Tabla de contenidos para Autumn 2023 en Esquire UK

MY MUM LOVED BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. She also loved The Beatles (especially George) and The Stones (especially Mick), and Elton John and Paul Simon and, perhaps not quite as ardently, Rod Stewart — he made her laugh — among the boomer stars of the classic-rock era. But Springsteen was her favourite. There really was no contest. She was silly for The Boss. You might think there’s nothing remarkable in that. She was a boomer herself, born in 1950, six months after Bruce. Had she not died, in 2021, she would be 73 now, the same age as him. He was and is one of the most popular rock stars of their generation. Why wouldn’t she have been a fan, even singled him out for special attention, as so many others have…

In February of this year, Hugo Worsley, founder of knife brand Allday Goods, conducted an experiment. He had been considering expanding Allday’s product range of high-performing, competitively priced kitchen knives, and had been scouring car boot sales for traditional, Sheffield-style table knives, the bone handles of which he replaced with the colourful marbled-plastic ones for which his company — which has already collaborated with brands including Maldon Sea Salt and Paul Smith — is known. When he had made 200 table knives, he decided to sell them at another car-boot sale in Stoke Newington, north London, in the middle of winter — four for £5, as he informed Allday Goods’ Instagram followers — to see if there might be interest. “From before 7am there was a queue of people waiting…

With a few famous exceptions — various princes, including Prince — purple has never been considered a colour with which the sharp dressed man should fill his wardrobe. But this season, a number of designers suggest options. Daniel Lee’s first collection for Burberry turned to the grape-soda shade to inject some fizz into slouchy sweaters and oversized suiting. In Milan, Giorgio Armani worked a similar tone into both his signature collection and his latest line for Emporio Armani. Fendi, Gucci and Louis Vuitton also received the memo, using intense tints of violet to electrify their collections. Rising Manchester label Clints Inc has employed a playful purple, somewhere between Tinky-Winky and Thanos, to zhuzh up its recent streetwear drops. Fashion’s sudden partiality for purple is part of a wider trend in…

“Spotify is disgusting,” says Manuel Sanz, flipping through the CD racks at Reckless Records, the second-hand music shop that’s been an institution in London’s Soho since 1984. “If there’s a band I like, I buy the product.” This morning, Sanz and his 12-year-old daughter are shopping for American punk CDs, specifically anything by the North Carolina group Polvo. What happened to the vinyl revival? Wasn’t that all the rage? “Vinyl is fine,” he says. “But I still have my CD collection from the 1990s. My player’s bust — you have to push the drawer closed — but it’s the easiest way to listen to stuff.” Shop assistant Connor Winyard says Sanz is far from alone. “When I first started working here, two years ago, it was 80-20 [per cent] vinyl-CDs,”…

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RICHARD RIAKPORHE IS A BRITISH BOXER on the up. In September, all being well, the 34-year-old from south London — nickname: The Midnight Train — will fight for his first world title, in the IBF cruiserweight division. Riakporhe’s professional record of 16 fights, 16 wins, 12 by knockout, makes him one of the most exciting homegrown talents in recent memory. Once he’s world champion, his ambition is to unify the cruiserweight belts and then to move up to heavyweight. Meanwhile, Riakporhe has a successful side-hustle as a model for fashion brands including Burberry and Dior. On a Wednesday in July, Riakporhe drove from his training base at Loughborough University to rural Wiltshire, and Hillwood Stud, where racehorses of the future are bred and those who are already competing spend their…

IT WOULD BE FAIR TO SAY I TAKE IT BADLY. Do I want to go to a remote Austrian medical health resort for 10 days to experience first-hand the booming industrial wellness-travel complex and write about it for Esquire? 10 days? This is the kind of thing you’d threaten me with if you wanted me to reveal where I’d hidden the diamonds. Or to get me to tell you the secret codes. The suggestion that I’d do it the day after getting back from Glastonbury feels totally inhumane. I say I’ll do five, final offer. It still feels like a prison sentence. Then again, it might be a useful way to detox from the festival. Or a different way, at any rate. Over the years, I have honed my own…

If you haven’t heard of Hex cookware, know that Gordon Ramsay, a brand ambassador, once called them the “Rolls-Royce of frying pans”. At upwards of £700 a pop, they can withstand temperatures of 900 degrees and are apparently a breeze to wash up. Think of a product, the more obscure the better — cat food, cooking chocolate, kitchen cabinets — and you’ll find a company trying to bask in the reflected glory of a niche car company founded 117 years ago. Of course, Rolls-Royce remains, resolutely, and securely, the only Rolls-Royce of cars. To lose that status would represent a spectacular dropping of the ball for the team in charge. The only safe thing to do, really, is to double down. Sometimes the company’s attention to detail can seem a…

