MINI MAG. 1 FALL 25
ISSUE
WELCOME TO THE FIRST EDITION OF ARMOUR’S MINI MAG.
HERE WE CELEBRATE FASHION, ART, CULTURE AS A COMMUNITY.
LAUREN SPEICHER
PHOTOGRAPHY
HAUL TILL YOU FALL
LAUREN SPEICHER
The subtle hum of the vaparetto outside my window woke me this morning. Groggy, I felt the glitter from last night’s Sagra dance in Campo San Giacomo still stuck in my hair. I looked at the clock: precisely forty-five minutes until I had to report to my morning position. I threw on a linen dress – the only material built to combat the Venetian summer heat – and slipped into the narrow streets. I gave up on Google Maps weeks ago. No map could do justice to the winding paths, secret bridges, and alleys of the labyrinth that is Venice. I was happiest roaming freely anyways. I always swore the best way to explore this city was to surrender to its current and let it navigate you on its own. It was the only place on Earth where I desired to get lost.
My pace was brisk. It was an unfortunate impossibility to be in a hurry in Venice. The present was the only pace. I hurriedly picked up a two euro cappuccino
from Giuseppe’s Bar, owned by a life-long Venetian who I befriended when I moved to Cannaregio and insisted I practice my (very) mediocre Italian with.
Thus began my mile-long walk to work: just Venice and me again. I refused to wear headphones on my morning commute. The Venetian atmosphere was music enough – the quiet claps of water in the canals, seagulls screeching from a distance, the chaotic conversations between merchants shouting across the markets…but what I loved most about Venice was its quiet moments. Contrary to what one might believe, Venice holds many pockets of silence…if you allow yourself to look.
Slightly sweaty, I slipped through the secret entrance at the Guggenheim and clocked in.
The clock read 9:18. Close enough.
“Beauty was not rare here; it was ambient, even in the most serendipitous places.”
In the intern room, I greeted my fellow Guggie coworkers and read my schedule: “PC4. SCH. PALAZZO. LUNCH. PALAZZO. FREE STUDY.”
I grabbed my walkie and reported to PC4. Guarding the galleries was often a tedious task, but I found I quite enjoyed it: I was required to exist in a space with Picasso, Magritte, Kandinsky, and Severini. Expected to learn and take in every brushstroke, color, and formal quality of these iconic works. It was a gift to live amongst one of the greatest collections of modern art in the world. Not so bad for an art history buff, if you ask me.
Despite the chaos of the city’s summertime rush, the
Peggy Guggenheim Collection served as a serene refuge for any passerby. A palace of innovation and endless beauty. I was completely smitten and inexplicitly inspired.
After work, it was customary to swing by the Corner Pub for a three-euro Select Spritz, made with a unique Venetian aperitif. Everyone would congregate on the steps of the nearby bridge and converse. I could get lost in conversation for hours, thinking only minutes had passed. I had a newfound love for the simplicity of just sitting and talking: Venetians have mastered this art form. Three essential ingredients were necessary: one Select Spritz (with a green olive of course), one (sometimes two) poorly rolled cigarettes, and a
La bellezza è condividerla. Beauty is sharing it.
crowded bridge to sit on. What a cliché, right? But here, this is no special occasion: it is a way of life.
My summer in Venice reignited my creative fire. I danced. I laughed. I existed in a bubble of art, love, and mysterious enchantment. The salt air made even the ordinary gleam. Beauty was not rare here; it was ambient, even in the most serendipitous places: the noon bell’s echo ricochetting within the garden, a cat blinking from a windowsill in the silence of night, a morning fog thread unspooling over Zattere. None of it meant to be concealed; if I can write it true, maybe others will feel the same small ignition.
La bellezza è condividerla. Beauty is sharing it.
LAUREN THROUGH THE EYES OF HER FRIEND
MAX SELVER
HAUL TILL
U FALL
CREATIVE DIRECTION: TALIA ZAKALIK, NINA BERGMAN
Withthe rise of Instagram and TikTok, we’re met with an ad every few seconds, typically disguised by a conventionally attractive girl who appears to be ranting until you notice it’s just another sponsored post. She tells us it’s a “must have,” her “favorite product,” and a “staple in her routine.”
While these descriptions mway seem far-fetched, advertisements via social media platforms used by Gen Z have skyrocketed and racked up intense profits.
97% of Gen Z consumers say they now use social media as their top source of shopping inspiration. TikTok shop, Amazon, and Pinterest also make the check-out
process user-friendly which further incentivizes spurof-the-moment purchases.
Another strategy to enable consumers builds upon recent strides in technology. Social media platforms have personalized algorithms that pair users with advertisements that fit their characters.
Along with online advertisements, social media also contributes to the superficial competition between peers. Day-to-day we can see and hear about the newest trends in clothes, products, and accessories with our peers.
