magCulture Director Jeremy Leslie’s Uplifting Quarantine Reading List
By Something CuratedmagCulture Founder and Creative Director Jeremy Leslie is a steadfast believer in magazines being a uniquely relevant and dynamic media form, despite various challenges faced by the industry today. His business operates simultaneously as a studio, offering strategic and creative services, a journal, focussing on the future of editorial design, and a shop with a changing stock of several hundred titles. While we remain largely housebound, Leslie shares with Something Curated an exciting edit of reading material, all available to order online.
Leslie tells, “After 15 years as the definitive men’s indie magazine, Fantastic Man has completely reinvented itself with a new themed editorial approach presented in a dramatic, large, square format. The second of the new editions has just been published, leading with architect Rem Koolhaas and adopting his love of the rural with the theme Countryside. The underlying mix of humour and astute seriousness remains intact but the whole project has been revitalised for the new decade.”
“This Dutch magazine places design at the centre of multidisciplinary research, each issue taking a single thing – in this case the Desk – and using it as a starting point to tell stories concerning sociology, cultural history, contemporary work practice and more. The featured object dictates its scope, and the Desk is an ideal catalyst for the MacGuffin team’s desire to push the boundaries of what a magazine can be,” Leslie says.
“Slight in scale when compared to the first two magazines here, this Parisian magazine has quietly developed into a must-read publication. It’s name hints at being a women’s magazine, but it is a far broader-based mix of fashion and literature, each issue structured around the novel idea of running stories in the chronological order of their arrival in the editors’ in-boxes. It’s a subtle confection, but like all the mags here, The Skirt Chronicles has defined its own unique world.”
“This bright, shiny magazine celebrates the digital, promising ‘Life is a Chatroom.’ Less overtly serious in tone than otherwise similar mags such as Civilisation and NXS, SOFA is perhaps a more accurate reflection of the digital realm, skipping effortlessly from the serious (the class disparity of British hedonism) to the silly (parody food art). Plus plenty that span both moods: a look into butt augmentation surgery, a first report on dating a clown and a fashion story shot through a CCTV lens. Presented in vivid RGB with barely a centimetre of blank space, it maps the thoughts of our new teenage would-be leaders,” Leslie says.
“Named after US congressman John Lewis’ life-long dedication to change via civil disobedience, this broadsheet publication campaigns against the rising wave of populism sweeping across our world. The issue leads with a special climate change section including Extinction Rebellion and work by Olafur Eliasson, adds a curated selection of protest art including work by Joan Jonas and David Shrigley, and finishes with an anti-Brexit poster by Scott King. It’s a vast package, the counter culture equivalent of a serious Sunday newspaper.”
Feature image via SOFA