Mini-Mag Issue 2: Winter 2026

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MINI MAG. 2 WINTER 26

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SZN 35 PHOENIX LEE

ARMOUR MINI MAG 2

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WELCOME TO THE SECOND EDITION OF ARMOUR’S MINI MAG. HERE WE CELEBRATE ART, STYLE, AND CULTURE AS A COMMUNITY.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS: 3

PHOENIX LEE

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ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

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MORE THAN THIS

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ARMOUR HIGHLIGHTS

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WINTER MOVIE RECS

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CULTURE

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FASHION NEWS

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Phoe

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enix Lee ARMOUR MINI MAG 2

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For most of my life, I avoided being alone at all costs. Solitude always felt like something shameful, a boring time for a boring person. Growing up, I was different from my peers in Western American Suburbia. Being alone felt like a punishment for my difference; keeping busy was a way to rebel against this punishment. On that note, I was the kind of person that abhorred an empty time slot, and I religiously filled my schedule with plans, activities, anything to keep the body and mind busy.

Graduating high school and leaving Colorado, college gave me more people, more things to do, and more ways to look outward. This setting gave me the noise to mute my self-doubt. I was constantly performing for an imagined audience, but being constantly surrounded by people gave me relief from the insecurities I felt from being alone. But behind all that activity, I was running from the quiet.

Like many WashU juniors, I studied abroad my junior year of college. Living in Europe was a great place to emulate European audacity. Somewhere between crowded hostels and train rides, I decided to spend a week alone in the Alps, challenging myself to an introvert’s dream: near zero human interaction. I hiked during the day, ate simple meals, and spent nights listening to classic rock and my own thoughts - both equally unpredictable endeavors.

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he 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.

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At first, it felt awkward, almost unnatural. But slowly, being alone stopped feeling like isolation and started to feel like peace.

I began to understand solitude as a fundamental process to find internal clarity. In solitude, the mind recalibrates. It confronts rather than deflects, and reflects rather than reacts. And in these interludes, I am able to genuinely understand myself apart from who I perform. dModern life often conditions us to interpret stillness as idleness, as though value is tied to visibility. But solitude resists that logic. It teaches that personal worth is not contingent on recognition and that peace does not require validation. Time spent alone sharpens one’s discernment between loneliness and self-containment. In learning to be comfortable in my own company, I realize that solitude allows the self to exist, unfiltered and unobserved, long enough to become whole.

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In solitude, the mind recalibrates— it confronts rather than deflects,

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and reflects rather than reacts.

“Beauty was not rare here; it was ambient, even in the most serendipitous places.”

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Artist Spotlight

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SMOKERS OIL ON CANVAS WINTER 26

MAYA DABNEY PRAYER & SALVATION TONER TRANSFER ON ACRYLIC ON PAPER 2025

My work explores what happens to the Black body when it enters systems of looking and devotion. Through printmaking and sculpture, I pair archived images with text drawn from erotic and religious signage—using phrases like “Repent” or “Taste It!” that function as commands, invitations, and accusations. My work implicates viewers in the fetishization and judgment of Black bodies, creating a space where devotion, desire, and condemnation collapse.

When thinking about how viewers interact with my work, I turn to Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, where she analyzes how Black bodies have been made into spectacles by systems of surveillance and forced performance. The Black body becomes a commodity available for consumption, judgment, and desire through the auction block, minstrel shows, and public punishments. Hartman describes this as fungibility—the way the captive body became an empty vessel for white projections and desires. This history of spectatorship shapes how I think about my viewer—If they’re looking, they’re particARMOUR MINI MAG 2

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MISS BLACK & BEAUTIFUL TONER AND ACRYLIC ON PAPER 2025

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MISS BLACK & BEAUTIFUL TONER AND ACRYLIC ON PAPER 2025

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KEEPSAKE TRANSEFR ON ACRYLIC 2025

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HER REIGN ENDS HERE, LITHOGRAPH 2024

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ipating. If they imagine touch or read the body against the text, they have no choice but to be complicit.

Printmaking and sculpture allow me to create works that demand interaction, whether imagined or acted upon. These labor-intensive processes that leave marks and require repeated touching carry their own history of commodification. They mirror how the Black body has historically been over-touched, over-examined, and over-consumed.

By appropriating archived images and pairing them with text, I inject new meaning into these photographs. I make visible the narratives that have always been projected onto the Black body such as the hypersexualized archetypes of WINTER 26

the Jezebel and the Black Buck. This approach to pairing text and imagery references Barbara Kruger, whose work examines power and desire in human relationships—how we judge, consume, pleasure, and punish one another.

