Vestoj #10
It’s been a while since a new issue of Paris-based fashion mag Vestoj was published, and even longer since we featured it. As issue ten arrives, here’s a quick reminder why we love it so much.
One
To describe Vestoj as a fashion magazine is to miss the point; it is a magazine about fashion, providing a much needed analytical voice for the subject. Leading with text—profiles, essays, critiques—each issue offers a rigorous series of themed pieces. This issue’s theme is ‘Doubt’, and these footnotes come from a piece collating quotes about doubt from an array of big name designers.
Two
Not that the texts that fill the magazine’s smallish pages are academic and humourless; they are accesible in tone, and often gently witty in design. The above spread comes from a piece by Mary Wang relating a pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage in terms of a crises in dressing that the series of events invokes in her. The left page bulges pregnantly, the right page echoes the pinched waists of fashion images.
Three
Another written piece is Brando Skyhorse’s autobiographical tale of his relationship with his thick, black hair. The centre of each spread is full of hair, so even as his story veers off in other directions the reader is continually reminded of the common thread to his words.
Four
Two thirds through the issue the pages turn a startling yellow for Irwin Shaw’s 1939 story ‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses’. A young New York couple talk their relationship into doubt—Michael is distressingly honest with Frances about his enjoyment of other girls and their clothes. The story is perfectly paired with Tiana Doan na Champassak’s collages that hit just the right mood for the story.
Five
Other stories are purely visual; the issue ends with Orfeo Tagiuri’s comic story of a man and his plantpot. The story arc travels through extreme doubt to a full happy ending. I can’t imagine a single other fashion publication that would publish such a story—and that’s what I love about Vestoj.
Editor: Anja Aronowsky Cronberg
Art directors: Sara Tamagnini & Valerio Tamagnini
Graphic design: Studio Blanco
Read our 2017 interview with Anja Aronowsky Cronberg here.