GQ’s Fall Fashion Guide to Being Whoever You Want

The September issue of GQ—of any fashion magazine—is where we make a defining fashion statement for the fall and winter seasons. In years past, that has looked like a guide to suiting, a cover shoot chock-full of ultra-fly coats and boots, an interview with patron saint of autumnal swagger Tom Ford. Hey, we have all those things this September, too! We’re also presenting GQ’s largest—and, in many ways, most ambitious—fall fashion portfolio ever.

Featuring 22 models, “Strength of Character,” by photographer Dan Jackson and stylist George Cortina, is not a roadmap, necessarily, to the fashion trends that will keep you winning till the snow thaws. It’s a character study, a mood board, a rumination on the beautiful and varied tapestry that is modern masculinity. Featuring 22 subjects, the portfolio includes some of the models defining the face of fashion today (guys like Alton Mason, Jordan Barrett, and Evan Mock), a few models you’re about to see everywhere (Matthew Later, Jonny Brown), two female capital-S supermodels, a couple of bodybuilders, one certified industry legend, and a guy who has never posed in front of a camera before. We hope that this fall and for seasons to come, you’ll call upon the vibes of this shoot to help take your personal style to new places. Because in this new fashion era, you can be whoever you want. The clothes are just tools to help you get there.

Dustin Heath

AGE: 24
HOMETOWN: Waialua, Hawaii

Heath, whose main hustle is hairstyling, moved to New York five years ago, having never visited. “I had no friends in New York. I was just like, I need to do hair,” he says, although he had never worked as a hairstylist, either. “I was just taking a chance.” Now he works for the legendary Ward Stegerhoek, the hairstylist for this shoot, who advised Heath to go for “sweet mint” for the occasion.

Baba Diop & Cheikh Tall

AGES: 23 and 22
HOMETOWNS: Diop is from NYC; Tall is from L.A.

Though they're from opposite sides of the country—and Tall's a Gucci guy while Diop's a new face of Louis Vuitton—when they met at Paris Fashion Week last year, there was “an instant connection,” Tall says. Then they learned that their parents emigrated from the same part of Senegal. “And now Cheikh and I are here in one place,” says Diop.

Erika Linder

AGE: 29
HOMETOWN: Stockholm, Sweden

As one of the first supermodels to regularly don menswear in editorials and campaigns, Linder helped open the door to today’s gender-bending fashion moment. Though she’s now focusing on film and TV projects, Linder says this shoot represents the fulfillment of a lifelong dream: “I had a subscription to [American] GQ in Sweden before I started male modeling,” she says. “I was just so inspired by all the menswear. I used to look at those pictures and be like, ‘Oh, one day.’ ”

Parker van Noord

AGE: 21
HOMETOWN: Amsterdam

Van Noord learned the trade of modeling from his father, the legendary Andre van Noord, who passed away last year. “He taught me to be yourself and to keep both your feet on the ground,” says van Noord, who is determined to carry on his father’s legacy. “I’m learning many new things in life and I feel like I'm growing as a person, and I think that reflects in my work because I’m becoming more comfortable with myself.”

Matthew Later

AGE: 24
HOMETOWN: Wilmette, Illinois

A writer on the side—with bylines in Out and Hero—Later is currently penning a literary account about his time spent modeling in Tokyo. What makes modeling fertile ground for fiction? “Ultimately most people begin modeling by coincidence or accident,” says Later. “So you end up having all these people brought to a very specific situation, but they might have totally different backgrounds and interests and personalities, which creates a system of really dynamic social interactions.”

Watch:

Rami Malek Goes Undercover on Reddit, YouTube and Twitter

Hannah Ferguson

AGE: 25
HOMETOWN: San Angelo, Texas

After growing up on a farm in Texas, Ferguson conquered the Chanel runway, a reality-TV show (E!'s Model Squad), and every magazine from Sports Illustrated to CR Fashion Book. So what’s next for Ferguson? The daughter of two Marines, she’s hoping to start a charity that’ll support military families. (Her brother is currently serving.) “It doesn't necessarily have to do with my industry,” she says, “but I think it’s really important to do.”

Levon Panek & Christian Fattore

AGES: 32 and 26
HOMETOWNS: Panek (left) is from outside Boston; Fattore is from suburban Philadelphia

What are the keys to getting huge? “Heavy weight, high volume, and high intensity,” says Fattore, who works as a project manager for a major Philly hospital when he’s not competing in national bodybuilding events. For Panek, a former conditioning coach at Harvard and occasional John Cena body double, MMA training and fighting is all in pursuit of his real dream: “action star.”

Jordan Barrett

AGE: 22, “but the internet says I'm 23, 24, and 21.”
HOMETOWN: Currumbin Valley, Australia

Ever since he was discovered as a 14 year-old in Australia (while stealing matches from a convenience store, true story), Barrett has brought a dose of ’90s-supermodel swagger to the dozens of campaigns he’s appeared in. So it’s fitting that he recently designed a collection of jetset-ready sunglasses for Chrome Hearts. “I wanted to make this pair of safety goggles that I had been wearing for a while,” Barrett says. “They were laser goggles. I stole them from my agent’s dermatologist.”

Jonny Brown

AGE: 24
HOMETOWN: Kingston, Jamaica

To walk in his first show, for Kim Jones’s Louis Vuitton, Brown stepped on an airplane for the first time. “It’s so hard to explain” what that was like, he says, “because I’ve never experienced anything like it, you know? It’s like I’m living someone else’s dream.” Now, Brown has logged countless miles repping Jamaica on the runway for the likes of Wales Bonner, Ann Demeulemeester, and Maison Margiela. But the best part of the whole experience, Brown says, is returning to Kingston. “I love sharing this with my family,” he says. “I’m kind of living for my family and friends. This is a life-changer for me.”

