CHARLI XCX

Gabriel Kahane is not an easy one to pin down. The composer and performer has written concert works, song cycles, folk albums, and even a musical, a varied body of work that is held together by a consistent sense of nuance and wit. For his latest project, The Ambassador, a set of songs tied to Los Angeles buildings both iconic and forgotten, the lines blur even further, between fact and fiction, past and present, myth and memory.

Aerosyn-Lex Meštrović, by virtue of his artwork, of his name, of his cultural background, and of his creative reputation, lives in the negative space between where he is now and where he’d like to be. To call Meštrović, who usually goes by “Lex,” an illustrator is reductionist. To call Meštrović an artist or, for that matter, any one thing, is also reductionist. At an enviably quick pace, Meštrović has already worked with Kanye West, Jeff Koons & Kiehls, Kenzo, Nike, Glitch Mob, Diplo, Beck’s Beer, and more. This year, he collaborated with Rodarte, the CFDA, Public School, and exhibited at MoMA for the Armory Arts Week opening gala.

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. Some of them feature actors, musicians, or artists who eventually made it big, […]

In Paris, a fourteen-year-old girl stumbles upon Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs at the Centre Georges Pompidou. The piece—a life-sized photograph of a chair, said chair, and the definition of a chair—served as a revelatory lesson in semantics and art for the teenager who was, at the time, cutting up all of her jeans. Now, fourteen years later, with a master’s from Central Saint Martins and a label of her own, Faustine Steinmetz’s handwoven designs embody that interpretive nature between user and object.

“The image is a kind of cosmic echo for me,” says artist Pieter Vermeersch. It might be a line from Thoreau or the Greek Stoics, and yet, gazing at the transcendent gradients that constitute one of Vermeersch’s paintings, it’s easy to share his poetic sentiment. Vermeersch’s canvases belong to one of the rarest species in the contemporary art world: his large-scale abstractions are driven by a rigorous process that nonetheless manages to yield an arrestingly beautiful end product.

Ever since we began back in 2008, we have worked with photographer David Mushegain every issue to bring you a collection of some of the raddest people from all around the world. David shoots and gets to know the young kids he meets on his travels, through his friends, or just walking down the street, and we are always happy to share his discoveries with you.

We love supporting new talent. Every issue, we try to feature a few commissioned works from some of our favorite artists. We give them free rein of a full-spread; the only limitations are the generous dimensions of the page. For our Fall 2014 issue, New York-based photographer Anthony Cotsifas captured a still life of shivs confiscated from prisoners, curated by Michael Reynolds.

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. 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 Martin Lidell’s all-Rodarte Fall 2009 shoot of an energetic and sexy Abbey Lee Kershaw, styled by Keegan Singh.

The up-and-coming Brooklyn band Bad Girlfriend performed at the inaugural Last Supper in July, held at Dan Martensen and Clare Richardson’s barn in upstate New York, with food by Alejandro Alcocer.