Yugyeom is partial to one tattoo. A dandelion etched in a geometric pattern on his right rib, it’s one of possibly nine tattoos that adorn his body. The dandelion stems from a specific childhood memory: walking beneath an underpass, he had spotted a delicate flower sprouting between bricks—a fond colour standing out in an unlikely place.
Enthralled by the flower’s strength despite its fragile appearance, he saw it as a symbol of resilience, especially when he also quickly discovered its fascinating ability to disperse its seeds in the wind. Unsurprisingly, it formed the title of his very first mixtape.
Since then, his life has been anything but slow. Amid 2024 adventures, the first stop in his TRUSTY tour was Singapore. Prior to our chat, the then-27-year-old singer had landed in the city the night before, shot an early AM video with Vogue Singapore, recorded a local radio interview, and spent the late afternoon at a full editorial spread with us.
I’m not sure if lunch was in there somewhere, but he was slated for yet another shoot later that evening before his show the next day. I’m exhausted simply mentally recounting the programme, and can much less imagine living it.
Typical to most folk accustomed to life in front of the camera though, if he was feeling any fatigue, he surely didn’t show it. This visit might be a little more rushed than what his schedule usually accommodates, but when it’s go time, it’s go time.
The K-pop artist stepped into the spotlight with ease, adopting a casual peace as the setup was perfected. Then, upon cue, he switched on a professional charisma that’s so ingrained, it felt less like a mask and more like second nature.
It’s what you’d expect from someone who has spent his adolescence training for and today possesses a decade’s worth of industry experience under his belt. He was unfazed by the echoing awes (there were many) from the crowded crew almost voyeuristically observing his every pose. Wholly focused, yet not missing a beat taking direction from the photographer.
It was just as fun spectating, post-shoot, as the photographer and stylist debated which shots made the final cut. There were too many good ones—a happy problem that’s not as common as you might think, even when including proper models and other field veterans. So picture it, dear reader, the photos you’re seeing are but a sampling of what was captured that day.
What remains most impressive about his social stamina was his sincerity during the conversation. While not fully fluent in the language, Yugyeom made keen effort to pepper words, or at least begin his sentences, in English.
Fans from the start would know that his musicality has changed considerably. After signing with AOMG, he embraced a deeper, edgier aesthetic in establishing himself as a solo act, complete with emo lyrics.
His latest album practically does a 180. It’s a bubblegum beat of catchy hooks and matching visuals. If anything, the vibrant approach genuinely mirrors his energy. Or as he succinctly summed it in four words and a huge grin, “Today’s style, enjoy more.”
In our bilaterally monolingual communication, his attention was unwavering. He read reactions and upheld eye contact, even though he didn’t need to with the translation provided by his staff. Present enough to amusedly tease a verbal quirk I hadn’t myself noticed before.
It’s not hard to believe that this authenticity is shaped by youth. As a kid, his dream to be a dancer was so resounding it inadvertently conveyed as confidence. From dancing through lunchtime, getting older boys to practice together, joining school trip talent shows to eventually getting scouted at dance tournaments.
Even when he hit a slump, where he and BamBam were initially excluded from debut plans, he managed to catch his break after a chance on a reality TV survival contest. Wouldn’t it, at age 16, be immense pressure to perform like your future depended on it? Needless to say, he did ok.
“I didn’t feel as much pressure then, because it was a burden collectively shared with fellow GOT7 bandmates,” he recounted in Korean, “Even now, it’s not the pressure [maintaining a solo career] because it’s what I chose to do, but that I’m very aware of my weaknesses and what I need to work on.
“Because I know,” he used emphatic English as a caricature of himself, or at least his attitude towards his work, “More detail, detail, detail!” Now, his priority is closing the gap between where he currently is and wants to be. He finds himself a little closer now.
If he had to attribute success between luck and hard work, it would be 30 per cent the former and 70 the latter. “My strongest belief is that consistency equals result and improvement,” he explained his drive, “Repetition is tedious, and it’s what people find most challenging, but it’s one of the most important things.”
Practising his craft was effortless when fuelled by pure passion. Now that it’s an occupation, he understands there’s much more to it than that. Maturity turned his frequent wondering about the greener pastures of normal student life into gratitude towards his given position. “I’m lucky enough to enjoy the part that most don’t,” he said, acknowledging his blessings.
You get the sense that under all that sunshine is a closet perfectionist. Though this year marks the 10th in this gig, Yugyeom doesn’t count the same duration fulfilled for his singing capabilities. He may have written his first song at 19, but his devotion to singing only sparked two years later.
There is no frivolous toe-dipping in any endeavour. He only considers it a pursuit when he’s very much invested, a dedication that similarly applies to hobbies like boxing. I mean, for someone who has only ever travelled for work, his concept of an ideal vacation is to chill at home or with friends over drinks.
He’s not sure where he inherited this ethic from but spoke of how his parents regularly instil the value of humility. “My name too,” he earnestly pointed out, “겸 (gyeom) means humble.” For those curious, 유 (yu) translates to have or own. In other words, his parents quite literally wanted him to get humble.
It certainly paid off. He went from being portioned the smallest parts in his early boyband days to finally singing the main chorus. Since the moment he was inspired by Chris Brown at the Grammys to decide to be more than a dancer, Yugyeom has been hitting all the milestones he set for himself.
Looking ahead, there’s a ton he wants to embark on, but growth is ultimately the goal. It’s the motivation to explore new genres and expand his horizons. “It’s something I’m very mindful of. There are artists I look up to who are always evolving,” he explained in native tongue. “I like to keep my fans interested and engage with audiences who may not be familiar with my work; to leave them all guessing my next step.”
With every song, there is no singular message that he is trying to express. Only the core sentiment that each succeeding one demonstrates growth to his fans, his staff and those who choose to surround him. It’s his way of reciprocating the love and support he has been receiving along this journey.
His beam barely ever left his face as he was telling us this. It was like watching a wild dandelion sway; rooted firmly in the ground but ready, at any moment, to ascend into the wind.
Photography: Shawn Paul Tan
Creative Direction and Styling: Asri Jasman
Hair: Christvian Wu using GOLDWELL
Make-Up: Kenneth Chia using JUNGSAEMMOOL BEAUTY
Photography Assistants: Chay Wei Kang and Xie Feng Mao
Styling Assistant: Erica Zheng
Talent Management: AOMG
I meet Jannik Sinner at a hotel in Monte Carlo. The day is gloomy, windy. Sinner shows up in tennis kit, a little intimidated perhaps, but with a ready wit. I tell him he seems taller than the last time we met. “Or maybe you, as you became older, got smaller,” he says.
On his wrist, he has his Rolex GMT-Master II, with a black-and-brown bezel. He takes it off so I can see the inscription on the back, celebrating his first Grand Slam victory, at the Australian Open in January 2024. That was when he beat Daniil Medvedev in the final. “That is how the most incredible year of my life began,” Sinner says.
Sinner is 23 years old. Since 10 June, he has been the world’s number one in the ATP tennis ranking: the first Italian ever to take the position. He is also the first Italian to win two Grand Slams in the same season; having won the US Open in September.
He is still young but it has been a long climb to the top. Sinner grew up in Sesto Pusteria, a village on the border between Italy and Austria. At home, his mother, Siglinde, and father, Hanspeter, speak German. When Sinner left his family at 14 to attend a tennis academy in Bordighera, near the French border—over 644 kilometres from his home—he spoke almost no Italian.
Now, he is a sensation in Italy—where tennis-school enrolments are skyrocketing, and beyond. His distinctive red hair and his rangy frame; his focus on mental health over the idea of “winning at all costs”; and his fans—the Carrot Boys—frequently sighted courtside, all make Sinner one of the most exciting personalities out of tennis. It’s easy to see why Rolex would want him as an ambassador.
“That’s a great source of pride,” Sinner says. “It’s important for me to work with [dignified] people who uphold a high standard of behaviour.”
The results speak for themselves. In addition to the Australian Open and the US Open, Sinner also triumphed in Rotterdam, Miami, Halle and Cincinnati this year, earning over EUR11m (about SGD15.6m) in prizes.
And yet, this has also been a year of huge disappointments. In May, a hip injury forced Sinner to retire from the Madrid Open. He missed the tournament in Rome. He suffered defeat by Carlos Alcaraz in the semi-finals at Roland Garros, and in the quarter-finals at Wimbledon by Daniil Medvedev. He missed the Paris Olympics due to tonsillitis.
But most of all, he had to deal with the suspicion of doping. On 10 March, at the Indian Wells tournament in California, and again on 18 March, he tested positive for less than a billionth of a gram of the banned anabolic steroid Clostebol.
He was suspended from tennis, initially for two days—4 and 5 April—before his suspension was overturned on appeal. Then he was suspended again, from 17 to 20 April. His defence was straightforward: the Clostebol, his team had discovered, had been contained in an over-the-counter spray that Sinner’s physio, Giacomo Nardi, had used to treat a cut on his own finger. When Nardi massaged Sinner, traces of the banned substance were inadvertently and unknowingly transferred to him. The ITIA (International Tennis Integrity Agency) accepted this explanation and cleared Sinner of any wrongdoing.
“It was a tough time,” Sinner tells me. “I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I couldn’t vent or get help. All the people who knew me and watched me play understood that there was something wrong with me. I spent sleepless nights because even if you are certain of your innocence, you know that these things are complex. Everyone immediately told the truth and that allowed me to play. But at Wimbledon, on the court, I was white. And even afterwards, my feeling with people was fearful. I went into training in the Cincinnati clubhouse and thought: How are they looking at me? What do they really think of me? I realised who my real friends are.”
While it seemed that the affair was closed, in September, WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, announced it was appealing Sinner’s case, asking for a disqualification on the grounds of fault or negligence. This, again, throws Sinner into uncertainty, for between three and six months. Yet the spirit is firm, and the game is unaffected. In October, he reached the final of the China Open in Beijing; in November, Sinner clinched victory over Taylor Fritz in the ATP Finals in Turin.
“I have grown so much this year,” he says, “Both mentally and physically.”
ESQUIRE: How do you explain your ascent to the top?
JANNICK SINNER: The results you see now are not sudden. They are the fruits of the hard work we have done over the past two years. I am the son of a chef, and I know that you don’t start cooking a good dish in a few minutes. You study, understand, try and try again—then the final dish will be good.
ESQ: What was the biggest thing you learnt on the court?
JS: Tactics. It is important because it can allow you to adjust a game that is not going well. When [former Italian tennis pro] Simone Vagnozzi came to my team, he gave me seven to eight pieces of information per game. I honestly didn’t understand anything. He told me: “Every now and then, you [need to] make a slice.” But I didn’t know how to do it, so we made a lot of changes. It’s a shot [that] I don’t even do technically correct because I hold the racket with two hands.
Still, I [now] feel more confident with it. Simone is good because we [have a lot of discussions] and he doesn’t impose rules on me. He asks me to be more fluid [in my serves like] touching the ball in the right way, which also means spending less energy.
ESQ: How do you think you can improve?
JS: In the US Open final, I didn’t serve well. That can happen. But that is a shot for which there is great room for growth. I’m convinced that, no matter how much you practise, you always have to deal with a bad day. But it’s important to be able to vary your shots, to feel more confident when going down to the net, to work on your bunt, to have a different feel for the ball.
ESQ: Can you describe your style to someone who knows nothing about tennis?
JS: It’s a mix between solid and aggressive. I struggle more defensively. In fact, I try not to go into defence. My tennis is versatile, but, for example, I still don’t know how to play the net game well. A player who has made me grow a lot is [Daniil] Medvedev. I had never serve-and-volley [but] he forced me to practise that to [to gain an advantage in beating] him. Against some players, I have to do more of a long backhand. In tennis, you learn from your relationship with your opponent. The real question for the tennis player is: how do I get into the opponent’s head? If you guess the answer, things in the match change.
ESQ: Amid all this chaos, how do you maintain your composure?
JS: Accepting myself. I have matured; I understand myself more. It may sound silly but getting to know yourself is fundamental. I worked on it a lot with [sports psychologist] Riccardo Ceccarelli. During the game, it’s easier for me—I forget the mistake easily. During training, on the other hand, I quickly look for improvement. That is wrong. When I started to admit [my flaws], I made small steps moving forward.
ESQ: Does having a winning mentality change you as a person?
JS: No. We always talk about results. For me, they are the consequence of what you express on the court. When you are at a high level and the body holds up, you don’t have to question yourself because the results will certainly come. My family understands me and my team understands me, maybe even better than my parents. I find my peace of mind with them. We live in hotels, planes; we travel all the time. They allow me to be the [man that] I am and understand what I need.
ESQ: For example?
JS: Simple things, such as indulging some of my passions. I love driving. It makes me feel great. Alone, isolated; I put the music on and every now and then, I’d [turn off the music to] hear the engine and I get charged up.
ESQ: Your girlfriend is fellow tennis player, Anna Kalinskaya; what has she added to your life?
JS: I don’t think anything has changed. Having a girlfriend is something that either makes you feel good or makes you feel bad. I want it to be something that feels very natural, [something that] comes into my life normally. I can’t afford to change as a player or as a person. That hasn’t happened so that’s why it works.
ESQ: Does nothing affect you?
JS: It’s not easy to play when there’s a personal tragedy. Knowing that my aunt Margith, who did so much for me as a child, was dying, certainly affected me.
ESQ: Do you ever reflect on the fact that you are the most successful Italian tennis player ever?
JS: You won’t believe it but it has never been a goal of mine to be the most successful in anything. For me, I place more value on what kind of person I am; what kind of people I surround myself with; what degree of trust I can have in them. I don’t believe that if you win, then you are good, and if you lose, then you are not good at all. Each of us has our own talents. The luck lies in finding a way to express them.
ESQ: Yes but being the champion changes things, doesn’t it?
JS: You face a lot more pressure. But I really believe that there is no money that can replace being healthy and living your life surrounded by people you love.
ESQ: The great football player Alessandro Del Piero once told me: “Losing makes me sick.”
JS: I am more of the belief that you are either winning or learning. For me, losing often to Novak Djokovic taught me a lot. It’s good for you; it wakes you up. In football, you might play against Ronaldo and realise you need to prepare better next time. But when is the next time? In tennis, we have more opportunities to make up for it.
