The Eye Read online

  While stepping away from daily operations of Dazed & Confused—although he is still Dazed Media’s editorial director—Hack says letting go has been really important. “I set the goals, and make sure that people who fit the Dazed vision are being hired,” he says, “but it’s those people driving the stories. It has to be young, it has to be close to the edge, and it has to be authentic.”

  Hack considers the seemingly endless argument of print versus digital almost irrelevant. “For me, it’s about people. It’s people who make the media, who are telling stories. The medium influences the story, but we know that.” He elaborates, “In the early days of digital, publishers cared more about aggregation—the mass- industrialization of storytelling—and here, we’re focused on the stories.”

  Blockchain is used to distribute transactions across multiple computers so records can’t be altered retroactively. In 2018, the startup Po.et announced plans to put publishing permissions on Blockchain and build an entirely new marketplace. Like Hack, the company has a vision to transform publishing so authors and creatives can monetize their content in the future.

  More telling, Hack says he banned the word “content” altogether. “We’re interested in the architecture of digital, understanding the system in order to hack it and produce better alternatives,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what form it takes—video, social, a cover feature—we are interested in stories that will inspire our audience.”

  “Magazines can’t be about people sitting at desks in offices,” he says, reflecting on the practical realities of publishing. “Some of that is important due to the reality of production, but creative people need to be in creative spaces, and out in the world with their eyes open.”

  For Hack, the future of publishing is “very much about space, opening it up for broadcasting, experimenting and creating things that can’t be predicted.” As such, he thinks the future of the industry might even include artificial intelligence (AI) and Blockchain.† “AI not because it will take people’s jobs, but because of how it will augment and enhance their roles,” he explains, “and Blockchain may provide the solution for more efficiency and accountability around the monetization of stories.”

  But at the end of the day, Hack says the future of Dazed Media and beyond is about keeping it real. “The more you grow, you stop keeping it real,” he says, “and I think one of the things that has kept us innovative, exciting and agenda-setting is that we’ve stayed independent.” The industry may be dazed with so many uncertainties, but Hack certainly isn’t confused. “We’ve stayed honest, we haven’t been sucked up by corporate agenda and we’ve still got the ‘This is not a magazine’ attitude that we had when we started.” *

  Magazines can’t be about people sitting at desks.

  It has to be young, it has to be close to the edge, and it has to be authentic.

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  “Fashion is a $2.4 trillion industry,” Amed told GQ in 2017. “What $2.4 trillion industry would be happy with sycophantic fluffy reportage?”

  Imran Amed

  THE Business of Fashion

  The Business of Fashion founder and editor in chief Imran Amed is an early riser. This tendency to wake up before dawn can be traced back to his childhood. “When I was growing up, I had a really insatiable appetite for reading and learning,” he explains. If he had a test the following day, Amed (a self-described “big old nerd”) would set his alarm for 4 a.m. to study. “No one forced me to do that,” he clarifies. “I always had this thing driven into me from a very young age about excellence and just doing the best that I could.”

  Now, instead of waking up for the sake of learning, the young entrepreneur starts each day with a moment to himself; he meditates. “I’m never the best version of myself when I don’t have that time in the morning to reflect,” he admits. Meditation, he says, has a long tradition on the Indian subcontinent that his family hails from, and his grandfather also used to meditate daily. “What I learned from my meditation, which is based in Buddhist philosophy, is that you should maintain equanimity, regardless of what’s going on,” he reveals. “If bad stuff happens, don’t react to it or reject it; just accept it for what it is, and it will pass.” He applies the same lesson to successes: “Celebrate them, but don’t let them define you,” he advises.

  Meditation also played a significant role in the creation of his multiplatform company The Business of Fashion (as such, it has also be­come a daily practice for a group of his employees). Amed hasn’t always been an industry insider—he studied management consulting and went on to work for the firm McKinsey & Company, until at 29, he realized that he missed the “mix of left-and right-brain work” that he thrives on. He left for a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in South Africa (“You couldn’t read, write, speak or make eye contact with anyone”), a break that proved life altering.

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  While attending university in Montreal, Amed worked

  at the Gap on weekends, an experience that he says gave him insight into retail and consumer behavior.

  It took that pivotal moment, that time to pause and reflect, to really get to know what I wanted.

  “It took that pivotal moment, that time to pause and reflect, to really get to know what I wanted,” he says. The London-based Canadian explored creative industries from film to music but ultimately landed on fashion. A friend of his, who at the time worked for the British Fashion Council, snuck him into shows and he “just felt really drawn to it.”

  The inclination wasn’t altogether new. As a child, Amed watched the Canadian television show Fashion File “religiously.” As a 10-year-old, he was enraptured by the international stories shared by the show’s host, Tim Blanks (now The Business of Fashion's editor-at-large). “It made me see that fashion was more than clothes, more than fashion shows,” Amed recalls. “There were all of these interesting people who made this world tick.”

