Innholdsfortegnelse for October/November 2023 i Esquire

PRESENTED BY THE HOME DEPOT The elements of a home office will vary based on needs, but an aesthetically pleasing room is universal. Accent a bold wall with necessities in neutral colors for a polished yet vibrant look. A creative space is sure to inspire creativity. GET THE LOOK DESK | Simpli Home, Harper Mid-Century Modern Desk in Walnut Brown, SKU #300893691 CHAIR | Baxton Studio, Harland Black and Walnut Brown Chair, SKU #317388385 AREA RUG | Artistic Weavers, Kastav Light Gray Indoor Area Rug, SKU #300324478 BOOKCASE | Walker Edison Furniture Company, Dark Walnut Industrial Bookcase, SKU #314006235 COFFEE TABLE | SEI Furniture, Relckin Black Oval Faux Marble Coffee Table, SKU #323418934 SHOP NOW Scan the code to shop this look and more! PERSONALIZE IT It shouldn’t be hard…

The first mention of the old-fashioned cocktail in Esquire was in October 1933. It would be nodded to throughout the decades with no real proper recipe included: It’s just sugar, bitters, and whiskey, after all. But the drink became something else over the decades, sometimes with muddled oranges or cherries. Not bad, if you like a fruit salad with your rye, but not really an old-fashioned. Fortunately, a proper recipe appeared in 2009 to remind people how to make the OG cocktail. While we’re all for making the old-fashioned as it’s meant to be made, we also like this riff that was suggested in a 1941 story about curaçao, the orange liqueur (like Cointreau). It’s simple: You replace the sugar with about ½ tsp orange curaçao and add the usual:…

THREE DAYS. THAT’S ABOUT HOW LONG IT TAKES TO CREATE A SINGLE piece of knitwear in Loro Piana’s LORO collection. Each crewneck, polo, turtleneck, and V-neck is made from recycled cash mere from the label’s production surplus. The extraneous bits—zippers, buttons, even stitching—are removed by hand. Then the cashmere is processed and blended with virgin, undyed cashmere to ensure the quality is of the utmost. The result? A more sustainable garment that’s indistinguishable from its brand-new cousins. Indistinguishable, that is, until you notice the understated sophistication that defines the LORO offering. The muted colors. The vast range of sizes, reaching all the way up to quadruple XL. The complementary accessories—a hat, a scarf, featherlight sneakers with cashmere uppers—that complete the look. It’s loungewear at its most luxurious, the sort of…

Gay Talese WRITER, 91, NEW YORK CITY __ YOU’RE TALKING TO A GUY who just turned in a book. Jesus Christ, I’m 91 and I finished a book. Not only did I finish a book, but I also read it over and I like it. Looking over 70 years as a published writer, I’m not anything but happy with what I did. __ ONE OF THE THINGS about being 91 is that you always think you’re going to be dead a week from now. So you’re always ahead of the game. __ WHEN YOU’RE A SHOP OWNER’S SON, you learn good manners. __ THE STORE MY PARENTS HAD was a former newspaper office called the Ledger. My mother had a dress shop on one side and my father had a…

AMELIA DIMOLDENBERG 2 million YouTube subscribers Dimoldenberg turned awkward dating into an art form and reinvented the celebrity interview in the process. On her YouTube show “Chicken Shop Date,” the British comedian questions famous guests in a fast-food restaurant as if they’re on a first date. She lets the painful pauses linger, and they pay off in moments of hilarious tension. With her production company, Dimz, Inc., the twenty-nine-year-old has launched additional series like “Amelia’s Cooking Show” and “Celebrity Rebrand.” —Sirena He DYLAN MULVANEY 10.6 million TikTok followers In March 2022, Mulvaney celebrated her coming out as a trans woman by launching the TikTok series “Days of Girlhood.” The yearlong video diary demystified the trans experience and earned her millions of followers as well as main-stream sponsors. This past April,…

