ALEXANDRIA

OCASIO-
CORTEZ
A Conversation
About Masculinity,
Power, and Politics
in Post-Roe
America
 CONTENTS

October
GQ World Behind the Scenes
With the People Who
Make GQ
Rad Suits and How to Wear Them,
Starring S H R E D M A S T E R K E I T H . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Contributor
Survival of the Slimmest Watches.... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

D I EG O LU N A Goes Rogue ............... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Features CRUZ VALDEZ

Photographer
“Representing a politician can be
Cover Story: A L EX A N DRIA O CA S IO - C O RTEZ . . . . . 40 intimidating,” says Cruz Valdez, the New
York–based fashion photographer. But
when she arrived at the Capitol to capture
In Paris With Design Genius N I G O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the cover
of this issue—just three weeks after
Roe was overturned—Valdez found that
her nerves turned to hope. “In the face
Natural Rooms............................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 of continued hateful legislation, I find her
presence in office to be a reassuring one.”
Inside the World of Leg Lengthening. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Office Grails

D E VON T U R N B U L L’ S Artful Sound Machines. . . . . 72

→

Meet the B ROS N A N Boys............................... 78

ON THE COVER: JACKET BY SPORTMAX; TURTLENECK BY WOLFORD; EARRINGS BY LAURA

LOMBARDI. CRUZ VALDEZ AND OFFICE GRAILS: COURTESY OF SUBJECTS.
←

GQ U.S.

me so upset.’

On the Cover
Photograph by Cruz Valdez. Styled by Dara.
Hair by Matt Benns at CLM Agency. Makeup
by Kuma using MAC Cosmetics. Set design by
Andrea Huelse. Produced by Harbinger.

6 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
 CONTENTS

October

ST YLIST, DARA. J A C K E T B Y C A LV I N L U O . PA N T S B Y C O . E A R R I N G S B Y L AU R A L O M B A R D I .

For our cover story on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, see page 40.

8 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 P H O T O G R A P H B Y C R U Z V A L D E Z
* Feel the city rhythm
 CONTENTS

October

For our story on Nigo, the new artistic director of Kenzo, see page 52.

1 0 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 P H O T O G R A P H B Y N A D I N E F R A C Z K O W S K I
 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
A Voice
for the GQ
Generation
O N A Q U I E T , moody Saturday in
July, I stood behind the photographer
Cruz Valdez, watching a laptop
monitor as images of Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rolled in.
¶ We were at the foot of the Capitol
Building in Washington, D.C. The
congresswoman was on the steps
just above us. In the distance behind
her, shafts of light were hitting
the warm off-white façade of the
United States Supreme Court
Building. ¶ Eighteen months earlier,
this very spot was the chaotic site
of the event now simply known
as January 6. And just three weeks
before our photo shoot, across the
street, the Supreme Court handed
down its decision to overturn Roe,
which unleashed a very different kind
of chaos around the country. ¶ To call
the photos that we were making
in that moment poignant would be
1 2 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
an understatement. I also think
it’s fair to call them brash:
Seeing a second-term member
of Congress boldly going arms
crossed on the steps of the
Capitol for a national magazine
is not standard fare.
Of course, none of this is
standard fare.
Ocasio-Cortez is just the
seventh active politician to
grace the cover of GQ.
The first was President
John F. Kennedy, who
was photographed in the Oval
Office for the March 1962
issue. The second was Lyndon
B. Johnson, who appeared
in March 1966. The September
1988 cover encouraged
readers to “Meet Joe Kennedy,
the Keeper of the Flame,”
soon after JFK’s nephew
arrived in Congress. Governor
Bill Clinton and Senator
Al Gore appeared together for
the November 1992 issue.
(Cover line: “Huck and Tom:
Gore Vidal Punches the
Ticket.”) And Barack Obama
appeared four times: once
as a senator and presidential
candidate (September 2007),
once as president-elect
(December 2008), and twice as
a sitting president (December
2009 and December 2015).
Which raises a question:
Why is a young congresswoman
from New York joining the
cover ranks of all those
presidents and Kennedys?
The short answer is that, as
limited as her raw legislative
power might be, Ocasio-Cortez
is having a singular impact on
our politics, and our culture.
GQ, of course, is a magazine
about culture, and AOC is
the politician who speaks from
and for the worldview that so
many of this magazine’s staff
and readership share.
In Washington, she embodies
something new: a kind of
generational paradigm shift.
She may be a member of
the House majority and share
a party with the current
president, but her perspective
has little in common with
his—or with the leaders across
Washington of all political
stripes, with whom she is so
often at odds. She is frequently
painted as a leader of the
P H O T O G R A P H
“radical left,” but for the GQ
generation she is right down the
middle: a dogged warrior for
profoundly simple principles
that we hold dear. I’m talking
about ideas like:
• The climate emergency is
real and must be addressed.
• All people have the right to
autonomy over their bodies
and basic reproductive
health care, including
access to abortion.
• The patriarchy, with its
outmoded gender dictates,
is both real and harmful
to all who live under it—
including the men it
privileges.
Is any of that so radical?
To me, and to us, these ideas
are so big and so basic as
to be uncontroversial. Which is
why Ocasio-Cortez offers us
hope. As Wesley Lowery’s cover
story (see page 40) details, she
is injecting our fundamental
truths into the mainstream—
and into legislation.
In other words: It’s working.
By force of will, wit, intelligence,
and activism, she is challenging
America to evolve.
Which, I think, puts the onus
back on you and me.
Can we be patient with the
long arc of progress—and are
we willing to put our principles
above our comforts and
entitlements?
Will we grumble and shrug
as people in power who
cannot seem to process how the
world has changed continue
to make disastrous decisions
that clash with our generation’s
way of life?
Or will we fight doggedly
for truths that we hold to be
self-evident?
The model that Ocasio-
Cortez provides is clear.
With her 33rd birthday
approaching, she is still
some two years away from
even being constitutionally
eligible to be president.
We are honored to have her
on our cover.
Will Welch
GLOBAL EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
B Y S I M B A R A S H E C H A
 Audience Communications Chief Business Published
Development V P , C O M M U N I C AT I O N S Officer by Condé Nast
E X E C U T I V E D I R E CTO R , Carly Holden
G LO B A L A U D I E N C E D E V E LO P M E N T , D I R E CTO R , C O M M U N I C AT I O N S
Elizabeth Webbe CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Roger Lynch
S O C I A L M E D I A & A N A LY T I C S Rachel Janc Lunny CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD
® Stephanie Williams Jonathan Newhouse
C O M M U N I C AT I O N S A S S O C I AT E
SENIOR MANAGER, AUDIENCE H E A D O F S A L E S , FA S H I O N &
Izzy Goldberg LU X U RY
G LO B A L C H I E F R E V E N U E O F F I C E R &
D E V E LO P M E N T PRESIDENT, U.S. REVENUE
Global Kevin Schlittenhardt Susan Cappa
Pamela Drucker Mann
Editorial Director Contributors H E A D O F S A L E S , A U TO & M E D I A /
M A N A G E R , G LO B A L A U D I E N C E FA S H I O N D I R E CTO R - AT - L A R G E CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER
Will Welch D E V E LO P M E N T Mobolaji Dawodu
E N T E RTA I N M E N T
Bill Mulvihill Anna Wintour
Alex Wedel
FA S H I O N E D I TO R - AT - L A R G E PRESIDENT, CONDÉ NAST
G LO B A L E X E C U T I V E D E S I G N
MANAGER, NEWSLET TER H E A D O F SA L ES , B I Z /F I /T EC H
D I R E CTO R
George Cortina Doug Grinspan E N T E RTA I N M E N T
S T R AT E GY Agnes Chu
Robert Vargas Kelsi Trinidad
CONTRIBUTING ST YLISTS
HEAD OF SALES, CPG & VICE
G LO B A L D I R E CTO R O F
Matthew Henson, Simon Jeff Barish CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER
MANAGER, SOCIAL MEDIA Rasmussen, Jon Tietz Jackie Marks
E D I TO R I A L O P E R AT I O N S
Melissa Yang H E A D O F S A L ES , H E A LT H & B E AU T Y
Sarah Schmidt CORRESP ONDENTS
Carrie Moore CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER
M A N A G E R , A N A LY T I C S Doug Bock Clark, Deirdre Findlay
G LO B A L C R E AT I V E D I R E CTO R
Ashley Grates Sean Flynn, Alice Gregory, H E A D O F S A L E S , H O M E & T R AV E L
Roxanne Behr Beth Lusko-Gunderman CHIEF PEOPLE OFFICER
A S S O C I AT E M A N A G E R , SOCIAL Chris Heath, Julia Ioffe, Stan Duncan
G LO B A L D I R E CTO R O F
Christian Rosa Drew Magary, Brett Martin, VP, REVENUE–MIDWEST
C O N T E N T S T R AT E GY C H I E F C O M M U N I C AT I O N S O F F I C E R
Michael Paterniti, Pamela Quandt
Joel Pavelski Danielle Carrig
Visuals Daniel Riley, Wells Tower VP, REVENUE–SAN FRANCISCO
G LO B A L F E AT U R E S D I R E CTO R C H I E F O F S TA F F
G LO B A L V I S U A L S C O LU M N I S T Devon Rothwell
Geoffrey Gagnon P R O D U CT I O N D I R E CTO R Joe Holder Elizabeth Minshaw
VP, ENTERPRISE SALES–
S I T E D I R E CTO R Victoria Graham C H I E F P R O D U CT & T E C H N O LO GY
C R E AT I V E D I R E CTO R - AT - L A R G E LO S A N G E L E S
Ben Williams V I S U A L S D I R E CTO R Jim Moore Dan Weiner OFFICER

G LO B A L E N T E RTA I N M E N T Stephanie Tran Sanjay Bhakta

VP, FINANCE & BUSINESS
D I R E CTO R C H I E F C O N T E N T O P E R AT I O N S
S E N I O R V I S U A L S E D I TO R GQ Global D E V E LO P M E N T
Dana Mathews Daria Di Lello D E P U T Y G LO B A L E D I TO R I A L Sylvia W. Chan OFFICER

S E N I O R S P E C I A L P R OJ E CT S E D I TO R D I R E CTO R ( B R I T I S H G Q )
Christiane Mack
VP, HEAD OF MARKETING
Mark Anthony Green Art & Production Adam Baidawi Rachael Klein
G LO B A L S T Y L E D I R E CTO R D E S I G N D I R E CTO R H E A D O F E D I TO R I A L C O N T E N T , E X E C U T I V E D I R E CTO R ,
Noah Johnson Keir Novesky GQ FRANCE I N T E R N AT I O N A L FA S H I O N
A RT I C L E S E D I TO R S A RT D I R E CTO R Pierre M’Pelé Bobby Graham
Chris Gayomali, Alex Hoyt Michael Houtz H E A D O F E D I TO R I A L C O N T E N T , S E N I O R D I R E CTO R , B R A N D
S E N I O R S TA F F W R I T E R D I G I TA L D E S I G N E R GQ GERMANY M A R K E T I N G , G Q & G Q S P O RT S
Zach Baron Corinne Ferman Tobias Frericks Jason Fitter
D E P U T Y S I T E E D I TO R G LO B A L P R O D U CT I O N D I R E CTO R H E A D O F E D I TO R I A L C O N T E N T , A S S O C I AT E M A N A G E R ,
Sam Schube Jim Gomez GQ INDIA BRAND MARKETING
Che Kurrien Haley Culp
D I G I TA L M A N A G I N G E D I TO R S E N I O R P R O D U CT I O N M A N A G E R
Codie Steensma John Markic H E A D O F E D I TO R I A L C O N T E N T , E X E C U T I V E B U S I N E S S D I R E CTO R
G Q I TA LY Jennifer Jackson
E D I TO R I A L O P E R AT I O N S M A N A G E R P R O D U CT I O N M A N A G E R
Federico Sarica
Raymond Ang Timothy Meneely
H E A D O F E D I TO R I A L C O N T E N T ,
W E L L N E S S E D I TO R WEB PRODUCER
G Q J A PA N
Chris Cohen Gabe Conte
Satoshi Niibori
S E N I O R E N T E RTA I N M E N T E D I TO R
H E A D O F E D I TO R I A L C O N T E N T ,
Luke Leifeste Copy & Research G Q M E X I C O & L AT I N A M E R I C A
WORLDWIDE EDITIONS

S T Y L E E D I TO R C O P Y D I R E CTO R
Urbano Hidalgo France: AD, AD Collector, GQ, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Vogue Collections
Yang-Yi Goh Corey Sabourin Germany: AD, Glamour, GQ, Vogue India: AD, Condé Nast Traveller,
H E A D O F E D I TO R I A L C O N T E N T ,
COPY MANAGER GQ, Vogue Italy: AD, Condé Nast Traveller, GQ, La Cucina Italiana,
S TA F F W R I T E R S G Q S PA I N
Gaylord Fields Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired Japan: GQ, Rumor Me, Vogue, Vogue Girl,
Eileen Cartter, Samuel Hine, Daniel Borrás Vogue Wedding, Wired Mexico and Latin America: AD Mexico
Gabriella Paiella, Clay Skipper, D E P U T Y TO T H E G LO B A L
H E A D O F E D I TO R I A L C O N T E N T , and Latin America, Condé Nast College Américas, Glamour Mexico
Tyler Tynes, Cam Wolf R E S E A R C H D I R E CTO R
G Q TA I WA N and Latin America, GQ Mexico and Latin America, Vogue Mexico
S E N I O R A S S O C I AT E E D I TO R Mick Rouse
Kevin Wang and Latin America Spain: AD, Condé Nast College Spain, Condé
Frazier Tharpe RESE ARCH MANAGERS Nast Traveler, Glamour, GQ, Vanity Fair, Vogue Taiwan: GQ, Vogue
E D I TO R I N C H I E F , G Q C H I N A
A S S I S TA N T TO T H E G LO B A L Matthew Browne, United Kingdom: London: HQ, Condé Nast College of Fashion
Rocco Liu
E D I TO R I A L D I R E CTO R Julia Pagnamenta and Design, Vogue Business; Britain: Condé Nast Johansens,
S E N I O R G LO B A L C O N T E N T
Anthony O’Baner Jr. L E G A L A F FA I R S E D I TO R , Condé Nast Traveller, Glamour, GQ, GQ Style, House & Garden,
PL ANNING MANAGER
E D I TO R I A L O P E R AT I O N S CONTENT INTEGRIT Y GROUP LOVE, Tatler, The World of Interiors, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired
Milly Tritton
A S S I S TA N T Lucas Zaleski United States: Allure, Architectural Digest, Ars Technica, basically,
Florence O’Connor Bon Appétit, Clever, Condé Nast Traveler, epicurious, Glamour,
Video GQ, GQ Style, healthyish, HIVE, La Cucina Italiana, LOVE, Pitchfork,
V P , D I G I TA L V I D E O
Self, Teen Vogue, them., The New Yorker, The Scene, Vanity Fair,
Fashion Vogue, Wired
A S S O C I AT E FA S H I O N D I R E CTO R ENGLISH L ANGUAGE
Miles Pope Brendon Henderson
PUBLISHED UNDER JOINT VENTURE
FA S H I O N E D I TO R E X E C U T I V E D I R E CTO R ,
P R O G R A M M I N G & D E V E LO P M E N T
Brazil: Casa Vogue, Glamour, GQ, Vogue
Brandon Tan
Josh Jun
A S S O C I AT E FA S H I O N E D I TO R P U B L I S H E D U N D E R L I C E N S E O R C O P Y R I G H T C O O P E R AT I O N
Haley Gilbreath S E N I O R D I R E CTO R , C R E AT I V E
D E V E LO P M E N T
Australia: GQ, Vogue, Vogue Living Bulgaria: Glamour China: AD,
FA S H I O N A S S I S TA N T
Noel Howard Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, GQ Lab, GQ Style, Vogue, Vogue+, Vogue
Natalie Petit-Frere Café Beijing, Vogue Café Shanghai, Vogue Film, Vogue Business
D I R E CTO R , C R E AT I V E
in China Czech Republic and Slovakia: La Cucina Italiana, Vogue
D E V E LO P M E N T
Commerce Hasan Khalid
Greece: Vogue Hong Kong: Vogue, Vogue Man Hungary: Glamour
G LO B A L C O M M E R C E C AT E G O RY Korea: Allure, GQ, Vogue, Wired Malaysia: Vogue Lounge Kuala
D I R E CTO R , G Q / FA S H I O N M A N A G E R , C R E AT I V E Lumpur Middle East: AD, Condé Nast Traveller, GQ, Vogue, Vogue
Martin Mulkeen D E V E LO P M E N T Café Riyadh, Wired Philippines: Vogue Poland: Glamour, Vogue
Jeremy Clowney Portugal: GQ, Vogue, Vogue Café Porto Romania: Glamour
A S S O C I AT E C O M M E R C E D I R E CTO R
PROGR AMMING MANAGER Scandinavia: Vogue Serbia: La Cucina Italiana Singapore: Vogue
Kyle Hodge
Darnell Point-Du-Jour South Africa: Glamour, GQ, GQ Style, House & Garden Thailand:
C O M M E R C E E D I TO R GQ, Vogue The Netherlands: Vogue, Vogue Living Turkey: GQ,
Avidan Grossman EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Vogue, Vogue Restaurant Istanbul Ukraine: Vogue, Vogue Man
Traci Oshiro
A S S O C I AT E C O M M E R C E E D I TO R
Tyler Chin S E N I O R V I D E O D I R E CTO R
Christopher Smith
COMMERCE WRITER CONDÉ NAST IS
Condé Nast is a global media company producing
Gerald Ortiz V I D E O D I R E CTO R C O M M I T T E D TO G LO B A L
premium content with a footprint of more than E N V I R O N M E N TA L
Robby Miller 1 billion consumers in 32 markets. condenast.com S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y . S CA N
SENIOR COMMERCE PRODUCER H E R E F O R D E TA I L S .
Emily Zoda SENIOR VIDEO PRODUCER Published at 1 World Trade Center, New York NY 10007.
Lizzy Halberstadt For subscription inquiries: visit subscribe.gq.com,
condenast.com/contact, or call (800) 289-2347.
For permissions and reprint requests: (212) 630-5656;
fax: (212) 630-5883. Address all editorial, business,
and production correspondence to GQ Magazine,
1 World Trade Center, New York NY 10007.
 GQ now is operating in Web3.
Join the conversation on Discord.
CASHMERE
SHIRT (PRICE UPON REQUEST ) BY MANS. TIE, $510, BY GUCCI. WATCH, $53,000, BY CARTIER. RINGS (ON LEF T HAND AND RIGHT INDEX FINGER), HIS OWN. RINGS, $230 (ON RIGHT MIDDLE FINGER),
$370 (ON RIGHT RING FINGER), AND $430 (ON RIGHT PINKIE), BY THE GREAT FROG. L APEL PINS, $495 ( TOP) AND $920 (BOT TOM), BY CHROME HEARTS. L APEL PIN (MIDDLE), $2,750,
F R O M K E N T S H I R E . S H R E D M A ST E R K E I T H : G R O O M I N G , M E L I S S A D EZ A R AT E U S I N G K E V I N M U R P H Y. TA I LO R I N G , A L B E RTO R I V E R A AT L A R S N O R D ST U D I O.