ESQ: What did you get wrong this year?
JS: Tennis is important, but I didn’t spend enough time with the people I love. I have to find time for that because some things pass and never come back.
Photography: Philip Gay
Styling: Nik Piras
Grooming: Gianluca Grechi using DEPOT – THE MALE TOOLS & CO.
Lighting Assistants: Carlo Carbonetti and Leonardo Galeotti
Styling Assistant: Marco Visconti
Production: Sabrina Bearzotti
It has been said that you don’t buy a Mr Jones Watch to get to your train punctually; you buy one to question whether you want to get on that train at all, and whether getting on that train is going to add anything to the sum of human happiness.
Established in 2007 by former fine art, sculpture and computer-related design student Crispin Jones, Mr Jones Watches are both immediately recognisable and unlike any other watch you've ever seen.
Before he got into watches, Jones made an office desk that answered questions.
The questions were things like “Will my love be returned?” “What do my friends think of me?” “Will I find my lost item?” The questions were contained on cards, 30 in all, and to obtain the answers the user had to place them over a metal slot on the desk.
“It was an attempt to use the computer in a similar way that ancient civilisations used oracles,” Jones once told Esquire.
‘The catch was, the metal slot became hotter and hotter as the answer came up". The piece was called The Invisible Force: The Amazing Psychic Table. A barcode was concealed in the pattern on the card, so when you dropped it onto the slot you triggered an electronic reader that slowly produced an answer on a dot matrix.
The answer to “Will my love be returned?” would produce the answer “Yes … if … you … stay … true … to … your…”. By the time the answer got to “true” the card slot would be getting quite hot, but if you withdrew your hand the system would reset and you wouldn’t see the whole answer. The last – very hot – word was “ideals”.
Jones was interested in the way technology was changing our lives: what it gives, and what it takes away.
That's when he began thinking about watches.
“The watch is interesting," he figured, “because we don’t think of it as technology the way we do about phones or computers. And it’s an incredible survivor: most technologies that are 10 years old look incredibly outdated, so that if I use a phone from 10 years ago it’s almost a provocation, and it makes me look massively eccentric. But you’re wearing your wristwatch from the 1950s and it doesn’t seem extraordinary.”
Jones observed that. while many of us tend to walk around with near identical gadgets these days, watches remain one of the few outward signs of our personality.
“And with watches you can weave in a lot of interesting stories and remap the concepts of how we think about time,” he said.
So he began developing his own.
Early Mr Jones Watches designs included The Summissus, subtitled The Humility Watch. This was “an object designed to remind people that death should be prepared for at any time”.
The watch had a mirror face, and alternated between flashing the time and the message “Remember you will die”. (A simplified later version of this was later made available for sale, and was known as The Accurate.)
Then there was Avidus, also known as The Stress Watch.
This reflected the feeling we have of time speeding by when we are stressed, and time slowing down when we are relaxed. The wearer would press the two metal contacts on the face, and a pulse would activate the display.
The more stressed the user, the faster the time would run; the more relaxed the user, the slower, and a meditative state would cause the time to run backwards.
Jones soon opened up his design process to external illustrators, and today Mr Jones Watches concerns itself less with philosophical nature of time and mortality, and more with novel and entertaining ways to approach time-telling. Mr Jones Watches mostly exist to put a smile on your face.
Take Ricochet [sp], for example. This model displays three cartoon robots playing pinball. The three metallic droids, engrossed in the action on the pinball machine, are each hand-gilded in a different metallic foil, so that they twinkle as they catch the light. The scoreboard of the games machine displays the hours and the minutes. In other words, it's the bit that tells the time.
Or there's Monster Melter 3000, in which a spaceman is locked in mortal combat with a terrifying man-eating alien. The position of the spaceman’s ray gun indicates the minutes. The monster’s severed tentacle shows you the hour.
Or how about the Cyclops watch? Instead of conventional hour and minute hands, Cyclops uses a single black circle to mark the passage of time. Each hour is represented by a different coloured circle beneath. The Cyclops is not particularly accurate. That is the point. It is billed as “the perfect Sunday watch”.
The wearer is invited to glance down at their wrist and deduce: “Well, it’s roughly half past the hour”.
For everything else, there is always your iPhone.
Mr Jones Watches has always been an outlier. But in 2024 it finds itself sympatico with an industry where (one argument has it) dial design is prioritised over such historically important factors as the provenance of a watch’s movement, the alloy of its case, or links to some tale or other involving a race car driver or an astronaut or a mountain climber from six centuries ago.
Instead, how about a watch that looks unlike any other, and is whimsical, humorous and fun, into the bargain? For that Mr Jones Watches has your back.
Crispin Jones has workshops in Forest Hill and Camberwell in south London, as well as a busy shop in Covent Garden, and an online shop that ships worldwide. His watches cost between £225 and £695, making them a good first watch, a decent gift or a unique new piece to add to your collection. The company generally puts out around 10 new watch designs each year.
I've long wondered about the process of watch design, so many of them look the same, after all, and have been curious quite how much latitude a designer is allowed before market forces and the pressures of Q4 to shift more 40mm panda-dialled chronographs kicks in, and any fun stuff is relegated to a file marked "Maybe Next Year".
Those are not concerns of Crispin Jones.
The other week, between occasional appearances from Stanley, the friendly office miniature dachshund, Crispin talked to me about how the Mr Jones design process works, why market research is for the birds, and the endless playful possibilities of time.
Here's 35 things I learned.
I think often people see our watches and think “Oh it’s just wacky nonsense. You can’t tell the time with this! It’s impossible!” But there is always a logic to it. There’s a structure, if you’re prepared to engage with it. You might need to relearn a little bit of how to recognise the time. But we’re not asking for much complexity. We’re really not doing things that are just confusing and arbitrary.
One of the most successful watch designs for us is “the swimming pool watch” – A Perfectly Useless Afternoon. Kristof [Devos; Belgium illustrator and author] designed that. His starting point was this quote from a Chinese philosopher that if you’ve learned to spend an afternoon doing absolutely nothing, then you’ve learned to live [the quote is from the 20th Century linguist and novelist, Lin Yutang: “If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live”]. And although you don’t need to know that narrative to appreciate the watch, that underpins it. I think it’s important for him that there’s a conceptual reason behind this guy lying in a swimming pool. That’s what it’s all about.
The second thing with that watch is that there has to be a really elegant way to incorporate the time-telling function. That’s what we always aspire to. The “swimming pool watch” is a really good example, because at any time of the day, whenever you look at it, the image is coherent. It makes sense. And then, if you know how to decode the elements, you can read the time as well. As soon as someone’s explained it to you, it’s obvious. But the first time you see it, your reference is all scrambled because there’s no conventional minute hand. There’s no numerals on there. But the time-telling element is coherent with the image.
There is a more intense subtext to that particular watch, which is explained in the booklet that comes with it. Kristof had an awful car crash where, I think, one of his very close friends died [In 2007, Kristof was holiday in Germany with his now wife, and friends who were newlyweds. The holiday was a wedding gift from Kirstof and his partner. There was an accident, and his friend Tina passed away. “We were all 26,” he has explained. “Nobody expects to lose someone, especially another friend. It was really heavy, it’s still really hard”] and that was his impetus to really cut back on work. He was doing commercial art direction for graphic design firms, which he wasn’t enjoying, and he also did children’s book illustration and authoring, which is what he really wanted to do. And when he proposed this design to us, he was trying to balance his commercial stuff with his more creative ideas. All the artists we work with get a royalty payment. And that watch is so successful that Kristof was able to give up the commercial art direction stuff and refocus on the children’s illustration. He’s now also trained as a teacher, so he teaches high school students. So that watch allowed him to reconsider what he was doing.
If we did any sort of the analysis like that, we would probably learn some stuff. I just worry that that would sort of steal a bit the charm of the whole process. I feel like, then we’d go “Robots and cityscapes sell more than landscapes, so we need to do more of them in Q4”. But it’s never like that.
Our guiding principle is always: “Is this the best version of this artist’s work that we can make in a watch form?” Our business model used to be that we’d do a 100-piece numbered edition. And, if it was super-popular and it sold really fast, then we’d reissue it down the line into the permanent collection. But then the limited editions started selling out really fast, so it became difficult to judge what was popular and what was not so popular. So, then we scaled up to 200-piece editions, and then those started selling out really fast, too. They were going in 25, 30 minutes. What we do now is a 12-hour [order] window [and fulfil all the orders placed within that timeframe]. We’ve always had a lot of customers from the USA, for example. Before, if we did a 200-watch release at midday London time, which is what we used to do, that’s not really sympathetic to someone on the west coast of America, where it’s 5am. We had a situation with people going “I love the design, but I'm furious with you as a company, because I can’t buy it.” That wasn’t ideal.
We’re not systematic. There’s no set of rules for something that makes a Mr Jones watch. We do have substantial numbers of unsolicited submissions, as you can imagine. We do weird designs, so people think “They do anything! I've got an idea for watch, I’ll send it in to you?” We have a submission form. There is a layer of filtering which the customer service team do. But they're instructed to not be super-rigorous. I guess what we always look for is someone with a distinctive quality that we haven’t seen before. Also, someone who brings a story to the design – a narrative. So many of the design submissions we get fall down… There’s a sort-of witty visual pun, and you're like, ‘Yeah, it’s kind of funny, but not really’. Like, they've not really integrated the timekeeping in an elegant way that’s coherent with this narrative they're trying to tell. It is a pretty challenging thing to do. I’d say we get about 250 submissions a year.
Our threshold for recouping our costs is very low, because everything we do is all done internally. We only need to sell maybe 100-150 of each watch in order to recoup the money we’ve invested. And we always sell more than that. That means we can be really free with the design. We don’t have to focus-group it, get a bunch of the customers together, test it…“Do you think this colorway, or the black colorway?” I guess it’s arrogant, in a way. But I think it would lose a lot of that magic if we introduced another voice into the internal company assessment of a design, coupled with the external artists. What if they’re competing voices? Who wins? We’re in a sort of luxurious position where we don't really have to do that.
That's not saying we don't make missteps. There was a watch we did called Tadaima [designed by the London-based Japanese illustrator Yo Hosoyamada], which has a view of the Tokyo cityscape. The limited-edition version had this cat looking out the window, and the minute hand was a bird. There was this nice narrative between the domestic cat that was captive behind the window, and the bird that’s flying free. For the reissue, we sampled it, and we sampled it without the cat, because the cat sat behind this window frame, and it closed in the design quite a lot. It just looked nicer without the cat – it looked more open and less fussy. That watch sold quite well. But now we’re forever getting people saying “Where’s the cat? I like the version with the cat”. So, that was the example of: we’re so fixated on making the best version of that design, and the purity. To my mind, it was a no brainer. The cat was clutter on an asymmetric image. But for a lot of the customers, the cat was really important. So we learned something. We are toying with the idea of bringing the cat back in the new year. But I know what will happen. Then everyone who bought it in between, will be like “Could I return my watch and get the cat version instead?”
We’ve got a pool of illustrators we work with, as well as a number of designs being done in-house each year. Before the illustration is agreed, there’ll be a round of rough sketches where we work out the theme for the watch – the basic design; the core elements; what the timekeeping [function] is going to be; what the feel of it is. There’s a bit of roughing out, so we can get a version of the design that the artists can be happy with. We spend quite a bit of time getting it right and working on screen before we commit anything to engraving plates and mixing up inks, because that gets quite expensive.
Once we’re happy with the basic proportions, we’re committed. Then they'll mix the inks from Pantone references. We use standard colour references, the same graphic designers use. We can generate a recipe for each Pantone shade. They’re fairly good, but they’re not always perfect. So there has to be a bit of by-eye adjusting as we go along. Each colour is printed in turn. It’s a bit like silk screen printing. It’s a combination of screen print and lithography. We’ve got an engraved plate, and then we're printing a single colour at a time off that. Mixing the inks and then setting up the ink on the machine for printing is the labour- and time-intensive period. We need to be fairly confident before we do a sample, because it’s a substantial commitment of time and effort. If there’s multiple colours, which there generally are on our designs, we tend to use pad printing [a prainting technique that uses a silicone pad to transfer a 2D image onto a 3D object, used in the medical, electronics and car industries], but in a fine art way. Pad printing is really an industrial printing technology – originally developed in the watch industry. But mostly in the watch industry it’s used for single or two-colour printing at most. I think the most colours we’ve used is 16. So that’s 16 layers of colour being laid down.
We never really have it where we go “Oh, this idea is non-starter”. You do often get things where the proportions aren’t right. This monster one [Monster Melter 3000] is quite a good example. What we were testing here was we’d print the monster on the glass, but we’d leave the mouth open and have some printing on the dial to give a sense of 3D-ness. The spaceman on the side is the minute hand, and this severed tentacle is supposed to point to the hour. So, it’s saying a quarter to four in the picture. But doing that, we felt the proportions of the two were a bit wrong. The spaceman was probably too small. So, the monster became larger. We scaled up a monster's head and that made it more impactful. But then we felt that the spaceman could also come up in size, which is in the final image. The planet sitting in front of the monster’s tentacle didn’t work either – it made it kind of incoherent. It should be behind by rights.
I wanted something really visually impactful [for Monster Melter 3000]. Our stock green and pink inks were not the brightest, so we sourced some fluorescent inks. That was exciting for the workshop, because they’d never used them before. You get a sense of how much more vibrant it is. At first, we thought “Oh we’ll use them sparingly”. “We'll use them on the monster or maybe on the dial, but we won’t go crazy”. But once you see them on some bits you go “Oh, we’ll just put it on everything! What’s the point of being subtle with it?”
Onorio [D’Epiro; the designer and illustrator who worked on Monster Melter 3000] was really nice to work with. A lot of the artists are working remotely, so we’re having to do it all over email or occasionally Zoom calls. But Onorio lives in Bedford. That’s not super-close to us in south London – but he became really engaged with the process. He came in for a bunch of the key review and resample meetings. We’d sit down and go – “All right, let’s try and brighten the colours”, and maybe we’d make some minor adjustments to the illustration. We can engrave new plates, mix new inks, print a sample, everything from start to finish, and we can do that in half a day. Because Onorio can be there, I can be there, the head of production can be there. We can all review it together – and talk about what's working, what isn’t, what the next step is.
