Carlo Mazzoni studied medicine at the University of Milan and piano at the Conservatorio Vivaldi in Alessandria. He became neither a doctor nor a concert pianist. Instead, he wrote three novels — I Postromantici, Il Disordine, Due Amici — worked as a journalist for Mondadori, Rizzoli, and Condé Nast, and in 2009, at twenty-nine, was named by the Corriere della Sera among Milan’s most prominent cultural figures, the youngest on the list. After launching and editing L’Officiel Italia for Editions Jalou from 2012 to 2014, he realized what he actually wanted was something rougher, more independent, and more seriously committed to the things mainstream fashion publishing only pretends to care about. In 2014, he founded Lampoon.
The name came to him while reading a book about Orson Welles that mentioned The Harvard Lampoon — in American English, a lampoon is a sharp, ironic publication that aims to be sincere and unsparing. That spirit became the DNA: Snob & Pop, as Mazzoni puts it. Mix the aristocratic with the commercial, the high with the low. The first print issue appeared in 2015 under the full title The Fashionable Lampoon, later shortened simply to Lampoon. With creative director Alessandro Fornaro and visual editor Sebastian Zössmayr, Mazzoni built a biannual publication that regularly runs past four hundred pages — each issue a dense, unapologetic object that treats fashion not as surface spectacle but as a cultural, economic, and political structure.
What makes Lampoon singular among fashion-adjacent magazines is the structural seriousness of its commitment to sustainability. This is not a green supplement tucked between perfume ads. The magazine investigates production systems, material sourcing, circular economies, and global forestry with the rigor of a trade journal and the visual ambition of an art publication. Italian hemp cultivation has become a dedicated editorial and manufacturing project — Lampoon Publishing House now works to restore the hemp supply chain in Italy, producing yarns and textiles from locally grown and processed fiber. Features examine luxury house supply chains, craftsmanship in Italian manufacturing districts, and the difference between genuine traceability and marketing rhetoric. The editorial position is blunt: sustainability, defined as honesty, transparency, and traceability, is the only form of contemporary culture worth practicing.
Now over thirty issues and a decade into its run, Lampoon has built a roster of contributors that ranges from composer Caterina Barbieri to artist Isabelle Albuquerque, from Olivier Zahm of Purple to novelist Joël Dicker. The magazine maintains a daily digital editorial alongside its biannual print editions, registered at the Milan Court since December 2014 and distributed internationally. Mazzoni’s conviction that a magazine can be simultaneously beautiful, critical, irreverent, and ecologically committed has proven durable. Lampoon is rough by design — in its textures, its arguments, its refusal to flatter. That roughness is not a pose. It is the editorial method.
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