David Gandy

Here's one of the first exclusive shots of @davidgandy_official in his @marksandspencer underwear range. To celebrate the launch David will unveil the collection at M&S Marble Arch 12pm 18.09.14 keep the date in your diary! #selectmen #davidgandy #gandyforautograph
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September 8th 2014 : Jaguar XE launch party in London
Eva Herzigova and David Gandy


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He's been on catwalks in Milan and London, been styled for magazine shoots in Asia and America, and jetted all over the world in his role as a London Collections: Men ambassador, but now David Gandy is headed into uncharted territory: your pants.

Following the success of Rosie Huntington Whiteley's lingerie line for Marks & Spencer, Britain's most famous male model has teamed up with the department store on his first line of underwear. Launching this week online and at the M&S flagship shop at Marble Arch in London, this will see Gandy jet off on another round of appearances around the world at branches on Dublin's Grafton Street shop (19 September), Hong Kong's Central Tower location (23 September) and Paris' Champs Elysees store (25 September). It's one of the biggest launches in the British brand's history - and the first time M&S has globally launched a new range (soon it will be available in over 350 stores worldwide and online). No pressure, then.

However, even with such a packed schedule, the man very kindly made time to sit down with GQ to talk us through what's coming in the 28-piece range, what makes it different from everything else on the high street, and why a selfie isn't necessary is a thank you. If that wasn't enough, we've also got an exclusive behind the scenes look at the design process, as well as the full photo campaign (warning: might induce gym guilt).

GQ: What was the most important thing for you when you began to design the underwear?
David Gandy: I wanted to keep things very subtle - I didn't want loads of branding over everything. So I brought in a houndstooth, a very traditional pattern, but not many people have used it for underwear that I know of. That's a bit of a nod to my love of traditional tailoring. The houndstooth is on the inside of the underwear band. And we've put it in on the inside of the pockets for the sleepwear and loungewear. And then we've used it all-over for the dressing gown, which is a very old school design with traditional piping.

Is there anything that you discovered about underwear while you were designing it?
Well I knew what I liked and what I didn't like already, but I had to learn quite quickly all the intricacies of why that was - why some rise up, why some are less supportive, why the shape doesn't work as well. And you're talking about differences of millimetres of material that makes one piece of underwear different from the next piece.

Which piece do you like the best?

We have a very traditional pair of cotton weave boxer shorts, very old school, which I absolutely love. People can wear them as underwear, but I think they're probably better as a loungy pair of pants to wear around your house - something your girlfriend would steal.

Your career has been based on not wearing very much. Was the campaign shoot for your underwear pretty straightforward?

Well, the [Dolce & Gabbana] Light Blue image is from eight years ago, back in 2006. And other than that I've only done the Dolce underwear campaign in 2009, so actually there have only been two photo shoots of me in underwear and that's it. It's not something I've done a lot of, it's just that that Light Blue image has become so well known.

And technically it wasn't underwear, per se…
Yes, you're correct. Everyone referred to them as white pants, but they were actually white Speedos. Very mediterranean.

What's different about your pants compared to everything else on the high street?
The premium materials that we're using, the supima cotton we've used with Lycra is a very new thing for M&S. I wanted it to feel high quality.

Is there more to come?
The new range I'm currently designing for next year, so that's spring/summer [2015]. Basically the core is there and I want to see how people react to that. Hopefully there are T-shirts and more lightweight fabrics coming soon. I imagine about 5 or so pieces will be added each season.

Do you want to go into outer levels of clothing too?
It's definitely something I've been considering. Over the past couple of years I've had people approach me about collaborations, but they were never quite right. This one was right because I wanted to work for a British brand and they're becoming few and far between - and M&S are the underwear experts. I have a great love of design, especially tailoring - so suits are something I'd love to get my teeth into. There's a hell of a lot of talent out there, so this is me just dipping my toe in the water.

We would say you must be looking forward to seeing people in your designs after all your hard work, but I suppose with an underwear range that's not strictly true...
[Laughs] Yes, that'll be fine - I don't need a selfie!

