ANOTHER FASHION MAGAZINE THAT WON’T SAVE YOU, BUT FEEL FREE TO TRY OTHERWISE

by Luigi Vitali

DUST MAGAZINE ISSUE 28 – FALL ∕ WINTER 25 – EDITOR LETTER

The reason for this title is simple: this really is another fashion magazine that won’t save you. Not that we thought our readers ever expected anything like it—but perhaps, somewhere along the way, we did. And not because of a delusional fantasy of doing something essential, but from the belief that those long nights and fragile convictions had to count for something transformative. This naïveté—which is perhaps our only fuel—is likely because we were growing up as millennials looking up to a cultural landscape where culture meant counterculture, and creativity primarily meant challenging the structure of reality itself. The 1990s we grew up in, carried that belief in culture as dissent—when culture was restless, defiant, and daring enough to confront a present it wanted to rewire, convinced that culture itself was enough to save us. That was probably the imprint of the approach we believed in—creating something, however small and marginal, that could still tilt perception. In our case, a magazine: a mix of image and thought, flesh and intellect, curation and care, able, through beauty and urgency, to stand, even in its smallness, as a portal of renewal.

DUST

This magazine was born in 2011, in the aftermath of the financial crash, when the collapse of the markets exposed a deeper cultural one. In that air of defeat and shifting age, it felt possible—or maybe inevitable—to look for new directions. Those were the years of Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the Indignados in Spain, the student protests in Canada—a global season of mobilisation and disillusionment when squares turned to politics again, and people demanded a new collective imagination, new narratives under the conviction that the world had no choice but to turn to a new page. Those movements ultimately failed, as their momentum was drained by austerity, repression, and internal disarray—but for a brief time, their urgency defined an era. DUST was born in that moment—from the dust of a world we saw collapsing, knowing that if from dust we came and must return, from dust we could also rise again.

We had no idea how to make a magazine or how the system worked, but that hardly mattered. When everything collapses, there’s room to come up with new rules—or at least that’s what we thought. It was a moment when the economic crisis led to the great publishing houses beginning to crumble, as monthlies and weeklies lost relevance to the rise of Web 2.0, and traditional publishing buckled under its own weight. We weren’t alone—those years saw a true renaissance of independent magazines, many of which were born with the DIY spirit of fanzines—niche projects driven by vision rather than profit. Their strength laid in their flexibility and freedom, in their ability to merge aesthetic research with critical thought. In open reaction to fashion’s visual conformity and narrative emptiness, these magazines experimented with new ways to address the present. Over time, that language, that rigour, that restlessness—and even that editorial model—became influential.

FRICTION

Fast forward to 2025. Independent magazines have become relics—a marginal form in an ecosystem ruled by screens, where optimisation sidelines anything that resists conformity. One way to put it is that making a printed magazine today means insisting on friction in an era built for smoothness—an age that philosopher Byung-Chul Han defines as “the smooth surface of the digital‑neoliberal economy”—where all transformative negativity, tension, and depth dissolve into the imperative to remain agreeable, sharable, and optimised. Making an independent magazine today means believing that choosing differently still matters in a culture driven by speed and surface. That belief alone is its purpose: to exist through friction, duration, and niche. But what does independence mean when visibility itself has become the ultimate form of capital? Where to exist now is to perform for the algorithm’s gaze? Where the archive of culture has turned into an endless feedback loop where everything—art, politics, catastrophe, even outrage—is flattened into content and each piece reduced to interchangeable units of attention?

We are an independent fashion magazine, one that occasionally discusses philosophy, spirituality, politics and more—but still, a fashion magazine renowned for its aesthetic. We use fashion and fashion photography as our visual language because they are the place where the present writes itself on bodies, showing how desire, identity and power are negotiated right now. Fashion speaks to the new generations who engage with its narrative, while addressing those who can afford luxury—the class who hold economic, cultural, and political power. It is a language that, better than any other, reflects the collective psyche and shifting values. But above all, we are a fashion magazine because fashion has both the resources and the will—at least till now—to invest in publishing and aesthetic research, as we do. Magazines have never survived solely on sales. Selling copies—especially at an accessible price—barely covers a fraction of production costs; it is advertising that keeps them alive. We exist in the crack between advertising and experimentation—a space that has always offered independent magazines a certain margin of creative freedom, where ideas could germinate, allowing us to see our purpose as valuable—even if only as an illusion worth preserving.

