What's Contemporary Now?

Alastair McKimm returns to What’s Contemporary Now?, this time on camera, to discuss life after 23 years at i-D and the launch of Prototype, a new creative venture bringing publishing, product design, and creative services under one roof. Now also Chief Creative Officer of Visual Talent Group (VTG), McKimm reflects on building a new model for creative businesses, his work with Gap, Marc Jacobs, and Miley Cyrus, and the role of curation in navigating an increasingly saturated world. From editing creative work to editing our own lives, we explore instinct, ambition, insecurity, and the challenge of sustaining a career wi...

It’s all about the Big Willy energy these days. What was once an independent, primarily menswear label showing at New York Fashion Week has become a full-blown fashion brand known for staging high-quality productions and often politically charged shows during the Paris men’s collections. The paradox of Willy Chavarria is that, despite the wide reach of his media storms, he’s still being discovered by new audiences even now. The illusion of overnight success is almost always backed by stories of hard work, an enduring willingness to prevail, and a commitment to learning everything one can along the wa...

As one of the first brands to democratize luxury fashion, H&M helped reshape the relationship between designer creativity and the wider public. From its landmark collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld in 2004, they’ve brought the creative genius of Versace, Margiela, Comme des Garçons, and countless others to the masses. A model that today reigns supreme when it comes to commonly practiced brand strategy and reaching key consumer touchpoints. Ann-Sofie Johansson, H&M’s Creative Advisor and Head of Design Womenswear, has been central to this evolution, along with playing a role in the brand’s dedication to nurturing emergin...

Copenhagen Fashion Week marks its 20th anniversary at a moment when the fashion system is being asked to account for itself. In conversation with CEO Cecilie Thorsmark and COO Isabella Rose Davey, this episode examines how a regional fashion week evolved into a platform with global influence, and what that evolution reveals about the future of the industry.

“Fashion weeks were falling out of sync with the world around us. They were celebrating fashion in a bubble, while everything else was changing.”

CEO Cecilie Thorsmark 

“What feels contemporary now to me is generosity.”

COO...

With a quick trip to Copenhagen for the city's 20th anniversary fashion week, we will be attending the shows, interviewing the organizers, and participating on a panel with Vogue business to explore the idea of what a magazine is today. Their impressive programming, in addition to the designers, includes an impressive array of subject matter that warrants a timely exploration and we'll be back on Monday with a full episode sharing all of the juicy details.

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The episode follows AMBUSH’s evolution from jewelry made for friends to a brand that Yoon describes as a platform, shaped by experimentation rather than a rigid business plan. She speaks candidly about learning in real time, being paid to learn, and why every job and skill eventually becomes useful. From research as a daily practice to AI as a tool that can accelerate creative work without replacing it, Yoon makes a case for staying open, resisting the urge to live in boxes, and trading horizontal expansion for deeper, more human storytelling. Her definition of what feels contemporary now is...

Asad Syrkett joins What’s Contemporary Now? for a wide-ranging conversation about design as a cultural language and the quiet ways environments shape identity, memory, and access. From a childhood spent moving through New York City’s homes, department stores, and streets, to a new chapter living and working in Milan, he reflects on how early encounters with the built world formed a lifelong curiosity long before he had the vocabulary of architecture or interiors.

Grounded in his background in architectural history and editorial leadership, Asad speaks to why design is never neutral, how interiors hold narrative and...

For our first episode of 2026, we sit down with Kyle Hagler and Emil Wilbekin for a deeply personal and wide-ranging conversation at the intersection of Native Son, culture, and media. We begin with formative histories shaped by strong women, faith, and instinct, before tracing how both have navigated long careers defined by pivots, visibility, and cultural responsibility. From Emil’s journey through magazine leadership to founding Native Son, to Kyle’s perspective on power, representation, and stewardship within fashion, the conversation explores what it means to build influence without losing yourself. Together, they reflect on community beyond branding, legacy with...

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Angelo Flaccavento has long been one of fashion’s most distinctive critical voices — sharp yet empathetic, rigorous yet imaginative, always willing to question his own certainties. In this conversation, he traces his path from a Sicilian childhood spent absorbing magazines in boutique backrooms to becoming a writer whose clarity and candor designers both fear and admire.

We discuss the formative power of self-doubt, the responsibility of the critic in an era shaped by branding and algorithms, and why genuine surprise has become fashion’s rarest commodity. Angelo reflects on taste as a lifelong education, the tension between fantas...

Camille Miceli brings a vivid, almost incandescent joie de vivre to Pucci, treating color, movement, and intuition as both vocabulary and philosophy. Her worldview is shaped by an upbringing steeped in art and fashion, and by formative chapters with Alaïa, Lagerfeld, Jacobs, and Raf Simons — each adding a layer to her finely tuned sense of glamour and discipline.

