Gerhard Steidl

I¿m Drinking Stars tells the luxurious story of champagne over 400 years. Pivoting around one of champagne¿spioneers Dom Pérignon and the brand named after him, the book explores the delectable overlap between history andlegend. In late 17th-century France the modest abbey in the Champagne village of Hautvilliers collected its taxes from farmers in the form of grapes. The Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon was responsible for the production of wine at the abbey, and by refining his techniques over 47 years he anticipated the méthode champenoise and created in his own words, ¿the best wine in the world¿. Through Dom Pérignon¿s wine both the abbey and its region became famous.I¿m Drinking Stars traces Dom Pérignon¿s elaborate history through the 17th, 18th, and 20th centuries: from the monk¿sinitial experiments, to Louis XV¿s hedonistic court at Versailles; from Marilyn Monroe¿s glamorous patronage of thechampagne, to Karl Lagerfeld¿s recent creations for the brand.

History of a Champagne

I Am Drinking Stars!

Eric Pfrunder

There was something in Capri, in its most wild, most solitary, most dramatic part, where the island, nearly human, becomes ferocious, where nature expresses itself with a cruel and incomparable strength, an extremely pure and linear promontory, which tore up the sea with its cutting claw. No place in Italy has such a wide horizon to stare at, nor such a depth of feeling. A site only for strong men and for free spirits Here, in this wilderness, I am the first one who will build a house. Few modern buildings embody antique beauty and mythical magic like Casa Malaparte, designed by the controversial Italian journalist, poet and novelist Curzio Malaparte in 1937 as a home for himself. Karl Lagerfeld visited the site for five days in November 1997 and took a series of Polaroids, which were subsequently transferred to Arches mold-made paper and published in book form by Steidl in 1998. This soughtafter classic is finally available again in a new edition.

Karl Lagerfeld: Casa Malaparte

Günter Grass

Tony Chambers

Karl Lagerfeld

Geza Schoen

Paper Passion Perfume captures the unique bouquet of freshly printed books. Designed by boutique perfumer Geza Schoen in close consultation with Gerhard Steidl and in collaboration with Wallpaper* magazine, the perfume expresses that peculiar mix of paper and ink which gives a book its unmistakable aroma, along with the fresh scent which a book opened for the first time releases. Schoen spent days in the depths of the paper-filled Steidl headquarters in Göttingen, sifting through books, papers samples and inks, to find inspiration for a perfume that is true to books, wearable, and which ages well in time just like a good book. It took Schoen seventeen trials to preserve in his words, the right balance between the smell of paper as such and an enjoyable perfumistic aesthetic. The elaborate packaging of Paper Passion Perfume does more than justice to the perfume within. The packaging is a real book with a hidden cut-out compartment in which the bottle sits. The first pages of the book contain texts on the pleasures of paper and the Paper Passion project by Nobel Laureate Günter Grass, Karl Lagerfeld, Geza Schoen and Wallpaper* Editor-in-Chief Tony Chambers. The end product is a unique perfume, an homage to the luxurious sensuality of books and in Karl Lagerfelds words, the silent smell of paper. Geza Schoen, born in 1969 in Kassel, has worked for nearly twenty years as a perfumer. He enjoyed professional success at a young age when he won the pitch for the first Diesel fragrance in 1994, while still in his education. While working for Haarmann & Reimer, which later became Symrise, Schoen travelled to Paris, New York, Singapore and Buenos Aires, researching perfumery in local markets. He launched his Escentric Molecules series in 2005, after Schoen was introduced to British branding expert Jeff Lounds and his friend graphic designer Paul White, and This Company was formed. Schoen is currently working on a series of fragrances called The Beautiful Mind, inspired by women admired for their intellects.

Paper Passion Perfume

The House in the Trees

Walter Keller

This is Karl Lagerfeld's own album of the photographic stories and sequences that he has created over the last eight years. Shot in black and white, often with models and costumes, his photographs are at once stylish, sensuous, literate, and full of fantasy and desire. Here are Lagerfeld's baroque photographic stagings of Dangerous Liasons and Afternoon of a Faun; other stories show actress Emma Thompson performing a homage to the choreographer Mary Wigman, and Helena Bonham-Carter playing Cinderella, and the Duchess of Windsor playing out the public drama of her private life."

Gerhard Steidl

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