Innehållsförteckning för December 2021/January 2022 från GQ

THIS SUMMER, when we were still in the planning stages of our 26th annual Men of the Year issue, I kept contemplating the idea that we are living in the era of the individual. ¶ I’m 40 years old, and for as long as I can remember, power has been in the hands of institutions, not individuals. Governments wield power. Corporations wield power. ¶ Now, however, something much different is happening in the culture. ¶ Social media is perhaps the strongest transformational force of our time, and it has emboldened a new generation of cultural figures to bypass authorities and gatekeepers. Backed by legions of followers, they can stand up to once-almighty institutions and fight for their own needs and the needs of their communities. Much of this is for…

MOST WATCH enthusiasts get creative when they have to travel with their timepieces. On a recent afternoon, Henry Golding brought his growing collection to a Venice, California, coffee shop rolled inside ankle socks, which were stuffed in a Tumi toiletries case tucked inside an Arc’teryx tote bag. Not entirely surprising, considering the 34-year-old actor was once a travel-show host whose timepieces had to hold up to treks up the Mekong. In fact, the host gig fueled his nascent watch obsession—Golding spent an entire season’s paycheck buying his first luxury watch, a Cartier Pasha. “I wasn’t too proud of that at the time,” he says. And then he got his big break, a starring role in Crazy Rich Asians, and bought a Cartier Tank. You have a very Cary Grant–esque persona,…

“THIS IS GOING to sound like complete bullshit, but I swear to you that this is true,” Tom Holland says. “Have you ever heard of cognitive dreaming?” We’ve been talking for a couple of hours at this point, and conversation—as it tends to, after long enough—has drifted onto the subject of dreams. I’ve been having nightmares lately, I tell him. Anxiety. This is something Tom Holland knows all about. He is a terrible sleeper; a sleepwalker; a sleep undresser, even. (“Four out of 10 sleeps I wake up completely naked.”) As it happens, he has a trick for dealing with nightmares, and because Tom Holland is Tom Holland—the actor who put the friendly back into your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and is just famously, energetically, irresistibly nice—of course he’s happy to…

IT WAS ANOTHER perfect spa-blue morning in Beverly Hills when Mark Hoppus, a pop-punk legend, accidentally told the world that he had cancer. This was back in late June, and Hoppus had just taken a photo of himself strapped into a chemotherapy chair, an image he wanted to share. But being woozy from the Benadryl and cocktail of cell-destroying drugs, his clumsy fingers made haptic contact with the wrong cluster of pixels on his phone. Thus the photo—the caption read, “Yes hello. One cancer treatment, please”—was transmitted not to his green circle of “close friends” on Instagram, but to his entire following of more than 1 million. A tragicomic oopsie. And then, a mess: First in the form of a concerned text from his manager, asking if he meant to…

Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele on the look of the year: “This look is very meaningful. It speaks to the roots of the brand and the essence of my work. A suit in a bold, acidic, unusual color that conveys the idea of an elegance also shaped by the refinement of the hue and the combinations. The suit is paired with something apparently unsuitable—this Lurex and fully embroidered ring-neck sweater. I believe this look talks about me and what I brought to Gucci: a great sense of color and a concept of styling that gives men the opportunity to have a wider and freer playground. This image, this color, this look are the essence of a certain type of masculine beauty and refinement.”…

Diesel’s low-rise, boot-cut jeans helped create the premium denim wave that swept the early aughts. And many of us invested a small fortune in them, only to see the trend pass. But now that Y2K has reemerged as a fashion buzzword, the Italian denim brand has come roaring back with Belgian designer Glenn Martens, creative director of conceptual Parisian label Y/Project, at the helm. Martens started at Diesel in 2020, and has already reinvigorated the brand with his signature asymmetrical silhouettes and radical proportions, creating pieces that take a progressive approach to conventional denim for the jeans-hungry masses. He’s also dipping into the archives—a recent Diesel x Diesel collection included zeitgeisty leather bombers and baggy jeans that Martens revived from the ’90s. But his focus, he has said, is actually…

ALMOST TWO YEARS ago, Charlton Kenneth Jeffrey Howard, a rapper from Australia, knew he had made it big when he received a surprise Instagram DM from an admirer. The message was from Justin Bieber. “He said, ‘You got the sauce,’” says Howard, better known as the Kid Laroi, scrolling through his phone to show me the exchange. He pulled his stage name from the Australian Kamilaroi people: His mother is of Indigenous descent. When he was younger, Laroi would record verses on her iPhone and post them onto Sound-cloud and Facebook. At 14, he was crowned one of the country’s best high school artists on a competition show called Unearthed High. A record deal followed, which put him in a position to catch the attention of a certain Canadian megastar.…

