Égoïste, Finally

I'd heard about Égoïste for years before I actually held one. Second-hand copies traded at prices that felt more like art auctions than magazine resale. This legendary, art-directed thing built entirely around one editor, Nicole Wisniak, who released it whenever it was ready. I finally tracked down a few copies. I can't overstate how good this body of work is.

As a designer what impresses me most is the creative control. Wisniak convinced the biggest luxury houses in the world — Chanel, Hermès, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent — to hand her their advertising pages and let her represent them entirely on her terms. "My idea was to sell just enough ads to do exactly what I wanted," she said. That's the whole business model in one sentence: the ads weren't a compromise that funded the magazine, they were the thing that made total independence possible. I'd bet on never seeing it replicated at this level again.

It's also a genuinely one-woman operation. The whole magazine was assembled by Wisniak alone — apparently not even her husband, who contributed one article per issue, was allowed to see the rest of it before it went to print.

And the signature look never wavered across 17 issues over 40 years. Strictly black and white. Oversized format. No staples to protect the photography. Garamond type. A layout so austere people call it Jansenist. One detail I love: the mastheads always credit a scattering of cities, and next to the usual London, Paris, New York, you'll find Timbuktu, Kathmandu, places that have nothing to do with distribution and everything to do with a point of view.

If you ever see a copy of this magazine out in the wild, buy it. You won't regret it. There's endless inspiration in these pages.