Table of contents for April 2019 in Esquire

The Adidas Samba is among the most versatile sneakers around. You can play soccer in them, and if you’re Kanye, you can even pretend to run from the paparazzi in them. Their low profile makes them perfect for everything else, including shucking them in the TSA panic. That’s why it makes sense that sportswear brand Oyster Holdings would team up with Adidas on its own Samba, in a Crayola-bright yellow. Oyster Holdings specializes in go-anywhere basics, so you can count on this shoe to withstand whatever you throw at it—from the tarmac to the penalty spot and beyond.…

One guy’s fashion sin is another guy’s signature style. With double denim, too much can be disastrous (remember Justin and Britney?), but when worn correctly, it’s one of the most timeless tools in your arsenal for proving you’re an Advanced Style Person. For inspiration, observe the pros. In the ’70s, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Warren Beatty pioneered the look, pairing western shirts and jeans. Bob Marley and the King himself were also early adopters, opting for lived-in washes and flared hems. But few can rock it quite like Ralph Lauren, who often sports a trademark uniform of not just double but triple denim—chambray shirt, denim jacket, and jeans. If the getup sounds dated, don’t worry—we’re not asking you to bring back bell-bottoms. Double denim has resurged thanks to guys…

PLEAT IT UP, BOI! CHECK OUT A FEW DESTINATIONS FOR YOUR JEANS SABBATICAL: PANTS OF VARYING SHAPES AND PATTERNS THAT’LL FLATTER YOU BUT STILL GIVE SOME MOVING ROOM. YOU CAN EVEN LEAVE THE BELT BEHIND. I wish I could say I stopped wearing denim after watching Brett Favre’s builttough Wrangler commercial one too many times, or because I refused to take a box cutter to my pant legs when I was 13, but really it’s because jeans never fit me right. I swore off them a few years ago, when jeans were as ubiquitous as Biebs and bottle flipping and all you had to do to punch up an outfit was keep a few standout sneakers in rotation. Now, thankfully, there are more options for your lower half. Take that…

Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.—Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 There’s a terrific scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove in which Major T. J. “King” Kong, played by Slim Pickens, announces the contents of his pilot’s postnuclear survival kits. There are guns and ammo and rations in there, he tells his men, and antibiotics. Then he gets to the good stuff: “Morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings.” He pauses and then comments, “Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that…

THE FIRST School Daze, 1988 As a townie lecturing college punks: “How come y’all college motherf#!&ers think y’all run everything?” LOUDEST Formula 51, 2001 To a dance club he’s testing psychedelics on: “You’re gonna kiss the sun, and taste the motherf#!& in’ rainbow!” BEST VARIANT Freedomland, 2006 As a detective facing an angry mob: “Kiss my ass, brotherf#!&er.” MOST PAINED Django Unchained, 2012 After Django shoots him in the knee: “Ah …AHHH… you motherf#!&er …” MOST TIRED OF THIS SHIT Avengers: Infinity War, 2018 As Thanos dusts him: “Mother…” BEST TWITTER USE BY @SAMUELLJACKSON “Why is that Hemorrhoid threatening to shut down the Government over a Wall budget? What happened to “and Mexico is gonna pay for it”??!! #ineversaidthat# yesthefuck-youdidmotherfucker” BEST USE DURING COMBAT Rules of Engagement, 2000 While ordering…

IN February 2017, the British magazine Sight & Sound published a long feature on Martin Scorsese, for which it compiled a sort of Where Are They Now?: New Hollywood Edition, cataloging the fates of the directors who transformed American filmmaking in the seventies. A few, like William Friedkin and Paul Schrader, were still working. Others, like Robert Towne, were effectively retired. Scorsese, along with Steven Spielberg and Terrence Malick, remained at the “top of the game.” Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Michael Cimino, Dennis Hopper, and Bob Rafelson, meanwhile, were “gone.” Shortly after that issue hit newsstands, I received an email from Rafelson, who lives in Colorado, that read: “So…Even the pros think I’m dead.” Below that was the eighty-six-year-old director’s response to an apology from the editor: “Ok for the…

