There’s something unsettling about obsession.
It’s an energy that powers action from the depths of the deepest blue and drives us to create, interpret or worship without explanation.
When inspiration strikes, obsession drives us on.
This issue of Dapper Dan is an homage to sources of rapture and joy, to the people, places and objects that keep us enthralled.
Is this what “normal” looks like? This issue we’re looking at anger, loss, uncertainty and creative, connective opportunities that come through engaging with the instability of our experience.
Artist Thomas Houseago talks about how Nick Cave inspired him to return to art and how he sees Brad Pitt as his brother. Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun–Stépanian discusses manufacturing the impossible, her work constructing playful experiences that mix science and creativity while challenging the status quo. Canadian artist Terence Koh invites us to explore his new treehouse project in New York and researcher Alfie Bown deconstructs how technology is dictating our desires.
In issue 25 of Dapper Dan we explore the idea of disruptive pleasure – the moments of indulgence that we cherish on a personal level, out of context from the realities around us. But also of communal pleasure, of how we find joy in collective action and exploration.
Pleasure feels a rarer commodity these days, which makes moments of release even more transgressive and delicious than ever. In this issue, Angelo Flaccavento celebrates a more selfish, private form of pleasure against the codified enjoyment of social media performance.
Notions of space, the permanence of place and the transgressive allure of location
are explored. Cyprus-based artist Efi Savvides and independent curator Marina Christodoulidou unveil and reflect on their recent collaboration, the project A territory without terrain, exploring the practice of socially engaged art. Luke Forbes talks to artist Tino Sehgal about his practice of creating “constructed situations” in visual arts spaces; and fashion curator and historian Valerie Steele talks to Filip Motwary about the allure of the closet and we visit the studio of Athens-based artist Alexandros Tzannis to discuss his compelling investigation of natural landscapes.
Our contributors also chronicle texture and composition. José Cuevas and Paul Maximilian Schlosser explore balance and poise in Of Lillies and Remains, William Waterworth and Michael Darlington unpack emotion in Man is Held and in Aponia, Arcin Sagdic and Elena Psalti play with presence and solidity.
This season, Givenchy presents an avant-garde, statement-making men’s fashion sneaker conceived by Creative Director Matthew M. Williams as his “dream shoe” and developed exclusively by Givenchy.
First spotted on the runway for Spring 2022, this unique style now has become an essential component of the Givenchy Pre-Fall 2022 collection. In naming the sneaker TK-360, Matthew M. Williams alludes to its singular “total knit” construction while hinting at exciting possibilities to come.
The TK-360 is an original, fully knitted piece produced using completely new, state-of-the-art technology. Its radical shape and bold lines firmly place it in the style vanguard, further consolidating the designer’s daring vision for the House.
It is the season for action.
After a year (and more) of lockdown and distance, Dapper Dan’s latest issue is dedicated to doing. To the energy of creativity, to the urgency of activity.
In issue 24, we revere the heart over mind. Sensual memories are evoked through Objects. David Zilber explores the ultimate emotive artefact: NASA’s Voyager Golden Record – a record of sounds from Earth that could communicate our planet to other species if discovered.
Essays by India Doyle and Kiriakos Spirou explore skin and touch, the former through an ode to bodies and impulse, while Spirou writes a sensual piece about the power of bath time.
An active life takes many forms, and in this issue critical thinkers, artists, fashion designers and dancers including Amelia Horgan, Ajit Chauhan, Daisy Collingridge, Nicolas Andreas Taralis, Benny Nemer, Euripides Laskaridis, Lenio Kaklea and Philippe Malouin share their creative practices as we explore what drives them.
In this issue, we’re on the move. In ‘Roadside’ Antoine Harinthe and Jack Borket capture curbside style. In ‘Heaver’ Vassilis Karidis and Nicholas Georgiou investigate the physicality of labour, and in ‘Arena’, Johan Sandberg and Chiara Ficola pay homage to the tactility of play in the sand. Plus Johan Sanberg and Paolo Zambaldi take fashion into sensory overload with two major series.
It’s a sensual issue, a tribute to what we’ve missed the most.
