“Magazines take themselves too seriously, like it’s life or death,” Jackson Bowley told Dazed earlier this year, at the release of the second issue of his wacky-and-wild ride of a magazine Circus. Bold, bright, chaotic, stressful, sickly, loud, scrappy and stupid, the beauty publication is a lot of things, but the one thing it isn’t is serious.
Circus was founded in 2021 by Bowley, a London-based photographer who was bored and frustrated by the monotonous state of the beauty industry and magazine editorials. Out of this boredom Circus was born, a space where Bowley and the band of creative misfits he assembles for each issue could explore limitless expression, push the boundaries of beauty, celebrate the absurd, poke fun at the industry and dismantle some hierarchies while they’re at it. “Everything about this magazine is what I’ve been told I shouldn’t do: everyone gets one image, everyone is on the same level, there’s no hierarchy,” he says.
Circus upends what a physical magazine can be; each issue is made up of a collection of loosely bound A1 posters, with each image more bizarre and left-field than the last – from an otherworldly Alexis Stone being tended to by three naked Alexis Stones, to jet-skiing alien triplets, to Olympic gold medallist Kathleen Dawson MBE, begoggled in a swimming cap, emerging from the deep with kaleidoscopic painted skin. At its heart, Circus is about finding the fun in what it means to be ‘beautiful’.
Text Alex Peters
