Innehållsförteckning för September 2021 från GQ

VICTORIA GRAHAM Bookings director Graham is a nexus at the heart of GQ, working with talent, photographers, stylists, art directors, editors, and more to breathe life into our photo shoots. “I love working with all the nuts and bolts on the ground and bringing those parts together,” she says. She collaborated on a new global scale for this September issue, whose cover will run in 17 markets around the world. “It takes a village to do what we do.” Office Grails…

HE DOESN’T WASH HIS hair. He rarely even touches it, except during moments of contemplation, when his fingers will comb the fallen front strands back into an upward swell that maintains an anime level of consistency. He does not “get” haircuts in the way most people get haircuts—by asking for and then paying for them. Haircuts simply happen to him, in the way a belly rub happens to a dog on a walk. Joe Keery’s most valuable asset isn’t the massively popular Netflix show he is very famous for (Stranger Things) or the Disney movie he is about to be very famous for (Free Guy)—possibly more famous than the 29-year-old has ever been. It’s his gravity-defying head of hair. A viral meme theorized that his curl pattern, the result of…

I HEAR LAMELO BALL before I see him. “Sheeeeeeeeeeeesh!” he exclaims when entering a room, his electric, beaming smile bouncing off the walls. “Sheeeeeeeeeeeesh!” he moans on the Charlotte Hornets’ practice court after an assistant coach scratches him across the eye. “Sheeeeeeeeeeeesh!” he whistles when I play Babyface Ray’s recent banger, “Real N-ggas Don’t Rap,” for him. The high-pitched screech is American vernacular at its wackiest, a sensational slang used all over TikTok to signify excitement and appreciation. But for LaMelo it’s almost like punctuation. He’s fluent in a patois drawn straight from the viral internet. In fact, he regards himself as a kind of viral entity in his own right. “How do I feel about memes?” he ponders for a tick before giggling wryly. “I grew up with this…

AGE: 29 HOMETOWN: Toledo KEY TRACK: “La Inocencia” You notice that Israel Fernández is pure flamenco from the moment he walks through the door. He embodies the art, twisting the rich lyrics in his throat and unleashing them as a wholly fresh sound. “It’s a gift God gave me,” he says, “and it also comes from my family. I have Roma origins. We grew up singing and dancing from a very young age. This is my way of life.” Fernández’s talent has already caught the attention of the new wave of Spanish artists, like Rosalía, C. Tangana, and El Guincho, who produced Fernández’s recent single “La Inocencia.” “For this song I didn’t want percussion, clapping, or an acoustic finish,” he says. “I was looking for something more electronic, and he…

AGE: 24 HOMETOWN: Satoshō KEY TRACK: “Nan-Nan” “The music comes first,” says Fujii Kaze, one of Japan’s new breed of YouTube-native pop stars. “Let me share my favorite Michelangelo quote: ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’ This is the way I like to follow.” In the noisy J-pop space, Kaze has distinguished himself by his ability to find marble worth carving. Early on, he won fans and subscribers through a smorgasbord of uploaded covers—everything from the Carpenters to Ariana Grande to 19th-century romanticist Frédéric Chopin. That borderless curiosity paid dividends on Kaze’s 2020 debut, Help Ever Hurt Never, a kind of stylized disarray of genres that felt thrilling and fresh. The album changes seasons from verse to chorus and track to track,…

AGE: 26 HOMETOWN: Sydney KEY TRACK: “Black Thoughts” “My dad talks about the feather and the sledgehammer,” says Ziggy Ramo. “You need to know when to hit someone over the head, but also when to be as gentle as possible. And for me, my art is my sledgehammer.” Born in Bellingen to a Wik and Solomon Islander father and a mother of Scottish descent, Ramo began making music in his teens. But when his first album, Black Thoughts, arrived last year at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, it hit the Australian music scene not just like a sledgehammer but like a meteor. “Black Lives Matter, that’s the subject matter,” he raps on the album’s title track. “Tell you to climb, then they burn down your ladder.” The…

AGE: 29 HOMETOWN: San Juan, Puerto Rico KEY TRACK: “No Se Da Cuenta” What place will Puerto Rico occupy in music history 20 years from now? Reggaeton singer Juan Carlos Ozuna Rosado, winner of two Latin Grammys, considers the question and smiles, Boricua pride between his teeth. “This is an island that sets the pace for many feet in the world,” he says, “but I think several years from now we will see the legacy more clearly.” It’s a legacy Ozuna wants to be a part of. Last year he released his fourth album, ENOC, which saw him return to the roots of old-school reggaeton. It also continued the Ozuna tradition of high-wattage collabs, with Sia and Doja Cat dropping in for features “I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with…

