Vogue Italia June Issue. Letter from the Editor

There’s a detail that will be familiar to anyone who reads this magazine every month. The titles on the cover and in the fashion section are not written in typeface characters. They are physical objects that the creative director, Ferdinando Verderi, composes by hand. He selects materials that are consistent with the theme of each issue, then assembles and photographs them before arranging them on the page. I still have the first sculpture created two years ago. The words take shape in a bizarre system of pins and yellow thread. They are artworks that originate from a shared vision: that print media has to become increasingly precious to keep its place in a digital world. Its contents and style must be crafted with care, from the big decisions to the finest details. These letters made of precious objects that appear humble, or found materials that become unique, remind us that every stage of our job entails a handmade element: you can do things the quick way, or you can put in a bit of extra, non-essential effort. Ferdinando and I think it’s worth the trouble, and we explain why in this issue.

After all, this is a year in which, with everyone stuck at home, we’ve all learnt to take stock of ourselves and our manual skills, the importance of rediscovering small gestures, of treating things carefully, preserving and if possible reusing them to give them new life: an old piece of fabric that becomes a dress, a cover that becomes a white canvas. Fashion is no exception. It must mean something if the website of The New York Times has launched a page dedicated to do-it-yourself designers, with current titles including: “Rick Owens Stitches a Souvenir”, “Irene Neuwirth Makes a Flower Necklace Out of Paper”, or “How to Make a Dishtowel Tote Bag, With Rodarte”.

There are in fact many ways to approach the slightly punk idea of DIY, which is the subject of this issue. We believe all of these approaches are thoroughly contemporary. They take shape on digital channels, tweaking age-old crafts to suit the language of new and very new generations (see the eloquent crossover between the art of knitting and Jonathan Anderson). As an attitude, the DIY mindset asserts its freedom of thought and sensitivity to diversity. But also an acceptance of imperfection, because history proceeds by trial and error, followed by further trials and further errors.

It is the story of a world in movement, fluid and restless, that has learnt to make a virtue – or sometimes even an art – of necessity. We celebrate its power to create openings, the opportunities offered by democratic access to new means of production, which do justice to individual talent and unlock spaces of creative freedom for people who would never have been able to gain access otherwise.

(At the same time, we would also point out that not everything is equivalent, that not all things spontaneous, or amateurish, are necessarily beautiful, and that in a mature society some experiences and specific fields of expertise should be conserved and protected.)

In recent years we have tried to use our cover in many different ways: with photography or illustrations, or with no images at all. But we’ve never invited the featured person to do everything by themselves: to pose, take the photographs and choose the clothes to wear. If there was a right occasion for this new experiment, it could only have been the DIY issue. Neither could there have been a better protagonist than Rihanna – who has appeared on so many covers, but never like this time in the version in which she, and only she, has chosen to portray herself, without filters or any mediation.

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