All clothing by Burberry. Glasses by Moscot.
Photographer – Horacio Hamlet | Stylist – Lex Robinson
Grooming – Scott Mcmahan | Model – Dylan Bell
Models are no strangers to seeing their names in magazines, but Dylan Bell’s can occasionally be found in a surprising place—the masthead. Between fashion weeks, the Toronto-born new face, who lounged in Gucci for Charlotte Wales’s camera on the cover of 10 Men Magazine last fall, is also the co-editor-in-chief, publisher, and creative director of the magazine Broke with Sarah Amormino, a fellow classmate in Ryerson University’s journalism program. “We had a class last semester called Magazine Editing and we both missed the first day of class. We had never met each other before and we ended up being paired together,” he recalls of meeting Amormino. “The whole class is about producing a twenty-page prototype for a magazine, and she really pushed us to do something that we’re interested in.”
That class assignment eventually became Broke, a self-published magazine that is meant to shine a light on young creatives in Toronto who are often overlooked because of their youth or their distance from major media centers like New York and Los Angeles—hence the tongue-in-cheek title. “People under twenty-five, it’s a little harder for them to get published if they haven’t been published before,” Bell explains. “It’s hard to submit to journals and submit to art shows if you don’t have a plethora of previous experience and have been on your A game ever since.”
Left: Trench coat by Burberry. Leather jacket (worn underneath) by Acne Studios. Shirt by Moschino. Pants by Issey Miyake. Belt by Will Leather Goods. Sunglasses (worn on shirt) by Warby Parker. | Right: Shirt and tie by Burberry. Pants by Acne Studios. Belt by Will Leather Goods.
A Kickstarter campaign meant to test the waters ended up getting funded, and Bell jokes that their hands were forced. “We kind of had to make a magazine at that point,” he laughs. “Neither of us had any experience in magazines other than a few little internships, so we put ourselves through boot camp and learned Adobe InDesign and started organizing interviews and shoots and reaching out to people asking if they were interested in contributing.” Besides overseeing the entire issue, the pair also conducted interviews and styled a shoot, which ended with many of the white designer clothes covered in red dust after a windstorm.
As the début issue went to print last summer, Bell also found himself suddenly in New York for the first New York Fashion Week: Men’s, where he walked for Duckie Brown and Richard Chai. When September and the magazine’s official launch date came around, he was in Singapore for work. “Trying to stay on top of it was one of the harder things we’ve had to do,” he laughs, “but here we are.”
Shirt and pants by 3.1 Phillip Lim. Shirt by Moschino. Shoes by Louis Leeman.
Bell was initially discovered on Instagram by Jarrett Plyley, who was then just starting his Toronto-based agency Ciotti Models, and says he originally thought modeling would present an ideal opportunity to network within the magazine industry and be just a “fun little hobby.” But things picked up after a few months, and jobs with COS in Montreal and H&M in Stockholm—not to mention his first show season in Europe this past January as well as the Fall 2016 shows in New York, where he walked for Michael Kors, Orley, Robert Geller, and Billy Reid—have made balancing his schoolwork a struggle, one which he looks forward to escaping when he graduates this semester.
But even as his modeling career takes up more and more of his time, Bell insists that he won’t abandon Broke, which released a second issue earlier this year, and continues to serve a purpose higher than even its founders initially imagined. “The response has been so overwhelmingly positive. We originally wanted for it to be a platform for other people to run with,” he explains. “The magazine was supposed to be a way for us to talk about young creatives not getting the spotlight they needed and it turned into a way to give young creatives that spotlight.”
Left: All clothing by Burberry. Glasses by Moscot. | Right: Jacket by Moschino. Tank top by Acne Studios. Shirt by Tomas Maier. Pants by Salvatore Ferragamo. Belt by Will Leather Goods.
