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NEW
SOUNDS
OF
SUMMER
FEATURING
ORVILLE PECK
LIL NAS X
ONEFOUR
DOMINIC FIKE

TAMEIMPALA
KEVIN PARKER STEPS OUT OF THE SHADOWS
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 Contents

January | February 2020

27 Brief 70 Fit
THE
Meet Orville Peck, the masked singer We all know meditation is beneficial,
NEW but how many of us actually practise
SOUNDS giving country music a shake-up; a chat
OF
SUMMER with Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield; it regularly? We consult the experts on
FEATURING
ORVILLE PECK
LIL NAS X
art phenomenon Daniel Arsham on how to do it – and stick to it.
ONEFOUR
DOMINIC FIKE working with Dior; and more.
72 Men of the Year
36 GQ&A A look inside GQ’s night of nights.
An honest chat with Justin Langer,
the man tasked with repairing the 94 A bitter pill
reputation of the Aussie cricket team Festival season is upon us but Australia’s
after ‘Sandpapergate’. pill-testing debate shows no sign of
being resolved. Is it time for a rethink?
42 Taste & Travel
TAMEIMPALA
KEVIN PARKER STEPS OUT OF THE SHADOWS
For a nation that loves to travel, we
tend to overlook our own backyard.
Here, the Aussie destinations to add
100 Dominic Fike
A colourful shoot with the Florida-
native who’s redefining pop music
to your 2020 bucket list. for the Instagram-era.

ON THE COVER
Jacket, $2700, and T-shirt, $1450, both
46 Stylist
by Dior Men; pants, $1525, by Stella Gucci’s Alessandro Michele on leading
McCartney; necklace, $2999, by Hardy
Brothers; ring, $2950, by Tiffany & Co. fashion’s genderless revolution; this
season’s freshest accessories are
Photography James J Robinson.
Styling Petta Chua. seriously fun; the spas with treatments
worth travelling for.
64 Watch
Find a new timepiece to match
your personality.
66 Cars
A look inside the luxury auto world’s
pivot towards sustainability.
116 Australia’s most wanted
How OneFour from Sydney’s Mount
Druitt captured the attention of
a nation – and the police.
122 Chaos at the top
of the world
The 2019 climbing season was one
of Mount Everest’s deadliest. We visit
base camp to hear the untold stories
of those who survived that infamous
human traffic jam, as well as those
who didn’t make it home.

68 Inc.
Ten steps to achieving business
success with our GQ Men of the
Year Audi Innovation Award
winners, Sipp Instant.

12 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020 GQ.COM.AU

ROB WHITTAKER
MMA FIGHTER
 Contents

PHOTOHRAPHY: JAMES J ROBINSON.

82 Tame Impala
With a new album
on the horizon, Kevin
Parker is finally ready to
embrace the limelight.

14 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020 GQ.COM.AU

 Editor’s Letter

P ositivity is underrated. So is being kind to one another. 2019

Mike getting in the first and the last of his barrels before he swaps Sydney for the Big Smoke.
could well go down in history as one of the darkest (and
perhaps also the silliest) years on record. So as we embark on a New
Year – indeed, a new decade – it’s more important than ever to act as
we wish to go forward. As well as embracing positive vibes for the
future and being generous in spirit, we wanted to begin 2020 with a
special issue dedicated to the sounds of summer. After all, there is no
better time of year than the Aussie summer, and I don’t know about
you but nothing raises the spirit or heals the soul better than music.
I’m stoked to have Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on our cover this
issue. Without doubt one of the country’s greatest musical exports,
the enigmatic singer’s new album is set to once again blow both our
minds and eardrums when it’s out next month – in fact, for the making
of this issue I had ‘It Might Be Time’ on repeat. There’s no doubting
now is Parker’s time. International stars Dominic Fike and Lil Nas X
also feature as does the controversial yet compelling figures of Aussie
drill, OneFour, whose story is one you need to have on your horizon.
In terms of new horizons, after seven years at GQ and in Australia,
I’ve taken the very difficult decision to move on. And I know what
you’re thinking: what better time to head home to the UK than
in mid-winter. What was I saying about the joys of the Australian
summer, again?
It’s been such a privilege leading this great brand and while there is
so much I’ll miss fondly – not least of all the weather – I’m so chuffed
to be handing over the editor’s reins to Jake Millar for the March/
April 2020 issue of the magazine. He’s been a wonderful companion
during my time at GQ and he will be ably supported by Christopher
Riley, who will be stepping up as GQ’s deputy editor. Together, they
will provide the dynamism, direction and impetus to continue to
drive GQ forward as the leading men’s lifestyle title in the country, so
please join me in wishing them the best of luck.

PHOTOGRAPHY: JARRAH LYNCH FOR URBNSURF.

Thanks for having me Australia, and thanks for your continued
support of GQ – long may it continue. Enjoy the issue and remember:
stay positive and be generous wherever 2020 takes you.

Mike Christensen Follow

Editor @christensenmike

16 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020 GQ.COM.AU

 Contributors
James Tolich
PHOTOGRAPHER
How was Dominic Fike to
shoot?
He was a total dream. He has a
graceful presence in front of the
camera; a true angel. He was
engaged and connected with the
creative concept which always
makes for more powerful portraits.
James Tolich What’s your favourite shot?
The one shot from above with
him holding a flower. It reminds
me of TV Hits magazine!
Are you familiar with his
music and story?
I’m not. I just want to shoot people
as people. I never research them
and don’t really need to know what
they do – this is how you capture
someone’s essence and what
I believe true portraiture is about.
Is this the most flowers you’ve
ever had on set?
Hundred per cent. Hattie was
amazing. I loved working with her.
You seem to always be on the
move – what’s the best thing
about travelling for work?
I live in Sydney and travel very
regularly to Paris and NYC. I enjoy
hanging with my good friends
in Paris and New York but I miss
Angus Fontaine my wife and two boys a lot so try
to pick and choose the jobs and
opportunities that’re worth flying
to the other side of the world for!
What was your highlight of
the past decade?
Marrying my wife/love of my
life, Georgie, and having my two
beautiful boys, Taika and Jimmy –
all before 30!
Who’s on your list to shoot
in 2020?
Nobody. Let’s see who comes
my way.
18 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
Angus Fontaine
WRITER
Have you always been
a cricket fan?
I’ve been selling print since
I was 10 and my paperboy
wages went on any cricket mag
I could get my sticky mitts on.
Allan Border was my God.
What are some of your early
memories watching Langer?
A hazy summer in ’93, Nirvana
on the radio, the West Indies
in their pomp, a little debutant
from the west being hit by fast
balls but hanging tough. He got
54 runs and 154 bruises. Safe
to say I liked Langer from the
get-go.
Having spent some time
talking with him – are you
convinced he’s the man to turn
the Australian team around?
Hundred per cent. He’s a warrior,
a searcher, a guru and a good bloke
with an iron moral code. That’s
precisely the compass Australia’s
cricketers need right now.
Where does ‘Sandpapergate’
rank in the list of sport’s great
controversies?
Globally, pretty low. Here
in Australia, very high.
I can’t remember one that hurt
more. Trying to explain it to
my 11-year-old son was gut-
wrenching.
If you could change one thing
from the last decade what
would it be?
Complete, unified, resolute
and immediate global action on
climate change. And Tom Petty
to still be strumming.
Any New Year’s resolutions
for 2020?
Speak less, do more.
Hattie Malloy
FLORIST
What was it like being on set
with Dominic and his team?
Fabulous! Dominic is down
to earth which made working
together wonderfully easy. I also
enjoyed working with both Petta
Chua and James Tolich on this
job. It was such an energetic and
relaxed team!
Can you talk us through some
of the flowers you featured in
the shoot?
The botanical elements I used
in the shoot included poppies,
orchids, rose bushes, kangaroo
paw and water lilies. My work is
usually inspired by the flowers
I come across at the market; that
morning at the Sydney Flower
Markets I was super inspired
by flowers I don’t usually come
across in Melbourne.
What’s the best part of your job?
I love looking back at my work and
seeing how my style has developed,
and how it also evolves over the
Australian seasons.
Any secret tips for ensuring
we don’t kill all our house
plants within the first week?
For me, less is more. I have only
one plant in my house, which
was my grandmother’s peace lily.
It’s about 25 years old now and
I give it all my love and attention.
Always buy plants you know you
have the capacity to care for.
Got a favourite ‘flower
moment’ in popular culture?
I’m a huge RuPaul’s Drag Race fan.
Season 9’s final ‘lip sync for your
life’ battle when Sasha Velour
whipped off her wig, allowing red
rose petals to fly out all over the
stage was simply iconic!
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ONLINE

AUSTRALIAN OPEN
As we count down to
the (often questionable)
MENSWEAR Australian Open style
MOMENT moves, we give you the
low-down on one of this
A new year country’s biggest sporting
means a new events, match by match.

season on the
men’s fashion
calendar. And
with AW20
looking to be
a wild one,
SUMMER STYLE
we’ve got our Now that it’s hot enough to
break out your shorts, tees
street-style and printed shirts, it’s time
photographers to bolster your weekend
wardrobe without breaking
ready to capture the bank. And, yes, we’re
all the can’t- here to help.
miss fits, from
just-dropped

WORDS: NIKOLINA ILIC. PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES.

streetwear to
superb tailoring
– plus all the
new digs from
AWARD SEASON
your favourite If it’s not enough to have the
designers. Golden Globes roll out the
red carpet in the first week of
2020, the BAFTAS and Oscars
are also heading our way this
summer. Head to GQ.com.au
Follow us @GQAustralia Tag us #GQAustralia for all the updates.

22 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020 GQ.COM.AU

 The Columnist

DAN ROOKWOOD

Decides it’s time to have ‘The Snip’

H ow’s this for a stat? One in four men in Australia over 40 have had their torpedo decommissioned,
aka The Snip, aka a vasectomy. That’s the second-highest vasectomy rate in the world, after New
Zealand. But I never thought it’d be necessary for me to down tools. Y’see, my wife and I were told we
probably couldn’t conceive in the usual way. Having tried for five years without success, we ended up having
our twin girls via IVF. It therefore came as quite the surprise to discover that we were expecting number
three, a little boy. I’ll admit my first reaction was a celebratory fist-pump that actually my cock and balls
work just fine after all thankyouverymuch. But then the realisation set in: three kids. Three. Kids.
Our doctor recommended that my wife Sam give birth via C-section. “And while we’re in there, would
you like me to perform a tubal ligation?” she asked casually – tie off Sam’s fallopian tubes to ensure no more
surprises. “Or,” she said, turning to me, “are you going to get a vasectomy?” Oh! A pregnant pause. And
then, like that moment when the bill arrives and you and your mate both reach for your wallets at the same
time, I found myself magnanimously saying, “No, no, please – I got this”.
Of course, Sam and I talked about it at length afterwards. And since there are more potential physical
and psychological complications for a woman to take the ultimate responsibility for birth control (via
tubal ligation or a hysterectomy) than for a man (via the ol’ snippety-snip), it feels as if I should do my
bit. So to speak.
I try not to make a big song and dance about it, like the fairweather father who wants a bloody medal for
changing the odd nappy or making the occasional dinner. In the grand scheme of things, this is the least I can
do. But as my appointment with the cock-doc approaches, I sense a lengthening shadow of melancholy. Will
I feel less of a man? (Spoiler alert: actually, no.) There’s just something so… so drastic and final about it. (It is
actually reversible, albeit without guaranteed success.)
As if to read my concern, a text prompt arrives from the urology clinic, like a reminder for a restaurant table.
“Press 1 to confirm, 2 to cancel.” Having experienced the heartache of unexplained infertility for so many years,
it now feels somehow ungrateful to choose sterilisation. And then I think of our three children, whom we love
dearly, the little sleep thieves who drain us of what little energy, time and money we have. And I think of Sam
who has put her career on hold for the last four years. So yes, three is enough: let’s tie a knot in it.
It takes balls to have a vasectomy. I cup mine tenderly, almost apologetically as I sit on the gurney, naked
from the waist down, awaiting the urologist. The room is cold and unlovely and my dick shrinks itself shy.
The walls are busy with anatomical diagrams of male genitalia which look like charcuterie from a distance.
The doc is reassuringly matter-of-fact. He tapes my banana out the way like it’s an Art Basel exhibit (oh,
you’ve seen the memes) and then sets about my scrotum with a disposable razor to make a clearing. I look
away. “You’ll feel a small prick,” deadpans the doc as he injects my ball-bag with local anaesthetic. I do.
The procedure is uncomfortable but the urologist’s bedside banter helps distract me from the matter in (his)
hand. At one point I hear a sizzle and see a thin plume of smoke emerge from between my legs. The sulphurous
smell momentarily transports me back to high school biology. The deed is done in 15 minutes. Cut and shut.
“You’ve done the right thing,” says the doctor reassuringly as he heads to his next appointment.
I gingerly tuck my numbed nuts into the tighty-whities he advised me to bring and call a cab.
V-Day tends to be a Friday so that convalescents can spend the weekend lying flat in bed watching The
Irishman, wincing for tea and sympathy, and be back at work on Monday almost like nothing happened.
The following day I delicately inspect the damage to my undercarriage: I’m black and blue, swollen like a
ripe avocado. For a week, the pain is a dull ache enlivened spasmodically with sharp bolts, as if I’ve been
roughly kicked in the swingers and occasionally Tasered. But compared to childbirth? Nope, not even on
the same spectrum – so man up.

“You’ll feel a small prick,” deadpans the doc as he injects

my ball-bag with local anaesthetic. I do.

24 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020 GQ.COM.AU

For
knowing
where you
stand
 Edited by Amy Campbell
Brief
PHOTOGRAPHY: LOUIE BANKS. STYLING: LUKE DAY.

Orville Peck
Cowboy, crooner, international mystery man. Meet the original masked singer who is making country music cool again.

GQ.COM.AU 27
 Brief | Music

O rville Peck is tired of being asked

about the mask. He doesn’t say that,
exactly – he’s far too gracious and nice – but
his shift of tone gives the game away. We
don’t blame him, either. From The New York
Times to Gay Times to country music mag
The Rodeo, Peck has been quizzed, endlessly,
about the meaning of his famous disguise.
“The only reason I don’t talk about it in
depth is not because I want to dodge any
questions, but because I want people to have
their own take on it,” he says. “I don’t want to
lay it out and pin it down. I just don’t think
that’s important.” We leave it at that.
It’s difficult to talk about the rise and rise
of Orville Peck without recognising the
cultural groundswell that’s given country
music a popular shake-up of late. Peck
released his first single ‘Dead of Night’ in
late 2017, just before Kacey Musgraves’
iconic ‘yee-haw couture’ quote went viral and
Lil Nas X transitioned from SoundCloud to
world domination. By the time Peck’s debut
album Pony dropped in March last year – a
nostalgic soundscape that’s knitted together
by tangy slapback echoes, historical country
references and Peck’s deep, sexy croon – the
cowboy movement was in full swing.
“The timing was really serendipitous,” he “A year and a half ago, I was working two
says, “it’s actually been nothing but helpful to
me and that’s why I don’t have a problem with
jobs, there were times when I didn’t know
people talking about me in relation to it.” how I was going to pay my rent.”
The uncertain nature of the months leading
up to Pony’s release may or may not have where to place it, they didn’t know what to labels when they asked, ‘Do you have a band?
something to do with Peck’s unpretentious call it, they didn’t know whether the mask Have you played shows?’” He lets out a hoot-
attitude toward the wave (horse?) he’s found would work and they didn’t know how like laugh in spite of himself, pointing out
himself riding. people would react to it.” that it’s even funnier, given his label is sitting
“A year and a half ago, I was working two To conventional music fans and industry in on our interview.
jobs, there were times when I didn’t know execs alike, Peck makes for an unconventional “I had nothing. I spent a month scrambling
how I was going to pay my rent, I was hand- country star. He is gay, he performs in to find people who would play these songs,
sewing outfits, sending 20 to 30 emails a day disguise and while his songs are intimately and the first shows we booked were favours
to anyone who would listen,” he recalls. “I personal (in ‘Big Sky,’ he croons about past – I begged a friend to let us open for him just
believed in it, but there were times when relationships with a boxer, bull rider and so I could say I’d played a show.” The label
people straight-up told me this wouldn’t jailer – none of which sound particularly bought it and soon after, so did the rest of the
exist in the country world, this wouldn’t healthy) there is little trace of his former life world. Peck has barely stopped touring since
exist in the indie world – they didn’t know on the Internet. “I basically lied to a bunch of Pony dropped.

28 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020


“Straight, white, middle-aged men
actually make up a big portion of my fan
base. They probably can’t relate to exactly
what I’m singing about but they connect to
the music on a different level,” says Peck. “I’d
like to think it’s because there’s a sincerity to
it. That’s what country music is, it’s sincerity
combined with bold storytelling and the
theatricality of performance.”
Does he think the country scene is
becoming more accepting of artists who don’t
fit the stereotype? “Slowly, yeah,” he responds.
“Sadly there hasn’t been an abundance of
those voices in country – I mean, they’ve
always been there, minorities are an integral
part of cowboy culture, so if anybody feels like
they’re not, they very much are.”
He likes to think that Lil Nas X, Brandi
Carlile, Yola – and himself – are giving
closeted country artists the confidence to
write and perform in the genre. “I think
the next five years are going to be really
exciting. I also think that people care less
– they just don’t care as much about the
details anymore.”
He wears elaborate masks and doesn’t shy
away from a rhinestone, but Peck’s most
* FOR FULL INTERVIEWS WITH LAUV AND CARIBOU CHECK OUT GQ.COM.AU
impressive quality is his dedication to the
music. “I’ve worked in the entertainment
industry since I was 10 years old, as an actor
and a dancer and a musician, to varying
degrees of success and varying degrees of
happiness,” he says. “I think I spent a lot of
my life trying to figure out who I had to be
in order to be successful, in order to be liked,
in order to be happy. I’ve finally got to the
point where I’ve realised that ol’ thing where
the only person to be is yourself; it’s the best
version of yourself.”
It’s a version others seem to be enjoying,
too – Dior Men designer Kim Jones among
them, who tapped Peck to play the after
party for his Pre-Fall 2020 show in Miami,
last December.
“Yeah,” he laughs, gratefully. “It seems to
be working out so far.” n
NEW YEAR, NEW MUSIC
Four more fresh albums fit for high summer rotation.
HOW I’M
FEELING,
LAUV
Lauv – “like
the word
‘loud’ but
with a v at
the end,” is the 25-year-old
American artist behind fetching
pop anthems like, ‘F***k I’m
Lonely’ and ‘I’m So Tired’ (ft.
Troye Sivan) – both of which
appear on his debut studio
album, How I’m Feeling. But
this is no conventional record.
A true son of the Internet, Lauv
has been drip-releasing singles
“as they’re ready,’’ the end
result being a glittery synthesis
of tracks with a certain radio-
friendliness that belies the
record’s existential themes.
So 2020. Out March 6.*
MANIC,
HALSEY
If you’ve
been rooting
for Halsey
since she
broke onto
the scene with ‘Ghost’ in 2014,
this record will probably make
you want to fist pump and
shout something embarrassing,
like, Get it, girl! Because after
lending her voice to so many
EDM toplines (some would
argue she carried tracks like
Benny Blanco’s ‘Eastside’ to
such popular acclaim), the
success of which potentially
overshadowed her solo
stuff, Manic feels like Halsey
smashing pop music’s glass
ceiling to fully, finally arrive.
Like we said, Get it, girl.
Out January 17.
SUDDENLY,
CARIBOU
Marking
Dan Snaith’s
fifth album
as Caribou,
Suddenly
sees the Canadian producer
offer more of himself, lyrically,
than we’ve heard before. But
the surprises don’t end here,
so buckle up and hold on tight.
Because just as the record
settles into that hauntingly warm
soundscape we’ve come to know
Caribou for, Snaith swerves into
unexpected territory, where
rousing instrumentals and a
goulash of samples collide
to echo the suddenness of a
change in the artist’s own life.
Yes, it’s all very clever. Out
February 28.*
HOTSPOT,
PET SHOP
BOYS
Pet Shop
Boys walked
so the rest of
house music’s
sad synthy acts – Hot Chip,
LCD Soundsystem, Cut Copy
– could run. And they’re still
going strong. Hotspot will be
the 14th album to come from
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe,
and the third to be produced
by Stuart Price, who, having
won multiple Grammys for
his work with Madonna and
Coldplay, is kind of a big deal.
Pet Shop purists will be happy
to know Hotspot contains many
of the band’s usual tricks while
those vying for something fresh
won’t be disappointed either.
Out January 24.
GQ.COM.AU 29
 Brief | Fashion

Eyes on the prize The awards

to know
Generous cash rewards, celebrity ambassadors and enough spectacle to
rival the Oscars. Welcome to the lucrative world of fashion design awards.

W hen the International Woolmark

Prize launched in 1953, it was one
of the only global fashion competitions offering
emerging designers a cash prize. Fast-forward to
today and the world of fashion prizes is worth
millions of dollars. Kanye and Kim Kardashian-
West are practically CFDA/Vogue Fashion
Fund groupies; Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford are
honorary members. Each year, Louis Vuitton
ambassadors like Jaden Smith and Emma Stone
present the LVMH Prize, and in 2018 the
CFDA even introduced an Influencer Award.
Ms Kardashian-West won it.
According to the Business of Fashion, over
$16.8m in prize money has been handed out by
various fashion awards since 2014, when LVMH
– the luxury conglomerate that owns Louis
Vuitton, Dior and now Tiffany & Co. – launched
its own design prize. In 2019, the winner of the
LVMH Prize, South African designer Thebe
Magugu, walked away with just under $490,000,
making the LVMH Prize the richest of them all.
It might be an enticing factor, but money
isn’t the only reason young designers enter
themselves in awards like the LVMH Prize, the
CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, the Association
Nationale pour le Développement des Arts de la
Mode (ANDAM) Prize and, closer to home, the
National Designer Award – or so we’re assured.
Matthew Adams Dolan, an Australian-
American designer and 2020 International
Woolmark Prize finalist, says the opportunity
to forge connections with Merino wool farmers
and mills while distilling his brand messaging
has been just as valuable. “These prizes really
force you to focus and talk about your brand and
practices in a concise way,” says Adams Dolan.
“What your values are, how you work, what
you’re interested in – these competitions really
force you to crystallise these ideas.” But he’s
pragmatic, too. If Adams Dolan was to win, he
says he’d use the winnings to further develop
his team, “to realise the relationships [he’s] been
fortunate to develop through the prize”.
But the Woolmark Prize isn’t Adams
Dolan’s first rodeo. Now based in Italy, the
designer – a favourite of Rihanna’s – was
named a 2018 finalist in both the LVMH and
CFDA Prizes. And this isn’t unusual. Samuel
Ross of A-COLD-WALL* is another IWP
finalist with a bevvy of past nominations and
wins to his name.
In some part, fashion awards offer big
industry players the chance to throw around
some money in the hope of discovering the Yves
Saint Laurents and Karl Lagerfelds of tomorrow.
But designers today don’t necessarily have the
luxury of ‘starting slow’ like young Laurent and
Lagerfeld did – social media killed that right off.
And so, strapped with the pressure to burst onto
the scene fully fledged, young brands need cash.
For designers like Adams Dolan, then, winning
the International Woolmark Prize could be the
difference between investing in new technology,
processes and people, or not.
When the winners are announced next
month, the fashion awards circuit will begin
again. But unlike Oscar winners, for young
designers, winning a fashion prize is just the
beginning. It’s maintaining the momentum
that’s the real challenge. Winners of the 2020
Woolmark Prize will be announced February 18.

Clockwise from top left, nominees for the 2020 International Woolmark Prize: Emily Bode of BODE, Ludovic de Saint Sernin, Shin
Kyu Yong and Ji Sun Park of Blindness, Richard Malone, Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh of Botter; Samuel Ross of A-COLD-
WALL*, Serhat Isik and Benjamin A. Huseby of GmbH, Matthew Adams Dolan, Dilan and Lezan Lurr of Namacheko, Feng Chen Wang.

30 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020 GQ.COM.AU

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 Brief | Art

D ior Men is leading the way when it

comes to today’s luxury fashion labels.
With one-of-a-kind collections shown in
Tokyo, Paris and Miami, 2019 saw the French
maison ascend to new heights as it continues to
shape a legacy likely not to be challenged for
years to come. While the genius of Kim Jones
is at the heart of Dior’s success, it’s the array
of artists the Brit has engaged that have helped
fill the new collections with a fresh sense of
character and relevance.
Inspired by geology as well as ideas of the
past, present and future, Arsham’s influence can
be seen all over Dior’s SS20 show in Paris last
June, where he collaborated with Jones on the set
design as well as the jewellery and prints used
for different garments. As the collection hits
Australian shores, here’s what the American had
to say when quizzed on bringing it to life.
GQ: Tell us how the collaboration with
Dior came about.

