Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2020 i Esquire

THE OTHER DAY, I GOT DRESSED for the first time in months. I put on jeans, a knit polo from the designer Brett Johnson, and a pair of shoes that wasn’t the dirty white Vans I’d been wearing for months. I even went to the office. It felt good. Refreshing. Cold, in fact. The air-conditioning at the Esquire office in Manhattan was cranked so high I threw on a cashmere sweater pilfered from our fashion closet. The simple act of getting dressed was transformative, despite the fact that I saw practically nobody inside the empty office. I hope the style pages in this issue—all of which were shot with strict social-distancing protocols—inspire you to get dressed, too. Even if, like the subjects of our feature on page 92, for which…

PARAPHRASING A CLASSIC NEWTONIAN NUG get might help us get at what’s happening with trousers nowadays: “For every waistband action, there is an equal and opposite waistband reaction.” In other words, the era of soft pants has, inevitably, given rise to the golden age of the waistband. Just think about it. After months of you languishing indoors in sweatpants, that elasticated waist feels played out. Now it’s time to not just put on clothes but get dressed again. What better way to make it feel real than to step into a proper pair of trousers with a waistband to match? We’re talking tab fronts. We’re talking buttons galore. We’re talking feats of sartorial engineering like the Gurkha waistband, with its strap-and-buckle closure that makes going to the bathroom an adventure…

SEXY IS A WORD NOT COMMONLY used in the same sentence as tweed. Posh, yup. Scratchy, possibly. But the fact is the fabric—even with its upper-crusty, country origins—can be sexy. And as finding your own personal style becomes more and more important, reevaluating classic elements piecemeal is a handy way to elevate your look. Take the gun-club-check jacket, a pillar of the Anglo nob wardrobe whose story is way cooler than you might imagine. Estate-tweed patterns like gun-club checks were the Victorian period’s proto camouflage. In a mid-19th-century mania for shooting estates in Scotland, newly minted Sassenachs from England (without the right to wear a tartan) needed something to wear. And they learned that the game found it harder to see you if you looked like a native shrub. Tweed…

It’s hard to surpass Clarks Desert Boots as a staple of coolness—their elegant, simple, utilitarian design never goes out of fashion. Cherished by beat poets, mod rockers, Jamaican rude boys, Hollywood icons, as well as you and me—less famous but just as important people everywhere—they are the hallmark of personal style. Defined but never bound by tradition and craftsmanship, Clarks makes sure the Desert Boot stays modern—the new 2s and 221s are gorgeous, with an emphasis on greater comfort, but still in harmony with the rest of the desert boot family, including the original. The balance between innovation and heritage is always a chief concern for the brand, says Giorgio Presca, CEO of C&J Clark International. “This year, we have embraced a simpler, more thoughtful way of life, with a…

“YOU SEE HOW NICE THE OFFICE IS IN MONTGOMERY?” ASKED Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. “You see that? They gave him the Oval Office in Montgomery. You’re on mute, Steve.” That’s Steven Reed, the mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, whom Lumumba was busy ribbing over Zoom. Reed was not the first to catch some light heat as we waited for the rest of the cohort to get on the call. Mayor Levar Stoney of Richmond, Virginia, was informed moments earlier that he could use a visit to the barbershop. “From my first campaign to my second one, I looked at my old pictures,” Lumumba added by way of consolation, “and I wouldn’t have voted for me.” He’s got jokes, but Lumumba is also, as Mayor Frank Scott of…

EVEN BEFORE A PANDEMIC-INDUCED WORK-FROM-HOME WARDROBE turned us all into connoisseurs of casual wear, able to sniff out the slight shift in bouquet between a simple sweatpant and a true lounge pant, the trend toward dressing down had been going strong for decades. Americans usually get the credit (blame?) for that, but well ahead of the advent of Casual Friday (and then Casual Every Day), some of Italy’s sharpest dressers were already leaning all the way into taking it easy. It’s not exactly the same, of course, but swap T-shirts for almost impossibly lightweight jackets and you’ll get the idea. From the days of buttoned-up bella figura, Italian tailors, spearheaded by the godfather of it all, Vincenzo Attolini in Naples, experimented with the structure of the suit to make it…

