A conversation with Viscose Journal founder and EIC Jeppe Ugelvig.

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Viscose Journal calls itself “a journal for fashion criticism” which sounds like a simple enough—and niche enough—premise for a magazine. Founded by Jeppe Ugelvig in Copenhagen and New York in 2021, Viscose has quickly become a vital touchpoint in the fashion world. And it has evolved into something far more complicated than what it still calls itself.

In many ways, Ugelvig and his team have created a magazine that is a pure distillation of what a magazine can be. Because every issue of the publication is different—in form and shape and style. In other words, this is a magazine without a literal template.

The first issue was called a “bagazine” and came in the form of a crocodile skin handbag. Another issue featured a garment label. And the current issue comes with a cover in the form of a cut-out of a perfume box.

The magazine feels like “an ongoing thought process,” not just with the subject of fashion but with the idea of making a magazine itself. And in this sense, it is a mirror not just to the disciplined anarchy of the fashion industry but also into the making of an independent magazine in the 21st century. And that means thinking about the brand, about events, about audience, about the future as a media hub. And that’s a lot of thinking.

Arjun Basu: You wear a lot of hats. I think your bio has more things on it than a lot of my guests. What hat do you normally wear or are there just many hats involved?

Jeppe Ugelvig: That’s a great observation. I would say that the hats are on constant rotation. I usually say that I am a perpetually happy freelancer who somehow managed to never get a full-time job anywhere.

That was certainly never the plan, but here we are. That’s the dream. It’s a dream and it’s a huge form of anxiety and precarity and I think it’s a temperament thing. It suits some people better than others. And yeah, it was never really the plan to go on this long.

But I think over the years, one of the things of being independent is that you get a real taste for what it means to be doing your own projects. Projects that you truly believe in, that are 100% yours, and the more you get, at least for me, the more I got a taste of that, the more the alternative felt like a compromise. And that particularly felt true with regards to publishing and commercial publishing.

Arjun Basu: So how did you start, or why did you start Viscose, what was missing? What did you think you could add to the discourse? What void did you want to fill?

Jeppe Ugelvig: Like you say, I think magazines are usually born out of identification of a lack or a gap somewhere. And for me, I was a kind of a magazine buff growing up. I grew up in the 2000s buying magazines on eBay, going to Copenhagen where—I’m from Denmark—and would get my monthly Vice magazine from the cool store and was collecting all of this stuff at home.

And really I was aiming for fashion journalism and being a fashion editor. And I ended up at Central St. Martin’s at the age of 18, so things were going as planned. But I did myself the un-favor of beginning to read philosophy and art history while I was working in fashion and writing fashion, working for fashion.

Arjun Basu: Always a mistake to start getting into philosophy.

Jeppe Ugelvig: Yeah. And I was really curious as I was learning, you know, writing intellectual and reading intellectual discourse, how little of that there was in commercial fashion publishing, the landscape. There was always a sense of fashion magazine’s tone speaking down to the reader, I felt. Not expecting much intellectually or critically from the reader.

But also of course the kind of eternal marriage between fashion publishing and promotion – promotion of consuming either products or identities, celebrities, personalities. So I started becoming quite, I think, aware of the premise of fashion writing, how it was profoundly different from what we know from art publishing. Not to say that commercial art magazines are in any way out of logics of commodity and promotion and consumption.

But nonetheless, there is a kind of a critical tradition there of a certain amount of intellectual ambition and critical thinking, and even a kind of politics. So I struggled, content wise, to find a model where I would want to take my work in. And at the same time, the “death of print” was happening, this sort of mythological event that happened at one point in the two thousands.

Arjun Basu: I just want everyone to know that he air-quoted “death of print.”

Jeppe Ugelvig: It was scary, I was a teenager during the financial crisis and by the time I started university, the creative industries had definitely taken a beating. The big advertising budgets of the 2000s were no more. And all these indie magazines that I had loved so much by the time I got to actually write for them, it was all about these digital platforms and feeding these digital platforms content.

