A decade of racial justice in Skin Deep magazine

by Steve Watson in May 2025

Race

In March we delivered the latest issue of Skin Deep magazine to our subscribers around the world. It’s presented as their anthology issue, collecting favourite stories from 11 years of publishing, and arranging them alongside original material to create, “a noisy, time-travelling miscellany”.

I love the effect they manage to create with it, jumping around throughout the decade and reflecting on the different ways they have approached their mission of publishing in support of racial justice. As current editorial director Georgie Johnson explains during the conversation, the idea for this anthology issue came up at the launch party for their 10th issue, which landed in their ninth year of publishing. Frustrated by that slight quirk of asynchronicity, they suggested publishing an anthology issue in the 10th year, which would then lead to issue 11 appearing in the 11th year. “But we’ve never done anything on time,” so schedules slipped, and the anthology ended up appearing in the 11th year, and all hopes of making everything neat and tidy have gone out of the window.

But of course that’s not the point, and the anthology glories in the messiness of jumping around throughout the years, demonstrating the incredible breadth they have covered. In fact the team has decided that their focus is not going to fall on print for the immediate future, preferring to lean into their events and online publishing instead, with the aim of working their way to sustainability and operating independently of the grants they’ve recently received. It was really interesting speaking with so many members of the team and hearing about the different facets of what Skin Deep has become, and I hope the video below will give a good sense of what the magazine is all about.

They shared several links in the chat while we were talking, so I’m including them all after the video below, including the tickets for the conversation between artist Amit Randhawa and co-creative director Sylvia Hong, speaking about the design of the issue. (I had a load of questions that I wanted to ask about the magazine’s design, but we just didn’t get to them within the hour.) That’s happening tomorrow night (Saturday 10th May), so I hope you’re reading this in time to join in!

We deliver a different independent magazine every month – our subscribers never know what they’re going to get next, but they do know it will be a beautiful, intelligent publiscation they probably wouldn’t otherwise have picked up. So if you’re not already in our club, sign up and we’ll start delivering our surprise selection to you. Or of course you could just buy a copy of Skin Deep magazine from our online shop to read it for yourself.