As the fast-paced digital world is swallowing traditional media, the Italian edition of weekly publication Grazia is launching its second collectible print issue on Tuesday.
Named “Future Made in Grazia,” the magazine celebrates and delves deep into future propositions about the arts, fashion, society, technology, architecture and more.
“This issue is dedicated to the future, how it will look and the people we believe will shape it. The world has changed dramatically in the Aughts, with new ways of facing reality surfacing thanks to the digital world,” Italy’s Grazia editor in chief Silvia Grilli told WWD.
The 314-page tome hits newsstand ahead of Milan Fashion Week in a bilingual version and it will be distributed in Italy, as well as across European countries and in New York. Grilli said it will later land on bookshop shelves.
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“Grazia is a weekly magazine, hence it’s extremely fast-paced: it’s the only [Italian] women’s magazine dealing with the 10 best news of the week, so each issue becomes rapidly outdated. We felt the need of a slow-paced product,” Grilli explained.
“It’s clean and limpid, it’s elegant — you keep it because it’s good-looking, but you want to read it because it’s current and because it’s readable despite its complex contents,” Grilli noted. “It’s a coffee-table book with contents.”
Grilli has tapped diverse contributors — many of them from the international scene — to submit their takes on how the future will look like in their respective fields.
The cover was lensed by New York-based photographer Nick DeLieto and fronted by nonbinary model Rain Dove, clad in a polka-dotted Marc Jacobs top with maxi ruches on the collar. Dove made headlines when she leaked the messages received last year by Asia Argento about the latter’s relationship with model Jimmy Bennett, who then accused the Italian director and actress of alleged sexual misconduct. “This is just the newsy angle, but in fact we’re telling Rain’s story, her ‘interior apocalypse’ as many kids, in the U.S. especially, are starting to define themselves as nonbinary,” Grilli explained.
Moschino creative director Jeremy Scott opens up about his “jet-lagged life” in an interview with Italian writer and director Ivan Cotroneo and flanked by portraits by Giampaolo Sgura. “My job doesn’t involve living in the present, but having a kind of ongoing jet lag in the present. That’s what sometimes allows me to see ahead,” Scott says in the interview, recalling how he predicted that then-president candidate Donald Trump would have won the election.
Talking about future prospects, performance artist Marina Abramovic discusses her upcoming projects, which include an exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 2020 called “After Life,” which she says will encompass a journey from life to death as “at 72, I’m starting to think about the final phase [of my life], and what kind of energy I want to leave behind,” as well as her itinerant retrospective exhibition traveling to Poland and to her native country of Serbia. “I’m frightened. My homeland was never especially generous toward me,” Abramovic contends. The artist was photographed for the issue by Fabrizio Ferri, one of the magazine’s longtime go-to photographers.
A dedicated artwork was created by painter Elizabeth Colomba to celebrate what Grilli described as a “long overdue ‘renaissance’ of artists of color, especially women, which now represent a genre with its own following on the international art markets.” The painting portrays Judith, one of the Bible’s female characters.
Also on the literature front, Grazia secured a contribution from Italian writer Marco Malvaldi, who is unveiling an unpublished tale dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci, on the 500th anniversary of his death. Called “The Moon’s Dress,” Malvaldi imagines a fictitious return of Da Vinci in today’s world.
Grilli explained she chose each contribution carefully, finding the best interpreter for each subject. Patricia Urquiola talks about the next frontiers of design, pointing to sustainable objects and bio-engineered new materials; French-American artist Anne de Carbuccia recalls her trip to Yucatan seeking partners in her green battle against plastics pollution; model Ruth Bell talks about queer activism and her relationship with Dior’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri, and Japan-born French writer Amélie Nothomb dedicates an open letter to female readers in which she muses on women’s future condition, noting “more rights will bring in more responsibilities,” which according to Nothomb means “infinite pleasures.”
The first collectible issue was published in September in conjunction with the magazine’s 80th anniversary and was dedicated to Made in Italy. Businesswise, Grilli noted that “both issues have generated big incomes in terms of advertising, and the first issue was great in sales,” adding that both fans of the title and a new audience were driven to the special edition. The issue retails at 5 euros.
The editor in chief plans to pursue the strategy of publishing collectible issues twice a year.