L'Officiel Global Chief Creative Officer, Stefano Tonchi, takes us back to the magazine's history as he discusses the editorial agenda for its centennial.

Celebrating its 100th year and now with 31 editions worldwide, L&rsquo;Officiel has grown beyond its French base. Its widespread mobility has allowed the magazine to transform its pages into a multi-platform publishing model bridging local and global communities. What started as a Parisian trade magazine for buyers of high fashion (which advanced the careers of Pierre Balmain, Crist&oacute;bal Balenciaga, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent) has expanded so much to the point that it could benefit from a return to form.&nbsp;
During my interview with Stefano Tonchi, who's known for his tenure at W Magazine and T: The New York Times Style Magazine, he explains, &ldquo;I started thinking about what the DNA of the brand is, and then the management asked me, &lsquo;Well, what do you think are we doing today?&rsquo; and I said, &lsquo;I think you're a little bit too avant-garde sometimes&hellip; I think we should focus again on fashion. That&rsquo;s what the brand is about.&rsquo; I don't want to talk about fashion in an abstract sense. It means a lot of things. It's about gender. It's about race. It's about sustainability. But it's fashion, you know. It's not about art. It's not about politics. I think the magazine is doing a lot of different things but not enough of the core that is fashion.&rdquo;
After consuming more than 70,000 images from more than a thousand issues, he&rsquo;s confident about this direction: it&rsquo;s all about &ldquo;telling true stories about fashion. It&rsquo;s a magazine that is always very international. I don't know if you know this, but when it started&mdash;it was in three different languages. It was in Spanish, French, and English. Then some parts of the magazine were translated in German and Italian,&rdquo; he says.
As an Italian living in America, he&rsquo;s aware that most of L&rsquo;Officiel&rsquo;s contemporaries focus on the Anglo-Saxon perspective from New York and London. This makes him eager to shift the cultural gaze so that readers can zoom out and watch what the rest of the world has to offer.
Read the whole interview with Stefano Tonchi in L&rsquo;Officiel Philippines&rsquo; March 2021 issue here. In the meantime, see how the magazine evolved with the times through its covers.

A Look at the Archives of L'Officiel Through the Decades

A Look at the Archives of L'Officiel Through the Decades

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