Sommaire pour Winter 2022 de Esquire UK

For some years now, fashionable shoppers have been likely to make ethical as much as aesthetic choices when choosing what to buy, and rightly so. The climate crisis has driven a boom in considerately made clothing that uses low-impact, recycled or organic materials, and it’s a big driver of the popularity of vintage clothes, a sector projected to be worth £39bn — 10 per cent of the overall retail market — by 2023. In menswear, no trend seems to better embody the rising stock of eco-conscious apparel than that for technical outdoor clothing. It’s not just that it’s eco-conscious in itself, but that it suggests of its owner a love of the great outdoors, and an adventurous spirit — even if it’s often only worn to the pub. Rare is…

Georges Kern is five years into his barnstorming tenure as CEO of Breitling, and his effect on the Swiss marque has been little short of revolutionary. The collection has been completely overhauled, featuring scores of new models; the marketing campaigns are unrecognisable from those of 10 years ago; the stores, or rather, “townhouses”, have made the experience of buying a watch from the heritage brand feel like a visit to your coolest friend’s loft apartment. A particular masterstroke of Kern’s has been the revival of the Chronomat, which was relaunched in 2020 and has become one of Breitling’s bestsellers. It first emerged in the early 1980s, designed in partnership with the Frecce Tricolori, the Italian Air Force’s aerobatic display team. Initially, it was a custom-piece for the team, but it…

IT WAS AN OLD FRIEND’S ABSOLUTE END — BUT also the beginning of the end, if not of life itself then at least of a period in mine that was a kind of living death. There we all were: a gaggle of contemporary folk at a funeral, displaying the mandated heterodox fashion sense. Some were properly in mourning — others alluded to the fact with a dark jacket thrown over an inappropriately vernal shirt or blouse. For, while the sunshine had that intensity we associate with the cusp of summer, this was in fact a brilliant September day on the hilly fringes of northern London. Not having been to a religious — as opposed to a secular — Jewish funeral before, I wasn’t sure what to expect. And then there…

on a sunday morning in late august, i went into a store on Calle Larga Mazzini in Venice, a street that runs down to the Grand Canal, close to the Rialto Bridge. Outside, as the heat started to tighten its grip, the sounds of the city ricocheted against the ancient walls: chattering tourists, street sellers; the scrape of a thousand wheely cases dragged over medieval paving. But inside the store all was serene, ascetic. The floors were pale stone, softened by Afghan rugs; the changing rooms had houseplants and oxblood Chesterfield armchairs. In front of a floor-toceiling photograph of a beautiful girl having breakfast on the terrace of a Venetian hotel, two sales assistants stood at the low till, smiling patiently as I looked at the clothes, which were suspended…

JAMES KNAPPETT IS ONE OF ONLY 22 CHEFS IN BRITAIN who currently hold two Michelin stars. The 40-year-old’s main restaurant, Kitchen Table in central London, serves a tasting menu that costs £300 per person, without drinks, which used to sound like a lot, but is now roughly the same price as heating your house for the evening. Knappett has trained alongside some of the greatest pot-shakers and tweezer-fiddlers of our age, among them Gordon Ramsay, René Redzepi at Noma in Copenhagen and Thomas Keller at New York’s Per Se. No mistake, Kitchen Table is a serious gastronomic destination, to an extent that, as its website prewarns, if you’re wearing a baseball cap, you will be politely asked to remove it. (What happens if you have on a fedora or, say, a…

As we head into winter, having lost count of the impending existential threats now facing humanity, we can at least take some solace in the simple act of browsing Rightmove for a compound in North Wales before everyone else does. Hopefully, it won’t be long before the search categories filter whether the property sits outside of nuclear-fallout zones, if it has its own hydroelectric power supply, if the fence can deter invaders when the mass exodus begins and how vulnerable the area is to temperature rises. North Wales could surely benefit from a degree or two. We’ll have to worry about the robots later. As a benchmark, the house owned by Michael Caine’s character Jasper in the 2006 film Children of Men would do nicely. It had a concealed entrance,…

“You start with a trash can,” says Kasper Egelund, the 47-year-old CEO and third generation coowner of the Danish design company Vipp, with a smile, “and then it can take you many places.” He’s not wrong. Vipp was born in 1939 when Egelund’s grandfather Holger Nielsen, a metalsmith, was asked by his wife to make a bin for her hairdressing salon. For its first 57 years of operation, the company sold just two products, both of which were pedal-operated bins, mainly to Danish dentists. But in the past two decades, Vipp has expanded into homewares and furniture, with an aim to bring the same integrity and longevity to plates, chairs and kitchen units that it did to Nielsen’s famous bin, which was added to the permanent design collection of the…

