TRUE LOVE

Description

« The designer, stylist, model, MUA and hair stylist all work as artists, alongside the photographer and those who assist. True Love is a magazine for those who adore this colourful, beguiling, ever-enchanting train of creativity, that hasn’t ceased to inspire me since I bought my first issue of i-D with Amber Valletta on the cover in 1999, and The Face, with Lauryn Hill and the Fugees on a school trip in 1996. The meaning of True Love for me is authenticity and constancy in the face of a creative world engulfed by a new tide of investment groups calculating how magazines should be, feeding the results of their research back to the objects of their research in the same way that AI reprocesses images. The results are often haunted and empty. Here the visions are true, in the sense of being real, and thus often challenging, like all forms of love. If you know the pleasure of surveying a table of bloodied plates in the colonnade of the Jardin de Palais Royal, with stained Bordeaux labels, ash collecting in an empty, syrup-smelling demitasse; if you’ve searched for a rare photobook, back issue, band T-shirt or Prada pouch for hours across town, in London Town, any town; if you can’t explain why seeing heavy ultramarine fabrics hanging over glittering pastel tights, the gleam of obsidian patent leather shoes and a tactile gold buckle pinging on the tang, while the model stares at dreams off-page, brewing like a storm, sets your mind ablaze – but you’ll settle for looking – then chances are you’ve found True Love. »

Matthew Smith, fouder & Editor-in-chief