Welcome to the special “20th Anniversary” section of Top Yacht Design. Here we present to you, day by day, the best stories, yachts, characters we have covered in these 20 years of Top Yacht Design, from 2006 to the present day.
Starting today, four times a week (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday) at 1 p.m. we will publish the best articles from our archives. And if you missed any, don’t worry, every Friday there will be our newsletter where you can read them all.
We begin with the editorial our editor in chief Matteo Zaccagnino, who tells us about this initiative
Top Yacht Design 2006-2026 – Design as Culture
Twenty years is enough time to change perspective. Not just to measure an editorial journey, but to observe how an entire industry has evolved its language, priorities and identity. In the yachting world, where aesthetics, technology and vision are constantly intertwined, two decades can represent a real cultural turning point.
When Top Yacht Design was born in 2006, the idea was both simple and ambitious: to tell the nautical story through design. Not just yachts as objects of desire or as extraordinary exercises in engineering, but the creative process that makes them possible. The ideas that generate them. The insights that transform them from simple shipbuilding to an expression of design.
Because there is much more behind every yacht than a hull or a layout. There is a design thought that comes from the meeting of architecture, design, engineering and technological innovation. And it is precisely this creative universe that the magazine has chosen to explore since its first issue, giving voice to those who imagine the future of the sea: designers, naval architects, design studios, engineers. In these two decades, Top Yacht Design has tried to contribute to the construction of a real design culture in yachting. A culture that does not just tell the story of boats, but investigates ideas, contaminations, and evolutions of language.
A culture that recognizes in the yacht not only an industrial product of the highest complexity, but a sophisticated synthesis of creativity, technology and vision. It is an editorial history that, as far as I am concerned, has its roots even further back in time. In fact, my path in professional journalism began to take shape at the end of the 1990s, when I had the opportunity to direct from the very first issue Yacht Design, the magazine created by my father Vincenzo Zaccagnino, which, from 1997 to 2014, represented the first real editorial platform dedicated to the story of design in yachting. At that time, the industry was undergoing a profound transformation.
The industrial and commercial dimensions of yachting were already evident, but there was still a lack of an editorial space capable of telling what went on behind the scenes of the creative process. Yacht Design was born with precisely this ambition: to shift the point of view. To give the designers a say. To enter the design studios. Telling the logic that guides the birth of a boat, from the first lines drawn on a sheet of paper to its realization. That experience helped open a new narrative perspective on an extraordinarily complex and fascinating field. And, in a sense, Top Yacht Design picks up the legacy, developing it in a profoundly changed context. In the meantime, yachting has experienced unprecedented growth, broadened its technological horizons, and dialogued more and more intensely with the world of design, architecture, and contemporary art. Today, talking about yachts inevitably means talking about design.
It means questioning the new forms of living the sea, experimentations with materials, innovations related to sustainability and energy efficiency. It means observing how nautical design has become one of the most fertile territories of design research. If there is a thread running through these 20 years of Top Yacht Design, it is this: the desire to tell the story of yachting not only as an industry, but as a cultural territory. A space where different ideas, skills and visions come together to shape objects that are both sophisticated machines and manifestations of creativity. Meanwhile, the way of doing information has also changed. If in the beginning there was only paper, today Top Yacht Design has become a true publishing platform. An ecosystem that, within the great process of transformation that is redefining the world of media, has been able to seize the opportunities offered by digital to bring to life increasingly rich, dynamic and immersive content. A natural evolution that expands the narrative without betraying its original identity.
To celebrate this milestone, we decided to do something simple and, at the same time, meaningful: retrace this 20-year-long journey by returning to our pages. Starting today we will repropose in full some of the best articles published throughout the magazine’s history, retrieving them from our archives. This is not a nostalgic exercise, but a way to reread, with today’s eyes, an editorial journey built over time. An itinerary marked by the power of words, the value of ideas and a journalistic approach that has helped transform Top Yacht Design into a point of reference not only for insiders, but also for all those who love boats in their many forms of expression. Because, after all, every project is born from a vision. Because before it becomes such, every yacht is above all an idea. And every vision deserves to be told.
Happy reading
Matteo Zaccagnino
