Luis Venegas was working as a designer for Thierry Mugler in Paris when his career in fashion began. It was 1996. By 2005, he had served as creative director of communications for Spanish designer Sybilla in Madrid, and the following year he launched his first magazine, Fanzine137, in a limited edition of 1,137 copies. Then came EY! Magateen in 2008. Then, in the autumn of 2009 — the worst possible moment, as Venegas freely admits, right in the teeth of the global recession — he launched the magazine that would change things. He called it CANDY, after Candy Darling, the Warhol superstar, and he subtitled it "The First Transversal Style Magazine."
The idea was born from a simple question about representation. Venegas had been thinking about how important it was, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to see Black models in fashion magazines — how Beverly Johnson on the cover of Vogue had mattered. He asked himself what was missing now. The answer was the trans community: deeply connected to fashion, endlessly creative, and entirely without a great fashion magazine of their own. The first issue was printed in an edition of 1,000 copies, and when Venegas approached brands for advertising, most were reluctant. They assumed the magazine would be tacky. It was, of course, the opposite of tacky. Venegas wanted it to look like Vogue. Actually, he wanted it to look better than Vogue.
Over the following fifteen years, CANDY published covers featuring Connie Fleming styled as the first transgender Black woman president of the United States, James Franco in drag styled by Mel Ottenberg, and a cast of legends and newcomers that stretches from Laverne Cox and Hari Nef to Candy Darling and Marsha P. Johnson. The photography came from Nan Goldin, Ryan McGinley, Jack Pierson, and Ellen von Unwerth. In 2020, Rizzoli published The C☆NDY Book of Transversal Creativity, a hardback retrospective with a foreword by Jefferson Hack of Dazed Media, compiling the best of twelve issues. i-D called Venegas "Spain's reigning champion of the queer/fashion crossover." He continued to run the entire operation — editor, publisher, creative director — from Madrid and Barcelona, simultaneously producing four other limited-edition publications.
Venegas once considered stopping. Trans models were winning Model of the Year awards. The content he had pioneered could now be found in mainstream publications and on social media. Then a transgender friend told him something that changed his mind: "Luis, you're not only showing the new hot people. You're also showing obscure figures from the trans legacy and helping to build and document culture." That, in the end, is what CANDY does. It is not a political magazine — Venegas has always insisted on that — but the fact that it exists, and that it looks the way it does, has been a political act from the very first issue. It is, as one admirer put it, the best party ever, and everyone is invited.
Explore CANDY at <a href="https://www.candytransversal.com/" target="\_blank">candytransversal.com