Esquire -julkaisun Winter 2025/26 -irtonumeron sisällysluettelo

WHETHER YOU’RE A SMALL- fry studio or a big-time star, the prevailing wisdom for how to succeed in Hollywood these days is simple: find a niche and stay there. Horror producers produce horror movies. YA writers write YA. Slambang action stars star in slam-bang action flicks. Being a Swiss Army generalist now feels as dated as celluloid and drive-in theaters—which is precisely why Rian Johnson confounds people. I mean, who the hell is he? The eye-candy confectioner behind nine-figure Star Wars tentpoles like The Last Jedi? The stealth power player who produces streaming hits like Poker Face and 3 Body Problem? Or the twice Oscar-nominated writer and director of the deliriously entertaining, pretzellogic Knives Out murder mysteries? Johnson is impossible to pin down. He likes it that way. On a sunny…

OVER THE PAST 25 YEARS, Venice-based Golden Goose has grown from a small, artisanal operation to a global retail phenomenon. That’s based largely on the brand’s iconic weathered sneakers, plus a firm belief—when everyone was going the other way—in the value of brick-and-mortar experiences. But what can get lost in the mix is just how good Golden Goose’s clothes are. You couldn’t call them street—they’re more elevated than that—but there’s a gently dilapidated vintage vibe about them, something that echoes rather than apes those deliberately pre-aged sneakers. They’re considered. Intentional. There’s no sense of a rush to expand massively with apparel, as the brand did with sneakers. This is perhaps why we don’t hear about the clothing so much—which is, to our minds, a strength rather than a weakness. Fall’s collection…

OUR JOURNEY INTO JAMES CAMERON’S universe begins at Lightstorm Entertainment in Manhattan Beach, California, the independent production company founded by the Canadian director, technologist, and explorer in 1990. Inside, it looks more like a museum than a film studio. To reach Cameron’s office, you first walk through a hangar filled with an extensive collection of movie props. Life-size statues of Jake and Neytiri, the blue protagonists of the Avatar saga, stand alongside the steel skeleton of the Terminator, a replica of the infamous Queen from Aliens, and two models of the Titanic—both the massive structure used for underwater shots and the wreck featured in Cameron’s documentary on the doomed ship. These displays set the stage for our meeting with the filmmaker. Cameron has earned his reputation as a boxoffice king,…

I still feel like I’m trying to not be a child-actor failure. I’m still trying to make it out. When I was a kid, the three things I wanted to get done as an adult were to be a father, a husband, and direct a movie. My mom was a flight attendant for Pan Am, so she was flying internationally half the month my whole childhood. Sometimes, Christmas would be on December 15 or the 2nd of January or whatever, depending on whether she was in town. We never really had Sunday dinners. My dad was a freelance writer, director, producer, so he would either be on location or maybe downstairs in the basement writing a script. My sister and I had a peer relationship with our parents; they were…

What’s the difference between sex and love? Hmm. That’s a good question. Hey, you interviewed Al Pacino. How’d he answer that? —Robert De Niro (January 2003) Sex is not important at all. Sex is the introduction. Sex is the handshake. —Gay Talese (October 2023) Sometimes sex gets in the way of a relationship. —Pamela Anderson (January 2005) Difference between sex and love? Well, you’re not always sure you’re in love. But when you’re having sex, there’s really no mistaking it. —Ornette Coleman (January 2010) You could try to live monogamously. Good luck. There’s people who say thinking about cheating is just as bad as doing it, so if you start looking at it from that angle, they got us all. —Willie Nelson (December 1998) Literally a hundred girls book themselves…

What we create needs to come from the things that we want. We need to design our own desire instead of being told how the fuck to feel by movies that are never changing and always the same. I have figuratively broken teeth learning that shoving into fear instead of backing away from it is key. I try to let this seep into how I spend literally all my time. I found that battle cry within myself, knowing that it is an echo of centuries and centuries of women that have needed to pick each other up. A real core-base activation piece for me was reading The Chronology of Water when I was a lot younger, in a time where I was in service of other people’s stories as an…

Writer, 58, Los Angeles Interviewed by Michael Sebastian, November 14, 2025 I never thought this would be a job. Sitting at the bar alone is one of the great luxuries in life. I have had great emotional breakthroughs just sitting at the bar. My parents viewed restaurants the way many families view Broadway shows. Going out to a restaurant was a big night out for us. My dad would cut Ruth Reichl’s reviews out of the Los Angeles Times and say, “We’re going here.” I’m not an extraordinary cook. I make extremely good French toast, though. I put in a lot of vanilla, a lot of real cinnamon, and a lot of egg. I hate Champagne. I know, it’s inexplicable. I can’t quite explain why. When I went to Side…

