Two Hundred and Seventy Pages of Strangers

Print is always dying until it does something surprising. I Like My Style Quarterly arrived claiming to be the world’s first user-generated fashion magazine—the kind of premise that sounds either visionary or lazy depending on your prior experience with claims like that—and at two hundred and seventy pages and twelve euros, it had enough material to make its own argument.

The argument was mostly convincing. The content was a sprawling, barely curated mixture of photos and essays, self-portraits and candid shots, text in English and German, schoolgirls alongside a gay ZZ Top lookalike alongside intimate scenes from somewhere in southern Florida. The kind of cast you’d never get from a magazine with a proper editorial line, which is precisely the point. It had a charisma that professionally produced fashion publications spend fortunes trying to manufacture and never quite achieve—because it came from people who had no incentive to be anything other than themselves.

The Berlin origin felt right. There’s a particular energy to that city’s creative self-documentation—less aspirational than London or New York, more interested in the texture of actual life than in performing a curated version of it—and this magazine had it. You flipped through looking for the image that stopped you, and there were more of them than expected. The faces were interesting. The clothes were sometimes extraordinary and sometimes genuinely terrible. The combination was exactly right.

One complaint: the deliberate mixed capitalization—uppercase and lowercase scattered through the text like something a twelve-year-old deploys for ironic emphasis on a social media profile—was a choice the rest of the magazine hadn’t earned. Everything else was punching well above its weight. The typography was still catching up.