Oliver Maxwell Kupper founded Autre — French for "other" — from Los Angeles, and the magazine has operated ever since from the premise that the most interesting culture is always somewhere other than where everyone is already looking. Kupper, who serves as editor-in-chief, runs the publication alongside managing editor Summer Bowie from a Spring Street office in downtown LA, producing a print and digital magazine that covers global art, fashion, and culture with the kind of cross-disciplinary fluency that most publications only claim. The contributor list tells you everything about the magazine's ambitions: Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Serpentine Gallery's legendary director, has conducted interviews for the magazine; Nadia Lee Cohen has shot covers; Harmony Korine, John Waters, and Gregg Araki have each curated special editions produced in collaboration with Kith.
Each issue is built around a single theme — Losing My Religion, Work in Progress, Citizen, Desire — and the editorial approach is curatorial rather than journalistic, assembling artists, writers, photographers, and thinkers whose work refracts the theme from unexpected angles. A single issue might move from a twenty-three-page interview with Norwegian photographer Torbjørn Rødland to forty pages of fashion editorials with Eckhaus Latta, from an excerpt of Françoise Hardy's memoirs to a conversation with Wim Wenders, from Paul Thomas Anderson to Paul McCarthy. The range is not eclecticism for its own sake. It is the product of a genuine belief that art, fashion, music, and film are not separate conversations but different frequencies of the same signal.
The magazine has also become a social node for the art world's most significant gatherings. Autre and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery have established an annual tradition of launching Frieze Week in Los Angeles with intimate dinners that draw a cross-disciplinary mix of guests — Sharon Stone, Gus Van Sant, Beck, Eric Wareheim, Julia Stoschek, Kendalle Getty — in settings that feel closer to a family gathering than a media event. In London, issue launches during Frieze have drawn full houses of creatives. Kupper has described the events as organic, warm, and totally inclusive — a chance to give people a great magazine to sink their teeth into and to connect with both old friends and new ones.
Autre exists at the intersection of everything it covers, and it has earned a position that few independent publications achieve: genuine credibility across the art, fashion, and cultural worlds simultaneously. The name, which was chosen to signal an interest in the other — the artists, designers, and filmmakers working outside the mainstream gaze — has proven prophetic. By the time many of the people Autre features appear in conventional media, they have already been flattened into familiar narratives. Autre gets there first, when the work is still raw and the story is still the artist's own.
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