Ghgthv

WITH

Maisie Williams Bimini Bill Nighy Kim Jones Samuel Ross

Radical Taste and Wild Style in the Kingdom

The Faith and Fire of

BUKAYO SAKA

SPRING/SUMMER 2022

Used by permission of the Jack Kerouac Estate and The Wylie Agency, LLC. dior.com – 020 7172 0172

THE SHAPESHIFTING SAMUEL ROSS

P122

WAY-OUT TRAVEL

P104

Iconic Watches & Lighting

P H OTO G R A P H , A D A M A J A L LO H . ST Y L I N G , A N G E LO M I TA KO S . O N S A K A : S H I RT, N A N U S H K A . T R O U S E RS , D U N H I L L . B O OTS , G I U S E P P E Z A N OT T I . N E C K L A C E , T I F FA N Y & C O. R I N G S , J O H N N Y H OX TO N L D N .

P94

VANGUARDS:

A New Breed of Conglomerate

BRITISH SUMMER TIME FITS

P130

COVER STORY

P43

CONTENTS

GQ STYLE SPRING/SUMMER 2022 P79

WHAT TO WEAR NOW: ALVARO STARRING THE BARRINGTON: ‘INDUSTRY’ BOYS NEXT-GEN ARTISTIC ICON

Mullets Are Back, Back, Back P86

P114

Bukayo Saka

P136

21

MAISIE WILLIAMS

SUMMER’S ESCAPIST ACCESSORIES

BIMINI P162

The Very Vibey Orbit of Bone Soda P204

AT HOME WITH KIM JONES

P214

Bleue Burnham’s Kaleidoscopic Jewellery

P226

M A I S I E W I L L I A M S P H OTO G R A P H , L E E W E I S W E E . ST Y L I N G , K A M R A N R A J P U T. O N W I L L I A M S : D R E S S , C A R O L I N A H E R R E R A . B I M I N I P H OTO G R A P H , M A R C I N K E M P S K I . ST Y L I N G , O L I V E R V O LQ U A R D S E N .

O N B I M I N I : B O D Y S U I T, M O N C L E R . N E C K L A C E , E A R R I N G S , G R I M A . B I L L N I G H Y P H O T O G R A P H , B E N W E L L E R . S T Y L I N G , T O B I A S F R E R I C K S . O N N I G H Y: B L A Z E R , S H I R T, T I E , B U R B E R R Y. G L A S S E S , H I S O W N .

P186

P174

Bill Nighy

P148

P196

COVER STORY

S.S. DALEY: A CLASS ACT

COVER STORY

CONTENTS

GQ STYLE SPRING/SUMMER 2022 COVER STORY

CONTRIBUTORS

Lee Wei Swee

Adama Jalloh

Swiss-born, Paris-based photographer Lee Wei Swee has worked with the likes of Timothée Chalamet, Béatrice Dalle and Kali Uchis. For this issue, he shot Game of Thrones actor Maisie Williams for the cover story and found her to be very down to collaborate. “While some actors and artists sometimes have a complicated relationship with fashion, it was very playful and experimental working on these photos with her. It’s really rare to get as much trust between members of a team. It feels like the good old days are back after all.”

Photographer Adama Jalloh’s work revolves around race and culture as she aims to capture moments of intimacy, honesty and familiarity. It’s something she achieved in her cover story with England and Arsenal footballer Bukayo Saka. “The selected armour pieces, partnered with the sleek tailored styling is what I thought was really cool about the shoot with Bukayo,” she says. “And what was even more great was that I got to try something new with him and saw the way he confidently positioned himself in front of the lens.” Jalloh also took designer Samuel Ross’ portraits for the issue.

Jeremy Atherton Lin

Alexander Fury

Jeremy Atherton Lin is the author of the book Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. His essays have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Yale Review and Fantastic Man. Interviewing Bimini, he realised their retro 1990s vibe rang true to his own past. Gossip about Drag Race brought Jeremy back to his brief stint (around four days) as PA to RuPaul in the “Supermodel” era. “Bimini was exceptionally well-mannered. The famed vegan never failed to say thank you and [in the restaurant where I interviewed them] politely refrained from interrupting or giggling throughout the waiter’s detailed spiel about the Argentinian rump.”

The fashion journalist, critic and collector headed to menswear hot property S.S. Daley’s studio to profile him for the issue. “Visiting London designers is a bit like visiting Narnia – not so much the perpetual winter, but the fact entire universes can be contained within spaces the size of a wardrobe. That was the case with S.S. Daley, where the addition of just one more person (me) was a logistical minefield in his shoebox-sized studio. I didn’t want to lean down in case I damaged something – like that suit he was making for Mick Fleetwood, now revealed to be worn in a promo image for Harry Styles’ brand, Pleasing.”

25

CONTRIBUTORS

Published By Condé Nast

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worldwide editions

Miranda Sawyer Miranda Sawyer has been writing about interesting people for over 30 years for British Vogue, The Guardian and Mixmag. Bill Nighy is one of the most interesting, she says, because he makes it his business to be so. “He considers it good manners to be entertaining, whether he’s discussing books, music, football or clothes. He’s an excellent person to spend time with.” Nighy wore Paraboots to visit the suburbs of his youth. “We spent a good 20 minutes discussing them,” says Sawyer, “and every minute was delightful.”

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Oliver Volquardsen London-based stylist and creative director Oliver Volquardsen has worked for Love, Perfect and 10 magazine, and for this issue, he worked with photographer Marcin Kempski to create the Bimini cover story. “I had such a pleasure working with them and was taken aback by their openness to being collaborative and was in awe at their dedication – from the fitting to the shoot day, there was complete willingness to try and literally work it. It was an absolute pleasure and a huge reflection of Bimini’s talent.”

28

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CALIBER RM 72-01

www.richardmille.com

Sp ri n g / S umme r 20 22

Lette r Fr om th e Ed it or

Welcome To Luxury’s Democratic Era since taking the helm of British GQ and GQ Style late last year: one of the big ideas we’ll be exploring in this new era is what luxury is, and who it is for.

We all know who luxury has been for – it was a cookie-cutter mould that some were born into, and others among us were compelled to shove and contort ourselves to fit in.

But that’s not true anymore. The vibe has shifted.

Our belief is that luxuriousness is not an aesthetic or a demographic or a race or an age or even a price tag. At its best, luxury is a signal to yourself and the world that you move through life in a way that is slower, more deliberate and more aware. Luxury as a state of mind: that is what this new iteration of GQ Style is all about.

And just like there is no homogenous blob of luxury, the worst-kept secret is that there is no singular Britain. There are of course many Britains. The cast of stars, characters and creators that occupy the pages of this magazine have little in common with one another – each of theirs is a different lane of Britain, a different tune of luxury. We want to be the glue that brings them together – which is why we called this issue “United”.

We wanted to reset our expectations with this new incarnation of GQ Style. It is an exploration – we’ve been driven by curiosity. The coverline on the front of this magazine says, “Radical taste and wild style in the Kingdom” and that is what you’ll find. Sometimes taste and style is an urbane 18th-century cottage in Sussex. Other times, a radical collective of creatives in Shoreditch. (Sometimes it is, uh, a very very gorgeous bejewelled Cartier Santos.)

In decades past, a magazine like this would have been a guidebook: one with intricate and inflexible instructions on how a man ought to be. Old luxury.

This new GQ Style is a map: a document of our curiosities that we further sketch with every great discovery we stumble across.

Today, we unfurl that map. Where you choose to go is up to you.

I’VE SAID THIS A BUNCH

Adam Baidawi DEPUTY GLOBAL EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

C O V E R T Y P O G R A P H Y, A R YA M A N M U N I S H .

ON THE COVERS

BUKAYO SAKA Photograph by Adama Jalloh.

Styled by Angelo Mitakos.

Jacket, £2,910, by Louis Vuitton. Chest piece, rented from Costume Studio.

MAISIE WILLIAMS Photograph by Lee Wei Swee. Styled

by Kamran Rajput.

Dress, £2,200, skirt, £1,300, shoes, £950,

by Prada.

BIMINI Photograph by Marcin Kempski.

Styled by Oliver Volquardsen.

Bodysuit, price upon request, by Moncler.

Necklace, earrings, from £35,000, by Grima.

BILL NIGHY Photograph by Ben Weller.

Styled by Tobias Frericks.

Blazer, £1,190,shirt, £450, tie, £220, by Burberry. Glasses, his own.

37

By Teo Van Den Broeke Portraits by Danny Lowe Styled by Angelo Mitakos

S TA R R I N G

THE BOYS OF INDUSTRY

PLUS

THE BEST NEW FASHION GEAR , DESIGN, OBJECTS , WATCHES, AND JEWELLERY Still-lifes by Mitch Payne

43

Sp ri n g / S u m me r 20 22

Harry Lawtey and David Jonsson’s stocks rose with breakout roles in the uncomfortably real baby bankers drama, Industry.

While we wait for season two in late summer, see them in this season’s wildest trends and read all about them on p72.

One killer way to wear separates this spring is in a bright acid hue. Whether you opt for block poison-magenta Canali or degrade candy-pink Louis Vuitton, go bold or go home.

Wh at to We ar N ow

suit £1,380 Canali vintage shirt £350 Relik

ON DAVID JONSSON jacket £1,870 Louis Vuitton

01

SPRING’S SICKEST FITS

ON HARRY LAWTEY

02 Nu-Safari Ralph Lauren Purple Label £3,550

Why should women have all the fun with bags? An Hermès Birkin carried like a briefcase will bring you all manner of kudos. And don’t be afraid of the price tag – you’ll use it forever.

03

A Bag For Life Hermès £13,560

45

Sp ri n g / S u m me r 20 22

Wh at to We ar N ow

04

Disco Blazer jacket (price upon request) Dolce & Gabbana

No one does bold tailoring quite like Dolce & Gabbana.

Inspired by the seasonal illuminations that punctuate the Sicilian seaside, this bejewelled DB number proves the point.

Sp r i n g /S umme r 20 22

Wh at to We ar N ow

06

The Reverso Jaeger-LeCoultre £7,200

05

E-BOY BRACELET

Tiffany & Co. £930

07

Smart Speaker Bang & Olufsen £1,399

Danish company Bang & Olufsen is renowned for high-end tech objet that could just as soon be art pieces as they could speakers. Case in point: this gold-toned portable sound smasher.

51

Sp ri n g /S um me r 20 22

BIG-BOY TROUSERS

08

white top £570 black top £990 shorts (worn under trousers) £1,250 trousers £1,400 belt £520 Prada rings (throughout), his own

Cut so big they’re designed to be worn layered over shorts, these roomy Prada trousers sit not-so-neatly in this season’s baggy pants energy.

Wh at to We ar N ow

If you’re in the market for Mediterranean-infused accessories with a side dose of sun, look no further than Casablanca. Designer Charaf Tajer’s crocheted bags are the best in the biz.

Casablanca at Matches Fashion £310

09

Slick Vase Tina Vlassopulos at The New Craftsmen £900

10 BE ACH BAG Christian Louboutin £775

11

Blue Denim Shoes

53

S p ri n g /S um me r 20 22

BAGGY SHORTS

12

54

Wh at to We ar N ow

jumper £1,300 vest £5,500 shorts £1,300 boots £990 Dior socks £20 Falke rings (throughout), his own

Inspired by the hiking shorts worn by Mitteleuropean climbers, some Dior drawstring nylon knee skimmers will be your new best friends come summer.

YOUR PERFECT CHINO

IC WAISTBA

DD

ET

ST

ND

UG

RT

HI

E IN PO

A

D

AD

EL

HAN

M

and maximum comfort. The Longs are the perfect chino both for weekdays in the office and weekends out and about. Now available in 23 colours. Which one will you choose?

AL

The Longs - MR MARVIS’ perfect chinos are designed for spring and summer. The stretch fabric is light & soft. The partially elastic waistband ensures the ultimate fit

EN

ZIP PO

CK

FR

EE

DELIVE

RY

F I N D YO U R S N O W O N M R M A R V I S . CO. U K

S p r i ng / Summer 2022

W ha t to W ea r No w

13

SMART PEN Cartier £540

14

Car Coat Connolly £5,000

MCM £280

Sp ri n g / S u m me r 20 22

FRILLY BOMBER

16

jacket £2,175 top £635 trousers £1,060 YSL necklace £675 Slim Barrett

If you plan on getting in on this season’s indie sleaze moment, look no further than Saint Laurent. This ruched bomber has ‘Pete Doherty in a k-hole’ written all over it (in a good way).

Wh at to We ar N ow

17

Paisley Shirt Etro £555

19 RING’S A MOOD

Lemaire at Matches Fashion £835

18

Cool Crossbody

British jeweller Stephen Webster has cornered the market in men’s bling with a bullion’s worth of attitude.

This aptly named ‘Vertigo’ ring will feel like wearing an M.C. Escher print on your finger.

Stephen Webster £4,550

61

S p r i n g /S u mm er 2022

20

AR T DECO WALLE T

Goyard £670

Points are back – and no points are pointier than these winklepickers from Saint Laurent.

Team with a skinny black suit and a long chain of Gauloises cigarettes (or even better, a vape).

62

TISSOT SEASTAR 1000 WATER RESISTANCE UP TO 30 BAR (300 M / 1000 FT)

TI S S OT WATC H E S .CO M

S p r i n g /S umme r 20 22

Wh at to Wear N ow

23

Vibe Tee top £930 Fendi

Once you’ve worn a silk Fendi tee, you’ll never want to wear anything else. Oh, and the marbleised pattern will guarantee a pop whether you team it with a hoodie or a suit.

bracelet, his own

67

Sp ri n g /S um me r 20 22

Pick one of the season’s most capacious trench coats to make you feel like a sexy spy all spring long. The best can be found care of Mark Weston at Dunhill.

24

Roomy Trench trench coat £2,095 jacket £1,695 shirt £575 trousers £3,295 Dunhill shoes £350 Grenson necklace £175 Vivienne Westwood Belt £135 Elliot Rhodes

W ha t to W ea r No w

Tissot £1,600

26

EVERYDAY WATCH

Bonadea £1,250

69

Sp r i n g / S u m me r 20 22

Wh at t o We ar N ow

28 Forever Scent Creed Fragrances £240

29

SUN CAP Loro Piana £315

The ultimate in stealth-luxe travel gear, Rimowa’s distinctive grooved aluminium cases are the kind of thing spies might travel with if they weren’t on British government wages.

30

Lightweight Case Rimowa £1,020

70

a classic has never finished saying what it has to say.

Sp ri n g / S u m me r 20 22

The stars of the coke-sex-banking show Industry Harry Lawtey and David Jonsson sniffed and riffed their way through a meteoric first season – and there’s plenty more lined up.

By S a m W o lfs on

Ph oto gr aph s by Da nn y L ow e

Sty led by Ange lo Mit ak os

Complex

Wh at to We ar N ow

ON LAWTEY jacket £2,270 shirt £525 trousers £890 Gucci shoes and necklace, stylist’s own ON JONSSON shirt £295 sweater vest £325 trousers £365 Margaret Howell trainers £80 Adidas bracelet £5,600 Stephen Webster socks £20 Falke Vest (worn underneath shirt) and necklace, stylist’s own

73

Sp ri n g / S u m me r 20 22

Wh at to We ar N ow

as a trickle, then all at once. Three years ago, Harry Lawtey and David Jonsson were barely out of drama school, picking up small roles in ITV dramas and the odd episode of Casualty. Now, the flood of work means they’re both exhausted. success tends to come

Lawtey has just got off a plane from Pittsburgh where

ual relationships. Gus is sleeping with one of his bosses

he’s been shooting a Netflix movie alongside Christian

– an old Eton chum with a wife. Robert has a charged

Bale and Gillian Anderson. I ask how many hours it has

relationship with fellow graduate Yasmin (Marisa

been since he last slept. “Oh man, I don’t even want to

Abela), as well as flirtation with her best friend and

think about it. If I counted, it would be scary.” Jonsson,

roommate Harper (Myha’la Herrold). These four leads

meanwhile, has wrapped as the romantic lead in Rye

navigate ever-changing relationships – as friends, lov-

Lane (director Raine Allen-Miller says he was “like

ers and backstabbing competitors for the limited num-

a young Brando… quiet, respectful, serious about stay-

ber of permanent positions at the firm.

ing in character”) and has been learning the notori-

Arriving as part of a young, all-new cast on set (not

ously punishing southpaw boxing stance for a movie

filmed in London, but the Cardiff suburbs), Jonsson and

with major fighting scenes.

Lawtey felt the parallels between being newbie actors

The show that transformed their lives from job-

and banking graduates. “We were supposed to be playing

bing players to permanently wiped-out leading men

naive, excited, inexperienced young professionals and

is Industry, the HBO/BBC drama that gets under the

that’s exactly what we were!” says Lawtey.

skin of the ruthless world of financial trading. The first

“On the first night of shooting, we all looked at

episode was directed by Lena Dunham and the debut

each other and said, ‘Not getting on is not an option,’”

season managed that rare feat of showing young peo-

Jonsson says. “From that point, we not only got on, but

ple in an authentic and uncringey way. The second,

loved each other and tried to be there for each other.

out in August, is destined for watchlists across the

We had a lot of tough, very open scenes, so to be able

planet, with people hungry for more of the triggeringly

to talk about it with each other really helped.”

accurate drama, which feels like an Anglo-Euphoria in Thomas Pink shirts and ballet flats.

Below: Lawtey and Jonsson with fellow cast members, from left, Myha’la Herrold, Marisa Abela and Nabhaan Rizwan.

Those tough scenes included snorting endless lines of fake cocaine and shooting all-day sex scenes.

Lawtey and Jonsson play Robert Spearing and Gus

Lawtey’s character Robert ends up in something of

Sackey, ambitious graduate traders who juggle the dual

a sub/dom relationship with Yasmin, sending photo-

pressures of high-stakes trading and high-stakes sex-

graphs of himself with her knickers draped on his face

and being told to consume his own semen.

One way they all managed to unwind after an intense

day of filming was by popping round to Lena Dunham’s cottage for a Domino’s. They swapped stories and played GCSE drama games. “We were all sitting on the

carpet playing Zip Zap Boing,” says Lawtey. Then, at

one point, Dunham got a text on her phone. “She was

like, ‘Guys, I don’t want you to think that I’m some cool

Hollywood superstar, but look who’s just text me,’” he recalls. “She had this text from Brad Pitt. Our jaws were

all on the floor, and then she took a photo of us and sent

it to him. He said we looked like a nice film family, but I saw the photo recently and you can see I’m trying to work out how to look for Brad Pitt. I ended up going for

a double thumbs up – something I still regret to this day.”

The critic Naomi Fry, writing in The New Yorker, celebrated the way the characters were products of their socio-economic environment, at times unsympathetically avaristic and unable to show each other

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www.mcmworldwide.com

Sp ri n g / Summe r 20 22

Wh at to We ar N ow

humanity. “In Industry,” Fry wrote, “the right to be frail,

to be human, is gone. Now it’s every cunt for himself.”

Lawtey and Jonsson don’t quite share that view

though. Yes, these are sometimes selfish and wrong-

headed individuals, but the actors were keen to show their humanity. “I was trying to find empathy in the characters,” says Jonsson. “These people are doing this incredible, intricate, high-risk, stressful job.

Learning about them has been an eye-opener.”

Their portrayals have been warmly received by city boys. “I’ve been stopped on the street by more bankers than I could have imagined,” Jonsson says. “They enjoy the fact they’re getting a depiction that feels true. Those

G R O O M I N G ( D AV I D ) BY B I A N C A S I M O N E S C OT T A N D C H A R L I E C U L L E N ( H A R RY ) AT G A RY R E P R E S E N TS U S I N G D I O R B A C KSTA G E F O U N D AT I O N A N D C A P T U R E TOTA L E S U P E R P OT E N T S E R U M .

interactions embody the way we portray them. They’re

very straight-talking – they say and do what they want.”

For both actors, playing monied, ambitious bankers was a world away from their own upbringings. Lawtey

grew up on a military base in Cyprus, and while his character Robert is a schmoozy party boy who takes advantage of the expenses account, Lawtey is far tamer. “It

was a funny role for me to get. My mates found it hilarious because I certainly couldn’t keep up with Robert

on a night out. But I tried to look at what’s at the root

Lawtey is not nearly as uninhibited as Robert – the character he plays in Industry – but explored what was at the root of his behaviour to give an authentic portrayal.

is so different from me. I never grew up in money at all,

so it was really important to me to have some sort of reference. I went to Eton, and saw how these boys carry themselves from the age of 12. I sat in pubs in Chelsea

of that behaviour. Most of us can relate to looking for

all day to hear people talking about their days, and they

acceptance and validation in all the wrong places.”

would talk about it like no one else was having a day.

Gus is the epitome of privilege and confidence,

They are the centre of their world.”

whereas Jonsson is shy and says the excesses por-

Both actors went to drama school, but approach their

trayed in Industry felt otherworldly to him. “I’m quite

craft differently. Lawtey loves the collaborative, social

tame – a bit vanilla. For me, a night out is some nice food

aspect of the process – thriving off new people. “It’s one

and a couple of drinks. I had to get advice from people

of my favourite things about being an actor. It’s such

on set about how to snort a line authentically. They’d

an unbelievably social job and you’ve got to love being

say, ‘Don’t hold the note that way,’ and I’d be going,

around other people to want to do it. On a good day, being

‘Oh, sorry, thank you.’” Jonsson grew up in London’s

on set feels like being at school. You’ve got a bit of work

Docklands, sandwiched between the excesses of

to do, but you’re also just learning from other people,

Canary Wharf and some of the poorest neighbourhoods

mucking around, talking about your favourite biscuit.”

in the city. “It was where most of the wrong’uns came

Jonsson ended up going to drama school after he was

from. I got into trouble at school for fighting and stupid

excluded from school and his exasperated mother yelled,

stuff, but I was just adapting to my jungle.”

“WHAT DO YOU WANNA DO?” Jonsson, even surprising

Transforming into Gus was a real challenge for some-

himself, screamed back, “I WANT TO BE AN ACTOR!”

one who hadn’t been around that kind of privilege. “He

But he’s low-key. “I’ve always been an introvert. My mum

always said that whenever we had family functions,

“I went to Eton, and saw how these boys carry themselves. I sat in pubs in Chelsea to hear people talking about their days.”

- JONSSON

I would make myself sick just at the thought of seeing so many people. But I’ve learned to embrace it.” He’s used

that shyness to get under the skin of his characters. “The danger with acting is that it can become kind of pedestrian: you get into a car in the morning, get served break-

fast, get told where to stand, say your lines and then go

home. I don’t think that’s acting. In Industry, we do more than that, so you sacrifice more of yourself.” 

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Sp r i n g /S umme r 20 22

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ALVARO BARRINGTON’S PAINTINGS

The 39-year-old artist swapped New York for London, where he transposes his history, community and experiences into grand, loving canvases.

TAKE A LIFETIME B y O s m a n C an Yere bak an

Ph o t o gr ap hs b y Je rem ia h Cumb erb at ch

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Sp ri n g / S u m me r 20 22

Left: Barrington’s most recent show, La Vie En Rose, at Ropac’s Salzburg space in 2021.

Below: Barrington’s compelling paintings have electrified the global art scene.

at a streetwear store called OMG in New York’s Soho in the early 2000s. When Prada opened its much-hyped Epicenter boutique right across the street, he immediately bought a pair of its America’s Cup sneakers. Wearing the kicks to church that Sunday – rather than the typical Clarks dress shoes – all eyes were on Barrington.

“I was one of the few kids who was commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan for school, so I would always observe the fashion and culture happening around the city,” the artist says.

All these years on and we’re sitting around the corner from his old boutique job in a corner booth at Balthazar. Fittingly, Barrington is wearing a Prada leather bag today. But much has changed for him over the last two decades: the 39-year-old has moved to London (it “tried me hard at first” and he was ready to leave, “but now I cannot run away from it – I will be here for a while”) and seen himself reach extraordinary new heights, storming the global art scene with his absorbing paintings.

“Unlike the circles I hung out with here, my friends in London are almost all from the art crowd,” he says now. This was the direct outcome of his decision to move to the city in 2015 to get a graduate degree at the Slade School of Fine Art. He and his classmates would spend all their days obsessively discussing paintings, to the point where, “if I were around people who didn’t participate, I would just walk out of the conversation and not feel guilty about it.”

A LVA R O B A R R I N G T O N W O R K E D

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T H I S S I N G L E - M I N D E D N E S S PA I D O F F.

Fresh from the Slade, Barrington’s first solo exhibition was not at a small gallery off the beaten path, but at the Museum of Modern Art’s Queens outpost MoMA PS1, in 2017. The installation, which included colour-bursting phallic paintings, postcards and Post-It notes, was a re-staging of his London studio inside the New York institution. According to art historian and curator Norman Rosenthal, who brought the MoMA PS1 show to Thaddaeus Ropac gallery’s London space, “every generation creates its own artistic icons, and Alvaro might be the next one.”

When the two met at an opening in Barrington’s very first week in London, Rosenthal was impressed by the talkative young painter, but thought the work still needed some cooking. Two years later, Rosenthal “was blown away by the energy in his New York show”.

