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When cult fashion designer and avant-garde guru Yohji Yamamoto first announced he would be collaborating on a line with Adidas, there were undoubtedly some raised eyebrows. Now, ten years later, Y-3 is the poster brand for the intersection between fashion and sportswear, a crossover that has found its way onto many of our favorite runways over the last several seasons. To celebrate this milestone, Y-3 has released 10 Years of Y-3: The Book, which archives pivotal moments in the brand’s history while offering a voyeuristic look into the seemingly unlikely collaboration’s DNA.

It was Ezra Pound who once said something to the effect that poetry loses its way when it gets too far from music, and music loses its way when it gets too far from dance.1 Music is not something to which one dances, Pound would have us believe; one dances and the gesture necessitates music. First comes the body, the physicality of life, and from that everything else follows in good order: music, poetry.

Postmortem biographies are often received with a certain set of weighty expectations, and Alexander McQueen: Working Process, published last month by Damiani, naturally arrives with its own. The collection of photographs follows the designer through the six months preceding his Fall 2008 ready-to-wear collection, his last before his tragically premature passing, and, as such, brushes closely against the final months of his life.

Fortunately, Working Process isn’t didactic, neither in image nor in text. Instead, it bears the mood of eulogy—a celebratory, albeit straightforward, look at McQueen’s creative process, and not a lofty musing on how the show and his passing nearly intersect. The photographs are those of Nick Waplington, a British artist personally selected by McQueen, who both commissioned and edited the final product.

We’re not that far away from the imagined reality of Spike Jonze’s new film Her, which tells the story of a lonely man falling in love with his operating system. The Los Angeles of this not-so-distant future is safe and sunny, a gentle new world where everything is designed to make life easier and more comfortable, from a state-of-the-art public transportation system to wearable computers that browse the web and deliver email aurally via a tiny earpiece way sleeker than Google Glass. People know to eat their fruits and juice their vegetables, they work in cheerfully-colored spaces that look like playgrounds, and their gadgets help them organize their lives. KK Barrett’s production design, Casey Storm’s costumes, and Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography combine in a brilliantly-rendered future that looks good and should feel good (Jonze has mentioned that the film’s color palette was inspired by Jamba Juice), but where a sense of melancholy seeps through every pore. Stunning shots of futuristic skyscrapers, bathed in the glow of dusk or shimmering at night, capture the excitement of the city’s social swirl, while hinting at the lonely lives tucked behind the blinking lights.

Conor McPherson is a wizard, but you wouldn’t know it. There is little flash in the playwright’s works, only the occasional bang—even pivotal moments are for the most part served up at room temperature in a way that can sometimes leave you feeling unsatisfied but that never, never rings as false. More keenly aware than most of the banality of both our hurts and our joys, McPherson is not one for setting off fireworks, but with surprisingly little material, he can build a fire you will watch for hours.

Heston Blumenthal, best known as one of Britain’s most decorated chefs and true culinary visionaries, has just released his latest book, Historic Heston. To call it a cookbook wouldn’t be fair, for Blumenthal goes far beyond any standard collection of recipes and dives deep into the murky waters of British cuisine.

The self-taught chef opened his first restaurant, The Fat Duck, in Berkshire, England, in 1995 and despite his lack of culinary training, the restaurant was awarded its first Michelin star after four short years. Since then, Blumenthal has been impressing critics with his uninhibited approach to cooking and his experiments with molecular gastronomy. The restaurant has topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for nine years, and currently holds three Michelin stars.

Fares Fares has come a long way since he and his younger brother Josef started their careers, as actor and director respectively, making Swedish comedies in the early 2000s. Their beloved 2003 film Kopps drew its humor from the painstaking lack of action for the Swedish police and offers a compelling juxtaposition to the dramatic heights of Fares’ most recent appearance, hunting down Osama bin Laden with SEAL Team Six in the Academy Award-winning blockbuster Zero Dark Thirty.

For his first piece as a contributing member of Brooklyn’s The Still House Group, Dylan Lynch proposed covering an entire bathroom in duct tape, including the inside of the toilet, without impairing the functionality of the space. Still House, an “emerging arts organization” that nurtures the career of young artists, many of whom chose not to attend art school, proved to be an excellent incubator for Lynch’s bold but untested ideas.

On most shoots, makeup artists and hairstylists work to add to the vision of the photographer or the creative director. Here at The Last Magazine, we’ve always tried to look at things a little differently, so we wanted to give hairstylist Anthony Turner the chance to realize his own personal creative idea. The result is […]