Might we see you around town for London Fashion Week?
No, I'll be heading around the world to promote this. I never really do much for women's fashion week, I leave that to the girls. To tell you the truth, I've never quite understood why lots of male celebs will sit there watching the women's shows. Are you really interested or are you just there to check out the girls...which is what I do, to be honest!

From £15. Available from 18 September online and at Marks & Spencer, 458 Oxford St, London W1 (with a personal appearance and customer signing at 12pm). marksandspencer.com
gq-magazine.co.uk
 
DAVID GANDY: MODEL OF A MAN

Girls, classic cars and, erm, luxury underpants. Male supermodel David Gandy ushers David Whitehouse into his very own fantasy world

Maybe we are all kneaded into shape by a divine baker of people, but if so, he or she is at best inconsistent. Regardless, 19 February 1980, the day of David Gandy’s birth, can be considered a remarkable day in the kitchen, not just by the baker’s wobbly standards, but by any. Popularly considered the world’s biggest, perhaps only, male supermodel, Gandy is in person as he is in portrait – immaculately proportioned, part sculpture, part human – a man set apart by the alignment of muscle and bone beneath skin. To be in the same room as him is to hop the red rope that parts punter from exhibit. People edge around the walls as if mindful of the signs, ‘do not touch’.

Instantly you assume that because he looks like, and indeed is, someone somewhere’s fantasy, he’s living out a fantasy version of a man’s life. Then you see the great watch and the sharp suit and the fast car and the beautiful girlfriend, and you realise, the knife of jealousy twisting in your gut, that he is, he actually is. He’s the James Bond no one is trying to kill.

“I have [all those things],” he says, “but that’s just because they’re my loves. My expensive habits that I can fulfil. I’ve just restored a Sixties Mercedes-Benz. It’s a hobby, the enjoyment of something classic and old-school. I appreciate design, and design for me doesn’t stop at clothing. It’s architecture, materials, everything. It’s a lifestyle. I’m not going to be able to do it forever. One day I will have a family and responsibilities. Hopefully I’ll have a boy, and he’ll be seriously kitted out when he’s older.” Never before has something been uttered that so many men wish they could truthfully say.



Blue blazer £795 by LANVIN AT HARVEY NICHOLS, harveynichols.com; burgundy shirt £145 by PAUL SMITH AT SELFRIDGES, selfridges.com; black slim cords £270 by DOLCE & GABANNA, dolcegabanna.com

SET SAIL

Gandy lounged to fame aboard a yacht in 2007 as the face of Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue fragrance, a campaign that saw his image loom over Times Square and on billboards worldwide, putting paid to the idea that wearing white pants is a fundamentally bad idea. Having charged the public imagination with the kind of sexual fireworks that makes people crash their cars, he set about trying to achieve a parity between his career and that of female supermodels, whose pay and treatment in comparison to male counterparts represented a topsy-turvy version of the struggle for equality in every other workplace on Earth. He wanted to capitalise on what he’d won in the genetic lottery, to become a brand, and in turn has morphed into an ambassadorial figure for the billion-pound British fashion industry, both here and abroad. A statesman for Savile Row. We meet him at a point in his life where he has gone full circle, in underpants terms at least, as Marks & Spencer launches David Gandy For Autograph, a 28-piece underwear and sleepwear range that he has helped design.

“Everyone has their go-to underwear. You can have 20 pairs, but you have your favourite. I wanted to create your favourite underwear,” he says, and his success – indeed, any man’s success – might be measured by the fact that his mother doesn’t buy them for him any more. “Not for quite a few years. Though ironically, if she did, they’d probably be from Marks & Spencer.”

Back when his mother did buy his underwear, the posters on the teenage David Gandy’s bedroom wall were not of bands or the cast of Baywatch (“I never had pin-ups,” he says). Instead he had pictures of the things it was his goal to one day own, starting with an Amiga 600 computer, and moving on to far more stylish aspirations: a Ferrari F40 and a Porsche 959. But it took a while for his sense of personal style to catch up with his desires, as evidenced by an old photo of him outside 10 Downing Street, where his grandfather worked on Margaret Thatcher’s staff.

