27

I’m glad that there’s a lot of magazines on the shelves right, now when doomed predictions a few years back had me thinking that there might be five or six left by 2014, but I still stick to a handful of publications I’ve been reading for a while. 032c still rules for it no-compromise approach to content. The 32-page dossier on Raf Simons’ work that opens # 27 is great — Pierre Alexandre de Looz put in some serious work, and it’s a piece that reveals just enough about the process behind Simons’ work to fully understand why the stylistic imitators trying to capture some of that deceptive simplicity with pretension rather than intellect as justification are so wide of the mark. This cover by regular Raf collaborator Willy Vanderperre is the kind of thing that makes me buy something, using the camo jacket from 2001 with the Richey Edwards imagery on it that got a Manics seal of approval — the collection united some of my favourite things and looked like it could have been tour gear for any Manics moment from 1991 to February 1st, 1995. To put that into a publication alongside pieces on Richard Yurley, Tom Kummer’s world of celeb fiction (complete with Juergen Teller’s very real photographs) and Kenneth Goldsmith’s book and music recommendations maintains the constant quest that Joerg Koch and the team are on to make something that’s better than the rest. This interview with TISSUE Magazine discusses Joerg’s straight edge roots and the no-fucks-given mindset behind something whose entire appeal is really rooted in how much of a fuck it gives about its quality control and deep cultural exploration.