Lifestyle
The Revenge of the Niche Fashion Magazine
On a snowy night just before Valentine’s Day, Cultured magazine gave a party for its February-March 2025 edition. It was held at Quarters, a TriBeCa space that is both a furniture store and a wine bar. The place was packed. The cover star, the actress Cristin Milioti, was there, and partygoers took turns posing in doorways or perched on sofas for their social media feeds.
“There has been an unexpected groundswell of support,” said Sarah Harrelson, the founder of Cultured, who has worked on publications her entire career, including InStyle and Women’s Wear Daily.
The first issue of Cultured, which combines the fashion and art worlds, appeared in 2012, when Ms. Harrelson was living in Miami, where she had worked for Ocean Drive magazine and started a magazine supplement for The Miami Herald.
“I think back now, and I was 38 and creatively bored,” she said. “I wanted to do something for myself and not have to heed the rules. Publishing had gotten formulaic.”
Independently produced print magazines with an emphasis on fashion are experiencing a boomlet of sorts, making waves for their striking design and high-quality production. There is Cultured but also L’Etiquette, Konfekt and Polyester, to name a few that line the racks of Casa Magazines, the West Village periodical store, and magCulture in London.
No longer seen as disposable or a relic of a dying industry, these magazines are regarded as high-end products. “It’s a luxury experience of sitting back and getting a single viewpoint coming to you that you didn’t know you wanted,” said Penny Martin, the editor in chief of The Gentlewoman, which could be said to have pioneered an indie print resurgence when it began in 2010.
Búzio Saraiva is the associate publisher of nine independent magazines, including Holiday and Luncheon, and the founder of Nutshell & Co., a company in Paris that works with other similar magazines.
“People behind independent magazines create material meant to last,” he said. “Someone will collect them, and then someone else will buy one at a flea market and make a moodboard out of it.”
Mr. Saraiva thinks of these magazines as vehicles for stylists, photographers, celebrities and writers to show off creativity in a way they might not be able to do in mainstream magazines. “It’s a lab,” he said. “It’s R&D for the creative industry. I see people taking pictures now that we shot 10 years ago. Not everyone is triple-checking to see if they’ve offended or please everyone.”
At first glance, independent magazines use a lot of the same celebrities that magazines owned by Hearst or Condé Nast work with. “A lot of time it’s the same cover and talents, but the interviewer or the photographer can be completely different,” said Joshua Glass, who started the food and fashion magazine Family Style in 2023. The spring 2025 issue has Gwyneth Paltrow on the cover interviewed by the curator Klaus Biesenbach and photographed by Brianna Capozzi.
A major difference, Mr. Glass said, was creative independence. Like many other indies, Family Style is majority self-financed. “I’m beholden to my own moral integrity, my peers and the people I employ,” he said.
“We are in the black,” Mr. Glass added. “We’re not flying private jets or taking town cars. We are extremely lean, and we do things in ways that are modest.”
Magazines like Cultured and Family Style generally rely on ways to stay afloat that are quite similar to those of mainstream print publications. They have advertisers who are happy to pay a cheaper rate for a smaller magazine with a younger audience.
“The tide has shifted,” said Nick Vogelson, who founded the culture, arts and fashion magazine Document in 2012. “Every brand sees the value of print media. Every season for 13 years, the advertising has grown.” This spring, Mr. Vogelson is adding a new magazine, Notes on Beauty.
“In my line of work, you don’t call them advertisers, you call them supporters,” Ms. Martin said, laughing. “It’s not just about display advertising, it’s about special projects, as they’re called. There are other ways to work with those partners who are looking for culturally engaged or high-net-worth readers.” The Gentlewoman has hosted an architecture tour in Los Angeles with Cos and a tour of the Chelsea Physic Garden in London with Vince, for example.
Here, a field guide to 10 of the new crop of fashion-leaning print magazines.
Notes on Beauty
For the first issue, spring 2025, Inez and Vinoodh photographed Julianne Moore for the cover with red rose petals stuffed in her mouth. There are stories on ancient wellness rituals and an essay about a writer deciding to forgo cosmetic treatments.
AFM
The A is for “A,” the “M” is for “Magazine,” and the “F” stands for something unprintable. Issue 001, with the theme “pursuits of happiness,” came out last fall, produced by the dating app Feeld, which proudly declared that more than half of its contributors were on the app. Feeld is one of a number of companies, including Mubi, the movie platform, and Metrograph, the movie theater, producing print spinoffs for their companies.
