Insider: Riposte magazine

Profiling bold and fascinating women since 2013, London-based Riposte magazine has made its mark as a smart alternative to mainstream women’s magazines.

As the sixth issue was announced, editor Danielle Pender and designer Shaz Madani surprised us with a split-run cover, featuring their first ever image-based cover alongside the familiar typographic format. I caught up with Danielle to learn more about putting the issue together.

In the making of this issue we…

Explored
We’re living in very weird times at the minute so we felt it was right that we look at some bigger issues than we have in the past.

We have a feature on everyday activism; we interviewed Amber Arcades, a human rights lawyer who deals with immigration, and who released her debut album to critical acclaim. We met with iconic women’s rights campaigner Gloria Steinem in the apartment she shared with her oldest friend, Barbara Nessim, in the 60s (below). And there’s an insert dedicated to the Mexican students who were abducted and murdered for protesting about education (also below).

We’ve balanced this out with some funny and personal pieces on friendship, mothers and sex, short stories on underwear and a feature on fashion and technology.

Listened to
A lot of Deerhunter. For some reason it really helps me concentrate. I could listen to Halcyon Digest on repeat forever.

Read
Lean Out by Dawn Foster
Barbara The Slut by Lauren Holmes
My Life On the Road by Gloria Steinem
Failed It by Erik Kessels
So You Want to Publish a Magazine by Angharad Lewis – a super helpful resource for anyone making magazines.

Learned
About the tactics and mechanics of cycling. I didn’t realise it was such a team sport and that the members of each team basically go all out to make one person win. We went to the Czech Republic to meet the Canyon//SRAM team and interviewed some of the riders about how everything works within the team. It was genuinely fascinating.

Met
Fashion designer Claire Barrow and talked underage drinking, punk, fashion cycles, clubbing in Yarm and politics.

Caryn Franklin at our launch event (below). She sat on one of our panels about body image and she was one of the coolest, smartest and most switched on women I’ve ever met.

Photographer Giles Duley, who I’ve known for a few years but hadn’t seen for a while. He selected his icon Lee Miller at the end of the issue.

Procrastinated with
Shaz Madani about what to do with our front cover. We decided to go for a split run in the end. We wanted to stay with the text cover, which perfectly sums up what we’re about, but we also wanted to test out what we could do with an image cover.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BGg92saJpIB/

Was excited about
A lot of the visuals that came back for the issue. There are some really great commissions from super talented people. I also got really excited about the Gloria Steinem piece. She is one of my personal icons.

Lost sleep over
Money. Distribution. Events. Deadlines. One of the worst people I’ve ever had the misfortune to have to deal with – although he really wasn’t worth losing sleep over.

Realised that
Nothing is worth stressing over. Everything works out in the end. If something doesn’t go the way you thought it would it’s an opportunity to do something different.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BGhcWiqppA5/

And everyone should buy a copy because
It’s BRILLIANT!! It’s our best issue yet. It’s funny, smart, informative, emotional and it looks amazing!!

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