In issue 24, Dapper Dan looks forward to a time of total physicality. To a time of limitless action, tangible touch and bodily instinct.
In the absence of physical touch, the imagination flourishes. Spending time apart and away from each other, we crave connection and seek it in new forms.
Dapper Dan Magazine’s 23rd issue moves away from the real and the physical, and into the subconscious.
In essays on
Fashion as Cinema,
Your Wildest Dreams,
The Art of Solitary Pastimes
and
Small Albeit Grand Thefts,
we’re thinking about pathways to creativity, the power of desire, and the radical potential of space.
Through interviews with
writer and artist Panagiotis Chatzistefanou,
writer Caleb Azumah Nelson,
music producer Jim-E Stack,
restaurateurs Jeremy Chan and Iré Hassan-Odukale,
costume designer Sandy Powell,
artist Olivier de Sagazan,
and more
we explore passion and craft with intimacy and intrigue.
Through fashion imagery, portraiture, art and costume, the pages of our magazine expand the mind.
What you see is only the surface. The subliminal is sublime.
Dapper Dan’s 22nd issue sees menswear and philosophy unfold during unprecedented times. We form ideas, sentences, objects, garments and images into our magazine.
Our writers uncover the inimitable ideas of GmbH designers Serhat Isik and Benjamin Alexander Huseby, groundbreaking digital designer Jon Emmony and critically acclaimed filmmaker Matt Wolf.
Through the pandemic’s preferred means of online communication, architect Jack Self talks to Lara Johnson-Wheeler and Filep Motwary calls artist Berlinde De Bruyckere at home.
In the literary sphere, writer Paul Mendez discusses his debut work, Rainbow Milk, and British-born, Cypriot poet Anthony Anaxagorou calls out oppression and othering.
Each reforms language into art on the page, questioning the structure of words.
Objects—Margiela’s Tabi brogues, Sacai jewels, shoes by Camper and Jil Sander shirts—are at rest, while the bright young things in modelling move, restless before our photographers’ lenses.
Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Inside the word ‘emergency’ is ‘emerge’; from an emergency new things come forth.” The work we’ve crafted, in the pages of Dapper Dan, questions the form of what came before, bringing the new to the fore.
Buying director and founder of MACHINE-A, Stavros Karelis, curates a collection of clothes in his store that is as unique to his eye as it is to the city it situates. originally from Crete, stavros is a firm fixture in London’s fashion scene and his influence on it is supportive and stirring.
The store, based on Brewer street, is dedicated to showcasing his selections from international luxury brands and up-and-coming British designers, as well as a handful of graduates. Fitting, therefore, that stavros is also a judge for nEWGEn, the British Fashion Council’s emerging talent scheme.
In 2014, in collaboration with SHOWstudio, the store began selling online. stavros takes umbrage with the terms “curator” and “mentor”, although they are terms that have become easily applicable to him and seem intrinsic to his role. despite having known and worked together for a number of years, when stavros and I met for a drink near the MACHINE-A store, we stumbled upon subject after subject we’d never touched upon, from the personal to the professional and back again. Continue reading “MACHINE-A’s Stavros Karelis talks to Lara Johnson-Wheeler”
Charlie Porter cut his teeth as an “arts with an s” reporter, at titles including The Daily Express, The Times and Esquire. In 2000, he became deputy fashion editor for The Guardian and following this, an associate editor for GQ and deputy editor for Fantastic Man. A quiet yet perceptible presence at fashion weeks, Charlie’s readers quickly lent him their ears as he documented the industry as menswear critic for the Financial Times. Until October 2018, that is, when—in a manner that may have seemed abrupt to some—he quit fashion.
Charlie has become known in the fashion industry as one of an elite “club” of critics that provide genuine criticism. He has, in the past, been banned from shows—an accolade awarded to those from whom brands take offence. taking an extensive coffee break during a day’s work writing and researching at the British Library in London, Charlie and I talked in depth about criticism; the ethics involved and the love of feeling something for fashion. Continue reading “Charlie Porter talks to Lara Johnson-Wheeler”