What if a fashion magazine was almost entirely photos of fashion? The fall 2024 issue of Heroine has short interviews with the actors Finn Bennett and Noah Jupe, but the highlight is the model Alice McGrath, photographed by Fabien Kruszelnicki and wearing a great deal of Celine.
Cultured
The most recent issue has several covers, including one with Cristin Milioti holding a lit cigarette, photographed by Chris Colls. The theme is art and film, and it has interviews with the director Luca Guadagnino, the Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres and the painter Torkwase Dyson.
Konfekt
Konfekt bills itself as “the magazine for sharp dressing, drinking, dining, travel and design.” It’s based in Zurich and often has a middle-European bent. Issue 17 includes profiles of a chef in Georgia (the country) and a calligrapher in Paris, and an interview with the Serbian-born fashion designer Dusan Paunovic.
Based in Paris, L’Etiquette puts an emphasis on personal style and the art of getting dressed. There are separate editions for men and women, and they’re perennially sold out on newsstands. Online, panels of fashion world denizens choose their favorite It bags, which turn out to be delightfully quirky and under the radar: an L.L. Bean suede tote, say, or a tiny Balenciaga shaped like a croissant.
Polyester
Polyester has a playful energy and a pop visual aesthetic reminiscent of 1990s magazines. Heroes to a certain kind of fashionable feminist are covered, like the winter 2024/2025 cover star Sofia Coppola or Chelsea Fairless and Lauren Garroni, the hosts of the “Every Outfit” podcast.
Patta
The namesake magazine of an Amsterdam shop, Patta has gained a cult following for its coverage of music and streetwear. The magazine takes a global view of culture with an emphasis on African-European connections. Its spring-summer issue has an interview with the Congolese-born director Baloji and an article on the rising EDM scene in Lagos.
Every edition of the midcentury magazine Holiday was dedicated to a different city. Writers included Truman Capote and Joan Didion. Fast-forward to spring 2014, and the design studio Atelier Franck Durand was given the go-ahead by the French publisher Lagardère to bring the magazine back, so strictly speaking, Holiday is not independently published. It still picks a city for each issue, the fall-winter one being New York. There is a vintage flavor in a reprint of the Joan Didion essay “Goodbye to All That,” but it also has Tommy Dorfman and Marc Jacobs in conversation.
Unconditional
“Made by Women, for Women,” Unconditional says, and the female gaze is apparent. Articles include a piece on lymphatic drainage practitioners in Paris and a profile of the designer Rachel Scott of the fashion line Diotima.
Lifestyle
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Lifestyle
‘Now is the time’: Bob Baker Marionette Theater to make Highland Park its forever home
In 2019, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater needed a lifeline. Forced out of its edge-of-downtown home of more than 55 years, the beloved troupe with its thousands of handcrafted puppets — a saucy black cat in heels, a fish out of water that can’t help but wiggle — ultimately found a new location in a Highland Park theater.
Signing a 10-year lease was a sigh of relief for the company, the result of a lengthy search that included more than 80 spaces and ensured its playful, fanciful shows would continue to be a multigenerational, SoCal tradition. But yearly rises in rent, as well as the looming end of the contract, remained a cause of stress for the nonprofit.
The Bob Baker Marionette Theater can exhale once again.
The saucy black cat puppet in a performance at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater.
(Chloe Rice / Bob Baker Marionette Theater)
The theater’s executive team said it has entered into an agreement to purchase its current location at the corner of York Boulevard and North Avenue 50, which had former incarnations as a movie theater and a Korean church. Once completed, the $5 million acquisition will ensure the theater has a permanent home, a place where skateboarding clowns and leek-haired onions can continue to frolic and dance for decades to come.
“This is monumental for us,” says Alex Evans, the theater’s co-executive director. “It’s been decades of us struggling to survive. Now we’re at this moment where it’s not a struggle. It’s a blossoming moment where our future is set up forever.”
Bob Baker’s Highland Park home was originally built as the York Theater in 1925, hosting movies and vaudeville performances during that era. It most recently housed the Pyong Kang First Congregational Church. Over the years it has also been a barbershop and the site of an organ sales and repair store.
The purchase comes at a celebratory time for the troupe. While its annual Bob Baker Day Festival at the Los Angeles State Historic Park had to be postponed from April 12 to the fall due to a forecast of rain — the historic and fragile puppets cannot be exposed to water — the company still took its show on the road to the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. Its adults-only May fundraising event the Puppet Prom, which typically raises more than $30,000, is nearly sold out, and the theater, which also hosts film screenings and concerts (with puppets, of course), continues to pack in full audiences — partly due to its location in a walkable neighborhood with young families.
