We interviewed Maria Azovtseva, publisher of the independent magazine BL8D, with whom we have had the honor of collaborating since the first issue was published.
As always, Maria responded with the sincerity that distinguishes the magazine even on difficult topics.
A tip: be patient and read the whole post!
1) What inspired the creation of BL8D, and how do you see its role in the fashion industry beyond traditional design discourse?
Until 2022, when BL8D appeared, we were a niche branding agency creating identities for fashion and art projects. Our main clients were yesterday's students, young fashion designers, with whom we were more involved in education than branding, since at that time, almost none of the institutes that graduated fashion designers in the post-Soviet space had not only professional trend books, but also a global understanding of how the international fashion industry functions.
Our "bible", the first trend book, on the basis of which we tried to understand the principles of developing fashion concepts, was a "contraband", secretly scanned TREND UNION, AW17-18. We still periodically look into this PDF file with crooked screenshots, which we got in great secrecy in 2017. Lidewij Edelkoort has created a timeless product, an ideal creative constructor. Her trend books are an anthropological gallery, in which she not only exhibits found fragments, but also collects them together through key images, emotions and states.
In 2018, inspired by Trend Union, we decided to create our own capsule collection, "City of the Sun" SS19. It was a shock for us that the video with the release was published on Nick Knight's platform SHOWstudio and got into the longlist of the Berlin Fashion Film Festival.
I think that after this experiment we first thought about the need to create an alternative trend book that would be available to our students (2500 euros per season is an exorbitant price for a novice designer), and most importantly, the aesthetics of which would be based on concepts and images close to our cultural code.
As for the possible role of BL8D outside the design discourse...
I would like to think that the techniques we use in our work on the magazine awaken curiosity, the desire to receive from fashion independent magazines something more than just a visual stating reality, help to look at Fashion not as a bottomless chest of drawers from which cool rags are periodically taken out, but as a complex anthropological process.
2) You describe BL8D as an alternative trend book that captures concepts rather than textiles or colors. How do you see conceptual storytelling shaping the future of fashion design?
My opera teacher (I studied it for about eight years) once said that music, as a kind of constantly vibrating process, exists in itself, and the musician's task is not only to organically enter these "waves," but also to constantly support and generate movement in them, to stay inside the process. As soon as there is a desire to fix yourself from the outside to admire, that's it—stop—you are stuck at some dead point, and the music flows on, but without you. This applies to any creative process, including fashion.
The way we organize the symbiosis of text and visuals does not allow either us or artists to "get stuck" in the process of self-admiration.
The main thing in each story is the key image or emotion, state, the transmission of which in printed format may require the simultaneous participation of completely different photographers, artists, graphic artists. We create texts and images that will subsequently be reflected upon by our readers and transformed into design products, creative concepts, possibly scripts, and so on... The interview format for us is, first of all, a dialogue within which "useful" information is generated. I know, it sounds terrible, but we are not interested in publishing biographies—this is dead soil. In our case, storytelling is a mental basis for launching a certain chain reaction in a creative environment, a joint search for a multidisciplinary visual language that most accurately conveys the meaning of a particular key message, which has the potential to be rethought, "reinterpreted" again and again...
Our job is to support this natural circulation of fantasies and thoughts, as a necessary level of creative oxygen, without which there is a risk of suffocation.
3) The name BL8D itself carries layered meanings—wandering, searching, even transgression. How does this philosophy influence the way you curate content and approach the creative process?
For us, a trend is something that literally vibrates in space, something that is impossible to ignore. It can be either an image or a state, a key emotion literally hanging in the air. Through the general visual concept of the issue, including its title, we try to set a certain tone, a narrative format that, in our opinion, will reveal the essence of the “caught” trend. And finally, the content of the issue, where each chapter is just one of the possible options for how the meaning of a trend, as a phenomenon, can be interpreted through certain images, graphic design, illustration, sculpture objects, and so on...
Each issue is like a year-long journey where initially only the general direction is known—a certain semantic space where we need to get to. And what tools and in what format we get there depends only on our imagination and the fantasy of the artists with whom we work.
4) Your first issue was an open anti-military manifesto—how do you balance fashion as a form of aesthetic expression with its potential as a tool for political and cultural critique?
I am answering this question on Palm Sunday, the day when the Russian army committed another terrorist act, killing more than 34 civilians in the city of Sumy, Ukraine. You can close your eyes and try to imagine that the War, which has been going on for more than three years, in the center of Europe, does not exist, but it is an objective reality that determines our thoughts, fears, lifestyle, geography of stay, methods of communication, and so on...
That is why I do not really understand what kind of balance we are talking about. At least for us.
We cannot not talk about the War. But we can choose the format, context and visual tools with which this narrative will be realized.
The first issue was presented in the format of a shabby book with old fairy tales. The second issue resembled a glossy collection of dreams with a mirror cover, the Third—a collection of personal diaries in which personal stories about the perception of death are literally scratched out and printed. All these three issues are connected with the War in one way or another. The war determined the topics of these issues, the content of the interviews and even the composition of the editorial board…
5) VOL. 3 explores death through “little tragedies.” How do you see this concept influencing contemporary fashion narratives and visual storytelling?