Daniel Arsham Daniel Arsham: Kim and I have a lot of

The New York artist discusses his unique relationship with
Kim Jones as the pair collaborate on Dior Men’s new collection.
Words Mike Christensen
mutual friends. I’ve followed what he was doing
at LV, and even back to his London days with
Umbro so when Kim asked me to work on this,
I knew it was an incredible opportunity. Also,
my wife is French so the Dior house and the

32 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

 significance of that name has been such a part of
my experience. One of the things Kim told me
from the beginning was that he really wanted
to find artists he thought Christian Dior would
be interested in if he was alive today. People
who were touching history, people who were
touching this moment in time.
GQ: What excited you the most about
working with Jones?
DA: Initially, just being able to access the level
of craft that they were able to achieve in the
collections. Because my first impression was,
how do we translate crystallised objects into
wearable things that are going to fold up and
be resilient? The jewellery really has a physical
quality that’s so similar to the actual work.
There’s inset crystals and everything and
they’ve done this kind of applique technique
to a lot of the garments where the materials
are embedded. Some next-level shit.
GQ: What was the most challenging thing
about transferring your art to clothing?
DA: Kim was adamant about how the translation
of my work was done through the collection.
They had brought a couple of samples to my
studio in New York and there was one that I was
looking at a little bit too long and Kim was like,
‘I can tell you don’t like it – we’re nixing that’. Surfboard chic
There were a couple of things that if they couldn’t From Disney to Dior, Pharrell Williams
achieve it exactly in the highest quality, they just to Future Relic, Arsham has combined
didn’t do it. We approached so many different forces with some of the most talented
avenues in terms of materials and techniques that creatives to produce other-worldly
I didn’t even know existed. collabs. As part of an exhibition
GQ: How do you ensure your work is currently at Selfridges in London, he
relevant today? designed a surfboard with Aussie
DA: Looking back into the archives, we pulled shaper, Hayden Cox of HaydenShapes,
out things where we were almost trying to like you’ve never seen before.
combine three eras in one: the past, this present “I grew up in Miami near the water
moment, and this imagined future where these and the ocean has always been a huge
objects become archeological objects. We talked part of my life. I can’t say that I surf
a lot about how although these words appear as but I can stand up on a smaller wave
if they’re kind of falling apart, but they’re made so when Hayden approached me, I’d
never done any kind of collaboration
of crystal, which is growing, so they could be
like this,” says Arsham. “He started
growing into this completion. That kind of
going into all of these techniques that
ambiguity sits well within my work and certainly
he had developed that never really
with what Kim’s done in the collection.
became part of anything. They were just
GQ: Can you talk us through your process
experiments. One of them was this idea
JACKIE NICKERSON; LEWIS RONALD.

of working? of having a clear board, which is what

PHOTOGRAPHY: ADRIEN DIRAND;

DA: My approach is to make things that
I need and want that don’t already exist. It’s a
bit like alchemy. You’re taking one material
and transforming it into another and imbuing
it with meaning. It’s an obsession for me but
it’s the making that’s the obsession for me. n
Arsham is currently exhibiting at the
NGV International.
Clockwise from far left: the set designed by Arsham for
Dior Men’s SS20 collection in June last year; ‘Heinz Tomato
Soup Can With Sign’ by Daniel Arsham; an eroded Porsche
courtesy of Arsham on display in Selfridges; the translu-
cent surfboard created by Arsham and Hayden Cox; Dan-
iel Arsham; one of the wearable accessories concocted by
Arsham for the SS20 Dior Men collection.
we’ve done – with erosions so they look
like they’re broken almost. You actually
can see through it. I assumed it wouldn’t
be functional – Hayden injected it with
helium and sealed it off so we literally
pressurised the interior on it.”
The board will be available for purchase
from April at danielarsham.com

GQ.COM.AU 33
 Brief | Culture

The
hustle is
Queer

Tan France Jonathan Van Ness

Bobby Berk

Antoni Porowski Karamo Brown PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES.

34 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020


Let’s talk about sex
We speak to Sex Education star Asa Butterfield, as he returns with a second
instalment of the most cringeworthy, bingeworthy show on TV.
Words Jake Millar
T eenagers seem to be everywhere
right now. Euphoria, 13 Reasons Why,
whatever TikTok is – people can’t get enough
of them. But while many series focus on the
dramas and difficulties of Gen-Z, few celebrate
the sheer awkwardness of high school quite
like Netflix series Sex Education. “I’ve noticed
you’re pretending to masurbate,” Dr Jean
Milburn casually mentions to her son, Otis, at
one point in the first season. “Would you like to
talk about it?” Turns out he would not.
This cringe-inducing dynamic between
Otis (Butterfield) and his sex therapist mother
(played by Gillian Anderson) soon becomes
central to the show. And as Otis’ oversharing,
overbearing mum, Anderson’s performance is
nothing short of hilarious. Her delivery of lines
such as “Jizz. Spunk. Man milk!” is easily one
of the highlights of the series, if not her career.
She didn’t get to say that on The X-Files.
“Gillian was a treat,” says Butterfield of
his co-star. “Me and Gillian didn’t have any
rehearsal time together, actually – we shot all
of her scenes in the space of about four weeks,
so it was really intense and a lot of fun. But
yeah, Gillian is lovely.”
Awkward as it may be, his mother’s frank
advice soon comes in handy when Otis teams up
with bad-girl Maeve Wiley (Emma Mackey) to
become his school’s resident sex expert. Despite
his own complete lack of personal experience,
he’s soon guiding classmates through their
various sexual antics and escapades.
“We all have our fair share of revealing or
embarrassing moments,” says Butterfield. “Otis
actually gets off quite lightly compared to some
of the others in season one, but when we signed
up for this project, we knew it was part of the
story. And as well as that, it was never grotesque,
it was always done tastefully, to show an aspect
of the character. In a sense it was embarrassing
at times, but you get used to it.”
One of the show’s key strengths is its diversity.
Rounding out the young cast is Eric Effiong
(Ncuti Gatwa), Otis’ gay best friend who comes
from a religious Ghanaian family; Adam Groff
(Connor Swindells) the headmaster’s son and
“We knew people would talk about it because
of the subject matter – it doesn’t shy away from
being bold and being upfront about its issues.”
Brief | TV
school bully; Lily Iglehart (Tanya Reynolds)
who pens alien erotica and is determined to lose
her virginity as soon as humanly possible; and
Anwar (Chaneil Kular); the unlikely leader of
mean-girl clique ‘The Untouchables’.
“It’s a huge talking point right now,” says
Butterfiled of inclusivity on screen. “But I think
our show does it in a way that’s not just ticking
boxes because the characters are so real and so
honest. You don’t believe they’ve just been shoe-
horned in to appease a certain community.”
Viewers clearly didn’t think it felt forced.
As well as being diverse and funny, the show
was also hugely popular – Netflix claims it hit
40 million streams within its first month.
“You never really know when you’re making
it,” he says of Sex Education’s success. “We
knew people would talk about it because of the
subject matter – it doesn’t shy away from being
bold and being upfront about its issues. But we
didn’t know it was going to be such a hit. Seeing
the response in the first week was amazing and
really reaffirmed that people wanted this kind of
show. They wanted something that is honest and
frank about what teenagers are going through.”
The show was renewed for a second season
last February, which hit screens earlier this
month. And while things mightn’t have been
too risqué for Otis in the first instalment, the
same can’t be said for season two. Not that
Butterfield is complaining.
“Otis is growing up, he’s got a girlfriend
now, so he’s finally exploring that whole side of
himself,” he says of what to expect. “And when
you’ve got 15 years of pent-up sexual tension
and it’s finally released, it is quite... explosive.
So he’s enjoying that.”
“Things heat up, for sure. But I came in
prepared and I probably would have been
disappointed if they hadn’t. We know these
characters now, we’re able to push things and
take them further. It’s exciting.” Season two of
Sex Education is now streaming on Netflix.
GQ.COM.AU 35
 &A

Justin Langer
After a string of resounding – and embarrassing – defeats, a heavily publicised cheating
scandal and a cultural identity all but destroyed, Australian cricket was in a shambles.
Charged with plotting its return, the former batsman’s leadership strategy is a simple
one: treat your players with honesty and respect and, in return, they will deliver.
Words Angus Fontaine

M ost cricketers, you’ll watch their eyes turn from water to

stone, over a career. Such is the test of character this game
places on players. No other team sport is so individual an odyssey.
Sure, there is batting in partnership, bowling in tandem and fielding
as a unit. But ultimately it is bat versus ball, bowler against batsman.
Blink and miss. Flinch and fall. Fuck-up and fade to black. Game over.
Justin Langer’s eyes have gone the opposite way to most. They
sparkle like coal. They say: Hello darkness my old friend. Bring me
pressure to make diamonds. That’s Langer’s mission as head Australian
cricket coach – restore the dignity of a team that shamed a nation by
cheating. And help them win – games and hearts.
It’s said sport has no soul and no memory but ‘Sandpapergate’ tests
that claim. Langer had a brilliant pedigree when he took the reins in
May 2018 post-scandal. But it was character Australia needed. And no
one in the summer game walks the path of the righteous like ‘JL’, a
decent man, a Christian soul and one tough nut. This is a man driven
by family, fitness and faith – and a job that is more of a quest.
Meeting Langer today he seems still to crouch on toes as if facing
a fast bowler. Yet his handshake has nothing to prove, and his smile
is warm, unwary. At 49, he’s father to four daughters with childhood
sweetheart Sue, a black belt in Zen Do Kai and a master of transcendental
meditation. Author of four books, including Seeing the Sunrise and
The Power of Passion, he counts Margaret Court as a neighbour, John
Howard as a mentor, and both Jesus and Buddha as confidantes.
It wasn’t always thus. Langer’s first ball as a Test batsman almost
killed him, and he endured a roller-coaster career of struggles,
exiles and triumphs. The ledger shows 105 tests for 23 centuries and
more first-class runs than any Australian in history. But it was the
billion bruises in between that made him a coach. Taking a missile to
the ribs only to bounce up with a grin, eyes twinkling, was the
Langer trademark. It disarmed bowlers, delighted crowds and
inspired teammates.
Take the hit – then hit back. Sounds like a mantra for Australian
cricket’s future.
GQ: Last October, one of your stars, Glenn Maxwell, played
a brilliant innings, performed a freakish run-out and did it all
with a smile. The next day he withdrew to deal with mental
health issues on your advice.
Justin Langer: Often it’s the greatest entertainers and brightest
talents who wear masks as an armour against reality. I see it a lot with
sportsmen and people in the public eye and I get it because I’ve done
it. I’d noticed the mask slipping with Maxy for the past 12-18 months.
He loves playing cricket so much he just doesn’t stop. But anyone who
doesn’t stop burns out, mentally and physically. So I asked: ‘How ya
going?’ He said ‘Not that good actually. Maybe we should talk.’ And
behind his mask was a human being with a serious issue.
GQ: Is the pressure of a cricket life greater today? Or are modern
players less equipped to deal with it?

36 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

 Vintage Langer in action
during the 1997 Ashes tour.
PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES.

GQ.COM.AU 37
 &A
JL: Modern sportspeople get paid very well, that’s no secret. The
danger is when they judge themselves on how much money they
earn as what they’re worth. When I was coaching state cricket we
tried hard to get players working or studying or doing things other
than cricket. Ever since I’ve been a coach I’ve made it my business to
develop cricketers as people. When I started playing I only got paid if
I got picked in the first XI. So I worked desk jobs in a bank and for a
stockbroking firm. And I laboured, grinding the paint off swimming
pools and installing airconditioners. I had to put money on the table
because cricket didn’t. It made me a better person and gave me an
understanding of how most people live. And after all day in front of a
computer, I’d get to training with crazy energy for it because cricket
was love, not work.
GQ: Is there a greater danger to modern players than too
much money?
JL: Absolutely. If I could give any sportsperson advice I wouldn’t say,
‘Watch the ball,’ I’d say, ‘Don’t do social media’. I hear this crap about
‘it builds your profile’ but what really builds your profile is being a great
cricketer and a good human being. That’s number one. Steve Waugh
said to me recently: ‘I’ve got to a point in my life where I don’t give
a fuck what anyone thinks of me’. But for a young person that’s hard.
Kids want to be popular but that pursuit also makes them a target.
I don’t do social media because I don’t want those voices in my head and
that poison in my veins. Grumpy old man? Maybe. Or wise old man
speaking from experience? See, I’m an old pro but when I came into
this job I let the scrutiny affect me. I kept telling the players not to get
distracted by white noise, but the truth was I was distracted. So when
we got to England for the Ashes I didn’t read one word of press for five
months. Man, it was so liberating. I de-personalised everything. And
the journos I’d wanted to go Mike Tyson on, I just smiled at.
GQ: Almost two years into life as the Australian coach, how do
you define the job?
JL: Father. Uncle. Brother. Headmaster. Policeman. Therapist. Soap
opera director! Sure, you’ve got to understand the game but I leave
bat and ball to the specialist coaches. My job is looking after people.
If my guys are happy off the field they’ll be happy on it. Ultimately
my bosses will judge me on win-loss, but for me the real challenge is
getting results while managing the human side no one sees.
GQ: So in that sense do you work for the players or the cricket
community?
JL: Both. One of the philosophies we’ve been
really strong on for this team has been making “It’s for cricket-
Australians proud of us again. That’s not some
bullshit slogan either. We have to restore pride
loving kids we
after what happened in South Africa. I’ve loved work hardest. They
Australian cricket since I was a kid. Kim Hughes,
Allan Border… those guys were my heroes. Later
love the Australian
I was fortunate to meet and be mentored, even team and when
captained, by those guys. But for me they were still
the heroes they’d been when I was a kid, always
we let them down
would be. So it’s for cricket-loving kids we work they hurt.”
38 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
hardest. They love the Australian team and when we let them down
they hurt and they bleed. When I try to make our team better people
and better cricketers, it’s those kids in the front of my mind.
GQ: The new mindset you’ve brought includes players walking
barefoot on the field before battle and cleaning up their own
dressing rooms after a game. How do those actions change the
culture of Australian cricket?
JL: Everyone talks about culture but that just means the sum of
individual behaviour. There’s a perception that brilliant individuals
destabilise a team. I don’t agree. If a player’s individual character
gets revealed negatively they’re out of the team. The guys whose
character reveals a great team man with an honest work ethic, they’re
the champions of the game you keep around. And just because people
work hard doesn’t mean their characters can’t emerge, having a beer or
a smoke after the game. Sandpapergate said our culture had to change.
How long will it take to do that? A million positive behaviours. Maybe
two million. It’s infinite. But one thing is for sure. It will only take
one piece of bad behaviour for people to say, ‘There you go, that’s the
Australian cricket team. Their culture is still shit’.
GQ: Let’s go back to the flashpoint. You weren’t yet coach. How
did you hear?
JL: I was on the couch. My wife was in London so I had the girls with
me. We turned on the telly and I saw it. ‘Pray that’s not Cameron
[Bancroft]’, I said to my youngest, because we love Cam at our place.
But sure enough it was. I was numb. Next day I was at Fremantle
Markets with my hippy daughter Ally-Rose. We go every Sunday
morning. She plays me her funky music on the way, then we sit, have
a coffee and a gozleme and we talk. For six or seven years that’s been
our ritual and people leave us in peace. But that day 50 people came
over, angry, sad, wanting answers. Then 300 guys in hard hats bailed
me up on a work site: What is going on? I didn’t know what to say. But
I saw how much it meant to people.
GQ: Did you get to the bottom of what actually happened?
JL: One thing I’ve hopefully brought to this team is something my
father taught me: honest conversations can fix everything. I had very
honest conversations with Davey [Warner], Smudge [Steve Smith] and
Cam and I believe I have a very good handle on what happened and
why. I don’t condone their actions. It made me sick. But I understand
that as captain and vice captain the scrutiny is relentless and they got
tired, desperate. They were knackered, under pressure and trying to
find an edge to get a quick result. They messed
with the ball. It was a dumb mistake and I don’t
understand the decision. I hate it. But I understand
that when you’re tired – whether you’re a cricketer,
a teacher, a dad, a business leader – you make
dumb mistakes and bad judgments. You lose sight
of what’s most important. Those boys lost sight
of their responsibilities to the fans and public.
They lost sight of their mum and dad, brothers
and sisters, and mates. If you make them proud, all
Australia is proud. Fuck it up and everyone suffers.
GQ: Given your workload, how do you safeguard
yourself against making similar mistakes?
“That’s what
JL: Meditation helps. I took it up in ’93 when I tell the guys:
I first got dropped from the Test side. I needed it
then because I tried too hard, thought too hard.
‘Cricket tests your
I’ve meditated every day since. It’s no secret character. I know
I didn’t enjoy the first six months in this job and
because I’ve been
this time last year it hit me. It was day three of the
test against India. I snapped at a journo during the there. So let me
press conference – funnily enough, about Glenn help you.’”
Maxwell – the next day’s front page was: ‘Langer
Loses The Plot’. I was at breakfast with Sue and
she started crying. ‘I don’t like what this job is doing to you. I don’t
recognise you anymore.’ It was a turning point. I’m usually pretty
self-aware but I have my own mask and armour. This job is relentless.
I’ve got 25 million people giving me advice. Even when we win, my
mind doesn’t stop. I go to bed thinking: Who do we pick for the next
game? How do I fix training the next day? What do I say to the
press? I work 360 days a year and most of the time I’m rooted. But
these are the responsibilities of leadership: if I don’t get myself up,
everyone senses it.
GQ: When it comes to perspective it’s easy to forget this
generation of players is still processing the death of their friend
and teammate, Phillip Hughes.
JL: In October we were at Adelaide Oval where there’s a photo of
Hughesy on the wall. We were debriefing after a game and I caught
his eye and said to the boys, ‘Let’s pause and raise a glass to an
absent friend’ and we toasted. Oh god, I still remember that day.
Ever since, Phillip Hughes has helped me find perspective. I loved
him. He won my heart, just like he won everyone’s. Hughesy was
the country kid who loved cows and smacked a cricket ball like he
was chopping down a hand of bananas. When he died he had 23
first-class centuries, Steve Smith had five. I probably had three at
the same age. The kid was a gun. I loved his freedom, his smile, his
attitude. I planted a magnificent native rose for him in my backyard
with a Buddha statue underneath. I talk to Hughesy a lot out there.
GQ: Phillip Hughes was your first coaching project, wasn’t he?
JL: He’d just been dropped, rang me and said, ‘I want to come do
some training with you’. I’d just finished playing and was thinking
of setting up a training academy so he became my guinea pig. Out
he came and mate, I threw everything at him. It was ‘Eye of the
Tiger’ stuff. I was Apollo and he was Rocky. We were running on the
sand, sparring in the boxing ring, running a hundred singles on hot
Perth days. But I couldn’t break him. He just kept on smiling. And
he made me smile. Hughesy stayed in our home, Sue and the girls
adored him. One night the fire alarm went off. Smoke everywhere.
Turns out a candle’s burned up into the ceiling. Fireys arrive, lights
flashing. I get the girls downstairs. They’re crying, scared. It’s all
over when Hughesy wanders out, rubbing his eyes. What’s going
on? Of course he later told everyone he’d rescued the girls from the
flames single-handed!
GQ: Many say Hughes would’ve been captain
of this team. Instead Tim Paine is leading the
side and, with you, restoring the integrity of the
Australian XI.
JL: Tim Paine has layers. People forget he was touted
early as an Australian captain. Then his finger, the
tool of his trade as a wicketkeeper, got busted over and
over. Eighteen months ago he was about to quit and
sell cricket bats for a living. Now he’s led a team that
retained the Ashes in England. Adversity taught Tim
Paine to be a leader. He’s much more than a wartime
captain. He’s a ripping bloke, an elite athlete, well
respected by all and hungry for success. What more can you ask?
GQ: He’s also 35. When Paine calls time, should Steve Smith
return as captain?
JL: It’s about timing. Australia usually gets the right captain for the right
time. Steve has learned a lot from what he’s been through and his batting
since coming back has been amazing. But after the Ashes he was cooked. Is
he ready for the pressure of leadership? We’ll have to think very hard about
whether he’s the right guy at the right time. And whether he wants it.
GQ: After being axed from the test side you wrote to Sir Donald
Bradman for help. He replied telling you foremost to enjoy
yourself. Good advice?
JL: I encourage fun because it’s easy to forget why we fell in love with
cricket as kids. The carrots are big in the modern game and these guys
can make a lot of money. But sometimes the more you play and the
harder you try, the less fun you have. I teach the guys to chill and relax
when they forget how. And we have fun. At the Ashes I’d never heard
so much laughter. Before that we went to Gallipoli and the Western
Front and shared a flask of whiskey at Lone Pine. Perspective. The great
athletes – boxers, runners, golfers – are limber, loose. Steve Smith is like
a hose in a swimming pool he’s so bloody loose! But he’s the best.
GQ: As a player you were never the best so did you set out to be
the toughest?
JL: When I got dropped again in 2001 it was as close as I’ve ever been
to depression. I was distraught. The dream was over. And I did what
Aussie blokes do: I became more machine than man. I hit a million balls
and talked to no one. I ran a thousand hills waiting for someone to ask,
‘Are you OK?’ I internalised the pain. At one point, after another duck
and another blown chance, I rang my wife, my mum and dad and my
best mate to say, ‘It’s over’. They all thought I was going to jump off the
hotel balcony! That’s what I tell the guys: ‘Cricket tests your character.
I know because I’ve been there and come through. So let me help you.’
GQ: When your guys fall out of love with the game, what do you
tell them?
JL: I say, let go. Let go of expectation. Let go of anxiety for the
future. Let go of what other people think of you. Just go about
your business. Look after each other. Have the courage to talk.
Know who your mates are. Trust them. Don’t do it by yourself
because it’s not soft to have hard conversations with your mates. n
Watch every game of cricket this summer on Fox Sports or on-demand with Kayo.
GQ.COM.AU 39
Unrivalled
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 Taste & Travel
Your F or many, Australia’s great charm lies
in its remoteness. This big, wide island
2020
continent offers the rest of the world the promise
of travelling halfway across the globe to explore
the unexplored. It’s our unique selling point.
travel It’s an appeal that draws European
backpackers in their droves to adventure our
hit list
isolated turquoise beaches and dusty outback
tracks. Some even stay and work for three
months in rural beach towns many of us have
Few people love an never heard of.
overseas trip quite like The great irony is that although others are
Aussies. But it turns out all too happy to invest in the great Australian
some of the finest hidden adventure, few of us are quite as willing to
tourism treasures are explore our own backyard. While domestic
right here within our overnight tourism is still on the rise, a study
shores – as long as you by travel website Wotif reveals that, on
average, most Australians have visited fewer
know where to look.
than one per cent of the 15,268 towns, cities
Words Jeremy Drake and suburbs around our fair nation.
42 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
We’ve gone soft since our Burke and
Wills days and instead of dying underneath
a coolabah tree outside Innamincka, we’d
much prefer to follow every other Melburnian
on a Jetstar flight to Noosa during the
school holidays.
Thankfully, 160 years since the pair’s
exploratory demise, there are still a few among
us who continue to follow in their footsteps
and seek out those under-the-radar hot spots.
Truth is, there’s never been a better time to
explore this great land, with a whole number
of regions and towns set to explode next
year, thanks to huge private and government
investment, some clever entrepreneurs, as
well as new direct flights.
With the New Year upon us, we’ve put
together a list of Australia’s hottest hidden
gems in each state and territory to keep your
eye on in the 12 months ahead.
The famously pink Lake Hillier
in Victoria’s Middle Island.
 Clockwise from top left: Mt Mulligan Lodge; the trail leading to
‘Best of All Lookout’ in the Scenic Rim, Queensland; Little Hellfire
Bay in Byron Bay; Dirk Lodge on Dirk Hartog Island; East Kimberley
Festival in Ord Valley.

