Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2023 i Esquire

NIGHT HAD FALLEN IN THE EGYPTIAN DESERT. THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED SHARP-ly, and the wind picked up. A hundred yards away, young men in a single-file line emerged from behind a sand dune, scarves and coattails flapping in the Saharan gale. The Pyramids of Giza, shrouded in darkness, loomed in the near distance. Slowly, the three pyramids were set aglow, silhouetting the young men as they walked a winding path toward us. It felt like we were in a movie. Except this wasn’t a Hollywood production. It was a fashion show. Forty-eight hours earlier, I had flown to Cairo to be among nine hundred people watching Dior show its fall 2023 men’s collection. My career is confusing to my daughters, who are eight and four. They understand that I make magazines,…

THE DAY CHRIS ESTRADA’S LIFE CHANGED started like so many before it: up early, in the car, off to work in a warehouse. Day shifts loading trucks. Day shifts unloading boxes. Years of this. For a while, it was nights, too. Two or three jobs, for nearly two decades. It felt as if this was how the rest of his life would go. It wasn’t. On the day Estrada’s life changed, in 2019, he’d been unpacking boxes of clothes all morning. At 12:30, on lunch break, he was in his car when a call came from comedian and producer Fred Armisen. He wanted to work with Estrada on a project that would become This Fool, the Hulu show based loosely on Estrada’s life and tightly on his love of Los Angeles.…

WAY BACK IN 1967, FAMED YACHTSMAN Emil “Bus” Mosbacher led the United States to victory at the prestigious America’s Cup sailing competition. At the helm of the Intrepid, he relied on Heuer timing equipment—a natural choice, as the company had been involved in timing yacht racing since the 1930s. Still, then-CEO Jack Heuer must have been moved by it; he released a watch the next year celebrating Mosbacher and the Intrepid. The aptly named Carrera Skipper, ref. 7754, featured a distinctive colored subdial to help skippers track the vital 15 minutes before the starting gun. It was an edition of just 20 pieces—at least according to watch-nerd lore—and earned the nickname “Skipperrera,” as it was the only version of the watch housed in the same case as the iconic Carrera chronograph…

2023 Esquire Grooming Awards WHETHER YOU’RE A GROOMING novice or the type of guy who spends hours in front of the mirror, the key to a modern routine is working smarter, not harder. Each year, hundreds of new products promise to up your game with innovative solutions to old problems, multitasking ingredients, and better delivery systems. We fact-checked these claims by putting the items through extensive tests and came out the other side with the definitive list of everything that actually lives up to the hype. No matter your particular needs, the stuff featured here works to make you look and feel your very best. face BEST FACE CLEANSER JAXON LANE BOOM CICA WOW CLEANSER This cleanser foams up to remove dirt and oil like the classics you’re used to, but…

JOHN BOYEGA WOULD NOT LIE DOWN. IT WAS 2021, AND HE WAS filming an early scene for the blistering sci-fi conspiracy thriller They Cloned Tyrone, which hit theaters this summer. Boyega’s street-hustler character, Fontaine, reconvenes with an irritable pimp named Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) at her grandmother’s house, still reeling from what they just saw (an apparent conspiracy). The script called for Boyega to lie flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling as they talk. Boyega lay there and sucked his teeth. “Not feelin’ it, bruv,” the thirty-one-year-old actor told the film’s director and cowriter, Juel Taylor, in his charmingly peppery South London accent. “I’m alert, bruv. I’m alert. I’m on edge.” Boyega figured Fontaine wouldn’t be in a passive position. It didn’t feel…

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I’M NOT CERTAIN WHETHER JAMES TAYLOR meant to predict the takeover of artificial intelligence and the death of our collective imagination in his 1970 song “Fire and Rain,” but somewhere a music teacher is saying to herself: “Called it.” That teacher is Miss Molloy—a bowl-cutted, crochet-sweatered, denim-skirted woman of 23 or 53—who taught our third-grade music class. One autumn morning, after we sang “Fire and Rain” off mimeographed lyric sheets, Miss Molloy taught us what the song was about, which was the robot apocalypse. “Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you” meant she had succumbed to the computer chip in her brain, as had all of humanity. This left Sweet Baby James the last remaining human, with the song he’d written her, but he “just can’t remember…

IT’S THE GRANDDADDY. THE OG. The quintessential blue jean. And with good reason: The Levi’s 501 traces its roots back to 1873, when Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis patented a method for riveting the pockets of pants to increase their durability. That was the first step toward the five-pocket design we all know and love—the innovation that helped take jeans from the mines to the modern wardrobe. But history isn’t reason enough to slide into a pair. So why does the 501 have such staying power? Because it’s always the right call. The fit—higher rise, straight leg—defies the trend cycle. The vibe? It works whether you’re a punk or a preppy. It’s one of the few items of clothing that truly deserve to be called time-less. Denim is an essential part…

THE RULE BOOK IS OFFICIALLY out the window. Men’s fashion is more fluid now than ever. Sure, that means getting dressed is a little more fraught—but it’s also exponentially more exciting. To provide inspiration, we went looking for men who dress confidently across the spectrum of personal style. The folks on the following pages aren’t professional fit gods and Instagram kings. They’re regular guys living regular lives who happen to have tastes that are strong, unique, and worthy of your consideration—and emulation. They’re authentic to themselves. And that’s what matters. So here’s to the bold and the brave—and the guys who can put together one hell of a look. BAILEY ANDERES CONTENT CREATOR AND BARISTA, 21 “I was the kid that would wear suits to high school. My style is old-fashioned,…