Print technicians are really highly skilled. They tend to come from a fine art print-making background. And it's really nice for them to be recognised, and not be seen as just “the technicians”. What that definition misses is all the problem-solving and the little tweaks that they're doing to the artwork, that go into the printing process to get the best possible result. That’s why it’s nice if the artist comes in. Then they can stand side-by-side with them and watch what’s going on.
I don’t think any of the artists we’ve ever worked with has ever designed a watch before. So, they’re always super-motivated, because even if they’re quite established commercial practitioners, they haven’t been asked to do a watch before. And particularly they haven’t been asked to a watch like ours.
The difference of working at this scale cannot be overemphasised. Most people work on a laptop, so they’re at least working at A4-size. Once you’ve scaled that down to 32-millimeter diameter watch size, something really nice happens with the designs. That focusing of the design in the smaller space. And the pad printing is capable of such fine resolution that you can put a lot of detail in there and still it doesn't get lost. If you’re working on a screen, you get fixated on really minute details. In the reality of a watch, it’ll be so minuscule as to be inconsequential. That’s a good reality check.
I guess it’s not so much a control freak – it’s just more an insistence on getting things right. When we used to work with the factories in the Far East, we’d have a design, get it sent out and they’d do a pretty good job. But we wouldn’t be able to have a dialogue like, “This red, it looks a bit washed out. How can we make that more vibrant and more impactful?” Because they weren’t really engaging on those terms. They were like, “Well, you sent the Pantone reference. We’ve matched that, and we printed it. How much more can we do?” Unless you’re really right in the thick of it, up to your elbows in the ink and stuff, you can’t engage on those terms.
We work principally with two pad print suppliers and they both really value us as clients. Because the work they’re used to doing is printing on pen barrels – putting a one-colour company logo on a pen barrel, to give away at a trade show or something. It’s really boring. So, we’re an unusual client for them. We’ve got odd demands, and high quality demands. And they’re not used to dealing with that.
Our second workshop is in Camberwell, just across the road from the Camberwell Art College. We go around the degree show with the workshop staff, where all the graduating students are showing their work. The last couple of years, we’ve cherrypicked a couple of graduating students and approached them after the show and said, “We’d like to work with you to design a watch”. I graduated from a sculpture BA, many moons ago. So, I know what that’s like –it’s kind of horrible to be released from the cocoon of the art college environment into the real world, without a project.
We get so many submissions where you have a design where you have two spots where you read the hours and minutes, but not in a particularly integrated way. They always suggest numerals. No one ever says “What I’m going to do is rework the hours as different colours. So that you need to learn to read that blue means two o’clock, and green means three o’clock", or whatever it is. I'd really engage that! We get slight variations of the guy in the swimming pool watch So, there'll be a ball and someone playing football or a ball and a dog chasing it. We do get a lot of dog watch submissions – because of Stanley [miniature dachshund/ Mr Jones office dog who also features on a line of t-shirts]. We get endless submissions on that. They think that’s the way to my heart! It’s always a dog chasing a ball, or a dog chasing a bone. People do spend a lot of time on them. It’s kind of heartbreaking. There’s some really talented people out there. They’re just not quite right for us. I wish I could support more.
When you look at the “swimming pool” watch, you can read it without having to numericise it. You don’t have to say “12.35”, you can say – “Oh we’re nearly at lunchtime”, or whatever. You process time in a different way.
We started off doing the skull watch [The Last Laugh, a skull design linked to the tradition of memento mori. Instead of hands, the skull’s teeth display the time.] The hours were on the upper jaw, the minutes on lower. That was the first time I looked into using jump hour mechanism [a watch complication that displays the current hour numerically, in an aperture. When the minute hand completes a full revolution the jump hour mechanism instantly "jumps" to display the next hour]. Because originally that watch used a two-disc quartz mechanism. So, the hour disc was constantly moving. The minute disc was constantly moving. But it became really challenging to read. Because, say at 1.30 – the hour numeral “1” would be in the middle of the jaw. The “30” would be directly below it. By the time you got to “1.55” you’d begin to get the numeral “2” appearing – so then you’re like “Well, is it 2.55 or is it 1.55?” That’s when we bought into getting jump hour modules. And now we use them on several watches. Before that all the watches we did were quartz because I always had the sense that our customers didn't really… I was going to say they didn’t really understand. They probably did understand, but they didn’t really care. They were buying our watches for the design rather than the movement. I feel like now because we’ve been around in the watch world for a while and what we do is quite distinctive, a bunch of people who love [mechanical] watches have found their way to us. They might prefer mechanical watches, so we do them with a slightly higher price, and with a slightly different size case.
The Zombie Pizza watch [created by the artist Mariana Calderón] was another limited edition. It sold well but it didn’t do well enough to get reissued. It happened not to be super-commercial, but that’s alright. Not every watch gets reissued. It doesn’t mean it was an unsuccessful design. Mind you, if we’re speaking in strictly commercial terms, having a watch where a severed finger points to the top the minute and a fly points to the hour… that is quite niche.
There’s a logic with the Cyclops watch [designed by Crispin Jones]. The width of the black circle is five minutes. So, if the circle [crosses over a coloured one beneath it] on the left-hand edge, then that’s five past. But if it’s the width plus the same width as the circle below then that’s 10 past. Equidistant between the circle then it’s half-past. Just touching the preceding circle and it's a quarter-to. [Congratulations if you're still following this, by the way - Ed.] We have thought about it a bit! It’s not just because I liked those colours.
Nobody needs that really functional timepiece anymore, because functional time is taken care of by digital technology: like your phone, your laptop, the screens at the railway station, or whatever. Functional time is all around us. So that’s freed up the watch to be a purely expressive, personality-carrying piece of male jewelry. It’s a way to have male body adornment, where fewer of those opportunities traditionally exist for men. There will always be people who want a flash accessory that embodies some of the technical precision of the world, a watch like a chronograph, for example. But dial design has definitely become more of a central focus, more recently.
At the Royal College of Art, I was influenced by former student Anthony Dunne, whose book Hertzian Tales argued for a more considered critique of electronic products, not least a reexamination of everyday objects on aesthetic grounds. In 2004 I wrote a manifesto posing two questions: "How could a watch undermine its wearer?" and "What if the watch could express some of the negative aspects of the wearer’s personality?" But his most provocative question was "How can the watch represent time in a more unpredictable and provocative way". Dunne was interested in what he called critical design, which was using the language and tools of product design as a form for social critique. My background before then was in fine art and sculpture. So then coming on a design course, I was naturally drawn towards something that was a bit less utopian and a bit more strange. One of the things that he talked about a lot was called value fiction, where an author’s values and beliefs are revealed through the plot. So that language, how we think of the watch – the personality, and the communicating aspect – has become the most important thing. I think that stuff is really interesting. That was my way in to designing watches.
I worked for Philips Design for a while. Philips Design in the late 1990s, early 2000s, invested a lot of money in wearable technology. They did collaborations with Levi’s and made these kind of funky snowboarder jackets with built-in MP3 players. It was kind of cool and interesting. But it wasn’t leveraging something that was genuinely happening. Snowboarders were not sellotaping their MP3 players to their sleeves in order to be able to access the controls on the slopes. So, it failed. But I thought the watch was a really interesting [object] because it has this really long history – at least back to First World War, if you’re talking about wristwatches. And if you’re talking pocket watches, you go back another couple of 100 years. Its enduring appeal is partly for those reasons we’re talking about. It communicates something about personality as well as being this sort of functional tool.
One of the fundamental shifts from when I started Mr Jones Watches, is that I thought that meant I needed to design all the watches. That's what it was! Other people can go and do Fred Blogs Watches. I’m Mr Jones Watches! But after four years, I was kind of flagging, and the quality was slightly deteriorating, and I thought it would be interesting to collaborate with different people who had an interesting relationship to time.
Early on, I asked an illustrator, Fanny Shorter, who I know quite well, if she would do some designs for us. And that was really nice. I knew her a bit. But I didn’t know her so well that I would feel an obligation to realise her design. She was really good, because she didn’t understand anything about what we could and couldn’t do [ie: any limitations in watch design]. She mostly did illustration for textiles and for wallpaper, and mostly worked in screen prints. She didn’t do one million colours on her designs, which was important, because we can’t do a million colours either. She really helped us to drive things forward. [Shorter’s watch design, The Promise of Happiness features a tiger playing under moonlight. The hour is displayed in the moon, while the minutes are camouflaged within its stripes]. That was really good for growing the knowledge of what Mr Jones watches could be. That’s when I stepped back more and had other people do the designs. I wouldn't have expected that, when I started the company, because my ego wouldn't have allowed it. So there’s been a growth from my side as well.
The skill set we have as a company is really to do with editing designs. When I say “I’m an editor”, it sounds quite lukewarm. It doesn’t sound as glamorous as being “the creator”. But, actually, having a design and recognising what’s strong with it, and what’s working, and refining it down, that’s the hard bit. And that’s what we're really good at now.
Putting the word “remember” on the hour hand, and “you will die” on the minute hand, that was my idea. That was really my statement piece. But I can’t keep coming up with iconoclastic sayings like that, year after year. My background is not really doing the pictorial-type designs. And that’s what our company is good at now. The pictorial image with a time-telling function integrated into it.
The skull watch [The Last Laugh] was a collaboration with a comedian [it was created with the comic William Andrews, and features artwork by the British tattoo artist Adrian Willard]. I thought comedians had a really interesting relationship to time and timing. [Andrews] talked a bit about dying on stage and how people would say to him, “You’re so brave doing what you do”. And he’d say, “If I have a bad day at work, the consequence is = people don’t laugh”. But if you're a surgeon or something and you have a bad day at work the consequences are far more serious.
I just thought watches generally work as gifts. And if you’re giving a watch as a gift, there’s always that moment of opening it. Most watch brands sell the watches on a little cushion with the strap done up, so the box needs to be quite big. But if you fasten the strap then it's marked the strap before you've even opened it. Also, our boxes fit through the letterbox.
People say we’re gimmicky. Gimmicky implies something is flashy or no good or has no substance. But there’s a coherence behind our work! I don’t want to slag off other people, but there was a company that were making something they called watches, but without a time-telling function. They were these little things you wore on your wrist that had a sort of duck pond on them, that were three-dimensional. That’s my definition of a gimmick. Because someone will get that and say “How do you tell the time with that?” Well, you can’t. Even when our watch is something playful like a pig escaping from a tractor beam [the Beam Me Up! watch], it still functions.
Originally published on Esquire UK
Mike Tyson steps through the black ropes and lies down on his back in the middle of the boxing ring. He looks up at the ceiling of the warehouse in the Las Vegas suburbs and closes his eyes. The makeshift gym is so silent and sterile that all you can hear is his breathing and the hum of the air-conditioning.
In a few weeks, Tyson will turn fifty-eight. He’s back in training for his first officially sanctioned boxing match in nearly 20 years—a much-hyped matchup with the influencer-turned-pugilist Jake Paul that is set to be held in a football stadium filled with fans and streamed live to a potentially massive audience online.
But right now it’s time to get to work. The warehouse where Tyson has set up his camp is next to the headquarters of the Las Vegas Raiders, and team owner Mark Davis is letting Tyson use the space, which is minutes away from Tyson’s house. Perhaps not coincidentally, the colour scheme is very Raiders. A tall black curtain separates the training area, with its black-and-silver weight equipment, from the rest of the more-than-15,000-square-foot structure and contrasts with the white walls and ceilings.
On one wall and hanging above the ring are black-and-white signs that read mike tyson boxing club. Behind a rack of dumbbells, there’s a large black-and-white poster board with a photo of Tyson—hands wrapped, towel over his head—and a quote from the former heavyweight champ himself: “Discipline is doing what you hate to do but doing it like you love it.”
His trainer, Rafael Cordeiro, begins stretching out Tyson’s tree-trunk legs. Then he starts working on his back. Tyson, who now battles occasional sciatica, grimaces softly as he leans forward.
Now loose, he gets up and walks slowly to the slip bag. He looks at himself in the mirror—a sweaty, jacked, older version of the “Baddest Man on the Planet,” who once rode on the end of a lightning bolt to the top of the world before crashing back down to earth—and places the bag against his forehead.
After a moment, he steps back from the bag, bobbing and weaving methodically at first to help hone his head-movement defence. The exercise quickens, with a bucket’s worth of sweat flying from the wrinkles on his head and the white hairs on his face, splattering against the mirror and the bag.
“I want to hit the mitts,” he says.
When Tyson gets back in the ring to train with Cordeiro, who’s covered up to his neck in pads, what follows is a blizzard of left-right-left-right—over and over again. The power of Tyson’s punches reverberates throughout the warehouse. In the moment, whether he can still punch with bad intentions after all these years doesn’t feel like the right question. It’s more like, Did you hear that? The sound of silence has been replaced by the sound of violence.
Tyson wonders aloud if Paul, his opponent, who is 31 years his junior, has any chance to touch him.
“Can I be honest?” he asks his team.
Please, Iron Mike. Be honest with us.
“I don’t think he can hurt me.”
He’s feeling himself. He spits outside the ring before turning to Billy White, a coach who has known Tyson since he was a teenager training with the legendary Cus D’Amato, for confirmation: “Coach, I don’t think he can hurt me!”
White smiles and nods. So does Tyson’s wife, Lakiha (known as Kiki), who is filming him on her iPhone from ringside. She also offers a reminder.
“Baby,” Kiki yells, “drink your electrolytes more than usual!”
Tyson obliges. He knows that Kiki knows what’s good for him. He takes a swig from his three-litre jug and gets back to work.
In the almost two decades since his last official fight (he fought an exhibition match against Roy Jones Jr. in 2020), Tyson has battled through deep financial despair, grappled with legal issues, struggled with a cocaine addiction, and suffered the tragic loss of his four-year-old daughter, Exodus, in 2009. But in that same period, Tyson has also become one of the more interesting and unexpected second-chance stories in recent American history—finding family, stability, and cultural acceptance in the process.
