T Magazine: Four New Magazines to Know
If print is dead, nobody told Francesca Burns and Christopher Simmonds, whose new biannual magazine, PRINT, launched late last year. “For us, PRINT was always about a love of magazines, a love of image making; and a desire to create something beautiful, honest and optimistic without an agenda beyond that,” says Burns, a contributing editor for British Vogue who met Simmonds (previously the creative director of Dazed and Confused and now an art director for Gucci among others) working on advertising campaigns. The magazine launched in December at Dover Street Market and 10 Corso Como — and sold so quickly it became, according to Angela Hill of the bookseller IDEA, the fastest selling independent magazine launch in the history of their store. The first issue of the oversized magazine comes packaged in a cardboard box with posters, prints and badges. “We wanted to create something timeless, that people could come back to and rediscover,” Simmonds says. Inside are intimate portfolios from photographers and stylists like Jamie Hawkesworth, Colin Dodgson, Joe McKenna and David Sims — and there’s even a photo essay from the singer Frank Ocean. According to Burns, the brief to contributors was simple: “to do something personal — to do something that truly inspires the artist and to take time over it.” In fact, this is a mantra that Burns and Simmonds took to heart: They pushed the planned release date of the magazine back by a few months. “We could take our time, digest it, revisit it and add to it,” Simmonds says. “The only people we had to answer to were each other. We could do what we felt was right.”
Mastermind
“What I most love in life is to do new things, take risks and embrace novelty,” says the renowned French fashion editor and consultant Marie-Amélie Sauvé, who is also T’s fashion director. “I get bored if I don’t leave my comfort zone.” After 20 years in fashion at publications like Vogue, W and brands like Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton (she has been a close collaborator of Nicolas Ghesquière since 1997), Sauvé will launch her own biannual magazine, Mastermind, on Feb. 9. The first issue features contributions from Stephen Shore, Steven Meisel, Bruce Weber and of course, Ghesquière. (There is also a “chapter” dedicated to the filmmaker Xavier Dolan.) The magazine’s eclectic content features pieces on architecture, psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires and food. “I like the idea that everything gets mixed up,” Sauvé says. “It’s fruitful. We want to be transgenerational and multi-thematic, that’s the essence of modernity to me.” She cites publications like Nova and Réalités as inspiration, for their mix of longform journalism with strong visual content — but says it wasn’t until she was asked to guest-edit an issue of Self Service magazine in 2014 that a spark was lit. She says, “It helped me realize that it was a chance to be able to express oneself in such a global way and also about the importance of developing a clear point of view.”
Re-Edition and Replica Man
Fashion is cyclical — and endlessly mines from the past to look to the future. Rarely has this been so elegantly realized than in the pages of Re-Edition, a quarterly launched in Antwerp in 2015 (currently on its 6th issue) by Eddie Eldridge, who previously worked at a photography gallery, and the British fashion stylist, Jo Barker. The magazine juxtaposes classic imagery (one of the first issue’s covers was an image of Stella Tennant taken in 1997) with new work by rising stars like Lotta Volkova, Harley Weir and Ethan James Green. According to Barker, the title of the magazine comes from Martin Margiela, that Belgian master of the avant-garde. “We are very influenced by Margiela’s way of thinking,” Barker says. “He used the words ‘re-edition’ for a selection of archive pieces he was releasing. For us it means to look back at the archives of photography and clothing.” Eldridge and Barker met at the Arles photography festival and were inspired by magazines like i-D, Dutch and The Face. With Re-Edition, they have set out to create a magazine that showcases their love of art and fashion photography. “We wanted to create a pure visual experience,” says Eldridge of the decision to keep text limited and give their photographers the freedom “where they could be open and put their own vision and point of view across, like gallery pages in a way.” Last December, the duo also launched a men’s magazine, Replica Man, which featured the photographer Mark Borthwick (shot by his daughter, Bibi) on the cover. The editors seek to broaden the definition of male beauty with the frequent use of street-cast models in the magazine — a welcome dose of subversion in the normally staid world of men’s titles. “There’s so much that you can do with men’s fashion compared to women’s,” Eldridge says. “You can push the boundaries much more.”
