Carlo Mazzoni was born in Milan in 1979. By the time he was twenty-nine, the Corriere della Sera had listed him among the city's most prominent cultural figures — the youngest on the list. He had published three novels with Salani and Fandango, worked as a journalist for Mondadori, Rizzoli, and Condé Nast, and in 2012 launched L'Officiel Italia for Editions Jalou, serving as editor until 2014. But what he really wanted to make was something rougher, more independent, and more serious about the things that mattered to him: Italian manufacturing, ecological responsibility, human diversity, and the kind of culture that doesn't apologize for being difficult.
In 2014, he founded Lampoon — named after the tradition of satirical, irony-laced publications, with a nod to The Harvard Lampoon that Orson Welles once referenced. The first issue of the print magazine appeared in 2015, published biannually from Via Bagutta in Milan and distributed internationally. With art director Alessandro Fornaro and designer Sebastian Zössmayr, Mazzoni built a publication that runs to over four hundred pages per issue, each one a visual and intellectual event. The Instagram bio captures the tone: "Horny for Culture."
What distinguishes Lampoon from other fashion-adjacent cultural magazines is its structural seriousness about sustainability. This is not greenwashing: 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. Hemp cultivation in Italy has become a dedicated field of research. Features examine everything from the supply chains of luxury houses to the forestry practices that sustain them. The editorial position is that culture today means sustainability in its honest meaning — human respect, tolerance, inclusion, community.
Now over thirty issues and a decade into its existence, Lampoon celebrated its anniversary with a new logo and an issue devoted to independence — featuring Olivier Zahm of Purple, author Joël Dicker, artist Isabelle Albuquerque, and composer Caterina Barbieri. It reaches 96,000 followers on Instagram and maintains a daily digital editorial alongside the biannual print edition. Mazzoni's conviction — that a magazine can be simultaneously beautiful, critical, irreverent, and ecologically committed — has proven durable. Lampoon is rough by design. That roughness is the point.
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