And it was a really—I used the word undignified a few weeks ago in a conversation about this—for the writers at least, like grappling in the dark, trying to feed this monster that none of us really understood how it worked. Was it going to please advertisers? Was it going to be the new revenue stream?

This is before the algorithm, but certainly social media was happening and it was all about linking things to Facebook. And I saw these two crises, one of a sort of quality of writing and another of the medium itself and the economy of the medium itself.

So a long story short, I jumped ship and thought I was going to go just 100% into art. So I went to study curating in New York, but ended up doing a project there about fashion publishing by artists and also artist publishing. So looking at Aspen magazine, looking at some of the cult kind of Fluxus-related projects, really a kind of experimental, creative, and very subversive approach to what a magazine even can be, in a sort of curatorial sense, almost.

So after that I thought, maybe we can do something in that lineage for fashion. Why not make a publication that prioritizes the written word and the critical word? Because that’s the other thing is that as I was looking into these histories of publishing, studying them as an academic, the golden age of fashion magazines, we often think of as Dazed & Confused, AnOther, Love Magazine, this sort of generation of British fashion publishing that was very close to a variety of talent.

But what’s important to note is that these talents were really primarily image makers. They were photographers and stylists, often friends from college who would get together to make these incredible publications on a dime that would be, sure, a form of artistic experimentation for them, often very ambitious, but it would also serve as a kind of pitch to commercial work. So to get work as stylists and photographers for brands.

These people are now in charge of much of the British—and in fact international—fashion economy. But the same can’t really be said for writing. The writing was never prioritized in these spaces. And so that basic thing of flipping the logic of the fashion magazine on its head to put writing before the image, that was the initial idea.

Arjun Basu: It’s interesting what you say because it’s true especially with fashion magazines, the mainstream ones, the big ones—you know the ones out of New York and Paris and London, but also the ones that you mentioned, the more indie ones—you remember the editor in chief, sometimes the art director, and the photographers. Because they were stars. They were like starchitects almost, the way we used to treat them. But you’d only remember a writer if it was a writer who was famous for doing something else. Or they’re big writers of fashion, but we don’t necessarily associate it with the writing that they produced for the magazines.

Jeppe Ugelvig: That’s right. Yeah. And it’s not to say that there was never good writing in these magazines because I think, the more you look into them, there are excellent pieces of writing, even in US Vogue. But it’s often, then, also a very specific premise of fashion writing. It is really in the service of promotion and most often it’s the advertisers, right?

There’s a historic link between lifestyle consumerism and fashion publishing—and it’s one that goes back to the earliest days of fashion itself, like the early 19th century—that these magazines are supposed to guide the reader towards a fashionable lifestyle, if you will. So what to buy, what to listen to, which cultural discourses to be a part of.

And that’s a premise that can be mined and has been mined really interestingly by writers in the past. But Viscose really takes a much more conceptual approach to try to look at fashion as an apparatus and as a site of cultural production.

So attacking it from these different angles, whether it’s from a point of view of labor or it’s a point of view of form, or it’s a point of view of image, to really think of fashion as a phenomenon that needs to be examined, studied, scrutinized.

Arjun Basu: I was going to say, more than a lot of the magazines that I’ve studied, Viscose really does feel like a thought process. And it’s really on the page. They’re huge productions. You can see it, it’s quite obvious, but it really does feel like, okay, this is what we’re thinking about and everything we’ve thought about is going to go here.

Jeppe Ugelvig: That’s right, yeah. We don’t have a template. We reinvent the wheel every time.

Arjun Basu: You literally don’t have a template?

Jeppe Ugelvig: We don’t have a template, which is another kind of disservice. We don’t have advertisers and we don’t have templates, so we basically make an entirely new magazine every single time. And that is for the designers, and it’s for me, and the guest editors.

We try to surprise ourselves and challenge ourselves and to listen to the content and the research. It all starts with me doing a wide kind of process of research, often theoretical and historical, and then I write this outline like a one pager, scoping out some sort of field of fashion production. So whether it’s style or the image or a geographical location or scent, like the last issue.

And that document is what is then fed to contributors that we invite, be they image makers or writers or artists. But it’s also what the art director and the creative director gets. So everyone is sketching. And I think that’s where the research part is really important because we all do other things. We all make a living in other ways. This will never be a kind of commercialized endeavor.

