Innehållsförteckning för Holiday 2017 från GQ Style

DIY usually means offthe- clock dads building backyard decks and grandmas decoupaging picture frames. At Gucci, it means a shearling-lined embroidered stonewashed denim jacket handmade for you. The white-hot Italian brand calls its expansive offering of customizable goods—from tiger jacquard silk bomber jackets to hibiscus red crocodile double monkstraps—Do It Yourself, and it’s the kind of subversive twist on luxury we’ve come to expect from Alessandro Michele, the mastermind behind Gucci. “This collection is dedicated to those women and men who are in love with their wardrobes and who like to wear unique things,” Michele says of the DIY buffet of tailoring, knitwear, shirting, outerwear, and shoe choices. “I tried to give them something slightly different, to allow them to have some little acts of freedom while wearing Gucci.” That…

What does it mean to wear a watch in this day and age? Meetings all have reminders, TV shows stream on demand, and your scheduled Uber will pick you up right when you need to head out to the airport. In our digital world, time is omnipresent. And with our streamlined, endlessly multi-tasking technology, there’s no real reason to fasten a miniature machine to your wrist that just measures the position of the earth in relation to the sun. But yet: There’s something about these things. Not only are watches sophisticated and mesmerizing bits of wizardly analog engineering; buying them also tends to mark the most significant moments in our lives. I think a good watch is the most important unimportant thing you could ever buy. You probably don’t need…

Friedrich Kunath’s odyssey from East Berlin boyhood to international-art-world success could easily span several volumes. But for now, here it is in quick-cut montage, set to the rambling strains of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: Kid grows up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall in an ad hoc hippie-commune-type situation thanks to a rock-manager mother and a roadie stepfather. Then, in 1985, stepdad gets a job in West Berlin, enabling teenage Friedrich to vault the wall a few years before it eventually comes tumbling down. He relocates to Braunschweig, Germany, and in a single day the soundtrack of his life fast-forwards a decade and change from early- ’70s Neil Young to the likes of Joy Division and Erasure. Free at last, young Kunath promptly begins showing telltale signs…

NATIVE DRESS—WITH A DESIGNER TWIST The Shrine is a refuge for the youth in Lagos—it’s a place where you can come and be free, maybe get a job, have a community—and these are some of the young cats we met there. We cast and dressed everybody on the spot with traditional Nigerian clothes and then these designer coats. I just looked for interesting characters. There was something about each of them that struck me; I think it comes across in the photos. It’s a vibe. You feel it. If someone has style, you don’t have to do too much. You put a tailored garment on them and they just own it.…

A man walks into an Hermès store. Let’s say it’s in Monte Carlo, but he could be anywhere in the world. He looks around but can’t find exactly what he needs: a bag to hold his daily apple. So he sits down with one of the store’s sales staff and drafts up a proposal. That proposal is sent along to the Hermès Sur- Mesure team, and so begins one of the most innovative and sophisticated made-to-order processes in the world. The proposal will be reviewed by a design team, sketches drawn up, prototypes developed, and finally, with the client’s approval, in the careful hands of Hermès’s highly skilled craftsmen, the apple bag will become a reality “I like to give an artistic and sometimes twisted answer to an object’s functionality,”…

New York’s Garment District is a dense commercial neighborhood in the heart of Manhattan where the American fashion industry did much of its business for decades. At one time, all aspects of apparel production went through here, from design to manufacturing, sales, and distribution. In the 1950s, you couldn’t walk down a block between Seventh and Ninth Avenues, from 34th Street to 42nd Street, without being nearly run down by a renegade rack of clothing or clobbered by a swinging bolt of fabric. Hundreds of thousands of laborers were employed to do every clothes-making job you can imagine—cutting patterns, stitching buttonholes, selling textiles, even making the needles used by sewing machines. The Garment District was a center for both industry and culture, a rare place where commerce and creativity met,…

When most guys need to visit their tailor, they hop in the car or on the subway. But every July a couple of hundred savvy dressers in need of new threads instead hop on their jets and yachts to visit the men who make their clothes. Because their tailors are Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, and they are Alta Sartoria clients. Alta Sartoria is Dolce & Gabbana’s hyper-exclusive, überopulent line. Since 2015, the designers have invited their most committed clients to an exotic Italian location for a weekend of shows and parties— palazzi in Portofino, Naples, and Palermo have played host—and to an annual January show in Milan. Suiting is the highlight of the collection, but for Alta Sartoria the duo tailor an entire maximalist fantasyland. “Alta Sartoria is a…

A$AP Rocky Answers Questions from GQ Style, Raf Simons, Mahershala Ali & More Our interview with A$AP Rocky was supposed to take place backstage after an A$AP Mob concert in Philly, in a quiet, empty room, but in the moment, Rocky had a better idea. “We need to capture this chaos right here,” he said, gesturing around his dressing room, still packed with Mob members, girls, security guards, other unidentified loiterers, and even (according to A$AP Ferg, anyway) a loose mouse. “Let’s embrace the chaos,” Rocky suggested. “Rolling Stones in 1967, feel me?” He took his spot in the middle of a leather couch, surrounded by his old friends from Harlem— Ferg, Nast, Ant, and Twelvyy—and started methodically breaking down a small mound of weed as he spoke in a…

Here, we make contact with 3 Stacks to talk about creativity, drugs, aging— and what he’s been doing since “Hey Ya!” first hit. “If they drop the bomb, you got 20 minutes to get here,” says André 3000. “We’re gonna need a whole lotta water to make it for two weeks.” We’re in the thirdfloor sub-basement of André Benjamin’s apartment building in downtown New York. André tells me that to survive a nuclear event, you have to be three stories underground and you have to stay put for two weeks while the winds clear the toxic air. His girlfriend has looked into it, and this basement is registered nuke-safe or something—it’s a legit shelter. So if things get hectic between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, or if Indian Point starts…