Western Australia
It’s a state that is about four-times bigger than
Texas and only the second-largest country
subdivision in the world, after a province
in northern Russia. And no offense to our
Yakutsk friends, but WA is probably slightly
more appealing in the weather stakes. No
wonder this is where most of Australia’s 2020
destination secrets are still to be told.
It’s also more accessible than ever. Virgin will
commence direct flights to Kununurra from
Melbourne starting May 15 this year, rapidly
opening up the East Kimberley to other major
cities, while Jetstar will follow suit with direct
flights between Melbourne and Busselton,
turning a once sleepy Margaret River into a west
coast version of Byron Bay.
According to new accommodation interest
and booking data from Wotif, five WA
destinations make up their top 10 most-searched
places from 2019, including Perth, Scarborough
PHOTOGRAPHY: ALAMY.
operate a luxury eco lodge in a converted
shearers shed, tucked in an idyllic corner of the
island called ‘Homestead Bay’. dirkhartogisland.com
STAY RITZ-CARLTON PERTH
The newest luxury hotel in the city has
opened right on the waterfront with 205
rooms and suites all with breathtaking views
of the harbour. ritzcarlton.com
EXPERIENCE ORD VALLEY MUSTER
What started as just an outback dinner
under the stars for local businesses, the
20th rendition of this iconic East Kimberley
festival will also mark the unofficial start of
Australia’s love affair with this region from
May 15 (the first day of those new direct
flights with Virgin). ordvalleymuster.com.au
Queensland
The promise of endless warmth has always
attracted visitors to the Sunny State and as
we usher in a new decade with the promise of
Debbie, shark attacks and back-to-back coral
bleachings on the Great Barrier Reef.
If you’re planning your annual visit north,
be sure to look further afield than the popular
Noosa or the Gold Coast. Even ‘Bris-vegas’
now has one of the most Instagram-worthy
urban resorts on the planet, The Calile,
which has topped just about every hotel
design award in 2019. Here’s our top picks as
this year shapes up to be a regional tourism
bonanza for Queensland.
STAY MT MULLIGAN LODGE
Located on a private 28,000 hectare outback
property, the lodge accommodates just 16
guests and has the sort of pool you tell your
mates about. mountmulligan.com
EXPERIENCE THE SCENIC RIM
Just an hour from Brisbane is a rainforest
region as old as the dinosaurs yet it’s ripe for
exploring. The Rim straddles the Qld and
NSW border and is home to unique stays

Beach, Mandurah, Margaret River and Broome.
But here’s a few more GQ secrets.
STAY DIRK HARTOG ISLAND
This 80km finger of land sits just off the most
westerly point of mainland Australia like a jewel
in the Indian Ocean. Kieran and Tory Wardle
even sunnier days (thanks, global warming)
expect no different.
However, regional areas such as Cairns,
Townsville and the Whitsundays have
been working double time to shake off the
negative impact of the devastating cyclone
like the famous luxury Nightfall glamping
experience in the Lamington National Park.
visitscenicrim.com.au
Tasmania
MONA and Dark Mofo founder David Walsh

GQ.COM.AU 43
 Taste & Travel
has certainly done a good job in turning sleepy
Hobart from a tourism afterthought into a
thriving destination. But forget Hobart, because
just like the rest of Australia, chances are you’ve
already been to the Salamanca Markets.
Instead, searches for getaways on Tasmania’s
remote West Coast are up by 65 per cent
from the previous year according to Wotif.
Tasmania’s south-west wilderness is truly
Australia’s last eden, where a road trip will have
you meandering into sleepy fishing villages
such as Strahan, before you settle in at a luxury
wilderness cabin straight out of a picture book.
EXPERIENCE BLUE DERBY PODS RIDE
Further north, Tasmania’s iconic Blue Derby
Pods have become a mountain biker’s mecca
thanks to two local entrepreneurs. Retreat to
your own architecturally designed circular
pod after a big day of riding, tucked away in
dense bushland. bluederbypodsride.com.au
South Australia
There’s always been a slight hesitation in telling
people you’re going to Adelaide for a holiday.
Yet the South Australian Tourism Commission
released figures in October that well and truly
debunk this stigma.
Number of nights booked by interstate
Aussies is up nine per cent on the previous year
and there’s good news if you’re a Barossa winery,
because expenditure is also up more than a fifth.
44 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
For a state only slightly larger than NSW,
with a population more than four times smaller,
finding a remote luxury getaway can actually
be pretty easy. Here’s our pick of the bunch.
STAY PRAIRIE HOTEL, PARACHILNA
This quintessential Australian outpost pub
(with a touch of elegance and an incredible
restaurant) comes alive with 4WDs,
helicopters and thirsty patrons at lunchtime.
Its Executive rooms have views right across
the Flinders Ranges. prairiehotel.com.au
Victoria & NSW
Hotspots are hard to come by in two of the
busiest places in the country. So the trick to is
aim for the destinations and unique stays you
can’t find on standard accommodation websites.
New online booking platform Riparide
claims to help city dwellers from Sydney and
Melbourne book what they call “soul-fulfilling
weekend escapes through storytelling”.
Analysis of the platform’s booking data
reflects that more people are escaping the city
and heading into the great outdoors as a way
to disconnect.
Its six most popular escapes in 2019 were
luxe tepees, glamping tents, tiny houses,
cottages and beach shacks, all of which are
less about luxe-mod cons and more about
authentic adventures just outside the city.
This one is not to be missed.
Clockwise from left:
one of the Blue Derby
pods in Tasmania; view
from the pool at Tiwi
Islands Retreat; inside
Midnight Hotel; the
limestone formation of
main Wilpena Pound
mountain in Flinders
ranges national park.
STAY THE GLASS HOUSE, MOUNT
FRANKLIN, VIC
Architecturally designed, modern house with
endless views and a round plunge pool is a
popular weekend escape for a group of mates.
viewretreats.com
ACT
Finally, there are reasons other than ‘work’
and ‘family’ to go to Canberra – multiple,
actually. Topping the list are Braddon and
NewActon, two inner-city precincts yielding
the hippest new bars, restaurants and stays.
STAY MIDNIGHT HOTEL
The newest art and design hotel by Marriot
gives its Sydney and Melbourne neighbours a
run for their clout. midnighthotel.com.au
NT
The heartland of Indigenous Australia, the
Northern Territory is full of sacred sites every
Australian should visit. And Ayers Rock is only
the start.
STAY TIWI ISLANDS RETREAT
Just a 20-minute flight from Darwin or two-
and-a-half hours by ferry, this remote retreat
on Bathurst Island is the brainchild of Matt
Wright, the star of National Geographic’s
Outback Wrangler – and the best archipelago
you can reach without your passport.
tiwiislandretreat.com.au
PHOTOGRAPHY: ALAMY.
GQ.COM.AU
 Stylist

Our pick of this summer’s

coolest new kit

This season is all about being brave, not boring. Explore the latest trends with some of our favourite
key pieces – from bags and bucket hats to ballet flats for men. Trust us, they’re a thing.
Photography Edward Urrutia Styling Dijana Maddison Words Jake Millar

46 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

GQ.COM.AU 47
 Stylist

48 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

 Chunky sneakers are taking a backseat. Introducing
Beach days call for a bag you can throw this season’s most fashion-forward footwear choice.
everything in, like this handy number. Plimsolls, $655, by Dries Van Noten; hat, $750, by Valentino; water bottle,
Bag, $1350, Celine by Hedi Slimane; and sandals, approx. $520, by Marni. $49.95, by Frank Green; and water bottle holder, POA, by Stella McCartney.

GQ.COM.AU 49
 Stylist
Alessandro Michele and fashion’s
T hank Alessandro Michele for one
of the greatest styling cues of 2019
– A$AP Rocky’s monarchist silk babushkas.
The 47-year-old creative director of Gucci
introduced a similar style at his 2017
women’s cruise show, held in the chapel of
Westminster Abbey, as a straight-up homage
to the staid scarves of Queen Elizabeth
II herself. Michele is also the source of
Ryan Gosling’s ’50s prom shirt at the 2017
Academy Awards, Donald Glover’s groovy
velvet suits, and the ongoing Jared Leto-
ssaince that has turned the musician-actor
away from off-duty-Angeleno style and into
a gentleman of the Canyon, caftans and all.
The list of men who flock to Michele for
suiting, loafers, baubles and kerchiefs seems
endless, in fact, and on it are names as diverse
as Swiss tennis star Roger Federer and Harlem
designer and hip-hop world legend Dapper
Dan. What’s more, many of these men are
equally as likely to sport a Gucci dress as
they are a Gucci loafer. At the 2019 Met Gala,
Leto showed up wearing a Michele-designed
red evening gown and carrying a model
of his own head as an accessory. Michele’s
version of masculinity has become fashion’s
predominant one: an idea not just of men
in skirts but of men embracing loveliness,
textural richness, and glamour – things that
in the 20th century were reserved largely
for women. Gucci’s celebrity friends and
collaborators are helping to popularise this
aesthetic in the mainstream and, as a result,
allowing the designer to push himself further
and further in restyling the modern man.
Michele lets out a big, bright laugh at the
recollection of Leto’s Met Gala look. He has
just returned from a summer holiday and is
gazing down past his chestnut locks into the
FaceTime screen, tapping his bulky rings
on the table in Gucci’s Rome design offices
for effect. “Jared is a person who loves to
experiment,” Michele says. “When I saw him
with the evening dress, I thought that it was
so unbelievably beautiful. At the end of two
days of big conversations – on the phone, in
50 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
Reshaping our vision of masculinity – babushkas, baubles, evening gowns,
Words Steff Yotka
his room, during a dinner – I said, ‘Choose
the red dress with the head. You will be like a
Shakespearean character.’ ”
The Bard is an apt reference for a designer
who stages his runways more like theatrical
events than typical catwalk fodder. It’s a
precedent set by his debut collection, for
AW15. At that time, Michele was acting as an
interim creative director, given just five days
to make something to present on the brand’s
Milan runway after the unceremonious
departure of Gucci’s then creative team.
What he dreamed up was nothing short of
revelatory. The flaxen-haired model Hugo
Goldhoorn opened the show in a red silk
pussy-bow blouse and pooling lank trousers.
Bracelet-sleeved suits in deep emerald,
Young Turk velvet-trimmed coats, and a
new iteration of Gucci’s banker-bro loafers,
stripped of their backs and lined with
Einsteinian tufts of kangaroo fur, followed.
Less than five days later, Michele (and that
pussy-bow blouse) was officially appointed
the creative director of Gucci. Five years later,
the shift in menswear started by Michele is
seismic, with that first eerily pretty ensemble
predicting a half-decade of luxurious revolt.
Michele designs both the menswear and
womenswear collections simultaneously,
pulling ideas from one to the other. “It’s
more interesting, sometimes, to work on
the menswear. You can really shout, because
menswear is more rigid,” he says. “When
you try to manipulate the codes of a man’s
wardrobe, you can do something really new.
It’s pretty interesting. I started thinking
about an idea of beauty that, for me, doesn’t
belong to men or women. It’s almost the
same; that’s why I put a few men’s looks on
women and the reverse. You can be more
masculine showing your femininity.”
In the five years since the fateful show that
ordained Michele as one of fashion’s utmost
provocateurs, he has staged an overthrow
of power in the world of menswear by
fashioning new male identities. Michele’s
conquest occurs with a stitch in place of a
 genderless revolution
and all – is a lot easier with friends like Harry Styles and A$AP Rocky.
PHOTOGRAPHY: TIERNEY GEARON.

Alessandro Michele
overlooking Sullivan
Canyon Park in LA.

GQ.COM.AU 51
 Stylist
3. 4.

2.

5.

7.

6.

PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES.

10. 9. 8.

1. Harry Styles attends the 2019 Met Gala. 2. The embellishments on Leto’s jacket for the 2019 LACMA 2019 Art + Film Gala. 3. Elton John attends the Gucci Cruise 2019 show at Alyscamps
in May. 4. Hugo Goldhoorn opens the Gucci AW15 show. 5. Donald Glover in head-to-toe Gucci in LA in November 2019. 6. A$AP Rocky in his now-famous babushka style at the 2018
LACMA Art + Film Gala. 7. Michele acknowledges the audience after the Gucci SS20 show. 8. Jared Leto and his iconic wax head at the 2019 Met Gala.
9. Omari Hardwick, Dapper Dan and 21 Savage in New York City in May. 10. A look from Gucci’s AW19 collection.

52 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

sword. That stitch can hold a hem flared out,
so when Donald Glover slinks across a stage,
he does so with a glamazon kick. It can hold
the shoulder of a jacket tight and high, to
relay a schoolboyish charm, or it can secure
a button on a silk blouse – even if it looks best
undone. All together, these are luxuriously
made garments that allow guys to liberate
themselves from antiquated codes. No longer
must you choose between powerful and cool.
Michele’s work allows for the conveyance of
a full range of characteristics: sensual, coy,
intellectual, menacing. It’s a sharp pivot from
Gucci’s last heyday, in the ’90s, when Tom
Ford popularised hot-bod hedonism with bare
chests and tight trousers.
“Dress codes belong to politics; society pushes
people to obey the rules – it’s easier. I think that
we must completely break from that.”
But to call Michele’s fey fashion radical
in the year 2019 is to misunderstand the
designer’s mission. The clothes beloved by
both Sir Elton John and Snoop Dogg are,
even at their wildest, classically minded.
“I understood,” Michele says, thinking
back to his first show, “that there is nothing
more new than an old beautiful code.” He
continues: “Dress codes belong to politics;
society pushes people to obey the rules –
it’s easier. I think that we must completely
break from that. Sometimes people feel
more comfortable in other types of dress,
in other lives. A pop star or an actor, they
can be a guide for other people if they show
something different.”
No one is a better embodiment of the
Michele method of masculinity than Harry
Styles, the British capital-P, capital-S Pop
Star with a voice and a visage that can launch
a thousand shrill screams wherever he goes.
“I think Harry is the perfect expression of
masculinity,” Michele says of his friend and
collaborator. “He is so relaxed in his body,
and completely open to listen to himself. He
likes to play with dress, with hair. I think
that he is really the incarnation of a pop icon
of the next generation. He’s the only one on
the market, I think, that is really in contact
with his feminine part. He’s sexy and he’s
handsome.” For the same Met Gala that Leto
attended dressed as an Elizabethan diva,
Styles wore a sheer black pussy-bow blouse
with high-waisted trousers, as an homage to
the New Romantics of the ’80s, part David
Sylvian and part David Bowie. “The friends
that I choose in my career, they really reflect
my idea of beauty, so I think that they are
really connected with their feminine part,”
says Michele. “For me, it’s more masculine.
A man is really attractive when he listens to
his feminine part.”
From the cult of Aphroditus to Jimi
Hendrix, men in skirts or ivory poet tops
were never out of style, really. But the magic
of Michele’s reappropriation of history is
that he does it not verbatim but with the
hazy almost-rightness of a dream, styling
togas over classic gray wool suits or ’80s
track pants with swaggy ’70s blouses. As
such, Michele’s Gucci promises that to lace
up a pair of ‘Ultrapace’ sneakers or step into
its monogram slides is never a sacrifice of
self in the name of style. The mash-up of
references, the diversity of products, allows
for everyone from Offset to Bradley Cooper
to find a Gucci piece to love. “It’s not that
I want to see all men in a gown. That’s not
what I think,” Michele explains. “It’s just that
I love the idea that I can be surprised by the
personality of someone else. It’s nice to play
with your life, to play with codes. I think that
the era of being masculine only if you have a
specific suit – it’s over. Completely over. Also,
women need men who are more connected
with a woman’s world.”
It’s this openness to explore every corner
of the fashion world that has made Michele’s
tenure at Gucci so exciting to watch. Over
the first five years of his leadership, Gucci’s
business was a fast-growing juggernaut.
“I think the more [the garments and
accessories] are special, the more they will
be saleable,” he says. “When I talk about the
collection and I show it to the merchandising
department, they understand that fashion
must be something unique. The era that
you just want to buy a black pair of trousers
without reason is over. Fashion can really talk
to you. It’s not just buying something, it’s
connecting to a strong image that suggests
something to you. I know that is very
complicated.” Michele laughs. “And it’s not
always easy to explain in English, but I always
try to be sincere with my position.”
The image Gucci champions, in the end,
isn’t one image at all. Michele has held
a mirror up to our world, reflecting the
tension, the sexuality, the fragility of being a
man in modern times back to us with passion,
rigour, symbolism, and love. As you move,
the Gucci reflection of you moves too. As the
world changes, Michele adapts. n
GQ.COM.AU 53
 Stylist | Moodboard

Back to work
Take the edge off returning to your desk (or whatever workstation awaits you)
by swapping your standard office essentials with a few on-trend alternatives.
Words Amy Campbell Photography Dijana Maddison Styling Harriet Crawford

Socks
Pineapple and racing-car prints might have been cute when you accepted your grad position,
but with promotions and bonuses comes the expectation that you’ll begin to dress for the job
you want. To be clear, this will require parting ways with your collection of ‘personality’ socks,
a phenomenon that is particularly prevalent in the corporate world post-Christmas. But believe
us, once your hooves get a feel for the superior cotton interior of Bally’s more sensibly coloured
socks (13), they’ll forget the pineapples even existed.

Bag
There’s nothing cool about the word ‘briefcase’, nor is ‘man bag’ a hip alternative. That being
said, a man needs a proper work bag – one he’s not ashamed to be seen with beyond office walls.
If you’re picking up what we’re putting down here, you’ll be tickled to hear that Bottega Veneta
(2) has built a case so crafty and handsome, you’ll feel proud simply carrying it around. Just
prepare for the compliments to flow in. But if not for this, what is buying a new bag for?

Shoes
The style of shoe you can get away with is going to depend on the mood of your work
environment, so here’s hoping you know how to read a room. But even if you’re surrounded by
suits, there are some subtle liberties you can take to bring the runway to work. Oxfords with
heavy-duty tread, such as Prada’s iteration, are evocative of SS20’s combat boot trend while
appearing respectable enough for the boardroom (26). If you’re more of a boot guy, this pair
from Givenchy (22) look sleek and subtle. And they are. Until you sit down, your hems inch up
and out pops that fun, shiny buckle.

Belt
Speaking of buckles, don’t forget the one that goes around your waist. Because in addition to
keeping your bottom half afloat it does wonders to infuse your entire ensemble with an air of
put-togetherness, the importance of which cannot be overstated in a professional setting. But
you know that. Here, you want to walk the line between conventional and ostentatious, and with
a glint of gold and a hint of status, this Tom Ford belt (16) does precisely that.

Pen
The modern office may be digitised, but the allure of a good pen – and the impression of know-
how it gives off – will never, ever fade. Think about it: when was the last time a punter with a
cheap ballpoint caught your attention (for the right reasons) from across the meeting room?
Exactly. With a handsome, metal-trimmed specimen like this fine writing instrument from
Hugo Boss (7) in hand, however, you’re a promotion waiting to happen.

Suit
Now that you’ve hit refresh on the accessories it’s time to talk about what goes on in the middle.
Assuming you’re encouraged to dress in a suit, now is the time to distance yourself from classic
black, grey and navy, instead moving toward something more brown and buttery. And if a suit
isn’t part of your on-the-clock garb, perhaps think about making it one. Because not since Robert
Redford (24) played the original Jay Gatsby, or Matt Damon (12) rendered the remorseless Mr
Ripley, has tailoring been this cool.

54 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

 5. 6.

3.

20.
17. 18.

21.
19.

25.
22. 23.
26.

24.

GQ.COM.AU 55
 Stylist
I f it seems surprising that a 35-year-
old business would launch its first
online store in 2020, well, it is. But what’s
even more surprising is the fact this business
hasn’t just survived but thrived for over three
decades without one. When most brick-and-
mortar stores found themselves faced with an
online-or-die ultimatum, Harrolds’ physical
footprint continued to flourish. It’s a bragging
right very few fashion retailers can lay claim
to. But this isn’t just any fashion retailer.
Having grown up in Harrolds’ Melbourne
flagship store (literally, his parents founded
the place) Ross Poulakis knows the ins and
outs of the family business like the interior
of a Tom Ford dinner jacket – which is to
say, very, very well. Now the managing
director and tailoring buyer of his family’s
store, Poulakis believes that Harrolds’
ability to curate clothing in an environment
people want to visit IRL, combined with its
confidence-enhancing customer service, has
allowed the store to prosper as many of its
competitors did the opposite.
56 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
Luxury
goes
online
“It’s not just a transaction,” says Poulakis,
“it’s the feeling you get when you walk
out with a luxury product, but it’s also the
interaction you have with the style consultant.
It’s being part of the Harrolds family and
that’s something we’ve really tried to nail.”
Launching harrolds.com.au, then, has been
a conscious decision rather than a product of
cultural circumstance. “We’ve got to keep
up with the times, we understand we need an
online presence,” admits Poulakis, “there are a
lot of people looking for luxury items online,
and they get taken to international websites.
They’re not really being looked after here.” He
says the biggest challenge to come from taking
Harrolds digital – and a cause for hesitation in
the past – has been working out how to activate
that same element of subliminal customer
service in the virtual world.
“There are a lot of people looking for luxury items
online, and they get taken to international websites.
They’re not really being looked after here.”
Of course, finding alternatives hasn’t
been much of an issue. A Melbourne-based
chauffeur service, which will transport
purchases to the homes of clients who’d
prefer their Saint Laurent didn’t travel via
mail, is just one example of how Harrolds
will transcend the facelessness of shopping
online. The store’s entire inventory will also
be styled in-house and photographed locally,
which means products will be displayed in a
way that actually makes sense to Australian
men. If you dabble in online shopping, you’ll
know just how much difference it makes
seeing the shirt you want to buy styled with
pants you’d actually wear.
It’s certainly a highlight, but the launch of
PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES.
Harrolds’ online store marks the beginning
of 12 months of festivities for the luxury
department store, as it celebrates 35 years.
 WHAT ELSE TO EXPECT

Amiri pre-Fall 2020

“It’s a big milestone for us. Eight years ago,
we got written off. People said we weren’t

DSquared2 SS20
going to have a business because online
would close us down,” says Poulakis. “Here
we are all these years later as the number-
one Australian retailer. I think we’re doing
something quite right.”
As Harrolds enters its icon era, you can
rest assured the store, its clients – many
of whom have been shopping at Harrolds
since it opened in ’85 – and Poulakis will
be raising a glass. But don’t expect to see
them pausing for long. Because the spring/
summer 2020 collections will land in store
ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: GORUNWAY.

shortly and Harrolds has some surprises –

including a few coveted brand acquisitions
– up its sleeve.
“We’ve recently introduced Versace and
DSquared², which we’ve acquired after years
of negotiations. And we’ve got some exciting
partnerships coming in for autumn/winter,
too. But I can’t talk to them just yet,” says
Poulakis. Watch this space. n
Harrolds’ online store will launch in early 2020.