GRAVITY

Reality, however, has shifted, especially in recent years, with the sector’s crisis, as major conglomerates—driven by optimisation and risk avoidance—have adopted the smooth framework of metrics, quantification, and exposure as the ultimate measure to which every level of the industry must conform. Independent magazines sit in one of the farthest orbits of the industry—distant from its centre, yet not immune to its ever‑consuming gravity. The logic of optimisation has reached them too, and no matter how far they drift or bend, they can’t avoid surrendering just to stay in the game. This same gravity defines its very centre. As Kering’s newly appointed CEO, Luca de Meo, recently argued, the role of the creative director—already often reduced to a curator reviving the codes of this or that archive—is expected to adapt to a system where crowd feedback dictates direction more than the auteur’s vision. This already signals a cultural shift which well reflects the overarching smooth tendency we are discussing here. A logic presented as improvement, but in practice, diluting agency, folding vision into the same metrics that govern every other form of visibility. This tendency now extends everywhere—beyond industries, beyond markets—a performative inclusivity giving the illusion of shared power in systems that already dictate the terms of participation. This isn’t democratisation or empowerment but the tyranny of a logic that rewires desire into conformity—turning every creative act into data, every choice into performance, and every freedom into compliance. In this cultural sphere, the fashion industry has readily adopted this logic. And if we consider the fashion industry’s farthest orbit, what exactly is the role of an independent fashion magazine? With advertising budgets shifting to digital platforms and cost optimisation taking priority, most cuts fall on print magazines, which, by nature, can’t optimise metrics, and when they try, the question that arises is just how much can they dilute their content? Collaborations—special projects or covers with brands, which is why we have more than 10 covers per issue—are what keep these magazines afloat, but if creative vision once thrived thanks to the distance from the centre that guaranteed a certain freedom, that space is closing fast.

As the system optimises, the crack thins while independence becomes another form of conformity. In the last year, as luxury groups faced double-digit losses and the industry entered its sharpest slowdown in over a decade, even independent magazines have felt this pressure more acutely than ever before. This means that, while the magazine’s authorial perspective is formally requested, in practice, it is expected to shoot full runway looks with no exception, including visible logos, displaying accessories, and sticking to the collection’s aesthetic, otherwise they risk rejection. This has always been the case for mainstream magazines, whose commercial goals and fees justify it. But the growing pressure on independent ones to align—as that pressure reverberates at every level, floor after floor—brings them to compromise creative freedom: the ability to reinterpret and tell stories, to choose an image for what they value rather than how a garment looks—diluting not only the content but the very reason for their existence. This is not a complaint directed at anyone; it’s a recognition of where we are and a way to reorient ourselves within this landscape. For many, it may sound obvious—this is simply how things work, how they’re meant to work, that the reward is in compliance: the advertisers must be happy. The problem is that, for independent magazines, advertisers used to be happy with creative vision, not data. And the fact that compliance now passes as common sense is exactly the problem—what used to be risk is now procedure. Still, the way forward for a stubbornly independent magazine ill-suited to the new pervasive logic isn’t to retreat into isolation or turn self‑sufficiency into a badge of virtue. It’s about staying in conversation with the market while holding its ground—a negotiation between autonomy and relevance, where meaning emerges from the balance itself. Survival, in the end, is about holding that balance—again and again—without losing sight of why it matters. This issue takes shape from that reflection.

SURFACE

Stepping back from any single field and widening the lens, a larger question comes into focus: how do we orient ourselves within the present we inhabit? Like all of us? We can even talk about rejecting infinite scrolls, about refusing to treat metrics as meaning or culture as noise, but this remains the surface we operate from—the same game we must navigate either way. In this whirlwind, what we know is that everything counts the same; everything becomes the same, but always unless we decide otherwise. That choice is not only about where we focus our attention; it’s about where we put our care. And care, in its most deliberate form, is what might still define culture in a smooth reality, where performance has already replaced truth, and meaning is breaking down under the speed of communication. Culture, at its core, is how we make sense of reality together—how we decide what matters and what does not. In a time when that shared sense is dissolving, the question is no longer whether culture can save us, but if its role still means something—if it can still shape our collective behaviour, influence how we see one another, and remind us of what we share.

Something is clear: culture doesn’t fracture alone; the very same forces shaping our attention also shape our politics, our fears, and our sense of one another. Let’s zoom out a little further and look at the bigger picture—the structure of the world our generation is moving through, how it’s built, and what, beneath the surface, makes our present feel so uneasy, so alarming, so out of reach. We live in a moment of speed without direction, of constant change but little evolution, where saturation itself feels like a shared condition. It seeps into how we perceive the world, how we interact with one another, and how we comprehend power—how we consume and how we consent. The architecture of social media, built on the saturation of predetermined information loops and emotion, has shown how easily anger and polarisation can be turned into engagement—and in turn, into group identities where hostility becomes a mode of belonging. This outrage that defines digital spaces doesn’t contradict smoothness—it actually follows its logic. The economy of attention has learned to refine anger and format dissent into something engineered for circulation. What once tore society apart is now designed to keep us scrolling. Polarisation is no longer rebellion; it’s business—an economy of outrage that fuels engagement and profit. The consequences are tangible: the erosion of civic trust, the corrosion of shared reality, and the growing incentive to destabilise truth itself.

