JOSH GLASS MAKE IT LAST

A selected portfolio of writing clips, special projects, and publications by Joshua Glass.

[joshglassmakeitlast]

“HIGH FIVE: Shiloh Fernandez”

The creative romance of the drinkery—one that once milked the likes of Faulkner, who was always in arm’s reach of a bottle of whiskey, or social butterfly Truman Capote, never one to miss an early-afternoon martini—is no longer something that exists today. Rather than admitting liquid inspi- ration, bars have been built to be a pleasure zone for the sloppy, often serving as the birthplace for bad decision and a cringe-worthy point of context once clarity has finally been caught. Like a bitter smack of light the morning after, this is too true for most of us. For the rising actor Shiloh Fernandez, though, the bar is still a blessing, having met his muse for the first film of his own intent after a fateful walkabout one evening in Auckland, New Zealand. “I heard a beautiful voice coming from the bar behind me. I went in and met this unique guy named Graham Candy. He was only playing his second or third show ever, but he was clearly someone incredibly special.” Days afterward, Fernandez had the idea for “Queen of Carthage,” a thriller co-written by, co-produced by, and starring himself, which, in almost metaphysical reflection, places Fernandez as Amos, an American on-the-run that happens upon Candy at a café. What ensues is a traumatic chase to protect new love while safeguarding a buried past.

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As in the case of “Queen of Carthage,” the 30-year-old actor has mostly been seen in the tense shadows of frightening filmatic roles, having first found mainstream success in Leonardo DiCaprio’s dark 2011 production of “Red Riding Hood,” after an early run headlining several festival-bait indepen- dent films like “Deadgirl,” and “Skateland.” He then starred opposite Jane Levy in the 2013 reboot of the supernatural horror “Evil Dead,” as David, Levy’s detached brother, who both unknowingly provoke a nightmare of demons while secluded in a remote cabin in the woods. Given his brooding features— sharply cut, angular cheekbones with just a touch of facial hair allied with a biting stare and looming stance—Fernandez’s subversive on-screen swipes thus far make sense. This fall, his newest film, “We Are Your Friends,” the buddy film turned music drama, brings the California-native to his most alien role ever: Zac Efron’s best friend. As fate would have it, it all happened after a night out.

“By chance, I first met [director] Max Joseph outside of a bar. He had apparently already offered me a role in a short film that my agents never told me about, and was meeting someone else that night to interview for ‘We Are Your Friends,’” remembers Fernandez. “When it came around to finally casting, Max had mentioned that he had me in mind when writing the role. I am such a fan that it was really him that peaked my interest in the picture.”

In the film, Fernandez plays LA Valley boy Ollie, a young, wannabe actor that grew up with his best band of bros and hasn’t left town since. The story follows Cole (Efron’s character) as he struggles from amateur DJ to electronic dance music superstar, paralleling the shattering of his crew’s stained glass worlds. “His aspirations aren’t quite as high as Cole’s when the film begins, but he’s still going for it,” says Fernandez. “He is really the first friend who longs for a change. As soon as he gives up on his dreams, he really gives up.” In a world of celebrity DJs—Paris Hilton reportedly makes $347K an hour to spin—Rob Kardashian-designed socks, and hypersensitive teen tech nerds, it’s an “Entourage” for a new age. Coincidentally, both films feature the inciting Emily Ratajkowski as a modern Helen of Troy. Growing up in Redwood Valley, a small NorCal town of no more than 1,500 people, and having not touched the inter- net until almost 18 years old, the tale of millennials hustling for fame took a bit of an adjustment, personally and professionally, for Fernandez, yet still there were tinges of nostalgia.

“This was a large film with lots of intricate char- acters and moments, a real ensemble, and it was all coming from Max’s head. It was a challenge to make sure we were all serving his vision,” says Fernandez. “He knew what he wanted, even when it came to what kind of necklace I was wearing or what kind of e-cigarette I smoked. It was [also] a throwback for me to a time when you were always with your friends: morning, noon, and night. Similar to Cole and Ollie, I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left home. It took a lot of luck and coincidences to find myself where I am today.”

Admittedly not a natural-born EDM fan— Fernandez affirms that he did attend a concert for preliminary research—the actor is more partial to country music. It’s partly from his childhood—“I grew up in the country and have a large nostalgia for that lifestyle, especially now that I spend most of my time in big cities,” he says—but it’s also a large part of his M.O. today. “I love how country songs can sneak large, worldly messages into soft sounding ballads,” says Fernandez. “I love older country musicians who sing with such heart and soul from the darkest corners of their being.” With this film and the next nearing few, that sort of guised emotional intricacy is exactly what Fernandez aims at jam-packing into his projects—be they Hollywood-sized or more inti- mate in their approach—so order another round and get ready, it’s his turn to say cheers.

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“HIGH FIVE: Michael Shannon”

A long time student of that quiet class of handsome, second-string players that you see almost everywhere but need a quick Google frisking to jolt the exact name—affiliated classmates would be listed, but therein lies the qualification— Michael Shannon has done it all: from Superman’s villain in “Man of Steel” to Nelson Van Alden, a “Boardwalk Empire” puritanical agent, and even an Oscar-nominated supporting role in “Revolutionary Road.” At long last, though, a storm of his own brews now for the 40-year-old Brooklyn father, as he moseys into fall with several cards dripping down the sleeves of his graduation robe, including four feature film releases, a Brett Neveu play in the works, two more major movies at the bat for 2016, and his very own Prada campaign. It’s all completely weird for the actor, he freely admits, who on a regular evening, like most men his age, finds himself in jeans and a T-shirt, washing the dishes after his daughters have eaten dinner and taking out cat litter to the trash.

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“It’s almost beyond comprehension to me,” Shan- non says. “I think back to where I come from, you know, growing up in Kentucky, playing in a creek out in the backyard, and trying to catch crawdaddies. Going from being covered in mud in Lexington to being a Prada model now ... it just makes life so fasci- nating and bizarre.”

The opportunity was serendipitous to say the least for the actor, who months after the final imag- es—an austere, black and white series by noted fashion photographer Craig McDean that exploits Shannon’s naturally dramatic presence—were released, remains unsure of how exactly the deal between himself and the fashion conglomerate came together. It may have been initiated by make- up artist and photographer François Nars. It may have been Miuccia Prada’s own fondness for the slick art of film. But from even just a glance at the actor, who towers a cool 6’4”, on set, though, the fascination immediately reveals its origin.

Shannon has an unobtrusive energy about him; one that is muted and serious in its somber affecta- tion until he transforms in the blink of an eye and clap of a slate. Persuasively, he becomes the off-kil- ter extremes: be it the loud-mouthed Rick Carver, the no-nonsense real estate shark and antagonist in Ramin Bahrani’s upcoming film about the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, “99 Homes,” or as Dane Wells, the real-life New Jersey officer rallying his force to support his dying cop counterpart (Julianne Moore) as she fights the Ocean County legislature for domestic partner benefits in “Freeheld.” Shannon’s highly-anticipated roles early next year as the desperate watchdog father in need to protect his gifted son from a paranoid government and extreme religious sect in the supernatural Jeff Nichols thriller, “Midnight Special,” and beside Kevin Spacey in “Elvis & Nixon” as the departed rock ‘n’ roll legend, should also be mentioned, though those seem worlds away from his other immediate fall comedic features, “She’s Funny That Way” and “The Night Before.”

“It was a very intimidating prospect to play Elvis Presley, because I didn’t want it to be a joke or stupid,” Shannon says, who, despite being passion- ate about music and even leading his own Brooklyn-based band, Corporal, confesses he had appre- hensions about the role. “I kind of got talked into it. When I finally committed to it, though, I started spending time with a fellow named Jerry Schilling, who was Elvis’ best friend and took me to Graceland and around Memphis to show me where this great man came from—I just kind of dove in.” It was a very different process than “Freeheld,” where the actor similarly shadowed the living Wells to prepare. “Dane wasn’t interested in me trying to imitate him or talk the way he talked. He just wanted the essence of that relationship to come through. More than anything he wanted people to know how much he cared,” Shannon says. “With Elvis, you’re chasing a very elusive ghost. Even someone like Jerry, who spent a lot of time with Elvis, said that he still main- tained a lot of mystery about himself. I believe he genuinely cared about the people he surrounded himself with, but I think being Elvis was an incredibly lonely experience.”