Barrington was born in Venezuela to a Haitian DJ father and Grenadian seamstress mother. Brooklyn was home for his formative years, where he was collectively raised by his grandmother and aunts after his mother’s passing. This sense of community is echoed in his practice, which he describes as painting while flirting with sculpture, collage, poetry, hip-hop, and even float design. This Renaissance manstyle openness to adjacent genres is not unheard of, but Barrington’s approach to art leads to a welcoming feast for all.

So in demand is he that Barrington is represented by a staggering eight galleries worldwide. In London, blue chips Thaddaeus Ropac and Sadie Coles HQ, as well as the edgier Emalin and Corvi-Mora. In Brazil, Mendes Wood DM deals in his paintings.

In North America, it’s New Yorkers Karma and Nicola Vassell Gallery, then Blum & Poe in Los Angeles. “Constantly being in dialogues with different opinions excites me – if I worked with one dealer, I would find myself in a single conversation,” he says, giving a hearty bro-shake to a fellow artist who shyly approaches our table. “Why be monogamous when I can learn different things from each relationship?”

The galleries seem content with the arrangement, too. After a total of eight solo exhibitions in London, Paris and New York in 2021, Barrington recently opened his newest show, La Vie En Rose, at Ropac’s Salzburg space. The show’s title references Tupac Shakur’s poem The Rose that Grew From Concrete and it delved into the ways we encounter beauty in the midst of the urban struggle. It drew heavily from Barrington’s Black-Caribbean experience in London.

A stand-out piece, Lady Sing the Blues @ Proud Mary Left to Right (2022), showed coloured yarn, hair curlers, drums and a broom woven into stretched hessian sackcloth – a material he typically chooses over canvas as a signifier of undervalued labour and marginalised commerce.

If you’re in London, you might spot Barrington avidly biking across the city or taking the half-hour walk between his

“Different opinions excite me…Why be monogamous when I can learn different things from each relationship?”

Above: Lady Sing the Blues @ Proud Mary Left to Right (2022) Yarn, acrylic on burlap, toilet rolls, plastic hair curlers, broom, 191 x 247 x 29cm.

Left: DMX Lose my Mind (2022) Oil, acrylic, collaged paper on paper in concrete, acrylic and velour frame, 100 x 122 x 8cm.

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Sp ri n g / S u m me r 20 22 Left, below and bottom: Barrington’s 2018 exhibition A Taste of Chocolate at Thaddaeus Ropac’s London Ely House.

“Each painting takes 39 years to make because I couldn’t get to any work without all this experience.”

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Above: They Have They Cant (2021) Hessian on aluminium frame, yarn, spray paint, concrete on cardboard, bandanas overall, 229 x 245 x 56cm.

Shoreditch apartment and Hackney studio.

There, after slipping into a pair of Bottega Veneta Puddle “work boots”, he starts his back-and-forth ritual between painting and sewing, working on whichever one echoes his mood. Figuring out the right harmony took him years, but art eventually became his path for salvation, “just like rappers rapping their pain”.

Weaving is when the painter finds himself ranting about anything from student debt injustice to the pandemic’s toll on vulnerable communities. It connects him with his aunts who taught him how to sew, as well as “my ancestors who picked cotton, and my mom who tuned into Oprah every day at 4pm”.

Painting calms him down.

How long does a painting usually take?

Unlike his other responses, the reaction comes without a long, thoughtful pause: “Each painting takes 39 years to make because I couldn’t get to any work without all this experience.”

Before discovering art, heavy panic attacks would floor Barrington. “I had so much to express that holding them down was haunting.” For him, art today is as much about the community as the meditation: “I don’t want to be in a space where I am not addressing how working-class people or college students are treated.”

While painting is a talent already granted to the rare few, the ability to translate the work into a social force is even more rare.

Barrington is opening a multipurpose art space in Whitechapel this summer, which will coincide with his return to the Notting Hill Carnival with another massive float painting. “I feel more and more integrated into a culture that has been so generous to me here,” he says of London’s Caribbean community. Being such an interdisciplinary artist, he could hardly find a more allencompassing backdrop: “It’s painting, performance, music, storytelling, fabrics – I get so much from Carnival.”

Whether it’s Western art history, 2000s rap, or the painful landscape of social injustice, Barrington’s swift weaving of ample references while disregarding any hierarchy is perhaps the primary reason for the growing fandom around him. For ICA Miami’s artistic director Alex Gartenfeld (who tapped the sculptural mixed-media painting They Have They Cant [2021] for his museum), Barrington is the newest voice in a succession of artists “whose work is very global while examining diaspora conditions in unexpected mediums”, and sees his work as “art history brought to the present”.

Fame has only kept piling up along the way, but for Barrington, recognition is “a tool, not the main thing. Like a wrench or a screwdriver, I have to use it in the right place.” Besides its responsibilities, the wide opening of the art world’s strictly guarded doors leads to fun, as well. Two years ago, he co-organised the humorously titled Artists I Steal From at Ropac in London,

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Sp ri n g / S u mme r 20 22 Clockwise from top left: Date Night Bobby Zoom (F) (2021) Velvet, concrete, wood, mixed media on burlap paper, 81 x 81 x 5.5cm.

Em Reclining Sofa Bed W/ Burberry Pillow (2021) Carpet, concrete, wood, mixed media on burlap paper, 201 x 201 x 8cm.

Jade (New kicks) Yellow/Carpet (2021) Carpet, concrete, wood, mixed media on burlap paper, 186 x 186 x 8cm.

K. B. Just Came Home (2021) Carpet, concrete, wood and mixed media on burlap paper, 143 x 143 x 7.5cm.

“I actually ask my dealers to let the collectors know I might come over and add new elements.”

daily notes, is now used as a reference in a curating course at Goldsmiths University.

In his entry about Cy Twombly, Barrington notes: “If his canvas or paper were a movie, he would have known exactly when silence should lead to a loud bang.”

Barrington loves making notes. He keeps a journal, which he constantly revisits and adjusts. It’s a planner of his next 30 years. “I have all the shows and venues I want to show written down,” he explains.

Prospective themes include a show about his coming into being through his mother’s immigrant experience. Another idea is to explore porn “as a territory to experience my demons, because watching it takes me to places I would not go in daily life”.

The goal for the self-proclaimed “sexually conservative” artist is to collaborate with his sex-worker and porn-actor friends to take a look at the undervalued nature of sexually graphic work.

While he works towards this threedecade script, life remains a never-ending painting that he sews, colours, tightens and alters with a surgeon’s precision and a DJ’s mixing. Whatever he sells, Barrington has no issues with letting his paintings leave his studio, because the departure doesn’t mean that the work is out of sight, out of mind. So if you’re interested in buying one of his pieces, be prepared for an impromptu drop-in from the artist. “I actually ask my dealers to let the collectors know that I might come over and add new elements.” 

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A D D I T I O N A L P H OTO G R A P H S , © A LVA R O B A R R I N GTO N . P H OTO G R A P H S , C H A R L E S D U P R AT. C O U RT E SY T H A D D A E U S R O PA C , LO N D O N , PA R I S , S A L Z B U R G .

along with the gallery’s senior global director and former director of Serpentine Galleries, Julia Peyton-Jones.

The show was a museum-level who’s who of Barrington’s icons: Joseph Beuys and Jackson Pollock across from Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning, and all next to a Barrington painting. At the beginning of their collaboration, PeytonJones gave the artist what she calls “the rule of the game”, and asked him to send her a note once a day about his fascination for one artist from the show.

“Alvaro has an immense curiosity and appetite about other artists,” she says.

“All artists steal, as we know well, but what makes him unique is his ability to learn something specific from each.” The catalogue, which is a collection of those

A rt

lyleandscott.com

By Finlay Renwick

Inside the very funny, very fashionable return of a grooming icon.

Photographs by Danny Lowe Styled by Angelo Mitakos

AGAIN 86

SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS.

M AT T I A “Getting a mullet was a necessary step to becoming the person I’m proud to be today. I don’t see it as a haircut, but a true personification of my essence. I was inspired by Prince’s look in the 1984 performance of Purple Rain. Use some sea salt spray after washing your mullet to give it some volume and make the curls look more defined.”

Sp ri n g / S u mme r 20 22

SIDDH “I got a mullet because I think it accentuates my neck.

I like to have a little length to play with at the back so I can do different hairstyles.

I always put a little wax in to give it a bit of body. I also love to give the mullet some light curls with my hair straightener – it creates a really nice, soft ‘anime boy’ look.”

88

G roo mi ng

a now sadly out-of-print title from 1999, the author Barney Hoskyns employs myriad terms to describe having that bit of extra follicle kick on the back of your head. There’s the Kentucky waterfall; the Camero cut; the beaver paddle; the neck warmer; business in the front, party in the back and, who can forget, the Tennessee top hat.

“As a trend, this has been bubbling around for a while now,” says barber and founder of Joe and Co, Joe Mills. “Through the first lockdown we all became obsessed with Netflix’s Tiger King and with salons and barbershops often being closed over the last 18 months, growing your hair out was less of a problem. After this, the whole idea of mullets and texture really took hold. What’s most interesting is that it suits most hair types and face shapes. As long as you have some length at the back, you’re good to go.”

P H OTO G R A P H O F A LTO N , C H R I S T I A N S O R A . M O D E L S , M AT T I A C I L U R Z O @ A M C K , S I D D H A R TA VA N D E R S L U I S @ S U PA . G R O O M I N G BY C H A R L I E C U L L E N AT G A R Y R E P R E S E N T S U S I N G D I O R B A C K S TA G E F O U N D AT I O N A N D C A P T U R E TOTA L E S U P E R P OT E N T S E R U M .

IN THE BO OK THE MULLET: HAIRST YLE OF THE GODS,

Model Alton Mason accessorises his mullet with Swarovski jewels.

While it might be considered an act of trendy rebel-

lion and winking irony in urban centres like London and New York, the mullet has never gone out of

style in certain parts of the Canadian and American

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heartland. One of the more intriguing grooming subcultures around is the concept of ‘hockey hair’,

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in which ice-hockey players in places such as Minnesota and Manitoba let their mullets grow out, purportedly because the style flows and

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flutters nicely as a skater beams across the ice.

One particularly hilarious and gratifying series of YouTube videos, the Citizen Kane of mullet content, started in 2011 and is titled, simply: 2011 Minnesota

High School Hockey Tournament – All Hockey Hair

Another location where the mullet has never left

Team. It was conceived and filmed by a mullet aficio-

the scalp of the zeitgeist is Australia, where it is

nado named John King of White Bear Lake, Minnesota,

rocked loud and proud. A couple of years ago, Craig

who noticed the incredible and enviable array of silky

Gibson, a Glaswegian photographer based in London,

flows gliding across the ice and decided to rank the

noticed an event called Mulletfest on social media, an

best manes on the rink in a deadpan and descriptive

annual mullet pageant that takes place in Kurri Kurri,

Midwestern accent. King, who stopped producing the

in New South Wales. Intrigued, Gibson travelled to

annual videos in 2019, calling it his ‘Grand Flownale’,

Kurri Kurri to capture the festival and its participants

declared in a New Yorker article on the phenomenon

in all of their diverse and elongated glory. “It seemed

that the existence of hockey hair “makes me proud to

like no one took themselves too seriously, and they

be a Minnesotan.”

didn’t,” says Gibson of the project and accompanying

zine, which he titled Kentucky Waterfalls. “Everyone embraced it. I liked the idea of shooting something more editorial and beauty based – the documentary

side of it had been pretty much covered, but I thought there was a style element that hadn’t been done.

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P H O T O G R A P H S , I S A B E L L A E L O R D I , G E T T Y, M A R C U S C O O P E R C R E AT I V E B Y C AT T U R A P R O D U C T I O N , F E D E R I C O M O R G A N T I N I , G U C C I . T R O Y E P H O T O G R A P H , M A R C U S C O O P E R , G R O O M I N G , C H A R L I E L E M I N D U .

S p r i n g /S umme r 20 22

G roo mi ng

“I learned that in Australia, the mullet may be more

Mullets have also enjoyed a flowing resurgence on

popular and worn more regularly, but it is still just

Europe’s major runways. Looking across the recent

as polarising as it is everywhere else,” adds Gibson.

spring/summer and autumn/winter shows, there

“Some are hated by parents and loved by partners and

were bleached and sculpted trestles and jagged

vice versa. Some are just young siblings copying their

drape cuts at brands such as Rick Owens, Casablanca

older siblings. Some locals grow theirs specifically

and, of course, Balenciaga, as well as Dries Van

for the festival and others grow theirs to fly halfway

Noten, Loewe, Craig Green, and more than one mullet

around the world and show it off. Either way, I learned

on the much-hyped Autumn/Winter 2022 Kenzo show

that they are passionate about them.”

– Nigo’s first foray as the brand’s artistic director.

Despite bedding in with the movement, Gibson

“I do think the mullet is for all,” says award-winning

wasn’t tempted to let it flow himself. “The beauty of

hairstylist Tariq Howes, who has years of experience

the mullet is that it’s completely subjective – each one

working with diverse hair types. “I would like to see

can be judged on its own merit. Although personally,

it done more often with different hair textures – for

I don’t think I could ever grow one. Mullets, for me,

example, Afro hair. I have seen and cut a few mul-

are a spectator sport.”

lets with Afro hair, and obviously it comes off slightly

All the young dudes rocked the mullet.

Clockwise from right: David Bowie, Lionel Richie, a model at Gucci AW22, Troye Sivan, George Michael and Jacob Elordi.

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Sp ri n g / S u mme r 20 22

G roo mi ng

“You have to be able to carry it off, and wear it with pride.”

Joe Mills Locks of the nonconformists.

Clockwise from top: Vivienne Westwood SS22, Bethany Williams AW22, Billy Idol and Prince.

different, but that’s what makes it cool. The way you

can shape and manipulate different hair textures is always interesting, and the mullet is one of the perfect styles to show this off.”

“The idea of what a mullet is for me is less 1980s throwback and more about expression,” adds Mills.

“It’s about length at the back and softness, and I personally like the fact that there are no real rules,

much length you have. It’s a statement haircut.” He continues, “You have to be able to carry it off, and wear it with pride.”

The return of the mullet isn’t that surprising.

It is a haircut that takes confidence and zest to pull off. Having been stuck inside for months and months, it’s only natural that those with the gumption to pull one off would want to give it a try – use it or lose it. One thing that the Dalston cool

kids, suburban Minnesota teenagers on ice, New York club goers and Aussie skullet die-hards have in

common is that they own the style. A half-hearted mullet is impossible; an oxymoron. Plus, they’re a heap of fun, which is something you can’t say about a short back and sides.  F I N L AY R E N W I C K I S A S T Y L E J O U R N A L I S T.

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How Vanguards – the family business behind sustainable luxury standard bearers Nanushka, Sunnei and Aeron – built a radical new breed of fashion conglomerate.

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Sp ri n g / S u m me r 20 22

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P O I N T O F V I E W, fashion is not a normal business,” says Peter Baldaszti, the co-founder and CEO of Budapest-born luxury fashion brand Nanushka – and he should know.

It’s not an overstatement to say that there has never been a fashion story quite like Nanushka. Founded by London College of Fashion graduate Sandra Sandor in 2006, the brand, which specialises in syrupy tailoring in muted hues and slouchy separates, had grown to annual sales of circa £1.34 million in 2016, but was reliant on financial help from family and friends.

That same year, Baldaszti, Sandor’s boyfriend of three years, saw the potential to turn Nanushka into a global brand with true fashion cut-through and brought in investment via Agoston Gubicza of GB & Partners Investment Management, whose funds include the Export-Import Bank backed by the Hungarian government. Together, the duo – who describe Nanushka, now worn by everyone from Justin Bieber to Jeremy Strong, as a “family business” – helped to engineer a turnaround which resulted in a 30-fold increase in sales in just three years.

Emboldened by the success of Nanushka, in 2020, Baldaszti and Gubicza founded Vanguards, a burgeoning fashion group consisting of their flagship brand Nanushka, Aeron (another Budapest-based brand), and Milan’s Sunnei. The group represents a new kind of luxury fashion conglomerate – smaller and nimbler than the behemoths, values-driven, and ruthlessly connected to the digital pulse of the fashion zeitgeist.

Case in point, just as this issue of GQ Style went to print, the Russian invasion of Ukraine took place before the eyes of a horrified world. Vanguards acted swiftly to cut all commercial ties with Nanushka’s Russian wholesale partners, a move which – at the time of writing – few other luxury brands have matched, and one which will cost the group a significant amount of money. Baldaszti is keen to stress the company’s respect for its Russian partners: “As a brand, with our values and our audience in mind, we feel that we should not do business with Russia until things are resolved. It’s not about punishing the Russian people – no one is going to be harmed by not selling luxury products. We have the utmost respect for our Russian partners. But we are a company composed of people and we are simply doing our duty and acting out of our deepest sympathies for the citizens of Ukraine.”

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Hungary, where the brand is headquartered, shares a border with Ukraine and expects up to 600,000 refugees as a result of the war. Nanushka has partnered with the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta to provide food, accommodation, clothing and transport to refugees.

“The first action was to use the company’s infrastructure and communications platform to support Ukraninan refugees in any way we can,” says Baldaszti.

This kind of values-based (rather than revenue-based) decision making wouldn’t be possible if not for the fact that the business is so sharply honed. “How do you do financial planning? How do you do store openings? How do you execute supply chain projects and scale up the business? We have a growing and extremely strong digital team in place. That’s really a pillar of the company, so we can support our brands in e-commerce, which can be a very complex business,” says Baldaszti, who insists that Vanguards will never interfere with the creative decisions of its acquisitions. The common thread running through the companies they invest in is ‘sustainability’ – a vague and tricky term, but which in Nanushka’s case means sweatshop-free manufacturing based in Hungary and the use of recycled fabrics and futuristic vegan leather.

Investing in fashion, and in turn making a profit, is notoriously tricky. History is littered with examples of once-glittering businesses gone bust. Most of them die after an acrimonious falling-out between the creative heads and money men. Take Band of Outsiders, a fashion world favourite known for its brash take on preppy classics, founded by Scott Sternberg. Despite winning two CFDAs, a bad investment forced the brand to go into bankruptcy in 2015.

“When you buy a mine, the market will deliver you the expected returns and profits.

Fashion is not so scientific.”

Sternberg’s second brand, Entireworld, whose elevated sweatpants and shirts were a cult hit during the pandemic, closed in 2021 after a disagreement over the terms of an investment. Baldaszti believes he knows why it so often goes wrong.

“If you are a financial investor from, say, venture capital or private equity, you have specific experience in investing in certain industries which are very scientific – very numbers-driven. If you invest in real estate, and you understand what the yield is, you know what you can make on the building, and most likely that building will deliver near to your expectations. It’s the same when you buy a mine: the market will deliver you the expected returns and profits. But fashion is not so scientific,” he says via a video conference from Vanguards’ HQ. There used to be a set formula for how a fledgling brand or designer might achieve success. A stint at one of the world’s major art or fashion schools, a well-received graduate collection and a design award, a collaboration or two with a high street retailer, followed by a creative directorship at a luxury brand et voilà – if you were extremely lucky – one of the big luxury conglomerates would invest in your namesake label. The gatekeepers to this system – the fashion editors, the course directors, the store buyers, the stylists and the executives at luxury groups – had also often been in the business for many years, usually drawn from a handful of the same business schools, fashion colleges and publishing houses. Barring some notable exceptions, this has been the dominant path for every new brand and fresh design talent since at least the early 1990s.

But change is afoot: a new generation of digital-first independents is now emerging outside of the major fashion capitals of Paris, London, Milan and New York, scaling globally significant businesses and operating if not totally outside of the traditional fashion system, then at least adjacent to it. Put simply: there is now more to life for a young fledgling designer or up-and-coming brand than selling your soul in a Game of Thrones-style environment dominated by the big three luxury kingdoms of Kering, LVMH and Richemont.

V an gu ard s

A block away from the Danube river, Nanushka’s headquarters have the same subdued opulence as its runways.

REFINEMENT ENGINEERED

DSautomobiles.co.uk FUEL CONSUMPTION AND CO2 FIGURES FOR DS 4: MPG L/100KM: COMBINED 61.2/4.6 TO 38.0/7.4, CO2 EMISSIONS: 121 - 168 G/KM. – Fuel consumption figures are determined according to the WLTP test cycle and are as a result of manufacturer’s tests in accordance with EU legislation. Figures are intended for comparability purposes only. The fuel consumption you achieve under real life driving conditions and CO2 produced will depend upon a number of factors, including the accessories fitted after registration, variations in driving styles, weather conditions and vehicle load. Model shown for illustration purposes.

Va ngu ar ds

From left: Some key looks from the Nanushka SS22 Collection.

came mainly from boutiques in co-founder and creative director Sandra Sandor’s native Hungary (you’ll remember her annual sales of circa £1.34 million). “We were very close to closing down the business twice,” she says of the early days before Baldaszti saw the global potential of Nanushka.

“It was tough but I somehow knew that we would pull through.” It was Baldaszti who helped to bring Agoston Gubicza of GB & Partners Investment Management on board, and with the new investment in place, Baldaszti and Sandor swiftly built an in-house sales team and ramped up the brand’s e-commerce operation with the ultimate aim of transitioning the brand into brick-and-mortar retail. “I like the harmonious collaboration between Sandra, the creative, and Peter, the business mind,” says Gubicza over email. “We all agreed on the common aim to make a fast extension from being mainly digital to entering the traditional luxury fashion segment through physical retail.”

PHOTOGR APHS: PIERRE-ANGE CARLOT TI.

I N 2 0 1 6 , N A N U S H K A’ S SA L E S

The fashion business can sometimes be compared to surfing: brands need to spot waves before they break, and ride them with perfect timing. In 2016, the tsunami that hit fashion was e-commerce driven by Instagram marketing: “Nanushka was one of the first to use influencers and social media in a strategic way,” says Baldaszti.

“I’m not saying we were the first – but we were among the pioneers.”

In 2020, Nanushka registered sales of close to £30 million, a 15 per cent increase from 2019 – despite the pandemic. The brand is on course to do over £40 million in net sales this year, which Baldaszti believes represents only 10 per cent of the brand’s total potential. Today, the label is sold by 500 retailers in 50 countries, while operating a global e-commerce operation and flagship stores in London’s Bruton Place, Wooster Street in Manhattan, and in Budapest. The brand’s modern values and sleek design codes have found fans in a range of A-listers as diverse as Strong and Bieber, but also the Duchess of Sussex, Rihanna, Timothée Chalamet and Paul Mescal, who are regularly spotted wearing the brand’s lo-fi luxury pieces.

So how did they do it? Sandor, who is a graduate of the London College of Fashion, wrote her university thesis on the Bauhaus, and says that Nanushka is informed by a “less is more” ethos of simplicity and

casual elegance, using, wherever possible, sustainable materials and manufacturing processes, often in Hungary. This means the brand is able to offer a high level of quality at a price far lower than comparable products from competitors. The brand is now known for knits made from recycled cashmere at £300, the aforementioned slouchy tailoring, and most of all, trousers, shirts, and jackets made from butter-soft vegan leather.

A puffer jacket for men made of this material, the quality of which is comparable to the most exclusive luxury brands, costs around £500 – a relative bargain.

This reimagining of sustainable luxury at an affordable price point is due in no small part to Sandor’s unerring eye. It was a swatch of vegan leather at a trade fair that allowed Nanushka to ride the sustainability wave. With a fondle-friendly handle that drapes and hangs off the body with all the richness of the real thing, Nanushka’s vegan leather products have to be worn and touched to be understood. But there’s one big problem: vegan leather is made out of plastic. “Vegan leather is a tricky one,” says Sandor. “There’s always been a debate about vegan leather and its impact on the environment. The pros and cons of it are a bit of a grey area.” She cites the Kering Group’s Environmental Profit and Loss audit of its manufacturing activities, which says the environmental impact of vegan leather is up to a third lower than real leather. She admits sustainability is an ongoing process.

For the past two years, the brand has been developing its own patented vegan leather made from recycled materials, one which requires far less water for its manufacture. Despite supply chain challenges during lockdown, the brand was able to increase its sustainable product offering by six per cent to a total of 56 per cent, with the aim of offering exclusively sustainable products by 2025. This includes the exclusive use of organic cotton, GRScertified polyester and FSC-certified viscose in its collections. “I think design has a huge role to play,” says Sandor.

“Instead of just thinking about the aesthetic qualities, we need to consider longevity, durability and versatility so that you can get the most out of a garment.”

“The fashion business is like surfing: spot waves before they break, and ride with timing.”

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In February 2022, the group made a decisive appointment to its senior leadership team, hiring former Highsnobiety editorial director Christopher Morency to lead global brand strategy at the group and identify new acquisitions. In his new role, Morency is laser-focused on businesses that combine a consistent creative point of view with a strong commercial ethos – as well as brands that orbit a community.

“When I was at Highsnobiety, I was always looking at the community aspect. Who’s around the brand, right? Who works at the brand? Who do they collaborate with?

Who do they hang out with on weekends?

That has become so important. Lots of luxury brands talk about their ‘community’ when all they actually have are customers.”

