Opine: Magaswoon – Loving Glossy Living

It’s not just working for a magazine that keeps me interested in the magazine industry. Lavishly-produced glossies are the staple of many a fashion blog, and not only serve to inspire, but also, enjoyed properly, become an act of defiance, a way of harking back to an earlier, pre-internet time when journalism only existed in a print form, and the most commentary you were likely to get was a letter printed on the following day’s ‘Dear Editor’ page. It’s a fact that the magazine industry is still in rude health because the quality of what’s being produced is increasing, and the real-time Twitter/blogosphere/comments page only serves to increase the lust for something permanent, concrete and unchangeable.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been fortunate to have a few hours of chilling out time in various places (my new flat is pleasingly without a working telly), and been able to sit down for an hour or so and digest an entire magazine. Reading Man About Town on a roof terrace with a glass of rosé in hand was one of the most civilised things I’ve done recently, and an evening’s settling down on my sofa in my flat with a mug of tea and a copy of Ten Men was a pretty equal second. The immersion into another world and the feeling of calm that this generates is incomparable; I justify the purchase of weighty magazines because I equate them with books. Yes, there’s advertising, and yes, there’s a lot of it, but just because the content is trying to sell you something doesn’t mean that it can’t be enjoyed on an aesthetic level.

The great thing now is that the magazine is now being used as a platform for emerging artists, supported through arts institutions. Pigeons and Peacocks is a commercially available, advert-free showcase of the London College of Fashion’s graduates, paid for by the LCF. Taking the degree show/yearbook idea to the next level, and printed on quality, matt stock, Pigeons and Peacocks fills 128 pages with everything from high-fashion shoots to illustrations of Eastenders characters; portrait photography to cultural discussion. Editorially tied together by the Class of 2010, the magazine manages to be wide-ranging and focuses simultaneously, and also avoids that potential self-trumpeting vibe that could come with such a publication.

Editorial in my favourite magazines now is irreverent and inspiring; Charlie Porter‘s piece on the escalator at St. John’s Wood station in the latest issue of Fantastic Man is one of the most inspiring articles I’ve read this year, because of its beauty-in-mundanity approach combined with the effect that Mr. Porter’s calming prose has on the reader. I can’t recommend searching out a good magazine and devoting an hour of the day to it; time spent reading is nothing if not essential.

–Seb Law