We asked 2 of the most qualified connoisseurs of the independent magazine world for their favourite indie mags.
(Image credit: Mabel Wynne)
For us creatives, magazines are a resource. This makes it vital to have the right ones so that you can have the best selection of artistic inspiration at hand. Every artist wants to make their own magazine, but this means that there’s a lot out there, and when walking into specialist stockists it can be hard to know where to start.
Independent magazines offer a more artistic approach to publication than the glossy magazines you might see in mainstream retailers (and those usually included in the best magazine covers). Created and produced independently by artists passionate about their work, the industry takes commercialism out of magazine-making and produces beautiful bodies of work focused on the storytelling of life.
To discover the best indie magazines available today, we spoke to the founders of two of the world's leading magazine shops: Jeremy Leslie of London's MagCulture and Daniel McCabe of Magalleria in Bath. Here are their top picks.
Zweikommasieben (ZKS for short) is a music magazine made in Switzerland, but the most intriguing feature of the current issue (29) is its design, with the format set up so that the contents of every page is within the shape of a phone screen. "And there’s the bit in the middle where it runs out of power," says Jeremy.
ZKS is not as world-leading as Dazed, but "we always have it and it always ticks over", says Jeremy. It’s a fan favourite that always sells, and a "fantastic, one-off". Each issue’s design is unique too; "it’s always a different format or changes design," Jeremy tells us, so the incredible printed phone simulation that Issue #29 gives us is just a sliver of the wide variety of graphic design you’ll get from this magazine.
Apartamento is an interiors magazine focused on people and their homes in their natural state, and is revered by both Daniel and Jeremy. According to Daniel, its fifteen-year legacy has created a blueprint for independent magazines. "It’s really popular to the point where now competitors look the same," he says.
Similarly, Jeremy believes that it’s one of those "longstanding magazines" that’s always going to be popular in the industry "unless something astonishing happens". Why is it successful? "It doesn’t ask very much of people," says Daniel. "It’s a kind of resource." He adds that "you know that the people they interview are going to be worth reading and have got something to say".
Subtitled ‘the life of things’, MacGuffin explores a different object in each issue, but not in the way you might expect. The current issue about walls "starts off being about a wall," Jeremy explains, "but it’s actually about TV shows and how they deal with walls". The current issue ends up exploring the fourth wall, but it doesn’t end there. It also explores Donald Trump’s first term in 2016, when "he held an audition in the desert for various different companies to come up with their design for the wall," says Jeremy. "So it’s all about politics, it’s about culture, it’s about all these different things that are based around the wall." Each issue features different contributors and specialist writers, making it an excellent, professionally put-together library of information on life and culture. "It’s always alive," says Jeremy, "and well worth a look."
Created by Matt Hranek, the first art director of Wallpaper*, WM Brown is a magazine full of photos so beautiful that it guarantees to restore your faith in humanity and especially, masculinity. Daniel promises me that it’s a men’s lifestyle magazine that steps away from the stuffiness and over-the-top whiteness of most men’s lifestyle magazines. "He puts people in suits with beanies – he subverts," Daniel explains.
The magazine puts people of all races in suits and settings that are predominantly presented in the industry using white models. It also makes men’s lifestyle fun; "he has a chapter on his favourite sandwich", says Daniel, "and his favourite cigar, his favourite tailor at the moment, he even does recipes". It presents masculinity in an open and celebratory light and is a publication that encourages men to do absolutely everything to a high standard. One of Daniel’s biggest sellers, WM Brown has "turbo-charged the men’s lifestyle sector".
"When it began it was women dressing as men," says Daniel. "Not with gender emphasis, but with sophisticated trench coats and suits that would traditionally been seen on men." The quote from Homme Girls on Magalleria’s website states that ‘dressing like a man doesn’t disguise a woman’s femininity – it ignites it.’ Homme Girls is a powerful magazine that places women in a position of power in its photographs rather than objectifies them. And unsurprisingly, it’s garnered large popularity. "We sell so much of this,"says Daniel, and he emphasises how the mag has become more "savvy" over time. "They’ve got a lot of K-pop content and fashion magazines seem to need K-pop at the moment."
A broadly focussed creative magazine, Pilot’s contents are united by the underlying theme of art. Jeremy believes one of its great strengths is in its ever-changing format; each issue is a different size and shape: "One was A2, and one was really small, like two boxes of matches stuck together." The creative director, Dagny Tepper, is "doing something right," he says. "I’m not suggesting it’s running the industry," says Jeremy, "but it’s definitely made a splash".
The Gentlewoman is known by those not even engrossed in the magazine world. Its success "just marches on", according to Daniel. According to The Gentlewoman's website, it’s a magazine for ‘women with style and purpose’, and it almost presents itself as the women’s version of GQ. It has an "intergalactic" circulation of 150,000, and as Daniel puts it: "this is how to do a magazine".
Originally published by Cofina Media rather than Conde Nast (and now published by Lighthouse), Vogue Portugal stands out amongst the other Vogues. It’s known for subverting the norms of what society expects from a commercial magazine; instead of playing it safe it has the freedom to be controversial every now and again.
During the pandemic, its cover of a couple kissing while wearing Coronavirus masks went viral, and its September 2019 cover also gained global recognition for its design focused on sustainability in fashion. Daniel’s shop, Magalleria, is the only official stockist of Vogue Portugal in the whole of the UK. "It really doesn’t look like Vogue, does it?" he says to me excitedly. "Every issue is themed – one was everything that’s unpopular, which is not something Vogue would ever do, and they did a kitsch issue." It sells very well in Magalleria, Daniel says, and "it’s always in trouble with the Catholic church".
Pleasant Place is a gardening magazine from the Netherlands. Stocked at both Magculture and Magalleria, it explores the cultural and artistic components of gardening and gardens, and is a recognisable cover in any independent magazine shop. Each issue is succinct and beautifully designed. "It just seems to have found its niche very quickly," says Jeremy.
Catnip’s publishing company Broccoli is described as ‘a publisher of unusual delights’, and also publishes Mushroom People. This and Catnip "are just huge", says Daniel. "There’s nothing like them. This is mushroom culture."
Catnip is a specialist cat magazine, designed for the audience of cat lovers who want endless cat-related content to flick through. With an eye-catching cover on the outside, on the inside it consists of of cat applique, ‘arty stuff’, and everything to do with culture that relates to cats. "I think cat people are quite easy to cater to," says Daniel. He believes their cat-based strategy is a "licence to print money".
Mabel is a freelance writer, artist and filmmaker. When she's not writing about the arts industry, books or culture, she's working on writing and illustrating her stories or developing experimental filmmaking projects. Working in journalism, poetry, documentary-filmmaking, illustration and fiction, storytelling is at the heart of what she does. She started writing articles in online magazines when she was seventeen. After training at the BFI Academy and then studying at UAL, she is now continuing to write articles while she works on creating and launching her first books and films.
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