Colors

On sale in over 60 countries, four editions published in five languages, an Internet site that has won a record number of hits and critical acclaim: Colors is a bimonthly magazine that talks to young people all around the world.

Colors, the brainchild of Luciano Benetton and Oliviero Toscani, was established more than ten years ago, under the direction of Tibor Kalman, with the firm belief that diversity is positive but that all cultures have equal value. Today Colors is part of the publishing activity in Fabrica, Benetton's communication research centre. Colors's editorial offices are situated in Fabrica's new architectural complex, restored and enlarged by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, and it has a network of external collaborators in the four corners of the Earth.

Pictures are, above all else, Colors's expressive medium: a method that is universal and reaches the greatest number of people with a strong, immediate impact. Using this visual language, Colors's themes alternate between the challengingly serious, such as ecology, wars around the world, the fight against AIDS, and the frankly frivolous such as shopping, fashion, toys, but each is seen from an unconventional, irreverent perspective.

From issue 41, under the creative direction of Fernando Gutierrez and with a new graphic layout, Colors has transferred its attention to the theme of different “communities” inhabiting the planet, using photographic images and interviews, to recount with simplicity and immediacy, the intimate beauty of all human beings.

To celebrate the first ten years of publication, Colors has organised an exhibition, Extra/Ordinary Objects, with around a thousand of the most eccentric and banal, ordinary and obsolete, useful and useless objects that it has used on its pages to illustrate the world's various cultures. The exhibition has now become a book, 1000 Extra/Ordinary Objects, with an introduction by Peter Gabriel. It is published by Taschen and distributed worldwide in four bilingual editions.