GQ.COM.AU 57
 Grooming

A free-spirited and enlightened approach to his work has propelled Perth-born Thomas

Words Alison Veness Styling Jillian Davison

58 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020


A s society has become more
progressive, Thomas de Kluyver
has felt more comfortable. “I love where
these lines of masculinity and femininity
are becoming blurred,” he says, reflecting on
his own self-expression through cosmetics.
“I’ll wear a really masculine outfit and I’ve
been carrying around the Gucci ‘Zumi’
women’s handbag everywhere. I wear nail
polish every day, sometimes a little blusher
in my cheeks… little things that make me
feel good. I love that make-up is almost like
a fashion accessory and an extension of a
person. When I was younger growing up in
Perth it was hard; we had to work hard and
also be quite brave to express ourselves.”
De Kluyver learned his craft doing his and
all his friends’ make-up when they went to
parties and raves in his hometown. “Good
old days!” he says with a laugh.
He is the master of stripped back self-
expression and is at the vanguard of a change
sweeping through the beauty industry.
“I think the way we transform our appearance
has changed a lot over the last few years, from
using make-up as a mask, or something to
wear because society expects us to wear it in
a certain way, to a new level of self-expression
and freedom within make-up which is being
celebrated more than ever.”
De Kluyver’s openness and raw, expressive
artistry are perhaps what attracted the
Eyes, ‘Rouge A Levres Satin’ lipstick in A Royal Scandal; Cheeks, ‘Rouge A Levres Voile’
lipstick in Mae Coral; Lips, ‘Rouge A Levres Satin’ lipstick in Goldie Red.
attention of Gucci creative director
Alessandro Michele. “I was in New York
on my way to JFK just over a year ago and
I got a call from my agent saying: ‘Alessandro
Michele wants to meet you.’ I was like: ‘Wait,
what?’ Like a dream come true.”
He immediately changed his flight. “For
me, what Gucci is doing is so exciting and
something I can identify with, and also
Alessandro loves make-up. I arrived [back] in
LA at like 3am, went to bed for two hours
and got up and had breakfast with Alessandro
at Chateau Marmont.” De Kluyver says they
talked about work processes and quickly
found common ground.
“I do a lot of drawing, a lot of research,
and approach my work in a similar way to
a designer. So even though some elements
of it seem simple, everything I do is
very considered.” He is very much about
celebrating individuality, as he says: “It’s
about creating looks based on the model’s
individual personalities, but also looking
back through my archive. So much of my
work focuses on identity and gender, and
make-up being used as a form of the self.”
Both the ride and the pace have been rapid
for de Kluyver, who is 33 years old, in the last
year, but he describes the Gucci team “like
a family” and says the days never feel long
because of what they’re creating. “The shoots
we do, we work for up to five days in a row.
They’re intense, but we create this incredible
vibe – the make-up room is so much fun and
there’s so much laughter and music. They’re
incredible sets to be on, like film sets, and
you’re in charge of the make-up of sometimes
up to 100 people.”
At the Gucci show last season he had a
team of 52 people working for him. “It’s the
real deal,” says de Kluyver. “I feel so humbled
by it all, though I’m an artist at the end of
the day and I approach my work in that
way.” He’s also enjoying working with the
58 shades that Gucci launched recently and
which are featured in a campaign for three
new lipstick collections that featured Dani
Miller from the band Surfbort.
De Kluyver has been championing a
new approach to make-up for years and
acknowledges this has played a role in his
ascent. “That was kind of my mantra: doing
make-up as a way to express yourself rather
than to hide behind it,” he says. “I’ve always
done looks that are quite free and I love it
when people wear make-up in a way that is
positive, whether it’s completely bare makeup
or a whole face covered in colours.”
He says “traditional rules like a full face
of foundation” or “the need to wear mas-
cara everyday” is changing. “Now it’s about
using make-up in whatever way you want.
Sometimes I just get some eyeliner and
smudge it in, or sometimes I do full glamour,
GQ.COM.AU 59
 Grooming
lashes, everything, old-Hollywood make-up.
I’m so inspired by people and I always want
the person I’m working on to own the look.
I want them to feel like they’re wearing it, not
it wearing them.”
De Kluyver is not on a crusade, though:
he does what he thinks will look beautiful on
someone’s face. “I always want there to be a
beauty to it, so even if it’s like paint smudged
on someone’s eyes, there’s something about
my work that people can resonate with,
because there’s this softness, too.”
He loves a gender-blurring mix of
masculine and feminine, particularly “some-
thing that fits in between them both,” and
reveals he taught himself early on by trying
looks out on his own face. “When I was
young, I wore a lot of make-up when I went
60 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
“I’m so inspired by people and I always want the
person I’m working on to own the look. I want them
to feel like they’re wearing it, not it wearing them.”
out clubbing. We used to go to BoomBox in
London and I used to wear really hardcore,
beautiful make-up. I remember meeting Pat
McGrath in a club and her grabbing my face
and saying she loved my make-up.”
De Kluyver has been based in the UK for
13 years but says his connection to Australia
remains strong. “My father and grandparents
whom I grew up with are Dutch, my mother
is Australian, I have always felt such a huge
connection to Europe because of my family,
but ever since I’ve lived there I feel so
Australian. I’m so patriotic.”
Thomas De Kluyver.
De Kluyver’s mother is a theatre director
and his father is a doctor of politics who
teaches at a London university – he’s close
with them and his siblings, including four
half-brothers and sisters. “They live all over
the place, but they’re very proud of me,
especially my mother, because she is such
a creative person. My family is very liberal.
They have a really diverse group of friends,
so I grew up with lots of different people
around like artists, musicians and writers.”
Although he was self-taught, he says Rebecca
Williams of Becca Cosmetics, who is also from
Perth, was a big inspiration. “My mum and
Rebecca were good friends in high school and
I was doing work experience at Becca Cosmetics
and she gave me a few make-up books, one
by François Nars, Makeup Your Mind, and
Stéphane Marais’ Beauty Flash. I taught myself
by copying the make-up in those books on my
friends in high school.
“Rebecca is so passionate,” de Kluyver says. “I
love people like that; it’s such an inspiring thing.
I surround myself with people who love what
they do and bring this kind of energy. Everyone
is there wanting to do the best job they can and
we all just push, push and push and try to do the
most exciting things, to do something new.”
His favourite make-up artists, apart from
Nars and Marais, include Serge Lutens and
Inge Grognard.
De Kluyver’s first book, All I Want To Be,
was published by Idea in 2019, showcasing
looks such as faces almost stripped bare
and accentuated with extreme colour, epic
eyeliner, a smudge of lipstick. His work is
irreverent, fresh, naughty and modern.
His main focus for now remains Gucci. “It’s
really exciting to be launching products that
I’ve been working on with Alessandro. It’s
always really important to keep pushing my
work forward every season, no matter what it is.
“I look back and see moments that were
brilliant, but you can’t keep repeating yourself,
so I look at more innovative ways of doing
make-up and ingredients. Working with Gucci
Beauty and with their cosmetic scientists is a
whole side of the industry and business that
I wasn’t exposed to before. There are a lot of
new challenges, and my goal at the moment is
nailing all of that. I’ve had a big year.” n
GQ.COM.AU
 Developer’s Kit RED

T HE WO RLD’S FIR ST SDK-AVAI L ABL E

GAME ON.
Ava i l a b l e at a d ul t s h op.com | @ l e l o_ offi c i a l
 Grooming | News

Celine’s
new
scents

62 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

 Spas worth travelling for
If that Christmas bonus is burning a hole in your pocket,
some pampering might be just what you need.

SISLEY, PARIS THE FOUR SEASONS,

No one does luxe spas quite BANGKOK
like the French – who tend As we were printing this
to think of them as more of a magazine, the finishing touches
birthright than an indulgence. were still being applied to this
This recently opened flagship uber-stylish outpost in the Thai
in Paris blends savoir faire, je ne capital and the sneak peek at the
sais quoi and all the other Gallic spa had us just aching to hand NEW MOVE
traits we don’t have English over our baht. fourseasons.com As with everything
words for. sisley.com Try Any of the 90-minute plus
Try The Anti-Stress Facial, Bespoke Bodywork massages, from film and
approx $277, which will banish (approx $300), which use the fashion to scents,
jet lag. Or at least the external region’s traditional techniques
signs of it. to unknot and unwind you. Tom Ford does
not tend to fuck
about. He quietly
researches
and develops
before dropping
– seemingly out
of nowhere –
indispensable
grooming gear.
His new ‘Research’
skincare line
is no different.
The Tom Ford
‘Research Crème
Concentrate’,
SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, TRUEFITT & HILL, SYDNEY $510, includes
BYRON BAY In operation for 214 years and
Australia’s chicest beach resort with establishments in Melbourne detoxifying and
– Rae’s on Wategos – gets the and Canberra, it’s Truefitt & Hill’s moisturising white
spa it deserves with the first new Sydney barbers that has
Santa Maria Novella collab in caught and kept our attention. porcelain cacao,
the country. raes.com.au Nestled in the stately surrounds caffeine and
Try The Santa Maria Novella of the QVB, it’s all quiet elegance
Indulgence, $355, including and gentleman’s-club wood Japanese green
a back massage using SMN panelling. truefittandhill.com.au
candle wax which melts at Try The Ultimate Shaving
tea Gyokuro. Think
body temperature, hand and Experience, $85, which includes a facial in a jar.
foot massages, a foot scrub, an old-school hot-towel wet
hair treatment, scalp massage shave, a face massage and
davidjones.com.au
and jade crystal facial. a spritz of fragrance.

GQ.COM.AU 63
 Watch

What’s your flavour?

Armed and Generous Military Precision

JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

Midnight Juggernaut French Connection

GQ.COM.AU 65
 Motor

Changing
climates
Supercar manufacturers like Ferrari were once the last
strongholds of pure performance. Now, as the world
takes a radical pivot towards sustainability, they’re having
to change their image – and their technology – to suit.
Words Brad Nash

66 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020


T he racing circuits and testing
grounds of Northern Italy will
always be associated with a certain driving
ideal, from the blistering straights and tight
chicanes of Monza to the sun-baked roads of
Tuscany and the Dolomites. The country’s
car scene is defined by power, passion
and performance. Most of which will be
appreciated by a public as passionate about
the car you’re driving as you are.
For a long time, the roar of a high-
revving internal combustion engine has
been synonymous with every iconic moment
in the Italian automotive scene. To own a
Ferrari or a Lamborghini is to own a license
to create drama, and thus, the personality
of the country’s cars is intrinsically woven
into the fabric of the nation’s identity.
What Alessandro Michele’s Gucci is to the
fashion world, its supercar marques are to
the automotive industry – places where
flamboyance and excess reign supreme.
You get the sense that over the last couple
of decades, such brands have fought extremely
hard to keep it that way. The creation of
a Ferrari, after all, has always been done
in pursuit of the purest expression of the
driving experience as possible. To drive a
Lamborghini, conversely, is to drive a car
that puts atmosphere – if not the atmosphere
– above all else.
But as the nation and its surrounds face up
to the very real threat of a warming planet, it’s
quickly becoming apparent that the supercar
landscape, as we’ve always known it at least,
is rapidly approaching its end. The idea of
an all-electric Ferrari or Lamborghini still
feels utterly foreign, and yet, the idea of any
Opposite page, from top: in red, the Ferrari ‘SF90 Stradale’, the Prancing Horse’s first production hybrid supercar, will
arrive in Australia late next year; in white, the Aston Martin ‘Rapide E’ is the company’s first all-electric model;
in lime green, the hybrid Lamborghini ‘Sián’ is the company’s first step into an electrified future; in green and black,
Porsche’s electric ‘Taycan’ is capable of 0-100km/h in 2.8 seconds and boasts a range of 300km+.
supercar manufacturer powering into the ’20s
on internal combustion alone is, at best, absurd.
At worst, it’s enough to make you angry.
The release of cars like Tesla’s ‘Model
S’ delivered a huge shock to the system of
modern-day supercar manufacturers. Within
the space of a couple of years, the concept of an
electric car creating Ferrari-level performance
became a startling reality, and even more
importantly, it became abundantly clear that
young, affluent car buyers aren’t bowled over
by twin-turbo V8s, crackling exhausts or fiery
paint jobs like they once were.
There’s now no escaping the fact that every
major supercar brand in the world is near-
enough obligated to follow suit. Some have
been quick on the uptake. Porsche’s ‘Taycan’
What Gucci is to the fashion world, Italy’s supercar
marques are to the automotive industry – places
where flamboyancy and excess reign supreme.
is, to many, the first real electric sports car,
capable of 0-100 in 2.8 seconds and a range in
excess of 330km. Aston Martin has followed
suit with the ‘Rapide E’, pledging that it wants
to have electrified its entire range by 2025.
Inaction, then, comes with the risk of both
an environmental and a PR disaster. And it’s
forced these final stalwarts of automotive
purity to rapidly rethink their public image
as a result, leading to two of the busiest years
in each of the company’s respective histories.
“If there is an electric supercar to be built,
then Ferrari will be the first,” declared Sergio
Marchionne in early 2018, the late CEO of
Fiat/Chrysler who own the Italian brand. Since
then, Ferrari has taken up the mantle with the
‘SF90 Stradale’ – the first plug-in hybrid in the
company’s history. Incidentally, with both its
engine and electric system combined, it’s the
most powerful Ferrari ever made.
Lamborghini has been somewhat more
hesitant to take the first big step into an
electrified future. Its first hypercar, the ‘Sián’,
was unveiled to a stunned public this year,
featuring some of the most radical design ever
put into one of the Modena marque’s vehicles.
However, it was more of a special edition.
Only 63 will be made.
Granted, these steps are small. Ferrari has
aimed to ensure that 60 per cent of its cars sold
in 2022 are hybrid, but even that seems like
a tough task. A twin-turbo V8 still primarily
powers the ‘SF90 Stradale’ and the car’s 2.5
second 0-100 time comes with the caveat that
it will only cruise for 25km under the pure
power of its electric batteries. The idea of a
true all-electric supercar seems even further
away. Neither McLaren or Ferrari think this
will be a realistic possibility until at least 2025.
At the very least, though, these are
steps towards a future where the Prancing
Horses and Raging Bulls of the world can
equate themselves with modern-day ideals
of sustainability. And that’s fundamental, if
they’re going to stick around. n
GQ.COM.AU 67
 Inc.
10 tips to becoming an Instant success
We sit down with the co-founders of Sipp Instant, GQ’s Audi Innovation Award winners, to discuss
the merits of setting up a business based on your beliefs in order to succeed where others will fail.
D ylan Garft and best mate Luke
Zocchio launched coffee company
Sipp Instant 18 months ago, but, really, their
journey has been a long time coming. Nearly
two years before their product – instant coffee
that’s filled with organic grains and packaged
sustainably – first reached consumers, the
pair were busy researching the best possible
ingredients and how they would source them.
Garft’s background is in marketing and
design while Zocchio is passionate about
fitness and has made a name for himself as
Chris Hemsworth’s personal trainer. They’d
always talked about going into business
together, and after Zocchio returned from a
trip to the US, he called Garft to say, “They
do coffee different over there, why don’t we
do a coffee brand?”
The question they asked themselves was,
‘How can we make a functional beverage that’s
better than just a normal coffee?’ With the
added incentive of Garft being passionate about
sustainability, the aim was create an ethical
business that gave them purpose when they got
up in the morning and didn’t make them feel
guilty about turning a profit.
The end result is a drink that’s part instant
coffee part wellness beverage. Coming in
various flavours from matcha green tea to
coconut chai, each is filled with what the
pair call “nutrition-rich carbohydrates”
that will help to sustain your caffeine fix for
longer. “With the added organic grains in
it,” explains Garft, “which are gluten free, it
gives you modulated energy release so you’re
not getting that coffee crash by 11am.”
With Zocchio on the road with Hemsworth
– after all, someone has to ensure those guns
stay polished – we caught up with Garft who
shared 10 takeaways that have helped shape
Sipp’s journey so far. Take note – who knows,
maybe next year you’ll be in the running for a
GQ Innovation award.
Start as you mean to go on
“We were able to build everything into our
cost of goods from the very beginning, so
budgeting for compostable packaging and
68 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
cool ingredients wasn’t an issue. That’s just
what the product cost. And then we were able
to build in our donation of a dollar from every
bag into the cost of goods as well. I think we’ve
just hit a nerve with people in a space and time
where they are shopping more consciously
and they are thinking about the products they
buy. There’s a lot of movements going on at
the moment: climate change, plastic-free. And
we just fit nicely into everyone’s idea of how
they want to live their lives. We also wanted
a product that’s in everyone’s life already.
A lot of people are doing mushroom elixirs
and stuff like that now, and that’s great but
it’s not in the mainstream. People are getting
busier and busier with their lives so let’s make
an instant coffee.”
Believe in what you’re doing
“Some advice I can give anyone wanting to
go down the path of being an entrepreneur
is you need to truly believe in what you’re
doing to begin with. It’s all well and good
to sell a product you think is going to make
money. But if there’s purpose behind what
you’re doing, you’re going to work that little
bit extra. And with purpose and drive behind
you comes authenticity, then customers will
come after that.”
Go into business with a mate
“Go in with open eyes about who you’re
going into business with. Everyone’s a little
bit different and people change over time.
So be ready for that. You put structures in
place in case anything does happen. With
us, there’s already documents in place so it’s
all good if something was to go the wrong
way. It’s important to know each other’s
strengths and let each other do their job. I’m
the workhorse behind the business, in there
day to day and I can’t ever expect Zoc to be
that, so there’s never any hard feelings if I
get left behind in the office to do customer
care or look at spreadsheets. If Zoc wasn’t
doing what he was doing, he would be good
at sales or HR. He’s very charismatic. You
can’t be angry at him!”
Get some help from friends
“Having connections like Chris and Liam
[Hemsworth], it allows you to be seen in
front of a lot of people quickly. When Chris
and Liam did a post, or even Ruby Tuesday,
it went viral, like massively viral and we sold
out. And it was a scramble to fulfill orders but
it’s a good problem to have. But the product
still needs to stand on its own two feet when
it is seen by the masses. Now I actually have
a demographic of who follows us and it’s 77
per cent female. But at the end of the day, it
doesn’t matter who’s endorsing your product
– if it’s a shitty product, it’s still going to fall
over.”
Buy into a lifestyle
“That’s a bit of a second phase. To start, it was
like, ‘What is this instant coconut coffee?’
Then people see our packaging and [that it’s]
compostable and we give a dollar [toward
sustainable charities] and they see all our
touchpoints quite easily on our social feed.
I don’t know if it’s wankythat we’re trying to
create a lifestyle, but we’re just trying to be
open and honest.”
Find the right name
“So this was trademark Law 101. We started
with Sip, this was after a long time of names
being thrown around and passing them to
our friends. Then we went to the lawyers and
they’re like, ‘You can’t use a word like that. Sip
is too close to a descriptive word that someone
would use when they’re drinking coffee.’ So
we thought we’d wasted so much time and
then spent even more time trying to find
a new name. This is probably what took so
long to launch, we just couldn’t come up with
anything. So we were like, ‘Let’s just put an
extra P on the end of it’.
WORDS: MIKE CHRISTENSEN.
Give up the day job
“I’ve definitely got a creative side so I never
enjoyed having that nine-to-five job. All my
previous bosses were fantastic and I loved my
jobs. But there was just something missing.
It’s tricky to put in words, but I want to leave
this planet a better place than what we’ve
gotten it into today. So when you are the boss
of your own destiny and you run your own
business, you can navigate that. And that
gives me great pride in what I do and that
extra fire to get up in the morning because
it’s your own.”
Manage social media
“Social media has been a huge, huge player
in the last five years as it’s allowed a voice
to people that didn’t have a voice before and
it’s connected the world and made it a whole
lot smaller. That’s why a coffee brand out of
Byron Bay can share its voice on sustainability
and be more than just a coffee brand. The
negative is you can get stuck in what you like
and you know what your political views are.
And that can be good or bad, because there’s
a lot of people just so extreme one way but
everyone needs to come into the middle a
little bit and accept everyone is different, you
know? That’s the tricky part.”
Go direct to consumer
“We don’t really do much wholesale. We’re
more of a straight-to-consumer business.
We’ve done that on purpose. We haven’t
chased the wholesale market because we want
to grow our customer base and essentially
our Sipp family. We can talk to them and
we’ve got great customer service. But we do
need to look at other areas, so food service,
hospitality, hotels and airlines. We’ve already
had certain meetings and people approach
us and it just didn’t feel right. You can easily
be distracted by money, big orders, this and
that, but you just have your checklist in front
of you to make sure that anything you do, all
those things are checked off.
Don’t be a perfectionist
“If you try and put yourself out there as a perfect
business or a perfect person, you’re just going
to alienate people. The world doesn’t need one
person doing everything perfectly. They need
a billion people doing everything imperfectly.
Because if everyone just has a crack and gives
it a go, it’s going to be better. Like, let’s just say
climate change is wrong and the climate deniers
are right. The worst thing that we’re going to
do is clean up the planet. That’s as bad as it’s
going to get. As a business we’re not perfect.
There’s things that we could be doing that
I don’t even know about. We’ll probably learn
about it in a year. But we’re trying our best, and
that’s all that I think people really want.” n

Clockwise from top left: Sipp Instant’s matcha latte; Sipp’s 100
per cent compostable packaging; Garft with Chris Hemsworth;
co-founders Garth and Zocchio.

GQ.COM.AU 69
 Fit

T he ’10s were a funny decade. During

a period that saw Donald Trump
evolve from angry TV personality to angry
leader of the free world, we’ve kissed goodbye
to truth in politics and watched social media
companies evolve from sharers of cat memes
to society-shifting giants capable of swaying
opposite end of the spectrum, and is proving
to have a wide range of practical uses from
boosting creativity and sexual desire to
raising your metabolism.
It’s estimated somewhere between 200-
500 million people currently use meditation
in one form or another – that’s three times as

Time general elections. But aside from questionable

changes in the world of politics, it’s perhaps
the sport and wellness spheres that have seen
many as in 2012. And it’s not just how many,
but who among us is meditating that’s really
catching people’s attention. When best-
to get the biggest shifts.
Over the past 10 years, the world has
selling author Tim Ferriss set out to interview
140 people at the top of their respective fields

meditated watched on as new wellness trends have

No longer reserved for lotus
positions and quests for spiritual
enlightenment, meditation could be
the key to unlocking our true potential,
whether that’s in the office, on the
sports field, or even in the bedroom.
Words Christopher Riley
emerged as frequently as Australian
prime ministers. But, as we move into the
uncharted ’20s, it’s safe to say not all wellness
trends are created equal. Some, such as the
silent retreats and various forms of restrictive
eating habits favoured by Silicon Valley
types, have heavily disputed benefits. Others
are downright weird – serotonin fasting,
anyone? Meditation, meanwhile, sits at the
for his podcast Tribe of Mentors, he found his
guests largely had one thing in common:
they meditated. All this to say, meditation has
clearly graduated beyond the fad phase and
deserves to be taken seriously by anyone with
an interest in up-scaling their life.
One person who’s gone all in with
meditation is Sydneysider Janoah van
Kekem. Having worked in hospitality and
landscaping before finding a job as a sales

Don Draper seeks some serenity in the iconic final scene of Mad Men in 2015.

PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES.

70 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

manager for an alcohol company, van Kekem
left the corporate world behind last year to
set up meditation workshops for individuals,
workplaces and athletes.
But according to van Kekem, until a few
years ago, he was the last person you would
imagine meditating. He’d heard it doing
the rounds but didn’t imagine it connecting
with his lifestyle. “Up until the point where
I actually learned to meditate I was probably
anti-spirituality, anti-open mindedness… I
was only interested in sport, picking up girls
and you know, the standard sort of things you
do growing up. Anything that was deemed
outside the norm, I wasn’t interested in.”
The turning point came following a
conversation with a client at his previous job.
“I really respected him,” explains van Kekem.
“He was a real lad… he surfed, he drank, he ate
meat and he was a hard arse. But he said to me
one day, ‘I just wish I learned this when I was
younger’.” Curious to see if he’d find the same
results, van Kekem started
experimenting with different
forms of meditation but
“It can shift how
found he was still sceptical. we perceive
“I wasn’t quite fully sold,”
says van Kekem of his early
the world in
attempts to meditate. “I was terms of what
like, ‘I still don’t quite get it’
but my intuition said, ‘Mate,
is stressful and
pull your head out of your what is out of
arse and just do it’.” Soon,
van Kekem was noticing
our control.”
things about himself he
didn’t even know existed.
“I actually didn’t realise that I had anxiety,”
he says. “I used to get physically ill before
big games of sport or even before a date
sometimes. That was just normal and when
I was pretty overwhelmed and stressed with
work I couldn’t go to bed without putting
headphones in to cancel out the shit noise
in my head.” That soon changed when van
Kekem started meditating regularly.
“Things like anxiety aren’t even a thing
now,” he explains. “If I do feel a little butterfly
I now lean into it and I feel it because I’ve
done the work – I have better awareness of
my body, you know? Intellectually, I feel like
I’ve up-levelled in how I operate.”
But don’t take van Kekem’s word for it. It’s
the science, he says, that’s irrefutable. “Every
time we meditate, it literally is rewiring our
brain,” explains van Kekem. “The beautiful
thing about our brain is its neuroplasticity – we
can literally change our habits.” A study in the
American Journal of Cardiology even found it has VEDIC
the capacity to extend life span.
Meditating makes us mentally more nimble MEDITATION
and able to withstand the pressures that come A BEGINNER’S
with modern life. “It can shift how we perceive
the world in terms of what is stressful and
GUIDE
what is out of our control,” says van Kekem.
Despite his own experience, van Kekem
found the people around him needed a lot of
convincing. “I looked around at every one of
my friends and I was like, ‘Would they go to
a teacher and meditate?’ I could tell you that
98 per cent of them would have been a ‘no’.
Meditation has a branding problem.”
He set out to fix that issue. Rather than
meditating being this elaborate thing
spiritual gurus do while “levitating around in
robes,” says van Kekem, he wants to remove
the stigma and help people find ways to fit it
into their everyday lives. “It doesn’t matter
if you’re on the train, it doesn’t matter if
someone’s sitting next to you
and it’s loud. Let’s get real
and let’s fit it into our lives
and make it as important as
I wouldn’t leave the house
without brushing my teeth
and having a shower.”
While he encourages
clients to find the type of
meditation that works for
them, van Kekem specialises
in the Vedic form that uses
a mantra to calm the mind.
After free consultations with his clients, he
assigns each one a mantra and guides them
through the benefits, philosophy and science
behind meditation. They’re then assigned
homework to go away and practise on their own
before coming back for further instruction.
“The idea,” explains the 34-year-old, “is
that you can walk away to be a self-sufficient
meditator.”
For van Kekem and the millions of other
people now meditating, the opportunities
really are endless. “For years I thought
healthy was meat, veg and exercising, but
I had forgotten the most important part...
your brain and nervous system.”
Next time you’re updating your
workout routine, it might be worth
adding some meditation in among the
squats and the curls. As van Kekem says,
“Meditiation is like gym for the brain.” n
janoah.com.au
GQ.COM.AU 71
S U P P O RT I N G PA RT N E RS
 Model of the Year
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
PACO RABANNE
A superstar on the runway and a flawless
champion of diversity off it, Alton Mason
was dressed to the nines in Paco Rabanne
as he received his much-deserved award.
#GQMOTY
Welcome to the party
Consider this your backstage pass to the hottest event around – a celebration of the achievements that defined the year, from the
actors shaping the new Hollywood landscape, to the designers, musicians, artists and entrepreneurs setting the tone for 2020.
Photography Sonny Vandevelde

GQ.COM.AU 73
 Men of the Year
Film Icon
IN ASSOCIATION WITH AUDI
Baz Luhrmann was awarded for
his two decades of cinematic
achievement, presented by Austin
Butler, the star of his upcoming
Elvis biopic.