So we use this place as our space of experimentation as a place to test out ideas and I really try to allow things to be as experimental as possible because as you say, it’s research, it is the thought process itself. And hopefully it leads to more questions than when we start the process.

Arjun Basu: So at what point—and for the listeners who don’t know, the first issue was like a handbag almost. And every issue is different. This one is in a box, essentially. Every issue is completely different. The second issue came with a label and it says, “71% criticism, 19% research, 10% images,” which feels very true and also very cheeky. That sort of felt like a manifesto in a sense. But at what point does the magazine take form beyond the writing? Does stuff start coming in or is it different every time?

Jeppe Ugelvig: I think we’ve managed to streamline the process a little bit over the last couple of issues, because it was a difficult birth in the sense that when everything is possible, but there’s still a very strict budget limit, it can be quite painful. And none of us, I should say, when we’re split across three continents, we don’t ever really spend time physically in a room.

So initially it would be, oh, here’s five different routes, or five different directions. We would entertain them all. We would start quoting things, and then it would just be extremely time consuming. So we’re trying to see if an idea comes up in the early stages of concept development, and then to just run with that and then try to fine tune it.

The idea of the changing shape and the objecthood really was a kind of an accidental thing that came out of the first issue. We did our issue devoted to style and we were looking a lot into the history of the stylist and styling as a kind of strategic media tactic for grabbing attention.

This was during COVID we were all locked down and it was also the time of the Telfar bag. So we were interested in how Telfar managed to make a physical object go viral in such a way by way of this very kind of appealing, hilarious social media campaign. And almost as a kind of mimicry. And also a middle finger to this “death of print.” We were like, “Is there a way to use these viral networks to re-fetishize a print object and to get people to spend $25 on a print magazine?”

So we did. It was that iconicity and playing with street style photography that really got people sharing images of them holding the bag and buying the bag. And so when we came to issue two, it was like, “We can’t reuse the bag thing, so what do we do?” And I think that’s just what we do every issue now. We can’t do what we did last time. And we don’t even have a logo. We literally don’t. We don’t even have a font.

So it’s an exciting process, but it’s a lot of work. So we try to streamline. For the last issue with the box, the flat pack, it was directly inspired by an artwork by the Italian artist, Davide Stucchi, which is a sculpture working with an empty Prada box around a perfume.

So we had that image sitting around and we got the blessing from him to workshop it and we played around with it. But ultimately the design takes form based also on very close contact with printers because you know, what is possible? And what can we afford?

We printed it almost in a new place every single time because we really, it’s a nightmare now. We just, the object changes and various tariff wars and COVID crises, it’s like sometimes it’s Estonia, sometimes it’s Germany, sometimes it’s Holland, sometimes it’s Belgium.

Arjun Basu: Nothing comes easy to Viscose.

Jeppe Ugelvig: I know. Yeah. And on top of that, we don’t have advertisers. Yeah. No. It’s an impossible project, but I think that’s why we get a lot of respect from people.

Arjun Basu: I say on this show often enough—but I’ve been saying it for years—that print needs to be printy-er, because when the internet came about, everyone panicked and they said, "we have to be like the internet." Which was the most ridiculous thing anyone ever said. And you are the printy-est magazine going. There are magazines like that, obviously, that really play with the form. But you don’t just play with the form. You actually create a new form every time. Which, as a former editor, freaks me out what you have to go through.

Jeppe Ugelvig: Yeah. It’s, as I said, it’s our room for experimentation, and it’s been a huge learning curve for the designers and myself to be testing out ideas and to do the quoting and think about paper stock and doing something differently. And, of course, it’s a type of portfolio work for my design collaborators. They imagine what they can show a potential client and say, “I’ve made all these crazy things and actually everything is possible.”

And you’re right, it’s about print should be printy-er. The premise for making this print magazine—we applied for money with arts councils in Scandinavia—and the premise was to make an object that you want to keep, that you want to keep on your shelf. You want to collect it, you don’t want to throw it out.

