they didn’t seem to be coming o≠. His expression was grim. His opinion of the protests may have been captured by a social media post he reportedly made in which he captioned a mug shot of Blake: “lol, he’s innocent.”

In the afternoon, the boys drove to a huntingsupply store and bought cheap military-style body slings for their assault rifles. They weren’t the only ones gearing up for that evening. Earlier in the day, a former Kenosha alderman who served as the administrator for the Facebook page of the Kenosha Guard, a local militia outfit, posted a question: “Any patriots willing to take up arms and defend out [sic] City tonight from the evil thugs?”

Soon the popular conspiracy-theory website Infowars boosted the post. According to analysis from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, from there the call to arms went national, with hundreds of RSVPs. Facebook pages for Kenosha-area militia groups began to fill with threats of violence against protesters. According to Buzzfeed, the Kenosha Guard event was flagged for Facebook moderators at least 455 times. The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, would later describe the failure to remove the post as an “operational mistake.” Just as social media had drawn left-leaning activists to Kenosha, now it was summoning a coalition of rightwing militia to oppose them—and supercharging political unrest.

Around 4 p.m., Rittenhouse and Black walked to a used-car dealership called Car Source, which they planned to guard that night. Black had previously worked there and later told police, “The owner asked us if we would go there [and] just make sure [protesters] don’t burn the whole place down.”

The boys’ apparent plan was to stand on the roof of the boarded-up garage and, if people threatened any of the 20 or so cars in the lot, Black explained, “we yell at them to ‘Get back!

Get back!’ We don’t point, we don’t shoot or anything.” The two teenagers were led by a 20-something local they’d linked up with, who, like Black, had a professional relationship with the Car Source owners. (In a brief phone call, the proprietors declined to answer questions but have stated elsewhere that they didn’t pay or ask for help from Rittenhouse and Black.)

Evening descended and dozens of arriving militia began assembling around two gas stations at the southern end of the block; according to one militiaman, the owner of one was giving out free drinks and thanking people for coming. Some of them were Kenoshans seeking to protect their city. Others, however, wore the Hawaiian shirts of the nihilistic Boogaloo Bois, a group whose most extreme members seek to overthrow the government. A Facebook post suggested some may have been a part of another militaristic anti-government faction called the Three Percenters. A third constituency was a “biker crew,” carrying “hatchets, ball bats, and firearms,” as one militiaman described them. That man also recounted that four people had told him they’d come from Canada. Some left-wing activists may have traveled similar distances. One independent journalist, who had extensively filmed

72 H O U RS I N KENOSHA C ONTIN UE D

protests in the Northwest, told me that he recognized multiple protesters from Seattle and Portland. Kenosha had become a battleground for some of the most committed warriors on both sides of America’s ideological divide, and Rittenhouse was now in the midst of it.

Around 6 p.m., a 31-year-old man named Ryan Balch approached the Car Source lot. He wore tactical gear from his Army infantry days, and he later provided a written account of his impression of Rittenhouse’s group: “Realizing that they were undermanned and had no leadership…we joined them and I inserted myself into a tactical advisement role.” Balch was accompanied by several other experienced militiamen who had carpooled to Kenosha with him. They had avoided the roadblocks police had set up by looping south across the Illinois border and then traveled along the back roads into town. Balch explained to me that Rittenhouse and the other young men “all told us they were of legal age,” and he watched as someone turned over the keys to the garage, allaying his concern that the boys didn’t have a right to be there.

Balch did notice, however, that the boy wearing the backward American-flag baseball cap appeared to be in over his head. One of Balch’s militia partners, another infantry veteran, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity and whom I’ll call Smith, criticized the “lazy, la-di-da, la-di-da way” Rittenhouse and the other young men let their weapons drift into dangerous positions. Black told investigators that Kyle’s gun skills were “horrible.”

Still, no one tried to call o≠ the 17-year-old.

According to a certain type of American logic, his gun made him a patriotic militiaman and granted him the right to be there.

Rittenhouse’s civil defense lawyer, Robert Barnes, emphasized that Kyle was not a member of any militia and that he hadn’t met Balch before, though the two would coordinate throughout the night as part of a team of about seven people who had taken it upon themselves to guard the lot.

As night fell, Black was on the roof of the garage with his rifle and scope, providing overwatch protection. Balch patrolled and tried to keep an eye on Rittenhouse, who spent much of his time at the front of the lot, clutching his assault rifle and staring toward the Civic Center, about a tenth of a mile away.

