I met Armando, at least in the version of the story I prefer, at an airport somewhere in the Eternal City. We were both going somewhere, which now feels like a fairly accurate beginning to a story about a man permanently caught between two places, two roles, a serious business conversation and a fitting-room selfie. Professionally, he moves between consulting, buying, merchandising strategy and design, occupying that particular corner of the fashion industry where taste is no longer a private matter. It has to become a decision, a product, a market and, eventually, somebody else’s desire.

I have followed his voice because he does not talk about that machine from a safe distance. He knows its mathematics and knows creativity has to survive a balance sheet, but he has also been inside it long enough to notice the moment the industry became better at producing product than producing ideas. So this is not a conversation about what we will be wearing next season. I was more interested in why we want anything in the first place, who manufactures that desire now, and what happened when fashion became a businessman.

When asked which of his many professional definitions best describes what he does, and which describes who he is, he rejects the distinction itself. He turns to Italian writer Michela Murgia and a sentence that has stayed with him for years: “I wouldn’t want what I do to define who I am. I would rather be who I am in everything I do.”

That sentence explains quite a lot.

“I don’t really mind moving from something very serious to something completely frivolous. In fact, I quite enjoy the fact that I can go from discussing a serious business strategy to obsessing over a fitting-room selfie five minutes later. I think that duality is actually quite healthy. Especially when you’re lucky enough to turn your passion into your work and therefore, in some way, into your life, I think it’s important not to let the ‘professional’ part swallow everything else. I find it incredibly sexy when someone is confident enough in who they are that they don’t have to take themselves too seriously all the time. Life is already serious enough; I don’t see why we should help it.”

The first thing he remembers wanting simply because he found it beautiful was not an item of clothing. It was a dollhouse, minus any real interest in the dolls. What fascinated him was the possibility of creating a domestic environment of his own, a small ideal world where he could decide how everything looked, where everything belonged and, perhaps most importantly, how he wanted that world to feel.

“Looking back, it’s almost embarrassingly obvious. Apparently, I was already trying to control my environment and create my own little version of reality long before I had any idea what that meant. Some things never change, I guess.”

The man who now chooses, evaluates and professionally tries to understand what other people might want clearly started early, just not where one might expect.

Before clothes, there was space.

His taste, he says, has not changed dramatically since his twenties. What remained was an almost obsessive need to experiment and occasionally question his own decisions. Now in his early forties, it is precisely that doubt he considers healthy.

He has a less philosophical piece of evidence too. Doubting whether skinny jeans were going to look good on him, he says, probably saved his image.

One thing took him much longer to understand: fashion is not the privilege of a particular status, class or price point. It is a vehicle for saying something about yourself, an extension of personality that can come from a luxury boutique just as easily as a vintage shop, a market or somewhere nobody thought to look.

“The size, the price, whether it comes from a luxury boutique, a vintage shop, a market or somewhere completely unexpected, none of that is really the point. The idea is the point. Because, ultimately, fashion is about ideas.”

Sooner or later, the idea has to meet the market.

This is territory he knows from the inside. As a merchandiser, he has spent years working along the fault line between people with highly specific taste, rooted in a strong sense of style and identity, and those whose desires are shaped by trends and increasingly sophisticated marketing mechanisms. He does not underestimate either group. He is more interested in what the system has learned from serving both.

That logic now reaches all the way to the top of the biggest fashion houses.

“They often choose creative directors who are extremely good at understanding the market, almost great merchandisers, but perhaps less remarkable as designers. And I see the same thing happening when it comes to emerging talent. Brands increasingly seem to want less personality and more execution: someone who can take the existing values of a brand and translate them efficiently into product.”

The price of that efficiency is an entire generation of emerging talent sitting on the sidelines and waiting, in some cases long enough to grow older while waiting for a real opportunity. When I later ask what he considers overrated in fashion, his answer sounds almost like a footnote to the same problem: “Which big designer is going to which big fashion house next.”

“I often wonder what would happen if some of the biggest companies simply doubted the system a little more. If they questioned how unhealthy parts of it have become and were willing to take a risk and change things, even at the expense of immediate profit. Maybe we wouldn’t be experiencing one of the biggest crises the industry has ever seen.”

This is not some romantic rebellion against business. He knows how important timing is precisely because he works in one of its most practical territories.

“Both can be dangerous. You have to be right on time. Timing is almost everything.”

Consultants sometimes see a trend long before the market recognises it, but the urge to be first can easily work against you. The instinct for the right moment, he says, may not even be something you can learn. You either have it or you do not.

And when the market rejects something he strongly believes in?

“I don’t necessarily question my taste. I question the market.”

It is not a claim to infallibility. Taste is built over years through experience, culture, mistakes and obsessions. It does not automatically have to surrender to a sales result.

There is, he says, something “much more cultural, romantic and idealistic about approaching fashion from the bottom up, rather than starting with the price tag.” Which is why he sometimes sees more fashion on the New York subway, in the parks of Paris or along the Navigli in Milan than at certain fashion shows. It sounds like a cliché, he admits, but he still believes it to be true.

His diagnosis of why fashion stopped taking risks is more uncomfortable.