E very year we say GQ’s night of nights is going to be our biggest

yet, but with the 2019 GQ Men of the Year, presented by
Audi, we really were not kidding. A mix of international superstars and
Aussie overachievers made their way to the Hyatt Regency in Sydney,
courtesy of our dear friends at Qantas and Audi, who ensured they all
arrived on time and in style – with each award winner also gifted a pair
of R.M.Williams boots. Guests were treated to Grey Goose cocktails on
arrival, before our host with the most, Mr Joel Creasey, kicked things off.
In all, 16 awards were handed out on the night, with speeches that ranged
from the hilarious to the heartfelt – and then it was time to celebrate.
Alton Mason hit the after-party dance floor in a way that only he could,
as guests sipped on Grey Goose espresso martinis and tried their luck on
the Paco Rabanne skill tester, for their chance to take home the brand’s
latest ‘1 Million’ and ‘Lady Million’ fragrances – and even win a brand-
new handbag. But just because you might not have secured a coveted
invite to our main event, that doesn’t mean you should miss out on all the
fun. Here’s a sneak peek of how it all went down backstage at the awards.

74 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

 2.
1. Patrick Johnson with Fashion Brand of the Year winners Song for the Mute’s Lyna Ty and Melvin Tanaya, and Tamsin
Johnson. 2. Sophie Monk and Joel Creasey. 3. Social Force winners HoMie’s Nick Pearce and Marcus Crook. 4. The
Grey Goose bar. 5. Model Georgia Fowler and an equally stylish Audi. 6. Models Roberta Pecoraro and Bella Thomas
wearing Paco Rabanne.

1.

3. 4.

5.

6.

GQ.COM.AU 75
 Men of the Year
1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: LUCAS DAWSON.

1. Ensemble of the Year was awarded to the cast of True History of the Kelly Gang, accepted
by Lola Hewison, Essie Davis, Louis Hewison and awarded by Downtown Abbey’s Joanne
Frogatt (far right). 2. Kim Ledger with Jacob Elordi, the winner of TV Actor of the Year, in
association with Qantas. 3. Michael Cheika and David Pocock, the winner of the Special
Editor’s award, in association with R.M.Williams. 4. The all-new Audi ‘TT’. 5. Winners of the
Innovation Award, in association with Audi, Sipp Instant’s Luke Zocchio and Dylan Garft
with Audi’s Paul Sansom and Julie Bishop. 6. Alton Mason at the Paco Rabanne skills tester.

76 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

 Woman of the Year
IN ASSOCIATION WITH AUDI
Zendaya, pictured here with GQ editor Mike
Christensen, was a deserved winner after her
performance as recovering drug addict Rue
Bennett in hit show Euphoria.

GQ.COM.AU 77
 Men of the Year

Musician of the Year

A day after winning an ARIA for best children’s
album, Dan Sultan took home the coveted
musician’s award, presented by Adam Goodes.

78 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

 1.
1. Jacob Elordi took home TV Actor of the Year, in association with Qantas. 2. Adam
Briggs awarded a masked Scott Marsh with Agenda Setter of the Year. 3. Our IG hosts
for the night, The Inspired Unemployed, in the Grey Goose booth. 4. Sportsperson
of the Year was won by Ash Barty, awarded by Dylan Alcott and accepted by Barty’s
parents Robert and Josie Barty. 5. GQ editorial director Edwina McCann, Joel Creasey
and Mojean Aria who presented Jason Momoa with his GQ Man of the Year award, in
association with Coach. 6. Alexander England with Breakthrough Actor of the Year, in
association with Grey Goose, Chris Pang. 7. 2018’s Chef of the Year Josh Niland (left)
presented Matt Stone with this year’s award, in association with Grey Goose.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.
ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: LUCAS DAWSON.

GQ.COM.AU 79
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TAME IMPALA
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OUT
OF THE
SHADOWS With his most musically ambitious
album yet, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker
is finally ready to embrace fame –
just as long as it’s on his own terms.
Photography James J Robinson Styling Petta Chua Words Noelle Faulker
Opposite: Jacket, $1595,
by Song for the Mute;
T-shirt, $79.95, by Ksubi.

This page: Shirt, $2880,

and jeans, $2110, both
by Louis Vuitton;
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GQ.COM.AU 83
 Shirt, $1500, by
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POA, by Sunspel;
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84 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

I
f millennial success could be defined by any recipe, it might
be two parts viral fame, one part pop-culture myth. It’s safe
to say Kevin Parker achieved the latter during his headline
performance at Coachella last year, when the artist known
as Tame Impala used 18 cannons to blast close to 300kg of
confetti into the sky, supposedly breaking Beyoncé’s confetti
record along the way. “I don’t know if it was a record and I don’t even
know that we broke it,” he laughs, as if wary of upsetting the Beyhive.
“But someone told me that we used more confetti than her. I don’t even
know that we did use that much confetti, to be honest. Who knows?!”
In an interview with Rolling Stone after the show, the self-confessed
‘confetti diva’ half-joked he wanted even more. The entire scenario
reads like a Spinal Tap moment. “I suppose, yeah,” he says. “You don’t
know how many Spinal Tap moments we have every day. It wouldn’t be
touring without them. You just have to laugh sometimes.”
When it comes to viral fame, Parker’s continues to spread. Take
2015 Currents single ‘The Less I Know The Better’, which spawned
countless ‘Fuck Trevor’ memes that plagued those unlucky enough
to possess the name (Trevor being the fictional, girlfriend-stealing
fuccboi from the song). While last year, the sheer might of Gen-Z
TikTokers set the four-year-old Gold single on course for Double
Platinum territory.
For a five-year-old album to experience the rise and rise of Currents
is almost unheard of. But that’s the Midas touch of our most diverse
musical export: he keeps his toes in the sands of nostalgia and his
eyes on the horizon. Or, as a former astronomy student, maybe the
stars. Tame Impala, Parker’s solo moniker – he uses a band for touring
only – sounds like an esoteric find from the bottom of a dusty record
bin; a discovery, that upon first listen seems all and only yours. Of
course, the brilliant irony of Parker’s orbit is that it’s also firmly in
the mainstream.
“I haven’t done interviews in a while. So it’s been a bit of a culture
shock,” admits the 34-year-old Perth-born artist, having returned to
Australia from an international press tour, just in time for summer.
“I’ve just been in my cave, for however long,” he shrugs. “I enjoy it! I do.
Who doesn’t like talking about themselves all day?!” Without context,
most Australians would probably palm that last comment off as self-
deprecating or sarcastic. Parker absolutely means it. He is charismatic,
humble and a generous storyteller, speaking in bursts with thoughtful
pauses in-between. You easily get the feeling he is either impervious
to fame or disinterested in the conventional trappings of it. He doesn’t
flinch when GQ’s fashion team puts him in lilac Louis Vuitton, an all-
white Stella McCartney look that can best be described as ‘dystopian
cricketer’ or a furry jumper and neon-splattered pants from American
artist Sterling Ruby’s SR Studio fashion line. Though, he admits the
looks are a far cry from his usual “expensive surfie” style.

GQ.COM.AU 85
 Jumper and jeans, both
POA, both by SR Studio;
shoes, $120, by Converse.
Cardigan and vest, both
POA, both by Salvatore
Ferragamo; pants, $610,
by Emporio Armani.

GQ.COM.AU 87
 Knit, approx. $1140,
by Amiri; pants, $269,
by Polo Ralph Lauren;
shoes, approx. $500,
by Officine Générale;
sunglasses, approx. $970,
by Jacques Marie Mage;
necklace, $2999, by
Hardy Brothers; sheets,
POA, by Sheridan.
 One gets the sense that Parker wears his ambition like a pocket
watch that every so often catches the light and is kept to a time
zone only he inhabits. That, it seems, is part of what drives him and
probably what keeps him rising; an inherent hunger to defy what
people expect. Put him into the context of the last decade of music
and few other artists have consistently reinvented and simultaneously
smashed the wheels they drove in on. Kevin Parker might just be the
most underestimated man in music.
This year marks a decade since the release of his debut record,
Innerspeaker. Ahead of the arrival of record number four, The Slow
Rush, we meet Parker at his most self-assured, having forged the
accoutrements that have seen him slide from unassuming shoegazer,
uncomfortable under the glare of a spotlight, to full-pelt stadium
deity. “I guess there was a time when I just decided to start enjoying it
and embraced that role,” he explains. “I never even used to want to be
a bandleader, let alone a solo artist, which I consider myself as.”
The world’s music tastemakers have shown no such hesitation with
bible NME describing tracks on his last album as “a work of dazzling
beauty; the layer-cake arrangement suggesting Parker as a natural
heir to Brian Wilson’s studio wizardry”.
Parker has written, performed and produced his own music since
age 12 and it just so happened he was able to hide behind Tame Impala
‘the band’. “I didn’t even want to tell people that [Tame Impala] was
mine and mine alone,” he says. “Terrified, I always pretended it was a
band that was making it in the studio.” But this isn’t another case of
“I JUST DECIDED, ‘FUCK IT. I’M GOING TO DO IT AND BE THAT PERSON THAT,
DEEP DOWN I WANT TO BE AND I KNOW THAT MY FANS WANT ME TO BE’.”
the old rock trope of a ‘reluctant star’. On the contrary, Parker has
always had ambition, he just needed to deploy it on his terms. “I just
decided, ‘Fuck it. I’m going to do it and be that person that, deep
down I want to be and I know that my fans want me to be, especially
on stage’.” Did he have to retrain his brain? “It was the opposite. It was
more liberating, to be honest. As an artist, people want you to be a bit
self-indulgent, they don’t want you to hold back,” he adds.
As Australians, we are taught to hide our success and our national
sport of tall poppy chopping is something Parker, who has homes in
both Los Angeles and Perth, still thinks about. “I guess becoming a
fan of Kanye West [opened my eyes],” he says. “Some of my favourite
people say whatever they think. Even if they talk about themselves
all the time. It’s something that’s frowned upon in society, but those
people are the most interesting. I say that as someone who definitely
isn’t one of those people, but it doesn’t hurt to embrace a bit of that.”
“This is the entertainment industry, after all,” we say.
“Exactly!” he replies. “Take Liam Gallagher. At the end of the day,
does anyone hate Liam Gallagher? No, they don’t.” Well, with the
possible exception of his brother, Noel.
There are few artists, let alone Antipodeans, who have managed
to straddle the world of indie, psychedelic rock, pop and rap as
effortlessly and composed as Parker has. Fewer have done so with a
sound as distinct as his and have entered and exited the machine with
commercial acclaim and their sonic signatures (and fandom) intact.
To name a few, Parker has been sampled, reworked and/or covered
by Rihanna, A$AP Rocky and Kendrick Lamar. Lady Gaga, Mark
Ronson, Travis Scott, Kanye West, SZA and Theophilus London
have all called on him to collaborate, and he has co-produced debut
albums for Koi Child, Melody Prochet and more. “It’s way easier
because you’re sharing the responsibility, the burden,” he explains.
Does he ever selfishly squirrel tracks away? “Well, you have to
remember that any time I’ve brought something to another artist, it’s
usually something that I’ve made by myself anyway.”
His phone is full of half-baked ideas, voice memos that may or may
not one day end up as songs, be it for Tame Impala, another artist or
something else entirely. “I have been like, ‘Ah man, I shouldn’t have
given…’,” he trails off and starts laughing, “OK so ‘The Less I Know
The Better’ was one that I wrote on my own. I gave it to Mark Ronson
for his album, but I took it back. I was putting off telling him that I
wanted to use it for me.
“I was in America recording with him for a few days. I was like, ‘OK
now, [I’ve] got to tell him I want it for me.’ When I finally mustered
up the strength, he was like, ‘Oh yeah, dude, I was going to say this
song is yours. I feel like I’ve stolen your hard drive!’ He was thinking
the same thing anyway.”
At the time of writing, ‘The Less I Know The Better’ is Tame
Impala’s most-streamed song on Spotify, with the best part of 430
million plays and, as mentioned, is on the verge of going Double
Platinum. “I don’t know if he regrets it now. I don’t know if he knows
how successful it is… and if he realised the song was going to be as
successful back then. He’s obviously not exactly kicking himself.”
Dropping next month on Valentine’s day, The Slow Rush is Parker’s
next phase. Exploring time and how we move through it, the record
is soaked to the bone in existential exploration and a sense of longing.
For what, depends on your interpretation – Parker isn’t giving too
much away. Youth? Legacy? Permanence? Tame Impala lyrics have
often been complicated in theme while erring on the blurry side
of ambiguity. But there are hints. ‘One More Year’, ‘Posthumous
Forgiveness’, ‘Tomorrow’s Dust’, ‘Lost in Yesterday’... ‘Glimmer’?
Each song holds and dissects time under a magnifying glass. “It
ranges from deeply personal to completely fictional and everything
in between,” he says. “It’s autobiographical, but from different parts
of my life – being much younger or even pretending that I’m older. I
liked exploring the idea of writing from different personalities in this
album and as though it’s like me in a parallel universe.”
Think of it as more of a range of self, he explains. “Like me if I
wasn’t who I was right now – I’ve been getting inspired by that a lot.”
Dynamically, The Slow Rush is intricate, curious and heady, like a
time-lapse video of the night sky or a flower blooming. It is subtle
and tidy in its refinement, and a lot to unpack. With drums front and
centre, spotting the bent and blurred genres is like playing record
store bingo. ’70s art-rock? Ding! ’90s uplifting house? Ding ’00s
space-pop? Ding! Neo-soul, psych-rock, hip-hop, ’10s synth-rap?
Ding, ding ding!
Continued on p134
GQ.COM.AU 89
 Jumper, POA, by Dondup;
T-shirt, $49.95, by Calvin
Klein; jeans, POA, by Kloke;
shoes, $120, by Converse.

90 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

Shirt, POA, by Dolce &
Gabbana; jeans, $180,
by Ksubi; and watch,
$18,200, by Chopard;
necklace, $2999,
by Hardy brothers;
bracelets, from top,
$8600, by Tiffany &
Co.; and $1640, by
Chopard; ring, $2950,
by Tiffany & Co.
 Coat, $2655, by Dries
Van Noten; shirt, $530,
by Commas; jeans,
$350, by MSGM at David
Jones; shoes, $100, by
Converse at General
Pants Co.; ring, $2950,
by Tiffany & Co.
Jumper, $1710, and pants,
$1525, both by Stella
McCartney; T-shirt, $60,
by HoMie; sneakers, $155,
by Veja; ring, $2950, by
Tiffany & Co.
Grooming Sophie Roberts
using Oribe Haircare.

GQ.COM.AU 93
A BITTER
94 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
 PILL
With festival
season upon
us, so too is
the debate
over pill
testing. And
although
the proposal
has renewed
support from
experts and
music fans
PHOTOGRAPHY: COREY WILSON.

alike, many
politicians
still remain
far from
convinced.
Words David Smiedt

GQ.COM.AU 95
 S
ummer means many things in Australia. Interminable
cricket coverage, heat that makes you sweat in crevices
you never knew you had and, of course, festival season.
Music festivals are big business and no matter your
taste, chances are there’s one for you. Into old-school
sounds and a lip-syncing Janet Jackson? May we
suggest RNB Fridays. Something more contemporary? Check out Falls
Festival. Dance your thing? Buy a ticket to Festival X. And on it goes
with most every musical genre accommodated. According to a report by
Live Performance Australia, both contemporary music festival revenue
and attendance grew by over 26 per cent in the 2016-2017 period, alone.
But more festivalgoers inevitably means more drugs, chemical
cocktails that are often of dubious origin and even more questionable
composition that will let you dance all night. Or, as we’ve found in some
high-profile cases, not. As ingrained as these gatherings in the cultural
landscape are news articles about the attendees who never made it
home. Young people doing what young people do, like 18-year-old
Hoang Nathan Tran, 21-year-old Diana Nguyen, 23-year-old Joseph
Nguyen Nhu Binh Pham, 19-year-old Callum Brosnan, 22-year-old
Joshua Tam and 19-year-old Alexandra Ross King. All died recently
as a result of taking MDMA, or ecstasy. Five of the six also had other
drugs in their system.
This spate of deaths from late 2018 to 2019 resulted in a NSW Coroner’s
Report which was released in November and brought forth a raft of
recommendations. A key component of which is on-site pill testing.
Professor Alison Ritter, a specialist in drug policy from UNSW,
supports the idea. For a start, it’s what young people want, too. “More than
82 per cent of the 2300 young Australians aged between 16 and 25 years…
supported its introduction. They want to make informed choices,” she says.
It’s part of a global trend, and as Ritter points out, pill-testing has been long
available through community organisations and local government in the
Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and Spain.
She says at the most basic level, pill testing changes behaviours.
“Research from Austria shows 50 per cent of those who had their
drugs tested said the results affected their consumption choices. Two-
thirds said they wouldn’t consume the drug [which was found to be
tainted] and would warn friends in cases of negative results.”
If this was the only benefit of pill testing, it would be worth further
investigation and large-scale trials, but it’s not. Evidence shows it can also
impact the black-market drug supply for the better, with dangerous pills
removed from circulation. “There’s research from Europe that’s shown
that when they identify a particular pill or drug – say the pink ones with
the X and Y logos on them – word gets out that they contain a dangerous
substance. So if a dealer tries to sell them, people say no. What this research
has shown is that over time, they were detecting less and less adulterants
in the drug-checking program because dealers have to adapt to the

