British GQ July - August 2020

Billie Eilish’s melancholy electropop has become the soundtrack of a world in crisis In one very clear way, the disco-grunge of Billie Eilish is the most apposite sound of 2020, a melancholy electropop that has unwittingly become the soundtrack of a world in crisis. It’s not just the existential teenage angst (she is still only 18, younger than Madonna, Lady Gaga or Joni Mitchell were before their first successes), nor the traditional youthful nonchalance (although that obviously helps, especially from a media perspective), but saliently her ability to appear distant and pertinent at the same time. The sophisticated noise she makes with her elder brother, Finneas O’Connell, isn’t bad either. The pair of them certainly produced one of the highlights of the One World: Together At Home concert earlier in the spring,…

Samantha BURKHART Samantha Burkhart styled Billie Eilish for this month’s cover shoot. “Billie has an uncompromising and visionary perspective on style,” says Burkhart. “Whenever we work together it is always a magical collaboration, in which I throw ideas at her and she takes them to places I could never even imagine.” Michael WOLFF GQ Contributing Editor Michael Wolff, author of Trump exposé Fire And Fury, turned his attention to the 45th president’s former would-be challenger, the ex-mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg, and his abortive attempt to secure the 2020 Democratic nomination. “There are three political arcs for New Yorkers,” says Wolff. “Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani – and each is surreal.” Ben ALLEN This month, GQ’s Online Production Co-ordinator, Ben Allen, interviewed singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers for GQ.co.uk ahead of her second album,…

If you’re looking for upsides to the coronavirus pandemic beyond binge-watching Disney+ and the dramatic fall in pollution we’ve not been allowed to go out and enjoy, take heart from this simple fact: the crisis has saved the NHS and BBC. Eight years ago, I wrote a little-read column expressing my frustration that so many people did not recognise the intangible value of the BBC and the NHS. What I argued was that the true worth of these public institutions was not merely in the service they provided, but their profound symbolic importance as an articulation of, for want of a better word, civilisation. After generations of deregulated capitalism, the BBC and the NHS were, and remain, the best, last expressions of a collective community, of some semblance of civic togetherness…

The virtual canopy leaves you to enjoy the panoramic, million-dollar view Car designers are well aware of the aesthetic appeal of ditching that pane of glass in front of your eyeballs. They’ve attempted to do so in the past, with the likes of the Mazda MX-5 Superlight or the Mercedes-Benz SLR Stirling Moss – and recently there has been a run of windscreen-less wonders. The Aston Martin V12 Speedster, for instance, and the Ferrari Monza SP. But this type of car has typically had one drawback: if driving at speed is to be even a remote possibility, you usually have to wear a helmet or it’s too uncomfortable. Which is why the new McLaren Elva has been turning heads. You can drive this car to 62mph in three seconds, no headgear…

In 2009, Pat Brown took a sabbatical from his biochem lab at Stanford University to decide how he could best fight climate change. Impossible Foods – and its “fake meat” that looks and tastes just like the real thing – was the result, and it has since raised more than £500 million in funding from backers including Bill Gates. Here’s how Brown got here… Spend big on R&D We recognised that [creating “meat” from plants] was an incredibly difficult thing to do. We invested in doing the R&D, knowing that it would be an uncertain period of time before we would have a product we could sell. We spent two-and-a-half years with dozens of awesome scientists just doing the hard research before we even seriously contemplated making a product. Don’t just plump for…

Lil Uzi Vert is practically machine-tooled to thrive in on-demand music Streaming has come into its own as a cultural force these past few months and that has only turbocharged Lil Uzi Vert’s star power. The 25-year-old is now the third musician in history to have had more than 50 entries on Billboard’s Streaming Songs chart, alongside Drake and Future. And there’s a reason for that: everything about him is practically machine-tooled to thrive in the world of on-demand music. His tracks encompass a multiplicity of genres – he calls himself a “rock star”; his sound is inflected with punk, drill, shoegaze and trap – which means he shows up on playlists of all stripes. And his personality, which is front and centre of what he does, has the kind of…