We are broken. Utterly utterly COMPLETELY broken. The size of the hole in our hearts is immense. You occupied a TREMENDOUS space in our lives Albertus. You were a giant, wonderful, kind, funny, talented man. I am drained from crying. The grief is exhausting. You were - ARE – so loved. I wasn’t going to post anything on here, because it feels tawdry compared to how much you mean to us. It’s private. But I also want everyone to know how much we love you. You and Eddie were among the first close friends we made when we moved to New York, and you immediately became our people, our gang. I loved coming over for pizza and playing with Pooks, the cat you loved even more than your trips to opera at the Met. I loved our picnics, and hanging out in your studio, which was just the most wild cave of ribbons and blocks and felt and art. You had that absurd storage unit full of vintage Gaultier that you couldn’t part with. That day we watched the Macy’s Day Parade with a wicked hangover from your window was magical – Snoopy and the other inflatables floating right past the window. I loved that the hats you made me were bigger than the ones for Oprah (“Your head is enormous Mark!”). I adored us all going for steak frites and red wine at Raoul’s, I was in absolute hysterics when we went to lap dancing clubs and The Cock at 2am, then had to have all our clothes dry cleaned to get the jizz off. You made us all laugh SO MUCH when we took you to Coney Island for the Mermaid Parade and you couldn’t believe how far from Manhattan we were going. “It’s just a few more stops! We are nearly there!” You made magic for Broadway and Vogue, and with Thom Browne, Marc Jacobs, Caroline Herrrera, Alexander Wang and Proenza Schouler, as well as Gap and J. Crew. I was so proud to see your face on billboards. You were so much a product of your South African heritage, and adored safaris and nature, and your homeland was a constant source of inspiration. I just KNOW that your future was going to take you back home to live amid all that beauty, with the man you love. You were Old New York. You were the best. You’ve left Eddie and Pooks and all of us, and we don’t know what to do without you.
“The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly”
News reached us on Monday just as we had sat down in a bar: Mark Quinn died suddenly on Saturday at home in Dublin. When I read the message, I thought about not saying anything to Neil. If I ignored it, it wouldn’t be true. But I did. We sat in silence, feeling like lead, disassociating. We tried to park it out of our heads and hearts until we got back home, and although it still doesn’t seem possible, the world has shifted.
It seems ridiculous Mark isn’t around. It’s an outrage he would die. It’s not something he’d do. He was a force of nature, operating on a different frequency to the rest of us. As Cillian once said: “If Mark isn’t living life to extremes, he doesn’t feel like he’s alive.”
Mark made everyone feel they were the most special person in his orbit. He was so Irish—incorrigible, with charisma to burn. He could have got away with murder. Hell, I’d have helped him do it. He would have made it a lark.
He could charm the birds from the trees, and the pants off anyone. He was hilarious, smarter than you, and a gentleman. He was a cheerleader for everything you wanted to achieve. He was loyal and had no ego. He rode horses, had beautiful eyes and the most genuine smile. He always bought dinner, no matter how many times I tried to get the card to the waiter first. When someone spiked the champagne at our wedding with MDMA, we blamed him. He hadn’t done it, but was the most obvious suspect. He was a handful.
It feels wrong to use the toxic carcass of social media to write this, but I really want everyone to know how great Mark was. If you knew him, you KNEW. My thoughts are with his family in Ireland, who I know are devastated.
After we heard the news on Monday, we left the bar and walked up a hill past a row of florist’s stalls, full of orchids. The smell was incredible. Mark knew how much I hate orchids, because the flowers fall away, and they look dead for so long before they bloom again. And I hate the reminder of what’s missing.
In today’s @fthtsi - the result of a day with the Nemeth family at their store in Tokyo last December. It’s 40 years since @christophernemeth_official moved from @house_of_beauty_and_culture and London to Tokyo to work with his wife Keiko on his iconoclastic label. He died in 2010 but Keiko and her daughters Lui and Riyo Nemeth have kept the designs alive. And the shop in Omotesando is a place of pilgrimage. You can buy select pieces from Dover Street Market, but this is the mothership. It’s like the old Pop Shop and World’s End - its existence is the thing. Just being inside it feels like you’re engaging with the work in a unique way. It’s always the first place I head to when I’m in Japan and it documents so much history about London and @judyblame and a really radical time for fashion as much as it is a great shop. I don’t wear anyone else’s denim. Nemeth forever… 🖤
From the beginning, it was clear among fashionable tastemakers that Philippe Starck would leave his mark on design by rethinking the process.
One of Ian Schrager’s closest friends, fashion designer Norma Kamali, remembers the early concepts Starck designed for the hotelier:
“You would be sure you’d always see something completely new,” she says. “Starck had a twinkle in his eye. Ian and Philippe changed the way people used hotels. It became an entertainment, and an experience worth copying by many.”
Swipe to read our exclusive interview and discover @starck ’s fantastical design philosophy.
Link in bio for the full feature with @markc_oflaherty ✍️
Once in a while I get to be a featured contributor in a magazine I have a story in. Go me! It’s such an ego boost, and when I get an email from an editor asking me to answer a Q&A, I stop whatever I’m doing and make myself a coffee and luxuriate in it… I will kick a deadline into the long grass to engage. I love labouring over every answer. For the latest issue of @livingcorriere I was given the big bit of the page (for my story on Stanley Wong in Kyoto), and talked about the Kate Bush song that makes me cry when I think of my mum, the Piers Gough building we live in, a certain McQueen coat from his Nihilism collection, and how the biggest complement ever paid to me was by a PR who accidentally copied me into an email to her colleagues describing me as “edgy, with great hair, and hates kids”. I also mention my new book here which I’m not supposed to talk about until next week because of the contract. But it’s in Italian here, so give me a break. This is also the first time my @ruthhogben portrait has been in print (wearing new season @skeltonjohn of course). I sound so much cooler in Italian. And Ruthie makes me look how I wish I looked IRL
Rights of spring. Shoots in Antwerp and Paris. Jaunts to Ireland. Barnaby and Molly’s birthdays. Flowers, cocktails, long lunches, Jack in the Green… Ceramics with Martha Freud and long overdue catch ups with friends
Words and pictures from the new issue of Harrods Magazine, from a wonderful day in December in Tokyo with the team behind @im_men_official - Yuki Itakura, Sen Kawahara and Nobutaka Kobayashi.
