Initial Zine Research
To begin the journey of our new project we explored different existing zones to refresh our mind of how they are made and what they stand for as well as how the differentiate from magazines themselves. Zines are more tactile, hand made, collage based, handwritten; basically made using more practical techniques and raw methods to then print professionally for a more unique, less high definition and perfected version of a magazine.
Polyester is made up from emotive, activism inspired posters and illustrations which are constantly challenging different social normative and ideals and expressing the opinions of people. The main part of this zine is to show expression, emotion and to inform the public, their audience, of issues that are important to them that aren’t being spoken about enough, or need to be spoken about more even if they are already. Polyester often has images relating to body image; challenging the idea of having body hair as it’s completely normal and natural to normalising different body shapes such as the athletic body or the larger body types.
https://polyesterzine.com/why-we-need-to-celebrate-the-athletic-body/
https://polyesterzine.com/prettyugly-from-the-author/
Law magazine, although still a zine, has a very different approach and completely different aesthetic to Polyester Zine which is shown from the video by i-D. “It’s not a fashion magazine, it’s an Argos catalogue of the things you never knew you needed”, this approach in itself shows how Law differs to high fashion magazines such as Vogue or Elle, which are typical fashion magazines as they present themselves as such, however the content features in Law is more broad, not always necessarily related to fashion or clothing but more about the people they attract to the magazine, the culture behind what they d and why they do it. Even the way they conduct photoshoots are very low maintenance and tactile by keeping up a massive white material to use as the background for their shoots as opposed to always going in a brightly lit expensive studio.
http://www.law-mag.com/about/
The Mushpit presentation of themselves is like a memory capsule, the work is quite documentary of people’s lives , their journeys and the emotions that they face as the owners started to document the years of their own lives and their friends lives to translate into the work of their zine.
All of these examples just show the variety that zines can have aesthetically and the origins of these three London based zines and how each of the founding members had a different approach to representing the art they want to make a sort of activist and expressive way to do whatever they liked a they were working for a creative independent zine and not a high fashion overly edited magazine, showing that the possibilities are endless.
