Summer, Issue 109, Out Now
An introduction to the new edition of NUVO, from editor Claudia Cusano.
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There is a familiar rhythm to how we talk about summer: the build-up, the escape, the promise of elsewhere. We imagine departure as transformation—the further we go, the more we become. And yet, every year, there seems to be a quieter counterpoint that suggests something different: that summer isn’t only about leaving but also about seeing. Seeing what’s been there all along, just obscured by routine, speed, and the small tyranny of screens.
To get away doesn’t always require a plane ticket (although one to Italy to stay at Il San Pietro di Positano in the Amalfi Coast is pretty epic). Sometimes it’s a passeggiata (evening stroll) taken without headphones, a long lunch that stretches into the afternoon (just a regular Sunday lunch in Italy), or a moment of stillness (listening to the church bells) reclaimed from the constant scroll. These micro-escapes don’t announce themselves in postcards or itineraries but remind us that presence can be its own form of travel.
This tension between escape and immediacy feels especially resonant now, as the idea of luxury itself continues to evolve. Once defined by distance and rarity, it is increasingly expressed through intimacy and the elevation of the everyday. What does it mean to seek the extraordinary not in the far-flung but in the familiar? It’s a question that threads through this issue and finds its most compelling answer in our cover story. With his first couture collection for Chanel, Matthieu Blazy proposes a new kind of grandeur—one that doesn’t remove us from daily life but returns us to it with sharpened eyes. His vision of couture isn’t about fantasy as escape, but about reality observed more closely. In “The Summer I Turned Couture,” Nyaueth Riam, photographed by Greg Swales, is couture’s most modern expression—sensual and unbound by tradition.
NUVO editor Claudia Cusano
In these pages, we move through a terrain of intimacy and attention, tracing how beauty reveals itself when we slow down enough to notice it. These are stories of people, places, and things that reward a closer look—where luxury is no longer about escape but about presence, fully lived.