And in the coming weeks the theater will launch its first new show in 40 years, “Choo Choo Revue.”
“Now is the time,” says Evans, who notes that while they have built new puppets and tweaked existing shows, this is the first proper new production since 1981’s “Hooray LA!” “We have the staff to implement it. We have a sustainable business to be able to pull off what is going to be close to a half-million-dollar production to mount a new show.”
In going public with its intent to secure the York Boulevard theater, the company is initiating a new round of fundraising. Bob Baker over the last year has raised $4.5 million of the $5 million purchase price. It is seeking $500,000 to close the gap as well as an additional $2 million for what it describes as critical renovations, such as repairing the building’s roof and restrooms.
Some of the eccentric canines puppets.
(Chloe Rice / Bob Baker Marionette Theater)
Mary Fagot, Bob Baker’s co-executive director, says the theater has in place a $500,000 loan to ensure the deal closes. Yet Bob Baker does not want to to begin its new era with debt.
“We think it’s an achievable gap,” Fagot says, pointing to community fundraising the theater had to enact to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the days of the shutdown, for instance, the company was able to raise $365,000 in four weeks.
Rising rent, say the co-executive directors, was a key driving factor in the decision to approach the building’s ownership to purchase the space. This year, Bob Baker will pay close to half a million in rent, an amount, says Evans, that is double the theater’s budget when it was in its prior space near downtown L.A. That, coupled with the lease’s impending expiration in a couple of years, acted as a sort of deadline to craft a proposal that could appeal to its building owners.
“We started to have discussions in 2023 with the owners of the building, and those evolved into this becoming a real possibility,” Fagot says. “Then we started the hard work of talking to our biggest supporters about getting behind us.”
Bob Baker, founded in 1963 by its namesake puppeteer, now attracts more than 145,000 audience members per year, including about 20,000 students via school field trips. Funding for the building purchase was secured, in part, by gifts from the Perenchio Foundation, the Kohl Family Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the late Wallis Annenberg, and celebrity donors such as Jack Black and Tanya Haden.
A sidewalk performance outside the Bob Baker Marionette Theater featuring ladybug puppets.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“I’m proud to have played a small part in helping safeguard such a beloved institution that has enriched Los Angeles for decades,” says Brian Mikail of Capstone Equities, which rents the space to the troupe. The hope when signing the lease, says Mikail, was that Bob Baker could someday be set up to purchase the venue.
The agreement, says, Fagot, is a win-win for both sides.
“I think we were the ideal owners for this space,” Fagot says. “If it’s for any other purpose, it would need a giant transformation, and for us, it’s exactly what we need.”
“Choo Choo Revue” is set to open May 16 and will feature more than 100 brand new, handcrafted puppets. Look, for instance, for a conductor with a clock as a face, dancing luggage and a cicada jug band, among a host of other oddities. Expect, perhaps, a crescent moon in pajamas to be a new favorite. Or maybe audiences will instead fall for the singing mushrooms.
“The show invites audiences to go on a train ride, where the show is looking out of a train window and seeing flights of imagination,” Evans says. “It’s daydreams outside of a window. Windmills run around. It’s weird, fantastical abstractions of what’s possible. The hope is by the end of the show people are inspired to be more creative and to look at the world more beautifully.”
There’s also a clear hunger for the type of whimsical, family-friendly entertainment that the theater provides. Gross revenues topped $3.1 million in 2025, up from $699,211 in 2018, according to its most recent annual report. Fagot says the COVID pandemic only increased the demand for the “special brand of magic” that Bob Baker creates.
“People needed community,” she says. “They just need joy. They need inspiration and creativity and want to do it together, and that is what we do.”
Lifestyle
With ‘Big Mistakes,’ Dan Levy returns to TV with a crime comedy : Pop Culture Happy Hour
Dan Levy in Big Mistakes.
Spencer Pazer/Netflix
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Spencer Pazer/Netflix
Dan Levy co-created and starred in the beloved Schitt’s Creek. And now he’s back with a new comedy on Netflix that’s got a very different vibe. In Big Mistakes, Levy and Taylor Ortega play dysfunctional siblings who get drawn deeper and deeper into the world of organized crime, even as their mom – the great Laurie Metcalf – runs for public office.
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