If you play golf, as I do, then you know how tempting it is to cheat. It’s a pretty ridiculous game, even when you’re good at it. The world-number-one Tiger Woods was no less prone to f-bombs and teeth-grinding self-disgust than the world-number-thirteen Tiger Woods. That’s because, unlike a team sport, golf pits you against yourself, so when things go wrong, you must find something else to blame—the ball, a noise, some tree, the world. On a particularly bad day, the game brings your self-esteem to its knees, and mocks you with your own inner thoughts—You actually paid to do this?—as you pretend that the last five hours were fun. I have never cheated in a real competition, and I never would. But out with friends for a casual, unposted…

April 2018 It’s revealed that Facebook exposed 87 million users’ info to Trump-affiliated Cambridge Analytica. September 2018 Uber pays a $148 million settlement for a data breach that nabbed private info from 57 million users. December 2018 Google acknowledges that a bug in Google+ inadvertently exposed 52 million users’ private data. The New York Times reports that hundreds of popular apps sell your location data for ad targeting.…

Bret Easton Ellis has never quite gotten over the incredulity and scorn he felt upon first contact with the culture of the millennial generation. Before he encountered it on Twitter, he lived with it in his home, in the form of a boyfriend 22 years his junior. Five years into that ongoing relationship, he recalled his early initiation into its alien norms in tones of fresh dismay. “I noticed this general wussiness in him and his friends that shocked me, and that my male friends, at a comparative age decades ago, simply did not have. I was shocked at what they were frightened of, and what they were offended by. To a hard-bitten whatever, Generation X, it seemed ludicrous.” Ludicrous enough to merit a term of abuse that Ellis coined…

Few things wear the way they look in the movies, but the bomber jacket does. You think Ryan Gosling would’ve seemed half as cool in Drive without that scorpioned bomber? There’s a reason it appears so effortless: The outfit starts with a T-shirt-and-pants template, but the bomber gives it a touch of swagger and elegance. Basically, the more luxe your jacket is, the more surefire it’ll be. Begin with something like this suede bomber, with material that’s supple and soft, so not only will it pair well with your office and weekend reliables, but it will look that much better. And it’s a no-brainer spring transitional layer: It’ll take you from March through May—regardless of the material you land on.…

Pierpaolo Piccioli, the creative director of Valentino, understands how to do two extremely difficult things that rarely occur in tandem these days. First, he designs clothes with fashion cred that don’t make you look like a fashion victim; second, he constructs them according to the impeccable standards of Old World Italian craftsmanship, but they still look modern, not like something that reeks of mothballs. The result is something special. Piccioli designs clothes that dare you to wear them. Dare because, though these are the kinds of essentials every guy should have in the closet—a well-cut suit, a trustworthy trench, some good ol’ khakis, a pair of black lace-ups that don’t look orthotic—Piccioli’s execution places them in the realm of Michelin-star combinations, skydiving, the Ring Cycle, and Polar Bear Plunges. You…

Recently, I was having dinner with two friends when one confessed he had been the victim of a somewhat strange public shaming. “I went to meet some buddies for drinks at Soho House in Dumbo, and a dude who works there told me to take off my tie. I said, ‘Why?’ He said I was wearing ‘corporate attire,’ which was in violation of their dress code, and in doing so I was making other members uncomfortable.” I laughed, thinking he’d made up the story. “Wait!” my other friend said. “The same thing happened to me at Ludlow House a few weeks ago. They said my tie was ‘not the kind of look’ they want to have in the bar. That I was making members ‘uncomfortable.’” I have to interject here…

