Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2020 i Esquire

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That’s the mentality Dior Homme brought to its newly imagined cologne, leaning into a modern iteration with more of the woody and gutsy elements. A few spritzes and you’re diving into a deep, sophisticated feeling—without losing the sort of freshness you need in an everyday fragrance. Need an endorsement? Just ask Robert Pattinson: “You don’t really notice you’re wearing a fragrance at all.” For more from him on his personal style, turn to page 38.…

I want you to try something after a stressful day. Pour yourself a drink and put on the Beatles. It’s … fine. A perfectly good collection of songs you’ve heard three million times that are now mostly background. But the Beatles don’t quiet your brain. Then cue up Wings, the band Paul McCartney formed with his wife Linda after the Fab Four broke up. It’s pure, uncut Paul: buoyant pop that’s often saccharine and occasionally weird. Wings is what happens when John Lennon isn’t there to raise an eye-brow. McCartney without Lennon transports you. (“Haaands across the water …”) Wings is what it feels like when you come home to your wife and kids after a couple happy-hour drinks. (“Love doesn’t come in a minute!”) Wings lights up the part…

IT WAS A SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN mid-December when I finally embraced it. Staring into a full-length mirror, examining the suit I’d just put on, I put my hands in my pockets—and I couldn’t see the outline of my knuckles. The gravestone would read here lie his slim pants, 2011–2019, but the death warrant was written a while ago. It took this moment to have the epiphany, but the truth is that I’d been thinking about moving on to more generously cut trousers for the better part of two years. This was the first time I’d felt good in a pair, but I was standing well on the latter side of their comeback. Fuller silhouettes have been creeping their way back into the zeitgeist over the past half decade. Now, visible…

WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE AMERICAN FOOD revolution of the past two decades, I think about people like Ryan Morgan. Morgan, 44, spent the early portion of his wage-earning years working as a mechanic. You can tell. Stocky, solid, salt-and-pepper-haired, and the furthest thing from a hipster, Morgan talks with a kind of no-bullshit midwestern gruffness that’s common in the city where he lives, which is Cincinnati. He happens to bake some of the best bread and pastries I’ve ever tasted, but you won’t catch him being precious about it. Ask and he’ll tell you that the whole thing was an accident. Back in 2011, Morgan and some relatives took over a family-owned Ohio bakery primarily so that his father, who was suffering from multiple sclerosis, could get restful time…

HE IS TAKING OFF HIS PANTS WHILE STANDING UP, TRYING NOT TO FALL OVER. He’s got his ankle kind of balanced on the opposite knee, and he sometimes loses his balance for a second, the way you and I do when we take off our pants while standing up. He has to hop on one foot. Sometimes he lets out a little whoop when he teeters on one foot, the way you and I might, especially if six people were watching us take off our pants and we lost our balance. So there he is in his underwear. Macaulay Culkin. I don’t know, they were like baggy briefs, I guess. Tan. He goes by Mack. “Hi, I’m Mack,” he had said four minutes earlier, before I saw him in his…

RICKEY THOMPSON AND I ARE IN THE WOMEN’S SECTION OF THE VAN NUYS Goodwill, playing a game we call “Is This ’90s Fashion?”—and I am losing. I fish out a sweater from the thrift-store racks, hold it up, and ask the social-media star: Is this ’90s fashion? The difficulty of this game is humbling, which makes no sense because Thompson was alive for only three years, ten months, and twenty-three days of the 1990s and I lived through the whole damn decade. But, he says, “recently, I fell in love with the ’90s/2000s era,” so I guess he’s the expert. When I show him a block-colored Dope polo shirt, he says, “That could work. It’s getting there,” but his eyebrows say otherwise. His nose is slightly crinkled. His upper lip…

