Olivier Zahm

Olivier Zahm (born September 1963 in Paris, France) is a French fashion journalist, blogger, photographer, and magazine editor. He is the founder, owner and editor of the French fashion and culture magazine Purple.

Olivier Zahm worked as a freelance arts journalist contributing to Artforum, Flash Art, Art Press and Texte Zur Kunst during the 1980s and early 1990s. Zahm is an art curator and has selected exhibitions for PS1, MoMA, and Centre Pompidou.

In 1992, Zahm founded Purple Prose magazine (1992–1998) with Elein Fleiss—the publication has also evolved spin-offs like Purple Fiction (1992–1998), Purple Sexe (1998–2001), Purple magazine (1998–2003), Purple Journal (2004–present), Purple Fashion (1995–1998, 2004–present), and Purple Books, a publishing house. The Purple Anthology was published by Rizzoli in 2008, encompassing the first 15 years of Purple.

The "realistic", sometimes dubbed "anti-fashion"-, aesthetics of Purple was a reaction against the glamour of the 80’s, and can be linked with the global counterculture of that time, with the work of Juergen Teller, Terry Richardson, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Mario Sorrenti.

Since 2004, Zahm has been editor-in-chief of Purple Fashion, a biannual magazine attempting to bridge the worlds of art and fashion. Zahm also runs the Paris-based think tank Purple Institute, an art direction society and consulting company aimed at creating links between the art world and industry. He also created "La communauté des amants".

Zahm founded Purple Diary, a blog, in 2009 and had a show of his photographic work at Colette in March 2010.

Zahm presented at Semi-Permanent Los Angeles in 2013.

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