Egypt is today a land at once both very old and very new. It is hard to imagine how a country that overflows with millennia-old temples and obelisks and sphinxes can be suffering birthing pains, but it has been only two short years since the day everyone refers to as simply “January 25.” There are few countries where people speak regularly of a time “before the revolution” with such poignancy, a time that is still fresh in many Egyptians’ minds, a time that many now recall with a mix of nostalgia and relief as they stumble forward, hoping to reach a new democratic equilibrium that appears tantalizingly close yet remains troublingly distant.
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Stephen Jay Gould once wrote that “the human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world.” This is the spirit that influences the work of Jürgen Bergbauer, a German-born, RISD-educated photographer whose images highlight the tense harmonies that exist between man and his natural surroundings. “That’s my understanding of photography,” Bergbauer says. “It’s about registering the visual world and endowing it with order and meaning. It’s a strong human desire.”
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Randa Saome and Natalia Altewai dreamed big and bold, and the silhouettes of their designs are no different. The Swedish friends are the visionaries behind Scandinavian fashion company ALTEWAISAOME, a brand that combines “Scandinavian simplicity and international high fashion,” according to the pair.
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Two Gothic spires morphed in perfect symmetry, melding into each other in twisting torsion, with one pointing upward and the other down. Wim Delvoye’s Suppo (scale model 1:2) hangs in graceful stillness—and like the late Gothic architecture it recalls, it is serenely imposing yet has an ethereal quality. You can see through its crenellated spires, pointed arches, and glassless rosaries, but its scale exceeds you. Most interestingly, the work holds any number of contradictions in surreal suspension: stainless steel against bending plasticity, modern design production versus Medieval tradition, Futurist and Gothic æsthetics.
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We’ve been around for a while now, and we know a lot of our readers might not have had the opportunity to experience our earlier issues. So we wanted to give you the chance on the first Friday of each month to discover one of our favorite stories from our archive. Some of them feature actors, musicians, or artists who eventually made it big, talents we are proud to have tapped early in their careers. Some have brilliant writing, and some have beautiful photography. Some have both. But all of them are so great we thought they deserved a second chance. This week we present Maciek Kobielski’s sexy Spring 2009 editorial starring the then-budding Eniko Mihalik dressed in Alber Elbaz’s vibrant collection for Lanvin.
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