She reflects on the value of frivolity in an anxious age, the necessity of surrounding oneself with challengers rather than cheerleaders, and the quiet radicalism of returning Pucci’s prints to hand-drawn imperfection. The picture that emerges is of a...

In this episode, Matthew Whitehouse reflects on the winding path from a rainy Lancashire childhood and a brief burst of band-life glamour to leading The Face, a title forever suspended between myth and reinvention. He speaks with disarming clarity about reviving an icon without embalming it, insisting that the magazine’s only true mandate is to capture the texture of now — not nostalgia, not futurism, but the pulse of the present.

We explore the politics that slip in through lived experience rather than declarations, the power of small stories to illuminate larger truths, and the editor’s craft...

Recho Omondi, host of The Cutting Room Floor, handles candor with the ease of someone who has little interest in performance and every interest in clarity. Over seven years, her once-modest podcast has steadily entered the cultural foreground, helped along by her habit of thinking — and learning — in public.

She moves fluidly between roles: moderating conversations, appearing on other platforms, or steering her own interviews with a mix of composure and quiet provocation. There is an unmistakable steadiness to her presence, never loud, yet impossible to misread.

Raised by a single Kenyan father, the youngest of t...

In his first-ever podcast interview, Ludovic de Saint Sernin traces the journey from a nomadic childhood to becoming one of fashion’s most closely watched voices. He talks about the diary-like beginnings of his brand, the Mapplethorpe collaboration that became a full-circle moment, and why he sometimes becomes his own muse.

We explore queerness, visibility, and the tension between intimacy and scale as his label grows, along with how travel, community, and personal history shape his work. He's a designer committed to beauty, honesty, and the freedom to define oneself.

If you want to understand th...

For GQ’s global fashion correspondent Samuel Hine, clothes have always been more than fabric; they were a form of identity long before they became his career. Growing up as an identical twin in Chicago, he learned early that style could be a language of individuality. That instinct eventually led him to New York, a meeting with Will Welch (through a friend of his grandmother, no less), and what’s now a decade-long career shaping how we read and interpret menswear.

In this conversation, we talk about the evolution of fashion criticism, the rebirth of men’s style...

At this year’s WSJ. Magazine Innovator Awards, Billie Eilish asked, “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? Give your money away” — a line that instantly reverberated far beyond the room. It was a reminder of the event’s magnetic pull and its place as a mirror for culture’s contradictions. Under Editor in Chief Sarah Ball, WSJ. Magazine has become precisely that kind of reflection: glamorous, self-aware, and culturally indispensable.

In this episode, Ball reflects on her path from a D.C. household stacked with newspapers to leading a magazine that continues to grow in both i...

Talking to Tish Weinstock offers the kind of unfiltered honesty — or, as she calls it, radical honesty — that every interviewer hopes to find in a guest. She has a unique ability to move between the frivolous and the deeply meaningful with equal parts wit and whimsy, leaving you to wonder whether she’s someone who refuses to take herself too seriously or simply someone who won’t struggle against whatever feels truthful in the moment.

Whether you know her from her work as a writer, her time in front of the camera or on the runway, or simply a...

The morning after his show debut as Victoria’s Secret’s new Creative Director, Adam Selman joined me to talk through the emotions still vibrating from the night before. The conversation moved from backstage calm to creative catharsis, touching on the full-circle moment of opening the show with Jasmine Tookes, who walked his first-ever presentation years ago.

This isn’t a conversation about lingerie or spectacle, it’s more about connection, leadership, and the power of joy as a design principle. Adam spoke about collaboration as communion—how designing with rather than for transforms the room—and how lessons...

Nicholas Aburn’s path to AREA was never a straight line. He grew up watching CNN Style with his mother, worked full time at Prada while studying at Central Saint Martins, and famously failed under Louise Wilson before showing his collection anyway and becoming the first in his class to get a job when he was hired by Tom Ford. He now calls that failure a “delayed education,” one that taught him how to manage his own creative and emotional state — a lesson more valuable than any critique. From Ford, he learned the beauty of discipline and real clothes, and from...

When we first thought to sit down with Jerry Lorenzo, we planned to talk about culture, fashion, the first official womenswear collection from Fear of God, and the unique background that made his future feel wide open — though not necessarily destined for fashion. We did all of that, but the timely wisdom he shared reached far beyond the industry. Lorenzo speaks with the calm authority of someone who knows where he stands and why, and his reflections feel essential — filled with the kind of clarity we all need in an era when certainty is elusive and conviction, or belief in s...

