Esquireの February 2017 の目次

Overheard “Listen. Because we don’t. We don’t even listen to ourselves.” —Pharrell Williams There are many things wrong with New Year’s resolutions, but the most glaring fault is that they’re totally backward. They start with the answer to your new year before that year has even begun. Resolutions are just a list of objectives. End points. Outcomes. Example: If I accomplish the following, 2017 will have been a good year: • losing 12 pounds; • receiving a promotion that entails at least an 11 percent raise; • learning conversational Spanish before my trip to Cabo; • journaling regularly (again). And there you are: The year is all wrapped up and ready to go. No questions. No mystery. Just stark, non-negotiable answers. It’s like a sales quota: Hit the numbers and…

WE LAUGHED, we cried, we cried again. And somehow we also found time to watch a bunch of movies. Hollywood, ahead of the culture as always, took bold stands against slavery and the bombing of sporting events and for interracial marriage and successful emergency landings while proving the trolls wrong once and for all: Women, we now know, are just as capable of making mediocre reboots as men. There were disaster epics and epic disasters, Angry Birds and Bad Moms, superheroes throwing citydestroying tantrums and white people dancing in the streets. Here we honor the best—and the most—from the year in cinema, such as it was. Best Supporting GARMENT Harley Quinn’s hot pants, Suicide Squad Best QUESTION, PERIOD “Why have you let me film this?” Filmmaker Josh Kriegman, Weiner Best…

IN THE LAST decades of the 20th century, Paul Auster was the coolest American novelist around. His books— slim metafictional puzzlers and existentialist meditations on the absurdity of the human condition— were philosophically rich in a European style but also quintessentially American, with countless references to Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe (not to mention lots and lots of baseball). These days, the literary roost is ruled by the social realism of Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith on one hand and the “autofiction” of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante on the other, but if you spend any time on a New York subway south of 14th Street, you will see plenty of well-thumbed copies of Auster’s The New York Trilogy and The Music of Chance. Auster turns 70 this year, and…

I LOVE A SIMPLE WHITE SNEAKER. My usual go-tos are a Stan Smith and a Converse low-top, mostly because I’m not a fan of a “fashion” sneaker—even from brands I love— since designer sneakers are usually too tricky and also cost more than I’m willing to spend. Then I saw these McQueens. What struck me is that they are elevated and simple at the same time.Plus, the leopard-embossed sole is cool but hidden from view, which plays into what for me McQueen is all about: impeccable construction and tailoring peppered with subtle design notes, whether through proportions or fabric prints and patterns. And here’s one more thing that’s great about this sneaker: Because it is so minimal, you can pair it with just about anything in your wardrobe. Sneakers ($560)…

Watch ($42,200) by Ressence; cardigan ($895) by Drake’s; gloves ($125) by Hestra; bag ($695) by Burberry; bracelet ($400) by Esquire Men’s Jewelry. TIMEPIECE INNOVATIONS are often the result of tweaking decades-old mechanical inventions, so when a watch comes on the scene that completely reinvents the game—check out the oil-filled dome!—we notice. Why oil? It provides the watch’s best special effect: a sleek display that appears to float against the curved crystal. For this 46mm titanium Type 5BB Black Black diver, the oil also ensures unparalleled legibility underwater (to 10 atmospheres/ 100 meters): The dial may be clearly viewed from any angle without the slightest glare or reflection. Underneath the dial, a series of magnets keeps the display linked to the mechanical movement, making for one slick wristwatch. THERE WILL BE…

IN JUST FIVE YEARS, Ronnie Fieg has built his brand, Kith (a name he took from the old English “kith and kin,” or friends and family), into not only New York’s go-to source for the hottest sneakers and streetwear labels but also a formidable name in the larger universe. His highly anticipated debut fashion show this past September, Kithland, comprised a whopping 90 looks, collaborations with 25 brands, and performances by New York artists Fabolous, Ma$e, and the Lox. The label’s blockbuster 2016 also entailed the opening of an outpost in Bergdorf Goodman, a pop-up-shop venture in Aspen, and a pop-up with Nike in New York. As he prepares to open a new store in Miami, Fieg tells us how he achieved his business vision. TIMING IS EVERYTHING: “I started…

THERE’S A FUNNY AND PARTICULARLY American moment in Bruce Springsteen’s recent memoir, Born to Run, in which he describes how his parents and younger sister moved from New Jersey to California in 1969, leaving him behind, at nineteen, to tend to his fledgling music career. Like EastCoast Okies, Springsteen writes, they pointed their 1960s Rambler west and ended up in Sausalito. It was an arty and expensive town near San Francisco and clearly not for them. So they pulled into a gas station, and Springsteen’s mother asked the attendant, “Where do people like us live?” Where do people like us live? It’s a paradigmatic American question, alongside the one that the former New York City mayor Ed Koch used to ask every day: “How’m I doin’?” The answer depends on…

