I’ve had so many weird thoughts this year. At one point I thought I would have to watch a nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust in order to believe in humanity once more. Then I felt: nothing can bring me down again, and all will end well! Recently my inner monologue went more like: maybe we should get married, my boyfriend and I? Just in case we need to flee (where to, I didn’t know). In a dreamt-up crisis, I just couldn’t trust that the rights of the married would be extended to two people of the same sex, even after a decade together.

Do you also have that feeling at times, that from where we stand right now, things could unravel? That something has been set in motion, and we are reacting to it too late to make much difference? A Donald Trump presidency looms on the horizon; Brexit is already a reality.

I sometimes go down to the Seine to read on one of the Paris Plages sun loungers. I have to show the contents of my bag – Mathias Énard’s Boussole, a French novel about orientalist academics – to a security guard. Police stroll by, then return a bit later. They are making the rounds for security. Walking back home, I meet four military men with machine guns at a pedestrian crossing. Threat permeates the hot summer air, yet everything is quiet. You get used to seeing guns, even though they remind you of death.

In the middle of all this, what’s the purpose of fashion? As Christopher Kane says in our interview on page 102, it’s difficult to talk about clothes in times like these. Yet for people in fashion it’s not “just” the world that seems unhinged – it’s the fashion system, too. Instead of feeling excitement about the future, many people are weary. We have to ask ourselves what could be lost through the cracks when fashion’s tectonic plates are moving so quickly.

After his A/W 2016 show, Dries Van Noten stated that there is no room to play things safe, that this is an era that calls for creative risk-taking. It’s true that we live in a world where playing it safe only works for the most mainstream of endeavours. For everyone else, the safe bet leads to oblivion – no one is excited by the mediocre. In today’s attention-driven culture, taking creative risks is the only way to reap rewards.

One night in July I’m at Stade de France to see Beyoncé. I feel elated as she enters the stage to the blaring sounds of Formation. This is a kind of relief from the woes of the world. “Are there any gays in the audience?” she asks. What feels like a million hands are raised in the air. “Any girls in the audience?” The sound is deafening. “If you come here to slay, say, ‘I slay!’,” Beyoncé commands. Everyone, at the top of their lungs: “I SLAY!”

Only later do I think of the violence in the words. But “I slay” is not about physical brutality, rather it exhorts us to excel, to perform at such a level that resistance is futile. This seems like an ethics and aesthetic to strive for. The words themselves hold a simple truth: that each and every one of us has the potential to be fierce.

This issue of Bon is for all those who want more, who try a bit harder, those who want to make a mark, not a fast buck. It’s for the artist Adrián Villar Rojas, who takes on the end of humanity; it’s for Christopher Kane, who refuses to do what has been done before; it’s for Laleh, the producer and artist who wishes to make pop that matters. It’s for Eckhaus Latta and their seamless mixing of art with fashion; for Gosha Rubchinskiy and his boys; for Eddie Peake’s daring artwork made exclusively for Bon. And for Hedi Slimane, whose last collection for Saint Laurent floored us. It’s for Turkish creatives such as Mihda Koray and Arslan Sükan, showing a fresh and important side of a country that is going down a dark path. It’s for Ocean Vuong and Alexander Chee, two Asian-American queer poets and writers, and their first meeting in person. It’s for Lina Scheynius and her intimate portraits of girls, models and friends.

In short: they slay.

Daniel Björk, Paris, August 2016