Buried or alive, the ripples of these projects hit Shannon in varying disturbances. With one hand he still defends his under the radar status—“The god’s honest truth is that a lot of people still have abso- lutely no idea who I am,” he says, vaguely reassured— and on the other he verifies that this is the exact moment in his career he has been waiting for: “Sometimes people get worried about oversaturating the market,” he admits. “Is this too much Mike Shan- non at one time? I think all my movies are very differ- ent and that they’re all very compelling in their own way. At this point I feel like I’m bringing something to the table.” Whichever Michael Shannon you opt to accept—the humble father or the back-to-back booker—surely it’s time to remember the name.

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“HIGH FIVE: Boyd Holbrook”

Seen by a spiraling cinematic eye, the suave Boyd Holbrook glides down a night-blanketed street in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, awashed by a prismatic shower of luminous neons and the city’s inherently balletic inertia, for Dior Homme’s Fall 2015 film, “Paris XVIE.” The event marks a measurement of sorts for Holbrook, whose hands stretch toward the fashion house’s seasonal crown yet again, after baptism originally on the runway in July 2002, then again, officially, as Dior Homme’s Spring/Summer 2003 campaign star. Rather than the demure model with the boyishly European face and long, wispy hair, though, the artist turned couture craze turned actor reinstates himself with the brand 13 years later, taller, scruffier, the star of Netflix’s new crime drama “Narcos,” and a whole new man.

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At the advice of Michael Shannon—coincidentally another Essential Homme cover star—Holbrook was working as a stagehand for a small theatre company when he was first found. “Basically, I was broke,” he recalls. “One day a random girl asked to take my photo to send to a modeling agency, and I was literally like, ‘What’s that?’ I’m not joking, I didn’t know what that meant. About a month later some- body called me, and I ended up doing my first Dior Homme campaign.” A dramatic precursor to his career in entertainment, fashion first lodged Holbrook on the figurative cultural map—starring in campaigns for the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier, Versus, and Hugo Boss and walking for Helmut Lang, Gucci, FENDI, Dolce&Gabbana, and more—but though it certainly was fun, it wasn’t his passion. “I did model- ing for a while. It was a luxury to be able to do the things I wanted to do because of it.” Holbrook says. “I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in New York, but it’s expensive.” For nearly a decade or so, Holbrook entertained the smoldering tango that is life as a top model off and on; using it at times to fuel his man of mystery curriculum vitae and, even more frequently, resting it coolly on the backburner. All the while, he attended a film production course at New York University, drama program at Esper Studio, and worked as a sculptor for the artist Fernando Mastrangelo.

Just like Holbrook’s collision with Shannon years earlier—they met at a department store—it’s life’s most random records, and how they are contextual- ized and positioned, as if pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle—that motivate notice. His first filmography credit came after presenting a script that he had written to Gus Van Sant. “I easily thought he’d want to direct it,” laughs Holbrook, “but instead he asked me to be in one of his movies.” That was “Milk.” When Holbrook happened upon Mastrangelo’s work in a Chelsea art gallery, he was so taken that he gave the artist a call for a job. That turned into a show of Holbrook’s own artwork at RARE gallery in 2008. Other than spearheading a brief traipse as an artist—a title that Holbrook insists would get him assassinated—the work under Mastrangelo would eventually help him land his biggest role yet.

Based on a true story, “Narcos” follows the growth of cocaine cartels from Colombia across the world, and law enforcement’s brutal battle to over- take the organized network of crime. “When I was working for Fernando, he made a life-size sculpture of a Colombian farmer picking cocoa leaves that was cast in pure cocaine,” says Holbrook. “I had done a lot of research to know, not just the grandiose effects of the drug, but how it affects the people that farm it. I think [the producers] were looking at some- one else to play the part, but they saw that I really understood it.” The actor stars as the real-life DEA legend Steve Murphy who, alongside partner Javier Peña, brought the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel to justice. “It’s not about America coming down to save the day—truth is, if we weren’t there, there wouldn’t have been an Escobar—it’s a two hand deal, not a one-way street,” says Holbrook. “I was excited to play an anchored character; a guy who’s not very flashy. He’s just trying to make sense of things in a world that is foreign to him.”

For Holbrook, who spent a week in training at the Marine Corps Base Quantico, an FBI breeding ground in Virginia, and six whole months filming the ten-episode series on location in Colombia, foreign sounds just about right. “We were the first actors to ever be allowed at Quantico. They have a whole city built inside this complex, and they do these crazy routines,” says Holbrook. “We were shooting rifles, doing home invasions, and going into raids. I got shot in the head with a blank gun because my drug deal went bad. It’s real. It was fantastic.”

Though the show is literally miles apart from the loving lens of Dior’s wandering Paris or the actor’s other big fall hit—“Jane’s Got A Gun,” the Gavin O’Connor western about old memories, bad boys, and the fear of revenge, also starring Natalie Port- man and Ewan McGregor this September—it’s of no difference for the Appalachia-born 33-year-old, who lives these days out of two suitcases, instead of designer’s freshly-made first looks. “Yeah, I’m not really concerned with people watching me. It’s not why I do this job,” Holbrook says. “If you’re watching me for six hours or two hours or even just a few moments, it’s not important. I’m involved because there’s something that I want to explore. I do it because it’s my trade.”

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“HIGH FIVE: Future”

"I don't want to know what life is like sober,” Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn, the hip-hop producer, singer, songwriter, and rapper known widely as Future, oftentimes Future Hendrix, says from a bustling downtown New York photo studio as his bodyguard or staff photographer, the title not particularly clear, snaps off-duty shots of him in some sort of strange, rhythmic form. It’s a muggy morning in July, the day, in fact, just before the Atlanta-born rapper’s big reveal: an L.A. Reid-hosted mega-event in TriBeCa, where Future would be debuting his highly-anticipated third studio album, “DS2” (Dirty Sprite 2), to the city’s chichi and surprise releasing it to the rest of the world at midnight. With all this looming, it would make sense if the artist was nervous, or at least tense, but on this unavoidably back sweat type of ill-feeling summer day—the kind where the random pellets of rain just sputter sodden heat—Future isn’t. Pausing only to pull out a fat wad of clean, crisp green bills and, in a moment of silence, count out at least two dozen fifties before handing the pile to a friend, he continues, “I need to stop doing drugs. But [without them] life is boring. I want to be more entertained. I want to have more fun.”

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It isn’t clear if the cash hand off, the frankness, the entourage—all of it in fact—is an act. It very well might be. A cardinal reconfiguration of the rapper in a new, tougher skin. Prior to his most recent depar- ture from the public eye, he had buttoned up his act, so to speak, swapping head-scratching, body-grind- ing mixtapes for radio-ready, R&B-slanting love songs and had a child with and a nine-month engagement to songstress Ciara. After the dissolve of the relationship, and the swarm of rumors that followed, Future took some time to himself. Today might just be a marketing-concocted comeback, both emotionally and as a hard rapper. It’s feasible, but my gut doesn’t think so. On his word, Future, today and forward, truly only wants to do “whatever the fuck [he] wants,” even, in a quick moment of paranoia, silencing the conversation and flipping the entire moment on me. He’s a man without repercus- sions, with a brain that can’t quiet its own monsoons. It’s a publicist’s nightmare, and a stan’s long-awaited dream. Dubious or not, one thing is certain: this Future is not the same.

“I’m in a different space now than where I’ve been before. I don’t have any limitations,” he says. “I’m open for discussion, I’m open to try new things, and I’m saying things that people thought I would never talk about.” That vulnerability resonates in “DS2,” an aggressive U-turn from his previous studio release, “Honest,” which dropped last April and featured guest spots from Pharrell and Kanye West, culminat- ing in a record that had more pop-y feels than ferocious verses. “When I was working on that I was in a rela- tionship, and when you’re in a partnership you can’t say certain things. You compromise certain things,” says Future. “Now I’m not in a compromising posi- tion. I want to say my shit.” The new album, he describes, was manufactured with that same emotional current he first roused in its mixtape predecessors, “Dirty Sprite,” in 2011 and “Beast,” from January of earlier this year. “I needed to give my day-one fans something they could be with and feel like is a complete storyline through everything,” he says, “I’m showing my improvement. I’m showing that I have no fear. I’m showing that I’m here to stay.”

