#identity

#identity

Long before social media feeds or targeted ads, my mother used to say that life tends to show you the thing you're looking for. Or the thing you're afraid of. Or the thing you keep insisting you don't want. If you were trying to get pregnant, suddenly everyone around you was pregnant. If you wanted out of your relationship, magazines on the grocery store rack were filled with tips on "spicing up your marriage." If you were single, you noticed couples everywhere.

February 2026 issue.When I was a child I was terrifiedof the space between One and Zero vast as the ages before my birthstrait as my death-late at night I heard my parents arguinglovingly in their locked room, the angora cat coming homewith a sparrow in her mouth, and the raindrops on the shinglescounting themselves-how to sleep, how to cross the empty placebetween the name "sparrow" and that limp thing crying,adamant, creating me with its cry

One of my dear friends was recently caught up in this swirl and roil. An attorney in the Department of Justice, the days of DOGE forced her to choose among uncertain options and to try to find firm footing in a landscape that shifted from solid to sand on a dime. Should she stay or go? Retire early or risk being fired? Each option had potential consequences beyond where she might clock in each day. What of her career trajectory? Her sense of purpose?

When I was 4 years old, my parents divorced, and my father moved away. I grew up thinking that my biological father was "John," but recently discovered that my mother had an affair with another man, "Allen." Allen is my biological father. This was a surprise and filled with a lot of drama, but it's gotten weirder than you'd imagine.

I lost all my contacts. My number has changed, multiple times. I am being encouraged to build upon a false narrative. A false past. A clean slate, a story that is "permissible" to move forward. With those who are less than trustworthy or truthful. No questions are allowed. I did not willingly sign up for this. My current strategy is to survive.

Ahead of his time, Bowie spoke of post-apocalyptic landscapes, of isolation, of the technological journey beyond the human realm posing the great question of our time: Is the planet going to survive? He talked of dynamiting binarism and making room for different notions of identity, while forging a deep and warm bond between those who listened to him.

At the core of violence lies emotional rupture, not only when harm is inflicted intentionally, but also when life is interrupted by forces beyond one's control. Forced displacement is one such rupture. It does not simply change location; it reshapes identity, possibility, and the nervous system itself. For those who leave home under threat, hunger, or despair, exile is not a chapter that closes. It becomes a psychological terrain carried within the body and mind.

Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, begins her memoir, The Other Girl, written in the form of a letter, with a description of a photograph of an infant in an embroidered dress. The description ends with these startling words: "When I was little, I believe-I must have been told-that the baby was me. It isn't me, it's you." (Italics mine.) 1

Last week, someone asked me, "Did you always want to be a mom?" My instinct was to say yes - but then I paused. Sitting on the floor with my 15-month-old daughter, I realized I'd never actually asked myself that question before. I'd always imagined what kind of mother I'd be, but not whether I wanted to become one. Motherhood, I would soon learn, has a way of undoing everything you think you know about yourself.

Are there people you wish you could be more like? You have goals, such as to speak up more, to stop and breathe when you get angry, or to listen with more curiosity before declaring your opinion. You set these self-improvement goals and then find reasons for not changing now, or you simply forget them. Your desire to transform is real, but your brain is sabotaging your goals.

We delve into surrealism to tell the story of a young man grappling with the freedom of his identity and social acceptance. His dreams become a dreamlike atmosphere, offering him an escape from daily oppression. Within this dream world, he encounters a recurring nightmare: the moon creature, a being that embodies everything he wishes to be in real life-free, authentic, and fearless.

Football, under French colonial rule, was built to exclude them.

Around the same time, he was turning 40, so I called to wish him a happy birthday. While we were catching up, he mentioned that he'd been eating healthier and working out consistently. Then he said something that surprised me: "I had a salad for lunch today." My brother has hunted since he was a teenager. Salad was never exactly his go-to meal.

A selection of recent paintings by Sri Lankan-American artist Shyama Golden. Born in Texas, Golden's work utilizes world-building and narrative to reveal the constructed nature of identity. The series, "Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth," exhibited at PM/AM gallery in London earlier this year. The paintings follow the idea of past lives and deaths as Golden charts her own over the past 200 years.

I hovered over the dropdown menu before clicking "widowed." I realized that next year I would be clicking "married." Though I will consider myself both "married" and "widowed" after my coming wedding, the binaries that govern paperwork will not honor this joint identity, erasing a title that I have come to embrace in the past four years since my husband's death.

Diagnosis transforms the clinical aesthetics rooted in Anastasiia Gerasymova's upbringing within a family of doctors into sculptural fashion. Anastasiia Gerasymova is a Ukrainian stylist and sculptural artist based in London, whose work often bridges fashion, art, and personal narrative. Drawing from the visual language of the medical world, precision, sterility, and the tension between care and control, the editorial reinterprets these references through styling and form.

There are some items that symbolise the gap between the person you want to be and the person you actually are. For me, that item is the leather trouser. Long the reserve of motorcyclists or try-hards (the Guardian in 2020: to buy a pair was to show the world that you were coping very badly with the ageing process), the trousers started to appear everywhere a few years ago.

Fashion image makers on our MA often treat the word 'fashion' rather loosely. We encourage that,

For while Erpenbeck adopted some of the features of the form apparently throwaway observations on daily life, such as minor irritation at the difficulty of sourcing proper splitterbrotchen, an unpretentious pastry now pimped for a more elaborate and wealthy clientele she consistently enlarged and complicated it. Into that recognisable tone of ennui and mild querulousness with which journalists hope to woo a time-pressed but disenchanted or nostalgic readership, Erpenbeck smuggled metaphysics, politics and history.

What's in a name? As people such as Peach, Riot and Aquaman have found, it can change your life for the better, or worse. With this in mind, we would like to hear from people with unusual names about how it affects others' perceptions of you. How has your name shaped your life? Share your experience You can tell us about how your name has shaped your life using this form.

Back to selectionEvery Contact Leaves a Trace, its title alluding to a basic principle of forensic science, is the latest cinematic exploration from experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Pairing this concept with seven (of the 600) business cards she's collected over the years, Sachs embarks on an investigation into "how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking" (as she explains in a VO that runs throughout the film).

Between Chaos and Control: A visual exploration that collides punk rebellion with futuristic surrealism. This editorial combines raw human vulnerability, including bruises and scars, with primal expressions, metallic distortions and digital 3D forms. Through this fusion, the series explores the tension between chaos and control, the body and the machine, authenticity and performance. It captures identity not as something fixed, but as a fluid, ever-evolving form shaped by technology and rebellion.