Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2020_DEL från GQ Style

SINCE 1957, GQ HAS BEEN THE HOME of exquisite handsomeness. There’s American Gigolo–era Richard Gere smoldering with a cigarette (March 1980). There’s Michael Jordan with a megawatt smile and a bossy double-breasted suit (March 1989). And there’s George Clooney making a casual wall-lean look like a sex move (October 1997). But what happens when, after all those years, handsome suddenly goes out of style? Right now “looking your best” simply doesn’t feel interesting, exciting, or cool. Sure, you can get the right haircut to frame your face, a nice tan, and clothes that flatter your body type—so that you always present the world with the most broadly appealing version of yourself. It will probably help you get a job. It will probably still get you laid. But what our Post…

Location Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Year established 2008 Specialty Hearts and skulls If you want a tattoo, there’s no shortage of street shops in New York City to choose from. If you want a fire-breathing, pitchfork-toting, skull-smashing all-caps TATTOO, you go to Smith Street Tattoo Parlour in Carroll Gardens, where industry legend Bert Krak helps lead a team of artists who are committed to keeping the art of hardscrabble New York ink alive. “At Smith Street, you’re gonna get a classic tattoo,” says Martin Mazorra, a Parsons and Pratt professor who discovered Krak’s work after asking a former student where he got his sick wolf-head tat. Mazorra now has three dozen Smith Street pieces that cover his entire body. “The designs are bold but very simple,” he says. “It’s going to…

LATE AFTERNOON ON A WEDNESDAY in December, and I’m in a glass-walled conference room in a Hollywood office building, waiting for an audience with Dwight Yoakam. This is his office. The plan was we’d meet at 4:30, but then 4:30 comes and goes, and then a Los Angeles winter sunset stripes the sky outside the window in blazing chemical-sorbet colors, throwing orange light on Dwight’s gold and platinum albums, his framed certificates of achievement from this or that songwriters’ association, the posters from films he’s appeared in, his neatly stacked coffee-table books on art and design, his Philippe Starck Louis Ghost chair, his little Jeff Koons balloon-dog sculpture. Then night falls, and just as I’m beginning to run out of things to say to the representative from Dwight’s management company…

STARRING THREE MODELS WE LOVE SONNY HALL WISDOM ONWUBIKO MONA MATSUOKA 01 Pleats and Plaids Sonny Hall Age: 21 Hometown: London Today fashion models are made out of TikTok stars. Sonny Hall is decidedly more analog: On the day of this shoot, he arrived with a dog-eared copy of Henry Miller’s Hamlet Letters in hand, a rumpled Savile Row suit on his back, looking like a Dickensian urchin gone intellectual. Which he kind of is: Last year he published his debut poetry collection, The Blues Comes With Good News. “Modeling has done a lot for me,” says the kid signed to Kate Moss’s agency. “But the more I do it, the more I think there’s way more to me than posing.” Pick up a copy of Blues to see for yourself…

Location Ikebukuro, Tokyo Years practicing 30+ Specialty Tebori tigers When you have closets full of fanatically curated Japanese fashion, like John Mayer does, you don’t get tattooed by just anyone. You wait until you meet the master. “Ever since I was old enough to get one, I was looking for the real-deal Japanese-style tattoo,” Mayer says. “It took years of asking around each time I went to Tokyo, until finally I was introduced to Horimitsu. I instantly had that feeling like I was at the heart of Japanese tattoo.” Mayer spent the next month in Horimitsu’s studio, getting a sleeve of glistening koi, vibrant peonies, and turbulent waves tapped out in the traditional Japanese tebori method on his left arm. The technique, in which the artist uses a needle-tipped rod…

“WAIT, BUD LIGHT MADE A SELTZER,” said Post Malone, standing in a convenience store in South Los Angeles. He frowned. “Wait, Bud Light made a seltzer,” he said again, quieter. “Wait, Bud Light made a seltzer?” Louder, now: “Wait, Bud Light made a seltzer!” It was five o’clock somewhere, but not in L.A., not that Post would have cared. Anyway, the store was fake: Post was on set, running lines for a commercial being filmed—amid military secrecy—for the Super Bowl. Post Malone has been hawking Bud Light since 2017, and drinking it for a good deal longer than that, and so Anheuser-Busch InBev had chosen him to help announce its newest product, Bud Light Seltzer: a watery beverage for people who find Bud Light too beery. Designers had converted an…

