The Modern
Classic

In Edition 13, "The Kinetic Threshold," we lingered on the mechanical bridge between intent and result — the click of a switch, the sweep of a second hand. Buried inside that edition, almost as an aside, was a single story about a Porsche Classic head unit: a device built to smuggle Apple CarPlay into a car that predates the smartphone, without disturbing a single switch on the dashboard. It turned out to be the seed of this entire edition.

For Edition 14, "The Modern Classic," we have pulled that thread. Every object here is defined by the same negotiation: something built to a pre-digital standard of craft, that has been allowed — carefully, sometimes reluctantly — to acquire a modern convenience without losing the thing that made it worth keeping in the first place. A camera with a brass top-plate and no autofocus. A speaker cabinet unchanged since 1970. A car with hydraulic steering built the year before the industry moved to electric assistance for good. A gallery building treated less like a museum piece and more like "a beloved patient," as its restoring architect put it, "returned seemingly untouched except for it running more smoothly."

None of these are nostalgia objects. Nostalgia looks backward. What interests us is the opposite gesture: taking something whole and correct from an earlier era and asking the minimum necessary of the present to keep it useful. It is a compromise, and like all good compromises, both sides have to give something up. That tension — between the object's original discipline and its modern accommodation — is, we think, the whole story of what makes something a modern classic rather than simply an old one.

Cinematographer Lol Crawley shot The Brutalist on VistaVision, an 8-perforation 35mm format Paramount developed in 1954 and the film industry largely abandoned once anamorphic lenses made widescreen cheaper to produce. The cameras themselves are museum pieces. "The VistaVision camera is an unergonomic camera," Crawley has said of working with 1970s bodies whose "optics tended to vignette a little bit on the viewfinder" — a format chosen not despite its inconvenience, but because of the texture only that inconvenience could deliver.

The choice was a statement of intent as much as an aesthetic one. "Long may FotoKem and all of these labs and Kodak reign," Crawley told The Film Stage. "We will not be beaten into submission and told that digital is the way forward." At three and a half hours, with an intermission, the film also revives a theatrical convention most modern releases avoid entirely. "Why are we constantly apologising for a film being the length that it is?" Crawley asked. "Why not make it a theatrical experience again?"

The film's own subject — a Brutalist architect rebuilding his career in postwar Pennsylvania — mirrors its production: a mid-century discipline, revived intact, for a contemporary audience. Source: A24.

It is a neat piece of formal symmetry: a film about an architect who refuses to soften Brutalism's rawest instincts for a modern client, shot on a format that refused to soften itself for a modern industry. "I was inspired by movies that were examinations of humans, not spectacle," Crawley said. "I really hope that when this film is released, people are sort of hungry for a movie of this type." Judging by the format's revival in prestige cinema since, they were.

The original L100 was, by some estimates, the best-selling loudspeaker in American history — a fixture of 1970s living rooms in its distinctive Quadrex foam grille. JBL revived the design faithfully in 2018 as the L100 Classic, refined it acoustically with the 2023 MKII, and for the company's 80th anniversary has now released the L100 Classic 80 — a version that is, deliberately, acoustically identical to the MKII it's built on.

Inside, nothing has moved: the same 1-inch titanium-dome tweeter, 5.25-inch midrange, and 12-inch woofer in the same three-way bass-reflex cabinet. What marks this edition out is entirely on the surface — a vintage-inspired brown Quadrex grille coordinated with the natural wood veneer, and gold-and-black commemorative badging. Production is capped at exactly 800 matched pairs, each numbered, each accompanied by a plaque signed by principal system engineer Chris Hagen.

The three-way driver configuration — titanium tweeter, midrange, and 12-inch woofer — is carried over unchanged from the L100 Classic MKII. Source: JBL / Harman International.

At $7,499 a pair — roughly $2,300 more than the standard MKII — the L100 Classic 80 is not a hi-fi upgrade so much as a piece of collectible restraint: a manufacturer with every capability to change a fifty-year-old design choosing, on its most self-congratulatory anniversary, not to.

The original M6 was, in its day, simply Leica's mainstream rangefinder: roughly 175,000 handmade units sold between 1984 and 2002, no autofocus, no motor drive as standard, a built-in light meter its only real concession to convenience. Leica discontinued it as digital took hold, then — to the surprise of much of the trade — brought it back unchanged in essentials for 2022.

Stefan Daniel, Leica's Executive Vice President for Technology and Operations, framed the decision as a response to a genuine shift in how people wanted to make pictures. "Conscious analog photography as an antithesis to the flood of digital images is enjoying great popularity," Daniel said, pointing to a generation of photographers for whom the friction of a fully manual camera — no autofocus to trust, no burst mode to hide behind — is the entire appeal rather than an inconvenience to be engineered away.