AGE: 18 HOMETOWN: Bangkok KEY TRACK: “Pakkorn” It was a Friday evening last August when Milli dropped “Sudpang!”—a raucous march of a trap tune that capped a wild year for the recent high school graduate otherwise known as Danupha Kanateerakul. She had jumped from student council president to a national star known for vibey beats with a swirl of local slang—and hits that get the whole club singing along and re-creating the dances from her videos. It was soon clear that we were witnessing the birth of a new generation of Thai hip-hop. With “Pakkorn,” her viral debut, Milli signaled a fresh kind of ambition: Laced through the lyrics were different Thai dialects, including Lu, an encrypted set of words used by the LGBTQ+ community in the early ’90s. “Someone…

AGE: 23 HOMETOWN: Alexandria, Egypt KEY TRACK: “Bel Salama (Lorry Pt. 2 Remix)” Born and raised in Alexandria, Wegz blends trap and mahraganat—Egypt’s answer to EDM—as an ode to his home turf. “Life in Egypt can be chaotic at times and moves at an insane pace,” he says. “There’s always something happening. It’s full of stories, and that makes for some serious inspiration.” He grew up no stranger to the party, and it only made sense to mix global influences with local tradition to create something new. “Life is life, Egypt or anywhere else,” he says. “It has its ups and downs, the good days and the bad. I write music about all of it.” Four years into his career, the young musician is challenging Egypt’s old guard and the…

The only thing that was strange about this ever growing network of GQ editions is that we didn’t really speak to one another. And we certainly didn’t collaborate. Which—in an increasingly globalized world—was a little like having access to an incredible superpower and choosing not to use it. Well, that changes for good with this issue. Like that scene in Spider-Man in which Tobey Maguire figures out how to fire cobwebs out of his wrists, GQ has entered the phase of its hero’s journey where it is testing out its superpowers and seeing what they can do. To me, the coolest aspect of GQ’s superpower is that it only activates when we all work together. For this issue, my international colleagues and I chose to unite at the intersection of…

some thought the covid-19 pandemic would be the final nail in the coffin for the men’s suit. ¶ And then a weird thing happened. Led by a new generation of designers and makers who are tinkering with the traditional formulas to invent (or revive) strange and exciting ways of dressing up, tailoring started coming back stronger than ever. ¶ The barometric designer Virgil Abloh was likely sensing this shift when he donned an epic suit—a belted blazer over voluminous trousers—in Paris on the day of his Louis Vuitton show earlier this summer. All around, stylish 20-something Parisians increasingly resemble French New Wave leading men, thanks to the influence of cult-favorite tailoring brand Husbands. In Atlanta, a new label called Factor’s has been flooded with appointments for its funky $3,000 unisex…

Everyone crowding around the monitor looking at the incoming photos is thinking the same thing: It’s him. The Starboy. The architect of the sexiest music to ever chart. Sole winner of Super Bowl LV. Lover to some of the most desired women on earth. The Ethiopian kid who changed R&B with three twisted, druggy mixtapes and never showed his face. The one with the falsetto rivaled only by the GOAT. The pop star who was infamously nominated for an award at a kids’ show for singing about face numbing off a bag of blow. Sure, the Harvard House has seen some shit. But so has Abel Tesfaye—a.k.a. The Weeknd. The day before the photo shoot, I met that same guy at a recording studio in Century City. He was wearing…

AGE: 26 HOMETOWN: São Paulo KEY TRACK: “Bonekinha” In Brazil, a new generation of pop stars is on the rise: artists like drag singer Pabllo Vittar, trans rapper Urias, and Gloria Groove, a drag performer whose music blurs the lines between funk, rap, and soul. “We are leading a major revolution in Brazilian pop music,” Groove says emphatically. Born in São Paulo as Daniel Garcia, the 26-year-old singer undergoes a Superman-like transformation inside the glam wardrobe of Gloria Groove. Her drag queen choreography—brash and powerful—is in total opposition to Garcia’s shy demeanor. And really, these are more than dance steps. For Gloria Groove, they’re a call to war. “The dolly doesn’t fool around,” goes the refrain in “Bonekinha,” a thumping track off Groove’s recent project Lady Leste. She plans to…

AGE: 20 HOMETOWN: Kings Langley KEY TRACK: “Black Hole” When GQ meets Griff, clad in a pearly Richard Quinn dress worthy of a Tudor queen, she’s overjoyed: It’s the drizzly June morning her debut mixtape, One Foot in Front of the Other, drops, and Taylor Swift, no less, has just recommended the project to her 166 million Instagram followers. “It’s really, really surreal,” admits Griff, born Sarah Griffiths in Hertfordshire, just north of London, and of Chinese-Jamaican heritage. Yet it’s easy to see why Swift would be impressed. Totally authentic on social media and fearless when layering vocals to produce her unique, confessional synth pop, Griff is the consummate modern “bedroom pop” star gone boom. Growing up, she felt that “pop was always associated with a lot of fake, musicindustry,…

