Destino Fanzine #1
NY-based Destino Fanzine looks like a magazine version of my teenage bedroom wall. It’s filled with scrappy pictures of friends hanging out, glittery star stickers, laid-back shoots and snapshots of the actual Mulholland Drive. Like many modern fanzines (I’m thinking especially of Got a Girl Crush and Subway), it’s true to the zine spirit because it’s so cut-and-paste and ramshackle. And like these newer zines, it also updates the traditional scissors and glue format: Destino mix-and-matches clip-art fonts, deliberately lo-fi photography and rainbow effects so that it has its own distinctly post-Internet flavour.
A lot of the spreads are energetic photoshop collages. I particularly like the assortment of Twitter updates from filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour, which Destino has rearranged randomly on a page (above). The mag describes it as the ‘perfect interview’ seeing as it’s ‘just a cocktail of pure talent and tweets’. There’s also collaged together shoots (like this one featuring one of the editor’s grandmothers, below), and cobbled together imagery that adorns snippets of chatty text (also below).
This first issue is themed ‘behind’, which means it’s dedicated to everything that is by your side or not visible at first site, the things that require a closer look. That’s why photo stories focus on the boring, the everyday, and the overlooked (below).
There’s something nicely approachable about Destino, everything inside feels lo-key and down-to-earth (though with a big dose of irony, humour and playfulness too). Maybe I’ve been spending too much time in the laundrette myself, but a shoot featuring a girl waiting for her washing to finish especially resonates with me (below). Her cobbled together outfits are exactly the kind of miss-match combinations that I like to think of myself wearing when I get to the very bottom of my fresh clothes pile. The fact that Destino comes with a t-shirt is therefore especially practical: I look forward to wearing it and simultaneously flipping through the mag during my next laundry run.