96 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

 marketplace and savvy consumers are not going to purchase a substance
where there’s been an alert put out by the public health officials about it.”
Ritter adds that although not everyone immediately discards
potentially adulterated drugs, those who choose to still partake will
often reduce how much they ingest.
Few are better placed to comment on the impact of pill testing at the
coal face than Dr David Caldicott from the ANU College of Health &
Medicine and Pill Testing Australia. Twice, he has been part of a team
that provided government-sanctioned on-site facilities at Groovin the
Moo festival. “We knew it would work because it’s worked everywhere
else it’s been tried and we’ve been campaigning for it for over 20 years,”
he says. “What I wasn’t expecting was the expressions of gratitude from
festival goers – I was a bit mortified quite frankly. While the purity of
the product certainly increased from the first year to the second, it also
wasn’t as high as people were expecting.”
Another of Caldicott’s in-the-field discoveries was that lurking in
what were purportedly MDMA capsules was a “particularly nasty”
chemical called n-ethypentylone. Users have described it as ‘cracky’
and far less pleasant than MDMA and its physical effects can include
raised pulse and blood pressure, high body temperature, convulsions,
rapid muscle breakdown and multiple organ failure. Psychologically
speaking, there’s agitation, paranoia, compulsion to redose,
difficulty sleeping for up to 36 hours, and temporary psychosis.
Perhaps most disturbing is its potency. According to knowyourstuff.
nz – which operates with the New Zealand Drug Foundation –
“A common dose for MDMA is around 100 milligrams, whereas a dose
for n-ethylpentylone can be as little as 30 milligrams. If people believe
they have MDMA and take 100 milligrams of n-ethylpentylone, then
they are going to be in a very risky situation.”
Beyond the mere chemical identification of pills, advocates are
quick to point out that it does not take place in a vacuum. Rather, it
* MATT’S REAL NAME HAS BEEN PROTECTED AT HIS REQUEST.
is the starting point for holistic discussion focused on health care as
opposed to committing a prosecutable crime.
“The basic premise is that pill testing should not occur in isolation,”
says Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, an honorary senior lecturer at The
University of Melbourne. “It comes with advice about risks and
avoiding harm. For example, if you are going to take a drug then do
not combine it with alcohol, ensure you are adequately hydrated, that
you use with friends and not alone etc. It’s about the availability of
health services to provide advice, support, assessment and linkage to
treatment for those (few) who wish to access further care. It’s also
linked with feedback processes to potentially act as an early-warning
“YOU NEVER REALLY KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GETTING WITH PILLS BUT I’D RATHER
WRITE OFF $200 OR $300 THAN HAVE MY ORGANS SHUT DOWN.”
system on particularly dangerous (deadly) pills, even to link in with
police to provide further forensic testing to provide information about
what (substances) are out there.”
Matt*, a 22-year-old call-centre worker living in Sydney, needs no
convincing. “I’ve been to two Groovin the Moo festivals where there
was pill-testing and both times I’ve had my gear analysed,” he says.
“I’m thankful I did because the second time they found something that
definitely wasn’t MDMA and I was like, ‘Fuck that’. You never really
know what you’re getting with pills but I’d rather write off $200 or $300
than have my organs shut down. I can’t say pill testing saved my life but I
can’t say that it didn’t. I’d like to see more of it to be honest because people
are kidding themselves if they think drugs are only at music festivals. I do
pills at least once a month just going out with mates and it would be great
to know what was in them instead of just rolling the dice.”
It’s not just Matt and his mates gambling on powder every other weekend.
The Australian Drug Trends Report 2018, commissioned by the National
Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, surveyed 800 participants and found
cocaine use jumped by 11 per cent year on year with ecstasy/MDMA at
some of the highest levels since the survey began in 2003.
From a budgetary standpoint, pill testing is a solid call. “One of the
things about drug checking is that it is relatively inexpensive compared
to either providing treatment or emergency healthcare or policing,” says
Ritter. It’s a point of view that has found support at the highest level of
Australian politics. Greens leader Richard Di Natale, a former drug and
alcohol doctor, has not only suggested the remit of pill testing go beyond
music festivals and into the wider community but had it costed out by
the independent Parliament Budgetary Office. For $4m a year over four
years, there could be 18 pill-testing services in major cities and rural
areas, each with a spectroscopy testing machine and five staff including
trained peer-support workers. Each facility would run four days a week
ten hours a day. By way of comparison, Free TV Australia will deliver
1000 hours of Aussie television content to broadcasters in the Pacific, as
the result of a $17.1m government fund over the next three years.
While no one is suggesting that the thin blue line should donate its
services gratis to what are commercial events, in just a seven-month
period between this year and last, the NSW Police Force alone raked
in almost $13m in revenue for enforcement duties at festivals.
The calls for pill-testing at festivals have been received differently
by various state governments. The ACT, for example, has conducted
sanctioned pill testing at two Groovin the Moo events while its NSW
neighbour has drawn a firm line in the sand over the issue, which is not
to say the latter has not responded to the issue in some positive ways.
GQ.COM.AU 97
 A spokeswoman for the premier said the government will consider
the coroner’s recommendations and that NSW Health has developed
harm-reduction guidelines for music festivals in consultation with
experts. “We have already taken considerable steps to improve safety
at music festivals and some of the recommendations for measures such
as peer-based harm reduction services are already occurring,” she said.
Following the December 1 death of a 24-year-old man at the Strawberry
Fields Festival at Tocumwal in southern NSW, Premier Gladys Berejiklian
doubled down on her opposition to pill testing. “What questions would
you be asking me if we allow pill testing and over a summer 10 people
died… after someone told them there were no impurities in their pill –
we’d be having a very different conversation,” she told journalists. “For
every person whose life might be saved by pill testing, if that were the case,
there could be 10 others that succumb because they’re given a false sense of
security.” As pressure intensified on the NSW state government over the
issue, Berejiklian announced the introduction of amnesty bins at festivals,
where attendees could dump their pills without penalty.
One of the most oft-cited sticking points around pill testing is that
it’s often perceived as being just about the chemical analysis rather than
the start of a process. “Visits to pill-testing booths create an important
opportunity for providing support and information over and above the
testing itself,” explains Ritter. “They enable drug services to contact a
population that is otherwise difficult to reach because these people are not
experiencing acute drug problems. Indeed, the intervention has been used
to establish, and as the basis for, follow-up work with members of not-yet-
problematic, but nevertheless high-risk, groups of recreational drug users.”
Will Tregoning from unharm.org, a not-for-profit founded in 2014 that’s
focused on preventing drug addiction, is also in favour. “These services
have been operating internationally for around 30 years and have been
really successful in engaging people who use drugs in health consultations,
where they receive the results of pill analysis,” he says. “It facilitates what
might be the first discussion they’ve ever had with a health professional
about their drug use. There are myriad benefits beyond what’s in a certain
pill. For example, emergency services can better manage a critical incident
by knowing what they’re dealing with.”
The challenge for Tregoning and many others in favour of pill testing
lies in convincing authorities that just saying no is not a sufficient response
to the reality of illegal drugs. He says that positive changes are taking place
though: “I think community sentiment is on board. We have majority
support in Australia for pill testing. Even in parliament, there is extensive
support. The barrier right now is a relatively small group of reactionary
politicians highly committed to the ‘just say no’ message as a way of
demonstrating a particular version of toughness which they find plays well
to minority groups that they focus on in their constituency”
That ‘toughness’ has also been kicked up a notch with the policing
of drugs at festivals via sniffer dogs. It’s an approach that was marked
out for criticism by NSW Deputy Coroner Harriet Grahame in her
report where she recommended a ban on dogs entirely.
While these measures certainly do recover illegal drugs, Graham
pointed to research published in the International Journal of Drug Policy
which found that they also lead to festival goers taking drugs before the
festival, ingesting double the dose or panicking and swallowing drugs
quickly to avoid detection.
“I THINK COMMUNITY SENTIMENT IS ON BOARD. WE HAVE MAJORITY SUPPORT IN
AUSTRALIA FOR PILL TESTING. EVEN IN PARLIAMENT, THERE IS EXTENSIVE SUPPORT.”
98 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
Of even more concern is the use of strip searches for drug
detection. Across the two days of 2018’s Splendour in the Grass
festival, for example, a single NSW senior constable strip searched 19
patrons. During an investigation by the Law Enforcement Conduct
Commission, it was found that the searches yielded a single Valium
tablet. Moreover, under questioning, the officer agreed that the
searches across the event were not lawful and only ten per cent of
them – one of which was on a 16-year-old girl – yielded illegal drugs.
After being strip-searched at the Hidden festival in Sydney, Lucy Moore
took to Facebook in a post that makes for harrowing reading. Aside from
feeling “completely humiliated and embarrassed,” she included details such
as, “As I have learned, police cannot ask you to squat and cough but police
were asking us to do this”. She also raised concerns about privacy: “Not
only did I see other people being [strip] searched, during my search the
door was left half open and only ‘blocked’ by the small female cop. I could
easily see outside which means that attendees and male cops could have
easily seen in as well.” She was 19 at the time.
Moore’s experience formed part of the UNSW’s Rethinking Strip Searches
by NSW Police report which called the practice “inherently humiliating
and degrading” and found that the number of NSW Police searches has
increased by almost 50 per cent in the four financial years 2014-2018.
And the horror stories just keep on coming. At a five-day NSW Law
Enforcement Conduct Commission hearing into several strip searches
undertaken at the Lost City Music Festival, an event for children aged
13-17 held at Sydney Olympic Park in February, the counsel assisting
the commission Dr Peggy Dwyer told the proceedings only five of
30 teenagers police strip-searched during the event had a parent or
guardian present while the procedure was completed, despite it being
required by law. While it should be acknowledged that the conduct
hearing taking place at all is a step in the right direction, this hopeful
positivity is immediately clouded by revelations such as that from a
15-year-old boy who was told, during a drug strip search by an officer,
“Hold your dick and lift your balls up and show me your gooch”. The
commission heard the boy was separated from his older brother and
placed in a security area before police searched both his wallet and
phone, including his messages, without permission. All of this was
prompted by a lone sniffer dog loitering near him.
The practice has sparked unprecedented action among frontline
doctors. In November, 27 senior clinicians from Sydney’s St Vincent’s
Hospital wrote an open letter urging NSW Premier Berejiklian to
scrap strip searches and adopt pill testing. “We find it abhorrent
that strip searches are used to investigate young people – including
children – for personal possession,” wrote Dr Jennifer Stevens. “Strip
searches, as currently conducted, demean both the individual and the
police conducting the search.”
The letter followed a recent incident in which a teenage girl went to
police for help after hiding two pills vaginally. Rather than being sent for a
medical help, she was subjected to a strip search and three internal medical
examinations, which uncovered no drugs but appalled medical staff at the
inner-city hospital.
But it seems the police are not backing down. Or at least the NSW
Minister for Police isn’t. Asked to respond to data sourced by the
Redfern Legal Centre – which found that 122 underage girls had been
 Pill-testing supporters gather at a rally outside Sydney Town Hall last year.
strip searched in the state since 2016 – David Elliott said, “I’ve got
young children and if I thought the police felt they were at risk of
doing something wrong, I’d want them strip-searched.”
What’s all the more galling for the likes of Tregoning is that
government spin is playing a role in what can genuinely be a matter
of life and death. “What we’re seeing is a failure of leadership in
parliament,” he says. “The most frustrating thing is that in both major
parties there would be people who recognise that this is a valuable thing
to do. The barriers are all political in the sense that it’s all about how
might we create the best bang for our buck in terms of meeting the
perceived agenda of our constituents. It’s not like, ‘How can we do the
best thing for the health and welfare of people in this state?’ It’s, ‘What
are people going to think of us as a party? How can we message this?
How can we make this work best for us?’ And the fact that that kind of
calculation happens in a context where people are dying is appalling.”
To paint law-enforcement as the one-dimensional bad guys in all of
this is both unfair and misleading. It is also decidedly unhelpful in a
debate which is easily oversimplified.
Professor Paul Komesaroff from Monash University notes, “It’s a
complicated environment. There are serious risks, and we’ve got to
work our way through it in a careful and mature way. Neither side is
completely in the clear. We will have to work very carefully with the
police force, and in a number of places, including especially Victoria at
the moment, that’s one of the main sticking points. I think the police
have looked at this in an appropriate and honourable way, and they’re
concerned about the ambiguous positions that they will be put in. On
PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES.
the one hand, it’s their job to enforce the law as it stands at the moment.
On the other hand, if there’s pill testing, there will be clearly some sort
of process according to which people who are in possession of illegal
substances will somehow have to be ignored or excused.
“But we can find ways around these issues. It’s not a discussion where
one side is going to crash through and defeat the other. There needs to
be a process of cooperation, where people acknowledge the issues and the
tensions and find ways to work together to solve the problem.”
For David Caldicott, much of this has already been achieved. Albeit
on the smaller scale of the ACT. “We’ve been able to sit down with
our counterparts in law enforcement, and commit to try and make
our festivals ‘death free’ as a priority, rather than the focus on them
being ‘drug free’.
“Law enforcement has a critical role in reducing supply – that’s what
they do best. But reducing demand? That’s my gig. So while other
jurisdictions rely entirely on police interdiction, here in the ACT,
we have a safety net that acknowledges the reality of consumption.
I mean, if we can’t keep drugs out of our prisons, what chance do we
have of keeping them out of festivals?”
While the equation that pill testing = lives saved is an oversimplified
one with far too many variables to definitively conclude one way or
another, Caldicott will say this: “From the earliest days of pill testing,
we’ve known that it reduces the rates at which people mix their drugs,
and the absolute quantities of drugs consumed. Both of those are
independent risk factors for overdose, and subsequently death.”
It’s on the topic of mortality that his soft Irish brogue hardens into
somethingsteepedinyearsoffrustration.Hepointsoutthattheorganisation
he works with, Pill Testing Australia, has offered every jurisdiction in the
country a free trial at a time and festival of their choosing. Take up has been
theoretical at best and politely declined at worst.
“I have a theory why our opponents are so against what we do. It’s not
about the pill testing itself – it runs far deeper than that,” says Caldicott. “It
represents a far scarier prospect for those so committed to an approach to
drugs that globally has passed its sell-by date. Pill testing represents a place
where discussions about drug policy are happening around Australian
dinner tables, and discussion is the last thing that advocates of prohibition
want. And for some, that’s terrifying.”
This season, as with many before it, festivalgoers – rather than
politicians – are the ones who will be taking all the risks on the pill-
testing issue. And like too much cricket, sun and time spent at the
beach, tragedy is likely to become just another all-too predictable part
of the Australian summer. n
GQ.COM.AU 99
 DOMINIC FIKE
Beneath the controversial come-up lies a talented artist that might
just set the blueprint for the future of modern pop stars.
Photography James Tolich Styling Petta Chua Words Christopher Riley

100 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020


T
he first thing you notice about Dominic Fike are the
tattoos. Each blink reveals two red Xs that seem to
dance above his eyelids as he talks. They’re not the
only ink on his face either; there’s the outline of an
apple that sits beneath his right eye – an homage to
the 24-year-old’s little sister rather than the tech
giant – and three symbols that skirt along the edge of his boyish face,
a look that puts him somewhere between cherubic and heroin chic.
In all, it’s an appearance that, like Fike’s music, is hard to ignore.
But the truth is, the world still doesn’t quite know what to make of
Dominic Fike. Not yet, anyway. Because, even in the age of the Lil
Pumps and the Billie Eilishs, wherein homemade Internet sensations
can, and frequently do, become legitimate superstars, Fike’s journey
has been a little unorthodox.
The world first took notice in mid-2018 when it was rumoured he’d
sparked a bidding war among the world’s major labels. It was eventually
reported that Columbia Records had acquired Fike’s signature for
nearly $6m, beating out the likes of Republic, Interscope, Atlantic,
RCA and Epic.
These days, a major record label paying big bucks for an emerging
star is hardly shocking. But this one felt different. Firstly, when anyone
searched for music from the artist who’d set the industry alight, there
was nothing to be found. It seemed, as Rolling Stone reported, “as if the
label had thrown a reported $6m to a ghost”.
Then came the arrest. When Fike’s debut EP Don’t Forgot About Me,
Demos dropped in October 2018, he was sitting in a jail cell, charged
with assaulting a police officer in his hometown of Naples, Florida. All
this, it seemed was a little far-fetched. Arrests, behind-closed-doors
bidding wars, mysterious back catalogues – it sounded like the sort of
thing labels cook up to create an artificial buzz around an artist. The
Internet, meanwhile, had taken little time in making its mind up –
Dominic Fike must be an industry plant.
And yet, over a year later, he’s still here. His breakout single,
‘3 Nights’ has hit No.1 in three countries, including in Australia
where it quickly went Triple Platinum; he’s sold out a world tour; can
count America’s favourite boy band Brockhampton as friends and the
likes of DJ Khaled and Kourtney Kardashian as fans. Safe to say, the
hype has not come and gone.
When we sit down with Fike, it’s the day before the Sydney leg
of his Rain or Shine tour and it seems as if he could fall asleep at any
moment. He’s friendly but not entirely there, as if his body is floating
through the day without his mind fully onboard.
Taking a while to warm up, Fike becomes animated when we
discuss the kind of music he makes. His songs have frustrated critics
for their refusal to sit neatly within a certain genre, but to Fike, that’s
perfectly normal.
“It just grows – it’s a vibe,” he says smiling. “Like, it’s literally
changing every second. There’s no plan to make this genre, we just
fucking do what we hear. We have the Internet so… there’s no reason
to stick in lanes.”
This sums up not only Fike and the generation of artists he’s coming
up with, but also the caution that follows their meteoric ascent. For many
of today’s scene, the Internet isn’t this relatively new beast that needs to
be treated with respect and caution, it’s simply a part of their lives, a tool
that has always, and will always be there. Like Lil Nas X and Frank Ocean
before him, Fike’s music can be considered rock, pop and/or rap depending
on what song you choose, or even what part of the song you choose. This
is not a deliberate attempt to blend genres, more a product of having the
Internet’s vast range of influences at their fingertips.
When we ask about another controversy at the heart of Fike’s
narrative – the decision to wipe all his past projects upon the release
of Don’t Forget Me, Demos – the response is the same. This wasn’t some
strategic call; he just did it because he felt like it. “Yeah, that’s just a
habit of mine,” he says casually.
Like many of his contemporaries, Fike has circumnavigated the
traditional route to success within the music industry. Both his sound
and his image refuse to be put in a box and with that comes a certain
type of hate from the industry’s insiders. Not that he seems to care.
“The Internet is going to be the Internet,” he says. “You can’t look
into it too much… They can tweet that shit all day, like, ‘Fuck you,
I can’t do shit’. So it is what it is.”
The thing is, the rumours and the criticism around Fike seem to miss
one important detail – one that becomes abundantly clear after just a
short discussion with the singer. People are throwing money at him, not
because he’s the beneficiary of some nefarious industry push, but because
he looks and sounds like an incarnation of everything that’s popular
in today’s market. With long, lithe limbs and a youthful face, he’s so
photogenic as to look custom-made for Instagram. His sound, too, in
all its genre-less ambiguity, could be a soundtrack for Gen Z. Charged
with the chaos of Soundcloud rap then softened with catchy Red Hot
Chili Pepper-inspired guitar riffs, it’s a hypnotic mix that The New Yorker
described, matter of factly, as the “the future of popular music”.
As our time with him draws to a close, so too does Fike’s energy
levels. The red Xs no longer dance above his eyes but lie lazily as if
waiting for the signal to clock off. We take the hint and ask one final
question: is there anything else he wants to share with those following
his journey? Fike pauses briefly before responding: “Be patient with
me and I will deliver.”
From what we’ve seen so far, that seems as safe a bet as any. n
GQ.COM.AU 105
Jacket, $1946, pants, $1,003, T-shirt,
$449, shoes, $396, and socks, POA,
all by Off-White; top earring, $40,500,
by Bulgari; and bottom earring,
$59,500, by Tiffany & co.
 LIL NAS X
In a matter of months, the 20-year-old experienced the delirious spectrum
of emotion that comes with overnight success – from the glorious highs of
‘Old Town Road’ to the relentless demands of sudden fame.
Words Caroline McCloskey Photography Michael Schmelling Styling Jon Tietz

112 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

I
t’s Saturday morning and Lil Nas X is spent. At an hour when
many 20-year-olds are still sleeping off last night, he’s under
the hot lights of a studio in downtown LA, fielding on-camera
questions from his fans on the Internet. He does everything
that’s asked of him, even delivers two-line readings of the
dictated script, but when the camera is off, he goes slack. “I’m
sorry, I’m tired,” he says.
This is not a solitary, one-rough-morning kind of sleepy (although maybe
it’s that too). What it more closely resembles is the chronic exhaustion –
that sadistic combination of isolation and vigilance and personal sacrifice –
of the new parent, which, in a way, is what he is: Nas X’s career as a celebrity
is still in its infancy and must be tended to at all times. If he leaves it alone
for even a second, he senses, something disastrous might happen.
You can’t blame the guy for wanting to protect and grow the thing he’s
made, and you also can’t blame him for needing a break from it. Nas X is
living a year that is unimaginable to anyone on the sidelines. Today he’s
promoting ‘Panini’, the second single off his EP, 7, whose video, after
two weeks, has been viewed more than 65 million times on YouTube. But
when you consider that the track’s predecessor is the record-shattering,
genre-straddling juggernaut ‘Old Town Road’, a song that leapt out of
the Internet last year to surpass such titans as Drake and Bieber and
Swift – not to mention Elvis, Madonna, the Beatles, and all the rest – to
become the longest-running No. 1 song in Billboard history (the ‘Official
Movie’ remix with Billy Ray Cyrus has more than 400 million views on
YouTube), you understand how high the bar for Nas X has been set.
The meme-like appeal of ‘Old Town Road’, a two-minute PG-rated
trap-country ditty – front-loaded with frontier imagery, delivered
with an attitude of gently defiant individualism, and leavened by
goofiness – managed to transcend America’s combustible on-the-
ground culture wars and prove irresistible to a shockingly broad
audience: ‘Old Town Road’, it seemed, was one thing many people
could agree on. Kids love it. Barack Obama loves it. My yoga teacher
“I THOUGHT IT WAS SOMETHING THAT WAS GONNA PUT ME ON ANOTHER LEVEL...
IT’S SOMETHING YOU CAN ACTUALLY LISTEN TO AS WELL AS LAUGH TO.”
loves it. But it was a whiff of scandal that ultimately tipped the song
into the stratosphere.
In March, shortly after ‘Old Town Road’ charted, Billboard
declared it ineligible in the country category, a decision many regarded
as a barely veiled get off my lawn-style message from Nashville. As it
happened, the remix with Cyrus was already in the works – a generous-
spirited creative co-signing that doubled as a slick piece of business,
since veteran Cyrus lent newcomer Nas X some institutional-country
cred while gaining an injection of cultural relevance for himself
(bringing new audiences to both in the process). When the remix
dropped the following week, it shot to the top of the Billboard Hot
100 and parked there. And then, having scaled those impossible
heights and surveyed the view, Nas X came out in a series of tweets at
the end of June, a glorious assertion of identity that transcended the
petty ground wars playing out below him: Nas X is more than a song
or a genre. Embedded in the runaway success of this apolitical bonbon
of a single was a second, more radical statement, presented in the guise
of indisputable fact: for 19 consecutive weeks in 2019, the most popular
song in the world was a country tune by a gay black rapper.
Swaddled in a black waffle-weave robe, Nas X beaches himself on a
low-slung sofa in a dim corner of the studio, rests his chin on folded
hands and yawns. With the gentle din of the caterer unloading lunch in
the background and everyone (wardrobe, makeup, producers, publicist,
PA) temporarily turning their backs to us, conditions are possibly too
relaxing. Nas X flutters his eyes closed. And then, like a dragon that had
momentarily forgotten about its gold and its enemies, he blinks them
back open and props himself up on his elbows, ready to go.
This time last year, Nas X was sleeping on the floor of his sister’s house
in Georgia – but actually he wasn’t sleeping much at all. He had just
dropped out of college to pursue music full-time, had zero income, and
was “leeching off family members,” he says, to get by. Days and nights were
spent online, promoting his music. “I was feeling very stressed and afraid
for my health,” he recalls. “Just being in a place where you’re not knowing
exactly what’s going to happen, how long it’s going to take.”
On December 2, 2018, he posted a snippet of ‘Old Town Road’ on
Twitter and shortly thereafter threw it on SoundCloud. It wasn’t quite
as naive a gesture as tossing a penny in the well and making a wish – by
design the song had broad appeal, and over the years Nas X had cultivated
an online audience and some skill at marketing his work on social media –
but it wasn’t too far off. Still he was optimistic. “I thought it was definitely
something that was gonna put me on another level of people knowing
who I was,” he says. “It’s something you can actually listen to as well as
something you can laugh to.” He generated memes and worked comment
threads to direct attention to the track, which soon found traction in the
meme community. During this time, he says, “I’m looking at numbers
but also promoting the shit out of it, ’cause it’s moving so fast, but you
want to keep the momentum going. You don’t want to try to move on
too quickly.”
After the song made its way to the social media video-sharing
platform TikTok in March, Nas’s life entered warp speed: hitting the
charts, signing with Columbia, collaborating with Cyrus – all within
a few weeks. In April he performed live, for the first time ever, with
Cyrus and Diplo at Stagecoach, in front of thousands of fans. To go
from anonymity behind a screen to major public debut seems a freaky
leap, I say, but Nas literally yawns (again). “No, not really, just ’cause
I had been building up to that moment. I knew it was coming. And even
posting that first video, [where I’m] dancing to the song, was kind of
breaking that mould of more confidence to do that, so it wasn’t anything
crazy.” And this is kind of the point: For Nas, who grew up on the
Internet – taking refuge in it, fucking around on it, finding community
in it – the distinction between the online world and the quote-unquote
'real one' is fluid, essentially nonexistent. A stage is a stage.
He remembers first going online at seven, logging on to “the big
bad computer at the library – I’d be playing games and on YouTube. It
GQ.COM.AU 113
was good times.” As a kid, he moved around a bit, living mostly with
his father and various configurations of siblings and stepsiblings (Nas
X is the baby) outside Atlanta. He’d always been a good student, but by
14 he was increasingly applying his aptitude toward figuring out the
Internet, he says, “seeing how people respond to certain situations and
stuff, and seeing the things that become trends and go viral. Learning
how the Internet works is a lot like how the world works, in a way.”
Nas X’s familiarity with the tidal forces of virality – the way it thrusts
you up and just as swiftly will knock you back down – prepared him for
the inevitable confrontations to come. During the Billboard brouhaha,
people wanted him to react. When, during a televised conversation,
Kevin Hart appeared to be dismissive of the bravery required to come
out as a gay black rapper, people wanted Nas X to be outraged out loud.
But whatever his private feelings, he has publicly shrugged these things
off. “I think just me, being a troll myself, helps [me] not really care too
much about what commentators said. Because I know how I was when
I was in that position. I had nothing going on and I was a hater, so
I understand the position.” His strategy for slaying troll armies, he says, is
simple: “The only way to fight it is to keep succeeding. It’s the only thing.
Because… people want to see you win, but not win too much.”
Of his decision to come out, which he did on the last day of Pride
Month, Nas says, “I’m in a position where I can do whatever I do,
kinda, so it’s like, ‘Why not? Who’s gonna stop me?’” It was also
an effort to control his own story, to remain the sole owner of it, to
retain the power. “One hundred per cent. That’s what I wanted to
do. [The response] was overwhelming support, and it blocked out any
negativity.” He’s in a relationship now but admits, “It’s kinda hard.”
Are you always surrounded by people?
“I feel surrounded but still alone, somehow.”
Kind of like being on the Internet?
“Yeah, in a way. I feel like everything has changed but everything’s
the same.”
As we talk, his attention slides in and out of focus. Sometimes, when
mulling a response, he taps soft codes on his left palm like it’s a phone
he’s texting on, or repeats questions slowly, word by word, as if translating
from moon language. He’s tried meditating to center himself, he says,
“but it just became me realising that I was just trying to hurry up and
open my eyes more than actually meditate.” Every now and then he has a
day off, “but I don’t end up relaxing,” he says. “I just end up on my phone.”
Personal relationships, diet, sleep – these things fall by the wayside,
because right now Lil Nas X is on a mission. “I feel like I’ll always be able to
maintain, but my focus is definitely on building. My only thing I do think
about is already reaching so many tippy-top moments. Of course you can
always make bigger moments in different fields.” Music, he explains, is just
the beginning of his story. “Of course I’m going to do other things. Acting,
modeling, fashion – I want to get into the gaming world somehow, because
that’s an industry that’s about to really blow up more.”
Whether you’re hunting big game or scrambling to survive, it can be
hard to know when and if to put down your weapon, and Nas X freely
acknowledges that “enough,” for him, is an alien concept. “I don’t think
that’s a real thing. Once you feel like you’ve had enough, you’re just
waiting to die.
“Even right now, with this song – this is my currency, with ‘Panini,’”
he says. He pauses, considering the motor of his relentless drive. “I don’t
know. It’s just fear, I guess.”
Fear of what?
“Fear that everything is going to go back to how I was.” n

114 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

AUSTRALIA’S MOST WANTED

They’re the
most exciting
and the most
controversial
group in
Australian
music. GQ
sits down
with OneFour
at what will
either be the
moment their
career took
off, or the
end of it all.
Words Christopher Riley
Photography Jake Terrey