ONE WELL-PLACED ACCESSORY can make a bigger impression than your whole outfit—provided you choose the right one. It can’t be an obvious cry for attention; that’s just sad. It needs to draw people in slowly. To first invite and then demand a second look. It needs, in other words, to be something like the iconic Panthère de Cartier ring, which transforms the French maison’s symbolic animal into an appropriately sleek and streamlined piece of jewelry. In real life, panthers are fully black versions of either the leopard or the jaguar. Don’t worry about that. We’re not on the hunt for natural accuracy here; we’re going for visual impact. Which is why our favorite versions of the ring are yellow gold with lacquered spots and garnet eyes, and a diamond-encrusted take in…

IT’S SELDOM SILENT IN MIAMI. THE AIR IS FULL OF CRICKETS AND the mm-tss, mm-tss of house music and the staccato backfires of souped-up whips gunnin’ down the causeway. But in the neighborhood of Little River, another welcome sound can be heard: the oceanic murmur of folks enjoying themselves. You hear it when you approach Sunny’s, a vast steakhouse where inside and outside blend together, Miami style. Sunny’s is a party. Like, the best party in town. The vibes are impeccable, and the food is so good that you make that face between disbelief and disgust that somehow conveys ecstasy. This year at Esquire, we’ve seen dozens of new restaurants like this, places where spectacular food is coupled with a damn good time—where ambition and abandon meet. These are the places…

Everything in life is just the fragile result of something that could have been so easily different. None of this would’ve been possible had my parents not emigrated out of China. My parents were the first class of students after Mao’s death that were allowed to leave the country to pursue higher degrees. My sister was born in Australia. I would not have been born if they had stayed in China. I went back to China this summer for the first time in nine years. I was taking photos outside my dad’s childhood home in Inner Mongolia, a dirt-and-straw house that is barely standing. I posted that to Instagram, and it got picked up on RedNote, which is their Instagram-TikTok amalgam. I assumed people wouldn’t receive SNL in China, and…

Your mother or your grandmother nurtured you before you knew how to sin. They see all good in you because they saw you when there was no bad. And later, when you get in trouble and you’re in prison, she’ll say, Look what they did to my baby. My grandmother used to say, Wear white underwears. They’ll tell you when to change them. We used to have big blocks of cheese that the government gave us. I still eat cheese sandwiches sometimes. There’s turkey and everything else in the fridge, and I’m still eating just the cheese and the bread. Habits are habits. You think you have money until you’re in a room with people who have money. We evolve. If you stay the same, then you just falling behind.…

Passion is momentary; love is enduring. —John Wooden (February 2000) It’s easier to write songs when you’re single. —Lucinda Williams (April 2002) The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person. You know they’re right if you love to be with them all the time. —Julia Child (June 2000) Love is being angry. Love is not talking for a day. Love is getting in each other’s face. Love is accepting that I’m wrong. Love is a 360 degree thing. It’s not linear. —Tim McGraw (September 2021) What if she takes your heart and wraps it around her little finger and has you going to the store, shopping, washing clothes, and then she breaks your heart? That’s the chance you’ve got to take on love. —Al Green (November 2001)…

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have. —David Bowie (March 2004) Heaven and hell are right here. People who live for the hereafter will probably never get there because the hereafter will always be the hereafter. Even if there was a hereafter, when you got there it would be now then. —Lynda Carter (January 2004) The only fear I have is how long consciousness is gonna hang on after my body goes. I just hope there’s nothing. Like there was before I was born. —Harry Dean Stanton (January 2009) Three times in my life I thought I was going to die. And I was reconciled to death, though I did everything I could to avoid…

I find it easy to relax. I think confidence has an awful lot to do with it, and a certain degree of accomplishment. I don’t mean that in a pompous sense. If I were struggling as a craftsman, I would tend to walk around with the tools of the trade in my hand. Now that I feel more wedded to my craft, I can put my tools down. I try not to use the word love lazily. Humans are, by nature, expressive. I didn’t say I wanted to be an actor until I was eighteen, but when I was a child, I saw a film called Never Take No for an Answer. It starred an Italian orphan who looked like me. Or, to put it more modestly, I looked like…

