Jefferson Hack is one of my publishing heroes. As empty and cliché as the sentence might be, I love how
Dazed & Confused,
Another Magazine and
Another Man are different from other fashion magazines in the market.
Hack gave an interview to
Purple Fashion magazine’s Olivier Zahm for the Spring Summer 2010 issue of the magazine in which he explains the genesis of his publications:
On
Interview magazine’s influence:
Interview magazine is hugely important to me. I bought my first copy of it when I was 13. It was a special issue about the future. […] I saw the magazine and flipped through it and it spoke to me. […] I realised that the magazine harnessed creative energy. It mixed sexual politics with forward thinking and a kind of intense interdisciplinary crossover of art, fashion, music, and film. […] Interview was a window through which I saw a world I couldn’t experience through any other medium. […] I immediately understood that this magazine could have the power to make a lid living in the provinces. a kid who feels different, who has troubles with bullies at school, feel like he’s not alone in the world.
On meeting
Rankin, who became co-founder of
Dazed in 1991:
In my first month at [The London] college [of Printing] a guy named Rankin walked into a class I was in and said, “I’m part of the student union. I’m recruiting people to make the student magazine”. He was going around looking for a team. He was doing a BA in photography and had taken a sabbatical to become a member of the student union.
Hack was then the only student to turn up to the magazine meeting. His first interview was with Gilbert and George. He had no idea who they were.
Rankin had total faith in me even though I had no qualification for the job. He gave me the confidence to take it on. Without him, I would never have done it.
Their student magazine went on to scooping Best Magazine and Best Design at
the Guardian Student Media Awards. Hack then left college to start
Dazed.
The first issue we did was a three-poster magazine: three pieces of folded paper that made a poster, in black and white. Totally self-distributed. It was like a manifesto. When you opened it out, you had editorial on one side and a whole poster image on the other. The idea was that kids could paste it on their wall. But it took a long time. It was a year between the first and second issues, and then another three months before the third. We started using staples in issue four, and to perfect binding in issue 20.
