Playlist: Fonts for fashion

Eighty-six years old but still looking fresh: famed French women’s magazine Marie Claire equipped itself with a new visual appearance, banking on the French typeface Cardinal. Marie Claire was founded in 1937 by writer Marcelle Auclair and tycoon Jean Prouvost. It achieved an amazing, immediate success with up to 900,000 copies sold weekly just two years later. Fashion, beauty and a healthy lifestyle were central topics from the start, but the magazine saw its mission not only in entertaining but also in informing its readers. After a difficult phase between 1940 and 1944 when Marie Claire could only appear in the Vichy-controlled area of France, the magazine vanished together with that regime in August 1944. In the direct aftermath of World War II, Marie Claire inspired the foundation of new women’s magazines like Marie France and Elle. Eventually Marie Claire was revived in 1954, involving the protagonists of 1937 alongside new faces and younger generations. Now a monthly with an up-to-date visual appeal, the magazine made a spectacular comeback and sold its first 500,000 copies within three days. In the 1960s and 70s, Marie Claire meandered between the conservative image of the perfect wife on one side and strong emancipatory impetus on the other, giving both sides their space within its columns. In the 1980s Marie Claire started to develop international offshoots and today there are editions in about 35 countries around the globe. In order to give a new drive to the French edition of Marie Claire, editorial director Katell Pouliquen, in early 2023, hired Adrien Pelletier as art director to rethink the visual language of the magazine. His task was to define a new house style that would be applied to the print edition as well as to the website and social media channels. Pelletier, a graduate from London’s Royal College of Art, has a fifteen-years-long carrier path in fashion media. In this post we present the result of his redesign of the flagship itself, the printed magazine, that first saw the light of the day in September 2023. Citing Katell Pouliquen, the new design “will give our content more repercussion and will help Marie Claire to position itself even stronger as a premium magazine. More rhythm, more visual guidance, more deep breaths.” The graphic design is characterized by large-format and full-bleed photographs, generous use of white space, and a mix of three typefaces. The serifed Lyon, designed by Kai Bernau and published by Commercial Type, is used for the reading text. Its counterpart, the sans-serif Barlow by Jeremy Tribby, can be seen in column titles, captions, and as a means of emphasis in the reading text. However, the typeface that stands out and that coins the overall visual appeal of the new Marie Claire is Cardinal, designed and published by Production Type from Paris. It is used as titling face in mid to big sizes. Cardinal is a complex system of styles with a Classic variant whose special feature are three different lengths of ascenders and descenders to chose from: Short, Mid, and Long. The two variants in use here, though, are the condensed Cardinal Fruit and the tightly spaced Cardinal Photo, referencing photo typesetting as much as photo journalism. Pelletier commissioned Production Type to add two new styles to the light end of the latter subfamily. Cardinal Photo ExtraLight and ExtraLight Italic made their first public appearance in Marie Claire. They are now available for licensing to anyone.

Art directed by VLF Studio, the identity of Italian fashion label Pihakapi is centered around a monogram that is “adaptive, unstable, and alive”. The bold amorphous logo is contrasted with lightweight minimalist typography: All text on the website, in product catalogs and social media graphics is set in a single style of Cardinal Classic Mid. The synthetic oldstyle serif from Production Type is used in a single size, with all caps as the sole means for emphasis. Pihakapi is a modern leather workshop for the future — hybridizing the heritage of a luxurious material with engaged design. A collaboration between the Italian manufacturer Pellemoda and creative director Vejas Kruszewski

Deus ex Machina is a lifestyle brand rooted in Sydney, Australia. We recently featured a no-nonsense jacket from their collection. This time we’d like to share two apparel prints that are undoubtedly about having fun – fun with content, and fun with fonts. The first one is a T-shirt titled “Pipes”. In it, a cartoon from the Andy Capp series, very famous in Great Britain and Australia, stands central. It depicts a man playing a phantasy instrument reminiscent of bagpipes. The punchline below reads “loud pipes save lives” which is a famous excuse among motorcyclists to justify the noise of their machines. This line as much as the brand name above the drawing displays Cardinal Fruit, a sub-family in the larger Cardinal collection designed and published by Production Type under the guidance of Jean-Baptiste Levée. Cardinal Fruit is a condensed roman style referencing the advertising aesthetics of the 1980s, especially in the field of personal computers. “Deus Recs and Publishing” is added in Grilli Type’s GT America Mono. The prints on the “Nimbus” shirts and longsleeves feature Cardinal Fruit, too. It’s used for the brand name, combined with Deerfield JNL, a boxy all-caps sans designed by Jeff Levine, for “Worldwide Service Manual”. Here the “meaning” of the message goes deliberately bananas: “We’ve tipped the cap to the modern day grovers and gone all out on the logo-heavy, non-sensical slogan vibe, added a few flashes of color and voila: a long sleeve set to lift even the most pessimistic of outlooks.” To be complete, additional fonts visible in the images are Cal Fraktur Modern, Windsor, and Eurostile.

This issue showcases the Mamie’s SKUs — from LE MAMIE to LE MAMIE BAGUETTE. Inspired by a 1960s market bag, the Mamie is a feminine take on practicality. With its elegant “tote hooks,” our timeless bag exudes natural charm.