Soon they could hear screaming, sirens, and flash-bang grenades as protesters there defied the curfew.

After finishing up his part-time job at a high-end grocery store, Grosskreutz had taken the country roads from Milwaukee to Kenosha, hid his vehicle far from downtown, disabled facial ID on his phone so police couldn’t force it open if they had him handcu≠ed, and then walked to the Civic Center. He arrived around the time that several hundred protesters defied warnings to disperse with cries of “Black Lives Matter!” One demonstrator, wearing a disturbingly realistic skull mask, burned numerous American flags while others pumped their fists. Soon the crowd began pelting police with rocks and fireworks, to which law enforcement responded with tear gas and pepper balls. Grosskreutz kept to the fringes of the conflict, attending to minor injuries and instructing others on how to flush tear gas out of eyes.

Unlike many street medics, whose credentials merely consisted of two strips of red duct tape pasted into a cross on their backpacks, Grosskreutz had spent years working in ambulances as a paramedic. But several years earlier he had enrolled in college, hoping to combine his medical skills with a new profession, like educating kids in the outdoors.

Earlier that summer, though, at a Milwaukee protest following the death of George Floyd, he’d seen a demonstrator take a dangerous fall and realized that he could help, especially as ambulances often can’t enter the fray of a protest. He quickly became a leader among Milwaukee-area street medics and, despite his own leftist politics, committed himself to treating anybody who needed assistance.

Then Grosskreutz heard a scream. About 50 feet away, a young woman was curled up on the ground. A rubber bullet had lacerated her arm. Grosskreutz applied direct pressure to stem the bleeding. Then another medic tapped him on the shoulder, warning, “We’ve got to go! They’re coming!” The “storm trooper march,” as Grosskreutz called it, had bulldozed the rest of the protesters out of the Civic Center, and police were so close he could see the laces of their boots. He and the other medic removed the young woman from the chaos, carrying her to a grassy embankment, where they finished bandaging her before she was taken by private car to a hospital.

Under the direction of his lawyer, Grosskreutz declined to describe what happened next. But videos show he rejoined the protesters as the police drove them south, toward where Rittenhouse and the militia awaited.

6. The Street Medic At the Civic Center, a tall, fit man named Gaige Grosskreutz strode through the chaos.

He was dressed in street clothes like the protesters, except for his baseball hat labeled “PARAMEDIC.” Actually, Grosskreutz preferred the term “street medic” and had served as a self-appointed provider of medical aid at numerous protests throughout the summer.

In an orange backpack he carried bandages, solution for washing tear gas from eyes, chest seals, and a tourniquet. He also had a pistol, tucked under his T-shirt, for self-defense; though he had had some misdemeanor scrapes with the law, he had no felonies and had a concealed-carry permit.

7. The Militiaman Not long before the protesters were flushed in his direction, Ryan Balch was talking to a police o∞cer near the used-car lot he and Rittenhouse were guarding. As Balch recalled it—and Smith, his militia partner, confirmed— the o∞cer told them, “Okay, we’re going to start pushing them down here soon, and it’ll be up to you guys.”

Balch responded to her, “So you’re going to piss these people o≠ and then push them at us and then leave?”

The two men say that the o∞cer, having delivered her warning, pulled away in a patrol

car. (The Kenosha Police Department, which will be contesting multimillion-dollar legal claims alleging that its o∞cers contributed to the violence, declined to comment.) Balch remembered that when Rittenhouse noticed his concern, the youth “was like, ‘Uh-oh.’ ” The former infantryman had taken the nervous Rittenhouse under his wing, thinking he could keep an eye on him. Rittenhouse had claimed to be an EMT, and Balch also figured having a medic on hand could be useful.

(Rittenhouse, in fact, had only first aid certifications from his work as a lifeguard.) “Our job is to protect this business, and part of my job is to help people,” Rittenhouse told journalist Richie McGinniss of The Daily Caller on-camera that night. “That’s why I have my rifle, because I need to protect myself, obviously. But I also have my med kit.”

What happened next is recorded in the numerous hours of footage that GQ synced together. From the auto shop, the militia watched as four armored personnel carriers— so-called BearCats—driving abreast, advanced on the crowd fleeing the Civic Center. The protesters tried kneeling in the street and chanting, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” setting up a blockade of dumpsters, and hurling fireworks at the BearCats, but the demonstrators were driven relentlessly south by rubber bullets and tear gas. As the crowd reached Car Source, Balch began shooing away protesters who looked disheveled and wound-up on the videos.

