MR PORTER
December 2019

Why No One Can Keep Up with Mr Eric Nam

Mr Eric Nam is what you might call a frequent flyer. Indeed, it feels like we might need to invent a new term for the Korean-American singer, songwriter, TV host and businessman, because he seems to be everywhere, all the time. His MR PORTER shoot took place in Seoul, a city where he is known and loved as perhaps the most Western-leaning of K-pop’s current crop of stars. When we interview him a week later over the phone, he’s in Los Angeles, rattling off his 2019 itinerary...

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MR PORTER
March 2019

Review: Instructions for a Funeral by David Means

Early on in Instructions For A Funeral, the new short story collection by New York State-based author Mr David Means, two words make us realise we’re in for something special. The words are “years later”, and when they first appear, in “Fistfight, Sacramento, August 1950”, they seem innocuous, an incidental piece of character detail about a woman watching a fight between a bratty rich kid and a farm worker. As the story progresses, though, “years later” becomes the axis around which the narrative spins...

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MR PORTER
December 2018

Meet the CEO making tech more lovable

On the day MR PORTER meets Mr Suyong Joh, the traffic is absolutely terrible. It takes over an hour to drive from Dongdaemun Plaza, where hordes of pink-haired teenagers are gathering for Seoul Fashion Week, to the comparatively calm and utopian environs of Seongnam, a satellite city south of Seoul that was built in the 1990s and, with its clusters of many-window skyscrapers, very much looks it. It’s here, in what’s known as the Pangyo Techno Valley (every forward-thinking city, it seems, now needs to have some sort of Valley), that we finally get to the offices of Kakao, one of South Korea’s most disruptive and successful tech companies, where Mr Joh has served as co-CEO since March 2018...


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MR PORTER
August 2018

Inis Meáin, The world’s most remote fashion label

You don’t just stumble upon Inis Meáin, the middle-most of the Aran Islands. Located 20km off the west coast of Ireland, and sandwiched in between its neighbours, Inis Mór and Inis Oírr, it’s accessible via a ferry from Ros a’ Mhíl in Co Galway or Doolin in Co Clare (it takes around 45 minutes, depending on where you leave from) or a five-minute flight from Connemara. This latter trip, by the way, is made in perhaps the tiniest passenger plane you are likely to come across, with just enough room for eight passengers (and that’s a bit of a squeeze, to be honest)...


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The Times Luxx
December 2016

How to be liked

Presumably, in some primitive dark age where we weren’t attached by the thumbs to small gimcracks designed by Apple and Samsung, it must have been difficult to know what people thought of you. That slight raise of an eyebrow after you told your favourite story — what did it mean? Approval? Disgust? Arousal? Human beings are so difficult to read. Thank goodness, then, for the emoting system invented by the social media network FriendFeed in 2007, which now exists on pretty much every networking app, from Pinterest to Tumblr, from YouTube to Instagram, in some format or another. Because of this era-defining piece of coding, we’re now in the far more comfortable position of knowing just exactly how much everything we do in the digital world resonates with others. In fact, we can rate ourselves in cold, hard digits. We’re talking here, of course, about the “like” button...


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The Financial Times
August 2014

The fashion case for mobile phone covers.

It seems like fashion has found a new star product. But why is it so, well, silly? And what might possess a professional woman ordinarily of sober style and judgment to carry a phone disguised as a googly-eyed frog?


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