HE DOESN’T REALLY WRITE THE songs. You understand that, right? Of course. Pharrell has written so many songs that it may, at this stage, be impossible to track and tag them all. But he’d like to dispute the whole concept. Pharrell listens. He listens for signals. He receives the songs. “I think everything is given to us,” he says. “Everything is. We didn’t create it. It’s being given to us in one shape or form. It is a deep delusion to think otherwise. I’m not the juice. I’m not the ice that makes it cool. And I’m certainly not the glass. I’m just the straw.” Which is not to say that being the straw is easy. To get the songs, you have to pay attention. “The greatest gift is self-awareness.…

Maximillian Potter hears his side. A. J. Daulerio tells me one Sunday this past September. We are on the concrete porch of an apartment he’s renting in a dismal section of Singer Island, Florida.He’s wearing aT-shirt, baggy basketball shorts, sweat socks tomidcalf, andshower shoes— a look he describes as “homeless chic.”He rolls a cigarette and a lighter around in his palm like they’re Chinese therapy balls. Not all that long ago, as the editor in chief of Gawker.com, Daulerio was among the most influential and feared figures in media. Now the forty-two-year-old is unemployed, his bank has frozen his life savings of$1,500,anda$1,200-per-monthone-bedroomis all he can afford.He’s renting here, he says, to be near the counselors and support network he has come to rely on lately. Six months earlier, Daulerio was…

MY PERSONAL STYLE IS comfortable, simple, and classic, just like this blazer from my friend Massimo Piombo. It has the kind of artisanal touch I look for combined with high-quality fabrics. I can wear it with a pair of dark-blue jeans or even with tailor-made gray pants and feel perfectly myself. I think people should choose wardrobe pieces that are distinctive to their personalities and not just try to follow trends. I follow the same rule when it comes to food. I don’t like elaborate dishes so much as simplicity and quality. Langosteria Bistrot, near the Moncler HQ in Milan, has the freshest seafood and vegetables. It’s true Italian with a cozy atmosphere, and the manager, Marco, is a perfect host.…

IF A CERTAIN second Tuesday in February rolls around and you find yourself in one of the following situations, two sommeliers from Esquire Network’s Uncorked (stream it at tv.esquire.com) offer some notes on which bottles to buy. —TYLER CONFOY TRYING TO MAKE AN IMPRESSION Passopisciaro 2014 Passorosso Terre Siciliane, $40 “You could talk about how it comes from super-old vineyards on a volcano and goes with a wide variety of foods.” —Jack Mason, Pappas Bros. Steakhouse, Houston STAYING IN WITH YOUR WEIRD ROOMMATE Turley 2014 Juvenile California Zinfandel, $23 “California zins are among the highest-alcohol wines. This one’s 15.5 percent ABV, so that will help.” —J.M. GOING ON A BLIND DATE Jean-Claude Lapalu 2015 Brouilly Vieilles Vignes, $28 “The most versatile wine— with both food and people—is a light-bodied red…

THE LAST TIME I heard this much about LSD, it was the spring of my sophomore year in high school and my then boyfriend, a longhaired Deadhead who went everywhere barefoot, had procured a stash for us. We took it at the Indiana Dunes, where I counted every glittering grain of sand, and again in my wood-paneled basement a few days later, where I stood before a mirror observing my face as it flickered and changed shape like flames. I didn’t try it again after that, affected as I’d been by years of antidrug propaganda. If you took LSD more than seven times, you would end up legally insane. (Who came up with that number?) Or you could have a bad trip and imagine that you’re crawling with worms, Go…

IN THE ESQUIRE OFFICES, we refer to an alltoo- common and unsightly style-fail among men as “sausage skin”—it’s what happens when a well-toned man falls for the fallacy that he should squeeze into a suit sized for a 125-pound boy. Sleeves and pants appear ready to burst, as if inflated with a bicycle pump. Under the intolerable pressure, jacket buttons look set to ping across the room and take someone’s eye out. From actors to singers to quarterbacks—and, increasingly, average Joes—no one these days seems immune to this style scourge. We know how it came about. Ten years ago, Hollywood stylists and certain style magazines took Thom Browne’s groundbreaking, sophisticated silhouette and corrupted it, twisting it into a high-and-tight aesthetic that rendered breathing optional. It’s a look that supposedly showed…

