Summer 2024 Editor's Letter

Imagine it is the middle of the evening and you must abandon your place of comfort. There’s been no warning. No explanation. No exact cause for panic, nor blanket to soften the blow. What makes it out with you? Loved ones, mobile devices, documents, sure—but what about everything else? We spend our lives perceiving and projecting value onto our belongings: acquiring, collecting, and passing them down, irreverent of their impermanence. Which of these souvenirs actually end up by our sides, and which slowly wilt away or disappear in a flash? And when they have truly vanished, what traces will we have of them in their wake?

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This, the sophomore edition of this magazine, is titled Objects of Affection. By the cultural calendar, it is Family Style’s design issue. More broadly, it’s a consideration of materiality and our relationship with it. How are the Pieces we own and the spaces we inhabit an extension of our own person? And how can they transform it?

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Hans Ulrich Obrist, for one, has created perhaps the most progressive museum I’ve come across—and it fits inside his pocket. As a guest columnist for this issue, the Swiss curator writes about conceiving his Nanomusuem, an ever-evolving display of new works that is the size of a pack of gum, and how he chaperones it around the globe. In Milan, the architect-duo Formafantasma have returned to their native countryside with new eyes to rethink domestic spaces and the meanings they hold. And on a remote island in his native Argentina, master chef Francis Mallmann is just happy to catch the sun as it shines down on his hand-built Patagonian oasis.

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What connects these three very different voices with the architect Sumayya Vally, the designer Marc Newson, the supermodel Paloma Elsesser, the artists DRIFT, the couturier Aska Yamashita, and the many other creative minds throughout Family Style’s pages? A tactful appreciation for the worlds they have carefully curated—and the rare ability to begin anew should the desire percolate.

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At the threat of minimalism, I am constantly role-playing the impossible task of killing my darlings to start over. Would the Jean-Pierre Garrault and Henri Delord light I
spent many months of rent on—and more months waiting for its shipment—survive? How about my favorite Guggenheim hoodie, whose size has shrunk well past “fitted” and whose merlot-shaded logo has succumbed to the prism of faded, speed-washed laundry? And what of the random kitchen trinkets and parcels forced onto me from my mother’s repoSitory? How could I live sober from my own objects of affection whose mere existence have come to define my own? I’m not so sure I could leave the building if I had to depart it empty handed, which I fear has been the answer all along.

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Family Style No. 2 is available online and at retailers now.