Starring
Shredmas
ter Keith.
B y YA N G -Y I
GOH and
SAM
UEL
HINE
BORN TO SHRED can fin d
On any given day, you
rdy living up to his
Bronx-born Keith Ha
ntown NYC
nickname on some dow
S TR IP ES
ano the r. Shr edmaster
FO R sidewalk or
S TA R S
kno wn , fou nd his first
In our post-W Keith, as he’s
FH age, gar bag e can when he
wearing a su skateboard in a
it means you rs since he’s
have somew was 11, and in the yea
he
means purp re to be—it ginative style of
ose, attitud honed a gritty and ima
and celebrat e,
an ska tin g— and an adventurous
ion. And urb
perhaps no tch. “You have to
suit better personal style to ma
exemplifies
the moment l ska tin g,” say s Keith, who
look coo
than this wi
de-leg, und in pen ny loafers, trim
strong-shoul cruises aro amy white
de rs, and cre
Laurent en r Saint pinstripe tro use
board has
se
pinstriped wi mble, ine ss on the
th suits. His scrapp ttin g pro,
threads that glittering turned him into a glo be- tro
’ll shine
ing fits, he’s
bright no mat
ter where and thanks to his dar
you’re head ar fashion icon
ed. evolved into a singul
. “I we nt to chu rch on Sundays as a
Jacket, too
$3,390, I wo uld we ar sui ts and
pants, $1 kid, and
,650, crazy patterns,” he
and boot button-ups that had
s, then, but now that
$1,250, by says. “I didn’t like it
am blin g through my
Saint I’m older I’m scr
Laurent o the shit that is
Anthony
by past, trying to grab ont
P H O T O G R A P H B Y C I A N M O O R E Vaccarel actually cool.”
S T Y L E D B Y B R A N D O N T A N
lo. O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 2 1

ORNATE
COORDINATES
Needles broke through
stateside on the strength
of its A$AP Rocky–
approved tracksuits,
but it’s the Japanese
label’s suit suits—decked
out in eccentric prints
with mile-wide lapels
and flowy trousers—
that now deserve your
full and undivided
attention (blazer, $939,
and pants, $593).
BOXY SHOES
Square-toe footwear
has long been written
off in menswear circles
as clunky and unsightly,
but Italian shoemaker
Marsèll’s chic take is
proof it’s time for a critical
reevaluation ($985).
BRILLIANT
BOUTONNIERE
Beautifully appointed
in yellow gold and
onyx—and splashed with
a sextet of diamonds for
good measure—Van
Cleef & Arpels’ iconic
Rose de Noël brooch is a
surefire way to level up
your lapels ($17,100).
PATCHWORK VEST
TWO-FACED Nobody said your three-
FASTENERS piece had to match.
Keep the shell pearls Acne Studios’ freaky,
on these cuff links textural, pattern-happy
from U.K. jeweler waistcoat will transform
Completedworks your standby charcoal suit
right side up on more into a supercharged party
formal occasions, fit (price upon request).
then flip them to the
jade-toned resin blobs SHOW-OFF SHIRT
when you’re feeling This autumn marks
funkier ($157). Miu Miu’s first
menswear offering in
14 years—which means
designer Miuccia Prada’s
internet-breaking
cropped button-downs
are finally available in
your size ($1,070).
COOL-GUY
COLLAR
The best way to pair a
FUCHSIA FROCK camp shirt—like, say,
The choice is yours: Bode’s delicately
You can drown your embroidered silk
fine tailoring under a version—with a suit
somber gray topcoat like jacket? Collar out, ’70s
everyone else, or you can style ($530).
swathe yourself in blazing
pink cashmere courtesy
of Valentino ($3,550).
SLICK SHADES
As Jack Nicholson has
proved for the better
part of a century, the
right sunglasses can
dial your suit up from
perfectly respectable
to unimpeachably cool.
These rimless gold-arm
frames from Chrome
VALENTINO, ALEX ANDER MCQUEEN: COURTESY OF BR ANDS. PROP ST YLIST, SHARON RYAN AT HALLEY RESOURCES.
Hearts are, without
question, the right
sunglasses ($1,540).
SHARP SHORTS
Dress shorts are a power DOUBLE TAKE
move—especially TROUSERS
when they’re as good The navy blue tones
as these deep-pleated, and flattering straight-
houndstooth-check, long leg cut make these
and loose stunners from Mans trousers as
Fendi Men’s ($820). TONED-DOWN TIE versatile as can be;
This tonal herringbone the subtle sheen and
Hermès tie, wood-grain weave,
embroidered with an meanwhile, ensure
artful nod to the Parisian they’ll turn plenty of
stalwart’s equestrian heads ($260).
roots, is a touch more
understated—but
no less arresting—than
the house’s famed bright AIRBRUSHED
silk neckwear ($335). BLAZER
A nod to Alexander
McQueen’s legendary
spring-summer 1999
runway collection, this
spray-paint-blasted,
double-breasted
sport coat reads more
downtown art opening
than Midtown power
lunch ($4,590).
CHRIST HARMET
PARCOUR ATHLETE

JOURNEY 1884
NATURALLY ATHLETIC,
AUTOMATICALLY AESTHETIC
For life in the urban jungle, an automatic timepiece that brings style and accuracy
to all encounters. Make every second count.

FROM THE MAKERS OF THE ORIGINAL SWISS ARMY KNIFE ™

ESTABLISHED 1884

WATERSHED
WATCH
To mark the Royal Oak’s
50th anniversary,
Audemars Piguet
slimmed down its
landmark octagonal
timepiece ever so slightly,
added a brand-new
self-winding movement,
and then dressed it up
with stainless steel
and 18-karat pink gold
($29,600).
STAGE-READY
SUIT
Alessandro Michele’s
Gucci has established
itself as the gold standard
for rock star tailoring,
with everyone from
Iggy Pop to Harry Styles
donning the house’s
raucous suits onstage.
This modish pea green
assemblage, with its high-
neck cut and offbeat four-
button closure, is plucked
straight out of Swinging
London’s trippy late-’60s
heyday (jacket, $3,600,
shirt, $750, pants, $1,350,
and tie, $510).
FLOWERY SOCKS
Tabio’s discreet floral
hosiery packs an outsized
punch without ever
veering toward novelty-
statement-sock territory
($18 for pair).
BUNCHED-UP
BLAZER
Most tailoring seeks
to sidestep fabric
scrunches and wrinkles
at every turn. For Dior
Men designer Kim Jones,
though, the scrunching is
all part of the fun—hence
the artful, surprisingly
elegant tie closure on this
icy blue suit ($3,300).
HIGHFALUTIN
HANKIES
Brunello Cucinelli’s
unbeatable pocket
squares pair the patterns
and palette of your
favorite bandana with the
luxe silk and hand-rolled
edges of your grandpa’s
hankie ($250 each).
CRISP CLOAK
Lapels? Where we’re
going, we don’t
need lapels. Let
Dolce & Gabbana’s
exceptionally sleek
dinner jacket show you
the way ($2,795).
FORMAL CHAIN
Not a tie guy? Take a
heavy gold chain—the
A-list’s red-carpet
neckwear of choice—out
for a spin instead. David
Yurman’s is finished
with an onyx scarab, the
ancient Egyptian symbol
of rebirth ($24,000).
COLOR-BLOCKED
COAT
Nigo’s Pop art sensibilities
come through loud and
clear on this woolly
Kenzo suit jacket, which
balances a thick slice of
pastel pink atop a mossy
green base ($1,265).
HIRSUTE SLIP-ONS
Some loafers mean
business. And some,
like these furred-out
Santoni pennies,
are just here for a good
time ($1,520).
OLD-SCHOOL
KNOTS
As Ralph Lauren
has proved over and
over again for decades,
sometimes the coolest
thing you can do is lean
into the classics—these
foulard twill neckties are
as classic as it gets ($125
each, Polo Ralph Lauren).
KENZO: COURTESY OF BRAND.
PECULIAR PANTS
Nobody makes the fusty
and traditional feel
playful and new quite like
Thom Browne. Case in
point: these enormously
cuffed trousers,
constructed from a trio
of clashing heavyweight
tweeds ($3,430).
©2022 Walmart Apollo, LLC

GQ World
Watches
Survival
of the
Slimmest
The current mania for
ultra-slim watches
is driving a race among
watchmakers to
capture the title of
world’s thinnest.
By NICK FOULKES
ATCHMAKERS LOVE
good arms race. The
W first and perhaps most
enduring being the
race to equip a time-
piece with the maximum number of
functions, or complications—a dis-
tinction currently held by Vacheron
Constantin’s breakthrough Reference
57260, released in 2015, which has
57 of them. Then, of course, there’s
the matter of depth. Among diving
watches, Omega trumps all with its
6,000-meter Seamaster Planet Ocean
Ultra Deep, as covered in this column
earlier this year.
Now attention has shifted to thin-
ness. The title of world’s thinnest
mechanical watch has been held by
Piaget’s Altiplano Ultimate Concept:
The entire watch is just 2 mm thick,
achieved with a mixture of new tech-
niques and micron-level-precision
component manufacturing, most
notably doing away with a baseplate
and building the movement straight
on the caseback.
But tiny measurements can create
huge problems. Presented in 2018,
the Altiplano went only into pro-
duction in 2020 (with no more than
10 pieces being made a year) and
required extreme feats of engineer-
ing, including adjustments to allow
for minute distortions created by the
pressure in an aircraft cabin so that
the crystal would not come into con-
tact with the hands and interrupt the
functioning of the movement.
Then in late March of this year,
Bulgari’s 1.8-mm Octo Finissimo
Ultra nabbed the world’s thinnest
2 6 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
From top: Richard
Mille’s RM UP-01;
Bulgari’s Octo
Finissimo Ultra;
Piaget’s Altiplano
Ultimate Concept.
title. It, too, saved space with the
caseback doubling as a baseplate
while, interestingly, displaying
hours, minutes, and seconds on sep-
arate dials—the logic being that more
wheels made for fewer overlaps,
ergo less height. For winding and
setting, instead of a crown there are
two toothed wheels mounted on the
caseback. It’s entirely in keeping with
the aesthetic of the Octo Finissimo,
one of the few genuinely iconic watch
designs of the 21st century. With this
record, the Italian jeweler added to
its reputation in high watchmaking.
A Bulgari’s stint at the top ended in
about three months. In July, Richard
Mille and Ferrari joined forces to
unveil an even thinner watch. The
RM UP-01 is just 1.75 mm, looks like
a credit card, and is an amazing feat.
But statistics alone do not tell the full
story of the RM UP-01.
It is a conceptually radical watch.
The components are unstacked and
arranged in a planar fashion across
a large surface area, and the hands,
normally discrete components, are
applied directly onto the wheels.
Incredibly, and unlike Piaget’s and
Bulgari’s thin creations, Richard
Mille respects the traditional con-
cept of a movement with a baseplate
housed within a case. Given the
Ferrari partnership—“most visibly
expressed in the choice of materials
and execution of the watch,” accord-
ing to the brand—it’s helpful to think
of the RM UP-01 as comparable to a
Formula 1 car. Just as those vehicles
bear only a partial resemblance to
a standard road car, the RM UP-01
looks unusual for a watch. The design
is a departure from the familiar high-
tech tonneau with which the brand
is associated, but there are some
familiar Mille touches, like the spline
screws studding the bezel.
The RM UP-01 is extreme watch-
making at its most daring, challeng-
ing the accepted notion of what a
COURTESY OF BRANDS.
watch looks like and pushing the
technology and ingenuity required to
create it. But record-breaking doesn’t
come cheap. At almost $1.9 million,
you are paying just over a thousand
dollars per micron.
THE RE
AC
OFF
FIELD.
AL
TION IS
THE
WAT C H AT youtube.com/gqsports
 GQ World
Fashion

GROOMING, MAT THEW TUOZ ZOLI FOR ORIBE HAIR CARE AND CHANEL. PRODUCED BY MAMMA TEAM PRODUCTIONS SL.

Diego Luna Goes Rogue

Two decades after breaking out in the iconic indie Y Tu Mamá También, the accomplished Mexican
actor is starting a galactic revolution in the new Star Wars series Andor. B y I A N A M U R R AY

P H O T O G R A P H S B Y F A N N Y L A T O U R - L A M B E R T
3 0 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 S T Y L E D B Y T O B I A S F R E R I C K S
 GQ World
Fashion

ASSIAN A N D O R , the
intergalactic spy played
C by Diego Luna in the
Star Wars universe, is
an enigma at first. In
the 2016 spin-off Rogue One, Andor
vaguely alludes to his lifelong fight
for the rebel cause, at one point tell-
ing a fresh recruit, “I have been in this
fight since I was six years old.”
Out of that line blossomed Andor,
a new Disney+ prequel series set a
few years before Cassian gave his life
for the Rebel Alliance, which tracks
his evolution from recalcitrant
cynic to martyr. The show, out in
September, is part origin story, part
political awakening, a saga about
how imperialism can shake a popu-
lation out of its reverie and make it
fight back. Luna tells me that, at its
core, Andor is “about a community
that is waking up.”
More than most actors, Luna gets
what it’s like to be ushered into a
rebellion. In 1994, the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation
(EZLN) staged an uprising against
Mexico’s government for the rights
of Indigenous people in Chiapas,
the country’s southernmost state.
With the encouragement of family
and teachers, a teenage Luna would
skip school to join the protests.
He and his classmates mobilized,
independently organizing events—
protests, concert fundraisers, food
drives—to support the residents
of Chiapas. “I remember meeting
amazing people of all ages, all wor-
ried about the same issues, and
feeling part of something mean-
ingful,” Luna recalls on a recent hot
July afternoon in Madrid. He found
comfort in the movement’s growing
numbers and learned the power of
banding together for a greater good.
“I was 15 years old and I was feeling
the responsibility of being a citizen in
my country. I remember those days as
being important. They defined me.”
We’re eating lunch at a tapas
restaurant in the Chamberí neighbor-
hood. The city is uncharacteristically
quiet, save for a few remaining traces
of the previous day’s Pride celebra-
tions. “You know,” he says, peering at
my plate of grilled vegetables. “You’re
with the only Mexican who doesn’t
like avocado.”

3 2 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
 O P E N I N G PA G E
Jacket, $3,700,
shirt, $1,600,
and pants,
$1,600, by Gucci.
Vintage belt by
Aigner.
T H E S E PA G E S
Sweater, $2,200,
by Miu Miu.
Pants, $1,100, by
Gucci. Vintage
belt by Aigner.

O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 3 3
 GQ World
Fashion

Luna has spent the past few weeks RIG H T

in Spain performing an intimate Coat (price

upon request)
play called Cada Vez Nos Despedimos
by Versace.
Mejor, which roughly translates to Turtleneck,
“Every Time We Break Up in a Better $1,825, by
Way.” It’s a monologue about a crum- Hermès. Pants,
bling decades-long relationship set $2,424, by
against the backdrop of events that Martine Rose.
Boots, $1,920,
have marked Mexican history, from
by Prada.
the 1985 Mexico City earthquake to
the contentious 2012 elections in B EL O W
Sweater,
which a deeply unpopular Enrique
$1,890, by
Peña Nieto became president. “It Prada. Pants,
was amazing occupying that space $925, by
for so many weeks,” he says. Prior to Umit Benan
the pandemic, he used to return to B+. Watch
the stage every couple of years. That (throughout),
$48,000,
live, ephemeral energy is something
by Rolex.
that Luna had been missing, espe- Necklace,
cially in “a tiny space for 250 people $1,425, by
every night.” David Yurman.
Luna broke out in the international
art house scene with Alfonso Cuarón’s
Y Tu Mamá También and has been
steadily taking on acclaimed roles
with an eclectic set of directors, from a
lovestruck airport attendant in Steven
Spielberg’s The Terminal to a Michael

Jackson impersonator in Harmony machine isn’t exactly easy. You’re

Korine’s Mister Lonely. With Andor,
the actor, now 42, is transcending the
art house roles that have so far defined
his career to become a leading man in
a multibillion-dollar franchise.
Nevertheless, Luna doesn’t mea-
sure success by scale. “We’re not here
for the fireworks,” he says. “We’re still
telling very intimate stories and char-
acter-driven journeys. I like to be able
to have that texture in a universe like
this.” Luna connected Cassian’s refu-
gee status to the forced migration he
sees happening all around the world.
(As a child, Andor’s home world gets
destroyed by the Empire.) “He’s got
a directorial eye,” his former costar
Sienna Miller tells me. “He approaches
something not just as an actor, he
really sees the bigger picture.”
Of course, finding and holding
onto space for artistry inside the
vast bureaucracy of the Star Wars
searching for glints of Shakespeare
inside the terms and conditions.
With Luna, that stubborn insistence
on storytelling and heart trickled
down through the rest of the Andor
cast. Tony Gilroy, the series’ creator,
tells me that “the personality, leader-
ship skills, grace, and empathy of the
person that occupies number one on
the call sheet has an incredible effect
on a show.” In Luna, he found that he
“could not have a better number one.”
THEATER W A S practically encoded
into Luna’s DNA. His father was a
renowned set designer in Mexico, and
his expat British mother designed
costumes. Young Diego was obsessed
with soccer. He played as a boy and
watched eagerly when the World Cup
came to Mexico in 1986. But it was
Luna’s home life that shaped him:
The kitchen table was constantly

3 4 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
 Boost Testosterone
Drive & Peak Performance
EXPIRES 12/31/22 M

SAVE $3.00
d bl ll l
d

v
e f
p p
e y
c y y y y y

w
m

r
V
U C S . ot a d o a
y

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration.
$3 COUPON redeemable at all Drug, Grocery and Health Food stores Nationwide This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

GQ World
Fashion
buzzing with debate and discussion,
and he remembers there were at least
three newspapers scattered around at
all times. Home was a judgment-free
haven where someone young and
impressionable could test ideas and
“define what you believed in.”
Luna’s schools were their own
nascent forms of democracy in
action. The student body would hold
a referendum on everything, even on
things as basic as what they would
have for lunch. Social justice was cen-
tral to their education. If there was
a demonstration going on—say, the
Chiapas uprising—educators would
leave the door open for you to go. “I
was always in schools that were push-
ing you to be proactive,” says Luna.
“To be loud about what mattered
to you. To define your voice. Not to
become just a number.”
3 6 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
Shirt, $1,150, His mother died in a car accident
and belt, when he was young, so Luna ended
$890, by Tom up spending a lot of time shadowing
Ford. Pants,
his father. The theater became his
$1,690, by
Valentino. playground. Whenever his father was
Necklace, working on a production, he would
$1,425, by run around and watch the techni-
David Yurman. cians and actors.
He forged a close bond with Gael
García Bernal—another son of art-
ists—when they were young. They
would become close friends and even-
tually creative collaborators, drawing
deeply from their shared background.
“We were quite advanced for our ages
because we grew up really exposed
to adult dynamics,” García Bernal
tells me. “We saw the adults play
[onstage] and we just wanted to
play too. We wanted to be close to
them. We became little Phantoms of
the Opera.”
Luna remembers witnessing
every step of his dad’s process,
from the impressionistic sketches
strewn across his home to the
architectural dioramas that would
steadily increase in size and detail.
Watching his father work entranced
Diego. “It was like being in Alice in
Wonderland,” he recalls, holding his
arms wide open to demonstrate the
scale. As a teenager, he apprenticed
under his father, learning the ins and
outs of theater production.
García Bernal remembers those
days fondly. “It was actually quite
incredible growing up like that,” he
adds. “Because we felt that we could
become anything or anyone.”
Luna cut his teeth acting in tele-
novelas. As a child actor he would sit
idly at a dinner table while scandal
and drama unfolded around him.
(In El Premio Mayor, for example,
he played the son of a womanizing
lottery winner who’s trying to tamp
down his libido so he can remain
faithful to his wife.) Those shows
transformed Luna into a teen idol in
Mexico, and the immediacy of that
fame was disorienting, especially in
relation to his previous theater expe-
rience, where integrity and perfor-
mance were valued above all.
It’s why Luna appreciates doing
theater, especially in Mexico—and
even something like Star Wars—so
much. There’s a real relationship that
develops between him and the audi-
ence. “There’s people that have seen
the last three, four shows I’ve done in
Mexico,” he says. “It’s nice that I get to
grow up with [them].”
Eventually, Luna landed a role
alongside García Bernal in Y Tu Mamá
También—Cuarón’s road movie about
a pair of horny teenage boys, with
homoerotic subtext so overt it’s just
plain text—which launched the pair
into a new stratum of fame. For six
months, they were on the road hitting
the festival circuit. “I had no expec-
tations of how my life was going to
change,” Luna recalls. “And then we
went to the Venice Film Festival and
won the award. I got an agent, things
started to happen. We went to Europe,
South America, Japan, and the States.”
It was the kind of promotional
circuit usually reserved for global
blockbusters. Both Luna and García
Bernal remember it as lightning in
a bottle, the kind of film that strikes
once a generation. “[If you pitched]
Y Tu Mamá También now, I don’t
think it would get made,” García
Bernal says. “With that film, we dis-
covered cinema. That’s when we both
formally decided that we were going to
be actors.” (continued on page 88)
 LOOK GOOD. FEEL GOOD. GET THE BOX. GQ.COM/FALLBOX

