In 1992, Olivier Zahm and Elein Fleiss printed the first issue of Purple Prose in Paris — a literary art zine born from disgust at the glossy superficiality of 1980s fashion media. They had no money, no experience, and no interest in playing by the industry's rules. The American artist Dike Blair suggested the name, a reference to the literary term for prose so extravagant it draws attention to itself. It was, Zahm would later say, made in the spirit of a fanzine.
What happened next changed fashion publishing permanently. Purple became the epicenter of the "realism" that defined 1990s fashion photography — commissioning fine artists to shoot editorials, producing a raw, improvisational aesthetic that made the polished perfection of mainstream fashion magazines look suddenly dated. Juergen Teller, Terry Richardson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Mario Sorrenti — the photographers who defined the decade's visual language found a home in Purple's pages. Chloë Sevigny appeared in almost every issue. In 1994, Zahm and Fleiss curated "The Winter of Love" at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, then brought it to P.S.1 in New York.
When Fleiss left in 2002, Purple split: Zahm continued with Purple Fashion, published biannually by the Purple Institute from Paris and New York, while Fleiss launched Purple Journal. The fashion magazine grew into a luxury object — the Spring 2004 relaunch ran to 418 pages — with art direction by M/M Paris succeeding founding designer Christophe Brunnquell. But Zahm has always insisted that publishing a print magazine in the Instagram era is one of the great paradoxes of contemporary culture: a luxury item in a world where images cost nothing.
More than three decades on, Purple remains what it was from the beginning: a collective work by creative people who believe in the artistic value of print. Every image matters, every text, the choice of paper, the layout, even the typefaces. It is the magazine that the magazine industry looks to when it needs to remember what magazines can be.
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