Nss Magazine Marks 10 Years of Chronicling Streetstyle and Streetwear
MILAN — Media platform Nss, which stands for Naples street style, has built a reputation over the past 10 years in Italy, following in the footsteps of online outlets such as Highsnobiety and Hypebeast and chronicling the rise of streetwear as a cultural phenomenon and its impact on fashion.
On Tuesday, Nss magazine — the editorial division of the multipronged business, which also runs a digital agency known as Nss Factory; a shop, the Nss store; Nss galleria, a digital space for exhibitions, as well as the sports and female-focused G-club verticals — is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a party on the first day of Milan Fashion Week.
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Helmed by cofounder and chief executive officer Walter D’Aprile and devoted to fashion and cultural hunting, as well as increasingly to reporting on the industry and the latest fashion-leaning TikTok trends, the magazine is launching Nssx to retrace its history with an agenda that includes the opening of a French- and France-focused vertical on its website and the unveiling of the Nss archive.
It will mark the milestone by taking over a newsstand on Piazza XXIV Maggio in Milan’s Navigli district, where the party will be held and open to the public.
“Since the very beginning, Nss has been a cool hunting project, a cultural hunting one. We’ve always looked for and reported on stories, trends, habits and passions before they became cult or gained obsessive media attention,” D’Aprile said.
Jumpstarted in 2012 in Naples, the magazine built on the experience of a blog launched in 2009 by D’Aprile together with Vincenzo Schioppa and Simon Laudati. It first looked at the southern Italian city for inspiration, starting to showcase its street culture.
“We tried to link worlds and cultures apparently apart from one another, blending street [culture] and runways, clubs and soccer fields,” the CEO explained. “We’ve been a hybrid [project] to create a space where creativity could flow with no labels.”
For the anniversary, Nss magazine conscripted 10 creative voices including The Attico’s Gilda Ambrosio, street retail platform Slam Jam, Dj Sita Abellan and street brand Luter, among others, to design celebratory T-shirts, to be sold at the party event for 10 euros each.
Ambrosio said she was inspired by “churchcore” and has incorporated elements from Catholic iconography, while Luter embedded one of its campaign images and Slam Jam paid tribute to the early punk scene.
Playing by its own rulebook, D’Aprile said the magazine has always championed an interaction between digital and traditional media, the Nssx party being an example with the newsstand location.
“It’s about establishing a dialogue…between worlds, which fought against one another for no reason, when in fact, as we keep saying, they are two sides of the same coin, if not a unique entity which is always evolving,” D’Aprile said, highlighting that change and improvement will stem for this dialogue.
A fanzine dedicated to the anniversary event will also be published and sold with stickers and pins.
After Milan Fashion Week wraps up, the Nss magazine’s team will head to Paris to tease the opening of Nss France, the French vertical, with an event at The Hoxton hotel on Sept. 29.
In October, the Nss family plans to unveil the archives, a collection of more than 90,000 images chronicling streetstyle over the past 10 years. It will debut online and will be followed by physical activations with exhibitions mounted at the Nss Factory headquarters in Milan.
