METAMORPHOSES

Voilá! ZIP MAGAZINE is going live in a brand new outfit: just a bit of couture we custom-made detail by detail, after many hours of work. The spirit of Viennese Art Nouveau, along with a touch of raw New York, moves threadlike through vivid imagery, interviews, and stories about art, film and fashion.  

In matters art, fashion and performing arts, New York and Vienna are interwoven like a classy cashmere sweater with an edgy touch. The intellectual revolution at the end of the 19^th century that raised Vienna to world-city status encompassed poets, writers, painters and composers. A new high standard—“café literature”—was born of the intellectual exchanges and artistic encounters at the city’s coffee houses. The new movements springing from “me, society and the world” and made manifest in the visual and performing arts, also swept over the Atlantic to New York and are still in place today. As Sigmund Freud said, “Civilized man has traded a bit of his happiness for a bit of security.”  As a real Vienna girl—that’s what they call you when you were born there—beauty and aesthetics were fascinating to me even as a child.  I experienced them on my way to school: an enchanting world of richly decorated house fronts, fashion boutiques with the most beautiful dresses, shoes and hats in the window, and coffee houses with antique interiors and all the fine ladies, elegantly dressed, sipping from their coffee cups. I loved peeking through the window to watch them. I knew that I never wanted to be like these women, but I was fascinated nonetheless by the story that their clothes told about their lives. There was so much to discover, like in an I Spy book. 

ZIP MAGAZINE isn’t just about stories, though. It also has a mission.

There are a lot of fresh, talented young people out there who deserve to be seen. Our first project, the theme of which is “ZIP & Culture,” produced by students at the Parsons School of Design under the direction of art director Marcos Chavez, is an exciting trip through youth culture, street art and handcrafts. At different points over the year we’ll present projects by these students and report on them via film, feature stories and interviews.

So join us on a trip through creative space. Let yourself be surprised, seduced and delighted, pleasured and inspired!

Creative freedom for all of us.

Love,

Katja Schmolka

Founder, Editor in Chief

ZIP Magazine is an independent online magazine that makes the global interface between culture and creativity fashionable.

ZIP Magazine is art, culture, fashion and film in both New York and Vienna, tapping into the exciting dynamic of these two very diverse scenes through interviews, trend-surfing and intimate looks behind-the-scenes, a dynamic in which the past drives both the present and the future—and in which timelessness is paramount. 

ZIP Magazine is feminine, elegant, and approachable. The logo is a Viennese typeface comprised of clean sans-serif strokes juxtaposed against a jagged handwritten script—historic Vienna versus raw New York. We bring a personal touch to the craft and history of fashion, to film, culture and contemporary art, and we make these worlds eminently approachable by interviews with real people telling their own stories, by giving creative people the space to talk about what makes them tick.

We have a mission

In order to give new talent—student talent—a voice within the well-established and very exclusive art, film and fashion industry, we’re collaborating with art, design, film and fashion institutes in New York and abroad to present emerging talents from their schools. These highly creative, multidisciplinary projects will give a glimpse of some of the amazing ideas and amazing work that’s just on the horizon. By showcasing them in ZIP Magazine and exhibiting their work at various venues, we hope to give these young visionaries a leg up into the professional world of art and fashion.

Zip Magazine is dedicated to all free-spirited people who work hard on their dreams—and make them come true.