Every recipient of the Hugo Boss Most Stylish Man Award
Since 2013 we have worked with Hugo Boss to award the Most Stylish Man Of The Year Award
Since 2013, GQ has worked in partnership with Hugo Boss to give one lucky man the Most Stylish Man Of The Year Award. Presented at a glitzy ceremony, held in association with Boss, the award (which we reckon is the one we'd most want to win ourselves) has been picked up by the likes of Mark Ronson, John Legend and Zayn Malik.
Below we guide you through every winner from every year.
Richard Young/Shutterstock1/7Dan Stevens, 2013
Since Dan Stevens' exit from Downton Abbey in 2012, the actor has had one of the most drastic style overhauls we've ever seen – so much so that we did a double-take when he reappeared on red carpets in March 2013 for Christopher Menaul's delicate Summer In February.
With his trademark floppy blond hair chopped short and dyed dark brown, Stevens is now regularly snapped sporting well-cut Calvin Klein suits. He even presented Thom Browne with his Menswear Designer Of The Year award at the CFDAs back in 2013 wearing a pair of patterned Derbies designed by the man himself. Doesn't get more stylish than that.
Mike Marsland2/7Douglas Booth, 2014
“I think young British guys dress really well these days,” said Douglas Booth in 2014, who as GQ's Most Stylish Man was, de facto, the best dressed of the lot. “There are loads of places for people to look for great influences, it's not too difficult.” And the 28-year-old actor's personal style mantra would be never to overcomplicate things: “I always have my staples: black jeans, boots and a T-shirt and a leather jacket in the winter. You don't need to take a longtime to get ready.”
Or, at least, you don't need to take a longtime to get ready if you're Douglas Booth. And here, we might as well reach for that Zoolander quote – this is because Booth is “really, really good-looking”. Which also gave him the perfect aesthetic for his role as the well-bred, overprivileged and seductive Harry Williers in The Riot Club. Adapted from the hit play Posh by Laura Wade, the film focuses on an elite society of Oxford University students. Does Booth see it as a comment on the Camerons, Osbornes and Johnsons of the world? “You can't ignore comparisons to the Bullingdon Club; it's a fictional version and heavily influenced,” he says. “But there's no, ‘This is Boris Johnson; this is David Cameron.’ I didn't go out to make a political film, but it might be one by resonance.”
On winning his award, Douglas Booth told us in 2014: “GQ, you've been patiently and stylishly educating me forever. To be truly stylish you have to be kind and courteous. I look out here tonight and see a lot of people who are just that. You've all influenced me so much.
“There's a lot of people I admire – not that I'm comparing myself to them – like Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp who, when they were my age, there was this focus on their looks,” he says. “Then they just forgot that. You work your way out of it.”
Mark Cuthbert3/7David Gandy, 2015
A London Collections Men ambassador, menswear designer, one-man brand and the world's only male supermodel, naturally.
Ask this year's recipient of the Most Stylish Man Award how he alone has managed to jump species from menswear model to male “supe” and he'll tell you that he had nothing to lose (his career, after all, started when a friend secretly entered him for a TV modelling competition he duly won); because he's never chased fame for fame's sake (“I've never posted a selfie, never taken a picture of my dinner or posted anything to do with my personal life”); and because he's only ever been interested in “being at the top of my field”.
None of which fully explains why the population of that field remains exactly one. Sure, we can name a few of his contemporaries, but in the end there's really only David Gandy: an Essex-born star of that Dolce & Gabbana fragrance commercial (already eight years old, although you'd hardly believe it looking at him) and, since its inception, a London Collections Men ambassador, where he's as happy to share the front rows with confreres Tinie Tempah, last year's Most Stylish Man Douglas Booth and (from next season) Lewis Hamilton as he is to make the occasional “walk” – this past season in support of Samuel L Jackson's male cancer charity, One For The Boys.
