EDITOR’S LETTER

I’m frantically typing this on my iPhone in the back of the ES car as I’m ferried from show to show at Milan Fashion Week (the bumpy streets really aren’t helping). I’m not complaining; I love being here. After two decades I still feel lucky to witness up close designers’ flights of fabulous fancy — but it is most definitely w-o-r-k. And, in reality, my time is mainly spent stuck in gridlocked traffic, feeling anxious that I might miss the next show.

By the time you read this, I’ll be in Paris in the back of another car being ferried from show to show again. This time with even worse traffic. By then, who knows how the news will have developed, but right now women are hacking off their hair and burning their hijabs in Iran and Vladimir Putin is chest-beating and making nuclear threats. It’s a peculiar duality reading these troubling stories as models strut by in beautiful and extravagant clothes, but it’s a reminder of the weird multiverse-like world we live in. All these realities co-existing: ‘Everything everywhere all at once.’ I guess the secret is somehow not to let one diminish the other. No easy thing.

Please bear with my leap of consciousness here but talking of multiverse-living our cover star, Sky Ferreira, finds herself caught between two realities. She is a blisteringly talented artist with a global following who have been waiting the best part of a decade for her second album, Masochism, and yet her record label seems happy to sit on it. Why? The internet is rife with conspiratorial theories, but the truth most likely lies in this famous 1985 quote from the late, great oracle Hunter S Thompson: ‘The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.’ Same as it ever was, then.

PS. I’ve just learnt that this well-known quote is, in fact, a complete internet fiction. Maybe he said it in an alternate reality?