Boy.Brother.Friend #11
230 x 300 mm, 148 pages
London, UK
Biannual
Founder and creative director: Kk Obi
Editorial director: Matthew Sterling Benson
Art director: Willy Ndatira
Boy.Brother.Friend ‘examines art, fashion & theory through the guise of the diaspora male experience.’ A poetic and visually stimulating magazine, this eleventh issue ushers in Willy Ndatira as art director and explores the push and pull of ‘Love’ amongst a fraying social landscape.
Split into three sections, ‘The Terrain of Vulnerability’, ‘The Histories We Hold’ and ‘The Erotic As Self-Knowledge’, the issue covers the evolution of love across generations and developing digital landscapes, love for one’s craft and oneself, and the interplay of emotion, sex, money, and power.
Inside, Alfie Bown writes about how early internet chat rooms were spawned for ‘sexual and gender-based experimentation.’ He links this to the importance of confronting desires in order to weaken capitalist approaches to intimacy. Elsewhere, the team sit down with co-creators, writers and producers of the HBO hit ‘Industry’ Mickey Down and Konrad Kay; Dries Van Noten creative director Julian Klausner chats to KK Obi about foundations of care; Yann Turchi showcases a selection of photographs from his ‘Bonda Ndzie’ (2023-2025) series, paying tribute to ‘the beauty, symbolism and legacy of traditional African hairstyles’; Raoul De Jong shares an excerpt from ‘Jaguarman’, confronting the search for paternal validation; and Carrie Stacks sits down with Chicago-native singer-songwriter KeiyA to reflect on the inspiration behind her new album ‘Hooke’s Law’ and the relationship between African American and Black British genres.