Monocle Issue 177 October 2024

Style: Ideas, people and places for a sharper future.

In the northern hemisphere the back-to-school feeling that hits after a hopefully blissful summer isn’t something that only students or their teachers experience. It permeates everything. Galleries pull up the shutters to open new shows, shops unveil their autumn wares, politicians return to parliaments – things click back into gear. While packing away the loungers and returning the sun cream to the bathroom cabinet can be a little unsettling, the new season also brings the promise of change and a renewed determination to end the year on a high, with projects completed and at least some of those January promises fulfilled. Here at monocle, there has certainly been a feeling that it’s time to switch things up, to try some new ideas to make the

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most of the autumn sprint. That new-season enthusiasm also, in part, explains why this issue has landed with such a thump and almost 300 pages of global reporting.

Just in case you were napping poolside when that new hotel started checking in guests or when the US got an airport terminal to boast about, one of the first things that we decided to include in this issue is a guide to recent openings, launches and products that might have snuck past you. Produced by our editor Josh Fehnert, it kicks off on page 171 and, during the numerous rounds of picture selects and editing, has already encouraged several of our team to change their travel plans.

Being a man with broad shoulders, Josh has also been marshalling a new to-be-regular essays section that aims to inform, challenge and entertain. One of the stories is about life on a submarine and the discipline and mindset that you need to live under the waves. Told as a long q&a, the narrator is Taylor Sheppard, who has completed eight deployments as a US Navy submarine officer. And how did we meet her? It turns out that one of her ways of coping with the weeks of isolation is to pack copies of monocle and Konfekt and she took up our offer to drop us an email.

This is also our style issue, in which our fashion editor, Natalie Theodosi, gets to seize a vast swath of editorial real estate. The directory of talent that she pulls together for these issues is always impressive and works on two levels. If you want to add some well-honed clothing to your wardrobe, of course, she has you covered. But the roll call of new brands is now essential reading for any fashion-shop buyer or sector investor on the talent-acquisition hunt.

In the Affairs pages, there’s also a story that touches on the worlds of fashion and design – and cultural confidence, identity and joy too. A generation ago, national dress seemed to be on a slippery slope to oblivion. It was often seen as parochial, a symbol of backwardness, a weakness if you wanted to project an image of modernity for your country. No more. Now it’s seen as youthful, a powerful marker of belonging and pride. In countries around the world designers are giving national dress new relevance, allowing people to take even more pleasure from sporting their thawb or saree. Alexis Self, our foreign editor, has marshalled a runway parade of writers to decode their country’s national dress with warmth and insight. Perhaps a kilt is in order.

This year’s monocle Quality of Life Conference will be taking place in Istanbul (from 10 to 12 October, if you would care to join us – tickets for it are now available from monocle.com/conference). We have taken our presence in the Turkish city as an excuse to dive into its design and music scenes, which reveal stories of tradition and modernity being valued, used and cleverly adapted in myriad ways. And there’s a surprising undercurrent of rule-breaking too.

It’s this need to innovate that runs as a rich vein throughout this issue – knowing how to hold on to the past while embracing new ideas. It’s an autumn recipe to embrace.