Spring Magazines: FUDGE, SPUR, So-En

My favourite fashion seasons are the transitional ones of spring and autumn and March-May and September-November are the months for which I amass the largest piles of magazines. Today I finally had the time and inclination (i.e. it's no longer snowing. In London. wtf.) to flip through the April batch and thought I'd give a quick overview of my three favourite Japanese fashion magazines.


Over the last year or so, SPUR has somewhat fallen from its lofty (self-erected) perch as "the intellectual fashion magazine" -- now over twice the thickness of So-En or FUDGE, its extra bulk is entirely due to ads, though it remains both less bloated and more thoughtful than Vogue [pomposity =/= profundity, Vogue, srsly]. The most unreservedly fashion-led of the three, it consequently has less of a coherent editorial voice, and my fondness for it fluctuates depending on how well the latest crop of trends chime with me, but given the sheer range of styles each edition encompasses, it remains a reliable source of tasty fashion tidbits, even if an individual issue is (like this one) generally a snooze-fest of the already-boring 'it' pieces from the big designers, lazily styled.

Anyway. Plenitude being the watchword, here are the yellow and green pages from their smorgasbord of print trousers:

and collaborations:

Although as round-ups go, I like their 'Styling School' series best. This round: Shirts!

I geek out over care instructions :D

This issue also features a random strawberry-themed collection, which I found cute without being too sickening:

....a mood which is carried over into my favourite (least forced) editorial from this month, a perfect sunlit J&M Davidson picnic, shot at angles both intimate and airy:


As for beauty, I am still on my modern '60s kick so very much enjoyed this:

and the powder-wing here is also something I'd like to play with:




Some of the Japanese brands featured this round (with short designer interviews and beautifully painterly pictures) include:

Some outfits featuring pieces from fifteen up-and-coming designers:

A few pages from a great, weighty chapter on fashion photography through the twentieth century:
But So-En isn't all FASHIN B SRS ART -- there's always plenty of pretty / wearable / approachable / straight-up kyoot to be had in each issue.
or this Minä Perhonen editorial (surprisingly shadowy / coolly lit!) and a piece on their new Kyoto flagship:


Beauty bits, one which I love in every last detail:

makeup by Yumi Narai

and the other which is an interesting play on low (left) and high (right) contrast brights.

makeup by Sadafumi Ito (NARS Japan)

Representative FUDGE model -- red and wayward of hair, freckled and elfin of feature -- and adorabling (rocking would be so inappropriate, no?) a Kusa Kanmuri print scarf.

One of the advantages of FUDGE's determinedly youthful approach to fashion is that they can often make me look again at even brands I particularly dislike with new and naïf/waif-like eyes. This issue, the editors introduce Louis Vuitton to its young readers through its "Brand Pick-Up!" feature:

I just like that it's all done in a fresh, irreverent [this time, through some Tom Sawyer-esque whitewashing storyline] and distantly-aspirational way, recognising that these pieces are beyond most readers' budgets. Diffusion lines and the quirkier domestic brands are its more usual fare:

But back to aspiration, this spin on the standard streetstyle feature sums up for me the likeliest ambitions of the FUDGE girl: "Art School Girl[s] in Paris [and London]"

Paris and London are FUDGE's primary fairylands (New York -- more resistant to their brand of whimsy -- comes in a very distant third), which excels at escapism as a 'young' magazine should. As a chauvenistic Londoner who goes to Paris a few times a year and finds it always disappointing (*ducks*) it can be a bit of a funhouse mirror experience reading seeing my city through this mag's eyes, but thankfully April's is a Paris-bound issue and this Paris is far more delicious than the one I know :P I particularly liked that one of the locations they chose to highlight was a millliner's :D



^this functions as our obligatory beauty shot -- love that orange blush -- and, like the violin in the grass, isn't quite as random as it might seem. A few FUDGE trademarks I've come to recognise over the years: the bathroom/tub shot, the balcony/climbing-out-the-window shot, the kitchen-perch shot, the ladder-perch shot, the random-object-as-hat-shot.... hey, it's still better than Vivi's facial-tic-o-rama. I may be growing up a bit after all :P


Any other magazine addicts? Share your faves or rant away in the comments <3