Self Service

What started in Paris twenty-five years ago as a dream to provide a platform for creativity to evolve, to represent a creative generation of both the avant-garde and the establishment, and to celebrate individual style and progressive ideas, has developed into a mission: an ongoing commitment to intensively explore the intricacies and diversities of fashion, photography and art.
Since the mid-1990s, Self Service’s mission, responsibility and raison d’être as a bi-annual fashion and cultural magazine has been to continuously support and celebrate the mechanics means of creativity within our industry; reacting to, engaging with and reflecting society and culture’s influence on fashion and the arts. We have discovered, championed and celebrated its artistic forces the many free-spirited cultural and fashion radicals and progressive minds, all those who have constantly explored and transgressed the norm through their undiluted imagination and ideology.
This film is a gathering together of two and a half decades of fashion, people, images and ideas as they have appeared on our printed pages, providing a fascinating testament to, and a subjective barometer of, fashion’s evolving aesthetic and cultural norms.
In today’s ever-growing standardisation of our industry, and communication with its rapid decrease of artistic and innovative expectations, the banal or the mediocre have become ever so acceptable. When will fashion be fashion again: that is, a means to challenge the boundaries of its own convention, a spirit that does not run away from risk, that makes you dream and desire, a driving force that redefines, enlightens and provides a stylistic and visionary glimpse of our times, hinting at creative trends to be?

EZRA PETRONIO