The business is looking around the corner of fashion and culture to see its ultimate destination. “In five years, I see ourselves as a group of at least 10 brands at various

scales, ranging from €10 million (£8 million) per year for the younger companies and up to the €100 million (£80 million) threshold for the larger companies,” says Baldaszti. “We’ll have a diverse portfolio of brands with very strong cultural relevance and a group that is perceived as the go-to place if you want to build a successful brand in the new luxury space.”

For a promising young brand or designer with global ambitions, the Vanguards approach represents a kinder way of doing business: one that clears a path for creativity and sustainability to lead in a cutthroat marketplace dominated by whalesized conglomerates.

Morency envisions a world where brands are not just companies, but grassroots movements of like-minded people who play and create together. This has always happened within streetwear in an informal and organic way – think back to the Stüssy Tribe, a collective of artists, musicians and designers who helped to create the industry’s first buzzy fashion collaborations.

Today, the idea of community collaboration and feedback can be applied to almost any successful start-up fashion brand. “Let’s say that your customer is an artist, a chef, or a florist,” says Morency. “How does that fit with our brand? Is that something that we want to align ourselves with? And if so, how can we get back to what they do, so that we both win?” he continues. “It’s this mindset shift: how can we both win?” A L F R E D TO N G I S A G Q C O N T R I B U TO R .

Top: A luxurious look from the Nanushka SS22 Collection.

Above: Nanushka CEO and co-founder Peter Baldaszti.

Left: Vanguards chief brand officer Christopher Morency.

Right: L’art pour l’art at the Hungary HQ.

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P H OTO G R A P H S : P I E R R E - A N G E C A R LOT T I , J O N AT H A N D A N I E L P RYC E / G A R C O N J O N .C O M .

on the belief that very few private equity and venture capital investors are interested in fashion companies growing within the range of £500,000 to, say, £50 million. This focus on smaller companies creates a less mercenary approach to growth and scale – one in which hard infrastructure and commercial functions operate more harmoniously with the creative aspects. “It’s never easy, especially for creative people, to work with investors. It’s like two different universes,” says Baldaszti. “Fashion is not as scientific as other investments because it is 50 per cent art and magic – the untouchable – and 50 per cent business. Why is something working or not working? Can you explain that to me through the numbers? Probably not, right? My job is to explain to investors that you have to find an ideal balance of business acumen and creative talent.

One cannot succeed without the other.”

VANGUARDS WAS FOUNDED

Va ng u ar ds

Great design never tasted so good.

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Levelling up a step with Louboutin Balancing innovative design structures with playful details of modernity, the luxury French house’s latest footwear collection paves the way for a major style upgrade this summer.

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GQ ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE

Coolito Sun Bistro Raffia Slipper £675 Louis Junior Bistro Raffia Trainer £725 Surf Flat Sandals £350 all by Christian Louboutin

with a change in style.

Longer days and warmer weather trigger a natural urge for us to elevate our wardrobes, shaping silhouettes with lighter pieces in order to put our best foot forward through the season. The driving ingredient for this success – in a literal sense – comes from the shoe of choice, and no brand ensures an eye-catching step more than Christian Louboutin.

With its iconic rich red-lacquered sole, the French house excels in providing luxuriously crafted designs which immediately enhance one’s sense of elegance on wear. Louboutin’s designs are not limited to classic textures. Rather, they serve as a solid starting point, branching out to a multitude of materials and styles which balance innovative shoe structures with playful colourways to encapsulate modernity. Case in point to prove that blend: the latest men’s collection.

Given the French status of the brand, the starting point was savoir faire (translating to “know-how” for us English folk). This age-old concept promises the highest sense of assuredness in establishing the block of a piece, meaning that you can count on Louboutin’s fabrication to hold up and comfortably accommodate your stride for years on end. But summer is the moment most on our minds right now, and thanks to these new styles, we’re going to parade through the season with power and pizzazz.

Key pieces include a woven raffia design, inspired by the bistro furniture of Paris, which covers casual trainers and formal slippers alike. Ooh la la. In other areas of the collection, an opulent floral jacquard clads the other styles for day, and there’s also a series of lightweight surf sandals framed around an athletic aesthetic. All in all, something playful and stylish for every kind of man. Combining comfortable craftsmanship with a colourful sense of character, this collection is proof that Louboutin remains in a league of its own – and it’s a must for any excursion in the days ahead.

S U M M E R I S SY N O N Y M O US

D I S C O V E R T H E F U L L C O L L E C T I O N AT E U.C H R I ST I A N LO U B O U T I N .C O M

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De si gn

Whether you’re looking to switch on or clock off, these veritable artworks all boast clean lines, striking colourways and flawless design.

By S tu ar t Brumf it t & Mi ke Ch r isten se n Phot og rap hs by Bake r & E va ns Sty led by An ge lo Mita ko s

Sp ri n g / S u m me r 20 22 (opening pages, left)

RICHARD MILLE RM 72-01 Many watchmakers claim to be purveyors of both tradition and modernity, but few deliver the detail that Richard Mille does.

The RM 72-01 captures that masterful wizardry in all its skeletonised glory.

RM 72-01 Automatic Lifestyle Flyback Chronograph (price upon request) Richard Mille

CHIARA TABLE LAMP

BY MARIO BELLINI FOR FLOS Mario Bellini’s space-age 1960s wing-shade lamps are laser cut from a single sheet of steel. Reissued by Flos in 2020, they’ve fast reasserted themselves as one of the most modern ways to make a room glow. £325 from Aram Store (opening pages, right)

PATEK PHILIPPE AQUANAUT CHRONOGRAPH Very much a fresh new squeeze for Patek lovers, the Aquanaut Chronograph 5968A-001 might not be memorable by name, but by nature it is a fine piece of sporty-looking wristwear that is a firm favourite to orange-loving footballers Jesse Lingard and Frank Lampard.

Aquanaut Chronograph 5968A-001 £40,990 Patek Philippe

NESSO TABLE LAMP

BY GIANCARLO MATTIOLI AND GRUPPO ARCHITETTI URBANISTI CITTÀ NUOVA FOR ARTEMIDE Detach this injectionmoulded thermoplastic lamp from its 1960s context and it feels fresh again.

A permanent part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art collections, this is a certified classic, in popping orange or clean white. £293 from Aram Store

HUBLOT BIG BANG UNICO Quite rightly, there’s nothing quiet about this Big Bang.

But thanks to Hublot’s ultra lightweight titanium, it is a friend to wrists everywhere.

Big Bang Unico Titanium Rainbow £58,400 Hublot

CUBE LIGHT BY MATHIAS SCHIFFERDECKER FOR TECNOLUMEN Play away with Mathias Schifferdecker’s Cube Lamp, whose handfinished, bevel-edged glass blocks can be stacked in endless ways. It’s inspired by Rubik’s cube and Bauhaus geometric principles, but is bang up to date. £678 from Aram Store

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ROLEX SUBMARINER DATE The OG diver is a crowd favourite and a watch you might actually go diving with, remaining true to the hallmarks of its 1953 original. Celebrating the big 7-0 next year, here’s hoping for plenty more of this blue-as-thedeep-sea colourway.

Submariner Date £11,800 Rolex

DIPPING LIGHT BY JORDI CANUDAS FOR MARSET This light was an immediate interiors success, catching the eye with its seductive gradients. But now it’s that bit better: cable-free and fully portable, so you can walk around with it like a modern-day candle. £277 from Aram Store

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ZENITH DEFY SKYLINE Since the release of its Chronomaster Sport last year, there’s been a bit of a song and dance around every new Zenith release. A streamlined future classic for everyday wear, the Defy Skyline only adds to the narrative.

Defy Skyline £7,100 Zenith

WAGENFELD WG 27 TABLE LAMP

BY WILHELM WAGENFELD FOR TECNOLUMEN Pushing 100 years old, these lamps by Wilhelm Wagenfeld were a spinoff of his Bauhaus table lamps. The fresh cone shade, chrome stem and green glass base feel as contemporary today as they did in the 1930s. £499 from Aram Store

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TUDOR BLACK BAY CERAMIC Tudor’s Black Bay has become a brand within a brand, and it simply keeps on finding new – and in this ceramic variant, drool-worthy – ways to present itself.

Black Bay Ceramic £3,730 Tudor Tudor

SNOOPY LAMP

BY ACHILLE CASTIGLIONI FOR FLOS Few interior design icons are inspired by cartoons, but the 1967 Snoopy lamp is firmly based on Charles M Schulz’s animated dog. The slanted white and grey marble base is topped by a choice of black, green and orange metal-enamel shades. £790 from Aram Store

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CARTIER SANTOS DE CARTIER Adding 206 brilliant-cut diamonds to the original pilot’s watch is a very Cartier move – especially when they are beset in a yellow-gold bezel on this particular Santos de Cartier moment. High horology jewellery at its most alluring, and yet you can still call it subtle.

Santos de Cartier £13,400 Cartier

Foster+Partners created these EVA glass cylinder up-lights to generate a throwback candlelit glow. But the design is all-out contemporary with a dimmer base that turns with the same satisfying motion as the dial on a gold bullion safe. £2,344 from Aram Store

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L I G H T I N G C O N S U LTA N T : T I N O S E U B E R T.

EVA TABLE LAMP BY FOSTER+ PARTNERS FOR LUMINA

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ULYSSE NARDIN BLAST TOURBILLON Angular doesn’t cut it but the Blast Tourbillon is a brooding, hypermasculine 45mm watch that exudes everything daring and fresh about the new wave of creative geniuses dictating the watch world today.

Patrick Pruniaux continues to surprise and enthral.

Blast Tourbillon £43,600 Ulysse Nardin

TIZIO LAMP BY RICHARD SAPPER FOR ARTEMIDE Richard Sapper’s lamp reeks of the 1980s yuppie heyday.

Its sleek, black minimalism hit peak popularity during the Wall Street boom, but it was actually designed in 1971.

After years in the design doghouse, this revolutionary light is ready to shine again. £466 from Aram Store

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De si gn LAMPS LEFT TO RIGHT: Chiara table lamp by Mario Bellini for Flos, Nesso table lamp by Giancarlo Mattioli and Gruppo Architetti Urbanisti Città Nuova for Artemide, Cube light by Mathias Schifferdecker for Tecnolumen, Tizio lamp by Richard Sapper for Artemide, Wagenfeld WG 27 table lamp by Wilhelm Wagenfeld for Tecnolumen, Dipping light by Jordi Canudas for Marset, EVA table lamp

by Foster+Partners for Lumina, Snoopy lamp by Achille Castiglioni for Flos.

See previous pages for prices and stockists.

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Like model, photographer and emerging artist Ralf Hersborg, the biggest fits of the season can do a bit of everything.

By Amy Francombe Photographs by Gregory John Styled by Angelo Mitakos

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Ralf Hersborg is fast becoming a face

Cotton, which draws parallels between contemporary

OPENING PAGE

of fashion’s alt-vanguard. The 22-year-

photography and magic. “From the initial viewing,

old half-Filipino, half-Danish Londoner

it’s hard to pinpoint how much was done by the

has popped up in campaigns for Dior, Balenciaga

camera and how much at the editing stage,” says

and Gucci, and like the rest of the great new youth-

Hersborg. To him, the photograph “functions like

trousers £1,680 shoes £415 Moschino

quake, he sees every visit to a set as a wild creative

a successful magic trick”.

collaboration. “There’s an aura that everyone needs

But while Hersborg’s photography explores the

to tap into, and when you do, everyone just wants

surreal, his daily fits err on the discreet. “I’ve never

to go for the weirder, more abrasive shit,” says

been one to dress really out-there,” he says, “but

Hersborg. “If the whole team is hyped and loaded up

it’s the subtleties that you can adopt alongside your

on adrenaline, then it’s really exciting.”

uniform that are more interesting, because it lets

Despite his early fashion scalps, Hersborg isn’t

your idiosyncrasies come out.” Right now, his go-to is

a full-time model – he’s also studying photography

all-black Nike Air Max 95s, “a solid pair of jeans” and

and fine arts at Camberwell College of Arts. And while

a “tight, cute T-shirt” (in keeping with the archetypal

he looks incredible in front of the camera, his bigger

stripped-down, off-duty male model dress code).

fascination lies behind it. “We see so many images

But he supplements all that with purchases from

every day, completely subconsciously, so I’m inter-

weird corners of the internet like kitsch retailer

ested in the idea of the learned visual lexicon,” he says,

Wish, eBay and amateur Instagram brands.

alluding to the split-second, reflexive process where

The big brand he can’t get enough of though is

we take on a photo’s meaning and file it away. “I like

Balenciaga. “I like the brand’s narrative shift from

that my photos can be read differently by different peo-

‘sincerity in irony’ to a pessimistic and almost apoc-

ple – highlighting how our visual lexicon is influenced

alyptic corporate embrace of social homogeneity,”

by age, culture and gender. Some people could read

says Hersborg. “They’re self-aware of fashion’s current

my images as something ethereal and idyllic, whereas

position as a digital experience and fully embrace the

others could read them as more violent.”

exploration of hyper-reality, whilst still bringing home

Hersborg is drawn to photography that spark emo-

the bacon to their investors.”

tion – anything from seeing his grandma uploading

You can imagine him rocking a Demna creation

amateur photos from the Philippines to dark, web-

head to toe at one of the 1990s rave-inspired parties

birthed, “cursed” imagery (wacky JPEGs that are

he hosts – “150bpm is the best way to describe it” – in

bizarre, disturbing or poor quality). He reinterprets

nefarious locations with a group of art school mates.

these visuals into his own work, creating pieces that

The nameless nights are a secret, except to a close

are “so pregnant with a story, but you can’t pick where

circle who “take their pleasure seriously and their ear-

it comes from.”

drums much less so”. They emerged from “a bubble

His works are like “adverts that fail to advertise”.

of people having a strong desire for collectivity and

His favourite is a shot of a man in a motorbike hel-

wanting further hedonism,” he says. You probably

met performing card tricks. The weird, wonky image

won’t be able to track one down, but if you do, expect

references an essay by curator and writer Charlotte

“fog, strobes, speed and skin”. 

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earring £250 Swarovski top, stylist’s own OPPOSITE

shirt £229 Tiger of Sweden vintage top Gianni Versace trousers £990 Dior necklace £610 Alighieri pink ring £395 multicolour ring £550 silver ring £325 Bleue Burnham

Fas hi on

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jacket £265 trousers £225 Fiorucci top £225 Maximilian at Matches Fashion key ring (around belt loop) £55 Ettinger OPPOSITE

jacket £2,630 shirt £800 trousers £1,180 bow tie £615 Gucci earring £140 Vivienne Westwood earring £3,700 Tiffany & Co ring £395 Bleue Burnham

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M O D E L , R A L F AT A N T I - A G E N C Y. G R O O M I N G , N O H E L I A R E Y E S U S I N G G L O S S I E R A N D L’ O R É A L P R O F E S S I O N N E L . P H O T O G R A P H Y A S S I S TA N T S , R O S I E T O N K I N A N D M A G D A L E N A F I E D L E R O V Á . S T Y L I S T ’ S A S S I S TA N T, K AT I E S M I T H - M A R R I O T T.

Fas hi on

OPPOSITE

shirt £1,390 t-shirt £1,190 Hermès

shorts £2,750 Fendi

shoes £330 Camperlab

silver necklace £225 Alighieri

scarf (around waist) £720 Dior

socks £13 Falke

blue necklace, stylist’s own

THIS PAGE

tracksuit top £445 tracksuit bottoms £445 Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY

shoes £200 GCDS

t ring £3,450 band ring £5,600 Tiffany & Co.

top, stylist’s own

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Shape

Samuel Ross, one of the most exciting designers in menswear, just dropped…a sculpture show?

How the 30-year-old talent is breaking the mould for young artists all over again.

By L u k e L e it ch

The

S am ue l Ro ss

Shifter Ph otog raph s by Ad am a Ja ll oh

WHEN

SAMUEL

ROSS

CAU G H T

the Delta variant of COVID-19 last August, it hit him hard.

“There was a point at which I thought I might be going to die. I’d lost a stone.

I was really sick. We were getting a will written because I needed to make sure Jennifer and the girls would be sorted. It was really fucking bad,” Ross says. Slowly, though, he came through it. “And after that I decided I was never going to wear a fucking shirt again. Because life’s too short to assimilate into what you’re not.”

Yes, you can take the man out of fashion design – even if that man, still only 30, has been a finalist for both the LVMH and ANDAM fashion prizes and a winner of the GQ X BFC designer menswear fund with his label A-Cold-Wall*, as well as a close collaborator with and protégé of the late Virgil Abloh – yet, you can’t take fashion design out of the man.

Isn’t it telling, I suggest, as our chat in Ross’s grail-filled office moves on, that you characterise your positive crisis towards free artistic expression as the rejection of a piece of conventional clothing? “Completely so! And you know what’s hilarious is that I wrote my dissertation on the power and the alchemy of the suit and shirting – how it can move you up and down. And a decade later I’m saying, ‘Fuck the suit, fuck the shirt, life is short, so live now and live fast and live emotionally free: fight for that freedom.’” after testing positive, Ross was in Miami for Art Basel. He was there to launch his partnership with the gallery Friedman Benda, which also represents artists including Daniel Arsham and the estate of Ettore Sottsass. Together, the gallery and Ross had united to present 12 works, including one – Trauma Chair – that had already been acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art. Although he refers to his earliest trainer designs for Nike as the beginning of his work as a sculptor, Ross has been developing more conventional iterations of that artform – large structures that can sit in a gallery, a collector’s home, or a public space – for only the past four years. Trying to tie him down – or at least obtaining his guidance – as to the specific themes he is exploring and meanings he is working to excavate is at first unfruitful work. Ross often speaks in dry conceptual abstracts, a little evasively, or refers to the artists and architects that have fired his own invention, such as Massimo and Lella Vignelli, Richard Rogers, Henry Moore and Richard Serra. “It was Richard Serra,” he points out, as I chip away, “who says it is better for artists not to talk, because it takes the value out of their work.”

Gradually though, Ross reveals the shape of his thinking under a gentle chisel of interrogation. We are looking at his sketches, hundreds of them, in charcoal. These are the creative kernels, still in development, of sculptures to come: next September, he will JUST FOUR MONTHS

The British artist, designer and multidisciplinary creative director has been creating sculptures for the past four years.

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Sa m ue l Ro ss

Trauma Chair, 2020

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Sam ue l Ro ss

present a full solo show at Friedman Benda’s home gallery in Chelsea, New York. There are also plans for a new large-scale sculpture to be installed somewhere in London – the site is still being finalised – in time for London’s next Frieze in October. Ross’s momentum in the art space is gathering speed.

The sketches, dark and intense, show abstract aerodynamic shapes which, divorced from scale on paper, could represent anything from sneakers to spaceships. If a lot of Ross’s work looks adjacent to furniture, this is because, like his clothing design, he incorporates potential imprints of a human body within their conception: these are pieces you inhabit. One of them is a low asymmetric table in a matte, dark brown material with irregular surfaces and indentations – Ross calls up a rendering of the sculpture, which is still being developed before construction in south London, on his laptop.

“It will be made in fired wood, probably West African hardwood, with a molasses lacquer…it’s this idea of exploding the body of a raw material as a reflection of that raw material having a sentient property.”

He adds: “This idea came from the breakthrough piece, Trauma Chair, which was treating the material as if it had the personified characteristics of the body. And that mirrors a topic I always lean back to: that the idea of subverting existence links to a POC experience within the Western society, and always has done. That’s where the multiple layers and planes and plateaus on the piece also come into play. They refer to cityscape, landscape, off-kilter positionings within society: all of these axioms emerge in a very visual and primary language.”

Now we are getting to it. By contrasting hyper-technical materials with those sourced from the cultural tradition of West Africa, then hewing them into shapes both painful and beautiful that are pushed and pulled and fraught and stretched and yet determinedly upstanding, he is both reflecting and canonising Black experience

Below: The limited-edition archival book of Ross’s work across A-Cold-Wall* and SR_A through the years.

Above: Ross’s charcoal sketches of sculptures still in development.

“I have to create to stay sane and to function – it’s my way to meet the world and express frustrations.”

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Below: Signal 1, 2021 Right: Terminal 1, 2019

G R O O M I N G , M I C H E L L E L E A N D R A U S I N G PAT M C G R AT H .

within the kiln of otherness. Cultural tension is inherent in the materials with which Ross works, and the placed relationship between these materials serves to illuminate and excavate cultural hegemony. Or, as Ross puts it, as we consider this sculpture-to-be: “I have to create to stay sane and to function – it’s my way to meet the world and express frustrations. To express the things that I’m pissed off about, the things that I feel.”

Back in Miami, just touched down on the Saturday before Art Basel was due to open, he DM’d Virgil Abloh, a man who had played a key role in Ross’s progress. The famous old story, that Ross mailed Abloh for advice and was offered work is, Ross says, not quite accurate. “I had been trying to email him, but could not get through.

But I had liked some photos on his Instagram, then he liked some of mine, and because my dotcom was on the bio he was able to email me, and he did – and then it went back and forth from there.

This was in around 2010. First it was about Donda, and then he said, ‘I’ve got this thing called Pyrex®’ – which, of course, I knew about – and then the attention moved to Off-White.” It was through working for and with Abloh on these projects that, at least in part, Ross acquired the momentum to found his fashion line, A-Cold-Wall*, in 2015.

That Saturday in Miami, Abloh messaged Ross back to say “make sure you go to the show.” He was referring to the Louis Vuitton Spring/Summer 2022 menswear reprise presentation, named ‘7.2’, due that Tuesday. And as we all now know, on the Sunday before the show, Abloh passed away. As for all of Abloh’s friends, family and collaborators who were at the show 48 hours later, it was a gut-wrenching experience. “When I saw those clothes, I saw him.

And that just broke me down. I haven’t cried like that in my adult life.”

He is still shocked by the divine injustice of Abloh’s passing. “What we were hooked on was no raves, no drugs, just work. We are all clean.

The drug has only ever been green juice and matcha.”

Ross says that through his work with, adjacent to, and independent of his fellow creative entrepreneur, “our goal was always to be considered as a canon – a school of thought – across this century.”

Other key voices in that school of thought that he cites include Reginald Sylvester II, Martine Syms, Precious Okoyomon, Hugh Hayden and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones. “It’s a very particular language,” he adds.

Last October, prompted in part by that Delta-delivered “fuck it” moment, Ross moved back to Northampton, the town – shoe town – where he was mostly raised. Here he lives in a house “on the border of the ends and the nice bit” and says that “since moving home my serrated edge, my confidence and my boisterousness have come back.” Ross also returned home to raise his family, daughters Genesis and Olympia, with his wife Jennifer. They met at a Black Lives Matter rally in 2016 and married last December.

Not far from their home, Ross himself was raised by his mother Esme and his father Michael. “Just so that you understand the context of my thinking,” he explains that Michael had formerly run an anarchist church in Brixton, and that Esme home-schooled him for several years after suspecting racism at Ross’ school. He was encouraged to draw all over the house, wherever inspiration struck. His mother was also a university lecturer and these days paints, while his father is a “nomad” travelling the world and working in stained glass.

I’ve known Ross for years now through fashion, and have always enjoyed hearing him dissect the manner in which his clothing is an exercise in both defying categorisation and taking ownership of it. In this there is most definitely a commonality between his work in that fashion space, and his work in this art space. What’s also interesting is how renewed his intensity now is. “I enjoy the elasticity that comes from being an outlier.

There’s strength in being able to move between different disciplines, to widen your peripheral view…and in this day and age there are no rules. I can be like, ‘Who am I to draw these forms and shapes and open these stories?’ But I feel I should be doing it, which is why I am doing it. And at the end it’s not about success or failure, because that is absolutely relative. It’s about expression.”

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good for location, utility or convenience, but others are all about spatial awe. At their best, they are way-out fantasy spaces existing on the cutting edge of architecture and atmosphere. That’s the mission the coolest new properties on the planet are circling: a promise to step out of the quotidian and into a heightened reality.

This new set can feel wildly preposterous and aesthetically challenging – the absolute polar opposite, basically, of your actual home (unless you are lucky enough to live in Ricardo Bofill’s Kafka’s Castle). But despite an industry-altering few years, a string of ambitious hoteliers have found ways to open a slew of extraordinary new spots, each led by design.

SOME HOTELS ARE

Maldivian design at Patina has been taken in a new direction: clean lines and a midcentury aesthetic.

PAT I N A SURE THE MALDIVES IS CENTRAL

casting’s perfect island paradise. The sea, the sand, the smattering of palm trees.

But too often there’s a formulaic feel to the design of the resorts: all those wicker roofs and Balinese-style interiors have evolved into a design trope. Refreshing then that Brazilian architect Marcio Kogan has taken Patina in a new direction. To start, he commissioned a James Turrell ‘Skyspace’, as well as other site-specific art installations. And while the materials still have local vernacular with lots of wood, the buildings are precise and rectangular with a sleek, mid-century vibe inside. The whole thing has a humility to it that is in keeping with the resort’s environmentally minded aspirations: there’s an organic permaculture garden and a zero-waste approach in the kitchen, helmed by Michelin-starred chef, Nick Bril.