The militia quickly found reason to feel antagonized by the protesters, and vice versa.

Demonstrators exchanged angry words with militiamen flashing laser gunsights at them, and it seems that protesters may have thrown “ammonia bombs”—which Rittenhouse, blinking back tears, would describe in a raspy voice to a video journalist as “ammonia, gasoline, and bleach” that had been mixed in small plastic bags that would explode when thrown. Still, both sides maintained a relative truce, and Rittenhouse even appeared to treat a young female protester whose foot had been injured by a rubber bullet.

Things started to escalate when the BearCats pushed the throng of protesters south past the Car Source to the two gas stations where many of the militia had gathered.

Soon protesters rolled a wheeled dumpster into the street with a thunderous rattle and then set its contents on fire, intending to propel it toward the police. Before they could, a militiaman in camo pants blasted the burning dumpster with a fire extinguisher. Protesters and militia faced o≠, screaming. At the center of the confrontation was an enraged stocky white man, in a red T-shirt, who shouted repeatedly in the face of a white militiaman, daring the militiaman to shoot him. This was Joseph Rosenbaum, the first person Rittenhouse would kill. But not quite yet.

“It’s not worth it,” a bystander yelled.

“You’re going to get us all shot!”

Protesters pulled Rosenbaum back, and militiamen talked down their guy.

The police withdrew in their BearCats back toward the Civic Center, leaving the protesters and militia to face o≠ against each other.

A Black man in a Black Lives Matter mask racked the slide of his pistol, and militia

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

8 9

72 HO U RS I N KENOSHA C ONTIN UE D

readied their guns. Cries of “Focus on the real enemy” zeroed protesters back in on the police, and they chased the BearCats north, reclaiming the flaming dumpster and pushing it up past the Car Source lot.

Once more the BearCats routed the protesters from the Civic Center. As the protesters again retreated past the Car Source lot, one of Balch and Rittenhouse’s fellow guards tried to stop some of them from reigniting the dumpster and got into a shouting match.

Balch attempted to deescalate the situation.

Meanwhile, Rittenhouse grabbed the dumpster and pulled it to the side of the road, away from the protesters, presumably so they couldn’t reignite it. A conservative video journalist, Kristan T. Harris, noticed and warned Rittenhouse, “Hey, your job is not to be in the street. Your job is to protect the property.…

Don’t look for trouble where there ain’t none.”

Rittenhouse suggested he needed to be in the action to o≠er help as a medic.

Harris responded that “they got their own medics, you know.” When Rittenhouse retorted, Harris explained that the protesters were afraid of the teenager, though Rittenhouse seemed to not fully understand why. Throughout the many filmed encounters that show Rittenhouse o≠ering medical aid to protesters—most of them rebu≠ed—he appeared incapable or unwilling to see himself and his group as others had that night: as threatening white men who had shown up to a racial-justice protest armed with assault weapons.

The demonstrators probably weren’t wrong to suspect that the militia groups may have harbored racists. Some internet posts purporting to be from militia featured extremely disturbing racialized threats, several involving the murder and rape of children of color. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Balch’s own online presence was troubling: “[He] used his social media accounts to link to a Nazi propaganda video, amplified white nationalist Richard Spencer, and uploaded symbols associated with the so-called Boogaloo [Bois] movement,” the anti-government militia. Balch disavowed the posts to me as “shit posting” and apologized to those who were o≠ended, adding, “I take my personal responsibility for it.”

Before the clash around the reignited dumpster could get further out of hand, the police in the approaching BearCats warned everyone to disperse and then released tear gas. Militia and protesters scrambled for cover. Once the irritating cloud had drifted o≠, the police o≠ered some indication about whom they’d been targeting: An o∞cer asked through a megaphone if any of the men guarding Car Source needed water, either to drink or to wash their eyes with. Rittenhouse answered in the a∞rmative. A hatch opened on the top of a BearCat and a police o∞cer tossed water bottles down while the megaphone crackled: “We appreciate you guys, we really do.”

Video of this scene would raise accusations of police favoritism toward the right-wing militias. The Kenosha Police Department would ultimately charge about 150 protesters with curfew violations, but the only person coordinating with militia who would receive a similar citation was Rittenhouse—and then only months after the event.

