FASHION Magazine
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MEN’S FASHION: Champion diver Alexandre Despatie on his return to Olympic form
Photography by Gabor Jurina For Alexandre Despatie, diving is all about aesthetics. “Every time I step on the boards, I’m judged by how I look,” says the two-time Olympic medallist while on set at his Men’s FASHION cover shoot in Toronto. “It’s a fact I live with. My form has to be sharp. Every angle of my body is studied—it’s what I’m marked on.”
At a solid five-foot-eight and 155 pounds, Despatie’s frame is noticeably well toned. As he approaches the camera in a brief black swimsuit, an air of confidence radiates from his diamond-cut build. “Our bodies are our machines—our Formula One race cars,” he later says, after throwing on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. “They need to be perfect to run well.”
In the midst of preparing for the London Summer Games—his fourth Olympiad to date—the Montrealer is clearly running on overdrive. Heading to the gym six days a week, he maintains a schedule that befits his title as Canada’s 36-time senior diving champion. Yet his daily routine—which includes 1,000 crunches, one hour of strength training, 20 minutes of trampoline work, an indoor cycling program called PowerWatts and 50 sets of ab exercises called “pike-ups”—is something he feels “lucky” to be able to do at all.
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MEN’S FASHION: Editor’s letter Spring 2012
In 1953, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a show that treated the automobile as an aesthetic achievement. In a Talk of the Town bit published in The New Yorker, the writer Brendan Gill played the Philistine, thinking old-fashioned thoughts about function and price as he was led through the exhibition by a curator from the museum’s department of architecture and design. The punchline of the piece occurred when, stopping by a Siata, the cool—Steve McQueen owned one—Italian sports car, Gill asked, “Handle nicely, does it?” The curator answered, “I don’t drive.”
Bill Blass, the American fashion designer, told a similar kind of joke in his memoir, Bare Blass. He confessed that “for eighteen years, beginning in the mid-seventies, I endorsed a line of Lincoln Continentals for the Ford Motor Company without knowing how to operate one.”
After reading those things, I—a non-driver for whom torque is something that happens on an ill-fitting T-shirt—felt less like a poseur going off to interview Max Wolff (page 78), a car designer now relishing his opportunity to reimagine the Lincoln.
