From the editor in chief: “DEVOTION • An Ode To The Makers And Muses Lensed By Erez Sabag

When I began envisioning our Winter issue, I was struck, utterly struck, by one irresistible truth: the world is racing, careening, spiraling forward in a breathless frenzy, and yet the most important creators, the truly serious ones, are doing something exquisitely subversive.

They are slowing down. Slowly. Sensuously. With intention. They look backward with reverence and forward with discernment. Vintage, my dears, is not nostalgia. Vintage is lineage. It is memory with a backbone. It is the divine act of resurrection. Of taking what has lived, what has loved, what has endured, and giving it new breath, new authority, new majesty.

There is a glorious return to the analogue. To the tactile. To the handmade and the hard-earned. Makers seated at their tables like high priests of creation, touching fabric, cutting, shaping, assembling, dreaming with what is found rather than what is fabricated. This is not simply zero waste. No. This is communion. A sacred conversation with Mother Earth herself. A deep, ancestral bond with the lineage of making. This, my loves, is devotion in its purest, most exalted form.

And then, of course, there are the people. Always, always the people.

Behind every image lives a magnificent collective imagination. A choir. A symphony. A congregation of visionaries gathered in service of my child, my love, my life’s work, Faddy Magazine USA. The photographers with their eagle eyes and poetic instincts. The hair and makeup artists sculpting fantasy, desire, memory. The stylists, the creative directors, the assistants moving like dancers behind the scenes. The designers whose work we approach with awe, as one approaches sacred relics.

And then comes my most cherished moment, the genesis, the spark, when I assemble the teams and choose the muses.

This is never clinical. Never transactional. It is instinctual. Emotional. Almost operatic. I choose those I adore, those whose spirits sing to one another, those who will not merely collaborate but collide creatively and become family. That is where the electricity lives. That is where fashion becomes myth.

I have been blessed beyond measure to work alongside extraordinary hands, extraordinary minds, extraordinary dreamers. For these individuals, creation is not a career. It is identity. It is survival. It is self-expression elevated to a calling. These are the makers. The vision behind the vision. They labor with their hands, their hearts, their dreams, their entire being.

I do not support artificial intelligence. I support the human soul. I support the sacred act of pouring oneself into every stitch, every frame, every gesture. This is alchemy. This is grace earned through discipline.

And the models, my dears, are indispensable. They are the breath, the pulse, the animating spirit. This is not easy work. It is demanding, rigorous, deeply creative. Each muse arrives bearing her own mythology. Some are artists. Some athletes. Some dancers, actors, poets in disguise. All possess that rare chameleonic intelligence, essential to storytelling at the highest level.

The relationship between photographer and model is symbiotic, intimate, electric, almost spiritual. Muses have fueled creation since the dawn of time. Designers and artists have always looked to them as mirror and flame.

When I think of legendary muses, I think of Dovanna and Dovima, eternal, untouchable, still instructing us in the art of elegance. Children, do a Google search and educate yourselves properly on the above.

As I contemplated the immense devotion poured into every issue, and into the daily lives of these creatives, the name of this issue revealed itself with thunderous clarity. Lensed by my dear friend and icon, Erez Sabag, I searched my soul, I prayed, I listened, and she arrived.