I’m so honoured to be introducing you to our magazine, a review of beauty in the old sense of the French revue—a looking-over, where the rituals, the relics and the small daily acts of self-invention are read closely, lovingly, with intrigue and awe.
Issue Zero is built around two words - ALTAR / ALTER.
ALTAR, from adolere, to burn / ALTER, the second of two
An altar is a high place. The Latin altare most likely grew from adolere, to burn, to send an offering up in smoke, though the Romans liked to hear altus in it, a table lifted a little nearer the gods. It is where vows are uttered, where prayers are received, where sacrifices are made.
Alter means ‘the other’. In Latin it meant the second of two, and it has scattered itself through the English language ever since. Alternative (another choice). Altruism (the other before the self). Alter ego (a second self).
Anyone who has ever sat at a vanity knows that ALTAR and ALTER belong together. A triptych mirror altarpiece frames you in the centre panel, a place to sit down in ritual, in worship, in sacrifice and in devotion. The altar is where you lay out the things you love. Alter is what loving them does to you, in the instant of sublime transformation, and slowly, over years of dawns, twilights and dusks.
The altar is where you lay out the things you love. Alter is what loving them does to you.
That thread runs through everything we care about. It is the makeover, the true art of alternate expression, in the holy act of feeling another’s touch on your skin. It is in a first love, the original altar call, answered at an age when we were willing to put our hearts on a plate for beauty. It is in the friendships we keep like a devotional practice; Cicero called the true friend alter idem, another self, which may be the oldest definition of a best friend we have. It is in the second selves we invent so the first can rest, and in glamour, which once meant a dark kind of magic. It is in the rituals of beauty that we keep, and it is in the icons we adore. Beauty—in all of its wonder and terror and strange surreal power—is ultimately about what we worship and how we transform.
Beauty has always had its preachers: people shouting about what you should be or who you ought to become. We have no wish to be one of them. What interests us is the devotion to a body, to a face, to a self; the peculiar and private ways that loving something rearranges you; what you choose to worship in the dark and who you choose to become.
A magazine is its own kind of altar. We lay on it the things we believe deserve looking at, in the hope that you will come close enough to admire them alongside us. This is a beauty magazine, but here, there is nobody waiting to tell you what you should become when you arrive, or how you should be transformed when you leave.
The candles are lit. The altar is set. Let us begin.
Ellen Atlanta
Editor-in-Chief