• • • The graphic tee is an easy, Instagram-friendly way for celebrities to add some pop to an outfit. But lately we’ve seen them go all-purpose with their casual step-and-repeats: the graphic knit. Let Donald Glover, Ryan Gosling, and Armie Hammer show you how to wear it right. All-Graphic Everything Go the extra mile and layer patterns over each other. Trailblazer Keep your blazer—just swap the oxford for a knit. Check Yourself Let a sweater this distinctive stand alone.…

Style secrets for the bigger man: Don’t be afraid to combine textures and prints. Fortune favors the bold. “I’m six-foot-five and over two-hundred-some-odd pounds. You don’t get to see a lot of my body type in fashion. I really loved that in this shoot we got to push the envelope of what types of bodies fit in the world of high fashion and representation.” “People tend to say that if you don’t fit sample sizes for a photo shoot, there’s not much choice for you. But I feel we’re showing people who don’t fit a sample size and who value self-expression that they have options.” Confidence is king. With the right swagger—and accent color—you rule the room. Chameleon-ism is no mean feat for any actor, but when you’re six-foot-five, it’s…

LOOKING FOR WORK Autistic young adults have the lowest rate of employment compared with their peers with other nonphysical disabilities. WAGE GAP Autistic young adults who work hold about three jobs during their early twenties—almost 80 percent of them work part-time at an average of $9.11 per hour. Nearly 42 percent don’t work for pay at all. STRUGGLING TO START Two years after high school, only 32 percent of autistic young adults have ever had a job. It takes six to eight years for that figure to reach 93 percent. KEY SKILLS Conversation ability is one of the biggest indicators of employment—only 15 percent of autistic young adults with the lowest conversation abilities have worked. GOVERNMENT OPPORTUNITIES According to the Department of Defense, those with autism can’t serve in the…

Walking through the lobby of the Fairmont hotel in Monaco, home to the Backgammon World Championship, is like striding through an aquarium. Well-tended women, summa cum laude graduates of the Ivanka Trump School of Advanced Moisturizing, move through the firstfloor casino as if in schools, their older boyfriends, many of them Russian, in tow. Call girls, only slightly less well tended, perch on couches and sip cocktails from long straws. There’s a throwback bad-taste glamour here in Monte Carlo, the Las Vegas of Europe. One waits for Engelbert Humperdinck or some other sideburned lothario of the 1970s to sidle past in a leisure suit. Yet the Fairmont, in its way, is an up-to-date sin palace. There’s the thumping of EDM from the hotel’s Nikki Beach roof bar. Out front there’s a…

Please forgive me. My notes from the dinner in Denver are a little sloppy. I had met up with a group of Coloradans in the main room at Rosenberg’s Bagels & Delicatessen. Dinner was a private affair, and the purpose of the meal was to pay close attention to pairings—to all the mysterious ways that food and wine interact. We had guides for this task: Carlin Karr and Matthew Mather, whose connection to Colorado restaurants such as Frasca and Tavernetta means that as sommeliers go, they’re sort of like Navy SEALs. Even with their sure hands steering a course through the bottles, however, I found it hard to focus. That’s because this January pairing dinner had a third component: cannabis. Five years after the first sales of recreational marijuana got…

OPEN SEASON No need to get overly fussy or formal about it—wear your blazer open to add dimension and relaxed style to an otherwise polished look. There are few things in the tailoring back catalog quite as loaded with meaning as the brass-buttoned navy blazer. Look at one and it’s hard not to think of Prince Charles. With its privileged allwhite connotations and its clubbable symbolism to the upwardly mobile, it’s a hard pill to swallow in these more egalitarian, street-inspired times. Yet its neglect has somehow shaken off some of those crusty associations. So it is intriguing to see fashion designers beginning to play once more with its possibilities this spring. Today’s blazer does not look or—more critically—feel at all like its snobby predecessor. Purged of the salty whiff…

