An exclusive conversation between the decadent Balmain designer and The Last Magazine’s Magnus Berger about his Eighties inspirations, his fascination with Fabergè eggs, and his love of Rihanna.

Minimalist painter-turned-amplifier designer Don Garber will not only blow you away with the sonic experience of his brand, Fi, but his amps are sure to please the eye as well.

It was in college that Don Garber heard a homemade audio system that changed everything for him. It was quite simple, he says. “It sounded like real music.”

We’ve been around awhile 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 to discover one of our favorite stories from our archive every Friday. 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 Magnus Berger’s personal Fall 2009 profile of hotelier Nicolas Malleville, owner of the Coqui Coqui chain of hotels in Mexico. If you haven’t planned your summer getaway yet, this might just inspire you.

Although Adam Marnie started as a painter, “because that’s what I thought art had to be,” he basically gave up on the medium when he enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design and started to explore sculpture and collage work. After receiving a BFA (he later earned his MFA at Bard in 2011), Marnie moved to New York and started working with artists and galleries as an assistant and art handler. This transition exposed him to new materials and the encasing of objects, something that becomes evident in his crate-like installation pieces and his use of the gallery wall as a canvas or sculptural element. When speaking about his recent Derek Eller Gallery installation, Marnie is excited about the fact that it was site-specific and had to be experienced and will never be experienced in the same way ever again.

Night after night for over a year starting in 2009, the curators Workhorse and PAC literally took street art underground by inviting the world’s leading street artists into an abandoned New York City subway station to create original artwork. The space had been abandoned for eighty years and, as PAC notes, they knew no one […]

In this new, more technologically democratic era, we all have access to pretty much the same tools. The mystery of photography has almost completely vanished and it has come back to composition and capturing moments. It was only a matter of time before the hugely popular Hipstamatic app—which allows users to choose from a selection of lenses and films to create vintage-style photos with warmth and imperfect charm—would start collaborating with star photographers. Though Photoshop has long helped many professionals and amateurs alike to mimic Herb Ritts, Guy Bourdin, and other fashion photo legends, we can now do it all from a phone. Whether you use it for work or for fun, it’s definitely an interesting development. Who wouldn’t want their party pictures to have the feeling of Testino or maybe McGinley, depending on your mood. English fashion and celebrity photographer Ben Watts recently worked with Hipstamatic on a custom lens and film that will definitely add an extra layer of fun to your vacation snaps.

If you happen to be in Amsterdam this fall make sure to look into Kahmann Gallery, featuring works by long-time Last Magazine collaborator Martien Mulder, who spent years exploring the sensitivities of color and finally comes full-circle in her exhibition “From Blue to Blue.”

The first time I saw an Irving Penn photograph I had no idea who’s picture I was looking at. It was an image of a man’s hand, and I knew right away the hand belonged to Miles Davis. How, I have no idea: I just knew. It made me very curious as to how it […]

On October 7th-10th, the American Ballet Theater will premiere three new performances by three choreographers—Aszure Barton, Alexei Ratmansky and Benjamin Millepied—at The Avery Fischer Hall at Lincoln Center. Millepied’s offering, titled “Everything Doesn’t Happen At Once,” is a large ensemble piece featuring Isabella Boylston and Marcelo Gomes, with music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang […]

Skweee music, a genre of mid tempo electronic funk music originating from Scandinavia, might be the perfect counterpoint to the cough syrup-infused hip hop beats from the dirty South. According to Flogsta Danshall label founder Franz Carlqvist, the name came out of (original Skweee DJ) Daniel Savio’s mouth and ended up in an article, since […]