What's Contemporary Now?

For our first episode of 2026, we sit down with Kyle Hagler and Emil Wilbekin for a deeply personal and wide-ranging conversation at the intersection of Native Son, culture, and media. We begin with formative histories shaped by strong women, faith, and instinct, before tracing how both have navigated long careers defined by pivots, visibility, and cultural responsibility. From Emil’s journey through magazine leadership to founding Native Son, to Kyle’s perspective on power, representation, and stewardship within fashion, the conversation explores what it means to build influence without losing yourself. Together, they reflect on community beyond branding, legacy without chasing legacy, and why staying contemporary today requires clarity, courage, and a willingness to exist fully in complexity. “A lot of my success came from haphazard decision-making based on instinct, not some grand plan. I followed the moment and figured it out later.” - Kyle Hagler “Native Son was never about nightlife or crisis. It was about creating space where we could see ourselves reflected with dignity.” - Emil Wilbekin Episode Highlights: Beginnings that explain everythingEmil reflects on being adopted at birth and raised by radically cultured, spiritually grounded Black parents, while Kyle traces the imprint of a brilliant young mother who negotiated her way through systems not built for her and brought him along for the ride. Strong women as original architectureNot a theme, a fact. Both credit women with shaping their confidence, ethics, ambition, and emotional literacy long before any career took form. The professional pivot, demystifiedReinvention is not indulgence, it is survival. Emil maps his evolution across media, teaching, faith, and founding Native Son. Kyle frames adaptability as the only real form of security. Safety, redefinedKyle’s assertion lands quietly but firmly: safety does not live in institutions or titles, it lives in your ability to navigate turbulence and keep moving. Spirituality as infrastructure, not ornamentEmil speaks to prayer and meditation as daily practice and social responsibility. Kyle shares a later awakening forged through loss, illness, and uncertainty, arriving at calm through surrender. A very New York origin storyThe Octagon in the 90s, Helmut Lang uniforms, early shade, and worlds colliding. Friendship eventually sealed not by proximity, but by shared obsession, precision, and care. Doing the work before knowing the impactEmil reflects on Vibe as cultural moment-making understood only in hindsight. Kyle recalls realizing his influence only once others named it, while he was simply doing the job. The birth of Native SonAn India retreat, a voice, Baldwin on a bookshelf. A mission emerges to create space for Black gay, queer, and gender nonconforming lives beyond nightlife, crisis, or erasure. Progress and backlash, side by sideVisibility expands while political resistance hardens. Both argue that representation without ownership is fragile, and that DEI without equity is noise. What feels contemporary now Fearless self-definition. Living in nuance. Building community that can hold contradiction, accountability, and becoming, without waiting for permission. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Angelo Flaccavento has long been one of fashion’s most distinctive critical voices — sharp yet empathetic, rigorous yet imaginative, always willing to question his own certainties. In this conversation, he traces his path from a Sicilian childhood spent absorbing magazines in boutique backrooms to becoming a writer whose clarity and candor designers both fear and admire. We discuss the formative power of self-doubt, the responsibility of the critic in an era shaped by branding and algorithms, and why genuine surprise has become fashion’s rarest commodity. Angelo reflects on taste as a lifelong education, the tension between fantasy and reality, and the importance of staying fluid rather than defined in a moment obsessed with categorization. “I’m a dreamer, but not an escapist. Fantasy has to somehow crash to the ground in order to become reality.” - Angelo Flaccavento  Episode Highlights: A Sicilian childhood shaped by boutiques and early fashion literacy Angelo grew up in Ragusa surrounded by family-run boutiques at the height of Italy’s fashion boom. Magazines, Versace dresses, Guy Bourdin images, and the glamour of the early ’80s became his first education in style and visual culture. Discovering i-D and turning Ragusa into his personal London Getting a subscription to i-D as a teenager becomes a defining moment. He reads each issue obsessively, treating it as a window into a world he hasn’t yet reached — the foundation of his sharp, culturally attuned eye. From aspiring designer to critic: finding the right medium Though he once dreamed of being a designer, he realized he was more drawn to ideas, imagery, and interpretation. Writing became his path, encouraged by teachers who sensed his voice before he did. A voice that evolves rather than settles Angelo talks about tone and style as living entities — shaped by constraints, sharpened by editors, and never fixed in place. He values clarity, concision, and atmosphere, always pushing himself toward more precision. Doubt as a creative engine He sees doubt not as insecurity but as momentum, calling it “the essence of progress.” Self-questioning keeps him open, curious, and resistant to stagnation. Criticism as decoding, not destruction For Angelo, the critic’s role is to cut through PR storytelling and help readers understand what they’re actually seeing. He believes in honesty delivered with generosity — critique as illumination, not cruelty. Maintaining integrity in a political, PR-driven industry He speaks openly about the emotional and professional navigation required each season, from access issues to difficult conversations, and why seeing shows live is essential to telling the truth. Fashion’s power to surprise Angelo celebrates the rare, electric moments when a show shifts the mood of the entire industry — reminders of why fashion still matters and how a collection can rewire the cultural conversation. Taste as instinct refined over a lifetime For him, taste is a mix of instinct and education — shaped by art history, architecture, vertical lines, trial and error, and everything one has ever seen. Taste is biography turned into perspective. What is contemporary now: resisting definition Angelo concludes that the most contemporary stance is fluidity — refusing to let algorithms, labels, or nostalgia define us, and staying open enough to see the world anew. