Magazines who go beyond paper.

Hi everyone,
paper is something we obviously care a lot about. Even if it has a very specific dimension, its meaning needs to be constantly redefined, changing over time. What differences must a contemporary magazine face today compared to one created many decades ago?
Are magazines still really just about paper?

One single action doesn’t make a real change. What may seem innovative was probably already done a few years earlier. The interesting part is how practices are revised by different people at different times.

Today’s reflections on this topic are of course not the first ones, and the writing process of this article has been simplified by the participation at the university course Publishing, Curating and Visual Culture at IUAV University of Venice, led by Professor Saul Marcadent.

Join us and take part in this thinking process.
Read the full article here.

As you may have heard, “Thinking is becoming a luxury good”, maybe is the ultimate new luxury good.

If it’s true that everything comes with a price, so does the weekly newsletter you receive in your letterbox, or the access to music without advertising, and so does for all the other subscriptions we have.

As journalist Christian Lorentzen writes for The New York Times, “We may be facing a future without magazines, at least glossy ones, and passing into an era of disembodied media entities”.

The other night, while we were drinking, a dear friend of mine told me she admired my ability to adapt to many situations or people around me.

Thinking about it, flexibility is something we can’t really live without, yet it is something really difficult to achieve. How can you manage to be in many situations and times, and still don’t lose yourself, your identity? Is it possible to change, and still be the same?

Magazines could give us some answers.

Periodicity is one of the main features that distinguishes a magazine from other editorial objects, and it would be right to say that a magazine’s identity is developed through multiple issues.

If you look at mainstream publications, the ones who are around from quite some time -like Vogue, changes aren’t loud. Contents obviously change, but on a surface level, the appearance always remains the same. Partially, this is how they built such a strong influence on people.

Independent publications are the ones whose changes are more remarkable. They often come from the desire of a small group of people to fill a void. Personal projects who reflect personal perspectives, and since they are personal, the magazine may adapt to the person's changes over time. The element that takes everything together, is the idea behind it.

Independent publications often reinvent themselves completely through every issue, the way they do it is an interesting matter.

In a time where the Internet didn’t exist, some independent magazines started to create their issues like if they were collector’s items, curating all the small details in order to give the reader an extraordinary experience.

In 1950 Fleur Cawles, married to the newspaper and (mainstream) magazine publisher Gardner Cowles Jr., started her own publication: Flair. The art director Federico Pallavicini, coming from a previous experience working for Aria d’Italia -an editorial experience that inspired the magazine itself, had the ability to make Flair more than a magazine. With the several cutouts and care for the details, Flair was more like a publication created by an artist rather than a magazine, and even if the experience lasted one year (from February 1950 to January 1951) due to the cost of production, its impact has affected many magazines that had to come.

Flair in a certain way, has been one of the first magazines, subconsciously or not, to go beyond paper.

Fifteen years later another magazine seems interested in a new way to experience a publication.

In 1965 Phyllis Glick, a New York journalist and editor, founded Aspen: The Magazine in a box.

The main idea behind it was about multisensoriality. A box containing some kind of an art space, and the reader is not just a reader anymore, but it’s also a listener, an audience. The magazine concept gets more freedom and it doesn’t have to be bidimensional, it can get the shape that you want it to be. Within the box in fact, you could find records and cds other than text and images.

Aspen as an editorial experience will come to an end in 1971, but -like it happened with Flair- its presence can be perceived in other subsequent magazines.

Nowadays to go beyond paper seems more like an urgency rather than a choice, and magazines need to adjust with that.

Magazines aren’t just about paper anymore, and it seems interesting to comprehend how we have gone from an intention to a requirement, from a want to a need.

While people assume that paper is dying, new magazines arise.

Independent magazines still are a space of experimentation, with an amazing ability to change, and yet still be the same.

System -founded in 2013 by Jonathan Wingfield, Elizabeth von Guttman e Thomas Lenthal- represents an example. Published twice a year, the magazine aims to take a picture of the fashion system through long interviews that take place during several months.

As Vanessa Friedman wrote in 2015- time is an important aspect of this editorial project, and also a feature that allows System to stand out from the other glossy magazines.

In this way, interviews have the opportunity to really bring out what people think and feel, being more personal.

As the founders told journalist Angelo Flaccavento for d Repubblica last February, their office is not a physical space anymore, and they have replaced long meetings with Whatsapp groups and video calls. In this way, ideas can flow more freely and with more immediacy.

On the occasion of their tenth anniversary, System digitalized their archive, making it accessible for everyone to read past issues through their Internet site.

One year ago, System has expanded as a podcast called “In conversation” where -like as in the interviews published on paper- the most relevant people of the industry get the chance to express their thoughts and give their opinions.

Last winter, the editorial team launched “System Collections”, published as an insight on the collections presented on the Fashion Month, adding up to System Beauty, published in December 2022. System Beauty -as edicola 518 describes it- explores how “the landscape of beauty has shifted and exploded into a myriad of singular beauties, each different, each unique”.

Glossy magazines at this time don’t feel like they did decades ago, and to enhance this feeling, journalist Michael M. Grynbaum wrote “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the media dynasty that reshaped the world”.

While Vogue U.S. chose to star on its October cover Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid, rejecting any political standing in a very political moment, Rachel Tashjian asks “Magazine editors used to be gatekeepers. Do we need them anymore?”.

In a common cultural flattening, role models seem to no longer exist, what happens instead are many forms of knowledge to learn from. As Christian Lorentzen points out, “Anyone with an Instagram account can be Anna Wintour, and, like me, Tina Brown now writes on Substack”.