9 0

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

Soon the BearCats re-established their barricade near the gas stations. Rittenhouse and Balch’s group were to the north of the police, the protesters to the south. Around this time, Rittenhouse excitedly explained on camera to McGinnis, the video journalist, that he and Balch “are out here running and saving people with medical.” At which point, Balch, sucking his lip and looking a little annoyed, said, “Speaking of which, we need to go check if someone got hurt again.” They walked south, passing the BearCats, heading toward the protesters. Though they didn’t know it, they had just e≠ectively cut themselves o≠ from backup—the police wouldn’t let anyone cross back over the line. Moments later, Balch looked around and realized that he had lost Rittenhouse.

8. The Nadir Recordings show that Rittenhouse wandered south by himself, still shouting o≠ers of medical help, perhaps showing o≠ for McGinnis, who was tailing him with a camera. Instead of the heroic welcome Rittenhouse seems to have expected, a young Black man called Rittenhouse out for previously brandishing his gun at him; Rittenhouse hu≠ed away, and McGinnis stayed to talk to the young man.

Less than three minutes after crossing south of the BearCats, Rittenhouse was captured on video, having turned north, approaching the armored personnel carriers on his way back toward the Car Source lot. A BearCat megaphone blared: “This road is closed! Do not come down here! Do not come down here!”

Rittenhouse raised a surgical-gloved hand and pointed toward the Car Source lot. “I work for that business!”

“You cannot come down here. This area is clear.”

Rittenhouse tried arguing a bit more but then, visibly frustrated, drifted back toward a group of protesters clustered around one of the gas stations.

According to the account Dominick Black gave police, it was around this time that the militiamen at Car Source got a call that another parking lot owned by the dealership was being attacked, with cars being smashed and fires ignited. Because this lot was south of the police barricade, Rittenhouse was best positioned to check it out. Apparently, someone called him and relayed the message. Rittenhouse grabbed a fire extinguisher, likely from bystanders, and hoofed it south.

Black, positioned on the roof, saw his friend run toward the southern lot before disappearing into the dark distance.

Many protesters were drifting south too, including a stocky white man who had wrapped his red T-shirt around his bald head, protecting his eyes from tear gas and his identity from cameras. This was Joseph Rosenbaum, who earlier had dared the militiaman to shoot him.

Rosenbaum, whose path to that evening would later be documented by The Washington Post, had just reached the nadir of a tragic life spent grappling with drugs, crime, and mental illness, during which he had served 14 years in prison for sexually abusing minors. Earlier that day, he had been discharged from a mental

health treatment program, to which he’d been committed after several recent attempts to take his own life. When he tried to pick up his bipolar medication, he found the pharmacy closed because of the protests, and when he attempted to reunite with his former partner, she reportedly warned him he could be jailed for violating a no-contact order put in place after he’d assaulted her. He rode a bus downtown and joined the demonstration.

When Rittenhouse arrived at the unguarded Car Source lot, vandals were hammering vehicles with baseball bats and setting cars aflame. A police investigator later wrote that Rittenhouse “told someone to stop hitting windows. The male he had spoken to then came at him and Kyle had to protect himself.” Black also told police that Rittenhouse later o≠ered him a similar explanation. (Robert Barnes, Rittenhouse’s civil defense lawyer, suggested to me that the teenager may have tried to put out a small fire, in which Rosenbaum was involved, with the fire extinguisher, prompting the confrontation.) Nick Dennis, just across the street, saw Rosenbaum start to chase Rittenhouse and then turned his livestream on them.

Multiple recordings captured Rosenbaum pursuing Rittenhouse across the car lot. Rosenbaum hurled a plastic bag at Rittenhouse—in it were the deodorant stick, underwear, and socks that the hospital had discharged him with. A bystander fired a pistol into the air for unclear reasons, perhaps to freeze everyone with fright. Rittenhouse turned. Rosenbaum lunged toward him, yelling, “Fuck you!” Rittenhouse blasted him with four .223 rounds that shattered his pelvis, tore through his right lung, liver, and left hand, carved into his left thigh, and scored his forehead, according to police records. Then Rittenhouse fled.

As Rittenhouse ran north, Grosskreutz was hurrying south toward the tinny sound of faraway gunshots. With his cell phone he filmed Rittenhouse laboring past him in his unwieldy cowboy boots, pursued by shouts. Grosskreutz demanded: “Hey, what are you doing? You shot somebody?”

