The Slick and Sexy HBO Financial Drama That Everyone’s Sleeping On
Industry is the first great show about a Gen Z workplace. -Gabriella Paiella
Amid a general cultural rejection of careerist ambition, the most privileged of young workers are starting to cry burnout, citing long work hours and mistreatment from higher-ups. In the real world, at least.
Not so much on Industry, the slick and sexy HBO financial drama and the best show you’re not watching yet. Created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, two 30-somethings who did a tour of duty in finance before decamping for TV, the series is set at a fictional London investment bank called Pierpoint & Co. It follows four horny, hard-partying young grads clawing their way through a maze of fleece vests and Bloomberg terminals, unspoken social mores, and routine hazing.
The young 20-somethings in Industry may not have fully developed prefrontal cortexes yet, but they still manage millions upon millions of dollars. That may also have something to do with how they behave off the clock: drinking and snorting and screwing everything in sight. They commit to their bad decisions with the same competitive rigor they apply to their work. This, of course, makes for mesmerizingly watchable TV.
Harper (Myha’la Herrold) is the bold and hungry American outsider with a natural gift for the biz. Yasmin (Marisa Abela) is the rich girl who struggles on the job. To occupy her time, she turns to psychosexually toying with Robert (Harry Lawtey), a working-class kid trying to navigate the blue-bloodedness of it all. Gus (David Jonsson) is an Old Etonian having a secret affair with a male colleague. Occasionally, there’s even an adult in the room, the most notable of whom is Eric (Ken Leung), Harper’s boss and mentor. In the pilot, a fellow trainee quite literally works himself to death. The rest keep their eyes on the prize, barely blinking.
From Wall Street to Billions to Succession, rich people have long held a gilded grip on the public imagination. There’s a grim pleasure in witnessing the pathologies of those responsible for the work, opaque as it is, that moves the world. Industry remixes the genre for a new generation, where lip service to diversity and inclusion is abundant and harassment seminars are frequent, but things are still business as usual. The rest of Gen Z may be too disillusioned to want to work, but their generation still makes for a great workplace drama.
The Next Generation of Global Sports Stars Is Here
It’s a new era.
The day after he turned 19, he beat Rafael Nadal in the quarterfinals of the Madrid Open. A day later, he beat then–world number one Novak Djokovic.
He’s got the Energizer Bunny athleticism of Russell Westbrook, the hops of Vince Carter, and the competitive fire of M.J.
The young Brazilian’s first touch is divine, a modern product of the country that the soccer gods have personally blessed.
Yes, it looks like he’s gonna slip out of his shoes when he hits the ball. But Scheffler’s unorthodox swing has, you know, whatever, led him to the top of the golf world at 26.
The Modular Couch Beloved by Frank Ocean and Kanye West
Pierre Paulin, the legendary French furniture designer, died in 2009. It’s only now that the rest of the world is catching up with his visions. -Sam Reiss
A couple of years ago, a video was posted from inside Kanye West’s enormous hangar-size studio. Sitting in front of a theater-screen wall was a huge diamond-latticed sofa—electric blue, with peaks and valleys—that jumped out more than anything else in the room.
The couch, called the Dune, was conceptualized by the late interior designer Pierre Paulin in the early 1970s and is today considered a masterpiece. Remarkable, given the couch’s early difficulty in even getting made. Paulin envisioned it as part of a collection of modular furniture he designed for Herman Miller—a collection that was never put into production.
It wasn’t until 2014 that the couch was brought to life—with help from Louis Vuitton—as part of a stewardship initiative called the Pierre Paulin Program, formed by the designer’s family to revive his old works.
PPP leaks out a couple of Dunes a year, more or less, and introduces other pieces from the program, like the Déclive n°5—a cool, U-shaped armless chair—and wilder Paulin designs that were never produced (or only in extremely limited runs), with every new model made to Paulin’s original, exacting specifications.
Under the guidance of Paulin’s widow, Maia Paulin, his son, Benjamin Paulin, and Benjamin’s wife, Alice Lemoine, the program is working its way through the designer’s vast archives, functioning as, Benjamin says, a sort of half-mobilier, half–book publisher creating a “testimony of the intelligence of my father’s work” and explaining a new narrative: a broader, freer sense of Paulin’s design. There are no sales targets, P.R. people, or marketing goals; PPP instead rescues Paulin’s wildest designs from just existing as sketches or prototypes.
