British GQ September 2019

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I was one of the lucky ones. Having left Saint Martin’s School Of Art in 1981, having spent three years studying design and photography (and, if I’m honest, studying rather a lot of clubbing too), a year after I left, I was not exactly punching above my weight. I was living in a housing association apartment in South East London (Peckham, actually, which bears almost no relation to the gentrified postcode it is now), getting up as late in the day as possible (the trick was to only eat one meal a day) and then watching Channel 4 for a few hours before getting dressed and going out to a club. I wasn’t proud of my existence, but I was gradually slipping into a dissolute lifestyle that revolved around The…

Louie BANKS For GQ’s biannual roundup of the most important looks from every major designer and fashion house, photographer Louie Banks headed to the home of all things haute: Paris. “Shooting the AW19 collections story was heavenly,” says Banks. “I brought my favourite models and spent the day with one of my favourite humans, GQ Fashion Director Luke Day!” Kathleen JOHNSTON GQ Social Content Editor Kathleen Johnston sat down for a meal at Mayfair’s Bagatelle to cover a new trend: the restaurant-club, AKA the “clubstaurant”. Three hours later, with music pounding, she had a good grasp of the concept. “Bagatelle is completely, brilliantly bonkers,” says Johnston. “If you’re keen to see just what a restaurant-meets-club looks like, this is the place to go.” Stuart McGURK Sleep is no longer a solitary activity. An entire £100…

I know that everyone who grew up during the Cold War claims to have been haunted by the prospect of nuclear Armageddon, but it really was true. I used to have a recurring dream in which I was sitting on a beach and – as they used to say – the balloon went up on the horizon and people just sat and stared, waiting for white hot annihilation to reach the shore. It was grim but at least it was by the sea and the sun was shining. Every mushroom cloud, eh? Those of us exposed to the 1984 BBC drama Threads had to consider the inevitability of horrible death coming to a post-industrial Britain already ravaged by unemployment and heavy rain. And then there were the baby boomers recalling how…

In a suite at the Gleneagles hotel, extremely foul language is being deployed – and then some. I’m on location with Succession, the HBO series about Rupert Murdoch-esque media tycoon Logan Roy, and before me a meeting of the Roy children is veering into absurdity. Kieran Culkin glugs an entire bottle of mineral water, unscripted; in the next take, he has impromptu sex with a window, prompting approving laughter from the crew. This is now the established shooting method of almost every partly improvised sitcom. Popularised by the likes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, it involves giving actors a few takes to ad-lib freely after the scripted version of a scene is in the bag. Yet watching Culkin mime explosive farts seems at odds with the fact that Succession is routinely…

Weird to think it now, but the last time the Olympics came to Tokyo, in 1964, there wasn’t much of a Tokyo to speak of. Skyscrapers had yet to start scraping skies (precisely one existed and it was just 72 metres tall) and only 25 per cent of homes had flush toilets. Yet the Games heralded a transformation that was barely believable: within five years Tokyo had 10,000 new buildings, subway lines, an airport monorail, five-star hotels and, in the Shinkansen bullet trains, the fastest mass-transport system on earth. Japan as we know it was born. Over a half-century later, the Olympics are once again set to transform Japan. However, while this land of singing toilets and robot restaurants no longer needs to be brought up to date, it does need…