Mark Vanderloo

AGE: 51
HOMETOWN: Eindhoven, Netherlands

Back in the ’90s, when supermodels were household names, Vanderloo was practically the pope—his face fronted seemingly every global campaign, and he regularly walked in as many as 75 shows a year. (The phonetic similarity between his name and Derek Zoolander’s is not a coincidence.) He’s now raising his kids in Amsterdam, but his historic career continues. So what’s Vanderloo thinking when he’s in front of the lens? “It depends. Sometimes you want to project something more beautiful, like totally serene, and then I'm thinking about my first love,” he says. “And sometimes it's like you're in a club—it’s rock and roll.”

Mahmoud Alhumoz

AGE: 23
HOMETOWN: Marrakech, Morocco

Four years ago, Alhumoz—born in Staten Island and raised in Morocco—was working full-time at the cosmetics counter at Saks Fifth Avenue. “For some reason there was one week when all my clients were telling me to try being a model,” he says. “I was just like, Damn, a lot of these people are fashionable; they might know what they're talking about!” He says his new facial hair is telling him something, too. “It’s cool that now I know I can pull it off. Every time I look in the mirror, I've got to pose for a second and then keep walking.”

Alton Mason

AGE: 21
HOMETOWN: Phoenix

When he was growing up, Mason says, “my family loved Naomi Campbell.” Now that he’s the flyest, smoothest, and one of the most in-demand models in men’s fashion, Mason’s gotten the opportunity to break bread with the woman he characterizes as his “mom.” And it’s helped him take his own work to the next level. “Being able to work alongside Naomi and just learn from her,” he says, “is like Michael Jordan inviting you to play one-on-one and schooling you.”

Matthew Noszka

AGE: 26
HOMETOWN: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

There’s that model cliché: that they all want to be actors. And then there’s Noszka, who, after being discovered on Instagram a few years ago while working construction and landing basically every fashion campaign up for grabs, has fulfilled not only his acting dream (with an upcoming role in Netflix’s Let It Snow) but also his dream of opening up a performance auto-body shop, called 412 Motorsports, in L.A. “I love it, man,” Noszka says. “When I'm there I'll work on a car, I'll put downpipes in, I'll put an exhaust on, I'll put an intake on it. I wish I could spend more time there.”

Evan Mock

AGE: 22
HOMETOWN: North Shore of Oahu

After Frank Ocean posted a video on Instagram of Mock—with brand-new bubblegum pink hair—shredding a skate park in Hawaii, the skater-surfer-photographer became a certified It boy in the blink of an eye. “If I knew Frank was gonna post it,” Mock says, “I would've gone way harder!” Mock embodies the laid-back Hawaiian cool of the surf community he grew up in, but he won’t pretend he’s experiencing whiplash from his rapid intro to fashion fame. “I've just worked to this point,” he says. “I knew this was going to happen eventually.”

Jeff Madalena

AGE: 43
HOMETOWN: San Jose, California

If you got in on the black drapey fashion wave of the New York City aughts, you can thank Madalena—he co-founded OAK, the seminal proto-streetwear Williamsburg boutique, back in 2001. Now he’s working on a unisex perfume line called Carlen. How’d he end up being photographed for this story? “My tarot reader told me I should do something out of my comfort zone,” he says.

Salomon Diaz

AGE: 23
HOMETOWN: Cali, Colombia

As a kid growing up in Colombia, Diaz thought he would one day be a doctor or a lawyer. Then he accompanied his sister to a casting in Mexico City, and the agent asked him to try a runway walk. Diaz nailed it, and now he’s the face of Versace fragrance alongside Gigi Hadid. For him, working in fashion feels not unlike being a lawyer or a doctor: “We can help people and inspire people.”

Jordan Legessa

AGE: 26
HOMETOWN: “Paris is where I became a man. Paris is where I fell in love. But I do not really have a hometown.”

Born in France, Legessa raised himself since the age of 14, after leaving the home of his adoptive parents. “I started to work everywhere to be filled by experience, to travel everywhere. I was a bit like Peter Pan,” he says. He now lives in Williamsburg, where M train riders often spot him playing the saxophone or trumpet on the roof of his building.

Jeremy Ruehlemann

AGE: 24
HOMETOWN: Mahwah, New Jersey

For a guy with that kind of jawline, Ruehlemann has a surprising opinion about modeling: “To me,” he says, “it isn’t about being attractive.” He’s into it for the challenge of developing a role, like the “punk from the ’80s British scene who just got his heart broken” he’s playing here. “I like when people make me look different. Looking handsome is boring to me at this point in my modeling career, you know?”

Dalibor Urosevic

AGE: 18
HOMETOWN: Belgrade, Serbia

When Urosevic was cast in the Saint Laurent fall-winter 2017 show—his first runway appearance—his life changed almost instantly. “It’s a really amazing story,” he says. “From the other side, to this side.” He dropped out of high school; he traveled to Tokyo. Urosevic still has plans to finish high school, but his vision couldn’t be clearer: “To be young and free, that’s my goal always.”

Oliver Kumbi

AGE: 23
HOMETOWN: Stockholm

Kumbi comes from a Swedish basketball family—he and his four siblings all played for the teenage national team. But the face of Ralph Lauren Purple Label found his real calling while working at a music festival one weekend. “These two model scouts asked me if I wanted to become a model,” Kumbi says. “I said no at first, but then they kept coming back, so I said, ‘Why not?’ ”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Daniel Jackson
Styled by George Cortina
Hair by Ward at The Wall Group
Grooming and makeup by Romy Soleimani using Bobbi Brown
Set design by Piers Hanmer

Originally Appeared on GQ