The Who

Sarah de Mavaleix, Sofia Nebiolo and Haydée Touitou are the brilliant minds behind this disarmingly beautiful project, structured in volumes (we’re at the 4th one) and imagined as a collaborative platform for various voices, skirts, lengths and cultures to be heard, seen and understood. And that’s just one of the reasons why The Skirt Chronicles won the editor of the year prize at the Stack Awards 2018.

Convince yourself, here:

The What

If you think this is just another fashion magazine or a female only endeavour, you’re very, very wrong.

 “It’s still the afternoon somehow, and my head in my hands is heavier than this planet”, writes Yelena Moskovich somewhere at the beginning of the magazine. I can’t remember when and where exactly, because I am already deeply immersed in Volume IV’s mesmerizing kaleidoscope of sights and insights on and off islands. Islands, you see, is the theme.

You feel Sicilian sweets melting in your mouth on a hot summer day, you get sweaty with a mini skirt dancing somewhere back in the 70s, in London’s original reggae record shop. “Love is nice, don’t get me wrong, but you can’t sing about love all day long”, but then how could you, when you think that there are more churches per square mile in Jamaica than anywhere else in the world? Did you know that? I didn’t, but then there’s Chris Peckings to talk to you about music culture and spirituality like they’re the only thing keeping this world together. And that just may be true.

Then there’s Bahraini-American artist Nasser Alzayani, fascinated by the flexibility of truth, drawing sculptures in the sand growing, and melting, and never quite the same, just like our memories. Just like the stories we tell ourselves. Just like the dungarees that pick us up, dust us off and sometimes, downright save us.

Just like that one member of the Coppola family you did not know about: Eleanor, not quite your desperate housewife, but the multi-disciplinarian artist that, after a life of experimenting with applied design, conceptual art and many other means of creative expression, has reached the movie making phase, in her 80s. Nantucket, photos and tales of salt and wind, of black and white rustles of sunburnt leaves and then, the next thing you know, you’re playing with Pierre Cardin couture.

“If you can’t use your creativity it turns against you”, says Eleanor.

It’s still the afternoon somehow, and I’m still enraptured by the universe conceived and concealed in these pages: short stories, interviews, fiction, confession, photo essays, photoshoots, poetry of afternoons that are still, forever there, somehow.

The Why

It’s like looking under a perfectly crisp, batiste, summer skirt: it’s playful, it’s quiet, it’s protected, it’s an adventure, it’s cheeky, it’s necessary. It’s curiosity travelling light. This magazine feels like a ghust of wind wrapping around your thighs on a warm summer night. And you don’t need to wear a skirt to know just how perfect that feels (but it’s better if you do).

 

Takeaways

“Holy water” hit me like a wave of salty water filling my nostrils, my ears, my eyes:

“The sea – the eternal whore – was my first love; and the blonde American girl that worked at the reception desk at the hotel in Hydra was the first incarnation of the holy female.” Then there’s Patla Kijie who makes jewelry you cannot lose: light and breezy, like poetry, like the poissarde earrings in the style worn by French fishermen wives, once upon a time, when the word literally meant “fish wives”.

And then, as if this whole journey had not been perfect enough already, there’s the Biannual Horoscope For Spring And Summer – here poetry explodes like popping candy in a million flavors in your mouth.

Listen to me