lastyearwasweird

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elias and amie in 1x07 ‘road trip’ and 3x04 ‘date night’

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Adut Akech wears all Kenzo, photographed by Senta Simond and styled by Agata Belcen for Dazed Spring 2021

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The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)

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Anthony Barboza - Grace Jones and the Chamber Brothers for Essence magazine, 1970

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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) dir. Chris Columbus Coraline (2009) dir. Henry Selick

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LAURA HARRIER @ SAVAGE X FENTY

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Wonderwall

The following essay is a piece I wrote for Heartbroken Zine for their Issue #2: Coming of Age. You can buy the issue on their site here.

Coming of age is a tricky thing to navigate. I’ve found that it’s quite hard for me to pinpoint moments in my life where I’ve sensed growth or tangible change. Some of us have extraordinary experiences to look back on when we think of how much we’ve grown over the years. But, for those of us who don’t, we have to sort through the boring database of life events that’s implanted in our heads.

Maybe we have something symbolic in our lives that has changed with the times and that represents our own personal change. Maybe it’s something simple and obvious, like our wardrobe. Maybe it’s something a bit harder to label as concrete evidence toward our coming of age, but is still representative of it, like our taste in music. Maybe it’s something in between. For me, it’s my bedroom wall.

When my younger sister moved into the guest room in our house, I was excited to finally have my own space. To finally be able to arrange the bed and furniture the way I wanted, and to finally decorate the wall the way I wanted. I never got around to the first thing (mainly because there was no particular way I’d wanted to arrange the bed and furniture), but I got to work quickly on the wall.

Soon enough, it was covered in Tiger Beat posters of One Direction and Ariana Grande. Heart and star wall stickers. Autographs of Disney World princesses like Tiana and Belle from our family’s last visit to the park, when I lost my autograph book and had to get their signatures on mailing address labels from the post office.

After I got a Teen Vogue subscription in middle school, this version of my wall—this elementary-school-girl wall explosion—slowly but surely became undone. Down came the Jonas Brothers cutouts and the Justice catalogue pages of girls my age in shiny tracksuits and sequined graphic t-shirts. Up went cutouts of perfume samples and photos of models walking down catwalks and wearing Chanel in grassy fields. Some of my previous decorations, most notably a poster of Harry Styles, remained. That era wasn’t completely over yet; it was fading slowly and bleeding into this new era, this “more sophisticated” era that was consumed by an interest in fashion and modeling and journalism and magazines like Teen Vogue that introduced these things to me.

Two pictures of my wall from March 2018, via the camera app HUJI. These are the earliest photos of my wall that I have, and this is around the time I started to realize how significant my wall was in representing who I am.

In my later middle school years, as my relationships with my friends grew stronger, relics of our time together were hung up too. Photo booth strips from school dances and birthday parties, polaroids from concerts and after school excursions around downtown Philadelphia. They were hung side by side with the magazine photoshoots, my friends and I sticking out our tongues and throwing up peace signs among models and celebrities standing straight and looking serious.

Throughout high school, my wall grew more and more into a culmination of my interests and relationships. No longer just photos of me with friends or family, but also things that reminded me of the times I’d spent with them. There was a series of acrostic name poems my friends and I had written for each other on a piece of scrapbook paper. A poster advertising the 2016 Boston Calling festival that my friend and I stole from a bus stop because it featured some of our favorite artists. Handmade birthday cards with bold, cursive lettering. Stickers and signs we made for our school’s Mock Election. Ticket stubs from movies we’d seen together. A map of the London Underground that I used during a trip to England to visit family.

Blurry screenshot of my wall from a video, August 2019. Not as ~artsy~ as the photos from above, and here it’s “messiness” is much more evident. I like to think of its untidiness as a testament to its authenticity.

My evolving interests also shined through in different ways. No longer just pages I’d ripped out of magazines and plastered on the wall, but things that I collected and created because of these interests. A framed, blown-up cover of an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. Harry Potter and Glossier postcards. An article I wrote for a journalism program about how the Internet has reinvented secondhand shopping. Even my love for magazines was immortalized through collages I made, featuring letters big and small, and miscellaneous cut-outs of floral fabrics and perfume bottles, accompanied by larger silhouettes of models or celebrities I liked. And in the corner, the smallest sliver of my younger self peeking through: a creased, 8 ½-by-11 poster of One Direction, circa 2012.

My wall in my dorm room, November 2020. It’s clearly much tidier than my bedroom wall back home, and it includes mainly pictures and postcards, as well as three collages from my original room.

I’m proud of my bedroom wall. I’ve used it as a backdrop for pictures of items I sold on Depop. Before I left for college, I would constantly rearrange it and take things down when they felt out of place or no longer significant to me. I’ve even tried to recreate something like it on a smaller scale in my dorm room. I think it captures perfectly who I am and how I’ve grown over the years. Every relic it features is from a moment I consider significant to my personal growth. It’s cluttered and messy, and therefore, it’s the perfect model of my coming of age journey.

