who’s on staff?
editorial EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Alana Valko CREATIVE DIRECTOR Kenzie King FEATURES EDITOR Sophie Cloherty PRINT FASHION EDITORS Nick Farrugia Jenny Ruan
business
DIGITAL FASHION EDITOR Alexa DeFord
PUBLISHER Claire Dickerson
DESIGN EDITORS Mackenzie Schwedt Manda Villarreal
ACCOUNTS DIRECTOR Colleen Jones
PRINT PHOTO EDITORS Katie Corbett Evan Parness DIGITAL PHOTO EDITOR Francesca Romano
MARKETING DIRECTOR Molly Shulan FINANCE COORDINATORS Kate Burns Drisha Gwalani
STREET STYLE EDITOR Lucy Carpenter
EVENTS COORDINATORS Paige Dobies Courtney O’Beirne
MANAGING PHOTO EDITOR Natalie Guisinger
OUTREACH COORDINATOR Ellery Benson
VIDEO EDITOR Hayley Danke
SALES COORDINATOR Kira Mintzer
DIGITAL CONTENT EDITOR Alice Huth
SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR Liz Haley
ILLUSTRATOR MANDA VILLARREAL
SHEI /’sh(ay)/ Magazine was founded in 1999 as an Asian Pop Culture Magazine and became affiliated with University of Michigan Student Publications in 2013. Our Digital Magazine, known as SHIFT at the time, was launched in 2015. Since then, SHEI has grown to campus wide recognition as a publication that students can come to for fashion, art, and culture commentary and inspiration.
MASTHEAD LETTER F
in this issue
LOW RIS S 2019-2
02 FROM THE EDITOR 06 NEW YORK ON FILM 08 SE JEANS ARE COMING BACK 14 CATALAN COLOR 18 SHALY GUO 28 MONOCHROME MADRID 32 2020 SHEI BOARD 42
letter from the editor
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I am writing this in an airplane. The moment is fleeting and I am bound to only remember the act of it as time passes. The moments of my day so far: being cut in line twice, forgetting to pick up a prescription, and the kicking of the person behind me on the plane will erase into a pillow beside my head—their touch and feel billowing my thoughts, but not quite slithering into a memorable experience. My plane just took off. I’m 30, 1,000, now 10,000 feet off the ground—moments that took only seconds in flight, but would be hours in trek. In those hours my feet would swell and my legs would grow weaker. My breath would get heavy and my water supply short. I would spend hours recovering from the strain I put on my back trying to fit that bulky sweater, too-large sleeping bag, and extra soup can into my backpack. I hiked 35 miles through the Smoky Mountains, to the top of Mount Cammerer, and to the bottom to set up tent. It took four days. This 10,000 foot trek included one crying baby and a few typed words. It took five minutes. The theme of this issue is Moment. We use expired film rolls, digital cameras, and words to create a
collection of captured moments, all which mingle into aromas of nostalgia, adventure and intrigue that you may feel throughout the issue. While all of these moments in time were shot and written separate from one another, some of them likely occurred at the same time, or at the very least, in the same span of summer. And in this span, our photo editor traveled from Mexico to Madrid, our features editor contemplated low-rise jeans and her cat, our creative director captured tender moments on expired film, and I—well I wrote this. Memories vary—most are quickly fleeting, but it is those special moments in time that have constituted our most important beliefs about who we are, what makes us happy, who makes us smile, and what makes us sad. For our board shoot, we brought ourselves into a sun-drenched field to capture our sweet, youthful selves on film. The memory of this issue may erode with time, but we will keep these Polaroids in the deep pockets of our storage. We will laugh about our “starter-packs” we listed under our names and smile for what we once embraced. For now I’ll take the pretzels, please.
Alana Valko Editor-In-Chief
N e w Yo r k o n Fi l m
There is something sacred about capturing images of the people you love in places you adore. This summer, New York City gave me sunshine: seeping visual collages of the many people and places we have yet to explore.
