Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2017 från GQ Style

“A really simple cashmere T-shirt can change the whole attitude of a wardrobe,” says Massimo Alba. He’s right. Slip into one of his cashmere tees and consider it your gateway drug into Alba’s sprezzy universe of band collars, deconstructed jackets, wide-leg pants, and sun-faded knits. These are clothes you could just as easily wear to bed as you could to the beach or the theater. And that’s exactly the way he wants them to be. “Nothing that I design is too loud,” Alba says. “It’s just a matter of feeling comfortable.” Comfort is a big reason why Alba is fond of cashmere, but the real secret to perfecting his casual-luxury formula is the wash. Every garment, from the knits to the shirts to the overcoats, is washed after being constructed…

I recently took two close friends out to dinner at Mario Batali’s Del Posto in Manhattan. The meal was a thank-you for some help they’d given me, so I was buying—which meant I had free rein to order a seriously good flight of wine. I’ve spent the past 12 years trying to learn my way around wines, and at this point I know more than your average roast-chicken eater. So when the sommelier dropped the list, I commandeered it. When he came back to check on me, I was ready. I ordered a bottle of the Ceretto. A year earlier, I’d gone to Northwest Italy and visited that vineyard, so I knew it well. The wine was good—very bold— and opened up nicely. Just before our entrées came out, the…

The giant. The all-seeing eye atop the dollar-bill pyramid. The father of modern Italian design. It’s as if he found a way to mainline the personality, creativity, and culture of the Italian people into his furniture, objects, and buildings. His prolific work in every medium is sensual, expressive, playful, colorful, and well crafted. There’s little Ponti couldn’t do. Trained as an architect, he made a name for himself designing ceramics, then glassware, then furniture, then buildings. In his life, he worked for over 120 different companies. He was also a great professor, writer, cultural advocate, and founder of the important and collectible design magazine Domus. Known for being one of the most charming and magnanimous of designers, feverishly curious, he welcomed all to his famous open-door studio. His 1961 Pirelli Tower (left) still looms…

The intellectual of the group. Her product and furniture designs are astoundingly original and specific to her singular vision. For me it’s all about her lamps, each one a masterpiece. Some affordable, some not. They seem to embody, then transcend, their period of creation. Her Pileino lamp, for instance, seems unmistakably influenced by a NASA space helmet. Her lamps are high-tech and organic at the same time. Almost robotic at first glance, but surprisingly functional and practical. A turning point in her career was her wildly successful and award-winning remodel, in which she turned a train station in Paris into the Musée d’Orsay, which showcases French Impressionist and Post- Impressionist art. She became the go-to architect in the early days of adaptive re-use, brilliantly balancing historical details with modern upgrades.…

“I never, ever listen to music while I’m writing. But often, on this one, I’d start to feel my energy flagging a little bit, and I could feel myself becoming a bit of a conventional editor and writer. So I’d go have lunch and crank up something from this list here to put extra energy into my body. You just feel your artistic aspirations go up, especially that kinda music, like these really energetic genius people. It just makes me want to impress them. I feel like, ‘Okay, I wanna live up to the level of Sleater-Kinney or Wilco.’ Or driving around to Aaron Copland, kinda more pastoral, almost cornily pastoral. To me, it’s all trickery. You try to get your mind and body into a place where they can…

Hopper Penn AGE 23 HOLLYWOOD LINEAGE Son of Sean Penn and Robin Wright OCCUPATION Model-actor you’ll see in Brad Pitt’s new military flick, War Machine. “I kind of consider it my first movie. It’s the first one I got o≠ an audition. And it was the greatest experience of my life.” THE SUIT An old-school cotton check re-imagined with a bad attitude by Prada Hailey Baldwin & Jordan Barrett AGES 20 OCCUPATIONS Supermodels, socialmedia superstars, jet-setters. “Jordan can never confirm nor deny where he’ll be at any given time,” says Hailey. THE SUIT A snow white double-breasted that all but comes standard with a silk shirt Gucci Mane & Keyshia Ka’oir GUCCI’S OCCUPATION Prolific Atlanta rapper who roared back on the scene in 2016 KEYSHIA’S OCCUPATION Entrepreneur and model THE…

AND THE AWARD GOES TOÉ Awards seasons come and go, but exceptional work, like MAHERSHALA ALIÕS performance in Moonlight, lasts forever. So we had the 43-year-old actor give us some of his all-time favorites of film.ÑLAUREN LARSON Best Picture • Nanook of the North [1922]. It’s about the Inuits. We follow a family around, led by Nanook, whom we see trying to survive in those conditions. It feels like a movie to me, but it’s one of the first documentary films. You gotta think how someone would approach telling that type of story as a documentary in a world that has only ever seen narratives told in the way in which we look at films right now. [Director Robert J. Flaherty] worked on it for years. He had a cut that I…

“MP Massimo Piombo is about pleasure,” says the Italian fashion-industry vet, who launched his new label in 2012. Declaring that your clothes will bring pleasure is easy; what’s hard is actually designing a collection that tickles the reptilian reward center in the back of the modern man’s brain. But that goal is fully realized in Piombo’s spring-summer 2017 line: It makes you want to jump into his jaunty, colorful, deeply pleasurable world. The collection features relaxed repp-stripe jackets with kneelength tunics and casual suits that look just as good with ties as without—all made the way they were a century ago. Piombo sources fabrics that reflect his extremely well-traveled life, from Scandinavia to Scotland to Belgium and beyond. Burnt orange, bright yellow, and fire-engine red are prominent. Shaken together in a…

