Dazed & Confused Autumn 2021

It’s a collision of sorts here at Dazed. Our September issue happens to be our 30th anniversary issue, and birthdays often act as a clean slate and the start of something new. For many, in fashion and beyond, September is one of the most anticipated months of the year. As schools reopen and the fashion calendar restarts, questions about our future linger in the air. New beginnings are afoot, and reinvention is rife. But we don’t want to go back to school – not like it was, anyway. While for the time being it’s difficult to resume exploring as we did, we tried our best to bring a wandering eye to the pages of Dazed. Together with the legends, we have brought a mix of exciting young photographers, writers and stylists into…

Three decades ago, Dazed started as a DIY zine, cut and spliced together as a snapshot of anarchical British culture at the beginning of the 1990s. What happened next, none of us could have imagined – from Britpop to Brexit, McQueen to Mowalola, crypto coins to a climate on the brink of no return. It’s not all been great – but Dazed has been there to document it all. Our 30th anniversary issue hits newsstands at an irreversible new dawn. Grab at the global stories from Palestine, Athens, South Africa and New York, reminisce on naivety in the face of what we never could have known, and look ahead at what the possibilities could be. As unpredictable as culture is, what we’ve learned is to sit back, relax and stay true to…

ATH Kids, Athens A network bringing the world into one sound from Greece “There was no blueprint for us coming up, we had to be the pioneers,” says ATH Kids beatmaker Taj Jamal. “So now we want to lay down the blueprint for those who come after us.” Before ATH Kids, hip hop was the last thing you would associate with Athens. But the crew, founded by rapper Kareem Kalokoh and creative director Valentin Rivera in 2015, is fast helping to establish the city as a new frontier for the genre. The collective, which also comprises DJ Joseph Mouzakitis, rappers Complex Shadow and Majin Cost, and producer Dazedboi, has created a new, cosmopolitan vision of the city, broadcasting its DIY energy to a global audience with bars as strikingly original as their…

Black holes and dead air in downtown Manhattan’s Dimes Square What would happen if an artist-run publisher took over a local gallery space and ran a radio station for one month? In July 2018, Stacy Skolnik, Thomas Laprade and AM Bang of the international art book publisher Montez Press set up shop in Chinatown’s Mathew Gallery for their annual summer residency program intending to find out. Transforming the gallery from “a space of viewing to a space of making”, they invited emerging and established artists, writers, musicians, publishers and thinkers to join them over five weeks, take to the mic and share whatever was on their minds. In the blink of an eye, Montez Press Radio was born. The resulting cacophony of voices and ideas go way beyond your usual radio programming.…

handwritten by the project manager “Their doors are open,” says GENG PTP, an archivist, teacher and host of Montez’s Channel PTP. “Before Covid, it was like, ‘Come through.’” For GENG, born and raised in Manhattan, the station’s inclusive programming embodies New York City itself. “You get all those folks congregating on the same frequency and, boom: you have a unique meeting of the minds.” Whether you tune in from the studio couch or your bedroom in Berlin, the radio’s aura resonates no matter how familiar you are with the city’s past lives. “Like, you can give two shits about Warhol, Blondie and Basquiat, but you can still get down with your folks at [Montez].” It’s exactly this kind of intergenerational, non-hierarchical experience that Montez is after. The team’s newest member, Sy Shinar…

On May 10, 2021, Radio Alhara, the Palestinian online radio station, went silent. The plan was simple: broadcast nothing but static for 24 hours in protest of the eviction of families in the occupied district of Sheikh Jarrah and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Within days, messages of solidarity began flooding in from other sound platforms and artists across the globe. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands flocked to the streets of major cities to protest the Israeli regime. “There was an urgency to come together collectively and reject all forms of injustice and oppression,” explains co-founder Elias Anastas. The station suspended its regular programming and opened up its airwaves to anyone who wanted to share in the act of sonic revolt. “We received enough contributions to run the radio…