In an ode to the reinventive copycat, Buffalo Zine‘s latest issue rips off—in the most creative way possible—the editorial styles of 10 of its contemporaries, including Dazed, i-D, 032c, and The Gentlewoman. The fine line between copying and paying homage has been a hot-button topic lately, with accounts like Diet Prada highlighting the knock-offs and the tributes.
At some bookstores, like London’s Artwords Bookshop, you can see the covers side-by-side—The Gentlewoman‘s Cindy Sherman alongside Buffalo‘s Joan Juliet Buck’s imitation cover in the same Gentlewoman font. And best of all, the editors of the copied publications all seem to be flattered. Dazed Media CEO Jefferson Hack sent an email saying, “you are amazing, this is brilliant!” and Gentlewoman editor-in-chief Penny Martin wrote, “Adrian, I’m so tickled to discover Joan on ‘our’ cover – you may know she was in our second issue. And doesn’t she look grrreat?!”
Luckily, Buffalo Zine‘s editor-in-chief Adrian González-Cohen told Dazed, the editors at the copied publications weren’t upset at all, which was fortunate considering the magazine’s team sent it off the printers without asking first.
“We’ve always had an ongoing discussion on the subject of copying,” he said. “We’ve been copied many times, we have copied many things, and our point of view about it is pretty celebratory. In this issue we exorcised it so we don’t have to talk about it any more.”