17 GOLD is perfectly baroque. The cover of the issue is hologrammed, embossed, and foil stamped, all on an already solid-gold background. There are seven pages of Philip Taaffe’s gold stars foil stamped onto vellum. Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin’s fashion photographs feature gold-foil stamping on top of four-color prints - crazy in theory but even more so in practice, when sometimes the only foil-stamped element was the stud earring in the model’s ear! Cecilia tracked down OrigamiUSA, who folds a gold-paper goldfish for each issue, and Todd Oldham contributed actual gilded-metal halos. Such frivolities come thanks to this issue’s sponsor, the Japanese department store Beams.
