Founded in 2024

NOT YOUR REGULAR FASHION PUBLICATION.

Obscura Zine was always in our hearts, but blossomed to life during our founder’s final year of university. We focus on providing accurate, authentic pieces that watch dog the industry, not appease it. Flipping the fashion world on its head, we strive to shed light on issues the future generation looks to change through engaging, transparent storytelling.

But, Obscura is more than that. It is your one-stop watering hole for both objective news reporting and oddball editorials with a humanistic approach. Through our reporting, we are sparking conversations in our open forums that are unswayed by the industry. Informing, observing, creating and investigating are what we do by centering content on market needs rather than individual brands.

Meet the Team

It all begins with an idea. Since the beginning, we knew we wanted to work to understand this multi-billion dollar industry— and, how we can disseminate information, uncover the good and the bad, and set a new standard in the industry.

  • Founder, Creative Director

    Alexia is a reporter, poet, graphic designer, public relations consultant, forever learner, and coffee lover.

BEHIND THE NAME

Molded by both the objective, hard and fast journalism that is so desperately needed, and authentic, oddball editorials, we pursue reporting with an accurate and humanistic approach. We are sparking conversations in our open forums that are unswayed by the industry. Informing, observing, creating and investigating are what we do by centering content on market needs rather than individual brands. 

The camera obscura phenomenon was a revolutionary stepping stone in creating the first photographic camera by having light pass through a small hole into a dark room, projecting the view from outside onto the walls. The original camera obscura projections, or pinhole images, projected these scenes upside down and reversed.  

The word obscure can be defined as uncertainty and ambiguity, while the word obscura, an inflected form of obscurus in latin, can be defined as shadowy and indistinct. 

It is no coincidence that both ties to the word curated the perfect juxtaposition to what we wanted to do with our publication – shed light on issues the future generation looks to change through engaging, transparent storytelling. We want to flip the fashion industry on its head, much like the images created by the camera obscura. 

Reporting on the good and bad while staying true and unswayed by the big names, we are building a hub for true fashion news and aberrant views. 

BEHIND THE SPIRAL

The spiral for Obscura is your sign, your white rabbit, your omen, to drop your ego, step out of the cycle, and see the industry for what it is. We aim to apply critical thinking, true reporting and authentic storytelling to inform, entertain, and foster conversations of progress. We are not your regular fashion publication. We aspire to be your spiral’s eye in the chaos of the fashion world, a place to observe, learn, communicate and eventually transform the industry.

Spirals, like the one tattooed and ingrained into my hip, appear in our natural and physical world like synchronicities — from seashells to mathematics, from tree trunks to our fingerprints. In visual semiotics, the spiral represents duality, transcendence and harmonious transformation. It calls on the notion that our intuition propels us toward evolution and to step out of the endless cycles we find ourselves caught up in. 

In psychology, the Spiral Theory is a model signifying the different stages of human development that we go through and grow through. It showcases throughout history and time, we ebb and flow between masculine and feminine energy, individualist and collective mindsets, with structures and desires becoming more complex at each stage of the spiral. This can be applied to our inner development as well, repeatedly coming round to the same point again but at a different level. 

Historically, the spiral and more specifically, the eye of the spiral, represents a natural center of balance around which all motion and turbulence revolve. The spiral's eye evokes one’s own center as a divine source, the eye of wisdom that observes all but is never entangled in turbulence.