British GQ May 2016

GEORGE Miller’s extraordinary dystopian road-rage movies had – if you’ll excuse me – been all the rage when God was a boy, back in the Seventies and Eighties, but did any of us think that he – Max himself, previously played by an actor, Mel Gibson, who had moved from A-lister to social pariah in the Hollywood pecking order – could be rebooted with any success? Didn’t it rise and fall and wither in the Australian outback, a relic of a bygone age, when black leather and a bad attitude were all you needed to wander a post- apocalyptic wasteland? Honestly, the last time Mad Max ventured into the world of the multiplex Tina Turner was in the charts. Hell, she was even in the film. Seriously, did anyone sense it…

Alexi LUBOMIRSKI Photographer Alexi Lubomirski shot Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron for our cover story. “Charlize is delightful to work with, since she is so comfortable in her own skin,” says Lubomirski. Theron, whose recent film Mad Max: Fury Road won more Oscars than any other this year, had her portrait taken at LA’s Milk Studios. “All the styling was black,” says Lubomirski. “It had a chic sexiness.” Amol RAJAN In his feature on Indian Premier League cricket, Independent editor-at-large Amol Rajan considers how the country’s growing power is harming the sport, riding roughshod over historical links with other cricketing nations in order to disassociate itself from its colonial past. “Vast swathes of the Indian administration are prone to corruption,” explains Rajan. “And corruption breeds bully boys.” Nick CARVELL GQ’s new Associate Style Editor, Nick Carvell,…

David Bowie was introduced by his hairdresser to Iman Abdulmajid in 1990. The Somali-American former model was wary of the superstar but he was entranced. He filled her hotel room with gardenias, wooed her. They were together until he died. A very different chap, the Scottish neoconservative historian Niall Ferguson, was similarly transfixed by another Somali beauty, Ayaan Hirsi Ali at a Time magazine gala in 2010. Ali, a Dutch-American author, is a religious insurrectionist who renounced and now denounces Islam, so gets serious death threats. Ferguson left his wife and married Ali in 2011. GQ columnist Tony Parsons describes the night he met his Japanese wife, Yuriko: “I walked into a Japanese restaurant where she was eating dinner alone at the bar and lightning struck.” They have been together…

IN the modelling Hunger Games that is the world of new-intake Victoria’s Secret Angels (the prize: fame on the level of Adriana Lima or Miranda Kerr) Sara Sampaio is outpacing the field – officially. You see, when analysts pulled together data including social media followers (over 5.4 million), marketability (24 magazine covers) and popularity (see picture) they discovered that the Portuguese 24-year-old was the most valuable of the ten women who earned their wings last year. So remember the name. Sampaio: it’s the most important you’ll learn this summer.…

HAVING reinvented car customisation for Ferrari with the Tailor-Made concept based on his own sartorial savoir-faire, Lapo Elkann, the Agnelli heir, has pursued his creative flair far beyond the family’s Fiat business. Behold: Garage Italia Customs, ready to wrap, reconfigure and otherwise rev up your favourite toy, whether it rides on wings or wheels, mono or multihulls. “In terms of materials and opportunities, it’s really an evolution of Tailor-Made,” says Elkann. “Tailor-Made offered a selection of approaches within the company’s rules and regulations. In this new scenario, the rules and regulations are much broader, the opportunities far greater. And we are able to do them not just for consumers but also for manufacturers. We won’t say yes to anything that we can’t do excellently as we want to be the best.…

Tory minister Matt Hancock made a beeline straight for Eddie Redmayne at the Baftas, comically loitering nearby so he could pretend to bump into him. There was no chance of his colleague Therese Coffey missing out either: she brought along a selfie stick to take the perfect red carpet snap. Sir Eric Pickles celebrated his knighthood with a party at the speaker’s sumptuous Commons residence. But John Bercow looked a little put out by Sir Eric’s jibe about his palatial taxpayer-funded home: “I hope he doesn’t exercise his ‘right to buy!’” The left of the Labour Party split long ago, but now I hear the right of the party isn’t getting on either. Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt strongly disagree about how best to defeat the Corbynistas. So much so that, at…