Wrapped in a blue abyss, a young Prince Gyasi is pictured playing with colourful tokens in the 2024 Pirelli Calendar. Only it’s not actually the 28-year-old photographer, but Abul Faid Yussif, a seven-year-old pretending to be him. Prince was behind the camera, capturing Yussif inside his mind. Here, on the cover, the visionaire’s creative innocence is epitomised – a driving motivation behind his exquisite execution of the docket’s 50th edition entitled Timeless.
When I met Prince, despite his aptitude for conceiving hues, he was dressed in all black (except for the silver accents on his square-toe Gucci boots). He’d just finished a few rounds of interviews ahead of the Calendar’s release, and unfortunately, I wasn’t his last. It’d only been two minutes, and we hadn’t gotten through formal introductions. Instead, I stood in front of the inspired creator, an architect of vibrance, if you will, watching as he dabbed spilled liquid from the carpet with a napkin. I had entered his room in The Edition Hotel when Prince, moving to greet me, knocked a can of Dole Pineapple Juice over. “Wait, let me wipe off this part,” Prince insisted before I approached the leftover dribble. “This is terrible.”