Today, he is a financially healthy family man and husband of 15 years, a New York Times best-selling author who performed his own autobiography as a one-man Broadway show, the owner of one of the nation’s most successful celebrity cannabis brands, and a podcaster who gets really deep—and really high—with his guests. This late-life renaissance has led Tyson to take on an opponent he knows he can’t knock out but wishes to take the distance: Father Time.
That Tyson’s return to the ring comes against Paul makes the event an instant spectacle. The polarising twenty-seven-year-old YouTuber has posted a 9–1 record since he broke into professional boxing. And along the way, Paul has become the face of the sport’s push to reach new fans by winning over celebrities, influencers, and disrupters.
Older boxing fans will be watching to see if the old champ still has what it takes to smack down a mouthy newcomer. Paul’s followers want to see him knock off a legend. The fight will be held at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, home of the Dallas Cowboys, and streamed on Netflix for the platform’s 270 million subscribers in more than 190 countries.
Netflix has promoted it as potentially the most watched combat-sports event in history—making Tyson the box-office bridge between boxing’s former glory and its brave new reality in the world of social media.
“I don’t think this was meant to be done by any man but me,” Tyson tells me, his eyes lighting up with passion. “I love it.”
The world will have to wait a little longer than originally planned to see Tyson make that history, however. In late May, a few days after I visited him in Vegas, Tyson was on a flight from Miami to Los Angeles when he experienced a serious ulcer flare-up requiring medical attention. His doctors instructed him to dial back his training for a few weeks to recover. That meant the fight, which had been set for 20 July, had to be rescheduled for 15 November.
And the boxing officials in Texas say they will be watching Tyson closely to make sure that his stomach problems have subsided before they let him step into the ring.
The bout is scheduled for eight rounds of two minutes each, rather than the usual three minutes, with bigger-than-usual 14-ounce gloves. (Paul announced in late June that he would now use the 20 July date to take on Mike Perry, a former UFC and Bareknuckle Fighting Championship competitor, in an eight-round cruiserweight boxing match in Tampa while he waits for Tyson.)
Even before the medical incident, plenty of pundits were questioning the wisdom of allowing a nearly 60-year-old man to take such a risk. His medical setback may only add intrigue for many fight fans. The curiosity in the buildup to the fight has been mostly divided into three questions. Will Tyson kick Paul’s ass? Will Tyson embarrass himself and lose? And maybe the most important: Why is Tyson doing this at his age?
“He’s always going to be the man in a lot of our eyes,” says Ric Flair, the professional-wrestling legend and a friend of Tyson’s, who founded his own cannabis brand, Ric Flair Drip. “But I think he wants to be the man again.”
The Reverend Al Sharpton, who supported Tyson back in the 1990s when he was released from a three-year prison stint—after a conviction for a rape charge for which Tyson still maintains his innocence—describes the chance of seeing his friend fight one more time as “almost like going to see a rare piece of art in a museum.”
“Mike Tyson is one of America’s last originals,” says Sharpton. “How do you tell somebody who always did the impossible that they have to conform to the possible?”
Tyson knows that people are describing his decision to take the fight as the aging boxer’s version of a midlife crisis. He gets sensitive when reporters ask if he’s still got it, or when sceptics suggest the bout is a gimmick event that isn’t real. He simmers down a little when he reminds himself that most of those who question him have never stepped into the ring themselves. Still, his inability to say no to a fight—a mindset D’Amato instilled in him that has stayed with the kid from Brooklyn—has even surprised Kiki, he admits.
“My wife keeps saying, ‘You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do this.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I do have to do this,’ ” he tells me, stressing that the millions he’s reportedly making from the fight “will not change my life financially in any way.”
So why is Tyson trying to chase and summon a version of his younger self—the ruthless ring destroyer who became the youngest world heavyweight champion in boxing history at age 20? It’s because he’s an addict. Always has been, always will be. But it’s no longer about sex, cocaine, or anger. These days, Tyson says, he is addicted to cannabis and to his wife telling him he’s a great husband.
Oh, and one more old addiction: glory. It’s the jones that hasn’t left him.
“I’m a glory junkie. I love people thinking about me all day,” he says. “I’d rather live a short life of glory than a long life of obscurity. It’s just who I am.
“This is all I started fighting for—to get all this fucking status. I’m going to be chasing it for the rest of my life. I know that. I’m never going to get what I want, because I’m one of those gluttons for pain. I can never get enough.”
A boy comes to me with a spark of interest, I feed the spark, and it becomes a flame. I feed the flame, and it becomes a fire. I feed the fire, and it becomes a roaring blaze. —inscription on Cus D’Amato’s headstone
Don’t ask Tyson if he’s an icon, or what he thinks his legacy looks like. Those two words make him wildly uncomfortable. “What is an icon?” he asks after a doctor’s appointment in late May. “I’m still going to die; I’m still going to starve if I don’t eat. Suppose I go on hard times and become a bum on the street. Am I still an icon? What is my legacy? Nothing but an ego. Who cares about my legacy? My legacy can’t buy me a hot dog. Legacy is going to get me nothing.”
And don’t tell him he’s the greatest boxer ever. That irritates him, too, even if he usually hides it.
“Let me tell you this,” he begins. “Fans say I’m the greatest fighter who ever lived. Anybody that is a great fighter who gets told you’re the greatest ever, you say, ‘Thank you,’ but that’s bullshit. Deep in my heart, I know these guys don’t know what a great fighter is.”
A week before we spoke in Vegas, Tyson had flown to New York for the first press conference to promote the fight. He returned to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, about four blocks from the old Dapper Dan’s boutique shop, where Tyson punched out the boxer Mitch Green in an impromptu early-morning scuffle in August 1988 after Green confronted him, saying that Don King owed him money. (Green left with his eye shut and stitches on his nose.)
The past is always present for Tyson. Video packages for the Paul fight are covered with clips of knockouts from decades ago, back when Tyson had hair and didn’t have the dramatic tattoo of a New Zealand Māori warrior on the left side of his face. When the press event begins, Tyson takes on a different role in this Netflix-and-social-media hybrid of a press conference: He’s the adult in the room. After a young boy who models himself as a mini Paul asks a couple of curse-word-laden, inappropriate questions in his attempt to go viral, Tyson asks what the rest of the room is thinking. “Where’s your mother at?”
The Apollo crowd laughs, as does Tyson. He admits he can’t believe this is a real press conference for a real fight. What is this he’s gotten himself into?
“Forgive me, I’m an old dude,” he says. “This is new.”
He can barely keep a straight face for four seconds as he faces off with Paul, eventually giggling with his opponent.
Videos of Tyson knockouts are nostalgia porn. Go on YouTube and you can get lost in the compilations of brutal hooks, vicious uppercuts, and slow-motion shots of his opponents’ unconscious bodies crashing to the mat. It’s what helped build the mystique around the fighter when he was first starting out, with local newscasts running video packages of a young Tyson demolishing everything in his sight.
“When you were watching him knocking out opponents and them flying through the air, it didn’t look mythical—it looked real,” says Jim Lampley, the former HBO boxing commentator who is now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a contributor to PPV.com. “This kid was like nothing we had ever seen before. Mike became a cultural phenomenon from the get-go.”
It’s difficult to think of Tyson as being old. For millions, he is frozen in time as the 20-year-old who conquered the world and could not be stopped. That’s not the guy who is training to fight Paul. Sitting in one of the black-leather recliners next to the ring in the training facility, Cordeiro says he understands the care needed to control his fighter’s fire.
Cordeiro, who began training Tyson for the Jones exhibition fight out of Tyson’s garage at the start of the pandemic four years ago, is using the same message passed down by D’Amato all those years ago. Be the fire, control the fire, and turn the flame up to high when you absolutely need it.
“You have to keep the fire on blue. When the fire is on blue, you have control of the fire,” Cordeiro says, comparing Tyson to a stove. “Mike has control of the fire. But when you step inside the ring, he knows how to go high as fast as possible.
“You still don’t mess with Mike.”
Billy White, who has known Tyson for more than 40 years, since they were both with D’Amato, remembers picking up the phone in a church parking lot and hearing his friend’s plans and his message: I need you. White didn’t hesitate and is helping his friend train three times a day, believing that only Tyson could pull this off, no matter his age.
“He’s the ultimate warrior,” the coach says outside the warehouse near Las Vegas. “The gods have called him out. How great that they called on him. Who else were they going to call?”
It’s not a problem for Tyson that many see him as forever young and hold on to this image of him. Yet he knows what kind of person he was back then—ruthless, dangerous, angry. And now as a father and role model for his children, he hates what he was.
“He’s never going to leave me,” Tyson says of his younger self. “But you have to realise I’m not that person anymore. That’s just the reality. I’m not that person. I will never be that person again. I don’t like that person.”
Tyson wouldn’t be fighting Paul, he says, if there wasn’t a chance he could fail or be humiliated. As he talks, Tyson leans in and reflects on what he’s learned through failure. He speaks softly but never breaks eye contact.
“I learned about life from my losses. I’ve learned that as I get older and I lose my friends, my children, my teeth, my hair—and eventually, I’m going to lose my life—life is all about loss,” he says. “We’re going to be old one day. We’re going to lose our teeth, lose our eyesight, lose our hair, lose our dick, lose everything we thought made us who we were. We’re going to lose our identity. In the end, we’ll be grateful if someone has a picture of us on the family wall, if they even put up a picture of us.”
Failure is an advanced form of learning for Tyson, but he’s hoping to avoid another lesson in loss in North Texas. Tyson does have respect for Paul, who went from performing skits on Vine in 2013 to fighting in his second professional-boxing match on the card of Tyson’s exhibition fight with Jones in 2020. He still calls Paul a friend, even as the influencer has vowed to “knock this old man the fuck out.”
But Tyson revels in talking shit and trolling him. Like the time he called Paul “fat and funky” in assessing his opponent’s shirtless physique. Or when he said that a video of Paul dancing when he was 16 strangely gave Tyson an erection. Two days after he suffered the ulcer flare-up, Tyson couldn’t help but jab at Paul on X: “Now feeling 100% even though I don’t need to be to beat Jake Paul.”
The age difference between the two is an inescapable, circus-like element in how the fight has been promoted and covered. The 31-year age gap between Tyson and Paul is reminiscent of the multi-decade age gap presented in a fictional fight in the 2006 film Rocky Balboa. The difference is also greater than that in another major fight in Tyson’s career, when, at 21, he decimated 38-year-old Larry Holmes with a fourth-round knockout.
Tyson takes a breath before considering any parallels between this fight and the one from 1988. He is unbothered being on the other side of a younger challenger. Tyson, who is a summa cum laude scholar when it comes to the history of boxing, notes one “big fundamental difference” between the bouts. There are levels to these mind games, and no one has weaponised the word YouTuber quite like him.
“Larry Holmes was a legendary fighter who was fighting a champion who was active every day of his life,” Tyson says before his workout. “I am fighting a YouTuber.”
He adds of Paul, “It doesn’t matter how seriously he’s taking it. He is who he is.”
Tyson’s publicist, Joann Mignano, echoes her boss’s confidence: “We’re used to the doubters; we’re used to the haters. I know the Vegas bets are all doubting Mike. But he’s ready for war.”
What started out as a joke to some turned into a legitimate fight after the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation surprisingly sanctioned the match in late April. As part of the process, the agency required Tyson to take a physical, an eye exam, and a blood test, as well as EKG and EEG tests, spokesperson Tela Goodwin Mange says. The 19 years between Tyson’s last sanctioned fight—a 2005 loss to Kevin McBride—and the upcoming one with Paul was considered “but was not a factor.”
That hasn’t stopped many from wondering why the fight is sanctioned and whether anyone cares about Tyson’s well-being. Promoter Oscar De La Hoya, a former world champion in multiple weight classes, urged Tyson to be careful and said he was going to pray for him in what he described as “a dangerous fight.”
Deontay Wilder, another former world heavyweight champion—whose career has been trending down recently—questioned whether enough people give a damn about Tyson potentially getting injured. He said that Tyson was “too old for this.”
When I ask Tyson about Wilder’s comments, he’s initially calm about the concerns his peers have about him being seriously hurt: “Then let Mike get hurt. You don’t have to worry about paying my bills.” As he thinks about it more on the black-leather couch at his gym, he has more to say.
“Everyone says this makes no sense, but he’s how old?” asks Tyson about the 38-year-old Wilder. The younger heavyweight, says Tyson, shouldn’t feel sorry for him and doesn’t know him or understand him. “He’s not who I am. He can’t go to Mongolia and have somebody know who the fuck he is.”
In a brief statement, sent a couple of days before Wilder lost his most recent fight by knockout to the Chinese heavyweight Zhilei Zhang in early June, Wilder says he “would just like to wish Mike the best.”
Surrender was never in Tyson’s vocabulary. The word was not in the lexicon of Alexander the Great, one of Tyson’s heroes, so why should it have been in his? Still, he had to learn it, and quickly, if he wanted to save his family and maybe his life.
In his words, the journey to selflessness began a little more than a decade ago with the release of his memoir, Undisputed Truth. The cover photo of the book, showing an almost broken Tyson with some stubble, is described by the fighter as a reluctance to surrender. That period meant not just surrendering to God but also having to hear from Kiki and his family about the hell he had put them through to move forward.
“I don’t know if it feels good to surrender,” he says before his workout. “But it does feel good that it’s over—all the dark stuff is over.”
His light is Kiki, whom he has known since she was a teenager through her father’s connections in the boxing industry. They tried being with each other a couple of different times, but it never worked out. At the time, she was too down-to-earth, and he was not on this planet. Her patience and discipline were what he needed. He just didn’t know it. They eventually figured it out and have been nearly inseparable since Tyson called her after he got out of rehab. They married in 2009 and have two children, Milan, 15, and Morocco, 13.
“He finally found the right person. Kiki is a wonderful wife, and boy, she’s the boss, too,” Flair says, laughing. “We all need that.”
Gary Smith, the former Sports Illustrated writer who profiled Tyson in 1988, remembers how the odds back then were “monstrously low” for anything resembling the boxer’s life today.
“There was no way that this seemed like a sustainable operation,” Smith says. “Somehow, against every odd, it turned the other way. I don’t think you could have ever predicted this one at all. He may be the biggest proof that you just never know in life.”
