How To Make A Zine For The Internet Age
With publication Born N Bread, five south London girls explore food, fandom, and black British identity.
“We wanted to represent ourselves as the missing voice in media,” says 25-year-old Londoner Adelaide Lawson, one of the founding members of London’s Born N Bread collective, explaining why she and a group of childhood friends originally decided to start producing a zine in 2014. “A lot of the time, in magazine culture, or just in this society, you’re told to be looking this way, told to be dressing this way, to talk this way—and [we were] like, ‘bun that, that’s long. Just do what you feel!’”
Zines are DIY magazines that come in pretty much any form; their popularity exploded with the punk scene in the ‘70s and riot grrrl in the ‘90s, as radical subcultures used them to give a platform to the voices and interests they didn’t see reflected in mainstream press. Once everyone and their uncle began expressing themselves through a billion carefully curated Twitter timelines in the '00s, it seemed like self-publishing was no longer a novelty, and the form might die. But now, the tide is turning again, and the internet is making it easier than ever before to promote and distribute your own revolutionary—or just plain cool—pamphlet (even Frank Ocean is doing it). Besides, as 26-year-old Born N Bread member Stephanie Sesay puts it, “Because we're so immersed in a digital space—Instagram, Facebook—people want something else. It's quite refreshing to write something down again and print it.”
Reading the Born N Bread zine is like reading a collective diary. Its loving, hilarious tone makes it obvious that it’s created by a group of lifelong friends: namely, Lawson and Sesay, together with 23-year-old Abigail Jackson, 25-year-old Olivia Udoyen, and 26-year-old Chika Wilson [all pictured above]. The first issue, “Black,” was about “trying to shine a light on a lot of black artists,” featuring up-and-coming local talents. Their second issue “N.Y.C. Diaries,” released earlier this year, focused on a group trip to New York. It contains an FKA twigs lyric page—a la ‘80s/’90s U.K. pop music magazines like Smash Hits—live music reviews written like religious epiphanies (“by the fourth song I was in another world,” writes Sesay of a Jesse Boykins III concert), anecdotes about creepy guys, and cut-outs of beautiful, intimate Instagram moments.
“With a zine, there’s no limit,” says Sesay. “It’s like, ‘[the upcoming third] issue’s gonna be about African culture in Western society.’ That’s it—you take it from there, and there’s endless ideas that you can bring to the table.” Each member of the collective gets her own double page in the zine to do whatever she likes with. They each create a collage of text and pictures by hand, before scanning their pages into the computer and taking the files to their local print shop in Peckham, south London. Once the pages are printed on A3 paper, they fold it up and staple it themselves; then they distribute it both online and in select cafes and shops (including record stores YAM and Rye Wax) in the area.
“There's no rule of how it should be!” Sesay enthuses. “[Zines can] come in every kind of color, size, typeface. It’s amazing.” But more than the creative freedom, this radical form of self-publishing offers a political opportunity to make yourself heard. “That’s the whole point of zines, these people have voices that might not be heard in certain places or in the world, probably, or they’re coming from a different angle,” says Sesay. “That’s why they choose to talk to you through a zine.” If you want to get in on the conversation, here are the collective’s most essential tips for getting your own publication out there.