The changes Leica did make are almost invisible: a solid brass top cover in place of the original's die-cast zinc, better anti-reflective coatings on the optics, a refined rangefinder patch. At $5,295, the reissue costs considerably more than a clean secondhand original — a premium, effectively, for buying the discipline new rather than inheriting it worn in.

When Porsche replaced the 997 with the 991 in 2011–12, the headline change wasn't the bigger body or the longer wheelbase — it was the steering. The 997's hydraulic system, in which "the steering rack is assisted by a hydraulic pump driven off the engine," gives the driver a direct mechanical read of what the front tyres are doing: road surface, tyre load, camber change, all transmitted up through the wheel. The 991's electric system is, by most measures, more efficient and just as accurate. It is also, by near-universal enthusiast consensus, quieter in the hands — accurate about what the front tyres are doing, but no longer particularly interested in telling you about it.

I should disclose an obvious conflict of interest here: I own a 997.1 Carrera 4S, and every word of the above is, in part, a case I have been making to my own bank manager for several years. It is, depending on how generous you're feeling, simultaneously the fulfilment of a long-held aspirational goal and the real-world embodiment of a mid-life crisis — I turn forty this August, and there are less predictable ways to mark it. But it is, without question, the last 911 that talks back — which is either the most persuasive argument for keeping it forever, or the most predictable thing a biased owner could possibly write in his own magazine.

Porsche Classic's PCCM Plus retrofit unit brings Apple CarPlay and Android Auto to 997- and 987-generation cars without altering a single visible dashboard control. Source: Porsche AG.

Which is precisely the gap Porsche Classic's PCCM Plus retrofit unit is built to close — and regular readers will recognise the thread. Edition 13 touched on the standard PCCM as a supporting detail in its look at classic-cockpit ergonomics; the Plus unit is its fuller, more capable successor, and this edition's entire premise is really just that one paragraph, pulled and expanded. Available for the 997, the 987 Boxster and Cayman, and the first-generation Cayenne, it swaps in a 7-inch touchscreen with CarPlay, Android Auto and navigation behind period-correct switchgear, using the car's existing amplifier, speakers and antenna rather than replacing them. "There is huge demand for contemporary networking of our timeless classics," says Ulrike Lutz, Director of Porsche Classic — the same demand that, one edition on, has swallowed this entire magazine.

Mies van der Rohe's 1968 gallery — a single vast glass box suspended beneath a flat steel roof — is one of the most revered buildings of the twentieth century, and one of the least forgiving to work on. David Chipperfield, who led its restoration to reopening in 2021, has called it "a touchstone for myself and many other architects" — and admitted that "taking apart a building of such unquestionable authority has been a strange experience but a privilege."

The brief was deliberately narrow: fix what needed fixing, and leave the rest indistinguishable from how Mies left it. The team refurbished the ageing concrete structure and steel frame, replaced the glazing, upgraded air-conditioning and lighting for modern energy performance, and modernised the visitor facilities — while preserving the original stone cladding, the steel-and-glass exterior, and the building's overall proportions untouched. "Our work was therefore surgical in nature," Chipperfield said, "addressing technical issues to protect this vision... we hope to have returned this beloved patient seemingly untouched except for it running more smoothly."

It is, in built form, the same discipline running through every object in this edition: restraint as the highest form of respect, and the modern intervention judged a success only insofar as nobody notices it happened.

Sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's Fall/Winter 2026 show marked a visible shift away from the brand's signature relaxed drape toward fitted, almost severe tailoring: cigarette trousers, shrunken jackets and curved boat necklines that recalled late-1990s precision cutting more than the brand's own recent past. It is the fashion equivalent of the brass top-plate on the new Leica M6 — a house returning to an older, stricter discipline rather than continuing to soften one.

The layering told the same story from a different angle: sheer turtlenecks worn over visible pearls, organza laid across poplin, "stealthy texture" delivered through fur-trimmed pencil skirts and sparse feather collars rather than anything louder. The effect, as reviewers noted, was a collection where "workhorse staples and couture-esque craftsmanship lived side-by-side" — pieces built to be worn constantly, cut with a precision that assumed they'd also be studied closely.

Fitted tailoring and sheer layering defined the collection — a tightening-up from the brand's usual engineered ease. Source: The Row.

It is, in other words, minimalism's own version of a restomod: the vocabulary of quiet luxury left intact, the silhouette underneath quietly re-engineered.