David M. Benett4/7Mark Ronson, 2016
Mark Ronson made the job of picking the Hugo Boss Most Stylish Man very easy in 2016 and it's almost all down to one particular outfit he wore at “an American sporting event”. Who else could we pick, other than the man who opened Bruno Mars' set at the Super Bowl wearing a high-shine, sparkly gold-and-black Saint Laurent bomber jacket? With just the right mix of flashiness, sportiness and style, that outfit set the standard for menswear this year. For a man who spent most of his early career either producing seminal albums, such as Amy Winehouse's Back To Black, or mixing records behind the decks in a DJ booth, 2016 was the year Ronson strode emphatically onto centre stage and looked damn good doing it too.
As GQ learned when we stepped into his walk-in wardrobe on the third floor of his West London townhouse, Ronson's style formula is the same as his music: select the best items from a particularly cool era, mix it all together with confidence and out pops a song (or outfit) which is greater than the sum of its parts. He says his style is not about “just looking the part to fool people. If I get into something I dive into it wholeheartedly. You want to be about that thing, right?”
As is evident from his wardrobe, filled with Saint Laurent, Gucci and two or three bespoke vintage-style suits sent 5,000 miles from the workshop of little-known Japanese tailor Kyosuke Kunimoto, Ronson has been earnestly diving into his personal style for a long time. As his music evolved, so too did his clothes: from playing in bands aged 13, he latched onto “the Madchester thing”, matched with his love of Blur; later, when rave was taking hold in New York, he combined his love of the Beastie Boys and hip hop by showing off with “ridiculously baggy jeans and 1970s vintage Pumas with fat laces”; then, when Hedi Slimane took over at Dior, everything changed. The French fashion designer “revolutionised the way young men dressed” and Ronson was committed to that revolution. “I remember the first really expensive thing I bought was a Dior leather jacket,” he says. “It was $2,300. I don't regret it. He makes jackets that you could wear down to the store and see Daft Punk wearing on stage.”
Slimane is an appropriate fashion icon for Ronson: joining Saint Laurent as creative director in 2012, he took inspiration from the music world, ripping up the brand's 1970s vibe and replacing it with a skinny, grungy, rock-star-chic look. His designs were equally adored by the public and the critics, sending profits soaring. Sound familiar?
Ultimately, though, it's not all about the label. “When I think of incredibly stylish people, that could be Serge Gainsbourg in a jean jacket. It's not just Bryan Ferry in a wonderful three-piece suit,” says Ronson. “The most important thing that unites stylish people is that because they love what they do so much, they automatically look cool.”
For Ronson, style is inextricably linked to music, but it's also important not to try to think too hard about it. “I know when I hear what I'm looking for. It's the same with style. You know it when you see it. You know when you kind of put shit together sometimes by accident, you're like, 'Oh, that's good. Maybe I'll rock with that for a minute.'” When he started working with Amy Winehouse on Back To Black, he'd “get dressed up in my Phil Spector suit and walk out with my f***ing brilliant ingénue artist [Amy], with her amazing look all of her own that was part-Camden, part-The Ronettes.
“Clothes seep into you. You can't be standing in front of a band or a horn section with this old-school arrangement wearing a f***ing T-shirt and baggy jeans,” especially when that audience isn't just a band, but two million people who watch the “Uptown Funk” music video every day or the 115 million Americans who tuned in to see his sparkly bomber jacket steal the show at the Super Bowl. In his own words, “Style is about having something and owning it” and Mark's been there, done that, bought the vintage T-shirt.
Doug Inglish5/7Zayn Malik, 2017
“I steal from Gigi's wardrobe all the time. Shirts, T-shirts, whatever. I won't necessarily wear them out publicly, but in the house I will. I don't care – as long as it looks cool,” he told GQ in 2017, while laughing. “I rob her sunglasses all the time. She's not too happy about that. I think I've lost a couple of pairs.”
This is, of course, part of the reason Zayn deserves our award: whether he's mopping his girlfriend's shades or hitting the red carpet at the Met Gala in metallic robot arms, he's not afraid to experiment with his style. He's one of those rare men who looks totally himself whatever he's wearing – somebody who does streetwear as effortlessly as a leading-man dinner suit. Everything he tries just works.