Handpicked by GQ editors. Delivered right to your door. Our latest box also includes:
The GQ Box is filled with the lifestyle upgrades, grooming Oliver Cabell Cuban Chain
essentials, and must-have apparel and accessories that our Bracelet in Silver, Jason
experts can’t live without. Delivered four times a year and always Markk Essential Sneaker
valued at over $200, each box is yours for only $50. Cleaning Kit, Commodity
Moss Expressive
Included in the box, you’ll find instructions for how to get the Fragrance, and more!
Goodlife Clothing Terry Crew Sweatshirt in your size, shipped
directly to you - at no additional cost ($98 value!)
Subscribe today at:
Products may vary, all available while supplies last. Offer valid GQ.COM/FALLBOX
August 1st through October 31st, 2022.
Almost four years after her improbable arrival in Washington, CONGRESSWOMAN ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ has
become the political voice of a generation—and a cultural star whose power transcends politics. Now, as the country
hurtles toward the midterm elections, AOC opens up about the battle over abortion, her own shot at the presidency,
and why it’s urgent that men step up now. BY WESLEY LOWERY PHOTOGRAPHS BY CRUZ VALDEZ ST YLED BY DARA

in Washington, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
walked the few blocks from her apartment
to her congressional office nearly every
morning, a routine she felt forced to change
after a treasonous mob stormed the Capitol.
Now she drives most days—a comically short
commute she considers a necessary safety
precaution. But for some reason—she’s not
quite sure why—the congresswoman decided
to walk to work on what would become
Washington’s most tumultuous morning
since the insurrection.
As she reached the Capitol grounds on
June 24, a group of men stopped her for a
photo. “I said ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you all
doing?’ ” she’d later recall. “They’re like, ‘Well,
you know… We’ve definitely been a lot better,
given this morning.’ ”
This was how the congresswoman learned
that the Supreme Court had gutted the con-
stitutional right to abortion established by
Roe v. Wade. The ruling had been antici-
pated for weeks—after a draft opinion from
the court’s conservative faction leaked—but
somehow much of Washington still man-
aged to appear blindsided. Democrats had
expected to spend the afternoon celebrating
the passage of a new gun control law. Now
their day had morphed into a wake.
Out on the steps of the Capitol, a group
of lawmakers gathered to sing “God Bless
America,” a preplanned photo op that now
read as hopelessly out of touch: Angry
Americans were spilling into the streets and
elected Democrats were singing campfire
songs. Ocasio-Cortez knew where she needed
to be. It wasn’t at a sing-along.
“Sometimes people ask, ‘Oh, what’s the
point of protest?’ ” she told me later, recall-
ing that day. The act of protest, she said,
creates community. And participation by
political leaders sends a message. “It’s really
important for people to feel like their elected
officials give a shit about them,” she said.
“Not from on high, but from the same level.”
4 2 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
I’d arrived at the Supreme Court a few
minutes before Ocasio-Cortez to interview
protesters, and watched as she maneuvered
in her plaid pink pantsuit past a small cir-
cle of antiabortion demonstrators and then
waded into the sea of women and men who’d
gathered to mourn.
Soon, she was speaking into a borrowed
megaphone, helping to lead the call-and-
response. “Into the streets!” Ocasio-Cortez
shouted, pumping a clenched fist in the air.
Within minutes, a sobbing young woman
found the congresswoman and threw her-
self into her arms. “I’m so scared,” she wept.
“I’m so scared.”
For a fleeting moment in front of the
Supreme Court, it was possible to see the full,
complicated public totality of the woman
we’ve come to know as “AOC”: a 32-year-old
second-term congresswoman representing
one of the country’s most diverse districts.
A certified celebrity. Arguably more famous
than any other person in American politics
without the last name Obama or Trump;
beloved and loathed at competing ends of the
political spectrum. Constitutionally opposed
to sitting down, shutting up, and conforming
to the patriotic play-theater of Washington.
The right wing’s night terror in the flesh.
To many foot soldiers of the fractured, con-
tradictory coalition that is the progressive
left, she represents something singular:
the future. A revolutionary on the rise. The
clear heir to an ascendant progressive move-
ment. The best and possibly last—depend-
ing on how quickly some combination of
fascism, religious fundamentalism, and
climate change comes for us all—chance; a
source of hope that things can get better in
their lifetimes.
“A lot of that was about a human need,”
Ocasio-Cortez said of why she took to the
streets that day. “About providing just a very
real position that this is not over and we’re
not giving up.”
Ocasio-Cortez
on the steps of the
Capitol with the
U.S. Supreme Court
in the background.
THREE WEEKS LATER I found myself sitting
on the couch in her congressional office,
beneath a wallful of framed photos and
across from the small bed where her French
bulldog, Deco, hangs out when he spends the
day at work with Ocasio-Cortez. I sipped at
the coffee she’d brewed for us as we began a
series of wide-ranging conversations—about
abortion, the upcoming midterms and 2024
presidential race, and the future: for the
progressive movement she helps lead, the
Democratic Party in which she is perhaps
the most polarizing member, and for herself,
both politically and personally. We discussed
her three years in Washington, the hostile
reception she says she still receives from
colleagues, the misogyny and the abuse she
endures. Days earlier, a conservative come-
dian had sexually harassed her on the steps
of the Capitol Building, and as we spoke, his
leering video of the confrontation was still
bouncing around the internet.
Our conversations came as the fallout from
the Supreme Court decision and the looming
likelihood of another Donald Trump presi-
dential campaign had Democrats, including
L AUR A LOMBARDI. OPPOSITE PAGE: DRESS BY VICTOR GLEMAUD; WATCH AND RING ( THROUGHOUT ), HER OWN.
the congresswoman, wondering if they might
PREVIOUS PAGE: SWEATSHIRT ( THROUGHOUT ), ST YLIST ’S OWN; EARRINGS AND NECKL ACE ( THROUGHOUT ) BY
actually find a way to hold onto Congress in
November. In those weeks after Roe’s demise,
Ocasio-Cortez was ubiquitous: at rallies and
on television, demanding that her colleagues
move with urgency to protect access to repro-
ductive health services and calling on men in
particular to share their stories of how they
had benefited from decades of legally pro-
tected abortion. The battle for bodily auton-
omy and human dignity, she said, will only be
won if men themselves join in the fight.
“For almost every woman that has gotten
an abortion, there’s a man who has either been
affected or liberated by that abortion too,” she
told me. “In this moment it’s really only going
to be the vulnerability of men, and men talking
to other men, that gives us the greatest hope of
shifting things the fastest, soonest.”
We’d agreed at the onset of our conversa-
tion that day to lean into difficult questions
about gender—with a specific focus on what
men need to be doing to combat misogyny—
and so I asked the congresswoman why she
believes men so often opt out. Certainly some
guys are just jerks. But what about men who
are more introspective? The call for men to
step up and speak out is neither new nor
novel, yet still seems unheard.
“I think there’s plenty of well-meaning rea-
sons why men may feel like it’s not appropri-
ate for them to talk about it,” she continued.
 “My everyday lived experience here is as a
person who is despised. Imagine working a job
and your bosses don’t like you—and the
competing company is trying to kill you.”
“I think sometimes the way white folks don’t
like to talk about race and they say, ‘We
just want to center the person who’s most
impacted, so it’s not my role to do anything
or take a space and speak up.’ But we know
that when white folks take up space and say
the right thing in rooms of other white peo-
ple, that is the most shifting activity that can
happen, more sometimes than any protest or
any person writing a letter to the editor or
anything like that. And we need men to be
speaking up in that way as well. But I think
men, sometimes they think, I’m not a woman.
This doesn’t affect me the most.”
But men also keep quiet, Ocasio-Cortez
pointed out, because of the burdens and anti-
quated expectations of masculinity. Feminist
writers and thinkers have raised this notion
for decades, pointing out how men themselves
are victimized by toxic societal constructs.
“Men suffer from being under patriarchy,” the
congresswoman said. “They don’t go to the
doctor. They suffer from much higher rates of
completed suicides. Even though they report
lower levels of depression, that doesn’t mean
that they suffer from it less. Just a couple years
ago the American Psychological Association
released a very deep paper and a campaign
about how these traditional cultural markers
of masculinity—stoicism, competition, dom-
ination, dominance—are leading to mental
health issues for men. There’s a stigma around
men being vulnerable.”
The key to combating that stigma, she said,
is for men to talk directly with other men.
“I think something that’s really powerful for
men is to share their stories of growth.”
I asked her about men who may be angered
by the conservative attacks on bodily auton-
omy and committed to personal change but
carry shame about past behavior. They, too,
should speak up, she replied. It’s not about
men posturing in public as if they are per-
fect, she said, rather explicitly noting that
they are not. “There are amazing men in this
world, and not men as a final product. There
are men on incredible journeys, internal jour-
neys, journeys of transcending beyond just
anger as the acceptable masculine emotion,”
she would tell me in a subsequent conversa-
tion. “Men who dive into their compassion,
into their sadness, into their insecurity and
explore it and work through it.”
“The most powerful and persuasive things a
person can say on any given issue,” she told me
that first day we met in her office, “is sharing
their personal experience and personal story.”
4 4 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
O C A S I O - C O R T E Z K N O W S well the power of
personal testimony. She’s become the most
talented political communicator of her gen-
eration by being frank and relatable—using
her social media channels, for example, to
explain policy in one moment and then share
her struggles building Ikea furniture the next.
Still, there are many aspects of her private
life that she has historically guarded. When
the insurrectionists stormed the Capitol,
however, she says that something changed.
She spent much of that day crouched in the
corners of various congressional offices, con-
vinced she was going to die. Weeks later, she
took to Instagram to describe her experiences
on January 6, explaining that the day had
stirred the remnants of a past trauma. She
publicly revealed for the first time that years
earlier she had been sexually assaulted.
“I could not talk about that day without dis-
closing it, because it was such a central part
of my experience,” Ocasio-Cortez explained to
me. “I felt like I could not really adequately
communicate what that experience was with-
out giving people the context of what I had
lived through and what was being echoed,
because so much of it was about resonance
and fear of a thing that was not theoretical
but a fear of a thing that I had experienced.”
Until that point, Ocasio-Cortez had told
only three or four people of the assault. Now
friends, acquaintances, and strangers were
sharing with her their own stories. She had
no intention of offering additional details
publicly. But the night after Roe fell, she was
addressing protesters who’d gathered at New
York’s Union Square, not far from the restau-
rant where she had worked at the time she
was assaulted. She told the crowd of the inci-
dent. “When I was about 22 or 23 years old
I was raped,” she said. “I was completely
alone. I felt completely alone. In fact, I felt
so alone that I had to take a pregnancy test in
a public bathroom in midtown Manhattan.
And when I sat there waiting for what the
result would be, all I could think of was,
Thank God I have at least a choice.”
Ocasio-Cortez told me later that she had
carefully weighed her decision to talk more
openly about her assault. Since entering
public life, her opponents on both the left
and right have gleefully dissected her every
utterance, hunting for ways to dismiss and
ridicule her. She had no expectation the dis-
closure of her assault would be treated any
more kindly or fairly. “One major trauma
that a lot of survivors of assault deal with is
a struggle with being believed,” she told me,
adding, “There are aspects of it that I may
never share because of the trauma of having
that experience litigated in public.”
Nevertheless, there was value, she felt, in
sharing what she had endured. “It was some-
one that I was dating that I was not sexually
active with, who forced themselves upon me,”
she told me. When she later confronted him,
the conversation did not go well. “The insis-
tence on a denial of what happened that very,
very clearly happened is also a through line
with other women’s experiences, friends that
I’ve had, or just a pretending that what very
clearly happened, did not happen,” she said.
“That, too, is also an assertion of power, and
so this assertion of power and dominance over
others is not limited to the actual physical
fact, but how things are treated afterwards.”
Eventually she confided in two of her col-
leagues at the restaurant and learned that her
experience had not been unique. “It was like
everyone had been sexually assaulted that
I had worked with,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez never reported her assault, a
choice she knows is familiar for many women
and one she said she’d make the same way
today. “If the vast majority of sexual assaults
happen by a familiar person, the last thing
you’re going to want to do is throw someone
in jail,” she said. “There is an intersection
with the work of abolition and healing and
contending with the fact that we as people
SPORTMAX. FOLLOWING PAGES: JACKET BY SPORTMAX; TURTLENECK BY WOLFORD.
are capable of doing harm, but we are also
OPPOSITE PAGE: JACKET BY CONNOR MCKNIGHT; SHIRT BY SAINT SINTRA; TIE BY
capable of healing from harm.”
Part of that healing, though, is the
acknowledgment and accountability that
she was denied. “Whatever the given circum-
stances of a situation, if a person is hurt or
harmed it’s important to hold space for it, and
it’s very, very, very difficult to hold space for
a hurt person when you are the one they are
saying hurt them,” she replied when I asked
how she’d advise a man in her life to respond
were he confronted with an allegation of
assault. “A lot of these people are not having
these conversations with a pitchfork. These
are people that very often are trying to heal,
and they’re saying, ‘Did what happened, hap-
pen?’ It’s not How do we punish? but How do
we process, and how do we heal, and how do
we change?”
OCASIO-CORTEZ DIDN’T register it at the
moment, but looking back she realizes that
the incident helped propel her into public
service. “My sexual assault was a pivotal event

in the trajectory that led me to run for office,”
she told me. “I can say that in retrospect, but
obviously I didn’t know that at the time.”
The story of the bartender who improb-
ably swept into Congress is by now legend:
how she spent her early adulthood navigat-
ing the financial downturn and the health
care system as her father battled cancer;
how she campaigned for Bernie Sanders and
road-tripped to protest the Dakota Access
Pipeline; and how she took service-worker
shifts to support her family after college in
the wake of her father’s death. Now we know
about the personal trauma she was also
navigating. “I didn’t grow up in an explic-
itly ideological household,” she said of her
upbringing. “I grew up in a household that
was very conscientious of the world, and
cared about what was going on, and paid
attention, and my parents voted, but we
weren’t like, ‘We’re left,’ or ‘We’re right,’ or
whatever that is. I grew up in a very socially
conservative and very deeply religious
household with very prescriptive messages
about women. And it’s not even sometimes
that they’re just handed down from your par-
ents, but just from the culture that you live
in. My experience with assault forced me to
confront all of these things that I was taught
about my self-worth as a woman.”
Like many young progressives, her politics
fuse the movements of her time: the climate
and antiwar efforts of the Bush years, the
boisterous street protests against unchecked
capitalism and racial injustice that dominated
the Obama years, the insurgent Sanders cam-
paign and its demand that we reconsider the
limits of what government can do for its citi-
zens, the revitalized women’s movement that
followed Donald Trump’s election.
With the 2018 midterms approaching,
a team of Sanders devotees launched an
effort to recruit like-minded progressives to
run for Congress. Though hesitant at first,
Ocasio-Cortez ultimately decided to become
a candidate. The impetus for her run was
largely frustration.
For nearly 20 years her district had been
represented by Joe Crowley, a Wall Street–
friendly congressman who served in the
House leadership and was a presumed
Speaker of the House–in–waiting. Crowley,
she said, was out of touch with the needs of
his district. “I think I can get a lot of Trump
voters to vote for me,” Waleed Shahid, a
progressive operative who worked with
Ocasio-Cortez early in her primary campaign
remembers Ocasio-Cortez describing as a
path to victory—at once a spot-on assessment
of the depths of antiestablishment discon-
tent across the political spectrum and also
an insane electoral strategy for a Democratic
primary in the Bronx and Queens.
She called for fundamental changes to
immigration enforcement, a higher min-
imum wage, Medicare for all, and urgent
action on climate. Her message was electri-
fying even as her chances seemed nonexis-
tent. “I felt so sad at those fundraisers. She
is firing up all of these people. All of these
young people, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans,
Colombians,” recalled Shahid. “There’s some-
thing kind of dangerous and sad about giving
people false hope.”
Of course, we know what happened next.
The bartender turned candidate pulled off
a stunning 13.5 percentage-point victory in
the primary and instantly became one of the
most prominent people in American politics:
a democratic-socialist David standing atop
her Establishment Goliath, hoop earrings and
a bold red lip in place of a shepherd’s sling.
Crowley’s longtime colleague Nancy Pelosi,
the top Democrat in the House, reportedly
“sounded distraught” that night after hear-
ing the news, according to Jake Sherman and
Anna Palmer’s book The Hill to Die On. “Holy
shit!” Sanders exclaimed across town, accord-
ing to a recent book by one of his aides. “Can
you get me her number?”
IN ONE OF the few interviews she’s ever done
about her daughter, Blanca Ocasio-Cortez
told the Daily Mail about how her daughter
got her name. It had been her husband’s sug-
gestion they call her Alexandria. “I thought
about it for a while and I said, ‘Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘That sounds
very powerful. That’ll be her name.’ ”
Three decades later, I asked the con-
gresswoman whom that newborn grew into
whether she currently believes that she is
powerful. “That’s a good question,” Ocasio-
Cortez replied, pausing to consider her
response. She said she doesn’t define power
as dominance over others, but that she does
feel power over her own choices. “Sometimes
O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 4 5
I don’t feel powerful. Sometimes I feel very
diminished, and sometimes I feel the least
powerful here.” I asked differently. Does she
feel politically powerful?
“There’s the political power of public opin-
ion,” she told me. “There’s the political power
of social movements. There’s a political
power of platform, and in those ways I feel
powerful. But since I got here, literally day
one, even before day one, I’ve experienced a
lot of targeting diminishment from my party.
And the pervasiveness of that diminishment,
it was all-encompassing at times. I feel a little
more steady on my own two feet now. But
would I say that I have the power to shift the
elected federal Democratic Party? No.”
Indeed, upon her arrival, the response
from parts of the Democratic Party estab-
lishment was undiluted spite. “It was open
hostility, open hostility to my presence, my
existence,” Ocasio-Cortez recalled.
Her first days in Congress were destined
to be awkward. Crowley still chaired the
Democratic caucus, meaning he was present
for new-member orientation. Each newly
elected Democrat was presented to their col-
leagues with music and a stadium-style intro-
duction. “From the first district of this state
and that state,” the congresswoman said,
mimicking a booming announcer’s voice. “It
would just be like these huge claps and what-
not. And then it came to me. And it was very
clear that the reception was not the same, just
a smattering of applause.”
At one point when Crowley was onstage,
Ocasio-Cortez recalled that an older male
member of Congress sat down next to her,
gestured up at Crowley, and, apparently not
aware of who he was talking to, said, It’s a
real shame that that girl won. “I turned
and I said, ‘You know that’s me, right?’ ” she
recalled. “And obviously, his face turns pale.”
Crowley had been a revered figure, and
his defeat amounted to a traumatic event
for many elected Democrats. If he could be
beaten, by a mouthy bartender no less, were
any of them safe? Ocasio-Cortez soon became
a symbol—a proxy, more than a fully realized
person—whose every utterance could be
mined for implications about the Democratic
Party’s ideological divides and the state of
politics during the tumultuous Trump era.
Her every move prompted a breaking-
news banner. President Trump soon seized on
Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of “The Squad”—
then an alliance of four progressive congress-
women of color all elected in 2018—as a foil,
leveling racist attacks against them in tweets
and at his rallies. The women were all inun-
dated with death threats.

A M O N T H A F T E R her election, in December

2018, Ocasio-Cortez had a two-hour lunch
in the Senate Dining Room with Ed Markey,
the Massachusetts senator involved in nearly

4 6 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
 Ocasio-Cortez in
the rotunda of
the Cannon House
Office Building.

