CRWN Magazine has launched its first issue after one year of curating, laboring, ‘picture taking’ and downright hard work. Recently co founder and editor-in-chief Lindsey Day and business partner Nkrumah spoke with Yahoo news giving them the inside scoop of what to expect with the first issue.
Via yahoo news:
CRWN magazine launched the first official issue of its natural-hair publication at an intimate rooftop brunch in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on Aug. 28. The launch comes almost a year to the day after CRWN saw its first iteration as a zine, which was handed out for free during the borough’s Afropunk music festival.
“[With the zine], we just wanted to put the essence of who we were out there and put it in people’s hands as soon as possible rather than waiting and building this huge thing to sell,” co-founder and editor-in-chief Lindsey Day tells Yahoo Beauty a week before the launch. Now, that “huge thing” comprises 137 pages and almost 20 contributors all on topics and issues of interest to women with natural hair.
“Black women have not been represented in an honest way in print,” Nkrumah Farrar, the publication’s creative director and Day’s business partner, tells Yahoo Beauty. The pair met working together on a blog on the West Coast, where Farrar still lives, but eventually reconnected and came up with CRWN on the very rooftop that the brunch was held. “The approach that has been taken is outdated visually and otherwise; we don’t just mean in hair magazines, we mean in magazines in general.” His statements ring true.
The content also goes deeper than hair. “People are going to be pleasantly surprised,” Farrar says. “I think people are expecting to open up a natural version of Hype Hair, and it’s not that. We probably have more thought pieces and essays in the issue than we do things that are specifically pertaining to hair. We use natural hair as a pivot point to connect with an audience of African- American women who share similar psychographics that led them to eventually becoming natural.”
According to Farrar and Day, this first issue was the manifesto, introducing fans to the world of CRWN, and subsequent issues will become more theme oriented. In cover stars, the pair are looking for authenticity as with this issue’s Whitney White feature. “She was just like the natural choice,” Day says of White, who boasts more than 67 million views on her YouTube channel that delves into her transition to a natural-hair lifestyle. “Funny enough, I met her at Afropunk on Day One of CRWN.”
“The genesis of all of this is digital,” Farrar says, noting that most of the natural-hair conversation has happened online. “We were thinking of an actress at first, but we decided to go in this direction. Whitney is one of the most important people in this culture because she was so early and she touched so many people.” And through CRWN, they are hoping to touch a lot more.
I do not know about you but I cannot wait to get my first issue, I will keep it forever. Follow CRWN here.
