Editing is a quiet job. The best editors tend to be invisible, which is what allows their magazines to feel coherent. When you read a good magazine, you are really reading the editor's taste — in writers, in photographs, in what is allowed to take up space and what is quietly cut. The three editors below run publications that still take craft seriously in a market that mostly does not.
Tamsin Blanchard
Tamsin Blanchard edits Hole & Corner, the magazine dedicated to craft, heritage and authenticity. Before Hole & Corner she was style editor at The Observer and The Telegraph, and she wrote Green is the New Black in 2007, back when the sustainability conversation was barely a conversation. What I love about her editorial voice is that it treats craft as serious journalism, not as a soft-focus lifestyle topic. A craftsperson is a worker with a practice, and she interviews them that way.
Sam Walton
Sam Walton is the founder and creative director of Hole & Corner, and her imprint on the magazine is visible in every issue. The design is spare, the portraits are close, the stories are allowed to breathe. Magazines with that kind of editorial confidence are rare. Most of them compress into the shortest possible version of themselves because the market pressures them to. Hole & Corner has held its line, and it has shaped how an entire generation of makers gets seen.
Anja Tyson
Anja Tyson edits The Lissome, a print magazine focused on regenerative design and sustainable fashion. Print has become a statement in itself now, and choosing to publish on paper — slowly, carefully, with photography that deserves the scale — is a quiet editorial argument for the value of slowness. The Lissome is the sort of magazine I end up reading from cover to cover rather than flicking through, which is basically the highest compliment I can give a publication.
The linen dresses at Souls In Clothes are made with wearers of magazines like these in mind — people who still value the long form of things.