Élan: The Velvet Peace is a narrative-led design project that merges character creation, editorial storytelling, and collectible product design into a single aesthetic universe. Set against the backdrop of 19th-century Europe, the project introduces Élan—born Alfred Leighton, an immortal aesthete bound to the Thyrsus of Dionysus—whose gift is the power to aestheticize reality itself. Conceived as both a magazine feature and a character-driven myth, the work explores Aestheticism not as decoration, but as ideology: beauty as force, excess as rebellion, and form as a disruptive counterweight to function.
Extending beyond print, Élan was developed as a fully realized character system, including a detailed character sheet and a collectible action figure concept. The figure design translates Élan’s androgynous elegance, gilded ornamentation, and theatrical posture into a physical artifact—bridging narrative design with product and packaging thinking. Together, the magazine, character, and figure form a cohesive world where storytelling, visual identity, and object design reinforce one another. Élan: The Velvet Peace ultimately functions as a meditation on obsession, taste, and the double-edged nature of beauty—celebrating aesthetic devotion while exposing its costs.
At the core of the project is The Velvet Peace magazine, a fully art-directed narrative issue that blends historical fiction, satire, and painterly visual language. Through richly staged spreads and episodic storytelling, the magazine recounts Élan’s surreal interventions in history—most notably his transformation of a Crimean War battalion into a velvet-clad spectacle, turning the battlefield into a runway of defiance. The editorial design balances decadence and clarity, using composition, color, and typographic rhythm to echo Élan’s own philosophy: that beauty, when taken seriously enough, becomes subversive.