Doubles from: £1,785 per night.

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Mid-Century in the Maldives AR C H ITE C T : MAR C I O KO G AN

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A Raw Coastal Hideaway A R C H I T E C T : YE KTA J O & VA L D E Z A R C H I T E C T S

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the exterior of Paradero hotel. It has the feel of a citadel, a place of refuge in the wilds of Baja California Sur – the sparsely populated southern tip of this Mexican peninsula. Beyond the walls though, it’s less of an austere fortress and more a fun palace – all hammocks, mezcal martinis, infinity pools and crab tacos. The rooms all have a high-minded, high-modernist ascetic beauty: unadorned raw concrete walls and simple furnishings that let the gorgeous views of the area’s surreal sunsets speak for themselves.

Doubles from: around £409 per night. night

CA M P S A R I K A

AMANGIRI HAD A PROBLEM. It wasn’t that

its star was waning – more than a decade after it opened in Utah in 2009, it was still the world’s coolest hotel, still aesthetically unmatched, still out on its own when it came to service, setting, everything. And it wasn’t about getting there, which is famously finickity, but also part of the fun. The problem was that demand was off the scale.

It couldn’t possibly accommodate everyone that wanted to stay there. Welcome, then, to Camp Sarika: 10 new canvas-topped pavilions created by experimental lodgings specialist Luxury Frontiers, all of which are serviced by a new modernist commons building that’s very much in keeping with the main Amangiri hotel and was designed

by New York practice Selldorf Architects. Set in the singular beauty of a lunar landscape, each of the pavilions has its own plunge pool and fire pit, plus a golf buggy so you can buzz about when you’re not horse-riding through the desert or on sunset balloon rides.

Doubles from: £3,091 per night. night

The Wild and Opulent Desert Outpost A R C H I T E C T : L U X U R Y F R O N T I E R S/S E L L D O R F A R C H I T E C T S

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a giant brutalist toast rack, creating rectilinear shapes, each framing a slice of lush countryside. The 14-villa resort is on Bali’s out-of-the-way north coast, so Australian architect Nic Brunsdon had to make use of the materials near to hand. In rural Indonesia, that invariably means bamboo, which was used to cast the concrete, giving it a rough-textured touch.

Like Geoffrey Bawa’s buildings in Sri Lanka, it works with the abundance of its environment: the villas’ modernist minimalism offset with touches of Balinese woodwork. Concrete baths sit in inside/outside light wells, the private pools have jungle views and the main pool is a blood-red rectangle next to Tejakula, the local beach that’s a killer spot for diving.

Doubles from: £26 per night.

Rectilinear shapes are everywhere you look at The Tiing, directing views towards the jungle.

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Tr av el Milla Montis’ tearshaped structures mimic the nearby Dolomites.

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to build everything to frame them. That’s exactly what Milan-based firm Peter Pichler Architecture did with the Milla Montis hotel in the northern Italian region of South Tyrol, creating a façade of empathetic, teardrop shapes to emphasise the monumental panoramas of the Dolomites. Interiors are simple and starkly beautiful – a world away from folksy, chocolate-box Alpine cliché.

The food is a creative take on South Tyrolean, meaning Austrian soul meets Italian flair.

You can come here to ski in the winter and hike in the summer, but as much as anything, it’s a retreat for swimming in the steaming outdoor pool and gulping in incredible air.

Doubles from: £126 per night.

The Architectural Mountain Haunt MILLA MONTIS

ARCHITECT: PETER PICHLER ARCHITECTURE

P H OTO G R A P H S, G EO RG RO S K E , TO M D U B R AV EC, DA N I E L Z A N G E R L , R A FA E L G A M O.

Dug into the hills of Dugi Otok, Villa Nai 3.3 has a luxury lair vibe.

C R OAT I A N A R C H I T E C T N I KO L A BA Š I Ć

AR C H ITE C T : N I KO L A BA Š I Ć

A Luxe Bunker on the Adriatic

VILLA NAI 3.3

achieved global recognition for his ‘sea organ’ in Zadar: an ocean wall embedded with tubes and cavities that sing with the waves as they lap at the shore. At Villa Nai 3.3, he’s embedding things again. This time, Bašić dug eight rooms into the terracotta hills of Dugi Otok, a tranquil island off the coast from Zadar – Croatia’s oldest city. There’s a lair-like energy from the outside, but everything inside is high-end Milan slick and there’s a yawning infinity pool with views over the water. The sailing in these parts is the main draw, particularly in and out of the coves at the Telašćica Nature Park. But you could just as easily rock up here for the island’s dreamy undeveloped languor and Villa Nai 3.3’s food: the hotel has its own 100-year-old olive grove and chef Denis Galić turns out seven-course tasting menus with fish plucked straight from the nearby Adriatic.

Doubles from: £535 per night.

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The ceaseless joy of

HOW THE ARSENAL AND ENGLAND STAR – AND ONE OF THE PREMIER LEAGUE’S BRIGHTEST TALENTS – IS TAKING ON THE HATERS, WITH PLEASURE.

By M u sa O kwo ng a

Ph oto gr aph s by Ada ma Ja lloh

St yl ed by Ang e lo Mit ako s

Buk ay o Sa ka

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Buk ay o Sa ka

in the burgeoning young life of Bukayo Saka.

It’s February, and last night he played 71 minutes as a resurgent Arsenal defeated Wolverhampton Wanderers by a goal to nil, taking them to fifth place in the Premier League. Two nights earlier he attended the BRIT Awards alongside Ian Wright, and presented Dave with the award for Best Hip Hop/Rap/Grime Act. Tonight, at Stork Restaurant in Mayfair, he is accompanied by his older brother Yomi, who is also one of his closest friends, as well as Ebi Sampson and Idz from his management team. Judging by the menu on offer, a four-page cascade of pan-African delights, the evening is set to be a gastronomic pleasure.

As I hesitate over the options – Jamaican jerk boussin or Ivorian sea bass? Chicken suya or spinach egusi? – Saka orders with the same assurance he’s shown on the field all season. “When you go out to restaurants, you get your go-to,” he smiles, going for a plate of sliced steak. “When you go to KFC or you go to Nando’s, you get your go-to.” He hasn’t asked for a starter, which is bold, I think: he’s putting a lot of faith in the size of a single dish. I go for king prawns to start, and jerk chicken for the main, accompanied by a glass of white wine. Saka and his brother Yomi go for the same non-alcoholic drink: the Chapman, a colourful cocktail, part fruit, part syrup.

Just a few months ago, Saka’s immediate future seemed much less joyful. Following England’s defeat in the Euro 2020 final against Italy, he – as one of three Black footballers who failed to convert their penalties – was subjected to sustained racist abuse on social media. Saka was unsurprised by the backlash.

Breaking his silence four days after the final, he remarked on Instagram: “I knew instantly the kind of hate that I was about to receive.” It was a grim finale to a tournament where for so long it looked as if England, whose team spirit had enchanted their country, would end their 55-year search for a major trophy.

It also meant that Saka had unwittingly provided us with perhaps the two defining images of the tournament: the first, of him beaming atop an inflatable unicorn in the team’s swimming pool, and the second, where Southgate embraced and consoled him after his penalty was saved. In that Instagram post, which he ended with the defiant line “love always wins”, he expressed a promise: “I will not let that moment or the negativity I have received this week break me.”

IT’S BEEN A BUSY WEEK

OPENING PAGE shirt £345 Nanushka trousers £3,295 Dunhill boots £896 Giuseppe Zanotti necklace £225 Tiffany & Co. rings £350 Johnny Hoxton LDN OPPOSITE jacket £2,910 Louis Vuitton chest piece rented from Costume Studio

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MUCH OF BUKAYO SAKA’S appeal comes from this spirit.

THIS PAGE jacket £2,500 Balmain OPPOSITE jacket £2,190 black top £450 white top £490 Burberry bracelet £750 Johnny Hoxton LDN ring £650 Stephen Webster

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He plays football with an ease, a rare lightness of touch, taking to the field as if, each game, he is discovering its joys for the first time. In an era where football can be entrenched in untoward scandals, Saka’s lightness matters. It is a reminder of why so many of us fell in love with the sport.

Yet beneath Saka’s perma-smile and carefree demeanour is an emotional toughness. “Saka possesses a kind of inner strength that is so uncommon in a player of his age,” says Andrew Mangan, the man behind Arseblog, a fan-led website that provides the most comprehensive coverage of all things AFC. “From the moment he arrived on the first team scene, he looked at home, never flustered, never overawed. It’s more than maturity though. His talent, his technical quality, anyone can see those things when he plays – this is something else.”

For Arsenal, Saka’s talent arrived just in time. Until recently, the club with whom Saka signed when he was seven had struggled to adjust to the departure of Arsène Wenger in 2018. During the later stages of Wenger’s 22-year tenure, Arsenal had slipped behind their Premier League rivals, and now gazed up the table with envy at Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea, Manchester United and (most uncomfortably) local rivals Tottenham Hotspur. The club has long needed someone to revive their hopes on the field – a player who could be a symbol of progress. In Saka, they have that player.

Early reports of Saka’s ability seemed hysterical – was a teenager really capable of taking on the club’s famed number seven shirt? But for Arsenal legend Ian Wright, there was never any doubt. “He was 15,” Wright tells me, “and people were already saying Saka was way too advanced for the team he was playing with. I remember watching him at Hale End, and he went past three players so easily, and the ball came to him a couple of times and he just popped it off, one touch, and moved. He was just doing stuff in that game that a player of 25 years of age would do. I said, ‘He’s going all the way to the top – no danger.’”

“Trust God and God comes through for you…I can be confident knowing that God’s got me.

That’s why I can be fearless.”

At the age of 20, Saka is already one of the Premier League’s most beloved young superstars. Voted Arsenal’s player of the season aged just 19, the scorer of four goals in 14 games for England has already been shortlisted for the Golden Boy award, given to the best young footballer in Europe – he’s setting records for Arsenal at a speed not seen since the World Cup winner Cesc Fàbregas. When Saka excels, as is becoming a weekly occurrence, fans smile. When he struggles, like he did when his penalty was saved against Italy in last year’s European Championships final, millions reach out in support.

But being a young talent shot to superstar status that quickly is bound to leave some bruises. “You know a player is quality when the opposition take every opportunity to stop him by fair means, but especially foul. This season he’s been fouled 52 times; the next most-fouled Arsenal player is on 27,” says Mangan. Saka has had no choice but to learn to take care of himself, adding an assertive side to his game. In 83 Premier League appearances, he has collected 11 yellow cards. “He gets little or no protection from referees, which is unusual for an English player,” observes Mangan. “Fouls are often waved away, play continues. But he gets back up, demands the ball and goes again. He has something at his core that is just very special – an innate ability to cope with all the mental and physical demands of top-level football.”

Another notable feature about Saka is his sense of gratitude, which is evident whenever he mentions the people who have helped him on his journey. He regards Wright with great affection. “Ian Wright knows everyone, you know!” exclaims Saka. “He’s such a good guy, man. I swear. He has a good heart. You don’t find people like that a lot.” He speaks often about being thankful for all that he has been given, and his Instagram account bears the proud moniker “God’s Son”. How important is his faith to him and his family? “Very important,” he says at once, with Yomi noting that they were regular attendees of their Pentecostal church.

“When we were growing up we were taught by our parents to have faith in God,” says Saka, “and when you’re younger you don’t fully understand. But throughout life, you keep exercising your faith, so when you get into different challenges, you decide, ‘this time I’m going to trust God’, and God comes through for you. That’s how it kept building and building for me, so I can be confident and go into places knowing that God’s got me. That’s why a lot of times I can be fearless.”

I’m reminded of an interview he gave during Euro 2020, when England were about to face one of their biggest historical rivals in the second round. Saka was asked, “Do you fear Germany?” As he answers, his gaze is relaxed. “Right now, I’m not scared of anyone, really.”

I wonder if that is Saka’s game face; the one which, beneath all the smiles, is the true and ruthless face of the world-class athlete.

“I don’t really have a game face and keep it, you know? I have a game face when it’s time to think, to analyse, or when it’s actually time to play. Apart from that, I try not to have one. I’d rather be free.” Some actors, in preparation for a role, will spend days in character, but Saka seems the type to stroll onto set and just deliver his lines. “I don’t like to overthink. If you overthink about positive situations, then negative situations can start to creep into your mind, then you get nervous and stuff like that. That’s why I have faith in God and believe in myself.”

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jacket £2,000 trousers £950 boots £465 Bottega Veneta chainmail hood rented from Prangsta

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G R O O M E R , F R A N C E S C A D A N I E L L A . H A I R , L A U R A I N E B A I L E Y. S E T D E S I G N , LY N D O N O G B O U R N E . S E A M S T R E S S , J E S S I N E S S .

“I’m thankful – few players make it to the professional game, let alone into the first team of their childhood dreams.”

I ask Saka a question that’s been bugging me for some time: how do you maintain your perfect high-top fade? He laughs. “To be honest, it’s more my barber’s job,” Saka says. “He shapes it up, gives me a good trim. All I have to do is wash it, condition it.” But anyone who has tried to maintain a high-top fade knows that Black hair dries fast, and there are few oils that trap the moisture in. “Oh,” he says, “I put cream on it twice a day.” But which cream – coconut, or something else? “A special product,” smiles Saka. Will he reveal which? “Nah,” he says, laughing.

“It’s my secret ingredient.”

Starters arrive, as does Idz’s drink – a fruity cocktail that Saka eyes with nostalgia. “That tastes like my childhood,” says Saka. As he recalls the Nigerian food and drink of his early youth, I recommend Ebe Ano, an excellent restaurant that Saka should visit if he is ever in Berlin. In turn, he speaks fondly of Germany, since it’s where he scored his first Arsenal goal in a three-nil win over Eintracht Frankfurt. The conversation turns to south London and the subject of UK rap. As we all talk, Saka sits, listening intently – something Wright refers to as his greatest quality – while politely waiting for a pause in conversation to clarify a detail.

“Professor Green?” he asks. “He’s the one that made that banger, it was on the radio and that.” Yes, I say, Green was a battle rapper, in the early days, then he started doing pop music.

“Wretch 32 is the best rapper ever from this country,” says Yomi.

How about Dave?

“No,” says Yomi. Kano? “Nah,” says Yomi. “Kano’s the guy in Top Boy?” asks Saka.

Everyone at the table broadly agrees that the best musician among UK rappers, in terms of sound, tone and tempo, is J Hus. Mains quickly follow, and though my jerk chicken looks delicious, I watch Saka’s steak arrive with a quiet envy: he has made the superior choice, draping thick ribbons of sizzling meat across his plate. The real business of the evening has begun: a vigorous discussion on the future of Afrobeats. The best artist of them all is Wizkid, insists Yomi, and there are no arguments there. As if in approval, the DJ begins to play a stream of Afrobeats hits from her booth on the floor above. Between mouthfuls, all the talk is about music. Two of Saka’s favourite artists are Central Cee and Ed Sheeran – the latter of which comes as news to Yomi. “You don’t bang Ed Sheeran,” says Yomi, frowning at his brother.

“Bro, I showed you, he’s in my top five artists on Spotify Wrapped!” says Saka.

“I don’t believe you,” says Yomi. “When?”

“Bruv, I’m not going to play Ed Sheeran when you’re in the car!” says Saka. “When I’m in the car with my girl, we listen to Ed Sheeran!”

Sheeran comes up again when talk turns to songs we’d expect to hear at a wedding.

“Giggs,” says Yomi at once. “‘Talkin’ the Hardest’.”

“Not Giggs at a wedding!” laughs Saka. “You’re not in a rave, bro!”

Someone actually got D Double E to play at their wedding, I say.

“D Double!” laughs Saka, incredulous at the thought of the veteran Newham rapper performing a grime set for the oldies. “Oh my gosh!

That one is not [for a] wedding, oh. I’m calling Ed Sheeran – I’ll pay him whatever!”

to Nigerian parents, the second of two sons. He grew up in Greenford, a quiet and unassuming suburb in west London, and was regarded as a model student at his local high school, gathering a cluster of high grades before concentrating solely on his career in football. He speaks fondly of his time in his hometown, not least of a great Chinese food spot next to the station – the muchloved Hung Hing, which has sadly since closed. Greenford was the first stop on his road to fame, but it was by no means a charmed path.

“I love my sleep,” he begins, “so I would leave it till the last minute [to get out of bed]. Yomi, what time did school start? 8:30am?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“So I’d wake up at eight o’clock. School was walking distance, but because I woke up so late I would make my mum drop us. School at nine, go through school, school finishes at three o’clock, then my dad’s waiting outside, so I get in the car, and we go straight to training.

I’d eat my food in the car. Training was in Walthamstow: Hale End Road. And at that time there was so much traffic to get there, that’s why I left straight from school.”

You drove all the way along the North Circular?

“It is horrible! I used to fall asleep. My dad used to go through all the traffic and I’d wake up and be there.”

Four days a week, up at 8am, home by 11pm, for years.

“It’s a lot. That’s why I always thank my dad whenever I do interviews,” he says. He is thankful too, because he knows how few players make it to the professional game, let alone into the first team of their childhood dreams. “Our coach would always say – even when we were young – he would look at the group and say, ‘Only one or two of you is going to make it,’” he recalls. “We would all look at each other because we were all so good, we were unbeaten, and everyone was baffled, like, who’s it going to be?”

Given the nature of the game, it’s no surprise that footballers talk about each other all the time. Which footballer, I ask, has blown you away with their quality?

SAK A WAS BORN IN EALING

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“Sergio Busquets,” he says immediately. Saka played against the legendary Barcelona and Spain midfielder in a pre-season friendly in August 2019. “The way he just so elegantly turned me! I came at him to press him, I tried to fake this side then go to the other, and the way he just embarrassed me: I was just like, yeah, this guy is elite,” says Saka, still in awe. “The way he just took me out of the play, I said, ‘Respect.’

[Busquets] is three steps ahead of everyone,” adds Saka, “and that’s what makes you a top footballer. That’s what I realised that day.”

Saka’s humility – that for all his talent, he is still keen to learn, to be better – is why so many football fans care deeply for him. “Saka is the ray of light that’s going to guide us to the light at the end of the tunnel throughout this difficult period,” says Wretch 32, himself an Arsenal supporter. “He’s the young heart and soul of the team…With all the ups and downs he’s faced he’s handled everything like a true professional, a true gentleman, a true G, and someone way beyond his years. He should be recognised for that, as well as for his attitude, and his talent and his performance off-pitch is equally as impressive. I’m looking forward to watching him grow and go from strength to strength.”

Saka embodies the best of what a player can be – confident without being arrogant, wide-eyed in wonder at the glorious world in which he has found himself. At no point does Saka look like he is taking anything for granted. Even his favoured goal celebration, an extravagant kneeslide, seems fresh and unrehearsed. He has a deep connection with kids and they often write to him with words of encouragement or even invitations to play football in the local park and go for ice cream.

We are nearing the end of our meal, too full to consider dessert but still with an appetite to talk football. Of all the great goals ever scored, I ask him which he would like to have scored.

“Because of the moment, I think I would say Leo Messi’s goal in the Copa del Rey final against Athletic Club. The one where he dribbled everyone. Now that I play, I can see how hard it is to score that goal.

People are trying to kick him, to bring him down in the process, and he just keeps going, and he still scored in the final, as well. I was just like, wow. When he says he’s going past you, you’re not stopping him!”

“He’s gone!” exclaims Yomi, with a shrug.

“Just like that,” agrees Saka.

We prepare to make our way out into the evening, taxis arriving to take us our separate ways; but I have one final question, about Bukayo, his most profound of Yoruba names.

“My grandma gave it to me because of its meaning,” he says, particularly happy to be asked. “It means ‘God has added joy to my life.’ She wanted me to add joy to the family, so she named me that…

Every time she called me, that’s probably what I meant to her.”

A few weeks after we speak, Saka will bring that same joy to his growing family of fans, slipping past defenders at the edge of Watford’s penalty area before thrashing the ball high and hard beyond the dive of the opposing goalkeeper. As he runs over towards the adoring crowd, there is no knee-slide this time, but that familiar grin crosses his face: his unique blend of glee and disbelief, a boy wonder filled with wonder at the thrilling place he has just taken us. We can only imagine where he will take us next.  M U SA O K WO N G A I S A N AU T H O R, P O D CAST E R A N D M U S I C I A N .

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AF TER B EC OMIN G ONE O F THE M O S T REC O GNI SAB LE FACE S ON THE PL ANE T, MAI S IE WILLIAM S C O MMIT TED TO A R ADI CAL NE X T S TEP : B EIN G HERS ELF.

By Douglas Greenwood

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front door swung in the wind and was held in place by a chain that a sharp kick could snap. Williams and her partner, the designer and fashion entrepreneur Reuben Selby, were locking up to leave for a six-week holiday when they realised the latch was broken. There wasn’t time to fix it, so the security of the home they’d just moved into (a 1930s cottage in south-west England, filled with all their earthly possessions) would have to rely on a thin sliver of metal and the goodwill of their postwoman.

They decided to simply let life happen.

When the pair returned, nothing had changed. Those earthly possessions remained.

The cold house was as together as they’d left it, save for the brown leaves that had blown in through the door and scattered across the hallway.

Williams feels safe here. This wouldn’t be possible in London where, until early 2021, she’d lived for five years. She’d first moved to the capital during the frenzy around becoming one of the most recognisable young actors in the world – partway through the eight years she spent playing the prickly and audacious heroine Arya Stark in the fantasy juggernaut, Game of Thrones. It was an HBO show of the scale and lasting pop cultural stature that seemed to die with the advent of the streaming era.

And then it ended, and her obligations changed.

Part of that aftermath involved leaving the city for somewhere that wasn’t her childhood home, but reminded her of it: pastoral; quiet; the kind of place in which you trust the person who delivers your post. Which is where she is now, an hour from the capital, picking me up from the station in a black Tesla, waving semi-maniacally from behind the steering wheel.

The last time we’d seen each other had been six months prior, at Selby’s London Fashion Week presentation. Back then, she’d come off the back of shooting her forthcoming project, Pistol: a Danny Boyle-directed series about the origins of the Sex Pistols in 1970s London, in which she plays Jordan, the model and punk pioneer who worked alongside Vivienne Westwood in the band’s seminal days. Her hair and eyebrows were bleached, giving her the appearance of a gorgeous and lethal nocturnal animal. Today, though, her roots are creeping in, deep brown, in a cool, unkempt way. From behind wire-rimmed glasses, her brows are shades of salt and pepper.

Her new hometown is part of a wider, unwritten plan. “I’ve always missed that part of my life where there isn’t pressure when you go to the shop and no one cares who you are or what you’re doing or what you’re wearing.” She tells me this with legs curled like a wishbone on the grey sofa in her new living room, wearing acid-wash Acne denim, a Marine Serre second skin and an Off-White logo T-shirt.

Her place doesn’t yet have the air of a “celebrity” home; right now, the design imprint is limited to the furnishings. But it’s cosy. Looking out to the garden, the grass descends into a pit of woodland, with knotted trees and bramble. Roe deer and foxes, rabbits and squirrels come by sometimes, she says. “But no people. I’m in heaven.”

L AST WINTER, MAISIE WILLIAMS’

I T ’ S N OT T H AT W I L L I A M S I S T I R E D O F C O M PA N Y,

more that she’s been battling the idea of being constantly seen for a decade. Leaving London has helped her to answer questions that have plagued her for a while: “What do I really care about? And what do I want to achieve when no one is looking?”

London is like Instagram, an insular gathering of peers and tangential acquaintances, all speaking at each other, conscious of their accomplishments. There, people – whether they’re public figures or not – form themselves in reverse; consider how they want to be seen, then act accordingly. “We subconsciously base our goals and achievements on the way they’re viewed by other people,” she observes, knowing she’s a part of it. “And it doesn’t matter whether or not you achieve those things, because it’s for the satisfaction of someone else. It never feels as good as you pictured it in your head.”

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She refers to her own internal sparring as an identity crisis, “but I didn’t confront it until I moved here,” she admits. “The more I tried to be like, ‘Am I like her? Am I like him?’, the more confused I got.

Now I just feel like I am doing everything I want to do when I want to do it.” She acts, yes, but her bailiwick boasts many facets: venture capitalist, producer, podcaster, occasional streamer on Twitch. Then there’s her work in sustainability, something that imbues her fashion partnerships with H&M and the luxury brand Coperni. The latter’s CEO and co-founder, Arnaud Vaillant, called her the voice of a generation. “She embodies the strong values of a diverse, innovative and responsible future,” he tells me.

By embracing all these things, she’s quelled her own crisis. Now, Williams says, “I look in the mirror and realise: ‘I see who you are.’”

This level of self-awareness often comes and goes when your job involves playing other people. But looking back before fame was

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“That doesn’t sound right either,” she says. “That just sounds like something I’ve read someone else say.” I’d asked Williams to explain the moment she knew that this – acting on camera, being in the public eye – was going to be her future. She goes back and forth, starting and stopping, takes one of those long pauses, and then finds these words: “I knew that the path laid out before me was going to be surprising for a lot of people who knew me, but on the inside I knew that was right.”

part of her life, Williams remembers an upbeat childhood that gave her solid foundations. Born in 1997, she spent her early years in Clutton, a Somerset parish village of barely 1,500 people, encircled by farmland, with her mother, stepfather and older siblings. She was “outspoken and peculiar”, she says, performing for her friends with the sole intention of making them laugh. She took up dancing classes at primary-school age, and says she was “just very happy at home”.

