MIXING IT UP: French fashion and news magazines were folding left and right back in 1996 — precisely when Tiziana Humler and Christian Ravera decided to launch Mixte, and give idled photographers a platform where they could express themselves freely.
It was the peak of CK One fragrance, and maverick designer Jean Paul Gaultier’s runway gender-bending. “If we were going to launch a fashion magazine, it had to be different. So the idea was to be unisex,” Tiziana Humler-Ravera, a veteran publisher, related in an interview. (Christian Ravera, her spouse and Mixte’s creative director, is a seasoned art director, formerly with Vogues Hommes International.)
Their concept initially flummoxed some advertisers, but the biannual is still going strong, marking its milestone with a 500-page anniversary issue, the thickest in its history, and an exhibition in Paris opening on Nov. 6 for a three-day run.
Spanning photos, videos and text, the display is organized thematically, and designed to show how Mixte has long flown the flag for free creative expression, and demonstrated its prescient antennae for talents.
To wit: Babeth Djian, who would go on to found Numéro magazine in 1999, served as editor in chief of the debut issue, fronted by Stella Tennant and Vincent Gallo wearing the same pinstriped jacket and center-parted hair. (Other Mixte contributors who went on to greater fashion fame include Carine Roitfeld, Emmanuelle Alt, Olivier Zahm and Loïc Prigent.)
Mixte nabbed Naomi Campbell for a cover as early as 1997, and conscripted such acclaimed photographers as Paolo Roversi, Peter Lindbergh, Jean-Baptiste Mondino and Jean-Paul Goude, who captured Björk for one of his limb-lengthening collages.
Substantive, investigative pieces on social issues — an early one delved into the repressive conditions for women in Iran — were also a calling card, along with showcasing new talents in music, film, art and fashion. “Not just the brands that are advertisers,” Humler-Ravera pointed out.
She and Ravera also pride themselves on unexpected encounters, once conscripting Karl Lagerfeld, shortly after his fall 2017 fashion show featuring a rocket, to conduct a live televised interview with French astronaut Thomas Pesquet — while he was floating in zero gravity on board the International Space Station.
“[Lagerfeld] did a lot of shoots for us, and he shot a series that focused on space and the moon. That’s how we came up with the idea,” Humler-Ravera related.
Mixte still prints 60,000 copies, 40 percent of which are sold outside of France, she noted.
