Life in Vogue
In April 2021 Vogue Italia announced the third edition of Life in Vogue, an entirely digital experience titled Love Letters to Milan. The event coincided with the publication of the latest issue of Casa Vogue and Milano Design City. Luke was invited to take part in the event along with five other international designers.
Life in Vogue opens the spaces of the editorial staff of Vogue Italia to a series of creatives and designers to re-read them according to their own vision. Unlike previous editions, the 2021 designers were not restrained by the limits imposed by the physical spaces available. As a result, they were given free rein to bring their highly imaginative worlds to Vogue Italia’s offices.
Luke's concept for the Art Director's room, which he called The Dreamer's Garden, revolved around the idea of a space that is half garden, half tented room. It is high summer and the boundaries have become deliciously blurred between indoors and outdoors, dreams and reality. We see a painted wooden floor and striped fabric walls, an old bathtub and a bright pink sofa, yet above the room cotton wool clouds float past, and wild plants and flowers are fighting their way up through the floorboards. At the centre of the room an old stone fountain provides a soundtrack of falling water, and from this fountain stone channels take the glistening water in four directions across the room, under furniture and out through arches in the tented walls.
A 1970s desk sits at the end of the room, raised on a dais and underneath its own tented structure. Beautiful and useful objects are hidden among the plants: a pair of Venetian grotto chairs, a stone Discobolus statue, a pair of velvet slippers, countless piles of books and pots filled with paintbrushes. Essentially this room is Luke's idea of a dream studio: a space to work in, yes, but a space to lounge about in too, a space to fall asleep in among the foxgloves and tulips and buzzing bees, and a space for his silver whippet, Merlin, to enjoy. (We see him hidden among the flowers, too.) It takes much inspiration from Luke's own garden in the English countryside and his love of tented structures, as well as Tim Walker's photoshoots for Casa Vogue in the early 2000s that he is so incredibly fond of.