ALL-STAR DAD CONTEST CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS! Do you know a Dad who is a real “All Star” to his children, his family and his community? If so, nominate him today as the National Father’s Day Committee searches for America’s #1 “All-Star” Dad. Every Dad is special. But does your Dad or another Dad you know demonstrate such important attributes as dedication, love, unselfishness, support, and community service on a regular basis? If so, he could be the Father’s Day Committee “All-Star” Dad for 2019. GO TO ALLSTARDAD.ORG TODAY AND SUBMIT YOUR ESSAY Esquire Men’sHealth…

“Art deco” was never a satisfying catchall for the explosion of modernist design that emerged post–World War I. Inspired by cubism and futurism, deco encompassed things as diverse as the rarefied luxury of Cartier and the undecorated architecture of Le Corbusier’s International Style. Unfortunately, lumped in with it was all the mass-produced tat—the cubist teapots and vorticist trouser presses—that redefined homes before it all went to shit in 1939. Le Corbu and Cartier ensured that art deco would retain respect, but apart from a brief resurgence in the 1960s, it has looked dated next to its successor, mid-century modern. Now some subtle cues suggest deco may get a rehab. Last year, Cartier reissued the Tank Cintrée, an iconic version of its Tank watch, always produced in limited numbers. Panerai introduced…

Tougher Than the Rest Bruce Springsteen backstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre, September 2018. DEEP BLUE “I wanted to be the black Jacques Cousteau. I always thought the inner space was a lot more interesting than outer space.” Samuel L. Jackson is driving our golf cart pedal to floor through the unseasonably cold southern California morning fog, pushing the whining electric engine to its limits. It is 8:15 a.m., and he and his foursome have already played nine holes. I met up with them at the turn and hopped into Jackson’s cart as they continued on the course, interrupting their mild shit-talking with sporadic occurrences of golf on the back nine. It is one of those bizarrely random Los Angeles groupings of people you never imagine together. Richard Schiff puffing…

“(HE) CHOSE TO PUT HIS OWN INTERPRETATION ON IT…. (AN) 800-WORD STATEMENT CONTAINED THE USUAL JUSTIFICATIONS FOR HIS ACTIONS THAT HAVE BECOME FAMILIAR….” —RE: RICHARD NIXON’S RESPONSE TO THE “SMOKING GUN” TAPE, AUGUST 6, 1974 “Mr. Reagan went beyond any of his previous statements….” —Re: Ronald Reagan’s televised address conceding culpability in the Iran-Contra affair, March 5, 1987 “Four administrations progressively developed a sense of commitment to a non-communist Vietnam, a readiness to fight the North to protect the South, and an ultimate frustration with this effort—to a much greater extent than their public statements acknowledged at the time.” —Re: the publication of the Pentagon Papers, June 13, 1971 “SAYING THAT HE HAD MISLED HIS WIFE AND THE PUBLIC, PRESIDENT CLINTON ADMITTED IN A SOLEMN AND GRIM-FACED ADDRESS TONIGHT THAT HE…

STORE INFORMATION For the items featured in Esquire, please consult the website or call the phone number provided. The Code, p. 35: Brunello Cucinelli jacket and shirt, 212-334-1010. P. 36: Beams F jacket, mrporter.com. Bode shirt, bodenewyork.com. 3.1 Phillip Lim trousers, 31philliplim.com. Brunello Cucinelli loafers, 212-334-1010. Boglioli jackets, 646-870-8250. P. 37: Adidas Originals x Oyster Holdings track pants and sneakers, adidas.com. Adidas Originals socks, adidas.com. P. 44: Prada jacket, shirt, and trousers, available at select Prada boutiques. P. 45: A.P.C. jacket, apce-us.com. AG shirt, agjeans.com. Calvin Klein Jeans jacket and shirt, calvinklein.com. P. 48: Panerai watch, panerai.com. Cartier watch, available by appointment only at select Cartier boutiques nationwide. Lalique sculpture, lalique.com. Paul Stuart cuff links, paulstuart.com. Boivin ring, available at Fred Leighton, 212-288-1872. Montblanc fountain pen, montblanc.com. Asprey liqueur set,…