AGE: 37 HOMETOWN: Coatepec KEY TRACK: “Mi Tierra Veracruzana” In addition to her career as a singer, Natalia Lafourcade takes another job very seriously: recovering Mexican folk’s bygone traditions. The winner of two Grammys, she’s worked to revive elements of historical genres like nueva canción and ranchera, prying their old codes out of obscurity and running them through her signature hazy folk soundscapes. “The path I have walked led me to get closer to the past and reinterpret it with the help of many musicians who walk the same path,” she says. “It has been a passionate journey to discover so many types of Mexicans that exist—their different ways of loving and suffering throughout our musical history.” Though Lafourcade has orbited the Mexican pop scene for over two decades, this…

AGE: 27 HOMETOWN: Créteil KEY TRACK: “Kid” Three years ago, Eddy de Pretto became a national pop idol within a few weeks. He grew up in a housing project a few miles outside Paris, listening to a steady diet of hiphop and Jacques Brel; his sound is somewhere between chanson, rap, and spoken word. “I was considered a weirdo at school, and now I put this weirdo and his feelings at the center of my songs, of my interviews,” says de Pretto. “I turned him into a sun.” Coming up, he caught eyes in industry circles with his striking stage presence, and when he released his debut album, Cure, in 2018, the people concurred: A week after it dropped, Cure hit the top of the French charts. Openly gay, de…

METOWN: Milan KEY TRACK: “Vorrei ma non posto” It took all of five minutes for Fedez to ignite a national debate on discrimination, inclusivity, and the future of Italian society. In a speech at a concert in May, he accused a cabal of far-right politicians of stalling an anti-homophobia bill in the Italian parliament. And he did it live on national television. That the comments came from one of Italy’s most glittering rappers—and the husband of über-influencer Chiara Ferragni—triggered both shock waves and praise, including a shout-out from Donatella Versace. “I think young people are ahead of the sensibilities of our politicians,” Fedez says. “I get very angry when people who are supposed to represent everyone say serious things against certain types of people living in our society.” For Fedez,…

AGE: 21 HOMETOWN: Novosibirsk KEY TRACK: “I’m Getting Drunk Again” “Production is 50 percent knowledge about how to make music, 50 percent the moment and mood,” explains Slava Marlow, the 21-year-old wunderkind from Siberia. “There is a lot of magic in making music.” His own process involves a bit of magic too. Combining oldschool music education—he took piano and sax lessons—with a childhood love for EDM, Marlow has crafted his own strain of rap that’s become a new soundtrack for millions of Russians. After finding his voice as a YouTube creator, Marlow shot to fame via a 2019 collaboration with Morgenshtern, a fellow vlogger turned rapper. In his ensuing solo career, he’s dropped a string of releases, including the deeply autobiographical EP APTËM. He’s also released the very meta track…

SAINt JHN’s “Roses (Imanbek Remix)” was one of 2020’s biggest, catchiest, most inescapable hits. But the Brooklyn-slash-Guyana-bred rapper is far from an overnight sensation—he’s spent the past decade carefully plotting for this moment, writing with Usher and dropping verses on Beyoncé singles, before finally striking gold on his own. “You know when you’re about to go out and you look in the mirror and change your outfit 30 times? I did that,” he says of his prefame days. “I’m certain of the human being I am, and I would’ve applied that to any profession. It happened to be music, but if I was just on a boat, paddling? I would’ve told the water, ‘I am this sexy.’…

I’VE BEEN OBSESSIVELY, perhaps even compulsively, buying watches for about 15 years now. Through my work in the industry, I’ve had the opportunity to see, experience, and purchase more rarefied and unique timepieces than I could ever have dreamed of. But to my surprise, my tastes have evolved a lot over the past decade and a half. Many of the watches I’ve covered in this column—the Submariners, the Royal Oaks, and the Speedmasters of the world—remain close to my heart. But gone is the urge to stunt on Instagram (been there, done that). I don’t even send braggy wrist shots of great complications or mega-mint vintage watches to friends anymore. Now I find myself seeking out watches that fall into one of two categories: pieces that have a story to…

