English Version | Backstage: Into the Blue

And the color blue…

…the sky of the world. And the tone that unifies Project: Vogue Union, which brings together dozens of renowned names in Portuguese fashion design in a capsule collection in numerous Pantones of this color. If you’re only now joining us in this initiative, the challenge was launched to a circle of names of national designers, post-quarantine, conveying a message of unity to overcome in the best - the only - way possible the blows dealt without mercy by the pandemic. The clothing that resulted from this pandemic are in the Fashion story Once in a Blue Moon (p. 290), and all the details of the project, including profiles about each of the participants that created the wardrobe that is part of this project, are right here.

PS: still concerning this editorial, after a lot of indecisiveness about locations and shaky trips regarding the contingencies caused by COVID-19, the sequence of photographs that you see along the 15 doubles that close this issue on blue were photographed in a city in Slovakia called Modra - which in the native language means blue. What a coincidence so out of the blue, isn't it?

Out of the blue, into augmented reality

What if this cover had motion? What if only took pointing your smartphone at it for this to happen? What if our model moved, in a video that puts the print part in audiovisual? What if you could hear the sound of the water, get closer, almost dive ...? What if there was no “What if…”? There is not. Because with the application of augmented reality from Lighthouse Publishing, print gains a new dimension of interaction. Download for free from the App Store and Google Play. 

The blue pencil in Salazar himself

We talk about censorship in Lapis Lazuli, a censorship story (p. 266), a good argument to fish out this Time cover from July 22, 1946. “Portugal's Salazar: Dean of Dictators”, said the cover line about António de Oliveira Salazar, accompanied by, in the illustration, an apple rotting inside. Piero Saporiti, Time correspondent in Lisbon, in cooperation with the magazine's editor, Percy Knauth, was responsible for signing the article, speaking of the country as “a melancholy land of impoverished, confused and frightened people”. Content that, for the time, could only be crossed out in blue: on August 27, 1946, PIDE and the National Propaganda Secretariat not only threatened to extradite the journalist, if he did not resign from the magazine (the Italian ended up going to France), but Salazar banned as well the sale of the magazine for the next six years, after having collected all the issues in newsstand. Thankfully, this censorship no longer exis…

Did you know that…

…throughout this edition, we realized that blue has always enchanted artists and authors, manifesting itself not only in their work, but simply in everyday confessions? It is true that we explored the tone in the Arts in The Blue Period (p. 108), and in Daniel Mattar's portfolio (p. 90), but in several articles, we mention names from literature, painting and beyond, confessing his professed love for the color or simply rambling about the effect  of blue in them. Which is curious, to say the least: a cold color with such a warm approach.

*Originally translated from Vogue Portugal's Into the Blue issue, published october 2020.