In September 2011, Claire Milbrath was finishing a history degree at Concordia University in Montreal and sitting on a growing body of drawings and paintings that nobody had ever seen. She had no gallery connections, no art school credentials, no obvious path to visibility. But she noticed that most of her friends — artists, photographers, illustrators scattered across Mile End and the Plateau — were in exactly the same position. So she did the logical thing: she started a magazine. The first issue of Editorial had a print run of about seventy copies. She had no experience in publishing and no written concept. She just had a community and a photocopier.
What grew from that impulse became one of the most distinctive art and fashion magazines to emerge from Canada in the past decade. Editorial started as an online venture funded, Milbrath has admitted, by her unemployment insurance. When she began printing, things got harder but also more real — artists took the project more seriously once there was a physical object involved. Olivia Whittick came on as managing editor for all written content, Rebecca Storm became the in-house photographer, and Milbrath's sister Darby joined as a close collaborator on artistic decisions. The magazine grew quarterly, with correspondents in Tokyo and New York, and copies began selling in vintage bookshops across Mile End, then shipping to stores in New York, Europe, and — somewhat improbably — Japan, where a friend distributed issues that consistently sold out.
The art Editorial favours is mostly contemporary figurative painting and illustration, presented alongside fashion stories that feel playful and unstaged rather than glossy and transactional. magCulture described it as combining the edge of Mushpit, the critical intelligence of Bomb Magazine, and the surreal fashion sensibility of Buffalo Zine — high company for a magazine assembled from a Montreal bedroom. The design is deliberately eclectic, mixing Victorian typefaces and decorative borders with risograph inserts and hand-printed posters, creating a visual identity that feels handmade without being precious.
Milbrath herself is a self-taught painter represented by Pangée in Montreal and de boer in Los Angeles, whose canvases of dreamy, naive-inflected domestic scenes have shown at The Hole in New York and Eve Leibe Gallery in London. She has described Editorial as something that began to support her painting career and then flipped — the magazine became the larger project, painting the more personal one. Having moved back to her native Victoria, British Columbia, she has slowed the magazine's pace deliberately, guided by her editor's principle that they should only make it if they enjoy it. There are no investors to appease, no schedules to keep. The magazine appears when it is ready, and what arrives is always worth the wait.
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