Esquire UK

esquire

Alex Bilmes Editor-in-Chief Deputy Editor Johnny Davis Creative Director Nick Millington Features Director Miranda Collinge Fashion Director Catherine Hayward Entertainment Director / Associate Editor Tom Macklin Photo Director / Managing Editor Henny Manley Style Director Charlie Teasdale Content Director Will Hersey Chief Copy Editor Brendan Fitzgerald Deputy Style Editor Finlay Renwick Copy Editor Josh Bolton Art Director Lisa Barlow Senior Designer Lauren Jones Designer Drew Burns Assistant Commissioning Editor / Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief Rachel Fellows Fashion Assistant Dan Choppen Editors-at-Large Sanjiv Bhattacharya (US Correspondent), Giles Coren, Andrew O’Hagan, Tom Parker Bowles, Will Self Photographers-at-Large Tom Craig, Simon Emmett esquire.com/uk Deputy Digital Editor Nick Pope Senior Digital Writer Olivia Ovenden Digital Style Editor Murray Clark Junior Digital Writer Tom Nicholson Social Media Editor Hannah Enderby Contributing Editors Tim Adams / Olie Arnold / Tom Barber / Richard Benson / Kevin Braddock / Peter Bradshaw Mick Brown / Ed Caesar / Dan Davies / Martin Deeson / Joe Dunthorne /…

contributors

RICHARD BENSON A former editor of The Face, Benson’s first book, the family memoir The Farm, was a number one bestseller, shortlisted for The Guardian First Book Award and serialised as a Radio Four Book of the Week. His follow-up, The Valley, won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography. For this Art and Culture issue, he turns his attention to the seemingly unstoppable rise of the podcast, talking to the key players behind one of the least expected media success stories of recent years. An Esquire contributing editor, Benson also writes for The Daily Telegraph. ALASDAIR MCLELLAN Arguably the most exciting and in-demand portrait and fashion photographer and filmmaker currently working, McLellan brings his very British sensibility and aesthetic — tough yet tender — to magazines including Vogue, Love and i-D, as…

all at sea

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF “A SPRAWLING, UNCONTAINABLE SURGE of writing that knows or recognises no genre boundaries or formal politesse.” That’s Miranda Collinge, Esquire’s features director, writing in this issue. She’s describing Herman Melville’s quixotic epic, Moby-Dick, or The Whale, rather than this publication. But you’ll forgive, I hope, my having felt a chilly shudder of recognition. While clearly only an obscenity-spouting madman would draw comparison between the glossy flimflam of a men’s style magazine and the raging magnificence of one of the most important works of fiction of the 19th century, still something in Miranda’s sentence resonated with me. It was the idea of something escaping its shackles, slipping its mooring, careening out of control. In Melville’s case the result was a timeless masterpiece. In ours? Hmm. I suppose there must be magazine editors, captains fantastic,…

double gazing

Lucian Freud, unlike his grandfather Sigmund Freud, did not indulge in introspection. He was interested in paint itself, its messiness, its texture. Flesh interested him, and the human gaze. Rather than finding the soul of his sitter, he was hunting, as he worked, for the drama he could create by capturing the contours and surfaces of the body. His paintings, including his self-portraits, give the impression of immediacy and roughness, while also being filled with meticulous and precise judgment, created with brushwork that is alert to light and suggests essence. Part of the excitement of looking at one of Freud’s portraits is the mixture of spontaneity in the way the paint is applied and a sense of fierce control in the composition and the vast quantity of detailed work in the…

turn back time

Were someone to ask you to close your eyes and imagine a sports watch, a swivelling Art Deco design on a luxury leather strap may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso is slim, elegant and classically proportioned. But when it debuted in 1931 it was the original sports watch, its flippable face a clever solution to protect it on the wrists of polo players whacking a ball about in British Empire India. These days it’s considered a dress model, the exposed back an open invitation to personalise it with an engraving. Yet it retains its sporty DNA, prominently so in 2019’s Reverso Tribute Small Seconds with its burgundy dial and matching Casa Fagliano strap from the Argentinian bootmakers responsible for equestrian footwear. It is also a…

do androids dream of electric suits?

It is an intriguing dress, if you can call it that. It could be a cape, or maybe a poncho. Light reflects from its surface, a shimmering, translucent silver with oil-slick pinks and golds seemingly woven into the fabric. Named “Iridescence” it was designed by The Fabricant, a recently founded Dutch fashion house. In May this year, it was bought by a Canadian tech executive called Richard Ma for £7,800 at auction. A gift for his wife, Rachel. Rather than being made from lace, silk, cotton, polyester or any other fabric, natural or synthetic, it is a dress formed out of pixels. A computer-generated garment that is superimposed onto a photograph of its “wearer”. If its creators and a growing band of designers, consumers and professional forward-thinkers are to be believed,…