Alex Bilmes

The crisis in masculinity isn't scaremongering. It’s real, and it’s dangerous.

To celebrate the publication of his final issue, our soon-to-be former editor looks back on a career of “extremely gruelling carousing"

Best known for her transgressive photomontages, the Hayward Gallery will celebrate an eclectic half-century

'The 1980s: Photographing Britain' focuses on the darker side of the designer decade

Sunspel says “yes”

How three leading lights of London hospitality created the capital’s hottest spot

Thirty-six years after the release of Tim Burton’s haunted house classic, Winona Ryder returns to the role that made her famous, in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. For Esquire, the singular star reflects on the highs and lows of her extraordinary life and career

A September morning in Dagenham, where east London edges into the Essex hinterland. Roundabouts, bus shelters, roadworks. Shopping parades offering ready-made narratives: take-away, pharmacy, funeral director. Rows of houses putting brave faces on it. Weather that can’t make up its mind.Outside the Sydney Russell School on Parsloes Avenue, two small groups have assembled. A soundbite of news reporters. A ribbon of local worthies. And, in green blazer and yellow polo shirt, a teenage boy who has…

With Naomi: In Fashion, a great British institution pays tribute to a great British institution

Andrew Scott’s success did not arrive overnight. His has been a slow and steady ascent from supporting player to leading man. But his status is now assured: at 47, the Irishman is among the most talented and prominent actors of his generation, on stage and screen.Dublin-born and raised, Scott first took drama classes at the suggestion of his mother, an art teacher, to try to overcome a childhood lisp. At 17 he won his first part in a film, Korea (1995), about an Irish boy who finds himself fight…

On 7 April, 1966, the writer and feminist Vivian Gornick published an article in The Village Voice, a supposed bastion of progressive New York values, under the headline “Pop Goes Homosexual: It’s a Queer Hand Stoking the Campfire”. “It is homosexual taste,” wrote Gornick, holding her nose, “that determines largely style, story, statement in painting, literature, dance, amusements, and acquisitions, for a goodly proportion of the intellectual middle class. It is the texture, the atmosphere, the…

Like the models that walk in them, fashion shows vanish as fast as they appear — with just the briefest moment, hand on jutting hip, in the spotlight. Fashion is intended to be ephemeral. You can’t make clothes for the ages if you’re hoping to sell people something new each season. Or, better yet, each week, or day, or hour, or minute. Fashion is about novelty, and progress. It’s about moving forwards and wanting more. If designers look frequently to history for inspiration, then that’s mostly s…

Director Denis Villeneuve’s mega-sequel successfully tees up… Dune: Part Three?

“I can’t,” says Kim Jones. He’s been asked to put into words a famous silhouette created by Yves Saint Laurent, one of his predecessors at the house of Christian Dior, in Paris. “You have to see it to understand it.” He slices the air with his hand, fingers slightly curved to form a serpentine line. “For me,” Jones says, “there’s a fluidity to his line that makes it very, very sensual. I think that’s what’s so appealing about his work.” Saint Laurent was celebrated, as was Christian Dior before…

In the summer of 2013, at a photo studio in north London, the photographer Craig McDean, the stylist Katy England and various Esquire rubberneckers, including me, gathered to shoot Kate Moss, the pin-up of her (our, my) generation, for the cover of Esquire. There are many standout moments in the career of a magazine editor — we’re very spoilt — but this, for me, was a highlight. To watch Kate pose for the camera in real life is equivalent to what it must have been like to watch Picasso paint, Ma…

You know what the problem with Brideshead Revisited was? Too much Catholicism, not enough gak or wanking in the bath. In her spirited (euphemism for: batshit) sort-of update to Waugh’s English country house classic, the British writer-director Emerald Fennell chucks everything at the screen to see what sticks. Like its predecessor, Fennell’s debut Promising Young Woman, a rape-revenge black comedy that won her an Oscar for best original screenplay, Saltburn revels in its own provocations and tra…

Precisely 20 years ago, The Darkness were the biggest band in Britain — confoundingly, magnificently, and briefly. Formed in 2000 in Lowestoft, Suffolk, not traditionally a hotbed of world-frotting rock deities, by brothers Justin (vocals) and Dan Hawkins (guitar), they released their debut album, Permission to Land, in the summer of 2003. It was, in the words of Justin Hawkins, a “megasmash”.On the back of an irresistible single, “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” — “a massive, monumental, rock…

As you would expect of a major global city, London has an embarrassment of world-class hotels — and that number seems to be growing by the week. The Evening Standard calls it “London’s 7-star gold rush”, identifying “at least 13” high-end hotels scheduled to open by 2025. The Peninsula, by Hyde Park Corner, opened in September, closely followed by the enormous Raffles at the London OWO (catchy name, no?), on Whitehall. Still to come: a Mandarin Oriental in Hanover Square; a Six Senses in the old…

Mick Jagger turned 80 in July. Keith Richards offered his congratulations in the time-honoured tradition: his social media team posted a video to Instagram, so he could ask his old mucker — no, really, he is quite old — to “give me a call and let me know what it’s like.” It being, presumably, life in one’s ninth decade. Jagger’s response, if indeed one was forthcoming, is not recorded, but Richards is a mere 79, so he must only hang on until December 18 to find out for himself.Six weeks after Si…

Growing up with The Boss