L'Uomo Vogue, May 2002

We've been collecting L'Uomo Vogues from the 90s and 00s for a while. In this 2002 issue -- Michael Pitt on the cover, Damien Hirst in front of the Twin Towers, and Leonardo DiCaprio in his prime, Nick Stahl, and more. Inside imagery is led by Steven Klein and Nathaniel Goldberg.

Klein was a regular for L'Uomo Vogue at this point. Shooting cover after cover for the Italian title through the early 2000s. It was somewhat rare that a magazine like this had the budget and editorial appetite to let him do the dark, cinematic, often psychologically strange work he does best. His imagery from this period has an atmosphere that's hard to come by these days.

Goldberg's contribution to the issue plays it differently — cooler, more detached, but no less precise. Where Klein pushes toward the theatrical, Goldberg stays observational. The result is an issue that holds two distinct sensibilities in the same binding without either one softening for the other.

This is why we collect these magazines. Not for nostalgia, exactly — more because this kind of work existed in a specific window when the money, the talent, and the cultural permission to make something genuinely strange were all in the same room at the same time. L'Uomo Vogue under Franca Sozzani didn't operate like a magazine trying to sell you anything. It operated like a magazine that assumed you already knew, and was ready to go further.