The passion for fashion: As you open this miniature glossy zine, you (and your most fashionable pair of shoes) are transported onto a high-end runway in New York City, or if you’re not so creative, a perfume launch at the Bay. This zine is so fashionable you have to slip into something more fashionable to read it. Yes. Take a magazine like Vogue, rip out the gazillion ads, crappy perfume samples and snob factor and what do you have? Fashion Projects bringing the art back into the fashion, or as designer Susan Cianciolo puts it best, being an artist who happens to make clothes. Just as a fantastic feature on Cat Chow’s elegant subversions is an earnest attempt to put fashion back on the visual arts map. It also brings back something long-forgotten in fashion zines: words on fashion instead of fullpage photos. Sweet literacy! Though, if you showed up at a Fashion Projects launch wearing sale rack specials, could you get by on words alone? It’s worth a try. (Nadja Sayej)
Fashion zine, Issue 2, US$5, 243 West 15th St, New York, NY, 10011, U.S.A. www.fashionprojects.org