Trip Tease, Julia Carter’s Book Psychedelic Now

You don’t open Julia Carter’s book Psychedelic Now. It opens you.

If coffee-table books had a pulse, Julia Chaplin’s Psychedelic Now would be beating like a bassline at Burning Man. Glossy, oversized, and unapologetically loud, this Assouline release doesn’t just showcase pretty pictures—it detonates a visual manifesto on the cultural comeback of psychedelia.
Chaplin, who’s already earned her stripes chronicling bohemian subcultures with her Gypset series, isn’t here to give you a dry history lesson or another safe, clinical take on psilocybin therapy. She’s after something bigger: proof that the psychedelic sensibility has crept back into the mainstream, dripping its cosmic fingerprints across fashion, art, architecture, and design. Think less “trip report,” more “cultural revolution, but make it chic.”

The City is Her Muse

The book organizes today’s psychedelic scene into four tribes. There are the Rainbow Utopists, all glitter and optimism, where designers like Marco Ribeiro and style-savvy rappers like A$AP Rocky live. Then come the Afrofuturists, bending time and sound with the swagger of George Clinton or Kid Cudi. The Cosmic Technophiles are the futurists with lasers and algorithms, like stage sorceress Es Devlin and light-art pioneer Leo Villareal. Finally, the Spiritualizers—James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson—artists who coax transcendence through light, color, and awe. Together, they paint a portrait of psychedelia as less about substances and more about states of mind, aesthetics, and possibility.

Chaplin’s lens is glossy, yes—this is Assouline, after all—but it doesn’t feel hollow. Beneath the polished pages is something raw: a sense that psychedelia isn’t a retro costume anymore—it’s a survival mechanism. Her curation makes the argument that psychedelia has matured, shed its counterculture cliché, and reemerged as a toolkit for optimism in a world flirting with collapse. Rick Doblin, founder of MAPS, drops the mic in the book’s pages:

“Humanity now is in a race between catastrophe and consciousness. The psychedelic renaissance is here to help consciousness triumph.” That’s not hippie fluff; it’s a call to arms.

Visually, Psychedelic Now is stunning.

Saturated photography, cosmic installations, wild fashion spreads—it’s the kind of book you can lose an afternoon inside. But it also sparks ideas: about how design can alter perception, how color and sound might reset a mood, how “psychedelic” no longer belongs to the hippies but to anyone bold enough to embrace chaos, play, and possibility.

Is it perfect? No. Purists might roll their eyes at the luxury-book gloss or argue that psychedelia shouldn’t be packaged alongside $900 handbags on a coffee table. But maybe that’s the point. Psychedelia, as Chaplin shows, isn’t underground anymore. It’s on the runway, in museums, on stages—and now, on your coffee table, humming like a beacon of technicolor hope.

Bottom line: Psychedelic Now isn’t a manual for tripping; it’s a passport into a cultural moment where consciousness is currency and kaleidoscopic thinking feels like survival. If you want safe, go read Pollan. If you want stylish, provocative, and just a little unruly? This is your book.