Highly inventive and seemingly blessed with thousands of epiphanies, he worked as a team with his brother Pier Giacomo until Pier’s death in 1968. Castiglioni loved everyday found objects and reveled in re-contextualizing them. For instance, the look and functionality of something as mundane as modern streetlights inspired one of the most popular (and most knocked off) lamps of all time—the Arco. A light source is dangled within a chrome ball almost seven feet from its heavy white marble base, creating a movable pendant, perfect for lighting coffee tables. The hole in the marble was so two people with a broomstick could move the piece. It is truly a ’60s icon. Paradox and irony were his trademarks. His Mezzadro tractor-seat chair, an early piece of Pop Art furniture that referenced…

Before his design career took off (his initial fame came from his iconic red Valentine typewriter design for Olivetti), Sottsass hung out in California with Beats like Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, then launched a publishing house in Italy to translate their writings. He was also a photographer (he shot Dylan, Helmut Newton, and Picasso) and a legendary womanizer. For years, he photographed every hotel room and bed in which he had sex. As an avant-garde reaction to the cool, tasteful international-style furniture and design that were popular in the later midcentury years, his idiosyncratic Memphis group, which he helped found in 1981, still shocks, divides opinions, and defines postmodernism with wild, febrile free-for-alls of color and exaggerated design. With a Pee-wee Herman gambol, they seismically shook up the design world. Sottsass…

Yesterday, Conor McGregor spent $27,000 at a Dolce & Gabbana store in Los Angeles, and then he did what he usually does after he spends $27,000 somewhere: He went for coffee, to give the store time to pack up all the things he just bought. “That’s a common occurrence for me nowadays,” he says. His handlers and his friends have grown used to the waiting. Spending that much money, they’ve learned, requires patience. So anyway, he’s waiting, and then he gets a call from the store, and then another call, because the overwhelmed sales staff keep finding stuff in the pile that they forgot to add to the bill—a pair of shoes, a pocket square—and now they keep sheepishly calling back to ask if they can run Conor’s card again.…

When designer Kim Jones landed at Louis Vuitton in 2011, he was already a cult figure in the men’s fashion world but not a household name. Known for his elegant, street-inflected eponymous line and ahead-of-its-time collaboration with Umbro, he began his rise to fame with a stint as creative director at the British luxury brand Dunhill, which lasted from 2008 to 2011. Then it all went turbo when LV brought him on to transform its men’s ready-to-wear arm into one of the most consistently cool collections in the luxury market. Jones was born a global explorer—few designers travel farther or more frequently for inspiration (he’s got the Instagram account to prove it). Having split his childhood among London, Kenya, and Botswana, he ventures to remote parts of the globe where…

Vans has been making the quintessential shoe for skaters since Jeff Spicoli wore the checkered slip-ons in Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982. Today it’s a $2.2 billion business with over 600 retail stores in the U.S. But even more remarkable for a brand that’s been around since 1966, it’s still cool. In fact, thanks to a merger of cultural streams from skate and pop, plus a grip of next-level collaborations, Vans is cooler now than it’s ever been. Vans’s director of footwear design, Nathaniel Iott, says that the spirit of collaboration has been there all along. The first partnership was in 1966, when Vans collaborated with legendary surfer Duke Kahanamoku on a run of floral-print sneakers. In 1996 it began an ongoing collab with Supreme and later took the concept…

E ach spring the world gathers in Milan for the annual Salone del Mobile, a city-spanning trade show featuring thousands of vendors that is at once the Super Bowl, Art Basel, and South by Southwest of lamps, chairs, and mind-blowing coffee tables. All the major players unveil their new lines and ideas at the Salone—which is why your favorite fashion designers, artists, and architects flock to this sprawling show for inspiration, and, of course, to furnish their homes, offices, ateliers, and showrooms. (Also snooping around are some not-so-nobly-inclined types looking to knock off the best designs ASAP.) At the Salone, the influence and power of the Roman Empire is very much alive: In the design community, the Italians set the trends and rule the world. Food. Fashion. Automobiles. Furniture. Interiors.…

The coolest cat. If he were music, he would be the Joe Morello drum solo in “Take Five.” In fact, he was so cool he once invented a cocktail glass that enabled multi-tasking lushes to hold a drink and a cigarette in the same hand. Mic drop! As anyone who’s ever seen The Graduate knows, the ’60s were all about plastics, and Colombo’s 4860 chair was among the first mass-produced chairs made entirely of ABS plastic. His Barbarella-looking designs still reek of their spaceage origins: The silhouette of his LEM lounge chair and the upholstery of his revered Elda chair seem to evoke a lunar-landing vehicle and a space suit, respectively. Colombo loved portability and compact, self-contained environments. Some of his most interesting creations were futuristic Kubrickian modular living habitats that would’ve been at home…

Lincoln in the Bardo is George Saunders’s first novel, but Saunders being Saunders, that designation is sort of useless—nothing in this book resembles any novel you’ve ever read before. It’ll be a fun parlor game to watch critics attempt to outdo themselves describing what this thing is. Here’s a shot: Lincoln in the Bardo is a fictitious (mostly) oral history of the night President Lincoln’s 11-yearold son, Willie, was interred. The oral history in this case comprises the voices of over a hundred ghosts living in a liminal sort of purgatory, a pre-Judgment in-between the Buddhist tradition calls the bardo. The Lincoln in this bardo, then, is the newly departed Willie—but also Abe, who leaves the White House to visit his son’s body during the night. It is a sustained chorus on life,…