Stockland Martel

For the fall 2010 edition of The Big Black Book, Esquire’s men’s style bible, John Midgley went on day trips with top-shelf designers—not to look at fabrics or gaze at fashion shows but to document these guys doing things they love to do. Like hunting, yachting, and clay shooting.

“Esquire’s fashion director, Nick Sullivan, and I are close friends,” John tells me. “He’d been watching what I’d been doing with the Brooklyn Circus and liked the idea of documentary-style portraiture, so he decided to send me out on these days trips—completely on my own.”

The designers were Rag & Bone; Billy Reid; and Alex Carleton, creative director of L.L. Bean Signature.

Let’s have a look at what John came back with…

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RAG & BONE

“For Rag & Bone, we went clay shooting in the Hudson Valley,” says John. “They all went to military boarding schools as children in England, so they were in their element just firing off shotguns.”

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BILLY REID

“For Billy Reid, we went to Alabama and drove with him into southern Mississippi to this enormous hunting range/farmland/swamp so he could go hog hunting.”

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ALEX CARLETON

“I went on a yacht day trip in Portland, Maine, with Alex Carleton—and went green and thew up over the side…”

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