This is the kind of magazine culture I grew up with. And I think that we’ve succeeded in that. And it’s interesting how the internet has actually helped us in that endeavor. It is very common for a Viscose reader to upload a picture of themselves reading the magazine after they buy it.

And we try to repost as many of them to keep emphasizing the object, the object, the object, the object. We don’t have a digital platform. We just have our archive, which is all scanned. It’s the scanned images of the physical object to, again, loop on constantly back to the thing itself.

Arjun Basu: That’s interesting because that’s like a pure marketing win. You want your users to become advocates and evangelists. And when they do that, then you’ve won as a marketer. I find Viscose, I feel like it’s almost a perfect mirror of the industry that it thinks about, right? I mean, fashion is that. You win when you have that photo taken and all that hard work is out in the world, and then people start doing things based on the photo. It’s almost like controlled anarchy in a way. Or chaos, but with rules. Like there were actual rules to it, obviously, to the fashion industry. But fashion always seems a bit chaotic, which is why outsiders can never parody fashion because the people in fashion know already.

Jeppe Ugelvig: Yeah. And to be in fashion, to be trendy, to be a form of a lifestyle narrative or a form of consumption, it’s really interesting to see one’s product be out there. And when you meet someone like, “Oh, I have all of them at home.” It’s like, like, “wow!”

It’s a huge honor to be a part of people’s material lives in that way. It’s an extremely abstract sensation that I think anyone who makes many objects of something—whether it’s clothes or design objects or magazines—it’s a very humbling sensation to see these objects find their owners. And yeah, social media is the most immediate reflection of, “Here I am, a part of someone’s life, so much so that they want to share it with others.” Which feels just crazy.

I will say, though, the most meaningful engagement with our readers happens at the live events that we do, and the launches, the physical launches. That’s another thing, perhaps a reflection of my own kind of ever-itinerant, independent freelance lifestyle. I lived out of a suitcase for the first five years of Viscose’s life.

So one of the ways of really injecting Viscose, and making it seem locally-anchored in many places also, was to do 8, 9, 10 launches for every single issue in different countries. So we’ve done launches in Korea and Japan and Germany and London and New York and Paris. We often do them in a kind of intense way, like right after each other basically. And meet the readers and invite people to speak and do reading groups and listening parties.

Arjun Basu: So then I have to use the word ‘brand,’ of course. You’ve created a community around a media brand where the brand is actually really important because the object changes so much all the time. And you have these outposts where you have your people and they support the brand. So what is the plan for this? And I realize just asking the question that you probably don’t know what two issues from now are going to be. But what is the plan? Because you’ve built something actually quite interesting.

Jeppe Ugelvig: Yeah, thank you. I’m thinking about this a lot. I think we all are right now. Because certainly in the last year or so we’ve hit a new level of kind of global visibility, I think. And we take that very seriously. We sold out, we sell out very fast. In fact, too fast. We’re upping printing. I can maybe reveal here we’re thinking of reprinting issue one and two because they are so extremely hard to get your hands on.

There’s that, but in the future, I think Viscose’s current setup will not last forever. We have more issues to do and we’re working on the next one right now. So not to worry. But I think in terms of the brand and the community, like you say, that’s really what I’m thinking about right now. How to institutionalize that and how to give that longevity.

There is a gap in fashion knowledge, and fashion research, and fashion discourse in and around print. And there are many ways we can occupy that as a physical institution, as a publishing house, as a magazine, as a web platform. It could go in many different directions and I want them to go in all the directions.

Arjun Basu: You just listed a lot of different channels there. So it’s obviously stuff that you’re thinking about all of those things.

Jeppe Ugelvig: No, and it’s, it basically comes back to the question of money and institutional structure, right? I was completely blank on how to produce and run a print magazine five years ago. That seems to be now a slightly more sustainable practice because we have great distribution. We still get funding from partners with museums and public grants.

But the idea of starting a publishing house, for example, or a research institute is a completely different can of worms. So I am very open to backers, to sponsors—we were very close with many universities. It’s an open question. And I think in the coming years we’ll be focusing a lot on that and we have some exciting collaborations and very institutional partnerships coming up.