Tyson is proud as he talks about how his daughter is now the avid reader in the family, joking about how reading Machiavelli and Tolstoy will make her feel superior to other people just like he did. The bout with Paul will be the first time the children he has with Kiki will get to see a real fight of his, but he hasn’t thought about what that’ll mean to him. I ask him about the importance of Kiki in his life. For the first moment in our time together, Tyson is almost speechless, trying to find the right words: “No one would think I would be with a woman for the rest of my life. It was almost inconceivable that this happened.”
He then exclaims, proudly: “And she’s a genius! She created the ears!”
Tyson is referring to one of his cannabis company’s best-selling products: gummies shaped to look like the ear of Evander Holyfield, which Tyson infamously bit off part of during their 1997 fight. Tyson has turned what was a casual and therapeutic appreciation for cannabis into a big business at a time when legalisation has swept across the United States.
His Tyson 2.0–brand products are now being sold at 745-odd retailers. He’s parlayed his celebrity in the cannabis space into a popular podcast, Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson, that recently wrapped up. He’s even taken on advocacy. Earlier this year, Tyson called on President Biden to grant clemency to all federal marijuana offenders.
“It’s a plant that makes you happy and hungry,” he says, admitting that it’s hard to give up and that he was not his best self around his family in the first week of training for the fight when he stopped using. “The family wasn’t friendly with me. I did not behave well.”
Before cannabis was Tyson’s therapy, there were the pigeons. So many pigeons. Adam Wilks never thought much of pigeons until he got to know Tyson as the CEO of Carma HoldCo, the parent company of the Tyson 2.0 cannabis brand. That started to change when the two were in Amsterdam for an event last September and Tyson asked Wilks if he wanted to drive a few hours north to meet a breeder of roller pigeons. Wilks agreed, not knowing what to expect or how long they’d be there.
“Everybody goes up to Mike and their jaw drops,” Wilks says. “I had never seen the opposite where Mike meets someone and he’s excited about it.”
They stayed until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, Wilks says, with Tyson looking starstruck. The family and Wilks had to go to bed but there was Tyson, in the freezing cold, hanging with the pigeon breeder and playing in the coop with the birds in the early-morning hours somewhere in the Netherlands.
And Tyson couldn’t have been happier.
Back in the ring at training camp, Tyson repeatedly lands lefts and rights on a padded-up Cordeiro until he gets his footwork the way he wants it. The former champ keeps telling Cordeiro, White, and Mike Angel, his videographer, who films everything, how much better he feels.
“It’s beautiful form,” Cordeiro says in his Brazilian accent, looking giddy.
Tyson recently got over a respiratory cold that he couldn’t kick when he was in New York to promote the fight.
“I’m happy to be back,” Tyson repeatedly says, feeling himself again. “I was fucked up in New York.”
The fire that burns inside is blue but Tyson is turning it up to hype himself up.
“He’s not going to hit me with the jab,” he promises of his fight with Paul.
White goes one step further to hype up his fighter: “He’s not going to land a glove on you.”
Tyson takes another swig of electrolytes and then looks in my direction. He rarely lets people watch him train who aren’t in his inner circle.
“I thought I was gonna embarrass myself in front of you today,” he tells me, relieved that he looked like a contender instead of a tomato can.
There are two things Tyson told me he is planning to do, before and after what might be his final fight. First, days before the bout, he will ingest a drug derived from the poison of the Sonoran Desert toad—known as 5-MeO-DMT or simply “the Toad”—for what he calls a one-way trip to meet God. He’s done the psychedelic close to a hundred times now, but he doesn’t know what he’ll talk to God about this time. He only knows it’ll be deep.
“I meet God every day when I look in the mirror,” he says. “Aren’t we images of him? That’s what they say in the Bible. So I guess I meet him every time I look in the mirror.”
The second item on his agenda will come after the fight. Whether it ends up being his 51st win or his seventh loss, Tyson will take some time to himself in his locker room at the football stadium. He’ll lean back in his chair and take that moment alone to hear his heartbeat. Only in that moment will Tyson, who was taught most of his life to believe that he was a god, know that he’s still fully alive. Even if the destroyer is no longer there.
“I’m 58 years old, and I’m gonna sell out an 80,000-seat arena,” Tyson tells me. “Hey, if that’s not godlike, I don’t know what is.”
For Tyson, it’s one more shot at immortality.
Originally published 15 July 2024 on Esquire US
This story contains spoilers from the season finale of The Penguin.
Rhenzy Feliz knows how to keep a secret. The Penguin star dabbled in the superhero genre on Marvel’s Runaways, but he was never part of a shocker like the one we saw in the season finale. Playing the role of the Penguin’s sidekick, Victor Aguilar, Feliz is a major player in the most gut-wrenching twist that HBO has pulled off since The Last of Us finale.
Let me set the scene. When the Batman spin-off series begins, Victor is a wayward teenager looking for any way to escape the slums of Gotham. A chance encounter puts him in the path of the Penguin, who is played by a transformative Colin Farrell. They foster a father-and-son relationship as two outcasts gaming the system of the city’s criminal underbelly. Well, at least until the heartbreaking finale ends in cold-blooded murder. The Penguin simply decides that Victor knows too much about his crimes, so he kills him.
Now that Feliz can finally discuss his demise, he’s ecstatic. “It was gruesome,” the twenty-seven-year-old actor tells me. “By the end, you’ve grown to like Victor a bit—and you need to like Victor so that when he kills me, you hate Oz.”
As much as audiences fell in love with Farrell’s performance over the course of The Penguin, Victor’s death solidified the Batman villain’s cruelty. Hate Oz? That seemed impossible just a week ago. Gotham’s very own Tony Soprano was the primary reason to turn on your television for the past two months. Still, it was The Penguin’s job to sell him as a formidable villain before his reemergence in The Batman Part II, which will hit theatres in 2026.
Farrell’s character suffocates Feliz’s in the final scene, meaning that the actor had no idea what the moment looked like until he watched the finished edit. “I was in his gut, looking at the ground,” he says. “But what Colin was doing… I was in awe. That face he’s making at the end, you can see what he’s going through. I found it so cold and painful.”
With The Penguin’s finale finally out in the world, Feliz shares what it was like to watch the explosive episode for the first time, the pressures of playing a character with a stutter, and the tunes that got him through the show’s most stressful scenes.
ESQUIRE: Obviously, this is the end of the road for Victor. But it’s so heartbreaking! Were you satisfied with how his story ended?
RHENZY FELIZ: Yeah, by the time I got to the end I was satisfied, but I always expected that to be the end. That was always the story to me, the natural ending. So I never even thought about more, because I knew where we were headed. For what we wanted to do, to serve the story, it was necessary for the audience to see [the Penguin] as irredeemable.
I loved when Oz picks up your driver’s license and confirms that you’re just Victor Aguilar. For everyone theorising at home, you’re not some secret Batman character. It really sold the moment for me.
Yeah, and what a brutal moment that is, too. The whole show, Oz is telling him [imitating Colin Farrell’s Penguin], “They’re going to remember us, kid. They’re going to remember our names. You can be somebody.” For him to take out my license and just leave me as this John Doe of a body in the river, that no one will ever know who I was… it’s brutal.
Fantastic Oz Cobb impression, by the way. I can’t stop quoting him myself, even around the office. Has Colin heard it?
No, not in front of Colin. [Laughs.] I keep that to myself. But when I’m around my friends and we’re watching the show, it’s fun to put on the voice.
You seem to have a knack for voice work. One of the things that impresses me the most about your performance is the stutter.
Definitely. When I first got the audition, [the script] didn’t mention it. I came back to meet the director, Craig [Zobel], and he sprung it on me in the middle of the audition. I did a couple scenes without it, and then he said, “Why don’t you just try it?”. As an actor, you feel like you can’t say no. I was just like, “Yeah, sure, I’ll give it a shot!” It must’ve been decent enough, because they wanted me to meet Colin. I hired my own dialect coach in between and I stayed in the stutter for a couple of days. I got the call later that they wanted me to come shoot. They hired a fluency consultant, Marc Winski, and he was incredibly helpful.
I wanted it to feel genuine to me. So we spent a lot of time going out in public with it, calling people on the phone, and really figuring out not as much the technical aspects of the stutter but more the mental and emotional side. Mark also has a stutter, so that was invaluable. I was concerned about the entire community of people who live with this every day. If I came in as someone who doesn’t have [a stutter] and didn’t take it seriously enough—or they felt like I was making fun of it—I was very afraid of the idea that they would reject me. Thankfully, everyone’s been incredibly kind. It was a relief.
I loved the scene that you have with Colin in episode 3, when you’re at a fancy lunch and he defends you from the waiter interrupting you while you stutter.
It was one of my favourite scenes to shoot. It’s really the first time you get to hear Victor speak. Before then, it’s only a sentence here and there, but then he actually talks about himself a little bit. He opens up and Oz listens to him. That day was beautiful. Colin came up to me after we were done and patted me on the face. He didn’t even say anything, but I could feel the energy was like, “That was nice. We’re doing a good job.” He and I knew that was an important scene for Victor, for his development with Oz, and as a character in front in the eyes of the audience.
It was probably easy for Colin to get in and out of his character, since he had to literally put on or take off a mountain of prosthetics. But was there anything you would do to get into the mindset of Victor before shooting?
I used music a lot. I made a playlist called “Vic.” There’s one song by Eminem called "8 Mile", and I used that the entire last half of the season. If anyone listens to "8 Mile", they’ll see.
“8 Mile” checks out.
I also have “Flight from the City” by Jóhann Jóhannsson. And I have the Howl’s Moving Castle soundtrack on here, too.
That feels like the opposite vibe of The Penguin. Was that just to mellow out after a really intense scene? Like a palate cleanser?
Exactly. I would use Howl’s at the beginning of every day just to go to a neutral place. It’s meditative. Calming. But then, by the time I was in the makeup chair with my lines in my hands, then I’m listening to the Victor music.
Was it hard to play a character who continuously makes bad choices?
The only time I was mad at Victor was when he would mess up the mission. I did my best to try to understand where he’s coming from. In his heart, he’s good. He doesn’t want to be doing any of these things, but he does them in spite of himself because he wants to be useful to Oz. He finds a love for Oz and he doesn’t want to let Oz down. It’s more out of necessity.
We all have choices to make—and we have a lot more control of our destiny than we feel. Victor, Oz, Sophia, even Francis—none of them are in a good position by the end of the show. When Victor kills Squid, that’s him thinking, I can’t let him hurt Oz and Francis, because they’re my new family.
I doubt Victor could show up in any potential Bat-verse projects from here on out, but from what I’ve read in your interviews, you seem like a guy who would rather move on to something new anyway.
Yeah, you’re definitely right that I am looking forward to the next thing. I just want to play even more interesting characters and be a part of as many exciting projects that I can. It’s not necessarily a role that I’m looking forward to, or a specific character that I want to play, but there is one in the back of my mind that I’ll want to play once I get a little older. I’ve always loved Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Hamilton is one of my favourite pieces of art ever made. I would love to get to do that at some point—just got to get my singing lessons up to par.
You were in Encanto. Seems like you’ve got an in with Lin-Manuel already.
Yeah. [Laughs.] I don’t know what it is about me. I just need to be better if I want to be able to perform that musical. That’s something that I’ve always looked forward to down the line.
Originally published on Esquire US
HENRY SEUNGYUN YANG: I came to Singapore two years ago, after Samsonite offered an opportunity for us to move from Hong Kong.
ESQUIRE SINGAPORE: Why? Did you not like Hong Kong?
HSY: I loved it. It’s a wonderful city that’s geographically close to every other country somehow. It’s closer to Korea than Singapore, which made it easy to fly back home from. There are Samsonite factories in China and they are now also looking to Southeast Asia—Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam—so here I am. But my family is happy in Singapore, and if they are happy, I’m happy.
ESQ: Are you going back for the holidays?
HSY: I just got back from Hong Kong actually. I go to Korea only once a year because flying with a baby [sighs loudly] for six hours can drive anyone crazy. Now, I do love my kids, but they can be quite naughty and don’t like sitting still for six hours.
ESQ: They are girls, yes? Do you have any preference for the gender of your children?
HSY: I don’t have a preference. The second girl was delivered in Singapore, while the first one was born in Hong Kong.
ESQ: When did you start wanting to be a designer?
HSY: Honestly, I never thought much about design back then. I was like any other kid, who loves going outside to play. I think every designer and artist starts out the same way: by drawing something and then finding out that they’re having fun doing it. My parents didn’t really say anything to dissuade me so I kept on drawing.
ESQ: That’s cool.
HSY: Yeah. If you know Korean parents you’ll know they aren’t usually this liberal. They will be like: you’ve got to be a doctor; you have to be a lawyer; study hard. But I was lucky that my parents were open to what I could do. I did study hard, mind you, but I didn’t go out of my way to be a scholar.
ESQ: Did you attend art school instead?
HSY: A couple of my friends suggested I should go to art school or something. When I got into university and it came time to select a major, I thought I would be a painter. I spoke with my art teacher at the time and she said, why don’t you be a designer because they earn more money? It’s hard to survive as an artist. So, I took her advice and studied industrial design. I eventually got a job in Hong Kong.
ESQ: What did you work on?
HSY: Back then, I designed phones, conference systems, cameras... it was fun.
ESQ: Do you still paint?
HSY: Well, I’m a bit busy with my kids these days. I do draw for them though, and that’s actually really fun.
ESQ: Are you guided by some sort of design philosophy?
HSY: I honestly don’t know. I’m not a super designer. I’m just normal. I don’t have any deep philosophical insight into this. However, the environment at Samsonite is such that we gather a lot of feedback from the market because our main aim is to design for people who travel. And when you focus on the people who use our luggage and bags, you push yourself to deliver user-centric design. I guess that is the key to how I work.
ESQ: Is getting feedback from marketing conducive to what you do?
HSY: We have regional offices across the globe. So, here at the Asian office we design for people in this region. Similarly, the US and Europe offices design for their respective demographics. We design separately simply because people’s lifestyles and travel habits are different around the world.
ESQ: Can you give us an example?
