Joël Wyss is the eye of Collective Agency, and, one might add, its taste, in the most literal sense. As Creative Director, he decides how the agency looks, sounds and feels. His true life’s work, however, begins where client advisory ends. One might call him trend-literate: he reads culture the way others read the newspaper. He spots trends not when they appear in magazines, but while they are still whispering in back courtyards.

At the weekend, you will find him in cafés no one has reviewed yet, listening to music no one has Shazamed yet, on his way to cultural events whose names people will only remember next year. What others call leisure is, for him, a business trip without an expense report.

He spends his summers in the footsteps of Gunter Sachs on the Côte d’Azur, his winters somewhere between New York, London and Stockholm. The search is always for the same thing: what cannot be captured in words, only, at best, in images. What looks like wanderlust is, in his case, fieldwork.

At Collective Agency, he translates his finds into brands that do not merely look good but stay a nose ahead of their time. He advises clients with a feel for nuance that cannot be learned, only cultivated, and with a care that leaves no pixel to chance.

Critics would call him performative. Admirers counter that every detail of his life is simply art-directed. Joël Wyss takes both as the same compliment.