“I think fashion started wanting to be luxury, and in doing so it betrayed part of its original purpose. And as a consequence, it became expensive. But more than fashion becoming too expensive, the fashion industry itself has become too big and too heavy to take risks. There is simply too much money, too many people, too many expectations and too much at stake.”

During his time with JordanLuca, one of the most exciting periods of his career, stylist Samia Giobellina gave him a sentence he never forgot: “Repetition is recognition.”

It explains more than recognisable product. At some point, fashion stopped identifying only an aesthetic or an ideology and began gathering entire communities around them. Miuccia Prada, Rick Owens and Demna became almost interpreters of those cults, with languages so recognisable they could sometimes look like repetition rather than surprise. Consistency matters more to him now than endlessly reinventing yourself for the sake of novelty, because somewhere in that process you can easily betray your own identity.

With Demna’s Balenciaga, what interested him most was not the clothes but the shift in who was allowed to become an ideal.

“What I found so powerful was not simply the clothes. It was the idea of taking people who had traditionally been considered outsiders, the outcasts, the people who didn’t necessarily fit into the conventional idea of beauty or success, and putting them on a runway, turning them into an ideal. That, to me, is fashion. Not because it was expensive. Not because there was a logo. Not because everyone immediately understood it. Because it gave you an idea you hadn’t necessarily had before. And I think that is the part of fashion we should be protecting.”

So what are we actually buying? The object, the idea, access, belonging, recognition, a version of ourselves? Probably all of them at once. Contemporary desire is complicated enough that reducing it to a single motive would be too easy. Force him to choose, however, and the answer is clear.

“I would say we buy the idea. The object is just the vehicle.”

Later he reduces the same diagnosis to four words.

More ideas, less product.

A fairly radical position for an industry that has never produced more.

Ms. Kim entered the conversation almost by accident. When I gave him a few words contemporary fashion culture had worn out completely, he decided luxury could stay. Curated could stay too. Iconic came with one condition: “Keep, but only to make fun of Kim Kardashian.”

Kim is collateral damage to a good joke, but the word itself opens a much more interesting question. Iconic status once required time. Something had to exist long enough, alter an image, a behaviour or a culture before we called it an icon. The internet can now finish the job somewhere between two posts, enough repetition and a few million views.

It would be convenient to blame the algorithm for all of it, or Kim, if there is a difference. He refuses to cast it as the villain.

Access to the same references does not produce the same taste.

“You and I could wear exactly the same T-shirt, and still experience it in completely different ways. We could give it a completely different meaning, and in a way, that makes it a completely different T-shirt, even though the object itself is exactly the same. And maybe that’s where personal taste becomes really interesting: not in finding something nobody else has, but in being able to make something your own.”

He sees a bigger problem in the sheer amount of fashion information now delivered with an authority that is not always matched by knowledge. Social media is full of people discussing fashion in supposedly serious terms, while some of them, he says, can place Acne Studios and Bottega Veneta on exactly the same level, as if they were interchangeable, creating enormous confusion for their audience.

Imagining what he might say if @subwaytakes stopped him today and asked, “What’s your take?”, he proposes that social-media fashion commentators should have an official licence to talk about the things they talk about.

He added a smiley. I’m not entirely convinced the smiley cancelled the proposal.

From there, the conversation moves naturally from clothes into space. After years in retail, he reckons that perhaps 90% of what makes a place memorable comes down to the people.

“You could take us tomorrow and put us in the most beautiful hotel in the world, with incredible architecture and perfectly designed interiors, but if the service were disastrous, we would probably remember it forever as a terrible experience. So for me, beauty alone isn’t enough. An environment becomes memorable through the human experience that happens inside it.”

He continues: “What looks perfect to one person can be completely boring to another. So I think there is always something else to discover. And perhaps the moment we think we’ve reached perfection is exactly when things start becoming uninteresting.”

The bridge to architecture is one he makes himself. He does not consider fashion to be art in the literal sense; if he had to find its closest relative, he would choose architecture. Both exist in physical reality and both have to serve a purpose.

Ask a man who works professionally with taste to define bad taste and he refuses.

“I don’t really believe in bad taste. Culture moves forward regardless of what we think is good or bad. We’re basically just trying to keep up with it. What we call ‘bad taste’ is sometimes simply something we haven’t learned how to understand yet. So maybe there is no bad taste. There is just culture moving faster than our ability to understand it.”

If we have already arrived at the question of who manufactures desire, one question remains: who gets the chance to make anything new in the first place? Why is the system so difficult to change when practically everyone inside it knows there is a problem?

The answer is not complicated.

“Because fashion is one of the most profitable businesses in the world. And, unfortunately, the money machine wins ten to zero against the ideas machine.”

“Everyone knows there are problems, everyone talks about them, but when there is that much money involved, suddenly changing the system becomes a much less attractive idea.”

Those rules also determine who gets to become “new”.

He sees two kinds of people. The first have the financial means to produce a collection and, equally importantly, the financial means to make people see it, to create visibility and gain access. The second have something far harder to quantify: a hunger to become relevant because they are convinced they have something to say and are willing to do almost anything to communicate it.

He is far more interested in the second group.

“Money can give you access, but it can’t necessarily give you something to say.”

