Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2022 i Esquire Singapore

This issue was supposed to be a revamped issue. One with a new format; a spit and a polish to that beautiful ride you’ve climbed onto all these years since we first hit your local newsstands. But the revamped issue needed a longer chrysalis period; it required time to take shape. So, for this April edition, anything goes. I can write about how the earth is actually discshaped and it’s perched on four elephants that are, in turn, perched on the back of a turtle. Or when you stretch out your intestines, it would be 6.7m long and you’ll be dead. Or how a colleague is always setting up playdates so that “our children can meet and get married”. I can put in all sorts of crazy things for this…

Seven years is not generally considered a long time in classical watchmaking where many of the best companies go back over 100 years. But seven years is enough for the TAG Heuer Connected watch to complete four evolutionary rounds, bringing a plethora of technical upgrades to the operating system each time while also continually improving on wearability. Its latest version since 2015 is the Connected Calibre E4–and before you start going on about how some smart watches on the market are already on their seventh- or eighth-generation model, bear in mind that the TAG Heuer Connected watch is not just about technical functionality, but watchmaking finesse as well. This year the Swiss manufacture has launched two variations, each taking a different route towards showcasing one of the Connected watch’s best-known…

BUT THE N0UGHTI3S I don’t know about you but it’s quite insane to think that the 2000s happened just two decades ago. I was born in 1989; I am an inbetweener millennial by all accounts having experienced the ’90s, but was definitely more aware of pop culture and lived and breathed it in the 2000s. Maybe it’s denial on my part (slowly creeping towards mid-30s here), but it honestly does seem like it was just a few years ago that we all had frosted tips and wore low-rise jeans. The noughties was the height of everything. And I do mean everything. It was the turn of the century that coincided with the start of a new millennium. There was a general panic about the then-impending Y2K computer bug that analysts…

27 JANUARY 2014 It’s just hours before Monday Night Raw, the biggest show in the history of professional wrestling, is scheduled to begin, and CM Punk’s voice is echoing through the cavernous backstage of Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena. He is screaming for someone to help him. Tonight. Right now. His head feels like it’s going to explode from a stiff blow he suffered during the Royal Rumble last night. He’s had enough concussions to know he’s got one. There is a disgusting welt on his ass that hurts like hell and keeps getting bigger. His ribs ache and his knee is shot. An infection rages in his body; he’s been coughing up yellow bile for weeks. A steady stream of oral antibiotics has been causing such intestinal distress that he…

Viagra wasn’t around in the mid-’90s to save me from embarrassment. Until that fateful night in a public park, erectile dysfunction might as well have been the name of a student punk band. It wasn’t on my radar as I engaged in some frenzied fumbling with a young woman, beneath the cover of an English oak tree, desperately hoping that our upcoming 27 seconds of pleasure, roughly, wouldn’t be spotted by a nosy dog walker. And then, the earth moved. A bomb went off. No, that’s not a euphemism. An actual bomb went off several miles away, as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonated an explosive device outside a major East London business district. Even a couple of randy teenagers struggled to keep up their end during a terrorist attack.…

Like the science-fiction-y cars developed to wow the automotive world, concept watches rarely trickle down into real life. But over at Panerai’s Laboratorio di Idee (‘Ideas Lab’ in Italian), the eggheads dreaming up the future of timekeeping are making stuff we can actually wear. Past efforts have included a mechanical movement that can run for 50 years without being serviced, a huge leap from the every five-ish years recommended today. A newer initiative focuses on pushing the technical limits of recycling. Last year, Panerai introduced the Submersible eLab-ID, a watch that’s 98.6 percent recycled, from the aerospace-grade EcoTitanium of the case to the SuperLuminova that lights up the hands at night. If you’ve got USD70,000 or so lying around–and can secure one of the 30 pieces put into production–it can…

Ugliness is something that’s continuously explored in fashion. The idea that a design unanimously agreed upon as conventionally ugly and at times tacky could be part of a fashion conversation is one which designers often find to be interesting. And, in some cases, perhaps seen as a challenge to change that perception. When it comes to footwear, the consensus is clear that Crocs pretty much takes the lead. Time named it one of 50 inventions that they deemed the worst based on just how ugly it is. But that hasn’t stopped the brand from existing and it grew to be in the mix of luxury fashion collaborations. Along the same vein of existence but still steadily gaining momentum as the industry’s favourite fixer-upper is the Birkenstock. While it’s not as…

“How would you describe his food?” That’s the question I get from Lynn Yeow De-Vito, the PR for Willow, the restaurant we’re at. It is lunch and we’ve managed to get the seats that were suddenly available to us three days ago. “He described it as simple, ” she continues with incredulity creeping into her voice. “Can you believe it? Simple, he calls it.” The ‘he’ in question is head chef Nicolas Tam, who is right in front of us preparing the dishes for the lunch crowd. Tam tries to play it off, switching to another conversation track as a form of deflection. But Yeow De-Vito is right to feel irked: her job is to trumpet Willow, but how do you do that when your chef is sheepish about his…

A Stranger in Olondria Sofia Samatar The best stories throw a wrench in our characters’ best-laid plans, and nobody throws a wrench quite like a ghost. Jevick is the stranger of the title, sold on tales of a wonderland called Olondria in much the way I was sold on the idea of that wonderland called New York. What Samatar does is pull us into a world so thoroughly strange yet so familiar that you think it’s one kind of story until it shoves you off course and becomes another. It’s about a man who has too much to learn and not much time to learn it, but it’s also about how a little knowledge really is a dangerous thing. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts Amos Tutuola It’s fascinating…

