The Glen O'Brien Purple Book

The Glen O'Brien Purple Book collects the writer's own selections and commentary in the small artist-book format Purple Fashion Magazine bundles with each issue, here shipped alongside Issue 25 (Spring/Summer 2016) as Purple Book #24.

Purple Books are short, single-artist or single-writer volumes produced by Olivier Zahm's Purple Institute in Paris. They are packaged with a numbered issue of the magazine but numbered separately in their own sequence. This one carries O'Brien's writing and eye rather than an artist's images. As with other entries in the series, it functions as a small, freestanding companion piece to the parent magazine rather than a conventional monograph.

Glen O'Brien (1947-2017) was a downtown New York fixture from the 1970s on: an early editor at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, host of the public-access cable show TV Party with Chris Stein, and for decades GQ's "Style Guy" columnist. His writing moved easily between fashion, art, and nightlife. Purple, which grew out of the same downtown milieu, gave him a recurring outlet for the same voice late in his career.