After the comedown of an over-caffeinated late-2009 and the glory of adventuring over the Yuletide period, I ruminated on resolutions and whatnot and I came up with naught on health or volunteering but I did decide that 2010 is going to be My International Year of Business. In 2010 I am cleaning up my act. I am buying new brogues. I am brushing my hair. I am making a magazine and I am making it work. So it was on that note that I shelled out a crazy $31.95 for apartamento because, in hindsight, this magazine is tantamount to a hipster Belle – an aspiration manual that is entirely based on profiles of good looking international people with gigantic salaries and highly enviable jobs in new media that allow them expensive faux-hemian libraries and kitchens. With a sub-head like 'an everyday life interiors magazine' I hated myself for buying it and I read it cover to cover.
It's excellent. It saves the champagne-lifestyle-beer-salary individual (like myself) all the time of making a Secret collage and even occasionally sprouts a genuinely interesting article.
I have little to say about its design or specific content. That's all very good. What was really put into question in my purchasing and reading of this magazine was my own individuality, or lack of it. It is totally on-point with its display of zeitgeisty terror. But between the display of those things all of us ironically dressed, designer-sandwich-eating, sub-culture card carriers desire in life (rooftop gardens, shaggy-haired toddlers, Victorian wallpaper, resplendent dinner tables, pattern clashing wallpaper) there are novelty sized arrows pointing at the contrivances, such as Chloe Sevigny's professionally designed antique book collection.
apartmento is the first successful Gen Y coffee table magazine. It's packed with a late-naughties whimsy and feigned down-to-earthness that anyone who has worn a nature t-shirt or a fawn brooch would immediately identify with.
And from one sourdough lover to another, it's fucking great.