Unlike most young actors, Williams got ahead in the industry with no formal training or nepotistic leg-up. She was raised in a council house – a fact she once considered almost unremarkable; but today she knows how much harder it is for actors from working-class backgrounds to make it big. Her mother now owns the same house, and Williams goes back from time to time. “I meet people who have no idea how I got to where I am,” she says, loosely clasping the tips of her fingers. Does that assumption annoy her? “No, no it doesn’t!

People can think what they like about anyone.” That, like most things, is out of her control.

Williams leaves contemplative pauses in her speech, sometimes as long as 10 seconds, between the end of a question and when she finally breaks the silence to answer it. A decade deep into doing this, she knows when someone is listening. Her words unfurl carefully; she’s seen her interview quotes transformed into tabloid headlines enough times to regret parts of otherwise normal exchanges. Today, on the off-chance she says something she might not later recognise, she chooses to address it out loud.

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IN AU GUS T 20 09, just a few months after turning 12 years old, Williams was cast in a role she’d unwittingly spent years preparing for. That adolescent tenacity played well into her role as Arya Stark, the headstrong daughter of the House Stark – violent, whip smart, powerful. It was the first time she had been in front of a camera.

The casting director Robert Sterne still remembers Maisie’s first audition. “We had seen hundreds of young people for the part,” he tells me, “and then in walked Maisie being honest and brave and unfazed and direct and funny; asking interesting questions. I don’t know how she did it.” Her portrayal of the character of Arya, he says, seemed fully formed from the very beginning.

The character stuck out for many reasons, not least because the idea of a young woman being offered the chance to wield a sword and not vie for the affection of a male character was so anomalous in television at the time. And Maisie, who appreciated the rough-andtumble experience and did many of her own stunts, leaned into it.

The show’s writers “revelled in writing more and more for her character,” Sterne says. “She had a lot to take on and rose to the challenges.”

The show ran for eight seasons, and by the time she’d hit her midteens, the world knew who she was. For the first time, she was exposed to that level of fame, walking her first red carpet for season three in Los Angeles. Until then, the show’s younger cast rarely made public appearances. “I’m grateful we were protected from it until that point, too,” Williams says, scratching behind her ear. “If that had happened when I was 12, I’m not sure what that would have done to me mentally.”

She stayed grounded as a consequence, learning how to handle the pressures of fame by twisting them into new forms of motivation. She’d left school by this point – the show’s popularity, she says, led to people changing around her – but instead opted to study at a dance school in her late teens, flitting between Thrones shoots and performances.

“She was just like everyone else, really,” says George Hill, who taught Williams at Bath Dance College at that time. Hill recalls a performance Williams’ class was preparing for, one she was desperate to be involved in but couldn’t rehearse for because of her filming schedule. That restraint didn’t seem to phase her; Williams made her own plan. “She came back in [after the shoot] and somehow knew everything,” Hill says.

Williams remembers the day she was handed a bra in the Game of Thrones costume trailer. It was a coming-of-age moment that, in the context of the show, marked the beginning of a distancing from, if not the fun of playing Arya Stark, then at least the way Williams identified with her. Up until the show’s final season, this image of a violent young girl – tomboyish, if old-fashioned, seems like an apt descriptor – was how she’d been seen by the world. “I think that when I started becoming a woman, I resented Arya because I couldn’t express who I was becoming,” she says. “And then I also resented my body, because it wasn’t aligned with the piece of me that the world celebrated.”

Her recollections of the show are wise but not calculated: you believe her when she says she had a great time working on Game of Thrones just as much as you do when she airs opinions that some may construe as contentious. Maybe that’s the byproduct of playing one character for such a long stretch of time: once you’re out the other side, they’re still lingering like a spectre, one that comforts and irks you in equal measure.

“What do I really care about? And what do I want to achieve when no one is looking?”

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“When I started becoming a woman, I resented Arya because I couldn’t express who I was becoming.”

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I ask her what parts of the show she misses. Then the silence comes, dead air filled faintly with the crackle of candles on the windowsills.

Eventually, she speaks: “Can I say none of it?”

To miss something would mean you wish for its return, which suggests a dissatisfaction with how we are in the here and now. That’s not a Maisie Williams MO. “I don’t think it’s healthy [to miss it], because I loved it,” she says.

“I look at it so fondly, and I look at it with such pride. But why would I want to make myself feel sad about the greatest thing that ever happened to me? I don’t want to associate that with feelings of pain.”

She’s dipping her toes into a return in other ways, having reprised the role of Arya (in voice only) for MultiVersus, a Warner Bros-produced video game in which characters from across the entertainment conglomerate’s IP battle it out in teams – you can watch her go head-tohead with Bugs Bunny. She enjoyed bringing an element of frivolity to a previously serious character.

But would she do it again on screen? She grins at the question.

“I’m not saying it would never happen, but I’m also not saying it in this interview so that everyone goes…” – she gasps, and slips into the skin of a GoT superfan: “‘The spin-off! It’s coming!’ Because it’s not. It has to be the right time and the right people,” Williams adds, her voice warm, and winking a little now. “It has to be right in the context of all the other spin-offs and the universe of Game of Thrones.” But most importantly: “It has to be the right time for me.”

It’s approaching lunchtime, and we decide to get some fresh air.

There’s a walk that starts in the bowels of the house’s back garden and takes us out onto a road where horse riders pass. It rained yesterday.

“Will it still be muddy?” Williams asks Selby, who’s deep in fashion week preparation. He grimaces a little: affirmative. So she stretches on a pair of tan Rombaut trainers – her chic outdoor shoes – and we set out, hoping for the best.

The air feels grey, but the thorny path in front opens up into wide vistas blotted with auburn-splotched ponies, long rows of slanted solar panels and little houses in the distance. Taking stock of the mud situation, we walk and talk.

Williams compares the aftermath of Game of Thrones’ lengthy TV tenure to “being born again”. The opportunity to embody new characters on a similarly deep level excited her. Even the simple things, like dying her hair carnation pink, suddenly mattered. “I was rejecting a lot of the pieces of me and my image that I’d been so well known for,” she says. But it wasn’t a crisis moment. “It was more that I needed to express myself.” Later, she says the changes were both personally and professionally motivated, to allow those who may have typecast her to see that she’d changed. “I think that sometimes other people need a helping hand to see that you’re a different person,” she says, “and I don’t resent that.”

The hunger for acting persisted, but its connotations changed.

“I quickly realised that it was more linked to the shame of being in one good thing and never doing anything again, rather than actually asking myself the question: what do you want to do now?” Williams says.

She wanted to work on a mini-series – something she knew the beginning and ending of – and found it with the well-received dark dramedy Two Weeks to Live, a Sky and HBO Max-broadcasted series about a young outcast avenging the death of her father by seeking out the murderer. It was shot and released within a neater timeframe than the 2020 movie The New Mutants, Marvel’s X-Men spin-off where she played a lead role. For a number of reasons, her first major movie took

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three years from the shoot wrapping for it to eventually reach cinemas.

I ask her why, and as she looks up to answer the question, we realise the muddy patch ahead turns into practical marshland. “I think this is where the horses go so it really chews up the ground,” she says. Her trainers are caked in mud; my trousers are soaked. “Should we turn back?”

She has nothing but fond and “extremely fulfilling” memories of that project, shooting in Boston with stars like Anya Taylor-Joy and Charlie Heaton, in the summer of 2017. “We were all these young starlets who’d had a taste of that world,” she says. The double hit of the Disney-Fox merger paired with the pandemic are her hypotheses as to why the film didn’t do well; it was thrown into cinemas when no one was going out to watch films. Rumoured creative tension between the studio and director Josh Boone has also been listed as a reason for fans’ disdain for the project, which earned some aggressively negative reviews. Williams isn’t so bothered. “I can’t remember what publication it was, but someone said it was the worst Marvel movie ever made,” she says, letting out a tickling laugh. “I still feel kinda proud of that!”

The roles that she plays seem sacred only for a short time, before she makes the conscious decision to remove herself from the places they come from. What comes after – the response, the criticism, the hysteria – isn’t a part of it.

When we meet again nearly two weeks later, this time at the BFI on London’s Southbank, the presence of Pistol in her life seems to linger still. She turns up in a pinstripe grey suit with a cropped jacket and some sneakers, like a business exec coming to a meeting straight from the club. Her hair is as punk-ish as it was the last time.

She chose here because it feels like part of Pistol’s early history.

The cast of the show – which includes model Iris Law, Enola Holmes star Louis Partridge as Sid Vicious, Australian actor Toby Wallace, and relative newcomer Anson Boon as Johnny Rotten – would hang out around here in between rehearsals at the nearby ITV building. It was the early days of the third lockdown. The city centre was dead still; Williams, like the rest of her co-stars, was returning to acting after a dormant stretch spent doing other things.

The show is still in the edit when we speak, so Williams tries to explain it to me. “It’s like an album,” she says; a “heart attack in every episode” body of work to be appreciated as a whole, rather than episodically. “It doesn’t owe you entertainment,” she teases, “but it is going to make you feel things.”

The process of winning this role started back in the late summer of 2020. Williams was in Paris, working on a number of jobs – including Selby’s debut fashion presentation – when her agent called, mentioning the project and Boyle’s attachment. He’d been on her hit list for a while. At the time, it felt like everyone was vying for a piece of Pistol, and by the time she returned to London, many of her male friends had sent in audition tapes for the lead roles. When her own time came, she read the suggested scene and sent back the tape. “I didn’t hear anything for ages,” she says. She’d half written off the concept of it happening, but then the NDA arrived, alongside a series of photos and stories of the character she’d be auditioning for: Jordan.

Born in East Sussex, Jordan made the commute from her comely English town to Vivienne Westwood’s Sex boutique in Chelsea

H A I R , L I A M R U S S E L L . M A K E U P, B A R I K H A L I Q U E U S I N G C H A N E L R O U G E A L L U R E L’ E X T R A I T A N D N O . 1 D E C H A N E L . N A I L S , M A R I E - L O U I S E C O S T E R AT C A R E N U S I N G C N D V I N Y L U X . S E T D E S I G N , S E A N T H O M S O N . S E A M S T R E S S , J E S S I N N E S . T Y P O G R A P H Y, A R YA M A N M U N I S H .

WILLIAMS IS A MASTER AT MOVING ON NOW.

“Why would I want to make myself feel sad about the greatest thing that ever happened to me? ”

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practically every day, hair scorched with peroxide, dark makeup dragged to her temples, and wearing an assortment of leather and PVC outfits that made fellow passengers gawk. She was a pivotal voice at the advent of punk, and a strong participant in the band’s rise to fame.

Her look was confrontational: she’d cycle to the train station sometimes wearing nothing but a membrane rain mac, breasts on show (paparazzi photos of Williams recreating this scene showed up last year).

William recalls those first conversations with the show’s casting directors: we want you to read for this role of Jordan, but you have to know there’s a lot of nudity, they said. She was hesitant at first, “just because of everything that happens in the industry and all the horror stories I’ve heard…I want to be in this show because I’m the best person to do this, not because I’m the only girl who’ll take her top off.”

She wrote a note back to them, airing her concerns. Later, her agent forwarded a clarification from Boyle that put her mind at rest. “Jordan was a political statement,” the note made her realise. “Her entire ethos was turning the male gaze in on itself, and it was overtly sexual in a way that made other people feel ashamed.” She could connect with the idea of being seen as a weirdo. “If I take my top off, I want to make other people feel uncomfortable.”

For her second audition, she joined a Zoom call with Boyle wearing a sheer KNWLS top with no bra underneath. She’d started that journey to embodying Jordan; Boyle seemed impressed by how greatly she’d leaned into the character. “And it worked out,” Williams says, grinning. “I got the part.”

“It was the perfect opportunity for [Williams] to own a big character,” Boyle tells me. “She’s a great realistic actor, but Jordan [rejects] the very idea of everyday life. Maisie’s a bit like that herself.

In a quieter, sweeter way, there’s a touch of Oscar Wilde about her, leading an awkward, self-conscious nation into being braver about sexuality, sensuality, gender, beauty…”

The show started shooting in March 2021 after a two-month rehearsal process, and the coterie of kids dove headfirst into a recreated version of 1970s London. Williams insisted she didn’t go method (“I definitely didn’t like, do any drugs”), but she revelled in the opportunity to detach herself from her own life for a while. Her phone – usually a constant fixture of set breaks on Game of Thrones, planning her social calendar – would stay in her trailer. In the era of Pistol, “you weren’t in constant contact with people, so I tried to calm my mind of modern-day stresses.”

She also had the unique opportunity to learn from Jordan, who consulted on the show and was the only non-immediate member of cast and crew allowed on set. “Maisie is somebody who never really wants to be encompassed by security,” Jordan tells me. “She wanted to push it all to the limit.” If Williams seemed cool on the surface, things weren’t so straightforward underneath: “It was a lot of pressure,” Williams recalls, “but honestly, I never needed to feel any type of way.

Jordan was never confrontational. She just knew what was what, and if things weren’t right, she’d say.”

Williams was guided on the necessities of Jordan’s mannerisms.

“I’m very emotive in the way that I communicate, but she was just constant. I had to stop moving my eyebrows while I was playing her, because she not only has the most incredible makeup, but her expression is painted – it never moves.” Boyle notes this acute attention to detail, calling Williams “precise, like a watchmaker”. In the beginning, the idea of Jordan being on set would panic her. “But then I realised, every single time, I know what I’m getting with her, and it’s me who’s unpredictable.” Chill, she told herself. “Stop thinking everything is either amazing or terrible. Just be.”

Williams is very good at just being now. The crises have passed, the pangs of anxiety about her post-blockbuster future are no more.

Should Pistol propel her back into that realm, you reckon she could handle it all over again. But it’s not something she can control, and that hands-off attitude is all that can guide her.

She turns to me; those big, nocturnal eyes are darting and wide – the source of her weird thoughts and secrets. “Not to get really existential about it, but I do think our fate is predetermined. I see things in the future, and have hopes and aspirations, but you can’t take shortcuts.”

Then Maisie Williams looks straight at me and smiles, content. “I feel like the path has always been set out. I just need to live it now.”  P I S T O L P R E M I E R E S O N F X T H I S M AY.

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Bimini has been booked, busy and on the glow-up ever since they found fame on the electrifying lockdown series of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. Now, the world’s biggest and punkiest nonbinary superstar is ready for their next move.

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vegan leather bag with the slogan “Open 24 hrs” on the tartan sits by Bimini’s chair at lunch. Later, it’s stashed beneath a table at Vogue House while Bimini tries on deconstructed blazers. The following week, in the lobby of a London hotel, I first spot the bag, then Bimini, nestled into a sofa. They’d performed in Nottingham the previous night, attended another fitting in the morning, then dozed off in the taxi.

Bimini is tired, but as soon as we begin chatting or walking, they’re abuzz, as if the dopamine of newfound fame is kicking in again. It’s been a dizzying year for the former RuPaul’s Drag Race UK contestant, who already seems bigger than the show.

Their current perfume is Byredo’s Slow Dance, but Bimini moves quickly, almost nervously. At one point, a handler offers to carry Bimini’s bag, and they politely decline.

It seems like a counterweight to keep their feet on the ground.

Bimini downplays their in-demandness with other Drag Race cast members with whom they’re on tour: “They’re like, ‘We’ve got a day off tomorrow’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah...’”

Bimini shows me their phone calendar with multiple bookings every day, all of them colour-coded pink. Barely any time to masturbate, I remark. In Bimini’s “anti-selfhelp book” Release the Beast (becoming a Penguin author also happened this past year), Bimini extols the benefits of daily orgasmic self-care. “Actually, I don’t masturbate every day now,” Bimini cackles.

“I’d say once or twice a week if I’m lucky.”

They also decided the less selfish thing to do, amidst this earthquake of change, was to split with their partner of four years.

“I want passion. It was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got a window here, let’s have dinner.’ I didn’t like that for him.” Bimini is not only newly single but also tasked with forming a new self – one capable of coping with celebrity.

By the age of 28, they’ve already had so many selves: weedhead, journalism student, Topshop clerk, “delusional” party monster, backpacking yogi.

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– just Bimini, a glow-up of the Bimini Bon-Boulash of Drag Race – is learning to set boundaries as much as test them. This includes sizing up industry players (“I question intentions a lot”) and dealing with fans who reveal personal, dark information (“things that maybe you’re not ready to hear”). You can see why – Bimini is just so approachable. “What I’ve noticed with people that approach me,” Bimini concurs, “is that they talk to me like they’re my mate.”

Over 10 weeks, from January to March 2021, the second season of Drag Race UK, the world’s most bingeable drag queen contest, helped viewers through the third, bleakest national lockdown. Nearly 90,000 people had died of Covid-19 in England. Through the first 10 weeks of the initial lockdown, Britons banged pots every Thursday at 8pm to demonstrate support for the NHS. This time, Thursdays meant escapism via drag queens on BBC. The charisma-heavy cast brought a working-class flavour. For a while, the sweetheart was Tia Kofi, the dippy but quick and self-deprecating Londoner who fellow contestants voted “Baroness Basic”. But week after week, a light shone brighter from Bimini Bon-Boulash: pansexual, nonbinary, vegan, punk. “I’m an imperfectionist,” Bimini tells me. Audiences related.

Bimini speaks with a rhotacism, meaning ‘r’s are pronounced like ‘w’s (not ‘drag’ but ‘dwag’). They reference gobby, aggy Brits – Katie Price, the Prodigy. Their quickly conceived Bake Off spoof showed sharp wit: “Brexit Bun is made of 52 per cent deceit, 48 per cent despair, and it’s 100 per cent not gonna positively affect anyone other than Steve, Dave and Paul down the pub.” Their stand-up routine – one of the show’s most notoriously difficult challenges – opened with, “I must say, you all look so sexy tonight, it makes me wanna… dismantle the patriarchy!” At the time, I was co-teaching an online class in which the undergrads could express whatever was on their mind on a virtual blackboard. One simply wrote: “BIMINI BON-BOULASH.” T H I S N E W I T E R AT I O N

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Bimini is of the moment by jostling against it. A report on the year ending March 2021 revealed that in Bimini’s home county of Norfolk, homophobic hate crimes increased by nearly a quarter, while offences against transgender people more than doubled. Bimini represents a resistance – a champion of inclusion and self-affirmation who replaces the churchy intonations of the very American Drag Race with a sardonic brashness.

At times, the sensibility sailed over the American judges’ heads.

For the UK Gay Icon challenge, Bimini dressed like their friend, east London nightclub staple and self-described “obscuro” Princess Julia. The judges weren’t totally convinced by the choice. But fashion insiders knew exactly who she was, while mums and daughters in Ipswich or Hull could intuit the Cockney night-owl vibe. Princess Julia, watching the episode at home, was “just screaming… We were squealing.” As much as the look, she takes the tribute to be about the significance of her decades-long presence on the scene. “I’ve not led a conventional existence, shall we say. I’ve come up through the ranks of various countercultural movements over the years, and I think that’s the thing Bimini loves [and] admires about me.”

Princess Julia has watched as previous talents have transitioned from clubs into the mainstream and, as she puts it, “become realities”.

Boy George was a first big breakthrough, “appealing to – just like Bimini – housewives, girls, children, grownups and freaks. You could sit down with George and have a cup of tea.”

Bimini and I are actually both having a Tommy’s margarita, and I propose a toast “to Tommy”, which is how Bimini is still known to some friends. Tommy is not a “dead name” – the term used to indicate a given name a trans person has discarded and no longer discloses.

Tommy is very much present.

The pivotal Drag Race moment for Bimini came on episode three.

The moment was in a sense not meant to be theirs. It was Ginny Lemon who cried while explaining they wear yellow because it’s the nonbinary colour, escaping oppressive girl-pink and boy-blue. But when Bimini turned round from their mannequin, grace radiated.

“We’re like square pegs in a circle,” they said to Ginny. “And how we want to self-identify isn’t up to anyone else, it’s not up to anyone else to have a debate about it, but how we feel inside.” As if overnight, nonbinary gender entered the national conversation. “That was a moment,” Bimini acknowledges. “I got tons of messages from people from all age groups telling me that because it’s such a simple explanation, ‘Oh, I get it.’”

Then the best thing that could possibly happen did: Bimini lost Drag Race UK. This meant fans could continue rooting for them.

Bimini became a very British kind of celebrity, one that doesn’t get above their station. Bimini adds: “I think it’s more punk not to win anyway.”

Within months, they’d signed to the women’s division at Next Models as the first nonbinary talent, scored a book contract with Penguin and released the rowdy pop song “God Save this Queen”.

On the publication day of Release the Beast in October 2021, Bimini chose to sit in the basement of tiny London bookshop Gay’s the Word, a hub of queer activism since 1979, and sign the hundreds of copies they’d pre-sold because, for one thing, that’s where Bimini directed fans. “They knew the business would make a crucial difference to a place like us,” bookseller Uli Lennart explains. “Bimini has real style.”

One of the book’s joys is its chatty tone – a throwback to an unnamed genre of British tell-alls. Shon Faye, author of The Transgender Issue and Bimini’s editorial consultant, points out, “There was more of a history of working-class British figures, especially in the ’90s, especially in fashion and art, who basically people would have said ‘sound a bit common’ – but in a good way. So Bimini’s voice has a nostalgia to it for these slightly more workingclass voices – a little bit gobby but quite charming – that have somewhat been lost elsewhere in the culture.”

While Release the Beast is pacy and accessible, it also interrogates gender with considerable punch, citing theorists Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam. A promotional appearance on a morning chat show was planned. “Great,” recalls Bimini. “Sit on the couch, talk about the book. And I was gonna wear this gorgeous Balmain two-piece suit…

“It’s more punk not to win.”

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“Authenticity doesn’t mean being natural-looking.

Authenticity isn’t an aesthetic.

Authenticity is within you.”

Denim, very 1980s. Lovely. Very sophisticated, chic, elegant.” But the producers insisted Bimini don the Drag Race promo look – hotpink high-rise thong, thigh-high boots, humongous blonde wig. “And I was like… No, I don’t want to wear that, because [I’d be] wearing a thong for one. And it’s 11 o’clock in the morning. And they were like, ‘Well, if you don’t want to wear that, then you’re not going to come on the show.’ And I said no.”

Bimini’s they/them pronouns signify gender fluidity, but also that they’re composed of many parts. When one aspect – the bimbo, in this case – is singled out and forced into the wrong context, it’s not an invitation to speak, but to be sacrificed. As lines between drag performance and androgynous identity blur, people can become squeamish about the ambiguities. Producers figure the public wants drag in pantomime tropes: clown, whore. “I know exactly what they’re trying to do,” Bimini remembers thinking. “They’re not pushing for equality of trans people. They’re pushing a rhetoric…The shit show that would happen on Twitter. And them being like, so why is this book important? And I’m talking about it while I’m sat there in pink stripper boots. I wish we lived in a world where you could do that.

Right now, we don’t.”

The legendary London drag queen Jodie Harsh recognises, “There’s a certain social responsibility when you have a platform such as Bimini’s. They’re flying the flag on a big stage for those who don’t conform to one gender or one thing, and they’ve been educating those who weren’t previously aware this even existed.”

Faye wonders how long they’ll want to carry that mantle though.

“It will be interesting to see, because it’s still only a year. That kind of ambassadorship is very tedious, and people do burn out with it.

And I personally wouldn’t blame Bimini if there’s a time when they feel that they just wouldn’t have to be doing that any more.” But Faye also posits that within the framework of drag, where everything is set in quotation marks, “There is a kind of playfulness and plausible deniability…Bimini can say everything was tongue in cheek, and it’s up to the reader, or listener, or person watching the interview, to deduce the sincere point.”

Bimini is naturally adept at representing because they’re funny and kind. When I ask which toilet they tend to use, Bimini eschews the toxic bathroom debate to speak not about what makes them comfortable but what won’t upset other people, depending on how they’re dressed that day. This might very well mean using the men’s room, where ironically, Bimini laughs, they’ll be told, “‘Oh, you’re in the wrong place.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, where do you win?’”

Bimini was raised among women, washing hair at the salon their mum named after them, Thomas H. It’s still there in the coastal Norfolk town of Great Yarmouth (above her menswear shop, Henry’s, named after Bimnini’s brother). Their dad, a former bodybuilder, lived elsewhere. “Women,” Bimini writes in their book, “ran shit in the world I grew up in.” Their mum, Bimini tells me admiringly, “was always

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just work, work, work. When I was younger, I think there were certain feelings of, why isn’t my mum picking me up from school like all the other mums? But I’m so glad that she wasn’t doing that, because she worked her ass off.” Cutting hair, Bimini’s mum would joke, was like being a psychotherapist. At the salon, women looked at one another and at magazines – glimmers of the outside world.