O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 4 7
every significant effort at climate and envi-
ronmental legislation for decades. His then
most recent attempt, in 2010, had passed
the House but not the Senate. That bill had
been 1,400 pages. Now, together, they wanted
to try again—and with legislation that was
just 14 pages long. Markey was instantly
impressed. “It was clear to me that her
knowledge was matched only by her clarity
of purpose,” Markey told me. “We needed a
movement. She was the generational leader
to spark a revolution that would change the
political dynamic of how climate change was
viewed in Washington.”
Ocasio-Cortez took eight pages of notes
that day, and for the next two months worked
with Markey and his team as well as advo-
cates to craft legislation they would call
the Green New Deal. They would deploy an
inside-outside strategy—using protests and
activists to force the Democratic leadership
to push climate to the top of the priorities list.
Days after her election, the congress-
woman had joined a climate protest out-
side of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.
Now, on the day Ocasio-Cortez and Markey
introduced their Green New Deal, Pelosi
seemingly decided to remind the young con-
gresswoman of her place. “The green dream,
or whatever they call it,” she quipped, dis-
missing the plan. “Nobody knows what it is,
but they’re for it, right?”
Little during Ocasio-Cortez’s time in
Washington has prompted as much media
flurry as a series of perceived clashes early in
her first term between her and Pelosi. Ocasio-
Cortez says it was overblown—the media’s
obsession with pitting successful women
against each other—and described their rela-
tionship as professional. “I wouldn’t say it’s
personal,” she said.
Various lawmakers and aides reminded me
that clashes between leadership and factions
of the caucus are commonplace. And Pelosi,
it needs to be acknowledged, directly paved
the path for someone like Ocasio-Cortez. Yet
that history makes it even more difficult not
to note that the first woman Speaker—to date
the most consequential woman in the history
of American politics—chose, repeatedly, to
publicly diminish the youngest woman ever
elected to Congress.
As we discussed generational splits across
movements—specifically the now geriatric
women and Black officials who, decades
after being elected as historic firsts, can’t
seem to stop throwing themselves in front of
television cameras to undermine the aims of
the younger activists attempting to ascend
behind them—Ocasio-Cortez recalled the
story of women’s suffrage, as depicted in
Suffs, a play she’d seen recently. The move-
ment was rife with tension between more
seasoned suffragists who advocated a state-
by-state strategy and younger activists
uninterested in moving so slowly. “The 19th
Amendment was passed by that younger
guard,” Ocasio-Cortez noted. “It wasn’t out
of defiance of the older guard, but it was in
incorporation of those gains in an attempt to
accelerate them.”
“This generational tension has existed
among virtually every single social move-
ment in American history, in labor, in suf-
frage, in civil rights, in marriage equality,”
the congresswoman said. “And it is a tension
between history and the present moment.
It’s a tension between inside and outside.
It’s a tension between what we can learn and
what we don’t know. Any sort of criticism of
the Democratic Party is immediately cast as
helping the right or ‘You’re disrespectful’ or
‘Don’t you know everything that these peo-
ple have done?’ And we do, but we are also
allowed to learn from the outcomes of those
victories and the unique dynamics of the
present moment, to also say that we have to
change tack and we can’t just do the same
thing for 30 years.”
THOUGH SHE MAY wonder how much power
she really has, Ocasio-Cortez unquestionably
has influence. “I have always felt that the true
power, and true power in the United States,
relies in mass movements and social move-
ments,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “And there are
many people who will not do something until
they are forced, until their hand is absolutely
and utterly forced, whether that be for deci-
sions of self-preservation or otherwise. And
so there have been moments where I feel like
I have been part of influencing an outcome or
a decision by the party.”
Among those moments, she said, was
early 2019 when she was one of the first
elected Democrats to call for Trump’s
impeachment. Then, in 2020, Ocasio-Cortez
and Representative Rashida Tlaib, from
Michigan, voiced criticism of the COVID
economic stimulus. The legislation had pro-
vided for $600 checks to some Americans.
But the congresswomen said the payouts
should be even bigger—introducing legisla-
tion to send out $2,000 checks. “The whole
party kind of chastised us and said that
we were being wrong, and unproductive,
and bad children, all that,” Ocasio-Cortez
recalled. “And then the next morning,
Trump came out in favor of it. And then
the Democratic Party at that point, in that
moment, found themselves to the right of
Trump on this issue. And so they took the
drafted legislation that Rashida Tlaib and
I had introduced, they took it, they made it
part of the American Rescue Plan. Of course,
without credit.”
There is nowhere in which Ocasio-Cortez’s
influence has been more apparent than in
the urgency with which large swaths of
the party now treat the need to address
climate change. During the 2016 presiden-
tial campaign, climate change was barely
discussed in the debates. By 2020, every
single Democratic campaign put out its own
version of the Green New Deal, even if some
of them called it something else.
After backing Sanders in the primary,
the congresswoman became an outspoken
surrogate for Biden, helping unite the party
in its efforts to oust Trump. Even so, party
elders gave more time at the party’s conven-
tion to literal Republicans than they did to
Ocasio-Cortez. The slight was no surprise to
the congresswoman, who had spent much
of the year defending herself against a pri-
mary challenger who had behind-the-scenes
support from parts of the Democratic estab-
lishment in both Washington and New York,
according to someone with direct knowledge
of the campaign’s inner workings.
“I feel like everybody treated me like a
one-term member of Congress, and they
worked to make me a one-term member of
Congress.” Ocasio-Cortez said. “There was a
very concerted effort from the Democratic
side to unseat me. And I felt a shift after my
primary election, and it felt like after that
election was the first time that more broadly
the party started treating me like a member
of Congress and not an accident.”
Once she’d been reelected, the congress-
woman began enjoying the fruits of her
labor in Washington. Biden named her
co-chair of his climate task force, along
with John Kerry. Both Kerry, whom Biden
would ultimately name his climate czar,
and another White House official described
her as a solutions-oriented team player. In
just two years, she’d gone from a sit-in at
the House Speaker’s office to charting the
climate blueprint for a Democratic Party
that now controlled both the White House
and Congress.
The congresswoman recalled a “bitter-
sweet moment” last year when President
Biden visited her district with Senator Chuck
Schumer after Hurricane Ida and the two
gave speeches about climate change. “Here
were these two very powerful individuals,
very powerful men, delivering speeches that
were basically in their content and in their
substance just complete Green New Deal
framing,” she said. “I’m listening and I lit-
erally know that if I say and read that same
exact speech, it is treated not just by the right
but by my own party as radical, impossible,
flippant, uninformed. But now the president
of the United States is saying it. And so it feels
very powerful because I wrote a lot of those
words. That he wouldn’t be invoking these
frames if it wasn’t for the work of movements
and what we pushed.”
The biggest win came in early August
when Congress passed the Inflation
Reduction Act, an omnibus budget bill
O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 4 9
 “The world that we’re fighting for is
already here. It may not be all here, it may
not be the majority of what’s here,
but it is undeniably here.”
that included $369 billion toward reduc-
ing greenhouse gas emissions. “The only
reason this is happening,” said Lori Lodes,
a longtime progressive operative and exec-
utive director of Climate Power, “is directly
because of AOC and young people rising up
and speaking out and demanding.”
None of that is to say that the political
establishment has become any more fair or
her existence in Washington any more fun.
In July 2020, Republican Representative
Ted Yoho passed the congresswoman on
the Capitol steps and reportedly told her
she was “disgusting” while later referring to
her as a “fucking bitch.” (Yoho apologized
but denied that he ever said the “offensive
name-calling words.”) In May 2021, Ocasio-
Cortez was confronted outside of the House
Chamber by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a
far-right member of the Republican cau-
cus, who ran up to her and demanded she
explain why she supports “terrorist groups”
like Black Lives Matter and insisted Ocasio-
Cortez debate her “radical socialist beliefs”
with her, according to two Washington Post
reporters who were present. Last November,
Arizona Republican Paul Gosar posted an
online anime video that depicted him using
swords to kill Ocasio-Cortez.
“Others may see a person who is admired,
but my everyday lived experience here is as a
person who is despised,” she told me during
my second visit to her office. “Imagine work-
ing a job and your bosses don’t like you and
folks on your team are suspicious of you.
And then the competing company is trying
to kill you.”
WITH THE 2024 presidential election fast
approaching and the question of whether or
not President Joe Biden will run again loom-
ing, progressives are weighing the future of
their movement. Sanders has signaled he’d
support Biden for reelection but hasn’t ruled
out another run in the event of an open race.
Still, operatives across the movement have
suggested that the 81-year-old Sanders is
ready to hand off the reins. The top adviser to
another leading progressive official told me
that Ocasio-Cortez seems “destined to inherit
the leadership of the movement.”
Whatever Ocasio-Cortez decides to do,
another top progressive operative added,
will be “consequential for every single
person who cares about the future of the
country.” All of the progressive political
operatives that I spoke with said they were
5 0 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
heartened by the number of leaders their
movement has produced in recent years. Yet
they all agree, when granted the ability to
speak freely, that there is something special
about the congresswoman.
When I spoke with John Kerry, one of
a handful of people with experience as a
major party nominee, he wouldn’t speculate
about Ocasio-Cortez’s political future but
was unequivocal that he believed someone
like her—an outspoken progressive woman
of color—could be elected nationally. “In
America, anybody can grow up to be presi-
dent,” Kerry told me. “I do believe that.”
Ocasio-Cortez used to believe that too.
Then she became a congresswoman.
“Sometimes little girls will say, ‘Oh, I want
you to be president,’ or things like that,” she
told me when I asked about whether she
believed that she or someone like her could
ever lead our country. “It’s very difficult for
me to talk about because it provokes a lot of
inner conflict in that I never want to tell a
little girl what she can’t do. And I don’t want
to tell young people what is not possible. I’ve
never been in the business of doing that. But
at the same time…”
Over the course of our conversations, the
congresswoman typically answered in a
confident, fast-paced patter—each sentence
closely chasing the tail of the last. But now
her speech slowed to a crawl and, for the first
time in the hours we had spent speaking, she
broke eye contact, burying her gaze in the
arm of her chair. Tears pooled in the corners
of her eyes.
“I hold two contradictory things [in mind]
at the same time. One is just the relentless
belief that anything is possible,” she said.
“But at the same time, my experience here
has given me a front-row seat to how deeply
and unconsciously, as well as consciously, so
many people in this country hate women.
And they hate women of color. People ask me
questions about the future. And realistically,
I can’t even tell you if I’m going to be alive
in September. And that weighs very heav-
ily on me. And it’s not just the right wing.
Misogyny transcends political ideology: left,
right, center. This grip of patriarchy affects
all of us, not just women; men, as I men-
tioned before, but also, ideologically, there’s
an extraordinary lack of self-awareness in
so many places. And so those are two very
conflicting things. I admit to sometimes
believing that I live in a country that would
never let that happen.”
Ocasio-Cortez
beneath the dome
of the Capitol.
There would be other impediments—
obstacles about which Ocasio-Cortez is
practical, if not exactly optimistic. “Could
Obama have gotten elected without the kind
of financial support that he had?” she asked,
noting that her opposition to Wall Street
would be a major hurdle to any further rise.
“I don’t know.” Even were she theoretically
to become president, then what? She’d face
a system—from the Senate to the Supreme
Court—both empowered and inclined to
thwart her most sweeping ambitions. “There
are still plenty of limitations,” she said, play-
ing out the hypothetical. “It’s tough, it’s
really tough.”
But so, too, is the current gig—serving in
an institution loaded with structural and
dispositional limitations. “Congress does not
move first, it does not move early, it moves last.
That is why we have never codified the right
to bodily autonomy. It’s why we have never
legislatively codified same-sex marriage or
marriage equality, and a whole bunch of other
things, contraception, none of that. Because
it’s easier to just let the courts do it,” she said.
“We’re going to need robust mass movements
that have already started. We’ve seen it in the
labor movement, we’ve seen it in racial justice,
and we’re going to need to continue to build
that while also ensuring that we are staving
off the very real threat of fascism in losing the
House or Senate.”
I pointed out to her that she had just made
an excellent argument for why she shouldn’t
be in Congress at all and could possibly accom-
plish more elsewhere—in a different elected
office, or as an outside movement leader. “I try
to think about how I can be most effective and,
honestly, to this point, I have not come up with
an alternative that I have found more effective
than what I’m doing at the present moment,”
she told me. “But this is something that I rou-
tinely revisit.”
OPPOSITE PAGE: DRESS BY VICTOR GLEMAUD.
IN THE WHIRLWIND of the past three years,
as she’s grown from being a well-recognized
politician to a bona fide culture celebrity,
Ocasio-Cortez, who friends say has always
been more introverted than she lets on, has,
in understandable ways, grown even more.
These days, she told me, she avoids appear-
ing in places where she’s forced to play her
part; where she can’t just be herself. She’s
adopted a rule that she says her father
deployed, back when they lived in rougher
parts of New York City: Once she’s home for
the night, she’s in (continued on page 89)
 ists like Pusha T a
r for art nd K
roduce lture for decades id
nd a p
shap ing cu . But Cudi, N
d w
ea s an ith
his igo h
g Ap rend ne a
in ing t w r s be
th t ole e
Ba set as n
f A art
ero is
tic
d
d
n
ou

ir
ef

ec
th

to
ro
As

fK
en
zo
,
th
es
tr
ee

i
tw

sk
w
ea

ko
rs

up
cz

er a
st
ar Fr
e
ha e. in
sa f or ad
no be N
pp ver s by
or t n e h
uni
t y to o n like grap
put hi sh i ot o
s i n d e l i b l e m a r k o n f a nt P h
aH u
B y J os h u

early December of last year, about 10 weeks
after taking over as artistic director at the
French luxury brand Kenzo, the Japanese
fashion designer Nigo flew by private jet from
Paris to New York, where he headed straight
for the Midtown Manhattan town house of
upscale jeweler Jacob & Co. It was a familiar
pilgrimage for the streetwear icon, whose
appetite for custom chains with diamond-
encrusted pendants has made Jacob “The
Jeweler” Arabo his informal biographer.
This chronicle of Nigo’s career began with
necklaces with fist-size ape heads inspired
by A Bathing Ape, the culture-shifting
streetwear brand Nigo founded in Tokyo’s
Harajuku neighborhood in 1993. Then came
the bejeweled dollar signs commemorating
the Billionaire Boys Club brand he cofounded
with superstar producer Pharrell Williams a
decade later. In celebration of Human Made,
the subdued, hypebeast-casual clothing
line he launched in 2010, Jacob crafted an
assortment of polar bears, ducks, and other
cartoonish characters cast in diamonds and
white gold.
As Nigo strolled the length of Jacob &
Co’s tunnel-like showroom, bathed in light-
ing powerful enough to reveal the flaws in
any gem, it was clear why LVMH, Kenzo’s
parent company, had such confidence in
the youth appeal of a 50-year-old designer.
Dressed in jeans, a white hoodie, and a
denim jacket, Nigo had arrived to find Lil
Uzi Vert waiting for him. A$AP Rocky soon
followed. Then came the record label exec-
utive Steven Victor, who summoned a film
crew for an impromptu music video shoot to
promote the album I Know Nigo, a pandemic
project that would blossom into one of the
more interesting hip-hop records of 2022.
The album features 11 songs, all curated by
Nigo, with new music by Pusha T; Kid Cudi;
Tyler, the Creator; and several other rappers
whose association with the streetwear icon
became a kind of hip-hop flex. The ultimate
flex, though, belonged to Nigo, who demon-
strated real clout by using the occasion of his
new album to reunite, for the first time since
2009, Clipse and the Neptunes—a defunct
rap duo and a seldom active production
team, brought together again by their favor-
ite fashion designer.
“Nigo is the master curator and taste-
maker,” Pusha T told me in an email. “His
ability to be so influential for so long is
unprecedented and speaks to his apprecia-
tion and love for the culture.”
Balancing music video shoots with his
work for Kenzo brought back a familiar
sensation—one that first struck Nigo two
decades ago, when A Bathing Ape exploded
in America. It was instantly embraced by
hip-hop luminaries like Jay-Z, Pharrell,
Busta Rhymes, and Kanye West, who, in turn,
sought out the designer when visiting Tokyo.
“I thought, Oh, here we go again,” Nigo said.
Of course, the Kenzo role presents a novel
challenge. For the first time in his long career,
the brand that would rise or fall on his creative
decisions was not one that he built himself.
Instead, the designer traded pure invention
for reinvention at the helm of an iconic Paris
fashion house that is older than him by several
months. Kenzo Takada, the brand’s founder,
remains a guiding light at 18 rue Vivienne,
despite retiring from the company in 1999.
Takada’s recent death, in October 2020, has
made Nigo especially mindful of the need to
balance his own creative vision with a degree
of fealty to his late countryman.
“It is legitimate to say that Nigo is the first
streetwear designer that’s taken on this kind
of brand,” said Toby Feltwell, a cofounder
and creative director at streetwear label Cav
Empt, who worked with Nigo at both Bape
and Billionaire Boys Club. (“I would say that
Virgil was a kind of post-streetwear designer,”
he added, not to diminish Virgil Abloh’s his-
toric turn at Louis Vuitton, but to correct a
common misapprehension about streetwear’s
current relationship with runway fashion.)
A month after the shoot at Jacob & Co,
Nigo would return to the international stage
to present his debut Kenzo collection—the
fall 2022 line, which is in stores now. It was
a parade of colorful workwear, suits, and
knits, replete with archival prints, styled with
berets and letterman jackets, all crafted from
the simple fabrics (denim, cotton, wool) Nigo
knows best.
The show was a reminder of Nigo’s talent
for outsourcing showmanship—Ye sat with
Julia Fox at the unveiling of the Kenzo collec-
tion inside Paris’s Galerie Vivienne, flanked
by Pharrell; Pusha T; and Tyler, the Creator.
Asked by a journalist why he was there, Ye
uttered just two syllables before walking
away: “Nigo.”
WHEN I ARRIVED at Kenzo’s Paris headquar-
ters in early June, Nigo was busy working on
the follow-up to his first collection in a large
sun-drenched office situated at the back of
the stately compound at 18 rue Vivienne—a
building that could easily pass as the head-
quarters of a European bank. Nigo’s outfit
was similarly understated: Dressed in a
simple gray sweatshirt and jeans, without
the sunglasses and hat that so often serve
as his uniform, he looked like a poster boy
for Japan’s late-20th-century obsession with
American casual clothing.
Nigo’s office is as spare as the empty court-
yard beneath it. In the center of the room, pho-
tographs of the collection in progress sat in
neat piles on the long table Nigo uses instead
of a desk. To the right of that table were a row
of cabinets, an espresso machine, and a small
refrigerator, and to its left, floor-to-ceiling win-
COURTESY OF KENZO (4).

dows facing the quiet courtyard. Behind it was

a foldable partition that serves as a makeshift
changing room, with a single hook for hanging
Nigo’s ubiquitous denim jacket.
“I’m here for about a week each month,”
Runway looks from Nigo’s first two Kenzo collections, fall 2022 and spring 2023, made use Nigo told me. During these sojourns from
of a few things he knows well—crisp denim, graphic prints, and statement hats. his home in Tokyo, he rises with the sun to