116 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

“WE GREW UP WITH OUR PARENTS, OUR AUNTIES, UNCLES
AND COUSINS IN THE CHOIR. BUT WE HATED IT, GETTING
DRAGGED TO CHOIR PRACTICE. IT JUST WASN’T OUR
THING, YA KNOW. SO WE GOT OUT, STARTED SINGING
IN THE CHOIR OUT ON THE STREETS.” – JM
D
epending on who you talk to, OneFour’s YP, Lekks,
JM and Spenny are either a group of trailblazing
musicians putting Australian hip hop on the map,
in spite of persistent, unjust police harassment;
or, they’re a gang of thugs, whose music incites
violence and whose very presence poses a threat not
just to their community but perhaps all of us.
Today, though, they’re just hungry. And we mean literally ravenous.
Arriving on set just after 9am, they offer a round of polite hellos before
diving headfirst into the breakfast spread. The bacon and egg rolls get
demolished first, then come the croissants. The pots of yoghurt and
granola, meanwhile, are left untouched.
In tracksuits and Nike TNs the boys circle the table with a mixture of
excitement and wariness – it’s the first time they’ve done a shoot like this,
their manager Ricky Simandjuntak explains. In two days, the group’s
youngest member YP, along with Lekks, the oldest, will face sentencing
for their roles in a bar fight in July 2018 that left one man with facial
fractures. But if there’s any anxiety, they don’t show it. Not yet, anyway.
Having spent most of the year with his identity hidden behind a
balaclava, YP opted to unmask during the video to last November’s
‘In the Beginning’. The boyish 19-year-old bounding around the
studio today contrasts the masked individual whose lyrics include the
menacing declaration, ‘Retaliation is a must, ain’t no maybes ifs or buts’.
“Instead of hiding behind the mask, I just wanted to take the music
more seriously,” he explains of the decision. “Before, it was there for
other reasons we’re not going to get into but when I took it off, I felt
more like a proper artist.”
And not just any artist. Starting the year as complete unknowns,
YP and the rest of OneFour have become one of the biggest things in
Australian music, let alone rap. Offering their own unique take on ‘drill’
– an offshoot of hip hop that originated in Chicago in the early-10s before
spreading to London – their music videos have repeatedly gone viral,
captivating not just Western Sydney, but the rest of Australia, the UK
and America. English superstar Skepta’s a fan, as is Ebro Darden, the host
of arguably America’s biggest hip hop radio station, New York’s Hot 97.
“We got fans from every corner of the world just showing mad
love,” explains YP of the growing movement. “It’s crazy.”
Their songs have a combined 73 million streams and have claimed
three out of YouTube’s top 10 trending Australian music videos of 2019.
That’s one more than Tones and I, the artist who stole the show at
November’s ARIA awards with four wins from eight nominations and
who holds the longest number-one song in the chart’s history. In short,
it’s hard to remember a moment like this. Australia’s had indie bands
command international attention, and Australia more than pulls its
weight in the pop world with stars like Ruel and Troye Sivan. But a hip
hop group made up of Samoan-Australians from Mount Druitt? Never.
Coming from one of Sydney’s toughest neighbourhoods, they rap
about life on the street with an alarming sense of realism. Credited as
Australia’s first drill group, they take their cues from the UK scene
thriving out of London, putting a distinctly Aussie spin on the genre’s
dark, gritty aesthetic. With its fast tempo and often unrelentingly
violent subject matter, drill is hard to stomach for a lot of people.
118 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
‘I back my shank and you pull yours and see who will take off first,’
JM raps on ‘The Message’, lyrics that have become the soundtrack to
OneFour’s Mount Druitt.
But if the lyrics are violent, OneFour will tell you that’s because they
come from a violent place. “You’re going to rap about princesses if all you
see is princesses,” says YP. “We rap about what we’ve seen growing up.”
“It’s not the city,” says YP of his hometown. “It’s a bit less fortunate
than others. It’s out west, ya know. When you can’t afford to live in
the city, you got to go out west. A lot of housing commissions and
that. But I didn’t see it as no ‘hood’, I just grew up there, it’s my home.”
The group’s depiction of home, however shocking for those not
accustomed to ‘The Area’, has shone light on a community often forgotten
in Australia’s growing metropolis. A far cry from the city’s affluent
centre, the suburb in Western Sydney is more commonly associated with
negative portrayals, such as controversial 2015 series Struggle Street. SBS
writer and Mount Druitt local Winnie Dunn describes it as “the place art
comes to die”. That is, until OneFour came along.
In an article last August, Dunn describes the experience of watching
OneFour’s music video to ‘The Message’ with her younger siblings:
“We all yelled, ‘Ayyyyyeee!’ as we saw OneFour with their boys
jumping in front of Mt Druitt Courthouse, Mt Druitt Station and
Dawson Mall behind the Mt Druitt Westfield whilst waving bright
orange smoke flares. Places we all visited on the daily were now on the
map. We were proud.”
Not everyone shares Dunn’s enthusiasm. For all the fans they might
have, their music is also attracting the wrong kind of attention – the sort
of scrutiny that could mean the year they’ve had will go down as both
the group’s biggest and its last. With the police claiming OneFour’s
members don’t just have criminal backgrounds but are tied to illegal
gang activity, they’ve repeatedly prevented the group from performing,
and consequently, from earning any real money from their music.
Simandjuntak rejects this idea. “Before the music they were in
labouring jobs,” he tells GQ. “Just because you have been in trouble
with the police doesn’t mean you’re in a gang.”
When tapped to support Mercury Prize-winning UK artist
Dave during his sold-out tour in July, the venue, Sydney’s Enmore
Theatre, was forced to pull them from the show citing “unforeseen
and unavoidable circumstances”. While the old adage, ‘all publicity
is good publicity’, is an often-accurate depiction of the entertainment
industry, this occasion didn’t appear to come with any silver lining.
OneFour went from emerging underground stars to notorious
criminals, with an article in The Daily Telegraph asserting a special
police strike force had been set up to “look at gangs such as OneFour”.
Each performance since that ill-fated July gig followed the same
format: shows would be advertised, shows would sell out, shows would
get shut down. OneFour’s manager claims they’ve been cancelled
due to police pressure. Talking to GQ, Simandjuntak explains each
one has followed a similar pattern: first venues would receive a letter
outlining the need for additional police presence at an additional cost,
and when the group would agree to foot the additional bill, police
would then threaten a review of the venue’s liquor licence.
Sydney’s Enmore Theatre did not respond to request for comment
but a letter obtained by Triple J’s Hack in November appears to
confirm this. Days before a scheduled OneFour show in Melbourne,
the venue received a letter from police warning a review of its liquor
licence, claiming police had “received information and hold concerns”
regarding the safety of the concert. Following the Melbourne
cancellation, the group was forced to pull all Australian dates from
OneFour members JM (top left), younger brother YP (bottom left), Lekks (top right) and Spenny.

GQ.COM.AU 119
their debut headline tour, leaving a single Auckland show their only
opportunity to perform. The gig would go ahead without incident.
For the group’s members, it’s letting the fans down that hurts the
most. “Everyone’s like, ‘Can’t wait for this weekend’, getting their fits
ready and that,” says YP. “To find out it’s shutdown, it’s a big bummer.”
This is hardly the first, nor will it be the last time a group of musicians
have found themselves at odds with the police. But the sustained way the
police have seemingly targeted OneFour has led many, such as rapper and
industry mogul Adam Briggs, to believe they’re being unfairly singled out.
“The way OneFour are being treated is unfair & bullshit,” he tweeted
in November. “Let the boys play. Let them thrive and be great.”
“I don’t get it,” says Spenny. “Because, back then when we were worse
we didn’t have this much pressure from the police. We’re trying to do
something good; it feels like they’re treating us more like criminals.”
The police, meanwhile, say they’re simply doing their job. “While
police provide safety and security advice to venues, promoters, and
other stakeholders ahead of major events,” a November statement read,
“the decision as to whether or not an event will proceed lies with the
relevant venue.” At the time of writing, the NSW police did not respond
to requests for comment.
But it’s not just the shows attracting the attention of the police. According
to a December report by the ABC, they are alleged to have requested
OneFour’s content be removed from streaming services and have even
gone as far as to serve Simandjuntak with a notice preventing him from
communicating with the group’s members. What started as a rags to riches
tale has morphed into something far more complicated, with media outlets
“THEY JUST THINK WE’RE A BUNCH OF CRIMINALS RAPPING ABOUT A BUNCH OF
CRIMES. BUT WHEN THEY GET TO MEET US IT’S A WHOLE DIFFERENT PERSONA.”
describing a war between OneFour and the police along the same lines as
NWA’s famous clashes with the LAPD back in the early-90s. Following
supposed gang ties and lyrics that incited violence against the police, the
Compton-based group were served a ‘cease and desist’ letter from the FBI,
preventing them from performing around America.
Likewise, NSW police have outlined they stand ready to use similar
tactics against OneFour if necessary, claiming a lyric from YP in March’s
‘The Message’ refers to a murder of a rival gang member. ‘21 what, one
got knocked, (hah!) I guess that makes them 20.’ YP, on the other hand,
asserts the line is pure fiction. “I just came up with it one day in my room,”
he told ABC’s Osman Faruqi. “I was like, ‘Yeah it’s a sick line!’”
Sergeant Nathan Trueman of Strike Force Raptor, a police unit
originally set up to combat bikie gangs and other organised crime
syndicates, told ABC’s Background Briefing he and his team have “serious
crime prevention orders” in their “back pocket” if they need – a claim that
former NSW director of public prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery has said
would be “perversion of the original intention of the legislation”.
For musician Hau Latukefu, this treatment is getting out of hand.
The host of Triple J’s hip hop show operates as a sort of A&R for the
group, offering advice and helping out in the studio but largely, he
says, he’s there as “the cool uncle”.
“I knew there was something special there,” says Latukefu of
meeting the group. “Not only were they talented artists, they were
young Pacific Islanders. I felt a sense of connection and pride.
“As young men who grew up in a tough environment, some of the
things they did, I didn’t agree with, but it was their life… Some police
attention is warranted but the amount they are receiving is bullshit.
They’re either paid or are paying for the crimes they have committed.”
YP and Lekks would begin to pay for their crimes two days after our
interview. Sentenced to four years in prison for their involvement in a
brawl inside a pub in Rooty Hill, the pair won’t be eligible for parole
until at least late-2021. Former member Celly would also be sentenced
to 10 years for his role in the fight.
Shortly after sentencing, CCTV footage of the incident was released
to the media. It makes for alarming viewing and there is little doubt
the pair deserve time atoning for their crimes. But what Latukefu and
others want people to understand is that while no one is denying the
boys have a criminal past, by preventing them from performing and
making music, they are also being denied the opportunity to build a
legitimate future.
The need to switch up the narrative is not lost on the group today.
At times during our interview, they inspect the tape-recorder in
front of them with barely concealed suspicion, as if cautious of saying
too much – or too little. Questions are met with a volley of raised
eyebrows between one another as if searching for clues on who should
break rank first.
Spenny sits back in his chair as if to create distance between himself
and this foreign object in front of him. YP, on the other hand, does
the opposite. Conscious his time is running out, he offers answers
more readily than the others, eager to show a side of himself not seen
through the music. When questioned on the group’s public perception,
he almost throws his voice at the recorder, desperate to be heard.
“They just think we’re a bunch of criminals rapping about a bunch
of crimes and that,” he says. “But when they get to meet us it’s a whole
different persona, you know what I mean. A lot more love when they
get to see us in person.”
While YP and the rest of OneFour have risen to huge popularity off
the back of their unapologetic recounting of life in the street – crimes
and all – their perceived authenticity is also one of the reasons for
their continued troubles. Although filmmakers require us to suspend
our disbelief in order to truly enjoy cinema, the strength of drill lies
in its supposed realness; artists require us to believe they are rapping
about things they have seen and possibly even done. But, as OneFour
has found, the risk is that people continue to believe the narrative
after the song has ended.
With OneFour’s ability to perform still in jeopardy, a gradual
movement away from drill’s controversial image might just be the
group’s best, or perhaps only chance of survival.
As if to acknowledge this fact, Spenny tells us their signature
aesthetic is about to get a facelift. “You should hear the new music
we’re cooking up,” he says with excitement. “We got new stuff that
isn’t too… ya know… it’s more ‘music’ music. That’s the way we’re
gonna go with it. It’s our longevity, ya know.”
Maybe. But with YP and Lekks now behind bars for at least the next
two years, whether their fans will get the chance to hear it remains
to be seen. And depending on who you ask, that’s either desperately
unfair, or just another case of four guys from Mount Druitt getting
what they deserve. n
GQ.COM.AU 121
CHAOS AT
THE TOP OF
It was one of the most arresting viral photos
of the year: a horde of climbers clogged atop
Mount Everest. But it only begins to capture
the deadly realities of what transpired that day
at 9000 metres. These are the untold accounts
of the people who were there.
Words Joshua Hammer

PHOTGRAPHY: AFP PHOTO /@NIMSDAI PROJECT POSSIBLE.