Similarly, Kara Walker’s silhouettes force viewers to project stereotypes onto anonymous Black forms, exposing their complicity in constructing racial narratives. Both force viewers to confront uncomfortable truths.

In my own work, the moment when a statement like “I’m Your Worst Fear, I’m Your Best Fantasy” becomes both reproach and desire is what I strive for. An object or image— whether devotional, erotic, or commodity—becomes sacred or fetishized through the rituals we perform around

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it and the desires we project onto it. When thinking of ritual and devotion, it’s not the specifics of religion that concern me, but rather its mechanisms: the repeated gestures, the use of symbolism and icons, the structure that dictates how and when we look. I want my work to trap the viewer in the act of looking.

But where Walker uses anonymous silhouettes and Kruger uses appropriated advertising imagery, I use archived photographs of real Black bodies—bodies that were already seen, already consumed, and subjected to a historical gaze.

Display becomes another mechanism for creating this trap.

Untitled (three Jezebels) and Miss Black & Beautiful are hung as diptychs and altar pieces, referencing objects of

devotion and religious imagery. Other works, such as Keepsake, are wrapped or obscured, creating a barrier between viewer and image that references fetish and the denial of touch. Both devotional objects and fetish objects operate through controlled looking—the altar doesn’t demand reverence but rather positions the body as a site where worship is desire, while the fetish intensifies that desire by restricting what can be seen or accessed.

The viewer must implicate themselves in the same systems of surveillance and devotional looking the work makes visible; there is no clean resolution in my work, only perpetuation.

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MORE THAN THIS

CREATIVE DIRECTION: TALIA ZAKALIK, NINA BERGMAN

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WHAT IF I SIMPLY WANT MORE OUT OF LIFE? NOT MATERIAL ITEMS, BUT PHILOSOPHICALLY.

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“Chasing after pieces of c and beauty products will your void of insecurity — our landfills.”

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clothing never fill — it just fills ARMOUR MINI MAG 2

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CREATIVE DIRECTION: TALIA ZAKALIK, YAEL GOLDWASSER PHOTOGRAPHY NINA BERGMAN, CHIBY ONYEADOR STYLING: TALIA ZAKALIK, YAEL GOLDWASSER MODELS: RHEA HERBERT, SEAN ARMOUR MINI MAG 2

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armour fl25

highlights

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ARMOUR FALL 2025 RECRUITMENT CAMPAIGN

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CUPIDUS LAUNCH PARTY 11/7/2025

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PHOTOGRAPHY: SOFIA HUITRON

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Film Curated by : Max Selver

MOVIE As winter approaches, the year’s most anticipated films begin to roll out, each vying for award recognition and a place in the cultural conversation. Here’s a look at some major contenders, festival standouts, and slept-on indie gems that you should check out (in theaters, of course) while you’re home for break.

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E RECS ARMOUR MINI MAG 2

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2025 Dir.Joachim Trier

SENTIMENTAL VALUE Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his acclaimed THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD explores a fractured relationship between a famous director and his two daughters. The film is a slow, cathartic portrayal of generational trauma that shines with humorous beats and a stellar score. Stellan Skarsgård delivers a powerhouse performance. Expect this to play big for Best Picture, Actress, International Feature, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress.

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2025 Dir. Lynne Ramsay

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DIE MY LOVE

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Lynne Ramsay returns nearly a decade after her last feature with this Martin Scorsese-produced psychological thriller. Jennifer Lawrence delivers her most electric work in years—it’s worth going to see for that alone. Don’t expect a joyride, though. You’re in for a trip through feuds with dogs, sleepwalking grandmas, and a fire-filled opening sequence. Ramsay’s sharp mise-en-scène and nonlinear storytelling make Ariana Harwicz’s book-born psychosis feel palpable.

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2025 Dir. Oliver Laxe

SIRĀT Spain’s submission to Best International Feature for this year’s Oscars premiered at Cannes to rave reviews and has been rolling out through festivals this season. The film follows a father’s desperate search for his daughter across Morocco’s nomadic rave scene. Don’t watch any trailers or read beyond that—go in blind for one of the most unpredictable films to release since PARASITE. A must-see, even if it’s just to witness its pulsing electronic score.

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2025 Dir. Josh Safdie

MARTY SUPREME S Since its surprise NYFF screening, the hype for Josh Safdie’s newest film has exploded. Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, an aspiring professional table tennis player, as he navigates an anxiety-inducing world of hustles and lies in 1950s New York. A24’s campaign for the film appears to be led by Chalamet, who shared an obscure 18-minute video meeting with the film’s marketing team. The result: a fleet of orange trucks and blimps parading through cities, and an unreleased windbreaker everyone is thirsting over. Expect this to play big in Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, and Score.

