London Design Festival: A Review
If Milan won’t say it, London will.
At London Design Festival 2026, design wasn't about spectacle — it was about materials, limitations, and imagining better futures. Across Brompton Design District, Material Matters, Hackney Downs Studios, and the V&A, a new generation of designers showed how sustainability and craft can reshape the objects we live with.
The Life He Almost Walked Away From
Reed Henry on the audition he almost skipped, finding a home at the Joffrey Ballet, and bringing ballet to a new generation through Étoile.
Sea, Pop & Sun: The Art of the Riviera
Barefoot through Pop Art.
A ferry ride away from the crowds of the Côte d'Azur, Porquerolles hides one of the Riviera's most extraordinary cultural spaces. At Fondation Villa Carmignac, Sea, Pop & Sun pairs Warhol, Hockney, Lichtenstein and Haring with the soundtrack of the '60s and '70s — and asks why Pop Art feels even more relevant in the age of influencers and AI.
"You Have to Say No to Get a Yes"
Luisa Pra Levis quit her corporate job to go all in on photography — and she's not looking back. In this conversation, we talk about growing up surrounded by creativity while still choosing the "safe path" first, what it really means to build a career as a photographer, and why learning to say no might be the most important skill in a freelance career. From shoots in Central Park to a rushed thirty-minute session on a Portuguese beach, this is a raw look at what it takes to build a life around what you burn for.
In Conversation With Margherita Bachini: From Her Grandmother's Sewing Machine to Her Own Brand
Margherita Bachini grew up watching her grandmother sew. For years, she kept her dream of starting a brand private, afraid of what it might mean to finally chase it — until one sleepless night with the same machine, and one comment from a friend, pushed her to launch Mila Studio.
An Hour From the Sky
An hour from the sky, and a lifetime from it too. Fiamma Nitti visited La Santé prison in Paris. “I went in with a thesis to write. I came out with something harder to name.” A story about banlieues, broken systems, and the men who taught her what freedom actually means.
Niki De Saint Phalle: A radical artist who shot at her own canvases and started a rebellion of joy.
She survived a childhood that should have silenced her — and answered with a rifle, a paintbrush, and eventually, a garden. In our second Inspiration Issue, Alice Semenenko traces how Niki de Saint Phalle turned pain into radical joy, and became the artist the world wasn't ready for yet.
The Return of Individual Craftsmanship
Our generation grew up with fast everything. Now, quietly, we are choosing the opposite. In our latest editorial, we explore the return of craft among twenty-somethings — and why a handmade, bespoke headboard might be one of the most honest things you can buy right now. Meet BOHÉ, the Copenhagen-based brand building pieces for rooms you actually want to wake up in.
The Transcendence into a Rothko Canvas
Gaya Francescon on the Mark Rothko exhibition in Florence — Palazzo Strozzi, Museo di San Marco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana — and the philosophy of the Sublime in abstract art. A DEPLÜME essay on colour, transcendence, and Renaissance frescoes in dialogue with Rothko's canvases.
Paulin, Paulin, Paulin –The New Playground for Adults
There's a reason playgrounds feel like magic, and it has everything to do with design. As we grow up, we trade sandboxes for sofas and somehow lose that instinct to interact, to play, to create connections through the objects around us. But Pierre Paulin never got that memo. His furniture does what the best playground equipment always did: it pulls people together. Alice Semenenko sits with Alice Paulin to find out why the most radical thing a chair can do is make you feel like a kid again.
THE INSPIRATION ISSUE - HILMA AF KLINT
She painted for a future that was not ready. Now the future is finally looking.
A woman who does not always appear in the manuals. A woman who painted abstraction before many of its so-called fathers. A woman who created for a future that was not ready to understand her yet.
The unknown mother of modern abstraction: Hilma af Klint.
REHEARSED: The Quiet Theatre of the Self
There is something quietly theatrical about the way we move through the world.
A gesture, a pose, a carefully chosen image, the version of ourselves we decide to present before entering a room (or before posting online). Performance has never belonged only to the stage. It is something inherently human, present in the way we dress, speak, look, behave, and construct meaning around who we are. Today, however, the rise of social media and the culture of constant visibility have made these everyday performances feel more present than ever.
Life, Measured in Depth: A Conversation with Lauren Kolodin.
Some books are written. Others are poured out. Lauren Kolodin's how to live; written by a girl who's going to die is the second kind. She has already lost someone who cannot be replaced. And somewhere in the aftermath of that, she sat down, shampoo still in her hair, and started writing. What came out was a raw and honest book: part diary, part guide.
We spoke to Lauren about grief, about writing without permission, and about what it means to measure a life not in length or height — but in depth.
Everything Intentional: Mona Lou on What Gives Her Art Its Substance
At 22, Mona Lou launched her new single “i know” the way you do something when you actually mean it: a cinema, a room full of people, scratch-art cards made on a plane to Dakar, and a music video built entirely by hand. We sat with her to talk about making something that is fully yours — and why, in a world that keeps offering shortcuts, she wasn't interested in taking them.
Milan Design Week Review: Designers or Party Planners?
Bread chairs. Cigarette tables. Furniture wearing piercings.
"I understand the world is chaotic these days, so I am not surprised design is signalling us to have a break." Our product & furniture design writer Alice Semenenko was on the ground in Milan — and what she found says a lot about where our generation is right now. Food, smoking, jewellery, sustainable materials, and the quiet return of social furniture: here's what stuck with her, and what we think you need to be paying attention to.
Still on the way to Ithaca
Why your twenties are less about arriving and more about learning how to travel
The prison of an abundance of choice
It was lunchtime. I sat at the table and started looking for some sort of entertainment. I began scrolling through an abundance of choice — from YouTube, to Netflix, Substack and Instagram or TikTok — it felt as though the options were infinite, and in fact they were. In the blink of a scroll, the time I had carved out for lunch was gone, and the only media consumed were the first three lines of a random article.
The chase of gold. The chase of the better option.
Designing Meaning
Lodovica Gay on bespoke jewellery, intuition, and the story behind the Keshi Ring
What the Strelitzia keeps
A personal reflection on how flowers come to hold meaning — not through tradition alone, but through memory, intention, and the honesty of those who give them.
What lights your fire?
A personal reflection on Christian Dior and the inspiration that changed everything.