It may be the most precise business sentence in the entire conversation.

He does not see his own responsibility as extending only to the companies he works with. He also consults, completely for free, for young designers taking their first steps in the industry. It is here that cultural responsibility stops being a grand abstract term. What matters is not only the output you give to the consumer. It is also the input you give to the person trying to create something.

Immediately afterwards, he refuses the opportunity to place himself at the centre of that noble narrative. Fortunately, he says, he is not the only person who thinks this way. There are people far more qualified and important than him with exactly the same approach, and he finds that reassuring.

Perhaps this is where his criticism stops sounding like another industry diagnosis and becomes something more useful.

A cynic would not care.

He clearly does.

When I finally ask what life has taught him is actually worth keeping, after the markets, collections, cities, airports and objects he has spent a career choosing, his answer has nothing to do with the next big thing.

“People. Without a doubt. And also a good archive.”

Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good definition of what might actually be worth saving from fashion.

Kristina Kika Jovanović has worked in modelling for years and is the author of the blog napisalaKika, where she writes openly about the body, appearance, ageing and beauty from the perspective of someone whose own appearance has long been part of the job. We talk about the body as working material, an industry forever asking for one more revision, and the point at which a change stops being part of the process and becomes a question of authorship.

There is one sentence in the creative industries that almost never means what it promises: just one more revision. Architects hear it from developers, designers from clients, photographers during selects, writers from editors. In modelling, things are more complicated because the material being altered is not a file, a drawing or a frame. It is the body.

Kristina Kika Jovanović has known that system from the inside for years. She has moved through couture, fittings, shoots and shows, working within the worlds of houses such as Stéphane Rolland, Mugler and Zuhair Murad, while also beginning to document what happens backstage and write about appearance, the body, ageing, beauty and control. She has spent enough time inside that image to understand how it is made, and enough time observing the process to recognise the point at which a correction stops being merely professional.

When I ask what her body would be if it really were architecture, she answers without much theory:

“A house in the city that is occasionally rented out on Airbnb to selected guests.”

It is funny until it starts to sound like a perfectly serious business model. A house has doors, rules of entry, rooms that are not open to everyone, and someone who is supposed to decide who gets the key.

There is a peculiar fact about modelling that the final photograph makes very easy to forget: the person and the material being worked on are physically the same thing. The body is measured, dressed, moved and adjusted through light, make-up and cut, but it does not get left behind in the studio when the production ends.

After shoots lasting several days, the professional role can stay with her for a while. “The feeling that I am a model stays with me for longer, and the transition back into Kristina takes a few days.” That transition back into Kristina describes the effect of the job with unusual precision: the professional version of the self does not necessarily disappear when the lights go out.

With long fittings, she takes it further. “You learn to detach yourself from your body and hand it over to the professionals.”

That can mean experience, trust and the ability to collaborate. In that process, other people adjust the clothes, hair, make-up, posture and movement. That professional ease opens a more difficult question: how many times can you look at your own body as a project before you begin to see it that way when the job is over too?

With Stéphane Rolland, she describes the process almost in reverse, as a form of creative transformation. “I think it is incredibly difficult not to change your character when Stéphane Rolland dresses you.” She talks about strength, mystery and the embrace of beautiful fabric, about posture changing and the body becoming, for a few minutes, “an untouchable, elevated being.”

Sometimes the change is not metaphorical. Some pieces are constructed so that the seam and composition of the garment themselves allow you to move only in certain ways. Strip couture of the house name, the music and the spectacle, and she reduces it to a single word:

“Cut.”

Construction itself is not the problem. The problem begins when a person no longer knows how much of the change they are still choosing for themselves.

Every profession requires discipline, but modelling is one of the few in which the result of that discipline is visible directly on the body. That line is very clear for her today. If something presented as necessary for the season is something a person does not want, restricting food, excessive training or other forms of pressure stop being professional requirements.

“That is an act of violence against your own body.”

Not every change is violence, and not every correction is a problem. What matters more is who requested the revision, and when the person agreed to it. In creative work, feedback can very easily become an internal voice. Hear often enough that something should be moved, narrowed, cleaned up, sharpened or fixed, and eventually it becomes difficult to know whether you are still looking through your own eyes or through someone else’s notes.

Contemporary beauty culture makes that process even harder to see. She does not look for a single culprit. When I ask who creates the average, she answers: “All of us.” Someone establishes the norm, someone accepts it, someone repeats it and then, as she puts it, the snowball becomes an avalanche.

If beauty is understood as symmetry, she believes that today “it is more radical to remain specific.” Fashion lives inside its own paradox here: it wants a face people will remember, then knows with remarkable precision what it would like to emphasise on that face. In her case, it is more pronounced cheekbones and a sharper jawline.

This is not only a fashion problem. Anyone working in a creative industry knows the moment when the thing that was once distinctive becomes an expectation. A designer is asked for another version of the same object, an architect for another house resembling the last one, a photographer for the same frame, a writer for the same voice. Success can turn style into a template very quickly.

Which is why how many revisions are enough? is ultimately less a question of appearance than of authorship.

The conversation changes weight when I ask what her body refuses to forget.

“The history of my body remembers unwanted touch, being taken without consent, and desires that should never have been voiced to a child.”

