WELCOME TO AMORE ISSUE NO.02

When I was asked what kind of magazine I wanted Studio XYZ to be, I said “one that Hunter S. Thompson and Nikola Tesla would have loved to write for, but where you could also find the ideas of an unknown Alexander McQueen when he was just an apprentice in Romeo Gigli’s Milanese studio.”  That is to say, I want it to be the crossroads between the world of superstars and the deeper underground, the reification of a new Italian voice and, at the same time, a space where everyone can look and find some kind of inspiration. On the morning news, war is ravaging the Middle East and who knows how many other parts of the world where conflicts forgotten by the Western media involve all kinds of states and militias, terrorist organizations, democracies, dictatorships, separatist groups, and armed guerrilla cartels. My God, what a world we live in. In the face of all this, I would be happy if this magazine can give even half an hour of serenity to anyone who finds themself reading it on a bench after a day’s work. Half an hour without thinking about the misery of the world, about the senseless productivity that capitalism forces us to achieve, half an hour without thinking about how to pay the rent and the problems at home. That would be a great achievement. If someone can find inspiration in these pages to make the world a better place, so much the better.

As far as this issue is concerned, the underlying theme is love. Carl Barât, in the interview that you will find later in the magazine, quotes a Beatles song, All You Need Is Love, and without getting into a disquisition on what love is, we can certainly say that it is what we need. For love is resistance. It is the faint flame that keeps the hope alive for change, for an end. But, in a society like the one we live in, love is rebellion, not the norm. We may cling to ideals and romance with all our might, but the regime that governs human existence, the grundnorm of peoples and villages, is made up of selfishness and lust, money and capital, desire and success.

This is the ruthless normalcy of the world, a normalcy that, as such, is hard to resist.

Love is what we need to resist all this and, as in any revolution, the struggle has a cost, it involves sacrifice. Boston George once told me that “love is the strongest force in the universe” and I agree, because every day we wake up on this earth, we have the chance to change things through love, wherever we are, from pulsating metropolises to rural suburbs, each of us has this power in our hands, the powerful of all factions to stop wars and conflicts, two strangers to give each other a smile in the subway – it is up to all peoples to settle differences based on artificial and fictitious superstructures. Nothing is lost, revolution!

You may not find what you are looking for in this issue of Studio XYZ, but it will hopefully help you in your search for what you want to find.

With love,

Nicolò