We always wanted to have the world of entertainment at our fingertips, to be a quick click away from infinite options. As always, we were not careful what we wished for. “Now we all have that,” says video archivist Bret Berg, “and we all hate it.” What’s missing is curation, and that’s where Berg and his nearly indescribable weekly Internet broadcast Museum of Home Video comes in. “As the child of a single mom, I was babysat by cable television,” he says, “so this is my attempt to understand my own upbringing and the world at large through the strange-ass media that I’ve consumed over the years.” Every Tuesday night at museumofhomevideo.com, Berg weaves old television, low-budget genre films, dead-mall videos, vintage local commercials, and even Ring camera footage—“all the…

THERE ARE MORE THAN EIGHT BILLION PEOPLE ON PLANET earth, and very few of them can remain relatable while they’re telling you about the time the diamond fell out of their mouth. Not just relatable, likable. Your heart breaks when you hear how he hungrily bit into a Chicken McNugget that night in Rome, and how he just knew he’d lost that $600,000 fang. It hardly matters that the story has already been spoiled. The two massive, real-ass jewels are right there on his canines where they belong; a happy ending is a sure thing. But still: “I had the left one in my hand, and I dropped it right into the sink hole,” he says. (Under normal circumstances, you’d correct him and say, “Drain,” but you don’t, because the…

“THE JOKE IS, YOU WALK INTO THE CAPITOL, look around, and you’re like, ‘How did I get here?’ ” says twenty-six-year-old U. S. representative Maxwell Frost. “Then you spend a few months listening to some of your colleagues, and you’re like, ‘How the hell did they get here?’ ” Frost, a Democrat, burst into the public eye after the Parkland school shooting, when he pulled no punches as an organizer of March for Our Lives in Florida. Now he’s got a moniker that’s sure to stick: “the first Gen Z member of Congress.” In 2020, he was arrested for participating in a Black Lives Matter protest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. When Frost was sworn in to represent Florida’s 10th Congressional District, he tweeted his new congressional photo alongside…

Overture: Jorge Viladoms, a thirty-eight-year-old classical musician and professor, is teaching the world to sing and ensuring that a new generation appreciates the music that changed his life. 1) Piano. Jorge’s father, a surgeon, has a century-old Bechstein piano. He cherishes it, though it’s rarely played. Jorge’s mom dedicates her time to helping orphans. The family moves from Durango, Mexico, to the larger city of Puebla when he’s fourteen. They bring the piano. 2) Dad. Jorge’s dad dies suddenly. It tears open a hole in Jorge. The family moves five times in a year, lugging the piano. His mother asks him, “What do we do with this piano?” At fifteen, Jorge takes lessons. He’s a natural. It opens his eyes to not only music but also art, philosophy, beauty. He…

UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, WHENEVER DADS WERE shredded by some tragedy, they dug a hole somewhere inside themselves and wept in it. Even the non-alpha, non-hard-ass data-enterers and periodontists born in the shadow of Nixon will tell you, proudly, “My kids never saw me cry.” Still, we occasion-ally stumbled upon them—our dads, I mean—sobbing in the den when they thought we were at the neighbors’ house. And, tiptoeing away so they never saw us, we learned two lessons. First: Of course, of course, men need to express their grief. And second: We do that shit in secret. Not anymore. The world has changed. Covid’s rampage forced us to reckon with a relentless, silent sadness. And one echo of #MeToo is that capital-M Masculinity has lost its sheen. In the taxonomy of acceptable…

THE AFTERNOON OF AUGUST 8 WAS TYPICAL for the Hawaiian island of Kauai: sunny, breezy, and powered mostly by renewable energy, thanks to steady solar and battery-storage investments over the past decade. But two hundred miles away, a climate-amplified inferno was reducing the historic town of Lahaina, on Maui, to rubble. The two islands are postcards from the future. And the promise and peril they represent are what drove Congress to pass the most ambitious domestic climate legislation in history, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Narrowly passed over Republican objection in August 2022, the legislation seeks to fundamentally reshape how we get around, power our homes, and fuel our economy. The IRA makes electric vehicles more affordable. It helps build battery and solar factories. It offsets the cost of high-efficiency…