One of the startling things about lockdown — and, let’s face it, there were a few — was the way in which television became everything. During those weirdly identical evenings at home on the sofa (was it a week? Or 6,000 years?), we worshipped the glowing screen like an altar, grateful for the chance of escapism, or relaxation, or a reassuring glimpse of Chris Whitty’s shiny head. As the darker months draw in, who knows what fun times lie ahead, but one thing we can ready ourselves for is a television-viewing experience that is as atmospheric and absorbing as possible. Which is where Bang & Olufsen’s Beosound Theatre comes in. It’s a soundbar, yes, but not as we’ve come to know them — instead, this state-of-the-art unit from the Danish…

AT A FOOTBALL STADIUM ABOUT HALF AN HOUR’S drive west of central Paris, where a match-day café costs one euro and the single stand seats just 600, Neymar Jr. is doing keepie-uppies on the pitch while Esquire’s photographer Luc Braquet chooses his next shooting position. It’s the end of summer and the Brazilian forward has begun the 2022-’23 season in impressive form for Paris Saint-Germain, the club with which he has won a dozen domestic trophies since his debut in 2017. Retaining the Ligue 1 title and winning the Champions League are high on his and PSG’s agenda, but before all that, he has lifelong ambitions to realise playing for Brazil. “It has been my dream since I was a kid to win the World Cup,” he says. “I have…

HOW DO THINGS FIT TOGETHER? HOW WAS America made, and how has that history turned into the stories on our screens? The musical Oklahoma! opened on Broadway on 31 March, 1943. It was an extraordinary, dynamic production, as if to justify its exclamation mark. In a nation at war, the songs by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein spoke to an optimism for the American West — it’s there in the classic opening song, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’”, and in the choreography by Agnes de Mille. The love story climaxed with the new statehood of Oklahoma in 1907. But this hit show (over 2,200 first-run performances) was also a travesty of American history. It omitted so much about the state it was admiring. You can’t blame that on Martin Scorsese;…

Pennsylvania rap rock band the Bloodhound Gang, whose popular albums of the 1990s included One Fierce Beer Coaster and Hooray For Boobies, have few champions in 2022. But they do have one, and he just so happens to be Britain’s most celebrated playwright. “Love, the kind you clean up with a mop and bucket,” recites Jez Butterworth, 53, the writer of some of our most critically and commercially successful recent plays, including Jerusalem and The Ferryman, to James Corden, 44, actor, writer of the BBC sitcom Gavin and Stacey and, latterly, host of the US chat show The Late Late Show with James Corden. He’s giving the lyrics of the band’s 1999 single “The Bad Touch” all the portent of Larry Olivier doing Hamlet. “It’s beautiful,” he sighs. It’s early…

occasionally i find myself on stage in real life — as opposed to in an anxiety dream, where I tread the boards almost nightly. But in all the public-speaking events I have done, I have only once heard the audience let out a sudden and audible sigh. (No doubt sudden but inward sighs occur frequently.) The moment caught me off guard, because I hadn’t thought the thing I’d said was remotely controversial. Yet on that evening, I think I even heard one slightly strangulated “noooo!” So what was it? What was this outrageous utterance that had startled even some of the good burghers of London out of their jaded cynicism —this thing that had caused them to react in a way that suggested a line had to be drawn somewhere,…

IF YOU SHOULD EVER FIND YOURSELF, AS I DID THIS past September, looking for a guide to the neat suburb of Edgeley, in the steep-sided town of Stockport, Greater Manchester, you could do worse than Terry John. Sturdy, shiny-headed, mile-a-minute gregarious, Terry grew up around here, and it’s clear from just a few hours in his company that while success in his work has enabled him to relocate to a leafier grove, on the edge of the Peak District, he remains a Stockport man to his bones. (To be clear, by “sturdy” I mean that Terry has the approximate dimensions of an industrial fridge freezer; by “shiny headed” I mean bald.) Pristine in his new cagoule and his Tipp-Ex-white trainers, Terry’s patter is an endless scroll of local lore, his…

sometimes he got these thoughts in his head and this evening’s thought was to see her. Driving there, the whole world seemed brand new — beautiful, actually. Even the litter by the roadside, reflecting the decreasing daylight, made him almost cry. The afternoon’s drinking had augmented his mood for the better, and it felt good now to be behind the wheel of a car. Newbuild property developments, at various stages of completion, had spawned in all the inarable fields during the time he’d been away. He was remembering directions in real-time as he drove; the road unspooling before him in memory-prompting ways. Five, 10 minutes, and he’d be in her neighbourhood. It was a weeknight, meaning — provided she still lived there — she’d likely be at home. Meaning, her…