#polyester zine

It’s not incidental that Tumblr’s culture was propped up by girls and queer people. Practices that are often dismissed as unserious or juvenile like mood-boarding, collecting screenshots, writing headcanons, obsessing over characters, were celebrated. What gets labelled as vapid fan culture is also close reading, archiving, prediction and analysis. Tumblr allowed these practices to exist without funnelling them into being productive or profitable. It taught a generation of young women to experiment with and develop creative instincts long before those instincts were validated as careers. And perhaps that confidence, and the practical fluency in image-curation that came with it, unsettles people when they encounter female artists with fully realised worlds. Women are so often accused of being manufactured when what they really are is self-possessed. It certainly stung when it was suggested that a record label think-tank had decided on our image, which was actually a life’s worth of R&D. We came to a shared visual language long before we had a project to attach it to.

"MUNA on Stevie Nicks, Political Songwriting, and Their New Album" for Polyester (March 2026)

MUNA for the March 2026 issue of Polyester