What has fashion lost to our data-driven new world?
We speak with Dust Editor-in-Chief Luigi Vitali about the broken promise between the industry and its magazines.
By Ryan White
When Luigi Vitali and Luca Guarini founded Dust magazine in 2011, it felt as though one world was giving way to another. “The certainties that had defined the previous decades were falling apart, and for a brief moment it genuinely seemed possible to imagine something different,” Vitali says. “Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the Indignados in Spain, student protests across Europe and North America: very different movements, but all with a shared belief that the world couldn’t simply continue as before.”
A name, then, was chosen to reflect this feeling. “Dust evoked a system in rubble, but also the possibility that something new could emerge from it,” he says.
A lot did emerge from that period, but much of it came at the expense of the print fashion magazine. Fifteen years later, Dust walks an almost impossibly fine line between maintaining financial viability and preserving a creative soul. “As screens, algorithms, and metrics have taken on the task of organising reality – making it difficult to distinguish visibility from value, immediacy from context – every image around us now competes with every other image, leaving us with an uncomfortable question: what are we supposed to be as an independent magazine?”
So, for their latest issue, the team decided to confront this tension head-on, producing a magazine made entirely of cover images, thus “granting every image – and every brand – the conditions it seeks: maximised visibility, circulation, engagement, and a claim on collective attention,” and prefacing it with an editor’s letter that offers one of the most honest and clarifying assessments of what’s happening in the industry to date. To hear more about this perspective on the industry, we spoke with Vitali.
When you launched in 2011, what was the magazine landscape like?
In those years, the financial and cultural crisis brought back a kind of DIY spirit. Doing things yourself felt more reliable than trusting the old ways. In our case, we had no idea how to make a magazine, and we thought that was our advantage. The existing publishing model was beginning to crack, not only because of the financial crash, but also under the pressure of Web 2.0, weekly, monthly and general-interest publications no longer had a clear reason to exist or sustain themselves. Independent magazines had existed for decades, but after the financial crisis a new generation emerged. We were part of that wave. Most of them weren’t driven by commercial logic. They had a flexible structure and inherited the editorial freedom of fanzines and earlier independent magazines, mixed fashion with politics, criticism, and treated publishing as a form of cultural production. We survived because brands recognised the cultural value of these niche magazines and began investing in them. Hedi Slimane at Saint Laurent was among the first, followed by others. They recognised that the value of independent publishing came from the freedom to experiment, and as we argue now, without that freedom these magazines lose the very thing that made them worth supporting in the first place.
Has the current moment we’re in now – the place of frustration your editor’s letter comes from – felt like a gradual shift since the beginning or has it catalysed quickly recently?
Over the last few years, the shift has been impossible to ignore. At first, it could have felt like it was about the constant changes of designers and teams making relationships with the brands harder, but it soon became clear that the issue was more structural.
As fashion sales slowed, the industry responded by playing it safe, doubling down on metrics and risk management. This means that every creative decision has now been measured in terms of performance, visibility and clicks. This logic has spread across the entire ecosystem, affecting everyone. Practically speaking, for us, even independent magazines, whose value has always lay in editorial freedom, are now increasingly expected to reproduce the aesthetic of collections as prescribed by marketing teams. Full-look policies, visible logos, strict product placement, avoiding mixing the looks with vintage, etc. To reinterpret, or introduce different narratives or angles, is often seen as problematic in a system built around optimisation. What is clear is that the conditions of creativity have shifted, and while brands once embraced creative freedom and daring ideas, they are now primarily driven by data and predictability, this calls the existence of independent magazines into question.
To give concrete examples, for the first time since we started, in 2024, a brand story we shot and produced was rejected just weeks before publication for not fitting these requirements. In the span of three issues, we had four stories rejected for the same reasons after they’d already been shot, which means losing the production budget.