According to our publication’s About page, Manic Metallic is:
“a fashion publication that aims, first and foremost, to critique fashion as an art and respect it as a discipline. We take fashion seriously, yet we allow for fun to be had within that seriousness. We want to bring the emphasis back to the fashion industry and its players – and away from the hype of the entertainment sector.”
While the above is very much correct, we are at a point in our existence where it is clear that this statement is incomplete. We will build on it below:
Manic Metallic was formed as a response to the fashion industry becoming more and more commercialized at a cost to quality coverage of talent native to fashion itself. We aim to critique all subjects and individuals fairly, with a strict removal of bias as our goal, and have an ultimate desire of making the industry stronger.
To add another quote from our About page, we “reserve the right to critique all subjects pertaining to fashion. Equally, we reserve the right to be independent – to be without master“. Being an independent publication gives us an advantage that many larger (or, more well-known, if you prefer) ones do not have: we have the ability to speak freely because we have no advertisers or bosses to please. This is intentional because we only want to be beholden to one group of people: our readers.
Manic Metallic strikes a balance between being a magazine and a journal. Imagine a scale where ‘magazine’ is at the right edge and ‘journal’ is at the left edge. Manic Metallic is slightly left of the midpoint on this figurative scale, making it technically closer to being a journal than a magazine.
We seek to go more in-depth with our writing than a typical magazine would. Manic Metallic takes pride in our well-researched articles; we like to think that we apply a certain level of rigor with each piece that we put out to the general public on both our publication website and our social media platforms. If our name will be attached to it in any way – whether that is as a collective or as individuals – we insist on showing quality work.
With that said, we don’t want to be so academic that we make any reader, both current and potential, feel that they cannot wrap their heads around what they are consuming from our publication. Our goal is to “take fashion seriously, yet allow for fun to be had within that seriousness“, as we mentioned above. We see our place in fashion media as a distributor of knowledge – and we work very hard to make that knowledge both interesting and educational.
When we state that fashion is an art, we truly mean it. An oversimplified way to state our belief – but a way that works nonetheless – is to say that ‘fashion is an art that one wears’. It is an art with which we interact on a daily basis; indeed, it is the most interactive art form that we have. Fashion is nothing without those who wear it – without a human to inhabit it, fashion becomes nothing but a beautiful shell. And while beauty can exist for its own sake, fashion is meant to be experienced and seen – whether that’s by wearing it or viewing it from within the halls of a museum.
To quote a previous article of ours, fashion “is one of the most precious of art forms – and it deserves to be treated as such. At the same time, it needs to live within the realm of humanity – as all art is created by humankind, and all art should be able to be taken in and appreciated by any who may wish to do so“.
Last, we respect fashion as the discipline that it is. There may be those who do not see fashion as legitimate for whatever reason (we write about possible reasons for this in this article), but we operate in a way that runs contrary to anyone who might think such a thing. To us, fashion is more than a mere exercise in vanity (though, vanity itself isn’t necessarily evil); it is both an expression of self and an exploration of one’s society – and ultimately, one’s world.
Taking the above into consideration, one can infer that Manic Metallic is many things, but that there is a core belief that we have (one that is familiar to our readers by now): fashion is both an art and a discipline, and we treat & respect it as such.
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