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It is 6 p.m. You have logged off from work and are unwinding with a glass of wine. You turn on the TV, but instead of Netflix, you click on a new app called 6pm in Paris, and spend the next 30 minutes learning French. Not on your desk. Not on your phone. But on your couch, watching a short movie. This is the vision behind a new language learning platform that recently launched. 6pm in Paris merges Netflix’s addictive streaming format with the short lessons style of Masterclass. The concept is simple yet effective: Each week, you pick a short film from a curated collection of French licensed movies. Then, you dive into the story and language through an informal video lesson called After Short. You can watch the films with dual subtitles and adjust the playback speed to your preference. Diligent learners can also review a phrasebook of key words and idioms, then take a short quiz to reinforce their knowledge. While apps like Duolingo are pouring resources into AI and gamified learning, 6pm in Paris is choosing cultureand therefore the human experienceas its primary lens. A big part of our vision is to be a window on the language, and the people, and the culture, says CEO and cofounder Lea Perret, who dreamed up the company with cofounder and COO Julien Frei. If people take to the format, you can soon expect 6pm in Tokyo, and 6pm in Rioand basically 6pm anywhere. Julien Frei and Lea Perret [Image: 6pm in Paris] Learning as a lifelong journey Perret imagined 6pm in Paris as a way to help students learn French beyond the classroom. Most people will sell you methods to learn French in three weeks, but it doesn’t work like that; it’s a lifelong endeavor, she says. And if you want to spend a lifetime learning a language, it has to be entertaining, or else you will throw in the towel. Originally from Toulouse, France, Perret moved to New York 17 years ago and has been teaching French in the U.S. since then. In 2013, she cofounded Coucou French Classes, which provides in-person classes in New York and Los Angeles. Since the pandemic, her team also launched online classes to over 50,000 students. Today, the company remains profitable, but 6pm in Paris is here to fill a gap that Coucou couldnt: to help people immerse themselves in French culture. While Perret was at Coucou (she left to run 6pm in Paris) students would often ask her for additional resources to help them improve their French. In response, she would send them a 17-pager recommending, among other things, French books and TV shows to watch. (Yes, Call My Agent featured on the list.) These shows, however, can be too long, which can wear out the learner, and the subtitles can be either inaccurate or incomplete, completely skipping quintessentially French filler words like euh or eh ben. This approach, she says, can take learners away from real language experiences and make it harder for them to connect the spoken word with its written form. [Image: 6pm in Paris] The 6pm philosophy With 6pm in Paris, the team is hoping to address many of these challenges with shorter, more digestible films and customizable subtitles that were crafted in-house to perfectly match the dialogue. For now, the team has licensed more than 60 short films by local filmmakers. These range from sci-fi to rom-coms to documentaries. The shortest lasts a mere two minutes; the longest clocks in at 25. (My personal favorites so far are Cloud Paradise, and Amoureuxse, both of which boast excellent storytelling.) By next yearif the team can raise the $1.2 million they need to growthey want to start producing films in-house, which would allow them to tailor the content to various levels by, for example, streaming down the dialogue so actors don’t talk over each other. They also expect to launch a whopping 170 masterclasses covering grammar for all levels. The series will feature short, digestible episodes delving into French conjugation. We believe in grammar, we just think there is entertaining efficient way to bring it to people so it doesn’t feel like a chore, says Perret. The current selection is more suitable to someone with an intermediate understanding of French, but the team maintains this shouldn’t preclude anyone from subscribing to 6pm in Paris. In fact, they believe that segmenting learners by levelsand tailoring content accordinglyis the wrong approach. The 6pm in Paris philosophy is that one of the most essential ingredients to learning a new language is exposure. Sure, you can start by learning the phrase, ‘je m’appelle Lea et j’habite New York,’ but what’s point of knowing how to say that if you don’t understand what the person replies to you? she says. According to Perret, Americans are obsessed with talking, but even more important are listening and comprehension. By watching a short film in French, even with English or French subtitles, you can slowly soak up the language, notice how words are spelled, and train your ear before ever uttering a single word. As someone who moved to a French-speaking country at age 7 and was encouraged to sit at the back of the class and just listen, I can attest to the efficiency of this method. (I was fluent in less than a year.) [Image: 6pm in Paris] TV as a learning tool Research backs this up, and many studies show that watching TV shows, especially with O.G. subtitles, can be a surprisingly effective way to build your real-world language skills. According to a 2022 study from researchers in Turkey, 44 participants from Kosovo who watched Turkish TV series with subtitles for one to two years saw measurable improvements in all four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing.) Another study from Spain shows that university students who watched Friends over the course of seven