Kinfolk, Volume 61 – Play

Delving deeply into home, work, style and culture, Kinfolk promotes quality of life and connects a global community of creative professionals from London to Tokyo. Since 2011, Kinfolk has become a leading lifestyle authority with a dynamic mix of print and online media, including a quarterly magazine sold in over 100 countries in four languages, daily posts on Kinfolk.com, bestselling books, plus international events and a gallery space in the heart of Copenhagen.

Printed four times a year, Kinfolk magazine is translated into Japanese, Chinese and Korean and seen by a readership of 170,000 25- to 35-year-olds. Mixing long-form journalism, interviews and shorter essays with concept-driven visual stories from contributors across the globe, Kinfolk magazine fosters a sense of curiosity about the art of living.

In this issue:

Kinfolk’s Sixty First Issue examines play as a way to move through adulthood with greater joy, curiosity and wonder. “We don’t ever lose the desire to play; we’re just socialized to stop playing in certain ways,” Mia Sundstrom, who leads the National Institute for Play, explains to us on page 154. Throughout the issue, we explore pathways to play, including expert advice on rediscovering your own play type as a busy adult and, failing that, five games devised and demonstrated by artist Carsten Höller for those who don’t know where to begin.

In a study of architects, psychologist Donald MacKinnon found that those considered most creative by their peers were often those who knew how to play; this is certainly true of John Outram, whose over-the-top masterpiece, Sphinx Hill, we visit on page 70. Painters play with color and line–a type of immersive flow state our fashion editorial explores on page 60. And musicians improvise and experiment, a process familiar to the band Balming Tiger (interviewed on page 78), whose alternative approach to K-pop subverts the genre’s perfectly synchronized image.