telekom electronic beats | 25 years of sound and subculture

If there’s one designer who knows how to orchestrate chaos with style, it’s Charles Jeffrey. For Spring/Summer 2026, the LOVERBOY founder traded the catwalk for cables and soundboards, staging his latest collection inside the legendary Abbey Road Studios. The show played out as a live ‘happening’, where fashion, music, and performance collapsed into one another in real time. But beneath the anarchic surface, SS26 reveals some of Jeffrey’s most considered design to date.

“Our project embodies that spirit of experimentation, blending the sound of our creative process with the iconic legacy of Abbey Road, offering a 360-degree experience of what LOVERBOY is all about,” says Jeffrey.

Named Prepared Piano after John Cage’s technique of modifying instruments into unpredictable sound machines, the collection treats garments much the same way: re-tuned, interrupted, and reimagined. Jeffrey pulls from Abbey Road’s visual history and archetypes, such as studio execs, shaggy-haired musicians, lab-coated engineers, and filters them through a distinctly LOVERBOY lens. That means sharply tailored suits warped into trumpet shapes, oversized hoodies fuzzed out like bedroom beats, and shirts with extra sleeves that double as makeshift belts. Ties come pre-attached, sunglasses wiggle like soundwaves, and trousers are already belted (for those too busy mixing tracks to bother with a buckle).

The concept is rich with art-school references (John Cage, Fluxus, Oldenburg) but there’s nothing academic about the execution. Think of distorted classics that feel lived-in, slightly melted, irreverent. As the name implies, these are garments ‘prepared’ like Cage’s piano — tampered with, bent out of shape, made unpredictable. A white coat becomes architectural; a rockstar flare is pushed until it’s absurd. Banana-yellow boots peel at the sides.

There’s an intimacy to this process too. Jeffrey and his team designed to the rhythm of Abbey Road recordings, treating silhouettes and details like samples to be looped, layered, and remixed. That experimentation continues with the show itself: performances from friends and collaborators including Planningtorock, Allie X, Francesco Risso, and Tom Rasmussen blur the lines between audience, artist, and model. The show culminates in an EP built from the day’s live recordings and a free sample plugin that will be available to music producers globally.

“In 2025, fashion for fashion’s sake feels vulgar,” Jeffrey says. So instead, he gives us fashion as dialogue, fashion as noise, fashion as unfinished experiment.

Find out more here.

photography. Ladislav Kyllar
words. Gennaro Costanzo

MAM’s latest project finds the Barcelona-based jewellery label in conversation with an unlikely collaborator: a dragon. Or rather, the tiled rooftop of Casa Batlló, whose curving, scale-like tiles inspired a new collection that brings Antoni Gaudí’s architecture into direct contact with the human body.

The starting point was instinctive. Both MAM and Casa Batlló draw on nature as more than just a reference: they work with it, letting irregular forms, movement and texture guide the outcome. At Gaudí’s landmark building, nothing stands still. Surfaces bend, walls ripple, and even the rooftop seems to breathe. MAM’s jewellery follows a similar logic: pieces are made to shift with the body, not sit stiffly on it. Shapes wrap, coil and flow. Nothing is static.

But the connection runs deeper than these shared aesthetics. MAM’s home base, MAM House, is a 19th-century building in the Gothic Quarter designed by Elies Rogent, who once taught the Catalan architect. It’s now a space for the brand’s creative experiments, and a quiet mirror to Casa Batlló’s show-stopping curves. Bringing the two together wasn’t about staging a contrast but rather continuing a conversation already happening across time, space and form.

The tiled roof became the collection’s centre. It suggests a spine, a creature mid-motion, and MAM leaned into that reading. The way the colourful tiles rise and settle informed pieces that wrap and respond to the body, as if in mid-shift. However, the collection also includes staples like bangles, earcuffs, earrings, rings, and even a bejewelled mask that’s otherworldly to say the least. 