The English seaside can seem less a horizon, more a reminder that this is an island. “You can see the stars,” Bimini recalls. But in order to become a star, you move to London. The glamour of the capital was personified by their grandma Maggie, who had flame-red hair, just like Tommy. Maggie wore glamorous clothes and strong perfume, was a Tiller Girl in the 1960s, dancing the can-can at the London Palladium in the West End, was a Playboy Bunny, a Penthouse Pet, “all of that stuff”. To starry-eyed kids, the Maggies of the world represent possibility. Indeed, Bimini tells me they’re following in her footsteps – they’re booked to perform at the Palladium.

In photographs of younger Tommy, their face is full of freckles.

When I ask where they’ve gone, Bimini admits to youthful hours baking in the sun, trying to tan. The freckles they got instead were “not a bad look, but it was probably not good for my skin.” Now, Bimini’s face is protected with SPF, as well as conditioned with profhilo injections and feminised here and there. “Yes, I like a bit of lip filler.” But Bimini likes the word authenticity, by which I suspect they mean self-invention. Even fakery? “Absolutely. As long as that’s what you want. Like, authenticity doesn’t mean being natural-looking.

Authenticity isn’t an aesthetic. Authenticity is within you.”

Barefoot at a fitting, Bimini stands on toes as if wearing phantom heels, then drops into the pose known in ballet as third position. They mention they have to shave their legs, brushing fair fluff on their shin – “just down here.” I’d been considering how Bimini’s gender can seem like a collage of distinct, dynamic attributes. After the second margarita, their voice becomes especially butch. Bimini, it turns out, talks a bit like a geezer. But their wiggle is coquettish.

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H A I R , R O S S K W A N . M A K E U P, B Y R O N L O N D O N U S I N G C H A R L O T T E T I L B U R Y. N A I L S , C H I S AT O AT C A R E N U S I N G O P I . S E T D E S I G N , K I N G O W U S U .

“I feel like I’m in a post-drag era right now – finding my feet outside of that world.

I’m excited to see what’s going to come of it.”

Has Bimini ever considered hormone therapy? “There were times when I did think about it; where I did think a lot about whether I wanted to transition or not, if that was part of what I felt was my destiny. But actually, it was when I started kind of rejecting that idea, [that] I was quite comfortable within myself to stay in my body and express both sides of my gender identity…Being able to be fluid, between both.”

It might seem unlikely for Shon Faye, a transgender woman, to collaborate with a drag queen who’s out to quash the gender binary, but Faye deftly points out such distinctions were complicated to begin with. “In many ways, that’s a return to what a lot of drag, maybe more so in the US, was anyway – pre-1990s, say, when you look at ballroom drag queens, you’re not really sure if you’d call them trans people, or gay people, or whatever. They’re kind of all of them. And I think Bimini in the UK is kind of a modern rediscovery of that, of how drag is also connected to gender nonconformity and resisting binary categories.”

Faye observes, “I think with Bimini, it can be hard to know the boundaries of what’s even drag any more. Because obviously it’s so not like, ‘this is a female character I dress up as, and this is Tommy’ or whatever. Actually, their drag can often be quite androgynous. And obviously they’re interested in fashion. That’s an authentic interest.

It’s whether or not it’s drag. That conversation between drag and fashion is one that’s going on in the culture anyway, and I feel like Bimini is probably an embodiment of that.”

Ever-restless, Bimini tells me, “I wonder what’s next.”

“What do you think?” I ask.

“What’s post-drag? I don’t know! I feel like I’m maybe in a post-drag era right now – kind of finding my feet outside of that world. But I’m excited to see what’s going to come of it.”

The first time I met Bimini, I told them they seemed fearless.

They immediately linked this to a courage they developed after the death of their best friend Ellie when they were 18. The tragic car accident shocked Great Yarmouth, Bimini recalled, because it was teenage girls and it happened on Halloween. It’s only when we talk about the accident a week later that Bimini reveals, “I would have been in the car. I would have been in the car. So this is the most shocking thing.” Though Bimini has already said it twice, I have to ask them to repeat it again.

That Halloween in 2011, Tommy, Ellie and four other girls had partied pretty hard and very late in the kinds of trashy Norwich clubs that offer cheap Jägerbombs. They piled into the car to drive home until, for some unremembered reason, “I got in a mood and got a taxi home.” It was an unusual decision; for one thing, the ride cost £35 – expensive for a teenage student. “I escaped…” Bimini says now. After they left, the car swerved off the road into the back of a parked lorry.

The other three girls got out before the wreck went up in flames, but Ellie died in the passenger seat. “I felt guilty all the time,” says Bimini.

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“I felt like I should have been in the car. I should have got Ellie out of the car. Why did we even do this?”

The way Bimini initially described the tragedy to me – almost objectively, perhaps a result of their journalism education – contrasts starkly with how they share their own memory of the night the second time we meet. This shift seems pivotal to Bimini’s sense of self.

They have a tendency to depict their own past as if it were a series of lessons. It’s actually how their book, subtitled A Drag Queen’s Guide to Life, is structured: for example, “Life Lesson 3: Know Your Her-Story”. This may be because of a wish (which they eventually confide towards the end of our last conversation) not to always care about things so deeply. “It can be difficult to disassociate sometimes,” Bimini says.

Bimini recalls the pop played at Ellie’s funeral – “End Credits”, Chase and Status; “Stop Crying Your Heart Out”, Oasis; “Cheers”, Rihanna; “Beautiful People”, Chris Brown – what Ellie would have wanted. She and Tommy loved a hot mess: Lindsay Lohan, Amy Winehouse, pink-haired Lily Allen carried out of the Glamour Awards in a k-hole. “That raucous noughties Brit culture.”

The next year, Tommy moved to east London – to study journalism but also on the trail of those bad influences. Mephedrone was big.

“It smelled like cat piss.” Tommy’s preferred poison was GHB. At one point, they took it hourly. “There was a really dark moment,” Bimini confides, in which they’d been partying for days and found themself “coming round in a situation where I realised I wasn’t safe. And I had been in a very vulnerable position. And I came round and realised that OK, this needs to stop. You’re 21 and this is not what you should be doing right now.”

Turning to sobriety and yoga was never going to be about a couple of YouTube videos. “I think I’m a person that has probably got an addictive personality, and I’ll probably always have an addiction to something,” they admit. Tommy travelled to Pai and Koh Phi Phi in Thailand then Rishikesh in the Himalayan mountains. In remote locations, they went into deep savasana and opened a pineal eye, but also began to question the contradictions of a cultish guru.

Back in London, the question became how to re-enter nightlife without being swallowed up. The answer was to rule it. They entered drag competitions tentatively, gradually adding pole dancing and polishing the looks. “Upgraded,” Princess Julia recalls fondly.

Becoming a drag queen did not mean merely inventing a new character, but taking from the past: Bimini is the name they’d have been given if assigned female at birth. Bon-Boulash was the name of an old family cat.

Today, Bimini is no longer teetotal. “I’ve been through a lot over the last six months that I often feel guilt and shame for moaning about, because of the level of privilege that I am in right now.

So it’s this double-edged sword. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, I’d love to be doing what you’re doing.’ And what I’m doing is fucking amazing.

But there are also times when I’m not appreciating what I’m doing because of other things going on behind closed doors that people don’t know about – things that people can’t know about. So then I maybe drink a bit more than I’d like to, and I see the patterns happening, and I don’t want to get caught up in that again because I am in a very lucky position.” Bimini describes discipline in terms befitting a self-taught pole dancer: “I think it’s just about that balance and about knowing how far you can go one way or how far you can go the other way.”

When I ask Bimini when was the last time they cried, they smile.

“On Friday.” Recording an interview for a documentary about their life for the BBC, they’d become overwhelmed connecting where they are now with where they’ve been.

As we prepare to part ways, the Westwood bag is on Bimini’s arm again. A friend once joked that handbags represent emotional baggage. To extend that metaphor, though, each of us must find a way to take past trauma along, as well as collect new experiences.

The challenge is to determine our capacity; how much we can bear.

A little later on, I enter the (gender-neutral) loo and clock Bimini’s bag on the counter. I turn back, wanting to afford them some privacy after all this talking. I don’t peek into Bimini’s bag, or enquire about what’s inside. There are some things you just don’t ask a queen. J E R E M Y AT H E R T O N L I N I S A W R I T E R , E S S AY I S T A N D T H E A U T H O R O F G AY B A R : W H Y W E W E N T O U T.

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Bill Nighy, the unsung national treasure who’s been dropping one-liners onstage and on-screen for more than four decades, takes us on a trip down memory lane to discuss his latest work, Living.

Just don’t expect him to ever watch it himself.

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Leave the railway station of commuterville Caterham in Surrey, walk a few yards to the mini-roundabout and make a left, and you might be tempted into that familiar British high-street establishment, a Pizza Express. If you were to enter, have a coffee perhaps, or cheeky Veneziana for lunch, you might notice the posters on the wall. Pizza Express often commissions artists to make work celebrating local landmarks and since 2015, a set of stylised prints have celebrated one particular Caterham local landmark, Mr Bill Nighy.

What’s odd about today is that if you walk a short way past that Pizza Express, you will spot a tall, lean man in heavy-rimmed spectacles and a blue mac, peering into the window of the Pop Inn Cafe. The actual Bill Nighy. He is having a moment.

“This,” he says seriously, “was a very important shop when I was young.” When Nighy was in his teens, in the 1960s, the Pop Inn Cafe was a travel agent as well as a record shop, for some mad reason. And it was here that Nighy, 72, heard Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited for the first time. “I stood in the travel agent and the lady behind the counter let me listen to the whole record, from start to finish. I was the only customer. It was one of the cultural events of my life.”

We gaze into the Pop Inn Cafe for a few seconds, contemplating its momentous history.

Then we hop into a cab driven by his friend Mick and take a tour around Nighy’s home town.

A day out in the suburbs. Not a usual day for Nighy. When he’s not working, the actor tends to base himself at his central-London flat, to occupy himself with what he enjoys, which is city life: sitting outside cafes, talking to friends, walking, reading, thinking about football, thinking about clothes. He is serious about these activities, and we discuss all of them in detail over the next few days. We also discuss acting and politics, though he is more circumspect on these. “I once did a talk where I was asked for advice for young actors and I said, ‘Make sure you learn your lines,’ because for some insane reason, it has become fashionable not to do so. And I got a call from my agent the next day, asking, ‘What did you say?’ It was all over the papers, apparently.”

Nighy looks appalled. He does not like undue attention, and he is a precise man, with precise ways, acquired over time to help soothe his inner anxiety: an acute, churning, self-dislike.

Nighy appears cool and collected, funny, charming. Impeccably polite, both to those who recognise him and to those that don’t (the waiter in Pizza Express had no idea who he was, despite the pictures). But if he lets his mind do what it wants, he can be crippled by selfdoubt. “I am aware that I have a fucked-up perception of myself,” he says. He’s like a swan, gliding through the water looking serene, but with legs paddling madly beneath.

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about being back in Caterham – he’s sort of fizzy – and points out things I might be interested in. Often, it’s pubs. “See that pub?” he says. “I’m barred from there…Oh, and that one, too.

The Harrow. The landlord called me and my friends perverts and barred us for life.” Very few pubs welcomed Nighy in his younger days, as we shall see.

Caterham’s shops are in a valley, but its houses spread up a steep hill. “That’s where my Uncle Les lived,” says Nighy, pointing to our left.

“He taught me how to wiggle my ears.” He demonstrates. “And here is what I think of when I think of home.” We turn down a wider, more affluent, residential road. “It’s not where we lived, but it’s what I think of.”

Nighy gazes out of the window at the trees, at the way the road gently curls away from the town. He walked along here after his mother’s funeral, he says, walked and walked and walked.

“There’s something about a suburb that gets to me,” he says. “I get quite emotional – quite moved – by certain aspects: the alleyways, the back doubles between houses, the parks. There’s all this heroism going on, you know, that no one notices. The suburbs are heroic.”

HE IS UPBEAT

of course, built on dreams. That’s what makes them heroic. Couples move there to fulfil their hopes: for their own home, perhaps a garden, a good job, nice parks for the children. Its children, however, are wistful for action. Suburban teenagers dream of cities, of noise, slick people, cool bars. Bill Nighy was a suburban child, and he is known now, as a city-loving man.

A few days earlier, we are in a more recognisably Nighy-esque environment: a cafe in central London, where he often has breakfast. He is sitting at an outside table, drinking tea and reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Nighy is one of the UK’s most-loved actors, properly famous since Love Actually, so you might expect him to hide in a gated community or employ a security guard. But since he split with his long-term partner Diana Quick in 2008, he has lived alone in a rented flat in the centre of town, where he frequents coffee shops and hotel snugs, restaurants and bookstores. People can be surprised that he lives so publicly, but it’s how he likes his life. “People come over and say hello,” he says. “They want a picture and it’s fine.”

We walk from the first cafe to another one: the beautiful Maison Assouline on Piccadilly, where it will be quieter. Nighy moves quickly, carrying nothing but his book. He travels as light as he can: no bag, no keys; an Oyster card, when needed. The Assouline isn’t quite open yet, but Nighy knows the staff well – he made them a music playlist – and they let us in to settle in the corner, with our iced soda water in red Murano glasses.

The suburbs come up again as we talk about his new film, Living, written by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, and directed

by Oliver Hermanus. It’s based on Ikiru, the 1952 film by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, which is itself based on Tolstoy’s affecting short story The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Essentially, it’s about how the knowledge of imminent death can galvanise a small suburban life.

Nighy plays Mr Williams, the central character, a buttoned-up British commuter of the 1950s who wears a bowler hat as though he was born with one attached, and communicates through gnomic sentences and slight turns of the head. He is excellent in the role – Variety’s film critic speculates that he might be “scooping up a fresh shelf of trophies for his performance” – and, though he shies away from awards ceremonies, Living might mean he’s invited to a few more.

Though that’s not how Nighy thinks. He enjoyed making Living because he thinks it “very unusual” to have such a man – “a quiet, decent bloke” – as a central figure in a film. There is much about the character that he admires: the delight in doing things correctly, and then the determination to find a morally proper way to finish out his days. “That decency about him, that heroism of leading a quiet life and decades of processing the grief of losing his wife, and then being told he’s going to die and his approach to that…”

Nighy assumes Living is good, but he doesn’t know for sure, because he never watches his films. He can’t bear to see himself on THE SUBURBS ARE,

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screen. His performance is never what he’d hoped – “all I see are all my ancient defaults” – and it attacks his confidence so badly that it can ruin the whole experience.

“If I see it,” he says, “I’ll see all the little bits of cowardice where I couldn’t quite pull something off. Whereas now, I can allow myself to think that, maybe this time, it was okay. I’m best left out of it. I can’t rely on myself. If I see it, it falls into the wrong hands.”

Everything in Living, as far as he is concerned, is perfect because he hasn’t seen it.

“The script was impeccable,” he says, “and I know how it looks to the point of the design, and the shots, and I know about the performances, and I observed the director and the cinematographer.

And I trust [producer] Stephen Woolley with my life. I didn’t think, and I still don’t think, we’re going to storm the box office or take the world by storm, but that’s not…What you look for is things where there’s dignity for everyone, and where you could just plant it in the world, and it will softly explode here and there, and…generally be something that helps.”

Living is a rare thing for Nighy: a fully leading role. Though David Hare, especially, has cast Nighy in central parts, he is usually in the middle of an ensemble. Directors like to make good use of his gift for comedy – the twinkle in his eye, the tilt of the head, the joy of landing, “Don’t buy drugs…become a pop star, and they give you them for free!” They like him to be the support guy to a central performance, where, you notice, he often steals the show. He is highly rated by his peers. Tom Stoppard tells me “he has everything a writer wants.”

Annette Bening, who starred with Nighy in 2020’s Hope Gap, loves his work. “He’s very social on set,” she says, “but he is serious. Never glib. I was so excited to work with him.”

His career is a long one, beginning at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre in the early 1970s, alongside Julie Walters, Matthew Kelly and Pete Postlethwaite. Another great actor, Jonathan Pryce, also just out of acting school, auditioned him. “He sat astride a bench and started his speech, a modern piece,” remembers Pryce. “And then he stopped, and said, ‘Can I start again?’ And started…and then stopped and said, ‘Can I start again?’ And he did this about five times.” Pryce decided he was “either a very good actor, or a madman,” and gave him a chance.

Though “it’s important to me that I do a good job,” Nighy doesn’t like talking about acting. He can be scathing on the idea of “process” and will explain to anyone who enquires how he feels after playing an emotional part that, “I didn’t have time to feel anything, I was too busy working.” By working, he means “making sure I’m in the right spot at the right time, so I can pick up that book, on that line, and pass it on another,” and then timing his line so it lands a joke properly. He can make it sound as though his job is just a series of mental instructions, a logical list to be worked through.

As he’s got older, both his parts and his technique have blossomed.

For research, I watched Dreams of Leaving, a Play for Today written and directed by David Hare in 1980, which stars Nighy as a lovelorn journalist. “His first romantic lead,” says Hare, when I speak to him on the phone.

“I cast him despite – or because – of his blond fringe.” Hare and Nighy have a long history together. Hare wrote the part of world-weary spy Johnny Worricker for Nighy, and has directed him in several of his plays, including Pravda and The Vertical Hour.

In Dreams of Leaving, the fluffy-haired Nighy is fine, but nowhere near the physically clear and emotionally precise actor he is now.

“He was shy, and I couldn’t give him confidence,” remembers Hare.

“He was also clearly charismatic and fascinating to watch. But not fantastically skilled. Someone like the young Ken Branagh, when he went on stage, he was in his complete natural element. Bill seemed like he’d wandered in from next door. He’s really learned on the job.”

Hare says that because Nighy doesn’t watch himself on screen, he’s more reliant than other actors on whoever directs him, which is why he tends to go back to people he trusts: Hare himself, Stephen Daldry, Richard Curtis, the late Roger Michell. Hare also believes that it was when Nighy was in Hare’s Pravda, at the National Theatre,

“The things that work are the things your grandmother told you: kindness, compassion, a concern for other people.”

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that he really stepped up his game. Anthony Hopkins played Pravda’s leading character, a Rupert Murdoch-type figure called Lambert Le Roux, and was, says Hare, completely brilliant, from the very first read-through. Nighy, who was playing his sidekick, realised immediately that he would have to “join him, or be completely smothered.”

And Nighy achieved it. They became, according to Hare, “an incredible double act. To have the guts to cope with Tony in full cry…not everyone managed it. But Bill did.”

Though Nighy remembers Pravda extremely fondly – he tells a great tale about Hopkins smashing down a sword and just missing an audience member’s head – what he really recalls is the fear. “Every play I’ve ever done, I stand in the wings on the opening night, and I vow with all my heart – and I mean it every time – I swear that this will never, ever, ever be allowed to happen again. I feel so unhappy and so lonely, and so stupid for agreeing to do it in the first place. And then you have to go out and do it.”

He does do it, as he does his films. He thinks about his work as a collaborative effort, so that he performs for the other actors, and the crew, rather than himself. Experience has taught him that, despite his crippling self-consciousness, his low assessment of his talents, things might be okay. Good manners mean he can’t let anyone down.

Nighy moves his phone so it aligns with the edge of the table. He once told me that his domestic talent was “straightening. I’m a great straightener.” He can’t cook, really (though his recipe for beans on toast once appeared in The Observer), so he doesn’t have a cooker in his flat, because what’s the point? He has a kettle but no coffee machine, just “one of those filter things that you can put on top of one cup.” No computer –“someone bought me one once, but I never turned it on.” A big sofa and a TV, to watch the football, and an excellent sound system to play his music. He goes out for breakfast, doesn’t do lunch, and prefers his dinner early, in a local restaurant, where – if he’s not eating with friends – he reads a book. When he finishes a book, he gives it away.

Because he’s out in public so often, he has a radar for intrusion – particularly male. On three occasions, when we’re talking, a man or a couple of men arrive, then manoeuvre a smidgen too close for comfort, make a tiny bit too much noise, and Nighy decides to get the bill. At one point, we are interrupted by an older chap, drunk, in pastel knitwear, who wants to know who played the male lead in The African Queen. Nighy, who is in the middle of a story, holds one finger up, then gives the answer – “Humphrey Bogart” – and looks away, so the man leaves. “No stranger to a sherbet, I would say,” says Nighy, quietly, and continues with his tale.

He returns to Living. “It’s a film about procrastination, apart from anything else. Certainly, I can procrastinate at an Olympic level. My whole life is a monument to displacement activity and procrastination.” What should you be doing instead? “Well, it’s embarrassing,” says Nighy. “It’s embarrassing when people talk about wanting to write. I think the reason I haven’t written anything is because I talk too much. Also, writing requires courage and organisation and planning.

And I’ve always lacked that courage.”

So, you’re not writing. What else are you not doing? “Just about anything you can think of. Not travelling for pleasure. Not learning to tap dance. I mean, that’s quite a big one. Because I’ve always wanted to do that. I’ve got the shoes.”

We discuss Christopher Walken, who Nighy loves, for his cool and his ability to dance. And at some point during our talk of acting and writing and tap shoes, we decide to go on an outing. To the suburbs.

To Caterham, Surrey.

IN MAISON ASSOULINE,

grew up in two homes in Caterham. His first, now replaced by a block of flats, was a house with a workshop and petrol pumps in the front yard: a garage, managed by his father. We drive to see it, and though nothing of it remains, Nighy is a bit shaken: “Oh my God, I’ve not been back since I left. I’ve never seen this before.”

Nighy’s father Alfred was, and is, a great influence on him. His dad would arrange himself just so, smoking a cigarette perfectly, one hand in his pocket, like Bing Crosby. He worked hard and looked good: a blueprint for Nighy now, though he rebelled against him as a teen. After hearing Highway 61 Revisited, Nighy was inspired to run away from home, aged 15, telling his parents he was on a French exchange. He and his friend aimed for the Persian Gulf (“it THE YOUNG NIGHY

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THIS PAGE shirt £440 Tom Ford trousers £460 Martine Rose OPPOSITE blazer £2,480 polo £950 trousers £760 Tom Ford

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THIS PAGE shirt £1,770 Ralph Lauren trousers £1,400 Prada OPPOSITE shirt £365 Lemaire trousers £790 Giorgio Armani

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sounded good,”) but only got as far as Marseille docks before they ran out of money and had to return home.

Nighy’s mum, Catherine, worked as a nurse in St Lawrence’s Hospital, a residential mental-health facility. Nighy himself worked there as a porter for a bit. Unfortunately, this was during his longhaired, “pervert” era, and his mum found his appearance as mortifying as the landlord of The Harrow.

“When I was young, I was an average mess,” he says. “Disabled by romanticism, the definition of airhead, really. I was airy-fairy. But my friends and I were, through our hair, threatening the very fabric of society. Apparently. We just grew our hair long.”

Their look was why he and his friends were barred, at least from the posher pubs. So they frequented the less-posh ones. There wasn’t a lot to do. They would meet outside the car showroom (Caterham is famous for its car manufacturing); they would clamber into the woods to smoke dope, “we buried a chillum in the ground, it might still be there”; they would play football in the park; sometimes Nighy would sneak into his house late at night and make beans on toast for all his friends. He managed to cook and clear up without waking his mum and dad: “It was one of my secret skills.”

This was at his second childhood home, about five minutes’ drive away from his first. In a narrow cul-de-sac, we pull up outside a small semi-d. “It cost £3,500,” notes Nighy. He gazes at it through the taxi window. “They’ve taken the shamrock off the top of the garage,” he says.

Nighy is the youngest of three; he has an older brother and sister.

Which room was yours? I ask. “Mine was above the porch, there,” he says. “It was a very small room, and I had a big radio, by the bed.

In the dark, it lit up like the sky at night. Anyway, that’s my window.

I threw my suitcase out of it in the middle of the night, stayed at my friend’s house, and then I legged it.”

A year after his Persian Gulf escapade, at the ripe old age of 16, off went Nighy again, with his friend Brendan, to Paris. The plan was to write “the great English short story,” and Paris was the place to do it.

So they hitch-hiked, with suitcases. At Folkestone beach, Nighy threw away his underwear: “Only because I’d read that Ernest Hemingway didn’t wear any.” Hence Paris, sans culottes. Unfortunately, when he and Brendan got to the city of dreams, it was late, and they had nowhere to sleep. They found some shelter and bedded down. On awakening, they realised they were under the Arc de Triomphe.

They managed to stay on for a while, and Nighy embarked on his writing career. He drew a margin on a page, but then got distracted, and “that was the sum total of my literary efforts.” He and Brendan got busy soaking up the Parisian atmosphere. It was the early ’60s and the coolest young Frenchmen were driving Harley-Davidson motorbikes, no helmet, with long hair, in shades and a suit, he noticed. Sitting outside a cafe, Nighy saw a biker arrive with a young woman, riding pillion.

She was in a Chanel suit, with “no makeup, no stockings, no handbag, and her hair cut really well” and – ping! – something happened inside Nighy’s heart. “Just shoes and a Chanel suit. It was a glimpse, you know? Those things that stay with you for a million years.”

that it was the girl that stayed within Nighy’s heart, what actually made a deeper impression was her clothes. It is hard to express just how important clothes are to Nighy. They are his absolute passion. “I take clothes very seriously as objects,” he tells me.

