Esquire UK

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contributors

CHRIS BROOKS Brooks’ work is usually found in Esquire’s fashion pages. This month, he turns his lens to sandwiches. Not just any sandwiches and not just any lens: Brooks shot on a 10 x 8 large format field camera, producing detailed images 64 times larger than the standard 35mm negative or digital SLR sensor. He is also a contributor to *Wallpaper, WSJ and W Magazine. CHIGOZIE OBIOMA Twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, first in 2015 for his debut novel, The Fisherman, and again in 2019 for its follow-up, An Orchestra of Minorities, Nigerian author Obioma is recognised as one of the most exciting writers of fiction currently working. For Esquire, he contributes a new short story “Spiders in the House of Men”, set in the country of his birth. Obioma has also…

food envy

YOU BECOME INURED TO IT, after a time. The vicious emails, the tearful phone calls, the claim and counter-claim, the malevolence, the hissyfits, the recriminations, the threats of legal action… it all becomes routine. Negotiating the cover story of a glossy magazine is much like I imagine it must be to take part in an illegal, bare-knuckle boxing fight in a provincial car park, though less convivial — we, too, allow biting and gouging, but we don’t do mutual respect, and we certainly don’t tolerate sweat. And no consoling hugs afterwards in the pub. Like me, you may recently have seen the new Noah Baumbach film, Marriage Story. It’s a dramatisation of the director’s own painful divorce — and about 70 per cent as much fun as that makes it sound.…

getting his skates on

‘Artists are always busy making, just sometimes we don’t have a light shone on the work’ Close to midnight on an early October night in central London, at a pop-up social club hosted by Prada, the artist Theaster Gates performed some gospel hymns from his childhood. The club was dark, the racially and sartorially diverse crowd noisily drinking and yapping, but Gates, who is 46 and comes from Chicago, decided to change the mood. Up on a small stage and dressed in an olive-green boiler suit, with a simple piano accompaniment from his band, The Black Monks, he removed his glasses and began to sing. The crowd took a little cajoling — the drinks were free, after all — but eventually, an unusual serenity descended. It felt, if you tried not…

electric shock

You might remember The Simpsons episode when Homer joins the Stonecutters, a secretive and influential masonic-like society whose club song boasts, “Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star? We do.” Guttenberg’s career has long since slid out of sight, and now with the launch of the Porsche Taycan (pronounced “tie-khan” to save your blushes), we can finally say the electric car has been held back no longer. Why now? It’s hardly the first electric car on the scene after all, but it makes a strong case for being the most significant. For a start, it’s the first all-electric production supercar from one of the industry’s true heavyweights. Yes, the Tesla Model S is already on the scene but Porsche, whose flagship model the 911 has been an…

jockeying for position

Presented with a series of scantily clad female models at a lingerie shoot, Swedish photographer Andreas Palm had an idea: “I wanted to feel sexy in underwear too.” Three years later, his idea has become a brand: CDLP, which Palm founded with friend Christian Larson, sells premium men’s underwear designed to offer the same choice, ritual and enjoyment as women get from theirs. “Something that would add an emotion when you put it on in the morning,” Palm says. Cut from Lyocell — a cellulose fibre made from wood pulp that’s more breathable than cotton and naturally antibacterial and biodegradable — CDLP pants are pitched at modern men who expect more from their underwear’s maker. “What we’ve been seeing are athletic football players in black and white photos flashing their abs, and it’s…