The body never arrives at work empty. It carries a history of touch, control, intimacy and fear, things that remain invisible to the people dressing, photographing or directing it that day. A professional relationship with the body can therefore never be purely technical. A fitting is not unwanted touch, just as collaboration is not possession, but the boundary between them has to belong to the person whose body is involved.

She does not frame recovery as some grand transformation. Old habits, she says, disappear more slowly than we expect: “Healing takes a lot of energy, but it is all in service of living better in your own body.”

A better stay inside your own body matters more than a perfect result. There is no final version of a person that can be approved once and sent into production. There is a sequence of changes, and the point at which we learn which ones are actually ours.

Writing becomes an important part of her story, though not as an escape from appearance. On her blog napisalaKika, she returns to appearance directly, writing about the body, ageing, aesthetic standards and her own relationship with the image. She has not stopped talking about appearance; she has changed the position from which she talks about it.

“I needed somewhere to hide where I could be Kika as a word, rather than Kika as a photograph.”

Writing has not offered her an escape from the image. It has given her the possibility of deciding for herself how she wants to speak about it. When I ask what is harder for her to post, a photograph or a piece of writing, there is no hesitation: the writing. “I write so I can feel calmer. Something in me has something to say, and that is why I write.” The worst moments are the ones when she catches herself writing for the sake of a good reputation rather than for the satisfaction of doing it.

This is where the shift in her position becomes clearest. Years spent inside a system that constantly evaluates and corrects appearance have not given her complete control over the process, but they have given her a far more precise understanding of which part of that control she is no longer willing to hand over. Confidence here has little to do with refusing change; it looks more like knowing the difference between collaboration and giving yourself away.

In the end, she reduces it to a simple boundary: “If the vision is fundamentally against my values, then it is the photograph. If I cannot stand behind my own words, then it is the writing.”

The question, then, is not whether trauma is somehow foundational to the profession of modelling. That would be both too broad and too simple.

The far more interesting question is what happens when an industry built on revisions works with material that has a history of its own, boundaries of its own, and the right to refuse the next version.

I think I began looking at Anja Demić’s work differently when I realised that the faces she records are rarely models in the conventional sense. They are her people. Friends, familiar faces and bodies, people with whom a relationship exists long before they enter the work. That small shift in perspective changes everything: what might initially read as a study of the body becomes a record of intimacy, trust and a precise moment that will never return in exactly the same form.

That feels close to the way I know her. She does not walk into a room with the urge to deconstruct it. She is calm, thoughtful and unobtrusive, but quick to notice relationships others overlook: between people, objects, materials and space. Listen to her for a little longer and you realise how precisely she observes what surrounds her. The same concentration runs through her work, through folds, shadows, textures and the small departures from order that make a surface feel alive.

She moves between painting, relief, the body, material and, occasionally, interiors, but none of those categories quite finishes the job. A list she offers almost in passing says far more about her practice: texture, shadow, tactility, touch.

“I always knew I would end up doing something that wasn’t tied to a fixed timeframe, and that it would be something I made with my hands.”

So the best place to begin is without too much theory, but with the hands.

There is a work in her hallway that began as a test. It has been there for several years, long enough for the way she sees it to change. What looked like a mistake at the time has become interesting to her because of that mistake. Almost every work, she says, carries some form of imperfection or incompleteness, but this piece is a particularly good example of how time can alter our judgement of the things we initially dismiss.

Here, error is not a pre-designed irregularity inserted to prove that something has been made by hand. It is far more ordinary, and far more useful. A material may refuse to cooperate, a reaction can move in an unexpected direction or a surface can behave differently from what she had in mind, and the work moves somewhere else.

The materials she uses often behave in exactly that way. They change in contact with one another and respond to temperature, humidity and time, which makes her want to understand them better.

“The ceramicists and craftspeople I work with have been invaluable advisers. My mother, on the other hand, would answer almost every one of their that can’t be done with yes, it can. I suppose she taught me that things don’t always have to be done by the book, and that there is probably a way. Maybe that is why I often feel like I can do anything.”

That “I can do anything” feels less like a statement of confidence than a habit she has developed over time, a refusal to treat a technical “no” as the end of the conversation. If something does not work, she changes the material, the process or the direction and keeps testing until something opens up.

And yet she is at her best when there is no answer she has to find at all. As long as the process remains a game and there is no target she has to meet, she works more freely. She can stop at the moment the work feels right, without forcing it further just because it is supposed to be “finished”.

At a time when even leisure is quickly given a task, a result and a metric of success, that relationship with play feels almost radical because she does not present it as such. She does not turn it into a philosophy. She wants the work to have room to surprise her.

And almost always, something has to escape.

She does not like everything to resolve into a flat plane. She is drawn to the detail that moves beyond it, the fold that was not completely planned, the surface that lifts and changes the way the work catches light. Her reliefs are therefore not simply paintings with volume added to them. They operate through shadow, depth, shifts in angle and physical proximity. The boundary between the work and the space around it becomes less certain.

That desire for form not to behave too obediently also appears in the way she works. Physical closeness often matters to her more than an overview of the whole.