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Camille Miceli brings a vivid, almost incandescent joie de vivre to Pucci, treating color, movement, and intuition as both vocabulary and philosophy. Her worldview is shaped by an upbringing steeped in art and fashion, and by formative chapters with Alaïa, Lagerfeld, Jacobs, and Raf Simons — each adding a layer to her finely tuned sense of glamour and discipline. She reflects on the value of frivolity in an anxious age, the necessity of surrounding oneself with challengers rather than cheerleaders, and the quiet radicalism of returning Pucci’s prints to hand-drawn imperfection. The picture that emerges is of a creative director who treats joy not as escapism, but as a practiced, precise way of making a brand — and a life — feel vividly alive. “We didn’t come to this planet to suffer. I’m here to enjoy, even if there are stressed days. You have to laugh sometimes.” - Camille Miceli Episode Highlights: An upbringing steeped in art and fashionCamille grows up between an art-world father and a fashion-world mother, surrounded by New Realists, Guy Bourdin shoots, and Azzedine Alaïa at the dinner table — early immersion in glamour, image, and attitude. Alaïa as her first tough teacherAt sixteen she interns for Azzedine Alaïa, who is lovingly ruthless about precision. The “traumatic” rigor of placing rocks every ten centimeters becomes the root of her perfectionism and obsession with detail. Chanel and Karl as excess and foresight schoolAt Chanel with Karl Lagerfeld, she encounters fashion as total universe — decor, invitations, product, marketing — and learns to think several moves ahead, like the “Chanel forever” bag response to a critical article. Marc Jacobs and the power of generosity and teamsAt Louis Vuitton, Marc pulls her fully into the creative side, asks her to design earrings, and kick-starts her jewelry career. She absorbs his generosity, his habit of crediting collaborators, and his refusal to work with “yes people” — a model she now applies as a creative director. Dior, Raf, and the dialogue with art and designAt Dior under John Galliano and then Raf Simons, she deepens her passion for art, design, and couture, finding common ground with Raf through shared references and visual obsessions. How all those experiences prepare her for PucciYears in fittings, communication, and collaborations give her a 360-degree approach: she thinks about clothes, image, stores, and storytelling as a single ecosystem, which she now applies to Pucci’s collections and retail spaces. Pucci as art, joy, and imperfectionShe sees Pucci prints as psychedelic artworks and immediately brings hand-drawing back to restore “imperfection as perfection.” The wobbly lines and pressure marks make the prints human, charming, and alive. Using print as logo and rethinking heritage codesRather than drowning everything in pattern, she treats the print as a signature — a button, a jacquard, a matte-and-shine texture — so a black jacket can still read Pucci. She evolves the codes instead of changing them seasonally. A modern stance on fashion systems and wasteShe pushes see-now-buy-now because she hates the lag between image and product, especially in an age of instant gratification. Pucci runs only two collections a year, staggered like intelligent “drops,” which lets her reduce waste and think deeply instead of chasing volume. Collaborations, culture, and what’s contemporary nowShe favors collaborations that bring true know-how (technical skiwear, for example) over hype, and considers the Art Basel entrance carpet a proud moment of print as art rather than logo spam. When asked what is contemporary now, she lands on sharing, respect for others, and radical care for the planet — especially water — and dreams of self-sufficiency as the ultimate luxury. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Matthew Whitehouse reflects on the winding path from a rainy Lancashire childhood and a brief burst of band-life glamour to leading The Face, a title forever suspended between myth and reinvention. He speaks with disarming clarity about reviving an icon without embalming it, insisting that the magazine’s only true mandate is to capture the texture of now — not nostalgia, not futurism, but the pulse of the present. We explore the politics that slip in through lived experience rather than declarations, the power of small stories to illuminate larger truths, and the editor’s craft as an exercise in restraint as much as vision. For Whitehouse, what’s contemporary is whatever you’re excited enough to run toward — a simple, infectious creed that shapes every page he oversees. “I’m not interested in the future. I’m interested in now — in documenting what it feels like to be alive in this exact moment.” - Matthew Whitehouse Episode Highlights: Growing up in Morecambe and dreaming of escape Born in a rainy seaside town that felt “far” from where he was meant to be, Matthew talks about music as his first love and his imagined ticket out, from The Beatles and Oasis to Springsteen. The ice cream man with a band and big plans While friends went to university, he stayed behind in Morecambe, working as an ice cream man and waiting for his kicked out bandmates to finish college so they could take music seriously. Dropping out for The Heartbreaks and accidental fame in Japan He leaves university just before the fee deadline, signs a publishing deal days later, tours with his band The Heartbreaks, tastes pop-star treatment in Japan, then ends up back home working in a meat packing factory. Band life, Burberry campaigns and the old fear of selling out Alongside the band, he appears in a Burberry campaign and editorials for i-D and Dazed, remembering how brand work once felt like “selling out” in a way that feels almost quaint now. From factory freezer to i-D and the grind of becoming a writer While cutting lamb shanks at 5 a.m., he pitches free pieces to small music sites, builds a portfolio, lands a short research job at i-D’s video team, and eventually pivots into editorial because he knows he has to write. The fast leap from editorial assistant to editor of The Face In about three years he moves from editorial assistant at i-D to editor of The Face, initially thinking the relaunch is a bad idea before realizing the opportunity of a clean slate with a legendary masthead. Legacy, fragmentation and making a magazine about the now Everyone remembers a different “version” of The Face, so he sees himself as a guardian trying not to ruin something beloved while making it feel true to 2025, balancing global pop stars with niche local figures. Politics in the margins rather than as a banner He describes issues where politics is felt rather than announced, like an edition that quietly became about the cost of living crisis through its voices and stories rather than an explicit think piece. When timing lands and small stories carry big themes He relishes moments where covers hit the perfect moment, like Jenna Ortega on the day Wednesday drops, and stories like a Manchester record label piece that opens up into class, race and regional inequality. What makes a good editor and what is contemporary now He likens editing to jazz, knowing which notes not to play, trusting his team, staying in conversation with young people, and defines what is contemporary now as whatever you are genuinely excited enough to run toward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices