Stephan Ziehen is a fashion and beauty photographer based in Hamburg, and CYTE is the magazine he makes because the mainstream ones stopped saying what he wanted to hear. Launched as a small, deeply personal project, the biannual publication covers fashion, beauty, music, and art with the rawness and unfiltered energy of a music fanzine — which is exactly the comparison Ziehen invites. The magazine carries no advertising in its print edition. It likes, hates, and comments without compromise. It calls itself punk for grown-ups, and it means it.
Sixteen issues in, CYTE has carved out a voice that is rare in independent fashion publishing: genuinely opinionated, uncomfortable with consensus, and willing to interrogate its own industry. The editorials are personal and discursive — Ziehen writes openly about the contradiction of loving image-making while knowing his commercial photography fuels consumption, about the erosion of genuine criticism in fashion media where advertising budgets silence honest voices, about narratives repeated until they become truths. When the keyboarder of Parcels kept his mouth open and eyes closed in all 25 photographs, that was the moment — and CYTE printed it. Because unconventional people deserve unconventional coverage.
The sixth issue addressed the need for lightness and positivity in difficult times — a rare thing in fashion photography, where smiling is almost taboo. The eighth issue dissected the concept of the narrative as a tool of manipulation. Recent editions have featured moving interviews with Ukrainian model Andrii Barabash, living out of a suitcase since the 2022 invasion, working to support his family from abroad. This is not the kind of story that makes it into conventional fashion magazines, and that is precisely the point.
Distributed through LOREM (not Ipsum) and available at selected bookshops, CYTE is for readers who want their fashion media honest, rough around the edges, and unafraid to say what it thinks — even when that means questioning its own reason for existing.
<a href="https://www.cytemagazin.de/">Visit CYTE