Tabla de contenidos para January/February 2020 en Esquire UK

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.…

Every ring designed by The Great Frog starts off as a block of wax in the hands of Reino Lehtonen-Riley. It might end up as a skull or an eerily lifelike eyeball framed in nine-carat gold, made by the same woman who creates prosthetics for the London Eye Hospital, or a simple silver wedding band. First the wax, followed by a master ring, a metal cast and then the final product, which will be worked into shape by one of the 40-odd jewellers inside The Great Frog’s windowless, subterranean Shoreditch workshop, beneath the coffee shops and construction sites of East London. With his stubble and slicked-back hair, Lehtonen-Riley, 40, is the archetypal rock ’n’ roll jeweller. “I’m also the owner, designer, cleaner, HR and shop-fitter,” he says. On the morning…

There’s a running joke among the partners at Pentagram, the celebrated design agency, sparked by a recent AGM, where they all piled into a bus. “We’re being driven up a mountain and it’s very bendy,” recalls Angus Hyland, when we meet at its London HQ. “When we get to the top someone said, ‘I imagined the headlines: “Fatal Road Crash: Paula Scher, and others…”’” Pentagram designs architecture and interiors, books, branding and corporate “identities”, films, products, posters and websites and has five international offices, including London and New York. It is the world’s largest independent design consultancy and maybe unique. By its own admission it was established by “three hippies” and remains owned and run by 21 partners. They have equal say. There is no CEO, CFO or COO. Profits…

While the actress Sophie Cookson was filming The Trial of Christine Keeler, a new BBC drama series about the Profumo affair of the early Sixties, in which the 19-year-old showgirl was revealed to be having simultaneous liaisons with the Conservative Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and a Soviet naval attaché — a scandal that eventually helped bring down the government of Harold Macmillan — she noticed a contemporary parallel. Former Conservative Party publicist Carrie Symonds was plastered over the front pages for her relationship with Boris Johnson. “So often still the focus is on the young woman,” says Cookson, who plays Keeler. “So this does feel like the perfect story to be telling.” It’s mid-afternoon and Cookson is sitting cross-legged in jeans and trainers in a members’ club…

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CONSIDERING THE SANDWICH WAS “INVENTED” circa 1762, a quarter-millennium ago, it took a long time for someone to realise that putting fists of ham hock, a fried egg, shoestring fries, piccalilli and malt vinegar mayo in the middle of some focaccia would be off-the-charts mind-blowing. It was, in fact, late 2014 and the visionary was Max Halley, the 37-year-old proprietor of Max’s Sandwich Shop in Crouch Hill, north London, and author of Max’s Sandwich Book. The third wave sandwich was born. As befits his creations, Halley has maverick tendencies. He swears he’s worn a black polo shirt every day for 12 years (no particular brand: “Fruit of the Loom?”) He has a visceral hatred of cheese. He has a quite literally unhealthy obsession with throwing strange ingredients in a deep-fat…

HE TRIED AGAIN THAT EVENING FOR WHAT MUST HAVE BEEN THE UMPTEENTH TIME. He hurried home after work, peeled from his body the coveralls that blew dust into the air as he slung them off over his head and put on clean clothes. Then he turned into the alley filled with potholes and approached the old house on Isolo Street. But by the time he got near the back fence, the courage that had accreted over the course of the long, hot day had leaked out. He saw the same woman from the previous day standing on the front porch, plaiting braids into the hair of a little girl. Even though close figures had begun to morph into silhouettes, there was still enough light for anyone who knew him to…

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…

In a genuine first for Esquire, we’ve collaborated with Highland Park to create a unique limited-edition whisky — the Highland Park Esquire Single Cask (ABV 60.3 per cent), launched at this year’s Townhouse event. Carefully chosen by master whisky maker Gordon Motion for its special combination of strength and subtlety, the aromas are easy to detect and arrive in waves — marzipan, nut, vanilla. Trademark Highland Park notes of heather honey with a touch of peatiness, born of the distillery’s Orkney location, are also very much in evidence. On tasting it for the first time, Martin Markvardsen, Highland Park’s global brand ambassador, immediately put it in his top five of all the single casks he’s ever tasted. And considering that number runs to a couple of hundred, it tells its…

Two years ago, Kaiwei Tang and his business partner raised £310,000 to launch Light Phone, a credit card-sized device that only did three things (calls, texts, alarm) and offered respite from our connected world. For Light Phone II it was £2.75m. “The timing resonates more,” Tang says. “Google, Samsung and Apple have all introduced wellness apps, trying to react to this social media backlash. You sit in a restaurant, or a subway, or in your living room not talking, and it’s crazy how we’re all staring down. This problem is only going to get worse.” Light Phone II does more than its predecessor. It keeps the same minimalist aesthetic but adds Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. You can also add functionality like a calculator or music player. There’s an apparent contradiction: more…

John Pawson has a problem with lights. “The big issue is seeing [home] fittings during the daytime. I always want to put them away and bring them out at night, like candles.” He concedes they do have their fans. “I suppose a lot of people like to look at antique lamps. And obviously they’re useful. It’s just in the daytime, they’re a thing that you… fall over.” The celebrated minimalist and architect to both monks and Calvin Klein is known for his austerity, restraint and love of empty spaces. You’re unlikely to fall over anything in one of his projects. So when it came to designing lighting with WonderGlass, the high-end “London company with an Italian soul”, the solution was a collection that “kind of disappears” in the daytime. Inspired…

