Esquire UK

MARIANO VIVANCO’S photography has appeared in magazines including Vanity Fair, Vogue, and the FT’s How To Spend It. ‘FITS FOR A KING’, PAGE 136 TIM LEWIS is a features writer for The Observer and an editor-at-large for Esquire. He is the author of Land of Second Chances: The Impossible Rise of Rwanda’s Cycling Team. ‘THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER’, PAGE 156 MATT HIND’S photography clients include Margaret Howell, Anderson & Sheppard and Moët & Chandon. ‘STREET STYLE’, PAGE 162 DAVID NEWTON has taken photographs for The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair, as well as for Dior, Nike and Tom Ford Beauty. ‘THE WATCH REPORT’, PAGE 99 LUKE DAY is one of the world’s leading menswear stylists and a frequent contributor to The Sunday Times Style. ‘FITS FOR A KING’, PAGE 136 DIPO FALOYIN is a senior editor at Vice…

“Ginger awoke around 1.30pm, rolled over, went back to sleep for a few minutes, then called her mother. ‘How was Elvis?’ her mother asked, and Ginger said she didn’t know, he had never come back to bed, maybe she had better go check on him. She washed and put on her make-up in her own bathroom, then knocked on Elvis’s bathroom door. When there was no answer, she pushed on it and discovered him lying on the floor, his gold pyjama bottoms down around his ankles, his face buried in a pool of vomit on the thick shag carpet. In a daze, she called downstairs and asked to speak to someone on duty, and the maid put Al Strada on the line. She thought there was something wrong, she told…

Somewhere in the wilds of Cumbria there is a bus, and on top of that bus there sits another, slightly smaller bus. This unholy splicing — the gentle hump of a VW campervan fused onto the hulking cuboid of an American community coach — is characteristic of the off-grid “Skoolie” movement in the US, which sees people swapping bricks and mortar for life on the road in a converted municipal vehicle. But that must be where the similarity ends, because there can’t be many Skoolies with an Aga. You can rent this mega-bus via Hinterlandes, a company established in the Lake District by Hannah and John Graham. They have a port-folio of remote abodes dotted across the Lakes — including a hut, a cabin and a Jetstream caravan — all of…

When Akwasi Brenya-Mensa was a child, growing up in Mitcham, south London, he became unofficially anointed as his “mum’s assistant” at mealtimes. The eldest of four boys, Akwasi was the one who found himself in the kitchen with his mother, peeling sprouts at Christmas or mashing things in the asanka, a ridged clay pot ubiquitous in Ghana — from where both his parents emigrated to England in the 1970s — which is used to pound food smooth. “To me, it was like this massive science experiment. It was like alchemy,” says the 40-year-old chef, who trained under The Great British Menu’s champion of champions James Cochran at Restaurant 12:51 in north London, and whose own restaurant, Tatale, is due to open in south London in the late spring. “It was like,…

In the summer of 2020, as dormant sports leagues plotted their comebacks amid rising Covid rates, the NBA turned to an unlikely place for help: a Finnish jeweller, albeit one with a twist. Pioneering smart-ring start-up Ōura offered teams the ability to analyse their athletes’ heart rates, respiratory health and body temperature through a titanium band and dedicated app, potentially identifying early signs of the virus (at which point, players would get turfed out of the league-wide bubble). The lightweight rings are far less obtrusive than smart watches, which convinced the NBA to purchase 2,000 of the sleek, sensor-packed devices. Following the restart, the season ended without a single Covid case. What began life in 2015 as a simple sleep-tracking tool had now earned a reputation as a public-health must-have. Sales…

In 1991, Cornelia Parker decided to blow up a garden shed. The shed didn’t belong to any-one in particular; in fact, it was a composite, built from various bits of other sheds, and filled with the tools and toys and general life-detritus that Parker had collected from friends and neighbours and car-boot sales. Parker asked the Army School of Ammunition if they would explode the shed for her, and to her surprise they said yes. After they’d done it, Parker gathered up the charred and shattered fragments and suspended them on wires around a single bare lightbulb. She called the piece “Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View”. Later, the owners of an old pram that her neighbours had donated came back for it, but it was too late. “It was…