Inside Carhartt WIP’s Material World, straight from Istanbul

Titled Material World, the latest issue of WIP Magazine, Carhartt WIP’s biannual mag, landed in Istanbul with a display that brought its focus on how objects and memory intertwine to the main stage. On July 11, the brand took over NOH Extended with an immersive installation that fused photography, video, and found objects, all pulled from the magazine’s 240+ pages of lived-in stories.

A night of celebration at Istanbul’s NOH Extended

The event itself pulled the magazine off the page and designed an evening out of it. Hosted at NOH Extended, the launch brought together large-format visuals, looping video, and functional found objects, all which were taken from the issue’s features. The room was created to be an installation, with Sami Baha’s cinematic beats setting the mood. Like past launches in Berlin or New York, it was about community as well as the content.

Back to the magazine, the pages are a sprawling central dossier that asks creatives across London, Paris, New York and Shanghai to share one item that shaped them. For some, it’s a T-shirt from a 70s reggae club in Scotland (shoutout Nicholas Daley). For others, it’s a repurposed tote-bag sofa (Parisian label Personalities), a 3D printed chain (rapper Implaccable), or a cello bridge from someone who’s never played a note (Shanghai-based publisher and creative agency Same Paper). 

The visuals stretch further with one cover being shot by Ramona Jingru Wang in Seoul, the other captures rapper MIKE post-tour in Paris. There’s also Adem Ustaoğlu’s ‘postcard from Istanbul’ skate photo essay, with Beşiktaş Plaza energy, plus features on artist-writers Seth Price and Brad Phillips in New York, and musician Léa Sen back in Paris.

As with past issues, WIP Magazine goes deep on the scenes surrounding the brand, such as everything from Technics-heads in Berlin to art-book bootleggers in Milan, Jamaican beekeepers in Liverpool to Sophie Calle’s dinner table. 

Elsewhere in the Carhartt WIP universe

But that’s not all from the brand. Earlier, Carhartt WIP had dropped a full capsule with hip-hop duo CLIPSE, blacked-out jackets, 3D-printed chains, album iconography stitched into heavyweight cuts. It landed alongside the duo’s first album in over a decade.

The magazine is out now globally in Carhartt WIP stores, on the app, and at select retailers. The Istanbul launch served as starting point for more events rolling out in Paris, Rome, New York, Beijing and beyond.