Because of this, “DS2” just might ironically be a more genuine glimpse into the damaged void of the rapper than “Honest” or anything before that. Returning to the complex and often dark emotional landscape the artist was once known for architect- ing, the album, which earned him his first No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, exploits remorse into a drug-fueled rhythmic disconnect. “Tryna make a pop star and they made a monster,” he raps in “I Serve the Base.” But as far down that these painful lyrics and bluesy, cannonading hip-hop beats dive, they also turn up just as tall. In “Where Ya At,” a vengeful call-out track featuring Drake, who the rapper shared a six-city tour with earlier this summer, Future shouts “Serve a lot of dog food, call you a mutt / Where your ass was at dog, when I was on my come-up?” and the album’s first single, “Blow a Bag,” is not without his favorite mentionings of Rolls Royces, African diamonds, and purple codeine. Rather than appealing to your pity for his pain or demanding help from his demons, though, Future has but one request from the release: take a seat. Join him on this journey. “Don’t take the things that are my mistakes and make them your mistakes. Take the greater in me and take my flaws and don’t make ‘em yours,” he says. “Learn from my experi- ence.” “DS2” is Future’s demise, but it also most certainly is his long-awaited triumph.

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“HIGH FIVE: Xavier Dolan”

When Xaver Dolan first returned to Montreal after presenting his third feature film, “Laurence Anyways”—the Kubrickian tale of ’90s nostalgia and love damned from gender—at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, his third occupancy at the highfalutin apex of both worlds of film and soci- ety, he was, for starters, flustered. The movie had sustained ranging reviews from both the coveted jury and international critics, and although Suzanne Clément—who stars as Frédérique, the title charac- ter’s girlfriend that fights to stay beside Laurence’s side during the transition from man to woman— received a Best Actress accolade, and Dolan himself won the festival’s Queer Palm Award, the movie didn’t collect its anticipated Un Certain Regard distinction. For the soft-spoken, 26-year-old actor, auteur, and ambassador for fashion brand Louis Vuitton, it was a bizarre position to find himself in, after his previous two works, “I Killed My Mother” and “Heartbeats,” seized palm-cradled honors across the art and cinema landscape. “I didn’t know whether the movie was good or not anymore,” remembers Dolan. “It had been a very demanding journey just to get it there. It was great for Suzanne, but it was all almost painful.” It was an ego check for the indie darling, to say the least, haunting a fall from grace earlier in his career, after his debut as a child star at the age of four.

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“A set is a very peculiar environment for a child, made of so many flamboyant, outrageous idiosyn- crasies. It’s like an alternate reality. You’re a kid, but people are talking about their girlfriends and you find out that people can be gay and that they can be doing drugs and you know that before anyone else,” says Dolan. “They treat you like an adult, and you start speaking like them. Then you’re back at school and people call you pretentious, but really it’s that you are discombobulated between the adults that you are admiring and the kids that suddenly seem to be living another life: a life you don’t want to live. So when it stops and you’re back in reality and audi- tions are not happening—it’s a weird thing to say that the phone isn’t ringing when you’re seven, but it wasn’t—it’s a very hard rupture.” His solution then, “like a 45-year-old woman in Hollywood,” he jokes, was to create the opportunities himself. Dropping out of school and manipulating a housing loan to fund his first film, “I Killed My Mother,” at the age of 19, serving as writer, director, producer, and star of the production. Years later, after “Laurence Anyways,” his solution was to reinvent himself yet again. “I was a little lost, but I knew that the next thing I did had to be something completely new,” says Dolan.

With this, Dolan set about adapting “Tom at the Farm,” his fourth feature, which debuted at the 70th Venice International Film Festival in September 2013, but finally makes its U.S. distribution this fall, from Michel Marc Bouchard theatre piece to taut and twisted cinematic thriller. It is a story of death and secret remorse, as Tom (played by Dolan) travels to a remote farm to attend the funeral of his recently passed lover. There, the secrecy of Tom’s existence and chillingly-damaged lives of Guillaume’s mother and brother quickly become apparent, resulting in a devastating antagonism of erotic and psychopathic nature. “When I saw the play, I immediately knew that I would direct it,” the filmmaker says. “Its detour into maternal distress hit too close to home for me not to keep driving down that road. It also seemed like a stimulating exercise, I knew it would be going some- where further than I’ve been before.”

Fleeting from the chase of impossible love, the tension in “Tom at the Farm,” is not fulfilled from unrequited nor stylized value. In fact, compared to its predecessors—take “Heartbeats,” whose starry-eyed slow-motion fantasies were only eclipsed by its motley-colored vignettes or the unwavering musi- cality of “Laurence Anyways”—the film is rather raw. It’s a decisive choice from the filmmaker who, despite what he’ll say, established himself cruising atop a modern wave of alternative artists, all with a rose-tinted gaze at youth culture and aggression to live out their dreams in fabulous universe, again and again on 35 mm. There is a slant toward narcis- sism, but the style is, nevertheless, distinctive. “I was very young when I started, and now I know more than ever what I like and what I don’t like,” says Dolan. “What I truly love in film is a movie that does what it should be doing, and I think that sometimes style gets in the way. When I approached ‘Tom at the Farm,’ I knew that the slow-mo was just not what the movie needed. It was the first time that I really ques- tioned myself, thinking, ‘Are we using the right lens?’, ‘Is this right place for our camera?’, etc.”

In that vein, Dolan continued to reshuffle his point of view after “Tom at the Farm,” although the extremes in styling, or lack thereof, as most filmic motifs, are open to audience interpretation. His fifth film, “Mommy,” debuted at, of course, Cannes, in May of last year with a luminous and hopeful sensibility to reflect Dolan’s focus on the troubled mother and son duo. “I did not want the characters to be the victims of their financial situation,” he says. It should be noted, though, that the production was shot in a 1:1 aspect ratio, a jarring square shift from the typical 1.85:1 or 2.35:1. With a movie set for early 2016 release, “It’s Only the End of the World,” and his first English-language project, “The Death and Life of John F. Donovan,” currently in financing (Kit Harington, Jessica Chastain, and Susan Sarandon have already been confirmed), the coming months do hint at another, larger deviation for the filmmaker, but when it happens, as Dolan has done several times in just a short life, he’ll adapt.

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“A Premier in Two Parts”

The crest of romantic monumentalism for many, few standing structures can echo that regal tightness in one’s chest or je ne sais quoi urge to throw on a tux and reach for the nearest flute of bubbly than an evening at a Parisian concert hall. Charge it as the unapologetic Francophile inside each of us or a cinematic convinced fantasy, sure, but these historical facades—be they sparkling in the Palais Garnier's Beaux-Arts style of opulence or groundbreaking as the Théâtre des Champs-Élysée was for modernism in early 1900s Paris—excite a spellish attraction that dances well past the orchestra pit and even after the second encore does not bow. Supersizing the city’s landmark legacies this spring, the long-awaited Philharmonie de Paris, a multi-exhibitional, performance, and educational music center, finally opens its doors.

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A two-complex operation, the project began in 1995 with the opening of the Cité de la Musique (known today as Philharmonie 2) by architect Christian de Portzamparc. A triangle-shaped, open-air space that mimics the idea of a neighborhood, it contains several different volumes—concert halls, a museum, amphitheatre, etc.—around which the public can walk through. Individual buildings stand in a startling modern design compared to other 19th arrondissement residents of their time. But it is the center’s shiny new addition, the Philharmonie 1, that is the focal point of the Philharmonie de Paris today. Inaugurated by KENZO’s Men’s Autumn/ Winter 2015 fashion runway show this past January, the building is a result of 20 years of planning, 340,000 bird-shaped shingles of aluminum in seven forms and four tints, 2,000-cubic-feet of concrete, 5 tons of steel, and 4,500 tons of metal framing. Designed by Jean Nouvel (famous for NYC's 100 Eleventh Avenue and the upcoming Louvre Abu Dhabi), inside the swirling, oyster- colored structure, among other inhabitants, is its pearl: the Grande Salle. Finding harmony between design, staging, and acoustic innovation, the symphonic space skews perception and breaks away from traditional shoebox and vineyard concert hall styles. “Evocative of immaterial, draped sheets of music and light, the hall suspends listeners in space on long balconies,” says Nouvel. “This suspension creates the impression of being immersed in music and light.” Frankly after such a lengthy overture, though, musical immersion— radiating from both the beautiful Grand Salle and off the property in general— sounds just about right.

