Dapper Dan 19 Is Out!

Dapper Dan 19 looks at how we—as artists, writers, thinkers—carve out time and space in a world that bombards us constantly, keeping us ever-notified. In the pages of our magazine, we build new rules. We champion those who move against this mechanism, embracing iconoclasm in an Instagram age. We question Raven Smith’s content and commentary, Samuel Ross’s garments and products, and Andrew Bolton’s curation and exhibitions. We showcase duo FAKA’s radical singularity and the structures in tailor Daniel Haworth’s craft. We shoot Celine SS19 and capture Zegna’s collection, placing garments alongside objects to reveal both the inanimate and the human.

Menswear and philosophy are mined. Ideas are distilled. Dapper Dan 19 explores the intimacies of alienation, a new individualism.

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DAPPER DAN 18 Is Out!

DAPPER DAN 18, autumn/winter 2018

Nick Knight considers the communication of beauty, while Mike Meiré expounds upon ugly. In this magazine, images and print are held up, analysed, lauded in close conversation. Dries Van Noten reflects on revelation. Garments are drawn out, draped, drooled over, before being styled and shot. As we pit banality and intricacy against each other, objects are upended and suspended. Klaus Stockhausen turns tables, Olivier Saillard turns his eye to design and James Massiah turns his back on faith.

Menswear and philosophy merge and melt, each concept drowning the other to become unrecognisable. Here, ideas are distilled. Among pages of print, DAPPER DAN turns 18

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L’Homme Objet: Gaultier’s Male Gaze

Photography by Johan Sandberg

Jean Paul Gaultier doesn’t have a menswear line anymore but most of today’s best menswear lines have a bit of Jean Paul Gaultier.

The migration of avant-garde ideas from the university, the art world and intellectual bohemia towards mass commerce and prime-time television marks the cycle of their cultural acceptance, of what is generally understood to be “mainstreaming.” The people you consider marginal end up shaping the reality of your children. The drag queen your father’s generation had locked up now sells lipstick to your daughter. Progressive minds find this is proof of the positive evolution of society. Which is why it’s so disturbing to hear Jean Paul Gaultier say: “I feel that if I were starting now I couldn’t have done what I had done at the time.” Continue reading “L’Homme Objet: Gaultier’s Male Gaze”

“The Artist is Present”: Maurizio Cattelan curates Gucci’s forthcoming Exhibit in China

Gucci’s ingenious creative director, Alessandro Michele, and Italian artist, Maurizio Cattelan, cross paths in a dream which will be brought into existence on October 10, 2018. Their exhibition project will take place in Shanghai, the homeland to “the copy is the original” thought. Continue reading ““The Artist is Present”: Maurizio Cattelan curates Gucci’s forthcoming Exhibit in China”

DAPPER DAN 17 Is Out!

DAPPER DAN 17, spring/summer 2018

DAPPER DAN is hot off the press with its 17th issue, in which we pore over Anthony Vaccarello’s take at Saint Laurent, probe Jean Paul Gaultier on the male gaze and investigate Clare Waight Keller’s stealth subversion at Givenchy. We also speak to arguably the world’s most famous curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, who tells us about interviewing artists, and conduct our own artist interview with Katerina Jebb, ahead of the upcoming exhibition at The Met Museum in which she was involved. In addition to this, Swedish blues singer Brør Gunnar Jansson tells about mixing music and storytelling, and we visit multi-talented tattoo artist/designer/publisher Maxime Büchi in his studio in London.

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Julien d’Ys talks to Filep Motwary

Selfportrait by Julien d’Ys

Julien d’Ys is more than a hairstylist. He is a storyteller, a poet and a fashion veteran who finds amusement in mixing the strangest materials together for the sake of beauty. Each of his projects serves as a testimonial—a point of reference in contemporary fashion’s history and the key to the gates to dreamland.
A good fashion show is everything together: the clothes (of course), the music, lights, casting, hair and make-up. The most incredible hair stories have carried his signature for almost 40 years. He also likes to paint, keep his notes in sketchbooks, and to flirt with photography. Julien d’Ys responds to my phone call in a very good mood. He has just returned from New York where he participated in “Art of the In-Between”, the Metropolitan Museum’s retrospective on Comme Des Garçons and Rei Kawakubo, with whom he has worked closely for more than two decades creating the hair for her shows and occasionally the make-up as well. He asked me to call him precisely at 11:32, as 32 is his lucky number. Continue reading “Julien d’Ys talks to Filep Motwary”

Mats Gustafson talks to Filep Motwary

Mats Gustafson, Eric, 1991

Fashion illustrations, landscapes, erotic portraits, plants, floating swans; the broad sweep of his brush transfers the most exquisite garments, senses and emotions, memory and fragility to paper, suggesting an almost poetic arbitrariness. A solemn simplicity even!
Mats Gustafson boldly uses watercolour to express his personal thoughts, desires or virtues, but most of the time to reflect the work of others through his talent in illustrating fashion. Ever since his multi-chaptered creative journey started around 45 years ago, his majestic work has been featured in the glossiest of the glossies while being exhibited in museums since 1986, as well as in galleries and renowned publications. He is soon to present a series of unrevealed works in Tokyo’s MA2 Gallery. I call him at his wonderful apartment in Sweden where he only arrived the day before, straight from New York. Continue reading “Mats Gustafson talks to Filep Motwary”

Time Tourist: Alessandro Michele’s Immortal New Gucci

Photography by Vassilis Karidis

When Alessandro Michele was appointed Creative Director of Gucci in 2015, the fabled Florentine house seemed to have fallen into a sluggish trance. Michele’s immediate antecedents had allowed

Gucci to lapse into the “good-taste” bad habits of drooping houses: they devoted their energies to resuscitating heritage loafers from the archive and putting out collections of perfectly unobjectionable peacoat-friendly ensembles in bourgeois tennis-club pastels. It had been years since Tom Ford’s tenure electrified Gucci with a depraved iteration of deviant Hollywood glamour. Continue reading “Time Tourist: Alessandro Michele’s Immortal New Gucci”

Margaret Howell talks to Matthew Hicks

Photography by Marie Déhé

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

The quote—inaccurately attributed to both Leonardo da Vinci and Coco Chanel—describes Margaret Howell’s quiet luxuries very nicely. Howell reminds one of an English character in a Henry James novel: a deeply refined sensibility of great influence and means disguised in elegantly modest packaging. Did you know that behind the graciously self-effacing Ms Howell there looms an international fashion empire, built upon exquisite attention to the finer details of British sartorial heritage—one that quietly generates £100 million per year? Probably not. Ms Howell is no showboat. Her collections are season-less meditations on one ever-evolving aesthetic— one that has seduced her customers with its chic pragmatism and hushed sumptuousness. Her MHL line explores an intriguingly handsome re-appropriation of British workwear while her MARGARET HOWELL mainline channels her discreet tastes into high fashion. She was kind enough to sit down for a chat with Dapper Dan. Continue reading “Margaret Howell talks to Matthew Hicks”