Every year since 2018 Gentleman’s Journal has published a list of London’s most interesting “tastemakers” – a word that has begun to feel more and more clichéd and overused with each passing edition.

But in 2026, at a moment when the machines now threaten not simply to take our jobs but also our lives (it gets jollier shortly, I promise), the idea itself seems increasingly vivid and reassuring. The people we admire the most at this magazine, I think, are the people who embody both sides of the “tastemaker” bargain. Which is to say: they are figures with good taste who actually make things.

And nowhere does that equation seem more richly solved than in New York, across what we here in London optimistically call “the pond”, but which sometimes instead seems like a vast chasm when it comes to ambition, opportunity and excitement.

NYC, to an Englishman like me, will always be the glittering castle on the hill, whatever you happen think of the surrounding kingdom. If you can make it there, someone once said, you can make it anywhere.

And so here are 30 people – from designers, to writers, to chefs, to photographers – who are more than making it today, in NYC or elsewhere.

Matthew Friend’s singular trick is to eerily inhabit the characters, voices and famous faces that he so tightly impersonates – while somehow honing a clear and winning persona all of his own. Friend, in fact, has arguably revived the artform of impersonation from a parlour trick into something truer and much more telling. As Dana Brown put it in his profile of the comedian earlier this year: “The ancient Greeks had a word for this: mimesis – which meant not just copying but representing; the act of making the invisible visible.”

As one half of How Long Gone alongside Jason Stewart, Chris Black has turned the often worthy podcast form into something moreish, whose unserious tone masks the discerning eye that has made Black such an advisor and voice on matters of taste and culture. His brand Hanover is a great encapsulation of this worldview: “A modern study in American essentials – timeless clothing shaped by quality, culture, and ease.”

He’s something of a modern renaissance man: an artist, designer, writer, editor and filmmaker, who has interviewed and collaborated with some of the most important figures in American art and design. He previously led publishing and editorial at David Zwirner’s 52 Walker in Tribeca and edited PIN–UP. He now runs November magazine and design studio E&Ko, beloved for its flower-like tables and chairs.

Just what is People’s, the intriguing social institution that has become one of the most beloved nightspots in lower Manhattan? A bar? A restaurant? A gallery? A clubhouse? To apply such labels is to misunderstand the magic of this spot, overseen beautifully by Hauer-King and her business partner Emmet McDermott, which operates under a policy of chaotic familiarity – reliable and delightful all at once.

He photographs New York as though the city were staging a private joke just for him. Perhaps it’s strange that he first found fame on Instagram, because his skewiff, off-centre, humorous shots are in sharp relief to the overly-perfect aesthetic of the platform. The New York Times has compared him to William Eggleston for his rich realisations of everyday Americana, cut-through with the unhinged energy of New York itself.

“The better you dress, the worse you can behave,” has long been the unofficial motto of Fred Castleberry’s near eponymous brand – though Fred, it should be mentioned, does both impeccably. He has been a master of “world-building” since long before that phrase became trite, combining colourful, eclectic references in a cinematic universe within which we all want to make a cameo. Drawing on prep, jazz, the golden age of travel, Wes Anderson shorts, stolen ashtrays, and punk – as well as the broiling city around him – he runs his brand with a fine attention to detail and care, neatly exemplified by a recent Instagram post he did about a sapling tree that the city planted outside his shop front, and which, out of the concrete of the sidewalk, he nurtured to full and colourful blossom.

Sundberg has elevated the once-unfashionable email newsletter into something compelling, enticing – and valuable. Her daily Substack missive Feed Me (one of the most successful on the entire platform) is ostensibly about “the spirit of enterprise” but is really an information- and taste-rich field-guide to ambition, consumer culture, media, fashion and the peculiarly modern economics of being interesting.

Baraghani’s first job was as a teenager in Chez Panisse in California, working under his idol, Alice Waters. Like Waters, Baraghani soon began to occupy the fertile ground between cooking and media, becoming a senior editor at Bon Appétit before writing cookbook The Cook You Want to Be. With new restaurant Ditto he’s opening exactly the kind of spot, according to the New York Times, that “New Yorkers need right now.”

He wasn’t even born when his father, the legendary downtown maestro Keith, opened Balthazar in 1997: the grand brasserie which pretty much set the tone for good-time dining at the start of the 21st century. But his first restaurant Faux is a confident new interpolation of that same spirit – a place for three martinis, two cheeseburgers, a plate spilling over with excellent fries, and a night spilling over with possibilities.