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“Alone or Together”

In even its loosest occurrence, the thought of what qualifies a hero figure today coerc- es distinguishing visions of admiration—gained from either courageous nobility or, more often, illus- trious envy—that one cannot completely shade from sight. For the former, these might take the form of a fallen man in service, a proved athlete bounding over an unfledged personal hurdle, or other brave emotional victories of the same sort, but for the second, glossy-coated set—whose bulk of fame is echoed in either size of property or brevity of name—the extremes of stardom broadcast a fasci- nation that we at large are not yet ready to shut off. Such is the attraction of “Entourage,” the Home Box Office comedy, drama, and cameo-heavy satire— whose social critique at times rebounded between the dramatic and the dubious—that aired on cable television during the early aughts and starred Adri- an Grenier as the iconic Vincent “Vince” Chase. The plots of the episodes were long-winded and the parties never-ending, but the overall premise was quite short: can a group of childhood friends from Queens, New York navigate—no, prevail—over the spiraling roads of the Hollywood Hills without scat- tering about along the way? “Entourage” quickly became a quick witted success and a smoke screen for, at times, a larger conversation on pop culture the movie business, and network programming, but the core of the show was always rooted in the close- knit brotherhood of its crew: Vince, Eric, Ari, Turtle, and Drama.

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When we last left our Hollywood heroes in 2011, they were each at their own sort of personal reckon- ings—Ari (played by Jeremy Piven) had announced his retirement and move to Italy to salvage his family, Eric (Kevin Connolly) had gained another chance with his baby-mama and was considering heading back to New York, and Vince was Paris-bound for his own wedding—and the group itself was at a diver- gence. As each member seeped into what appeared to be the natural courses of their lives, the eight-sea- son long dependency on each other didn’t seem so urgent. This June, four years since the show’s finale, the original bros of young Hollywood are back in Los Angeles together and single again, with Grenier at the center of the squad, for the series’ feature film of the same name. And while Vincent’s habits might still seesaw between A-list and adolescent—now on 35 mm film—the real-life actor can’t really say he’s kept up with his onscreen persona.

“Vincent Chase is the best, best friend you could have,” says Grenier, who plays an actual Marty Stu of Executive Producer Mark Wahlberg with bits of Vince Vaughn, Tobey Maguire, and Leonardo DiCap- rio sprinkled into the mix too. “He’s loyal, he’s loving, and just he happens to be a movie star, so he’s able to be generous beyond most people’s means. He brings his friends along for the ride of their lives in the height of celebrity lifestyle.” But while the actor does relate to many of his role’s descriptions—raised by a single mother in New York, similar start to his acting career, very tight group of friends, etc.—Grenier insists that there is a clear distinction between both worlds.

“Vince has really been able to bask in all of the riches that he’s been allotted. I don’t spend nearly as much as he does. For example, I own a 2004 Prius. I like humble things,” he says. “But then again, there is a commonality between us too, of course. We both see the big picture and we know what’s important. It’s not all the things and the stuff ... it’s the family and the friends, you know, the genuine experiences. Obviously Vincent indulges, but he still keeps a head on about what’s important.”

In the hiatus between the wrapping of the show and the filming of “Entourage” the movie, Grenier continued to exercise his creativity, working to fill out what he himself deems important. From the inception, development, and growth of Reckless Productions—a vehicle to directing that Grenier originally founded in 2001 but that didn’t really start to gain steam until the next decade—he has been able to focus on socially-minded documentaries that pause on personal topics, national policy, and the planet.

“I think having a macro and micro balance is important. My films are not only extensions of my passion for documentaries, but also my passion for the environment and search for ways of using storytelling to communicate larger things and themes of humanity,” says Grenier, whose impetus also aspires to incite. “Not enough people are engaged. Not enough people believe that they can make a difference. I think it’s a failure of society to have so many people who are disempowered or feel that they can’t do anything. We have to inspire people to recognize that they can affect the world and that they ought to—that is what I try to do with my work.”

While trying to preserve both the environment and future during his off “Entourage” time, the actor also turned back to the past, co-founding Church- key Can Company, a Washington state brewery that packages a pilsner-style lager in 1930s-esque nostalgic cans. Recyclable, of course, each beer can only be opened with a piercer known as a “church- key,” and is only available in select West Coast cities, harkening back to an old-school pastime with privi- leged quality.

“I was with a buddy in Portland and we were drinking a beer, as one would in Portland, and talking about the old flat-top cans, you know, like they drank in the early days of ‘Mad Men.’ We realized that we wanted some and did some research on how to get them today. Lo and behold we found that they don’t exist anymore, so we decided to make them,” he recalls. “The beer recipe itself was designed by two home brewers that actually created it in their garages. We’re really promoting an engaged lifestyle: getting involved, trying things, doing it yourself, and opening it yourself. We think life is better when you’re a part of it.”

Ultimately it is that scheming towards a reac- tion—either from a beer that requires a special tool to open, a documentary about a whale hybrid that emits a frequency foreign to others (“52: The Search for the Loneliest Whale in the World,” currently in development stages of production), or as Emily Ratajkowski’s tabloid-fueled boyfriend in “Entourage”— that equalizes the actor as an anomaly and some sort of modern crusader; bulldozing across the usual ideologies of heroism. Not to say that Grenier is a hero, but rather, that he is blurring the realities of consideration from both ends with an impassioned will. “I’ve been doing a lot of work for the oceans. I think it’s an important focus today and I really want to do what I can in that area,” he says. And as for the future? “I have some projects that I’m working on that I’d like to see get off the ground, and I want to continue to seek out roles that I think can elevate my career. That isn’t easy because Vince is such a dominant force, but I’m up for the challenge.”

[joshglassmakeitlast]

“Design Within Wear”

WHILE MOST OF NEW YORK rests pregnant with early morning torpor, twice a week, every week Carlos Garciavelez quietly tiptoes out of his Upper West Side apartment hours before the light of day to catch a flight to Boston. In a city most- ly governed by the underground transit commute, it’s quite a trip—especially considering his typical day-length-stays—but for the architect-turned-fash- ion-designer, who lectures at the Harvard Graduate School of Design as a side job—apart from publish- ing two intensive books, one on Latin America’s modern architecture and the other on Mexico’s urban development, just this past year—Garciavelez is used to it.

FROM ESSENTIAL HOMME JUNE/JULY 2015 -- READ ARTICLE AS ORIGINALLY PRINTED

“I always choose the same seat. The closest to the front on the right side of the wing if I’m going north, and the closest to the left on the far side if I’m heading south,” he says. “I get to see the clean hori- zon when I’m going through the water or a blurred horizon or one colored pink. There is always the same point at the start and end of each day, but each trip it transforms.” For his debut collection this fall, Garciavelez chose to ponder this idea of the horizon and how it becomes recalled by qualities that he calls “ephemer- al changes.” Through fog, sunset, sunrise, time of day, and the not-so-physical, the familiar linear aspect that we know bends and becomes something anew in even a moment’s glance. Journeying through cites often called otherworldly—be they ethereal as Iceland’s Reykjavik or isolated in the style of Marfa, Texas—the designer set out to translate these intan- gible landscapes into garments befitting a modern “cultural nomad.” It was quite a task for the urbanist’s first attempt at fashion, but then again, he has always taken everything on at full speed.

Garciavelez was born in Mexico City, but grew up with an international hand. He attended boarding school in Massachusetts and earned his undergrad- uate degree at the Rhode Island School of Design, before receiving his Masters of Architecture in urban design at Harvard. Perhaps this, combined with the guidance from his father—an architect too, who works on a global level—is where the self-described “trans-scalar” artist adopted his wanderlust affecta- tion. And fashion? “The love was always there,” says Garciavelez, who also worked at Gabellini Sheppard Associates in New York, known for designing interiors for Jil Sander boutiques, before attending informal construction and textile classes at Central Saint Martins and interning at Alexander McQueen in London.