“I trust the eye, of course, but when I am sculpting or painting I often do not want to step back. I know seeing the whole is a crucial part of the process, but sometimes the detail, the fold and the feeling under my fingers that the material is the way I imagine it matter more to me.”

One gaze organises the whole, while another tests the skin of the work. For her, those two ways of seeing do not necessarily exist in a hierarchy. Sometimes what is beneath the fingertips carries more weight than the composition viewed from the other side of the room.

Texture spills into the things she chooses outside the studio too, into clothes, objects and surfaces. Even when something is flat, she looks for the point at which flatness stops being complete. Something has to disturb the image just enough to keep it from becoming dead.

Perfection bores her quickly.

Belgrade Skin is a collection made directly through the human body. Plaster is applied to the skin, taking on its surface, its irregularities, folds and differences, so each work begins with an actual body at a specific moment. The title is easy to misread if taken too literally. The skin of Belgrade here is not a façade, asphalt or a collection of brutalist surfaces. It belongs to people.

“I think people are the greatest charm of Belgrade. The city has gone through dark periods, but the warmth and welcome of its people are still what foreigners remember when they leave.”

The city stops being something observed from the outside and begins to accumulate through the people who live it. In Belgrade Skin, the body is not simply a subject or a neutral surface onto which a concept is projected. It physically takes part in making the work. Through direct contact, the plaster takes on its form, leaving behind a relief-like record of that body at that moment.

No two bodies are the same, and individuality interests her far more than comparison. Bodies change, which means the same process can never produce the same result twice. A fold, a shift, a trace, a difference. All the things that make one body impossible to substitute for another.

Many of the people whose bodies become part of the collection belong to her everyday life. They are friends, familiar faces, people she knows before the work and continues to know afterwards. The gaze she turns towards them is therefore not the gaze of someone encountering a body for the first time, because it already contains closeness, memories and earlier versions of the person that came before the moment she records.

This is where Belgrade Skin functions as a personal archive, without any desire to freeze things in place. It does not preserve Belgrade through buildings, but through the physical traces of people who existed within it at a given moment. The city does not accumulate in a panorama, but in the presence, character and bodies of those who carry it with them.

That is a more precise way of recording a city. Architecture can remain unchanged for years while the people inside it change countless times.

Workshops attract her because of the period before the finished object, when it is still not entirely clear what the material will do and when someone else in the room knows far more than she does.

“For me, a creative workshop is much more than a gallery. It is an inexhaustible source of play and possibility.”

When she travels, that can mean tiles, moulds, casting, clay and techniques that cannot be learned by looking alone. There is no need to romanticise craft because what interests her is the process itself, what happens when you take a material into your hands for the first time, get it wrong, repeat the gesture, learn its logic and only then begin to contradict it.

In every process, she feels as though she is back at the beginning. Again and again. There is always something else to explore in form, in the body, in material, in the way it behaves and affects its surroundings.

That sense of beginning does not mean she glorifies not knowing. Quite the opposite. The better she understands a material, the more confident she becomes in testing it and taking it further.

The workshop is therefore not an escape from artistic practice, but the place where that practice expands. She does not go looking for a souvenir, but for an experience that remains in the hands longer than the finished object.

She carries the same principle into interiors, which she occasionally works on without any need to declare them a second profession. She has a very specific measure for how much of a space should remain open to life: twenty per cent.

“A space should remain at least twenty per cent unfinished so that the person living in it can leave their own mark.”

It is a surprisingly good measure. Enough for a space to have intention, but not so much that the person entering it has to spend the rest of their life acting as an extra in someone else’s composition. A bad space interests her more than a characterless one. If nothing else, she says, it leaves a trace.

This is where the conversation about good taste becomes more complicated than the standard critique of Pinterest, Instagram or trends. Good references train the eye, and the problem begins when the gaze becomes so well trained that it no longer dares to make a mistake.

Once everyone has learned the same lesson about which wall colour looks serious, which chair signals design literacy and exactly how carelessly books should be left on the table, taste can easily stop being personal.

She would rather leave that twenty per cent unfilled, so life still has somewhere to enter.

Anja loves rocks.

It could easily be one of those things you know about a friend and never have any reason to write down. In her case, though, it is difficult to separate from a body of work in which material, the body, change and time are so present.

Stone exists at a rhythm that is almost impolite towards human time. The body does not have that luxury.

“A sealed moment matters to me, but so does transience. As bodies age and change, they gain more character for me. They become more interesting.”

The most accurate way to see her here is as a kind of quiet witness. Not a portraitist in the classical sense, and even less someone attempting to stop time. She records a situation knowing that everything within it will continue once the work is over.

The people she knows will change. Their bodies will change. Her relationships with them may deepen, recede or become something else entirely. The city around them will change too, along with the way they see themselves. The work will remain as a precise record of one version of a person that was once the present.

That is why transience in her work does not carry the taste of loss. It is simply another material.

The materials she works with continue to shift in contact with time, air, temperature and other surfaces. A work that has spent three years in a hallway gradually stops being a mistake. A body once recorded acquires another history. Belgrade stays the same only on the map.

Stone, meanwhile, is doing something else entirely. Almost nothing.

