Dear Reader,
The world today has a thing for legacy. Legacy brands. Legacy debates. We love to call things “iconic,” “classic,” “historic,” or “GOATed” before they even have a Wikipedia page. Maybe we fixate on legacy because we live in a time when so many things are uncertain and disposable. Or maybe being obsessed with legacy isn’t so new—search: museums, the patriarchy, why someone’s face is on my money, etc.
I thought about legacy more than I normally would in the process of editing this magazine. After all, it’s my first issue as Editor-in-Chief, and it also marks the 374th time i-D has gone to print. Funny enough, if you browse deep into the archives—an experience I would highly recommend—this publication never had much interest in legacy. Its pages are populated with many unnamed people. Its writing is poetically dashed off, as though dictated hastily through a voice recorder. Celebrities and supermodels rub elbows on equal footing with club kids, street-hockey players, and CUTE STRANGERS from all walks of life. i-D’s chief concern was the present moment—not the past, or how things will be seen in the future—and as a result it (somewhat ironically) became monumental.
At the heart of this anti-legacy legacy is the unknown, new things happening so fast that we don’t totally understand them. “It’s called the internet,” announced The Network Issue in 1994. “From computer nerds to info-junkies, chat addicts to cultish weirdos, some 40 million people are now ‘on-line.’ Is this the future of communication?” i-D has always had a thing for the unknown, and it celebrates unknown people by putting them in the spaces normally reserved for the well-known. That’s why Madonna, Naomi Campbell, Rachel Weisz, FKA Twigs, Paloma Elsesser, and more had their first covers here. That’s a legacy I can get into.
This issue started with a simple idea: Find an unknown young person somewhere in America, put her on the cover of our magazine, and see what happens. Once the plan was hatched, I knew that legendary casting director Jennifer Venditti (the genius behind Euphoria and other groundbreaking casts) was the only person who could help us pull it off. “It’s about what magazines were really meant to do as machines for fame,” I told her on our first call, laying on the hard sell. “But it’s also about what it means to be a girl today.” Jen signed on and commenced a nationwide talent search.
Six weeks later, I was on a plane to Ohio to visit a high school senior named Enza Khoury. Amidst the hundreds of PEOPLE JEN AND the i-D team met through the casting process, we were all drawn to Enza by how she embodies the central paradox of being a teenager: at a time when you are most at the mercy of your parents and your teachers, you are also at the height of your capacity to define your world. For Enza, a trans girl growing up in a red state, the oppression all young people feel is concretised by very real and hateful forces in the world. In fact, by the time this magazine is in circulation, she legally won’t be allowed to use the bathroom or join a sports team at her school. Growing up in hostile territory, Enza has written her own script. She works part-time at a movie theatre, because she’s a cinephile and because that’s what storybook suburban kids do. She’s laser-focused that acting will be the ticket out of her sleepy surroundings, another arc seemingly ripped from a cult classic. Even the name of her picturesque town, Chagrin Falls, feels like something the late David Lynch would have invented.
It’s uncanny meeting a stranger you’ve seen in casting videos dozens of times. But what was even more powerful about meeting Enza in the living room of her family’s home was that she already had the presence of a monumental person. She didn’t need the magazine cover we were about to shoot to seem like a hero. It made me feel like I was living in history, while at the same time being part of everyday life. This is what the mode of making i-D feels like. It’s the real legacy.