It would be easy to say that, like songwriting as a solo artist, this is the result of having the freedom to be yourself after being constrained in the tightly image-controlled stylings of a clean-cut boy band (“It's definitely a nice feeling to wear whatever you want and not have to match with somebody else”), but there appears to be something deeper to Malik's approach to dressing.
“My dad said you should always wear things that fit you right,” he says, “rather than just caring about the brand. That is something I live by to this day. I'll wear anything as long as it looks good on me. I don't really care about where it's from or the price tag.”
That's not to say he doesn't wear designer clothes, but you might just run into him out in LA searching for old band merch in the city's legendarily good vintage shops (“What Goes Around Comes Around is pretty sick,” he says). So it's perhaps not surprising that when asked which man's wardrobe he would have liked to steal, he chooses someone whose face has probably appeared on more merch than any other's: Tupac Shakur. “He had some really cool Versace stuff back in the day, one-off jumpers and jeans that were just amazing.”
Then again, perhaps it's a good idea he'll not be getting his hands on the rapper's vintage threads any time soon. To be GQ's Most Stylish Man Of The Year, it goes without saying that you need to have more than just a mild menswear obsession, but that comes with its own problems...
“I think I've got too many clothes, to be honest,” says Malik. “It's about time I started giving them away to people.”
David M. Benett6/7John Legend, 2018
The singer is to style what Roger Federer is to the tennis court: he has an effortlessness, a grace, an élan that ensures even his most relaxed, holidaying-on-a-super-yacht look appears to have been micromanaged by a team of savvy, urbane aesthetes – together, but not too try-hard. Take his dad look: narrow beige chinos matched with a pair of ice-white fashion trainers and a loose Breton T-shirt. It’s To Catch A Thief meets The Talented Mr Ripley, but with the modernity turned up to eleven.
What about when he’s performing? Whether in a white tux or tailoring that’s a little bolder – “I love Gucci’s thing at the moment and Harry Styles rocks that whole troubadour thing so well” – Legend goes out of his way to ensure nothing looks too “showbiz”. There’s a pop, but it’s still elegant – not unlike the man’s music, of course. “I always make sure I’m in something that can be seen from the back of the arena,” Legend explains in regard to what he likes to dazzle in.
“I try to consider that clothes reflect the person I am as an artist. I don’t want my style to scream ‘entertainer’. Fashion can be a really powerful visual shorthand. To be fair, any man that grew up as a teenager in the 1980s will have learnt this the hard way. I look back at the bagginess of my jeans sometimes and wonder, ‘What was I thinking?’”
So what’s the 2018 Hugo Boss Most Stylish Man’s cast-iron style rule? “Get yourself a tailor. Or find a local tailor that can help you take in and modify your clothing to suit your body shape. It’s unreasonable to think that clothing bought from a store will fit you perfectly; it’s rarely going to happen. My mother is a seamstress and my father went into business making hats, so I’ve had the notion of taking in and altering clothing – creating outfits – around me my whole life. How your clothes fit is the most important aspect of looking good. Oh, that and listening to your wife.”
David M. Benett7/7Richard Madden, 2019
Like a lot of men who navigate a busy and complex career and social life, 34-year-old Madden has settled upon a uniform. By day, he prefers a black T-shirt, black jeans and black boots with a suede bomber jacket from Valstar or Officine Générale (that James Dean thing again) – simple items carefully chosen for their perfectly tailored fit. So how has his wardrobe evolved since he came to success?
“Mainly in terms of the quality I can buy now,” he told GQ in 2019. “Rather than just discarding and getting new things, I’d rather invest in good pieces that last.” At the premiere for Rocketman at the Cannes Film Festival, Madden was coaxed out of his uniform and into a white double-breasted dinner jacket. “I was like, ‘Yeah, this is great!’ I always like to wear black, so it was a departure for me,” he explained.
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