What is style?
You know it when you see it: it’s immediately recognizable, but hard to pin down. It’s irresistible – style pulls you in. If you’re lucky, it flows through you and the things you create.
Today, we’ve launched a new permanent home for art, fashion, design, architecture, luxury and autos. It’s called Style, because that’s the elusive, compelling quality that underlies these creative industries at their best.
But style is more than a matter of appearance.
With his chosen theme of Architecture and Emotion, our inaugural guest editor Daniel Libeskind is commissioning a series of features that explore the relationship between the things we create and they way they make us feel.
“As an architect, it’s my responsibility to make a personal connection – not just with the physical environment, but also … our memories and emotional responses,” he explains.
So for the first of his commissions, Libeskind asked us to take a deeper look at the common bonds between architecture and the arts.
Turner Prize-winning British artist Grayson Perry confesses that his most “moving aesthetic experiences” have been in buildings – a reminder of how creative practices mingle and nourish each other.
And that, in a sense, is also why we’re here.
Whether it’s a building that connects us to a shared history, an artwork that brings new clarity to an emotion, a pair of shoes that puts a spring in our stride, or a product that eliminates an annoying task in an elegant fashion – design touches our life at every turn.
In this way, it has a tremendous power to shape who we are, how we feel, behave and think about the world. In other words, it matters – and often makes for an excellent story.
That’s why we’re in Hong Kong, talking to a traditional Chinese dressmaker about his still-thriving craft; and in Sydney, face-to-face with the ‘Godmother of performance art’ confronting mortality; and out in the Danish countryside, taking a last ride with the man who’s about to part ways with his life’s work: Europe’s finest private collection of pre-war classic cars.
You’ll find us everywhere from Lagos to London, Art Basel to Shanghai Design, from the galleries of the Louvre to the art studios of Brooklyn.
We’re excited. It’s a privilege to produce genuinely international coverage of arts and design. And that’s exactly what we plan to do.