Felicity! LULA 19 2014
Former Editor-in-Chief Leith Clark left but
Lula still stays. While Clark points out via her tumblr post, that ‘Lula has
been changing…and I don’t want her to change too much’, Issue 19, featuring
British actress Felicity Jones two-thirds of her visage, grey eyes revealing a
sense of curiosity and beauty, a layering hue of cover, only printing in white
font ‘ISSUE 19’, ‘Lula’ and ‘Felicity’; indeed it changes, but at the same
time, it as well preserves the best of Lula.
Issue 19, under Editor-in-Chief Sheila
Single and Creative Director Maja Kölqvists’ co-directory, still, Lula carefully chooses the advertising
partners, such as A.P.C, Vanessa Bruno and Chanel, which perfectly matches the style of the magazine. Issue 19 inherits Lula’s multi-cover
tradition, presenting different young faces—Actress Felicity Jones, blogger
Tavi Gavinson and artist Angel Haze—to express its theme: ‘Revolution’. Since I
like Jones’ performance at movie director Niall
Maccormick’s Albatross, plus the strong graphic design of the cover, I easily
choose my personal copy among the three cover girls.
The interior design of the magazine echoes the
layering-hue cover, on the introduction page, on the fashion campaign pages of
Felicity Jones’ and ‘Lula Likes’ accessories by photographer Arvida Byström. Without any editor’s letter, yet readers
can sense the feminine photography and sensual interview within Lula. Note that
the bold-font captions between the paragraphs, such as ‘it’s good to do things
in life that you’re scared of, you’ve got to be brave’ by Jones (Brandes, 134),
or ‘I definitely consider myself a feminist and I have basically since I
learned what the word really meant’ by Gavinson (Bumpus, 74), are projecting
its core concept of the editorial team.
Viewing page by page, Lula is a beautiful fashion
photography album with appropriate amount of writing. Perhaps new Lula will not
be able to present the highly literary report such as ‘Shakespeare & Co.’(Lula
issue. 15, 2012), still issue 19 includes poetry ‘Delta Aeroplanes in Twilight’
by Greta Bellamacina, a rare act among any female magazine nowadays.
The true reasons for Leith Clark’s abandon of Lula could
be various, but from my review of issue 19, the direction of the art, the
quality of writing, the use of the papers and the voice from the inner side are
not changing that much, continuously very Lula, very dreamy, very girly yet
strongly independent. Year by year on purchasing fashion magazine, I prefer choosing
less commercial and more sophisticated photography, and Lula is ‘it mag’. Lula
Issue 20 will be launched in January-February 2015, and I am looking forward to
it already.
For the tumblr post by Leith Clark:
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