He can spend hours discussing suits – men’s or women’s – how many buttons, where the vents should be, the line, the cut. When he first got parts in plays, if the part required a suit, he would wear it offstage, too, and negotiate with the costume manager to keep hold of it after the end of the run. He wanted to look good, even when he had very little money, so he would compromise on, say, housing (he lived in squats), but look out for clothing opportunities.

“I knew I had money when my shoes didn’t squelch,” he says. “Every night, I would put my Doc Martens on the windowsill to air and I would wash my socks, because I only had one pair. The socks were never T H O U G H YO U M I G H T A S S U M E

quite dry in the morning, so I used to squelch everywhere.” Sometimes other actors would collect their unwanted clothes together and give him a bagful; but that was no good, because he was too fussy to bring himself to wear anything he didn’t like.

We get on to cardigans, about which he has “a thing.” “I go weak about certain cardigans,” he says. “I’m not exaggerating to be amusing. It’s for real. I get a funny feeling, a physical sensation.” He buys them for his daughter, Mary. Margaret Howell does a collaboration with Marion Foale (“just exquisitely mod”) and he has bought Mary every single one. He also, when it comes to women’s cardigans, has a soft spot for Prada: “Fine wool, little buttons, maybe white. You can’t get chicer than that.”

Men’s cardigans can cause him problems because they’re always “four inches too long; even John Smedley’s”. He buys Scott Fraser Simpson’s, and sometimes his cycling jerseys, just as objects. “It’s like buying art. Usually, I end up giving them to somebody younger.”

He’s considering a couple of cardigans at home, one “a fabulous thing: with fat stripes and a big collar.” He puts it on in his flat, sometimes nearly makes it through the door, but then chickens out.

Because the point of clothes, to him, is not just the cut or the quality, but how you wear them. The Holy Grail of style, for Nighy, is to wear expensive clothes casually.

“I go weak about certain cardigans.

I’m not exaggerating to be amusing.

It’s for real…I get a physical sensation.”

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“I was in a cult of one who considered that anything that was designed to prolong your life was vulgar and embarrassing.”

“Yes,” he says. “In a way that takes the curse off.” To be so cool, so stylish, that you can wear a cardigan like you were born to do it; to make Saint Laurent seem like a T-shirt and jeans. To rock a Chanel suit, as though it’s nothing; to wear it without a handbag.

Where would you put your keys if you don’t have a bag? I wonder.

“Oh, you’d just stash them under a stone by your door,” he says airily.

A suburban solution.

and motor past Essendene Lodge, a prep school. This used to be his state primary school, “the St Francis of Assisi Catholic Primary School for Boys and Girls.” Nighy was an altar boy when he was young – a privilege he enjoyed, because of the attention and because he was given Marmite sandwiches and a cup of tea after mass, which he could consume at his desk in front of the other children. “I mean, it couldn’t have been more attractive. A great feeling of self-righteousness, plus Marmite sandwiches.”

He wondered for a while if he might be called to the cloth. He waited for the Lord to give him a sign, but He kept talking in Nighy’s own voice, which made him suspicious. When he was confirmed, all the girls wore white, with a sash, and he was distracted; soon after, the hair thing started happening and he gave up on religion. Still, though, he remembers being shouted at by the kids from the Protestant school: “Mary lovers!” was the insult, which makes him smile now.

At 11, he went to John Fisher School, a Catholic grammar, though he’d failed the qualifying examination. A teacher, Mrs Bold, put forward his case and he was allowed in. He thinks this might have slightly divorced him from his roots, which he defines, when pushed, as “blue collar”. He uses clothes to illustrate his point: “With actors, if they’re from a blue-collar background, they dress up.

If they’re from a white-collar background, they dress down.” Nighy is the former – “always a little overdressed” – so he wears a suit, even if rehearsals involve him rolling around on the floor. Actually, especially if they do, because it amuses him: “I’m going to work,” he says.

“So I dress as though I am.”

Nighy doesn’t particularly like being called working class. He has no problem with the label – he has no time for people who are snobs – but somewhere inside he worries that his parents might not have liked it. His parents worked hard and were proud of what they achieved; his dad began as a mechanic and rose to a works manager, who bought his own home. “I suppose you would say they came from working-class backgrounds, but they were aspirational. I don’t know what they would have been. I get confused.” He pauses, rethinks. “They were decent people, but they subscribed to the myth, which is still healthy, that certain types of people are naturally designed to rule over us.”

Nighy does not agree. He doesn’t agree with fixing people to their birth situation, celebrating them for being born to money, or leaving them to rot if they’re having a bad time, “simply due to geography.”

And he doesn’t like being labelled himself. Recently, he was at an art launch, and was approached by a journalist for a quote. “She said, ‘Well I know that you’re extremely left wing…’” Nighy’s mouth curls.

“And I said, ‘Hang on. Do you know that? Because it’s news to me.’ And she said, ‘Well, everybody knows that.’ And I said [he is icily polite], ‘Really, how?’ She said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Well, neither do I. I’m not extremely anything. And I don’t consider myself left wing. I don’t think in those terms.’”

What terms do you think in? “I think there’s decent and indecent, basically. The things that work are the things your grandmother told you. Kindness, compassion, a concern for other people – as a principle, not strategically. Generally, that we look out for one another. That is a great political statement. That’s as sophisticated as anything you could possibly say.”

WE LEAVE NIGHY’S OLD HOME

Another one where Nighy and his friend were barred for life. The new owners are delighted to see him; one young barwoman is quite overcome. Nighy happily has his picture taken with her. We examine the beer on offer. There is a skull on the beer tap.

WE ARE IN THE PUB.

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Nighy hasn’t drunk alcohol since his early 40s (since 1992), and – as many heavy drinkers find when they stop – his career has soared even further since he’s become sober. A naturally addictive person, after he gave up alcohol, he found himself drinking 15 cans of Diet Coke a day, or hoovering up packet after packet of biscuits. So he gave up sugar (he carries sweeteners), and reduced his caffeine intake, because it was making him anxious. Now he has one perfect cup of coffee a day, plus lots of tea. Also, he also gave up smoking, which he’s very proud of.

More shockingly, he has started exercising. Three times a week, he gets on the Tube and goes to see a personal trainer. There is no way Nighy would ever go to a gym, with all the mirrors on the walls.

“When I tell people that I exercise, their first response is always to laugh, which I get because I’m old, and I’m lanky, and I’m skinny. And then when they have finished laughing, they say, ‘But what do you wear?’ Well, I wear a pair of training trousers and a T-shirt and a pair of pomegranate Pumas. Retro pomegranate Pumas.” He is delighted with his Pumas, of course. He is also delighted with exercise.

“Exercise is one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me,” he says. “I was never going to do any physical exercise. I was in a cult of one who considered that anything that was designed to prolong your life was vulgar and embarrassing. Like, Who do you think you are that you need to live longer than [everyone else]?

But it changes the way you think. And the bit afterwards, when you walk towards the Tube, and you’ve got 20 minutes to walk and drink a cup of coffee, that’s as good as it gets.”

Nighy lives for such moments – those short times where life seems perfect. He tells a brilliant story about being in New York, in a play, and stopping off at a candy shop (it was before his no-sugar days) and buying a load of sweets, eating them in a taxi and Barry White coming on to the radio. He got the driver to turn it up, and raised his arms in delight: high on sweet, sweet sugar and smooth, smooth Barry.

He gets other moments from watching football (he supports Crystal Palace but watches Serie A matches, because of the Italian teams’ hair), or sports films (he likes the bit at the end with the slo-mo; it makes him cry). From music, obviously. Also, from work. He loves to land a joke properly in a play. “I only do plays that have got jokes in them,” he says. “I think it’s vulgar to invite people to sit in the dark for two and a half hours and not tell them a joke. It’s just bad manners.”

Nighy directs us to Caterham graveyard. It is a lovely spot, large and green with a view over the valley. Nighy has brought us because he used to hang out here as a youth, after the pub, taking in the sky and the lighted houses. But also, he wants to visit his parents’ grave. On it there is an engraving of a cog wheel – because Alfred was a mechanic – and a thistle – because Catherine was Scottish. Nighy thinks he will be buried here, “because, where else?”

His dad has been on his mind a lot, because of Living. “He, too, was a very reserved and principled and disciplined person who went to work and got on with stuff, and conducted himself in a modest and discreet way.”

When Nighy ran away to Paris, he wrote a letter to his dad to explain why. “It was two bits of writing paper. And it said, ‘Don’t try and find me. I’ll be 17 soon, and I can no longer live under your repressive regime.’” He smiles: “It was terrible, the most embarrassing piece of tosh you’ve ever read in your life.”

When Alfred died, in 1976, Nighy found the letter amongst his things. His father had kept it, this ridiculous teenage rant from his youngest son, this neatly written adieu to what he then dismissed as a boring little life. These days, the thought of it can move Nighy almost to tears. Don’t try and find me!, when, of course, he brings his dad and these suburbs with him everywhere he goes. WHEN WE LEAVE,

L I V I N G W I L L B E I N C I N E M A S L AT E R T H I S Y E A R .

blazer £2,480 polo £950 Tom Ford grooming by Alfie Sackett. set design by Josh Stovell. tailoring

by Faye Oakenfull.

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Box-fresh white sneaks should be the finishing touch to any warmweather fit, but this summer consider switching them for some iced-out Derbies. These leather lace-ups will do the trick – wear with caution (and avoid mud). shoes £179 Boss

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Remember Dorothy’s lunch pale in The Wizard of Oz? Well this is the sexy, leather Guccified version of that.

Perfect for carrying your arancini to the beach. Certo, Toto? bag £4,840 Gucci

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This leather number, courtesy of Maison Margiela, is big enough to lug every daily essential you’ve got. bag (price upon request) Maison Margiela

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like so many young and emerging fashion designers. It’s nondescript: blank white walls, pattern-cutting tables filling the space, bitterly cold in January. If you expect something elegiac and romantic like the flower-strewn fashion presentations or lookbook imagery of his label, S.S. Daley – which mostly resemble backstage outtakes of Cecil Beaton shooting a Brideshead adaptation – you’ll be sorely disappointed. There are no marbles or busts, no artfully draped curtains. No flowers. This space is expressive not of fantasy but of the pragmatic reality of a designer trying to make it in a doubly tough time in an already tough-enough industry. Fashion isn’t for the faint of heart, especially not at what we hope is the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stokey-Daley counts himself lucky he has the space at all.

Previously, he was holed up at his childhood home in the suburbs of Liverpool in the north-west of England, furiously sourcing fabrics and haranguing retailers and press to interest them in his wares.

That said, there are a few glimmers of another time and another place in his London space: the clothes in process all around, for instance, which seem gloriously incongruous to their humdrum surroundings. There’s a pair of thickly purled cable-knit vests from his Spring/Summer 2022 collection laid on a table, seeming raiments of a 1930s cricket beer match, yet actually brand new. There’s a twopiece outfit in hallucinogenic purple and lilac zebra stripes destined, Stokey-Daley tells me, for the musician Mick Fleetwood. And there are a few posters of another musician, Harry Styles, a pin-up for millions, wearing the label’s clothes.

Let’s get this out of the way at the start: Stokey-Daley’s studio is next door to that of Styles’ stylist Harry Lambert. After his 2020 graduation from the University of Westminster fashion design BA, via email from his bedroom in Liverpool, he showed Lambert some shirts and trousers he’d created. Lambert was interested, and commissioned pieces for Styles, with no guarantee he would wear any of them, which is the way dressing pop stars normally works.

But Styles did wear them, a lot, notably in his video for Golden and IN A SMALL STUDIO IN EAST LOND ON,

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opening pages STEVEN STOKEYDALEY

all clothing, and accessories, his own

Right and below, all wearing S.S. Daley’s Autumn/Winter 2022 collection.

accompanying single artwork. If you Google that abstract adjective now, even with no context, the first result that pops up is Styles’ video. You can, of course, buy advertising like that – many brands do. But Stokey-Daley didn’t, and when interest in him exploded, he was nonplussed. Luckily, when the spotlight shone, he – and, more importantly, his clothes – were ready.

Stokey-Daley’s second post-graduate collection – the first S.S. Daley show – was that moment. Staged to a packed audience at London Fashion Week last September, his garments were worn not by models, but a retinue of 10 actors from the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain – Will Atiomo, Tomás Azocar-Nevin, Alexander Da Fonseca, Billy Hinchliff, Jez Davess-Humphrey, William Gao, Felix Kai, Gael Mfula, Nay Murphy and Liam Whiting. All male-identifying, aged from 18 to 25, their backgrounds nevertheless ran the gamut – Atiomo, for example, is an old Etonian, only the second Black student.

Notice the use of ‘show’ and ‘stage’: this was no ordinary catwalk experience, rather a short theatrical production specially created

by NYT artistic director Paul Roseby, exploring school experiences alongside entwined themes of sexuality, masculinity and race. For Stokey-Daley, it was giving back to theatre that he stated had given him so much. “After a two-year period where actors have had their literal world ripped away from them – theatres closed, the government saying it isn’t important enough to fund – their entire being has stopped, in a way that fashion hasn’t,” Stokey-Daley says. “And we’ve got everything there. We’ve got lights, we’ve got a space – why would we waste that? Why don’t we just come together? This is a great way to push theatre in front of people – and also to give this group of boys an IRL experience. They were so excited about it.”

The energy of the result was a testament to that enthusiasm. Think Lord of the Flies for the 21st century, only without the bloodshed. The clothes referenced the attire of privilege, with a backwards bent to the golden interwar and postcard periods, before stately homes either crumbled or opened their grandest rooms to public rambles, before social mores were completely upended. Wide-legged Famous Five shorts, rugby shirts, jacquard dressing gowns, the archaic tailcoats

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often sported as part of public-schoolboy uniforms – all were present and correct, in the unexpected dusty pastels that seem to be the S.S. Daley house colours. The result was about neither performance nor clothes, but both, harmonised, each adding depth and meaning to the other.

Given that, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when meeting Stokey-Daley. He went to the National Youth Theatre himself for a summer in his teens and harboured serious ambition to become an actor, but he isn’t overly dramatic in the flesh. Like his studio, he comes across as practical and no-nonsense, dressed not in his blousy volumes nor lavish embroideries but in a neat zipped black top, perched on a stool, probably eager to get back to work a few weeks before his Autumn/Winter 2022 London Fashion Week show. StokeyDaley is happy to talk, with a typically northern loquaciousness. He’s 25, a flash of braces on his teeth making him seem younger, and his words are couched in the flattened vowels, dropped ‘g’s and catarrh-y ‘k’s of the Scouse accent. I’m used to it – my parents live close to where Stokey-Daley grew up. I was in nearby Lancashire, in Bolton, where the town clock didn’t have hands for an extended period of time. It seemed to sum up the place: timeless, somewhat inescapable. My own father has a pithy saying: born in the north, live in the north, die in the north. Light-hearted. StokeyWHY Daley’s background is one many northern kids share. It’s one of escape, to something brighter, better. “Massively,” Stokey-Daley says. “I think that actually was the first crack in my tight friendship group in school. I actually remember the conversation.

I asked, ‘So where are you going to go? Well, I’m going to go to London.’

And they were like, ‘…go to London?’” He laughs, lightly. Many of his friends are still in Liverpool now, working normal jobs, having babies.

By contrast, Stokey-Daley had the impetus to move from an unexpected source: his grandmother, Denise. “She worked in a local sewing factory as a teenager, with her two sisters. It’s kind of a thing around where I live – she worked there as soon as she turned 14, and she absolutely loved it. Her sisters hated it. But she really wanted to stay. She was offered an opportunity to move to London, to be an apprentice for a tailor. And she was going to take it, but her family sat her down and said, ‘You need to meet someone, to settle down here.’

I think she felt pressured to do that. And she says that she’s always, always wondered what life would have been. She doesn’t regret it, she’s still with my grandad, but she’s always said, ‘I just wish that I was born in a different time. Because opportunity is just so different.’

She was never encouraged – she was actively encouraged to do the opposite.” He pauses. “I found that so heartbreaking – actually, really, really sad. I think she lives vicariously through me, to go and just do that. She’s always pushed me. I think she’s the main reason why I have so much drive.”

You’d be forgiven for not immediately detecting Stokey-Daley’s working-class background in his clothes. But that summer at the National Youth Theatre when he was 14 made an impression: it’s woven into what he makes. His clothes have a lush, histrionic bent: billowing blousey shirts; capacious Shakespearean coats; brocade trousers of near Scarlett O’Hara proportions actually made from torndown curtains (not from Tara, granted). The Robe Room is Becoming the Garden was the title of his post-graduation collection – a twist on the title of a haunting, plaintive Michael Nyman song from his baroque score to the 1982 Peter Greenaway period film The Draughtsman’s Contract. Watch a few flickering clips of that on YouTube and the brocades, bobbing hats and exaggerated hairstyles aren’t a million miles from territory Stokey-Daley has, even at this nascent point in his career, established as his own.

Before these clothes risk falling off a tightrope into the ridiculous, there is a practicality – perhaps born of Stokey-Daley’s background.

Grounding touches of sportswear, easy stuff: knits, brief jackets cuffed deep with ribbing, boxer shorts worn as normal shorts, and the kind of clingy, revealing wrestling singlets around which a whole homoerotic online subculture has been built. Uniforms of hypermasculinity are what interests Stokey-Daley – of other upbringings and his own, often combining the two. It stems, he says, from a specific point in time. As a fashion student at Westminster, he was walking near that school’s campus in Middlesex, close to Harrow, the English public school whose most famous alumnus – known as Old Harrovians – is probably Winston Churchill. Or maybe Lord Byron.

Harrow was perched on a hill. “It’s a different world to us below,” Stokey-Daley says. Walking up the hill, Stokey-Daley was suddenly surrounded by students of that school, be-blazered – blazers are known as ‘bluers’, worn with dove-grey wide-legged trousers (‘greyers’) – Harrow boaters clutched under one arm, walking in pairs.

Their otherwise arcane costume, en masse, made Stokey-Daley feel like an outsider. “I remember I felt ridiculous when I walked there,” he laughs. It also illustrated, up front, the students’ connections to one another. “That’s what all those vintage Merchant Ivory films are all about – a bond between boys,” Stokey-Daley says. “It’s a ridiculously

“WE’VE WE’VE

GOT G O T

LIGHTS, A

S PAC E –

W H Y WO U L D W E WA S T E T H AT ?

D ON’T WE JUST COME TO GETHER?”

hyper-masculine culture,” one he reasons isn’t homosexual but homosocial, “a friendly thing that blurs the lines but isn’t overtly sexual. I found it fascinating.”

Stokey-Daley collides those literal uniforms of upper-class public schools with the unofficial uniforms of the working class – beaten-up trackies (hard Scouse accent on ‘t’ and ‘k’) laid against the flowerbedecked boaters – worn by Etonians on the Fourth of June Day in honour of George III’s birthday. “In the context of Eton and Harrow, that look is its own version of hyper-masculine,” Stokey-Daley says.

Applied to rose-bedecked straw hats, it says a lot. “And then, looking back to where I grew up, sportswear, the North Face, that’s also hypermasculine. It’s in two different ways. And if we switched two people, from each world, they would be seen as the polar opposite.” He stops.

“It’s massively about class.”

For S.S. Daley’s first show at London Fashion Week in September, his clothes were worn by 10 actors from the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain.

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STEVEN STOKEYDALEY

all clothing, shoes, and accessories, his own

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T H E R E ’ S A

WORD,

SHIBBŌLETH. IT’S

BIBLICAL.

tells of the tribe of the Ephraimites whose pronunciation of the word shibbōleth – the Hebrew word for ‘stream’ – betrayed their origins, leading them to be instantly killed. I don’t know it from there, but it reminds me of Nancy Mitford’s satirical expounding of U and non-U speech in the 1950s – ‘U’ denoting the upper class, ‘non-U’ the aspiring upper-middle classes – and the inward shudder she declared to repress when, say, someone used the word ‘serviette’ instead of ‘napkin’. Between classes, she said, “there is a very definite borderline, easily recognisable by hundreds of small but significant landmarks.” The working class didn’t get a look-in.

Class, I’ve been told, is something difficult to the point of nearimpossibility to articulate to anyone not inured from birth to its idiosyncrasies and vagaries. Which is, basically, anyone not British.

That’s because class isn’t founded in physicality, the concrete, but in the ethereal and, really, unchangeable. It’s most definitely not about money – although that winds up playing a big part. In short, it’s not about what you have but about who you are, where you come from, and what you know. Hence the importance of shibbōleths, of the innate and unsaid understanding that, say, the coat you wear while you’re hunting is actually called a pink… even though it’s red.

Stokey-Daley’s work is embedded in these kinds of ideas, obsessed with them. Needless to say, he may be British but he isn’t from the aristocracy. Not many really good fashion designers are. It’s beyond premature to place him in the canon of greats like Lee Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood or John Galliano, but they all share working-class upbringings. McQueen’s father was a taxi driver, Galliano’s a plumber, Westwood’s a shopkeeper (she began as a primary school teacher before shifting her attention to fashion).

Stokey-Daley grew up on a former council estate; his grandfather and father were both builders. He didn’t, however, grow up wanting to ‘better’ himself – distinct from, say, Cecil Beaton, on whose imagery and wardrobe his sophomore collection was based. Beaton was a snob, driven by the conviction that he had been born into the wrong – middle – class, and desperate to elevate himself. Stokey-Daley knew he wanted to do something else, somewhere else, but rather than aspiring to shift through classes, he is content to observe, be inspired by these other worlds rather than wishing to become part of them.

“I had interactions with people from different classes through theatre, when I was growing up. In the National Theatre, it was very supportive – a group. Kind of anti-hierarchical, because you’re all coming together. But then when I went to uni, I was confronted.

I was like, Whoa, I don’t know how to act. There were a few people in my year that were so the opposite kilter to me, I felt very uncomfortable when they spoke to me. I felt myself agreeing, toeing the line with them. People who could just throw money at the problem, while I was furiously typing emails for fabric sponsors.” He interned at Tom Ford for six months, Alexander McQueen for another six.

The latter donated part of the fabric to help create his graduation collection. Others came from all different places – deadstock, leftovers, secondhand tablecloths, uphostery fabrics, the aforementioned old curtains.

There’s a true ingenuity to Stokey-Daley’s work, born of resourcefulness. It ties with sustainability, a quality many designers are seeking but which seems to come naturally to him. It also links back to his upbringing again – he grew up “surrounded by brick and mortar,” he says, and there’s a certain interest in making, construction, the inner workings as opposed to just the final outcome. He was the first member of his family to attend university. “I told one girl my family were all lawyers,” Stokey-Daley laughs, of his first years in THE BO OK OF JUD GES

further education. But the initial focus wasn’t fashion. Following his interest in theatre, he wanted to pursue playwriting. “I grew up the clichéd, very dramatic, over-the-top gay child. I was very into theatre and drama when I was growing up. That was the thing I was going to do,” he says. “But I think it was that expectancy of me that made me restless. I hate doing the thing that I’m expected to do. I was going to Warwick to study English literature. And I had the car packed to go and…” he exhales, “I decided not to go. I’m not afraid of hard work, but it didn’t feel right.”

He lost money on residential fees, but begged a local college to let him study art foundation instead, off the back of previous graphics studies. A tutor suggested Stokey-Daley look into fashion. He was reticent – he’d never studied textiles and couldn’t sew. One of his first projects was based not on Balenciaga or Dior, but on the work of French dramatist Antonin Artaud and his theatre of cruelty.

Artaud’s interactive theatres, with the audience as key participants, feels related to Stokey-Daley’s disruption of the fashion show format. “I just carried on pushing, tying those together. I built a bridge to get to fashion.” It was, however, not costume – and remains so.

“I was always adamantly not that,” he says. “I wanted to infuse these theatrical elements into everyday life.” And, of course, the uniforms

Above and below left: Actors wearing S.S. Daley’s Autumn/Winter collection.

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Above and opposite: All actors wearing S.S. Daley’s Autumn/Winter 2022 collection.

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experienced some resistance to his ideas and approaches. “Someone once said: ‘Don’t you think you’re just fetishising Tory culture? You’re not from that world?

So what right do you have to do that?’” His face seems genuinely perplexed. “Where I grew up, no one wore anything other than North Face two-pieces. Do you expect me to do that? I’m not doing that.

I remember I went to see different exhibitions in London about the North, and they paint it with a very singular vision. I almost feel people are trying to keep me in that box: get back to where you belong.” The fetishisation of the working class has long been part of culture – the French even have a term for it: nostalgie de la boue. You see it in gay culture, especially: from the 19th and early 20th-century obsession with working-class ‘trade’, evident in the trial of Oscar Wilde and the writing of Christopher Isherwood, through to a more recent hyper-sexualisation of ‘chav’ or ‘scally’ dress. But flipping the tables still seems subversive, even perverse.

It’s important to state, I feel, that Stokey-Daley doesn’t see himself as a victim, or disadvantaged. This isn’t some kind of aversion to the upper classes – indeed, his boyfriend, a dancer, was public school educated – nor is it a critical comment on them, or a hankering after greener pastures. It’s something far more interesting. There’s a detachment. He cites the ideas of the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, who had actors directly address the audience to break the fourth wall and prevent them relating to – and therefore from empathising with – characters and their actions, from believing the fantasy before their eyes.

