Purple Magazine
— F/W 2013 issue 20

Edito

It isn’t by design that this issue has so many subjects about or made in Los Angeles — skaters on Venice Beach, a modernist house by John Lautner, Jeffrey Deitch’s vision of the city’s art scene, portraits of Johnny Hallyday in downtown LA, a graphic interpretation of its architecture by Nicolas Alan Cope… In less than a century, LA has grown from an outpost of 15,000 people to a megalopolis of 16 million, while hanging on to its connection to the natural world around it — the sea, the desert, the mountains, and the enveloping blue sky. LA is Western culture’s final frontier, capital of the Pacific Rim, and the mecca of American film, where history is fictionalized for popular audiences. The city has even been instrumental in creating a style of suburban architecture — in the ’60s, when Richard Neutra transformed Bauhaus sensibilities into West Coast domesticity. LA’s art world was also born in that same decade, with Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari, and later grew up in the perverted pop art of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy.

Yet only recently has LA’s reputation in art begun to compete with New York’s. Now, LA is an art capital as well as a film capital. Why now? What’s the attraction? Is it the climate and the beach? The casual lifestyle? Does the threat of seismic disaster from the San Andreas geologic fault contribute to its energy? Are dreams and hopes LA’s psychic defense against calamity? Or does LA’s creative force derive from its geographic placement at the frontier of history — our history?

Naturally, Purple is instinctively attracted to any shifts and changes on the cultural map.

— OLIVIER ZAHM

[Table of contents]

F/W 2013 issue 20

Table of contents

purple EDITO

purple NEWS

purple BEST OF THE SEASON

purple INTERVIEW

purple FASHION WOMEN

purple FASHION MEN

purple DOCUMENT

purple BEAUTY

purple TRAVEL

purple SEX

purple PHILO

purple NIGHT

purple STORY

purple VISUAL ESSAY

© Purple Institute

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