Thom Browne Guest-edits A Magazine
BE MY GUEST: American designer Thom Browne is the latest fashion figure to guest edit A Magazine, a fashion title based in Paris and printed in Belgium. Haider Ackermann, Riccardo Tisci, Stephen Jones, Iris Van Herpen and most recently Delfina Delettrez have also done the honors.
“Death and Mourning in Black and White” is the theme of the magazine, dovetailing from the designer’s fall 2015 show season. His men’s show had a funeral procession, while his women’s show was “inspired by the romantic idea of mourning” as he told WWD. The magazine has been printed in black and white — with a red, white and blue grosgrain ribbon serving as a bookmark, echoing Brown’s signature logo.
Browne has tapped contributors including Baz Luhrmann, Martha Stewart, Rick Owens and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Luhrmann and his costume designer wife Catherine Martin made an illustration; Stewart created recipes — a menu for her own funeral wake — and had them shot at her upstate New York farmhouse; Owens and spouse Michele Lamy detail plans for the tomb that they will construct for the afterlife together; Obrist wrote a text where he links his Instagram project, “The Art of Handwriting,” to extinction and mourning and included notes from the likes of Björk, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith and David Lynch.
Meanwhile, Andrew Bolton, curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and Browne’s boyfriend, chose to include 19th-century lithographs by Robert Dighton as well as the “Dialogue Between Fashion and Death” by the Italian philosopher Giacomo Leopardi.
The issue will be released during Paris Fashion Week with a cocktail event on March 6. It will roll out to a select distribution in 30 countries, including at Colette and OFR Bookshop in Paris and Opening Ceremony, and the Museum of Modern Arts in New York as well as Selfridges in London and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The issue features about 200 pages, with advertisers including Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co. and Valentino.