“I have a very broad understanding of design and sometimes it might feel disconnected, but it’s there,” says the designer. “For doctors there are different aspects of medicine that you can be exposed to, but even if you’re concentrated on just one you still have to stay very aware of everything else. I am that way; my interest lies in design across scales.”

Garciavelez launched his self-titled brand seven months before he presented it during New York Fashion Week this past February. Starting with menswear foundations, Garciavelez engineered formalwear with a sporty energy for the man that wants to one day walk in the designer’s explorative shoes. The sharp structure of his design practice is not lost on the range, which layers tailored hooded blazers over oxford button-ups for a perfectly-posi- tioned play on a visual horizon and details upon closer inspection—segmented neoprene, a trou- ser-jogger, and a strategic label—further reveal the strategic eye of the garments’ maker.

If the high concept does not come across to the collections’ wearers, though, it’s no matter, accord- ing to Garciavelez, whose priority concern is more of ease than idea. “There’s a specific point of view that I’m trying to bring across, but comfort is the number one underlying aspect,” he says. There is a fire to the way the creative approaches everything—from his clothes to coffee table books, even his 6 AM SoulCy- cle class—that reassures this. “I’m the most passion- ate person today,” Garciavelez smiles. “I’m able to do finally what I really, really like, but I’m not leaving anything behind. I’m still kind of doing everything.”

[joshglassmakeitlast]

“The Graduate”

NOT EVERY 24-YEAR-OLD can pull off sardonic charm quite like Bill Skarsgård, son of Stel- lan and brother to Alexander and Gustaf—all actors of the Stockholm-to-Hollywood Skarsgård clan— that sort of caustic poignancy, somewhat difficult to bear yet still severely cognizant, that you can readily recall of that former classmate, unapologetically studied of any question a teacher might quiz, or of a learned elder desperately needed to be proven wrong. Which isn’t to say the kid—who looms over you at a painfully handsome 6'4"—is a wiseass, no, he is not, but rather, uncomfortably sharp; critically aware of the many mortalities of his industry, himself, and even society in general, unexpectedly so for an actor made mainstream by Netflix; with a deft that would radiate ripe frustration if it didn’t have tinges of truth to it. Given this, Skarsgård, a generational oddity, also speaks from a fair amount of distance: his tact, perhaps like any product of Scandinavian stoicism or actor of decent media training, requires beats of formalities to dance around with upon greeting, but once first blood is drawn and Bill is ready, you better bet he’s on.

FROM ESSENTIAL HOMME APRIL/MAY 2015 -- READ ARTICLE AS ORIGINALLY PRINTED

“There is something about the obsession with social media today that frightens me. It’s not sincere and it’s not genuine. It’s fucking bullshit. You post a photo of yourself and people tell you, ‘Oh my god you are so pretty,’ and ‘You are so hot,’ and ‘I love you so much.’ You get all these comments that you read through while you’re taking a shit on the toilet from all the people that have liked your cool little photo, and you think of how many people that think you’re good looking—that love you—and you become obsessed with that false sense of gratification. It’s toxic,” says the actor. “Especially for actors or any type of public figure, of course these fans don’t love you—they don’t even know you! They’re just obsessed with whoever you play on whatever film or show you are on or how your hair looks. The fans get this fake idea of who they think the actor is and a fake sense that this person is somehow important to them now, and they shouldn’t be because they are just fucking actors that don’t matter! And vice versa. Obviously the actor who reaches out to the fans doesn’t give a shit about the individual persons. It’s this eternal fake-based relationship. It’s very weird.”

Despite the handful amount of fan-run Twitter pages and Instagram accounts that we briefly discuss, Skarsgård is not active on social media, well at least not anywhere you could find him. Part of it is disgust and part of it is a fear of further encouraging this self-gratuity, yes, but it’s also quickly apparent that though the actor does know he should effort himself with marketing his image, Skarsgård, to be frank, just doesn’t really care.

“The thing with actors is that we don’t create our own material, so when we’re not working—there’s not some instrument to practice or draft to rewrite— we’re really not working, which is a little lackluster to say, because now I’m sitting here in this interview, so I’m obviously conscious of everything I say and how you are going to perceive it, write it, and how the reader is going to perceive me when they read what you wrote of the things I said, for instance, I don’t have a lot of hobbies,” he nervously laughs. “On a typical day I read. I run errands. I try to work out, maybe, probably not. I read some more and then I watch a movie. It's pretty eventless. It would be a better inter- view if I was like ... ‘oh no I love fly fishing. I go out by myself at least a couple times a month and I just zone out and I fly fish for a couple of hours and feel one with the nature.’ ... Like, okay, well that’s a cool thing to do, but I don’t do cool shit like that. I don't fly fish. I don’t collect fun things. Collectors also make for a fun article ... ‘Oh really, Bill collects weird cans of beer?’ ‘No, yeah, he has 400 old beer cans at his house.’ ... I’m just me, and I don’t have a house.”

Skarsgård is currently on location at his not-so- home away from not-so-home in Toronto filming the third and final season of the Netflix original series “Hemlock Grove,” a mystery that explores the horrif- ic happenings of a fictional Pennsylvania town beset with murder, magic, and the devastation in between, co-starring Famke Janssen, Landon Liboiron, and Penelope Mitchell. The series premiered in April 2013 to admittedly mixed critical reception, but it did receive a Primetime Emmy Award nomination that summer, one of three Netflix shows to first break the barrier of original online only web television for consideration from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Replicable to a college experience, the show has been “a lot of ups and downs,” for Skars- gård, who never attended formal university himself. “It’s been three years of my life that I’ve gotten to work with many different directors, writers, and actors on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “You can’t ask for a better school than that to figure out how cameras and set-ups work and understand different opinions, some that you don’t agree with at all and some that completely inspire you.”

But as, he’s quick to emphasize, Canada is not Skarsgård’s home, and in fact, he does not have one. Born in Stockholm into a family of six children, led by a father whose career really peaked in North America during his childhood (“Breaking the Waves,” “Good Will Hunting,” the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, etc.), the actor quite literally grew up on film sets. “When my dad would get a job somewhere he would take all of us with him and we would spend months in places like Mexico, Cambodia, even Toronto,” he recalls. “I saw a lot of cool places that a lot of kids don’t get to see—especially coming from Sweden, which is a very privileged country in a very privileged part of the world. It let me see how different people lived at a very young age.” Eventually older brothers Alexander and Gustaf would follow in their father’s footsteps, both torpedoing through the small Swedish film industry before gaining career-making roles in “True Blood” and “Vikings,” respectively.

The middle Skarsgård, though, would take his time, briefly inquiring an acting career at age 9 when reading lines was just, well, reading lines, before taking a several-year-long hiatus. “I had to go away to find my own identity in myself,” he remembers, instead pursuing science in secondary school rather than the arts.

“I didn’t like the idea of being a fourth Skarsgård actor. Acting for me at that point didn’t feel like it could ever be mine because it was already theirs. As I started doing it more on the side, I got more comfortable and I felt that it was within me—that acting did become me. It’s a very internal process. Once you find that, it is completely yours,” he says. “Obviously the whole thing of having my father and brothers already so well-known is always going to be there—‘how can I ever do this when they’re so good at it,’ comparisons, and so on—but from a pretty early age I just chose not to dig into it because it doesn’t help, it just limits. They are doing their own things and I need to focus on my thing, which is completely mine and has nothing to do with them. It’s my profession and how I see it and how I approach it. It’s completely internal and completely about me.”

And it is about Skarsgård, who, for someone that righteously seems just as sure of who he is as he is of everything else around him—“mini series are going to become the savior of the death of indepen- dent film,” he confides—finds himself now in the peculiar position of not quite positive of what is next.

[joshglassmakeitlast]

“CONVERSATIONS: Humberto Leon and Carol Lim”

It’s been over ten years since Opening Ceremony (OC) first opened its doors as a small store in downtown Manhattan. Now that you’ve claimed foreign territory (more than once), developed and defined an in-house line that rivals some of the store’s accounts, and revived the great house of KENZO, do you plan on letting up to enjoy your successes anytime soon?

Carol Lim: We can’t really sit down and stay still. We’re always constantly in motion, so even though we’re super proud of the accomplishments we’ve made, we’re always asking ourselves, ‘ok what’s happening next? What are we excited about now?’ I don’t even think at Opening Ceremony’s ten year anniversary that we high-fived or went out to dinner…we just kept going.