1 Small but not exactly subtle accessories, from avant-garde earrings to intricately detailed rings worn by the bunch. 2 THE RELEASE OF AMERICAN, ALSO, A DOCUMENTARY CHRONICLING THE TWO-YEAR LEAD-UP TO THE STUNNING SPRING/SUMMER 2020 PYER MOSS FASHION SHOW HONORING SISTER ROSETTA THARPE, THE INVENTOR OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL. 3 Raf at Prada. 4 Enjoying knitwear at its most functional. Let there be cold, and not just that of the air conditioner. Bring on the big sweaters. 5 Martine Rose’s impeccably executed gun-check topcoat. (For more on the pattern, see page 40.) 6 Cuban-heeled boots, for a little more height and a lot more vibe. 7 Contentious Proposition No. 1: Wear a tie to your job. It will confuse everyone, but it’s so alien that it might just work. 8…

ABEL TESFAYE, AKA THE WEEKND, IS DOING SOMETHING FEW people are letting themselves do right now. Something we’ve been avoiding for the past four or so months. It’s thrilling, but a little dangerous even, considering how quickly the slippery slope could give way to an existential spiral. He’s sitting alone in the Westwood condo where he’s been holed up since March, imagining what he’d be doing right now, on a typical summer night on tour, in an alternate timeline. One that doesn’t include a pandemic and varying degrees of lockdown and social isolation. He really shouldn’t, but he’s letting himself be seduced by the hypothetical. It’s 7:00 p.m. in L. A., where he is, but 10:00 p.m. on the East Coast, where, if it were normal times, he’d be making…

AROUND THE TOWN OF ORANGEBURG, IN THE MIDLANDS OF SOUTH CAROLINA, THE days had retractable fangs, like the copperheads in the woods and the water moccasins in the river. The fangs came out at night, gleaming in the moonlight through the canopies of Spanish moss. Jaime Harrison heard the story from his grandmother Jimmie Lou, who, with his grandfather Willie, helped raise him. Jimmie Lou told him about what it was like when she was coming up in and around Orangeburg, where the family home was, and where the fangs of the night were ever present, and where nocturnal menace was as general as the still, humid air. “It was a fear that I’d never seen in my grandma’s eyes before,” said Harrison, forty-four, a Democrat running to take Lindsey…

STORE INFORMATION For the items featured in Esquire, please consult the website or call the phone number provided. The Short Stories, p. 27: Canali jacket and trousers, canali.com. Uniqlo turtleneck, uniqlo.com. Moral Code boots, moralcode.com. P. 28: Canali jacket and sweatshirt, canali.com. Levi’s Authorized Vintage jeans, available at Levi’s stores. Clarks Originals boots, clarksusa.com. P. 32: Church’s shoes, church-footwear.com. Slowear Incotex trousers, slowear.com. Jockey socks, jockey.com. P. 33: Ralph Lauren jacket and trousers, ralphlauren.com. Levi’s Vintage Clothing T-shirt, levi.com. Zodiac watch, zodiacwatches.com. Tom Wood necklace, tomwoodproject.com. P. 35: Kingsman sweater, mrporter.com. Giuseppe Zanotti boots, giuseppezanotti.com. P. 36: Liverano & Liverano tie, thearmoury.com. P. 37: Valextra briefcase, valextra.com. Seiko watch, seikousa.com. P. 40: Husbands jacket, husbands-paris.com. Holiday Boileau shirt and trousers, holiday-paris.fr. G.H. Bass & Co. Weejuns loafers, ghbass.com. Anonymous Ism…