KANYE WEST Atlanta, August “Hey, Siri, can you dry-clean rubber Balenciaga spikes?” BERNIE SANDERS Washington, D.C., January After the planet’s most unlikely influencer wore a pair of recycled wool mittens made by one of his Vermont constituents to Joe Biden’s inauguration, demand for quirky knitwear skyrocketed. But don’t sleep on the rest of the Green Mountain State’s contributions to fashion. “We have some good coats as well,” the senator told CNN. A$AP ROCKY AND RIHANNA New York City, September America’s hottest couple were the last guests to arrive on the Met Gala red carpet, and undeniably the coziest: Rocky was draped in a repurposed quilt (originally made by a SoCal grandmother) and a custom silk taffeta tux, both by ERL, and Rihanna was cocooned in Balenciaga couture. DANIEL CRAIG London,…

NOT LONG AGO, Giannis Antetokounmpo watched his partner, Mariah Riddlesprigger, give birth to their second son, Maverick, and when he saw Maverick he immediately burst into tears. This happened with Antetokounmpo’s first son, Liam Charles, too—that Giannis wept. “But I thought maybe it was because he was my first one,” he told me. He doesn’t think of himself as someone who cries, he said; he’s survived too much deprivation, too many provocations, to be reduced to tears by just anything. We were in the living room of his red brick house in the Milwaukee suburbs, hiding out from the August sun. Mariah was napping in the other room. Liam, big now and curly haired, was wandering around saying hi to everything that moved. Mav was in Giannis’s lap. Giannis was…

Members of the neoprep, post-streetwear New American Sportswear cult have been mobbing Nolita for a few years now, keeping the retail dream alive at the flagships for brands Noah, Saturdays NYC, and, the buzziest of them all, Aimé Leon Dore. On any given day outside the cream-colored shop and café, opened in 2019, you can witness firsthand how a clothing brand can become the linchpin of a subculture as young people in ALD New Balances, Yankees caps, and mohair cardigans swarm the block sipping lattes and snapping ’grams, waiting their turn to shop the latest drop inside. Wondering about the future of brick-and-mortar? Just ask the boss, Teddy Santis. He’s usually perched out front.…

“Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated—in the main, abominably—because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.”—James Baldwin, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” 1985 WHEN I SEE THAT there’s a Fort Lauderdale party on the agenda for my time with Dennis Rodman, I get nervous. Not only because we’re in Florida, where COVID surges seemed to be happening every week, but because this is Dennis Rodman we’re talking about. I have no idea how to prepare for whatever could go down at a party hosted by one of the most notorious partiers of all time. The festivities are set to take place at Salt7, which bills itself as an upscale steakhouse that pulls double…

IT’S NOT that playing Spider-Man wasn’t fun, Andrew Garfield says. No, playing Spider-Man—which he did in two films, preceded in his red-and-blue spandex by Tobey Maguire and followed by Tom Holland—was great. It was all the stuff that came along with being Spidey that he couldn’t stand. Before he even agreed to star in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man, he worried about this—about the way the job seemed certain to transform him into a public figure and upend his life. But he said yes anyway, and then watched with mounting panic as the role basically consumed his life Garfield was shooting his second Spider-Man film, in 2013, when he realized he had reached a breaking point. It felt excessive—the money, the fame, the attention. They were filming in New York City,…

LIL NAS X—Montero, Monte, or Nas to the friends he still has—knew before I even arrived at the San Vicente Bungalows in West Hollywood that he was where he was meant to be. No one had to tell him who I was. The universe had informed him, as he arrived and saw his lucky numbers—7 and 9—on the license plate of the car in front of him, that his future depended on him being here, right now. His detractors thought he was going to fade away after “Old Town Road.” And yet Lil Nas X has been, for both hip-hop and pop culture, a destabilizing force—a “trickster,” if you will—who has changed the face of how we do what we do, and who gets to do it, forever. Never before…

If most young designers require a handful of years to hone their vision, Eli Russell Linnetz emerged fully formed as a fashion godhead. Sure, the wunderkind came with excellent credentials—after assisting David Mamet, he became a protégé of Kanye West, eventually directing the video for “Fade,” and then made a name snapping portraits of Lady Gaga and Hailey Bieber. But in 2020, Linnetz leveraged a different kind of support when, at the urging of Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market president Adrian Joffe, he launched his first full men’s collection with DSM. ERL’s easy, colorful sweatshirts, long underwear, gym shorts, and corduroys hit like a mandate for California dreaming. This year, his puffers became a celebrity must-have, and he debuted a perfume, called Sunscreen. He burst into a new…