An experimental fashion magazine
There are some things that only a student magazine can do, and the latest issue of Garment is an experimental fashion magazine that feels like it could only have been dreamed up within a university. Produced by students and staff at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, Garment is published every summer at the end of the academic year, and each issue focuses on a different item of clothing. Programme lead Frank Jurgen Wijlens is good enough to send me a copy each year, and I love watching the one-upmanship, as each successive group of students tries to go one better than the years that came before.
This latest issue focuses on the t-shirt, with the central observation that they are massively popular but often overlooked. Since we often only miss something once it’s gone, the magazine asks what life would be like without the humble t-shirt, and one half of the magazine features t-shirts, while the other does not.
The innovation that makes this issue so distinctive, though, is the binding, which unfolds to create a huge, unwieldy, four-panel layout. Every story has been written and designed to be read as both a double-page spread and a quadruple-page spread, and you can see that a huge amount of effort has been poured into making this bizarre, experimental fashion magazine into a printed reality.
More than that, though, it looks like everyone involved has had a huge amount of fun doing it. Yes, the quadruple-page spread is thoroughly impractical, but it’s also a brilliantly ambitious creative execution that totally fits the editorial idea behind the magazine. As you’ll see from the video above, it really needs to be opened out on a flat surface to see those big spreads in all their glory, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it in the more conventional double-page spread format, flipping back and forth to see how the two sides of the magazine correspond to one another.
It’s beautifully produced and it can’t have been cheap to make, but I’m very glad that even in times of shrinking finances, there are still academic institutions that will provide students with a budget to realise their mad ideas in print. I’m already looking forward to seeing how next year’s students are going to try to top this…