HSY: The European luggage and bags are more colourful and sporty. Even the businessmen in Europe tend to go for more casual bags, more colourful bags. The design vibe is expressive. But in Asia, consumers prefer minimalist designs. Colourwise, they go for black or navy or something neutral. In the US, they like luggage that’s more feature-driven. It’s utility over appearance for them. I’m talking broadly about the majority of the consumer base now. We handle a wide range of Samsonite products.
ESQ: Do you also have to talk to the department behind the tech?
HSY: Of course. That’s actually very important. We have to be updated on the latest tech all the time. That’s why we have a strong product development team on site and they will brief us on the advancements. The marketing team, design team, the product development team will sit together to discuss what models will be released. Marketing can talk about upcoming trends and results of market feedback; the PD team wants to reveal a certain feature or new material. And we, the design team take all that data and come up with designs.
ESQ: Do you like that sort of restriction?
HSY: Every designer needs to work with limitations. Without limitations, that’s art. So, sometimes when someone gives me carte blanche to do whatever, I’ll be like, I don’t know what to do. It’s always good to have a guideline, a limitation. I prefer to have that. It makes it more interesting. You need the input and whole mindset of others to make the job successful.
ESQ: You designed the Unimax Spinner and it won the Red Dot Design Award.
HSY: I’ve no idea why we won it—I didn’t get to talk to the judges so I don’t know [laughs]. But like I’ve said, this is one of our visions at Samsonite in terms of brand image and DNA. Samsonite has all kinds of designs—minimalist, explicit, fun, colourful... we have everything, but what is Samsonite’s DNA? That is the starting point.
We had a line called EVOA—same texture, no groove, very clean design. It was very successful. We believe Asian people prefer minimalist design. So we start with that, and then we say let’s improve on it. [Takes a Unimax Spinner; points to features] We put in more features like a front opening; a brake system; the Aero Trac Whirl Suspension Wheel... Normally, you’d have the logo on the front of the luggage but we’ve added the logo on the aluminium corner protector instead, where you can still see it when you look down.
At the time, in order to get a seamless design [that has curves], you’d need to mill and bend the piece, and this was an expensive process. We decided to postpone it until we managed to create that aluminium bar and corner protector. For our future product line, we’ve now managed to overcome the limitations and found a way to mill and bend multi-directionally. I think only Samsonite can do this.
ESQ: Is there a particular product you’ve done that you’re proud of?
HSY: [Points to the Unimax Spinner] This would be it. ESQ: What about something that’s not Samsonite?
HSY: Before I joined Samsonite, I worked for a company called Kohler.
ESQ: Ah, okay.
HSY: There was this toilet called Numi. I quite like this product. Very proud of it, in fact. The initial brief was: what if we can make a supercar version of a toilet? Like a Ferrari. It sounded funny but I was quite ambitious. Ok, let’s make something cool. So, the Numi was given voice control, a lot of lighting options, seat temperature, sensors that know if it’s you or someone else...
ESQ: Oh? Does it have bespoke settings for individual users?
HSY: Oh yeah! You can set it up for five or six people. When you enter the bathroom, the Numi will make a sound and light up, the seat cover rises and you sit on it. So, your pre-programmed temperature and wand position are adjusted for you.
ESQ: How does it know it’s you?
HSY: It knows you by your height and weight. There’s a sensor there. And if you want to flush, you can just say, hey, Numi, flush. When it plays music, the lighting changes... it was quite a crazy project but our team loved working on it.
Funny thing is even, though the design is done, the project remained stalled when I left. They were still working on fixing the features and that was done with a year ago. I worked on Numi for three years and left Kohler about six years ago, and it went on for another five years but they launched it. Outside of Samsonite, I feel really proud of Numi.
ESQ: Is music part of your process?
HSY: That’s a good question. Music is part of culture, am I right? So, I believe it does help. But you’ll need to experience the culture that the music is from to actually see something different.
ESQ: What is this lens that you peer through?
HSY: Even though I’m way past teenage, I still like listening to rap and hip-hop. My wife is always laughing at me, oh, you’re not a child any more, you know? Why don’t you listen to classical music or something like that?
ESQ: The luxury market is trying to infuse street culture into its products and marketing.
HSY: I feel quite weird about that because the hip-hop that I was into back then was kind of niche. Back in the day, no one really followed hip-hop. A lot of Korean parents didn’t really like it, but it appealed to me. Now, hip-hop has become super popular and every brand is doing streetwear, and promoting their wares with modern music that feature hip-hop elements.
ESQ: It’s gone mainstream.
HSY: That is why it’s hard to say that I’m into hip-hop music now, because I don’t want to be part of this mainstream. If I tell people that I’m into hip-hop, they’d think I’m just following a trend, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.
ESQ: What is that one piece of design that you wish you had done?
HSY: I like Fukasawa Naoto. He’s an industrial designer who did work with Muji. I like his philosophy. One of the things he said that really impressed me was that a product doesn’t need to stand out. It needs to harmonise with your life because you see it every day. That’s why his design is very minimalist. That’s a pretty strong message as an industrial designer.
Of course, I don’t really do it that way. I still like colours but I respect what he has built during his design life. I like Virgil Abloh as well. He’s gone now, sadly, but what he’d done for the fashion industry was quite amazing. He started as an architect but he’s done awesome stuff for Nike and Louis Vuitton.
(Salehe) Bembury is another designer I like. He also started out as an industrial designer. Ah, Errolson Hugh as well. He’s crazy good. I wish I could meet him one day.
ESQ: How do you stay creative?
HSY: One of the best ways is meeting people, eating good food, having fun, travel.
ESQ: That’s basically, just living.
HSY: [Laughs] Yes. Can I show you something? [Takes out a Streamlite Neo model] You see the clean design, right? But if you looked inside... [shows a vintage pattern], I found the design from the Samsonite archives. We have a black variant of the pattern as well.
ESQ: So, this and the EvoaZ and Major Lite are the next models we can expect from Samsonite?
HSY: We are still in discussion but we need to cater to different opinions. It’s up to marketing. I’ve no idea. This takes time but this is how we work. I’m ok with it. No harm waiting, we’ll see what happens. But if the project stalls too long, then we’ll lose the chance to launch it.
ESQ: Like the Numi.
HSY: That’s right. [laughs]
ESQ: What’s the next big thing in design?
HSY: Sustainability.
ESQ: That’s every company’s buzzword.
HSY: Yes, but we need to figure it out. Using recycled material, do you think that’s sustainability? I don’t think so. I think it’s more than that. It’s about the cycle. Using recycled material in the product is the easy part but that doesn’t tackle the root problem. There’s something more to this and I can’t put my finger on it just yet.
Oh, but this is too serious. Maybe, the next big thing is luggage for space travel, who knows? Maybe it’ll be a combination with a drone so you don’t need to carry your luggage.
ESQ: Or you can attach the drone to your bag and you can carry it so you can fly. Like Doraemon.
HSY: Yeah. Exactly. That would be fun. There are already people out there who can ride on motorised luggage. I’m not sure when a drone version would happen, but I look forward to seeing it.
In the infinite scroll of social media, between the blur of selfies, sponsored posts and pictures of brunch, sometimes all it takes is a single image to catch the attention of fate. For Jaylerr, it was a photograph from a modest jean modelling gig at a mall in the serene city of Chiang Mai. It was hardly the stuff of a star-making moment—a makeshift runway, amateur photographs and the casual poses of a 16-year-old at the end of his walk. Yet, through some cosmic design, those images found their way to prominent Thai director Ma-Deaw’s screen.
Ma-Deaw, the visionary behind critically acclaimed works like The Love of Siam (2007), saw something in those mall photos that others might have scrolled past. Perhaps he spotted something in Jaylerr that exuded the same ineffable quality he captured in his masterpieces—raw, authentic, uninhibited. Perhaps it is as a much younger Jaylerr jokingly recalls in a 2013 interview, “My good looks caught the attention of the staff”. Whatever the reason, a team was dispatched, a mother was contacted, and suddenly Jaylerr found himself cast as Oat in the 2013 coming-of-age film Green Fictions.
What Jaylerr found himself holding at 17 was the entertainment industry’s most precious currency: opportunity. It’s what young actors dream of, what seasoned performers still chase. But in the unforgiving world of show business, opportunity alone doesn’t guarantee survival.
The industry is strewn in what-ifs and could-have-beens, lined with the photographs of child stars who blazed across screens only to disappear into oblivion. Success demands a rare alchemy—the perfect collision of opportunity and readiness, and Jaylerr had both. He used his initial success as a launchpad to propel himself across the spectrum of entertainment from film, television and web series. The trajectory of his career may have started with a stroke of luck, but everything that came after was determination.
Perhaps this is why QOW Entertainment, his latest talent agency venture with partner Thanaerng, feels less like a business and more like a mission. Perhaps it’s his way of completing the circle—creating opportunities for others and showing them how to seize their own destiny, just as he once did.
ESQUIRE SINGAPORE: What drives you to act? Is it the love of storytelling, personal expression, or something else entirely?
JAYLERR: It’s something else. In my view, acting has become a major part of my life. I started young, and at first, it was just an opportunity I wanted to seize. But over time, it became something I truly fell in love with and grew deeply passionate about.
ESQ: What do you think draws international audiences to Thai drama productions?
J: I think a lot is coming together, especially with the rise of Asian entertainment. Thai drama is growing fast, and I believe we have strong production quality and talent.
ESQ: Are there any international collaborations or crossovers you’d be interested in exploring?
J: I really want to collaborate with many artists. Over the last two or three years, I’ve explored a lot of works by Asian artists, and I think they’re amazing. There’s so much talent out there, like Yung Raja from Singapore, SB19 and James Reid from the Philippines, among others.
ESQ: Many international viewers watch your work with subtitles. Do you think anything gets lost in translation, especially when conveying emotions or humour?
J: In my opinion, something does get lost when we’re watching and reading subtitles at the same time. That’s why we often have to rewatch things to catch all the details.
ESQ: What is your favourite movie?
J: Forrest Gump.
As a kid who grew up on the outskirts of Chiang Mai, procuring and owning music was anything but easy. As with any adolescent that grew up with the internet in the 2000s, he resorted to downloading music illegally. However, after much wrestling with his musical conscience, he ended up doing the right thing. With only 1,000 baht to his name and a burning desire for music, Jaylerr made his first legitimate purchase on the Apple store—Kid Ink’s My Own Lane. It was here where he committed the proverbial “sin” of judging a book by its cover. What he thought was just a pretty album cover introduced him to hip-hop, a genre that would quietly shape his artistic DNA long before he knew that it would.
The beats and rhymes of My Own Lane planted seeds that would take years to bloom. Once Jaylerr found his footing as an actor, music was a direction he found himself exploring. He was invited to join the nine-member boy group Nine by Nine.
Though short-lived, it caused something to stir in Jaylerr's musical memory. Between everyday life and performances, he found himself closely observing his groupmates who rapped. What started out as a tentative question of “Can I try?” evolved into late-night writing sessions, countless hours of practice and hip-hop listening sessions. He would pour everything he absorbed into “Empty King”, a collaboration with his former groupmates Paris and Captain under the “Human Error” project. This would be the first song ever composed and written by him (Insert Q-Tip nodding in approval). This creative liberation led to Jaylerr x Paris, a duo where Jaylerr could fully indulge his hip-hop side. Now, as a solo artist at 28, he’s no longer the guilt-stricken boy who could barely afford one album. The restraints have fallen off, leaving an artist with both the freedom and artistic integrity to explore every corner of his musical identity.
ESQ: Between music and acting, which feels more personal to you? Do you find that one feels more like an extension of your true self?
J: Both feel really personal to me. Acting has become personal because I’ve been doing it for so long, while music is personal because it allows me to express my true self.
ESQ: What’s your favourite song?
J: “Limbo” by Keshi.
ESQ: Aside from being an artist, is there anything you’ve been interested in developing but never had the time to pursue?
J: I really want to develop my music production skills, and learn to play the piano. It’s on my list, but I haven’t had time to pursue it yet.
ESQ: What’s one hobby or passion outside of acting that keeps you grounded and helps you recharge creatively?
J: Night drives. I don’t know why, but most of my creative ideas come when I’m driving at night. Sometimes I have to stop the car to jot down ideas that pop into my head.
The blur of streetlights, the quiet of the night, the world rushing past windows. It makes sense that night drives get his creative juices flowing, it’s this sense of movement that seems to spark something deeper within him. After all, staying static and stagnant is hardly the environment where unique ideas are born. Perhaps this is why travelling to different countries seems to inspire Jaylerr as well. As he ventures into unfamiliar sights and different environments—whether he’s walking on the streets of a foreign city or simply observing the way people live, Jaylerr absorbs the nuances of each place.
ESQ: Where’s somewhere you have travelled that has impacted you deeply?
J: Kood Island in Trad, Thailand. It’s a very quiet and peaceful place.
ESQ: How do you balance your creative process when travelling, whether for work or leisure? Do you find it easier to focus on music or acting while you’re on the move or when you’re settled?
J: I don’t have any trouble being creative because the places I visit and the people I meet always inspire me. But when it comes to focusing on music or acting, it’s definitely easier when I’m settled.
ESQ: What are some of your must-have essentials when you’re travelling?
J: Earbuds, analogue headphones, my phone and perfume.
ESQ: How has visiting other countries changed your worldview?
J: Experiencing new cultures while visiting other countries always broadens my perspective.
ESQ: Do you ever get homesick?
J: All the time. I’m the kind of person who gets stuck in places and the past.
This cover story with Esquire Singapore feels emblematic of the journey Jaylerr has taken—not just across physical borders, but across the boundaries of artistry itself. In the end, maybe there’s no real difference between his travels and his artistic evolution. Both are about forward motion, about finding new territories to explore, about the courage to venture into the unknown with nothing but instinct as a guide. Travel broadens the soul but it is home that is ultimately the anchor.
