Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i Esquire

I HAVE ONE SIBLING, A BROTHER NAMED DONNY. Because he’s seven years older, our childhood worlds rarely overlapped. When he was a high school senior, preoccupied with girls and Guns N’ Roses, I was in the fourth grade, building Lego pirate ships and mastering Super Mario Bros. 2. I was the good student; I liked school and got mostly A’s. Donny was the music guy, the fashion guy, the car guy. He drove an orange ’74 MG. The one time he helped me with homework, I was sixteen and reading The Great Gatsby. My American Lit teacher had assigned us a short paper on a Jazz Age–related topic of our choosing. The topic Donny suggested: the martini. You might say I was Donny’s student. He taught me to drive stick. Made…

YOU LAND. YOU DRINK. AND NOT UNTIL THEN have you arrived. As the cradle of cocktail culture in America, such is the way to offcially commune with New Orleans. While the city’s best bars have always had their way of making classics a touch unique, over the past few years, some of its most tried-and-true cocktails have gone through an evolution at the hands of brilliant new bars with a deep respect for tradition. If you’re going to hang your drinking hat on a nongimmicky, unironic home-bartending trend this year, make it the revised classic NOLA cocktail. The most profoundly transformed classic is the Sazerac that Chris Hannah, one of the stewards of New Orleans cocktails, serves at Jewel of the South. And it is dead simple to make. The…

LIKE THE SCIENCE-FICTION-Y cars developed to wow the automotive world, concept watches rarely trickle down into real life. But over at Panerai’s Laboratorio di Idee (that’s “Ideas Lab” in Italian), the eggheads dreaming up the future of timekeeping are making stuff we can actually wear. Past efforts have included a mechanical movement that can run for 50 years without being serviced, a huge leap from the every five-ish years recommended today. A newer initiative focuses on pushing the technical limits of recycling. In 2021, Panerai introduced the Submersible eLab-ID, a watch that’s 98.6 percent recycled, from the aerospace-grade “EcoTitanium” of the case to the SuperLuminova that lights up the hands at night. If you’ve got $70K or so lying around—and can secure one of the 30 pieces put into production—it…

TOWARD THE END, MY GRANDFATHER TOLD US ABOUT THE time he was sailing on a United States Navy battleship in the Mediterranean Sea and his convoy was attacked by the German Luftwaffe. In the cacophony and chaos, he watched a gunner on another American battleship in the party turn the great deck guns and shoot a Nazi warplane out of the sky. It spun from the air and crashed into the water not far from my grandfather’s own ship. He told us all this, and then he told us what he thought while he watched it happen. “That poor bastard.” This was no surprise to hear from John Shevlin (Jack to those who knew him, Poppy to my family), whose humility and relentless curiosity about the world would never have allowed…

__ I AM THE luckiest motherfucker in the world. __ I WAS BORN with spina bifida. I had my head cut off when I was six weeks old. There were three other kids who had that same operation that day. The other kids died, and I lived. One girl made it for a while, and I used to see her at basketball games. She was paralyzed from the neck down. She died when she was about, I don’t know, thirteen. __ WHEN I FIRST got the name John Cougar, I said, “No, no, no, we’re not doing this.” The owner of the record company said, “Well, okay, you can go back to Indiana then. We’re done.” I’m twenty-one years old, and I was like, “Okay, I’m Johnny Cougar then.” __…

BRUNELLO CUCINELLI WAS HAVING A DRINK AT MANHATTAN’S Odeon bar in 1989 when he spotted twenty-eight-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. among the patrons. They didn’t speak, but Cucinelli, then thirty-six, observed the young Kennedy. He noticed his shoes—they had been resoled. His sweater had patches on the elbows. “Clearly, he could have easily bought a new sweater,” Cucinelli says now. “I thought that was very chic. So I went back to Italy and put suede patches on the elbow of my new sweaters. It didn’t make sense to some, but the customers loved it.” It’s a charming anecdote that reveals why Cucinelli remains a singular presence in the fashion world today. There’s the ability to anticipate what his wellheeled clientele will want to buy. There’s the appreciation for the “sense of…