What’s more contemporary than the pursuit of happiness? The restless task of creating it, sustaining it, sharing it. It’s a game not so far from that of the creative class, with its inevitable demand for the next turn, the next gesture, the next affirmation of relevance. Designers, editors, critics, even self-anointed new media mavens know it all too well. Exploring larger cultural truths in their microcosmic forms is a habit we’ve happily returned to this season, and one we look forward to sharing across the months ahead.

Because happiness, like relevance, is nev...

While the world appears to have taken leave of anything resembling objective reality, and our feeds continue to oscillate between the surreal and the mundane in a choreography of dissonance, we have returned to the quiet act of making. Production on the new season is underway, and with it comes the opportunity to explore the role creativity holds within culture. More than ornament, it serves as reflection, as resistance, and occasionally, as remedy.

Whether through personal narrative or collective observation, there is no shortage of terrain. The world, in all its instability and invention...

In recent years, it’s become harder to tell whether fashion can still stand on its own, without leaning on the scaffolding of sport, film, or whatever cultural tentpole happens to be in rotation. But with the sustained relevance of System and the sharp ambition behind its latest expansion, Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Wingfield offers a clear answer: yes—fashion can still trade on itself.

It is a business, unquestionably—but a beautifully complex one, in constant dialogue with culture. And in that dialogue, the currency of creativity proves more stable than gold. Unlike so many aspects of contemporary life...

It’s easy to repeat oneself in fashion. Certain truths return again and again, not because we lack imagination, but because they remain unresolved. One of them is this—authenticity isn’t rare because people are unwilling to be real, but because many still don’t know who they are. Carlos Nazario does. And more than that, he shows up as himself, without spectacle and without self-mythologizing.

What makes this conversation compelling isn’t only his perspective on fashion or culture. It’s the way he holds space for complexity—the exhaustion and the joy, the disenchantment and the deep l...

 It is Monday, but not just any Monday. It's the first Monday in May queue. The flash bulbs, the group chats, the live tweets, the MET Gala is here, and with it, the annual flood of speculation.

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Describing Lyas as a "fashion narrator" rather than a critic or commentator feels curiously apt in a moment when fashion could use a little more imagination and a little less judgment. Storytelling, after all, is what he does best — with a kind of honesty that carries weight without ever feeling heavy. Unlike many of his peers, Lyas is as much a creator as he is a commentator, sculpting himself into a living performance while quietly building a world behind the scenes with two films already in the works. His energy moves through the industry like a weather system — sometimes wild...

In fashion, there are stylists—and then there are image-makers. As the “C” in KCD and one of the first male editors to define women’s fashion editorial, Paul Cavaco helped shape the modern visual vocabulary of the 1990s, styling everything from Harper’s Bazaar under Liz Tilberis to Madonna’s era-defining Sex book with Steven Meisel and Fabien Baron. Tonne Goodman, whose early days included modeling for Richard Avedon and assisting Diana Vreeland, brought that same instinct for clarity and cultural intuition to her longstanding role as the American fashion editor of Vogue. In a moment when the function—and...

While it’s nearly impossible to open your eyes without encountering some news item signaling uncertainty or disruption, we couldn’t help but find excitement in the inevitability of change—even when that change isn’t exactly what we might have chosen ourselves. With the season’s remaining episodes ahead, it felt like the right moment to invite audience participation by opening the mic to your questions—ones you’d like answered by the creatives who make up our incredible cast.

DM us on Instagram or email us at [email protected]. If you've enjoyed the show, leave us a review...

Once upon a time—not so long ago—it was fashionable to declare that print would only endure if it became a luxury object. That forecast now feels less like speculation and more like prophecy. Today, conversation tends to orbit a different anxiety—the ceaseless deluge of content, the flattening effect of algorithmic consumption, and a hunger not just for beauty but for discernment. In that context, Beyond Noise feels less like a magazine and more like an antidote. Conceived by Sarah Richardson as a biannual publication with the weight of a collectible and the spirit of a cultural artefa...

Some may have balked at the news that a Brit would take the helm of Vogue France, but anyone familiar with Claire Thomson-Jonville knows she has long been fluent in the visual and cultural codes that define the brand. Her Instagram alone reads like a prelude to her appointment—an archive of nuanced Parisian style, shaped by years of aesthetic consistency and editorial clarity. No surprise, then, that Anna Wintour has called her the embodiment of French chic. In this episode, we speak with Claire about her longstanding creative partnership—and rare level of trust—with Alastair McKimm, the growin...

Sarah Harrelson, founder and editor-in-chief of CULTURED magazine, joins us to discuss what it means to engage the culture rather than simply cover it. From her early training as a competitive equestrian to her unexpected pivot from politics to publishing, Harrelson shares how discipline, curiosity, and an eye for the underdog have informed her editorial approach.

