PHANTOGRAM

In just three years—a startup period that would see most others still searching for steady ground—the young Belgian menswear designer Tim Coppens has managed to establish both a reputation for quality and a signature design vision that seem the end results of years of planning and perfecting. But to hear him tell it, it almost came about all too soon.

It seems like Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman has been in everything we’ve liked this year. From David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to AMC’s The Killing, Kinnaman now stars in the big-budget reboot of RoboCop. We caught up with the breakthrough actor as he was becoming a household name.

Of all the fashion capitals of the world, few offer as coherent a national vision as Stockholm. Long a center of design, the city has of late become a hotspot for the kind of sleek, minimalist sportswear that is instantly evocative of Scandinavia. High-street labels like Cheap Monday and Tiger of Sweden have the same […]

Inclusive is the new exclusive, says Ben Pendole, founder of the travel website AHotelLife.com. He rounds up eight of the most interesting game-changers working in the hospitality industry today for us.

New York-based designer Emily Kroll was born so farsighted that she was prescribed bifocals at one year old. A former shoe designer for both Calvin Klein and Alexander Wang, and currently a consultant for Michael Kors, she recently embarked on a personal project whose origins—in a rare but welcome occurrence for any creative professional—were visualized in her sleep. “In the dream I was blowing up small details of photographs I had taken to make large-scale abstract compositions. They looked like huge magnified pixels. They were beautiful and reminded me of a hard-edged version of the way I see without my bifocals,” she explains. Kroll chose quilting as the medium to bring her color blocks to life.

Our ongoing series of original short fiction continues with “The Sport of Running,” Mika Seifert’s haunting tale of an exercise epidemic that takes a dark turn.

There was a strong strand of elegance in the air in Paris during the recent Fall 2014 men’s shows, with a panoply of innovative takes on classic suiting and long overcoats with a clean, grown-up air. The Last Magazine fashion director Alastair McKimm’s top ten looks demonstrate the range of the city’s talents, from classic pinstripes to vibrant shine and shimmer.

In an era all but defined by æstheticism and consumerism, standing out as a new designer can be near-impossible. “Causesumerism”—products that you feel good about buying because proceeds are donated to a cause—is an increasingly popular route. Skeptics may criticize a company’s alliance with a foundation as simply a marketing tool, but whatever the motive, millions of people—whether through Lauren Bush’s FEED project or TOMS’ “One for One” mission—benefit from the sale of these goods. And what’s wrong with that?

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 2013 issue, New York-based Marlo Pascual contributed one of her iconic, stark photograph […]