I Like My Style

The user-generated fashion magazine I Like My Style Quarterly exists now, which means someone at a printing press finally connected the obvious dots: fashion is in, users can make anything, print is fashionable again. The result is a 270-page book that costs twelve euros and somehow works.

It’s a chaotic mix of photographs and text, English and German, self-portraits and snapshots of strangers who all somehow belong together. You get sixteen-year-old schoolgirls, middle-aged men built like ZZ Top, intimate photographs, people who weren’t selected or filtered or made pretty by a team of professionals. They just showed up and got printed.

Looking through it, you immediately want to do something reckless with your own clothes. Cut up your school uniform. Burn something. The magazine has this effect because all these people being printed and bound together proves you don’t have to be beautiful or interesting to matter. You just have to show up.

The one thing that doesn’t work: the typography. Scattered uppercase and lowercase letters like someone’s thirteen-year-old cousin just discovered effects on their Beepworld page. It’s trying to feel youthful and subversive but mostly just reads as trying. Everything else in the magazine earns its chaos. This doesn’t.

But that’s minor. The real thing happening is simple: a bunch of strangers got printed, and that mattered enough to bind and sell. No invisible gatekeeper, no one deciding what’s interesting enough. Just paper and people who didn’t ask for permission.