GQ'S FIRST GLOBAL ISSUE BETS ON JAY-Z AND RASHID JOHNSON

## Adam Baidawi Named Global Editor on February 17, 2026. The Jay-Z Issue Dropped 35 Days Later. That turnaround tells you everything about the temperature inside GQ right now. Under the magazine's new editor Adam Baidawi, GQ launched a new global special issue, featuring Jay-Z as the cover star and commissioning Rashid Johnson to produce the cover images. This was not a legacy assignment carried over from the previous regime. Baidawi, 35, who led British GQ and was the deputy global editorial director, replaced longtime GQ editor Will Welch, who left to move to Paris to work with Pharrell Williams, the musician and men's creative director for Louis Vuitton. The first issue of any editor's tenure is a manifesto. It is the clearest signal of who they think the magazine should be talking to and, more importantly, who they believe should be behind the camera. Baidawi said he wanted to restore GQ "to its rightful place as the North Star of masculinity" and proposed "a version of masculinity that is yes, progressive, yes, modern, but is also sexier and cooler and more aspirational." Commissioning an artist, not a photographer, to shoot the cover of a global special issue is one way to mean it. ## Van Der Zee and Francis Bacon Walk Into the Same Shoot Rashid Johnson did not pick easy references. For the shoot, Johnson drew on two reference points that are, on the surface, unlikely companions: James Van Der Zee, the great Harlem Renaissance photographer who documented Black life, aspiration and dignity in portraits of extraordinary formal beauty, and Francis Bacon, whose raw, destabilizing paintings of the human figure are about as far from Van Der Zee's aesthetic as it's possible to get. Hold both of those in your head simultaneously. Van Der Zee shot Harlem in its aspirational ascent. Bacon painted flesh like it was trying to escape itself. Johnson chose to hold both in mind for a portrait of one of the most photographed men alive. The shoot captures Jay-Z in contemplative poses, and in one image, Jay-Z partially covers his face with a mask as he stares into the camera. This is not celebrity portraiture. It is something closer to a psychological argument. GQ tapped Johnson, who has interrogated the Black male psyche in paintings, installations, and photographs, while also resisting the notion that Blackness is monolithic or easily defined. In that respect, Johnson is an apt match for the rapper and hip-hop mogul, who has spent his career behind the mic, in front of the camera, and in the boardroom challenging facile notions of Blackness and its place in American culture and life. ## Anxious Men on Oil, Then on Newsstands The Anxious Men series started in 2015 at New York's Drawing Center. A decade later, it showed up on GQ's global cover. Johnson's "Anxious Men," begun as a series of drawings in 2015, confront the viewer with visceral immediacy. The works are dominated by an abstracted face or series of faces with large bulbous eyes, gritted teeth, and a small, tensed neck. The male subject is messy, vulnerable, and fearful, filling the frame with confrontational urgency. While Johnson's original impulse for the series was to explore his own anxiety, he soon recognized that the project could speak more broadly to the experiences of Black men in America during a time marked by police violence and mass incarceration. For the GQ issue, Johnson created a sequence of oil paintings as a continuation of those Anxious Men portraits, building the set where he then photographed Jay-Z. The paintings were not backdrop. They were context. Executed with oil stick on surfaces such as white ceramic tile or linen, and often incorporating culturally significant materials like black soap and wax, the works evoke the sterile environment of institutions like bathrooms or mental health clinics while simultaneously referencing African diasporic rituals of cleansing and healing. Auction results confirm what the art world already knew. The Anxious Man works on paper typically bring around $300,000 to $500,000 at auction, while monumental scale works on tile range around $1 million to $1.2 million. This is not a working artist who needed a magazine commission. This is a Guggenheim-level figure agreeing to collaborate on something he found worth his time. ## The Collector, Collected Jay-Z did not meet Rashid Johnson at a photo shoot. He met him at an art fair, or through a dealer, or through the kind of quiet acquisition that does not come with a press release. According to GQ, Jay-Z discovered Johnson about a decade ago and is a collector of Johnson's work, which often represents Black intellectual life. Over the last two decades, Jay-Z has become one of the most active high-profile celebrities in the art world. His collection includes works by artists such as Damien Hirst and Laurie Simmons. The rapper filmed a music video for "Picasso Baby" at New York's Pace Gallery. The GQ commission, then, is not a new relationship dressed up as a collaboration. It is a decade-long intellectual friendship that finally had a format. Johnson told GQ he links Jay-Z to Harold Cruse, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Michael Eric Dyson. That is a specific and serious lineage. Cruse wrote "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual" in 1967. Du Bois published "The Souls of Black Folk" in 1903. Dyson is the foremost contemporary scholar of hip-hop's intellectual weight. Placing Jay-Z in that company is an argument, not a compliment. Jay-Z sat down with GQ editor Frazier Tharpe for a couple of 2-hour interviews that also included follow-ups over email and text. The cover story features an extensive interview tied to the 30th anniversary of his 1996 debut album, Reasonable Doubt, with Jay-Z now styling his name JAŸ-Z in honor of that milestone. Nine years since his last solo album, 4:44. Six years since his last project. The umlaut appears, and suddenly GQ is the venue where he speaks. That choice alone signals what this moment is supposed to mean. ## 12 Editions, One Cover, and What That Means for Print in 2026 GQ does not launch a "global special issue" lightly. Baidawi's appointment oversees the brand's editorial vision and content strategy across its global network of 12 owned and operated editions. Coordinating a single cover narrative across 12 markets, in 2026, when every local edition runs its own algorithm-optimized cover strategy, is an institutional bet. It says: this story is big enough to transcend geography. Baidawi now oversees all of GQ, including its U.S. publication and its global editions, as well as the music publication Pitchfork, which was folded into GQ in 2024. That Pitchfork merger is worth noting here. A music criticism brand absorbed into a men's style magazine, then the new global editor's first act is to put a rapper on the cover shot by a fine artist. The Pitchfork acquisition starts to look less like a budget consolidation and more like a thesis. Baidawi doubled revenue on flagship events including Men of the Year and GQ Heroes since his appointment at British GQ, and has overseen covers including Paul Mescal, Malala, Charli XCX, Mo Salah, Andrew Garfield and Pierce Brosnan. That roster is deliberately global, deliberately not Hollywood-centric. The Jay-Z issue continues that logic, except now the ambition is explicit: one story, one artist, one subject, shipped to every market simultaneously. Johnson's retrospective "A Poem for Deep Thinkers" ran at the Guggenheim from April 18, 2025 through January 18, 2026, three months before this GQ issue dropped. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Two institutions at the height of their respective powers, brought together by a magazine that needed to prove it still knows where power actually lives. The question now is whether Baidawi's September 2026 print debut, his first official issue by title, can match the argument this April commission made. That is a very high bar to walk back to your desk and clear.