Deep love for the pre-loved
I first met Mildew editor Ellen Freeman at a magazine event in San Francisco at the end of 2022. The first copies of her launch issue had just arrived at the venue, which meant she was seeing it for the first time, and I got to witness the excitement (and trepidation) of those initial moments flicking through a new magazine. Her passion for the magazine was infectious then, and as you can see from the video below, it hasn’t dimmed in the intervening months.
Mildew is a secondhand fashion magazine, and I liked the concept as soon as I saw it, but it was only when I got home and properly read the magazine that I knew I wanted to deliver it to our subscribers. Because while there’s plenty to like in its fun fashion shoots and nostalgic love for vintage fashion, there’s also something else that bubbles away beneath the surface, lending a more ideological, often grittier motivation to the storytelling.
We delivered the second issue of Mildew to our subscribers in November 2023, a year on from that first meeting, and then at the start of this month I caught up with Ellen again for our Stack Magazine Club. She talked about the fun, colourful editorial approach, as well as the ideas behind the project, and I was particularly struck by her description of finding stories as like stumbling across an amazing item in a flea market, researching it and becoming more and more obsessed by it.
Ellen clearly lives and breathes this magazine and I loved hearing her speaking about it in such detail. She also talked about what she has learned as deputy editor of Broccoli, and about the particular qualities that print brings to both those projects. I hope you enjoy the video below, and remember, all our subscribers are invited to these Stack Magazine Club meetings every month, so if you want to receive a surprise independent magazine, then hear directly from the people who made it, sign up for our subscription today. We’ve got some brilliant magazines lined up over the coming months and we want to send them to as many readers as possible.