THERE WAS AN ODD SPAN OF YEARS, in the early ’00s, during which flight attendants, restaurant workers, and other strangers would mistake Peter Saul for a woman. Perhaps advancing age had added a touch of femininity to his features. “I’m glad you’ve become a woman,” his wife said to him at the time. “Now we can really get to know each other.” Rather than balk at the misunderstanding, he ran with it. One anatomically graphic painting from 2006 shows Saul reclining on an examination table, his bespectacled head transposed onto a naked woman’s aging body. Saul is fond of saying that the only things he’s really concerned with are the painting he’s currently working on and the ones that will come after that. So at the moment, he’s revisiting that…

ANDERSON & SHEPPARD The bespoke tailoring shop behind the most stylish dressers in history LITERARY STYLE ICON Fran Lebowitz once wrote: “Love of clothing is what I have instead of spirituality. It is personal, transcendent, and deeply fulfilling.” It’s no ordinary threads that led the famously unflappable author to sartorial nirvana: The bespoke Savile Row tailoring house Anderson & Sheppard, she said, “is my preferred denomination.” Lebowitz is not alone in her devotion to Anderson & Sheppard. If you were to go through the company’s measurement books, you would find that some of the most rakish dressers in history are members of that tailored-clothing cult: Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, Duke Ellington, Bryan Ferry, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Prince Charles. A few designers too, namely Bill Blass, Calvin Klein, Manolo Blahnik, and Tom…

Location Joshua Tree Years practicing 5+ Specialty Artful stick-and-poke Aidan Koch is best known as the author of three book-length comics and as an artist whose dreamlike illustrations have been shown in galleries from L.A. to Paris. But in the past few years, Koch’s stick-and-poke tattoo practice, which she does under the nom de needle House of Ruin, has developed a devoted cult following in the underground art and fashion communities. “If you know, you know,” says Brooklyn-based artist and writer Diamond Stingily, who has “about 10” of Koch’s delicate ink drawings. “Aidan’s work is so distinct to her,” Stingily says of Koch’s appeal. “She doesn’t do anything for clout. She respects her craft.” What is your signature style? I do stick-and-poke. I have a fairly loose style, but it’s…

MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA Square-Toe Boots Early ’00s Credit: Instagram users @arth_archive (white) and @heatarchive (black) The elusive designer abruptly left his namesake brand and disappeared from public life in 2009, but his legacy of deconstructed fashion and avant-garde streetwear is as present today as it ever was. Take the square-toe boot here. It was a Margiela staple throughout the late ’90s and early 2000s and is a quintessential example of the designer’s peculiar design ethos. The black pair is a simple, undeniable classic, while the white pair represents one of Margiela’s signature motifs: a pristine white when brand-new, but with time and wear, the paint cracks and chips away, creating something one of a kind. HELMUT LANG Bondage Fishtail Parka Fall-Winter 1998 On loan from David Casavant Like Martin Margiela,…

WE’RE BACKSTAGE JUST MOMENTS BEFORE Burna Boy makes his Tonight Show debut, and Africa’s biggest superstar is tucked away in his dressing room, surrounded by an entourage of more than a dozen people. Dressed in slim-fitting Louis Vuitton with matching black patent leather loafers, he sits quietly at a weathered upright piano, tickling the keys and toking on a blunt, as two members of his crew vigorously debate who sang the 1981 classic “In the Air Tonight.” ¶ “It was Lionel Richie,” says one guy, who is as emphatic as he is incorrect. ¶ “How can you mix up Lionel Richie and Phil Collins, man? You’re mad,” another counters. A distinctly pungent cloud begins to envelop the room. ¶ After a quick Google search, the Richie fan begrudgingly concedes that…