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via @uglyshadow_official on instagram

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MEGAN THEE STALLION DON’T STOP (2020)

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Adut Akech and Mona Tougaard at Jacquemus SS 21 Backstage

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beauty @ fendi hc

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WASH DAY – 2019, dir. Kourtney Jackson

As they get ready for the day, three young Black women discuss the public perception of their Blackness in relation to their cultivation of a strong sense of self. Wash Day is an intimate exploration into how private, domestic acts such as washing your hair or putting on makeup become a significant re-acquaintance with the body, before and after navigating the politics of one’s outwardly appearance.

watch here.

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this show deserves an emmy for this scene alone

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Thoroughbreds (2017) Directed by Cory Finley

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from paper to web pages: the end of teen print magazines

Enjoy this ~artsy~ Polaroid I took circa 2016, feat. an American Apparel bag, an H&M catalogue, and Teen Vogue’s February 2016 issue with Amandla Stenberg on the cover.

I received my first copy of Teen Vogue in November 2013, Demi Lovato gracing its cover. Over the years that followed, I collected the magazine through an on-again, off-again subscription. I ripped out countless pages from countless issues to create mood boards that now decorate my bedroom wall. I wrote my college essay about the ways magazines have inspired me artistically and shaped what I want to do in the future. Teen Vogue was the first publication I read that effortlessly discussed beauty tips and political issues within pages of each other, which is something I admired. So you can definitely imagine my disappointment when I learned that the magazine’s publishing company Conde Nast was discontinuing the print version and would only be releasing content online. And the decorated “fashion bible for teens” isn’t alone in its endeavors.

Teen Vogue got rid of its print version in 2017. It was known for its pieces on beauty, fashion, mental and physical health, and, more recently, politics and social justice; it continues to publish content on these topics for its website.

In 2017, around the same time as Teen Vogue’s announcement, Nylon (another of my favorites ever since they featured Marina Diamandis on its cover in 2015) revealed that they were moving fully online and getting rid of the print version. The news begged a question in my mind: What is happening to teen print magazines?

The decline of print magazines, especially those geared toward teens, makes total sense. Everything important to younger generations lives on the internet, and if it’s not online, it may as well not exist at all. Plus, these magazines have already had an established presence on the Internet. Both Nylon and Teen Vogue have stylish websites and YouTube channels where they conduct interviews and host fun activities for their cover stars and other celebrities.

During the 2016 presidential election, Teen Vogue began publishing political content, including one of its most read pieces titled “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America”, an op-ed by Lauren Duca, criticizing the presidential candidate. This new kind of content resulted in its website gaining millions of views and lots of focus, most notably for the magazine’s shift from solely fashion and beauty to include politics and social issues.

Nylon, meanwhile, previously maintained an online store where they sold t-shirts and hoodies with their logo plastered on it. More recently, the magazine’s cancellation directly led to a focus on its online presence; they were acquired by Bustle Digital Group and debuted the online edition with a music issue in April 2020. There are reportedly plans to revive the print version again, but seeing that these have been delayed to late 2021, it’s a bit too early to tell what impact Nylon’s e-version will have, if any, on bringing the magazine back to paper.

After announcing the cancellation of its print magazine in late 2017, Nylon made its digital debut in April 2020, with actress and singer Maya Hawke on the cover.

The transition of these publications, along with others like Glamour and Seventeen, from paper to digital is one that leaves me with mixed emotions. The young teenager in me, the girl who constantly checked the mailbox to see if her latest issue of Teen Vogue had arrived, is nostalgic over the fact that today’s kids likely won’t experience the same rush I felt as I paged through new copies in my room. But the person these magazines helped to shape understands that they’re going out of style. The untouched magazine shelves at Barnes & Noble serves as proof of that.

I’m hopeful that the online equivalents of these publications will be able to create the same kind of safe space I had for newer generations. Considering promises made by their respective teams that both Nylon and Teen Vogue are adapting their online spaces to convey their iconic brands to audiences on a digital scale (this is evident through the continuation of their editorial photoshoots and cover stories, as well as through articles and other pieces in the same caliber of things that had been published on paper), it’s definitely not as far off as it may seem. That, coupled with reports of both sites surpassing their physical counterparts in readership and circulation, suggests that digital magazines may become the future of what teen journalism has to offer.

SOURCES:

Conde Nast Laying Off 80, Shutting Down Teen Vogue Print Edition

Nylon Magazine Is Shutting Down Its Print Edition

Nylon scales back print relaunch, moves forward with digital edition

Post-print, Nylon looks for its digital footing

Real Teens Mourn the Loss of Teen Vogue's Print Edition

Teen Vogue Finally Ends Its Print Run After Years Of Rumors

Teen Vogue Will End Print Edition as Part of Condé Nast Cuts