_RULE NO. 1 IN AN ARGUMENT BETWEEN TWO MEN, THE ONE CHEWING A CIGAR NATURALLY HAS THE UPPER HAND. _RULE NO. 104 A man may own exactly one pair of holiday-themed boxers. _RULE NO. 596 A man should never own more than two pairs of convertible pants. _ RULE NO. 32 TALK HALF AS MUCH AS YOU LISTEN. _RULE NO. 155 PROPERLY MADE, LEFTOVER CHILI GETS BETTER AND BETTER EVERY DAY UNTIL THE FOURTH DAY, AT WHICH IT BEGINS ITS SLOW DECLINE. _RULE NO. 47 There is no dignified way to ask why you weren’t invited to the pool party. _RULE NO. 287 IF A MAN IS WEARING A PINKIE RING, DO NOT FUCK WITH HIM. _RULE NO. 60 A SANDWICH TASTES EXACT-LY ONE THIRD BETTER WHEN IT’S MADE BY…

MAURIZIO DONADI LOOKS THE part. White-haired, with a burly beard to match, he’s pushed his wirerim glasses up above his eyebrows so they’re resting comfortably on his perfectly tanned forehead. Big, baggy camouflage pants and a white tee hang loose on his frame. If you sent a memo to the folks in central casting requesting “an Italian fashion-industry veteran who decamped to L. A. to focus on upcycled clothing,” they couldn’t do better than Donadi. Good thing he’s got the bona fides to back it up. Donadi, 66, is the founder of Transnomadica, a fouryear-old company in Vernon, just outside L. A., that specializes in acquiring vintage and secondhand clothing—he defines vintage as pre-1979; secondhand is any time after that—and passing it on, sometimes with a rework or redesign, to in-theknow…

THE NAME ATTOLINI IS SYNONYMOUS WITH great Neapolitan style. Vincenzo Attolini, who pioneered soft Italian tailoring back in the ’30s, made sure of that. But we’re here to talk about a different Vincenzo Attolini: his grandson, who founded the Casalnuovo-based brand Stile Latino in 2008. “I was tired of changing out of my work suit before I went out for an aperitivo with friends,” he explains. “I wanted to make clothes that were more sensual than traditional tailoring.” Stile Latino’s creations manage to mold to the body without the sort of structure usually needed to do so—a feat of sartorial engineering. But Attolini and his team also focus on color and cloth as key elements. An unlined cashmere overcoat might mix a subtle navy-and-brown weave with a hot-pink check, as seen…

I DON’T WANT TO ALARM YOU MEN, BUT you’re not men anymore. You can be forgiven for not noticing that men aren’t men anymore, because men are always not men anymore. “Men aren’t men anymore”—like “nobody younger than me wants to work” and “this isn’t real music”—has been said every day in every language since we’ve had days and languages. It’s a particular concern in America, where men haven’t been men anymore from the jump. Almost certainly one of our founding fathers told his son, “Don’t leave this house without your wig, stockings, and frock coat—I didn’t raise a sissy.” But now, as our culture reevaluates gender, reconsiders the patriarchy, and has red-assed opinions about Barbie, men are yelling about men not being men anymore more than ever. It’s given…

Humans are hardwired to look ahead. We make to-do lists. We bet on the Cowboys to cover the spread this weekend. We fantasize about the cocktail we’re going to have after work. We make bold plans for new jobs, new lovers, new lives. At Esquire, a big part of our job is peering into the future and cu-rating it for our readers. The clothes you’ll wear this winter. The actors you’ll talk about during awards season. The music you’ll listen to on that road trip you’re planning. The books you’ll read and topics you’ll debate with your friends. We’re always asking: What’s next? In this issue, to honor ESQUIRE’S 90th ANNIVERSARY, we’ve channeled that same forward-leaning energy into a special package we’re calling The Next 90. It’s packed with people…

“I THOUGHT I CRUSHED A BUTTERFLY THE OTHER day,” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah says, sounding genuinely rueful. “I felt so bad.” Today at least, the lepidoptera we have come to see at the Museum of Natural History are safe from harm: It turns out that tickets to their famed vivarium are sold out, so instead we watch through Plexiglas as their little gemstone bodies flicker and weave for a lucky scrum of schoolchildren and elaborately scarved Europeans. Even in the wilting heat of a late-stage New York summer, Adjei-Brenyah cuts a striking figure; a security guard pulls away from corralling unruly tweens just to compliment his hat, a trilby in rich forest green. The guard probably has no reason to know that this elegant, soft-spoken man who quite literally would not hurt…

