Before Giannie Couji founded UBIKWIST in 2014, she trained as a pattern cutter at ESMOD in Paris and worked her way through the fashion world — from Catherine Malandrino to Hermès, from casting agencies to styling. What she did not find, anywhere along that path, was a publication that looked like the world she actually lived in. The fashion magazines she picked up were overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly narrow in their definition of beauty. So she made her own. UBIKWIST launched from New York City as a biannual, independent, and defiantly multicultural publication — part fashion magazine, part cultural statement.
The name is a deliberate play on "ubiquitous": the magazine's founding premise is that beauty, creativity, and cultural richness are everywhere, in every community, if you bother to look. Each issue assembles fashion editorials, artist profiles, and cultural features with production values that rival any mainstream glossy, but with an editorial voice that centres underrepresented communities — Black, Brown, Indigenous, diasporic — without reducing them to a single story. Issue eleven, themed "Exposé," brought in the trailblazing filmmaker Euzhan Palcy as guest editor and featured conversations with Angela Davis and Kendrick Sampson on civil disobedience and the future of America. That is not a typical fashion magazine lineup.
Zoltan Alexander, a Hungarian-born creative director with stints at British and French Vogue and collaborations with LVMH and Issey Miyake, joined as art director in 2014 and helped set the visual tone. The result is a magazine that carries its activism in its aesthetics: the photography is lush, the layouts are confident, and every page communicates the idea that diversity is not a niche market but the default condition of culture. With sixteen issues published and a loyal international readership, UBIKWIST has outlasted the pandemic, the print downturn, and the attention economy — fuelled, as Couji has said, by a consistently progressive vision that refuses to compromise.
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