Letter From The Editor

During Milan Design Week, over 2,000 people patiently queued up to visit the offices of Vogue Italia in the city centre, in groups of 50 at a time. For the occasion, eight architecture and interior design studios were invited to rethink the magazine’s work spaces, designing rooms where historic photo prints are mixed with the latest design items, past with future, and sometimes all in the same room. For example, in the creative director’s office, a curtain gives access to a totally white area, almost like a page waiting to be filled with ideas. (For my own room, the British designer Faye Toogood – who not by chance also previously worked for a publishing house – wanted to send me a message. Indeed, the furnishings she chose all have rounded shapes, as if to inspire a soft and team-spirited exercise of authority – although I think the welder’s helmet left lying in a corner suggests that I mustn’t forget to keep paying attention, just in case.) In those same days, we were working on the article that you will find on the opening pages of this issue: an interview with Christopher Wylie, the “whistleblower” who triggered the Cambridge Analytica scandal – undoubtedly the most interesting reflection of the shape of our lives in the age of social networks. As Wylie explains, by using data cropped from social networks, it is possible to “measure” cultural (and political) phenomena. And once they have been measured, it is possible to modify them by exerting pressure on a selected number of key individuals – and thereby establishing a trend. By an odd coincidence, which isn’t actually pure coincidence, Wylie learned to apply to politics a method that was devised for fashion: understanding, and if possible influencing, the development of trends is an increasingly substantial part of what we do every day. Walking along the corridors of Vogue Italia, accompanying groups of students from all around the world as well as long-standing and newer readers, it occurred to me that for 125 years this magazine has been performing precisely that task: understanding how fashions develop, and if possible influencing them. But it has always done so with the use of intelligence and the tools of the trade (meeting people, asking questions, looking around, knowing about the past), not with the improper use of personal data. And I felt happy that I had been asked to make part of this story. ( Trad. Antony Bowden) • original text page 24