Esquire UK July/August 2020

MIRANDA COLLINGE is Esquire’s Features Director. She was responsible for commissioning and editing many of the stories in this issue. She also wrote one of them, “The Greater Blue-Legged Bulbul”. Collinge lives in south London.________GARTH GREENWELL is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Awards Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction and was a finalist for six other awards. He has had short fiction published in The Paris Review and Vice. Greenwell’s second novel, Cleanness, was published in April. He lives in Iowa City, in the US._______PHILIP HENSHER is the author of two short story collections and 10 novels, including the Booker Prize longlisted The Mulberry Empire, the Booker shortlisted The Northern Clemency, and Scenes from Early Life,…

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF walking alone by the sea during an emergency referred to as The Situation, a woman makes a phone call to the man she loves. In a graveyard in central London, an elderly couple, old lovers, defy advice to meet again. At a café in Manhattan, an older man tells a younger date about his sexual awakening, and remembers a generation decimated by plague. In a future San Francisco just slightly weirder and more unsettling than the present San Francisco, a cop is interviewed following the shooting of her new partner. At a restaurant in Paris, an American abroad reflects on a year of loss, betrayal and secrets kept. Backstage at a West End theatre, a journalist is accessory to a celebrity tantrum. Trapped in a confined space for weeks with…

In the chequered history of portmanteaus, “restomod” has to be one of the less successful examples — it’s definitely no “brunch” — but the restored and modified car scene it describes has been going from strength to strength in recent years. The concept is pretty alluring: take a vintage car and all the great things that go with it — looks, backstory, rarity; and add the best of modern driving — comfort, eco-friendliness, not breaking down every time you drive it. There’s nothing intrinsically new in modernising old cars but there is in the scale and slickness of some of the operations involved, epitomised by the super high-end (and expensive) “re-imaginings” of Nineties Porsche 911s undertaken by Singer in California but now filtering down to almost any beloved classic you can think…

As you surely know already, this summer, for the first time since 1945, there will be no Championships at Wimbledon. As if to compensate those of us who watch the sport almost as much for the aesthetics as the athleticism, 2020 is proving to be a very good year for tennis-inspired, off-court fashion. “I grew up being inspired by tennis style,” says Charaf Tajer, founder of Casablanca, a Parisian label that sauntered onto the scene a few seasons ago with its louche, painterly take on silk shirts and luxury sportswear. For SS ’20, Tajer has imagined his own Casablanca Tennis Club complete with retro logo, which is sewn and printed onto sweats, caps and T-shirts. A pair of pastel-pink silk tennis shorts is a particular highlight. Why tennis, rather than football or…

For Dom Bridges, founder of Margate-based skincare brand Haeckels, it is “about reconnecting and falling in love with ceremony and simplicity”. For Mats Klingberg, owner of London’s Trunk Clothiers, the appeal is “comfort and a sense of history”. And for Laurent Delafon, cofounder of United Perfumes, a high-end scent licensing and distribution firm, it is “meditative… there is something magical about smoke”. They are all fans of incense. Not the packetof-10 masala sticks variety, a staple of spiritual gift shop and first-year halls of residence, but high-quality, natural incense finding favour in a new appreciation of a centuries-old ritual. Where the hefty designer desk candle was once a C-suite essential, today the slow-burning bamboo stick speaks of assurance and taste. “It’s not a statement like a candle because there’s nothing to show…

Style trends come and go, but one iron law of psychology remains: we find symmetry attractive. The theory has been used to explain the pleasure we get from gothic cathedrals, butterflies and George Clooney’s face. More recent thinking has suggested that what we like even more than symmetry is asymmetry: approximate, or imperfect, symmetry, for therein lies true beauty. Take the Patek Philippe 5235/50R Annual Calendar Regulator, an undeniably beautiful watch. With its rose gold case and two-tone dial that contrasts black sub-dials with a graphite-coloured central section, plus matching calendar windows at 10 and two o’clock, it appears to be a perfect example of aesthetic equilibrium. But look again, and notice that the whole thing is thrown off by the brand name at three o’clock and one of the…