In the 1957 novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac writes, “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.” That exact sentiment can be applied to menswear too—a constant wheel of reinventing and reimagining codes—and no one does it quite like Dior Men artistic director Kim Jones. For the first time, the Dior Men fall 2022 collection was shown in London, the place of Jones’s formative fashion years as well as where Christian Dior himself first presented a collection in the city back in 1947. Yet it wasn’t a wholly British-inspired affair. The idea was about travel, specifically the aforementioned On the Road’s fictional portrayal of Kerouac’s travels across the United States with his friends—key figures of the Beat Generation of the ’50s the likes…

What’s more impressive than successfully climbing Mount Everest? Climbing Mount Everest without help or extra oxygen. According to Nat Geo, as of 2016, more than 4,000 people have achieved the former, but fewer than 200 have done the latter. That’s why scaling the world’s highest peak without supplementary oxygen is considered the ultimate test of a mountaineer’s prowess. Something that Nepalese-born British mountaineer Nimsdai Purja will be attempting this May, courtesy of Montblanc–which happened to have created what is possibly the most perfect timepiece for the challenge: a zero-oxygen watch custom built to withstand the harsh Everest climate at the summit which can drop as low as minus 19 degrees Celsius at its warmest. This is precisely why Purja will need a watch like the Montblanc 1858 Geosphere Chronograph 0…

Longines has announced a watch to commemorate the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games. The dial and the bezel are blue and yellow, echoing the colour palette used in the Games’ zigzag “B” emblem, said by the event’s designers to represent “Birmingham as the youngest city in Europe”. (They mean by inhabitants’ age. Birmingham itself has been around since 1166. At the time of writing, almost 40 percent of its population are under 25.) The HydroConquest was introduced by Longines in 2007. It has provided a modern counterpart to its vintage-style divers, the Legend Diver and the Skin Diver, ever since. The company has form with sporting events. As well as being the official timekeeper for the French Open at Roland-Garros, it has sponsored many an Olympic Games, beginning with the 1952…

Sometime in early 2013, a handful of Americans could be spotted out and about in California wearing a new gizmo that looked like a cross between a pair of plastic prescription glasses and Cyclops’s wraparound visor from X-Men. It was the prototype of a new Google launch, Project Glass. Released to the public later that year, the USD1,500 smart-glasses comprised a tiny display screen mounted onto a flexible frame that incorporated a camera, a microphone and a computer. Like a Google phone, they could be voice-activated, using an “Okay, Glass” command. Some visionaries predicted that the ability to take photographs, check your e-mail or start recording video, without having to pull out your phone, would be a gamechanger. Others thought people would make a spectacle of themselves. The naysayers won,…

UNESCO created World Book and Copyright Day, which falls on 23 April every year. That’s your cue to shift attention to the East and look beyond the ever-popular Murakami to diversify your Asian literature collection. Support these contemporary creatives who put their heritage at the forefront with narratives that blur reality and dreams. All titles are available at Books Kinokuniya. To Paradise Hanya Yanagihara The title sounds like a promising positive read, but beneath it lies countless mortal perils. After the intense A Little Life, the editor-in-chief of New York Times’ T style supplement still heads down into the tormented path in her latest novel. Consisting of three stories—an alternate past circa 1893 where a wealthy man navigates through a gay- and lesbian-accepted society, a tumultuous relationship between a young…

Being an environmental artist who lives in a fully urbanised island-state is a reality that nature-loving and plant-powered Zen Teh thrives off of. The 34-year-old credits her insatiable curiosity towards Mother Nature to turning vegetarian at age 14, but it’s clear that her courage to engage with the multiple disciplines which study her muse fuels her practice and the pursuit of further education. With a sense of ease and calm true to her name, Teh shares what it means to make art that explores science, the beauty of multidisciplinary collaborations and a still deepening relationship with the environment, moving forward. ESQUIRE: How is it like making art with scientists? ZEN TEH: It is very interesting. I feel like their brains are wired differently. Artists draw connections, reflect and ask critical…

To illustrate quite how low-key the person I’m going to be writing about is, let me start by telling you about someone else. Let me tell you about Martin. Martin is the taxi driver the fates assign me at Dublin Airport when I arrive in Ireland the day before the interview with the person I’m going to be writing about. Once the car doors are closed, Martin wastes no time in indicating to me that he, like the person I’m going to be writing about, is a little bit famous. Unlike that person, Martin is not low-key. “Google ‘Dublin taxi-driver same-sex marriage’, ” he instructs me, as we careen southwards into the city. But I don’t need to, because Martin’s already telling me about the time in 2015 when he…

When God created the world in six days, He rested on the seventh. Operating in today’s world—Climate change! Wars! The Internet! TikTok!—we’re gonna need more than a Sunday for R&R. But why would your benevolent bosses allow such a thing that runs contrary to their capitalist ideals? Wouldn’t less time in the office equate to less work done? Au contraire, certain companies have already implemented a four-day workweek; and while the worldwide pandemic was a major factor in that push, there were startling benefits for a shorter workweek. Companies in Iceland reported that workers had less burnout and stress; in Japan, companies reported a “40 percent increase in productivity”. If that still doesn’t elicit any response with your upper management (we assume they don’t read this portion of Esquire and…