weeks, and with English subtitles, learned more informal English (like slang and idioms) than those who used Spanish subtitles. Television might be the greatest source of first language input, and learning a foreign language by watching TV is more common than it might seem. According to a recent survey performed by the research platform AtomRadar for Fast Company, 43% of participants have tried to learn a foreign language by watching TV shows or movies. Of these people, 60% found it effective. AtomRadar, which surveyed a representative panel of 300 American adults over 18, also found that younger people are substantially more likely to have tried learning a foreign language through movies and TV, with 55% of 18 to 24 year olds having tried it, compared to only 30% of 55 to 64 year olds. (Once again, I can relate as I distinctly remember looking up the definition of rooting for someone after a love triangle materialized on the teen-cult TV show One Tree Hill.) 6pm in Paris isn’t the first company to recognize the potential for cinema to double as a learning tool. FluentU uses beginner-friendly movie trailers and music videos to teach you vocabulary and grammar in context. Lingopie offers a streaming library of foreign-language TV shows with interactive subtitles. And France Channel, which lets you stream French films and series otherwise unavailable in the U.S., markets its platform as a way to learn the language through immersion. Earlier this year, Duolingo, too, recognized the power of cinema with a Korean campaign in collaboration with Netflix. Korean course sign-ups had jumped 40% after the first season of Squid Game aired in 2021, so when season 2 rolled around in 2025, Duolingo launched Squid Game-themed vocabulary lessons, a TikTok filter that could test your pronunciation skills, a K-pop music video, and a music video featuring Duo the owl suited up as a Pink Guard. Is 6pm in Paris worried about all the competition? Not in the slightest. She notes that her team wasn’t inspired to start a new company to fill a gap in the market, but to meet their students’ needs. The outputs may be similar but the motivations are different. The company is still too young to gauge success, but the first few months show promise: After a beta run with Coucou students, the team opened up the platform to the public and leaned heavily on a marketing campaign to attract subscribers. So far, 1,300 people have joined (and 70% of users who started with a free 7-day trial have converted to a paid subscription). Three quarters of subscribers log in every week to watch the weekly film, followed by the after short. For now, you can only watch on your laptop or by casting to a Smart TV. But once the team secures more backing, they plan to upgrade to a more robust (and pricier) streaming platform that supports native TV apps. Some years down the line, you could soon turn on your TV, click on your 6pm streaming app, and choose which language you want to learn based on the culture you want to discover. I want it to be as easy as ‘you turn on TV, go to 6pm in Tokyo and discover many things about the Japanese culture, says Perret. I do believe there would be lot more understanding, and the world would be a better place if we knew more about each other.
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Behind some of the most recognizable iconography in the world, from American presidential campaign logos to New York City subway signage and Apple keycaps, is one Swiss designer and a textbook he published in 1949. Youve probably never heard of either. Walter Käch was a calligrapher and educator at the Zürich School of Arts and Crafts in the late 30s and 40s. During this time, he published a simple manual, called Lettering, which laid out his approach to crafting letterforms, letting students learn about proper technique and trace and copy letters directly inside the book. Experts have credited Lettering for popularizing the idea of type families and directly inspiring the creation of Univers and Helvetica, two of the worlds most famous typefaces. Over time, Kächs contributions have largely been overshadowed by those of his students. Now, theres a team working to fix that. This week, the first modern reprint of Lettering was published through a collaboration between Dinamo type foundry, the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, and the graphic design firm Omnigroup. For the designers behind the reprint, its a passion project thats been more than six years in the making. [Photo: Michelle Mantel/courtesy Dinamo Editions] The book that inspired Helvetica Fabian Harb is the cofounder and head of type design at Dinamo. He discovered Lettering while studying at the Basel School of Design, where he learned that, despite being printed in an extremely limited run (likely between 500 and 1,000 copies), Kächs manual has had resounding ripple effects on how typefaces are designed today. [Käch] really went about type design in a quite broad way, Harb says. If you look through the manual, it’s not just sans serifs; it’s also about serifs, its also about script typefaces. Back in those years, there wasn’t a lot of teaching material around, so this being such a proper folder, I’m 100% sure it traveled and people that were teaching in other places also drew from the same material. [Photo: Simon Merz/courtesy Dinamo Editions] Letterings holistic approach to type design represents one of the first true explorations of a versatile type familyor a cohesive system of fonts with various weights and orientationswhich is the standard in todays industry, where most new typefaces come with eight to 10 different weights. Käch also directly inspired his student, Adrian Frutiger, to conceptualize the typeface Univers in 1957. Univers is now one of the