TIMES HAVE BEEN TOUGH FOR THE middle-class musician. Streaming sucked out the album revenue, Covid cooled the touring business, and the race to place songs in shows and commercials has pop music sounding more same-y and stagnant than ever. “We entered a music industry that was on the cusp of upheaval,” says the St. Paul–born, Nashville-educated Daniel Ellsworth of his first big project, the group Daniel Ellsworth & the Great Lakes, which debuted twelve years ago. “We were the tail end of indie artists who could tour and attempt the traditional album cycle and scrape by.” The prolific singer-songwriter-producer grew increasingly frustrated trying to conform to the typical music-business model. Why not just get all the music in his head out into the world? “I spent so many years in a…

MY EDITOR IS A VERY NICE PERSON. MY EDITOR IS ALSO UN-fathomably cruel. A while back, she told me that this magazine would be celebrating its ninetieth birthday this autumn and, as part of the celebration, she would like me to write about what things might be like ninety years from now. Hello there, 2113. What’s up? She had to be kidding. I couldn’t write with any authority about what I think will happen next week, let alone 4,680 weeks from now. By Christmas, we might be watching Florida drown. By Easter, Vivek Ramaswamy might be rolling to victory on a platform drawn from old episodes of Drunk History. By this time next year, we might be preparing to reelect a vulgar talking yam, back this time with a vengeance.…

PATRICK MAHOMES II DIDN’T WANT TO BE A quarterback. He wanted to play baseball. Of course he did. Pretty much every kid whose dad is a Major League Baseball player wants to be in the big leagues, too. Think of the sport’s astonishing list of Juniors—Ken Griffey Jr. and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., to name but a couple. Barry Bonds is the son of a ballplayer. In all there have been 259 sets of fathers and sons who have played Major League Baseball and countless more who came close. Growing up, Mahomes seemed to be very much on the baseball path. His dad, Pat Mahomes, spent eleven years in the majors pitching for the Twins, Red Sox, Mets, and three other teams. Young Pa-trick’s earliest, and some of his fondest, memories are…

AND SO I SIT THERE, HIGH ON MUSHROOMS, TAKING A SHIT IN THE BATHROOM OF THE pastor’s home. It’s been hours since I ate the chocolate, and I still feel no closer to God. Everything remains so far away: Jesus, Sonya and the kids, and (most of all) any sense of self-worth. That’s why I came here, to Colorado, to meet two of the clergy who are part of the underground movement. Sonya didn’t want me to. I had to convince her that this trip might save my career, save me. But taking psilocybin like it’s some kind of sacrament seems to only hide now the deeper truth of my life: I’ve fucked up everywhere, starting with the fact that two thousand miles away my wife is distressed and can’t even…

Welcome to the Big Black Book. First published in 2006, the Big Black Book appeared twice a year as a stand-alone magazine. We’d conceived it as the style manual for successful men, with an emphasis on fashion and design. Then came the very unstylish Covid pandemic, forcing the Big Black Book into cold storage. But we’re back. Partly as a public service. The world has changed dramatically since the birth of the Big Black Book, starting with the vast access you now have to style coverage; this very minute, your phone is pulsating with pics and recs from all manner of influencer. And yet access to everything means access to nothing. Without thoughtful curation and good taste, it’s all just … stuff. That’s where we come in. To celebrate Esquire’s…

TUCKED INTO THE FOOTHILLS OF THE ALPS in northern Italy is the Oasi Zegna nature preserve, 100 square kilometers of mountainous land blanketed by half a million trees. Company lore holds that the founder of the luxury label that shares his name, Ermenegildo Zegna, planted the first one there in 1910. A century later, though Zegna HQ is in Milan, the wooded oasis serves as a spiritual center for artistic director Alessandro Sartori. “Oasi is not just a place but a mindset,” he explains—both a source of creative inspiration and a reminder of the company’s obligation to preserve nature. The Oasi Zegna capsule collection is the distillation of that philosophy. The cashmere that’s a cornerstone of the fall lineup comes directly from Mongolia and is transformed entirely in-house—from spinning and weaving…

