Tyler Brûlé had already reinvented the magazine once. In 1996, the Canadian-Finnish journalist and designer had launched Wallpaper\* from a London basement, turning it into one of the most influential design and lifestyle publications of its era before selling it to Time Warner in 1999. When he started again in 2007, the ambition was even larger: a magazine that would cover global affairs, business, culture, and design in a single publication for an internationally minded readership that didn't exist in any one country but was scattered across all of them. He called it Monocle.
The premise was unfashionable. In an era of digital fragmentation and niche publishing, Brûlé proposed a general-interest global magazine — printed on heavy stock, sold at a premium, and dedicated to the idea that a reader in Tokyo, Zürich, and Toronto could share the same curiosity about architecture in Copenhagen, retail in Melbourne, and diplomacy in Addis Ababa. The headquarters were established in London's Marylebone, with bureaux eventually opening in Tokyo, Zürich, Hong Kong, Toronto, and beyond. Monocle Radio launched in 2011 as a 24-hour internet radio station. The Monocle Shop began selling everything from bags to notebooks. Monocle Cafés opened in London, Tokyo, and Zürich.
The magazine itself — ten issues a year plus an annual forecast edition — became famous for its editorial formula: a mix of long-form journalism, city guides, design features, retail dispatches, and soft-power diplomacy coverage, all produced with a visual consistency and production quality that turned each issue into a lifestyle object as much as a publication. The design, overseen by Brûlé himself, was clean, information-dense, and instantly recognizable. Critics accused Monocle of aestheticizing global capitalism; admirers credited it with proving that intelligent, international print media could not only survive the digital revolution but thrive in it.
By the mid-2010s, Brûlé had built what amounted to a media brand with the reach and diversification of a small conglomerate: print, radio, retail, events, cafés, and a growing sister publication — Konfekt, launched in 2020 for a female readership. The company has since shifted operations increasingly toward Zürich, following Brûlé's post-Brexit instincts about where the cultural center of gravity in Europe was heading. Love it or resist it, Monocle rewrote the rules for what an independent magazine could become — and proved that one person's obsessive attention to paper stock, typography, and the quality of airport retail could, against all predictions, turn into a publishing empire.
Explore MONOCLE at <a href="https://monocle.com/" target="\_blank">monocle.com