50 objects that have defined our 50 issues

Over the past 50 issues, these are the people, places and peculiar objects that have come to define Gentleman’s Journal

…which dated from the 1910s and contained an actual dead viper. Marco uncorked it for us to drink before a podcast recording at his home in 2021 – at 9.30 in the morning.

…under which we snuck to shoot James Norton for our summer issue at Cannes in 2018, to the gentle unease of the hotel management.

…which Greg Funnell shot (including ankles: editor’s own) in April 2018, in the week that the grand dame of the Riviera opened for the summer season. We interviewed over 40 members of staff and ate possibly over 50 steak dianes for the piece, which is still one of our most-read ever.

…with his steel watch strapped eternally over the top. The look was either down to Piedemontese custom, or the fact that he didn’t like cold steel on his wrist, or maybe simply because his tool watches were too big to fit under his shirts. But we captured it, and all of Agnelli’s stylish idiosyncrasies, in our celebration of the Fiat patriarch on the twentieth anniversary of his death in 2022.

…whose utilitarian beauty seems to better evoke the real south of France than any gleaming supercar. We wrote about the world’s greatest beach buggy in our summer 2024 issue: “In a Citroen Mehari the world is not your oyster. The oyster is your oyster. Who wants the world anyway? Have you seen the world lately?”

We met Rocky and his entourage on a scorching day in New York to shoot our September 2018 cover in The Box nightclub. The set designer had meticulously laid out a sprawling feast for the shoot, from lobster to dollar-slice pizza, which Rocky decided to top off with a pair of his Gucci slides, for some reason. Things got pretty messy pretty quickly.

We met photographer and art collector Jean Pigozzi at his house, Villa Dorane, in Cap d’Antibes. “I do as many things as possible so I do not think about death,” he said – including curating inflatable animals (and inflatable celebrities, perhaps) to bob in his famous kidney-bean shaped pool.

…which was hoisted in its new red-and-white colourway in summer 2021, just as we were coming out of a dismal second lockdown. The idea of a pint on a Chelsea corner pub was the finest thing on the planet.

…which stood in a case in Lenny Kravitz’s townhouse (a former American embassy) in Paris, where we shot him for our summer 2019 cover. The boots were surprisingly petite.

…which the ‘king of clubs’ wielded against Fred Castle-berry when the photographer journeyed to meet him at his home in The Hamptons, summer 2018.

“Scaramucci often said that he wasn’t a backstabber but a frontstabber, so you’ll know it if he comes for you,” wrote Harry Shukman in a profile of ‘The Mooch’ just after he’d left the White House in 2017. “And, in a gimmick that is typical Scaramucci, he keeps a steak knife in the restaurant, his name carved into the enormous blade. ‘These are frontstabbing knives,’ he says, flashing a set of fluorescent white teeth, before tackling a pork chop the size of a hubcap…”

…which we painstakingly deconstructed over a 12-hour period for a single (and pretty remarkable) shot in our January/February 2018 issue.

Guillaume Bonn provided exquisite archive shots of the great conservationist and lion-whisperer Tony Fitzjohn, who we met for his final interview before his death in 2022.

…which he wore on the cover of our summer 2021 issue, in front of a peerlessly blue Malibu sky – one of our favourite covers, and one of our loveliest cover stars.

…which photographer Lauren Maccabee captured in a rare and lovely behind-the-scenes story at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea in the summer of 2018. We ran it in the same issue as A$AP Rocky, The Mooch and a 16-page superyacht report. There probably isn’t another magazine that would do that.

…though ‘museum’ or ‘hoard’ would be more accurate. In summer 2017 we met Sir Paul at his studio in Covent Garden, filled with a bewildering array of objects, knick-knacks and collectibles – from art prints to racing bikes to 10p fairground toys. All of them elicited complete joy in our host.

…part of an unlikely collection of jets which dots the inventor’s remarkable campus, where we profiled him in the spring of 2017.

…which he tucked into for our wonderful summer 2025 cover story. Surely our greatest and newest national treasure?

Jonny Wells informed us that the first televised instance of champagne being sprayed from the winner’s podium took place at the famous 24-hour-race, whose high-octane history we traced in 2019.

…which he wore, along with a highly sharp black tie ensemble, on the cover of our celebratory 10th anniversary issue in 2022. Arise, King John!

We met the singular Constance de von Gstaad III in the autumn of 2022 – where he revealed he was “briefly married to Céline Dion” and would like to be resurrected as“a Peruvian vicuna, exclusively farmed by Loro Piana…”

…Which sailed past in the luncheon tent before the beginning of every new match of the frozen-lake tournament, raised aloft by a young bellhop from Badrutt’s Palace.

…a symbol of subterranean fun at Five Hertford Street, it appeared in Ed Cumming’s survey of the soft (and sometimes not-so-soft) power of the Mayfair members’ club on its tenth birthday in 2023.

…which the hugely missed chef told us about in our winter 2021 issue. “How could anything so simple be so good?” Norman wrote – a fine description of all of his food, in fact.

