GQ Style Spring 2019

THE YEAR WAS 1995. I was in middle school. The Grateful Dead were coming to Atlanta, and I was a lock to see them, thanks to my best friend, Ben, and his generous Deadhead father’s tickets. Then disaster: Ben called an audible and invited his new girl-friend, Lucy, to the show instead. All I got was heartbreak—and the T-shirt above. Five months later, Jerry Garcia was gone. To be fair, it’s a great shirt. Skeletons enacting scenes from Mark Twain. It’s faded and frayed now—better than ever. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve since spent—first in head shops, then on eBay—collecting Dead merch like it. Maybe I buy all this stuff out of genuine passion, or maybe I’m compensating for the fact that I never saw the Grateful…

“WELL, I’M WATCHING all these sheep walk by,” Caleb Landry Jones is saying, “and I’m thinking, I don’t know if they got it more figured out or less figured out. They seem all right. But unlike the geese, they can’t fly away. And the geese can fly away. I think they just don’t know that they can.” It’s a Tuesday, just after the New Year, and Jones is calling from Texas, where he grew up. Talking to him over a spotty cell-phone connection is a cosmic, enjoyably disorienting experience. His sentences spin out into riffs, one-man dialogues featuring drawling impressions of his piano-teacher mom or his contractor dad, Boomhauer-esque verbal vapor trails. Right now he’s doing his best to answer questions about the craft of acting, about balancing preparation and…

WHEN MARNI CREATIVE DIRECTOR Francesco Risso was growing up, he would raid his parents’ and siblings’ closets like a mad scientist in search of parts. His sister would go out and return home to find jackets with sleeves lopped off or a skirt sprouting pant legs. His habit “tragically created dramas,” he laments over the phone from Milan, and earned him the nickname the Virus of the Wardrobe. Risso just wanted to express himself. His childhood home, he recalls, was like a “commune” that bustled with extended-family members and the random architect, artist, or agriculturist whom his dad would bring around. Risso says he wasn’t shy but he wasn’t chatty, either. He preferred to express himself through clothing—slicing up whatever he could find to make it just right. “It was…

FOR HER SPRING-SUMMER 2019 show, Martine Rose skipped the Fashion Week runways and instead staged her show on a sleepy cul-de-sac in northwest London, where neighbors mingled on the sidewalk with the international fashion corps while models clomped about in square-toe loafers embellished with sleazy gold chains. As designers appropriate the anti-fashion of the ’80s and ’90s, the sworn-off angular shoes have made a semi-ironic comeback in menswear. But nobody makes bad taste look as good as Martine Rose. Rose’s billowy trousers and parka-sized button-down shirts appear less extreme today than when she was the star of London’s underground fashion scene a decade ago. But just barely. For Rose, who founded her namesake brand in 2007, exaggerated proportions are how she tells stories about the characters that inspire her—the crusties,…

WHEN CAV EMPT was born, in 2011, it was not a bolt of lightning but rather an earthquake that struck Toby Feltwell and his fellow founding partners, the designer known as SK8THING and Hishiyama Yutaka. Quite a large one. Nuclear reactors were shut down, and much of Tokyo, a city of endless, dazzling light, went dark. The result was eye-opening. “You end up in the same place,” Feltwell recalls, “but you see it immediately very differently.” Feltwell and SK8THING were nearing the end of a long stint at A Bathing Ape, after the hugely influential and successful clothing brand was sold by its original owner, Nigo. Feeling disenchanted by mass appeal but eager to work together, the founders had a seed of an idea that was just germinating when the…

THE 12 CARDBOARD boxes are found across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, past San Rafael, through a canyon, up the drive, at a house situated on an idyllic green hillside. Then: into the basement, past the meticulously organized antique-radio workshop, and down another set of stairs to the dirt-packed crawl space beneath. Inside the boxes are some several hundred T-shirts, constituting both the vintage-fashion score of this or any year (but especially this one) and an incomparable historical collection. Spread across them, emblazoned in a quarter-century’s worth of gaudy design trends, is the story of the Grateful Dead, Marin County’s psychedelic cowboys and now mythological American legends. Upstairs, the bemused shirt owner watches as they unfold and bloom across the living room, like rainbow spores from cardboard seed…