One of the standout pieces in the project is a large-scale silver tile, designed as a kind of anchor between Gaudí’s legacy and MAM’s own language. It reflects the same curved surface of the roof, scaled up and recast in metal. The intention was to capture the historic significance of Gaudí’s work and project it into the future using MAM’s jewellery pieces. And the results speak for themselves.

To mark the launch, MAM invited the Torres brothers to host a dinner inside MAM House. Known for their meticulous, ingredient-first approach to cooking, the three Michelin-starred chefs put together a multi-course experience that reflected the themes of the collection: fluidity, surprise, and transformation. Guests were given another way to experience the ideas behind the project, this time through scent, taste, and texture.

Find more information about the collection here.

photography. Monica Herede
words. Gennaro Costanzo

Primavera Sound 2025 brought its usual mix of chaos and catharsis to the Parc del Fòrum, in Barcelona, with a lineup spanning the extremes of experimental electronics, millennial pop melodrama, and gritty live performance. With the Mediterranean sun as a backdrop and a crowd ready to sweat, scream, and self-reflect, Schön! was there to witness it all — and capture all the standout moments.

At the opening night, FKA twigs needed little more than minimal scenography to conjure an entire cosmos. Her Thursday night set on the Estrella Damm stage bent pop performance into something sinewy and spellbinding — and she only needed a pole, a sword, and some scaffolding. Across contortions (yes, including pole dance) and sparse-but-precise costume changes, FKA twigs danced her way through EUSEXUA, then dialled the energy down to deliver liquid intimacy with Home With You, Two Weeks, and a devastating Cellophane rendition. Her set followed lively and fun openers with Japanese duo YOASOBI and emerging star BEABADOOBEE, who initiated the day of music celebration. 

On Friday, queer icons Charli XCX and Troye Sivan brought the heat with SWEAT, their only European joint show. A relentless club sprint through their respective eras, BRAT and Something to Give Each Other, with Sivan leaning into twink villainy as he marked his 30th birthday, and Charli XCX tearing through the brat club canon like a woman possessed. The set, however, hit its peak fan-fuelled delirium when Chappell Roan appeared on screen mid-routine, delivering her “Apple Girl choreo” in full drag-pageant mode. Camp? Of course.

Sabrina Carpenter followed, bringing her new-age Barbie energy and extra heat to the festival. On a stage somewhere between a TV studio and an oversized dollhouse, she leaned into ’80s tropes and bubblegum bravado, teasing the audience with one-liners and hits, from Espresso to the just-dropped Manchild.

But if anyone came to claim the crown, it was Chappell Roan. Dressed like a prom queen from a gothic fever dream, she turned the Estrella Damm stage into her own neon-lit fortress. She opened with Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl, read out text messages from exes (for public shaming, naturally), paid tribute to the trailblazing women before her with a belting cover of Barracuda, and closed with the queer anthem Pink Pony Club. 

And through all of this pop chaos and sonic euphoria, CUPRA returned as festival partner for the fourth year, bringing with it a new highlight: CUPRA Pulse. The mirrored installation became a hub for rave realness and sonic experimentation, with sets from Crystallmess, Lolahol, and LSDXOXO transforming the space into a chrome-lit playground. The CUPRA Stage hosted influential artists like Amelie Lens, TV On The Radio, and Amaia, while the brand’s digital platform, CUPRA Music Hub, streamed the action globally.

“Music has been a part of CUPRA since our foundation. It inspires us and enables us to convey the values we stand for: boldness, creativity, and celebrating the talent of the future,” said Patrick Sievers, CUPRA’s Global Head of Marketing. “We have designed the space to amplify the connection with the audience and turn each performance into something more immersive.”

From scaffold to strobe light, from mascara tears to euphoric drops, Primavera Sound 2025 was a fantasy you could dance inside. And this year, it had a heartbeat of chrome.

photography. Àlex Grimà, CUPRA, Christian Bertrand, Clara Orozco, Henry Redcliffe, Gisela Jané, Silvia Villar, Sharon Lopez
words. Gennaro Costanzo