I joined Facebook when I was 14. The first status I posted, on 5 September 2006, at 11.42am, read, simply, “Cold lampin’”. (I was a big Public Enemy fan.) All that cold lampin’ must have worn me out, though, because at 4.27pm, I updated my status to read, “Exhausted”. Whenever I think to delete my Facebook account — which, since Mark Zuckerberg’s charmless testimony before Congress in 2018, has become a daily occurrence — I remember that the company already has a record of my thoughts and feelings going back more than 13 years. Facebook knows, for instance, that on 23 September 2006, at 9.59am, I was “getting my Jew on”. At 1.20pm that same day, I was “blasting music and shouting ‘Wu-Tang! Wu-Tang!’” Facebook knows that on 3 October…

In search of a location fit for the season’s best menswear, the Esquire fashion team reserved a table at Hélène Darroze at The Connaught. Recently reopened, the results of a two-month refurbishment are exceptional. French interior designer Pierre Yovanovitch has reimagined the main dining room, using deep hues and rich textiles to create a modern, refined space, while the redesigned show kitchen downstairs boasts a Chef’s Table where up to 10 guests can dine in an informal setting, with dishes prepared and presented personally by the chefs. The refreshed menu complements the surroundings, too, ensuring the two Michelin-starred restaurant remains the perfect venue for intimate, fine dining — as well as an Esquire fashion shoot. Carlos Place, Mayfair, London W1; the-connaught.co.uk Photographer’s assistant/digital operator: Marsy Hild Thorsdottir | Fashion assistant:…

“WHAT IS IT LIKE?” is surely one of the questions any piece of descriptive prose — such as an article about that storied Marseillais dish, the bouillabaisse — must answer. And to answer this, “What is it like?” adequately, it must in turn give its readers some sense of not just the fish stew’s taste, but its appearance, its texture, its aromas, its sheer nourishing heft. This is by no means all, for the merely sensuous cannot hope to capture the full essence of the bouillabaisse. Why? Because one thing that must be said of it at the very outset — in advance of any attempt to describe this gastronomic gestalt at all — is that a true bouillabaisse is, in its own way, not so much thick fish broth…

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‘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…

A film’s “title drop”, when a character speaks the name of the movie as part of the dialogue, usually has audience members grinning (or groaning) in recognition. The Rhythm Section, however, has one that gets you moving to the music of your insides. Jude Law is on title-dropping duty, as his former MI6 operative Boyd — that’s Boyd, not Bond — explains to would-be assassin Stephanie Patrick, played by Blake Lively, that to fire her gun accurately she must first control her body’s rhythm section, to think of the heart as the drums and breathing as the bass. Esquire’s man, rapt in row B of Paramount Pictures’ London screening room, could not help but retune his internal percussion on Law’s instruction, and achieved an unexpected moment of zen, along with…

We need a new photograph of you!” yells the receptionist at the gym. Not because I am slimmer or fitter or stronger in some before-and-after way that might serve the gym’s own push for self-promotion. No. They need a new picture of me because I have aged. The receptionist, probably still at school when I first came here, is trying to read my expression, since I have frozen just past the turnstile to contemplate my fate in one of the place’s many mirrors. To contemplate my fate, and the fact it has indeed been 16 years since I first came in. “Sixteen years of fitness!” he shouts as I trudge down to change. There, in another inescapable mirror, I see what I’ve become. Balder and wiser, a living witness to…

ONCE, 1976 I THINK IT WAS, I HAD A FRIEND in London who decided to celebrate selling her house with a party. The property had been completely cleared of all furniture and pictures, and was bare but for a freezer full of ice-cold bottles of vodka and a small table on which sat a kilogram tin of wild Beluga caviar. There was music, too, from a cassette player. I sat on the deep freeze with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a table knife in the other that I dug into the caviar at regular intervals, and ate the gleaming black pearls off the blade. I was delirious and deliriously happy. I knew then that I’d never have the chance to indulge in this way again. Nor have…

1. LUNCH, BACKWARDS The table had been booked for one o’clock, but two was fast approaching and we hadn’t yet taken our seats. A fierce wind hurried clouds across the sky and ushered leaves across the terrace of L’Oustau de Baumanière, in the town of Les Baux-de-Provence, in the south of France. Heston Blumenthal had just started on his negroni, and sparked up a Marlboro, when a waiter approached and wondered if the famous chef would prefer to eat his lunch in reverse, as he had done once before at this restaurant: begin with petits fours, then pudding, followed by cheese, then main courses, starters, finally amuse bouche. The wine would go backwards, too: dessert, red, white. It was a Thursday in early October. We were a party of four:…

When Esquire arrived in rural Provence in October, to profile Heston Blumenthal, perhaps Britain’s least predictable chef (see pages 164–177), we found him in fine fettle except for one inconvenient injury. Blumenthal’s right wrist was strapped up, the legacy of a cycling accident in the summer that had seen him take a bone-shattering tumble from his state of the art electric mountain bike. He had been pedalling it in the local mountain range, Les Alpilles, and had come a cropper when applying too much pressure to the front brake. It turned out Blumenthal wasn’t the only celebrity cook who’d done himself a mischief on this infernal machine. Malheureusement, Raymond Blanc, another recent visitor to the Blumenthal residence in the village of Eygalières, had a nasty fall just a few feet…