Table of contents for May/June 2019 in Esquire UK

The splendour of the Venetian lagoon melts away alarmingly quickly as you head inland. Canals, vaporettos and audacious bridges give way to a flat expanse that runs all the way to the foot of the Tyrolean rise, which looms over the right eyebrow of Italy. This lowland is home to the Riviera del Brenta, an area that surrounds the canal that runs from Padua to Venice, and one of the foremost regions of fine shoe production in the world. In turn, it is home to Louis Vuitton’s Manufacture de Souliers, in the little town of Fiesso d’Artico. From its atelier, the French brand now offers a customisation service on its Run Away trainers, allowing clients to choose from scores of materials and colours (including the iconic “Damier” check), of which…

If you listened closely during the men’s autumn/winter 2019 fashion shows in January, it was possible to hear a collective sigh of relief. Classic tailoring — a once favourite son, ostracised for a few seasons’ worth of collections and replaced with technical fabrics, sporty silhouettes and trainers — had been beckoned back into the clubhouse. Blazers, matching slacks, shirts and even ties — yes, ties! — were back in vogue at Dior, Ami, Dries van Noten, Fendi and others. The revenant was rubber-stamped by Hedi Slimane at Celine, who used the brand’s first men’s show to demonstrate that blokes rarely look as good as they do in a suit. Rumours of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Parallel to this coming-in-from-the-cold, there has been a rise in the number of…

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I WAS A TIMID BOY, FEARFUL OF THE SEA. I’d grown up next to it, in a port city, Southampton, but the sense of it filled me with dread. I never learned to swim. The sound of foghorns drifting over suburban roofs was a lament for my incapacity. The gulls wheeling over our house mocked me. Thirty years later, living in the East End of London, far from the sea, on the dole and adrift, I felt I had to address this failing. I went to the local pool, a tiled Victorian emporium, the kind where you might imagine the Kray Twins to lurk, and I began to splash about in the shallow end. Trying to work out how this thing worked, and why I was so scared of it.…

Walking, the new book by Erling Kagge — adventurer, publisher and author — which has just come out in this country, is a slip of a thing. “Quite often books are too long. I think you should be able to say what you find important about walking in 25,000 words,” says Kagge, 56, who is tall and trim with wild greyish hair that he often runs his fingers through. “I don’t think people should spend more than one or two evenings reading about my ideas because you should rather go walking.” And we do. It’s a cold, bright day as we meander around Oslo, the city where Kagge was born and still lives, talking about his book and the experiences that inform it. The snow crunches under our boots. For…

Discover Asia, its bustling cities and golden temples, fascinating cultures and awe-inspiring wonders. Seabourn Ovation’s Asian explorations are like travelling in a boutique hotel, but one which enables its guests to explore this extraordinary destination in style, and without having to repack. There’s a wide choice of itineraries: destinations range from Cochin in India, Pulau Weh in Indonesia, Sihanoukville in Cambodia, Boracay in the Philippines, Penang in Malaysia and Da Nang in Vietnam. Many of the most amazing Asian experiences are available only to those arriving by sea. On Ovation these include several places inaccessible to larger ships. Immersive activities on shore range from sea kayaking to caviar and Champagne served “in the surf”. Onboard treats on Ovation include movies under the stars and deck dance parties to a wide…

Of all mechanical watch “complications” — any feature outside the display of hours, minutes and seconds — the most impressive is the perpetual calendar. This “grand complication” will track day, date, month, year and adjust for leap years. As technically brilliant as that is, it presents the wearer with a basic drawback. Forget to wind it and you’re going to need a watchmaker to reset the thing. For this reason, hand-wound watches are often talked up in terms of their power reserves — that is, how long it takes for the mainspring (or metal coil) that powers the watch to unwind before it ticks to a halt. The bigger the power reserve, the less winding required. Vacheron Constantin has been making beautiful, intricate and complicated watches, including dozens of perpetual…