“I’m going to the police,” Rittenhouse answered over his shoulder, still fleeing.

“Who’s shot? Who’s shot?” Grosskreutz yelled. Rittenhouse didn’t answer. Then Grosskreutz yelled, “Hey, stop him!” Grosskreutz pursued Rittenhouse, withdrawing the pistol tucked in the waistband of his shorts.

Rittenhouse tripped. When Anthony Huber, a 26-year-old father figure to his girlfriend’s two children, smacked him with his skateboard, Rittenhouse sent a bullet through Huber’s “heart, aorta, pulmonary artery, and right lung,” according to police reports, killing him.

Then Grosskreutz towered over the fallen Rittenhouse, a pistol in his right hand. That’s when Rittenhouse blew o≠ Grosskreutz’s right biceps, his bullet exploding a tattoo of caduceus, the winged sta≠ entwined with snakes that is the symbol of Western medicine.

Rittenhouse stood. The boy who had so often been bullied watched everyone flee him. Balch and Smith were running down the street toward him, but at this point there was no way to save him from what he had done.

Approaching the BearCats, Rittenhouse raised his hands. But he didn’t keep them

72 H O U RS I N KENOSHA C ONTIN UE D

up and handled his weapon multiple times; cops have shot people for much less. But the police ignored the white kid and rumbled their BearCats toward the crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters. Rittenhouse tried to turn himself in at a patrol car but was brushed away. And so, the unrest that began with a Kenosha police o∞cer shooting a Black man seven times in the back ended with the department letting an armed white youth who had just killed two people and grievously wounded another walk free.

9. The Next Battles At the auto-body shop, Rittenhouse told Black what he’d done.

They drove to the apartment of Rittenhouse’s mother, in Illinois. According to police documents, Wendy Lewis suggested to her son that he flee. Rittenhouse insisted on turning himself in at a nearby police station.

There, he cycled through fits of crying, throwing up, and then calming down again.

When he and Lewis were left alone in an interrogation room, a CCTV camera recorded them weeping and hugging. “I’m gonna need therapy,” he said to her. He told a police o∞cer, “I know this fucked me up.… I’m not a child anymore.” The police, whose ranks he had wanted to join his whole life, were now his jailers, and he begged them to delete his social media accounts, as they had possession of his phone.

Eventually, Rittenhouse would be charged with first-degree reckless homicide for slaying Rosenbaum, first-degree intentional homicide for killing Huber, and attempted intentional homicide for shooting Grosskreutz, as well as two counts of recklessly endangering the safety of others and use of a dangerous weapon for almost hitting bystanders, including McGinniss, and one count of possessing a dangerous weapon while underage.

As Rittenhouse was characterized on the left as a murderer and a white supremacist, he became a cause célèbre on the right. A team of high-profile conservative lawyers took his case and portrayed him as a patriot defending small businesses and then himself.

Extensive favorable coverage on conservative media helped raise $2 million for his bail.

And Rittenhouse and his mother opened an online store that peddled “Free Kyle” merchandise, including bikinis for $43.

Other survivors are grappling with wounds that are proving di∞cult to heal.

Grosskreutz’s arm was saved, but his rehab has been grueling. He has redoubled his

activism and is helping set up an organization to train street medics.

Blake was paralyzed from the waist down and is struggling to get healthy; the charge of sexual assault was dropped, and he pleaded guilty to two lesser charges of disorderly conduct.

Meanwhile, the bloodshed in Kenosha increasingly seemed less like an isolated incident than the first in a series of battles, as liberals and conservatives shot, stabbed, beat, and rammed vehicles into one another, at protests from Oregon to Colorado, Washington State to Washington, D.C., resulting in serious injuries and deaths.

Early this January it was announced that no charges would be filed against Sheskey for shooting Blake; investigators concluded that Blake had possessed a knife, which would allow the o∞cer to e≠ectively claim selfdefense at a trial. Despite frigid temperatures in Kenosha, Nick Dennis, who has devoted himself full-time to activism since the events of August, led protests in the streets. “I felt like that [decision] was like a slap in the face,” he said, and it made him feel that the country had “a lot of work to do.”

That same afternoon, Rittenhouse pleaded not guilty to all charges. The trial would be many months and legal maneuvers away.

According to court documents, about 90 minutes after his hearing, he showed up at a bar.

