British GQ June 2017

If a week is a long time in politics, 20 years is an eternity. In May 1997, Tony Blair’s Labour Party won a landslide general election victory, the largest in its history, making him, at the age of 43, the youngest prime minister since 1812. Flags were unfurled, glasses were raised, there was dancing in the street and general merriment ensued. Street parties were both metaphorical and literal. Britain experienced something of a brave new dawn. Tories were soon banished to the boondocks and the country was enveloped in a rosy egalitarian glow. New Labour were in power and Blair was suddenly in his pomp. (The euphoria seems overly dramatic when you look back now, but when you see images of the Blairs walking into Number Ten, their arrival was…

PA HÜE DE FONTENAY Are Parisians the pinnacle of cool? They certainly look it in our “Red Hot And Blue” fashion feature, which presents a denim-clad coterie of the French capital’s locals shot by PA Hüe de Fontenay. “Most Parisians, whoever they are, however they’re dressed, always have something about them that looks expensive,” says the photographer. “They can go from day to night in the same outfit.” Alastair CAMPBELL GQ has been asking Contributing Editor Alastair Campbell to interview Tony Blair for the last two years. Now, as a result of the current political tumult, he finally agreed to sit down with his old boss, the former Labour prime minister. “Given the weak leadership at home and abroad, we need his voice more than ever,” says Campbell. Bill PRINCE The GQ biannual watch report…

Sometimes you really only notice things when they’re staring you right in the face. Or, in this case, when you’re wearing them on your feet. OK, so there’s this investment banker I know, a man who worked for one of the big banks out of New York in the Nineties, and who now spends his time bouncing between Hong Kong, Mumbai and Amsterdam like a pinstriped pinball, chasing money that seems to move even faster than he does. He’s in his mid forties and spends his fashion cash on the sorts of things that are still going to be acceptable long after the bloggers, hipsters and trouser cognoscenti have moved on. Like most of his breed, he invests in clothes rather than simply wearing them, buying entry-level Savile Row suits,…

THE RISING STAR THERE was a contention back in antiquity: “nothing comes from nothing” (or “nihil fit ex nihilo” if you ever find yourself trying to impress the foreign secretary). It’s an axiom worth remembering when you encounter the likes of Ana de Armas. Although the 29-year-old might seem to have come out of nowhere to own the cinema – she stars in this summer’s Scott Eastwood heist film Overdrive and plays the female lead in this year’s event picture Blade Runner 2049 – she has been quietly building her profile since 2006. First she had Spanish TV shows; then, after moving to Los Angeles in 2014, Hollywood outings: re-watch Keanu Reeves’ Knock Knock, Robert de Niro’s Hands Of Stone or Jonah Hill’s War Dogs. She’s the Cuban actor stealing all…

GOT A swimming pool in your basement? We feel for you. Innovative architects are equipping their buildings with what design critics have come to call “sky pools”. Either cantilevered over the side, or suspended between two towers, it’s a gravity-defying embellishment that has won favour around the globe. Part of the allure is the sheer thought of how difficult such a feature must be to engineer: water weighs 62.4 pounds per cubic foot – and if a glass structure is being used to bridge two independently moving towers (buildings always move) then there are obvious complications. One of our favourite examples of a cantilevered pool can be found at the Okura Prestige hotel in Bangkok, overlooking the heart of Thailand’s builtup capital. Designed by Palmer & Turner Thailand for the Japanese…

It’s not always easy to tell whether the design of one version of a product is better than another, but there are exceptions, like aircraft seats. If you spend a long-haul flight on a seat that folds out flat like a bed, you’ll stand a fighting chance of sleeping. If not, you’ll risk stumbling off the aircraft feeling shattered with a throbbing head and sciatica. In the early years of air travel, cabins were furnished with armchairs and beds. Then came an arsenal of health and safety regulations, which decreed that furniture had to be secured to the floor and stipulated the degree to which the seats should be resistant to fire, turbulence, slops, spills and so on. Designing aircraft seats has since been a battle against the laws of physics to…