It is enough to remain close: to see the fold before the whole, to feel the material under her fingers, to recognise when something should be allowed to escape, and when a moment, however brief, is worth keeping.

Paris is wet tonight, though not in the cinematic way. It has been raining long enough for coats to smell damp, pavements to turn black and windows to fog up from the inside. I’m sitting at Le Crocodile in the Latin Quarter, between photographs and old posters on the walls and a cocktail menu so long that ordering feels like a minor commitment to the evening.

Somebody has decided that tonight belongs to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Not one song, but what increasingly feels like the entire discography. After thinking about him for days, Sacha Kassy starts to sound like a plausible cocktail somewhere between two others I have never heard of. It isn’t there, though by then I think it should be.

A room like this makes sense as an opening scene: too much music, too many objects and an interior that looks as though it accumulated its identity over time. He is a French DJ and producer based in Paris, but music entered his life long before clubs did. He started playing drums at seven, moved through jazz and classical orchestras, discovered DJing at sixteen, later became a resident at London’s Subtle Radio and today also works as a curator at Hark, where records, audio equipment, design and people still have to occupy the same room.

Miu Miu has translated that renewed appetite for physical music into its Vinyl Club pop-ups, where records and turntables become part of the architecture of retail. A fashion house no longer just chooses music to accompany clothes; it rebuilds the conditions around listening and makes them desirable in their own right.

Calling all of this an analogue revival misses the point. The seventies are not coming back, nor is vinyl returning in any historical sense. What is returning is an appetite for things with weight, surface, ritual and a little resistance.

His explanation for the renewed interest in vinyl begins somewhere much more practical than a collective hunger for authenticity.

“Vintage culture, second-hand objects and thrifting are mainstream now, for good reason, and they’re economically much more interesting. I think that plays a big role in the new generation becoming interested in vinyl again.”

He belongs to a generation for whom music was never purely sonic. An early 2000s childhood meant music videos, YouTube, label identities and pop culture experienced as much through images as sound.

“The vinyl object itself reminds me of that pop culture era and echoes our new world, which is much more digital than it used to be but is still based first and foremost on the visual aspect of things.”

We miss touching things, but we also like the way touching things looks. Records, sleeves, turntables and speakers satisfy both impulses at once. His first vinyl was The Marshall Mathers LP. He was eight or nine and had no idea who Eminem was. “I just thought a guy randomly sitting in front of his house looked cool.”

Before taste becomes knowledge, it is often attraction. A record sleeve does the same job as a chair, a poster or a piece of clothing: it makes you stop before you have worked out why. Domestic technology spent years trying to disappear; now speakers are becoming sculptural again and turntables are given furniture of their own.

When a day is organised around sound, the distinction between music and design becomes hard to maintain.

“Music almost never ends. I wake up and the first thing I do is play a record, then I produce or dig for a bit, then I spend the whole day at Hark, and finally I go back home and play or listen to music again. I don’t watch TV or play games, and I don’t really go out that often. I’m kind of obsessed with making things sound.”

The way he makes music follows the same logic. It begins with something concrete: sampling something specific, building a club track around a bassline, playing with breaks and allowing the rest to find its direction.

“From that starting point, everything comes out naturally with the flow. There isn’t much reflection beyond that.”

When I ask whether records, objects, spaces and Hark have changed the music he makes, he tells me he cannot give a particularly relevant answer. Working there has opened him up to a much wider range of musical styles and given him a stronger knowledge of recording history. He does not improve the answer for the sake of the interview.

A neat version of this story would require him to distrust algorithms. He spends his days around records, so it would be convenient if he told me digital discovery had flattened everything. Instead, Instagram introduced him to Ele A, a Swiss rapper from the Italian-speaking part of the country, and he has kept listening ever since.

“I really appreciate how hybrid and unique her musicality is, also thanks to the productions from her DJ, Disse3000. I think they’re both in my top ten at the end of every year.”

The algorithm occasionally gets it completely right. There is more music available than anyone could realistically hear, yet he usually knows within a few seconds whether something is going to stay with him.

“I can’t really explain it. I guess it’s just a feeling. Most of the time, I can tell within a few seconds if I’m going to like a track or if it just won’t make anything resonate inside me.”

Artwork and record covers still enter the decision. “Visual art and record covers also play a big role in the way I understand a project or become interested in it.”

Access is no longer the privilege; attention is. A record sleeve interrupts the endless stream differently: you have to hold it, turn it over, decide whether the image or typography deserves another look. None of that makes digital discovery its opposite. A day spent among records can still end with a favourite new artist found on Instagram.

The codes of underground culture are everywhere now: small rooms, vinyl, raw interiors, secrecy, visible equipment. Fashion, retail and hospitality speak the language fluently, and projects such as Miu Miu Vinyl Clubmake the shift obvious.

I had assumed there was an interesting question here about the moment underground became aspirational. He is far less interested in the category itself.

“To be honest, nowadays I can’t really tell what is underground and what isn’t, and I don’t really care.”

Then he becomes more exact. “As artists, we just need to create what we feel. After that, the audience and the ‘big machine’ of the industry choose what is working and what isn’t. Designing or creating something in order to seem underground doesn’t make any sense to me. It isn’t a vibe or an aesthetic. Some talented people really struggled hard to get themselves out of that category.”

