Fashion Is Desire Is Skin
Someone at Husk Magazine sent me a copy of The Book of Husk Magazine with a note tucked inside dedicating every nude and semi-nude photograph in the publication to this journal. Which is one of the finer things to receive by post.
The spring and summer issue of the self-described fanzine—fashion, art, music, culture—is dense with photographs. Lucy Carr-Ellison, Luke Byrne, and Munich-based artist Katjana Frisch each bring something distinct to the frame, and the black-and-white sequences in particular have a restless, roving quality, moving through fashion capitals without quite settling anywhere. Darth Vader turns up unexpectedly. Faces are cut away. Boys sit at piano keys with a kind of suspended concentration. These feel less like editorial flourishes and more like a grammar—a way of saying things through absence and displacement, through the detail that shouldn’t be there. Texts by Manuel Link, Katharina Schwaiger, and Ulrich Schippke hold their own alongside all that visual density.
The whole thing turns on one equation: fashion equals desire equals sexuality. Not a new claim, but Husk presents it with enough visual intelligence that novelty becomes irrelevant. The photographs earn the argument. Something assembled with this much care and this little self-importance is a genuine small pleasure, and I’m glad it found its way here.