Beauty is not the subject of this magazine.

At least, not in the way we’ve been taught to think about it: as an ideal to aspire to, a product to consume, a tool of exclusion dressed up as glamour.

We don’t begin Notes on Beauty with a definition. We begin with the opposite: a question. What is beauty now—and who gets to decide?

This publication was born out of a desire to pause. To linger. To resist the relentless speed and surface obsession of our visual culture. Over the last decade, through Document Journal, we’ve explored fashion, art, and politics as intertwined expressions of contemporary life. But increasingly, I found myself returning to one idea that kept slipping through the cracks: beauty. Not the commodified version, but the deeper, stranger, more unsettling kind. The kind that disorients as much as it delights. That attracts and unsettles at once. The kind of beauty that doesn’t conform to taste, but expands it.

Notes on Beauty is not a journal of answers—it’s a space of inquiry. A curated field of reflections, conversations, provocations, images, and essays that engage with beauty as a force, a pressure, a question mark. We’re interested in the way beauty moves between bodies and objects, language and silence, surface and structure. And perhaps most importantly: we’re interested in who has historically been left out of that conversation.

Beauty, after all, is never neutral. It is always political—shaped by systems of power, capable of reinforcing or resisting them. For too long, beauty has been used to uphold hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality. It has functioned as a gatekeeper, a silent standard, a mirror held up to the most limiting myths of desirability. But beauty can also be something else entirely. It can be the site of resistance, of reinvention. It can be soft armor. A coded language. A kind of freedom.

This inaugural issue brings together a wide constellation of voices—from artists and philosophers to designers, writers, and photographers—each offering their own response to the question of what beauty means, and what it might still become. Some of the conversations are direct and tender. Others are deliberately oblique, circling the idea rather than trying to pin it down. Because to talk about beauty is to talk about what we long for, and longing is not tidy. It’s contradictory. It’s charged.

One of the anchors of this issue is “Love Is the Message,” a portfolio by Inez and Vinoodh and our Beauty Director, Yadim, a meditation on beauty as a process of uncovering rather than transformation: a journey of becoming oneself. Opening with a hand-painted title by Tabboo!, the project brings together some of the most resonant figures of the last four decades, individuals who have shaped the cultural landscape of New York and far beyond. To each, we posed a simple yet profound question: What did you need to learn to understand beauty in relation to your identity? And what did you have to unlearn to fully embrace who you are today? Through their lens—and through Yadim’s deeply intentional approach to beauty as language and liberation—this story becomes an unfolding narrative: personal, political, ever-changing. 

The covers themselves reflect the layered spirit of the magazine. The Francesco Vezzoli cover was the first we conceived—an image that wrestles with beauty as mythology, distortion, and desire all at once. It set the tone for what followed: a refusal of easy answers, a pull toward ambiguity. The cover featuring Anok Yai, styled by Yadim and photographed by Carlijn Jacobs, is another defining moment—a visual articulation of strength, softness, and the radical act of self-possession. Together, these covers chart the range of our inquiry and the richness of the conversations within.

Overall, we’ve approached Notes on Beauty as an object to hold, not scroll through. Slightly taller than Document Journal, the magazine’s dimensions are more closely in line with the golden ratio, which is ubiquitous in nature. The paper, the sequencing, the quiet spacing of text and image—these choices are intentional. We want this magazine to slow you down. To invite you to pay attention, not only to the work, but to the way you move through it. The layout doesn’t shout. It breathes. It leaves room.

The Notes on Beauty masthead and headline typeface is drawn by Christian Schwartz and Tim Ripper. The starting point was an inscription at the MIT campus dedicated to George Eastman. It’s the synthesis of an early 20th-century American architectural lettering seen all over the campus, that, as I understand it, was usually drawn by architects themselves.

If Document Journal is where we explore culture through the lens of fashion and culture, Notes on Beauty is where we let ourselves be undone a little. It’s where we question the frameworks we’ve inherited. It’s a place of unlearning, and of curiosity. A place where intuition holds as much weight as intellect, and where vulnerability is not a liability, but a point of entry.

I hope you find something in these pages that moves you—not necessarily toward agreement, but toward reflection. That’s what beauty has always done for me. It has destabilized me, challenged me, made me feel more alive. And right now, in a world that often feels flattening and transactional, that’s no small thing.

Thank you to the contributors, artists, editors, and thinkers who helped shape this first issue—and to Yadim, whose vision as Beauty Director brought clarity, emotion, and depth to every facet of this project; to Jawara, our Senior Beauty Editor, whose rigor and poetic sensitivity helped push our conversations on representation and identity; and to Ronald Burton III, our Style Director, whose sharp eye and cultural fluency infused every page with intention and vision.

This is only the beginning of an evolving inquiry—one that resists closure, embraces contradiction, and insists on beauty as a critical site of cultural, political, and personal meaning.