Brown’s 2022 memoir Dilettante vividly detailed the excesses and delights of the final imperial days of magazine publishing. It was also a reminder of the sensibility and personality that’s made Brown such a success: a combination of old-world charm, omnivorous curiosity and a sharp worldview. He now runs Caper with that same gimlet eye, bringing richly and exactingly to life the modern world of food and restaurants.

Yes, he’s the actor best known for playing Cousin Greg in Succession – a role he filled with a pathos, humour and depth far greater than in the show’s script. But he’s also known in Manhattan as a backer and general roisterer of the creative scene, investing in and advising on various hospitality projects and hotspots – including Pebble Bar, Ray’s (with Justin Theroux), Jac’s on Bond, and S&P Lunch.

Angela Dimayuga used to helm the sensational Mission Chinese Food before moving on to become creative director of food and culture at Standard International, where she treated restaurants, bars and nightlife as platforms for art and politics as much as food. Deeply embedded in the culture of downtown New York, she represents a more expansive, creative idea of what hospitality in the city can be.

Charming, connected and well-read, Vail was previously the chief communications officer at both Air Mail and Vanity Fair, and now leads Gravity Partner’s Influence Practice, advising clients on power, access and reputation. In May it was announced that he and Graydon Carter were launching the Par Avion production company, developing creative and non-fiction projects with a strong emphasis on literary adaptations.

Jack Carlson is menswear’s archaeologist-in-chief, with the PhD from Oxford to prove it. The founder of Rowing Blazers (and a former US national rowing-team coxswain), he made his name with unexpected collaborations and eclectic references: Barbour to Babar the elephant. Now the creative director and president of J. Press, his first collections have honoured the rich history of the 125-year-old institution.

“The clip is the show” is one of the guiding principles behind Kareem Rahma’s ridiculously successful Subway Takes — indicative of its creator’s knack for boiling down the interview format to its juiciest elements. But for all its short-form brilliance, Rahma’s vehicle also feels somehow old school — a more relaxed, intimate way for notable people (from Charlie XCX to the late Jane Goodall) to say what they really think.

Emily Adams Bode Aujla has built BODE around an unusually romantic proposition: that clothes can carry memories, transforming fashion into a form of preservation. Her Brooklyn-based brand has helped change the conversation around American menswear, while her approach – part archivist, part designer, part anthropologist – has made her one of New York’s most distinctive creative voices.

Vanity Fair was like a stately old galleon when Guiducci took the helm last summer: a beautiful craft that was sinking amid the media storm. His trick has been to re-invigorate the title with the zip, fun and purpose of its 80s/90s heyday. But the resulting magazine is something that cannily meets the modern moment, too: stylish and serious, with journalistic heft on one page and escapist glamour on the next.

Laila Gohar treats food as a medium through which to explore beauty, absurdity and hospitality. Born in Egypt, now based in New York, she’s collaborated with Prada, Hermès, Comme des Garçons and Simone Rocha, while her Gohar World label, founded with sister Nadia, turns the dinner table into surrealist theatre. She is an unusually complete and eclectic tastemaker, in the spirit of great NY polymaths of yesteryear.

Air Mail has always felt like a digital publication with the soul and craft of a proper, old fashioned magazine, and its new-ish editor Vitale seems to brilliantly embody both sides of that bargain. Under her keen editorship, the publication has continued with its heady editorial mix of good taste, high-end scandal and vibrant bookishness, while introducing sharp new voices and franchises, like Rickie De Sole’s ‘Dress Code’ newsletter.

For a few years now, certain corners in downtown New York have been dotted with white stickers containing a strangely wholesome sentiment: “I LIKE YOU!” The man behind them is Isaac Hindin-Miller, a New Zealander living in New York for fifteen years now, whose city guides and on-the-street interviews have become hugely influential; snappy bellwethers of a certain metropolitan taste, sensibility and charm.

When he was 10, McGarry cooked his way through Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook. At the age of 17 he was described by Vogue as the “Justin Bieber of food”, after he began hosting elaborate supper clubs at his family home. In the decade since, the cook and host has opened five New York projects, culminating in the much-lauded Cove in SoHo, a homage to the Californian coast of his childhood.

Writing about music, someone once said, is like dancing about architecture. It seems similarly futile to attempt to categorise the work of Jon Batiste, performer, songwriter, pianist, bandleader, composer, TV personality. The best way to put it, perhaps, is that Batiste is a phenomenon that needs to be felt to be understood, with live shows that change every night and who seems constantly in touch with the creative spirit.