special REPORT On October 22, 2017, Nicholas Pimentel, a twenty-seven-year-old restaurant cook, was driving his pickup truck home from a bar in Ceres, California, when police pulled him over for a traffc stop. But Pimentel didn’t stop, instead leading the cops on a high-speed chase, which ended when police blocked his path around the corner from his house. His truck spun out. After Ceres police offcer Ross Bays rammed the driver’s side with his patrol car, body-cam footage from another offcer shows Pimentel’s engine continuing to rev and the truck’s wheels spinning in place as it was stuck between Bays’s cruiser and a parked car. Bays fired his gun into the vehicle at Pimentel, then another offcer did, too. Pimentel died that night with twelve gunshot wounds. Ten months later,…

It’s your last day on earth. You’ve said your goodbyes, counted up every regret, left enough food for the cat, and now you’re watching your life flash before your eyes. A song plays over tape of your best moments. Man, look at you, trick-or-treating as the cutest vampire the world has ever seen. There you are with your lovely prom date. Can you believe she said yes? There’s your college graduation, a beautiful May morning. You’re proposing now—that’s New Year’s Eve—look at those smiles. Your wedding, the summer after that summer. Don’t forget the kids, both Virgos. Then something dawns on you. None of this happened in March. You ask yourself if anything good ever happened to you in any March ever. You find that, no, nothing good has ever…

OVER THE HOLIDAYS, I joined my family in helping our mother pack up her condo and move into a smaller place. Our parents kept a tidy house, but every home has one: the unfinished part of the basement, the cellar of misfit toys (and old rugs and cathode-ray televisions), the place where you put the boxes you packed hastily the last time you moved, or the time before that. These would need to be gone through carefully—a sample box would be three wax apples, a Learn Windows 95 VHS, and my father’s birth certificate—but we would need to be ruthless. Donate or pitch unless it was absolutely necessary to keep, for the neat and uncluttered life Mom deserves. Who cares if you’re euthanizing a memory? The point is to simplify,…

STAY Faena Hotel Miami Beach Strolling into the lobby of the Faena feels like being on the set of a sumptuous, dreamy old-Hollywood production. That’s no accident. The hotel’s redesign was headed up by fourtime Oscar-winning production designer Catherine Martin (along with her husband, some guy named Baz Luhrmann). The result is what every great hotel should be: a place that feels exotic yet homelike, from the buzzing Saxony bar to the crushed-crimson and goldtrimmed rooms to the gilded mammoth skeleton by Damien Hirst. 3201 Collins Avenue DRINK Cafe La Trova You can experience a sense of Cuba at several spots in Miami, but when it comes to devouring plump empanadas between sips of masterful rum cocktails like the Papa Doble, head straight to Cafe La Trova in Little Havana,…

A shiny veneer means nothing if there’s no substance behind it. For something to be truly stylish—to stand the test of time, to deserve a spot in your wardrobe—it needs that can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-it element that takes the dependable and turns it into the undeniable. It might be the history, or a single detail. It might just be a feeling. Regardless, it says the same thing: This is it. This is the real deal. In an era when brands flare into and out of existence in a snap, when the trend cycle is spinning like a teacup, that kind of authenticity isn’t just valuable; it’s vital. ¶ On the following 31 pages, we’re highlighting the people, items, brands, and ideas that exemplify genuine, no-bullshit style and show the way forward. We’re calling…

3 FEET HIGH AND RISING De La Soul The work of this groundbreaking hip-hop act was still not available for streaming at press time. Fine; it sounds better on a turntable anyway. Their debut is so good, even the skits are worth listening to. STRANGE ALLIANCE Tommy Keene If you know, you know. Keene is the great American power-pop cult figure; his ’82 debut goes for $100 on eBay. This is why I cannot pass a used-record store without dashing in and thumbing through the K’s. ANY K-TEL COMPILATION If you find a record called Fantastic or Hit Express, snap it up. K-Tel albums were like the Now series for the ’60s through the ’80s: perfectly eclectic snapshots of their cultural moments as they truly were, not as we immediately…

