Magazines – Page 2 – Paul Gorman is…

1970s

A selection from my archive in Subscribe, the exhibition about artists and alternative magazines at the Art Institute of Chicago

Beginning in the early 1970s—as under-represented groups were demanding new forms of visibility following the emergence of political movements such as Black Power and the Stonewall Rebellion—a handful of British and American photo-driven alternative magazines came on the scene. The Face, i-D, Rags, Out/Look, and other new publications amplified marginalized voices, especially those of queer […]

January 21, 2022

1970s

The Rise & Fall of the Music Press: The brilliance of Black Music, Carl Gayle and Alan Lewis

Working on my forthcoming book The Rise & Fall Of The Music Press has brought home to me the brilliance of publications and journalists who have been marginalised in the story of the media sector inaugurated by the launch of The Melody Maker (as it was then known) in 1926.

January 20, 2022

1980s

When Steve McQueen modelled for i-D

A few years back over dinner in New York when I was working on The Story of The Face, the British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen mentioned that he (“well, it was mainly my back and my arse”) had appeared in an i-D fashion shoot when he was a student.

April 1, 2020

2010s

The Gentlewoman celebrates a decade of fabulousness with special mini-edition

Small is beautiful when it comes to the inventive mini-edition of The Gentlewoman, a greatest hits package celebrating the exemplary British magazine’s “10 years of fabulousness”. During that time (after all print had been roundly declared as “dead” in 2010), editor Penny Martin and her team have consistently confounded expectations around independent print publishing and […]

February 14, 2020

1970s

Bizarre semi-naked woodland Mr Freedom shoot, I was a TV, Edward Bell’s ‘The Queen Of Clapham’… Inside the infamous Curious magazine featuring David Bowie + Freddie Burretti on its cover

The British sex magazine Curious was well-named: for the duration of its near-decade long run from the late 1960s it was indeed a curiosity.

December 4, 2019

1970s

A code for kicking against the pricks: THEM (Slight Return) with Peter York interview in Arena Homme +

The jury is out on this autumn’s relaunch of the print edition of venerated British style magazine The Face; as I suggested here it’s going to take more than one splashy issue to assess whether the proposition has legs as we enter the 2020s (next May will mark the 40th anniversary of the founding of […]

November 17, 2019

2010s

Recent journalism: Baggies with attitude for MacGuffin + the colour black in street style for Fred Perry Quarterly

Here’s a couple of pieces of recently published journalism, one filed for the Netherlands-based biannual MacGuffin, the other for the second issue of Fred Perry Quarterly.

June 4, 2019

1980s

The return of The Face: Some thoughts

In my twin capacities as “biographer” of The Face and curator of last year’s British independent magazine exhibition PRINT!, I’ve been asked publicly and privately for my thoughts on the imminent online relaunch of the title (the plan is that the quarterly physical edition will follow in August, carrying a September dateline). So here they are: […]

March 30, 2019

1960s

Student 1969 + i-D 1991: How Anna Wintour and Edward Enninful started their journeys to the top

Two decades apart, the editors of the American and British editions of Condé Nast’s Vogue began their respective careers with modest contributions to prominent independent youth culture publications of their day.

February 20, 2019

2010s

PRINT! Tearing It Up ends with a British Values bang

PRINT! Tearing It Up – the exhibition I co-curated at London’s Somerset House this summer – ended with a bang with a talk by journalist Kieran Yates about her magazine British Values (one of my highlights of the show).

August 24, 2018

Category: Magazines