IN 1911, A GUY NAMED J. K. DANIELS sculpted a cow out of butter and sent it along to the annual Iowa State Fair. To this day, about 600 pounds of butter is spread upon a wood-and-metal frame in a refrigeration unit kept at a steady 40 degrees. After the fair, they turn up the heat, and when the butter is soft enough to be removed, they collect it in five-gallon buckets and use it again the following year. The butter cow is eternal. Over time, the cow was joined by a cast of supporting butter sculptures. Down through the years, these have included a Butter American Gothic, a Butter Abraham Lincoln, and a Butter Starship Enterprise. In 1999, the fair featured a Butter Last Supper. But it is the…

THERE WAS A TIME, SOMEWHERE AROUND THE MID-2010s, when the fashion industry began to question the relevance of the traditional fashion show in the digital age. The doubt was short-lived. Instead of scrapping the concept, bigger brands hit on the idea of supercharging it: They started picking ever-moreexotic locations to impress not only the gathered VIPs but also the wider world watching on TikTok and Instagram. Which is how, at the end of 2022, Kim Jones—the British designer at the head of Dior Men since 2018—found himself in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza for the unveiling of his fall 2023 collection. “I wanted to focus on the historical aspect and what a place like this means to the world,” Jones says. “After all, the Great Pyramid is one…

JOURNEY MUELLER WASN’T ready to come out. At eighteen, the Colorado Christian University freshman had only just admitted to herself that she liked women. But one autumn day in 2017, two of her roommates—women she considered her closest friends—tried to pry the secret from her. When Journey evaded their questions, they pelted her with more. When she tried to leave her dorm suite, they physically blocked the door, she later said in a sworn legal declaration. When she held her tongue, they did the talking, piecing together a narrative that was spot-on: That fall, Journey’s lesbian friend Casey had been a frequent visitor, taking Journey away from campus for hours. What were they doing? Were they dating? Was Journey gay? Journey stood frozen before her friends, one hand touching her cross…

THE GREEN MANGO MARTINI AT SUPERBUENO, ON THE CORNER OF FIRST and First in New York City, is easily my new favorite cocktail. There’s no vodka involved. Rather, the main ingredient is Patrón infused with green mangoes and accompanied by mango brandy, Sauternes, honey, and a drop of costeño chile oil. Its otherworldly deliciousness and elegance represent in one cocktail how far tequila has come in the U. S. Aficionados know that the Mexican spirit is every bit as complex as whiskey but just as much fun as rum. If you were to tell me 23 years ago, when I started writing about drinks, that tequila and mescal combined might one day beat vodka to become America’s best-selling spirit and that people would be drinking $18 tequila martinis, I’d have done…

AT THE TIME I DISCOVERED HIP-HOP, I was waist-high to an adult and an aspiring simulacrum of Michael Jackson’s style. (Picture a Jheri curl, pleather Thriller jacket, and penny loafers.) Then my aunt Maria, who was five years older, dropped an LP on the basement record player. “I said-a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie/To the hip hip hop-a you don’t stop the rock.” Although I can’t be sure the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” was the first rap song I ever heard, it was the genre’s first mainstream hit, introducing hip-hop to the masses six years after DJ Kool Herc unveiled his break-beats at a party in the Bronx all the way back in 1973. That means this year—2023—it turns the big 5-0! And while rap might be the most popular…

WHAT IS LATE-STAGE, MIDDLE-AGED, WHITE-MALE ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM BUT ending up in a ridiculous shouting match about native plants? That’s how it worked out for me, at least. But long before I found myself screaming, “What if this were your front yard?!” at a guy operating heavy machinery, I was just a writer forging a path into the environmental movement—by way of the popularity of a novel I wrote with the cheery title of Annihilation. Annihilation of what? Of a certain sense of self ? So a different self can emerge? Wandering college campuses in the aftermath of that novel in 2014, flooded with invitations to speak on climate change, I realized I knew fuck all about the subject from a drilled-down, personal angle. For years, I’d contributed to causes. And yes,…

“GOD, PLEASE HELP ME DO THE BEST I CAN FOR PENNY DAHL and for her daughter. If someone took that young woman, I hope she’s still alive, and it’s your will I should find her. I’m taking my Lexapro, which is good. I’m smoking again, which is bad.” She thinks of Saint Augustine’s prayer and smiles into her clasped hands. “Help me to stop . . . but not today.” With that taken care of, Holly Gibney opens her Covid drawer. There’s a box of fresh masks beside the box of wipes. She takes one and heads out to begin her investigation into the disappearance of Bonnie Rae Dahl. TWENTY MINUTES LATER HOLLY IS DRIVING SLOWLY UP RED BANK Avenue. Just short of Deerfield Park she passes a Dairy Whip where a…

__ THE MOST PHILADELPHIA THING about me is my entitled double-parking tendencies nationwide. To be from Philadelphia is to park where you want with absolutely no repercussions. You do that in Los Angeles and you’re instantly getting a ticket. I learned that quick. __ THE BLOOD IN MY VEINS and my DNA is made up of Soul Train. Even now I have all eleven hundred episodes of Soul Train, and I keep it on a twenty-four-hour loop on all televisions in my house. __ MY DAD was a fifties doo-wop legend. His name was Lee Andrews. Lee Andrews & the Hearts was the name of his band. __ MY PARENTS did not believe in babysitting. At no point did I feel like I was being tricked into the family business;…