most influential typefaces of all time, appearing everywhere from George W. Bushs two campaign logos to some of Apples early keycaps and the UNICEF logo. Likewise, the font Helvetica (the basis of NYC’s subway signs) is believed to pull direct inspiration from Kächs work. [Photo: Michelle Mantel/courtesy Dinamo Editions] Theres a direct connection to Univers and Helvetica, which are typefaces that just became so big, so visible, and so influential up until today, Harb says. Designers definitely know Univers, and Helvetica is probably known even to people that dont have anything to do with graphic design. Helvetica is so closely connected to Käch, but nobody knows about him. [Photo: Simon Merz/courtesy Dinamo Editions] Reprinting an iconic text The idea to issue a reprint of Lettering came as Harb learned more about the text for himself. In school, Harb discovered that copies of the manual are considered rare and precious, and those that are available in Switzerland are mostly held by libraries that dont allow them to be checked out. Meanwhile, designers interested in owning their own copies often found themselves in intense bidding wars on eBay, as those “in the know” on the manual’s influence jostled to secure a version for their collections. [Photo: Simon Merz/courtesy Dinamo Editions] It was a little bit of a sport to check the eBay and see, Okay, is a copy coming up? Harb says. Then everybody would bid on it, and basically whoever had the most money would get it. Very often it went for crazy prices, especially as a studentlike somewhere like 250 and 350 Swiss francs. Due to the manuals interactive nature, nearly all surviving copies of Lettering tend to be in poor condition. People worked with them, a lot was traced in them,” Harb explains. “You can see that sometimes, people drew their own guidelines to figure out the proportions. [Photo: Simon Merz/courtesy Dinamo Editions] Finally, in 2014, Harb’s type foundry Dinamo was able to secure its own copy of Lettering through his connection with the Basel School of Design. The acquisition began a years long exploration of Kächs work for Harb, starting when he designed a custom typeface inspired by Kächs core teachings called Walter Alte. When Walter Alte was used in a contemporary art exhibition, the publicity led Leonardo Azzolini and Simon Mager, cofounders of Omnigroup, to connect with Harb over their shared interest in Kächs work. Together, the three created another Käch-inspired typefacethis time translated for a digital agecalled Walter Neue. Both Walter Alte and Walter Neue were officially published in 2022. As Harb, Azzolini, and Mager dedicated months to closely studying Kächs principles, they realized that the rest of the design community should have access to this resource, too. So, they joined forces with the Museum für Gestaltung on a new reprint of Lettering, a project that took another three years to complete. [Photo: Michelle Mantel/courtesy Dinamo Editions] The 2025 reprint of the manual, designed by Omnigroup and co-published by the Museum für Gestaltung, is made to come as close to the original as possible. All of the text, Harb says, has been copied one to one. And, just like the trailblazing 1949 text, the new version of Lettering allows todays generation of type designers to trace directly in the book itself. The book is now available online for 48, a far cry from the cutthroat prices on eBay. Still, Harb says, anyone with an interest in type design should get the chance to look at one of Kächs original manuals at least once. [The reprint] is very similar to the original, Harb says. But if you ever have the chance to see the original, youll see that it has a richness of materiality that, in todays world, is almost impossible to recreate.
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E-Commerce
The Postwar design phenomenon known as mid-century modernism has been backand thrivingfor years now. In addition to a steady stream of new products from major retailers that cash in on the clean curves of the past, people continue to buy originals, reissues, and knockoffs of icons like the Eames Lounge Chair in droves. But if theres one person Id wager loves it just a bit more than the rest of us, its journalist Dominic Bradbury. In the wake of his tomes Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Masterpieces and Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Houses, today Bradbury is back with another book: Mid-Century Modern Designers, a hulking A to Z chronicle of 300 design pioneers known and unknown. [Photo: courtesy Phaidon] I do write about contemporary design and contemporary architecture as well, Bradbury says. But I have become slightly obsessive and fixated on this period. I just find it so exciting and so inspiring in lots of different ways. Naturally, it was thus more difficult for Bradbury to stop at 300 designers than it was for him to reach 300 in the first place. His initial list comprised some 450500 names, and he whittled it down using a number of criteria. He and the publisher wanted an international focus and a diversity of disciplines, with a particular focus on those designing for home or personal use. They also wanted a mix of big names like the Eameses, Alvar Aalto, and Lina Bo Bardi, as well as more obscure designers who played a critical role in the movement. What I find really exciting about doing these kind of big, research-led books, is you’ll always discover something new, Bradbury says of resurfacing lesser-known talents. To that end, on the eve of the books publication, we asked Bradbury to select his top five forgotten mid-century Moderns who helped define their era. Their work speaks to the question of who gets remembered and who gets left in the pastand perhaps also shines a light on why