Picture it: you open Tinder and you see somebody bearing the particular facial features, hair, body and confidence that you fancy. In other words, the particular traits our culture has taught us to desire.

You swipe right, and almost immediately begin preparing yourself that you two will not match. Before they have rejected or accepted you, the hierarchy has already been established.

They are the person who gets to choose. You are the one waiting for confirmation whether you are worthy of a match or destined to disappear into the void with everyone else they have swiped left on.

This exact hierarchy was labeled as “Models and Mortals” in the second episode of the pilot season of Sex and the City.

The episode introduces the modelizer: a breed of man obsessed with women, much like the womanizer, but with the core distinction that the modelizer is obsessed not with any women, but with models.

To a modelizer, being chosen by a model becomes evidence that he must possess extraordinary qualities other men do not, because the title “model” is a symbol of access, achievement, status, and beauty—qualities that models presumably would not spend on just anybody.

Almost thirty years after that episode aired, in 2026, there are still modelizers, and maybe they are even more numerous, because if in 1998, they needed access to New York fashion parties and the women whose faces and bodies appeared in magazines, then nowadays, the modelizers need only a smartphone.

We are all models now

Professional models still occupy a glorified position in our culture, their faces still sell advertisements, and their bodies are still treated as properties of their agents and the public, at least partly.

But the distinction between models and mortals today has become significantly less stable as social media has made almost everyone pose for a version of themselves:

The pretty one.
The young one.
The cute one.
The smart one.
The ambitious one.

We choose how to present ourselves online through photos and different angles, posing at glamorous or recognizable locations, and we all feel the need to display our work, family life, and relationships as something that requires public validation.

Technically, we are all modelling ourselves.

Bulgarian designer and artist Stoyan Dimitrov describes social media as the modern equivalent of a corset, as he mentions in our interview, without even realising how accurate he has just described our new current.

“Social media determines how people see us,” he explains. “We build the structure of the corset there and shape the figure through which we want to present ourselves.”

According to him, that figure shall not be understood only as the body, because today, our partners are another part of the silhouette, too.

The partner is evidence

When we introduce our partner to other people, we rarely present only that person.

We also present the version of ourselves that exists beside our chosen ones, so they have to meet some criteria of course.

We want them to look good, to have beautiful hair, an attractive face, a well-maintained body, appealing style, and some other quality suggesting that this person could have chosen anybody.

And yet, they have chosen us.

Their desirability becomes evidence of ours.

If somebody beautiful has chosen us, perhaps we must be beautiful enough. If somebody interesting has stayed beside us, perhaps we must be interesting too. If the person appearing beside us in our photographs seems impressive, then perhaps their presence confirms the version of ourselves we want other people to see.

None of this means that attraction to beauty is shallow, not that every picture of a happy couple is a performance. Beauty is real, so is desire, and so is the pleasure of looking at somebody we love and believing they are extraordinary.

But the pursuit of perfection can become increasingly insatiable.

Stoyan describes it as an appetite that expands as soon as it is fed.

“When you take a bite and become satisfied,” he says, “you start looking for the next one—bigger, with more flavour and colour.”

So the partner becomes an upgrade.

One person completes and adds the final touches to the desired version of ourselves, and the potential future partner seems capable of completing an even more impressive version.

This may resemble reinvention, but when an identity is primarily built from the outside, the reinvention can never quite be complete.

The violence of feeling insufficient

In “Models and Mortals,” Miranda painfully discovers that intelligence, career success and ordinary attractiveness cannot compete with somebody chasing the status of a “model”, so in the modelizer’s eyes, Miranda is a mortal.

Today, this is still valid.

People who are not conventionally attractive may possess intelligence, sensitivity, humour, artistic ability and fascinating ways of understanding the world, yet never receive enough initial attention for those qualities to become visible.

Choosing a partner today, especially through dating apps, while we are still seeking the perfect match, could feel like being trapped in a cage built from first impressions.

For much of my life, I have been put in boxes, too—cute, sweet, sensitive, geek—and I am not saying that those words are cruel, they are true.

But they are incomplete.

Being perceived as “cute” does not mean I am not ambitious, nor does it erase my sexuality. Being described as sensitive can sometimes make my complexity sound fragile, even though I know it is not.

