Dépêche Mode

/
 

Viscose Journal calls itself “a journal for fashion criticism” which sounds like a simple enough—and niche enough—premise for a magazine. Founded by Jeppe Ugelvig in Copenhagen and New York in 2021, Viscose has quickly become a vital touchpoint in the fashion world. And it has evolved into something far more complicated than what it still calls itself.

In many ways, Ugelvig and his team have created a magazine that is a pure distillation of what a magazine can be. Because every issue of the publication is different—in form and shape and style. In other words, this is a magazine without a literal template. 

The first issue was called a “bagazine” and came in the form of a crocodile skin handbag. Another issue featured a garment label. And the current issue comes with a cover in the form of a cut-out of a perfume box. 

The magazine feels like “an ongoing thought process,” not just with the subject of fashion but with the idea of making a magazine itself. And in this sense, it is a mirror not just to the disciplined anarchy of the fashion industry but also into the making of an independent magazine in the 21st century. And that means thinking about the brand, about events, about audience, about the future as a media hub. And that’s a lot of thinking.

—

This episode is made possible by our friends at Freeport Press.

 

Noted. (Relentlessly)

/
 

Alex Hunting made his name as the design director of Kinfolk, the indie magazine that everyone loves, and has influenced thousands of would-be editors and art directors around the world. Which is why he was the guest on episode 17 of our sister podcast, Print is Dead (Long Live Print!). But that’s not why he’s here.

Along with Editor George Upton (also from Kinfolk), Alex has just launched Footnote, a “journal of artistic exchange,” in which writers are invited to, well, write a story which is then used as a prompt for a wide range of other writers and artists and illustrators to build and comment and add and create a magazine.

Now, this means a few things. First, Alex has no idea what will happen or how the magazine will end up. There’s planning, but there’s no flat plan, for you magazine insiders, because that comes much later in the process. And this lack of a plan includes, perhaps, potentially, the form the magazine might take. We’ll get into that.

Second, the magazine is organized via footnotes—yes, hence the name—but the footnotes are not organized as you might expect them. If there is an editorial eye, or a creative plan, it is in the arrangement of the various footnotes.

The result is baffling, stimulating, entertaining, and gorgeous. Footnote might be the most magazine-y magazine we’ve yet to present on The Full Bleed. It is a brazen experiment that plays with the idea of the magazine while being an oversized, tactile, designed editorial object. A magazine, in other words.

 

A Better-Built Magazine

/
 

When a company publishes a magazine, or at least an “editorial” product, for whatever reason, it is called custom publishing. I have a long editorial background in custom. And custom has a surprisingly long history itself.

How long?

John Deere started publishing The Furrow in 1895. The Michelin Star started as a form of custom content: what better way to sell tires to monied Parisians than by enticing them to take a drive to the countryside to try a great restaurant?

Amex Publishing famously published Travel + Leisure among other titles for decades. That in-flight magazine you once enjoyed on your flight overseas? That, too, is custom publishing.

Now, after some down years, custom publishing is leaning waaaaay into print again. Henrybuilt is an industry leader in designing and constructing well-built products and furnishings for the home. Henrybuilt is not, however, a company that you would think is screaming for a magazine.

But the qualities that make a great magazine—attention to detail and craft, the curation of ideas, hard work—are the very qualities that have made Untapped, a “design journal that looks back to look forward.” 

Led by editor-in-chief Tiffany Jow, Untapped is a smart, well-designed magazine that avoids the pitfalls of most design journals in being free of jargon and thus accessible.

With an enviable level of editorial freedom, Jow has created an editorial product that richly explores livable spaces and champions “ideas-driven work.” The result is a growing media entity across platforms independent of Henrybuilt while hewing closely to its brand. It’s good stuff.

 

It’s Le Monde’s World, We’re Just Living In It

/
 

Name a major newspaper—anywhere in the world—and you will find a magazine. Or two. Or three. The New York Times is the obvious example of this. The Times of London is another obvious example. And now more and more legacy newspapers from around the world are publishing their magazines in English.

La Repubblica in Italy publishes D. And now France’s venerable Le Monde is out with M International, a glossy biannual that distills their weekly M magazine for an English-speaking audience.

Long called “the newspaper of reference” in France, Le Monde occupies an oversized space in the French media. When the Olympics returned to Paris, Le Monde decided to create an english version of their newspaper for the web. Then they decided to create the magazine—in English—something that not just added an extra piece of land to their media ecosystem, but one that pleased their advertisers as well. 

