THE AVANT/GARDE DIARIES PRESENT MAXIME BÜCHI & ALEX BINNIE »IT’S A LIFETIME THING«

© by The Avant/Garde Diaries / Editorial Lead Kitty Bolhoefer / Filming & Photography Fridolin Schöpper / Editing Konterfei Hagen Hinkelmann / MusicBunnystripes

With his magazine Sang Bleu, Swiss creative director Maxime Büchi publishes one of the most beautiful magazines out there. Since the publication focuses a very sophisticated mix of art, fashion, literature, tattooing, body modification and fetish, it comes only natural that Maxime got into tattooing himself. »It’s only now that I can see the smoke clearly, but it’s a lifetime thing«. Influenced by his background in graphic design and typography (in 2006 he started B&P TypeFoundrytogether with Ian Party), he developed his very distinct style featuring clean, geometric lines and occidental illustration.

When The Avant/Garde Diaries asked him to introduce someone who he considers to be avant-garde, it came to no surprise that he came up with tattoo legendAlex Binnie, founder of Into You, arguably London’s most famous tattoo studio. Alex was a true pioneer in the tattoo world when he started with his own place in 1993 after tattooing in Hollywood for a couple of years. »At that point, Into You was pretty much the first truly custom tattoo shop in London. The whole tattoo landscape was completely different then, there were no magazines, there were hardly any shops, tattooing was an underground scene,« he explains. As much as he still enjoys tattooing, the whole change of the scene got Alex started to concentrate on producing art on other surfaces than the human body. From 2000 on, he started out with silk screens, spent a few years getting to grips with the medium, before turning to woodcuts.

Moving on and developing more ways of expressing one’s own artistic vision, is also what Maxime pursues with his latest publication Novembre, a magazine about fashion and contemporary art from Switzerland.



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