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
Greetings from Maputo, Mozambique’s capital, shaped by a modernist architecture
I took a ride on a tuk-tuk motorcycle taxi around Maputo, Mozambique, with my buddy and fellow All Things Considered producer, Vincent Acovino. We were in the country reporting on changes to U.S. funding for AIDS in Africa.
Vinny noticed it first: There was something magical about a number of the concrete apartment blocks and government offices here. With half a day off and a little googling, we gave ourselves an impromptu tour of the architecture of Amâncio “Pancho” Guedes. The late Portuguese-born architect designed some pretty cool buildings here in the 1950s and ’60s. They include the Prédio Abreu, Santos e Rocha pictured above, and other structures with evocative names like The Smiling Lion apartment block and the Lemon Squeezer church. Step into a small interior stairwell of The Dragon House, and you see a mural in sparkling black and white stone of a spiky dragon with a toothy grin. It transforms what would otherwise be a dim stairwell.
Guedes designed more than 500 buildings in the city, from churches to bakeries. I don’t have the language to capture it: the use of heavy materials, combined with the playful use of shapes and murals. “Eclectic Modernist,” I later learned, is how his work is described. One critic wrote that his work brilliantly mixes the “sculptural and figurative with practical requirements and traditional local identity.”
Maputo will change and I have to imagine not all of his work will survive. But stumbling into a town with a visual landscape that still shows Guedes’ thumbprint was a delight. For an afternoon, riding through the city streets in the open-air tuk-tuk, looking for what might have been his handiwork was a good time. Like an Easter egg hunt in concrete.
For more Far-Flung Postcards, click here.
Lifestyle
Now you can visit dozens of state historic parks for free through 2026. Here’s how
From now through July 6, residents and tourists alike can download the California State Parks Historian Passport for free, allowing them access to more than 30 state historic parks across the state through the end of 2026.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the initiative Wednesday in honor of both Juneteenth and the the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
“California’s state historic parks preserve some of our nation’s most powerful and meaningful stories, and I’m proud to live in a state that celebrates diversity to connect more people with those stories through this limited-time free pass,” California State Parks director Armando Quintero said in a statement. “I hope the free Historian Passport introduces more Californians to the state’s historic gems and sparks a curiosity and thirst for knowledge that leads to many return visits.”
The pass typically costs $50 and allows unlimited entry for up to four people to state historic parks and museums that charge a per-person admission fee or a vehicle day-use fee.
Historic parks in and around L.A. County that accept the Historian Passport include:
Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park
(Courtesy of California State Parks, 2026)
Other parks that accept the pass are:
A full list is available at parks.ca.gov.
To download a free pass, visit ReserveCalifornia.com and click “Passes” in the upper main menu. From here, you’ll be prompted to either create a new account or log into your existing account. Once logged in, you can use the dropdown menu on the page to select “Special Edition Historian Passport 2026 – $0.00.” You can then check out with your pass and will quickly have it added to your list of passes within your account.
Leaders with the California State Parks Foundation and the California State Railroad Museum Foundation, which helped finance the initiative, said they hope the free Historian pass opens up access to more people to see our public lands.
“California state parks help us understand the history of California, the United States, and the ongoing work of building a more inclusive democracy,” said Rachel Norton, executive director of California State Parks Foundation. “The special edition Historian Passport is a great opportunity to explore state parks for free. We hope access to the Historian Passport encourages more Californians to visit a historic state park and learn about, and reflect on, our shared history.”
Lifestyle
On a flight home, a stranger helped her understand what came next
Rebecca Simonitsch (right) smiles with her mother in 2001, the year she had her surgery.
Rebecca Simonitsch
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Rebecca Simonitsch
In the summer of 1995, when she was 15, Rebecca Simonitsch woke up in the hospital. She later learned she had had a series of convulsive seizures that put her into a coma. For the next three years, she took medication to prevent future episodes.
At 18, before she left for college, her doctors took her off the medication. That’s when she began noticing more subtle kinds of seizures, known as focal seizures. She later realized she had probably been experiencing them on and off ever since she left the hospital.
“The average person would likely have never known when I was having a seizure,” Simonitsch said.
“[But] if I tried to speak during them, my words would come out sounding a little like gibberish. And then I would also feel nausea, weakness and fatigue.”
Simonitsch was diagnosed with epilepsy. She cycled through multiple medications to stop the seizures, but nothing worked. She could no longer drive, and the side effects of the medication became unmanageable.
By the time she was 20, it was clear something had to change. That winter, she flew from Charleston to Baltimore to meet with a neurologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital. After many tests, he identified the source of her seizures — scar tissue in her left temporal lobe — and told her she was a candidate for brain surgery.
On the flight home, Simonitsch kept replaying what the doctor had told her.
“And like so many patients who receive difficult or big news, I had really only absorbed 10 to 15% of the conversation. And now I had so many questions,” Simonitsch said.
“So I just recall being on the plane, looking out the window and feeling so many emotions in that moment … everything from fear to worry to relief.”
As she continued to grapple with these feelings, the man sitting next to her struck up a conversation. He asked her what she was doing in Baltimore, and she told him about the surgery.

“He turned to look at me. And he shared with me that he had an expertise in neuropsychology, and he had worked with patients like me.”
For the rest of the two-hour flight, the man listened as she shared what the doctor had told her and the questions she still had. He clarified what the surgery would involve and made sure she understood. Then he reached for his bag and pulled out a notebook and pen.
“He had some really old school graph-like paper that he put on the airplane table,” she said.
“And then he just started drawing pictures of the brain. And even marking sections of his drawing as he spoke … and ‘This is what they would do with the surgery and how they would remove that scarred region.’”
Twenty-five years later, she still remembers how that conversation made her feel.
“I’ll just never forget his kindness and the warmth that he exuded. And how it helped my anxiety fade,” she said. “And that was what I needed on that flight back to Charleston by myself.”
Simonitsch went on to have the surgery, and today, she remains seizure-free. She still has that piece of paper with the man’s drawing of the brain.
“He gave me something that I deeply needed that day: realistic hope, reassurance and compassion,” she said. “All from a complete stranger sitting beside me on a crowded flight.”
My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.
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