A raw wall is still only a wall, and a vinyl-only set does not automatically make a scene. Once underground becomes an aesthetic target, it begins to lose the thing that gave it meaning.

What still feels alive in Paris has less to do with defending the purity of a scene than with the people moving through it.

“I still love the fact that I’m discovering new artists, DJs, photographers, painters and filmmakers every week, every time I’m out. It makes me very happy to be surrounded by all those creative people and to have the chance to sometimes cross paths with them.”

Paris enters the story less through addresses than through collisions. A photographer meets a DJ, a filmmaker ends up beside a painter, somebody hears something they had not gone out looking for. A scene needs rooms, but its real infrastructure is proximity.

Working at Hark gives him a good position from which to watch people choose music when no feed has already chosen it for them.

“There’s a very specific way of digging that’s unique to each customer, and I find that really interesting. Some people know exactly what they’re looking for, some only look through the newly arrived records, while others can spend hours going through everything and listening to anything.”

“I don’t know exactly what it reveals. I guess it just reflects the way people consume art, and I find it very amusing to get the chance to experience that every day.”

A physical space lets the process remain visible: hesitation, wrong turns, the record somebody picks up and puts back, the one they never intended to hear.

When I ask what can still happen between two people and a piece of music that no platform can reproduce, he refuses to make the answer larger than it needs to be.

“Anything can happen, and nothing can happen too. It’s only music.”

Dry, accurate and almost annoyingly resistant to interpretation. Good.

By the time our conversation is almost over, the rain outside Le Crocodile has not improved and the Red Hot Chili Peppers have been with us for most of the evening. The room has become louder without anybody deliberately making it louder, and the objects around us have stopped asking to be interpreted. You no longer care who designed the chair or whether the speaker deserves to be called sculptural. The night has moved beyond that.

I ask him to imagine two versions of himself meeting somewhere around five in the morning in Paris, the one who was starting out and the one standing there now.

“I think both versions of Sacha would recognise this quest to be one hundred percent true to themselves, which I could describe as wanting to remain as reckless and humble as a kid. But I think the one from years ago would look much sadder and more lost than I do today, luckily.”

It is the most personal thing he says, and he does not decorate it afterwards. He does not perform an answer because an interview demands one, nor does he turn instinct into theory. If there is something precise to say, he says it; if there isn’t, the empty space does not bother him. In an environment where everybody is expected to have an articulate position on everything, that restraint looks unusually confident.

As we finish, the RHCP run finally comes to an end and whoever is controlling the music switches over to Rinse France. The sound changes almost imperceptibly, a different rhythm slides underneath the conversations, and Only Love Tries, his new mini EP, begins to play.

I look back at the cocktail menu. Maybe Sacha Kassy was on it after all.

Marseille has a habit of dismantling whatever image of it you arrive with. It is loud, rough and overcrowded, then almost village-like a few streets later, monumental, improvised, French only up to a point before becoming something far more Mediterranean. Stefan and I spent much of this summer discovering it on foot, which is probably the quickest way to understand how badly a single definition fits the place.

That is precisely why Pierre Zenatti’s photographs caught my attention. His city is quiet, empty, precise and intensely blue. There are no crowds spilling across the pavement, no scooters passing slightly too close, no faces interrupting the geometry. Facades become lines, shadows almost become architecture, and Marseille, a city not particularly known for its mute button, suddenly goes silent. Everything looked so clean and exact that, for a moment, I found myself wondering whether I was looking at a photograph at all.

And yet, I already knew this Marseille. We had been staying in Le Roucas-Blanc, an almost village-like part of the wider city centre, where small houses, narrow streets and gardens slow the pace, and the view from above reshapes the relationship between sea, sky and architecture. From there, this version of Marseille felt entirely real. Walk downhill, however, and the same image begins to come apart.

His photographs occupy the space between those two Marseilles: a very real fragment extracted from a much louder whole. People sometimes accuse him of showing a city that is too clean, too quiet, almost imaginary, yet everything stood in front of his camera. The more interesting question is why we are so much more willing to accept certain other versions of Marseille as more real.

“A photograph is real as an object, but what it shows is an interpretation. Pure observation does not exist. As soon as we look, we construct.”

He started taking pictures as a hobby during university, without much passion or ambition. His first real visual love was graphic design, particularly Photoshop. Photography became more serious during his time in the French Army, where he began developing the fundamentals of photojournalism.

“Through these photo essays, I was asked to convey as much as possible with a single photo, so that a viewer could understand the entire scene and its implications as quickly as possible. So there was little room for emotion, and even less for artistic concerns.”

The photographs he is known for now came later, after years of experimentation and a search for a visual language that could combine his own aesthetic instincts with techniques drawn from graphic design. The contradiction is useful: he was taught to put as much information as possible into a single image; today, he seems interested in what happens when almost everything is removed.

“I’m not thinking yet. I’m feeling.”

Control follows quickly. A slanted line bothers him, as do a badly adjusted frame and imperfect symmetry.

“So if I had to answer in one sentence: intuition tells me where to look, and control decides what stays. One without the other doesn’t work. An image that’s purely intuitive is rough around the edges. An image that’s purely controlled is cold. It’s the tension between the two that makes a photo just right.”