WHETHER WE’RE SHUFFLING around in house shoes or dipping out in sandals or sneakers, our day-to-day lives haven’t demanded much in the way of non-cushy footwear recently. Well, fall is here, and whatever weird, wild world awaits us, you should step into it wearing the right shoes. Slippers don’t belong outside. Sandals have a built-in seasonal expiration date. And over the past few years, the constant grind of the sneaker release cycle has given way to a sense of fatigue. We’ve all got way more serious shit to worry about than taking an L on the latest Mad Lib of a sneaker collab. So allow me to introduce what I’ll be wearing the most in post-lockdown life, a new go-to as versatile as any sneaker but better suited to this…

MIND MELD WITH FANTASTIC NEGRITO IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE a more fitting title in 2020 than Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? (out now), which graces the cover of the third LP from Xavier Dphrepaulezz, aka Fantastic Negrito. “I was dealing with, okay, a kid who’s been reading all this white-supremacist ideology and identifying with the Confederate flag goes into a church and shoots nine people,” the Oakland rocker says of what was weighing on him. “A guy in Las Vegas decides to start arbitrarily murdering people. And what really inspired me was Sandy Hook. We forgot about these little babies. The gun violence—it seemed like it was nothing to us as Americans. We just accepted it.” But Mind is more than just a timely release. It’s also the most…

WAY BACK IN 2018, WHEN ERICK WILLIAMS, A CHEF IN CHICAGO, WAS DREAMING OF opening a restaurant called Virtue, he had something of a spiritual prototype in mind: “What inspired me the most was the idea of Dooky Chase’s.” ¶ Williams could tell you that Dooky Chase’s is a restaurant in New Orleans that opened in 1941, but that would be like describing Prince as a musician from Minneapolis. Dooky Chase’s remains iconic as a strategic hub of the civil-rights movement, a haven for Black diners who had no other elegant options in the era of segregation, a showcase for Creole cooking and Black art, all of it presided over by chef and matriarch Leah Chase, who died last year at the age of 96. ¶ Virtue and Dooky Chase’s…

SITTING IN A ROOM SURROUNDED BY FRIENDLY BLACK faces for his inaugural Black History Month breakfast, in 2017, Donald Trump rattled off a list of notable Black Americans, and when he mentioned Frederick Douglass, he noted that Douglass was an “example of someone who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.” Douglass had been dead for 122 years. Trump is not alone in butchering Douglass’s legacy. Walking from Morningside Heights to get across Central Park one morning, I passed the Frederick Douglass Houses, where there is a placard with a well-known quote from Douglass: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Forget Trump’s ignorance. Here was, perhaps, a greater danger. Because for as long as that sign has been there, the project’s poor, mostly…

LAST DECEMBER, VIRGIL ABLOH, THE MEN’S artistic director at Louis Vuitton, gave an interview to Dazed magazine that sparked a forest fire of debate in the fashion community. He predicted that streetwear would soon “die.” Considering Abloh is one of the most prominent designers to blend traditional codes of streetwear—instantly recognizable graphics, hype-fueled exclusivity, a generally casual but thoroughly considered way of getting dressed—with high fashion, this was a big deal. The remark angered fans of both Abloh and his label Off-White, who consider themselves part of the streetwear community, and comment sections on Instagram overflowed with disbelief and vitriol. He’s since clarified those remarks, telling Esquire in March that the statement was meant as a provocation—a way to help prevent streetwear from becoming formulaic. And now he’s putting those…

FOUR MINUTES and forty-nine seconds into what would become a several-hours-long binge of Padma Lakshmi’s new Hulu show, Taste the Nation, life as we knew it changed. No kidding. Changed! Our host was strolling down a small street in El Paso, Texas, when she paused and popped inside local outpost Jalisco Cafe for a meal. As she ordered a bean burrito, we watched as her previously violet shades began to fade. By the time her food arrived, the lenses were clear. Transition lenses are fucking sick, the high poets sang. Wait a minute. Transition lenses? Sartorial staple of the aggressively anti-fashion? Official accessory of high school math teachers? Yes, those. Free yourself from the idea that transitions are the facial equivalent of a cell-phone holster and a whole world of…