Esquire UK

LUC BRAQUET’S pictures have appeared in Vogue, ELLE and Kinfolk. He has shot advertising campaigns for Graff diamonds, MAC cosmetics and Maurice Lacroix watches. ‘OFFICE APPROPRIATE’, PAGE 118 CHRIS FLOYD’S photographs have appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. His retrospective, Not Just Pictures, will be published in October. ‘SOUND AND VISION’, PAGE 84 BOO GEORGE is a fashion and portrait photographer. His work has appeared in Numero, LOVE and Harper’s Bazaar. His clients have included Chanel, Hermès and Loro Piana. ‘MR SMITH GOES TO WESTEROS’, PAGE 108 SAM KNIGHT is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold. ‘MY ONE TRUE PREMONITION’, PAGE 80 CJ HAUSER is a novelist and teacher of creative writing. Her collection of essays, The Crane Wife, is out…

BEFORE YOU BARGE YOUR WAY INTO THIS ISSUE OF Esquire with all the delicacy of a finance bro on a bonus-week Negroni binge, turn the magazine face-down to the outside back cover and check out the power shoulder on that Prada coat. Hard to ignore that guy on the way in to work. All done? Good. Now turn to page 10 and get a load of the mile-wide lapels on that gold overcoat from Dolce & Gabbana. Then, feast your magpie eyes on our cover star, Matt Smith, in Giorgio Armani whistle, crisp white shirt and tie, on the opening spread of his interview. Now take a stroll through our office-appropriate fashion shoot, spotlighting the best of the autumn/winter collections, and place your orders for the sharpest suits on the market. For…

It has become a commonplace of travel journalism to frame the experience of visiting an extremely beautiful place through the prism of Pixar, the American quality-content supplier that renders every scene in its fabulous movies pixel perfect. Every city is pathologically well-ordered, every landscape is gentle and verdant, every sky is blue, every smile is dazzling. Pixar makes the world anew. It looks a bit like the one we live in, but cleaner, shinier… better. The Cotswolds, according to this rubric, are the English countryside as if CGId by Pixar. Notting Hill is London with the Pixar filter on. The West Village is New York, Pixar-fied. I have friends, lucky people, who have a splendid house in a tiny village in rural Provence, and every other person who visits them there…

Find someone in your life who talks about you the way Robert Chambers talks about agnolotti. “There’s a special technique to getting them right,” says the 39-year-old chef, who heads up Luca in Clerkenwell, London, of the Piedmontese pasta variety. “They’re the most perfect shape, like a cushion. They hold the sauce beautifully. When you eat them, they’re just lovely. The shape, the mouthfeel… To be honest, any ravioli or tortellini or agnolotti I can fill with maximum flavour, I just love that.” Whatever qualms Esquire had about asking a grown man to name his favourite pasta shape were quickly allayed talking to Chambers, for whom pasta — and Italian food in general — is a serious business. Luca is the second finedining restaurant from the founders of the Michelin-starred The…

Football is in a strange place right now. In the past year we’ve seen the announcement and swift rejection of a European Super League, the government sanctioning and sale of Chelsea Football Club, the use of extreme force by the French police on seemingly innocent fans queuing to get into the Champions League Final, and the former heads of Fifa and Uefa in court on charges of corruption. That’s not to mention the ick of the imminent winter World Cup in Qatar. Football is bigger business than ever. As global entertainment, it is unmatched. Yet many would argue that the sport has been forever sullied by such scandals, and the many more besides. Not merely that its image has been besmirched, but that something rotten has taken root. “We believe there’s…

Beyond profit and critical acclaim, surely the truest test of a product’s success is whether its name gets assimilated into a collective lexicon or, better yet, transformed into a verb. (If you have a question only the internet can answer, you don’t use a search engine, you “Google” it.) So, aside from the fact we are still using them 125 years later, that we reach for a “Swiss Army Knife” — rather than a “multi-tool”, or some other generic piece of hardware — is testament to the peerless design of Victorinox’s original “Officer’s and Sports Knife”. Designed by the Swiss inventor and Victorinox founder Karl Elsener, the knife was first patented in 1897 and featured two blades, a corkscrew, a can opener, a punch awl and, crucially, a screwdriver — the…