These trends are often short-lived due to the competition and fast-paced nature of social media. Cycling through clothes and products demonstrates today’s overconsumption crisis.
80% of all clothing is landfilled or incinerated. This means that only 20% of clothing gets donated and recycled.
We’ve been told since our youth to “reuse, reduce, recycle,” but is this even possible with low-quality, mass-produced clothing? Fast fashion runs rampant on platforms like TikTok shop, Shein, Aliexpress, and
other websites known for being inexpensive.
Many teens will look to cheawp stores and websites for trendy clothing and specific outfits planned for one-time use, such as Halloween costumes. Once these clothes are bought, they live on the bottom of dress drawers and hidden in the depths of one’s closet.
These pieces are so inexpensive and trivial that donating them to a Goodwill or Salvation Army would not even be a passing thought. Additionally, brands like Shein are known for being low quality, so even if
“Chasing after pieces of clothing and beauty products will your void of insecurity — our landfills.”
clothing never fill — it just fills
donated, they would likely not be sold as their price at Goodwill may even be more than it was originally. The only solution seems to be to avoid fast fashion brands altogether and invest in longer-lasting clothing. Do we need over five pairs of jeans? Four pairs of sunglasses? What about a purse that doesn’t fit anything so you need to buy a functional purse and keep the tiny one for the “aesthetic.”
Overconsumption in its purest form represents American society’s pressures to keep up appearances. We buy more and more in the pursuit of keeping up with trends and asserting our dominance over others.
If 34 billion pounds of textiles being wasted each year does not serve as a wake-up call to Americans then what will? Does the humanitarian crisis of child labor and close-to-nothing hourly pay not make Shien shoppers bat an eye?
18 cents of a $30.62 shirt goes to the worker. On average, an Ethiopian worker makes $26 per month.
Whether it be the inhumane working conditions for garment workers in factories or the hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic microfibers that pollute the
ocean each year, find a reason that drives you to stop supporting fast fashion and stop engaging in overconsumption.
The market for fast fashion is only growing and greenhouse gas emissions are growing with it. Chasing after pieces of clothing and beauty products will never fill your void of insecurity, it just fills our landfills.
CREATIVE DIRECTION: TALIA ZAKALIK, NINA BERGMAN
PHOTOGRAPHY
EMILY LAPIDUS, ANDY MAI
STYLING:
SHIRA PINKER
GILLIAN NEVINS-SAUNDERS
MODELS: COURTNEY LUCAS II
TATUM GOFORTH
WRITING: NATALIA JAMULA
LEVIN GARSON
I paint spaces, bodies and technological artifacts, through which I map out bodily desire. I work with imagery from archival films, photographs, and my own encounters, which I stretch and pull digitally, culminating in oil paintings. I’m influenced by the work of Canadian filmmaker, David Cronenberg. In his films, the evolution and development of the body takes center stage; eroticism and bodily function are replaced with futuristic machinery. In a 1999 interview with Richard Porton for Cineaste, Cronenberg spoke about technology, saying, “we absorb it into our nervous systems and into our concepts of reality and into our bodies.” My paintings work similarly; they are artifacts of manipulated image and reality. The stretch and warp in my paintings indicate that the photographic stimulus has traveled through a digital space and been projected back, differently. My pulled images also mark
NEW SENSORY ABSTRACTION, OIL AND ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
24X30”
a shift in perception. Something is pulling my gas stations to the upper left corner, something obscured and unknowable. I am interested in what we perceive, as well as what we can’t. In Spatial Expansions (Gas stations), my paintings are both sensual and perceptually altered. The gas tanks, pumps, stopped cars, signage, and lampposts you might find in middle America are all subject to my warping process, becoming sites of erotic consumption. America is spacious, filled with imagery and commodifiable bodies. Yet seen through the stretch and pull, it becomes hollow and deflated, rendered alien and foreign.
I MADE 6 PAINTED OMENS/PROPHECIES, DRAWN FROM BOTH ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY SOURCES. THROUGH STRETCHING THE IMAGES, THEY BECOME CLEARER WHEN VIEWED FROM THE SIDE.
1. DEAD FISH
2. ELON MUSK’S STARLINK SATELLITE
3. CAR CRASH 4. BLOOD MOON
BIRD OF PREY
DELTA PLANE CRASH
OMENS, OIL AND ACRYLIC ON MYLAR
Painting is the final stage where my work terminates. Oil painting is a bodily experience to me, a fleshy sensation like sex or eating a fig. It’s a physical and tactile work, an extension of my body. Yet it’s also a tool, a prosthesis. My brushstrokes scan the canvas’s surface like radar, caressing and examining it. My brushstroke isn’t descriptive, instead intuitive. Through painting I perceive what is revealed and what is obscured; what is surveilled and what is censored. I also use painting to abstract sensation. With just color and brushstroke, I construct sensual spaces, sometimes mimicking the American landscape or built environment, elsewhere replicating light and temperature. Reality is displaced with shifted color and wet paint. My paintings absorb these new realities, leaving them laid bare on canvas.