5 4 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2

Nigo at Kenzo’s headquarters in Paris, where the designer works on
upcoming collections when not at his home base in Tokyo.
keep up with business back in Japan, which
includes overseeing operations at Human
Made. Later on in the morning, as Paris
comes alive, he goes about the business of
creating his latest collection for Kenzo, which
involves a lot more collaboration than Nigo is
accustomed to—or at least a lot more people
than he’s used to collaborating with.
“My way of working is not like a top-down
dictator, but like a director,” Nigo told me.
“Rather than very defined instructions, I
bring the team images and reference pieces
that I hope will inspire them.” Initially, this
meant using specific references from his
own personal collection, feeling that “it was
essential to look at actual garments in order
to avoid producing something that seems
artificial, which is always a danger in street-
wear, especially in Europe.” For spring 2023,
he was able to make better use of references
from Kenzo’s own extensive archives, which
fueled his appetite for “compiling, editing,
and trusting that the things I want to con-
nect together will be right.” In early June,
with just over three weeks left before show-
time, his focus was on achieving “a degree of
consistency” by connecting his first Kenzo
collection to his second.
“I’m not into the idea of a brand moving
faster than the customers,” Nigo said, describ-
ing the current system by which most fashion
brands work, a system that he does not intend
to fall in line with: “You do a show to get people
excited by the clothes, and then by the time
those clothes are in the store you’ve already
moved on to something completely different.”
On the table between us sat a vintage
Japanese fashion magazine, which he opened
to reveal several pages filled with black-and-
white photos of Kenzo Takada, who’s become
an object of intense study for Nigo. Flipping
through the magazine, his Buddha-like
detachment dissolved into giddy fascination.
“My work for Kenzo reflects my personal
connection to the brand, so I place the
emphasis on where it was in the ’80s, because
that’s when I was first becoming interested in
fashion,” Nigo told me.
In most of the magazine photos, Takada
wore distinctly European coats and double-
breasted suits over turtlenecks. But in a few he
seemed taken with the same American casual
clothing that would later fascinate Nigo—
jeans with thick leather belts, plaid dress
shirts, and sweaters draped over the shoulders
like some sort of Ivy League cosplay. “I always
thought Western things were so much cooler,”
Nigo said. “To the extent that I started hating
Japanese culture.” This hatred has faded, but
Nigo’s genuine affinity for Kenzo’s founder
does seem to be rooted in their shared fascina-
tion with the sartorial mythologies of the West.
Nigo’s fascination with Amerikaji, or
American casual, started with a popular
Japanese boy band from the 1980s called the
Checkers. “They dressed like 1950s rockers,
which I really loved,” Nigo told me. “I started
wearing Levi’s 501 jeans and Adidas T-shirts
and a bomber jacket I got at a store specializ-
ing in American casualwear.” Next came Run-
DMC, who helped connect Nigo’s Amerikaji
obsession to American culture, just as it was
becoming increasingly synonymous with hip-
hop culture. But Nigo’s success would depend
as much on his emerging sense of taste as on
his studies at a top Tokyo fashion institute
called Bunka Fukusō Gakuin, where he grad-
uated from a program for aspiring magazine
editors in 1991. His inspiration was Hiroshi
Fujiwara, founder of the seminal Japanese
streetwear brand Goodenough, who was
touted as Japan’s original street-culture seer.
In those days, he wasn’t yet known as Nigo,
but went still by his given name, Tomoaki
Nagao. He bore such a close resemblance to
Hiroshi Fujiwara, though, that friends began
referring to him as Hiroshi Fujiwara Nigo,
meaning Hiroshi Fujiwara number two. A stint
as Fujiwara’s personal assistant cemented the
nickname, which was soon shortened to Nigo.
That proximity to Fujiwara also put him at the
center of the burgeoning Harajuku streetwear
scene. He landed a job at the taste-making
menswear magazine Popeye—with the slogan
“magazine for city boys”—and in 1993, Nigo
and his Bunka Fukusō Gakuin schoolmate
Jun Takahashi opened a small shop called
Nowhere, located in what were then the quiet
back streets of Harajuku. Takahashi sold cloth-
ing under his own label, Undercover, while
Nigo dealt in streetwear brands imported
from America. (Fujiwara had long been the
de facto Stüssy representative in Japan.) Before
the year was over, Nigo began making his own
limited edition T-shirts and jackets, adorned
with simian imagery cribbed from Planet of
the Apes. The brand’s ape logo was designed by
Shinichiro Nakamura, an artist better known
as Sk8thing, who also gave Nigo’s clothing
line its oddly poetic name: A Bathing Ape in
Lukewarm Water. This nod to the aimless,
tolerably comfortable lives of Nigo’s genera-
tion, who entered adulthood amid Japan’s first
O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 5 5
postwar economic downturn, was shortened to
A Bathing Ape, and, eventually, Bape.
Over the course of the next decade, Bape
exploded, first in Japan, then abroad. Its stun-
ning success was partly due to the strategy
of boosting demand by keeping supply low, a
notion that was already working for Stüssy in
Japan. That brand’s founder, Shawn Stussy,
had initially made clothes for surfers, but they
caught on with skateboarders as well. “Shawn
was focused on the people he made the clothes
for,” Fujiwara told me. “His priorities didn’t
change overnight when Stüssy became pop-
ular with people who weren’t surfers.” That
focus made an impression on Fujiwara, who
deployed a similar strategy with Goodenough.
Nigo then followed the Goodenough example
and limited production and restricted sales
to his own stores, which cultivated an aura of
exclusivity around Bape T-shirts and jackets
made with ordinary, inexpensive materials.
His connections at important magazines
like Popeye and Hot Dog, and his insider
understanding of Japan’s fashion press,
meanwhile, assured the kind of coverage
that helped spotlight the cult clothing brand.
Scenes foretelling streetwear’s global future
unfolded outside the tiny shop, where rabid
fans lined up by the hundreds for a chance to
buy one of 50 new Bape T-shirts. This went on
for several years before Nigo finally embraced
the key difference between himself and his
mentor: Unlike Fujiwara, who never wanted a
big company with an army of employees, Nigo
A Kenzo employee fits a model leading up to the spring 2023 show; a range of embellishments from the
collection, including the Japanese boke flower Nigo introduced as a new motif for the brand.
5 6 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
craved more. In 1998, he opened several new
shops across Japan, each designed to project a
sense of luxury, and he started making enough
T-shirts to sell to everyone. Bape soon tran-
scended exclusivity and became, arguably, the
world’s first streetwear label capable of mas-
querading as a luxury brand.
Nigo’s profile went global around 2003,
when he became friends with Pharrell. They
met through Jacob, who, Pharrell told me,
“was talking about this guy who would come
in with posters of me and the jewelry I was
making with Jacob, saying he would want jew-
elry made just like it. So Jacob would make
it for him, but if I got it in yellow gold, Nigo
would get it in yellow gold and white gold
and rose gold.” Eventually, they met in Tokyo,
where Nigo invited Pharrell to use his record-
ing studio while he was in town for a concert.
“And when I worked at his studio, I realized
it was a whole world,” Pharrell told me. “One
floor was a studio, another was a showroom
for apparel, the next was a showroom for foot-
wear, and the next floor was a photography
studio where he shot all his campaigns.”
In the years that followed, Nigo and
Pharrell became like Vivienne Westwood and
the Sex Pistols—and because Pharrell was
synonymous with hip-hop, so too was Nigo.
This evolution is most evident in Nigo’s own
music, which he produces by conceptualizing
songs, samples, and beats that are then real-
ized through a broad array of collaborators:
His genre-bending debut album, Ape Sounds,
released on the British Mo’ Wax label in 2000,
blended psychedelic pop and trip-hop and fea-
tured Money Mark and Cornelius. Five years
later, with his Japanese hip-hop group Teriyaki
Boyz, Nigo’s producers included DJ Premier,
Just Blaze, the Neptunes, Ad Rock from the
Beastie Boys, and Mark Ronson. What hap-
pened in the interim was explained to me by
Feltwell, who was studying law and working as
an A&R representative for Mo’ Wax when Nigo
hired him to come work at Bape.
“We recognized that there was a big shift
coming in global popular culture, and that we
kind of fitted into that in a symbiotic kind of
way,” Feltwell told me. “We could see it coming,
and we could see that there needed to be a new
look that fit with that cultural movement.”
With Feltwell acting as his interpreter,
Nigo spent more time in New York, where
both men grew increasingly convinced that
American hip-hop would become the dom-
inant cultural force in the decade to come.
Japan’s rising cultural relevance in America,
meanwhile, was evident by the turn of the
century—Hayao Miyazaki won an Oscar for
Spirited Away, Takashi Murakami became
a Pop art sensation, and sales of Hello Kitty
merchandise presaged what would later
happen with Pokémon. By 2003, American
pop culture was awash in visions of Japan
through Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation,
which was filmed on location in Tokyo for a
budget of $4 million and earned $118 million
at the box office. (Hiroshi Fujiwara had a
cameo.) A year later, with her song
“Harajuku Girls,” Gwen Stefani
paid tribute to the neighborhood
that Fujiwara and Nigo helped
build. All of this was in Nigo’s
favor, as was his broad curiosity
about America and his malleable
sense of what American culture
was supposed to look like. Then,
of course, there was his fortu-
itous friendship with the hip-hop
world’s favorite jeweler.
In time, Nigo’s penchant for
collecting ostentatious jewelry,
modern art, and vintage furni-
ture led him to buy a reportedly
$30-million home with its own
warehouse in central Tokyo. “It
got pretty out of hand, which is
part of why I decided to sell some
of my collection a few years ago,”
Nigo told me. He did this through
a 2014 Sotheby’s auction, which
was presented as an estate sale. It
included artwork by Andy Warhol,
KAWS, and Hajime Sorayama; fur-
niture by Jean Prouvé and Charles
and Ray Eames; and luxury goods
ranging from Richard Mille
watches to trunks from Maison
Goyard, Louis Vuitton, and Fendi.
Auctioning off part of his collection, he told
me, was an opportunity to witness something
like his own funeral—the auction was called
Nigo Only Lives Twice. That desire spoke to
the profoundly object-oriented worldview
he has adopted; one that is in tension with
his belief that “the real joy of collecting things
is knowing that your collection will never
be complete.”
At the time of the auction, three years had
passed since Nigo had sold Bape’s parent
company, Nowhere Co. Ltd, for just a little
more than $2 million—a sum that reflected
the company’s sizable debts rather than its
revenue, which remained above $60 million
annually. Aside from its mounting debt, the
sale seemed to be partly motivated by Nigo’s
desire to move on creatively, rather than stay-
ing tethered to the same hoodies and Bapesta
sneakers that kept his simian colossus going
from one season to the next. “In some ways
I felt limited by the success of Bape, because
it forced me to spend a lot of time making
things I didn’t necessarily want to make,”
Nigo said. “Every season had to have its own
shark hoodies or camouflage pieces—the
parts of the brand that were most successful
just ended up weighing me down.”
Human Made, which Nigo founded in 2010,
was an attempt at reconnecting with his fash-
ion roots, and for years its smaller profile has
been a kind of refuge for the designer, who
reveled in his post-Bape freedom to indulge
in Amerikaji understatement and the freedom
to focus on making “something real,” as he
put it. “Things right now are so shocking and
so loud. My approach is to make something
so grounded in reality that it contrasts with
the insanity of all these clothes that you can’t
really imagine anyone actually wearing.”
Freedom can be its own kind of trap,
though, even if this didn’t occur to Nigo until
he was asked to take over at Kenzo. “I realized
I’d done pretty much everything you can do in
the world of streetwear,” he said. “I realized
I needed a new challenge.”
WITH THREE WEEKS left to prepare his soph-
omore collection, Nigo joined me for lunch
at a favorite Italian restaurant in Paris’s 2nd
arrondissement. Over white wine and an
antipasti of creamy burrata, he told me he’d
never imagined his work schedule might one
day revolve around runway shows. “I don’t
see that part of the fashion business as espe-
cially romantic,” he said. “But having spent
my career in another part of the fashion
world, taking this job at Kenzo was attrac-
tive in part because it gives me the chance to
experience what might be considered main-
stream fashion.”
The learning curve was steep. While build-
ing his debut collection, Nigo had to adapt
to an entirely different work culture. His
staff was on edge, at first, because it’s not
“I realized I’d done pretty much
everything you can do in the
world of streetwear. I realized
I needed a new challenge.”
uncommon for new creative directors to
bring their own people with them. “I think
a lot of them expected to be fired,” he told
me. The arrival of CEO Sylvain Blanc eased
the transition, but it took weeks for residual
tensions to pass. “The group doesn’t change
the CEO and the designer of a brand at the
same time because things have been going
fantastically well,” Feltwell said. “There was
a reason that there had to be changes.”
Other challenges proved more attractive.
For the first collection, Nigo embraced the
opportunity to design a line of womenswear,
which was well received. He also dialed back
the streetwear aesthetic that the brand had
spent part of the previous decade leaning
into, offering up colorful suits, overcoats, and
simple workwear in place of graphic hoodies
and bold logos.
Now in sync with the staff at Kenzo, Nigo
found that his challenge, as a veteran taste-
maker, was to look further into the future
than the streetwear business requires. At
Human Made, a small on-site factory makes
it possible to swiftly transform ideas into pro-
totypes and prototypes into products.
“Creating that sense of desire, that feeling
that you have to have something for yourself,”
Nigo told me, requires not only an ability to
“see ahead of everybody else, but also match
their feelings.” One of the challenges pre-
sented by his work for Kenzo, then, is imag-
ining how people might feel about a piece
of clothing in several months, rather than
several weeks. “Coming from a background
where things aren’t built around shows, or
presenting the clothes to the media months
in advance, I’m grateful for the chance to
study and learn what that world is all about,”
Nigo said. “But for me, the real event is when
the clothes arrive in the store.”
One way of managing this disconnect was
to release a handful of Kenzo pieces ready
for order ahead of the spring-summer 2023
collection: A “drop” of sorts, built around a
painting of a Japanese boke flower blossoming
on crewneck sweaters, carpenter pants, and
coach jackets; a simple, fully realized capsule
of stylish clothing that suggested evolution
as much as interpretation. Then there’s the
instant gratification of his work for Human
Made. In late March, when Victor Victor
Worldwide launched the I Know Nigo album
with a pop-up store in Lower Manhattan, the
line stretching down the street and around the
block brought to mind a variation on Matthew
McConaughey’s most famous line from the
film Dazed and Confused: Nigo keeps getting
older, but his customers stay the same age.
Three months later, however, the launch of
his funky Ivy League–themed spring-summer
2023 collection for Kenzo served as a reminder
that Nigo can, at least for now, have it both
ways. In the front row, Justin Timberlake sat
next to Jaden Smith; backstage, David and
Cruz Beckham each posed for their own sepa-
rate photos with the designer.
Nigo’s debut Kenzo collection, fall-winter
2022, is part biography, part autobiography.
Jungle flower prints recalled both iconic
Bape pieces and Kenzo’s fall-winter collec-
tion from 1976. Berets marked “1970” com-
memorated the year of Nigo’s birth as well
as Kenzo Takada’s inaugural fashion show
at Galerie Vivienne. And, in what may be his
most personal statement, Nigo named one
print after his master ceramics instructor,
Shuji Fujimura.
About four years ago, Nigo added a ceram-
ics studio to his compound in Tokyo, where
he spends his free time crafting ceremonial
tea bowls. “My tea ceremony master lives
in the countryside and I don’t get to visit
often, and I’ve found that my ability declines
quickly without regular practice,” Nigo told
me. His aim, he said, is to achieve the ele-
vated sense of hospitality that comes from
“serving tea to my guests in a bowl that I’ve
made myself.” And yet its hold on him, he
conceded, is probably “tied to his feeling for
objects and acquisitiveness.”
When we met for the last time in his office
at Kenzo’s Paris headquarters, I asked Nigo
whether he felt he could keep his hobby
separate from his career. Could it remain
a sanctuary, untouched by the entrepre-
neurial urges that have defined his life and
dominated our culture? Or will he continue
evolving Harajuku, the neighborhood that
reshaped global streetwear, by opening up
his own ceramics shop? Several weeks later,
on a sweltering afternoon in Tokyo, I thought
of his answer while walking the streets of
Harajuku, where I passed boutiques for Bape,
Human Made, and Billionaire Boys Club as
I headed for lunch at one of the two curry
restaurants Nigo owns.
“You know me too well,” he said.
JOSHUA HUNT is a writer in Brooklyn
and a former Tokyo-based correspondent
for Reuters.
O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 5 7
A tour through six
of the most inspiring
living spaces on the planet,
where organic materials
and handmade elegance rule.
B Y N O A H J O H N S O N W I T H M AT T H E W B R O W N E

5 8 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
 The bathroom at
the George
Nakashima–
designed
Reception House.
 The Salmon Creek
Farm kitchen—
first envisioned
as an office.

Reception
House
Bathroom
(OPENING PAG ES)

Mira Nakashima
LO CATIO N :
it’s a reaction to the years of hypercapitalist excess we’ve
all grown accustomed to, or maybe it’s the inevitable
New Hope, PA
result of having had our lives rearranged and our brains Who designed this room and
rewired by a pandemic, but nature and craft feel more what was the concept?
essential than ever when it comes to the way we live. My father, George Nakashima,
As the Japanese artist Kazunori Hamana puts it simply, designed the room to feature
“We humans are a part of nature.” His home, in Isumi, a Japanese sunken bathtub
perched 50 meters from the Pacific Ocean, is the perfect heated by a wood-burning
example of how the harmony between nature and craft boiler imported from Japan.
can fill a room with comfort and intrigue. His studio— He knew it was going to
built solidly in the Japanese wood-frame tradition and be his last building on the
filled with the natural clay pots Hamana makes—balances property and wanted to make
creative expression with sturdy simplicity. it the culmination of his
Artist and arborist Ido Yoshimoto’s love for nature architectural and aesthetic
was first expressed through building tree forts and rope ideals. Since in 1975 he was
swings under the local canopies of Northern California— acutely aware that human
Salmon Creek
Farm Kitchen
(OPP OSITE PAG E )
Fritz Haeg
LO CATION :
Albion, CA
What was the initial concept
for this kitchen?
I designed this addition to a
small cabin at Salmon Creek
Farm. It was the original
communal cabin, and the first
of many built on the land in the
early ’70s. I built it by myself
over the course of 18 months.

PREVIOUS PAGES: COURTESY OF GEORGE NAKASHIMA WOODWORKERS, S.A. OPPOSITE PAGE: FRITZ HAEG/COURTESY OF SALMON CREEK FARM.
now it comes through in the large-scale wood carvings beings should reduce their The long thin spaces of the
he makes from the trunks of fallen trees. His open-air consumption of fossil fuels, he addition create a courtyard,
workspace was originally built by the legendary artist went to the trouble of finding, centered on a beautiful old pear
J.B. Blunk and is full of unique, hand-carved details from importing, and installing the tree. Most of the windows face
decades ago. “I’m sure I subconsciously absorb these wood-burning boiler. south, with a wide overhang that
shapes and aesthetic sensibility by being in and around shields the high summer sun but
them,” Yoshimoto says. What materials were used, lets the low winter sun pour in.
Salmon Creek Farm proposes another way to live in and how was it constructed?
unity with the California redwoods. This old hippie com- The shell was poured of What materials were used, and
mune has been reimagined by the artist Fritz Haeg as a reinforced concrete and how was it constructed?
colony for those in search of a back-to-the-land style of coated with Japanese penny- I built it entirely of wood milled
living. Haeg built the kitchen in Cabin #1 Orchard himself. round tiles in colors that up from the land. All of the
“There’s no conventional kitchen cabinetry,” he says, “no Nakashima himself selected. framing and the 3-inch slab
stainless, no drywall, and no pantry of canned goods.” He invited my brother and my counters are from one large
Maverick builder SunRay Kelley is a legend of the four children to write their fir tree that was in bad shape
handmade, vernacular architecture scene from which names in and around the tub, and shading our gardens and
Salmon Creek springs. His rolling homes (in his words: with some of their own special orchard. The exterior paneling
“Gypsy Wagons”) are compressed versions of his fantasti- designs from the tiles. is heartwood-redwood board-
cal cabin and tree house designs—more Ken Kesey than and-batt, and the interior
Winnebago. Kelley wants these psychedelic motor homes, How does this room fit into paneling is the sapwood left
which incorporate solar power and wooden walls, to serve the overall Nakashima design from that milling process—not
as object lessons for a sustainable path forward. “I have sensibility, or into your suitable for exterior use but
great hopes that we can turn the tide of environmental father’s aesthetic vision? great for fences or interiors. All
degradation,” he says. The shape of the tub is of the doors and windows are
The late, great George Nakashima also had a vision remarkably similar to the from a salvage lot just down
for sustainable design—and a premonition, back in the swimming pool below [the the ridge from us. And the
’70s, that nature would be much happier if we stopped Reception House], which was sink I found abandoned in the
extracting its fossil fuels. For his iconic Reception House designed and built in 1960— meadow just below the cabin.
bathroom on his Pennsylvania estate, he built a creative an amoeba, or a boomerang
tub that relied on a wood-burning boiler. Stoking the perhaps, but it has a softly How does the design of this
fire to heat the water could take hours, Mira Nakashima, contoured raised ledge so you room fit into your overall
George’s daughter, says, so long soaks were in order. can easily sit on it before or design sensibility of aesthetic
Maine-based designer and builder Anthony Esteves after entering the hot water. vision for living?
knows a thing or two about the importance of staying The colors are muted white, I wanted a space for cooking
warm. His scrap sauna, built entirely of salvaged mate- grays, and blues, consistent and eating that was focused
rials, save for the metal chimney, heats to above 160 with the other interior colors on the garden and orchard
Fahrenheit. Esteves says, “It’s a place for us to gather with of the Nakashima palette. just a few steps away. A direct
friends and family and create warmth in the cold months.” The overall effect is quite connection to the earth and
These six unique rooms are sanctuaries, designed with soothing, relaxing, calming, cultivation is so vital, grabbing
nature, history, and craft in mind. Something we can all which the bathing experience herbs, vegetables, and fruits
use more of in our lives. should be. from right out the door.

6 0 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
Handmade
Woodshop
Ido Yoshimoto
LO CATI O N :
Inverness, CA
How would you describe
the purpose of this room
and how you use it?
This is the indoor/outdoor
workspace where I do
most of my sculpting and
woodwork. It also acts as
storage for materials.
It’s basically three walls
and a roof with a lot of
ventilation, and one open
side where a truck can back
in and large pieces can be
moved in and out easily.
6 2 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R
Did you build this room?
The room was built by the
artist J.B. Blunk, who was
my godfather. He used it as
his workspace as well. It was
built with salvaged materials.
Redwood from old chicken
barns in Petaluma, sections of
old telephone poles as posts,
corrugated steel and spun
fiberglass for the roof. The
fiberglass panels let in diffused
light, which is really nice.
What’s unique about this room
that suits your particular
design sensibility or aesthetic
vision for living?
I think that the history in this
room is what makes it so
inspiring and enjoyable to work
2 0 2 2
in. My father was J.B.’s assistant,
friend, and collaborator, so I
have memories of the space
as a small child. It is full of
hand-carved details in the door
latches, shelves, bits of leftover
material from decades ago. I’m
sure I subconsciously absorb
these shapes and aesthetic
sensibility by being in and
around them. I am happy to
see it unintentionally coming
through in my work.
As both an arborist and an
artist, what draws you to
working with wood?
What I learned about tree
growth and health as an arborist
deepened my understanding
of wood. It was also exciting
to climb tall trees, trimming,
or rigging massive sections.
I enjoyed using all the saws,
gear, and heavy equipment.
The progression came naturally
when I began to bring chunks
of wood home to be milled or
stashed to cure. Slowly my
interest and practice evolved
into what it is now, creating
sculptural and functional pieces
out of the wood.
Ido Yoshimoto’s
indoor/outdoor
workspace.
 Solar
Rolling
Homes
SunRay Kelley
LO CAT I O N :
Sedro-Woolley, WA
What was your initial idea
for these rolling homes?
My concept was to show the
world that you can take a house
down the road on sunlight
because I really believe that
we need to move to a solar
economy. I want to promote
this as a salvation to humanity.
We were put on this planet to
be gardeners of Eden. Until
we return to our true nature as
caretakers of this planet, we will
not know the true happiness,
the true joy, the true peace that
we’re meant to experience.

What attracts you to building

living spaces on vehicles?
I’m kind of a turtle and I like
carrying my house on my
back—wherever I’m gonna
travel, I’m home. My house is
there, my coffee pot is there,
my shower is there, everything
OPPOSITE PAGE: ALANNA HALE. THIS PAGE, TOP: CYRUS SUT TON; BOT TOM, COURTESY OF BONNIE HOWARD.

I need. I’ve always been

fascinated by the automobile, by
kinetic sculptures. I make a lot
of waterfalls and windmills,
and even my buildings—I want
to make them so that they
don’t let your eye fall asleep or
get bored.

How does this project fit SunRay Kelley calls

into your overall design his acclaimed
mobile dwellings
sensibility or the aesthetic “Gypsy Wagons.”
vision you have for living?
It’s all about the enlightenment
of humanity, the conscious
growth of humanity, the
awakening of humanity. So
that your heart rings with the
bell of truth. I love working
with wood too. If you put a
human next to these different
materials that we build
with, wood gives the most
comforting, secure feeling.
I have wood because I live
on forest land and I’ve been
building from that land
my whole life.

