Tyler Brûlé had been thinking about it for more than five years. The founder of Monocle — the magazine that had, since 2007, defined a particular kind of globally minded, design-literate media — wanted a publication aimed at female readers. But not a women's magazine in the conventional sense: no beauty tips, no celebrity gossip, no aspirational anxiety. Something smarter, more European, more interested in craft and culture than in consumer trends. In the summer of 2020, driving through the Austrian Alps near Susanne Kaufmann's hotel in Vorarlberg, the word came to him. Konfekt — German for ready-to-wear, but also for confection, for something sweet and carefully made.
The first issue appeared in December 2020, edited by Sophie Grove, Monocle's former senior correspondent in Paris, senior editor, and Istanbul bureau chief. Grove, based in London, edits alongside style director Marcela Palek in Zürich, with additional bureaux in Paris and Tokyo. The magazine is published quarterly in both English and German, printed in Germany, and distributed internationally — a pan-European proposition that reflects the Mitteleuropa sensibility at its heart. Where Monocle maps the world through geopolitics and urbanism, Konfekt explores it through fashion, food, travel, design, and the particular pleasures of living well.
The editorial voice is unmistakably Monocle-adjacent — curious, opinionated, production-obsessed — but pitched to a different register. A feature might follow the artist Claudia Comte through Basel on a wanderwege, visit the Norwegian artist and scent expert Sissel Tolaas for dinner in Berlin, or guide readers through the concept store Song in Vienna with its owner Myung-il Song. Grove has described the magazine's perspective as rooted in designers like Jil Sander and Petar Petrov, who speak to a woman the mainstream fashion press tends to overlook: the German-speaking, culturally sophisticated, quietly luxurious consumer whom most luxury brands have found elusive.
Now seventeen issues deep, Konfekt has expanded into a fortnightly newsletter, a monthly podcast, and curated products — a Charvet linen tote, a Mühlbauer summer hat hand-crocheted in Austria from Japanese paper yarn. It is the kind of magazine that takes a swim in an icy Swiss lake as seriously as a haute couture show in Paris, and considers both essential components of the same well-lived life. The title, as Brûlé intended, suggests something sweet and precisely made. That is exactly what it delivers.
Explore KONFEKT at <a href="https://konfektmagazine.com/" target="\_blank">konfektmagazine.com