Fake / Folk

Sleek 37 Spring 2013: Faking the Folk Pt. II

Sleek magazine bounds out of winter with a spring in its step and a question on its lips: what’s fake and what’s folk today? What’s the fascination with craft and textiles, with romantic landscapes made with Photoshop, and men with beards in bands? There’s an answer too. In 1999 the then-editor of The Face magazine, Richard Benson, wrote a landmark essay, “Faking The Folk” for that magazine on how the emerging fetish for folkiness was a strange combination of the authentic and the artificial, the plastic and the organic. Like all the best journalism, it not only captured the zeitgeist back then but feels even more true now – and that’s why for the all-new, redesigned and re-engineered Sleek, he updates his essay with “Faking The Folk Pt.II”, which opens the Assignment section.

In there, find fashion stories by photographers including Thomas Lohr, Alexander Straulino, Willem Jaspert, Tomas Falmer and Sabrina Theissen, all of which pull the idea apart and put it back together again in extraordinary ways, plus contemporary art stories that look at romanticism in the Web 2.0 era, the resurgence of handicrafts in fine art, feral photography and more.

Fashion Now – Art Forever

Sleek is dedicated to tracking the changing world through the prisms of art and fashion, and there’s much more on offer this Spring: in Sleek’s biggest issue to date (we mean more and bigger pages), find interviews with Kenneth Anger, Takashi Murakami, Jim Shaw, Francesca von Habsburg, Christian Wijnants and Robert Montgomery. Meanwhile Hili Perlson looks at Talia Link’s reanimation of the witch, Francesca Gavin explains the “thingliness” of artist Steven Claydon, Kevin Braddock profiles Belgian man of the moment Christian Wijnants, and there are thoughts on the dawning Anthropocene era, studio visits with fascinating new artists in Berlin and plenty more.

Out now

This issue and for the first time Sleek also comes with its own dedicated fashion and art covers, art directed by Bureau Mario Lombardo, whom we welcome to the team. Don’t they make a beautiful couple (or trio, if you see it that way)? Available in stores now, or download for the iPad and other tablets from the iTunes store