the world still cant seem to get enough mid-century modernism at large. It’s such an extraordinary period of innovation and excitement and so many ideasand just also this really incredibly optimistic feeling, which I think we’re probably all in need of at the moment, says Bradbury. Yrjo Kukkapuro [Photo: courtesy Phaidon] Yrjö Kukkapuro (19332025) The Finnish Kukkapuro used to sit in the snow to study the shape of the human body as he was working on his best-known piece, the 1964 Karuselli (carousel) Chair, according to Bradbury. Kukkapuro later covered himself in chicken wire to create a plaster mold of himself reclining, all of which played into the final design of the reclining swivel chair. He was one of the early masters of ergonomics, Bradbury notes. The chair found fame when it landed on the cover of architectural and design magazine Domus in 1966. Its production continues to this day, although Kukkapuro is often overlooked in lieu of more famous Finnish designers, such as Alvar Aalto. When you’re going around Scandinavia, you sometimes see these chairs in hotel lobbies and things like that, Bradbury says. They’ve become a bit of an icon. Nanna Ditzel [Photo: courtesy Phaidon] Nanna Ditzel (19232005) You may not know the Danish Ditzel by name, but youve probably seen her most famous workor copies of itwhich she designed with her husband, Jrgen Ditzel: the 1957 Hanging Egg Chair. It is also still in production today, like many of her creations. I really admire her for her combination of craftsmanship and organic materiality, Bradbury says, adding that while other egg chairs of the period might have been created using fiberglass or other solutions, the Ditzels used natural wickerspinning an expressive take on traditional materials in a modern context. Thanks to such decisions, as Bradbury notes in his book, Ditzel offered an engaging version of warm Modernism. While Ditzel may not be mentioned in the same breath as other master Midcentury Scandinavian designer, Bradbury says that like many on this list, her work is being rediscovered as people search archives for pieces that could be suitable for reissue or collection today. Borge Mogensen [Photo: courtesy Phaidon] Brge Mogensen (1914-1972) Mogensen trained under Kaare Klint, the father of modern Danish furniture design. Bradbury says a major part of Klints approach was making sure one understood traditionand that carried over to his protégés output. Mogensen’s work [features] this combination of looking to the past and looking to the future at the same time, says Bradbury. So he would take traditional forms of furniture, like a hunting chair, and then reinterpret them in this sort of modern idiom. That yielded such pieces as the 1950 Hunting Chair and his 1958 Spanish Chaircreations that make one ponder the broader question of why some designers get overlooked in mid-century modern history at large. Bradbury says one key part of the equation is whether or not a designer’s work took off internationallylike, say, Finn Juhls did in the U.S. and Asia. Another major factor Bradbury is mulling at the moment: How designers were (or were not) embraced by the media, and how they promoted themselves. (The mid-century era is kind of when that started becoming more and more important, he says.) He says the Scandinavians were adept at it, and they would band together to do shows and exhibitions to get eyes on their workand as a result, many left a lasting impression in mid-century Modernism to this day. This contradicts the British mid-century modern designers below. John and Sylvia Reid [Photo: courtesy Phaidon] John & Sylvia Reid (19251992; 19242022) While many mid-century modernists are known for their high-end output, the married Reids became ubiquitous for their lower-priced furniture designs from the U.K. stalwart Stag Furniture. The Reids bedroom collections targeted young couples, who could buy a set or a piece at a time. They were very popular lines in the U.K. during the Postwar period, Bradbury says. Their furniture was beautifully designed, well-made, but quite affordable. Like Charles and Ray Eames, they werent limited to furniture, and were wildly talented multidisciplinary designers who also worked in lighting and graphic design. Unlike the Eameses, they didnt receive an enduring acclaim that persists to this day. Sergio Rodrigues [Photo: Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images] Sergio Rodrigues (19272014) Bradbury started to notice a pattern when working on his book New Brazilian House. We just kept seeing these amazing pieces of furniturebeautiful mid-century chairs with wooden frames and kind of slouchy leather cushions. We’d say, who designed those? And [the answer] would be Sergio Rodrigues, he recalls. As Bradbury details in his new book, Rodrigues created his signature Mole Armchair in 1957 after photographer Otto Stupakoff asked him to create a comfy couch for him. He later had another hit in 2002 with the Diz Lounge Armchair; a culmination of a long career. There was something quite joyful about his workyou just wanted to relax into his armchairs or his sofas, says Bradbury. They’re the kind of chair you can’t walk past without wanting to sit yourself down and spend a moment. Ultimately, Rodriguess work was spotted and appeared in international trade shows, leading to distribution abroad. But what of the other South American mid-century modernists lost to time? [They] just sort of stayed at home and concentrated on [their] home marketbut that doesn’t mean the work is any less amazing, Bradbury says. Who knows: In the current era of mid-century rediscovery and reappreciation, it may only be a matter of time before we see these mid-century modern designers anew, as well.
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