What's Contemporary Now?
Designed for curious minds, "What's Contemporary Now?" engages various thought leaders across cultural industries taking in their broad, compelling perspectives and unveiling their common threads. Hosted by Christopher Michael Produced by Sasha Grinblat
Episodes
February 3, 2026 • 40 mins
Copenhagen Fashion Week marks its 20th anniversary at a moment when the fashion system is being asked to account for itself. In conversation with CEO Cecilie Thorsmark and COO Isabella Rose Davey, this episode examines how a regional fashion week evolved into a platform with global influence, and what that evolution reveals about the future of the industry.
“Fashion weeks were falling out of sync with the world around us. They wer...
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January 26, 2026 • 41 secs
With a quick trip to Copenhagen for the city's 20th anniversary fashion week, we will be attending the shows, interviewing the organizers, and participating on a panel with Vogue business to explore the idea of what a magazine is today. Their impressive programming, in addition to the designers, includes an impressive array of subject matter that warrants a timely exploration and we'll be back on Monday with a full episode sharing ...
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January 19, 2026 • 50 mins
The episode follows AMBUSH’s evolution from jewelry made for friends to a brand that Yoon describes as a platform, shaped by experimentation rather than a rigid business plan. She speaks candidly about learning in real time, being paid to learn, and why every job and skill eventually becomes useful. From research as a daily practice to AI as a tool that can accelerate creative work without replacing it, Yoon makes a case for stayin...
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January 12, 2026 • 47 mins
Asad Syrkett joins What’s Contemporary Now? for a wide-ranging conversation about design as a cultural language and the quiet ways environments shape identity, memory, and access. From a childhood spent moving through New York City’s homes, department stores, and streets, to a new chapter living and working in Milan, he reflects on how early encounters with the built world formed a lifelong curiosity long before he had the vocabula...
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January 5, 2026 • 59 mins
For our first episode of 2026, we sit down with Kyle Hagler and Emil Wilbekin for a deeply personal and wide-ranging conversation at the intersection of Native Son, culture, and media. We begin with formative histories shaped by strong women, faith, and instinct, before tracing how both have navigated long careers defined by pivots, visibility, and cultural responsibility. From Emil’s journey through magazine leadership to founding...
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December 23, 2025 • 1 min
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December 15, 2025 • 49 mins
Angelo Flaccavento has long been one of fashion’s most distinctive critical voices — sharp yet empathetic, rigorous yet imaginative, always willing to question his own certainties. In this conversation, he traces his path from a Sicilian childhood spent absorbing magazines in boutique backrooms to becoming a writer whose clarity and candor designers both fear and admire.
We discuss the formative power of self-doubt, the responsibi...
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December 8, 2025 • 42 mins
Camille Miceli brings a vivid, almost incandescent joie de vivre to Pucci, treating color, movement, and intuition as both vocabulary and philosophy. Her worldview is shaped by an upbringing steeped in art and fashion, and by formative chapters with Alaïa, Lagerfeld, Jacobs, and Raf Simons — each adding a layer to her finely tuned sense of glamour and discipline.
She reflects on the value of frivolity in an anxious age, the necess...
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December 1, 2025 • 35 mins
In this episode, Matthew Whitehouse reflects on the winding path from a rainy Lancashire childhood and a brief burst of band-life glamour to leading The Face, a title forever suspended between myth and reinvention. He speaks with disarming clarity about reviving an icon without embalming it, insisting that the magazine’s only true mandate is to capture the texture of now — not nostalgia, not futurism, but the pulse of the present.
...
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November 24, 2025 • 51 mins
Recho Omondi, host of The Cutting Room Floor, handles candor with the ease of someone who has little interest in performance and every interest in clarity. Over seven years, her once-modest podcast has steadily entered the cultural foreground, helped along by her habit of thinking — and learning — in public.
She moves fluidly between roles: moderating conversations, appearing on other platforms, or steering her own interviews with...