A couple of years ago, I was at the end of a long book tour in Italy and found myself in Padua, a city I was visiting for the first time. That period was one of discovery for me. I’d visited Italy before but my reading tour had taken me to places I’d never been to and, in some cases, never heard of. In Rovereto, I admired the austere Austrian influences on the architecture; in Rimini, I walked along rows of colourful umbrellas on the beach and watched elegant Italian families at the end of their holidays, when summer seemed to have dragged on too long and everyone was exhausted by the heat; in Lucera, the skies were constantly lit by lightning storms that cut the internet and sometimes the…

Is there a watershed in heaven? Like, is there a please-don’t-swear-before-nine-o’clock rule? Because, if so, I’m fucked. Not that I’m going to heaven. Mrs Docherty, my teacher at St Luke’s when I was eight years old, told me I was heading for the Bad Fire because I accidentally used the words “fuck you” in the dining hall when what I meant was “no thanks”. My swearing career began the year before when I wrote a piece of narrative journalism in my news book about my dad coming home drunk from the pub. I realised, when I consulted my creative writing guru (my mate Fergus), that it was impossible to nail the story without the use of some authentic Glaswegian dialogue. And so, after assembly, I sat down on a tiny…

Leo Houlding’s free solo climbing rack “Occasionally, I can’t be bothered to tell people what I do, so I just say I work in marketing,” says British rock climber Leo Houlding. Having undertaken his first climb aged 10, Houlding became the British Junior Indoor Climbing Champion six years later. At 18, he was the youngest Briton to free climb The Prophet, a notoriously tough section of the infamously difficult El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Specialising in free climbing technical peaks and the world’s biggest walls, Houlding has more recently taken up para-alpinism (climbing up, then flying down). Later this year, he travels to Papua New Guinea to tackle the world’s tallest trees and then to Guyana for Mount Roraima, its 12sq mile summit area bounded on all sides by…

THE SHOPPING PAGES COLOURFUL SUITS BREAD KNIVES NOTEBOOKS PLAIN SWIM SHORTS DIVE WATCHES BINOCULARS ICE LOLLIES TOTE BAGS BOAT SHOES…

A AESOP aesop.com AMI amiparis.com APC apc.fr ASPINAL aspinaloflondon.com B BALL ballwatch.com BLANCPAIN blancpain.com BOSS boss.com BOTTEGA VENETA bottegaveneta.com BRIGENIUS brigenius.net C CANALI canali.com CANON canon.co.uk CHARLIE CASELY-HAYFORD casely-hayford.com CHURCH’S church-footwear.com D DIOR dior.com DOLCE & GABBANA dolcegabbana.com DRIES VAN NOTEN driesvannoten.be DUNHILL dunhill.com F FENDI fendi.com FRESCOBOL CARIOCA frescobolcarioca.com G G H BASS ghbass-eu.com GANT gant.co.uk GIEVES & HAWKES gievesandhawkes.com GIORGIO ARMANI armani.com GLOBAL available at selfridges.com GRENSON grenson.com GUCCI gucci.com H HAY hay.dk HACKETT hackett.com HEDI SLIMANE AT CELINE celine.com HERMÈS hermès.com K KAI SHUN available at boroughkitchen.com L LABOUR AND WAIT labourandwait.co.uk LEICA leica-camera.com LEVI’S VINTAGE CLOTHING levi.com LONGINES longines.co.uk LORO PIANA loropiana.com LOUIS VUITTON uk.louisvuitton.com M MERCER CULINARY available at boroughkitchen.com MOLESKINE moleskine.com MONOKAKI available at choosingkeeping.com MONTBLANC montblanc.com MR P mrporter.com N NOAH noahny.com NIKON…

Brendon Babenzien, the former Supreme creative director and founder of the ethical clothing company Noah, is drinking tea in a café in downtown Manhattan, talking about his early years growing up in New York. “You’re a suburban kid,” he remembers, “you’re into skating and surfing, wildly influenced by California in the Eighties. But then you’ve got New York: hip-hop, graffiti, B-boy culture and break dancing, and that’s just as appealing to you. So, by the time you’re 16, you’re this kind of crazy mashed-up person.” Babenzien grew up on Long Island. Now 48, he began skating when he was five. By 13, he was working at the local surf shop, and within a couple of years was in charge of the skateboard department. The spirit of Noah is that youth…

