The name is a bilingual pun that captures everything about the magazine in two words. Alla carta — Italian for “on paper” but also evoking à la carte, the freedom to choose — is a biannual fashion and culture publication from Milan that conducts every interview around a table. Not a desk, not a Zoom call. A table, with food, in the Italian tradition of conviviality. It is an editorial method disguised as a social ritual, and it gives the magazine a warmth and specificity that most fashion publications cannot replicate.
Now twenty-six issues deep, Alla Carta approaches high-end fashion, art, and design through the particular lens of Italian cultural history. Each issue is built around a thematic concept borrowed from that history: the Pinocchio issue explored self-transformation through Carlo Collodi’s 1881 novel. The Ratataplan issue, inspired by Maurizio Nichetti’s 1979 film, unmasked the world’s cruelty with the grace of innocence. The Le Interviste Impossibili issue drew on a legendary 1974 RAI radio programme in which Italian writers imagined conversations with illustrious figures from the past. Recent issues have tackled mythology and the cult of the idol through the lens of 883’s 1993 pop hit “Sei un mito.” The references are distinctly, unapologetically Italian — and the writing assumes readers who will follow them.
Printed at 225 by 310 millimeters, each issue runs to over two hundred pages in English, distributed internationally. The fashion editorials are conceived as complete artistic statements rather than seasonal lookbooks, and the meal-based interviews — breakfast with architect Umberto Riva, lunch with artist Diego Perrone, dinner with designer Matthew Adams Dolan — produce conversations with an intimacy and specificity that email Q&As cannot touch. The production values are what Italian design culture demands: meticulous, sumptuous, built to last.
In a media landscape where most fashion interviews happen over publicist-monitored video calls, Alla Carta insists on the one thing that technology cannot replicate: the experience of sitting across from another human being, sharing a meal, and seeing where the conversation goes. It is expensive, impractical, and impossible to scale. That is precisely the point.
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