DETECTIVES
OIL ON CANVAS, 24X24”
THIS PAINTING COMES FROM A MODIFIED TWIN PEAKS STILL, SHOWING THE DISTORTION OF BODIES THROUGH THE SCREEN
MOVIE
DEAD POETS SOCIETY
Sink into the couch and let the golden hush of a Vermont autumn surround you, as Robin Williams reminds us how precious it is to simply be alive.
1989
Peter Weir
RECS
If “finishing a page and having no idea what you just read” were a movie. Non linear storytelling is in, and director Wong Kar Wai is king.
1994
Wong Kar-wai
PERFECT DAYS
Who knew public toilets could be so cool? Cassettes from the 60s and 70s, film photography, and plants galore-everything to satisfy that performative male urge.
2023 Wim Wenders
2001
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
AMÉLIE
A whimsical narrator, a kaleidoscope of color, and a parade of beautifully peculiar souls. Think Wes Anderson – if he traded his corduroy for a striped shirt, a handlebar mustache, and a crimson beret.
AMÉLIE
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
If you’re bothered by Leonardo DiCaprio not dating anyone over 25, watch him be a deeply loving, disfunctional, pot-head father in One Battle After Another. Watch it before it frontruns the Oscars–you can thank me later.
2025
Paul Thomas Anderson
DEAD POET’S SOCIETY Stream on Hulu
CHUNGKING EXPRESS Stream on Tubi
PERFECT DAYS Stream on Hulu
AMÉLIE Stream on Apple TV ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER Watch in theaters now
CULTURE
COMMENTARY BY: JARED GARELICK
TAYLOR SWIFT & THE LIFE OF A SHOW GIRL
In no surprise to anyone at all, Taylor Swift has managed to completely monopolize Culture™ again with the release of her highly-anticipated 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl on October 3rd. Despite the myriad of highly critical reviews and not-so positive response from fans online, the album still was able to debut at #1 and break a whole bunch of other streaming records. Where my issue lies, besides the clunky lyrics and boring production, is the visual aspect of this whole rollout. Taylor Swift, in my opinion, has become such an enigma in the way she has slowly rendered herself completely untransformable, which makes new aesthetics and “looks” feel like the random silly ones they throw in during a makeover montage in a 90s movie, not the perfected final one revealed at the end. Underneath the undoubtedly expensive feather headdresses and rhinestone bodysuits is still the same Taylor we’ve had for the past few years, including the now signature bangs and red lipstick she’s had since 2022.
CARDI AND NICKI: ROUND ????
Just when you thought the coast was clear, Cardi B and Nicki Minaj managed to reignite their almost decade-long feud on Twitter (X if you’re lame) in days following the release of Cardi’s long-awaited sophomore album Am I the Drama? (a beautifully ironic title given the circumstances). Although I’d like to be the kind of person that tries to rise above the pettiness and advocate for a drama-less discourse between mainstream artists, I can’t help but be entertained by the sheer audacity and deeply hateful one-liners the two rappers manage to spew at each other for seemingly hours on end. In this most recent edition, both Nicki and Cardi really pull out all the stops, dragging in the other’s children, romantic relationships, and allegations of drug abuse (although not really new, I still have to commend their unwavering creativity).
BAD BUNNY HALFTIME SHOW
Within minutes of the announcement that Bad Bunny would be the next Super Bowl halftime show performer, conservative corners of the internet did exactly what they do best: lose their collective minds. Apparently, the idea of Bad Bunny headlining America’s most sacred sporting event was just too much for the “family values” crowd to process. Fox News commentators started throwing around phrases like “cultural decay” and “woke halftime propaganda,” while Twitter filled up with blurry screenshots of him in a dress accompanied by captions about “the end of Western civilization.” It’s almost impressive how predictable the outrage cycle has become, given how he hasn’t even stepped on stage yet and already managed to spark enough hatred to cause people to petition to have him replaced with someone that they deem representative of the US (southern white guys who sing country).
KING KYLIE IS BACK
As the biggest threats to pop culture, the Kardashian-Jenner conglomerate have the unique capability of being able to feel the pulse of what’s trending, hop on it to make maximum profit, and then effectively kill the trend immediately after. In this particular case, Kylie Jenner has decided that now is the time to revive her 2014 persona King Kylie, rereleasing the original Kylie Lipkits and… dropping her first feature as a musical artist. While I’m not exactly surprised that this happened in the slightest, it’s still very obvious to me that Kylie’s heart isn’t in it enough for me to shrug my shoulders and just let it be a fun little fad. This feels too calculated and forced, like when Pedro Pascal heard everyone called him daddy on Twitter and then shoved it down everyone’s throats for a month. It also doesn’t do this revival any favors when Kylie’s boyfriend, one Timothee Chalamet, is producing professionally shot and edited promo videos for his new movie Marty Supreme, including a posse of guys wearing ping pong ball helmets (I’m not making this up).