I cannot count the number of times I have wanted to say:

Yes, I am sweet. I am also smart, intelligent, difficult, artistic, hot, ambitious, and capable of holding a conversation that extends beyond the limits of:
“Do you have a place?”

Yet it seems our appearances arrive before we do, and they make it easy for people to sort our personalities into categories they find convenient to comprehend.

Within gay dating culture, what is generally considered desirable is the muscular body, the carefully maintained beard, and a specific performance of masculinity.

And there is me—a twink, bearing a moustache—looking at the kind of “gorgeous” man I described and assuming, before I have even swiped, that he would never choose me.

And just like that, I appoint myself the mortal.

The person on the cover

If the mortal fears that nobody will look, the model fears nobody will look beyond the label.

During her decade-long career, Vogue Ukraine cover star, Bulgarian supermodel Ivelina Choeva-Kadieva has learnt that the features one culture interprets as flaws may be precisely what another considers remarkable.

In certain pictures, she has noticed that she might appear slightly cross-eyed. In Bulgaria, she has encountered comments mocking that difference, but internationally, it became part of what made her face interesting enough to hire.

“They have given me work and paid me precisely because of that imperfection,” she told me in our conversation, “because somebody, somewhere, found it beautiful.”

That immediately complicates the idea of perfection, because beauty is not necessarily defined by correcting every slight asymmetry until a person resembles a culturally approved image. Sometimes beauty is defined exactly in the asymmetry, the small flaws, or the feature that prevents a face from becoming interchangeable.

But being recognised as beautiful creates another problem.

Choeva does not pretend beauty has never helped her. A striking or well-maintained person naturally receives attention, she says, and physical appearance can make certain doors easier to open.

Yet after completing her education in London and entering another professional field, she discovered that the same image that once granted access could also prevent people from taking her seriously.

She had been understood as a model, as beautiful, as a woman with long legs. When her work demanded another kind of competence, she had to convince people that the person behind the appearance could actually perform it.

“Almost all of these women have other qualities and interests beyond what is shown,” she says of models and influencers, remembering colleagues who studied medicine or spoke six languages while travelling and working.

Beauty can elevate and diminish a person simultaneously.

It attracts the gaze, but can narrow the terms under which someone is understood, and it turns out the image arrives before the human being and threatens to become the final verdict.

Even nakedness can become a costume

The episode’s darkest expression of the modelizer appears through Barkley, who secretly records his sexual encounters with models.

First of all, this act today would be scrutinised even more severely: the recordings are non-consensual and explicit, intimacy turns into a collection of trophies, and the women themselves become evidence of his worthiness.

Consensually sending an intimate image on a social media app is fundamentally different from recording somebody without their consent, but both exist within a visual culture in which even nakedness can become part of the performance of worth.

We send images hoping to prove that our bodies possess the correct forms, proportions or sexual characteristics. We present ourselves at our most physically exposed to strangers for rapid assessment and turn nudity into a costume when it is performed primarily to secure approval.

Being chosen does not cure the fear

I have dated men I considered extraordinarily attractive in entirely different ways.

One looked like a fashionable Apollo and was emotionally unavailable. Another was intellectually impressive as well as physically attractive and very pretty. Another had long hair, tattoos and a body unlike anybody I had dated before.

Before each of them chose me, I doubted that they ever could.

And even after they did, being chosen did not permanently remove the doubt.

This may be the modelizer’s most humiliating secret—you may have a beautiful partner beside you and still believe you are the mortal who somehow was granted access by mistake.

And today, we have become both model and modelizer

That realization made me stop.

For most of this piece, I had been wondering whether I had been the model or the mortal to the men I dated.

But I had not realized I had also been a modelizer. I was being evaluated, but I was evaluating, too.

The men I dated were all gorgeous, therefore, they were worthy of being chosen, and I was always very proud of walking beside them through the streets of Istanbul. I also particularly remember the pleasure of entering somewhere together noticing people turn their heads:

“We are getting noticed,” I would think and I would even hold my partner’s hand even tighter.

And there it is—I chose. My partners chose. I desired them partly because I found them desirable and their desirability sometimes made being chosen by them feel even more significant.

We swipe through people while knowing other people are swiping through us.

We curate ourselves on Instagram and dating apps, and we select photos, manufacture first impressions. So we are models.

We assess other people’s faces, careers, lifestyles, and status. So we are modelizers.