Which would explain why the Dune has ended up in so many artistic spaces. Tom Ford and Christian Lacroix collect Paulin’s furniture; Frank Ocean has the same color and model as West. “These designs that my father made when he was young, in his 40s, have an immediate understanding,” says Benjamin. The work forms a kind of wordless connection to other obsessed young people who make things. At its root, the Dune is freeing, and a boundary breaker. You can spend the whole day on it. It can be a bed, a chair, or an office.
Like Paulin’s work, the pieces produced by the studio all speak to one another. The Tapis-Siège, a similar couch–slash–sunken room with built-in tables and storage, looks like the Dune’s cousin. Déclive n°1 and another chair, the Dos à Dos, mirror each other, and PPP has different options for open, modular shelving. These pieces are set against more refined and delicate wood designs originally made for former French president François Mitterrand.
Early on in his career, Paulin became France’s first great modern designer. Inspired by Scandinavian and American modern design, Paulin followed that same energy, turning out, for a decade, scads of imaginative chairs and desks that were both useful and fun. His 1960 Mushroom Chair—stretchy, hidden hardware, simple; you’ve seen it—kicked off the modern era in France, and his list of hits from that period is long. Chairs like the Tulip, Orange Slice, and Ribbon are all high-end classics. Sofas like the wavy ABCD are just about undeniable.
Whatever the era, Paulin always “started from the technical situation” when designing, says Benjamin. The function of a piece determined its style, shape, and artistic intention. Paulin’s work varied across mobiliers—tonier clients got more regal designs—but all his pieces were labored over. Many earlier pieces remain in production today thanks to different distributors. Paulin’s made-in-France ’50s designs have been consigned to Ligne Roset, the French standard bearer in furniture. Artifort makes his tubular pieces. PPP handles all the wild stuff.
The majority of the pieces that PPP is issuing had never made it off the sketchbook; Benjamin estimates that 90 percent of the designs were never actually produced. They’re all ideas that Benjamin says Paulin was “obsessed with” but were too expensive to make, or too tricky to adapt to industrial production “without losing the sense of the design.” Some, like the Dune, were simply too big.
In the ’80s, Paulin returned to working with wood, whereby he fashioned pieces slowly and meticulously. The Mitterrand designs, originally sold in editions of 12, were technical marvels, and couldn’t, then or now, be produced industrially and are made from tricky, fragile grains, like amaranth. So much challenging furniture today is made on demand, or produced in low numbers, mostly as a way of inoculating designers from the production pitfalls that Paulin experienced. In the ’80s, “nobody really understood” why Paulin did it all in limited quantities, says Benjamin. But now it’s the rule.
For this year and next, the business is focused on making however many pieces it can pump out while nailing the details, publishing books, and curating what Benjamin calls living exhibits that feature the furniture: one in France next year, and another this fall in Tokyo, with the architect Yoshio Taniguchi. PPP is a furniture company, sure, and the best kind, but it’s really more of an act of stewardship, one that bridges the gap between functionalist furniture and avant-garde designs. PPP is helping the rest of the world catch up to a designer ahead of his time. The shortest way to get there might be a very big sofa.
The Funky Reign of Khruangbin
The trio have long made music from another reality. And now their sound is everywhere. -Gerald Ortiz
There’s a placelessness to the band Khruangbin that, counterintuitively, gives them their gravity. I saw them live once in 2016 at The Independent in San Francisco, back when American revivalist acts were all the rage. Khruangbin were dressed in long black wigs and groovy 1970s clothes, while the music dipped into everything from funk to surf rock to psychedelia, with influences from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Thai-sounding guitar licks over dub bass lines. It was trippy shit. You would never have guessed they were from Houston.
There’s a sparingness to the band’s approach that makes them easy to digest. No face-melting guitar solos. Barely any singing. The total effect is silky and dreamlike, like a more mellow but equally atmospheric Cocteau Twins.