So I think it’s essentially trying to solve the riddle that all independent fashion publishing deals with. To also think about how we can retain the spirit of Viscose, which is inherently anti-commercial. I don’t think it would make sense to do a Viscose volume two that’s just full of ads. I don’t really see how that would be the same endeavor, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I need to be proven wrong.

But I think we’ve managed to stay, like, so uncompromising for so long. To me, that is a sign that we should continue to, and that we’ve actually identified and carved out a space for us that’s very different from a normal magazine. So I’m trying to nourish that and see where that can go. So if you have any ideas, I’m all open.

Arjun Basu: Well, think about it some more. There’s an interesting round table about fashion criticism in issue six. And one of the critics says there’s more discourse around fashion now with kids engaging with theory. And that to me is very interesting. And fashion’s always been about intersections of art and music and the wider culture and then very technical things like fabric and place. It’s both a leader and a follower, the idea of younger people getting involved on an intellectual level to me is interesting. Is that something that’s new? Is that something that you’ve helped evolve—and is that reflected in your readership?

Jeppe Ugelvig: I hope that we’ve been a part of it, but I certainly see that those kits are flocking to Viscose. And I know that we are the favorite magazine in the fashion theory programs, fashion history programs. And that is something we’re extremely grateful for, but also was not really the plan, to be honest.

As I said, this was really intended as a fashion magazine for the art world, if you will. I pitched this to the Danish Arts Council, hoping that we would get some money, and often still when I fundraise, I call it an art project, it’s an exhibition, it’s a curatorial project, whatever.

And those people have responded. But the true kind of public that has been created by Viscose is this sort of theory-leaning, nerdy, research-interested, young fashion readership, especially students. And they’re very young. They’re 18, 19 years old. They are so hungry for knowledge and for critical thinking, which makes a lot of sense because they’ve been robbed, in their coming of age, of engaging with media.

They grew up in the age of the algorithm, which feeds you material. These filter bubbles that we’ve been talking about for years. I think with this young generation, you see it in that they are used to consuming the feed. So what they really are looking for is much more obscure niche material. They’re really unhappy with the suggested content, if you will.

And this excites me because that reminds me of my earliest days on the internet, in the age of the blog. And I think something like Substack and this sort of alternative media developing in the last couple of years is another sign of the collapse of Web 2.0, the collapse of media platform internet. And it’s really being led by hungry readers and listeners and media consumers, which may seem like a new thing, but that is exactly the history of publishing, right? This happened in the seventies—

Arjun Basu: Yeah, I mean it’s very interesting because I’m fascinated by not just fashion. And when I read that I was like, “Of course it would be!” Because I’ve been reading some excellent thinkers on places like Beehive and Substack. And I think we needed a generation of digital natives to destroy the digital experience. And they’re doing it because the tech lords are awful people and seem to be doing a good job of destroying it itself, but for the wrong reasons. And they are saying, “Wait a sec. It sucks, but read me. Because I have something very interesting to say that you’re not actually getting from anyone else.” And this was what print was. Nothing is new, right? And so here we go, we’re getting this specialty niche stuff again. The only thing that died with the death of print was a general interest magazine.

Jeppe Ugelvig: Yes. And of course, in the age of Substack, I do worry quietly, What about the beauty? A Substack is not exactly an editorial. It’s not an editorial aesthetic experience. It’s very underwhelming. Even good old Blogspot from 2008 would probably be slightly more HTML customized.

So I think in terms of content, you’re absolutely right. We’re back in independent media in some sort of sense, especially in an economic sense. It’s become more fractured than ever and individualized subscriber based. And that worries me in the sense that where does the indie print magazine sit in that? And the kind of hyper-tactile but also social space that a magazine is. A magazine is a reflection of a network rather than an individual mind and thinker or writer.

It’s hard for me to see it when I make the magazine, but looking at issue one, for example, like it is such a snapshot of where we were at that particular moment—who our friends were, our neighbors were, which cities we were in, which movies we were watching, and who we were talking to.

