Apartamento

The culture of fashion: the creative legacy of Willi Smith



WilliWear designer Willi Smith courtesy Bonnie Brownfield

I finally managed to get stuck into the Willi Smith community archive – part of the recent Cooper Hewitt Willi Smith: Street Couture exhibition – with its immersive oral history from friends and customers. It’s so brilliantly done, giving you a real sense of the designer, the man and his influence on his creative community. (more…)



The culture of fashion: what next for magazines?



Document Journal Amoako Boafo Marie Humbert

Out of crisis comes opportunity. We hope.

The Business of Fashion has a story on the future of fashion media, highlighting the struggles for magazines of operating with smaller ad revenues then ever.

There will for sure be casualties but those will likely have been coming for a while. There is just too much content out there and especially now, more short form video, memes, social media and digital newsletters than ever.

I expect the legacy players may go for reduced frequencies of print publications, both to alleviate pressure on printing businesses operating with reduced capacity and in response to market interest. (more…)



Time well spent



Elizabeth Peyton

Observation: When you buy a book or a magazine, what you’re really buying is time. Time to get away from fast information, time to get lost in stories, ideas, theories or just idle page-turning.

I find it harder to get into books these days – the lure of the phone is too strong! But I realise that’s because the apps are designed to be as addictive as Las Vegas slot machines (it’s the apps, not the phones*). So I’m trying to ween myself off screens and spend more time with print. (more…)



What’s on your reading list?



The World of Apartamento book
Continuing on last week’s #namastayinbed theme, we’ve reached peak hygge time of year, aka annual book-buying season. December and January are the only months of the year I get time to properly absorb myself in books, so I’m looking forward to getting stuck into Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Michelle Obama’s Becoming. No spoilers please!

The rest of the year, I just accept I don’t have the attention span for deep absorption books. Instead I go for dip-in-able non-fiction stuff, which is probably why I like oral histories and diaries. I’m late to Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries but it’s on my Christmas list, as is Uncovered: Revolutionary Magazine Covers – The Inside Stories Told by the People Who Made Them  (more…)