Harper’s Bazaar Italia, 2025 redesign

Harper’s Bazaar, the world’s oldest fashion magazine still in publication, launched its Italian edition in 2022. For the 2025 redesign, editorial director Stefano Tonchi brought on Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak, the Paris-based duo known as M/M (Paris), as art directors. The two have built their reputation on treating typography as a central design element rather than a supporting one, and that approach defines this redesign.

Inside the magazine, M/M use Gran Bazaar, a custom all-caps display typeface, for expressive titles. The colored semicircles and bars that make up this alphabet evoke the mobile sculptures of the Italian artist and designer Bruno Munari, blurring the boundary between letterforms and typographic composition. Its name references Gran Bazaar, a Bazaar Italia sister publication from the 1980s that covered architecture and interior design. It’s paired with two existing typefaces used throughout the rest of the magazine: LL Schema, designed by Italian type designer Alberto Malossi, and AL Sigla, designed by Alex Lescieux.

LL Schema has its own backstory tied to the redesign. It’s Malossi’s reworking of Permanent, a 1962 neo-grotesk by Karlgeorg Hoefer that saw wide but understated use in Italian publishing through the 1960s and 70s. He developed it during his Master’s at ECAL and shelved it, unpublished, after graduating. It resurfaced when Alina Andone, a designer at M/M’s studio and Malossi’s former ECAL classmate, was asked to find something distinctly Italian with a warmth Helvetica never had, and remembered his design. It’s now used across Bazaar Italia.

Its commercial release followed the same route. Cornel Windlin, co-founder of the Zurich foundry Lineto, had long dismissed Permanent until he spotted Malossi’s version in the magazine’s new graphic identity. He got in touch, and the finished family is now published by Lineto as Schema, Malossi’s first commercial typeface.

AL Sigla, meanwhile, is Lescieux’s faithful revival of FTC Sigla, a transitional Italian typeface by Umberto Fenocchio with a 1960s character, since expanded into a fuller family of weights and italics. AL Sigla is used for long-form texts.

M/M have described the aim of the redesign as a magazine that moves “at the speed of thought, not the speed of scroll.” Tonchi’s letter makes a related point, describing a magazine where “images and words can seduce or argue.” Both point to the same decision: type set and paired deliberately, rather than defaulting to conventions built for fast digital reading.