Each issue of Collection Issue begins with a destination. Not a studio, not a set — a place. For Issue 04, editor-in-chief and creative director Mark Rabadan took top model Adesuwa Aighewi to Accra, Ghana, where she keeps an apartment. The images that came back were sun-drenched, unhurried, and completely unlike the controlled environments where most high-fashion editorials are produced. That tension between the rigour of fashion photography and the unpredictability of real locations is what defines the magazine.
Published in London on a biennial schedule, Collection Issue sits at the intersection of travel, fashion, and culture. Rabadan serves as both photographer and editorial leader, which gives the publication an unusual coherence: every image, every layout decision, every cover choice flows from a single creative vision. The roster of models who have graced its covers reads like a who’s who of the contemporary fashion world — Hanne Gaby Odiele, Tasha Tilberg, Shanelle Nyasiase, Blesnya Minher, Frida Nerdal — but the styling by Anna Schiffel and casting by Megan McCluskie consistently pull the editorial toward something warmer and more personal than a typical fashion shoot.
The result is a magazine that feels more like a travel journal kept by someone with extraordinary taste than a conventional fashion publication. The locations are not backdrops; they shape the mood, the colour palette, the rhythm of the pages. When Collection Issue sends a model to Ghana or Scotland or wherever the next issue takes them, the place is as much a protagonist as the person in front of the lens.
Four issues in, the magazine has carved out a distinctive space: too fashion-forward to be a travel magazine, too rooted in real places to be a fashion magazine, and too personal to be either. For readers who want their fashion photography to smell like somewhere rather than nowhere, Collection Issue delivers exactly that.
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