AGE: 22 HOMETOWN: Chicago KEY TRACK: “Rapstar” This summer, as heavyweight rappers like J. Cole and Migos returned from hiatus, they found a new name dominating the charts. A shy 22-year-old named Taurus Tremani Bartlett, he calls himself Polo G, after his favorite fashion label and a friend named Gucci, who died at 16. “I’ve had a passion for rapping since I was 19,” he says, “and it’s been fun. But I only recently found a deeper passion for it.” He’s sitting in the lobby of the Dream Downtown, in Manhattan, reflecting on his new project, Hall of Fame, which topped the Billboard 200 and is starting to feel like one of those pivotal third albums that announce a generational talent (think Kanye’s Graduation or J. Cole’s 2014 Forest Hills…

AGE: 24 HOMETOWN: Antalya KEY TRACK: “Kendine Gel” One of the best nights Emir Taha had during the turbulent past year was spent cooped up in an Airbnb, putting the finishing touches on a track he’d titled “Kendine Gel.” The song—an R&B number layered with synths and Eastern melismas—reckoned with a universal challenge: getting ahold of yourself in difficult times. It dropped last year as one of the standouts of Taha’s EP Hoppa pt. 1. “Just like everyone else,” he says, “I’ve accumulated a lot in my head, which shows through the way I think, live, and create music.” Taha’s Hoppa project continued this year with a second installment, this one an even moodier take on R&B. The pair of EPs epitomize the borderless nature of Taha’s sound: You can…

AGE: 29 HOMETOWN: Mumbai KEY TRACK: “Mere Gully Mein” Just behind Mumbai’s glittering international airport terminal stretches a teeming borough called Andheri East. A patchwork of tin, tarpaulin, and glass, it’s a blend of shantytowns and working-class neighborhoods—and home to millions who have arrived, over decades, in India’s city of dreams. It’s also where a young boy named Vivian Fernandes discovered hip-hop. He first encountered the culture on a friend’s T-shirt emblazoned with 50 Cent’s face and on a borrowed CD stuffed with dozens of songs by Tupac, Biggie, and Wu-Tang Clan. In 2015, “Mere Gully Mein”—a track he built online with Naezy, another young rapper on the rise—went viral on YouTube, spawning the gully rap subgenre. Divine’s seminal verse, delivered in his local Bambaiya Hindi dialect, was brash and…

AGE: 33 HOMETOWN: Yunnan Province KEY TRACK: “Shadow” Years after breaking into the Chinese music scene, Akini Jing has rebooted her image—though she calls it a “firmware update.” Her newly revealed cyborg persona is replete with fits worthy of a Y2K renaissance, lonely pop tracks heavy on cyberpunk synths, and an earnest exploration of humanity through the eyes of an outsider. But that futuristic makeover perhaps masks a more timeless sensibility. “The truth is,” she says, “I’m just dearly in love with what I’m doing and get quite a kick out of it.”…

AGE: 33 HOMETOWN: Taipei KEY TRACK: “Change” E.SO—one of Taiwan’s reigning rap monoliths—has been lying low during lockdown: staying home, playing video games, even banking a little coin from crypto. He’s also working on the follow-up to his first solo album, Outta Body, which saw him zigzag away from the hip-hop sound associated with his Taiwanese rap group, MJ116. But E.SO is in no hurry to wrap an LP—he takes the long view on inspiration. “You need to accumulate enough feelings in your everyday life,” he says. “Those thoughts might not trigger anything in the moment. But after a while, they’ll suddenly come back again—that’s inspiration.” His methods are proving effective: Outta Body—a melding of hip-hop, neo-soul, and Afrobeat—was a huge hit. Now, over a decade after entering the public…

AGE: 27 HOMETOWN: Gondomar KEY TRACK: “Quase Dança” By the time Eurovision introduced her to the world stage, Portugal had already fallen for Cláudia Pascoal’s whimsical take on pop. But her talent doesn’t end with breezy ballads and charming wordplay. To paraphrase José Saramago, Pascoal is an artistic tsunami: She’s experimented with painting, stand-up, directing video clips, and tattooing. Of these side hustles, she says nobody should “confuse diversified tastes with the inability to dedicate themselves to just one thing.” But Pascoal acknowledges that her artistry has evolved with her. “If, at the beginning, music was just something funny, and a way I had of communicating with people, along the years it became something way more serious,” she says. “It became like taking something out of my chest, having an…

IN 2017, the English skater and designer Lev Tanju traveled from London to New York to take a meeting at the Madison Avenue headquarters of the Ralph Lauren Corporation. Palace, the skate brand Tanju had founded with friends in 2009, was on the brink of a momentous collaboration: working with the legendary American fashion company on a co-branded collection that was set to include silk pajamas, velvet slippers, and the beloved “heelflip” Polo Bear sweater. Ralph Lauren had always been one of Tanju’s favorite brands (and a favorite of just about any skater who came up in the ’90s). Nevertheless, Tanju arrived for the meeting attired as he would be on most any other day—whether he was going to the pub or the skate park—wearing a pair of heather gray…