…beyond which the real high-rollers play, and a nice metaphor for Jonny Wells’ and Greg Funnell’s incredibly rare behind-the-velvet-rope story at the iconic gambling palace in 2022.

…from an exquisite black-tie ensemble to a random pair of red socks. The aesthetic ideal of 20th-century American style, Newman has been a spirit animal of Gentleman’s Journal from pretty much the first issue.

…whose unlikely resurgence Ed Cumming rightly praised in our summer 2022 issue. “The issue is not why the mullet is back,” he concluded, “but why we ever bothered with any other kind of hairstyle…”

…or any of the cocktails in our ‘Martini Mafia’ portfolio in winter 2021, where the leading Italian barmen in London were captured by Greg Funnell in exquisite chiaroscuro.

…which the ‘King of Miami’ wielded to mixed effect in our summer 2022 profile. Grutman, a hospitality honcho extraordinaire who pretty much made modern Miami, still plays every single morning on a private court at 6am.

The arch chronicler of Britain’s jolly-making classes has featured in our pages several times over the years – but was perhaps at his best in a survey of raucous country house parties over his decades as a fly on the wallpaper.

Does the first son of French cuisine have possibly the finest mane on the planet? “So Gallic, so certain, so unfussy, so deep and rich. Patisserie hair. Bourgougnon locks. Can a bouffant shrug?” we wrote in 2022.

…the classic continental-preppy-Brideshead look, whose meandering history we traced in a needlessly lengthy essay in summer 2023. Title: ‘Armless Fun!’

“François ‘Ponpon’ Pousot is humming a tune, the kind of ditty one hums when walking in the park or mowing the lawn,” wrote Josh Sims in his encounter with the stunt jet team. “But presently Pousot is some several thousand feet above the ground and travelling at 400kph…”

…as supplied by Rudy Kurniawan, the burgundy fraudster extraordinaire, whose outlandish schemes we documented, with the help of several wine detectives, in the summer of 2016.

…with which Rich Mackichan and Greg Funnell got up close on a trip into the heart of the most beloved wine appellation on the planet.

…which is perhaps our editor’s most prized possession; it came from a corporate golf day a couple of months before the financial crisis, and has the words ‘Above Par’ on the back, which Bear clearly wasn’t. We used it to illustrate Harry Shukman’s excellent essay on the dark allure of ‘financial crisis chic’ in 2021.

…whose fall and rise Ed Cumming painstakingly documented in a superb oral history of the underground King’s Road night club. “My job was to clean up sick off the carpet with a mop,” said one Gap Year-bound chin. “It was absolutely revolting. I never once got a tip.” Good times.

…which editor Joe Bullmore and photographer Greg Funnell were some of the last to ever see, as they prepared for a shoot and interview with the hotel’s talismanic owner André Balazs. The day after the profile, the Firehouse burned down.

…which we shared with the actor during the cover shoot for our 2019 food and drink special issue.

The inimitable McGregor, who we met for our autumn 2024 issue, draws crayon sketches of fun things on lovely hotel stationary – a cheeseburger on a notepad from Le Meurice, say. “Strangely, for me, McDonald’s is as Parisian as a boulangerie…”

…which the owners would apparently use to hurry away the gamblers at five in the morning during the Berkeley Square den’s 1970s heyday, according to our 2021 oral history of the club.

…which he used during our excellent and intimate 2024 cover story – shot at home by his wife, one Penélope Cruz.

…a stolen masterpiece which art detective Arthur Brand tracked down just before our rare profile of the secretive figure in our art-and-design special in 2019. “Only a few people in the world have ever laid eyes on this Picasso,” Brand told us. “And for one night, I had it in my house. So what did I do? I hung it on my wall and I sat and I looked at it and I smoked.”

…whose colourful taxonomy we traced in excruciating detail in the summer of 2023.

…or any beautiful, status-y credit card, whose obsolescence now seems assured in the age of contactless payment. “I opened the letter and there was this blue card, from the summit of American male clothing at the time, with my name on it,” said Graydon Carter in our 2022 lament. “I almost wept. It was the first time I felt that I was truly a New Yorker and that I, in some way, belonged here…”

…whose publication caused quiet consternation among the clubbable classes in the autumn of 2024, with its stark delineation of every club in the capital, ranked on a scale of ‘Good’ to ‘Ghastly’...

…the recipe for which ‘Hughby’ (that’s what his mother calls him) supplied, rather wonderfully, for our winter 2020 issue.

…an image of which we chose to accompany Harry Shukman’s deep-dive into the strange Swiss mountain boarding school back in 2022.

…which we learned that the Concorde staff would stash under his seat (1A) whenever the ‘million-mile man’ flew on the service. Rory FH Smith’s 2021 story on Finn is still the most read in our website’s history, and many loved this specific detail. But was it even true? A couple of years later, a champagne expert wrote to us to say that Dom Perignon didn’t even produce half-bottles in that period…

…which he held triumphantly aloft for our profile on the chef in 2023, just after the roaringly successful opening of his eponymous restaurant. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do until I was doing it. And then I realised: fuck, I’m doing it! It’s been full sixth-gear, going at it, ever since then…” After 50 issues, we feel the same way.