  It is those people who continue to drive Amed today. “When you’re in the position as a journalist or writer, you get to sit down and interview incredible people and ask them basically whatever you want,” he says. “Every day, I get to meet people like that and learn from them. Maybe it’s not even learning a concrete skill; it’s learning what drives them, how they live their lives, where they get their ideas or how they built their businesses.” Though it’s been over a decade since he started the company, Amed’s love for his job remains palpable.

  “With no background in fashion or media or technology, I’m now running a fashion, media and technology business. Every day over the past 10 years or so has been a very steep and very exciting learning curve for me,” he explains. After running through the various skills he’s acquired and experts he’s been able to work alongside, he adds, “All of this is new to me, and I love that. There are so many different facets to what I do, so it’s never boring.” Today, Amed has a long list of accomplishments—he has been named to Fast Company’s annual list of the Most Creative People in Business, received CFDA’s Media Award in honor of Eugenia Sheppard and was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire for his service to the fashion industry, to name a few. Yet Amed is humble and very aware of his role. “My job is being the leader and helping to provide direction, inspiration and guidance for a growing group of people,” he says. “That takes energy, and you have to find the energy from within yourself to do that every day. I’m really grateful for this opportunity that I have, and I want to make the best of it.” *

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  Borsche says he never pitches blindly for a project, insisting people should be 100 percent aware of who they want to work with.

  Mirko Borsche

  Bureau Mirko Borsche

  In the world of graphic design, many who’ve reached a level of Mirko Borsche’s success choose to characterize their tastes, and indeed their work, as either implicitly superior and sophisticated or irreverently, brazenly kitsch—design guru versus desi
gn anarchist.

  Mirko Borsche, a German designer whose clients include Rimowa, Givenchy, Balenciaga and Audi, is perhaps then not who you would expect to have self-proclaimed “borderline” taste. It also tends to surprise when he describes his work as “normal,” while helping once- dusty institutions, such as the Bavarian State Opera, refresh their public image in order to attract new, younger audiences.

  It was Borsche’s wife who told him he was “always very, very close to bad taste,” but he says, “it’s always balanced a bit to the right side of good taste.” His work is refined enough to create a sense of trust amongst design aficionados, with just the right dash of the idiosyncratic and offbeat to make it feel forward thinking. The result is both timeless and very current. Maybe that is normal after all.

  Borsche agrees it’s a good place to be, but not an easy one. “I feel like that guy, walking between two skyscrapers on a rope,” he says, referring to high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who famously and playfully teetered his way between New York City’s World Trade Center towers in 1974. It’s no surprise that the designer approaches daunting tasks with just as much lighthearted pleasure.

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  Speaking to magCulture Journal, Borsche says the one mistake he made with a weekly periodical was attempting different typefaces every issue. Creating 52 readable options was way too ambitious.

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  For the Bavarian State Opera, Borsche used Scotch Modern, a revival of a typeface first published in 1873 and refined by Nick Shinn in 2008.

  Some of Borsche’s most notable work is his editorial design for ZEITmagazin, a supplement to the weekly Hamburg-based newspaper Die Zeit. It was also one of his biggest challenges: the marathon project was no one-off for his studio, Bureau Mirko Borsche, but a test of creative endurance. That it has remained a benchmark, week after week, since editor Giovanni di Lorenzo first handed him the project in 2007 is no small feat. Borsche acknowledges the challenge, but one gets the impression that, way up there in the heights of his industry, he still finds joy in it. “I love sitting on a plane, seeing someone with a magazine I know I’ve designed,” he says.

  It’s not an unfamiliar sentiment for someone who entered design through graffiti. Borsche remembers the thrill of being a passive observer to his audience. He first picked up spray paint in the late 1980s, tackling some Deutsche Bahn trains in his hometown of Munich, a subversive pastime he eventually converted into a graphic design education at the University of Kingston in London.

  Since 2007, after stints in advertising and an ill-fated attempt to move in-house as art director for a former client, he started his own studio. Borsche continues to treat it much like a team of graffiti artists: It has to be collaborative, each member working on his or her part with a unified vision (Borsche’s) in mind. Perhaps as a result, he mostly hires staff after they’ve completed an internship at the studio; it takes more than a portfolio to prove that you’re a good fit. After all, the team is intimate. At the start, for example, Borsche’s home doubled as the office, and the staff spent its days all sitting together around one big, rectangular table in the kitchen.

  I feel like that guy, walking between two skyscrapers on a rope.

  Collaboration doesn’t stop at the front door, either: it reaches into the clients’ boardrooms. “Sometimes they love it, sometimes they’re unsure, but most of the time they hate it,” he says of the big reveal, a creative agency go-to that Borsche avoids. Instead of keeping final designs a surprise, Borsche makes sure that clients are involved from day one. The approach allows them to be an intimate part of the process, he says. Borsche often forthrightly explains or shows clients what he hopes to do in the first meeting. “We are not surprising our clients,” he explains. “We’re surprising their clients.”