Noz Nozawa’s work belongs to a generation increasingly suspicious of anonymous “luxury” interiors; the bland panic-room chic of modern high-end design. Instead, she prefers colour, texture, bold colour and eclectic objects, creating rooms that suggest their inhabitants actually live interesting lives. She brings the sensibility of a museum curator to domestic space, making her part of the broader (and highly welcome) New York movement toward more expressive, referential, individualistic design.

Celeste Yim has made American comedy brilliantly echo our modern moment. A writer and performer associated with Saturday Night Live, Yim brings an idiosyncratic sensibility to comedy. She represents something particularly New York about the current scene: smart, slightly deranged and comfortable moving between the internet, old-school media and the city’s subterranean live performance world.

All the most interesting writers had a stint as a party reporter at some point. Weiss was very much the man-about-town in New York throughout the 2010s, writing an affable party column for both Vogue and The Observer, the latter with the excellent title “The Shindigger”. He has since nimbly segued that calling into a career as a branding expert and highly tasteful consultant, notably with Outerspace and Nice Laundry.

Ayesha Nurdjaja has become one of the most compelling figures in New York’s adventurous restaurant scene. At Shuka and Shukette, she draws on Indonesian heritage alongside broader Mediterranean and Middle Eastern influences, creating food that is generous, moreish and unmistakably her own. Her cooking is only part of the appeal: she also has the rare ability to make a restaurant feel like a living community.

Straker’s brand of cooking and hosting, so heartily on display at his first joint in Notting Hill, seems spiritually calibrated for Downtown New York: fun-loving, raucous and brilliantly executed. His latest venture launched this autumn to rightful fanfare in the SoHo spot once inhabited by Lucky Strike, owned by Keith McNally: a Londoner who moved across the pond and transformed the city’s dining atmosphere.

Emmett McDermott’s first-ever documentary feature White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch debuted at number one when it came out on Netflix in April 2022. His next project, the excellent nightspot People’s, which he opened with Margot Hauer-King in 2025, was also an immediate standout success, albeit in a completely different field. There’s probably some clever through-line to be drawn between the two (a deep understanding of humans? A knack for propulsive storytelling?). But we’re just here for the martinis.

An object I would never part with is… My signet ring. It was a gift from my co-founder Margot when we opened People’s together and somehow it symbolises everything I’ve accomplished in life.

I would describe my personal taste as… A little off.

Something that inspired me recently is… An old silk scarf from the 21 Club.

The creation I’m most proud of is… My fermented ghost-pepper hot sauce.

My advice for others starting out in my field is… The art of hospitality shapes the business of hospitality.

The best thing about New York is… One door always leads to another.

The one thing I would change about New York is… Bring back the 4am licence.

The best meal I’ve eaten this month was… Chez Denise in Les Halles.

Latterner’s The Bowery Review describes itself as New York’s “best and only humour magazine”, and the publication does seem like a singular outlier, some gloriously re-animated dodo of the past, among the often dour and worthy wider media landscape. Latterner – who had previously worked at National Lampoon, Playboy and CollegeHumor – says that he “has a crazy plan to make this magazine work somehow”. That somehow, perhaps, will be by allowing it to be defiantly and uproariously itself.

An object I would never part with is… One of my first jobs in comedy was writing for this website called CollegeHumor, and they had this ping pong table in the office that had custom balls with the logo on them. I swiped two on my last day and they’re in a small whisky glass on a bookshelf now.

I would describe my personal taste as… New York Prep meets Provençal Granddad.

The best piece of advice I’ve received in my career is… Spike Lee once told my class at NYU that you just gotta make stuff. Just keep making stuff.

The creation I’m most proud of is… The Bowery Review: New York’s Best and Only Humor Magazine!

Matt Starr’s Perverted Book Club has staged readings everywhere from Burger King and Sbarro to neighbourhood sex shops, replacing the solemnity of the traditional literary salon with something louder, stranger, and considerably more fun. These outings are symptomatic, perhaps, of the way that Starr’s company, Dream Baby Press, does things – a strategy, as he told Vogue earlier this year, that really just boils down to: “Do we find it interesting? Are we having fun?” And the answer to both those questions, as far as his acolytes and collaborators are concerned, is a resounding yes.

An object I would never part with is… My cowboy boots

I would describe my personal taste as… A combination of Harold and Maude, the Upper West Side, and an old diner

I would love to have created… Gatorade and Annie Hall

Something that inspired me recently is… Driving alone through Yosemite

The one thing I would change about New York is… More opportunities for older and younger people to spend time together

The secret to a good atmosphere is… Good people