M/M (Paris) built Harper's Bazaar Italia a typography that plays trompe l'oeil

Issue 23, titled 'Trompe l'oeil', explores optical illusion through fashion — including 'Bizzarro', a story photographed by David Sims and styled by Paul Sinclaire — and needed a design language to match.

An issue of optical illusion carried by its letterforms: a custom all-caps alphabet of semicircles and bars, revived 1960s Italian faces, 'staccato' spacing.

M/M revived a 1960s Italian Times New Roman as AL Sigla for long-form text, chose Lineto's then-unreleased LL Schema for shorter texts, and drew the exclusive all-caps Gran Bazaar; deliberate spacing, repetition, colours and shapes drawn from adjacent images do the 'staccato', with wraparound and circular paragraphs blurring letterforms into composition.

The issue reads as a manifesto for a free, playful typography in motion that revives Italian graphic design applied to fashion, and the approach became more pronounced in the issues that followed; LL Schema made its first major editorial appearance here months before its official release.

For its 23rd issue, titled 'Trompe l'oeil', Harper's Bazaar Italia — the youngest edition of the world's oldest fashion magazine still in publication — handed its pages to the art direction duo M/M (Paris), Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak, in only their second issue since taking creative direction in September 2025. The theme was optical illusion, explored through fashion stories like 'Bizzarro', photographed by David Sims and styled by Paul Sinclaire.

The typography carried the idea. For long-form texts M/M used AL Sigla, a faithful revival of a 1960s Italian Times New Roman by Umberto Fenocchio; for shorter texts they chose LL Schema, Alberto Malossi's fluid new grotesque for Lineto. The headlines got something exclusive: Gran Bazaar, an all-caps face whose semicircles and bars recall the mobile sculptures of Bruno Munari, used throughout the magazine until the line between letterforms and typographic composition starts to blur.

M/M pushed the effect with what they call 'staccato' — deliberate spacing, repetition, colours and shapes drawn from the images the type sits beside. Wraparound paragraphs, circular and diagonal lines of text and shaped blocks turn the issue into what the Fonts In Use writeup calls a manifesto for typography that is free, playful and in motion, reconnecting with the warmer, more idiosyncratic side of Italian modernism: 'We wanted to reconnect with a language shaped by the warmer, more idiosyncratic side of Italian modernism,' the duo said.

The Munari reference was structural, not decorative: the Negativi-positivi series, where figure and ground become hard to distinguish, echoes the issue's theme of perceptual instability and illusion.

Gran Bazaar was designed as an additional typographic tool rather than a logo — a working alphabet deployed across the whole magazine instead of a cover treatment.

Pairing a warm 1960s Italian revival with a brand-new grotesque let the issue speak in Italian modernism while staying contemporary and approachable.

The staccato system ties type directly to imagery — spacing, repetition, colour drawn from neighbouring pictures — so the design builds the magazine's space rather than decorating it.

An identity can be an instrument, not a coat of paint: designing a working typeface gives every future issue a voice, instead of restyling each one by hand.

LL Schema's first major editorial appearance came here, several months before its official launch on June 26, 2026 at Program/me Paris, the space run by Syndicat and M/M. The writeup notes the approach became increasingly pronounced in the issues that followed, a breath of fresh air in an editorial landscape it describes as confined by impeccable but conventional tailoring.