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November 17, 2025 • 44 mins
In his first-ever podcast interview, Ludovic de Saint Sernin traces the journey from a nomadic childhood to becoming one of fashion’s most closely watched voices. He talks about the diary-like beginnings of his brand, the Mapplethorpe collaboration that became a full-circle moment, and why he sometimes becomes his own muse.
We explore queerness, visibility, and the tension between intimacy and scale as his label grows, along with ...
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November 10, 2025 • 42 mins
For GQ’s global fashion correspondent Samuel Hine, clothes have always been more than fabric; they were a form of identity long before they became his career. Growing up as an identical twin in Chicago, he learned early that style could be a language of individuality. That instinct eventually led him to New York, a meeting with Will Welch (through a friend of his grandmother, no less), and what’s now a decade-long career shaping ho...
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November 3, 2025 • 46 mins
At this year’s WSJ. Magazine Innovator Awards, Billie Eilish asked, “If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? Give your money away” — a line that instantly reverberated far beyond the room. It was a reminder of the event’s magnetic pull and its place as a mirror for culture’s contradictions. Under Editor in Chief Sarah Ball, WSJ. Magazine has become precisely that kind of reflection: glamorous, self-aware, and culturally...
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October 27, 2025 • 46 mins
Talking to Tish Weinstock offers the kind of unfiltered honesty — or, as she calls it, radical honesty — that every interviewer hopes to find in a guest. She has a unique ability to move between the frivolous and the deeply meaningful with equal parts wit and whimsy, leaving you to wonder whether she’s someone who refuses to take herself too seriously or simply someone who won’t struggle against whatever feels truthful in the momen...
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October 20, 2025 • 39 mins
The morning after his show debut as Victoria’s Secret’s new Creative Director, Adam Selman joined me to talk through the emotions still vibrating from the night before. The conversation moved from backstage calm to creative catharsis, touching on the full-circle moment of opening the show with Jasmine Tookes, who walked his first-ever presentation years ago.
This isn’t a conversation about lingerie or spectacle, it’s more about co...
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October 13, 2025 • 34 mins
Nicholas Aburn’s path to AREA was never a straight line. He grew up watching CNN Style with his mother, worked full time at Prada while studying at Central Saint Martins, and famously failed under Louise Wilson before showing his collection anyway and becoming the first in his class to get a job when he was hired by Tom Ford. He now calls that failure a “delayed education,” one that taught him how to manage his own creative and emo...
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October 6, 2025 • 41 mins
When we first thought to sit down with Jerry Lorenzo, we planned to talk about culture, fashion, the first official womenswear collection from Fear of God, and the unique background that made his future feel wide open — though not necessarily destined for fashion. We did all of that, but the timely wisdom he shared reached far beyond the industry. Lorenzo speaks with the calm authority of someone who knows where he stands and why, ...
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September 29, 2025 • 52 secs
What’s more contemporary than the pursuit of happiness? The restless task of creating it, sustaining it, sharing it. It’s a game not so far from that of the creative class, with its inevitable demand for the next turn, the next gesture, the next affirmation of relevance. Designers, editors, critics, even self-anointed new media mavens know it all too well. Exploring larger cultural truths in their microcosmic forms is a habit we’ve...
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July 7, 2025 • 1 min
While the world appears to have taken leave of anything resembling objective reality, and our feeds continue to oscillate between the surreal and the mundane in a choreography of dissonance, we have returned to the quiet act of making. Production on the new season is underway, and with it comes the opportunity to explore the role creativity holds within culture. More than ornament, it serves as reflection, as resistance, and occasi...
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May 19, 2025 • 40 mins
In recent years, it’s become harder to tell whether fashion can still stand on its own, without leaning on the scaffolding of sport, film, or whatever cultural tentpole happens to be in rotation. But with the sustained relevance of System and the sharp ambition behind its latest expansion, Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Wingfield offers a clear answer: yes—fashion can still trade on itself.
It is a business, unquestionably—but a beautif...
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