BLAME IT ON THE BOSTON. Not Boston Boston (tempting) but the Birkenstock Boston. Or point your finger at designer versions from JW Anderson or artisanal ones from Brother Vellies. Take your pick. Because while the entry points are varied, the truth is singular: Right now the mule is undeniable. It’s the coolest, most laid-back shoe you can slip into. A mule doesn’t just denote ease; it demands it. Try running to catch the train in a pair. Not gonna happen. Better to shuffe along to the bar, order a beer, and kick up your heels (be they sock covered or bare). Or post up by the wall and let your wide-leg trousers hang loose while you do the same. The next train will be along eventually. And in the meantime, a…

I HAVE A MAN IN MY HOUSE, and he’s been aging for a long time now—I want to say 50-odd years. In my understanding, this aging process was supposed to refine all of his flavors, making him more robust yet more patient, more tenacious yet more caring. And while I have observed a notable uptick in tenderness and affection, I was under the impression, based on the novels I’ve read and the movies I’ve seen, that he’d become increasingly independent and bold and courageous over time. This has not been my experience with the man in my house. While I enjoy and treasure this man very much, lately he’s seemed to dislike rapid changes in temperature. He has a minor foot injury that he updates me on daily instead…

I PICK UP JAKE GYLLENHAAL IN LOWER MANHATTAN, NOT OUT side his building, a redbrick factory converted into luxury condos designed for discretion, but instead at a hotel taxi stand three blocks south. We set out for Monticello Motor Club, a members-only racetrack in the southern Catskill Mountains, two hours north, in my beat-up Jeep. He volunteers to take the wheel—“I’m a good driver, you’ll see!”—then to navigate, and he sounds a little aggrieved when he’s upstaged by Waze. “I want to be a good copilot here,” he says as we creep toward the Lincoln Tunnel. The traffc is bad, but he doesn’t complain. He’s been looking forward to leaving town, away from the endless obligations and the hounding tabloids. This day is work, too, of course, but at least it…

THE BARBOUR INTERNATIONAL BY NICK SULLIVAN WHILE MOST MODERN TECH jackets are destined to look meh in a few years, a waxed-cotton Barbour looks its best after putting on some miles. You could wait decades for your new International to weather itself into a pleasing state of decrepitude. Or you could, like me, cheat and buy one to which someone else—possibly several people—has already done the hard work. Its story will be written in each crease and stain. And the worse it has been treated, the better. Such is the currency for these old Barbours that often, for a really well-aged piece, you’ll pay more than the cost of a new one. If you care about the style, the price won’t bother you. A handy way to date a prospective…

STORE INFORMATION For the items featured in Esquire, please consult the website or call the phone number provided. Blueprint, p. 40: Birkenstock mules, birkenstock.com. P. 42: Panerai watch, panerai.com. P. 45: Tom Ford jacket, tomford.com. Lucchese belt, bootbarn.com. Amiri bag, amiri.com. Rockmount Ranch Wear shirt, rockmount.com. Wrangler dress jeans, wrangler.com. Peyote Bird Designs bolo tie, cuff bracelet, and ring, peyotebird.com. Tecovas boots, tecovas.com. The New Authentics, p. 71: Jacques Marie Mage glasses, jacquesmariemage.com. Instant Icons, p. 74: Gucci jacket and trousers, gucci.com. Manolo Blahnik shoes, manoloblahnik.com. Shihara necklace, shihara.com. TAG Heuer chronograph, tagheuer.com. P. 75: Dolce & Gabbana jacket and sweater, dolcegabbana.com. P. 76: Hermès shirt, trousers, and belt, hermes.com. P. 77: Dolce & Gabbana jacket and sweater, dolcegabbana.com. P. 78: Louis Vuitton Men’s T-shirt and trousers, louisvuitton.com. Panerai watch,…