The fashion industry these days is becoming more and more if not only about ‘the business’ of fashion. The bigger priority seems to be which designer will hallmark the grand fashion house in order to monopolize bigger revenue. Perhaps legitimate in this still unstable economy, but you can’t help to wonder what function fashion has culturally when talk of the town is more so about who went where and who was replaced by who, instead of the presentation of a collection that actually made your head spin. It looks as if those days are over, while we are all waiting for that change, that big apocalyptical moment where fashion again can be also about just fashion and not only the business. It seems disheartening to think the counter culture of fashion has disappeared.

Which of course is not really the case. As the term ‘underground’ has become dated, the only place where we can find counter culture currently is on the World Wide Web. In relation to fashion it comes in the shape of New York based self-described post Internet lifestyle magazine DIS. Most people might be puzzled at first by DIS, like one of our earlier bloggers, who at first mistaken the Kenzo video for some odd though appreciated departure of the brand, while in fact the DIS people master minded it all. But this is also the charm of it. While the rest of the fashion industry still abides by the hierarchical system in order to function, DIS dismantles it all by presenting a vision that merges that exact generic advertising of fashion with editorial content that forces you to rethink how much ‘beauty’ and ‘ugly’ really differ from each other. Who’s to say shopping mall fashion isn’t as inspiring if not more than that high-brow exclusive flagship store on 5th Avenue. DIS embraces the mundane the same way the fashion world clutches tightly on to the slow disappearance of couture. Only theirs is more liberating than stifling.

DIS launched in 2010 by founders Lauren Boyle, David Toro, Solomon Chase, Marco Rosso, Nick Scholl, Patrik Sandberg and Samuel Adrian Massey. The editorial team consists of Toro, Chase and Boyle who are also editorial directors for V magazine multimedia conglomerate offshoot Vfiles, as well as Nick Scholl who is a web designer and Marco Rosso a creative director at Grey New York. DIS is razor sharp, witty and cunning, placing any so called renowned Vogue.com editor in the shadows. Whether it’s recognized by the bigger audience or not, they do succeed in placing the untainted smile back into fashions current constraints. An emotion I last experienced with fashion in the early 2000’s with the rise of fashion designers like Bernhard Wilhelm, Wendy & Jim and Bless. Lauren Boyle explained in a New York Times interview “Alber Elbaz once said: ‘where Uptown and Downtown meet, but not in Midtown. We hate Midtown,’ ” Lauren continued, “I think that statement says a lot about fashion, and we pretty much feel the opposite. Midtown isn’t high or low, it’s medium. For us that’s where the fertile, untrodden ground is. Mass-market department stores are not where the trends go to die, it’s where they culminate.” This exact unsettling approach might go against everything the fashion industry has been fighting so hard for, DIS though has understood very well that the only way to liberate the art in fashion is to break down the current state it is in. If they succeed within that exact fashion industry is perhaps unlikely and probably not even an ambition. In the meantime they have been picked up by the International art-circuit like the New Musem, Miami’s Art Basel and Frieze Art Projects while the fashion world meanders what to do with them. DISmember?

DIS