Magazine Madness: Lula Issue 19, 2014 Felicity

Felicity! LULA 19 2014

Former Editor-in-Chief Leith Clark left but Lula still stays. While Clark points out via her tumblr post, that ‘Lula has been changing…and I don’t want her to change too much’, Issue 19, featuring British actress Felicity Jones two-thirds of her visage, grey eyes revealing a sense of curiosity and beauty, a layering hue of cover, only printing in white font ‘ISSUE 19’, ‘Lula’ and ‘Felicity’; indeed it changes, but at the same time, it as well preserves the best of Lula.

Issue 19, under Editor-in-Chief Sheila Single and Creative Director Maja Kölqvists’ co-directory, still, Lula carefully chooses the advertising partners, such as A.P.C, Vanessa Bruno and Chanel, which perfectly matches the style of the magazine. Issue 19 inherits Lula’s multi-cover tradition, presenting different young faces—Actress Felicity Jones, blogger Tavi Gavinson and artist Angel Haze—to express its theme: ‘Revolution’. Since I like Jones’ performance at movie director Niall Maccormick’s Albatross, plus the strong graphic design of the cover, I easily choose my personal copy among the three cover girls.

The interior design of the magazine echoes the layering-hue cover, on the introduction page, on the fashion campaign pages of Felicity Jones’ and ‘Lula Likes’ accessories by photographer Arvida Byström. Without any editor’s letter, yet readers can sense the feminine photography and sensual interview within Lula. Note that the bold-font captions between the paragraphs, such as ‘it’s good to do things in life that you’re scared of, you’ve got to be brave’ by Jones (Brandes, 134), or ‘I definitely consider myself a feminist and I have basically since I learned what the word really meant’ by Gavinson (Bumpus, 74), are projecting its core concept of the editorial team.

Viewing page by page, Lula is a beautiful fashion photography album with appropriate amount of writing. Perhaps new Lula will not be able to present the highly literary report such as ‘Shakespeare & Co.’(Lula issue. 15, 2012), still issue 19 includes poetry ‘Delta Aeroplanes in Twilight’ by Greta Bellamacina, a rare act among any female magazine nowadays.

The true reasons for Leith Clark’s abandon of Lula could be various, but from my review of issue 19, the direction of the art, the quality of writing, the use of the papers and the voice from the inner side are not changing that much, continuously very Lula, very dreamy, very girly yet strongly independent. Year by year on purchasing fashion magazine, I prefer choosing less commercial and more sophisticated photography, and Lula is ‘it mag’. Lula Issue 20 will be launched in January-February 2015, and I am looking forward to it already.

For the tumblr post by Leith Clark:

http://ileithclark.tumblr.com