ACNE PAPER'S NEO-CLASSICAL REVIVALIST

Art Director Christoph Stolberg builds each page with painstaking care

If Fashion as an industry can be thought of as the great enduring myth of the Northern European haute bourgeoise then the latest issue of ACNE Paper excavates that myth down to its core bones. When a magazine ostensibly designed to sell a brand's blue jeans opens with the a selection of sheet music from Eric Satie's Gymnopédies then segues into an editor's essay tracing Satie's reference back to ancient Greece, you can rest assured your intelligence is not about to be insulted.

Hinging a youth themed issue to the idea of a New Traditionalism might seem counter-intuitive and reactionary. But to highlight a body of hithero anonymous emerging talent ( tailors, watchmakers and carpet weavers ) steeped in classical training, using the conventional tropes of fashion photography burns off the hint of cliche.

And the strategy really works given the precision of execution crafted by the magazine. Art Director Christoph Stolberg builds each page with such painstaking care you would suspect he was modernizing a tradition of rigorous hand-crafting. Think Peter Saville's crypto-19th century rendering for New Order's "Power, Corruption, Lies" as the ghost of taste that hovers over each page of Acne Paper's brilliant 12th Issue.