Alessio Ascari was studying philosophy and visual arts at university when he started his first editorial project. He was not a good student, by his own admission, but the project took off in the Italian art world and then across Europe, and it became a job before he had finished his degree. In 2009, at twenty-something years old, he launched Kaleidoscope in Milan — a quarterly magazine of contemporary art and culture that would become one of the most respected independent art publications on the continent.
What Ascari built was not just a magazine but a platform. Alongside co-publisher and executive editor Cristina Travaglini, he developed Kaleidoscope into an ecosystem that includes Spazio Maiocchi, an exhibition space in the heart of Milan; Manifesto, an annual festival staged during Paris Men's Fashion Week at the iconic Espace Niemeyer; and Capsule, a sibling publication and curatorial studio focused on design. In 2016, Myriam Ben Salah joined as editor-in-chief of the international edition, with Ascari shifting to the role of publishing and creative director — a transition that signaled the magazine's evolution from a one-man editorial vision into a genuinely global operation.
The magazine's art direction has been as restless as its founder. The Swiss studio Kasper-Florio redesigned the publication in 2021, introducing a visual framework that Ascari has described as almost musical in its layering — a grid system augmented by illustrations from Berlin-based studio PWR that hack the Swiss precision with viral energy. Each issue is organized around a single theme — archive, outdoors, season — explored through artist interviews, critical essays, and visual portfolios that are given the space and production quality of gallery exhibitions. Contributors range from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Jeffrey Deitch, from Dan Graham to Sandra Mujinga.
Distributed worldwide and now running quarterly, Kaleidoscope has earned its reputation by refusing to separate disciplines. Art, fashion, music, and design are treated as a single conversation, with the magazine functioning as the laboratory where ideas are developed before being tested in physical space — at Spazio Maiocchi, at Capsule Plaza during Milan Design Week, at Manifesto in Paris. It is the rare art publication that has built an entire cultural infrastructure around itself, and it did so from Milan, a city small enough to be exciting and ambitious enough to be global.
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