O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 6 3

Oceanfront
Ceramics
Studio
Kazunori Hamana
LO CATI O N :
Isumi, Japan
Where is this room located?
This room is located on the
second floor of my house by
the sea. My house is located
on the Bōsō peninsula, facing
the Pacific Ocean. This is the
living-and-dining-room–slash–
workplace. I always work
forming clay and letting them
dry on the dining table, as you
see. These vessels in this room
are unfired—I use this room for
the basic process of ceramics
making before firing. The
small vessels on the floor are
antiques from my collection.
Who designed or built this
room? What materials
were used, and when was
it built?
I did the architectural and
6 4 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R
THIS PAGE, TOP: BEN RICHARDS; BOT TOM, COURTESY OF KAZUNORI HAMANA. OPPOSITE PAGE: COURTESY OF ANTHONY ESTEVES (2).
construction designs myself.
A local architect and carpenters
physically built the house.
Construction started in 2000,
and in the following year
I began living here. I decided
to use the Japanese traditional
method of construction:
a wooden framework and
Japanese red pine trees to build
beams or joists.
How does this room fit into
your overall design sensibility
or your aesthetic vision
for living?
The location of my house
and its wide windows help me
to feel close to nature. I feel
like I’m camping at home! It’s
beneficial to experience the
soundscape and landscape
of the sea, listen to the sounds
of insects and birds, or see
the sparkling ocean surface
and sunlight while one
is engaged with creative
activities including ceramics
making or cooking. Nature
and creation are key parts Kazunori Hamana’s timber-framed
of my life. studio, perched near the Pacific.
2 0 2 2
Scrap
Sauna
Anthony Esteves
LO CAT I O N :
Spruce Head, ME
What was the initial concept
for the sauna?
The sauna began as an idea
years before we actually built it.
There was an old bare-timber
frame tucked into the woods
by the house on top of an outcrop
of granite bedrock. The frame
was made of wood salvaged from
a 19th-century home nearby and
reassembled here many years
ago and used as a simple animal
shed. Turning that bare frame
into a sauna was a pandemic
project. School and much
of life were on hold, and we
were here with time and lots of
scrap materials.
What materials did you use,
and how was it constructed?
The materials at hand were
scraps left over from building
our house: hemlock, white cedar,
spruce. Random lengths and
quantities I would reshuffle and
stack yearly to cull the rotten and
ant eaten. All but the new metal
chimney were remnants of old
projects. Even the stove, an early
Michigan-built Nippa, is from a
Finnish log cabin I dismantled in
Kingfield, Maine.
How do you use it?
This sauna is wood fired with a
gather with friends and family
and create warmth in the
stove that is built with a wide top cold months. Aesthetically,
to hold stones. When the stones the project combines different
are hot, we pour water on them materials and techniques in
to create steam. The steam feels a loose hand-built style that
as if it cleans the air and raises strikes a balance between rustic
the temperature of the room and refined.
above 160 Fahrenheit. We keep
soaked towels on our heads and
a cold plunge outside.
How does this project fit into
your overall design sensibility
or aesthetic vision you
have for living?
Having a sauna in this climate
A sauna that
is important to us. We use it blends the rustic and
weekly in the fall, winter, and the refined—built of
spring. It’s a place for us to repurposed materials.
O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 6 5
A growing
number
of men are
undergoing
a radical and
expensive
surgery to
grow anywhere
from three to
six inches.
The catch: It
requires having
both your
femurs broken.
GQ goes inside
the booming
world of leg BY CHRIS GAYOMALI
lengthening. PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROGER KISBY

O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 6 7
 TODAY WAS A GOOD DAY but his biggest fear was becoming addicted to the drugs, so he
weaned himself off the regimen earlier than he should have.
John Lovedale is feeling pretty good, despite the fact that he Why would someone like John—handsome, confident, funny,
should not be walking right now. It’s a little after 9 a.m. on a a father to three—shell out for a procedure that costs more than
hot Saturday morning in Las Vegas and he’s ambling through a Tesla and results in months of agony for a couple of extra inches?
the Aria Resort & Casino with a pronounced limp, wincing It’s not like he was particularly short, at just shy of the average height
as he throws his hips into wide semicircles and dragging his of an American man (five feet nine). But the opportunity to be above
feet exactly where they need to be. The effect is like a Grand average was too good to pass up. “I noticed that taller people just
Theft Auto extra who’s just been sniped in the butt. seem to have it easier,” John says, laughing. He shrugs. “The world
John is in his mid-40s and stands five feet eleven and a half. Big- seems to bend for them.”
hearted laugh. Built like a saguaro cactus. If you squint he kind It was last summer when, after a Google search, John was first
of resembles a brolic Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s in town to see his swarmed by Facebook ads for the LimbplastX Institute, a clinic in
orthopedic surgeon, having arrived last night from Harrisburg, Las Vegas founded in 2016 by Kevin Debiparshad—Dr. D, if you’re
Pennsylvania, where he works as a network engineer for the govern- nasty—one of only a handful of surgeons in North America who per-
ment. He almost missed his flight and was in such a rush he forgot form cosmetic leg lengthening, and among the leading experts in
to bring the crutches he’s supposed to be using, but, again, he’s been the procedure.
feeling pretty good. When I first called up Dr. D, he told me that business has been
That John is on his feet at all is impressive—and probably foolish— booming: Since the onset of the pandemic’s work-from-home era,
considering that only eight months prior, he was five feet eight and a the LimbplastX Institute has been seeing twice its normal number
half. Back in September, he paid $75,000 for the agonizing privilege of patients, and sometimes as many as 50 new people a month. That
of having his legs surgically lengthened. That entailed having both his claim is backed up by a BBC report suggesting that hundreds of men
femurs broken, and adjustable metal nails inserted down their centers. in the U.S. are now undergoing the procedure every year.
Each nail is made of titanium, which is both flexible and sturdy, like On paper it makes sense. Stigmas around cosmetic surgery are fad-
bone, and about the size of a piccolo. The nails were extended one ing, especially for men. According to the American Society of Plastic
millimeter every day for about 90 days via a magnetic remote control. Surgeons, in 2019, male cosmetic procedures were up 29 percent
Once the broken bones heal, ta-da: a newer, taller John. from two decades prior.
With a procedure like this, there are, of course, some caveats. All the But male height, particularly the absence of it, is one of the last
height gain obviously comes from your legs, so your proportions can social stigmas, as if the new rules of body positivity fail to apply ver-
look a little weird, especially when you’re naked. Also, the recovery can tically. Short guys aren’t so much discriminated against as they are
be long and taxing. When we meet, the bones in John’s legs are not yet precluded from stuff: like dating certain taller people, or making your
fully healed, and a small section of his right femur is still a little soft, frosh-soph basketball team. According to a 2009 study of Australian
like al dente spaghetti; the smallest stumble could snap a bone in two. men, short guys make less money than their taller peers (about $500 a
And it’s especially dangerous since he’s a big guy, over 200 pounds. year per inch); are less likely to climb the corporate ladder (according
Then there’s the pain, which is relentless, ambient. The extension to one survey, the average height of a male Fortune 500 CEO is six feet);
of the nails in his legs stretched the nerves and tissue around the and, for the cis and straight among us, have fewer romantic opportu-
bones—especially the thick, meaty muscles like the hamstrings—to nities with women (a 2013 study conducted in the Netherlands found
an almost excruciating degree. He couldn’t walk for months. “They that women were taller than their male partners in just 7.5 percent
fill you with enough painkillers that it’s bearable,” John explains, of cases). I’m five six on a good day, and I’ve found that being short is
great for flying economy class—and
not much else.
The promise of Dr. D’s institute is
that, for a price, you too can increase
your odds of becoming a Fortune 500
CEO. And people are willing to pay.
Most patients will fork over from
$70,000 to $150,000, depending on
how many inches they want to gain.
The majority opt for the standard
three inches, which can be expected
if you get only your femurs done—a
process that takes about a year—but
six inches is possible if doctors later
THESE PAGES: ROGER KISBY/REDUX PICTURES.

do your tibias as well. You then have

to get the nails surgically removed,
which costs an additional $14,000 to
$20,000. Money an issue? Personal
financing is available through SoFi,
the online bank. John took out a loan
for his femurs—$1,200 a month for
the next five years.
It’s nothing short of a miracle
that we can change something in
the human body that was once
Dr. Kevin Debiparshad points out the amount by which he was able to lengthen one of his patients’ unchangeable. A short king can
legs by severing his femur and inserting a titanium nail through the center of the broken bone. transform himself into just a

6 8 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
 Before-and-after X-rays of a patient who had both their femurs and tibias lengthened, increasing their height by six inches.
king—as long as he’s willing to subject himself to the kind of horrify-
ing, life-altering injury traditionally associated with getting hit by a
bus. It’s as if we’re playing God to appear slightly more boneable on
Tinder. On some level it’s grotesque. It’s also a medical wonder. And it
raises all kinds of thorny existential questions, like whether creations
as fragile as us should be playing God at all.
ADJUSTMENTS
Like most cosmetic surgeries designed to make you a hotter version
of yourself, cosmetic leg lengthening was originally intended to help
patients with real and sometimes dire conditions. The procedure
was developed in the 1950s by a Soviet orthopedic surgeon named
Gavriil Ilizarov, who wanted to treat complex bone fractures and
deformities like limb discrepancies. The process is, to put it lightly,
really fucking gnarly.
It involves a medieval-sounding device called the Ilizarov frame,
an adjustable apparatus that is wrapped around, say, the lower part
of a patient’s leg, ankle to knee, like scaffolding erected around a
townhome. The patient’s leg is then broken, and the apparatus’s
series of pins pierce the leg, jamming through skin and muscle until
they are fixed to the bone itself, where they remain for months—
holding the severed bones in place, slightly farther apart than
they’d naturally be positioned, so that new bone tissue grows to
fill the gap. After spending months bedridden, a patient with, say,
a shorter left leg could miraculously find himself with two legs of
more or less the same size.
The Ilizarov frame is still in use; what’s relatively new is the alter-
native form of leg lengthening that Dr. D performs, which has rapidly
evolved over the past five years. Dr. D compares the procedure to get-
ting your boobs done: “If you want to change this characteristic about
yourself, I’m not changing who you are. You’re still who you are.
This is just one [thing] that you want to change about yourself.” One
of the main innovations at Dr. D’s clinic is the extendable titanium
nails that can be inserted directly into the bone, meaning patients
no longer have to deal with open sores from the Ilizarov frame’s pins.
Now surgeons are looking for other ways to streamline the process.
From 2019 to 2021, there existed a load-bearing nail constructed out
of stainless steel, which is stronger than titanium—an innovation
that enabled patients to walk almost immediately after surgery.
Those weight-bearing nails were recalled after evidence emerged that
the steel might corrode, but Dr. D says that a new nail is awaiting
FDA approval and should be available in 2023.
As I would discover, Dr. D is always trying to find new and better
ways to lengthen legs. When I meet with him in Las Vegas, I quickly
notice how fast he talks, like his work calendar is an infinite block
of Google blue. If you were to ask him what he loves most, he would
likely include his wife and two young daughters; the HBO show
Entourage; and bone, which he calls “the most exciting tissue in the
world.” “It repairs itself!” he exclaims. “You die and it’s the only thing
that’s around when you’re gone.”
We’re eating dinner inside Catch Las Vegas, a trendy seafood joint
where all the servers look softly VSCO filtered. Despite the evening’s
oppressive heat, Dr. D, who is five ten, is wearing Diesel jeans and
a black button-up shirt with polka dots underneath a black vest.
Originally from Kingston, Ontario, he studied medicine at McGill,
with a postgrad fellowship at Harvard, and initially thought he’d
work in a more boring specialty—something like internal medicine—
until he did a rotation in orthopedics with a famous surgeon from
Montreal named Ken Brown.
Brown ran a center called the Lizzy Clinic, which focused on
fixing bone deformities in children. “Lengthening bone, correct-
ing clubfoot deformity, tibial deformities, that sort of thing,” Dr. D
explains. Working for Brown, he was captivated by the idea of using
devices like the Ilizarov frame to stretch and distort bones and heal
injuries. “We’re actually creating this bone in this space,” he recalls
a fellow explaining, as he squinches his thumb and index finger like
he’s appraising a diamond. “I looked at him like, ‘You’re lengthening
this bone? You’re fixing this two-inch discrepancy in this patient?
It seems like magic.’ ”
Dr. D’s patients don’t fit into any one phylum, except that most are
loaded: physicians, finance guys, actors, CEOs. A news anchor. Even
college basketball players looking for a few more statistical inches,
though Dr. D doesn’t recommend this. “It’s hard to predict what the
athletic outcome is going to be,” he says. “What I generally tell patients
is, look, if your paycheck depends on you being faster than the guy next
to you by milliseconds to get that position, then this may not be the
procedure for you because it can decrease your athletic ability.”
There are trans men, who often just want that extra stature to feel
more like themselves. (Dr. D sometimes does leg shortening for trans
women.) I talked to a Filipina nurse who was under five feet—and
now she’s not. One patient, a popular YouTuber in Asia, apparently
paid for the procedure by selling a few Bitcoin.
And of course there are tech bros—a whole gaggle of tech bros.
“I joke that I could open a tech company,” says Dr D. “I got, like, 20
software engineers doing this procedure right now who are here in
Vegas. There was a girl”—because girls can be tech bros too—“yester-
day from PayPal. I’ve got patients from Google, Amazon, Facebook,
Microsoft. I’ve had multiple patients from Microsoft.”
What all the patients I spoke with have in common is that leg
lengthening helps them feel like a more complete version of who they
O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 6 9
 One popular Vietnamese
YouTuber went from
five foot four to five
seven after Dr. D
extended his femurs.

think they are. “A lot of patients see it as an invest-

ment in themselves, and not necessarily romanti-
cally,” says Dr. D. “Stature is such an important part,
I think, of who you are and how you perceive the
world and how the world perceives you. Being able
to alter that is so impactful.”
John remembers the first time he realized he had
actually become a taller person. He was standing
over the toilet to pee when the trajectory of his
stream felt off. “And I’m pissing all over the place!”
he tells me. “I’m not used to peeing being danger-
ous. I’m used to it going right there. I’m having to
adjust for those three inches.”
To explain his change in height, he told every-
one outside of his immediate family—including his
supervisor—that he fell in the bathtub and needed
surgery to fix a broken hip, even though he’d never
even broken a bone before. These days, John has
been working out a bit: upper-body weights, some
walks on the treadmill. “I’m not walking as fast as I
could be once I’m fully healed,” he says, “but every
day is more encouraging.” Even though it’s been an
ordeal, he likes being in public now. “People just
look at you differently when you’re tall. I’m not even
lying,” he says, laughing. “I already get a lot more
looks at the gym.”

TRANSFORMATIONS
There’s no single reason anyone opts for leg-
lengthening surgery, but often at least one of those
reasons has to do with impressing girls. Take Alan,
23, a sweet, lanky software engineer from Chicago.
(Some of these names have been changed.) Originally
just under five feet six, Alan never really thought of himself as short
until a girl he had “a super big crush on, like, roasted me for it” in col-
lege. This instilled in him a deep insecurity that ultimately prompted
him to get his femurs done in February. Now, after spending the last
three months alone in his apartment eating delivery food, he’s five nine.
Or Bryan, a handsome Chinese American guy from New York who
made a lot of money option trading. He’s 27. His voice is slow and
dudely, and he’s something of a player. But he always thought that his
batting average with women could be better. “A lot of times I would
get rejected,” he says. “I was, like, swinging 100 and, like, [connecting
with] four or five.” That was when Bryan was five seven. Now he’s five
ten and itching to get back to the clubs.
There are also guys like Chad, formerly five feet five, a CFO who
did his rehab in El Paso. He’s 53 and a little aggro, the type of shorter
guy who’ll remind you again and again that he’s good at jiujitsu.
The kind of guy who gets mad when he has to stand on his tiptoes
to wave down bartenders. “I’d go to a bar and literally try to order a
drink. Some freaking goon, standing a head taller than me, comes
over behind me,” says Chad. “And the bartender looks up to him, like,
‘What can I get you?’ I’m like, ‘Motherfucker, I’m right here!’ ”
One time Chad had his ego shattered by a taller woman (five ten)
he was dating. They were walking down the street together, holding
hands, when someone passing by gave them a look. She dropped his
hand. “And I was like, ‘All right, you want to be like that? If you think
you could do better, you go do better. See you later.’ ” Chad got the
procedure done back in December and now he’s almost five feet eight.
At one point during dinner, Dr. D casually reveals that 90 percent
of his patients don’t ever tell anyone they’ve gotten the surgery.
The revelation causes my brain to short circuit. How can you keep
something like that secret?
“I just told everyone I was in a ski accident,” says Alan.
“Yeah, my mom’s pretty oblivious,” says Bryan.
“I’m just going to tell everyone that they put so many things in the
vaccine,” says a patient named Johan, who got his femurs and his
tibias done, and went from five four to five ten.
Dr. D understands why his patients would opt to play the proce-
dure close to their chests. “I don’t think women are like, ‘Oh, I got
breast augmentation,’ like they’re proud of it,” he says. “You know
what I mean?” He thinks that’s beginning to change, though. When
some people get cosmetic surgery now, “it’s like having a Birkin or
having a fancy car or whatever. They brag about it, because it’s like a
sign of this elite status in some ways.”
As dinner wraps up, we skip dessert and call it an early night,
because Dr. D has to get up at 5 a.m. He has a leg lengthening to
perform in the morning, and I’m invited to watch.
UNDER THE KNIFE
Should you find yourself a guest observer in Dr. D’s operating room at
Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, you’ll be escorted by a relentlessly
upbeat representative, who will take you past the self-playing piano in

7 0 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2

the lobby, the infirmary, the employee locker room, and into the heart
of the hospital, where you will trade your street clothes for scrubs.
And there, in the bedlam of the operating room, is Dr. D, cheery
as ever, like he never went to bed, surrounded today by a phalanx of
guys wearing Hokas and Salomons. Usher’s “My Way” booms through
the O.R.’s speakers. “We usually listen to Britney!” someone jokes.
In the middle of the room, his top half covered with a tarp, lies
the patient, unconscious. Today he’s getting two nails implanted
into his femurs. Even though he’s only visible from the waist down
(his junk is taped off ), I can see that he has an athletic build, which
makes him look like a mannequin that got dumped into the back of
a garbage truck.
That he appears slightly dehumanized is maybe to my benefit.
Because the drilling is about to commence.
Dr. D inserts a small drill in one of two inch-long incisions he’s
made in the upper right thigh, to get the break started. He then calls
for a device called the reamer and everyone moves with the choreo-
graphed efficiency of an F1 pit crew. The reamer materializes in his
hand. It’s basically a handheld cordless drill, only the actual bit is two
feet long. The reamer is used to hollow out the bone so that the nail
can be placed snugly.
Dr. D gives the reamer a few whirs and then jams the pointy part
into the other incision and down into the patient’s leg. With the aid
of X-rays and a guide wire, he begins to drill a hole down the center
of the femur. The sound of hot spinning metal pulpifying bone isn’t
unlike the sound of installing drywall anchors.
“People just look
at you differently
when you’re tall.
I already get a
lot more looks at
the gym.” — JOHN LOVEDALE
Actually severing the femur takes only a few
seconds. What he’s started already with the drill is
followed by deployment of the osteotome, basically
a razor-sharp chisel. Dr. D inserts the tool into the
incision along the patient’s thigh and starts whack-
ing away with a mallet.
“Sometimes it’s one tap,” Dr. D shouts while
casually hammering, as if he’s hanging a picture
frame. “Other times it’s 10 taps.” Clink, clink, clink,
clink—CLANK.
When Dr. D pulls the reamer out of the incision—
the effect is kind of like Jack Nicholson’s Joker pull-
ing a comically long pistol out of his pants—a warm,
bloody slurry of liquefied bone and marrow and fat
begins to ooze out of the hole with horrifying speed
and volume.
Once the nail is finally set in the now-severed
bone, Dr. D makes a few more tiny incisions along
the leg and drills a few screws in to hold every-
thing together. On the X-ray screen it looks like the
patient’s thigh is pregnant with a weather vane.
All in all, the right leg is completed in 38 minutes.
The left will take more or less the same amount of
time. But it’s only when the patient wakes up two
hours later—with five to six new holes in each of his legs—that the
real work can begin.
PROTECT YOUR INVESTMENT
When John and I show up at the LimbplastX Institute on the morn-
ing of his appointment, Dr. D is a little frosty, a few degrees removed
from his usual self. (Which is to say he’s still extremely pleasant, like
an angry Kenneth from 30 Rock.)
The problem is that John doesn’t have his crutches, and he hasn’t yet
been cleared to go without them, even though he isn’t feeling any pain.
This, according to Dr. D, is a huge no-no. “John’s been a bad boy ever
since he came here,” he says. “I always tell patients that when they stop
lengthening, that’s when they get into trouble. Because they feel good.
They got their new height and they have no pain. They get impatient.”
As Dr. D explains, John’s femurs aren’t fully consolidated. He’s
95 percent healed on his left side but only 80 percent healed on his
right. Meaning the bone tissue is still forming, still pliant and a little
squishy. If the nail were damaged in a fall, they’d have to replace it
with a new one, and the whole process would have to begin again.
(This has only happened in his practice a handful of times, says Dr. D.)
“So, yeah, protect your investment,” Dr. D tells John in the register
of a disappointed grade school teacher. “It’s just three more weeks,
okay? You’ve already gone this long and then you can have the whole
summer to move around, all right?” (continued on page 88)
O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 7 1
 BY
NOAH
JOHNSON

PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
ISA
SAALABI

Devon Turnbull’s
custom-built
speakers can be
heard in Supreme
stores, at New York’s
hottest new hotel,
and in Mark Ronson’s
house. But Turnbull’s
not chasing clout
or decibels with
his hi-fi audio gear—
he’s offering an entirely
different approach to
the listening experience.

7 2 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
 Devon Turnbull builds speakers,
amps, and turntables by hand to
create unique hi-fi sound systems.

ONE DAY IN March 2020, just as New York City
was sliding into lockdown, Devon Turnbull got
a cryptic text message from his friend Virgil
Abloh. “I didn’t even get it at first,” Turnbull
tells me over lunch this summer. “He’s like,
‘Your time is now. You’re about to blow up.’
I was just like, really? ”
For Turnbull, 43, who had been working
for several years in relative obscurity building
high-fidelity home-audio equipment under
the creative pseudonym Ojas, the impetus
for Abloh’s prophecy remains a mystery. “I
don’t know if that was just based purely on
his insane level of foresight and his ability
as a visionary,” says Turnbull. After all, Abloh
reimagined the future of streetwear with
7 4 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
his brand Off-White and reinvented Louis
Vuitton as the brand’s men’s artistic director,
but Turnbull couldn’t be sure. “It could have
just as easily been that he was on some fuck-
ing LVMH company trend-forecaster market-
ing thing and people were like, ‘Home audio
is about to become huge.’ ” Either way, Abloh’s
message was clear: Your moment is about to
come. It’s about to happen.
At the time Abloh texted him, plenty was
already happening for Turnbull, who had
fashioned an intriguing niche as the maker of
custom audio systems for some of New York’s
most influential creatives. Ojas had gone from
an alias to an actual company, and its distinc-
tively brutalist and often exceptionally large
home-audio systems regularly sold for five
figures. Turnbull’s speakers were installed
in Supreme stores around the world, and he
had designed an audiophile-grade system
for the buzzy Brooklyn club Public Records,
known for having the best sound in the city.
Meanwhile, Abloh himself had asked Turnbull
to create custom speakers for his traveling
“Figures of Speech” exhibition, which debuted
at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
in 2019. By April 2020, Ojas had also released
its first Artbook Shelf Speaker, a smaller ver-
sion of his more extravagantly priced cus-
tom units, which now sells for $6,000. And
Turnbull was developing a DIY model with
all the components needed for audiophiles to
assemble one at home. His plan was to sell
the kits, then host Zoom sessions for people
to hang out and build them together—an idea
that found instant success during a time when
the only nightclub was often your living room.
“I had no idea that it would resonate the
way it did,” Turnbull says. “It’s the first thing
I ever posted on my Instagram that was viral.
It was the only time I’d ever had hundreds
of comments on a post. And then it was
just off to the races.” Abloh offered to make
Canary Yellow, his multiuse e-commerce site,
the commercial home for the Ojas Artbook
and DIY speaker kits, and the next genera-
tion of Ojas converts was born. Since then,
Turnbull’s client list has grown to include the
new Nine Orchard hotel on Canal Street and
celebrity music producers like Mark Ronson.
The fashion retailer Ssense started selling his
speakers. This summer, an Ojas sound sys-
tem was installed as an actual work of art in
a downtown New York gallery.
At Turnbull’s
installation at New
York’s Lisson Gallery,
visitors shared the
experience of
intentional listening.
 What makes this success all the more
remarkable is that it’s Turnbull’s second
act. Almost two decades earlier, in 2003,
he cofounded the menswear label Nom de
Guerre. The brand’s Bleecker Street shop
closed in 2010, but it remains influential
among certain fashion cults. Turnbull might
now be thriving in a totally different kind of
career, but his sensibilities—minimalism,
utilitarianism, an obsession with quality—
remain the same. And as he makes some of
the most rarefied audio equipment in the
world, it’s his eye as much as his ear that sets
him apart, a duality that perhaps made him
especially appealing to a polymath like Abloh.
That versatility was immediately apparent
to Turnbull’s Nom de Guerre cofounder, Isa
Saalabi, who recalls visiting Turnbull one
day in 2007 when Turnbull told him in lucid
detail about the home-audio system he had
just built, his first of its kind. “It was a very
clear conversation,” recalls Saalabi, who pho-
tographed Turnbull for this story. “He talked
about a vision for a sound system with this
brutalist design, and he specifically said,
‘I see it as a sculpture in a Chelsea gallery.’
The vision was there from the beginning. And
that’s what makes the whole thing so special
and beautiful. This wasn’t something that
happened overnight.”

