In this design issue we celebrate the obsessives. The people who are drawn to the same subject, and then return again, and again, and again. We meet those who have a monofocus, a range of singular and extraordinary points of view. Some are refining a single object, such as the perfect white shirt, the subject of my own enduring fascination, or ceramic glaze. Others are on a quest. Ramdane Touhami, the polymathic entrepreneur and hotelier, is currently fixated on 19th-century stamping devices that he is accruing in order to revive the monogram.

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Model and artist Sang Woo Kim has spent many of the past few years painting self-portraits. Mostly of his eyes. Sang, who grew up in Hampton the child of Korean parents, has found that flipping the act of observation has offered him a means of reclaiming “my lost identity”, and challenging a popular image “that has misrepresented who I am”. He will shortly take part in a group show at AMA Venezia alongside Arthur Jafa, Jenny Saville and Charles Ray. As he tells Charlotte Jansen from beside a wall of eyeballs, the portraits are a response to being “exoticised, objectified and fetishised”, while also being seen.

A former fashion stylist who retrained as an architect in the ’90s, Sophie Hicks is famed for her stark, minimal designs. Yet many of her projects are born of close collaboration: her skill is in weaving her signature into a broader vision for brands such as Paul Smith, Chloé and Alaïa. In this issue she talks about her ongoing love affair with Seoul. Hicks started working in South Korea in 2014, and has taken on a number of different jobs, the most recent being a building for the fragrance brand 025S in Seongsu-dong. Hicks is refreshed by the youthful focus of the country: “A lot of the people I’ve worked for are the same age as my children. They’re very dynamic.” It’s an attitude that helps refine her aesthetic, and reinvigorates her sometimes “jaded” point of view. 

For many people singular can mean reductive – and there is no shortage of minimalism in design. In fashion, minimal usually means something white and unfussy, an idea that is revisited in our shoot with Julia Nobis, Tonne Goodman and Craig McDean. As they show, there is something deeply pleasing and uncompromising in the execution of the perfect silhouette.

I was also intrigued to read about Heinz Mack, the German artist who in 1957 co-founded the Zero art movement in Düsseldorf, with the aim of creating “a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning in art”. Now 95, Mack has cycled through “four quarters” but remains committed to the Chromatic Constellations he began more than 25 years ago. A man with a truly singular vision, he has continued to be productive and is compelled to make more work. As he skips off towards his studio, it’s clear he’s doing something right.