One of artist Michael Rakowitz’s longest-running projects is called “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist”. It is an attempt to remake all of the 7,000 objects looted from the National Museum of Iraq following the Coalition invasion in 2003, as well as other monuments across the country destroyed during the war. Rakowitz’s recreations are made from food wrappers and Arabic-English newspapers; one of the larger pieces, an Assyrian bull god, or Lamassu, that stood at the gate to Nineveh from 700BC until it was destroyed by the fighters from the so-called Islamic State in 2015, he recreated using date syrup cans. It currently occupies the Fourth Plinth of London’s Trafalgar Square where, on a sunny day, it glitters. Other parts of “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist” will be on…

A substantial figure of the American stage and screen, most celebrated for his performance as a world-weary homicide detective on the peerless HBO drama The Wire, the actor Wendell Pierce describes himself as “tri-coastal”: he lives between Los Angeles, New York and his native New Orleans. Or, as he puts it in his sonorous basso profundo, “That’s the West Coast, the East Coast and the Gulf Coast.” Dramatic key change for that final Coast, reflecting Pierce’s emphatic pride in the place of his birth. Typically, perhaps, when I reach him on the phone, Pierce is in none of the three cities he calls home. It’s morning in the Midwest, and the actor is at his hotel, recovering from a night shoot for Chicago PD, a show that is one of…

“Mukozuke”, reads the first dish on Umu’s Winter Kaiseki Menu, and underneath: “Kombu cured Scottish scallops, kombu trio, white ear mushroom.” So, here is an exquisite bowl with three small, fat pillows of creamy scallop resting in it, with shavings of kombu (a kind of kelp); pickled kombu; a dark dab of fermented kombu; a small clump of pickled white ear mushroom. The scallops are cool marine toffee. Curing the scallop between leaves of dried kombu (kobujime) heightens its flavour. One kombu is meaty, the next has the tang of pickling, the next a salty intensity. The white ear mushroom is chewy like jelly. It is a subtle, careful, exquisitely judged introduction to a meal that will run through eight courses. Umu is tucked away on Bruton Place, just off…

Jeremy Irons is buying a loaf of artisanal sourdough from my local bakery. It is around 9am, the month is December and conditions are distinctly frosty. The rest of the queue is togged up in requisite North Face and Patagonia or that weird, Matrix mum gym gear that has become de rigueur for the West London school run set. But Irons, Oscar-winning star of Reversal of Fortune, and my Notting Hill neighbour for the past five years, has gone off script and decided on an alternative ensemble. He is wearing a thick-knit, U-boat commander roll-neck in navy; a blue polka dot silk scarf, double wrapped and tied with a rakish flamboyance; expensive looking, English-made loafers in brown; no socks and… black leather trousers. The old, broken-in strides — possibly of…

The question of the farm was settled some time before my grandfather’s death. There would be no feuds, no bitter clashes, no cries of disbelief as the will was read out in the nondescript office of some solemn, small-town solicitor. No, none of that: my father would get the farm. It is a small and mostly unprofitable scrap of land, down a narrow road at the edge of a bog in the Irish midlands, a place you would simply never have reason to visit unless you were born there, or knew someone who was. My father keeps a few cattle on the land now, nothing else; no crop could be reliably grown in that ground. In the last few years, he’s taken advantage of some grants to plant trees in…

WHEN PUNISHMENT CAME IT WAS SWIFT; the embarrassment acute. The blame all mine. I had picked up my cuttlefish using the tips of my chopsticks, not the sides. Had I studied my 96-page restaurant guidebook, Sushi: Jiro Gas tronomy, available at the reception desk of this eight-seater, two-Michelin-starred restaurant, as well as bookshops across Tokyo, more closely, I would not have been so foolish. “Think of the sushi as a portable shrine,” it advises. “Place your chopsticks parallel to the tray as if they are the shrine’s carrying poles, and lift the sushi by grasping it along its sides.” Had I done so, the sushi would not have buckled as I lifted it on its journey, that terrifying journey, to my mouth from the counter tray, where Chef Takashi Ono’s…