welcome to gq’s first-ever Global Creativity Awards issue, and congratulations to our inaugural class of honorees: Tim Cook, Donald Glover, Hoyeon, Yohji Yamamoto, Karol G, Gaetano Pesce, Grace Wales Bonner, Tyshawn Jones, and Bill Strobeck. Wow, what a crew!! ¶ Over the course of my 20-year career, I have watched creativity go from being a slightly mystical, unattainable, and not-terribly monetizable attribute reserved for flighty artistic types to what it has become today: the sexiest and most desirable cultural currency of our times. To the point that I know finance guys who are at great pains to be seen as creative. Why? I guess it’s because having the power to use innovation and art to impact people for half in the making. But to rewind for a sec and locate the true genesis of the Global Creativity Awards, I have to go back to 2011–2012. That was when, everywhere I went where people still read (the New York City subway, the Delta lounge at LAX, hotel pools), the kind of people who looked like they should be reading GQ were, in fact, reading something else: Steve Jobs, the biography by Walter Isaacson.
Eventually the book crisscrossed my transom so many times that I bought a copy. And as soon as I cracked it, I realized its urgent appeal— and the reason for its ubiquity.
All those young, cool professionals weren’t reading Steve Jobs because they were Macworld enthusiasts. They were reading the book as selfhelp. They were trying to mainline some of that Steve Jobs unicorn mystique. In a word, they were trying to become more creative.
My aspiration for the future of the Global Creativity Awards issue and event is that we build a franchise that tracks and celebrates the evolution of creativity in our culture for years to come.
That, each year, we continue to shine a light on a new class of creators who are as radical, rangy, urgent, and inspiring as this first crew. And that, eventually, no matter where
I travel every April, my world will be dotted with young, cool professionals mainlining this issue of GQ. Not just for entertainment or style
advice—but as a whole new kind of self-help. Will Welch GLOBAL EDI TORIAL DIRECTOR the better is cool—and being rich and powerful just ain’t enough anymore. To have real clout today, you gotta have juice in the marketplace of ideas, too.
As the team and I planned the launch of a new global platform that would celebrate this new, supermodern version of creativity, we asked ourselves a simple question: In a world where everybody wants to be creative, who are the real-deal global icons setting the bar?
What makes our first class of honorees so special—and so right-on for this new program— is that while together they encompass industries that include tech, fashion, film, television, music, art, design, and sport, none of them can be contained to any one category or discipline.
In fact, when the GQ squad began the ridiculously fun process of debating who should be honored both in this issue and at our big awards event on April 6 in downtown New York City, we were determined to prioritize multidisciplinary, multi-platform, highly collaborative creators. Why? Because the energy in today’s culture gets unleashed when you go skidding across industries and silos, shouldering your way through walls and punching out glass ceilings along the way.
There’s a reason this is the era of the side hustle and the multihyphenate.
There’s a reason that across music, art, and fashion, collaboration is the order of the day. Get two great things and crash them together! Get two brilliant people from far flung worlds and make them make something! Abracadabra, baby—it’s all sold out!!
By some measures this project has been a year and a half in the making. But to rewind for a sec and locate the true genesis of the Global Creativity Awards, I have to go back to 2011–2012. That was when, everywhere I went where people still read (the New York City subway, the Delta lounge at LAX, hotel pools), the kind of people who looked like they should be reading GQ were, in fact, reading something else: Steve Jobs, the biography by Walter Isaacson.
Eventually the book crisscrossed my transom so many times that I bought a copy. And as soon as I cracked it, I realized its urgent appeal— and the reason for its ubiquity.
All those young, cool professionals weren’t reading Steve Jobs because they were Macworld enthusiasts. They were reading the book as self help.
They were trying to mainline some of that Steve Jobs unicorn mystique. In a word, they were trying to become more creative. My aspiration for the future of the Global Creativity Awards issue and event is that we build a franchise that tracks and celebrates the evolution of creativity in our
culture for years to come.
That, each year, we continue to shine a light on a new class of creators who are as radical, rangy, urgent, and inspiring as this first crew. And that, eventually, no matter where
I travel every April, my world will be dotted with young, cool professionals mainlining this issue of GQ. Not just for entertainment or style advice—but as a whole new kind of self-help.
Will Welch
GLOBAL EDI TORIAL DIRECTOR

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