Bal Harbour

P H OTO BY J E R E M Y L I E B M A N style setter veryone loves an underdog story. It's just hard to imagine a time when Sarah Harrelson was one. Raised in Rumson, New Jersey, Harrelson studied political science at NYU before finding her way into magazines, beginning a career that would take her between New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. By the time she founded Cultured in 2011, she had worked at Women's Wear Daily, W, and Seventeen, had created Home & Design for the Miami Herald and helmed Ocean Drive and Art Basel Magazine. Rather than continue climbing the masthead at other titles, she decided to create one of her own. "I saw an opportunity within the editorial landscape to cover art in a different way," says Harrelson, "and to cover fashion, art, and design through a very specific lens, supporting voices who were not being covered in legacy media." Harrelson was launching an independent print magazine at precisely the moment print was being declared dead, entering a publishing landscape where a handful of titles still largely determined who and what mattered. It was, by almost any measure, an unlikely proposition. Fifteen years later, Cultured hasn't simply survived that bet—it has become one of the most influential publications in contemporary culture, with a reach that extends well beyond the art world. For Harrelson, however, the measure of what she has built is more personal. "I am most proud that I created something that people connect to and that I am still passionate about all these years later," she says, also crediting the collaborators who have built it alongside her. This fall, Harrelson turns her discerning eye to a new project. "The Cultured Collector," her first book, offers an intimate look at 30 private collections through more than 200 photographs and conversations with Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz, Michelle and Jason Rubell, Daniel Humm and Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Sheree Hovsepian and Rashid Johnson, among others, with a foreword by Venus Williams. "I became very curious about the many different ways people live with art and how they feel about the artists in their home," she says of the concept, which grew naturally out of conversations she began having with collectors more than a decade ago. Turning those conversations into a book also gave an editor accustomed to the relentless pace of magazine publishing something increasingly rare: time. Harrelson spent a year on the project, a process she describes simply as "a luxury." Asked about a great lesson learned through creating "The Cultured Collector," she offers, "Collectors of any kind, whether art, stamps, or watches, have a passion that is different from just having great taste," she says. "It is a level of commitment and curiosity that never really lets up." It's a description that could just as easily apply to Harrelson herself. She moves easily between the worlds she covers, and is as likely to be found in an artist's studio as sitting front row in Paris and Milan, or hosting one of the many events that have become Cultured hallmarks. Her own approach to fashion reflects the collector's instinct: an appreciation for pieces with staying power, and an eye for what is worth keeping. Harrelson once said that "an interesting story is an underdog story—a person who has broken through, defied the odds, and reached success." Today, it's difficult not to see something of her own trajectory in those words. There is a certain symmetry to Harrelson now appearing in Style Setter, the very column she created during her tenure as an editor of Bal Harbour magazine (2010–2023). Perhaps it's fitting, then, that the woman who has spent her career identifying the stories worth telling has become one herself. E After nearly 15 years of shaping conversations around contemporary culture, Cultured founder Sarah Harrelson turns her attention to the passion, curiosity, and commitment behind collecting in her first book, "The Cultured Collector." BY BRENDA DÍAZ DE LA VEGA cultured eye a Sarah Harrelson has long driven the conversation around culture; her first book, published by Monacelli, is out this Fall. 78 78 BALHAR B O U RSH O P S .CO M

• Cover