  And surprise they do. The studio’s work for the Bavarian State Opera has been one of its biggest success stories. They’ve produced posters, seasonal guides, program books and flags that have bucked tradition—pairing a 19th-century typeface with dis­tinctly unstuffy imagery, such as cartoonish illustrations by Craig & Karl or Stefan Glerum. Borsche’s inspiration was the work of German-born graphic design legend Pierre Mendell, who had been the in-house designer for Die Neue Sammlung, Munich’s international museum for applied art, since 1980. Mendell’s style was defiantly pared back, colorful and modern. Borsche applied this thinking and used it to recontextualize a 350-year-old institution.

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  In addition to ZEITmagazin, Borsche’s studio is responsible for the art direction of Spike, a contemporary art magazine founded by Rita Vitorelli.

  One of Borsche’s favorite books is Nick Waplington’s 1991 Living Room, a compilation of documentary photos taken over years at Broxtowe Estate in Nottingham, UK.

  Today, the posters are collected by fans, and the program books (with no branding on their covers) sit on bookshelves, not in wastebaskets. Borsche has managed to give the Opera not only a fresh edge but also gravitas: It lives on in print now, in people’s homes.

  For Borsche, it’s all in the story. Infusing design with a rich meaning not only justifies an agency’s work but also gives tools to its client to defend it. It may look timeless, but if nobody understands its origin or purpose, he says, few are going to defend it, and the mark won’t last.

  Bureau Mirko Borsche never takes too heavy a hand. Though not exactly minimalist, Borsche never wants his design to overpower. Projects, like a new word mark for Rimowa, are less elaborate, consisting of a very simple bespoke typeface. “My mom asked me why it took three months,” the designer says. “She exclaimed, ‘I could do that in an hour!’” He often looks to architecture, where ornamentation must cede to function—present, visible, at times playful, but in service to purpose.

  Borsche’s home is filled with hundreds of books on architecture, photography† and art, but he rarely looks to graphic design; when he does, it’s with an attempt to access a particular thought process. One exception is an assortment of old leather-bound books. “I like the fonts, or to see how the text was treated,” he says. A well-appointed bookshelf is important, he continues, and always has been—it’s the first thing he notices in a stranger’s home, and he doesn’t think he’s alone in such observation.

  Just as crucial for Borsche is Munich’s picturesque Bavarian setting. He hikes in the surrounding mountains as a way to reset, shedding the claustrophobia of city life (and lots of air travel). As an added bonus: “You don’t see one cool person there,” he says.*

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  It is often assumed that Borsche is based in Berlin, but the designer is proudly located in Munich. He enjoys his hometown’s proximity to nature and in the summer often takes lunch breaks at the Isar River.

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  “Punk rock,” says Abu- Nimah, “changed my life.” Alongside Dieter Rams, Noam Chomsky and Irving Penn, she cites The Sex Pistols as a major influence.

  Ruba Abu-Nimah

  Revlon

  Elle

  Shiseido

  bobbi brown cosmetics

  Ruba Abu-Nimah’s influence is visible well beyond the realm of publishing. In the world of makeup, she has served as the creative director for Bobbi Brown and Shiseido and worked with the likes of Pat McGrath, Smashbox Cosmetics and now Revlon (she calls the latter an “interesting challenge” having “never worked on a mass brand before”). An influential force in branding,she has collaborated with fashion houses from Calvin Klein to Marc Jacobs, Phillip Lim to Tiffany and Co. Nike also tapped her, in 2017, to develop five shoe designs (one she based on the US Postal Service’s 1984 “LOVE” stamp and another was inspired by Bauhaus minimalism).

  Despite all of her accomplishments, “If I had the choice,” she says, “I would only ever design books, like one of my heroes, Irma Boom.” After graduating from Parsons School of Design in the late ’80s, Abu-Nimah launched her career with a stint at ELLE in Paris. Nearly three decades later,
in May 2017, she returned to the women’s magazine, this time in New York and as its creative director. The appointment made waves—she was the first woman to be given the title—but was short lived. Early the following year, she quietly exited in the midst of a major leadership change (editor Robbie Myers left and was succeeded by Nina Garcia, Project Runway judge and former creative director of Marie Claire). Yet Abu-Nimah seems, for the most part, unfazed. “Every project I have ever taken on has been a learning experience,” she explains. Changes are inevitable, but her routine stays the same: She starts her day with a single cup of coffee, reads the news and checks up on her social media accounts. “The rest of the day is a toss-up,” she says. “You never know where it will go.” Her process varies, as she works across a range of industries, but one thing is consistent: She always asks a lot of questions.