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THROWBACKS

2015 Dir. Todd Haynes

CAROL Few films evoke the holiday season and nostalgia better than Todd Haynes’s masterpiece, which captures the quiet unfolding of a fortuitous love story. Ed Lachman’s lush 16mm cinematography makes the film glow like cigarette smoke in winter light, while Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara deliver magnetic performances that somehow make longing feel like an art form in itself. Even if romance isn’t usually your thing, its tender pacing and mesmerizing mood make it one of those films you can sink into—and one that lingers long after the credits roll.

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1997 Dir. Hayao Miyazaki

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PRINCESS MONONOKE Comfort films are essentialSduring the holidays, and few deliver solace quite like Studio Ghibli. One of the most staggering animated epics ever made, the film is a sweeping meditation on what binds humanity and nature. Nearly three decades after its release, its hand-drawn beauty and moral complexity remain transcendent—making it a classic that’s bound to play well for the whole family after a big holiday dinner.

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FOUR WOMEN YOU NEED TO KNOW WHO HAVE RESHAPED THE BY: VIOLET HOLAH

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ARCHITECTURE Svetlana Kana Radević was an iconic architect from Yugoslavia. Her work was transformative for the time, pushing minimalism in a time of local brutalism and soviet-directed ideology. Radević’s work was informed by her native region yet had an international influence and impact. Radević spent time in Austria, France, and Russia, studied with Louis Kahn in the United States, and collaborated with Kisho Kurokawa in Japan. At just thirty, she received the prestigious Borba Federal Award, becoming the youngest recipient and the only woman to ever receive the honor. Her accomplishments transcend awards and stand out for their diversity and ambition, from hotels, housing projects, parks, memorials, interiors, and furniture. Radević’s works were realized outside major urban centers, demonstrating that decentralization was not a limitation but a unique opportunity for experimentation. Her monuments, particularly the Monument to the Fallen Fighters of the Lješanska Nahija Region, reject static reverence. She believed monuments must confront moments of heightened rupture and sorrow, while continuously being a place of liberating dignity.

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Rosa

MUSIC When Rosalía announced “Berghain” on Instagram with the line “this is what my intrusive thoughts sound like,” the title suggested techno, yet the song arrived orchestral and mystical.

“Berghain” and “Lux” were praised for their ambition and orchestral scope, not focusing on genre mastery but on experimentation of reggaeton, flamenco, rap, classical, and pop. “Lux” explores feminine mystique structured in four movements and inspired by the lives of female saints. The album covers fourteen languages, showing Rosalía’s dedication to craft and translation. Her meticulous process began with Google Translate to professional translators and phoneticians. Rosalía’s music becomes an intimate experience, asking the listener to alternate between the line of body and ghost. “Berghain” and “Lux” were praised for their ambition and orchestral scope, but Rosalía’s deeper effect lies in how the music becomes a devotional presence to experience something unresolved.

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Paloma Wool

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FASHION Paloma Wool, founded by Paloma Lanna, started as a passion project. Lanna enjoys working analog and began by printing photos she would take onto sweaters and other garments. Her first capsule collection was made up of 3 pieces but articulated a clear vision of memory and lived experiences rather than trend cycles. At the center of Paloma Wool is a brand that has a direct relationship to art and femininity. The clothes are meant to make women feel comfortable and confident in their own bodies. Beauty is understood expansively and relationally, found across different body shapes, skin tones, and forms of presence, with garments designed to be worn, repeated, and lived in. Through care and continuity, Paloma Wool treats fashion not as a trend but as a shared practice grounded in intimacy and lived experiences.

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Ana Mendieta’s iconic Silueta series, initiated in 1973 with Imágen de Yágul, evolved both visually and conceptually from direct bodily presence to symbolic absence. Born in Havana and exiled to Iowa as a child, Mendieta described her displacement as being “cast from the womb (nature),” a rupture she never resolved but instead ritualized through art. In Silueta, she imprinted her own body into landscapes across Iowa and Mexico, carving, burning, flooding, or covering her form with mud, flowers, and blood.

These works were intentionally made without a live audience and preserved through photography and Super-8 film. Over time, Mendieta withdrew her physical body from the frame, saying, “I decided I didn’t want to be in the work anymore, I don’t particularly like performance art.” Referring to the works as “earth-body works,” she distinguished them from the monumental earthworks of male contemporaries who, she argued, “imposed themselves on nature.” Instead, Mendieta’s practice pursued “submersion and total identification with nature.” Instead of running from the body, Mendieta centered it, transcending what femininity can be across human and cosmic forms.