FROM ESSENTIAL HOMME FEB/MARCH 2015 -- READ ARTICLE AS ORIGINALLY PRINTED

Has this unceremoniously humble response to your work been molded by early success, or do you think it’s some sort of innate quality—or rather, natural thirst—that you both share?

Humberto Leon: No, it’s not about wanting more. Our goals are just a lot bigger than who we are and where we are now. We are at the tip of the iceberg for what we want to do. It’s difficult to reflect back on yourself, but it’s easy to know your goals.

CL: I met Humberto at Berkeley. We were 18 and had both grown up in Los Angeles. We realized that separate from before we had even met, we had a similar approach to life, work, you know, all of the above. We were—and we are still today—both very curious people and we don’t just stop at the surface. We want to know the details about everything and we like to reminisce about brands that we grew up with.

OC has had so many collaborations in its life thus far that sometimes it can be hard to keep track of, much less buy everything. From the Muppets to Maison Martin Margiela’s MM6, how does the inception for these happen? Were there any ideas that were just too crazy or weird to make the retail floor?

CL: Sometimes we’ve experienced something in the past and it ends up becoming the inspiration of a new project or sometimes a conversation or a person today will inspire us by triggering something. For example, every year Opening Ceremony picks different countries to focus on. When we decided to feature Germany, a lot of our friends were moving there—this is back in 2004/2005—which told us, ‘okay, there must be something interesting and creative happening in Berlin right now.’

HL: One thing you should know is that nothing is ever too crazy or too weird. What it comes down to is how it is approached. When you look back at the projects we’ve done, they range from introducing Havaianas to a global market, working with Yoko Ono and people like [artist] Terence Koh, and doing amazing projects with Rodarte and Chloe Sevigny. We try to see all our ideas through, so I would say the follow out is very few—maybe one or two that didn’t work out—but we have a list of a million more.

CL: We don’t have a formulaic process. We do plan things, obviously, and we think ahead, but because we’re so flexible—and since we like to respond in real time to real things—a project can come up on the table tomorrow, and within a few weeks we can execute something. We react in the way that I think human beings react. We’re not so robotic that we can’t.

You just listed a bunch of names from a seemingly-unending registrar of high-browed products to complete brand resuscitations. Did any OC project particularly resonate with either of you on a personal level?

HL: In so many ways they are all personal accomplishments. The store really represents Carol and me, so being able to work with all of our idols—people, brands, and artists that growing up we just simply wished to meet—is a huge thing for the both of us. And that could be working with a company like Vans to working with David Lynch or MIA, I mean, the list goes on. We have a very fortunate job that we get to work with everybody and anyone that we think is the most authentic and coolest and raddest in the field, and not everyone can say that.

How do you continue the momentum of the store given the commercialization of the boutique mentality and people’s constant search for a more interesting shopping experience?

HL: We follow our own momentum. The store comes from a very personal and curious place. It is super eclectic, and we approach everything in a very humanistic way. We ask the questions that you’d probably ask, but then we have to answer those questions to ourselves every day. We’re also not just holding onto things to hold onto them. When people love something and they want to see more of it, then we’ll hold to it. If we want to move on, then we will. There are brands that have been on the floor since the very beginning, but there is always an injection of new. We have a constant refresh button.

OC is somehow able to interest both label lookers as well as the black sheep—extremists or ‘anti-fashion’ enthusiasts that would laugh at the idea of tailored formalwear. Particularly for men, this jump can be dramatic. How do you find an equilibrium between the likes of Band of Outsiders and Bernhard Willhelm under one house?

HL: We see the store almost as a person’s closet. There are occasions when you really just want to represent the classics; something fun, beautiful, and simple. Maybe you’re going to a wedding or an event. And then there is everyday life where you want to be individualistic. But also, there’s no reason why you can’t wear that Bernhard Willhelm top with those Band of Outsiders perfect-fitting trousers. We’ve never once said that you have to wear head-to-toe a certain one designer. Like your wardrobe, it’s all about how you put it together.

As you suggested, there have been many brands with you since day one. I spoke to Patrik Ervell earlier this year and he referred to OC as an incubator for experiment. Who are some other voices or styles you’ve grown with?

HL: Brands like Alexander Wang, Acne, Rodarte, Proenza, and Pendleton would all tell you that we put a mark into their brand; in some way, shape, or form, that we were really a place where things were formed for them, and that’s super exciting. I could probably list another 20.

And how have these brands affected you?

HL: I think that we’ve affected each other. We come from different point of views, us as retailers and they as designers or brands, but it’s always been about the cohesion of telling the story.

CL: They also affected us in a way in that we became homes for them. As their brands developed, we became an outlet for them to storytell their point-of-views.

HL: Sometimes it’s brands we all know like DKNY and sometimes it’s new brands. For instance, with the LVMH Prize, we’ve started off this season carrying all three winners [Thomas Tait, Miuniku, and Hood by Air]. Other times, it’s about re-discovering brands that mean something. We went back to Walter Van Beirendonck after we started to feature Antwerp to really question what life after Antwerp Six—beyond Raf Simons and everybody else—meant. Today I see Walter in a lot more different stores, which is great.

How much creative crossover is there between OC and KENZO?

HL: They are both treated very differently. Opening Ceremony is a brand new story that is all about Carol and myself. While KENZO is about retelling a really important story to the fashion world. Knowing that Kenzo Takada was the first Asian to really make it big in Paris—by establishing a fashion house and bringing that cultural excitement to France—it’s an exciting story to be able to narrate. Both brands have our marks on them heavily, but the great thing is we are in control of both, so we can keep them separate.

I found it interesting that considering OC is so outer-looking—as you mentioned about its visiting country program—that for KENZO's SS15 collection, you brought the brand back to its Parisian roots. How was this idea conceived?

HL: Through KENZO, we’ve celebrated a lot of different aspects to the brand, but the one thing we felt like we hadn’t celebrated was our love of Paris. We wanted to take a really bold stance for our Parisian take and talk to the city as a theme, while celebrating it from an outsider’s point of view. Not just as modern day Paris, but the historics of Paris as well; everything from the architecture, to the birth of Modernism, and all the aspects that we love and cherish about the Parisian lifestyle. It was really our nod to the city that is the birthplace of the brand.

You’ve really pushed the narrative aspect.

HL: It’s hard for us to see product without a narrative. Partially I think because we didn’t come from a fashion background, and also because we are constantly with people outside of the fashion world, our approach is very much on a super black and white level of ‘how do we tell this tale?’

Not to continue with the comparisons, but your influence isn’t just limited to IRL. Opening Ceremony completely revolutionized online shopping with a super interactive e-commerce platform and KENZO has begun to follow suit in the last few years. How do both brands—OC, a contemporary retailer, and KENZO, a luxury fashion house—fit into an online portal.

HL: Carol and I are two people that experienced life before the internet, yes, but we’re also heavily excited about the internet. The first thing that we did when we came to KENZO was create an online presence. We wanted a blog and a way to contribute content globally to tell the story and have a voice for the brand. It’s a different approach than others and a great Opening Ceremony comparison, because it’s the OC flavor that we brought into the fashion house’s heritage. Online is something we definitely don’t shy away from; instead, we approach and attack it very excitingly.

What do you think Takada’s reaction would be to the reawakened, cooler-than-ever KENZO?

HL: Our first week at KENZO we wrote a letter to him saying how honored we felt to be at his house. He wrote us back after he saw our first show and said that he felt like we were bringing the energy back that the brand represents. Three seasons ago he started coming to all of our shows. For two people to take over this brand, it’s very, very humbling to see the originator come, support it, and tell us how excited he is of it—that he sees what we’re doing and how we’ve paid tribute to him and the brand. Carol and I put a lot of thought into each collection in knowing that we are telling this on-going story. It’s a 40-year-old historical house, and Carol and I play a role in the timeline of it. It’s exciting and a little unbelievable to see his stamp of approval.