ON THE ARCTIC ISLANDS OF SVALBARD, IN MID-February, the sun still hasn’t groped its way out of its four-month winter hibernation. At most, an eerie half light hangs over Longyearbyen, the northernmost town in the world, for a few hours. Temperatures hover around zero degrees Fahrenheit but frequently drop much lower. This is a place in deep freeze—not the usual habitat for die-hard watch fans. A few years ago, however, Panerai began pairing limited-edition watches with immersive experiences for collectors. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—if you can get on the list. Fans lapped up the chance to live for a few days alongside Navy SEALs, America’s Cup sailors, and free divers, often in exotic locations. It was this program, along with explorer and Panerai ambassador Mike Horn, that brought our group…

“There is one form of entertaining which a man can always fall back on—cocktail parties.”SEPTEMBER 1936 “SERVE A COCKTAIL in the drawing room, and keep it down to one or two unless you are sure that your dinner is not going to be fit for consumption by sober people.” MARCH 1934 “AT A COCKTAIL PARTY, restraint can be tossed to the winds: let liberality and variety characterize the drinks; let the variety of the appetizers be wanton and in a volume to match the tastes of your companions.” JUNE 1950 “DO NOT ASK ALL YOUR CLEVER FRIENDS TO ONE DINNER AND THE DULL ONES TO ANOTHER. NOTHING ANNOYS A CLEVER MAN OR WOMAN MORE THAN A SECOND ONE.”MARCH 1934 “IT’S A PRETTY safe bet to offer two cocktails, one of…

AT A CROWDED NEW YORK APARTMENT IN 1977, Norman Mailer uppercut Gore Vidal in the mouth. Vidal, who had infuriated Mailer by comparing him to Charles Manson in a review six years earlier, is said to have replied, “Norman, once again words have failed you.” The two would eventually reconcile, but their feud—as intellectual as it was physical—marked an era of literary rivalries that the profession has since abandoned. In their place has emerged a kind of camaraderie and support that is both moving and necessary—writers stick up for each other when publishing houses cannot. This is mostly a good thing. Competition and infighting, especially the physical kind, rarely make for healthy careers. But based on years of research over drinks and in kitchen corners at parties, I’ve gathered that the…

_ Wearing a suit when it’s not required _ Dogs with human, adult names: Stanley, Frank, Nancy, Linda. _ Having a third martini. _ THURS ______ DAY. _ Luxury slippers AT THE OFFICE. _ Horny K-pop (see Jung Kook’s “Seven”). _ VOTING____. _ Words THAT rhyme with robust. _ Knowing that the first person who will live to 150 has already been born. _ Being low-key grateful you won’t live to 150. _ Paying your dues. _ Handwritten thank-you notes on personal stationery. _ Using “that’s what’s up” as an all-purpose expression, like shalom or aloha. _ KRAFTWERK. _ Awkward small talk. It builds character. _ SHAME. _ MDMA as a therapeutic tool but also as a thing to do because it’s fun and you feel like it. _ The return…

Will anything fend off our dystopian, AI-curated future? As far as cinema goes, it will probably be filmmakers so inimitably idiosyncratic and human that the machines just can’t compute. Fortunately, a rising tide of independents are storming the scene. They don’t have big budgets—or, well, any budgets—but their films are more DIY in spirit than in looks: gleefully weird, palpably personal, and shockingly professional. It’s a big, messy cohort that doesn’t adhere to a single genre or aesthetic framework, epitomized by these three terrific, and terrifically different, filmmakers. —Max Cea EDY MODICA Before she was the loud, lusty juror Jeannie Abruzzo on Jury Duty, Modica was honing her boisterously bawdy shtick as a wearer of many hats (writer, director, actor, comedian) in Brooklyn’s alt film scene. She’s quickly established herself…

Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness. Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil…. Exodus, 23:1–2 “I’M DEDICATING MY LIFE TO BEING USE-full,” he says. “To my community, to my neighborhood, to my city. And to do that means letting go of some burdens of the past. Never forgetting, but forgiving. There is power in forgiving.” Spare a thought for the falsely accused. For the man sent to prison as a boy for something he didn’t do. Does anyone ever allow the reality of a false accusation to sink in and upset the equilibrium for even a moment, or is it just in and out and on to the next, like everything else? That accusation, after…

