More Issues than Vogue

H&M sweater
Zara trousers (similar)
Balenciaga heels
Vintage handbag (similar)
Mango sunglasses
Keltie Leanne Designs ring (c/o) (similar)
Delphine Pariente ring (similar)
Location: The Great-West Life Building – Winnipeg, Manitoba

I bought my first issue of Vogue in eleventh grade. As fashion girls go, I was a bit late to the Vogue party. But, while I loved fashion, my monthly magazine budget went to copies of International Gymnast magazine for virtually all the years that I spent as a competitive gymnast. That budget, needless to say, was relatively small, and I was forced to prioritise. For me, gymnastics came before everything else in life.

It was in the year after my knee injury, when I reluctantly gave up gymnastics and the identity that came along with it, that I bought Vogue for the first time. Figuring out who I was without my schedule of weekly training sessions and upcoming competitions was a struggle. In fact, the loss of identity made me reluctant to give up the sport. Despite the fact that I knew I could no longer meet its intense physical demands. If I quit, I asked myself in my journal, who will I be?

Vogue didn’t give me much in the way of answers. The design clothes featured in the glossy editorials were not only so far out of my price range as to seem not quite real, but the avant-garde shapes and colours didn’t seem to have a practical application in my daily life, which, on an exciting day, mostly called for jeans and sweaters. What it did give me was a stack of glossy, elegant art supplies.

I didn’t start by cutting up my first copy of Vogue. I had some old issues of Flare tucked away in a drawer that I took a pair of Crayola scissors to. In retrospect, I don’t recall what possessed me to start cutting, but once I did start, I couldn’t stop. It started with making postcards, but that was just the beginning. Two months from the end of twelfth grade, I taped the first cutout to my bedroom door and, in the ensuing year, I covered the entire space, floor to ceiling, in an elaborate, colourful collage. While it’s faded significantly now, it’s still on the door to my old bedroom at my parents’ house.

These days, I spend a lot of time in airports. And any trip to an airport inevitably involves a visit to the newsstand for me. It’s been years since I bought Vogue regularly. There are so many reasons for that, including the consistently decreasing relevance of opinions from old guard editors like Anna Wintour to the vitriol fashion journalists release, time and time again, against bloggers who they perceive to be taking away their work. Mostly, it’s that magazines are heavy and, in the digital era, there is no need to carry around a hard copy of anything printed in trade paper. All the same content is online, anyway.

It’s rare I actually make space in my budget for magazines now, but I will always have a place in my heart for Vogue and its compatriots. At a time in my life when I wasn’t really sure who I was or where I was going, they were there. And while I spent far more time deconstructing them than actually reading them, they helped me to realise there was more to me than the gymnast I had been. They gave me the freedom to create – not just my own art, but a new sense of myself outside of the sport I’d devoted my life to.

So I still pick up a magazine sometimes. (Usually, it’s Porter these days – their photography and creative direction eclipsed Vogue’s almost immediately after their launch. At least in my opinion.) I don’t cut them up anymore. But I still know that I can. I still know I can take something that exists and transform it entirely, making it my own along the way. Vogue gave me that.