If we look at Fashion as a phenomenon of a culturological and even anthropological nature, then we, as a fashion magazine, are obliged to “work” with the reality around us.
The little tragedies of the third issue in the form of a collection of monologues is the format that seemed to us the most relevant for another “uncomfortable” conversation with the creative environment. This is a dialogue not at the level of slogans, manifestos, calls for something. This is not a collection of interviews, where the reader is only an outside observer, following the conversation of people he does not know. A monologue is the most personal format of communication with the reader, allowing you to talk about the most intimate things - the fear of death, the fear of not being alive, the fear of the system that grinds up human lives.
War is not the main subject of the third issue, but it is definitely the culprit of its appearance. Our attention to the fragility of human life, vulnerability, fear of pain and oblivion is a counterbalance to the war machine that, through the media, tries to teach us to treat human life as disposable.
For the first time in our practice, we asked contemporary artists to independently write monologue texts in order to then build a visual narrative on their basis.
In the third issue, we create a visual and semantic space in which a direct dialogue takes place between the artist and the reader, without intermediaries in the form of leading questions in interviews.
Hand-made fonts, photographs, illustrations support the degree of this emotional process as much as possible.
We do not think about the influence on fashion processes, our task is to provide fertile ground for its functioning, to offer a mental base on which a relevant design product can be created.
6) BL8D operates at the intersection of fashion, anthropology, and art. What methodologies do you use to construct new semantic meanings from cultural clichés? And have you encountered any unexpected insights or narratives that reshaped your understanding of trends?
We don’t have a single methodology, but rather a set of working tools that we constantly expand. One of them is the so-called “museum method”, which appeared after the exhibition dedicated to Rick Owens’ twenty-year career, which was in 2018, at the Triennale, Milan.
Never again have I seen such a meticulous, scrupulous immersion into the designer’s worldview. It all resembled a grandiose archaeological excavation, the results of which were presented to the public: scraps of letters, seemingly accidentally found pebbles and ceramic fragments, archival photos, an endless number of samples of some crazy knitted textures, withered flowers, locks of hair, and soil from the coast of Venice, where, according to the designer, he will be buried someday. Clothes were presented there as just one of the products of his worldview.
When we create the concept of the magazine, we try to think of it as an exhibition in a museum—about what we will fill its space with.
Historical references, archives, documentary evidence, sculptural objects, graphic sketches and monumental canvases, of course, explication...
By the way, the new Rick Owens Temple of Love exhibition is on at the Palais Galliera in Paris from June 28.
7) Many fashion publications focus on trends, whereas BL8D delves into deeper philosophical and social issues. What kind of audience do you aim to reach, and how do they engage with your work?
Let's agree that color palettes, fabric textures, accessories and even silhouettes are not trends, they are their consequences. They are tools, thanks to which the trend is realized in space through certain fashion images. These images are formed on the basis of symbiosis of certain kinds of phenomena, events, states of society and so on...
So the Trend is an excellent tool for turning what excites the consciousness of humanity into a design product.
We do not declare ready-made images, we only generate mental soil for their creation and subsequent transformation in a creative environment.
Therefore, our audience is primarily those who are interested in first finding ideas for developing concepts and only then choosing the necessary tools for its implementation.
If you ask if only designers read us—absolutely not. One of our most devoted readers lives with his father on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, in a small house, somewhere between Britain and France, where, according to him, couriers rarely get. His father once worked as a volunteer in Chernobyl, and he himself is a retired architect. They read BL8D because they are interested in the context in which we discuss what is happening to the world, to us...
Once we received a message from Randy, a guy from America, a German by origin, whose grandfather fought for Germany in World War II. He thanked us for the magazine and at the end of the message there was a postscript "My wife Snezhana (native-born Ukrainian) and I (third-generation American of German descent and a proud adopted son of Ukraine) look forward to your response."
At such moments you think that the world is very small and we are all connected to each other very tightly, and any of our activities—magazines, fashion, art—are the most powerful tools for making this connection visible, obvious.
8) Looking ahead, how do you see BL8D evolving? Are there particular themes or cultural phenomena you plan to explore in future volumes?
After the issue on Death, a rebirth surely awaits us—haha.
On a serious note, at the end of this year, we’re planning to open a workshop-library-gallery in the center of Florence. Anyone who wants to chat with us about the making of the magazine, flip through other design publications, or even get some work done with a cup of coffee at our big Tuscan table—you're more than welcome. There’ll also be a bar and Sunday brunches—just beautiful!
In the basement there will be an art bunker, a gallery of digital sculpture. There we plan to organize exhibitions of artists with whom we collaborate, magazine presentations and even film screenings.
As for the next issues, if we collect the required number of donations for the renovation of the premises, very soon we will be able to announce a new open call!
