Expanding The Gentlewoman’s world

On May Day this year, The Gentlewoman Club popped up in Bicester Village to celebrate the launch of 1995, a one-off magazine published to mark 30 years of the Oxfordshire designer shopping outlet. Drawing on themes like 30th anniversaries, the summer of 1995, and the charms of Oxfordshire, the magazine is a hugely entertaining and genuinely informative read, all bundled up with the effortless style and warm charm of The Gentlewoman.

In this conversation, editor-in-chief Penny Martin speaks about her enthusiasm for taking on another magazine project alongside The Gentlewoman’s biannual schedule. She explains that this was never going to be a straight-up piece of contract publishing; the sort of white label project produced at one remove from the main brand. Instead she and her team went the other way, producing a publication that is proudly part of The Gentlewoman family, and embracing the opportunities it afforded: “We even photographed men in this magazine!”

This year also marks a significant anniversary for The Gentlewoman itself, its 31st issue coming 15 years after the magazine launched. Looking back on that time, Penny reflects on the changes to their editorial process, and warns against the dangers of becoming too safe or comfortably accomplished: “With any luck you get better at making the magazine, but that’s not always a good thing. So it’s about choosing to keep a degree of strangeness, or conscious amateurism, whereupon once that was inadvertent and now it’s intentional.”

It was lovely speaking with her as always, and I hope you’ll enjoy listening to her words of wisdom, either via the audio above, or the video embedded below. We release a new episode of the podcast every fortnight, so if you’d like to hear more like this, make sure you follow us on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and we’ll be able to keep on delivering our latest episodes to you as soon as they’re ready.

thegentlewoman.co.uk
Photography by Holly Whittaker for The Gentlewoman