Santa Claus was nursing a beer at an uptown dive bar. The neighborhood was gentrifying, and management seemed eager to accommodate—there was scented soap in the bathroom and twenty-two-dollar lobster rolls. But the place couldn’t outrun the regulars. They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim, illicit pours they secured with ten-dollar tips to a curvy Dominican bartender. Santa—Billy—was fiftyish, with a modest gut, gray hair, a lustrous beard, and a caddish gaze that followed the bartender up and down the rail. He was dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. For the price of three beers, he told me his story. As a young man, Billy had come to New York to be an actor, but over time he began to feel like an extra in his own…

STORE INFORMATION For the items featured in Esquire, please consult the website or call the phone number provided. The Blueprint, p. 28: Santoni shoes, santonishoes.com. P. 30: Golden Goose coat, jacket, polo shirt, jeans, and boots, goldengoose.com. Pandora necklaces and charms, us.pandora.net. P. 34: Omega watch, omegawatches.com. Pp. 36-37: Prada coat, jacket, trousers, shirt, tie, knit, jeans, and shoes, prada.com. P. 42: Polo Ralph Lauren jacket, shirt, and trousers, ralphlauren.com. Wolverine boots, wolverine.com. Bell & Ross watch, bellross.com. The Frankie Shop jacket and trousers, thefrankieshop.com. Soft Goat sweater, softgoat.com. Oliver Peoples sunglasses, oliverpeoples.com. John Hardy bracelet and ring, johnhardy.com. P. 43: Givenchy jacket, T-shirt, jeans, and socks, givenchy.com. Duke + Dexter loafers, dukeanddexter.com. Title of Work wallet chain, titleofwork.com. Brandon Sklenar, p. 84: Canali coat, sweater, and trousers, canali.com.…

WE ARE LIVING THROUGH THE DUMBEST possible times. We are a nation of adults who know which Harry Potter dormitory we’d be sorted into. We are a country whose newspapers regularly use the phrase “claps back” in breaking-news headlines, whose Department of Homeland Security said “womp womp” in official correspondence, whose finest actresses are calling each other things like “greedy little pig bottom” on Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair. It is dangerously stupid out there. Do you want to know how I know it’s bad? I know it’s bad because I know it’s bad, and I’m one of the five dumbest people I’ve ever met. It was not always this way. I am old enough to remember when George H. W. Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, corrected a child’s spelling test, marking…

Italian shoemaker Santoni has a unique way of making bespoke shoes. Instead of starting with finished leather, it cuts the upper part of the shoe from what it calls Origine: vegetable-tanned but undyed calfskin, the perfect canvas for Santoni’s in-house craftspeople to work their magic. Painstakingly, they build layers and layers of pigment and patination to create a one-of-a-kind color and finish like what you see on the smoky-blue Uniqua pair shown here. The double-monk-strap shoe—made from a single piece of leather and available with solid-gold buckles, if you so choose—certainly lives up to its name. But something so singular takes time. You’ll need to give it about six weeks for the first fitting and up to six months for the final shoes. If you ask us, it’s well worth…

NOWADAYS, IT’S A NO-BRAINER THAT BOX-OFFICE STARS MAKE unbeatable ambassadors for fashion brands. It wasn’t always that way. In the mid-1990s, when cell phones were good for phone calls and not much else, actors would show up for premieres but rarely for fashion shows—and never in an ad campaign. At the time, magazines were fat with glossy ads full of models with impossible faces and bodies photographed in exotic locations mere mortals could never hope to visit. Clothes were sexed up and splashy. Real life was nowhere. That was the game. But Prada wasn’t playing. Instead of shouting for attention, the Milanese brand quietly nudged its way into the men’s-fashion consciousness with clothes that were simple, wearable, modern, and, above all, cool—more of a grown-up uniform than a way of life.…

MOST MILITARY CLOTHING IS FORGED IN THE CRUCIBLE OF WAR and crafted to solve specific problems encountered in battle. Such is the case with modern menswear staples like cargo pants and the M-65 field jacket. The A-2 flight jacket, however, came into being in peacetime—specifically in 1931, during the Great Depression. Still, it was an answer to a real-world issue that was dogging enlisted men. The U. S. Army Air Corps was flying in open-cockpit planes at the time, and airmen needed something to protect themselves from wind. The A-2’s leather exterior—horsehide at first, followed by cowhide and goatskin right before the U. S. entered World War II—provided the necessary wind-breaking qualities to keep pilots comfortable in the air. (The B-3, introduced in 1934, used sheep’s wool to add warmth for…