PHOTOGRAPHER KENZIE KING GRAPHIC DESIGNER MACKENZIE SCHWEDT
Low Rise Jeans Are Coming Back The cat knows things I don’t: how to hunt, colors at night, how I turn in my sleep. This is my first few weeks of ever living with an animal. Maya the cat slinks around in her orange and black fur and jumps on my bed each morning. She doesn’t like to be touched, but sometimes she’ll lie affectionately at my feet, her belly exposed to be scratched. Coexisting with this being, I’ve been thinking often of perspective. I want desperately to know what she thinks. How do pet owners do it? How do they submit to such unknowing? I’ve begun to fabricate her thoughts in the silence. I imagine she filters everything the same way she walks—in feral, manic jumps or lazy sun struck saunters, there’s no in-between. Both these time spans, however, proscribe no history or future. I imagine this animal to be hungry for the moment, for
WRITER SOPHIE CLOHERTY GRAPHIC DESIGNER MACKENZIE SCHWEDT
her mood to change in an instant, for the daylight to predict her behavior. All this is far from true. Maya the cat has lived histories. My favorite history is the one where my roommate gets off a plane in Detroit and drives an hour to pick her up off a woman’s porch in a shoebox. Do I see the world in manic jumps or lazy saunters? When I encounter the word “instant” I slip into the past. I jump from photo to photo in the pile I keep stacked in the back of my closet—to be looked at only as I resituate myself in early September. Each jump is an act of creation. I recreate myself on a mountain I stood on once. I recreate when the rain came and we didn’t turn around. I recreate my mother next to a palm tree, what she said about her first taste of coffee, I recreate an old boyfriend on a bridge, why he held my hand. I recreate a lamp
in an attic, the yellow way I thought about summer. I want to jump fast from visual to visual, but I find myself sauntering down threads of thought. Each image is threaded to another so that an image of a living room recalls the entirety of the house. I often find the instants I record come to define the heart of things. In fashion we have moments. Moments have something to do with the heart of things. We might call moments accumulations of instances. Tom Ford sends low rise jeans down the runway, Bella Hadid is photographed walking her dog in hip hugging white corduroys, old images of Madonna keep resurfacing on the internet, Chanel pairs a low-rise cut with a swimsuit, your mom pulls out her treasured pair of wranglers, your best friend starts wearing a choker. These instances accrue and panic ensues—are
low-rise jeans and the 2000’s having a moment?? These moments can never occur in isolation. Other moments constantly tug at our peripherals. Sustainability, for example, is having a “moment,” boy bands are having a “moment.” Who is responsible for a moment? That’s a difficult, if impossible question to answer. I might argue that to declare something a moment is simply to acknowledge a collective nostalgia. There’s a multiplicity, then, inherent in the word moment. I’m thinking just now that it’s about that rounded o sound, or the way a moment begs description as Mary Elizabeth Coleridge understands in her poem A Moment: “The clouds had made a crimson crown/above the mountains high…” An instance, then, is something more flashy— perhaps more feral, unpredictable. I might remember
that my mother spoke about coffee or I might remember the next day when we drove through Topanga canyon with the windows down. A moment, of course, doesn’t have to be fleeting. We can saunter through it, saver it, understand it. We do this in words, we do this when we style a shoot, we do this when we contemplate a photograph. A magazine, for example, seeks to capture a particular moment, to curate a collection of instances that we find meaningful. In doing so the art form asks its onlooker to wrestle too with everything that’s out of the frame. When we define a moment, we simultaneously define those instances we exclude. We beckon to the world builders. This summer I came across the compelling and brilliant world builder Christopher Smith. In 2016 the contempo-
rary photographer released a series of self-portraits to which he has since added. Each portrait has no visible location or setting other than the body. His clothes and the lines of his face form a time machine—a Greek gladiator, a fifties house wife, a ballet dancer. When I see each photo I construct the way Smith moves about a space, what he thinks. Each shot is an instant, but one that unravels. This is the first time I have decided that an image, perhaps even fashion, can say everything. I’m a writer. I am shocked. I have never before wanted this to be true. I’m on my fire escape scrolling through Smith’s photos and shifting through film prints I’ve managed to keep intact through all the moving about I’ve done. I am thinking of ways I can use words to recreate instants. I am thinking about what it means to do so. I am
thinking about how many porches Maya the cat seen before this one? How many does she remember? While I remember in instances, I can’t continuously live in them. So too does fashion. The language of fashion jumps about, is deeply affected by daylight, is hungry for the moment, but like all things is unable to exist independent of its surrounding histories. All I mean to say here is that low rise jeans are coming back and that the cat knows more than I do. It’s that time in Ann Arbor when Summer saunters around and Fall jumps at windows in the night. Inside, my roommates are discussing the uses of the word feral. Maya saunters out and curls up by my arm. Our histories comingle and exist for an instant in complacent and communal silence.
vibrant tones and summer scenes from Barcelona and Costa Brava
PHOTOGRAPHER EVAN PARNESS GRAPHIC DESIGNER MANDA VILLARREAL
S H A L
PHOTOGRAPHER KATIE CORBETT GRAPHIC DESIGNER MACKENZIE SCHWEDT
L Y
G U O
PHOTOGRAPHER EVAN PARNESS GRAPHIC DESIGNER MANDA VILLARREAL
Monochrom
me Madrid
2019–2020
SHEI BOARD We asked our board members this year “What’s in your starter pack?”
Editor-In-Chief
Creative Director
Features Editor
Print Fashion Editor
Print Fashion Editor
Digital Fashion Editor
Design Editor
Design Editor
Print Photo Editor
Print Photo Editor
Digital Photo Editor
Street Style Editor
Managing Photo Editor
Video Editor
Digital Content Editor
Publisher
Accounts Director
Marketing Director
Finance Coordinator
Events Coordinator
Events Coordinator
Outreach Coordinator
Sales Coordinator
Social Media Coordinator
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