Men’s-fashion stylist and art director WHAT’S THE FOUNDATION OF YOUR STYLE? “I was born in Südtirol, the mountainous area of northern Italy. To get to the house, you have to get a funicular railway and then a chairlift. The area makes me like traditional clothes—not just from there but from wherever, from India, from Russia. I like to put traditional pieces together in a modern way.” WHAT IS YOUR FIRST FASHION MEMORY? “I was 15, 16. I desperately needed to get a particular leather jacket from Armani. It was a leather blouson with graphic black-and-white stripes. It was the ’80s.” To me, taste is always a more important thing to aim for than fashion. GROWING UP, WHO INSPIRED YOUR STYLE? “What inspires me is the style of my own family…

Q: WHAT DO BROOKLYN BARTENDERS and Paul Bunyan have in common? A: Beards. Like all formerly cool, counterintuitive trends, beards have become proverbial. A bold change of direction for the new year might be in order for you. If your face has not seen sunlight in several months or years, here is a guide to reacquaint you with facial grooming. 1: You can’t chop all that fuzz with a razor blade. First, use an electric razor to remove the greater part of your beard. Our favorite at the moment is the small yet surprisingly powerful Philips Norelco One- Blade, which comes equipped with three switchable guides. It can tackle the first few centimeters with ease and take you right down to a threeday stubble. Best part: It functions as a…

One small consolation of last year’s space-slug attack of a presidential election was the debate sketches aired by Saturday Night Live. Alec Baldwin’s impression of Donald Trump often sounded more like a transcript from the campaign trail than a joke. “All of the blacks live on one street in Chicago,” fake Trump says in one episode. “It’s called Hell Street. And they’re on Hell Street and they’re all just killing each other.” Hillary, played by Kate McKinnon, responds, “Can America vote right now?” How easily parody slides into reality: As U.S. voters proved in November, fearmongering works—and not just for Donald Trump. Across the globe, autocrats are on the rise. Strongman populism, usually served with a steaming pile of xenophobia, has claimed Greece and Hungary; it’s also mangled Turkey. Italy,…

A few words on achieving the impossible . . . Be nice. Ask your friends. Know what you’re looking for. Be patient. You’re going to hear this a lot in the following pages. If it sounds like advice for living, maybe that’s because landing that coveted hotel room or acquiring that rare dram is less about short, quick bursts of energy (and money) than the willingness to enjoy the pursuit, no matter what you get (or don’t). The finer things in life just tend to come to those who can roll with anything and get a little help. So to that end, allow us to provide some assistance . . . 1 THE IMPOSSIBLE WATCH Watch collectors i nva r i a b l y s p l i t…

WITTROCK HAS A KNACK FOR SHAPE-SHIFTING BETWEEN PSYCHOPATH AND GOLDEN BOY. I T ’S 1 1 : 0 0 A .M. and Finn Wittrock has good reason to be hungry. He’s fresh off his first performance of Othello, in which he wrestles and bench-presses and does one very convincing keg stand onstage. So when we meet at a bustling Ukrainian diner on New York’s Second Avenue—where he’s enough of a regular that a waiter gives a small salute as we pass by— who am I to tell him it’s a little early for kielbasa and pierogi? FINN WITTROCK SPEAKS UP It took me a moment to recognize the 32-yearold actor, who’s traded his usual swoop of hair for a high-and-tight cut in order to play Cassio opposite Daniel Craig and…

Jeff Gordinier AUTHOR OF “MAKE AMERICA HAPPY AGAIN,” Credentials: Former staff writer at The New York Times; author of X Saves the World and the forthcoming Hunger, about chef René Redzepi. On his Impossible List: “Finding the most secretive, revered, delicious spot in Japan and somehow getting a seat at it.” Greatest virtue: Emailing poems to friends. Greatest vice: Loving Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days.” Tim Weiner AUTHOR OF “THE BIG BUST,” Credentials: Former national-security correspondent at The New York Times; winner of a National Book Award; author of Enemies: A History of the FBI. On his Impossible List: “To return to countries destroyed by war and see them as they were before their destruction.” Greatest virtue: Knowing what he wanted to be from the time he was eighteen. Greatest vice:…

SAMPHA’S MUSIC often boils down to the sound of his voice: a big and tremulous exhaling, often sliding up into a falsetto, over rich keyboard chords. Born to a Sierra Leonean family in London, he has served as a producer, a guest singer, and a kind of moral compass in songs by Kanye West, Drake, and Solange, and he has put out a couple EPs of his own. But until now he’s avoided making a grand statement, clearly by design. During a recent conversation at a café in Brooklyn, a few nights after his first gig in New York, Sampha told me that he’s had to work to think of himself as a singer and as a collaborator; in his head, he’s still a keyboardist and a producer making tracks…