He is equally precise about what he refuses to photograph: too much movement, too many people, a face breaking the silence, an image that already looks like a postcard.

“I’m not documenting a place; I want to transform it.”

Maybe he simply does not like crowds. That is probably healthier than turning every aesthetic preference into theory. What matters is that he has turned that inclination into an unusually consistent visual language.

Marseille officially contains 111 neighbourhoods, many retaining traces of the villages and local centres absorbed as the city expanded. It has never been very good at being just one thing. When people describe his Marseille as too beautiful, he says they may be reacting less to the city than to what they have stopped seeing.

“When you live in a big city, you no longer look at it; you just pass through it. My work doesn’t deny the noise, the movement, or the chaos, because that is the very identity of this city. It simply sets them aside. For the duration of a single image, I remove everything that’s overwhelming, and what remains in the end is a silent, peaceful city.”

The lines are there. The blue is there. What changes is the way they are looked at. Marseille has long been easier to sell through another vocabulary: danger, poverty, drug trafficking, violence, neighbourhoods where the state can feel absent. He does not deny any of it.

“I’ve been living here and exploring the city for nearly five years now, and I’ve never been afraid, not even once. I’m not saying there aren’t problems: there’s poverty, drug trafficking, neighbourhoods where the government is absent, and where people naturally feel abandoned. But the violence people talk about abroad and even here in France isn’t part of everyday life in Marseille. It’s just a small part of reality, the part that makes headlines in the media.”

For him, the city is closer to Naples or Barcelona than to Paris.

“It’s Mediterranean before it’s French.”

People speak loudly, become familiar quickly, argue and show affection in the same sentence. Marseille can be criticised endlessly from within; criticism from outside plays by another set of rules. Yet fear is only one way outsiders flatten the city. Romanticising it can do exactly the same thing.

“Those who romanticize Marseille make the same mistake as those who fear it: they look at the city from the outside, but from the opposite perspective. They’re searching for the Marseille of the past, the one that smelled of soap and lavender, where neighbors knew one another. The problem is that that Marseille never really existed; the old neighborhoods were poor, and people didn’t live there because it was picturesque—they lived there because they had no choice. Finding charm in a place where people are struggling isn’t paying them tribute at all; it’s turning their lives into a backdrop.”

Then he turns the argument back on himself.

“They also forget that Marseille isn’t a museum. It’s a living city; people don’t want to live in a postcard, they want a future. And I have to be honest: my work can feed into that vision. My Marseille is silent, empty, clean; it isn’t the whole truth; it’s just a fragment. I don’t claim to show the ‘real’ Marseille; I show my own.”

He knows that his Marseille is a construction too, neither more nor less truthful than every other version. Perhaps the “real” Marseille does not exist. A city made from 111 different neighbourhoods probably never needed one.

The conversation eventually returns to my original suspicion: the photographs had initially looked generated to me, while AI, he tells me, has already copied his work.

“It’s my perception, one that’s hard to replicate, even if AI can copy my work, as has already happened to me recently.”

The question is therefore less whether AI can produce an image that resembles his than whether it can reproduce the reason he noticed that particular line in the first place.

His visual language was not born in Marseille. He traces it back to a trip through Mexico and the intensely colourful alleyways of its southern cities.

“I could apply it anywhere, in any city; I’ve already done so. The place changes, but the perspective remains.”

That perspective is physical too. His photographic walks can stretch for at least twenty kilometres, alone and without music. Design and architecture matter, as does Provence; so does the solitude he openly admits is part of the reason people rarely appear in his work.

“I’m a solitary soul, even a bit antisocial at times. That’s partly why there are never any people in my photos. It’s not an aesthetic choice. It’s a reality.”

He describes himself as pragmatic, organised and a bit of a control freak.

“My minimalism isn’t a way to withdraw from the world. It’s a way to look at it more closely.”

AI can learn the blue, an empty facade, a hard shadow and a perfectly aligned line. What remains harder to reproduce are the twenty-kilometre walks, Mexico, Provence, military photojournalism, graphic design, solitude and the instant in which someone decides that this wall or this shadow is worth stopping for.

For him, the reason to keep photographing is not primarily the finished image.

“What makes a photograph indispensable to me isn’t what it shows. It’s what it makes me feel the moment I take it. When I take a photograph, there’s a moment of calm. A moment when everything stops. I don’t think about anything else. It’s instinctive: I see something, I raise the camera. And then, very quickly, it becomes a deliberate process: framing, settings, composition. But that first impulse, that inner moment of silence, is what drives me to keep going.”

He wants to leave something behind that survives the endless stream of images.

“For me, the fewer elements there are, the more beautiful and essential the image is. To remove is to make it stronger. And deep down, what I want is to leave a mark. Not just another photo in a stream. A reminder.”

He has also quit his job to try to make a living from photography. There is something usefully concrete about that: the eye AI is learning to imitate still belongs to someone trying to build an actual life around it. Universal approval does not seem to interest him much either, and perhaps that is the more interesting problem of suspicious beauty.

We have become so accustomed to asking whether an image is real that we sometimes forget to ask whether it made us feel anything at all.