Feeld Trip

Depending on how you look at it, a partnership between The World of Interiors and alternative dating app Feeld can either appear entirely unexpected or perfectly in character. On Monday 7 September, guests from across design, publishing and nightlife met after dark to celebrate the two brands’ erotically inclined recent releases: respectively, Top Shelf and the third issue of A Fucking Magazine.

Only one venue in the city could be fit to host such an occasion: the new Clerkenwell home of Climax Books – a treasure trove of rare publications, ephemera and erotica run by former Dazed editor Isabella Burley – which is surely the only bookstore to offer customers latex shopping bags for the discreet transportation of their wares.

Climax Books’ suggestive floor-to-ceiling mirrors were emblazoned with The World of Interiors and AFM’s partnership

Top Shelf, our one-off limited-edition publication dedicated to sex and interior design, includes an essay from Maria Dimitrova, co-editor of AFM, exploring the erotics of home renovation – the ultimate exercise in materialising (or failing to materialise) one’s shared fantasies and desires. In turn, the third issue of AFM probes The World of Interiors’s long-held aversion to the staid norms of interiors journalism. That unorthodoxy, combined with a deeply human preoccupation with matters of the bedroom, culminates in Top Shelf, which writer Nell Whittaker calls a ‘non-euphemistic, non-PG response to the eternal question of the interiors magazine: What’s going on in there?’ The essay is accompanied by a selection of especially enticing beds and bedrooms from The World of Interiors archive.

Courtesy of writer/gourmet Jago Rackham: a platter of cured silver anchovies, pickled onion and olives. Echoing the dish’s shape elsewhere were calissons, Provençal iced fruit-marzipan sweets

Rackham’s puds riff on the pastry known as minne di Sant’Agata (St Agatha’s breasts), baked by nuns for the feast honouring Sicily’s patron saint, who was martyred after refusing a Roman senator

Providing a menu to match the venue’s mirror-clad interiors was chef, writer and expert entertainer Jago Rackham, who once elaborated on his utopian dinner-party philosophy for WoI. Metalline menu items included: greengages skewered on silver picks with Cornish yarg, silver anchovies, and calissons – Provençal marzipan sweets garnished with silver foil. The pièce de résistance were chocolate ricotta-filled minne di Sant’Agata, breast-shaped Catanian delicacies made by nuns to honour the region’s patron saint, who is often pictured carrying her breasts on a platter.

Browse a selection of images from the intimate gathering below.

The covers of AFM Issue 3: Rooms With a View and Top Shelf both barely conceal their fleshly pleasures