Reading Print Magazines Is an Elite Pursuit

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Magazines were my life’s blood in my formative years. I would pore over the pages for hours in my local Barnes & Noble. It was a free education in cultures that seemed just out of reach. Music, art, fashion, and photography were not taught in my school, and the internet was in its infancy. I would spend hours with a bitter black coffee at the in-house Starbucks reading Rolling Stone, Spin, Paper, and Punk Planet as well as Vanity Fair, Vogue, Index, i-D, The Face, Monocle, and, of course, GQ. This formed my taste and gave me the baseline I needed to do what I am doing now.

Then things went digital. Information began moving much faster. The focus in publishing shifted to cranking out many stories a day instead of a select group each month. The industry and the people who fetishized print still used their corporate American Express at the newsagent. But the average American moved on, happy to skim headlines on social media.

But as we head into 2024, the print tide is coming back in. Magazines are merch now: Signifiers of good taste, to be displayed on the coffee table or desk to let visitors know that you don’t just mindlessly scroll at your phone. The same wave that pushed vinyl back into the mainstream long after it was pronounced dead is now powering magazines. It’s a new, affordable way to support your favorite creative people. Swifties who don’t own turntables are scooping up $50 12” LPs from Urban Outfitters. Magazines are (usually) cheaper, and you don’t need a player to actually enjoy them.

Cool independent titles like Apartamento, The Gentlewoman, Fantastic Man, and Marfa Journal have been thriving for years thanks to loyal readers, luxury advertisers, and clever uses of the digital space. Recently, aughts bible Nylon has said it’s bringing back a print edition. Saveur, the gourmet food and travel magazine, is doing the same. Young people are paying top dollar for pristine old copies of Dazed & Confused.

It’s not just nostalgia reads and tasteful lifestyle publications that are back. Zines have also made a return. A DIY, community-minded phenomenon that I came to love during my days in the punk and hardcore scene, these cheap, typically photocopied publications have been reborn as, well, marketing materials. Bottega Veneta has produced several, A24 does a broadsheet, and Nike tapped Homme Girls for a limited edition print piece. But like the original indie zines, they are physical objects that you keep and revisit and cannot be replicated digitally.

There’s a reason why it’s magazines like Marfa Journal that are thriving and brands like Bottega Veneta that are reviving the zine: Because print is a luxury experience for the cultural upper crust—people who not only want to display their taste and intellectual leaning with the reading materials decorating their apartments and offices but whose pursuits and careers afford them ability to actually flip through those heavy-stock pages. In an age where ubiquitous algorithms have made short-form video and shallow thinking inescapable and journalism is increasingly scarce online, reading an actual magazine is aspirational. And what easier way to achieve cluttercore than to just spread them around your space when you’re done?

Of course, I never gave up on print. Reading online is efficient, pleasurable, and satisfying—and I love Twitter as much as ever—but nothing beats a Sunday afternoon on the couch with a newly purchased pile of magazines. Everything comes back around, but the presses never stopped. Some of you just needed to be reminded of their value.

Originally Appeared on GQ