Since their first album released in 2015, Khruangbin have worked with everyone from Paul McCartney to Wu-Tang Clan to Leon Bridges (with whom they’ve toured). One of their songs made it onto Barry. Now their forthcoming album, Ali, out this month and recorded with Malian musician Vieux Farka Touré, expands Khruangbin’s sound into blues territory with a hint of West African palm wine music. It’s more pulsing and energetic. You can zone out and cut a rug.
These days, Khruangbin can be heard just about everywhere: in cafés while patrons clack away at their laptops, in the background of hip bookstores, on Bluetooth speakers at the beach. I suspect it’s because their music exists in that rare Venn diagram where the circles are “work appropriate” and “tunes you can share bong rips to.” In other words, excellent in most situations. First they pull you in. Then they make you float.
A Style Trend Worth Adopting
Wear Your Sweater Over Your Shoulders Like a Grandpa. -Yang-Yi Goh
You saw it everywhere in Pitti: menswear types peacocking in front of the Fashion Week cameras with their sweaters and overshirts over their shoulders as opposed to, you know, just wearing them. Once reserved solely for ’80s movie villains, tennis-playing octogenarians, and your one cousin who just got home from a semester abroad in Naples (excuse me, Napoli), draping a sweater over yourself feels suddenly, astonishingly all kinds of fresh. Call it the Coastal Grandfather Effect, but a growing number of supremely stylish folks are making the fusty move their own: art world types in vintage argyle pullovers; cool teens with underground skate hoodies; rich jet-setters wrapping monogrammed cashmere over their bespoke suits.
There’s a practicality to tying a sweater around yourself, of course, given the increasingly unpredictable climate that continues to defy our weather apps. But I prefer to think there’s something a little more Linus’s blanket about the whole thing—that a V-neck slung over your shoulders is comforting, reassuring, and gives you peace of mind. You’re ready for anything your day can foist upon you, whether it’s sudden-onset bad weather or a bar with extremely good air-conditioning. It’s a superhero cape you can stand tall in, despite, well, everything.
We Took the Most Exciting Electric SUV on the Planet for a Spin
Rivian’s vehicles are as futuristic as Teslas and drive like Land Cruisers. But can the company keep up with demand? -Rosecrans Baldwin
Remember when everybody switched from cell phones to smartphones, practically overnight? RJ Scaringe, the founder and CEO of the electric truck maker Rivian, predicts that drivers are about to make a similar jump. “Once you try a product that completely shifts the technology forward, it’s hard to go backwards,” Scaringe told me recently. “We’re going to see a level of consumer-mindset shift that’s hard to imagine.”
Scaringe long dreamed of an electric-vehicle company to reduce our addiction to fossil fuels, but he knew those kinds of cars would never be an easy sell. Too sensible, too quiet, too dull. But what if an electric vehicle came along that was built like a Tahoe and accelerated like a Corvette? Scaringe envisioned an entirely new kind of E.V.—one that could excite drivers across the country and the political spectrum. Rivian, which he founded in 2009, would reimagine the industrial past to make the car of the future.
When its launch models debuted in 2018—a pickup truck called the R1T and an SUV called the R1S—the fanfare was instantaneous. Investors included Ford and Amazon, with Amazon ordering 100,000 electric vans. But Rivian didn’t begin delivering the R1T to customers until late 2021, months behind schedule, and some forecasters, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have been predicting disaster, given all the trials—from supply-chain issues to raising capital—that face start-up car companies.
Rivian now has a waiting list about 90,000 preorders long. For a variety of reasons—including computer-chip shortages—it has only delivered about 6,600 vehicles. Anticipation for both Rivian models is full throttle, but drivers soon won’t lack for other options: Ford, GMC, and Tesla each have their own electric trucks to sell. Among such a crowded market, can Rivian hope to gain a foothold?
Once you actually get behind the wheel, as I did during a recent weekend in the Catskills, it’s easier to be optimistic. The R1S, which costs around $90,000, drives like a glammed-up Toyota Land Cruiser that can pace a Ferrari. (It does zero to 60 in three seconds on pavement, which made me feel like my organs got remapped.) And in the woods, it just goes where you point it, even when that’s down a 45-degree grade of mud.