The last time I shot at the Miyake Design Studio it was with Issey-san himself. I was really surprised when the Miyake menswear was stopped, but I think IM Men is the best work that’s come out of the studio for decades. It’s so clever.
When Miyake moved his special projects department into House 1032, a glass and concrete building built for him in Shibuya by architect Kojiro Kitayama (the youngest sibling of Tadao Ando) in 1987, it established what would become a spectacular time capsule, but also a design landmark that remains home to radical new design. Among the pieces inherited by the Miyake Design Studio is a rare suite of cardboard furniture by Frank Gehry in one of the main meeting rooms. Around the corner is a powder coated metal wire chair by Tom Dixon next to an umbrella stand and chairs by Shiro Kuramata of the Ettore Sottsass-founded postmodern Memphis collective. The whole place is a reminder that the 1980s – when Miyake developed cult status in the west – was as much about industrial modernism as it was pop kitsch.
When I visited the studio the team were showing me pieces and mood boards from Spring/Summer 2026 collection, Dancing Texture, inspired by the ceramics of Shoji Kamoda.
Many thanks to all @isseymiyakeofficial and to @amylbroomfield and @katie_service_ for the commission. Such a delight to do. #isseymiyake #immen
#miyake
A total joy to work with @j.bruce.garden (and his dogs Frida and Nohni) on tomorrow’s @ft_weekend story on his Field Nursery project. He’s doing radical things with horticulture, and comes from an art background that informs everything – including creating an “edge of chaos” garden for @simon_costin at his crazy house in Cornwall.
I particularly love what Bruce has been doing with Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness – a place that obsesses me and has done since I wrote my dissertation at film school about Jarman and Greenaway (and their very different but equally painterly approach to filmmaking). Jonny is keeping the legacy alive and also, literally, growing it. It’s become a favourite day out for home counties tourists who add it to an itinerary of National Trust properties without any knowledge of Jarmen’s polemic.
From tomorrow’s story:
Bruce has been the head gardener at the late artist, gay rights and Aids activist Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, since Jarman’s partner, and Bruce’s friend, Keith Collins died in 2018. The shingle garden is defined by its pagan hag stones, circular rock arrangements and rusted iron punctuating the silvery green curls of sea kale, sage and lavender. As a student, Bruce had been fascinated by Jarman’s 1991 memoir Modern Nature, detailing his life in the now celebrated garden at the cottage he bought in 1986.
When Bruce studied art history at Cambridge, he saw gardening as “window dressing for rich people’s homes” but viewed Jarman’s garden as a manifestation of “anti-establishment politics, mysticism and the occult”. Today he frequently encounters teenagers who have made a pilgrimage there after reading his books and seeing his films. “I’m so heartened by that,” he says. “It’s a place of inspirational refuge. I like to have flashes of orange hot marigolds and other brash bold colour in the garden — Derek was a showman and loved camp.”
Packed the SAD lamp away for another season… a few fun things that really brightened up the end of winter, including an always welcome visit from Paul Murray from Dublin, and jaunts to Deal, Rye and Snowdonia. Bring on the Easter Bunny!
It’s always easy to remember when Molly’s birthday is because in 2020 when she celebrated by going axe throwing in NY the whole world closed down the next morning because of the plague. This is the first birthday in her London home… and it was GORGEOUS. Superb pasta bake, and one of Neil’s INCREDIBLE Guinness cakes with cream cheese frosting 😋
@lindersterling has always been immersed, never just an observer. A cult figure since the 1970s, her work is immediate, visceral, subversive, glamorous, political, cathartic and often incredibly funny. But it’s laughter in the dark. As she says: “I love the phrase, ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ Wit is a human thing. There’s a power in laughing together as one.”
The artist, who was the subject of a 50-year retrospective – Danger Came Smiling – at the @hayward.gallery in London last year, is profiled by @markc_oflaherty inside 10 Magazine Issue 76. The pioneering creative is lensed by @hazelgaskin in a shoot creatively directed by Linder’s close collaborator, @ashish .
Hit the LINK IN BIO to read our interview in full and pre-order your copy of Issue 76 now.
ISSUE 76 – CREATIVITY, CHANGE, FREEDOM – IS OUT MARCH 18.
Photographer @hazelgaskin
Creative Director @ashish
Fashion Editor @amystephensons
Talent and Artist @lindersterling
Text @markc_oflaherty
Hair @mr.hiroshi.matsushita using @oribe
Make-up @andrewgallimakeup using @officialbyredo
Manicurist @hayley.evanssmith using @essie
Photographer’s assistant MAXWELL ANDERSON
Fashion assistants @daayunn_n and @katiepminto
Production @pltnr and @sonyamazuryk
Processing and scanning Labyrinth Photographic
Post-production @crosspost.ltd
Location St Mary Magdalene’s Church, Paddington
Special thanks to ANDY BUTCHER and @alicesear at @wearevillage@lindersterling wears @ashish
#10magazine #lindersterling #creativitychangefreedom