“Fame, fame, fatal fame It can play hideous tricks on the brain. But still I’d rather be famous Than righteous or holy Any day Any day Any day.”—The Smiths, “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” RECENTLY, WHILE HUNGOVER, I CAUGHT UP WITH THE KARDASHIANS. MY young children were down for a nap, befuddled by why helping them put together a Hello Kitty puzzle had nearly made Dad’s eyeballs explode. I was nestled up beside my wife on the couch; she was watching an Easter episode of Keeping Up with… in which Kris Jenner, the matriarch of reality TV, hosts a Sunday-afternoon party for the family’s mostly famous friends. Somewhere around the egg hunt, it dawned on me: A decade ago, many halfway-respectable people—including a few in the pages of this magazine—dismissed the Kardashians…

I don’t want to completely blow your mind [extended bong rip], but have you ever really considered the nature of the self? Are we born with immutable characteristics that define us throughout our days on this planet, or do we reinvent ourselves constantly—sometimes so totally that the “you” you are now isn’t the same you as, say, last year? What I’m really trying to ask here is: Am I the kind of guy who can wear a gold chain? Sure, I’m physically capable of draping one around my neck. But that’s not the challenge. A necklace is a necklace, but I’d never been able to get past the idea that a string of precious-metal links is more than that. It’s a statement. Of wealth. Or confidence. A desire to let…

ROBERT PATTINSON COULD BE UNLIKABLE. There was all that brooding in the vampire movies. And then the Trump tweets—remember when our then-future president tweeted his sympathy for Pattinson after his breakup with Kristen Stewart, at whom Trump hurled insults? Pattinson could have taken the vampire fame and run with it or thanked the president-to-be. Instead, he put his head down and got to work. It was 2017’s Good Time—made by the same directing duo behind Uncut Gems—that gave audiences one of their first glimpses of the fully realized, post-Twilight Pattinson, or what you might call Weird Pattinson. Last fall, Weird Pattinson reached full bloom with The Lighthouse, a movie about two men going crazy in which he masturbates onscreen. Pattinson, 33, has also become a low-key fashion hero—and it started…

Which foods are good for your body, and which are the opposite? If you’re like us, you find it impossible to keep track, because the diets and data keep changing with each passing decade—or week. (If you lived through the margarine haze of the 1970s, you remember a time when butter was as feared as the Zodiac Killer, whereas now there are true believers who stir globs of it into their coffee.) With that in mind, we offer an updated cheat sheet of often-vilified foods. —J. G. SUGAR: Will kill you SALT: Probably won’t kill you MILK: Might kill you BUTTER: Probably won’t kill you WINE: Might extend your life COFFEE: Might extend your life BREAD (PROCESSED): Might kill you BREAD (ARTISANAL): Might extend your life TEQUILA: “I’m gonna live…

if YOU LIVED THROUGH THE 1980s, you will understand the strange and special thrill of receiving a concerned voice mail from Huey Lewis. “I’m going to see you tomorrow, but I need you to drive real slow,” Huey tells me, his indelible rasp turned fatherly. “There are a couple three days a year when the roads are really bad, man. And you’re in’em.” It’s 5 degrees the next morning when I drive to his ranch, an hour outside Missoula, Montana, on narrow state highways as much ice as road. When I pull in—carefully, as instructed—there he is, a solitary figure standing in the snow, an icon in camouflage, surrounded by snow-capped mountains. This is a place where Huey can do what he likes while he waits to find out whether…

STORE INFORMATION For the items featured in Esquire, please consult the website or call the phone number provided. The Short Stories, p. 32: Cartier chain, cartier.com. Tom Wood chain, tomwoodproject.com. Ambush chain, ambushdesign.com. David Yurman chain, davidyurman.com. P. 34: Giuseppe for Swae Lee sneakers, saks.com. P. 36: Bell & Ross watch, bellross.com. P. 42: Michael Kors Collection trousers, michaelkors.com. Levi’s Vintage Clothing T-shirt, americanrag.com. O’Keeffe shoes, mrporter.com. Great Britons, p. 74: Bottega Veneta jacket and trousers, bottegaveneta.com. Brioni T-shirt, brioni.com. Santoni shoes, santonishoes.com. P. 75: Brioni jacket, brioni.com. P. 76: Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket and shirt, celine.com. P. 77: Boss suit, hugoboss.com. Calvin Klein Underwear tank, calvinklein.com. P. 78: Valentino shirt, valentino.com. Cartier watch, cartier.com. P. 79: Givenchy jacket, shirt, and trousers, givenchy.com. Jimmy Choo shoes, jimmychoo.com. P. 80:…

