For it's second XXL issue, PIN–UP invited multidisciplinary creative director Rana Toofanian to shape an issue centered on the intersection of fashion, design, and contemporary culture. Drawing on her experience across publishing, film, and image-making, Toofanian brings together a network of photographers, artists, designers, and cultural figures whose work she admires. In PIN–UP 41, Toofanian joins these collaborators and creative voices to explore how fashion shapes the way we see, make, and engage with the world around us.

With the issue now out in the world, we’re excited to share her editor’s letter below.

Fashion and architecture are the ultimate odd couple. One is accused of being frivolous, commercial, and ephemeral, while the other fancies itself noble, meaningful, and permanent. Both caricatures obscure how deeply entangled the two have become, particularly at a time when Big Fashion is pushing into design, hospitality, and the home. Architecture may supply the rag trade with seriousness, but fashion is by the weightier business — not least following the shift from designer to creative director, when the job morphed from making clothes to building worlds. Building, you could argue, is architecture’s strong suit. Fashion needs it to tell stories clothes alone cannot, even though the business of building operates on an entirely different schedule to the 24-hour content machine it is increasingly asked to serve. Fashion, meanwhile, is an omnivore, absorbing art, music, dance, film, design, and almost every other form of cultural expression into its vast entertainment-industrial complex, with architecture in the supporting role to fashion’s more seductive lead. This issue, PIN–UP’s second XXL, examines their relationship, the ways fashion keeps changing its terms, and why each new encounter feels exciting all over again. Architecture and fashion meet again. Somehow, it’s always the first time.

— Rana Toofanian with Felix Burrichter