032c is a magazine and apparel brand. Our workshop in Berlin is a production and research center, where we assess and contribute to contemporary culture. Our findings are published digitally and as a collectible manual for freedom, research, and creativity, printed twice annually.

Founded in Berlin in 2000, 032c Magazine is edited by Joerg Koch and art directed by Mike Meiré. 032c Apparel is creative directed by Maria Koch. Read more at GQ Style: “Inside 032c, the German Magazine That’s Also a Cult Streetwear Brand.”

The 032c.com platform is designed and engineered by International Magic in collaboration with Uli Schöberl & @032c.

032c is headquartered in Berlin-Kreuzberg, Germany.

Impressum

032c
Editor-in-Chief / Creative Director
Joerg Koch
Art Director
Mike Meiré
Designer
Tim Giesen
Executive Editor
Victoria Camblin
Fashion Director
Marc Goehring
Advertising / Studio Director
Miriam-Leah Hess
Assistant Editor
Daniel Beatty Garcia
Assistant Designer
Svenja Wittmann
032c Apparel
Creative Director 032c Apparel/RTW
Maria Koch
Senior Womenswear Designer
Felix Hupka
Product Manager
Lisa Hauser
E-Commerce Manager
Eleftheria Orfanidou
Sales Director
Nunguja Kisalya
Assistant Womenswear Designer
Birutė Mažeikaitė
Contributing Editors
Suleman Anaya, Thom Bettridge, Carson Chan, Jina Khayyer, Hans Ulrich Obrist
Director Digital Services
Uli Schöberl
Design and Engineering, 032c.com
International Magic
Sales Interns
Joonwoo Park, Isaiah Kremer, Arnaud Buisson
Accountant
Mecnun Yildirim

Deeper

We don’t know this, but we’re telling you anyway.

WHAT WE BELIEVE began as a series of keywords designed to circumvent the conflict adverse atmosphere of a “post-everything” culture. As it evolved, it became 032c’s guide for doing business, a fluid set of protocols for an age of uncertainty.

WHAT WE BELIEVE is provocative of the present-tense tensions that contribute to the new. It embraces doubt not as a critical scapegoat for techno-cultural insecurity, but as a starting point towards decision-making. As Kanye West once told a group of Oxford students, it could be “completely fucking with you, and the world, the entire time.” It then moves past doubt, with a Kanye-level measure of conviction. WHAT WE BELIEVE harvests energy from the irritations and confrontations of the now, in the service of the future.

We don’t know this, but we’re telling you anyway.

Energy is the capacity to do work, and to produce change. It may well produce change, but will never quantitatively undergo it. It is contained in every object, person, animal and system. By the laws of energy conservation, it cannot be lost or, despite the usual eco-vocabulary, wasted. Thermodynamic entropy will cool your soup or melt the ice cubes in your drink, but as a measure of disorder and chaos in media as well as physics, entropy is an overlooked function. With information entropy, noise balances that information by increasing with it, as nonsense does with sense. Messages are thus communicated transformatively, without for a second losing power. That is the process that incurs the most powerful and productive kind of change.

2. Sex

Sex is at once the most commercialized thing on the planet and the most resistant to commercialization. It has been made phenomenally public and yet it remains deeply private. It is an instance or state of being that is thought and talked about constantly, but not in any proper terms, because it is a physical matter, a question of impulse, not intellect. It is beautiful and it is horrifying. It is impermeable to the perversion of culture and it is the perversion of culture. So it is, officially, the most mysterious non-mystery ever – a paradox so unfathomable that the only thing to do about it is embrace our fascination. Obsess about it. Reproduce it, and sell it. Censor it. Celebrate it. Practice it as much as possible. It will never lose interest, and it will never lose power. Fighting it is to fight a losing battle. So just let sex win.

Below: Robert Mapplethorpe, “Joe Rubberman,” 1978. Courtesy of Galerie Thomas Schulte. Copyright Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. READ Wilson on Mapplethorpe.