THE 16TH ARRONDISSEMENT OF PARIS IS a sleepy but chic western suburb close to the Bois de Boulogne that happens to be the epicenter of one of the most intriguing developments in men’s wear right now. A small gang of style geeks have set up a string of stores within a five-minute stroll of one another that are attracting style hounds from around the globe. The men behind these shops are using media—print magazines and Instagram accounts—to spread their gospel of cool. There’s Le Vif, a showroom and shop selling American-made vintage clothing (think jeans, T-shirts, military jackets). Nearby is Holiday Boileau, a store with a collection of easy, vintage-inspired clothes whose founder, with journalist Marc Beaugé, reintroduced Holiday, a travel magazine from mid-century America that remains an inspiration for…

TO CALL THE RISE OF COMEDIANS DESUS NICE AND THE Kid Mero meteoric would be an understatement. In just six years, the duo have taken a cult following on Twitter and turned it into a budding empire of cultural commentary, which led to a show on Viceland and now on Showtime, plus a book, God-Level Knowledge Darts: Life Lessons from the Bronx (on sale April 14). When it all started, their reach may have been confined to those in the five boroughs of New York City with a specific sense of humor. But a lot has changed since Daniel Baker (Desus, left) and Joel Martinez (Mero, right) first put their Twitter fingers to use. The medium that helped make them has devolved into an under-regulated hotbed of hate. And all…

Few aspire to fame more deliberately than a politician. When you choose to run for office, you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into. Please, you’re saying to the national media, scrutinize everything I’ve said and done in my entire life—right now, all at once. In seconds, CNN is on the horn with your tenth-grade trig teacher. But in today’s fractured political landscape, fame is inseparable from infamy, and with a legion of fans come just as many hot-blooded Americans convinced that you’re an enemy of the state. We asked politicians from both sides of the aisle to describe their public lives during this charming time in our nation’s history. Ilhan OMAR U. S. Representative, Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District (D) TRAILS BLAZED: The first Somali-American member of the House, first Muslim…

British indie filmmaking got thirty-year-old CALLUM TURNER (left) hooked on acting. “A Room for Romeo Brass really affected me,” he says of the gritty 2000 coming-of-age flick. After a breakthrough role in the latest Fantastic Beasts installment, Turner’s next gig is the right-person-wrong-time romance The Last Letter from Your Lover, opposite Shailene Woodley. Need an actor who can master any accent? Call up JOSH O’CONNOR (below). He spoke with aristocratic menace in The Riot Club, delivered a rural Yorkshire growl in God’s Own Country, and nailed the posh diction of Prince Charles on The Crown. “Accents for me are one of the first steps of building a character,” says O’Connor. “It’s such a big part of our identity.” EARL CAVE (left)—yes, offspring of Nick—is a nineteen-year-old bundle of nervous energy…

JERZY GWIAZDOWSKI: THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS PUNNER Jerzy Gwiazdowski is an actor, just not a famous one. He’s appeared in Across the Universe, Nurse Jackie, Ray Donovan, Girls, and more, but if you know him, it’s probably not for that. “I get recognized for acting stuff, but I’m not in the same stratosphere as I am in the boutique world of punning,” Gwiazdowski says. “The puns have definitely eclipsed that.” At this writing, Gwiazdowski is the winningest competitor in Brooklyn’s monthly “Punderdome.” “There will be someone who will compete for the first time and they’ll say, like, ‘You’re my inspiration,’” he says. “Or sometimes I’ll be getting a beer and some twenty-three-year-old dude will work up the courage to say, ‘I really want to follow in your punning footsteps.’” Gwiazdowski…