Feature: The Village Cry and Carhartt WIP

In 2018 Carhartt WIP printed the covers of a 1970s Swiss photography paper onto a run of t-shirts and sweatshirts. The paper was called The Village Cry, it managed eight issues in about two years, and one of them was put together with the architects who would go on to build Tate Modern.

It started as a catalogue

In November 1976 the Swiss photographer Beat Presser had his first solo show, Daydreams and Nightmares, at a gallery in Basel. He and Rolf Paltzer put together a newspaper to go with it and called it Palm Beach News. It got more attention than either of them expected.

The name changed for the second issue on the suggestion of Carl Laszlo, an art collector in the city, whose reasoning was that if you're working somewhere small and you still have something to say, you have to cry out so people hear you. Presser has also traced it back to Marshall McLuhan's global village.

The Palm Beach name didn't disappear entirely. Look along the bottom of an issue and it still reads a Palm Beach production, made in Switzerland.

They were both 25 and neither had published anything before. Presser describes the pair of them as youngsters with no experience, no expertise and no staff, which is worth holding on to when you look at what they actually managed.

What was in it

It came out as a tabloid, folded once, printed in English and sold internationally from Switzerland. Paltzer published, Presser edited, and between them they did the writing, the photography, the design, the advertising and the distribution.

The issues went by theme. Fashion photography in Paris. Then architecture, put together with Presser's friends Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron — two decades before Tate Modern and the Pritzker Prize. Then film, with Klaus Kinski on the cover, whom Presser had met on a Paris set. Then UFOs, then punk, then photography.

The Kinski issue mattered more than it looked at the time. Years later Presser applied to Werner Herzog for the stills photographer job on Fitzcarraldo, and knowing Kinski from the magazine was part of how he got it.

The run finished in 1978 after six issues under The Village Cry name. A final number appeared later under a different title again, Flitz Flying Magazine, which brings the whole thing to eight.

What Carhartt WIP did with it

Forty years after the last issue, Carhartt WIP went back to the covers and printed them onto a handful of t-shirts and sweatshirts for autumn 2018. It's the sort of thing the brand has always done well — the archive it borrows from isn't only its own, and a Basel photography paper is exactly the kind of source it tends to find.

We're not going to pretend that run is still around. But it sent a lot of people looking for the magazine, and the magazine turned out to be worth the look.

The current range is in our Carhartt WIP collection.