“I think I’ve been quite lucky with how I’ve gone about my education,” Stokey-Daley says. “But I know for a fact now, looking back, that there is just a disparity, between the access to those hierarchies and cultures.” He pauses again. “I think I look back to myself at home.

And if I didn’t make those few, really quick, off-the-cuff, instinctive decisions, I wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t have been able to have access. And it kind of makes me sad.”

But sadness isn’t the overriding emotion evoked by Stokey-Daley’s work. It’s joyous, uplifting, thought-provoking, unique. His examinations of class aren’t intended to skewer ideas of elitism, nor do they celebrate them. Rather, they embrace universal values of community, togetherness, friendship – exactly what Stokey-Daley experienced as part of the NYT, regardless of structures of class. In a sense, they are also celebrations of the freedoms afforded in 2022, when you can dress freely without worrying about Nancy Mitford snubbing her nose at you. These clothes are also a reflection of the tenacious will of a young, working-class designer determined to impart his vision on the world; a creative with something new to express. That is what draws the likes of Styles and Fleetwood to his door. It’s also what secured him, at time of publication, a spot in the final of the ultra-prestigious LVMH prize 2022. The theatrics set the stage for his vision, but it’s the clothes that really do the talking. EVEN IN 2022. STOKEY-DALEY HAS

A L E X A N D E R F U R Y I S FA S H I O N F E AT U R E S D I R E C T O R O F A N OT H E R M AG A Z I N E .

GROOMING, MICHELLE LEANDRA USING DR BARBARA STURM.

associated with much of everyday life can be seen as archaic, even theatrical costume – not least public schools. “I wrote my dissertation on Brechtian theory and theatre, how it could be applied to, like, the uniform of Eton – it serves a purpose to alienate a certain part of the class structure,” Stokey-Daley reasons, casually.

I keep coming back to class, stumbling over it slightly. StokeyDaley talks about class structures in a way we, as Brits, have always been discouraged from doing: objectively, with remove. But there is no way to extricate it from his work, unless he chooses to do so himself. His next S.S. Daley collection for Autumn/Winter 2022, Pantry, is an evolution of the obsession. He’d watched Gosford Park (“not Downton”) and become obsessed with a different reflection of class.

“This season, I got really into reading about the destination of the stately home in the UK. Upstairs-downstairs, inside-outside thing.

I’m able to examine the class structures similarly,” Stokey-Daley says.

“We’re not looking at the public school culture I feel we wrapped up in a really nice bow. We’ve explored that over three collections – a start, middle and end – we’ve seen that boy’s progress, we’ve seen him almost graduate.”

The Spring/Summer 2022 S.S. Daley collection marked his idealised boy’s graduation. At the same time, it felt like Stokey-Daley had pushed himself to reach a new level, too. The clothes were still sensitive and soulful, but with increasing sophistication and maturity.

The Harry Styles-ish shirts were still there, oversized with spread collars and voluminous Byronesque poet’s sleeves. But they were teamed with twisted pinstripe tailoring, skewed checks, granddaddy knitted tank tops, trench coats billowing in back and trailing lappets of ribbon like a long-forgotten portrait of a 17th-century dandy.

Paisleys that seemed lifted from the faded cushion covers of a grand manse were cut into sweet boxer shorts but also narrow-shouldered double-breasted tailoring with soupy Oxford bags underneath. You can see why rock stars come calling for these clothes. The first look included a jacket shrunken like a school blazer, the model’s wrists hanging free of the sleeve hems as if he’d outgrown it; the last outfit was a ragged black silk morning coat – formality, sobriety and seriousness. The S.S. Daley boy grew up in the course of a single collection – from public school to House of Lords, maybe?

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Whether launching Slowthai’s career or adding rocket fuel to the ascendance of PinkPantheress, creative crew Bone Soda have a clear mission statement: architect vibe.

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P hot o gr ap h s by Jam es Pea rson -Ho we s

Sty le d by K it S wa nn

B on e So da

r y Vibey O e V e rbi Th t

BONE SODA

of

Sp ri n g / S u m me r 20 22 (opening pages, from left)

ON TRUCE jacket £995 Tracery La Mille at CP Company SKINNY

shorts £160 Daniel W. Fletcher

31, CO-FOUNDER

“I used to see Truce at Work It, a party he was involved in. I didn’t love listening to hip-hop and R&B the whole night, but it was a loving environment compared to the parties we’d been going to – dark, dingy shubz in someone’s house where it was common for someone to get beaten or stabbed. Truce was doing the door and we started hanging out, then started working together on projects and parties. Bone Soda started in his bedroom and blossomed into what it is now. There is some logic to it, but it’s a lot of following the rabbit hole and seeing where it goes.”

ON CRASH TRACY jacket £775 Moncler trousers, his own ON SKINNY blazer £529 Tiger of Sweden jumper £365 Vivienne Westwood trousers £745 Kiko Kostadinov trainers £155 Salomon Sportstyle sunglasses, his own

ON DEBBIE jacket £228 Palace Skateboards jeans £210 Ami all other clothing and jewellery, her own

ON IVY jumper £940 Maison Margiela at Matches Fashion tracksuit bottoms £170 Edwin Jeans all jewellery, her own

ON JYRREL (standing at rear) jacket £695 CP Company

blazer £529 Tiger of Sweden

all other clothing, his own

jumper £365 Vivienne Westwood

ON SEAN jacket £795 Vivienne Westwood top £75 Sunspel all other clothing, his own

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trousers £745 Kiko Kostadinov trainers £155 Salomon Sportstyle sunglasses, his own

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says the co-founder Skinny Macho. “We’re an enigma,” muses Sean, the brand manager. Trying to define Bone Soda – the ever-evolving London group – isn’t easy, even if you’re part of it. The words “vibe”, “energy” and “family” come up plenty, but the truth is, no one really knows what they are, which is precisely what makes them so shape-shiftingly exciting.

What we do know: Bone Soda was born out of a friendship between co-founders Skinny Macho and Truce. As teenagers in Brixton and Stockwell, the pair bonded over a love of eclectic music and a mutual feeling of being outsiders. “Bone Soda represents the misfits,” says Skinny, remembering how “there was nothing else around at the time that spoke to us – that’s the real reason we wanted to start something.” Both he and Truce came out of left field. “Truce was skateboarding back when Black kids didn’t really skate,” says Skinny. “We all grew up the same way, wearing tracksuits, going to the same parties, but we weren’t the same as our friends.”

“WE’RE EXPERIMENTALISTS,”

Before they became close mates and collaborators, the pair were sizing each other up. “I only listened to R&B and hip-hop, but I used to paint my nails, have weird hairstyles and dye my hair blond,” Truce recalls. “Skinny used to side-eye me all the time. We were both misfits.”

When they finally united, they started their Bone Soda club nights – roadblock parties that took a far less rigid approach to genre than other nights. Hip-hop and R&B sets would drift off into house and UK funky; everyone was welcome, there was no dress code and the emphasis was very much on freedom and fun.

The crew grew quickly, and while music is always at the heart of everything they do, they’ve since moved beyond dance floors to span everything from radio shows to fashion collaborations, music videos to a record label. They’ve helped launch the explosive early careers of Slowthai and PinkPantheress and worked with Nike and Virgil Abloh.

But levelling up hasn’t changed their values: the group still pray at the altar of spontaneity and no idea is out of bounds. As they add more members and move from their whitewashed Spitalfields studio to a multi-storey townhouse round the corner, the next era of Bone Soda looks boundless.

ON SEAN slippers £90 Ugg all other clothing, his own ON TRUCE jacket £898 Palace Skateboards t-shirt £95 MHL by Margaret Howell

SEAN

TRU CE

26, BRAND MANAGER

31, CO-FOUNDER

“We’re a diverse group and we mix with all pockets of society. One day we’ll be at a Michelin-starred restaurant, the next we’re in a warehouse rave. I work on partnerships and help manage the events as well as working on shoots. We have a mixtape series with Toro Y Moi called “Gunk”, and I make sure we collaborate with the right designers for the artwork. We’re very spontaneous; one day we’ll be releasing music, the next we’ll be doing a design collaboration. I’m also a product nerd and I’ve always been into fashion – we did an event with Virgil Abloh last year, which was a landmark moment within the London streetwear fashion scene. It felt important then, but it feels even more so now.”

“When you’re doing all these different things like us, there’s a lot to learn to become proficient and respectable. Take the music industry: it’s this whole animal and if you want a piece of it, you have to learn all the processes. We used to share music all the time, then we started working with artists. I was drawn to Slowthai because he was rogue, and he still is. There’s no, ‘We can’t do that because it’s not connected to this.’ If we wanted to do a food pop-up tomorrow, we would.

And in the future, we want to design more things. We all love product and design, from a beautiful plate to a beautiful chair to clothes and interiors.”

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DEBBIE 25, DJ

JYRREL 24, DJ & PHOTOGRAPHER

“Bone Soda is a family thing. Skinny has been doing it from the start and I started to become involved in the events.

It all felt very natural.

One of the first things I ever did was a shoot in Morley’s chicken shop in Brixton. With a lot of collectives, it’s about being similar to each other, but everyone in our group seems to be really in their own space. The music side is so broad, but niche at the same time. We’re all very open to different sounds and musicians.

I always look forward to Bone Soda parties. We work with artists who feel really different to everything else that’s going on in London, so it always brings a unique crowd of people together. We shot a video with the singer Dexter the other day, which was a lot of fun.”

jacket £695 CP Company all other clothing, his own

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“Growing up, there was always music around the house, whether it was old cassettes or pirate radio. I always knew I wanted to be involved in music, but I didn’t know how – I’m not the best singer and I can’t rap. Mum always said that I talk a lot, and I realised I love to talk about new music, so that became my thing.

I got a show at Radar Radio, which is where I met Skinny in 2018.

He DM’d me saying, ‘I’m rooting for you.’ I was like, who is this weirdo?

But everyone around me told me, ‘He’s the guy,’ so I started doing a few DJ gigs with him.

During the pandemic,

I lost my job at Clash magazine and Skinny invited me to the studio and asked why I wasn’t a part of Bone Soda yet. From there, we started building. My highlight was playing the PinkPantheress after-party on the same line-up as Mura Masa.

That was a good time!

What’s important to me about Bone Soda is they know my worth and how much of a star I can be.

They see my potential.

I really appreciate that.”

top £1,450 Gucci all jewellery, her own

B on e So da

jumper £940 Maison Margiela at Matches Fashion tracksuit bottoms £170 Edwin Jeans brooch £550 The Ouze

IV Y J OHNSON 20, DJ & ILLUSTRATOR

“During the pandemic, I was studying illustration at Camberwell and working at Stüssy. I dropped out of uni because I really wasn’t enjoying it. I’ve been doing a lot more illustrations now that I can work on what I want to, when I want to. Pierre [Crash Tracy] suggested I try DJ’ing and I thought it sounded fun. He’s been teaching me ever since. He said I should do stuff for Bone Soda and I’d known Sean for a little while, too, so it made sense. Sometimes I’ll be listening to Beyoncé or Megan Thee Stallion and I want to mix it with something really electronic. I love to dance, so when I play music, I want everyone to be dancing. Bone Soda is like a family.

Everyone is so friendly.

We’re really laid-back and we’re all just having a good fucking time.”

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S p r i n g /S u mm er 2022 CR ASH TR ACY 25, DJ

“I used to go to a lot of parties and always admired Bone Soda.

It was the variety of music; Slowthai is an artist other people would have been afraid to try and work with at the start because he was so different.

Bone Soda bring people to the table you might not see anywhere else.

I work at Stüssy and I’m studying contemporary media cultures at the London College of Communication.

A couple of years ago, I got my own radio show on Know Wave. Skinny and Truce liked what I was doing and invited me to do stuff with them.

I’ve never felt boxed in and I like that. I can come to the guys with an artist who is a bit whacky or a bit out there, and they’re like, ‘Do whatever you want.

If it bangs, it bangs. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.’ They believe in you and want you to try things. When Paris Texas came to London, I wanted to host an interview with them.

When Dexter came over, me and Jyrrel set up a live session with her.

We’re always sharing music on the group chat.

We’re a crew of people with a similar mindset who each bring their own personalities to Bone Soda. That’s the beauty of it: it’s not a one trick thing.”

jumper £138 tracksuit bottoms £118 Palace Skateboards shoes £150 GH Bass & Co.

B on e So da

ON SKINNY jacket £6,400 Louis Vuitton trousers £105 Daily Paper shoes £285 MHL by Margaret Howell

ON IVY jacket £2,660 trousers £1,480 Louis Vuitton all other clothing, her own

ON TRUCE jacket £7,800 Louis Vuitton trousers £128 Palace Skateboards shoes £145 Ugg

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ON IVY (at front) jumper £940 Maison Margiela at Matches Fashion brooch £550 ring £345 The Ouze

ON TRUCE jacket £995 Tracery La Mille at CP Company ON CRASH TRACY jacket £775 Moncler bomber jacket £350 A-Cold-Wall* t-shirt £70 MHL by Margaret Howell

ON DEBBIE jacket £228 Palace Skateboards jeans £210 Ami all other clothing and jewellery, her own

ON SKINNY blazer £529 Tiger of Sweden sunglasses, his own

top £75 Sunspel all other clothing, his own

ON JYRREL (standing at rear) jacket £695 CP Company all other clothing, his own

ON BYUL jacket £995 CP Company vest £90 Daily Paper

“Bone Soda is like a family.

Everyone is so friendly.

We’re really laid-back and we’re all just having a good fucking time.”

— IV Y

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G R O O M I N G , C H A D M A X W E L L AT O N E R E P R E S E N TS U S I N G N A RS . R E -TO U C H I N G , ST U D I O R M .

ON SEAN jacket £795 Vivienne Westwood

B on e So da

BYUL 22, DJ & MODEL

“I model, but I also take DJ’ing very seriously.

I lived in Seoul for two years where I used to play at an underground club called Cakeshop.

Getting into music was a natural transition for me; I had a lot of friends in Seoul’s indie and R&B music scenes and I’ve always loved going out. When I moved to London, I started playing with the Bone Soda crew. I play dance music in its broadest sense; bass, heavy, electronica, trap and R&B. I find new music in everyday life – the other day I walked into a kebab shop and they were playing something hard, so I asked them what the song was.

I love it when you walk into a room and everybody’s focusing on the music.”

shirt £470 Kiko Kostadinov jeans £220 Emporio Armani shoes £895 Christian Louboutin socks, her own ON SKINNY (left) top £1,710 Bethany Williams tracksuit bottoms £118 Palace Skateboards trainers £175 Salomon Sportstyle bag £1,600 Prada sunglasses, his own

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Jones, peeking out through a back window.

I nte ri or

By H am is h B owle s P hotogr aph s b y Sim on U pt on

When he’s not refashioning the maisons of Dior and Fendi, Kim Jones takes refuge in an 18th-century Sussex home straight out of an E. M. Forster novel.

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age of 14, Kim Jones, Dior’s artistic director of menswear since 2018 and Fendi’s artistic director of women’s collections since 2020, experienced a double epiphany when he was turned on both to fashion and to the multifaceted wonders of the Bloomsbury Group, the loose collective of forward-thinking writers, creatives and intellectuals that shaped the look of British art and thought in the early 20th century. Jones’s passion for the latter began on a high school trip to Charleston farmhouse in Sussex, the hub of the group known for their unbridled creativity and their triangular relationships.

As the schoolboy toured the house, layered with pattern and paint and charm, and drew in the gardens, famed for their exuberant plantings and spirited layerings of colour, he thrilled to the idea of “all these people living together and living quite free lives,” as he puts it now. “Anyone who’s forward-thinking and changes the way society lives is interesting to me.

That’s something that I’ve always stood for in my life: I want to live how I live, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”

AT THE IMPRESSIONABLE

Left: While in lockdown, Jones discovered the ideal weekend retreat in a wisteria-shrouded brick-and-flint-stone rectory. Here, one of his dogs, Lola, keeps guard.

Opposite: Handsome double doors lead out to the street.

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working intensively on reshaping Fendi – and amid his ongoing work for Dior – Jones was looking for a country house in bucolic Sussex that would provide a weekend respite from his relentless work schedule, ultimately finding the perfect place online: a beautiful 18th-century brick-and-flint-stone rectory straight out of an E. M. Forster novel, replete with Victorian additions, wreathed in wisteria, with a croquet lawn and blowsy herbaceous borders in the back, and fast by the storied villages once peopled by the Bloomsbury Group. “It was perfect,” Jones says. “There’s enough land to have privacy for the dogs [Jones has four – Dexter, Lulu, Lola, and Cookie], and then it’s got a secondary house.”

The interiors were painted chalky white – a scheme that Jones decided to keep. “I liked the fact that it was light and peaceful and calm,” he explains. He also added a decidedly unrural snowy carpet underfoot, and kept the arrangements of furniture in the public and private rooms reductive. “I always sleep better in a minimal room,” notes Jones, ever the perfectionist. “I can’t sleep in a mess.” This serene backdrop makes the myriad objects that Jones has collected sing even louder – and what a collection it is.

“Between 1910 and 1930 there was a lot going on. Things were changing radically, and fast – especially in painting, which I really am interested in,” Jones says. In the dining room alone there is a Lilypond screen painted by Duncan Grant on the eve of the First World War, like kinetic camouflage; a desk with a similar treatment to its surface; and an Omega Workshops chair blooming with painted poppies. Over the doughty stone chimneypiece, meanwhile, hangs a portrait by Vanessa Bell, while in Jones’s convivial kitchen is a plump teapot that the same artist painted for her sister, Virginia Woolf, who lived with her husband, Leonard, in the nearby village of Rodmell.

Jones’s library here and in London – where he lives in a brutalist house of punctured concrete, steel mesh, and glass with an indoor lap pool, a striking modernist rug designed by Francis Bacon (and hung by Jones as a tapestry), and a further embarrassment of Bloomsburiana – is remarkable. There are, of course, the first editions, sodden with provenance and including a copy of Orlando – inscribed from Virginia to Vita, no less. (Another book, gifted from Woolf to her inamorata, reveals a streak of unsuspected humour in the eminently serious writer’s character. It bears a note from the author: “In my opinion the best novel I have ever written.” The book’s pages, alas, are all blank.)

“The proportions of the rooms in the house are perfect,” says Jones of the Sussex retreat. “I love the kitchen because it’s got a big table and I adore the study. Once you’re in the house, you’re away from it all. All the windows have shutters on them, so it’s very private, though I have lots of friends who live nearby – Romy from The xx lives in the same village…It provides a bit of time away and fresh air, and that full stop I need between collections.

“I’m thinking about time and space a lot at the moment,” continues Jones. “I’ve gotten into a lot of sci-fi recently – Dune by Frank Herbert, and George Lucas’s Star Wars book. Star Wars is one of my favourite things. I always like the past, the present, and the future.”  WHILE HE WAS BUSY

Opposite: The designer at home.

Above: A Quentin Bell cup and The Receipt Book of Elizabeth Raper and a portion of her Cipher Journal on Jones’s dining table.

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I nte ri or A portrait by Vanessa Bell – whose younger sister was Virginia Woolf – hangs over the stone mantelpiece in the dining room.

The table, from 1915, is by Roger Fry. Opposite: A desk painted by Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry circa 1912 now lives in Jones’s study.

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“Once you’re in the house, you’re away from it all.

It provides a bit of time away… and that full stop I need between collections.”

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Men’s jewellery is in the midst of a full-blown renaissance.

At the centre of it all is an enthusiastic embrace of no-holds-barred Technicolor – and nobody is a bigger proponent of jewellery’s candy-tone revolution than London’s Bleue Burnham.

B y F el ix Bi sch of

P hot o g ra ph s by A lexa nd er Cogg in

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is what Bleue Burnham felt when he held the first piece of jewellery he’d made. That ring has since been followed by many pendants and bracelets starring jubilant gemstones in Jolly Rancher colourways and “Rice Krispie” pearls (as they’re known in the business).

When I enter the 29-year-old’s central London workshop, a bag of the crunchy pearls bursts open, cascading from his desk and bouncing on the floor like a tightly choreographed haute joaillerie advert.

High drama – but this is no jewellery workshop of old.

The Brighton-born Burnham is dressed in sombre tones. Vibrant, however, are the trio of rings he wears – in recycled yellow gold or silver, all set with brilliant stones – which play off the yellow gold of his vintage Cartier Tank. Burnham’s jewellery is a high-key kaleidoscope: he uses sapphires in rainbow tones of sunshine yellow, juicy fuchsia or apple green. The brand’s signature Window Box and Riviera rings glisten with a multi-chromatic display of stones. “Colour is just one of the most emotionally powerful things in the natural world,” says Burnham. “It evokes something so deep inside of us, but we don’t quite understand why we love it, or why it makes us feel a certain way.”

After a period of crafting his pieces alone at home, Burnham set up a studio on the Strand. Here, he employs two full-time makers and several part-time members, including his brother Solomon. “Finding people is difficult. Everybody has to learn from the ground up. I don’t ever think there will be a quick route because there’s a mastery to what we do.”

Burnham is self-taught, but there’s a fine art to his craft: he’s developed his own method of creating surface texture with precious metals and unique ways of incorporating gems – one he fights to protect.

“I created the way that I set stones myself, through research and development. I tried to have these more organic textures – that took me ages to work out.”

The brand, launched in 2018, is part of a rising group of jewellers – among them, Fraser Hamilton, Hatton Labs and Polite Worldwide – who are ringing in a shiny new era of jewellery for men; one that has destroyed the traditional masculine-feminine divide. This renaissance began with dangly earrings and posh pearls, and has exploded into sparkles and brash colour as extensions of personal style. “Now,” says Burnham, “there’s space for more styles and a much richer tapestry of possibility.”

“INTENSE HAPPINESS,”

MOOD A look around Burnham’s studio reveals his many inspirations. Collaged on a pin board by his desk: botanical plant diagrams, black and white images of a tree’s root system, and the 1973 book jacket of The Secret Life of Plants. Olafur Eliasson is a favourite, so there’s a shot of his 2014 outdoors-indoors recreation, Riverbed, at the Danish Museum. Burnham also keeps books on the Icelandic–Danish artist’s practice, alongside publications on English gardens (he’s a fan of Great Dixter in East Sussex), and the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake.

The self-taught Burnham brings his visions to life in his studio on The Strand.

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GEMS Diamonds and pearls: Burnham works with both, with a laser focus on sustainability. The designer scours car boot sales and charity shops near his home in east London for vintage pearl jewellery to give a new lease of life to.

But it’s sapphires that he’s best known for. Burnham decided to work with lab-grown versions of the stones in a bid for supply-chain visibility. “When I started wanting to use gemstones, I started looking at where I could get them from,” he says. “You didn’t know where anything was coming from and no one would tell you. So, I was like, ‘What are the other options?’”

Careful research led him to forge a partnership in Thailand. “We could have a direct relationship with the factory and so we started using lab-grown sapphires.”

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PROCESS Burnham sketches his pieces at his studio on the Strand. Using the centuries-old process of lost-wax casting, Burnham sculpts and fine-tunes wax models of new designs. This model is then used to create a master mould, into which molten metal such as yellow gold is poured to shape his gems. For this, he collaborates with London specialist AA Fine Castings on the far-from-glamorous Holloway Road.

“We are making everything here in the UK,” Burnham explains. “We’ve got a nice jewellery-manufacturing industry within this country.” Once the casting is complete, the pieces are returned to Burnham and his team to be set with stones, then perfected for market.

Burnham’s designs make a short trip north from his Strand studio to a casting house on the Holloway Road.

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Molten metal, such as recycled yellow gold or silver, is poured into the master mould to shape the gems.

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IMPACT At Burnham’s young brand, nature is a recurring motif – hence the tree diagrams.

Natural colours and textures give detail to designs such as a line of figurative pendants in the shape of dahlia flower bouquets and rings that interpret the rippled texture of mown grass. Burnham also follows an ambitious environmental progression strategy, working with recycled precious metals, using renewable energy, and wrapping gems in pouches made from fully organic cotton and biodegradable packaging.

Then there’s the company’s own charity, the Natural Community Trust, which was launched this February and is financially underwritten by a pledge of 10 per cent of end-of-year profits going to conservation projects. “Luckily for me, being my own business means I can have more control and be a bit more radical with what we do.”

COLOUR Burnham’s vibrant colourways embrace the opulence and abundance of decades – and centuries – past. The unique treasures of 17th-century Moghul emperors perhaps, or David Bowie’s onstage fits in the 1970s. Not that Burnham’s work is too referential. “I felt an urge to try and create something new. I’ve always worn a lot of colourful clothing, so it was just another way of doing that.” In one of his first pieces, Burnham paired a pink stone with glowing precious metal. “The gold and the pink – still to this day that is the most beautiful colour combination that you have in jewellery,” he says, describing the stones as a “really dark, Turkish Delight pink”.

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Pho to graph by Marc in Kem ps ki

SS22 CAMPAIGN BABACAR PHOTOGRAPHED BY HEJI SHIN IN COLLABORATION WITH JOSH SMITH