Miniatures in Orbit
Aleia Murawski Scales the Universe with Helmut Lang, Ribeyron, and Gucci
In 1990, when the Voyager 1 spacecraft photographed Earth from 6 billion kilometers away, the only planet we’ve ever known appeared as a pale blue speck. “There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world,” said Carl Sagan. He has a point—sometimes we need to scale things down in order to put them into perspective. But even the details leave much to the imagination. What can we learn about the CN Tower when it’s shrunken down and fit inside a Helmut Lang clutch? Can organic specimens survive in Yeezy PVC? Does the Simone Rocha extraterrestrial come in peace?
For their first SSENSE editorial, Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland play with scope and scale to explore the implications of what it means to be out of this world.
New Icons: SSENSE Exclusive Vetements Flame Boots The Paris Collective Shows Its Slapstick Side with an Ode To Glam Rock When you ask someone what they look for in a romantic partner, you will likely hear them rattle off a “deeply superficial” list of attributes, spearheaded almost always by the necessity of humor. “He or she needs to be funny!” A joint sense of humor is based on shared values. The same goes for one’s sense of dress: two people admiring one another’s styling decisions have met a kindred spirit in many ways. After all, to really pull together a look, we rely on comedic timing. 
The Epic of Donatella An Interview with Versace’s Creative Director about Loss, Addiction, and the Power of Blonde “To be blonde means to be caressed by the sun, and to be your own sun,” Donatella Versace remembers about discovering her signature platinum-haired look at the age of 12. Since that time, Versace —both the woman herself and the fashion house founded by her late brother, Gianni—has come to embody a hedonistic idea of luxury so iconic and enduring that it can no longer even be called . This past year marked the 20th anniversary of Gianni Versace’s murder, a date widely publicized by a television series on the event that was unauthorized by the Versace family. 
Comme des Garçons Fate and Free Will in These Digitally Dickensian Times “...the streets and courts dart in all directions, until they are lost in the unwholesome vapour which hangs over the house-tops, and renders the dirty perspective uncertain and confined; and lounging at every corner, as if they came there to take a few gasps of such fresh air as has found its way so far, are groups of people...” —Charles Dickens, Scoffed at by critics and diminished to a writer of platitudes, Charles Dickens is often misunderstood.