On Men’s Folio Singapore’s August 2026 cover, &TEAM’s Maki turns restraint into the loudest statement in the room.
By Simone Okafor-Bright · Kpoppie Magazine · Photography courtesy of Men’s Folio Singapore × GUCCI
The Floor Gives Way First
He’s on the ground before the story even starts. Steel bars slice the frame into fragments of gold light, the wood floor holds the weight of every year it’s been walked on, and Maki sits inside the wreckage of it like he built the room himself. A leather jacket unzipped to the sternum. Legs folded wide, unbothered. Fingers pressed to his mouth in a gesture that reads less like a pose and more like a thought he hasn’t finished having yet.
This is the opening image of &TEAM’s Maki fronting Men’s Folio Singapore’s August 2026 issue, styled top to bottom in Gucci, and it does something a lot of idol covers forget to do: it makes you wait. No blinding smile, no peace sign, no immediate offer of access. Just a young man testing how much stillness a camera can hold before it has to look away.
It doesn’t look away.
The Shift Nobody Announced
So &TEAM debuted under the banner of youth — a multinational group engineered for velocity, built to move fast across languages, markets, and platforms under YX Labels. Maki was the visual through-line in those early years: precise, photogenic, easy to slot into the “next generation of K-pop’s global export” narrative that critics love to write and just as quickly forget.
What’s harder to forget is what happened after. Somewhere between the group’s early comeback cycles and now, Maki stopped performing youth and started performing control. The jaw set differently in interviews. The eye contact in fan-cams got longer, more deliberate. He became a member people described first by mood, not by role — the one who makes a room go quiet before he says anything.
That’s the turning point this cover captures without spelling it out. This isn’t a debut-era idol borrowing adult styling for a magazine spread. This is an artist whose current aesthetic finally caught up to who he’d already become.
Style as an Argument
Fashion, for Maki, has never been décor. Across this Gucci pictorial, every piece functions like a sentence in a longer argument about restraint. The oversized black tailoring in the second image — sharp-shouldered, deconstructed at the cuff — reads formal until you notice how loosely he wears it, how the Gucci GG canvas mini bag slung crossbody turns a luxury signifier into something closer to a weapon on a chain. The red-and-green web strap is the only color allowed in the frame, and it’s placed exactly where the eye would land anyway: throat level, close to the pulse.
Compare that to the first image — full leather, unzipped, boots catching what little light the set allows — and a pattern emerges. Maki’s Gucci isn’t costume. It’s armor with the seams deliberately shown. Nothing about the styling asks to be liked. It asks to be read.
That’s the throughline of his current visual identity: clothing as a way of setting terms. He is not accessible by default. You earn the version of him that unzips the jacket.
One Language, Three Instruments
What separates Maki’s current era from the standard idol-visual playbook is how deliberately music, movement, and styling are being run as one system rather than three departments. &TEAM’s recent creative direction has leaned into low-lit, high-tension staging — choreography built around isolation rather than symmetry, vocal arrangements that favor tension and release over pure vocal fireworks. Maki’s individual visual language, cool, coiled, faintly dangerous, isn’t decoration layered on top of that sound. It’s the same idea, translated into a different medium.
This is what “creative direction” actually means when it’s working: a listener can close their eyes during an &TEAM performance and still know, from the phrasing alone, what the visual world around it looks like.
Maki has become one of the clearest embodiments of that alignment in the group — an artist whose stillness on camera and control on stage are visibly the same instinct.
The Fandom Doesn’t Whisper
K-pop fandom has always been fluent in close-reading — cataloguing a single expression across a hundred fancams, building entire discourse threads around one unscripted laugh.
Maki’s fanbase does this at a different register. The commentary isn’t “he’s so cute today.”
It’s “he looks like he knows something we don’t.”
That shift in fan vocabulary, from affection to intrigue, is its own kind of cultural data point.
It also plugs directly into where global pop culture is heading right now.
Fashion houses have spent the last several cycles chasing K-pop not for its polish but for its intensity — the way idol fandoms turn a single magazine cover into a 48-hour global conversation across TikTok, X, and Threads before the print run even ships.
Gucci pairing with Men’s Folio Singapore to feature Maki isn’t a novelty booking.
It’s a house reading the room correctly: idol culture isn’t adjacent to fashion’s future audience anymore.
It is the audience.
Where He’s Standing No
What makes this cover story land is that it refuses to resolve Maki into a tidy label. He isn’t “the visual.”
He isn’t “the mysterious one” in the reductive, marketing-copy sense.
He’s an artist in the middle of actively redefining what presence means for a K-pop idol operating on a global fashion stage in 2026 — someone using restraint the way other performers use spectacle, and getting a louder reaction for it.
&TEAM’s broader trajectory under YX Labels has always pointed toward global crossover.
But covers like this one suggest the crossover isn’t going to look like assimilation into existing fashion norms.
It’s going to look like Maki, on a warped wooden floor behind prison-bar lighting, making the entire industry wait for him to finish a thought.
That’s the current cultural temperature of &TEAM’s Maki: unbothered, unresolved, and impossible to look away from.
Not the loudest voice in K-pop’s global expansion — the one deciding when to speak at all.
Credits & Rights
Kpoppie Magazine
A publication of Velocity Entertainment Inc. Limited (Japan / New Zealand)
Cover story published in collaboration with Men’s Folio Singapore × GUCCI, August 2026 Issue
&TEAM is managed by YX Labels
All original photography © Men’s Folio Singapore / YX Labels. Reproduced here for editorial commentary and fan discussion purposes.