Scarlett Johansson, 2001 © Leeta Harding. All images courtesy of Wahter Studio
The discontinued magazine receives a retrospective exhibition as part of Paris Design Week
Founded in New York in the late nineties, INDEX Magazine is a snapshot of a moment in blooming pop culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Though the magazine closed its doors in 2005, its legacy remains as one of the most influential publications of its time, featuring artists from the likes of Scarlett Johansson, Marc Jacobs, Isabelle Huppert and Aphex Twin.
Running from 11 to 14 September at CØR STUDIO, INDEX Magazine Retrospective was designed by Wahter Studio alongside Peter Halley, co-founder of INDEX, presenting original works produced for the magazine by world-renowned photographers such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller, alongside archival spreads, covers, and rarely seen issues. There was also a Reading Room which allowed visitors to read editions featuring archival interviews such as Alexander McQueen interviewed by Björk, Hedi Slimane by Klaus Biesenbach, and Werner Herzog by Doug Aitken.
Looking back at the magazine’s mark on culture, Halley says that “we wanted to bring together both emerging and established talents across different disciplines. We believed in letting creative personalities speak directly through long interviews rather than interpretive articles – that philosophy shaped the magazine’s unique approach.”
“What made INDEX so special was the ability to capture cultural icons not through staging or control, but through immediacy and trust”
Working with photographers like Tillmans, Teller, and Mark Borthwick before they were widely known, Halley remembers that “these photographers created a vérité-style for our photographic essays that was unique to magazines at the time. Their approach employed natural light and featured offbeat, intimate moments. I think it encouraged a new generation of photographers to value authenticity over slickness.” He believes the magazine’s photographers shaped “a legacy of visual honesty, collaborative creativity, and boundary-pushing style that reverberated across culture and continues to influence visual media today.”
One image on display, exemplary of the spirit of INDEX, shows social activist and human rights advocate Bianca Jagger, shot by Wolfgang Tillmans in 1998. The magazine’s team was struggling to find a time to shoot Jagger; finally, she called Tillmans and told him she was boarding a plane at JFK in the next 30 minutes. Tillmans grabbed a cab and ended up photographing her at the check-in counter. That image became the cover.
“For us, including it in the exhibition was non-negotiable,” says the team at Wahter Studio. “It embodies what made INDEX so special: the ability to capture cultural icons not through staging or control, but through immediacy and trust. That tension between the ordinary and the iconic is central to the magazine’s DNA, and it’s something we wanted visitors to experience firsthand.”
Wahter Studio’s team tells me that Design Week felt like the right moment to stage this retrospective “because INDEX was, at its core, about design in the broadest sense – not just graphic or editorial, but the design of culture itself. The magazine blurred boundaries between disciplines and treated interviews, photography, and layout as equal parts of a larger ecosystem. That ethos aligns perfectly with what Design Week represents: a celebration of how ideas move fluidly across mediums and industries.”
For the Wahter Studio team, bringing INDEX into this context was also about “repositioning” it: “It’s not just a piece of publishing history; it’s a design object, a curatorial project, and a cultural experiment that anticipated so much of how we create and consume today. Paris Design Week attracts a cross-disciplinary audience that understands the power of design as both form and thought. It felt essential to present INDEX here, in dialogue with a new generation of designers, artists, and cultural producers who are unknowingly working within its legacy.”
