FFF Zine #4
Issue four of FFF Zine, the ‘world’s dishiest magazine’ hits the shelves this week. We explore its ongoing investigation into the links between food and fashion.
FFF Zine – Food For Fashion Zine – feels like a vintage cookbook, more hefty paperback than mag, let alone a zine. Think Julia Child meets Petra Collins, via Ren Hang. Think analogue, almost greasy photographs of oysters on ice, rose petals, honey, half eaten hams and recipes for ‘ex-lover’s’ cotton candy (below). Think curly font superimposed over a perfumer’s face, who will surprise you with their recipe for orange blossom madeleines (hot tip: let them burn a little).
No detail is overlooked, right down to the page numbers, each one framed by a tiny heart. Everything about FFF Zine is romantic, whimsical and cool.
The mag could never be described as minimalist. Every page is a squash of fabrics, limbs, lobsters, fruit, walls of text and collaged images. The consistency of the design allows for seamless transitions between a whole lot of potentially clashing features.
The non-human influencer or, ‘proud robot’ Blawko pops up. As a contemporary/friend of Lil Miquela – the other insta-famous robot musician and recent cover star of Tunica magazine – Blawko’s interview is just as surreal as you’d expect (above).
He discusses dating laserjet printers in LA, his love of ‘smelly’ humans, and his panache for baked beans sipped from a champagne flute. Yet earlier in the mag there is a wonderfully earnest interview with Pamela Clark, the beloved Australian children’s baker, whose speciality is a shark-shaped cake held together by toothpicks (below).
All these clashes (not to mention the combining of food and fashion in the first place) means FFF Zine could easily be misread as ironic. While irony is undeniably an ingredient (sorry), its sense of humour balanced enough that moments like the one on page 217 – in which a partially nude model pretends to read Delia – wander off into sincerity (above).
FFF Zine’s long list of highly credible collaborators and interviewees helps, too: notable here is Adrian Gonzalez-Cohen, editor-in-chief of Buffalo Zine, a magazine with which FF Zine shares a sesne of identity. Past issues have seen contributions from a whole range of people, from Olafur Eliasson to Twiggy.
An interview with cover star Laila Gohar, ‘fashion’s fabulous feeder’, reveals links between food and fashion I had not considered before: both are inherently ephemeral mediums, both provide a ‘window into social or cultural histories’. Both are fetishised on instagram, a phenomenon that has practically built Gohar’s career.
Food, being as necessary as it is, will never be ‘uncool’, yet FFF Zine is clearly determined to bring it to the next level. It’s refreshing to see (unclean) eating being celebrated alongside fashion, an industry that for so long has been averse to embracing anything remotely calorific.