Perennials: David McKendrick

To celebrate this year’s Perennials collection, we travelled from New York to London to Paris, spending a few days with friends whose style we admire. We wanted to find out how they wear Drake’s, and to see how these clothes have become trusted companions in their everyday lives.

David McKendrick has been art directing campaigns, working on print projects, and lending his distinctive imagination to the world of fashion, advertising magazines and more for 20 years now. Since moving down to London from his native Glasgow, he’s won multiple awards for his work as creative director of British Esquire, and with creative agency BAM, which he launched with fellow art director Lee Belcher in 2014, before launching his eponymous David McKendrick Studio recently.

He’s leant his visual styling to projects recently for the likes of John Lobb and Connolly, White Cube, Mr Porter, and a book about swimming pools for Rizzoli, but we’re here, mainly to talk to him about another project of his, Paperboy.

When the pandemic hit, and lockdowns interrupted the usual working routines, David took things into his own hands. He started Paperboy because we wanted to create a magazine that would deliver a bit of good news during difficult times. He released the first issue in 2021, and is currently working on the ninth.

But as well as being a little dose of positivity it’s also born from a deep love of materiality of print, and the playful possibilities of magazine making. Paperboy is stuffed full of stickers, inserts, exciting visuals and interesting stories. They’ve run editorials on Umarells — Italian granddads who watch men at work — sock puppets and bollards, bubble gum and wellington boots.

We spent the afternoon with David at his studio, local cafe, and on the streets of Hackney, dressed up in some of Drake’s finest clothes, to find out more.

Hello David! Happy New Year! What was your creative highlight of 2025?

Getting Issue Eight of Paperboy out there. It was the Scottish Issue. I’ve lived in London for 25 years now, longer than I lived in Glasgow, so it was a tricky one to pull off. Even though I’m Scottish by birth it left me feeling a tad insecure about whether I still held the authority to make an issue about my homeland. As it turns out, the issue sold out, and the reprint has also just sold out. So if the proof is in the pudding, it’s time to get the bill!

Can you remember why you decided to start Paperboy?

When the pandemic gave me the space to make it. That great pause gave me a moment to reflect and begin the project that had been in my head for the last ten years. It also had a strong purpose; to deliver some good news! In a time where quite frankly, there was only bad news. I had time but I also felt the duty to deliver some sort of antidote.

What does the name mean? Where did it come from?

I was a paperboy when I was eleven, delivering the Evening Times in Glasgow, five nights a week after school. It was pretty hard graft for a wee skinny boy, but if I remember rightly, it gave me my wee bit of cash to spend on things I shouldn’t. I guess I am a paperboy once again, delivering good news in a cheeky irreverent way.

You’d been a very successful creative director for many years before launching Paperboy, had you always dreamt of having your own publication?

I have wanted to do my own publication, in various different forms, at different stages of my life. The great thing about publishing my own magazine is that I can get away with finally making all the ideas that were quashed by conservative editors over the years.

What do you love about print? What do you hate about it?

I love that print, especially magazines, not only provide a cultural bookmark, but serve as a form of relevant and timely entertainment. And I do enjoy the time it takes to put together. It ensures it’s a thoroughly researched and considered way of delivering information, in a beautiful way. Especially as an antidote to the current bombardment of information, that we can’t even rely on to be true.

I don’t hate anything about print other than manufacturing is becoming super expensive and prohibitive for young creatives with good ideas.

What have been the most interesting creative challenges with Paperboy?

Over the past four years I have managed to assemble an extremely accomplished bunch of contributors. World renowned writers, photographers and artists, but more importantly, and at times more challenging, I have recruited a select group of young people; high school students and undergraduates with the idea to give young people the opportunity to get published, seamlessly alongside some greats. I am trying to create a space for the full gamut. The oldest contributor to date has been 91 with the youngest being nine!

Do you have some favourite stories you’ve worked on?

I’ve enjoyed introducing profiles into the latest issue. I like to find people of interest that perhaps the Paperboy reader wouldn’t know and introduce them to our audience. I don’t ever want to cover the super famous. It feels like a bit of waste. In the last issue we profiled the world’s strongest men, who happened to be two Scottish brothers. A quite touching story of love, loss and lifting very heavy things for a living.

What are you working on at the moment? What’s got you excited?

I believe that the more you do things the better you get at it. We are working on issue nine, The Upside Down Issue. We thought it would be a nice idea to do a profile of someone who lives — or at least spends a lot of time — upside down. We were very taken with London Zoo’s two-toed sloths, Marilyn and Leander. So we are planning to do a full celebrity profile on these guys, which as I am sure you can imagine, presents exciting, but big challenges.