Wallpaper

(Subtitle: The stuff that surrounds you). British magazine of contemporary living. It was founded in 1996 based on an idea of Tyler Brulé, a young and brilliant London journalist. Despite its tiny budget (the four issues were assembled in the front room of Brulé’s apartment) the magazine was enormously popular, and was purchased for well over a million pounds by Time Inc. (the American publishing branch of Time Warner). Fashion, architecture, design, travel, and food were treated equally with news and photography intended for a youthful, cosmopolitan audience, both men and women. The aspirations of the readers were reflected in the sophisticated graphics of the magazine, which made it a desirable object in and of itself. The journalism was minimalistic in its contents, humorous in its use of a refined English filled with wordplay, and it was in any case a worldwide success. Journalists from around the world worked on it, providing a sense of contact with what is happening in the places that count. At the furniture salon (Salone del Mobile) of Milan in 1999 it organized the event of the season, the Limitless Luxury Party, exhibiting all the mosst desirable objects, including an English butler. Shameless consumerism or British irony, whichever it was, it attracted all the names of fashion, design and architecture, thus establishing Brulé as a style guru for the twenty-first century.