FOR SEVEN SEASONS I HAVE WORKD as a commercial oysterman along the waters of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Current mapping shows that there are 4,664 acres of wild oyster beds that grow between the limits of high and low tide here. I am responsible for 4.8 of them. I lease my oyster beds from the state, which gives me exclusive use of “intertidal portions of Inlet Creek, Swinton Creek, unnamed creeks, and tributaries near the Intracoastal Waterway … for the purposes of commercial shellfish culture.” In exchange, I pay a nominal fee every year and commit to restoring more than I take. South Carolina’s wild-oyster season opens when the waters cool and closes when the waters warm—a window that seems to be getting smaller every year. The season usually starts in…

For the items featured in Esquire, please consult the website or call the phone number provided. Blueprint, p. 38: Loro Piana sweater, turtleneck, polo, shorts, and pants, loropiana.com. The End of the World as He Writes It, p. 63: Yohji Yamamoto pour Homme jacket and shirt, theshopyohjiyamamoto.com. Shelf Life, p. 68: Hublot watch, hublot.com. Patek Philippe watch, patek.com. Jaeger-LeCoultre watch, jaeger-lecoultre.com. Cartier watch, cartier.com. P. 69: Panerai watch, panerai.com. Bulgari watch, bulgari.com. Tudor watch, tudorwatch.com. Bell & Ross watch, bellross.com. P. 70: Victorinox watch, victorinox.com. Bell & Ross watch, bellross.com. Hermès watch, hermes.com. P. 71: Vacheron Constantin watch, vacheron-constantin.com. TAG Heuer watch, tagheuer.com. Breitling watch, breitling.com. Yes, Chefs!, p. 101: Dries Van Noten jacket and skirt, driesvannoten.com. Brunello Cucinelli jacket, shirt, trousers, and tie, shop.brunellocucinelli.com. Gianvito Rossi shoes, gianvitorossi.com. Longines…

Moncler Risler Down Jacket Moncler’s meteoric rise in high fashion hasn’t stopped the brand from making the sort of rugged performance gear preferred by professional explorers. This puffer, from the fall/winter 2023 collection, takes its design cues—like the short shape and plastic zipper track—from functional midcentury styles. But in a nod to modernity, it’s made of recycled matte polyester. Il Bisonte Le Laudi Tote Based in the heart of the Italian leather industry, the 53-year-old Florentine label Il Bisonte was founded on the idea of combining eco-friendly, vegetablet anned leather and simple shapes for a natural, lowkey luxury. Everything is still sourced from within a 20-mile radius of Florence, and the tote you see here will only get better (and softer) with age. C. P. Company Goggle Jacket Decades before…

NEAR THE CENTER OF PARIS, IN THE ELEGANT 2nd Arrondissement, a tight-knit group of French creatives is plotting to overthrow the status quo in men’s fashion. Italian and British tailoring has long been the standard. But these folks are pushing for a different—and far edgier—point of view. At the heart of it is Gauthier Borsarello, a 35-year-old style savant with an impressive platform. A cofounder of the magazine L’Etiquette, Borsarello is also at the creative helm of the veteran French tailoring brand Fursac, where he’s reinventing a mid-’60s style born not in lofty bespoke ateliers but on the street. Inspiration is right outside the window. From his office at Fursac, Borsarello can point to what was once the café-brasserie Le Golf Drouot. From 1961 until its demise in 1981, it served…

THE MARRIAGE OF HIGH PERFORMANCE AND HIGH FASHION ON THE SLOPES was inevitable if you think about it. Skiing is as aspirational as it is athletic. And locales like St. Moritz, Deer Valley, and Zermatt are basically built for engaging with unabashed opulence. Naturally, the folks sipping something in the lodge would eventually want to wear their favorite labels on the piste as well as the sofa. Companies such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Moncler, and Stefano Ricci—the creator of this Italian-made helmet wrapped in buttery-smooth leather—have been happy to oblige, crafting items that expertly balance utility with luxury.…