We talk about the magazine’s evolution—from its roots in print to its growing influence across art, fashion, and design—and why events were always central to the brand’s DNA. She reflects on building access without elitism, maintaining integrity in a met...

Few figures have shaped fashion’s visual language like Marie-Amélie Sauvé. From her formative years at French Vogue to her lasting collaborations with Nicolas Ghesquière, she has navigated an industry that thrives on change while staying true to her creative convictions.

In this episode, Sauvé reflects on the golden era of editorial freedom, the founding of her own magazine, Mastermind, and why true innovation demands risk. She also shares how yoga sharpens her creative discipline, why she gravitates toward brands in need of reinvention, and what she believes is fashion’s biggest challeng...

Fashion thrives on newness but resists change, celebrates young designers yet makes survival nearly impossible. Olya Kuryshchuk, founder of 1Granary, knows this contradiction well. What began as a student-run blog at Central Saint Martins has become one of the industry’s most unfiltered voices, exposing the gaps between talent, opportunity, and success.

In this episode, Kuryshchuk unpacks why magazine editors are shifting to brand consulting, how ageism shapes studio culture, and why true innovation isn’t about aesthetics but structure, sustainability, and survival. With characteristic candor, she lays bare fashion’s broken pipeline, the illusion of overnight succes...

For years, celebrity stylists were seen as separate from those consulting for brands and shaping fashion imagery. But the red carpet, like concerts and live performances, is its own battleground - one where fashion meets spectacle and commands cultural attention.

Today, with "earned media value" driving the industry, the role of the celebrity stylist has become central, crafting moments that break through the algorithmic noise and recall an era when culture felt more unified. Few understand this better than Jahleel Weaver, whose work with Rihanna, Dua Lipa, and Taylor Russell has positioned him as a defining force...

The inevitability of change is something we can either fear or embrace with insatiable curiosity, and one of them, of course, yields far better results than the other.

Today's guest is a serial entrepreneur and self-described "forever intern" who co-founded Basic.Space, which later acquired Design Miami, where he now serves as chairman. Up next is Design.Space, a project that explores the power of quality curation within an IRL/URL retail experience while bringing together the worlds of design, art, and fashion.

In a culture where the concept of community has been co-opted by...

We often bring up the idea of humanity on this show, exploring the anthropology of it all with the creative industry as our backdrop. When sitting down to speak with the absolutely lovely Francesca Burns about her journey - and all of the people, places, and things that have shaped it - we have the opportunity to go beyond the obvious and touch on the human interest of it all. From her early days with Kylie Minogue, the prolific career she's enjoyed working across titles and brands like i-D, British Vogue, Italian Vogue, Self Service, Beyond Noise, Chanel, Gucci...

Daniel Arnold's work can be seen anywhere one consumes visual content, whether it's on the walls of a gallery, the cover of a magazine, or his own well-engaged Instagram feed. But beyond the humanity captured through his lens—with all its bells and whistles of what makes the individual an interesting subject—is the humanity of Daniel himself and the speed with which he can disarm you with his contagious brand of honesty. Speaking to generally relevant subjects as much as his more personal anecdotes, with the same level of fluency that somehow always sounds informed yet ever questioning, the...

The audacity of achievement is beautifully illustrated in the story of LUAR’s Raul Lopez, whose show has been one of the most anticipated at New York Fashion Week for several seasons and counting. Having discovered the power of stepping away when necessary, his process is one we can all learn from when it comes to fueling our own dreams and rediscovering our sense of purpose. The miseducation of humility can all too easily convince us that playing small does anyone favors—or even that it might make us better people. But Raul? He’s not here to ask for pe...

Under Michael Kliger’s stewardship, Mytheresa has emerged as perhaps the most profitable platform of its kind. Unlike its sprawling competitors, Mytheresa thrives on a philosophy of precision—offering a tightly curated selection shaped by an intimate and ongoing dialogue with its discerning customer base.

Where most brand events aim for maximum visibility and the optics of adjacency to “the right people,” Mytheresa takes a different route. Their gatherings are a masterclass in exclusivity, designed with their fiercely loyal repeat customers in mind—a rarefied echo chamber that isn’t trying to be everything to everyone, but everything t...

While many in the fashion industry were already well-versed in the work of journalist Lauren Sherman, the early days of The Line Sheet sparked rumblings across the dinners and drinks that often define the social musings through which the industry connects. Having captured everyone's attention, she went on to launch her podcast, Fashion People, and has since amassed a dedicated audience.

In this episode, Lauren shares her personal journey while helping us dissect the cultural moment we’re navigating—a world fractured into countless niches yet searching for universal connections.

From the evolving role of jour...