A LITTLE HELP HERE! IT’S GETTING HARDER EVERY DAY TO FIGURE OUT WHAT IN THE SAM HILL is going on in the world—and how to keep our sanity, day after day. And it’s not just the politics of it all, although that part is freaking us out. There’s too much social media, which isn’t social at all and floods our feed with memes about how we drink too much. (You get those too, right?) Too many mediocre streaming shows, of which we watch every episode. Too much intolerance. ¶ What we all need right about now is some wickedly smart people to explain it all—the meaning of life. As a public service, Esquire has consulted with some of the smartest folks we could find and distilled those discussions into this compendium…

I sometimes think I tried to get good at comedy so comedy people would talk to me. I’m not sure where the instinct to hoard came from. I started doing it when I was little. Every autograph I ever got, I would put in a photo album and treat it like it was the Shroud of Turin. My Phil Collins autograph poster was handled with so much care. I always joke: It’s not hoarding if all your shit is awesome. I’m a hoarder who takes good care of his hoard. I was obsessed from the earliest age with the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello. That turned into George Carlin and Steve Martin. I went deep down the Lenny Bruce well as a seventh grader. That’s how much of a…

Having a good conversation is a lost art. SubwayTakes came out of this: My ideal night is four hours at a table arguing and conversing with a group of five people. Debating about nothing, no one getting offended, because it’s for fun. The spirit of debate is missing from America. SubwayTakes is a place where you can have a good time arguing. After more than five hundred SubwayTakes, nothing surprises me anymore. Growing up as a Muslim kid in Minnesota, I learned how to be a chameleon. I didn’t want to be different. I couldn’t speak English for the first six years of my life. I got bullied for it. In my home, it was Arabic music and the news, CNN and Al Jazeera. When I was a kid, I…

My parents were big on fighting for what you believe in. I tell people all the time, God has to yell at me to get me to move. Law school was never part of my trajectory. I went to a liberal-arts school. Little Shop of Horrors was one of my favorite movies growing up, and they were doing the musical at school. I was cast as Ronnette. And the mock-trial coach, Professor Pohlmann, saw me in the show and was like, “You should try out for the mock-trial team.” I said, “No, no, no—I’m going to be an accountant. I’m not going to law school.” And he says, “Some of these kids are too stiff—we need people like you.” So I made the team and became an all-American. And he…

The reason I am wealthy can be distilled down to one word: women. And that’s plural. My mom was a secretary in the seventies. It was just me and her. She didn’t have resources. My ability to provide or be a more involved father is a function of circumstance. I got my shit together when my mom was sick. She was not a dramatic person. So when your mom calls you and says, “You need to come home,” it is bad. It was an ugly scene. I had a total of $600 in my checking account. I remember thinking at the age of twenty-five, “I’ve had all the blessings. I’ve been such a fucking idiot that I can’t take care of the one person who’s taken care of me.” Every…

BRANDON SKLENAR IS BAWLING HIS EYES OUT. IT’S 2022, HE’S thirty-one years old, and he just left the biggest audition of his life: 1923, the Yellowstone prequel from TV kingpin Taylor Sheridan. The adrenaline is surging through his body, so Sklenar races to the bathroom—a space to breathe. Rejection hits heavy and often in acting, which he knows painfully well, but this time is different. He can feel with a rare certainty that his hard work has finally paid off, and he’s overcome with relief. “You really feel like Sisyphus pushing this monumental boulder up the hill,” Sklenar tells me today. “Like you’re the only person that can see why you keep doing it.” Now thirty-five, he’s sitting in a patch of grass in New York City on a break from…

SHOULD YOU FIND YOURSELF AROUND SO-CALLED CIVILIZED discourse this holiday season, you’ll likely encounter a well-worn idea about televised kickoffs and tip-offs on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Which is: They should not be happening. The argument hinges on the sanctity of the few days each year that every overworked, underpaid American is obligated to take off. How dare we sully them with . . . sports? Next, consider the thousands of players, coaches, team and league personnel, reporters, photographers, stadium employees—everyone it takes to run a multimillion-dollar broadcast. All those people are required to work and miss precious moments with their families. Finally, goes the conventional wisdom, stipulating that the games do occur, you at home shouldn’t tune in and miss precious moments with your family. Let us be clear: Put the…