At Istituto Marangoni Firenze, Arts Curating students spend long hours on books. We often study and analyse the graphic and technical choices that make a good publication. With this in mind, you can imagine our eagerness to visit Testo, a vast book fair that took over Florence last weekend. by Isabella Chevasco Champsaur and Asia […]

What is a fashion show? It is an event, a showcase, a neurosis, alienation. It is collective exaltation, mania, and obsession. It is a phobia, or it is simply nothing. One thing is sure: it reflects our being. Like Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a fashion show tells about an inner search, a journey, an enterprise: […]

A real champion manages to anticipate the competition. It is someone who brings innovation, one who has extra gear, determination, and full control of the whole car – a vehicle driven by the mind, the imagination, and out-of-the-box thinking.Every second-year student in Fashion Styling and Creative Direction at Istituto Marangoni Firenze ran their creative vehicle […]

Florentine fashion designer Stefano Chiassai keeps his memories in a place frozen in time. In a building located in San Giovanni Valdarno, near Florence, TheCube Archive mirrors Chiassai’s life. It houses a selection of about 15,000 items dating back to the designer’s personal and professional archive. Each item narrates faces, places and atmospheres that shaped […]

How can one unite both visual and literary narratives? American artist Ed Ruscha has been a mastermind at encapsulating his visual aesthetics by creating visual poetry through his signature addition of written words to the painted landscapes of Los Angeles and Southern California. His publication They Call Her Styrene (Phaidon, 2000) exemplifies Ruscha’s interest in […]

Jonathan Monk’s One Hundred Meals Between Rome and Berlin (Humboldt Books, Milan 2016) is the perfect example of how an artist’s publication found a synergy with a digital counterpart, just like so many others to come. With this artist book, the British artist playfully recreates works by different artists across media, such as photographs, drawings, […]

Fashion victims are often criticized for the value they place on the looks or style of other people or even themselves. They are considered shallow, only because they pay great attention to appearance. “Never judge a book by its cover”, they reproach. But speaking of books, what happens when the writers themselves question the way […]

Five years after the release of The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, the same authors are releasing a much-needed sequel about how our brains are being affected by the current digital age. With The Extreme Self: The Age of You (Walther und Franz König, 2021), Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans […]

During our continued consumption of a cornucopia of images, our senses might reach a climax of over-saturation. We no longer process the content we are surrounded by, but rather just unconsciously react to it. In his latest essay The Imaginary Museum (TLS, 2020), Ben Eastham has bestowed the reader with an alternative vantage point regarding […]