PURPLE #35 THE ISLAND ISSUE

The word Island has always held deep emotional resonance for me. I-land. Is-land. A word that conjures summer family vacations in the ’70s, romantic escapes in the ’80s, and the fantasy to disappear and start over somewhere, far away. Always looking for the Island that could change my life.

That was pre-pandemic, before an entire year of travel bans, global health control, and the mass destruction of social, sexual, and artistic life. We were stuck, feeling miserable, which suddenly reinforced the appeal of the Island as not simply a dream but as a real option. And, by the way, we are all Islands. Wherever we are, our home is an Island. We are increasingly isolated, yet ultra-connected. We are alone while in permanent contact with each other. Solitude is not a romantic condition anymore; it’s a technological state of mind, the existential form of our increasingly digitalized life.

I also wanted to experience firsthand what it means to live and work on an Island, creating this issue mostly from Ibiza with a group of friends and artists. The idea was to experience the Island from the inside, not just as a tourist visiting for a week or two. Not only for my own inspiration, or to escape the stress of cities on permanent high alert, but to approach life from a different perspective.

The Island represents a myth, an allegory, and a visual motif. It can be defined more by the fantasy it arouses than by its geography. It’s an “other space,” a margin, an exile, an elsewhere. Thomas More called his Island “Utopia” (“no-place” in Greek), a fictional micro world offering an ideal model. An Island is not only a possible place for isolation, refuge, pleasure, and escape; it’s also a restart pod, a launchpad to the unknown, a secret laboratory for new experiences and sensations.

While land affirms identity, stability, conventions, control, and power games, the Island represents openness, movement, transition, transgression, anarchy, clandestinity, and new ideas. Urban spaces are no longer the center of attraction. Living in big cities is no longer even necessary, even for fashion designers and photographers. The pandemic has started to create an artistic diaspora, inciting people to leave crowded communities. Living apart is now not only acceptable but recommended and inspiring, even remotely, deep in nature, high in the mountains, or in the middle of an ocean. Creative encounters might occur in a more profound and perhaps truer and more intimate way. The feeling of exile can lead to forms of creativity beyond the restrictions of cultural conformity. The Island cliché is mostly associated with idyllic pleasure, hedonism, and artistic endeavors (crafts more than art). But Islands can also be regenerative places to develop a new form of underground — one that is unregulated and surprising, but also technological and rooted in deep science.

Islands can also be places of resistance, in physical opposition to dominant mainland ideologies. They are places for free thinking, but also for smaller communities of people looking to escape big data, which is permanently taking over our lives and monitoring our decision-making. The appeal of Islands continues to grow as our uniform, disillusioned, and somewhat disoriented technology-dependent societies search for “other spaces,” ones that are disconnected from the ever-expanding Anthropocene.

In this issue, it was important to explore all kinds of new possibilities: from transfeminism to sustainable housing, from wild swimming to archipelagic thought, from utopian topics to architecture, and from audacious fashion to the power of painting — with four fearless women artists (Amanda Wall, Elizabeth Glaessner, Miriam Cahn, and Lisa Yuskavage) whose works transport us.

It was also necessary to travel to real Islands, to shoot there, to meet people, and to capture something from this non-continental perspective: from Hong Kong and its nearby Lamma Island to New Zealand, Ibiza, a Swedish Island, and the Island of Naoshima in Japan. Each one is a powerful microcosm, a miniature world reflecting the planet and the human condition.

As many small Islands are threatened by global warming and rising water levels, it is urgent to protect them in order to save ourselves. And in the face of this changing world, what if we were to imagine the world as a vast, diverse archipelago, and to see what the Island can teach us?

— Olivier Zahm

Purple Fashion

Purple Fashion is a magazine that knows that having personality is about more than just being extroverted. Published in Paris under the eye of its charismatic Editor-In-Chief, Olivier Zahm, each issue is as decadent as his lifestyle is reported to be. Its articles and photo shoots ooze intimacy and somehow get inside places that many would dream to be. Indulgent? Perhaps. Typical? Definitely not. Purple Fashion manages to capture a ‘fashionable’ world in a way that subverts notions of superficiality and replaces it with a focus on personal expression and quality.

Content #32

• we are the world by Emanuele Coccia
• 150 billion pieces of clothing by Maxine Bédat
• selling space by John Jefferson Selve
• panic civilization by Peter Sloterdijk
• the creation of the world or globalization by Jean-Luc Nancy
• harmony korine by Richard Prince
• marie-claire daveu by Olivier Zahm
• art paul mccarthy by Paul Mccarthy
• jean-marc janvovici by Olivier Zahm
• joep van lieshout by Kaitlin Phillips
• living in a bubble by Gianni Oprandi
• martin rees by Hans Ulrich Obrist
• doug aitken by Olivier Zahm
• time zero by Synchrodogs
• olafur eliasson and thomas demand by Maxime Ballesteros
• emma kunz by Hans Ulrich Obrist
• the multiverse miu miu f/w 19/20 by Coco Capitán
• alicja kwade by Donatien Grau
• best of men f/w 19/20 letter to a young scientist  by Ola Rindal
• éliane radigue by Jonathan Hepfer
• gravitational waves chanel cruise 2020 by Dario Catellani
• an interview with judy chicago by Jeffrey Deitch
• bernard stiegler by John Jefferson Selve
• inclusivity now dior cruise 2020 maria grazia chiuri by Olivier Zahm and Suffo Moncloa
• falling to earth by Bibi Cornejo Borthwick
• Purple ARCHIVES: FRED EVERSLEY BRINGS AN OPTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC EDGE TO CALIFORNIA’S LIGHT AND SPACE MOVEMENT⁠ ⁠ by Olivier Zahm
• scott bolton by Savannah Nolan and Olivier Zahm
• alex reed by Olivier Zahm
• after the fire (malibu) bottega veneta f/w 19/20 by Colin Dodgson
• the no kill kitchen manifesto by Carsten Höller
• philippe parreno by Olivier Zahm
• lucie and luke meier by Olivier Zahm
• tomorrowland by Angelo Pennetta
• u  2 m  2 u  2 m by Urs Fischer and Madeline Hollander
• hilma af klint the invisible, the spiritual, the occult by Hans Ulrich Obrist
• ad astra fendi f/w 19/20 by Olivier Zahm
• tom sachs space program: mars, 2012 by Olivier Zahm
• zen garden continuum by Takashi Homma
• an interview with jordan kahn by Olivier Zahm
• marine serre F/W 19/20 by Olivier Zahm
• balenciaga f/w 19/20 astro-monastic  by Juergen Teller
• bomarzo parco dei mostri gucci f/w 19/20 by Camille Vivier
• from chaos to cosmos by Donatien Grau
• christophe galfard by Olivier Zahm
• best of the season f/w 19/20 cosmodrome by Tim Elkaïm
• 186,282 miles per second by Pierre-Ange Carlotti
• eleven years by Tim Blanks
• neuromance prada f/w 19/20 by Chikashi Suzuki
• yusaku maezawa by Emilien Crespo
• chaosmos by Félix Guattari
• the origin of the universe by Étienne Klein
• edito by Olivier Zahm