[joshglassmakeitlast]

“NYFW by Night”

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“Now Boys Allowed”

FROM ESSENTIAL HOMME FEB/MARCH 2014 -- READ ARTICLE AS ORIGINALLY PRINTED

Treated to a painstakingly careful renovation by architect Annabelle Selldorf, including a reoriented main entrance, demolition of the first floor slab, elongation of the space’s windows, and deep mahogany and walnut trimmed accents, the Martha Washington Hotel lives familiar of its original turn of the century daring spir- it, yet primed with contemporary details that surface specifically in the building’s public spaces. Adjacent to the hotel’s entrance stand Danny Meyer’s Marta, a new restaurant from Chef Nick Anderer that reimag- ines Roman thin-crust pizzas in a modern yet soul- ful furnished space underneath a ballad of hanging glass rod pendants, and Veronica’s, the hotel’s lobby bar, which draws its name from the actress Veronica Lake—who, as legend goes, worked at the hotel as a barmaid when her career started to fade in the mid ‘50s—boasting similarly tall ceilings and a classically modern palette. Above both, a variety of cozy single bedrooms to deluxe suites in sleek setups offer a home for a transient stay, and an elaborate ballroom and outdoor terrace exist for celebratory excuses, but it’s truly the crust and the crowd downstairs that is worth crossing Madison Avenue or even a river to visit.

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“Coast 2 Coast”

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“Hero of the Heart”

The crux of the fortunate few that find celebrity in youth has typically been confinement to the very narratives that thrust them into the spotlight in the first place. As the public, we wholeheartedly welcome generations of these confidants into our lives—be it a child erroneously deserted by his family over Christmas vacation or a brazen young man charged with the task of destroying a cursed family trophy—but just as we frown to the signs of our own aging, we refuse it to these beloved characters, bidding preservation in the familiar roles that we first encountered. Not a feat to be overlooked, the odyssey out of these child-star-enclaves serves as a testament to the ability of any actor that can make his big break twice over; first as a boy and then again, undergoing metamorphosis while being burdened by his own legacy. No riper crop in today’s harvest of pop culture has soldiered this battle so elegantly as Daniel Radcliffe, who first survived as The Boy Who Lived, and now—with the closing of The Cripple of Inishmaan on Broadway last month and arrival of two new movies this fall—stands a man, prospering.

FROM ESSENTIAL HOMME AUG/SEPT 2014 -- READ ARTICLE AS ORIGINALLY PRINTED

There is still a polite humility to Radcliffe that one can easily imagine as dating back to before life for the British actor first became crazy— before his controversial portrayal of the poet Allen Ginsberg, before both West End and Broadway revivals of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and, of course, before the ten year, eight-film production that was the Harry Potter series—when Radcliffe was just an 11-year-old boy from the south west London neighborhood of Fulham who wanted to poke around as different characters for fun. Today, at The Jane Hotel in New York City, the eagerness to transform himself is still readily observant in the 25-year-old, whose far-reaching range in appearances on and off the movie screen over the last decade have been motivated by personal interest and not—as one might assume—to flee from the looming shadows of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

““All of the projects I get involved in begin with a fascination with the story. I can’t work within the mindset of ‘Will this script get me further away from Harry Potter?’ or ‘Will this play make people see me differently?’ because I don’t have any control over any of that,” says Radcliffe. “All I can do is make the kind of films that I would want to see as an audience member.”

Following Kill Your Darlings—a collegiate exploration of the Beat Generation as its founders cultivated sexual and substance discoveries at Columbia University in the 1940s—in his latest film, What If, Radcliffe becomes Wallace, his most diverse character to date… in that he is a completely average guy. “It was really exciting because it was the first time I’ve been able to play a normal human being in the 20th century,” laughs Radcliffe. Opposite Zoe Kazan as Chantry, a flirty animator whom Wallace becomes infatuated with despite being unavailable, the romantic comedy compels the question that no tension-filled friendship wants to confront: can platonicism pervade or is an imbalanced tip of the teeter-totter of love inevitable? Alive with motion graphics and quirky in its off-the-cuff dialogue—heightened further by punchy supporting actors Adam Driver and Megan Park—What If arrives as the perfect vehicle for Radcliffe to finally be seen in a dimension dominated by thoughts and emotions than that of one ruled by dungeons and dragons. But despite his representation in the film as an altruistic romantic, the actor himself does not hold love to such extreme standards.

“The idea that there is one person for everyone is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. With almost seven billion people around the world, how could that even be possible?” asks Radcliffe. “[In What If] Wallace has a very idealized version of love that is flawed. For me, love is just about being with somebody that makes you incred- ibly happy and that you want to spend your time with. Someone that, despite how long any day is, their presence immediately lifts your spirits. I don’t believe in fate or destiny.”

Without the gloss of the silver screen, of course not everything in real life is quite as black and white. “There are lots of relationships that start as friends and eventually graduate to something else,” admits Radcliffe—whose own parents met through work and maintained a neutral relationship for a year before initiating anything romantic,“ but there are many men and women who just stay friends.” And he would know, having found himself in the same quandary years ago with a close female friend. “We both admitted to having a thing for each other, but neither of us did anything about it, which I’m actu- ally very happy about because we are still friends today,” he says. “But it was something that had to be discussed and acknowledged before we could move on.”

Realities such as these form the accelerative forces that keep Radcliffe buoyant.“I’ve been working since I was 11, so there has never been a moment in my life that has not in someway incorporated my job.” It is this steadfast dedication to his craft, while stay- ing completely aware of how he is perceived, and an ambition towards the future that have allowed the actor to leave such a dynamic footprint in the often crusted-over cement of the cultural zeit- geist. If one can believe there is still aspiration left in someone that has already flown his broomstick so high, between shooting films—his second film, Horns, a thriller co-starring Juno Temple, releases later this fall—Radcliffe has dreams of crossing the camera line to become a film director, and spends his downtime writing his own scripts. “I thought it would be easier to write something myself than to convince someone else to give me something for me to screw up,”he admits. Until that day comes though, the actor is more than happy to continue to evolve.

“I want to be perceived as an actor that takes on multiple roles,” Radcliffe says. “It’s fine if one of the roles is Harry Potter, I don’t mind that at all—in fact, I would be foolish to think anything other than that would happen. It’s obviously very much a part of my life, but my goal now is to be thought of in other capacities alongside that.”

[joshglassmakeitlast]

“Loud and Clear”

In its nearly two-decade lifetime, Swedish fashion house J.Lindeberg has scaled more progressions than even the most discerning ear might interpret; swerving from the raw-edged rock ‘n’ roll menswear roots of its founder (former Diesel CEO and Marketing Director Johan Lindeberg) to Italian-inspired suiting—and even women’s—confiscating, diffusing, and then spotlighting again elements of athleticism from the ski slopes, golf course, and various company owners along the way. Approaching ten years on call, Jessy Heuvelink (who joined the brand in 2004 as a sportswear designer for Lindeberg himself), stands head of design today, marching the brand out of its Scandinavian safeplace—Spring/Summer 2015 marked J.Lindeberg’s return to New York Fashion Week, paralleled by a big international retail push—through verses one would not expect.

FROM ESSENTIAL HOMME DEC 2014/JAN 2015 -- READ ARTICLE AS ORIGINALLY PRINTED

“I get a lot of inspiration from nature. I’m kind of a bird and animal freak, and my house is like a little museum,” says the designer, who collects dried insects and stuffed animals in his pastime. “People always tend to get drawn toward beautiful things, but there is so much more potential in the things that are ugly or scary. Bats and insects appear disgusting, but when you look at them they have so much beauty that sometimes we forget about.”

Last summer Heuvelink first provoked this fascination into an insect-inspired collection of over-printed, colorful suiting with hives of hidden details that required the likes of almost a microscope to fully realize. It was one of the designer’s early experiments helming the J.Lindeberg ship since transitioning from sports to ready-to-wear in 2010, a categorical jump not completely foreign for Heuvelink, whose resume dashes from the high-end to performance wear, including former stints at Viktor&Rolf, Christian Lacroix, and adidas. “I love the whole idea of couture, but it’s so niche. Once you made it that was it,” he remembers. “I like to see my designs flourish on the streets, and I like to see as many people wearing them as possible... Not in a fast fashion way that they get massive, but exactly like J.Lindeberg, where I can bring a touch of couture and my personality to the brand’s DNA.”