My time in the car prompted a genuine moment of reflection: Was Rivian’s promise a flickering fantasy or something more real? I’d spent three days tooling around in this remarkable new machine. It honestly felt capable of anything. If only it could manufacture itself.
Five More Insanely Cool Electric Vehicles From Around the World
The future is looking stylish.
An ultra-sleek, high-performance hatchback guaranteed to turn heads.
Quirky. Futuristic. It charges fast (10 to 80 percent in under 20 minutes) and has a surprisingly spacious interior.
Scooters are an egalitarian form of transportation, and the rechargeable Chetak takes its name from the legendary horse of an Indian folk hero.
The iconic Volkswagen Bus reimagined. Perfect for the next era of van life.
Minimalist luxury in the form of a compact SUV, the XC40 Recharge is understatedly slick, not too flashy.
Why Everyone’s Sipping Tequila
What was once a liquor associated with cheap shots and late-night drunk texts has, inexplicably, become the go-to drink that everyone’s ordering. -Emily Sundberg
Bloomberg recently reported that Americans will spend more on tequila and mezcal this year than whiskey. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. I’ve had countless friends return from their four-day Mexico City trips waxing poetic on the ceviche at Contramar, the cobblestone streets, and, of course, the difference between tequila and mezcal. For the past 12 months, my Instagram feed has been lousy with aspirational photos of Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila. And I can’t remember the last time I went to a bar without hearing someone order a skinny margarita. How did we get here? How did it become righteous to order a blanco neat with dinner?
The short answer: George Clooney. After launching Casamigos in 2013, Clooney and his partners eventually sold their company to beverage giant Diageo for $700 million. From there, the Clooney Effect kicked in, and everyone from The Rock (Teremana) to E-40 (E. Cuarenta) got on the lucrative tequila train. “Now every fucking celebrity has a fucking tequila brand,” Andrea Hernández, consumer-product expert and consultant, told me. “And if you look at JAJA Tequila, it’s a combination of celebrities, right? It’s Chainsmokers meets the FuckJerry guys.” It shouldn’t be a surprise that famous people are leveraging their star power and partnering with small, family-owned distilleries. “The meteoric boom of tequila actually led to a shortage of the agave plant that’s used,” Hernández added.
The other part of tequila’s appeal is a confluence of the wellness craze (low calorie, not-bad hangovers) with the post-pandemic urge to socialize. Josh Hanover, the bar director of New York’s Estela, Altro Paradiso, and Lodi, thinks that the emergence of the high-quality stuff has everything to do with tequila’s sudden popularity. “People are drinking good tequila and they realize it’s not just a hangover in a glass,” Hanover says. “It’s a good, fun high. It’s a very jovial kind of experience. And when you are doing it in the quality sense, you realize, like, Oh, I feel okay the next day.”
Tequila, more so than other liquors, has also long been associated with the two prevailing moods of the moment: partying and feeling sad. I remember listening to T.I. order a “Patrón on ice” through my iPod headphones when I was still taking the school bus, and I drove around listening to Dan + Shay sing “When I taste tequiiilaaa” after a particularly bad heartbreak years later. Tequila, in its own way, was always there for us, a single set of footprints in the sand, long before we wanted to live like Kendall (and maybe even date Devin Booker). Now it comes with a less gnarly headache.
Friends With Benefits Is the Social Club of Tomorrow
The DAO can throw a hell of a party. -Gabriella Paiella
Imagine: crypto, without the cringe. Friends With Benefits proves it’s possible. The social club and decentralized autonomous organization was founded to foster creativity and community during the deep isolation of 2020, with a Discord that called back to the shaggy, collective early days of the internet. “It felt very much the way that those old kinds of web forums and chat rooms felt like,” cofounder Raihan Anwar says. And then they went IRL.
The over 4,000 FWB members worldwide range from artists and musicians to crypto nerds to V.C.s. (Count Azealia Banks, James Blake, and Flying Lotus as members of the club.) “We don’t want to keep people tethered to a chat at all times. We want to give people the tools that they need to make the best art they can,” Anwar says. They’ve also been known to throw the best parties, with DJ sets by artists like Flylo or Toro y Moi, and they used FWB funds to collectively launch their own yerba maté beverage with the drink brand Taika.
