On the worlds we carry within us. And those that open up when we look more closely.
We talk a lot about how we want to live. About good food, beautiful places, mindful travel and the balance between work and leisure. But do we feel alive in the process? With “WORLDS WITHIN”, THE Stylemate explores this question through encounters with art, time spent together and places that change our perception.
A gaze can set a story in motion. A stage can change how we experience ourselves as part of a community. A shared meal can bring us closer to the everyday life we otherwise move through so quickly. The new print issue of THE Stylemate follows moments like these. Under the title WORLDS WITHIN, it explores what lies beyond the immediately visible and what happens when we engage with it.
Aliveness provides the starting point. It reveals itself in curiosity, in encounters and in a willingness to leave something unresolved for a while. Four stories from the issue give this idea different forms.
Mercedes Helnwein: The Story Takes Shape in the Viewer’s Mind
The young women in Mercedes Helnwein’s paintings seem to keep something to themselves. A gaze, a posture, a subtle shift in the familiar: her paintings open up situations whose beginnings and endings remain uncertain. Even the artist does not always know the full story of the moment she captures.
In conversation with Nina Prehofer, Helnwein discusses this openness and the freedom she now allows herself in her work. Viewers bring their own memories, assumptions and feelings to her paintings. The work continues to develop in their minds. It is a fitting opening for an issue about the many worlds a single image can contain.
Es Devlin: Spaces That Affect Us
In Es Devlin’s work, too, the audience remains part of what unfolds. The British artist creates stages and installations that bring together light, language, movement and architecture. Her spaces influence where we look, how we move and how we perceive other people.
Our story follows her thinking from the first mark on paper to a shared experience. Across theatre, concerts and immersive installations, she creates situations that connect people for a moment. A question emerges that reaches well beyond the stage: how does the world change when we change our position within it?
Plum Village: Life Happens at the Kitchen Table, Too
Chopping vegetables, cooking rice, setting the table. At Plum Village, the Buddhist community in southwest France, these familiar activities are given time and attention. Eating together and washing up afterwards form part of a practice of living together that begins in everyday life.
Taking The Plum Village Cookbook as its starting point, the story explores a kitchen where cultural roots, the work of many people and the conditions of nature come together. Here, aliveness can lie in a conversation we make time for. Or in the brief moment when we notice how good something tastes.
ESH Hotel: Where the Landscape Enters the Building
In Nosara on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, the issue takes us to ESH Hotel & Spa. Among exposed concrete, timber and tropical greenery, the landscape runs through courtyards, up steps and along shaded paths into the heart of the property. Moving from one area to another becomes part of the stay.
The hotel in the Lifestylehotels™ Selection brings design into contact with surroundings that have a rhythm of their own. Yoga, water and the nearby jungle draw attention to the body and the world around it. The story opens up another perspective on travel: places where we become more receptive to our environment again.
Letting a Little More of the World In
These four features offer a first glimpse of THE Stylemate 03|2026. Alongside further stories from art, fashion, design and travel, they explore the many forms aliveness can take. The issue gives these ideas room on paper, too: in generous images, open spreads and a format to pick up, fold and return to.
Perhaps more life sometimes begins with giving something our attention for a little longer. An image. A person. A place. And allowing something to emerge that was not already decided.
THE Stylemate 03|2026 – WORLDS WITHIN. Discover the new issue in THE Stylemate Shop.
