I first heard about Brutus when they profiled Naked a little while ago. This issue seems to be a special one, centering around interior design. Maybe it's the Hiragana, but Japanese magazines seem to be laid out so much nicer than ours. This is one of my favorite pages:
Don't you just want to live there? I think it's a bakery. It reminds me of the bookstore in... I think it's Norwegian Wood... that the girl inherits from her family. The one where she cooks a big feast for the main character in the kitchen upstairs, and there is a fire somewhere in the distance. This page made me daydream for several minutes.
Speaking of Murakami (but a different one), here is the most endearing picture of Takashi Murakami I've ever seen, wearing a big ball of his own work, and a flower crown hat:
(are you in a good mood yet?)
This is the best part. The cover of this magazine was very big. It wasn't a page at all, actually: it was a page-sized, flat box attached to the front and serving as the cover. There was a little window cut out of the inside, revealing...
Sometimes the most delightful things come out of putting two completely different ideas together. In this case, a plate and a magazine. Would you ever have dreamed of opening a strangely-big magazine cover and having a little dish slide out?
Surprise + delight = win! This is why paper magazines aren't ever going to die, they can delight so much more tangibly than electrons.
ReplyDeleteThe bakery is very cute - there are a lot of cafes like that here in New Zealand - in houses :)
This reminds me of when New York magazine gave out a pair of Absolut vodka gloves designed by Donna Karan one year when I was in middle school. This was when the bottle shape ad campaign had become very popular, and the ads seemed to be everywhere, including all over kids' binders and lockers at my school. I was so delighted when I saw it on the newstand! For some reason, no one's parents seemed disturbed by the fact that their children were collecting vodka ads from magazines, and most of my friends (and me) had a pair or two of those gloves. The ad said "ABSOLUT WARMTH." and as you pulled the gloves out, the red line on a bottle-shaped thermometer nestled in a snowy background rose to the top (as if it was getting warmer).
ReplyDeleteBut a Murakami plate is much, much cooler, and I'm pretty jealous. Also, I'm exploring your digital world a little while procrastinating cleaning :)
I noticed! Thanks so much for commenting... I bet those gloves would be worth something by now, especially if they were still packaged with the magazine. What a cool idea. We don't get enough free little trinkets with magazines like that here...
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