In a private members’ club in London’s Knightsbridge, Nicolas Pickaerts is showing me something made from burl wood and Damascus steel. The nine-inch object has been handmade in Wiltshire, by the chef and farmer Ben Bodman, formerly of the triple-Michelin-starred restaurant L’Enclume. It is quite something: the surface has been hand-etched with a kind of swirling abstract pattern that suggests something both ancient and of scientific function. The handle feels so good in your hand you don’t want to put it down. It is a pizza wheel. A pizza wheel that Pickaerts’ company sells for £980. Who would buy such an item? The answer is potentially any of the million monthly customers who browse Abask, the online “unique and collectable objects” shop founded by Pickaerts and Tom Chapman, his former…

At a festival last year, Romy Madley Croft was performing “Strong” — a trance collaboration with the DJ Fred Again, from her forthcoming debut album Mid Air — when she realised something was off with the crowd. “I felt like they were moving a lot with their chests,” she says. “I wanted people to move with their hips.” The problem, Madley Croft explains, was the bassline. She returned to the studio with Fred Again and tinkered with the song in hope of prompting a different movement. “And it worked: I played it out again, and I felt a different energy in the crowd.” That admirable determination for a harmonious dancefloor may explain why Mid Air has been preceded by “long-awaited” for a while now, but there are other factors. The…

It’s been a decade since Nicholas Daley graduated from Central Saint Martins, and he feels “blessed” to have plenty of notches on his hand-crocheted belt already. “If someone told me back then that during the next 10 years I’d be an LVMH Prize finalist, recipient of the BFC Designer Fashion Fund and continuously working with some of the best stores in the world, I think I’d be pretty happy,” says the 33-year-old designer, in the upbeat yet unassuming manner that turns out to be his neutral gear. “I’m very fortunate to have experienced these sorts of successes.” Over iced tea at his studio — a vibrant space in a converted warehouse in Tottenham, north London — I meet Daley to talk about his newest notch: a one-night takeover of London’s…

The textiles, techniques, prints, colours and crafts of India have long provided material, literal and metaphorical, for Western fashion designers and shoppers, as well as backdrops for countless fashion shoots and shows. But India’s native designers have not been accorded the same prominence and respect as their nation’s sartorial traditions. “It’s good that [the interest in India] creates room for people to listen to more diverse stories,” says Kartik Kumra, the creative brain behind the fashion label Karu Research. “That’s always interesting, and I think we’ve benefited from that. The bad side is that there’s a romanticisation of craft without implementation of it. So, what you actually end up having is a very diluted version, like a digital print of a block print or machine embroidery that was once hand…

SO THIS IS HOW THE FOOD WORLD is supposed to work. Restaurant critics tell us where to eat. We, fellow humans not in possession of their credentials, palates or expense accounts, follow their recommendations. It’s a serious business. The most mythical and powerful critics will sometimes never reveal their faces, like spies, superheroes or internet trolls. They reserve their tables under noms de plume and put on wigs and fake glasses in the taxi on the way to dinner. They eat multiple times at a restaurant to ensure they see it at its best and worst. And, when they finally deliver their verdict, it is definitive. A rave review will jam booking systems for months or prompt queues around the block, if it’s one of those goddamn no-book, lord-of-the-flies joints.…

I’M WAITING FOR PAUL MESCAL AT WHAT LOOKS like the mouth of hell. It’s some kind of nightmarish, subterranean space down a backstreet in London’s Soho and, rather than entering it through, say, I don’t know, a door, there is just an open ramp leading down into pitch-black darkness. It’s hard not to imagine that, when you get to the bottom of the slope, you will be greeted by a pit of writhing, agonised souls; and, from some of the pictures I’ve seen ahead of time on TripAdvisor — for it is, indeed, one of those new-fangled, volume-up, lights-off gyms — that seems a reasonable guess. It makes sense that the 27-year-old Irish actor — breakthrough star of Normal People and already an Oscar nominee — would suggest meeting somewhere…

As we may have mentioned in this space before — ahem, Spring 2022, for starters — a quirk of print-magazine publishing is that we begin putting our editions together months before they go on sale. As a result, we must photograph our autumn/winter fashion stories in high summer and the spring/summer collections in deepest winter. (A quirk of the fashion industry, of course, is that the clothes that should see you through until February, the thick jumpers and long coats and heavy boots, go into shops real and virtual in August, when many of us are still thinking about what to wear to the beach.) One thing we do have on our side, at British Esquire: the reliable unreliability of the local weather. If we shootcation in the UK, we…