Very big. Highly chunky. The new WOI is here.
"The act of making is fundamental to every edition of The World of Interiors. There are, of course, the many people who go into creating an issue: photographers, writers, editors, designers and so forth. But for every room we show there might also be a furniture designer, a bookbinder, a plasterer, an embroiderer, a painter, a gilder, a darner, a metalworker, a basket weaver, a ceramicist, a printmaker – the list goes on and on. The skill and untold hours of graft poured into these pages by every single artisan are extraordinary and something to be celebrated, not just for the final product but for the knowledge and experience gained along the way.
As is always the way with our October issue, our biggest of the year, we push creativity to its outer limits, firstly by featuring the work of interior designers and decorators and secondly, as our cover attests, with our supersized showcase – 27 pages long in this instance – of the latest fabric collections. This year, Ruth Sleightholme and her comrades have magicked up a puppet show in collaboration with London’s Little Angel Theatre. The production tells the tale of Aschenputtel by the Brothers Grimm, which has also been reinterpreted for The World of Interiors in verse by poet and playwright Simon Armitage. Each puppet was hand-carved and -painted for us, every stitch of clothing handmade, propelled by countless brilliant brains and bodies, from costume crafters to calligraphers. Keep an eye out, too, for the first chapter of a short film we made capturing the puppets in motion, narrated by the actor Anne-Marie Duff.
This mammoth issue has too many stories to touch upon every one. There’s the wonderful Lore Archive, a ‘collection of more than 2,000 garments and objects of outsider material culture includ[ing] dried Inuit parkas, 100-year-old Transylvanian waistcoats and sakiori fishermen’s vests’; and the series of projects undertaken by people in France in the aftermath of grief or separation, or in their retirement – beautiful, strange worlds often formed from salvaged materials and recorded by photographer Francis David. Across the Channel, Tom Hunter’s images of London’s squatting community in the 1980s and 90s are accompanied by words from Nathalie Olah, who charts the ‘romance, heartbreak, love, depression, anger, euphoria’ that these spaces soaked up. Meanwhile, Marella Caracciolo Chia marvels at the new porcelain gallery in the Capodimonte museum in Naples, which has been given a recent facelift by nonagenarian designer Federico Forquet."