WHAT DEVON TURNBULL does with sound is so

specific, so rare and far-out, that even within
the world of high-end home audio he’s an
outlier in his devotion to utter sonic purity.
“It’s countercultural,” he says of his role in the
audiophile community. “I partake in a global
underground culture within audio that pre-
scribes a certain formula for sound produc-
tion equipment.”
When it comes to analog music, sound, of
Turnbull’s sharp
course, begins when a needle passes over the
aesthetic sense is
grooves of a record. A small electrical signal is evident in the design
generated that must be amplified to create a of his speakers.
vibration strong enough to move air through These boxes were
the tubes of a speaker to make a sound. “I want screen-printed with
to do as little as possible so as to not disturb gray wood grain over
matte gray paint.
the purity of that signal,” he says. Turnbull’s
unique designs thus contain a surprising par-
adox. “You could call it a minimalist approach
to audio reproduction,” he says. “But if you
look at the stuff, it doesn’t look minimalist
at all. It’s extremely heavy, extremely large.”
“He specifically baseball cap, and has the cool, streetwise vibe
of an aging skater—says that he is “100 percent
Here’s an important fact when it comes to
hi-fi audio: Larger speakers do not have to use
said, ‘I see acoustically motivated.” It just so happens that
he has a highly developed aesthetic sensibility
more power. Ojas systems, counterintuitively, a sound system to go with his audio-engineering expertise.
use massive horns, boxes the size of refriger- Born in New York, Turnbull relocated to
ators, and subwoofers as big as dumpsters, as a sculpture Iowa with his family when he was 11. After
because Turnbull is using super-low-wattage dropping out of high school, he got his GED
amplifiers to power them. Larger speakers in a Chelsea and moved to Washington State at 17 to study
allow for less distortion and high dynamics.
The result is a sound system with a visual
gallery.’ ” “the science and business of sound,” as he
calls it, at the Art Institute of Seattle. There,
impact that is nearly as great as its aural —ISA SAALABI he learned to read a schematic of audio elec-
impact. Turnbull—who most days wears tronics—the drawing that explains how a piece
baggy cargo pants and graphic T-shirts with a of equipment is made—and took a class in

O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 7 5
Many of Turnbull’s
speakers and
components are
developed in the
listening room on
the top floor of his
Brooklyn town house.
graphic design, which he found came naturally
to him. In 1999, Turnbull moved back to New
York and started making stickers and T-shirts
and hats printed with Ojas—a Sanskrit term
that loosely translates to “life vitality” and that
he used as his tag as a graffiti writer. He ped-
dled his wares downtown and got some trac-
tion in the nascent scene that was budding at
proto–streetwear shops like Alife and Union.
A couple of years later, in 2003, he cofounded
Nom de Guerre with Saalabi, who had worked
for Marc Jacobs; Wil Whitney, previously the
manager of the New York Stüssy store; and
Holly Harnsongkram, a former fashion editor
at W magazine. Mixing their various back-
grounds in art, graphic design, streetwear,
and high fashion, they tore down the walls
that stood between their various worlds and
created a subterranean shop in downtown
Manhattan where all kinds of ideas about high
design intermingled.
With Nom de Guerre, Turnbull made fre-
quent trips to Japan, where the brand did
much of its sourcing and production. There he
began to discover the roots of the audiophile
7 6 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
“I try to create
an environment
that feels
like a temple
or a shrine.”
—DEVON TURNBULL
culture that he would eventually dedicate his
life to. But it was at a store in Paris—home
to a flourishing hi-fi audio scene of its own—
where he first heard a sound system that he
has described as “psychedelic,” as compared to
the stereo he had been listening to. “And then,”
he says, “I was sure that that was my path.”
Over the next decade, while focusing on
streetwear, Turnbull began making his own
hi-fi systems—avant-garde works he called
“sound sculptures”—and he eventually
glimpsed a chance to turn the sideline into a
new career. Using his old graffiti tag, Ojas, he
began to produce large-scale brutalist sound
systems distinguished by their naturalistic
audio quality. As Ojas grew, Turnbull increas-
ingly felt like there was more to be done with
the equipment he was building. In 2020 he
hired two full-time employees and moved
his business operation from the top floor
of his Brooklyn town house to an industrial
workshop in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Now,
Ojas is capable of building about 15 custom
speaker setups per year. It’s an increasingly
more robust operation but one that’s still rel-
atively small-scale compared to the burgeon-
ing interest in this unique form of hi-fi audio.
Last year, one of Turnbull’s friends, the
artist Hugh Hayden, introduced him to an
avowed audiophile named Alex Logsdail,
the CEO of Lisson Gallery, where Hayden
shows his work. Logsdail invited Turnbull
to place an Ojas system inside of his Chelsea
gallery as part of a show called “The Odds
Are Good, the Goods Are Odd,” which
included works by Hayden and other art-
ists with a focus on handmade sculpture.
In a private 390-square-foot room located
at the back of the gallery, Turnbull installed
his HiFi Dream Listening Room No. 1—not
a sculpture but a complete hand-built sound
system. At one end of the Listening Room,
which was on display through August, stood
a wall of brutalist speakers. In the middle
were the turntable and the amplifiers that
power them. And at the other end were
seats where visitors could sit and listen.
All of the components were hand-built,
angular, and matte or slightly glossy gray,
as though carved from stone or cast in
concrete. The feeling in the room was sim-
ilarly heavy, thanks in part to careful cus-
tomizations of the space to maximize the
acoustics—this is a place where something
important is going to happen. “I really try to
create an environment that feels like a tem-
ple or a shrine,” Turnbull says, “or a wellness
space of some sort.”
The listening room ran for around two
months, free and open to the public (as most
galleries are) to come in and listen to the
Ojas system for as long as they pleased. The
musical offerings included sessions with the
legendary jazz imprint Blue Note Records, a
selection of ambient music by Brian Eno, and
live performances recorded directly to tape
and played back over the sound system. Each
day the room filled with a mix of hi-fi fanatics,
Ojas acolytes, and unsuspecting gallery-goers
of all sorts. Turnbull rolled around
the room on a wheeled stool, drop-
ping records on the Ojas turntable
and simply listening, as everyone
else did, facing the speakers.
One visitor, Chance Chamblin, a
21-year-old film student from New
York, was familiar with Turnbull’s
work through social media but had
never had the opportunity to experi-
ence an Ojas system for himself until
it landed in the gallery. “Serenity”
is how he describes what he found
in that room. “Peace of mind.” He
estimates that he spent around 30
hours listening to Turnbull’s sys-
tem at the gallery. On his first day,
he sat for seven hours. “I come here
to surrender myself to this gorgeous
and incredible-sounding system,” he
tells me.
WHEN TURNBULL was 11, his parents,
former Transcendental Meditation
teachers, moved the family from
the New York metropolitan area
to Fairfield, Iowa, to be closer to
the Transcendental Meditation
community there. Turnbull and
his sister were educated at a pri-
vate academy affiliated with the
movement, the Maharishi School,
and Turnbull recalls spending
a few hours a day meditating as
part of their curriculum. It was “like a lit-
tle cult, remote, middle of nowhere,” says
Turnbull, who has since stopped practicing
Transcendental Meditation and distanced
himself from the community, though the
experience continues to inform his designs.
“There’s a lot that I draw from that experi-
ence,” Turnbull tells me. “The sense of com-
munal consciousness tapping, and mind
melding, and people getting together for a
shared experience.”
Through his years of meditation, Turnbull
came to realize that a certain kind of patience,
devotion, and mind-over-matter calm can
yield great rewards. He mastered the sche-
matics and formulas required to build hi-fi
audio—Ojas equipment is imposing, with a
lush and visceral sound—but he also learned
how focus and intention can be transforma-
tive when paired with exceptionally good
sound. So that people properly appreciate its
quality, the HiFi Dream Listening Room No. 1
encourages stillness, silence, and a clearing
of the mind. Turnbull notes that visitors
never had to be explicitly told to be quiet; the
implicit request was miraculously obeyed by
virtually all who entered the room.
In recent years, Turnbull’s parents have also
moved on from Transcendental Meditation.
His father is now the chair of the advisory
board for the NYU Center for Psychedelic
Just days before the opening of his
Lisson Gallery installation, Turnbull was still
fine-tuning his seminal hi-fi project.
Medicine; his mother, a guide for psilocybin
studies at NYU and Johns Hopkins. Turnbull
has recently been helping his parents incor-
porate music into their studies as an audio
consultant, primarily by improving their
equipment. “I told my parents that they were
only getting half of the potential experience by
overlooking the playback equipment,” he says.
“They agreed, and their joke now is that I’m
missing 90 percent of the potential of my lis-
tening sessions by overlooking psychedelics.”
Helping bring hi-fi audio to his parents’
lives was the start of something new. Turnbull
is now hoping to repeat that process on a
grand scale, in a way that democratizes this
incredibly rarefied listening experience.
“I want to create a hi-fi for the people,” he
says. The first step toward that goal will be
to create more free, public listening rooms.
Turnbull sees museums and galleries as the
best opportunity to make that happen. “Music
deserves these spaces,” he says. “I don’t think
there should be just one, I think there should
be a lot of them. I think it’s so unfortunately
rare these days for people to have even a good
stereo system to listen to stuff on. When the
gallery approached me I realized, Oh, my God,
this is my dream. My ultimate hope is that this
works, that there will be more of these, and
you can one day go to the museum where you
can sit down and enjoy sound.”
For Turnbull, the gallery show
recontextualized his work in a
radical way. “When people ask me
what I do, I have a really hard time
answering that. If I say, ‘I own an
audio-component manufacturing
business,’ that sounds nothing like
what I do,” he says. Now, after his
HiFi Dream Listening Room No. 1,
he can simply say, “I’m an artist.”
Streaming platforms, Bluetooth
speakers, and wireless earphones
have made music more prevalent in
our lives than ever. We never stop
listening. But we primarily do it
passively, streaming while we drive,
work out, do chores, make dinner.
Most of us don’t know what it’s like
to listen with intention. Turnbull
is now on a mission to bring his
very specific vision for world-class
audio beyond the micro-niche hi-fi
community. “Sound is just ripples
in the air,” he says. “Musicians are
like shamans; they learn how to
manipulate people’s brain func-
tioning through those ripples in the
air. I have an important responsi-
bility to capture those vibrations
and transmit them, to spread those
vibrations around the world.”
NOAH JOHNSON is GQ ’s global
style director.
O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 7 7
 You already Now meet his
know Pierce: model-
legendary musician-
Irish American filmmaker sons
actor— Dylan and
a Bond. Paris,
two of the only
Possibly the people on
most earth capable
charming of resisting
man alive. his charm.

By ALEX PAPPADEMAS Photographs by DANIELLE LEVITT Styled by SIMON RASMUSSEN


FEW YEARS AGO, some of Dylan Brosnan’s closest friends showed
up to his house in Malibu for his 21st birthday party, and there they
met Dylan’s father, who turned out to be Pierce Brosnan. Dylan had
never mentioned it.
Dylan laughs. “I don’t tell anybody that, under any circumstances,”
he says.
It’s a hot but breezy Wednesday afternoon in that same Malibu
property, which Dylan’s parents—Pierce and his second wife, Keely
Shaye Smith, who married in 2001—have owned for more than
20 years. Dylan is on a couch in the living room, looking out the win-
dow at a blue gradient of sky and sea, explaining what it was like to
grow up in a place where everyone knew his father’s face.
“I always thought he had a lot of friends, growing up,” Dylan says,
“because people would come up to him in the street, and he’s like the
nicest guy, so he talks to everyone for a really long time.”
Dylan is 25, born in 1997. His early childhood coincided with the
peak of Pierce’s box office mojo—the years of 007 and Thomas Crown.
Later he’d talk to his father about these experiences—Do you remem-
ber your friend, that guy who dressed funny and hung out by the
movie theater every day?—and only then would he learn that these
enthusiastic friends on the street were actually strangers. Mostly fans
and, in some cases, weirdos.
Pierce Brosnan walks into the living room. “I was just getting the
dog,” Brosnan says. “He popped away. Slipped out of my back pocket.”
He’s wearing khaki shorts and an old white T-shirt—a silver-haired
dad with nothing on the agenda except this conversation. When it’s
over he plans to pour a cocktail and watch the pelicans squabble on
the shoreline. Next year he will turn 70. Time has softened his face,
blunted its severity.
He’s still preposterously good-looking, though. Later I will feel
obligated to ask him: Pierce, when did you know you were a very
handsome man? He will laugh loud and long at this question and
then politely decline to answer it, because, what could he say? This
face is something he was born with, like the birthmark on his left
arm: “It was a scarlet birthmark. My grandmother always said, He’s
a lucky boy. He’s a lucky son.”
Brosnan shrugs. “So far, so good.”
Dylan went to high school and college in L.A.—but before that he
and his brother Paris, 21, bounced back and forth between here and the
family’s house on Kauai’s Hanalei Bay. Hawaii afforded them a com-
paratively normal-ish existence that Dylan compares to Stand by Me.
“A bunch of kids running around a forest, looking for some-
thing to do, riding bicycles down the street, going to caves
and swimming and surfing and stuff,” he says.
“I would be there and then come here for a few days.” He
says all that shuttling made him a transpacific man of
mystery at school: “Kids would be like, ‘Oh, yeah—you’re
that guy. I went to fifth grade with you for, like, one week
and then you left.’ ”
Dylan and Paris also spent time on their father’s sets
when they were younger—Dylan remembers exploring
the ice palace from Die Another Day—and as adults
they’ve both worked behind the scenes on his films.
But Brosnan has always advised them against careers
in acting.
“Just because it’s fucking hard work,” Brosnan says
with a shrug. “It’s a cross to bear. You’re constructing
and destroying yourself.”
So far the Brosnan boys have taken their father’s
advice and pursued less existentially risky forms of cre-
ative endeavor. Paris—the one with the bee-stung lips—
paints and surfs and has walked runways as a model for
Balmain, Dolce & Gabbana, and Moschino.
Dylan—the tall one with the long hair—posts psyche-
delic demos to SoundCloud, pitches in whenever some-
one’s band needs a bassist, and plays every instrument
on a record that he’ll put out one of these days. (He lists
Chet Baker and Scott Walker as key influences, and still
can’t quite believe that his dad saw Nick Drake play live
in London in the ’70s; he seems way more impressed by
this than by the whole Bond thing.)
In 2020, Dylan and Paris did make headlines (“Meet
Dylan and Paris Brosnan, Pierce Brosnan’s Hunky Sons”)
when they helped pass out hardware as “ambassadors” on
the Golden Globes telecast, a job that’s been a springboard
to the big screen for second-generation stars from Laura
Dern to Dakota Johnson.
But the younger Brosnans seem more drawn to the
parts of filmmaking that happen behind the camera.
Dylan has worked with (text continued on page 84)
←←
OPENING PAGES
FROM LEF T
All clothing by
Fear of God

ON DYL AN
blazer $2,750
jacket $1,695
t-shirt $1,100
pants $1,500

ON PIERCE
coat $2,500
jacket $2,095
pants $1,500
shoes $195

ON PARIS
knit t-shirt $795
pants $1,050
cummerbund $695
shoes $195

←
OPPOSITE PAGE
ON PIERCE
jacket $3,200
shirt $1,700
Dior Men

ON PARIS
jacket $3,900
shirt $750
Gucci

ON DYL AN
jacket $2,550
shirt $1,250
Versace
earrings
(throughout),
his own

→
THIS PAGE
blazer $2,995
pants $1,100
Brunello Cucinelli
sweater $825
Brioni
shoes $145
G.H. Bass Originals
sunglasses $1,150
Fred
watch $8,700
Jaeger-LeCoultre

O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 8 1
 ON PARIS
coat $5,345
jacket $3,945
turtleneck $1,245
pants $1,595
Dolce & Gabbana
sunglasses $280
Gentle Monster

ON DYL AN
coat $7,500
turtleneck $690
pants $1,390
belt $350
glove $850 for pair
Saint Laurent
by Anthony
Vaccarello

ON PIERCE
suit $5,845
shirt $1,425
Dolce & Gabbana

O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 8 3
 jacket $4,590
turtleneck $1,640
pants $1,430
pocket square $195
Tom Ford
sunglasses $340
Gentle Monster
watch $18,800
Jaeger-LeCoultre
ring $3,950
David Yurman
Thom Zimny, the director of docs on Willie Nelson, Elvis, and
Springsteen; Paris is an environmental activist who’s made shorts
on voting and world hunger.
Dylan and Paris say they’ve learned a lot from their father’s exam-
ple—lessons about preparation, passion, confidence, showing up on
time. And humor, Dylan says: “Don’t be afraid to make fun of yourself.”
That in-on-the-joke quality comes through in the elder Brosnan’s
self-deprecating responses any time the conversation veers into craft
talk. It’s always been key to his appeal. He’s there when the movies
need a Pierce Brosnan type to put on a tux, but he also meets our
need to see a Pierce Brosnan type be made to look silly (traversing
a hotel lobby in The Matador wearing nothing but boots, a mus-
tache, and a Speedo). He’s been pelted with fruit by Robin Williams,
transformed into a disembodied head by Martians, and once sang
Abba’s “SOS” to Meryl Streep.
Judging by the trailer, he appears to be having more campy fun in
his first comic book movie. It arrives in October, and he’s allowed to
say very little about it: “Black Adam, Dwayne Johnson, DC Comics.
I play Dr. Fate.”
In the comics, Black Adam is a once-enslaved Egyptian turned
semi-immortal antihero—think Superman as a brooding Middle
Eastern head of state—and Fate is a sorcerer in a mystical gold helmet.
Brosnan did the whole superhero-movie routine, motion capture suit
included, and found it all “humorously and delightfully rewarding.”
They shot in Atlanta—you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Pierce
Brosnan say “Atlanta,” as if savoring the word’s rich terroir—and he
spent his downtime painting “renditions of helmets.” When Brosnan
is working, the pages of his scripts end up filled with drawings and
artwork. “Repetitions of symbols, self-portraits. Emblems of some
Celtic past,” he says, with a self-puncturing chuckle.
8 4 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
The drawings usually find their way into paintings.
He’s painted for years. “It assuages,” he says, “the kind
of solitary life that you lead as an actor making films—
sitting in trailers, sitting in parking lots, sitting in fields.
Up a mountain, down a mountain. Waiting in the wings.
So I create studios wherever I go.”
THE O V E R S I Z E D P A I N T I N G on the back wall of the
room we’re in—a four-panel Pop art-style blowup
of the instructions from a package of disposable foam
earplugs—is from 1995, painted between setups on
GoldenEye, which was six months of loud gunshots
and explosions.
Brosnan tends to paint abstract human faces in
buzzing psychedelic colors. But he’s also intrigued by
vernacular images, like the illustrations on airline safety
cards. “The hieroglyphics of our day,” he muses. “The
woman changing the baby’s nappy. How to escape, how
to put your mask on. There’s a vocabulary and a silent
diction there that lends itself to this type of art.”
He trained to be a commercial artist, before acting
derailed him. He likes Warhol and Lichtenstein but
also Surrealism. He says it was his idea to have Thomas
Crown rob the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the original
script called for him to hit the Guggenheim.
“The first night we got to New York, I had this beau-
tiful apartment,” he says. “Dylan was a little baby. There
was a book on the table. René Magritte. Raining men in
bowler hats.” He called up director John McTiernan and
suggested that having Crown wear a bowler in tribute to
The Son of Man, Magritte’s image of homme obscured by
pomme, would be perfect for the character. “The visible
in the invisible. What you see, what you don’t see.”
His first real gallery show is scheduled for spring 2023
at Seasons LA. Ear Plugs will be in it, although that one’s
already been sold to an undisclosed buyer.
The show will be a true retrospective, Brosnan says; the earliest
works in it will be from 1987, when he first started painting.
I ask what brought that on. The answer snaps us into real life.
“My late wife was in her second year of ovarian cancer,” he says
evenly. “Dealing with that disease.”
His wife was Cassandra Harris, also an actor. They met in the late
’70s. Brosnan was just out of acting school then—a working-class kid
from the banks of the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, who’d
moved to London and found a creative life at the off–West End Oval
House Theatre (where he occasionally worked the spotlight at plays
and dance performances put on by the British Black Panthers). He
and Harris were married in 1980, the same year Brosnan made his
film debut in John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday as Irishman #1,
an IRA thug who holds a gun on Bob Hoskins.
Brosnan soon booked a lead on The Manions of America, an
ABC miniseries about migrating to the United States during the Irish
potato famine. He and Harris took out a second mortgage on their
house in Wimbledon and moved out to Los Angeles to be closer to
whatever opportunities Brosnan’s big American TV job opened up.
He’s told this story a million times. He rents a lime green AMC
Pacer for 50 bucks a week and is driving to his first L.A. audition
when the car craps out somewhere in Laurel Canyon. Pierce walks
down the hill in his good jacket and slacks, makes the meeting, and
books the job: Remington Steele, which makes him a star.
Critics saw the show as longer on style than substance, but its
style holds up—the show is a perfect retro-’80s stream, a Champagne
bubble bath for your brain.
The ratings were good and the gig ran five seasons. Brosnan
splurged on art supplies, which went into a cupboard. “I was on
 jacket $4,600
shirt $750
pants $1,750
Gucci
sunglasses $675
Matsuda
bracelet (top) $795
David Yurman
bracelet
(bottom) $950
Tiffany & Co.