That has to be nourished somehow. And I hope that this current hunger for something other than the big platforms will continue to have space for these slightly more aesthetically-ambitious projects.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, me too.

Jeppe Ugelvig: It was a long pause there.

Arjun Basu: I know. I was like, “What do I say?” I think you answered everything I had to ask. I love doing this podcast because I’m exposed to so much stuff. Like you say, it’s so hard to stay in touch with everything. And I think the difference now is scale. It’s not even quantity because I think people have always thought there was too much media, even when there wasn’t. Like you’d go to a magazine store or the newsstand and there were hundreds and hundreds of magazines. Now it’s just scale. And there’s a lot of good stuff out there. Viscose It’s like the type of magazine that you can read like a book and come back to.

Jeppe Ugelvig: Yes. It’s more like a volume. Yeah, you’re right. And this is also why for a long time, we’ve resisted reprinting. First we couldn’t really afford it, but also like, “No, onto the next.” A magazine is a periodical, let’s respect a project going forward and time passing. And fashion itself is forever on the move. And we want to respect that. But at the same time we have to admit that so much work goes into these things—we commission a lot of original writing.

And the other goal of Viscose was always to make these texts mandatory reading in classrooms and have people print them out. Which is why we have our PDF exportable online archive. But people want the objects. They really want the objects. And I think for me, scale is really about operations. It’s about economy. It’s about, “What is this?”

Arjun Basu: Yeah. It’s a production issue.

Jeppe Ugelvig: Yeah. What is this—if we don’t do advertising, if we don’t have an agency service behind Viscose, which most independent magazines do. We don’t. Maybe we should. You know, What is going to be our bread and butter here? And I think recently we were just like, look, there are so many people, including libraries, who will protect our legacy for the next many centuries. They can’t get a hold of Issue One. We’re sitting on actual assets here, we’re doing a favor to the writers to send them back into the world.

So this is a decision we’ve taken recently because—and this is again, amazing—that if you are an M.A. student in fashion and you want to write your thesis on the history of the stylist, you’re going to need Issue One of Viscose because that is actually one of the best resources on that material. And similarly, if you want to do one on histories of trans fashion and trans politics in fashion, that Issue Four we did is an exceptional resource, because nothing was ever done on it before and nothing was ever done on it after.

Which is maybe why we’re drifting more into a book publishing house logic slowly. And I’m trying to think about what that means and if it’s the same or if it’s different. But, there are histories, there are examples of this in the past. Many magazines have started publishing houses.

And I look at someone like the great editor and writer who started Semiotext(e). Semiotext(e), over the course of his life, changed shape many times: It was a journal, it was an exhibition, it was a publishing house for translating French theory, then it was a publishing house for English language literature, then it became a magazine again. I would like for Viscose to be something like that, to be this place for a certain kind of knowledge production. But that changes shape many times. Because Viscose itself, this is why we chose the name: Changeability.

Arjun Basu: So is that the through-line, in terms of the brand, in terms of the magazines? Because each one is so different because your publishing schedule is irregular. Is the thinking the through-line?

Jeppe Ugelvig: The thinking is the through line. The respect for print and the thinking and the research into fashion, I think. It is always trying to reinvent our intellectual approach to fashion, which includes the object and print. And like I said, if you read the sort of manifesto, the introduction from the first issue, it’s a pretty tough diagnostic. On one end, identifying, like I mentioned at the beginning, a kind of superficial commercial fashion publishing culture that doesn’t allow space for critical thinking.

But on the other end, an institutionalized fashion studies kind of academic world that is very caught up in, like methodological hangovers. It’s extremely inaccessible to a non-specialist audience. It’s often behind impossible paywalls that you can’t get beyond unless you have academic affiliation. And it’s just not good writing. It’s too, it’s too much in the lineage of dry sociology. It’s positivist and its modes of arguing.

So that is the tension between the commercial lifestyle magazine and dry-assed fashion academia. That’s where we are in the middle of. And I think this is also why the fashion students have responded. And I think they will continue to, because when you’re in school, this is the most open your mind will ever be. You are young, you are learning, and you have no trauma from the professional world.

Arjun Basu: You haven’t been corrupted yet.

