Fashion magazines are usually not only extremely heavy to carry around, they are also expensive. The idea behind them is that you buy them, read the features, look at the photo shoots, get inspired and store these heavy burdens of style in your personal library. Yet many of us live in a very limited amount of space, and, above all, with the Internet available how many of us really end up investing in magazines? The other problem is that even if you want to invest in fashion mags, the market seems to be so crowded that you might simply get lost and end up buying a publication full of ads rather than full of inspiring pieces of writing and photographs.
So, if you are looking for a quality magazine that will take you through the summer and will also have that “collectable” added value about it, don’t look further than Nico: Fashion & Interviews. This Luxemburg-based magazine is published by the leading independent publisher Mike Koedinger Editions, the group that organises the biennial symposium Colophon, aimed at magazine makers, advertisers, experts and readers. Nico comes out in three formats: an international edition (in English and French) sold worldwide in selected bookstores, museums and concept-stores, and two regional editions (France and Benelux) sold throughout the newsagents’ networks.
The winning formula of this magazine is its eclectic and international group of talented collaborators from different fields of the fashion industry. Indeed, rather than seeing it as a magazine, its editor conceives it as a creative lab in which ideas are exchanged and readers are given the chance to explore the fashion universe from unconventional points of view.
The summer 2008 edition, with a minimalist cardboard cover by illustrator extraordinaire Hiroshi Tanabe, features an article on the future of the Bread & Butter tradeshow in Barcelona; a profile on young British photographer Luke Stephenson, interviews with fashion designer Felipe Oliveira Baptista and with Belgian labels Sandrina Fasoli and Cathy Pill.
Quite a few pages of the magazines are dedicated to features on illustrators and graphic designers, a very important topic in the fashion industry, which is not often addressed properly. More intense pieces on the rise of Chinese design and an in-depth interview with American intellectual and economist Richard Florida, author of three seminal books on the creative industry, take the interview section of the mag a step further than most ordinary fashion magazines.
There’s also plenty of fashion shoots with themes such as ritual adolescence, tennis and being stranded on a desert island. The latter seems particularly interesting and it uses in an original way vintage items of clothing from London’s boutique Rokit and the most amazing heels by Christian Dior, Gareth Pugh, Marni, Rupert Sanderson, Christian Louboutin and Moschino.
Annual subscriptions (2 issues/year) are available for €20 (Europe), €30 (USA, Japan) and €35 (Australia, South Africa, Asia and South America). If you are part of that worldwide “creative class” set to boost the world economy that Richard Florida talks about in the interview featured in the latest issue of the magazine, you might as well invest a bit of your money in Nico.
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