American TV and I was earning a lovely wage and I thought, Now is
the time to paint. And all I did was work.”
Harris got sick around 1986. One night the following year, Brosnan
says, “Carrying the weight and pain and the fear of that illness,
I took out the paints. And started painting. With my fingers. With
my hands, actually.”
That canvas will be in the show. “That’s how we start—heavy. But
beautiful, beautiful.”
REMINGTON STEELE got the attention of the late James Bond producer
Albert Broccoli, who supposedly saw Brosnan’s photo and said, “If he
can act, he’s my guy.” NBC got wind of this and kept Brosnan under
contract for another abbreviated season; the next Bond would be
Timothy Dalton. But Brosnan would be the next next Bond—he took
over the role beginning with 1995’s GoldenEye.
For the record, Brosnan has never had a few drinks and played the
Nintendo 64 game GoldenEye 007—has never played it at all, in fact,
except once, on TV, with Jimmy Fallon. The game might be the most
fondly remembered aspect of the Brosnan Bond era, but the movies
get a bad rap—they’re the last Bonds with a touch of camp, an echo of
Roger Moore’s arched eyebrow.
Around 2004, the Bond producers rang him in the Bahamas to let
him know they were going another way. He was briefly pissed off—“It’s
bloody frustrating that the fuckers pulled out the rug when they did,”
he told Playboy in 2005—and then relieved to be free. His successor,
Daniel Craig, glowered through five films, a haunted-badass Bond for
increasingly un-fun geopolitical times. Now Craig’s time is over, and
jacket $5,845 for suit
shirt $1,425
Dolce & Gabbana
sunglasses $470
Bottega Veneta
→
ON DYL AN
shirt $900
Brioni
tank top $890
another reinvention is imminent. Brosnan Tom Ford
answers the question he knows is coming: pants $695
“Who should do it? I don’t care,” he says. Ralph Lauren
“It’ll be interesting to see who they get, who Purple Label
the man shall be,” Brosnan continues, in a sunglasses $650
tone that indicates it’s maybe not actually that Dita
interesting. “Whoever he be, I wish him well.” bracelet (top) $795
“I saw the last one,” he says, “and I saw David Yurman
Skyfall. I love Skyfall. I’m not too sure about bracelet
the last one.” A pause. “Daniel always gives (bottom) $950
of his heart. Very courageous, very strong. Tiffany & Co.
But…” he says. The thought goes unfinished. ON PIERCE
Paris had come bounding into the room, overshirt $233
fresh from a fashion fitting for this story, Lessless
wearing immense furry boots that could shirt $775
be Flintstones props. End of Bond talk, to Brioni
Pierce’s obvious relief. pants $1,295
Brosnan tells Paris about a movie he’ll be Giorgio Armani
shooting in September. belt $395
“You could get a job on the movie,” he says. Ralph Lauren
“I’ll be another P.A.,” Paris says. “The Purple Label
lunch runner.” ON PARIS
It’s a joke, but it sounds like he might jacket $4,000
make it happen, just so he can go off to shirt $570
make a film without saying goodbye to his pants $1,370
son again. Brosnan never knew his father, a Louis Vuitton Men’s
carpenter who left the family not long after sunglasses $700
Pierce was born; his sons have Dita
lived a very different life, person-
ally as well as socioeconomically. Brosnan has a painting
studio out in the garage, and sometimes he and Paris go
in there and paint together—Paris likes to work with an
oil stick, homaging Basquiat.
“He just devours these canvases,” Brosnan says.
“It just fills me with the greatest pride, fatherly pride, to
be painting alongside him, just to be quiet in the garage or
wherever we’ve painted. It’s a really beautiful experience.”
Paris and Dylan have grown up watching their
father make art on any available surface—drawing on
tablets, painting on their shoes, on Paris’s surfboards.
They’re excited to see his work on view in a gallery after
all these years.
“He’s, like, evolving into a legit artist,” Paris says, with
zero irony, “and taking it to the top.”
His father laughs and, with more than a little irony,
says, “Thank you.”
For now there’s still the day job. Brosnan gets up, grabs
a wooden cane with silver accents, an old Tod’s briefcase,
and takes a few steps, dropping into the stooped posture of
an 89-year-old. He’s about to go to Belfast and Normandy
to film The Last Rifleman, based on the true story of an
octogenarian Royal Navy veteran who escaped an old folks’
home and legged it from East Sussex to northern France for
the 70th anniversary of D-Day. The cane and the grip are his
tools for this performance, along with “a lot of prosthetics.”
“I found a wonderful company ,” Brosnan says. “They
do great work. They just made Kenneth Branagh look like
Boris Johnson—it’s unbelievable.”
He whips out his phone, scrolls through photos, then
finds it: a tight headshot, resembling a smiling weathered
potato with the sharp, bright blue eyes of Pierce Brosnan.
He makes quite a charming old man.
ALEX PAPPADEMAS is a longtime GQ contributor and host
of the podcast The Big Hit Show.
for pierce brosnan: grooming
by david cox using kevin
murphy. for dylan and paris
brosnan: grooming by
heather-rae bang using
balmain hair couture.
set design by brian crumley
for rob strauss studio.
produced by isaac féria.
 DI EGO LUNA
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 3 6
For Luna, it was gratifying to see the world
embrace the film, especially one so steeped in
Mexico’s history and culture. “We were tell-
ing a very specific story [and] you had to read
subtitles, and audiences responded,” he says.
“I suddenly realized there was a chance that
specificity will take you far.”
Y Tu Mamá También’s legacy endures in
everything from aesthetic Tumblr GIF sets to
film-school curricula. I tell him that I studied
the film in college—a fact that horrifies him.
“I was a part of your textbooks at school?”
Luna says, his voice rising in faux despair as he
sinks into his chair. “I’m ancient!”
attentive to Mexico’s
L U N A I S PA R T I C U L A R LY
film industry, having witnessed how a number
of films from the late ’90s and early aughts—
Sexo, Pudor y Lágrimas; Amores Perros; Y Tu
Mamá También—became phenomena that
birthed a movement. “People went to cinemas
to see stories where they could see themselves
and their context represented,” he explains.
“Back then, there were very few films that the
government wanted to fund. That control is
not there anymore.”
But despite the greater creative freedom,
he is aware of the challenges that Mexican
filmmaking currently faces. “We don’t have a
healthy industry these days. It’s very difficult
to get your money back from the box office,”
says Luna. “The amount of pressure the major
[blockbusters] have on cinemas leaves very lit-
tle space for Spanish-speaking movies.”
Even if Luna will forever be one of the faces
of the New Mexican Cinema, he eschews the
pedestal of national representation. “I don’t
like thinking in passports,” he says. “I don’t
think my passport defines anything about me,
besides that I was born in a place at a certain
day and certain time….” He stops himself. It’s
an impossible paradox: He’s trying to avoid
thinking nationalistically, but he recognizes
how his roles have allowed others like him to
feel seen. “How do you say arraigo?”
He looks over at me, immediately clocks
my cluelessness, and reaches for his phone to
ask Siri:
“Arraigo in English.”
The word translates to “roots,” but that
definition doesn’t sit right with him. It’s insuf-
ficient; arraigo is something more ingrained.
It’s one of those words whose connotations
run deeper than what an internet translation
can convey.
“But let’s use roots,” Luna continues.
“I think your roots can’t just be from one place.
My mom was British, my father is Mexican. As
soon as I was 18 years old, I started going to
8 8 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2
Spain, then to the States [for work]. I’ve lived
in many places, but I’ll always call Mexico
home. When I’m here in Spain, I relate to this
country as if I were a local. I think we have to
be very careful of this nationalism that’s very
dangerous these days.”
Every night after the play here in Madrid,
he greets fans outside the stage door. There
was someone who came back a second time
to bring their partner, others who flew all the
way from France and Italy to watch him. Luna
became acquainted with the city’s thriving
Latin American community—Colombians,
Venezuelans, Peruvians.
“As much as the States is the region to
migrate to from Mexico and Central America,
countries in South America tend to look
more to Spain as a place to move to,” he says.
“I ended up understanding a little more of
what Latin America is like being in Madrid.
Latin Americans interact more here than we
do in our [countries]. We know very little
about each other, but Madrid congregates so
many nationalities.”
He adds: “This doesn’t happen anywhere
in the world, where you can cross 20 borders
and you’re still speaking the same language,
right? At the same time, it’s kind of sad, how
little we [Mexicans] travel—our art, our sto-
ries, our work. When you’re in Madrid, you
realize how all these different communities
interact [with each other] in a very interest-
ing and rich way.”
T H E N E X T D AY, I see Luna at a modest villa
outside the city. We’re surrounded by thick,
well-read books that line the walls: Historia
de España, an architectural atlas of Warsaw,
a biography of American engineer John
DeLorean. Luna tells me he wants to direct,
something he’s done a few times in the past.
“It’s something I’m missing,” he says, hoping
to create something more personal. “We have
this saying in Mexico,” he says.“Jugamos como
nunca y perdimos como siempre. It means, ‘We
played like we haven’t ever played before, and
we lost like we always lose….’” He trails off,
unsure. “It sounds better in Spanish.”
Luna explains that the phrase comes from
soccer. He felt it during the 2018 World Cup,
when Mexico faced off against Germany, who
were among the favorites to win the tourna-
ment. Mexico somehow did the improbable
when Hirving “Chucky” Lozano scored a goal
in the first half.
Luna remembers the moment clearly—
he had 30 people in his house, all crowded
around the TV, just waiting for something to
go wrong. “Until the last second, there was a
feeling we were going to draw, that they were
going to score somehow,” he recalls. The say-
ing, then, describes the “feeling that you’re
never going to be able to win. But that was the
day I went, like, Okay, something is different.”
Germany’s attack grew desperate, but
Mexico’s defense was stronger. The Mexicans
ended up winning 1-0.
“And then we lost the next day,” Luna says,
laughing. “But in that game we beat Germany,
the unbeatable team. And I felt like things
could change.”
IANA MURRAY is a writer based in the U.K.
L EG L E N GTH E N I N G
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 7 7
John is apologetic. He was just so eager to
be the newer, taller him already. “There’s a
mental discipline that you have to have,” Dr. D
would tell me in private. “It’s like training for
the marathon.”
Wouldn’t It Be Cool?…
I first discovered leg lengthening almost
15 years ago, when I was just out of college.
Like a lot of short guys, I simply googled the
phrase “How to grow taller as an adult?” At
the time, part of me conflated being short
with being less desirable. Sometimes I’d fan-
tasize about winning the lottery, getting the
procedure, and disappearing for a year. Truth
be told, my height is maybe the one thing I’ve
ever felt regularly insecure about. The only
times when it really bothers me are when it
precludes me from doing stuff: like dating a
taller woman I had feelings for years ago. Or
making my frosh-soph basketball team when
I was five three and all my friends seemed
to have grown six inches overnight. Or, even
now, fetching the Instant Pot tucked away in
the high cabinet without a stool.
Then there’s my wife—cool, beautiful, con-
fident, smarter than I’ll ever be—who towers
over me at five feet nine. We were old friends
who became more than that, and now we’ve
been together for over a decade. Before we
got together, I once quasi-drunkenly blurted
out, “If I was taller we’d probably be together
already, ha-ha,” and to this day, I still feel like
a dick for having said that.
And so the fact that these guys are so willing
to throw down six figures and endure months
of pain makes all kinds of cosmic sense to me.
It’s not like you wake up one day and realize
that you’re short. It’s more of a slow-onset neu-
rosis. In high school you watch as all your peers
shoot up a few inches while you keep hoping
that your growth spurt is imminent…. But
then it never happens. The hope doesn’t fade
so much as it calcifies within you. For some peo-
ple it weighs them down. Maybe it makes them
angry, like Chad. For most short people, there’s
always a part of us that feels like a physically
incomplete version of who we were supposed
to be. You, but at 90 percent scale.
One night a few months after I got back
from Vegas, at home in Brooklyn, I asked my
wife what she would think if I were to mirac-
ulously find a spare hundred thousand to get
the surgery myself.
“I mean, if you wanted to get the surgery,
I wouldn’t be like, no,” she replied. “But that
money would do very nicely in [our son’s] col-
lege savings.”
Then I told her I had a confession: That
I felt bad for having said, early on, that we’d
 L EG L E N GT HE N I NG C O NT IN UED A L E X A N D R I A O CA S I O - C O RT E Z

probably be together already if I were taller
than her.
She paused. “But you shouldn’t,” she said.
“It’s funny! I thought you meant it as a joke,
so I took it as a joke, mostly. And I don’t think
it was true.”
In what way?
“I knew that deep down, eventually, I came
around to the fact we could be 80 years old
and still together. And at that point, we’d just
be hunched over, wrinkly, droopy. Having that
longer-term perspective…it was easy.”
What do you think it was that made you get
over my being short?
“I guess there’s no one thing. It’s just chang-
ing a mindset. There are some annoying lit-
tle life adjustments. But am I mad that, like,
I can’t wear heels to a wedding again? That my
feet don’t hurt whenever I go out? That’s fine.”
And in that moment, I felt six feet four.
Perhaps our spiritual heights are more
important than reality, anyway. During our
dinner, I asked Dr. D whether he’d ever con-
sider getting the procedure himself.
“No,” he said. But then he hedged. Maybe
if his kids were grown up, and if the load-
bearing nail gets approved by the FDA, and
if there were someone he trusted enough to
insert said nail, then…maybe? Surgeons from
all over the country are interested in learn-
ing how to perform the procedure, he said,
and a few of them would love to franchise the
LimbplastX brand.
He noted that his wife, who’s five four, some-
times teases him about getting her legs done.
“She’s like, ‘Wouldn’t that be cool if I was a little
bit taller?’ ”
There are some minor annoyances worth
noting should you suddenly find yourself a
taller person. John has to get the height on his
driver’s license changed, for example. His knees
graze the seat in front of him when he flies
coach. And his own kids all clown on him. They
even gave him a nickname: Inspector Gadget.
Now other people are starting to notice
something different about him. Recently he
ran into his cousin, a friend, and their dates
at dinner. It had been six months since he’d
seen them. His excuse was that he’d broken
his hip.
They went back to the friend’s apartment,
and John found himself in the kitchen, alone
with his friend, who is about six feet. “He leaned
in to me,” says John. “He says, ‘Look, man, I’ve
known you for three years. Never have you been
able to look me eye to eye. What’s up?’ ”
John looked him up and down—and started
laughing. “To this day, I still haven’t told him,”
John says mischievously. “I’ve just been like,
Maaan, you’ve gotten shorter.”
CHRIS GAYOMALI is a GQ articles editor.
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 5 0
for the night. She leans most heavily on the
relationships she’s had the longest, the people
who knew her before she became AOC.
“I work very hard at trying to cultivate a
nonattachment to all of this,” she said. “I try
to nurture nonattachment, so that—I think a
lot of it is accepting that if all of this goes away
tomorrow, I will not have an identity crisis
[over the idea] that who I am to me is separate
from the material trappings of this work.”
She met her partner, Riley Roberts, when
they were both 19 and undergrads at Boston
University. When they started dating later
in their 20s, neither of them suspected what
they’d eventually be swept up in. “For him to
experience us dating when I was still working
as a waitress and a bartender through now
and seeing how the world responds [to me],
I think has been a very eye-opening experi-
ence for him as well,” she said.
Roberts has largely avoided the public eye
as he and Ocasio-Cortez have adjusted to
shuttling, these past few years, between New
York and Washington, D.C. Just prior to the
pandemic, after a long lobbying campaign
from Ocasio-Cortez, the pair added Deco, the
aforementioned French bulldog, to the mix.
“I have very few dreams—like straight-up
dreams—in my life,” she told me. “Since I was
a child, I dreamed about having my very own
dog.” When she spoke of Deco, she displayed
more earnest excitement than at any other
point in our conversations. “Dogs have a way
of evening out the lows. It’s kind of like a hard
floor, and I definitely felt like my lows would
be lower before him.”
Late last year, Ocasio-Cortez and Roberts
found themselves discussing their New Year’s
resolutions. Riley had a particular priority
in mind. “It’s my resolution that perhaps
we can be engaged by the end of the year,”
she recalled him telling her. “And I said, ‘Oh,
really? Well, you’re going to have to woo me.
You’re going to have to convince me, after all
this time, why I should.’ ” Ocasio-Cortez told
me that she never considered marriage inev-
itable. Her relationship with Roberts, who
is white, raised its own particular questions
about identity and belonging: She wasn’t
positive that an intercultural, interracial
relationship would be the right fit for her.
And then there was the fact that their lives
had changed so much, so fast. A lot of men,
she told me, only believe that they want to
be with an independent, successful woman.
“The moment you start being yourself, they
kind of freak out,” she said. “I think it causes
a conflict within them that they didn’t even
anticipate. It’s not even a deception. It’s just,
they uncover insecurities that they didn’t
know were there.”
When she first ran for office, Ocasio-Cortez
wondered if that was destined to become the
story of herself and Riley. “In fact, the oppo-
site happened,” she said. “He has been so sup-
portive and willing and deeply engaging. He’s
not a witness to this. He dives into the fray for
himself in that he uses what we go through
as opportunities for personal growth. And
it’s incredible.”
In April they got engaged while on a vaca-
tion in Puerto Rico. “I feel like I won the men
lottery in my life,” she went on, answering a
question I hadn’t asked, listing off men in her
life whose examples she admires: the father
who set the gold standard; the cousins she
grew up with in the South Bronx, who over-
came a lifetime’s worth of adversity and are
now raising children of their own; and even
her chief of staff, Gerardo Bonilla Chavez, who
leads her team with grace. “It is the presence
of good men that has shown me what kind of
men are possible in this world,” she told me at
the end of one of our conversations.
It was hard not to hear in these remarks
an expression of the core belief at the base of
her broader political ideology and outlook:
The reality we wish for may be closer than
we think.
Sure, Ocasio-Cortez’s political project
would see us fundamentally restructure our
society. But is that any less realistic than the
hope that we’ll one day eradicate misogyny,
racism, or homophobia? Are progressive fan-
tasies about replacing our nation’s guns and
capitalistic greed with guaranteed jobs and
health care any more far-fetched than the abo-
litionist’s vision of an America without slav-
ery or the suffragist’s dream of a democracy
in which her vote is counted? The fight always
seems less impossible, the congresswoman
reminded me, once you realize that we’re not
starting from scratch.
“The world that we’re fighting for is already
here,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “It may not be all
here, it may not be the majority of what’s here,
but it is undeniably here.”
WESLEY LOWERY is a GQ correspondent and a
Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter.

GQ IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2022 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VOLUME 92, NO. 8. GQ (ISSN 0016-6979) is published monthly
(except for combined issues in December/January and June/July) by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Roger Lynch,
Chief Executive Officer; Pamela Drucker Mann, Global Chief Revenue Officer & President, U.S. Revenue; Jackie Marks, Chief Financial Officer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post
Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001. POSTMASTER: SEND ALL UAA TO CFS (SEE DMM 507.1.5.2); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address
corrections to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE INQUIRIES: Please write to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717, call 800-289-9330,
or e-mail subscriptions@gq.com. Please give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks after receipt of order. Address all editorial, business, and production
correspondence to GQ Magazine, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For reprints, please e-mail reprints@condenast.com or call Wright’s Media, 877-652-5295. For re-use permissions, please e-mail contentlicensing@
condenast.com or call 800-897-8666. Visit us online at www.gq.com. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines on the World Wide Web, visit www.condenastdigital.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully
screened companies that offer products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, please advise us at P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717 or call 800-289-9330.

GQ IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED ARTWORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS,
AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ARTWORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS,
UNLESS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY GQ IN WRITING. MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND OTHER MATERIALS SUBMITTED MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A SELF-ADDRESSED STAMPED ENVELOPE.

O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 G Q . C O M 8 9
 FINAL SHOT

For our story on

Devon Turnbull
and his handmade
sound systems,
see page 72.

9 0 G Q . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 P H O T O G R A P H B Y I S A S A A L A B I