Ana Mendieta

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FASHION

FASHION COMMENTARY BY: NORA SILVERGLEID

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IN CHARACTER

IN ORNAMENT

Who is Alex Consani? For Demna Gvasalia’s La Famiglia Gucci Campaign, she is La Bomba; for Matthieu Blazy and the pearl-clutching attendees of Chanel’s Métiers d’art collection, she’s the pinstripe professional. Campaigns have become character studies, selling not so much a blazer or a bag, but the fantasy of the woman you want to be, or at the very least, the one you hope slides into the seat beside you on the New York Subway.

As we trim our firs with baubles, we treat our garments in much the same manner. A periwinkle plume drifting at the collarbone, your aunt’s inscrutable animal brooch, Julia Roberts’ pin-covered tie, Carolina Herrera’s gold metal tulips. Those who collect and display these pieces appreciated something long before it was named: the December impulse to bedeck can be lived year-round. Ornamentation is not seasonal, but instinctive.

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IN PREP

IN REPOSE

Stomping their Oxfords across Paris Fashion Week were the College Boys, all grown up. Jonathan Anderson, an Irishman, and Michael Rider—Ralph Lauren alum—have polished American prep into something finer: clubby double-breasted blazers, collegiate knitwear rendered in silk, campus silhouettes with couture tailoring. The resurgence of J. Press, long-time custodian of prep, confirms that this revival isn’t so much about nostalgia, but a new form of the uniform.

Perhaps it’s the winter air that inclines us to sheath our overcoats and scamp about in a slip or silk evening short. During a season when so much of your attention is turned outward, it’s natural for last night’s garment to slip from bed linens into the evening.

Holiday dressing does not require spectacle; intimacy reads as formal when the fabric is already ceremonial.

But do steam.

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FASHION

FASHION COMMENTARY BY: EDWARD KOMBE

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LET’S GET WRAPPED: REIMAGINING THE CUMMBERBUND

BUZZ BENEATH THE MISTLETOE: JW ANDERSON’S DIOR PRE-FALL 2026

The cumberbund, once a practical waist sash in the Persian empire, has become a red-carpet constant for Hollywood men whose desires extend beyond even Met dress codes. In his debut at Dries Van Noten, Julian Klausner liberates the accessory from the black-tie ceremony by wrapping the male torso with mischievous abandon. His reinterpretation feels like an unexpected Christmas gift: familiar, yet delightfully out of place. Thus, suggesting that even the most rigid accessories can join the season’s spirit of reinvention.

Shot in the home of 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, JW Anderson’s Dior Pre-Fall 2026 finds poetry in domesticity. Anderson resurrects Christian Dior’s famous “beehive” metaphor, letting the bee motif hum across several looks with nostalgic intent.

Much like the holidays, the collection captures that familiar buzz–the joyful chaos of loved ones drifting in and out of rooms. His work reflects on fashion as a memory, echoing the way home softens us.

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HELLO, MR. HANDSOME: A$AP ROCKY IN FASHION

LET’S GET MOVING: FABRIC IN MOTION

Rapper A$AP Rocky, these days introducing himself as simply “Handsome,” continues his ascent as high fashion’s most charismatic shapeshifter. His appearance in Matthieu Blazy’s teaser for the first Métiers d’Art show proves he’s no longer adjacent to fashion but deeply woven into its narrative. Rocky moves through culture with a kind of elegant ease, remixing masculinity without breaking a sweat. In doing so, he has become both muse and maker of today’s menswear movement.

This season’s obsession with movement, fiberglass at Alaïa, fil coupé at Bottega, and Lemarié’s feathers and organza at Chanel, turned runways into kinetic theatre. Even through a screen, the clothes seemed to breathe, flutter, and almost levitate. Movement became the message, revealing craft not as static art but as choreography. This moment is a reminder that creativity, more than exclusivity, remains the true luxury in 2026.

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EDITOR

EVELYN PAE

COVER STAR

PHOENIX LEE

COPY

SEOEUN KIM

PHOTOGRAPHER

NICO CEVALLOS

PHOTOGRAPHER

EVELYN PAE

PHOTOGRAPHER

CHIBY ONYEADOR

PHOTOGRAPHER

SOFIA HUITRON

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

TALIA ZAKALIK

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

YAEL GOLDWASSER

MODEL

RHEA HERBERT

MODEL

SEAN

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT FILM EDITOR

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MAYA DABNEY MAX SELVER

CULTURE EDITOR

VIOLET HOLAH

FASHION EDITOR

NORA SILVERGLEID

FASHION EDITOR

EDWARD KOMBE

LAYOUT DESIGNER

EVELYN PAE

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Mini mag. Winter 26 ARMOUR MINI MAG 2

THIS WINTER ISSUE OF THE MINI MAG WAS CREATED AT WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

BY ARMOUR MAGAZINE WINTER 2026 SZN35