It’ll set you back 75 $FWB tokens to join, or about $750 to $14,000 depending on today’s volatile market fluctuations. As Dexter Tortoriello, another cofounder and the head of technology, puts it: “It’s a true safe space for weirdos. While sometimes this entire space can look really lame and capitalistic, I look at us as the cozy dive spot that still has its lights on after everyone else clocked out and shut down.” At its core, FWB creates space—both online and off—for its thousands of members to gather and pool their creativity.
The New Dubai Underground
The sprawling desert city has become, dare we say…cool? Four pins to drop before your next vacation. -Samira Larouci
Out in Dubai, freshly paved roads and artificial islands still spring out of the desert so fast that they’re in use before they appear on Google Maps. But the city, long a symbol of wealth and commerce and light-speed development, has also taken on another identity in recent years: as a destination for young creatives across the Global South.
These third-culture kids are cultivating a new Dubai, remaking the city to their liking. Take Wathek Allal, the Algerian Dubai-based skateboarder and founder of streetwear brand Precious Trust. Or Nigerian artist Cruel Santino, who splits his time between Dubai and Lagos, and often collaborates with the fashion designer Mowalola. Today Dubai even has its own culture-and-lifestyle festival, Sole DXB, returning this fall after a COVID hiatus, which brings together streetwear and luxury fashion through the prism of sneakers and music. (Everyone from A$AP Rocky to Burna Boy has performed there.)
This fashionable young insurgent class is infusing Dubai with a new sense of cool—at least, if you know where to look.
Known as the city’s arts district, Alserkal is where you’ll find acclaimed gallery the Third Line, Paris’s beloved juice spot Wild & the Moon, and countless pop-up galleries and specialty tea and coffee shops.
A skate shop, café, and concept store housed in Dubai’s Design District. The epitome of East meets East. Founded by Peter Ahn, who was born in Seoul, this store is where you can find advanced brands like ERL, Junya Watanabe, and Undercover.
Screening cult and independent Arab films, as well as internationally acclaimed titles, Cinema Akil is the Gulf’s first art house cinema. Seasons are intensely curated, uniting everything from Italian neorealism to Sudanese cinema.
The NYC institution has a permanent location housed on the fifth floor of the Sheraton, of all places, serving up Caribbean food until the early hours. This is where Rocky grabs dinner when he’s in town.
It’s Time to Smell Like Flowers
Five floral scents that anyone can wear. -Sable Yong
For too long, men’s fragrances have offered a predictable menu that has rarely strayed from a static picture of masculinity: dusty, muted sandalwoods; heady, leathery ouds; Old Spice. But scents—and their ingredients—do not have genders, as any perfumer will tell you. The best new fragrances have quit playing sides altogether, which is why we’re experiencing a modern flower-powered renaissance. Florals have served as common accents in fragrances for ages, and now they’ve been firmly replanted in the spotlight and left tired old gender norms behind. Consider these scents for everyone.
A floral woody musk, this is sweet orange blossom and cactus flowers floating on a hot desert breeze. It has a velvety warmth that dries down to a cedar, wearing light on the skin.
Fresh, searing, breezy, this musky floral evokes sun-bleached roses on the beach, evaporating down to a woody base with a salty finish.
Peppery and smoky, this violet number reads more Western showdown than English garden. It’s a quirky bouquet of gunpowder, tea leaves, and soft, suede violet on top. Not for the average cowboy.
Iris is a subdued, secretive flower. Its scent hides out in the heat of your skin, detectable only by those who come near. The effect is a comforting, heady musk that smells like the pages of your favorite beat-up first-edition novel.
Roses and leather may read as an unexpected duo, but this fragrance ships it well. The rose is a glassy interpretation—more angular than dewy petals—giving a crystalline edge to the otherwise suedelike leather underneath.
