Daisy Chain Magazine Wants You to Think Differently About the Intersection of Art and Fashion

As the art world continues to recover from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the recent launch of Daisy Chain magazine—a new international biennial from Phillip Bogart Duncan (a former associate art director at Vogue) and Charles Daigrepont Desselle, focused wholly on photography—offers a hopeful sign that there is still room for growth and innovation in creative industries.

Duncan and Desselle’s inaugural issue, “Space,” includes original work from artists including Thibaut Grevet, Shaniqwa Jarvis, Kuba Ryniewicz, Emma Summerton, and Zeng Wu. Vogue recently spoke to the Daisy Chain co-founders about starting their magazine at a distinctly challenging time, choosing its first theme, and making a final product that is “somewhere between a coffee table book switched out twice a year and a fashion magazine.” Read the full interview below:

Vogue: What was the spark behind the idea for Daisy Chain.

Charles Daigrepont Desselle: We spent years working together, being creative for clients, before Daisy Chain was a fully formed idea. And in our work, we’re constantly discovering or re-discovering images so compelling and special that seeing them only on-screen feels incomplete. We’d always talked about how cool it would be to make a print magazine, but it was just talk because we were so busy having fun working, travelling the world, and collaborating with talented people. Of course, like pretty much everyone else on the planet, the pandemic forced us to pause. We ran with the spark when we invited [photographer] Emma Summerton to visit us on the island of Hydra in 2020. We’d been living there, in a bare-bones Greek version of a surf shack, for a couple of months as COVID surged back home, and we decided to ask Emma to come make pictures with us, just for enjoyment. 

It felt like such a long shot because Emma is so major, and that’s apart from the fact that a pandemic was raging. But we got up the courage to pop the question, Emma said yes, and then found a way to escape London—with two trunks of photography equipment in tow. The ideas flowed easily and without constraints as we cultivated this new bond, from which emerged a dreamy psychedelic world called Hydrea that Emma captured on film and is printed in this issue. We were looking into publishing a book of our work with Emma, and we met the good people at Damiani Editore in Bologna [publishers of Daisy Chain], and the rest is history.