These fractures open the space for something darker to emerge, because no matter how formatted this political and social anger becomes, the frustration and sense of powerlessness beneath it do not fade. It gathers force in silence, hardening into new convictions. And the louder it grows, the more violence becomes normalised across the political spectrum—not only at the extremes but spreading like common sense. Whether framed as identity, protection, or retribution, violence is increasingly seen not as politics’ failure but as its remedy. A shift that marks a dangerous redefinition of collective frustration and power itself. When societies split into blocs that no longer recognise each other, violence stops being taboo and becomes a response. This is what is building up beneath the surface’s smoothness, and it’s unclear how long it can be contained.

FAILURES

Rising polarisation, the incendiary rhetoric of leaders who use it as a tool of consensus, and the collapse of institutional trust create conditions where violence risks being normalised. This is the landscape that both breeds and is sustained by autocrats—leaders who convert fear into power and strength into the illusion of protection. In such contexts, this leads to an expanding culture of impunity that continues to erode institutional trust, as leaders defy sanctions, ignore courts, and rewrite the rules to suit their agendas. As moral deterrence weakens, human‑ rights violations and even war crimes are recast through shifting narratives of security and necessity.

At the global level, figures such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu embody this transformation in distinct ways, each contributing to the normalisation of force and the erosion of democratic norms. Trump brought to the United States a rhetoric of delegitimising institutions and glorifying conflict as proof of political authenticity. Putin attacked international law from without, transforming plain brutality into a language of imperial legitimacy, indifferent to its consequences. Netanyahu, meanwhile, has attacked it from within, bending international norms and pressuring Western democracies to rationalise barbarities beyond ethical or legal limits. Different in method but similar in effect, each, in their own way, has enabled the normalisation of a world where force outweighs law and narrative overrides reality. What connects these tendencies is not a shared ideology but a common disposition—the acceptance of force as a stabilising principle, built on the implicit promise that conflict alone can restore order or defend truth—always someone’s truth, always the strongest’s. And this erosion of the structures we once trusted rarely feels like an exception in a world this fragile. As the weights and institutions that anchor reality begin to lose their grip and meaning, politics, culture, and everyday life merge into a single spectacle of belief, where performance becomes the only shared language. When politics no longer work to prevent conflict but rather initiate it—and culture mirrors that same choreography of display and division, that’s when we’ve crossed into new territory—one where there’s nothing left to look up to. This might be the most profound crisis of liberal modernity.

DISCERNMENT

Is this where we’re heading? Is this the new shape of the world we now inhabit? If so, is it still possible to be radical while rejecting violence in all its forms—not only the kind we denounce on the other side? Can relevance exist without outrage? And what is the role of culture—or of meaning itself? Can it save us? Can a shared sense still be built at all? How do we position ourselves within this present—and, most of all, in a system of predetermined choices, how do we choose otherwise?

Within this feedback loop we call reality, the question is no longer whether culture can save us, but whether we can still recognise it when we see it—if we can tell the difference between truth and performance, between conviction and manipulation, between dialogue and display. The future of culture may not depend on innovation or scale, but on a more difficult practice: discernment.

In the end, this may be the only sense of direction left: making sense of what’s around us, not by trying to solve questions bigger than us, but by infusing every act, whatever the practice, with presence and care for what still feels meaningful. It won’t reverse the accelerating collapse of truth, attention, or empathy on its own, but it will make a difference. For us, the small act of publishing—making sense together through pages and images—is what we know how to do best, and if it manages to exist as a small exercise in discernment, that is already enough to give it purpose. A magazine like this lives in the fragile space between relevance and irrelevance—too slow to trend, too small to scale, too unadaptable to optimise. Yet that’s exactly the space we aim to safeguard, guided by the urge to slow down and see clearly, to connect through language and image.

These attempts leave few traces, but they might, for a moment, remind you that you are not entirely lost in the feed—that meaning still requires attention, and attention is a form of care—a small act of resistance that begins with looking, listening, and feeling fully present. In a world built to distract, caring might just be the only radical thing left to do. As we wrote in our past issue, for us, this magazine is a personal exercise in developing and safeguarding care. Because to place this kind of care at the centre of your practice is to find your own centre in a present that has none, and to allow meaning to return to the things you choose to touch. Care is not performance. It is not branding. It is slow, unscalable, and inherently human. It is an act of conscious presence—something that lives in whatever you do, however small, if done with intention.

The role of an independent magazine is not to explain what we already know, but to give shape to what risks being lost when creativity exhausts itself in its own exposure, when communication becomes an exercise in conformity disguised as freedom. The only disclaimer, before you flip through, is that this is really just another fashion magazine that won’t save you. But nothing stops you from trying otherwise.

Luigi Vitali