122 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

THE WORLD

GQ.COM.AU 123
I
t was morning and bright, and Reinhard Grubhofer,
depleted and dehydrated, hoisted his body over a crest and
rose uneasily. There, from the summit of Mount Everest,
he could see everything. How the earth curved gorgeously
in all directions; how wisps of clouds sailed beneath his
boots. The view – out beyond his worries – was beautiful.
But closer at hand, he could see trouble taking shape. He could feel
it, too, shuffling with a dozen other climbers onto a slim patch of
ground roughly the size of two ping pong tables. The space was
crowded. Shakily, Grubhofer held up a small flag and posed for
photos with his climbing partner, a fellow Austrian named Ernst
Landgraf, who’d made the slog to the summit uneasily. It had been a
brutal day. Their 13-man party had awoken at 11 the previous night
and trudged through the darkness up the icy incline of Everest’s
north side. Along the way, the temperatures dipped to well below
-170 C. At some point, the water bottle that Grubhofer packed had
frozen into a solid brick. He was thirsty and exhausted. But he tried
not to pay attention to any of that now. After weeks of waiting and
years of planning, Grubhofer had made it. It was 9:30 am on May 23,
and a less experienced climber might have thought that the hard part
was over. Grubhofer knew better.
As he jockeyed for a place to stand at the top of the world, his
Sherpa’s radio came alive. Kari Kobler, the founder of the Swiss
mountaineering agency that had organised Grubhofer’s expedition,
was radioing urgently from base camp. Bad weather was moving in
fast. They had to descend, quickly.
Grubhofer looked down toward Nepal and could see grey clouds
sweeping across the southern face of the mountain. There was
something else down there too: a line of a hundred or so climbers in
brightly colored suits snaking up the side of the mountain. The crowd
seemed incredible – like a bag of Skittles had been scattered down
the slope. On the north side, Grubhofer knew, more climbers were
tracing his trail up the mountain from Tibet too.
He hopped off the summit and crossed two windswept snowfields,
digging unsteadily into the crust with his crampons. Whenever
Grubhofer encountered somebody ascending the mountain, etiquette
forced him to unclip himself from the rope to step around the climber.
Each time he did so, he was aware that a gust of wind or a misstep
could send him hurtling to an uncertain fate.
Grubhofer had tossed his goggles after they’d frozen in the night
and now was wearing Adidas sports sunglasses, which fogged over
constantly, requiring him to remove his down mittens in the cold
to clean the lenses – a tiny reminder of the multitude of dangerous
unpleasantries and unforeseen challenges that crop up on Everest.
None of this was new to Grubhofer. A wiry 45-year-old with a
thatch of reddish-blond hair, he’d taken up mountaineering 15 years
earlier at 30. That’s when Grubhofer, depressed following a divorce,
vowed to restart his life. He set out for the Himalayas and scaled the
6500-metre Mera Peak in Nepal. “I was not fit enough, but it got me
hooked in,” he recalls. Over the following decade, Grubhofer ticked
off three of the Seven Summits – the highest peaks on each of the
seven continents.
Everest would be his fourth. He took his first shot in 2015, but the
adventure was cut short. He was dug in with his team at 6500 metres, at
what’s known as Advanced Base Camp, when an earthquake hit the region,
setting off an avalanche that killed over a dozen people at the Nepalese base
124 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
camp. Grubhofer’s expedition was untouched, but no one from either the
Tibetan or the Nepali side of Everest summited that season.
Returning to the mountain hadn’t been cheap. Grubhofer, who
works for a sightseeing company in Vienna, paid $96,000 for a package
that included travel to and from Tibet, visas, guide and Sherpa fees,
and the $16,000 permit issued by the Chinese government. Reaching
the summit this time around represented a special kind of thrill, but
he refused to celebrate until he was safely down the mountain. Late in
the morning, as he made his way along the crowded trail, a fog rolled
in, the wind whipped up, and snow began to fall.
Around noon Grubhofer arrived at the most dangerous obstacle
on the northern side: step two, a roughly 30-metre drop, negotiated
this time by three rickety ladders placed against the rock-and-ice
façade. The first ladder was about nine metres long. To reach it, a
climber had to twist his body to face the mountain and extend his
heavy, crampon-covered boot past an overhang, feeling blindly for
the first rung. It was here that the half-dozen climbers ahead of him
ground to a sudden halt.
Why the hell aren’t we moving? Grubhofer wondered. What’s holding
up the line?
He swiftly identified the problem: a woman in a red climbing suit
adorned with the emblems of a Chinese mountaineering group perched
just before the drop-off, unwilling to go forward. The woman’s two
Sherpa guides were firmly encouraging her to descend the ladder,
but she remained paralysed in apparent fear. For those in the logjam
behind her, there was no going around. Everybody was stuck, freezing
in the storm. Nearly 10km high in the Himalayas, Grubhofer knew,
conditions were unforgiving: standing still for long periods in the
so-called death zone above 9000 metres dramatically increased the
risk of frostbite, heart attack, stroke, pulmonary or cerebral oedema
– and death. Grubhofer knew that Ernst Landgraf, the member of
his climbing party whom he had seen on Everest’s summit, had been
exhausted at the top. He could just make out Landgraf – obscured by
snowfall, clouds, fog, and people – a few climbers behind him, but
Grubhofer didn’t know how the 64-year-old was holding up.
“Move it!” shouted a climber behind Grubhofer.
Oh, shit, Grubhofer thought, this is getting serious.
This Chinese woman, he was sure, had no business being on the
mountain. Why hadn’t her guides screened her ahead of time? Thirty
minutes crawled by. Forty-five passed. Still she wouldn’t go down
the ladder.
“For God’s sake,” another climber exclaimed, raising his arms in
disgust. “Why is she not moving?”
FOR MUCH OF THE YEAR, climbing Everest is an impossible idea.
But each May the roaring jet stream that torments the mountain
subsides just enough to allow alpinists a shot at reaching the top. Should
the weather suddenly turn, the results are often deadly. Jon Krakauer’s
Into Thin Air made famous the May 1996 disaster during which eight
climbers – caught in a blinding whiteout – perished from exposure
or plunged to their death. The book was a tale of the vicissitudes of
nature, the hubris of climbers, and the ineffable lure of the mountain,
as well as a reminder that, though Everest had been summited by
hundreds, it remains an incredible and dangerous challenge. It was
also a scathing portrait of irresponsible guides catering to wealthy,
out-of-their-depth dilettantes who were floundering around in what
had become an increasingly commercialised enterprise. It was greeted
as a wake-up call.
But two decades on, the Everest experience often seems to have
devolved even further into a circus-like pageant of stunts and self-
promotion. In April 2017, DJ Paul Oakenfold outraged mountaineering
purists by hosting an EDM concert at the base camp in Nepal; this year
three Indian climbers returned home to celebratory crowds after they
supposedly summited on May 26, only to be accused of fraud after other
mountaineers claimed that they never made it past 7150 metres.
And then there are the growing crowds. For this year’s climbing
season, Nepal handed out 381 permits to scale Everest, the most ever.
The Chinese government distributed more than 100 permits for the
northern side. According to the Himalayan Database, the number of
people summiting Everest has just about doubled in the past decade.
And in that time the mountain has become accessible even to relative
novices, thanks to a proliferation of cut-rate agencies that require little
proof of technical skill, experience or physical fitness. “Some of these
companies don’t ask any questions,” says Rolfe Oostra, an Australian
mountaineer and a founder of France-based 360 Expeditions, which
sent four clients to the summit this year. “They are willing to take
anybody on, and that compounds the problems for everyone.”
On May 22 – the day before Grubhofer reached the top – a long
line near the summit had already begun to form. One of those pinned
in the throng was a Nepali climber named Nirmal Purja. That
“YOU’RE SLIDING BACK, FIGHTING TO KEEP YOUR BALANCE, EXPENDING A LOT OF ENERGY.
I ASKED MYSELF, FOR THE FIRST OF A THOUSAND TIMES, ‘SHOULD I TURN AROUND?’”
morning, Purja snapped a photo of the chaos. The picture showed
a near unprecedented traffic jam on the popular southern side: a
column of hundreds of climbers snaking along the knifelike summit
ridge toward the Hillary Step, the last obstacle before the top, packed
jacket-to-jacket as if they were queued up for a ski lift in Vail. The
image rocketed around the world and, as the events on the mountain
were still developing, raised an urgent question: what the hell is going
on atop Mount Everest?
IN THE HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS, calamity frequently takes
shape off in the distance. Events have a way of cascading. Everest was
clogged with climbers in late May because of – among other things –
a cyclone that had struck weeks earlier, several hundred miles away.
Earlier that month, cyclone Fani made landfall in India as a
massive Category-4 storm, blasting warm, wet air westward into
the Himalayas. For weeks snow and wind buffeted Everest, and the
climbers and crews who’d come to the mountain hoping for clear,
calm skies dug in to wait.
At base camp, Kari Kobler, who was directing Grubhofer’s
expedition, was feverishly consulting the forecasts, hoping for a break.
When the skies finally cleared, suddenly the race was on. “We were
waiting for good weather at the base camp until May 19,” says Dendi
Sherpa, one of the lead Nepali guides in the Kobler group and one of
seven Sherpas hired to help the team. It was apparent to him what was
going to happen: “We have only a two-day window, and all the people
are going to summit at the same time.”
Grubhofer joined the caravan, and by mid-afternoon on Wednesday,
May 22, he’d ascended to Camp 3, a bleak and windswept slope at
8350 metres. At these heights, the low air pressure means that the
vascular system is receiving far less oxygen than it would at sea level;
most climbers rely on supplemental oxygen. After arriving at camp,
Grubhofer hunkered down to sleep. At eleven o’clock that night, he
pushed off toward the summit along with some 80 climbers from a
dozen other groups – twice as many as usual, according to one veteran
Everest climber.
Grubhofer’s aim was to arrive at the summit shortly after dawn on
Thursday morning, giving him plenty of time to make the descent
before encountering the bad weather that typically sweeps in during
the afternoon. He carried a bottle of oxygen that would last him
between six and nine hours; his Sherpa guide carried two spares
for Grubhofer as well as one tank for himself. But one hour above
the camp, Grubhofer ran into trouble: the snow cover had melted,
exposing treacherous patches of bare rock and gravel. “You’re
trying to dig in your crampons, but you’re often sliding back,
fighting to keep your balance, expending a lot of energy,” Grubhofer
says. “And I asked myself, for the first of a thousand times, ‘Should
I turn around?’”
After wasting precious time struggling up the rock slope, Grubhofer
reached the first of the three difficult steps just below the summit.
At least 10 other climbers lined up ahead of him, waiting to make the
ascent. To do so, climbers had to squeeze sideways into a rock crevice
and pull themselves up by a fixed rope. Grubhofer watched several of
them flounder and thought, Oh, Jesus – what are they doing here?
Two hours later, on the ridge above the second step, he came upon
two frozen corpses lying beside the path. Judging from their torn and
faded snowsuits and the patches of snow that covered them, Grubhofer
could tell that they had been on the mountain for years; one was
missing gloves, and the exposed hands had twisted into claws. “They
seemed to be reaching toward me,” he says. The bodies were among as
many as 200 corpses abandoned on Everest, most left behind because
of the high cost – up to $150,000 – and dangers of recovering them.
They’re grim reminders of the mountain’s perils, and they’re likely
to become more noticeable: as climate change thaws the mountain,
the melting snow and ice are exposing additional corpses each year.
Grubhofer looked away. “You just move on,” he says. “You refuse to
let it affect you.”
On the north side as well, Kuntal Joisher, an Indian alpinist famed
for summiting Himalayan peaks while subsisting on an all-vegan diet,
was trying hard to maintain a similar stoicism, despite what he was
seeing. Joisher was attempting his fourth summit of Everest and had
fallen in behind three Indian teenagers who seemed to have no idea
how to negotiate the ascent of the second step. Fearful and slow, they
took over half an hour to cross the step – usually a 10-minute climb for
a strong alpinist. “I was thinking,” Joisher recalls, “Man, I’m freezing
to death, and you guys are causing a traffic jam.” There was nothing to
do but wait his turn in the frigid wind. “You are standing at the ledge
GQ.COM.AU 125
of a giant boulder, and it’s just wide enough to hold your boots, with a
sheer drop on one side,” he says. “You are totally exposed.”
Above step three, the scene got worse. Joisher encountered a Sherpa
guide, sprawled in the snow, separated from his client and utterly
exhausted and delirious. His oxygen bottle was empty, and, says Joisher,
“he had been there a while, and he had no idea what to do.” Joisher’s
Sherpa searched the man’s bag, found a full bottle, attached it to the
man’s regulator, and waited for the oxygen to flow. “After 10 minutes he
was able to form good sentences and was in good spirits, and he said, ‘OK,
I’m ready to go up now.’” Joisher made the summit at 5:30 in the morning
on May 23. “It was jam-packed at the top – it was crazy,” he says.
He stayed only 10 minutes in the cold and wind before heading back
down – desperate to avoid the crush of 80 or 90 people whom he could
see approaching from both sides.
AMONG THOSE WHO’D also expected to be near the top by
daybreak on Thursday morning was Chris Dare, a dentist with the
Canadian Armed Forces. Like Grubhofer, he had started for the
summit Wednesday night, falling in with a long line of headlamps
snaking through the darkness.
One of those headlamps belonged to Dare’s buddy Kevin Hynes, a
gregarious 56-year-old from Galway, Ireland. But Hynes made it only a
hundred yards out of Camp 3 before he turned around. He wasn’t feeling
up to it and decided the prudent move was to head back. Dare pressed
on, figuring he’d reach the top by six o’clock in the morning. But long,
debilitating waits at each step delayed him until just before 9:30. Soon after
his moment at the summit, of course, the weather began to turn ugly.
“YOU ARE STANDING AT THE LEDGE OF A GIANT BOULDER, AND IT’S JUST WIDE ENOUGH
TO HOLD YOUR BOOTS, WITH A SHEER DROP ON ONE SIDE. YOU ARE TOTALLY EXPOSED.”
At around 10am, Dare was heading back toward Camp 3 when
he encountered a member of his team, Kam Kaur, a British yoga
instructor, still inching toward the summit with her guide. Kaur was
an experienced mountaineer, but, says Rolfe Oostra, the Australian
guide leading the group, she wasn’t in top physical condition – and
it was dangerously late to be making the summit push. She was
determined to go forward.
Covered with ice, short on oxygen, and physically spent, Dare made
it back to Camp 3 at 7pm and collapsed in his tent. He was barely
conscious later, when a commotion erupted outside. The Sherpa
whom Dare had seen earlier that day helping Kaur up the mountain
had staggered into camp, incoherent and alone. They’d run into
trouble, he said. According to Oostra, the Sherpa’s oxygen ran out and
he’d been forced to leave Kaur to seek help. Oostra had been to the top
once before but had abandoned his summit push that morning at the
second step, after a faulty regulator valve had blocked his oxygen flow.
“Where’s Kam?” he demanded when he saw the Sherpa.
“She’s up there,” the Sherpa gasped.
Oostra strapped on his crampons and grabbed an oxygen cylinder
and a headlamp. As he prepared to climb, he spotted a light high on
the ridge and flashed his headlamp three times; three flashes returned.
Oostra locked onto the point in the darkness where he’d seen the light
and set out up the icy slope. When he found Kaur, she was curled into
the foetal position. Her oxygen had run out, and she was drifting in
and out of consciousness. It hadn’t been Kaur who’d signaled Oostra –
126 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
her light was nearly dead – but rather another man, a badly weakened
Indian climber, who flashed for help and then staggered away. (Kaur
disputes Oostra’s timeline, though she told GQ that she’s not yet ready
to publicly share her story.)
In Oostra’s telling, Kaur was practically helpless when he found her
on the rock. “Can’t move my hands, babe,” she whispered. “They’re
frozen.” Oostra strapped her into a sling, clipped it to his harness, and
rappelled with her down the buttress. Then he pushed and dragged
her back to Camp 3, shouting above the wind to keep her awake.
FOR THE FIRST-TIMERS on the mountain – the multitude of
climbers who had never been to Everest – the crowds and the chaos
might have seemed normal. But the Sherpas knew better. Hundreds of
them were scattered on the high slopes that night, and many of them
understood that the mountain had never seen anything like this.
Each year, in the months before the climbing season, mountaineering
agencies identify the most agile and fearless men from high-altitude
Sherpa villages – and then hand them awesome responsibilities. Sherpas
lay the fixed ropes that guide climbers to the summit, lug the heavy
oxygen bottles that keep their clients alive, and closely monitor their
clients’ physical and mental states. The work is risky – in April 2014,
16 Sherpas died in an ice avalanche on the Nepali side of Everest; two
Sherpas would die this spring in the Nepali Himalayas – yet the money,
as much as $15,000 per season, provides an escape from the poverty of
rural Nepal.
The men often form an emotional bond with their clients, living
beside them for weeks, sharing their victories and their setbacks. The
finest walk a faint line between being helpful and being obedient –
between bowing to their clients’ wishes and saying no when those
wishes seem dangerously misguided.
On Grubhofer’s expedition, one of the lead Sherpas was Dendi
Sherpa, a 37-year-old veteran who had worked for Kobler & Partner
since 2008 and had summited Mount Everest six times. Having worked
his way to a top guide spot on Kobler’s team, Dendi had remained
behind at Camp 3 on the day of the summit push.
Now Grubhofer – inching his way down, just past the second step
– was headed in Dendi’s direction when he heard agitated shouts and
cries right behind him. His immediate thought was that his teammate,
Ernst Landgraf, was in trouble. Landgraf was an experienced
summiteer, but he was exhausted at the top. As he and Grubhofer sat
on the summit that morning, congratulating each other, Grubhofer
noticed that Landgraf seemed particularly spent.
A Sherpa on his team had the same impression when he confronted
Landgraf the night before they set out for the top: “He was weak, but
he said, ‘This is my goal, I have to go to the summit.’ And I thought,
Let him do it. It’s quite difficult to tell him, ‘You cannot.’ ”
The Sherpa faced a dilemma confronted by many guides on Everest:
how to respond to the determination of an apparently ailing or unfit
climber. Only rarely, many experts say, will a Sherpa demonstrate the
force of will to override a client’s decision to summit; for new recruits
trying to make a mark in a competitive business, getting a client to the
top often becomes the priority.
 A climber rests for a brief moment at the summit of Mount Everest.
Grubhofer listened again for the shrieks. Please don’t let it be Ernst,
he thought.
But it was. Later, Grubhofer learned that Landgraf had slipped
while trying to plant his foot on a ladder. Grubhofer was told that
because Landgraf had been clipped by his carabiner to the fixed line
when he fell, he banged into the ladder and then dangled limply on the
line. Guides quickly attempted to free him. The wind was blowing,
the temperature was dropping, and the climbers behind Landgraf’s
suspended body were desperate to get off the mountain.
Later, Kuntal Joisher heard that the waiting climbers were getting
agitated. “Cut him off the rope!” some yelled. “We’re getting blocked
– we’ll die.”
The rescuers struggled to get Landgraf off the line. After
determining that he was dead, they pushed him aside and left his body
hanging there. The exact cause of his death is unknown, but Kuntal
Joisher says that at that altitude, with a weakened body under intense
stress, the slightest stumble can be disastrous. “A small slip or fall can
PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES.
cause your heart rate to shoot up to such a level,” he says, “that you
will have a massive heart attack.”
ON THE OTHER SIDE of the mountain, the Nepalese approach
was turning into its own scene of confusion and death on Thursday.
Gyanendra Shrestha, a Nepalese government liaison officer at the
Everest Base Camp, had foreseen the trouble, watching days earlier
as over 200 climbers milled around the tents waiting to set off for the
top. One of them was an old friend of his, Kalpana Das, an Indian
attorney who had summited Everest in 2008.
Das had been given a hero’s send-off by thousands of admirers in
her hometown before she set out for Everest in April as part of an all-
women’s team of climbers. But Shrestha, having observed her during
acclimatising runs up the mountain in mid-May, saw that she was off
her game. “She was very slow, and she was a decade older this time –
54,” Shrestha says. “I told her at the base camp, ‘Don’t push yourself
much. I have a sense you cannot do it this year.’”
Das struggled on the Khumbu Icefall, the first obstacle beyond
the base camp. She eventually made it to the summit at around 1pm
on Thursday, but she collapsed on the way down. When Shrestha
received a mayday call from Das’ Sherpa, Das was unconscious, barely
breathing. The guide said that he was too exhausted to bring Das
down alone. A four-man rescue team was dispatched, but by the time
they reached her, hours later, Das had perished.
Shortly after dawn the previous morning, Donald Cash, a Utah software
salesman who had quit his job in December to devote himself to high-
altitude climbing, had also reached the top. The achievement marked the
completion of Cash’s Seven Summits project, and overjoyed, he performed a
little victory jig at the summit. Then, without warning, he sank to his knees
and toppled over. Cash’s guide raced to his side and opened wide the valve on
his oxygen.
The rush of air revived Cash, and the Sherpa helped him down to the
Hillary Step, a 12-metre high rock outcropping at 8,800 metres. A group
GQ.COM.AU 127
of Sherpas had been dispatched to help bring Cash down, but when they
arrived, it was too late. Cash had collapsed again and never got back up.
Cash’s body was left on the mountain, as his family wished.
Largely unaware of the tragedies unfolding around them, the other
teams on the route raced higher up the mountain. Anjali Kulkarni, an
experienced marathoner and high-altitude climber from Mumbai, and
her husband, Sharad Kulkarni, summited on the same day as Cash,
according to an account in the Times of India. After leaving the summit
with her husband, Kulkarni fell ill. Above Camp 4, the paper said, she
collapsed and died. A video shows a pair of rescuers, presumably Sherpas,
attempting to move Kulkarni’s limp body. She lies unresponsive, her
right arm extended, hand still clutching the fixed rope.
The surviving members of Anjali Kulkarni’s team staggered,
mourning and half dead, into Camp 4. Nearby, another exhausted
Indian climber from a different expedition, 27-year-old Nihal
Bagwan, who according to the Times of India had abandoned a 2014
Everest climb 400 metres below the summit, would die of altitude
sickness just before midnight on the 23rd.
Bagwan had been climbing with a Nepalese agency called Peak
Promotion, which had already lost three other climbers in the
Himalayas the week before. (The manager of Peak Promotion told
GQ that the deaths in 2019 represent the first time the agency lost
clients in its 27-year history. She also said that Peak Promotion
has guidelines in place to ensure that Sherpas have extensive
mountaineering experience.) Another Nepalese agency, Seven
Summit Treks, founded by four Sherpa brothers in 2010 and now
one of the biggest mountaineering companies in Nepal, had an even
worse record this year. On May 16, a client of theirs named Séamus
Lawless, a 39-year-old computer-science professor at Trinity
College in Dublin, unhooked himself from the safety rope to relieve
himself near Camp 4, according to Seven Summits. A climbing
companion speculates that a freak gust of wind blew him off the
mountain, and he apparently fell hundreds of feet to his death. His
body was never recovered. That same night, Ravi Thakur, a 27-year-
old Seven Summits client from Haryana, India, died in his tent at the
same camp. And in the days that followed, disaster struck three more
times on expeditions led by Seven Summits on nearby Makalu, the
world’s fifth-highest mountain.
When I met with him this summer, Tashi Sherpa, one of the
founders of Seven Summit Treks – and the youngest person ever
to reach the top of Everest without using supplemental oxygen –
defended the company’s safety record. Seven Summits had 64
clients on Everest this year, led by 100 Sherpas – and all but two had
returned safely. He conceded that the climbing season had not been
good, but he insisted that the company’s practices are sound.
Last May’s tragedies involved a wide range of outfitters from all
over the world – including elite European agencies like Kobler’s. It’s
not the case that companies from poorer countries are inherently
more troubled or lax in their safety considerations. Still, Kuntal
Joisher, the Indian climber, told me that the industry had become
inundated with inexpensive agencies that cater to budget clients
– Seven Summits’ Everest trips generally cost $56,000, according
Mountaineers climbing up the Khumbu Icefall on the route up Everest.
 to Tashi Sherpa. The cheaper companies often have less to pay for
guides and are said to employ more inexperienced crews. (Seven
Summits insists that it rigorously trains its Sherpas and pays them
higher than the market rate.)
These agencies have found a steady clientele among Indian climbers,
who typically have much less money to spend than Europeans and
Americans and are dying on Everest at a greater rate than anyone else.
Four out of the reported 11 who died on Everest this year were Indians;
of the 17 who died on Nepal’s 8000-metre peaks, eight were Indian.
“Indians are showing up who have not even climbed a 6000-metre
mountain,” Joisher says. “So many got frostbite, four died this year –
clearly there is something wrong.”
GRUBHOFER SPENT the last dreadful hours of May 23 in his own
kind of agony. He’d staggered down the north side at a dreadful pace,
exhausting his oxygen while waiting for others to move. Within sight
of the cluster of domed tents of Camp 3, Grubhofer collapsed. He
inched forward on his hands and knees in the gathering darkness,
shredding his jacket on the rocks, begging for tea, water, and oxygen.
“He was in terrible shape,” recalls Dendi Sherpa, who revived
him, replenished his oxygen, and placed him in his tent with
another climber.
Too late to escape from the death zone, Grubhofer slept fitfully for
hours, with his oxygen mask strapped over his mouth and nose, then sat
up at around three o’clock in the morning, gasping for air. He felt terrible.
With effort he removed his gloves, found his headlamp, scrounged
“A SMALL SLIP OR FALL CAN CAUSE YOUR HEART RATE TO SHOOT UP TO SUCH
A LEVEL THAT YOU WILL HAVE A MASSIVE HEART ATTACK.”
around the mess of the tent for his oxygen bottle – and checked the meter.
The tank was empty. It had been nearly full when he’d crawled into bed.
He realised he must have accidentally opened the valve all the way.
“Fuck,” he said. He tore off the mask of his regulator and retched.
“Dendi,” he croaked as the wind howled outside. “My oxygen.”
Grubhofer again rasped out a plea for help.
Moments later, Dendi Sherpa began his standard check of his
clients’ oxygen supplies. Entering Grubhofer’s tent, he saw Grubhofer
motioning desperately for assistance. Dendi looked at the meter,
saw the needle was on zero, and hurriedly attached a new bottle.
Grubhofer drew deep breaths through his respirator and settled
back in his sleeping bag. Without the new tank, says Dendi Sherpa,
“Reinhard would have died.”
A few dozen yards from Grubhofer, Chris Dare was thrashing about
sleeplessly in his tent that night. All he could think about was getting
below the death zone the next morning. He was ready to be done.
He was eager to reunite with climbing buddy Kevin Hynes, who had
turned around before the summit push. With Everest behind them,
PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES.
the two were looking forward to meeting up at the cabin Hayes had
built in the Maine woods.
In the morning, as Dare and the group headed down the mountain,
a Sherpa received a radio dispatch from Camp 1.
“Kevin’s gone,” he told Dare.
“What do you mean?” Dare asked, confused.
Hynes, Dare learned, had died in his tent at dawn. It might have
been a coronary or a stroke or any one of the fatal afflictions that
can overwhelm a climber’s heart, brain, or lungs at Everest’s merciless
altitudes. Oostra says the coroner’s report would attribute the death
of the vigorous Irishman to “natural causes”.
IN KATHMANDU IN AUGUST, long after the last mountaineers had
returned home, I found the local climbing community consumed by a
debateaboutwhathadgonewrong.Atleastfourclimbersdiedinthe24hours
that followed Grubhofer’s moment at the top – casualties of interminable
lines and tragic miscalculations, victims of one of the deadliest seasons the
mountain has ever seen. In all, 11 would die on Everest in May. By the
time I visited, the Nepalese government had proposed a new set of rules
requiring, among other things, that prospective climbers provide proof of
high-altitude experience. But sceptics doubted that the government would
seriously enforce such reforms and risk reducing its millions of dollars in
permit-generated revenues. “At the end of the day, the changes that Nepal
talks about never happen,” Rolfe Oostra tells me. “At the end of the day,
money talks.”
Reinhard Grubhofer shares the assessment that something has to
change. When I meet him in Vienna, it has been three months since
he scaled the mountain and he is still basking in the achievement.
“I cannot go anywhere without being the one who has just done
Everest,” he says with a smile.
Sure, more people were climbing the mountain than ever before,
but reaching the top of the world continues to offer unique bragging
rights, he tells me. That will never go away, he thinks. “If I would meet
you here and tell you I climbed, say, Annapurna, knowledgeable guys
would say, ‘Wow,’ but 99.9 per cent don’t know what you’re talking
about,” he says. “Mount Everest is such a fascinating mountain, this
huge monster. It is still one of the biggest adventures on the planet. It
is a prestigious place.”
And yet the disasters that struck on the day he reached the summit cast
a shadow. Nirmal Purja’s infamous photo of the traffic jam on the summit
ridge, he admits, has diminished the achievement in some people’s eyes.
“I was asked about the photo when I came back,” he tells me. “People said,
‘Oh, you’ve also been queuing up there,’ like it was the supermarket.”
New rules have to be implemented, he says, to weed out the incompetent
and the inexperienced, to reduce the crowds, to remove the Disneyland
illusion and bring Everest back to something approximating its pristine
state. Too many people, he says, have died needlessly because of sliding
standards. “Let’s not make it a tourist mountain,” he says. “Let’s not spoil
it even more [and] reduce it to dead people and tourists.”
Of course, Grubhofer also knows that the high stakes are part of the
mountain’s attraction. A note of humility creeps into his voice when
he acknowledges how close he had come to asphyxiating in his tent –
and how a single slip had been enough to end the life of his climbing
partner, Ernst Landgraf.
Two days after Landgraf perished, Grubhofer tells me, a small team
from Kobler & Partner returned to the site and gently removed the
body, which was still hanging from the line. Grubhofer says they
pushed and dragged it away from the trail and then found a niche
in the rocks where they laid Landgraf’s remains to rest – another
haunting reminder of Everest’s fatal allure. n
GQ.COM.AU 129
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WA•TER•MAN |wôtərmən| noun (pl. watermen)
The Modern Waterman is not just a versatile water athlete, adept at interpreting weather and tide information to
decide the best water activity for the conditions; he is also a fashion connoisseur, demanding a functional wardrobe
to transition freely into land-based pursuits.

SWIMWEAR | BEACHWEAR | UNDERWEAR | SKINCARE | PERFORMANCE | APPAREL

GQ.COM.AU 131
 Exposure

From top left: Tommy Hilfiger

and Dee Ocleppo Hilfiger;
Lucky Blue Smith; Cameron
Robbie; Josh Heuston snd Cartia
Mallan; Jono Friend and Roberta
Pecoraro; Yan Yan Chan and
Nathan Jolliffe; models Kristen
Apollos and Mun Mun.

Club Tommy
O n his first ever visit to Australia, American fashion icon Tommy Hilfiger left
no stone unturned. We’re not kidding. On this particular night in Sydney Mr
Hilfiger hosted not one, but three parties. Beginning with VIP drinks on a yacht and
culminating in a dance party that continued well into the wee hours of Friday morning.
With supermodel guests like Lucky Blue Smith and Gemma Ward in tow, Club Tommy
was the hottest ticket in town.

132 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020

 The Fountain of Goose brought
out some of Sydney’s finest,
with artist and former Archibald
Packing Room Prize winner
Jamie Preisz, photographer
Jake Terrey and journalist
Melissa Hoyer in attendance
with the GQ team and friends.

Fountain of Goose
V odka connoisseurs Grey Goose brought its Fountain of Goose – which looked exactly
as it sounds – to the Gold Coast, Sydney and Melbourne late last year, in celebration of
a limited-edition bottle designed in collaboration with French fashion label Maison LaBiche.
At the Sydney instalment, which popped up at Circular Quay’s First Fleet Park, botanical-
inspired cocktails were poured while a ballet dancer entertained a crowd of GQ editors and
friends. Never mind the fountain itself wasn’t flowing with actual vodka; there was plenty of
Grey Goose to go around.

GQ.COM.AU 133

OUT
OFTHE
SHADOWS With his most musically ambitious
album yet, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker
is finally ready to embrace fame
just as long as it’s on his own terms.
Photography James J Robinson Styling Pe ta Chua Words Noelle Faulker
There is a drumbeat that sounds like it’s been lifted off a Kelis
track and other nods to the familiar. Parker plays with orchestral and
organic-sounding instruments more than ever – acoustic guitars,
bare-ish snares, trills and stabs of piano. There are timpani drums
and pan flutes – if anyone can make plan flutes cool, it’s Parker. That
ambition? Well, here it is stamped and grooved in wax.
“I know that I’ve got a lot of ideas, genre-wise in there,” he says.
“I wanted just to make an album that was dance music-, hip-hop- and
R&B-friendly, but still had the instruments that I love to use and a lot
more of them.”
With The Slow Rush, he says, he aimed to create something divergent.
“I used a lot of synths and drum machines and synthetic stuff on Currents,
but for this one, I wanted it to have a lot of real-sounding instruments, but
still sound like Tame Impala.” What is most interesting, is the confessed
perfectionist’s priority among the flirting with genres and jumble of
instruments: it needed to sound like someone deep in the studio.
From the outside, it seems like the aloneness of Parker as an artist
permeates everything – his processes, his visions, his concepts. It’s even
in The Slow Rush album art, a photograph by Neil Krug of the dune-filled
rooms of Kolmanskop, an ex-diamond mine ghost-town in Namibia.
Having grown up with a somewhat rickety childhood (his parents
divorced when he was four), Parker found solace in solitude, using music
as a way of expression and grounding in its infinite possibilities.
His surroundings still play an integral part in his process and his
love affair with Australia has never waned. “I just love being near the
ocean,” he says. “Coming from Perth and being able to go down south
whenever I want, it’s a luxury I’ve grown up because we have such a
beautiful landscape. It’s a beautiful part of the world to get lost in.”
Tame Impala encapsulates a dichotomy of modern loneliness, with
mixes for headphones and melodies all but tailor-made for party
playlists. But Parker is, creatively, still an island.
“It’s been a while since I’ve made an album so I’d forgotten just what
it took to actually finish, especially on your own and not having a team
of people around you to help carry the load and responsibility,” he
says. Isolation has its perks, but can become a battle against himself.
“At the start, it’s simple. It’s just me and my recording equipment in
my studio or an Airbnb or wherever I am,” he explains. “By the end, it
becomes infinitely complicated because there are just so many factors
that I have to think about at once.”
Granted, Parker’s process hasn’t changed much from fiddling
around with a guitar in his bedroom as a kid. These days he just has a
fancier bedroom and a much fancier desk. “Music has to be a raw and
almost childlike thing,” he explains. “When you’re making music, you
have to feel like there’s no responsibility, there are no expectations
for you to be sensible. For that reason, you have to tap into your most
childish, heady, emotional frames of mind.”
As he gets older, does he worry that old habits of retreating into self-
imposed solitude might impact his relationships? “That’s why I do it
134 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020
by myself. I love my wife. She understands that I have to make music,
I have to make art. The rest of the people around me have known that
that’s been me for as long as they can remember.
“Everything I do has to be experimental in some way, I detest the
OUT OF THE
idea of just doing what you know.” Parker is not only anti-what people
expect of him, but harsh on himself. “I think music is the best when
SHADOWS it sounds like someone trying something they’re not fully capable of,”
continued from he says, sounding very rock-critic-esque. “I like all of those things in
page 93 music. Jay [Watson, of Pond and Tame Impala’s touring band] was
telling me he read something about rock and roll a while ago that was
like, ‘the best rock albums sound like a band that are just at the edge
of their capability’. I think that’s true about all music and probably
everything to do with art.”
If there’s anything he stands to avoid, it’s repeating history. “I would
never want to do an album that sounds like I know exactly what I’m
doing. That’s why I never wanted the same album twice because it’s like,
‘I’ve done that’.” I could make Innerspeaker 2.0 in about 24 hours because
I know exactly how to. But I think that would sound really boring.”
It might help pay the bills though. “You know, what? Probably not,
actually. People think they would listen to me doing the same thing
twice, but I think they are mistaken.”
With his collaborations, Currents and the incoming pop-leaning
The Slow Rush, Parker is a far cry from his stoner, dive-bar roots.
Does that affect his vision of Tame Impala? “Every decision
you have to take for itself and not to allow commonly-believed
connotations to drag you down,” he says. “I’m just not one of those
people. When we got offered a record deal, I remember saying,
‘Holy shit. Modular Records!’” he says, “and the first person I told,
a friend, said ‘Oh, don’t sign to them. They’re electro.’ From the
very first day I said something, my friends turned their noses up.
[Modular] were interested in my music, they were genuine, they
didn’t ask me to change in any way. They believed in me. So I just
try to take every turn as its own thing and not think about what it
means culturally.”
The mental load of producer, performer, writer, collaborator,
husband, friend, press junket talking head and GQ cover star can’t
be light. “It’s difficult. Well, can be difficult,” Parker sighs, half-
joking that he often does that ‘Australian thing’ and just doesn’t
talk about it. “I assume that everything I’ve done is unlistenable
every time I’ve released it. I’ve promised myself I’m going to enjoy
it this time – the rollout and people hearing the songs for the first
time. I’m going to get excited and not freak out as I have with every
other album.”
We all know the breakthrough cliché, the pressure felt by an artist
trying to get another bite of the relevance cherry. I ask Parker, having
experienced that three times over, if it gets any easier when you achieve
confetti cannon-level success? “No. No, it doesn’t,” he sighs. “In fact,
it gets worse. A lot of people consider my last album [Currents] to be
the best... Above all else, I too considered my last album the best one
I’ve ever done. Until I made this one.”
He pauses. “So the pressure I was putting on myself to make
another album that becomes my best one yet was greater than ever.”
He concedes, “You just have to turn that pressure into positive
energy and just try to ride the wave, rather than get dumped by it.
You know? Just hold on for dear life.” Parker takes a long pause.
“Which is funny, because all of the waves at the beaches I go to in
Perth are dumpers anyway.” n
The Slow Rush is out February 14 and Tame Impala will be touring in 2020.

THE MODERN MAN’S DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO ESSENTIAL SHOPPING AND SOPHISTICATED STYLE.
DR I N K TO THAT
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 The Last Word

Alexander
Ludwig

PHOTOGRAPHY: ARTHUR GALVAO.

136 JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2020 GQ.COM.AU