TITLE: Countryside (Feat. Eva Tolkin, Liam Benzvi, Ian Isiah)
You got time and I got money Truth Moon (Feat. Bon Iver) Petals
Something Familiar Rubio Issy 100° Lovely Sewer Beetlebum
Stabilisers for Big Boys
Your Lips, My Mouth Kiss of Life Alien Love Call Joneses Water
80’s Comedown Machine
West End Girls Sepentskirt
October in St. Louis occupies the liminal space between seasons, not quite warm and not quite cold. The air carries that quiet stillness before winter settles in. These songs are a blend of synthpop, indietronica, and jazzy melodies that remind me of that autumnal air.
“Something Familiar” by Unflirt and “Rubio” by Mila Degray
I made this playlist for that in-between feeling, fleeting and romantic, where every song feels like a memory you almost remember.
ARTIST:
Blood Orange
Smerz
Dwele
Daniel Caesar
mark william lewis
Unflirt
Mila Degray
Zack Villere, Mulherin, Phoenix James DERBY
Yves Tumor
Blur Panchiko
Airiel
Sade
Turnstile, BADBADNOTGOOD, Blood Orange
Mother Soki
Jerome Thomas
The Strokes
Pet Shop Boys
Cocteau Twins
FASHION
FASHION COMMENTARY BY: REID
MCVEY
Paris Fashion
Week felt hopeful. Blazy debuted at Chanel, Anderson followed at Dior, and Ackermann presented a Tom Ford show that may have been the best in years.
CHANEL SS26 RTW: A TRIUMPH FOR FASHION, BUT NOT THE CHANEL WOMEN
While Matthieu Blazy exectued a technically gorgeous Chanel show, it felt like a Phoebe Philo-ification of the brand. This resulted in looks that, without context, could have been Lanvin or Celine. Beyond the clothes, the celestial set and music were excellent- superbly Chanel. While fashion won, the Chanel client didn’t.
DIOR SS26 RTW:
A BEAUTIFUL AND STRATEGIC SET TOWARDS A COOLER FUTURE
Jonathan Anderson’s highly anticipated women’s collection for Dior felt distinctively modern. His silhouettes strike a balance between his affinity for abstraction and functionality, imbuing the brand’s designs with a harmony that also honors Dior’s rich heritage. Not to mention Luca Guadagnino’s brilliant set design. But most importantly, it will sell.
SS26
Haider Ackermann’s newest TF show was a masterpiece, from the music to the set design to the tailoring genius that was evident in the way the models exuded power, sexiness, and control. Ackermann once again proves his prowess as a designer and his talent for creating clothes that are as much to be worn as they are to be seen. His tenure continues to be lauded, and for good reason.
TOM FORD
RTW: TOM FORD: A SHOW THAT DOESN’T MIND BEING CALLED SEXY.
In an world where the internet’s tradwife fantasy has resurged, Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu “At work” SS26 collection has spoken
Utilizing the imagery of an oversized apron, Prada redefines work through a light of agency, care, and respect.
Highlighting the dual expectations of performance and authenticity that women have confronted in past and modern society, she has again shown her ability to twist time and trend to speak to the different cultural meanings behind what we consider “work.”
Carrying a bold social and political message, Prada speaks to her quirky persona and marries innovation,culture, and nostalgia to create an act of defiance.
As workwear takes a new form, her collection strikes me as a statement that encourages us to reframe our cultural understandings of what it means to work.
PHOTOGRAPHER
PHOTOGRAPHER
PHOTOGRAPHER
PHOTOGRAPHER
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
STYLING
STYLING MODEL
MODEL
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
FILM EDITOR
CULTURE EDITOR
MUSIC EDITOR
FASHION EDITOR
FASHION EDITOR
LAYOUT DESIGNER
EVELYN PAE
LAUREN SPEICHER
LAUREN SPEICHER
NATALIA JAMULA
MAX SELVER
EVELYN PAE
EMILY LAPIDUS
ANDY MAI
TALIA ZAKALIK
NINA BERGMAN
SHIRA PINKER
GILLIAN NEVINS-SAUNDERS
COURTNEY LUCAS II
TATUM GOFORTH
LEVIN GARSON
ETHAN KIM
JARED GARELICK
SEO-EUN KIM
REID MCVEY
ABBY HAHN
EVELYN PAE
THIS FALL ISSUE OF THE MINI MAG WAS CREATED AT WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS BY ARMOUR MAGAZINE FALL 2025 SZN35