STEPHEN GAN

VISIONAIRE

V. The fifth to the last letter of the alphabet. The first letter of many superlatives and nouns related to power—victory, vainglory, vicissitude. And the one-letter name of fashion’s most cutting edge magazine. Its rules are, it has no rules and as evidenced by the long list of Hollywood A-listers who have let their visage be framed in between the two rays of V, it is a platform free of constraints and full of in-your-face, unapologetic fashion-as-art.

The visionaire behind it is Filipino-Chinese Stephen Gan. A self-described punk, Stephen’s story is now the stuff of fashion legend. A proper fan would know that he moved to New York at the age of 18 to study in Parsons. After a fateful meeting with the original, pre-Sartorialist streetstyle photographer Bill Cunningham, he dropped out and worked his way up the ranks of Details magazine where, after a corporate shakeup, he was spurred into creating his own platform and thus, in 1991, Visionaire was born, V magazine followed in 1999. Fast forward to 2001 and Stephen gets a call to become creative director of

Harper’s Bazaar, a position he continues to hold today. The fashion industry is famous for its vertiginous learning (or rather, promotion) curves, and yet in six months, Stephen was honored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America with the Creative Visionary Award.

And yet the most surprising, if not charming, thing about Stephen is that he of the front row seat in Paris, London and New York Fashion Week, when last in Manila, woke up at 5AM to squeeze in a shopping trip to noisy Divisoria, Manila’s bargain haven.* In an interview with Ground magazine, Stephen describes V as “a collective way of thinking about a certain subject. It’s like having a space and inviting different people to come in, and seeing what happens.” Quite like how a Filipino would always welcome people in, although this one is in the company of Carine, Mario and Karl, just to name a few.—MY

*as relayed to the author by Andrew Gan, his brother.