Three New(ish) Novels Worth Devouring
Buzzy books from some of the most exciting authors from around the world. -Colin Groundwater
A moving fable, The Last White Man begins with a simple, Kafka-esque premise: White people start waking up with dark skin. Where it goes from there is much more complicated. Set in an unnamed city, the book centers on a young couple—Anders and Oona—as they reconfigure their relationships as the world changes around them. “The seeds of [the book] were planted around the time of 9/11,” says Hamid, “when I experienced a huge change in how I was perceived as this brown-skinned guy with a Muslim name at airports.”
One line rings through Serpell’s novel like a mantra: “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” The follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Old Drift, The Furrows digs into the mess and uncertainty of grief. When her younger brother dies in an accident, a girl named Cee has to chart a way forward. She navigates her parents’ coping mechanisms, psychiatrists, and her biracial identity on a journey that takes her from Baltimore to San Francisco. “I wanted to write about how grief interrupts time,” says Serpell, who, like Cee, also lost a sibling when she was young.
A surreal and hilarious read, Rip It Up follows a scummy layabout who drifts between panty bars and art shows as he tanks his family business. Author Kou Machida started out as a punk rock musician (check out his old band Inu) before he started writing books in the ’90s. Now he’s recognized in Japan as an influential literary iconoclast. He published Rip It Up to critical acclaim over two decades ago, but it hadn’t been translated into English until this year by Brooklyn’s indie Inpatient Press. When he first wrote it, “I was totally satisfied with everything I did,” says Machida. “But when I read it now, there are parts I think are really great, and parts I think are really awful. It’s about 50-50.” We disagree. It’s awesome insanity through and through.
The Hairstyles to Rock Right Now
According to the hair experts who would know. -Chris Cohen
“What we’re talking about is not like the old embarrassing yearbook-photo hair, or something shaved on the sides—the Bushwick hipster cut. It’s more just a shaggy haircut with a tail in the back. It’s a very natural, flattering look that works for lots of different kinds of people, of any gender. Pin-straight Asian hair? Curly hair? It looks good with any texture.” —Masami Hosono (@masamihosono), owner, Vacancy Project salon
“I’m Dominican, and I got into braids as a way to care for my natural curl and find joy and beauty in that. Traditional braiding shops are usually not very flexible with creative ideas, so the coolest, most unique people are running it out of their house DIY. Sometimes you’re at it for more than 10 hours. And the freestyle braiding I do? You couldn’t replicate it even if you had a picture. I don’t think I could even copy myself.” —Rosemery Duran (@rosedatgurl), professional braider
“If you have length on your hair, you have to take more care with the color processes you’re doing; there’s a higher level of maintenance involved. With a buzz, it’s so temporary you don’t have to be as careful. That’s also why it’s such an easy way to have fun with your look. If you don’t love it? It’s not that serious. A buzz only lasts a week and a half before you hit it with the clippers again.” —Jackson Heller (@jacksonheller), colorist at Beauty Supply
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of GQ with the title “The Hype List”
IMAGE CREDITS:
Collage elements, clockwise from top left: Troye Sivan, Rodin Eckenroth/WireImage/Getty Images. Industry: courtesy of Amanda Searle/HBO. Hairstyles: Simbarashe Cha (2). Khruangbin: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic/Getty Images. Rivian: courtesy of Rivian. Pierre Paulin/Dune: David Crotty/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images. The Last White Man: courtesy of Riverhead Books. Cocktail: Cris Cantón/Getty Images. Bajaj Chetak: courtesy of Bajaj Auto. Scottie Scheffler: David Cannon/Getty Images. Volkswagen ID. Buzz: courtesy of Volkswagen AG. Sweater style: Edward Berthelot/Getty Images. Industry: courtesy of Amanda Searle/HBO. French Waltz: Luis “Panch” Perez/courtesy of Golf le Fleur. Vinícius Júnior: Berengui/DeFodi Images/Getty Images. Serge Ibaka: Edward Berthelot/Getty Images. The Furrows: courtesy of Hogarth Books. Pierre Paulin/Tapis Siege: Guy Bell/Alamy Live News. Rip It Up: courtesy of Inpatient Press. Violet Ends: courtesy of Boy Smells. Casamigos: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg/Getty Images. Evan Mock: Cindy Ord/WireImage/Getty Images. Tears of Iris: courtesy of Gucci. Ja Morant: Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images.