DUST Issue 25 – The Smile Issue

DUST #25 - The Smile Issue

These recent years feel like the most perplexing times our generation has ever experienced. More and more, our present has been worn away and reshaped, confining us to a world that tests our ability to envision a welcoming future or give us reasons to smile about it. A smile, however, remains one of the most powerful tools we have—not as a means of escaping reality or succumbing to cynicism, but as a defiant act of hope. In the face of ever-intensifying climate catastrophes worldwide, wars waged ruthlessly against international laws, the threat of unregulated AI, rising polarisation in society, and the alarming rise of anti-democratic populist forces, smiling becomes our act of defiance, a rejection of a reality we refuse to conform to. Inevitably, smiling creates spaces where new ideas flourish, inclusive movements are nurtured, and a better tomorrow is forged, spreading a contagious spirit of resistance. Losing our smile means losing our future.

DUST, A EUROPEAN MAGAZINE ABOUT FASHION AND ITS OPPOSITES IS A BIANNUAL MAGAZINE BORN IN 2010 BASED IN BERLIN AND DISTRIBUTED WORLDWIDE.
The intent of the project is to explore the universe of youth, in the context of a present time marked by a continuous state of crisis. Our interest is to enlighten the genuine and non-codified aspects of youth and of the new emerging generation by directing our gaze far from institutionalized geography and trends, and above the current standardization that tends to conform the experience of youth in regulated forms. In our research we cross conflicting territories, where structures collapse and the western codes of appearances dissolve into different kinds of choices, different kinds of dynamics. We like to underline a silent geography, at the margin of mainstream paths, in order to rediscover a stronger attachment to life, somehow more vital, genuine and awake; something that is hard to find in the anesthetized youth presented by the disoriented circulating culture. The territory in which we dig is ‘the crisis’ as the elected place where to redesign forms, ideas, values and strategies for our generation to embrace a different way to conceive of life. We observe the collapse of stabilities taking place globally as an irreversible shift of scenario that’s pushing youth to an urgency of change, an urgency to find a new and proper vision. As many do, we feel renewal to be necessary in all fields, based on a more personal sensibility. In light of our concerns and interests, the realms of communication, visual culture, art and fashion need to be reconsidered from a new point of view. Our magazine is intent on creating, within the limits of any cultural product present in the market, this new vision. We consider the magazine a laboratory of ideas and concepts through which we search for a new esthetic and to give the image new value. Our personal interests go beyond the idea of coolness, trends, waves or anything established by pop culture. We prefer to direct our gaze to the basic, genuine way through which youth expresses itself, from where everything should be reconsidered.