We spoke to Louis Dreyfus, the CEO of Le Monde about the business case for English, how the magazines attract new readers to the newspaper, the power of print, and how AI is one of the reasons Le Monde can create in english in the first place.

 

The New, New Coffee Generation

/
 

On today’s show we’re creating a storm in a coffee cup about everyone’s cup of joe. We’re spilling the beans about your morning brew. You’re going to hear a latte puns about your cuppa, your high-octane dirt, your jitter juice, your elixir, and by the time we’re done you will have both woken up and smelled the coffee.

Luke Adams is the editor in chief of Standart, a magazine about a bean that was first cultivated in Ethiopia in the 9th century and within a few hundred years had many of us hooked. It is a subject obviously and extravagantly rich in history, lore, and possibility. 

What it is not, however, is a paean to what Luke calls “cutting-edge coffee-making geekery.” 

Rather, Standart is about growers and roasters. It is about cafes and third spaces. It is about culture. It is, in other words, about you, the coffee drinker. It attempts to bring together a disparate potential readership around a singular subject, one that not too many actually talk about. Because while cafes encourage conversation, that conversation is rarely about what we’re drinking. Even when it’s a “damn fine cup of coffee.”

 

In the Realm of the Senses

/
 

Psychedelia has an image problem. At least that’s what editor and journalist Hillary Brenhouse realized after she saw through the haze.

Both in art and literature, psychedelia was way more than tie-dye t-shirts and magic mushrooms. Instead of letting that idea fade into the mist, she kept thinking about it. And the more she looked, the more she realized maybe she should create a magazine to address this. And so she did.

Elastic is a magazine of psychedelic art and literature. It says so right there on the cover of the beautiful first issue that just launched. So this is not your standard issue lit or art mag. After all, this is one backed by … Harvard, and UC Berkeley, and a couple of major foundations. 

Hillary Brenhouse has learned a lot about the craft and the business of making and selling magazines this past year. Lucky for us, she and her team are quick studies. You can see it on every page of Elastic. And she also may have redefined the literary magazine. Without a single tie-dyed t-shirt or magic mushroom in the lot, man.

 

Run to the Light

/
 

A monochromator is an optical device that separates light, like sunlight or the light from a lamp, into a range of individual wavelengths and then allows …

… Sorry. I failed physics the last time I took it and I would fail it again. I’m not telling you about my shortcomings for any reason, because a podcast about my shortcomings would be endless.

But I thought I’d look up the word when confronted with Monochromator magazine, which aims to “deconstruct selected films under a shared monochrome to reconstruct them for social relevance.” Look, that’s what it says on the website.

But when you read the magazine, you get it. This is politics and social issues filtered through big movies. How big? The first issue uses Barbie and Oppenheimer to examine the rise of American power (hard and soft).

Having said that, it’s very interesting reading and not heavy. And editor Alex Heeyeon Kil is not even sure she’s editing a film magazine. She sees Monochromator as a discussion about the real world using fictional stories, in this case movies. And her team, divided between South Korea and Germany, publish this annual magazine knowing they might step on more than a few landmines.

Strap in. Or turn on a lamp and take a look at the light and maybe you’ll understand what you’re seeing better than I ever will.

 

Every Day is Mother’s Day

/
 

If The Full Bleed’s second season had a theme, it just might be “We Made A New Magazine During the Pandemic.”  Listen to past episodes and you’ll see that our collective and unprecedented existential crisis ended up producing a lot of magazines.

Melissa Goldstein and Natalia Rachlin met as coworkers at the lifestyle brand Nowness in the UK. Later, with Melissa in LA and Natalia in Houston, they bonded over their new status as mothers: they had given birth a day apart. 

And they both found that magazines aimed at mothers were barren. These titles spoke of babies and parenting and the decor of the baby’s room, but they rarely spoke of the moms as … people. 

So they created Mother Tongue, a fresh look at womanhood and motherhood, and a kind of reclamation of both terms. The magazine functions as a conversation between like-minded moms from everywhere. Plus, like all modern media brands, Mother Tongue has great merch. 

The election looms large, of course, over the magazine and our discussion—we spoke a week after it—and let’s just say both Melissa and Natalia were still processing the results. But Mother Tongue is not going to shy away from talking about that either.