Interview with Bertie Brandes: Founder of Mushpit Magazine

From self-publishing to brand partnerships, Bertie Brandes talks Mushpit Magazine, a witty, raw, self-conscious publication with an anarchic satirical fashion and feminist approach that disrupts. 

“A lot of people these days think that until you partner with a brand the thing that you’re doing isn’t legitimate, whereas we should really be trying to avoid that as much as possible” 

- Brandes

MERDE: What brought you into the world of fashion publishing?

BRANDES: I got blogspot.com when I was 17, so I was always writing on that and it was kind of fashion adjacent. When I graduated, I got a job a Vice. They asked me to be Fashion Editor after 6 months. That was my really lucky little push in the door; it allowed me to enter in that world a bit. My first ever paid job was fashion week, so I just went straight into it andlearned from that. It snowballed from there. 

MERDE: Tell me about your history with your partner Charlotte Roberts and why you two started Mushpit?

BRANDES: We met through a friend when we were 21. We were both free and had this burning desire to make something. It felt very natural. At that point I wanted to be a stylist, so Mushpit allowed me to try my hand at that. We were both learning the ropes about the industry and were finding it quite funny so we thought maybe Mushpit could be a good outlet for us to talk about those experiences. 

MERDE: What were your dreams when starting Mushpit, what were you trying to achieve?

BRANDES: We both wanted to make something physical that gave us a direction where we could experiment and have fun. It was a lovely dream, to run a magazine which is anything you want to talk about anytime - to develop an audience and relationships around it. That is what happened, we were very lucky. The goal was always to make it bigger and better we just didn’t really know how at first. 

MERDE: Who did you see as your audience?

BRANDES: We saw our audience as ourselves. We didn’t have the foresight to really think about who was going to read it - which ended up serving us well. We thought of it as an outlet for things that we wanted to say. In a brilliant way, the question was always “what’s funny to us? This is funny, let’s do it.” It was a tiny magazine, with a tiny distribution. It was really just for us and our peers at the beginning. 

MERDE: How did you form a contributor network?

BRANDES: I would reach out to people that were doing cool things - it could be anyone from a photographer to a journalist to a fiction writer or an artist. Just emailing them worked a lot of the time. If you write, using the right tone of voice, asking in the right way - and give people the right amount of freedom, they’re willing to participate. That’s what was great about self-publishing, because with Mushpit we had total freedom to do anything we wanted. 

MERDE: After self-publishing the first few issues, how did your intentions and perspectives change?

BRANDES: Mushpit was always absurd and open. We didn’t have a page count or a flat plan, so if someone wanted to do something and said they needed 20 pages to do it, if we thought it was a good idea we’d say “fine, fucking go for it.” For example, in Issue 10 there’s a 14 page spread called “Panic Attack.” 

Mushpit didn’t have to exist within any structure, even in terms of timing, if one of our contributors needed more time we could give it to them, which meant we could really push and flex to make sure that we had time and space to accommodate people’s visions. There is so much you can do with the printed page. 

MERDE: What was Mushpit’s unique point of view that strayed from content produced by other magazines?

BRANDES: I think fundamentally Mushpit didn’t so much have one specific point of view. We were always interested in new ideas and it was amazing we had so many people as contributing new ideas to our vision. We would loosely theme an issue but really we would just ask our contributors “what do you think? What can you do around that?” It helps when you don’t have strict deadlines or advertisers breathing down your neck. 

MERDE: When working with brand partnerships, how did you remain subversive and not “sell out?”

BRANDES: We were lucky because the first 4 or 5 issues were free of any branded work at all. We were quite ‘out there’ content wise - therefore if brands approached us, they knew exactly what they were getting themselves into - that they wouldn’t get something ‘safe.’ For example, with Nike, we did 3D rendered advertorial galleries depicting the end of the world where all the shoes were hidden underneath water. They knew that’s what they had to expect, and that’s what they got. 

MERDE: Why did you decide to move on from Mushpit?

BRANDES: Issue 10, our final issue released in 2017, was by far the best. We worked with the amazing and brilliant Richard Turley as the director. He made it everything that I’d always wanted Mushpit to be and more. After that happened it was hard to imagine ever doing another one. It just came to a really natural conclusion. 

MERDE: What are your reflections on Mushpit?

BRANDES: Sometimes things don’t go on forever, it’s sad but true. It was great - I believe really meaningful things that you put your heart and soul into generally don’t tend to be commercial. We almost didn’t want to be able to sell it. I think it’s a mistake a lot of people make these days, making things too commercial. We might have made this mistake if we were [financially] able to. A lot of people these days think that until you partner with a brand the thing that you’re doing isn’t legitimate, whereas we should really be trying to avoid that as much as possible. We were quite independent and strict. I try to find an unusual angle or humor in everything I do, as we did with Mushpit. 

“Fucking go for it.”

- Brandes