The Skirt Chronicles

The Skirt Chronicles
Sofia Nebiolo & Haydée Touitou
4 Dec 19

In December we met Sofia Nebiolo and Haydée Touitou, two of the three founding editors of Paris based magazine The Skirt Chronicles for the second chapter of The Magazine Club. This elegant magazine embraces a wide variety of contents: photography, writings, interviews, poems, excerpts from novels, illustration, emails exchanges... and much more.

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The Skirt Chronicles is a Paris-based publication by Sarah de Mavaleix, Sofia Nebiolo and Haydée Touitou that was launched in March 2017 at Librairie Yvon Lambert in Paris. Granting the same importance to photography as it does to the written word, The Skirt Chronicles is a title exploring literature, fashion, culture and beyond.

The Skirt Chronicles
France
Since 2017
Biannual (2 per year)
152 x 218 mm
176 pages

“It took us a year to make this first issue, it was a really amazing project for us to come together and to create all this identity, and to see what the final product would actually become, because I think when you start a project like this, you might have ideas and you may think how it looks like, but in the end you can never really be sure”
—Sofia Nebiolo

MV: Taking the move from the interview with Dr. Worwitz from the current issue, on the notion of risk, I’d like to ask you if you think that The Skirt Chronicles was or is a very risky venture, for you.
HT: That’s a very good question… Well, every good question has not a “yes” or “no” answer, I guess, so… Of course it’s taking a risk because it’s taking time after our daily jobs, after our personal projects, we had to group together and try to make something, yeah… As we said before, everybody advises you against making a magazine… When you [talking to Karl Henkell] started with Record maybe you had a similar approach thinking “Oh, I’d love making a magazine!” and every single person just saying “Don’t do it! That’s insane! You will go crazy, and you will be so afraid…” and yeah, we still do it and somehow we managed it. Yes, maybe it’s a risk, but it’s a very small risk.

SN: I guess I would say that when we started it, I mean, maybe this was a great idea but we didn’t really have much of a plan behind how we were going to do it. We just wanted to make this project, and we thought “Ok, if it works it works, if it doesn’t it doesn’t”, so I think that in that way it was a risk because we just hoped that it will reach people, and that it would be something that people could resonate with… But I guess maybe the way we go out making the magazine is not thinking about it!

MV: How is the creative process to put an issue together? How is a typical TSC meeting?
SN: We are also friends so we take time to catch up and talk and that’s a big part at the beginning. For example, we just started issue 6, it’s coming out March 2020, everyone came with a list of what we wanna do, and then everyone presented our own ideas. The three people are best together, we have roles in the magazine right now, like in a classic magazine there are roles, but in the end we are a team, and I think that’s the kind of way that we work.

MV: How long does it take to you to put the issue together?
HT: This little baby came in 4 months and a half because we decided to be biannual, now we decided to come out every woman’s fashion week in Paris, so we have no choice, 6 month and that’s it!