STUART VEVERS HAS worked for some of Europe’s poshest outfits—Bottega Veneta, Mulberry, Givenchy. So when Coach, the venerable 76-year-old New York brand, brought him in to rethink the line, we were curious to see where he’d take it. Fear not: The Coach that defined a quiet, traditional luxury still exists. But Vevers has injected a boldness that has made the brand an example of how to reimagine a house with a strong heritage without losing its soul. Vevers oversees all of Coach’s production and merchandising, including its legendary leather goods, but it’s in clothingthat he is really shifting the company into a higher gear. Coach 1941 has a decidedly youthful feel. “The new codes of luxury are being defined by the next generation, which wants to spend its money on…

WHEN IT WAS PUBLISHED in 1985, The Young Fogey Handbook was one of the most radical and entertaining books about taste and style ever written—a friendly thumb in the eye to trends and fads. Young Fogey was a polite “thank you but no” to progress in all matters of culture and lifestyle, but especially in the case of clothes, based on the conviction that nothing much of interest had happened— in any area—since 1937. Wine was claret. Jeans were anathema. Nouvelle cuisine was silly. Tweed was everything. For a short time, you saw YFs everywhere in London and most university towns, usually pedaling bicycles of ancient manufacture. Being a YF signified a refusal to wear new clothes just for the sake of it. Its adherents preferred iconic things that were…

RING JACKET’S OBJECTIVE is simple: to make lightweight, extremely elegant clothes. With minimal structure—a natural shoulder, a gentle midsection—a Ring Jacket garment looks and feels very Italian, especially when you slip it on. Yes, its spiritual home is Naples, but curiously enough, the line was founded 63 years ago in Osaka by Jhoichi Fukushima, who wanted to create a more bespoke version of the Ivy-style tailoring that was then gripping Americana-obsessed Japan. In the intervening years, Italian style brought a new ease and lightness to the tailoring favored by Japanese and American men, and Ring created its unique style through pieces like the Balloon Jacket (a name that, to us, suggests it’s lighter than air). But you don’t need to go to Tokyo to get a Ring—they’re now available in…

Victoria’s Secret models have made New York’s Dogpound their fitness home. Maybe you should, too. ASK KIRK MYERS, owner/trainer of the Dogpound, why so many Victoria’s Secret models— eleven of the fourteen current Angels— are members and he responds with fitness platitudes: “Everyone here has a positive energy.” “We’ve built a strong community.” “The girls are seeing results.” Uh-huh. Working out at the gym doesn’t elucidate the mystery, either. The space, though stocked with brand-new high-quality equipment, is stamp-sized. There are no showers. The changing room is a bathroom stall. But look around the steel-and-black interior as you train one-on-one or in a group boxing class and there they are in the flesh: the type of women you wish would grab the StairMaster next to you but never actually materialize.…

We Nominate GEORGE SAUNDERS IS WITH ME in a 2-degrees-too-clubby hotel lobby on the Upper West Side to prove that greatness is earned, not ingrained. For years, the Great American Writer—winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, author of dozens of short stories and, as of this month, a highly anticipatedfirst novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House)—struggled to find his voice. “As a former Catholic, I’d internalized the sense that if I wanted to pursue something, it must be sinful or wasteful or self-indulgent,” he says. A piece of advice from an unlikely source changed everything. In 1990, Saunders was in his early thirties with a wife and two young children. He’d wanted to become a full-time writer for years. The life of an unemployed starving artist wasn’t an option—“Once we…

SHORT POINT Angles are attitudes: The more sensible the collar, the more out there the tie. SUIT ($1,950), SHIRT ($350), and TIE ($190) by Salvatore Ferragamo. “THERE ARE TWO THINGS I REALLY LIKE TO DO, AND THAT’S WHOOP ASS AND LOOK GOOD.” — Conor McGrego ROUNDED TAB Advertise your inner creative with a collar-and-tie combination that is anything but corporate. S H I R T ($145) by Boss; T I E ($180) by Hermès. SWEPT BACK To match the rakish angle of a swept-back collar, add a strong, ample pattern. S H I R T ($228) by Paul Stuart; T I E ($245) by Ermenegildo Zegna. “ MY MOTTO IS ‘MORE GOOD TIMES.’ ” —Jack Nicholson ENGLISH SPREAD A big old spread collar calls for a big knot to fill…