The handmade has made a major comeback over recent years, perhaps as a reaction to the slickness of digital communications. From Marmalade magazine’s early attempts to subvert QuarkXpress through to today’s ubiquitous paper sculpture mobile phone ads, the DIY aesthetic is a part of our times. Cut is a magazine from Munich that is dedicated to extending this DIY aesthetic beyond a visual trend to become a way of living.
Published independently by Horst Moser, it’s packed with suggestions like how to make your own jewellery, rebuild your bicycle and get knitting. All presented in DIY style featuring stitched page headers and hand drawn/hand made typography.
What makes it relevant here is that the central part of each issue shows how to make a single piece of clothing from scratch. As the cover says, ‘Leute machen Kleider’ (People make dresses), so there’s a full-size pull-out tissue cutting pattern to start you on photo-story guided journey toward sewing your very own garment, in this case a blouse.
Very old-school – the dress-making pattern periodical is a part of publishing history that had seemed to have disappeared – but ideally suited to today’s new financially troubled world.