“You’d laugh at this picture of me and my sister,” he says. “My grandad took us up there one Saturday. Now we look at that picture and ask our mum if she actually knew what we were doing that weekend. Why did she not dress us properly? We were wearing hand-me-down ankle-high tracksuit bottoms, the most awful trainers in the world and sweatshirts that didn’t fit. But there is something lovely about it. Now we live in a world where we’re judged on what we own and what we look like, not on what we do. And that grinds on me a little bit nowadays.”



Black leather shirt £2,020 by GUCCI AT HARRODS, 020-7730 1234; blue and green roll neck £110 by CHESTER BARRIE, 020-7439 6079; plum slim cords £270 by DOLCE & GABANNA, dolcegabanna.com

PICTURE IMPERFECT

Gandy is evidently uneasy with our new culture of vanity, and he might well be. Here is a man whose image is his trade, yet whose image is taken and shared every time he sits down in a café next to someone with Instagram on their phone. In a world where everyone is posting their own photographs online, where does it leave the man who is paid to do it best?

“I do envy people in the public eye and stars of the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties who could still have a lot more privacy,” he says. “You’ve now got people Instagramming you in the street and tweeting saying you might be in London when you’ve told someone you can’t go to a meeting because you’re not in London. It sounds strange, but I still don’t like having my picture taken. I am still quite naturally shy, which is something I’ve had to overcome. I sort of switch. I always say that my suits, when I wear them… it’s almost like a suit of armour. I put it on and it’s protection for my real self.”

This dedication to privacy means he doesn’t appear on panel shows. He doesn’t take the countless offers he’s had to appear in films, or host his own TV programmes. Instead he endeavours to embody a lifestyle as tailored as his Savile Row suits. The watches, the cars, “the creation of an iconic image”, unsullied by our modern obsession with celebrity. He fronts a number of charities, has twice spoken on the subject of style at the Oxford Union, and even appeared in a part of the 2012 Olympics’ closing ceremony devoted to what was best about Britishness. He’s also a loud advocate of an aspect of homegrown dressing that he feels we’ve lost.

“Before globalisation, before the internet, you could have a really individual style. Don’t get me wrong, you can still do that with a good tailor. But back then, everyone could be an individual with their style. Nowadays a trend is set overnight. It’s been Instagrammed, it’s been tweeted, then it’s in the shop and suddenly everyone is wearing the same thing.”

Individuality, though, is what Gandy does best. It’s a flair much coveted by the current incumbent of the Downing Street address he once stood outside, and those fighting to replace him in it. “The Labour party particularly,” he says. “In choosing the other Miliband they’d have had a much better face. But that goes back to JFK. When JFK and Nixon had the TV debates in the Sixties, Nixon was sweating a lot and JFK was a good-looking guy, and just like that the vote changed to JFK. Nixon might have had the better policies, but people weren’t looking at that.”

David Gandy is a man who understands what people are looking at, because usually, it’s him. And you do look. Too much. This arrangement of flesh and skeleton makes his an otherly presence. The shoot’s attendees try to act naturally, but the truth is Gandy seems to be, physically, on a different step of the evolutionary ladder, one of the X-Men, but not magnetic or blessed with flight. Just handsome, to an extraordinary degree. Some bakes just turn out better than others.

The David Gandy For Autograph collection at Marks & Spencer is now available from selected stores and at marksandspencer.com

(Images: Richard Stow)

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shortlist.com/style/david-gandy-model-of-a-man
 
FHM Collection China F/W 2014.15
Ph: JumboTsui
Styling: Justine Josephs





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David Gandy attends a photocall to launch his collection for Marks and Spencer Autograph at M&S on September 18, 2014 in London, England. (September 17, 2014 - Source: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images Europe)
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David Gandy attends the annual Collars & Coats Gala Ball in aid of The Battersea Dogs & Cats home at Battersea Evolution on October 30, 2014 in London, England. (October 29, 2014 - Source: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images Europe)
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Model David Gandy attends the GQ 2014 Men of the Year awards at the Palace Hotel on November 3, 2014 in Madrid, Spain. (November 2, 2014 - Source: Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images Europe)
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ES Magazine (Evening Standard)
Yes, Mr Gandy, I will come in for coffee


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