This weeks marks the launch of the winter 2017 Luxury Issue, on newsstands soon and viewable online now, HERE.
As this issue went to print in early November, I found myself particularly grateful for the work I get to do as editor of this magazine. Together with my team and our community of writers and photographers, we are able to create something that is special.
Photo by Steve Benisty
Since our beginning, we have wanted to make the creative field more accessible. We believe that artists can open our eyes to a world beyond ourselves. We believe that culture can be a force for change. We believe that learning every day, addressing challenges every day, and asking questions every day is important.
We get to speak to and learn from fascinating people from all over the world, working in a variety of creative industries. During interviews or studio visits, we get to try to understand their areas of expertise. We discover what drives them, inspires them, energizes them.
It is our hope that our readers will uncover within these pages something new, encouraging, stirring, or even heartening. Such as when in this issue, an artist like Cai Guo-Qiang shares how he can surprise even himself in his work and how it is, in those moments that he feels connected to a higher spirit or force. Or when Anthony Bourdain speaks of his admiration for people who create beautiful things with integrity, people who “care enough to persevere in the face of overwhelming evidence that what they’re doing is foolish.”
We talk to Gregory Long at the New York Botanical Garden, which broke ground in the fall on an expanded Edible Academy program that educates New York children and families not just about gardening, cooking, and nutrition, but to love nature. We hear from Roth Martin, who has worked for the past several years to launch a fully recyclable women’s shoe that is both stylish and made from reused plastic bottles, combating the excessive waste in the fashion industry.
We recognize that not everything we encounter is purely altruistic, but there are glimmers of good intent for our readers here. At his recent New York show, Marcel Wanders told us, “Design for me is an impossible thing. It pertains to how we create a vision for the future. How we spread love and trust in the world—I think that is core to design.” He did go on to qualify that for designers, “there’s an agenda and it’s fair to be honest about it.”
Others, like the collector Lio Malca and the event producer Etienne Russo, recognized the luck in their everyday endeavors. Malca, who pledged that, “Anything I want to do from now on for the rest of my days, it’s going to involve art . . . The art world has opened a window, a passage for me that I don’t want to be without,” believes that because he collects, he has a responsibility to make sure the art he owns is seen by as many people as possible. Russo, when asked to reflect on his 20-year run at Villa Eugénie and what lies ahead, offered, “I’m learning every single day of my life. Every single day is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Also in the issue are features on Bernar Venet, Linda Pinto, and Alexandre Allard. You’ll also find interviews with Mercedes Abramo, Johnny Coca, Fawaz Gruosi, Davide Marello, Ingird Donat, collectors Gary Metzner and Scott Johnson, and more.
To be sure, it’s not all positivity and selflessness in the art and lifestyle industries. But there are good intentions in creative pursuits, and we will continue to lift those up in Whitewall. Happy New Year.
