First things first: A Magazine has a new editor-in-chief. In June, Blake Abbie, the glossy’s former editor-at-large, quietly took over from Dan Thawley, who sat at the top of the magazine’s masthead for over 10 years. For his first issue, the actor and editor looked close to home.
Abbie met the designer Peter Do a decade ago when they were both new New Yorkers. Do was fresh off his stint at Céline, and Abbie, who had been living in London, wanted to be closer to home in Vancouver. They’ve been close friends ever since, their personal lives often intertwining with their professional careers. Abbie walked Do’s spring 2023 runway show, and now he’s invited the Vietnamese-born designer to curate his first issue of A Magazine.
A year prior to Abbie’s model turn, Do staged his debut runway show. The spring 2022 collection cemented his arrival as one of the most exciting names in New York fashion—one of those “you had to be there” moments. Titled “Home,” it was the first time that Do addressed his Vietnamese origins in his work. This issue bears the same name.
On the topic of his Asian-American identity, Do says that, like all facets of his intersectional identity, it inspires his work rather than defines it. For this issue, he returned to his hometown of Biên Hòa, Vietnam, for the second time since emigrating to Philadelphia back in 2004. The magazine contains images of his latest work photographed in his childhood home. It is as meta as it is dissociative—the latest iteration of Do contextualized in the place where his story started.
The Peter Do of today is not the Peter Đỗ of then, and it’s the awareness of this growth, of this multiplicity of self, that makes the issue such an intimate portrait. “I’m not bound by where I come from because it doesn’t feel like home anymore,” said the 32 year-old. Home is where Peter finds himself, and today it happens to be in this issue of A Magazine.
One evening last week, I paid the pair a visit at Do’s Helmut Lang office in the meatpacking district. They took an hour away from the arduous task of selecting a cover (the issue was going to print soon after) to talk to me about this collaboration. Here are the highlights from our conversation.
Let’s start from the beginning. What was the genesis of this issue?
