Since the weekend I’ve been delving into the eight issues of Umbrella magazine that have been published to date.
This was purely a chance discovery, due to a passing reference in the new edition of the Phil Thornton “Casuals” book (a review of that is coming post haste).
This is a sort of leftfield men’s mag, with articles on design, dressing, food, travel, music and socio-political issues. It exists mainly online, where all issues can be read or downloaded to iphone/ipad for free. Or, in an unabashed appeal to commodity fetishism, if any particular issue takes your fancy you can order a hard copy for your collection for about US$20 a pop.
As you would expect from a publication referenced in Phil Thonton’s book, at least some of the publishers seem to have a strong association with the terraces, so there’s plenty of football articles, the menswear section often focuses on Stone Island and CP Company and much love is shown to Boys’ Own fanzine. The first issue features a frothing-at-the-mouth appreciation of “Selected Ambient Works” by Aphex Twin and a reminisence by “Away Days” author Kevin Sampson on how he made the “Short Film about Chilling” documentary with The Farm. So this nails the “Eastern Terraces” demographic dead-on.
A kind of Wallpaper magazine by and for post-casuals, presented in nice, intellectually-undemanding (I mean that in the best possible way), bite-size, easily digestible chunks.
Highly recommended!
http://www.umbrellamagazine.co.uk/
Posted by Gunter Sacks
The Eastern Terraces 