After a year-plus of creative fecundity – a Golden Globe win, an Emmy nomination, that Spider-Man cameo – the actor is reckoning with a new and joyous career freedom. It just so happens that all this has followed his greatest loss.
Luke Gilford.
In his GQ Men of the Year interview, Andrew Garfield rejoices in being “in a real period of not-doing”. This after a real period of doing a lot: an Emmy nomination, a hit musical, being cast as the lead in a biopic about a certain Virgin billionaire. His cover shoot definitely fits into the latter category. In fact, it’s doing so much that it’s practically hyperventilating.
To match the new rig – on full display, as is every gym rat’s human right – Garfield pounded the desert in leather trousers. A pair of classic straight cuts from Alexander McQueen, there are few details: no zips, no Ramones patches to really clobber us with the fact that these are ROCK AND ROLL. Just leather pants, quietly sexy, and letting a statement fabric do all the lifting.
Luke Gilford.
Story by Alex Pappademas.
A few minutes across the border between Los Angeles and Ventura County sits a members-only club called Little Beach House Malibu, and in that club’s open-air dining room, on a balmy Thursday in October, an out-of-work actor sits facing the sea. Andrew Garfield – modestly bearded, dressed in white painters’ trousers, a logo-less black T-shirt, and your basic incognito-celeb baseball cap, whose brim he keeps tilting upward like the visor of a knight’s helmet – orders a cheeseburger with sweet potato fries, yellow mustard on the side, and begins to elaborate on what he’s been up to lately, which isn’t much.
“I’m in a real period of not-doing,” he says, cheerfully. “The usual aggressive, ambitious, driven heartbeat, rapping at the door has subsided for a while.”
Andrew Garfield on GQ UK.
The break he’s on now comes after 14 months of remarkable work, even by Garfield’s standards: Tick, Tick… Boom! and The Eyes of Tammy Faye. A surprise return to the role of Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home. An Emmy nomination for the TV miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven. To hear Garfield tell it, all this work has been challenging, rewarding, and unexpectedly satisfying – and all of it has been put in perspective by the loss of his mother, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2019. Over the course of a few hours in Malibu, he’ll bring up her passing again and again – not as a painful memory, but as a line of demarcation; an experience that’s broken him open in unpredictable ways, recalibrating his understanding of existence itself, and how fleeting it can be.
Luke Gilford.
McQueen is no outlier. The British marque is in good company with Prada, Dior, Rhude, Fendi and Dolce & Gabbana all going hell for leather during A/W ‘22. And Garfield only turned up the volume. Elsewhere in his GQ cover shoot, there was a full anime villain look in a trench from the brand that’s made leather its entire existence: Saint Laurent. Under creative director Anthony Vaccarello, the French brand has leaned into its after-hours aesthetic; of party people that always know of a late licence, of leather that feels seductive without ever trying too hard.
It’s the perfect move for these times. Menswear, finally, has entered its thot phase: those wild college years where fashion is getting it all out of its system. Waistbands are on full display. Gym memberships are at an all-time high. There’s even Andrew Garfield, the former boy-next-door, wandering the desert in a pair of leather trousers looking like a Greek god. Maybe it’s time we all enter our transformative era.
Luke Gilford.
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PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by Luke Gilford
Styled by Michael Darlington
Grooming by Sonia Lee for Exclusive Artists using Le Domaine Skincare and Oribe
Hair by Jeff Verbeck
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Production by Petty Cash
Andrew attending the Man of the Year 2022 at GQ UK.
Andrew Garfield isn’t listening to your tired old rules about getting dressed. Nobody is, to be honest. So when the classicists say that all black is for mourning, we say: au contraire! All-black is a loose way to do black tie – and it’s a solid interpretation of style for GQ’s MOTY 2022.
