Greetings from HQ. This is Fantastic Man’s 32nd newsletter of 2024, and before you’re all excused to celebrate your Christmas in great style, here’s a quick flashback. ■ Together with ARKET we did our own line of FAN merch, and ever since, we’re loving a glimpse of a FAN cap on the street, or the super practical NAMCITSATNAF T-shirt at the gym, perfect for all your mirror selfies. ■ Some sizes still available.

Our first issue in 2024 featured a cover story with LEV TANJU, the co-founder of PALACE and now also the designer at FILA+. ■ As if that wasn’t festive enough, we celebrated the issue with a big dinner and dance party at Toklas, London, on 19 April.  We’d been joking beforehand that we weren’t even sure whether LEV would actually attend the event in person – that’s how much of an enigmatic dream subject he’d been to us. ■ Guess what? He was there! Speaking to the masses! (Above, that’s him, standing at the table.)

Three months earlier, on 20 January, we co-presented the new COURRÈGES menswear collection over dinner in Paris. What a fabulous night! ■ Portuguese/Danish pop sensation ERIKA DE CASIER sang for us, the food was great (courtesy of Bar Gui, Amsterdam), and our friendship with COURRÈGES’s designer NICOLAS DI FELICE materialised into a sprawling story for our current issue, to be read online now. ■ Learn everything and more about northeastern Paris, NICOLAS’s fascination with house-hunting, and how he made his one-off couture collection for the house of JEAN PAUL GAULTIER. Also: the origins of NICOLAS’s tattoos…

One fashion highlight of the year: RICK OWENS’s show, in January, at home, featuring blow-up shoes and some other otherworldly fashion suggestions. If all runway shows could be that amazing! ■ Meanwhile, RICK’s description of how he goes to sleep, from our latest issue, is a popular feature on our website.

Fantastic Man’s digital desk calculates that this year’s most-liked Instagram posts include male supermodel LEON DAME, more supermodels by the names of TYSON and ALTON, bird watcher CHRISTIAN COOPER, our cover story with STEVE LACY, a tasty interview with Interview’s MEL OTTENBERG and a fabulous series of Speedo-like swimwear titled “It Fits!” by BENJAMIN FREDRICKSON. (One example above, featuring bubble jeans by DURAN LANTINK.) ■ Needless to say in this ever more restrictive world, Instagram’s algorithms thought it almost too racy for your eyes to see. Oh well! ■ From us all at Fantastic Man, we wish you a happy Christmas and an especially special new year. Stay together, as SUEDE sang 30 years ago.