Almost a year later, Heuvelink’s Spring/Summer 2015 collection for the brand is admittedly without its Arthropoda clout, but not too far from reach. Titled Biotopia, the mostly monochromatic collection interprets the natural world into a rumbling clothes dryer of an urban environment that is jumbled about and etched in cool hints of Woodstock style and late ‘60s musicality. Blasting rocker reverberations from the brand’s founder louder than ever before, Biotopia succeeds in subverting painted plantlife onto ultra-luxe suede leather jackets, transforming florals into camo jacquard prints, and keeping tight denim and clean slacks slickly tailored above the ankle, as per the brand’s golfer tradition.

Together, the parings reflect Heuvelink’s personal and very of-the-moment slantings toward blending concepts across the border. “I like to combine things, like splitting up coats and trousers from suits or wearing blazers with sneakers and white jeans that have been in the wash too long,” he says. “I like a nice clash.” A sentiment that readily encourages that the collection be seen as less of a seasonal release and more of an introduction to a new, fashion-forward J.Lindeberg, re-modernized for a younger, cooler, and more global man. Though still maintaining its diffused sports and women’s lines with a synergistic focus, the main men’s collection is “about keeping a rock ‘n’ roll spirit while implementing newness,” according to the designer. “We’ve found our ground again. This is the direction we are going to stay.”

As for any doubts of the brand’s revitalized course, Heuvelink has nothing but just hopeful notes of confidence. “When we did the insect collection, the initial reaction was like, ‘really, insects?’ but when I showed the clothes, people were shocked by their beauty. Many don’t tend to look at things like that on their own,” he says. “Fashion is a tool to express myself and to broadcast my ideas and what moves me. Hopefully a little bit of that can transcend into the collection and J.Lindeberg can move other people the same way.”

[joshglassmakeitlast]

“Noir Kei Ninomiya”

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[joshglassmakeitlast]

“A Neu Feeling”

FROM ESSENTIAL HOMME OCT/NOV 2014 -- READ ARTICLE AS ORIGINALLY PRINTED

“He asked me to play it again and again and again,” says London, ”and then we went to his place and he asked me to play it again.” What would come after was an international game of catch Kanye if you can, including ominous “meet me in Tokyo” and “meet me in New York” and “meet me in Austin” emails with three word subjects and no concrete details to follow, late night reviews over barely working sound systems in the backseats of Uber town cars with frightened drivers, and an unrelenting sense of collaboration. Even- tually the work crescendoed into Vibes!, the half dance, half hip-hop “spiritual progression” of a sophomore album by London, executive- ly produced by West, releasing in the U.S. on Nov. 4. But this is not where the story begins.

“I’ve been preparing for this moment my whole life,” says the Trin- idadian-born London today. “It’s like this magic that I created; it’s already played out in my head about ten times already.” Although a newly-turned west coaster, the recording artist—whose full name is not a music moniker as one might think, but rather the second coming in his family lineage—spent the first quarter of his life in New York, soaking in the city’s intrinsic obsession with making it big and thriving in the underground hip-hop and rap circuits of each borough.

“I embodied New York. The whole city was my stomping ground and I took a shit in every corner of it,” the rapper remembers. “I did things criminal—no, I’m kidding, I don’t have a criminal record—and creative everywhere, from playing the most gangster open mic nights in Har- lem—where I was the only kid in H&M skinny jeans and everyone else was a thug with a fur jacket and a gun—to performing in New Lots [Brooklyn] for my gay cousins with cool style.”

But despite what the musician might try to make you believe, it wasn’t always smoky nightclubs and tight-waisted jeans, of which to- day the rapper only dons Dior Homme. Like any young boy, London’s career aspirations started off as extreme as ever, with the gutsy goal of becoming a fireman. Switching gears in the way that only Brooklyn in the ‘90s could make one’s desires do so, his flames quickly fanned toward style and sneaker design—“I used to spend hours compet- ing with my friends about who could draw the best shoe silhouette,” London fondly recalls—settling upon a desire to make his already mouthful of a name more noticed.

“I started seeing people like Ja Rule, Ashanti, Biggie Smalls, and Diddy, and I remember thinking, when Biggie was in Brooklyn he was so raw, but then he moved to LA and got all Versaced [sic] out with suits and canes. It was cool. I wanted to do that,” London says. “I wanted to be an innovator. So I started rapping in high school and girls would react.” Once he showed them his Prince-inspired dance moves paired with tailored Fendi jeans and chunky Jordans, they really went crazy.

Eventually his debut EP, Lover’s Holiday, dropped a week before Val- entine’s Day in 2011 featuring guest spots from Solange, Dave Sitek (TV on the Rado), and Glasser. Timez Are Weird These Days came out six months later and brought a whirlwind with it: one of a kind col- laborations between brands such as Surface to Air, Del Toro, and Cole Haan with London’s own LVRS, a re-occurring nightlife and fashion byline on Style.com, representation from NEXT Models, and studio session sync ups with other then-emerging artists like Azealia Banks and A$AP Rocky. While the single from the first album “I Stand Alone” proclaimed, “The clothes don’t make the man,” Lon- don proved through everything, with his trademark wide-brimmed hat and nearly-solid and round optics, they certainly didn’t hurt.

It was upon the conclusion of his last tour, which coincidently aligned with Paris Fashion Week, that London decided he had to start working on the next one. Cooped up recording during the day and playing sidekick to the likes of Frank Ocean and Kate Moss all night, he began Vibes!. “It was a bad idea,” London says in retrospect. “I was exhausted.” That didn’t stop him from convincing Motown legend Leon Ware from joining him in the studio, another chance victory encountered on a Parisian road. “He called and all he said was ‘I saw the record. You almost look as good as me,’” remembers London. “When he said who he was, I made my driver pull over be- cause I started crying.”

Afterward, following a successful session in Germany with producer Peter Fox and a confusing trip to New York—“I felt completely lost and out of place”—London finally followed in Biggie’s footsteps west, making the move to Palm Springs. “I played Coachella first and I real- ized my phone didn’t have any service and I couldn’t get any emails,” says the artist. “It was perfect. I needed to get out my old mindset and I had to leave New York. I had to build my artilleries outside of the warzone. I couldn’t show people the guns or spaceships that I was making.”

In a sprawling house in the desert, London constructed his own portal. For nine months he abstained socially and sexually, lock- ing himself inside the home/studio and not speaking to anyone he wasn’t working with or didn’t run into at Walmart—which, as the only source of entertainment, the department store was “every- thing” for him during this time.

“I had to open up and break my- self into a million pieces to put a new me back together. It was hard. I can’t do that in front of other people and I can’t switch on and off” says London. “I didn’t want to come to a studio and have it feel like I was working... like I was on set for hours and after I could leave and go back home to my wife and kids. I don’t have a wife and kids. This album was all I had and I needed to make a world around that.”

Of that emotional world, Vibes! breezes in as penetrating in vul- nerability as it is silky smooth. From to the genre-bending ”Tribe,” featuring Jesse Boykins III as well as the first single off the album, to the soulful “Can’t Stop” track, sporting a verse from West in his Col- lege Dropout-era playfulness, and a commandingly ‘80s slow jam with Devonté Hynes, “Figure it Out,” the record dreamily dancesthrough decades as if mere- ly passing from one room to the next in some sort of ec- centrically grandiose home. Dedicated to the rapper’s late aunt who delivered him as a baby in Trinidad, Vibes! brings even more touching weight for the artist, with friend and collaborator Karl Lagerfeld leading the visuals for the re- lease, including photographing London for the cover and design- ing the title’s handwritten logo.

“It’s called Vibes!, because every- thing just vibed together. There’s nothing I can say to truly explain it,” says London. It’s very spiritual and powerful. I saw a bigger dream and everyone wanted to contribute to the creation of it. I’m very grateful.”

And for London, who seems to tee- ter between strategic mastermind waiting for all of his crops to grow and fortunate passenger, maybe that's the best placet to be right now. With Vibes! comes the introduction of a new lifestyle brand under the same name (similar to that of LVRS), starting first with a denim capsule collection with Stüssy, and plans to expand to footwear and wines with other partners. Under his ever-widening collection of fedoras and similar head pieces—accessories used to “finish off outfits and separate [himself ] as a king”—even if he’s standing alone in the California desert or hopeful in a car on the streets of Paris and things don’t quite make sense yet, that is ex- actly how London wants it to be.