Zine-Making Workshop โ Parsons Paris
As a guest lecturer for the Masterโs in Fashion Studies & Communications program at Parsons Paris, I led an immersive workshop on independent publishing and creative storytelling. Students were challenged to step away from their screens and embrace the raw, tactile nature of zine-makingโexperimenting with cut-and-paste aesthetics, collage, and hand-assembled layouts. This hands-on approach encouraged spontaneity, individuality, and a deeper connection to the DIY spirit of print media. Selected works from the workshop will be published in MERDE Magazine, spotlighting the next generation of editorial disruptors.
International Fashion Research Library - Guest Speaker
I was invited to speak at the International Fashion Research Library in Oslo, Norway, where I shared the story behind founding MERDE Magazine as a part of their Guest Salon Series In conversation with a curated selection of fashion theorists, curators, and independent publishers. I spoke candidly about building a print publication from the ground upโhow it began as a space to uplift underrepresented voices and emerging designers, and evolved into a media platform that challenges conventional narratives around beauty, identity, and taste. The talk reflected on editorial risk-taking, the ethics of image-making, and the power of fashion as a cultural document.
Miriam Gallery - Williamsburg Exhibition
MERDE was featured in A Magazine Show, an exhibition spotlighting contemporary offbeat magazines that challenge and reimagine the format of print media. Held in Williamsburg, the show celebrated publications with a distinct point of view โ those unafraid to shift form, embrace play, and root themselves in the emotional texture of time and place. Alongside a curated selection of titles, MERDE stood out for its genre-blurring approach to fashion, storytelling, and cultural commentary.
The show invited visitors to engage with magazines not just as objects, but as living, breathing entities โ meant to be read, handled, laughed with, and lingered over. Through reading rooms, public programming, and a soft-focus on community, A Magazine Show created space for MERDE to live exactly as it was intended: at the intersection of the tactile and the experimental.
My thesis explores the rise of subversive, self-published fashion magazines that challenge mainstream fashion imagery and its perfectionist ideals. Focusing on Cheap Date and Mushpit (1997-2016), I analyze how these publications use irony and parody to critique the industryโs capitalist and consumerist structures. The study culminates in my own contribution to this movementโproducing the second issue of MERDE Magazine, a satirical, anti-aesthetic publication that disrupts traditional fashion narratives.