'a magazine about the rest of the world'

"The message of this magazine is that your culture (whoever you are) is as important as our culture (whoever we are)."

The first thirteen issues of Colors — a quarterly magazine devised by Oliviero Toscani for Benetton and edited by Tibor Kalman, founder of the New York design firm M&Co — were image-led from the start and imbued with an irreverent wit used to explore the world's problems. Issues 4 to 12 were based around a single theme: The Street, Ecology, AIDS, Religion, Shopping, Sports, Travel, and Heaven. Kalman left after the publication of issue 13, which contained no words. Instead, it ran an extended picture essay using stock photography to explore life on our planet.

'I felt that around the world there were young people who were progressive, and closer in spirit to each other than to their parents or cultures. This is the audience I wanted to reach with Colors. It had to be about a broad range of subjects that were of interest to us all, breakfast, religion, sports, and so on. That is why we cut down six thousand trees to print this magazine' (Tibor Kalman).

Periodical; 13 vols in various formats; illustrated throughout with photographs, bilingual English and Italian text, near-fine; various paginations.