Innehållsförteckning för October 2022 från GQ

CRUZ VALDEZ Photographer “Representing a politician can be intimidating,” says Cruz Valdez, the New York–based fashion photographer. But when she arrived at the Capitol to capture Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the cover of this issue—just three weeks after Roe was overturned—Valdez found that her nerves turned to hope. “In the face of continued hateful legislation, I find her presence in office to be a reassuring one.” Office Grails SARAH SCHMIDT Global director of editorial operations, GQ U.S. “The best color? Navy. The best tee? Cashmere.” NATALIE PETIT-FRERE Fashion assistant, GQ U.S. “Nina once sang, ‘Alabama’s gotten me so upset.’ I now relate.” EILEEN CARTTER Style writer, GQ U.S. “I borrowed my roommate’s vintage Dingo Harness boots enough times that I finally decided to get my own.”…

WATCHMAKERS LOVE A good arms race. The first and perhaps most enduring being the race to equip a timepiece with the maximum number of functions, or complications—a distinction currently held by Vacheron Constantin’s breakthrough Reference 57260, released in 2015, which has 57 of them. Then, of course, there’s the matter of depth. Among diving watches, Omega trumps all with its 6,000-meter Seamaster Planet Ocean Ultra Deep, as covered in this column earlier this year. Now attention has shifted to thinness. The title of world’s thinnest mechanical watch has been held by Piaget’s Altiplano Ultimate Concept: The entire watch is just 2 mm thick, achieved with a mixture of new techniques and micron-level-precision component manufacturing, most notably doing away with a baseplate and building the movement straight on the caseback. But tiny…

IN early December of last year, about 10 weeks after taking over as artistic director at the French luxury brand Kenzo, the Japanese fashion designer Nigo flew by private jet from Paris to New York, where he headed straight for the Midtown Manhattan town house of upscale jeweler Jacob & Co. It was a familiar pilgrimage for the streetwear icon, whose appetite for custom chains with diamond-encrusted pendants has made Jacob “The Jeweler” Arabo his informal biographer. This chronicle of Nigo’s career began with necklaces with fist-size ape heads inspired by A Bathing Ape, the culture-shifting streetwear brand Nigo founded in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood in 1993. Then came the bejeweled dollar signs commemorating the Billionaire Boys Club brand he cofounded with superstar producer Pharrell Williams a decade later. In celebration…

ONE DAY IN March 2020, just as New York City was sliding into lockdown, Devon Turnbull got a cryptic text message from his friend Virgil Abloh. “I didn’t even get it at first,” Turnbull tells me over lunch this summer. “He’s like, ‘Your time is now. You’re about to blow up.’ I was just like, really? ” For Turnbull, 43, who had been working for several years in relative obscurity building high-fidelity home-audio equipment under the creative pseudonym Ojas, the impetus for Abloh’s prophecy remains a mystery. “I don’t know if that was just based purely on his insane level of foresight and his ability as a visionary,” says Turnbull. After all, Abloh reimagined the future of streetwear with his brand Off-White and reinvented Louis Vuitton as the brand’s men’s…

ON A QUIET, moody Saturday in July, I stood behind the photographer Cruz Valdez, watching a laptop monitor as images of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rolled in. ¶ We were at the foot of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. The congresswoman was on the steps just above us. In the distance behind her, shafts of light were hitting the warm off-white façade of the United States Supreme Court Building. ¶ Eighteen months earlier, this very spot was the chaotic site of the event now simply known as January 6. And just three weeks before our photo shoot, across the street, the Supreme Court handed down its decision to overturn Roe, which unleashed a very different kind of chaos around the country. ¶ To call the photos that we were making…

CASSIAN ANDOR, the intergalactic spy played by Diego Luna in the Star Wars universe, is an enigma at first. In the 2016 spin-off Rogue One, Andor vaguely alludes to his lifelong fight for the rebel cause, at one point telling a fresh recruit, “I have been in this fight since I was six years old.” Out of that line blossomed Andor, a new Disney+ prequel series set a few years before Cassian gave his life for the Rebel Alliance, which tracks his evolution from recalcitrant cynic to martyr. The show, out in September, is part origin story, part political awakening, a saga about how imperialism can shake a population out of its reverie and make it fight back. Luna tells me that, at its core, Andor is “about a community that…

BORN TO SHRED On any given day, you can find Bronx-born Keith Hardy living up to his nickname on some downtown NYC sidewalk or another. Shredmaster Keith, as he’s known, found his first skateboard in a garbage can when he was 11, and in the years since he’s honed a gritty and imaginative style of urban skating—and an adventurous personal style to match. “You have to look cool skating,” says Keith, who cruises around in penny loafers, trim pinstripe trousers, and creamy white suits. His scrappiness on the board has turned him into a globe-trotting pro, and thanks to his daring fits, he’s evolved into a singular fashion icon too. “I went to church on Sundays as a kid, and I would wear suits and button-ups that had crazy patterns,”…

FOR HER FIRST TWO YEARS in Washington, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez walked the few blocks from her apartment to her congressional office nearly every morning, a routine she felt forced to change after a treasonous mob stormed the Capitol. Now she drives most days—a comically short commute she considers a necessary safety precaution. But for some reason—she’s not quite sure why—the congresswoman decided to walk to work on what would become Washington’s most tumultuous morning since the insurrection. As she reached the Capitol grounds on June 24, a group of men stopped her for a photo. “I said ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you all doing?’ ” she’d later recall. “They’re like, ‘Well, you know… We’ve definitely been a lot better, given this morning.’ ” This was how the congresswoman learned that the…

TODAY WAS A GOOD DAY John Lovedale is feeling pretty good, despite the fact that he should not be walking right now. It’s a little after 9 a.m. on a hot Saturday morning in Las Vegas and he’s ambling through the Aria Resort & Casino with a pronounced limp, wincing as he throws his hips into wide semicircles and dragging his feet exactly where they need to be. The effect is like a Grand Theft Auto extra who’s just been sniped in the butt. John is in his mid-40s and stands five feet eleven and a half. Big-hearted laugh. Built like a saguaro cactus. If you squint he kind of resembles a brolic Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s in town to see his orthopedic surgeon, having arrived last night from Harrisburg,…

A FEW YEARS AGO, some of Dylan Brosnan’s closest friends showed up to his house in Malibu for his 21st birthday party, and there they met Dylan’s father, who turned out to be Pierce Brosnan. Dylan had never mentioned it. Dylan laughs. “I don’t tell anybody that, under any circumstances,” he says. It’s a hot but breezy Wednesday afternoon in that same Malibu property, which Dylan’s parents—Pierce and his second wife, Keely Shaye Smith, who married in 2001—have owned for more than 20 years. Dylan is on a couch in the living room, looking out the window at a blue gradient of sky and sea, explaining what it was like to grow up in a place where everyone knew his father’s face. “I always thought he had a lot of…