Photography: Chee Wei
Creative Direction: Izwan Abdullah
Fashion Direction: Asri Jasman
Art Direction: Joan Tai
Styling: Kelly Hsu
Hair for Thanaerng: Panithan Summa
Makeup for Thanaerng: Yothin Chuaysri
Grooming for Jaylerr: Sukwasa Khadphad
Photography Assistants: Thanakit Meecharoen and Thanakorn Kantaponthanat
Producer: Ratchada Tubimphet
We reckon Barry Keoghan knows a thing or two about "Burberry weather". The Saltburn actor grew up in Dublin after all, where temperatures rarely go beyond 20 degrees Celcius—perfect weather to be layering over just about any kind of outerwear all year round.
The Burberry global ambassador is one of seven personalities chosen to be part of Burberry's latest outerwear-centric campaign, "It's Always Burberry Weather". Shot across London and the British countryside, the campaign is a series of cinematic vignettes—each individually fronted by Keoghan, actor Zhang Jingyi, Cara Delevingne, England footballers Cole Palmer and Eberechi Eze, musician Simz, and Academy Award-winning actress Olivia Colman—with each highlighting a particular outerwear style reimagined by Burberry. Colman, for example, wears a cosy quilted outerwear while on a drive in the countryside and recounting her sleep trouble woes to a friend over the phone before humorously stumbling upon a flock of sheep. And in the campaign's longest short film (a runtime past the nine-minute mark), Palmer lounges on a deckchair in a duffel coat by a lake, waiting for a fish to bite.
In true thespian fashion, Keoghan's short film sees him running lines with a server at a streetside cafe. He's dressed in a Burberry Check puffer jacket that's very much in line with his own personal aesthetic. It's also reversible—Keoghan wears it with the plain-side out in the short film but is photographed by Alasdair McLellan with the Burberry Check in full display for the campaign's stills. We can't help but draw the parallels between the reversibility of the puffer jacket with Keoghan's own artistry and penchant for taking on characters that aren't exactly what they seem like on the surface—a journey that he tells us, is something that he enjoys discovering while on set and in the moment.
ESQUIRE SINGAPORE: What’s your earliest memory of Burberry?
BARRY KEOGHAN: The first Burberry piece I owned was a Burberry scarf. I remember I used to wear it with anything and everything and it had the traditional pattern on it as well.
ESQ: Being a global ambassador of Burberry now for over six months, you’ve been dressed by the brand a few times, even before the announcement. Is there one significant highlight or moment with Burberry that still sticks out for you?
BK: My favourite Burberry piece I own is the white puffer jacket I wore to the Burberry Summer 2025 fashion show.
ESQ: How did you approach shooting the Burberry Outerwear campaign?
BK: Some of the moments that I remember from the Burberry shoot, was just how fun it was and how easy it was to shoot on film, and how good it was to work with the directors and creative team to bring some humour to the shoot.
ESQ: You do have a penchant for streetwear pieces. How does Burberry Outerwear fit in with your own personal style?
BK: My personal style is sort of like trackies and cropped jackets. I love a good jumper and high neck shirts, and basically a cropped jacket/cropped jumper—I love.
ESQ: Who are some of your biggest acting heroes and non-acting heroes?
BK: Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and to be honest, animals—I’ve always talked about how I’ve watched and observed animals, and also body language and posture, and documentaries. I gather and observe that. And I also just observe life. I never want to see anyone acting and I’m always looking for what looks true and real and I always find that in documentaries.
ESQ: What has been the most challenging role you’ve taken on so far, and how did you overcome it?
BK: The most challenging would be my Saltburn character. It wasn’t that it was hard or difficult but with the word being "challenging", it's the sort of the thing that I’m drawn to. I like to play characters that aren’t necessarily easy and that I can easily slip in to. I want to always have a challenge and physicality and a skill set I can learn.
ESQ: You’re about to officially take on a role, The Joker, that’s been played by a great number of actors. What’s the thought process like of accepting and then formulating a game plan for a role like that?
BK: Getting into character I have notebooks that I write things down in. I dress like the character, I stay in acting to familiarise with the period, and I do a hobby that the character does. Then I go away for two weeks to get into character and get into the character with no distractions—to live and breathe the character. Then I go to set and be open to collaboration and discovery with the director and team because again, I love to find the character as I go along in the journey and not have everything figured out—just like life.
ESQ: How are you hoping to end the year?
BK: I’m hoping to end the year with some growth and progression in my arts. I hope to be able to look back at it and look at how much I’ve grown and look to set new goals and challenge myself for next year.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Perfumer Quentin Bisch is no stranger to the industry, having worked on some of the most iconic fragrances for brands like Jean Paul Gaultier, Ex Nihilo, L’Artisan Parfumeur and more. His first project with Issey Miyake reinterprets the famed L’Eau d’Issey to bring about a new idea on what masculinity is today: Le Sel d’Issey.
ESQUIRE SINGAPORE: How did you become a perfumer?
QUENTIN BISCH: I have always been fascinated by scents, but I didn’t know anyone who worked in perfumery, and unfortunately I wasn’t good at science. I thought I couldn’t be a perfumer without it. So, I decided to focus on the performing arts and even managed a theatre company for six years. But the pull of perfumery was too strong and I ended up writing to Jean Guichard, director of Givaudan Perfumery School. He thought my profile was interesting and recommended that I start as an assistant perfumer. I began working with Michel Almairac at Robertet in Grasse, who taught me about raw materials and accords. The following year, Givaudan contacted me and I was accepted into their school.
ESQ: What is your first olfactory memory?
QB: The perfume my mother used to wear: Shalimar by Guerlain. She had a bottle of it with her when she gave birth to me, so I probably smelt it as soon as I was born.
ESQ: How did you come to connect L’Eau d’Issey with salt?
QB: Launched 30 years after L’Eau d’Issey pour Homme, Le Sel d’Issey is a tribute to today’s masculinity, reconnected to its senses, conjuring up the image of a beneficent nature that transmits to men the impetus, drive and desire to live intensely.
ESQ: Scents are often tied to one’s memories. Because salt inherently has no scent, what’s your personal memory to salt that conjured up the eventual fragrance that is Le Sel d’Issey?
QB: I wanted to create the smell of that exact transition point that exists between land and sea, when the waves recede. The memory of the water left on the earth, this salt deposited like an imprint.
ESQ: How did the salt accord for Le Sel d’Issey come about?
QB: I wanted to work on the concept of movement, the infinite surf of the waves and salt as a mineral memory deposited on the earth. The idea of working with a large, salty and pure woodiness took hold. We, with the Issey Miyake teams, sought to facet the subject while preserving the singularity of the initial idea.
ESQ: You included upcycled ingredients as part of making Le Sel d’Issey. Is this something that you’ve done before?
QB: Many key perfume ingredients are part of our certified upcycling portfolio. As a result, they are used regularly.
ESQ: Are sustainability and the use of more earth-friendly ingredients (sourced ethically and with lower impact on the environment) things that perfumers take into account nowadays?
QB: By 2030, Givaudan aims to achieve a fully renewable and responsibly sourced ingredient palette, which serves as the perfumers’ essential tool. This ambition underscores our eco-conscious approach to enhancing fragrance ingredients by incorporating materials derived from renewable sources, while simultaneously improving processes to minimise carbon and energy consumption.
ESQ: You’ve worked for both niche and designer fragrances. Is there a difference in how you conceptualise a scent for each?
QB: There is no difference in fragrance conceptualisation, but there is a difference in the way the perfume is developed. Often, more niche or high-end perfume brands have an artistic director with
whom we are in direct contact. On the prestige side, the stakes are much higher, in terms of distribution and at the economic level for example. There are therefore more decision-makers and competition.
ESQ: Are there ingredients or scents that you personally would not use in your own creations?
QB: Never, because even if we hate a colour, maybe one day this colour will be very useful in a painting to bring out something else. Colours like smells are tools to create something, so I think rejecting some of them would be closed-minded. In reality, you never know what you will need tomorrow.
ESQ: TikTok has somewhat brought to light cheaper fragrances that are regarded as “dupes” (or similar) to luxury fragrances. What are your thoughts on such fragrances that smell almost identical to niche or luxury fragrances?
QB: I hate the idea because it is totally disrespectful to the original creations.
ESQ: What is the most quintessential men’s fragrance, in your opinion?
QB: There is not one, but several masculinities. And they are constantly reinventing themselves and we therefore cannot define masculinity. It is up to everyone to define it and moreover a feminine perfume can be extremely masculine on a man or on a woman.
Sinn’s story begins in 1961, not in a boardroom, but a cockpit of a World War II airplane. Its founder, Helmut Sinn, was a man from the skies—a former pilot and flight instructor whose experience beckoned him to create aviation watches that his contemporaries could rely on in the clouds. Luxury was never the end goal, rather, it was a means to an end. Functionality was always the priority, and he wanted a watch that could be easily serviced anywhere in the world. In addition to being durable, technical, innovative, this would eventually become a hallmark of the brand.
After more than 30 years at the helm, Sinn would sell the company. Enter Lothar Schmidt, a former engineer under IWC who pushed the brand into a new stratosphere of innovations. Tegiment technology, for instance, hardened the surface of Sinn watches, making them incredibly scratch-resistant. Hydro technology filled watches with oil, eliminating any distortion underwater and allowing for perfect legibility at any depth. Ar-dehumidifying technology used copper sulfate capsules to absorb moisture and prevent fogging in extreme situations. Sinn was no longer just an aviation watch brand, but a brand focused on creating mission-specific watches. Fire brigades have the Einsatzzeitmesser, astronauts have the Series 140, and even white collars have the Frankfurt Financial District watches. But now, there’s something special brewing for the Singaporean market.
In celebration of Watches of Switzerland’s 60th anniversary—Sinn’s exclusive retailer in Singapore—Sinn is unveiling a commemorative watch, the Sinn Pilot 104 St Sa I WOS Commemorative Edition. We sat down with Sarah Michel, head of sales at Sinn, to discuss the new release, Sinn’s approach to the Asian market, and how the brand continues to stay true to its philosophy and unique positioning.
ESQUIRE SINGAPORE: Can you tell us about the special commemorative watch Sinn has created for Watches of Switzerland's 60th anniversary? What makes this watch unique?
SARAH MICHEL: You’ll notice a few unique features compared to the standard 104 series. We have a special dial with a color gradient starting light blue in the center and transitioning to a darker blue outward. This gradient is something we've incorporated in some of our special editions, and it's been really popular.
What's unique here is how the darker blue continues on the bezel inlay, in a colour we've never used before for the 104. The date indicator is also in blue, a nice touch to keep the design cohesive.
Functionally, it’s similar to the standard 104 model, with a double date display in both German and English, thanks to the Sellita 220 movement. For example, you can set it to display "Saturday" in English, or "Samstag" in German, depending on your preference. Each of the 200 pieces is individually engraved on the back, and it comes with a unique cow leather strap in light blue, complementing the dial.
ESQ: What were the key design elements or inspirations behind the commemorative watch?
SM: Well, the inspiration actually came more from the Watches of Switzerland team. They might be able to explain their specific inspiration for the blue color better.
WATCHES OF SWITZERLAND REPRESENTATIVE: The inspiration for this watch’s colour combination came from wanting to create a cohesive theme for our limited editions. The theme we focused on was Singapore—specifically, tropical elements. So, we incorporated greenery, brown for the tree trunks, and blue for the water. For Sinn, we chose blue to represent water, which gives it that fresh, cooling vibe.
ESQ: If this watch could have a personality, how would you describe it?
SM: I think it's young and breezy. It has a carefree vibe, someone who likes to look good without trying too hard. That's the kind of person I could imagine wearing this watch.
ESQ: Sinn has a loyal following in Europe—how do you envision expanding that success in the Asian markets?
SM: We’re on a good trajectory. We already have sales partners across Southeast Asia and East Asia, and we look forward to expanding further. That said, we also want to deepen the partnerships we already have. Sinn watches are very technical, and not the easiest to understand immediately, so having knowledgeable partners who can explain the details is important. We want to grow in a sustainable way, ensuring high-quality sales experiences.
ESQ: Which specific Asian markets do you see as having the most potential for growth in the coming years? Why?
SM: I think time will tell where we’ll see the most growth in Asia. It’s too early to pinpoint one specific market right now.
ESQ: What are the key benefits of Sinn's partnership with The Hour Glass?
SM: The Hour Glass has a knowledgeable team with great market access and beautiful stores. They have well-trained staff who are passionate about watches. We’re very happy with our relationship with them and look forward to continuing it in the future.
ESQ: If Sinn were to sponsor a sport or competition, what would it be?
SM: We don’t usually sponsor celebrities or athletes to wear our watches. All the celebrities you see wearing Sinn watches have bought them on their own. We’ve had a presence at some sports events in Germany, mostly rally-related. For example, we’ll be at a rally event this week, as there’s a race car driver with a long history with the brand. However, any collaboration we do has to align with the Sinn DNA—like when a high-altitude jumper broke a world record wearing a Sinn watch.
ESQ: Why doesn’t Sinn sponsor competitions or celebrities?
SM: We’re still a small brand compared to others, and sponsoring can be expensive. Also, it doesn’t really fit our brand ethos. We prefer that people wear Sinn watches because they love them, not because we paid them to. We want our wearers to be passionate about the technology and design, not just celebrities doing it for money.
ESQ: In a hypothetical "Watchmaking Olympics," what events do you think Sinn would win gold in?
SM: (Laughs) Definitely in the extreme diving category! We’d have a great chance there with our UX model, which can go as deep as you can imagine—the watch will always go deeper than you. I’d also say we’d perform well in any piloting event, especially anything involving legibility during flights. If there were an event for timing loops while flying, Sinn watches would certainly be a top contender!
ESQ: What do you see are the biggest challenges facing the watch industry in the next decade?
SM: Well, we’re already seeing a bit of a challenge now. After the COVID period, which was actually a good time for watches because people were home and getting into collecting, we've had to adjust. Brands received a lot of attention during that time, and coming down from that high has been a bit of a reality check. Now, we need to work harder to keep people’s interest. We have to stay innovative, creating watches that continue to excite people and validate their passion for horology.
ESQ: And what about opportunities?
SM: There are plenty of opportunities! Online marketing, new forms of exhibitions, and different ways of sharing content—whether through social media, online retail, or even bespoke experiences in person—are all exciting areas. The key is finding your niche and creating unique experiences. It’s not about right or wrong; it’s about how focused and innovative you are in your approach.