He had changed from a blue collared shirt and black tie, police colors, to a gray T-shirt that read: “FREE AS FUCK.” Prosecutors in his case alleged that security videos show that immediately upon arriving at the bar, he posed for pictures with some men flashing the “okay” hand sign, which has recently been adopted by the white-power movement; Rittenhouse was also serenaded by five men with “Proud of Your Boy,” the anthem of the Proud Boys, an organization the FBI has categorized as an extremist group with ties to white nationalism. (Robert Barnes told me that his client was simply indulging the request for a picture from men he had not known beforehand and disputed the notion that the “okay” hand sign had anything to do with white power.)

The next day, while Congress was tallying the electoral votes to certify the presidential election of Joe Biden, Donald Trump inspired thousands of his supporters to storm the Capitol. According to criminal charges, alleged Proud Boys were part of the mob that overran a perimeter of police, seen in video leading a chant of “Whose house is this? Our house!” Criminal charges also assert it was a

Proud Boy who smashed through a Capitol window with a stolen police shield, letting protesters into the building. The violence that had been confined to America’s streets poured into its most sacred halls. Rittenhouse’s killings increasingly looked like shots in a new phase of our slow-breaking civil war.

10. Death Looms In all the months I spent reporting about the tragedy in Kenosha, I kept searching for any scrap of agreement between the warring sides. Everyone claimed that they were defending the true America, but self-defense against the self-defense of others only seemed to result in ever more intensifying conflict.

The only moment when Americans seemed able to unify was when a human life hung in the balance.

Grosskreutz was kneeling on the pavement, just after he was shot, blood gushing from the crater in his arm, howling for help.

A video journalist who’d been livestreaming the altercation, CJ Halliburton, reached him first. Grosskreutz directed Halliburton to the tourniquet in his medic backpack. Halliburton got the device applied to Grosskreutz’s wounded arm but didn’t know how to correctly tighten it.

Smith, the militiaman, had rushed toward the sound of the gunshots and used his Army training to o≠er instruction on how to correctly torque down the trauma bandage, while Grosskreutz weighed in as well. Balch stood watch against more threats and then put a hand on Grosskreutz’s shoulder, as if trying to comfort him. A picture captured the men huddling around the wounded street medic, striving as a team to keep him alive.

Behind them loomed Death. Not the Grim Reaper, but rather the demonstrator in the skull mask—the one who had been burning American flags in protest at the Civic Center earlier that night. From this man’s neck chains dangled a last shred of the Stars and Stripes. In the moment captured by the photograph, Death reached toward the Americans with a single black-gloved hand.

It was impossible to tell if Death was trying to help or making a claim. For even though Grosskreutz would survive, Death is patient.

In the end, all men and nations are owed unto him.

doug bock clark is a gq correspondent.

Jacqueline Costello provided research assistance.

GQ IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2021 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VOLUME 91, NO. 3. GQ (ISSN 0016-6979) is published monthly (except for combined issues in December/January and June/July) by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Roger Lynch, Chief Executive Officer; Pamela Drucker Mann, Global Chief Revenue Officer & President, U.S. Revenue; Jason Miles, Chief Financial Officer (INTERIM). Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001. POSTMASTER: SEND ALL UAA TO CFS (SEE DMM 507.1.5.2); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address corrections to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE INQUIRIES: Please write to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717, call 800-289-9330, or e-mail subscriptions@gq.com. Please give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks after receipt of order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to GQ Magazine, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For reprints, please e-mail reprints@condenast.com or call Wright’s Media, 877-652-5295. For re-use permissions, please e-mail contentlicensing@condenast.com or call 800-897-8666. Visit us online at www.gq.com. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines on the World Wide Web, visit www.condenastdigital.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, please advise us at P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717 or call 800-289-9330.

GQ IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED ARTWORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ARTWORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS, UNLESS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY GQ IN WRITING. MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND OTHER MATERIALS SUBMITTED MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A SELF-ADDRESSED STAMPED ENVELOPE.

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

9 1

FINAL SHOT A self-portrait by Will Oldham—the cultish musician often known as Bonnie “Prince” Billy. For our story on his new album with Matt Sweeney, see page 52.

ST YLIST, MOBOL A JI DAWODU.

Suit, $6,900,

by Ermenegildo Zegna XXX. His own sunglasses

by Ray-Ban. Jewelry, his own.

S E L F – P O R T R A I T 9 2

G Q . C O M

A P R I L

2 0 2 1

B Y

W I L L

O L D H A M