GERT JONKERS AND JOP VAN BENNEKOM, BUTT Magazine, Nos. 20, 23–29, Amsterdam, 2007–2011

A near-complete run of BUTT's final act — the Amsterdam quarterly founded in 2001 by journalist Gert Jonkers and designer Jop van Bennekom, which built a readership by photographing artists, porn performers, musicians, bartenders and unknown men with the same unhurried intimacy. No. 20 (Summer 2007, the LA BUTT issue) opens the group; an unbroken sequence from No. 23 through No. 29 (Autumn–Winter 2011) carries it to the close of the original print run — the title would not resume until its 2022 revival.

Contributors across the eight numbers include Wolfgang Tillmans, Hedi Slimane, Terry Richardson, Walter Pfeiffer, Alasdair McLellan, Marcelo Krasilcic, David Benjamin Sherry and Zoe Ghertner behind the camera; Jake Shears, Kele Okereke, Rick Owens, Telfar Clemens, Thom Browne, Gore Vidal, John Waters, Jayne County, Vince Aletti and Slava Mogutin before it or in print. No. 24 (Autumn 2008) carries a rarely reproduced portfolio of Keith Haring's 1978 penis drawings, predating his familiar public iconography by several years. No. 26 (Spring 2009) includes a sixteen-page colour Tillmans portfolio, Der Unterwäschekatalog.

The verso as running commentary. The back covers form their own sequence — six American Apparel campaigns bracketing single insertions from Calvin Klein Jeans (No. 24) and Dior Homme, Marlon Teixeira photographed by Karl Lagerfeld (No. 26). One American Apparel page (No. 25) is a memorial advertisement for Quetzalcóatl "Quetzal" Rangel Sánchez, 1985–2008 — commercial space surrendered entirely to remembrance. No. 29 closes the run with "Queer Employee Style at American Apparel," nine staff portraits arranged as a typology: advertising that has stopped announcing itself as advertising. American Apparel's relationship to the title went beyond sponsorship — when the magazine's sale was challenged in Canada in 2009, the company publicly defended it by name.

Read front to back, the group tracks two histories at once: a small pink magazine assembling a culture through adjacency — carpenter beside pop star, intern beside icon — while a specific slice of 2007–2011 fashion capital queues on the reverse to be seen next to it.

Price: £60 per issue / £500 the group.