ESQ: What do you think sets Sinn apart from other brands?
SM: I think it’s our commitment to practicality and precision. We don’t just make watches to look good, though of course, they do! We make them to serve a purpose, whether it’s for aviation, diving, or even niche fields like rescue operations. Our goal is to create a tool that can be relied on in extreme conditions, and that’s something that resonates with a lot of our customers. When you wear a Sinn, you’re wearing a piece of precision engineering.
“The Spirit of the Faubourg” is Hermès’ theme for the year, referencing the Maison’s iconic first flagship that still stands at its original address at 24 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. You may think that it’s somewhat of a disconnect then that Lauren Clay, a visual artist based in New York, was given carte blanche to design artist windows for Hermès’ Singapore flagship. But perhaps Clay’s dream-like, almost mystical oeuvre is the perfect way to channel the Hermès spirit. Clay tells us all about it as she readies to present her first ever window to fellow artists in Singapore.
ESQUIRE SINGAPORE: The theme for Hermès this year is “The Spirit of the Faubourg”. What does it mean to you?
LAUREN CLAY: I’m fascinated by the concept of “place” and the unique qualities that a city or building holds. Sometimes we refer to this as “vibes.” The ancient Romans had a term, "genius loci," which is Latin and translates to “the spirit of a place.” This term, “genius loci,” also describes the atmosphere or character of a space. This is an idea that I’ve been inspired by for many years.
Regarding the theme “The Spirit of the Faubourg”, I aimed to capture the feeling of visiting the Hermès rue du Faubourg store, which for me, resonates with the experience of visiting Paris. The store embodies all of the beautiful aspects of Paris that we all love. I also wanted to convey the sense of discovery within the store, highlighting the various elements and unique architectural details it contains. There are numerous pieces from the collection and Hermès family history throughout the store. In my window installation, I wanted to evoke the feeling of exploring and encountering the unexpected.
ESQ: Is that how the name "The Traveller" came about for the windows?
LC: Yes. In the rue du Faubourg store, I particularly admire the main staircase— the curvature of the marble steps and the way they wrap through the different levels of the store. I aimed to capture that in the window display.
In my work, I often try to evoke the feeling of standing on the threshold between the natural world and some other realm. I think this sensation is familiar to most of us in dreams, where we encounter the familiar juxtaposed with the strange or unexpected. It’s similar to the feeling of being a traveler. I appreciate the way Hermès often captures this sensation in their storytelling.
I have a deep appreciation for architecture and ancient art history. Although I studied painting in school, my love for architecture and decorative arts significantly influences my work. The Hermès Faubourg store stands out in that regard.
ESQ: It reminds me of your work as well, because you do feature a lot of stairs in your artworks.
LC: Exactly. I frequently use stairs as a symbol in my work, drawing on art history. Many painters and sculptors have used stairs as a psychological symbol of transition. For example, William Blake’s painting of Jacob’s Ladder and Martin Puryear’s "Ladder for Booker T. Washington" come to mind.
ESQ: What's the process like in creating "The Traveller"? Was it a deviation from your usual process?
LC: This installation was slightly different. Typically, when I create an exhibition for a gallery or museum, I start by making a model of the space and studying its architecture. Usually, I consider the path and vantage points that the viewer has as they walk through the space. However, for the Hermès window installation, the viewer has one main vantage point, which in a way, gave me more freedom. I knew I wanted to create an illusion of depth and space beyond the window. I began with sketches—probably around 20 ideas that only my husband saw—before choosing one and developing it further.
ESQ: Because you're also interested in architecture, did the architecture of the Liat Tower building kind of informed how it was going to look like as well?
LC: Because I live in New York, I hadn’t visited the Hermès Singapore store before, but I studied photos provided by the Hermès team and also different views of the building from the street view on Google Maps. In planning the window, I considered the architectural features, such as the height of the window. Creating this installation felt similar to creating a diorama or tableau, which aligns with my background in painting. A window offers a controlled view, similar to a painting.
ESQ: What was the biggest challenge in designing a window for Hermès?
LC: A key challenge was finding where my artistic vision and the Hermès aesthetic would intersect. I had to ensure both worlds remained distinct while complementing each other.
ESQ: Did you also have to consider where products would be placed or how they would be placed?
LC: Yes, I had a lot of freedom—pretty much full creative license, which was exciting, like a shopping experience.
ESQ: I've looked through a lot of what you've done before and there's clearly a sense of fantasy, dream-like reality to your work. And you often use a lot of pastel colours. Has anything from your own childhood informed or influenced the use of these colours?
LC: I think my colour palette is heavily influenced by growing up in the southern part of the United States. I went to school at the Savannah College of Art and Design, in Savannah, Georgia, one of America’s oldest cities known for its beautiful pastel Victorian and colonial architecture. After Savannah, I went to graduate school in Richmond, Virginia—also an old southern city. It’s hard to explain, but both of those cities have a distinct feeling of place and history. The unique atmosphere there contrasted with my suburban upbringing and profoundly influenced my artistic sensibility. All of my work, going back to college has been influenced by that experience.
ESQ: Is there a story behind the use of the specific colours for "The Traveller"?
LC: The colour palette emerged from collaboration with the Hermès team. Some of my initial sketches were darker, but I’m pleased it evolved into brighter tones. The pastels reflect the stone and marble of the original Faubourg store and work really well with Hermès’ colour palette.
ESQ: I read in previous interviews that you also kind of tie some of your works to dreams that you’ve had. Was there a specific dream that you had for "The Traveller"?
LC: I've been studying my dreams carefully for about five years now. In my dreams, I often find myself in familiar places, like a grandparent’s house, but I keep discovering hidden doors, stairwells, or entire rooms that I didn’t know were there. I have this type of dream frequently, and I wanted to bring that sensation into the Hermès installation—that feeling of discovery and mystery.
ESQ: Have you learnt anything from studying your dreams?
LC: Definitely. Yes, I feel like a completely different person after spending five years studying my dreams. I agree with Carl Jung’s idea that dreams often reveal parts of yourself that you didn’t know were there. Dreams come from the unconscious realm—quite literally, the part of you that you’re not aware of. Sometimes the unconscious can reveal something encouraging; other times, it stings a little. But it’s valuable information, and I’ve found studying my dreams to be really rewarding.
ESQ: Do you dream in colour?
LC: I do, and some dreams have particularly vivid colours, though not always. Colour is a whole other type of symbolic language.
ESQ: It does seem as well that your work mostly has this positive, dream-like energy. But I do feel that there are some darker influences in certain pieces.
LC: I'm curious what pieces you’re thinking of.
ESQ: For example, "Fix your eyes on the unseen realm" and “Lover’s Knot" I feel had darker undertones.
LC: I think what you’re picking up on is that feeling of witnessing something that is simultaneously familiar and uncanny. I'm intrigued by spiritual ideas and the realm of the unconscious, which is why I often discuss dreams in relationship to my work. I think most of us have experienced this feeling in our dreams; there’s a mysterious aspect to dreams. Carl Jung referred to it as “the numinous” aspect of dreams. The sculpture, “Lover’s Knot” is inspired by an old Scottish folk song, "Barbara Allen", which is about unrequited love and a couple who die and are buried next to each other. Out of one’s grave, a thorn bush grows, and out of the other, a rose bush, and they grow together, intertwined. It’s a folk song that influenced early country music, but there’s definitely a dark element to that reference.
ESQ: Is it important for you to keep your artwork kind of lighthearted?
LC: Given the darkness in the world, I prefer to bring light. The New York art scene can be very cynical and political, which isn’t my focus.
ESQ: It feels like your work is a collage of different ideas and references, that you then twist into your own vision. In some ways, to me, it echoes what AI does, right? Pulling out information from everywhere, and then generating an image. What are your thoughts on AI with respect to art?
LC: I find it fascinating. I’ve experimented with AI for generating ideas, and I think it’s an exciting tool. There are artists who have been successfully using it for years—like Jon Rafman. I’ve only played with it a bit but I’ve used it to inspire new concepts, feeding in images of my work and observing the results. It has sparked ideas for a few of my drawings. Sometimes it has good ideas. (laughs)
ESQ: There's this saying that likens a painting to a window and now that you've done an Hermès window, how do you feel about it?
LC: Working on this installation for Hermès felt particularly poignant because it literally serves as a window, offering a curated view into a space that is simultaneously real but impossible. Just as I do in all my work, for this project, I wanted to create a bridge between the familiar and the fantastical, allowing viewers to experience a moment of discovery.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
It’s a little like a homecoming for Josiah Chua when we shot at his former class at LASALLE College of the Arts. Where mannequins acupunctured with needles stand at attention; sewing machines wait in rapt silence, there are ghosts of Chua’s past: of him and his peers sewing and cutting cloths.
Chua is part of the 2009 graduating Fashion Design class that consists of designers like Sunny Lim, Mae Pang and Pauline Ning. After graduation, as Chua was enlisted into National Service, his peers were roped in for PARCO next NEXT, an incubator programme to groom burgeoning fashion design talents. Held at PARCO Marina Bay in Millenia Walk, this was an initiative organised between PARCO Singapore and Textile & Fashion Federation (Singapore) (TaFf).
Despite the exclusion due to his conscription, Chua was excited for his peers. “During the weekends, when I booked out, I’d visit them at their booths and hang out.”
Eventually, the retail scene became a tough landscape to traverse, more so for local brands. PARCO next NEXT and, later, PARCO Marina Bay, shuttered. With this closure, Chua fretted about the loss of his friends’ outfits. “The local retail scene was competitive. For the amount of work that [my friends] put into their pieces, the prices that they were selling at weren’t enough in the long run.”
Previous collections were kept in storage and their prices often got discounted. Eventually, unsold collections were faced with the unkindest cut of all: disposal. Chua, who was already collecting toys and anime paraphernalia, stepped in. After all, what’s one more genre to collect, especially when they are the result of your classmates’ hard work?
Back then, as a student, Chua didn’t have the wherewithal and the funding to amass all the local pieces that he’d like. Approaching the designers that he knew, his classmates, seemed prudent. When he was able to earn his keep, Chua would revisit conversations with his friends about attaining their collection. He’d also resort to hunting down local brands on Carousell (an online market place).
Nostalgia is a huge factor in Chua’s obsession. The clothes reminded him of an era, a period in his life that represented possibilities. “Looking at them start their own labels told me that it was possible for me to join them at the PARCO next NEXT programme."
But that didn’t happen. Instead, Chua, who was trained as a fashion designer, found success as a stylist. He points to the lack of design houses in Singapore as a factor for his career change. “For design students, whenever there’s an internship, a lot of them would go for publications,” Chua explains. “Or work retail at Club21 or tailoring shops. Working in publications was a more viable option because there were many opportunities to work with editors and to find out how to market yourself.
"I didn’t choose to be a stylist but I don’t hate it. I enjoy what I do. Somehow the styling path found me. At the heart of it all, I’m still a designer.”
Chua’s collection started with works by his classmates but it soon included designers and their labels that he’d admired like alldressedup, Baylene, Woods & Woods. In a sense, Chua has the added onus of being a fashion anthropologist. In 2022, he and his friend, Daniela Tan (co-founder of the fashion label, MASH-UP) organised an exhibit called Capsule 2009. It was a visual archive of fashion pieces; over 50 garments, magazines and ephemera from the 2009 graduating class as well as from designers that they looked up to as students, were displayed. You can see part of the exhibit on the Instagram account (@sgfashionarchive), which has not been updated since.
The reason for the lack of an update is time; Chua is unable to set time aside for a meticulous archiving of his collection. Currently, 200 pieces of clothes are packed in boxes and suitcases; stored away in a corner of his flat. Recently, when he was unearthing what he had for this feature’s shoot, he was overcome with a compulsion to pick up from where he left off and properly catalogue his collection.
It’s a travesty if these outfits were allowed to disappear, no one else would know of their designers. That is why Chua steps up to the plate. That in his act of preserving this bubble of his past, he can also remind Singaporeans that their country has talent.
“If I don’t do it, I don’t know who the hell would,” Chua simply says.
(Clockwise from left-most)
Fabric neckpiece, KWODERENT. Panelled leather jacket, PAULINE.NING
“This Kwoderent piece isn’t mass-produced. It’s one of each. I went to [designer Grace Tan] studio and she had to open up her archive for me. It was eye-opening as it’s made out of foldable organdie fabric and green isn’t a common colour that Grace would use. The pauline.ning pieces were harder to acquire because Pauline didn’t want to let any of them go because she only had one of each design. Her patterns were so intricate. I kept inquiring about her key outfits and eventually, she caved in. She kept them in a large box and gave it to me. It felt like Christmas when I opened it.”
Printed silk georgette dress with rope hardware, ALLDRESSEDUP
"alldressedup is no more. [Jazz singer] Joanna Dong gave me a piece that she bought for one of her gigs. She knows that I was collecting local designers and she graciously gifted it to me. This is one of a kind; look at the print and the intricate rope hardware."
Tailored shirt with metallic panels, MILS BY SUNNY LIM
"When Sunny passed away, I asked his best friend [Lee] Yun Ting (designer of Episene) whatever happened to the rest of his collection. She said that they were stored at his mom’s house and his mom doesn’t know what to do with them. I asked if I could have them. Or if I sold them, any money that I made could be donated. I have his panelled metallic stuff and some that have cut-outs to reveal skin.”
Jersey and cotton tailored shirt, WOODS & WOODS BY JONATHAN SEOW
“Woods & Woods was a brand that I knew about but I was a bit late to the game. I looked up to Jonathan as the bench mark because he did Paris Fashion Week. Back when Woods & Woods was popular, I didn’t have the means to afford his stuff. Jonathan mixes unexpected fabrics. This shirt is constructed to look like a man’s shirt but is made out of a Jersey mesh material. Technically, it’s very creative. It’s not a showy shirt but it’s all about the details that I found appealing."
Panelled jacket with pleated darts, MAE PANG
"This is one of the first few pieces that I got that kickstarted the collection. Mae and I are close friends so her pieces were easy to attain. A lot of thought goes into her outfits; she’s so technical and it’s designed in such a way that it’s also suitable for our climate. After Mae, the collection just snowballed from there.”
Photography: Jayden Tan