Jeppe Ugelvig: You haven’t been corrupted, and this is really the time where you can get these people, you can inspire them, you can show them the practices that they will end up building businesses around, or they will read a writer that they will emulate ,for the rest of their careers.

It’s an incredible time. Really, students are the most important people on the planet, I think. And they forever will be. So that’s where we want to be. Whatever form that will take in the future economically and institutionally, I think.

Arjun Basu: Students marching towards the future.

Jeppe Ugelvig: Yeah, totally.

Arjun Basu: So what are three magazines or media that are exciting you right now?

Jeppe Ugelvig: Ooh, gosh. Put me on the spot. Right now, what magazines do I read? New York Review of Architecture. I think there’s a kind of a broadsheet reinvention in New York City. It’s been really nice to be back. I moved back here a year ago after a long time on the road. And I don’t know what it is about New Yorkers, but they really love reading and they love print media and they also love readings at the moment—like physical reading events. There’s like a lot.

So the Whitney Review—my dear friend Whitney, and a long time contributor to Viscose as well, has also reinvented the broadsheet. It’s focused on literature and reviews of books. Those two magazines I think are exciting because they’re in the same spirit as, actually much more hardcore than Viscose in the sense they do not prioritize the image.

Arjun Basu: They’re very text-based.

Jeppe Ugelvig: Very text-based. And I heard one of the editors of New York Review of Architecture the other day, addressing this in a talk of how they actually don’t have images in the magazine. They have illustrations, I think. They gave me a copy and it took me a while to get through it myself because it’s just—it’s chunky. But I think that’s exciting.

And in terms of commercial magazines, for me, the only exciting commercial magazine is still Pin-Up magazine. And again, this is very within my own little orbit. Felix Burrichter, the editor-in-chief and founder, is my mentor and is in many ways the one that pushed me to start Viscose.

I used to spend a lot of time in his office conceptualizing this. And he’s helped me with printing stuff—he’s just been incredibly generous. And he comes from a different era of magazines. He was one of the New York editors of Butt Magazine back in its earliest shape.

And I admire him because he has carved out a space that is quite exceptional in the realm of architecture and interior design, and runs a commercial model on advertising that makes sense. Because, if you think about it, the world of interior design and furniture is so full of incredible brands, but there aren’t any good magazines, so why would they spend their money on Architectural Digest?

So here comes Felix, who makes an interesting, intellectual, but very fun and entertaining editorial space. Of course, these Italian luxury furniture companies are going to throw their money at him! And that gives—not to say that it’s a gold mine, Pin-Up—but it gives a kind of a structure and a raison d’être to that magazine in a kind of old-school way.

And I think that is 100% because the team there take nothing for granted and are constantly reinventing the way of doing old-school commercial fashion publishing in an indie way. And this is something I’ve never managed to do. I’ve never managed to sell an ad even if I wanted to. I took a different route.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. You don’t have specs.

Jeppe Ugelvig: We don’t have specs.

Arjun Basu: You don’t have technical specs for advertisers. There’s going to be an advertiser that understands what you’re doing. And the one thing we will say about the fashion houses is that they still do understand advertising and brand.

Jeppe Ugelvig: Yes.

Arjun Basu: More than any other industry. Luxury brands in general understand this space, and understand print more than any other industry because it’s tactile and they understand that part of it. And they understand the engagement and that a lot of this is a long-term play. You’re not going to sell an $80,000 whatever with one ad. It’s going to take a campaign, it’s going to take a strategy, and it’s going to take a thought process. So that’s why I think maybe you could sell an ad, but it’s going to be a lot of work.

Jeppe Ugelvig: Yeah. That’s exactly it. It’s really hard to sell an ad. It gets harder and harder every year. There are very few people in the business who are doing that professionally. And at the beginning there was a political or critical posture, I think, in being ad free. But there certainly isn’t anymore. We’d welcome an ad.

But it’s like you say—where do you put your energy? And I think we’re so busy doing the thing that by the time that we get to the commercial side of it we’ve lost interest, we’ve lost steam. And we hope that Viscose finds its way to its people in a different way.