Editor’s Letter
PEOPLE THOUGHT THE WAISTCOAT was all over. It isn’t now!
Sorry, but the groan-inducing World Cup dad jokes are hard to resist from where I’m sitting, feet up on a hot desk, staring at a proof of the newsstand cover of this month’s Esquire. Tom Hardy’s on it, wearing a striking example (football pun) of the above-mentioned garment. A garment you would never previously have seen worn in this way — no jacket, my dears, like a snooker player! — on the cover of this, Britain’s most dapper and debonair men’s magazine. But now here it is, loud and proud and suddenly, bafflingly visible again thanks to the efforts of an extremely unlikely fashion influencer: a football manager.
It’s not often that an anachronistic item of formalwear enjoys a moment in the sun, or The Sun. But this summer the waistcoat (or at least a waistcoat) made it on to “the global stage”, as the pundits will insist on having it, decorating front pages, trending on social media, putting it about like the sartorial equivalent of a box-to-box midfielder — possibly a French one — with an overactive Instagram account.
But then it’s not often that the England football team makes it to the semi-finals of the World Cup, nor that the man on the touchline is widely held to be the greatest living Englishperson since Shakespeare, or Churchill, or Balding. To you, reading this in August or later, Russia 2018 and Gareth Southgate’s World Cup waistcoat are distant memories, just two of a series of surreal occurrences that characterised our fever dream of a summer, from the heatwave that seemed it would never break to the farcical goings on in Westminster — wait, don’t tell me: has Danny Dyer been appointed Brexit Secretary yet? — to the British public’s sadly inevitable bad romance with Love Island: the new Bake Off, only with better buns.
As I say, all ancient history to you, but still fresh as this morning’s doughnuts to me. As I write, it’s days since England lost to Croatia. Tourist-in-Chief Trump is in town, impressing all with his famous sparkling wit. And some tennis matches are taking place, about which absolutely no one cares a fig because of The Football. So you’ll understand that for me the waistcoat is still very much front of mind. That’s Gareth Southgate’s waistcoat as well as the one Tom Hardy is wearing on our cover, as if in silent sartorial tribute to the former Crystal Palace centre-half and erstwhile Pizza Hut spokesperson.
I’m not going to pretend we planned it like this. We’re not even close to that clever. In fact, when Greg Williams’ photos of Tom arrived in Esquire inboxes in early June, weeks before the lionising of our Gaz began, there was widespread feeling in the office that the one we absolutely, positively couldn’t use — and certainly not on the cover — was the one of Tom wearing a waistcoat but no jacket.
Because, really, who does that? Who, apart from head waiters and flushed best men delivering off-colour speeches in stifling wedding marquees (yes, and the banjo player from Mumford & Sons) is permitted to wear a waistcoat without a jacket? It’s a no-no up there with chisel-toed shoes and clamdiggers and wraparound shades. It’s beyond the pale. Verboten. It’s just not done.
And yet, Southgate did it. He did it with a navy M&S number, worn over a light blue business shirt and a red, white and blue tie. And not under the jacket that it presumably came with. (Where is that jacket, by the way? I think the nation should be told.)
The thinking here is, if Southgate can get away with it, then certainly Tom Hardy can. Here is a man who doesn’t need anyone’s permission, least of all mine, to wear anything he damn well pleases. You may notice he’s also wearing two watches on the cover. Who does that?
And yet he carries it off, just as he seems to carry off everything he does. This is our third cover with the most magnetic screen star of his generation, the third to be photographed by Greg Williams, and the third in which the interview has been conducted by Miranda Collinge, our features director. Tom and Greg have been close friends for years, since long before either of them was successful, and you can see that ease and trust and shared humour and history in the photos. Tom and Miranda met for the first time in 2015 when she first wrote about him for Esquire. Clearly they hit it off, because he asked for her again, in 2016, and then again, this summer.
For the photographs this time, Tom and Greg spent a day knocking about in Tom’s neck of the woods, in and around Richmond, in south west London, where he grew up. A few days later, Tom invited Miranda to do the same. They ended up in Homebase, of all places, as you don’t very often with an A-list Hollywood superstar, but I’ll let her tell the story…
It’s an uncommonly intimate portrait, with little or even none of the usual strict boundaries and formal niceties of the celebrity interview. It’s two people, who clearly have already established a rapport, having a conversation about matters profound and otherwise. And even though it is, still, technically, a celebrity interview for a glossy magazine, and they are aware of their roles as interviewer and interviewee, it doesn’t read like one. A credit to both of them, I think.
He wasn’t wearing a waistcoat, by the way, on the day of his meeting with Miranda. He’s distinctive and unusual in many ways, including in his dress, but he’s not weird.