And everyone else is doing precisely the same thing to us. So everyone is both a model and a modelizer.

And suddenly, Sex and the City Season 1, Episode 2 begins to resemble an early version of a culture that swallowed almost all of us.

What happened privately between me and my former partners is now built into contemporary dating—everybody presents, everybody evaluates, and everybody wants to be chosen by somebody they themselves consider worth choosing.

Which translates into:

We’re all modelizers because we are casting.

We’re all models because we are auditioning.

When the corset comes off

Stoyan Dimitrov’s metaphor reaches its most revealing point when he imagines the moment after the corset has been removed.

Underneath it, the person is naked—the structure that shaped the body into a silhouette is no longer there.

“If the people in front of whom you have undressed accept you as you are,” he says, “then you never needed that corset.”

This may be the real challenge of connection in 2026.

Not whether we can attract somebody through the image, but whether we can survive being known after the image is gone.

Not whether somebody will display us proudly, but whether they can understand the qualities that cannot be photographed.

Not whether we can reinvent ourselves through the person beside us, but whether we know who we are when we stand alone.

The answer is not to deny beauty, attraction often begins with appearance.

The answer is to allow the gaze to become curiosity, and curiosity to become knowledge—something capable of complicating the first impression rather than merely confirming it.

Maybe the most radical reinvention is not becoming somebody the world would proudly display, nor becoming someone who always evaluates, nor continuing to live simultaneously as model and modelizer.

Maybe reinvention is becoming somebody who no longer needs another person’s beauty to prove that I deserve to be seen.

Had someone told me half a year ago that today I would be writing August’s Editor’s Letter for my own publication, The Wonder Mag, I would have thought they were kidding.

Instead, today, having just returned to Istanbul from my summer trip to Rome, there is nothing more natural to me than writing and interviewing again.

For years, I was convinced that my work as a journalist was over, and that I had to accept the fact that I had turned myself into a full-time language teacher who had moved cities in search of escape and relief from the environment that had shaped him.

None of this turned out to be true.

All it took for the exhausted teacher to return to his actual identity was therapy that had been long overdue, personal space in which he could breathe and think without the constant noise of the outside world, a library that would become his headquarters, and the confidence to recognise that now he carried far more life experience than he had imagined.

Today, I am writing this letter not as the exhausted teacher I was at the beginning of the year, nor as the editor I hope one day to become, but as living proof that change is possible.

Proof that you can take a chapter of your life you thought had been closed, turn it around, and realise that you can redefine its ending, and then create a new beginning.

That is where August begins for The Wonder Mag.

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Sure, there is a backlog from July and I was not pleased to “kill” beautiful features as I was putting August into shape, but there are moments in life when we shall learn not to regret everything that had not been done, but absorb and understand what the current situation is revealing.

Sometimes, it can reveal the strange recognition that a home can remain unchanged while the person entering it has shifted.

At other times, it reveals that the old life has stopped fitting, while the new one is not yet built.

So you keep building.

We enjoy picturing reinvention as something glamorous — glorious comebacks, transformations that prove we have changed, while having somehow preserved our core identity, but in reality, reinvention is often messy and it requires time.

This is where I find myself in August — the old life has begun to lose its grip, but the new one is still being defined.

Two weeks ago, I travelled to Rome for the first time and discovered myself walking through its streets, capturing in my mind every building, landmark, and small corner, and I felt I was breathing with ease while envisioning future possibilities.

I returned to Sofia for a week, where some old habits and family dynamics reminded me that nostalgia is real, but reinvention is never a clean escape from everything that came before.

And now I am back in Istanbul — the city where I learned independence and rebuilt my relationship with writing and publishing.

So this month, The Wonder Mag is looking at reinvention not as one of those dreamy before-and-after stories, but as a process that teaches us through its own uncertainties, strategies, and tiny bumps across the road.

August will begin by completing a conversation that started in July.

In “MODELIZERS,” we will return to the second episode of Sex and the City and examine what happens when attraction becomes part of social identity and the person beside us begins to function as proof of status or personal worth. The feature brings together ideas that emerged during my recent conversations with Bulgarian model, Ivelina Choeva, and Bulgarian fashion designer, Stoyan Dimitrov, binding their points of view and asking what we borrow from the people we crave — and what image we attempt to create for ourselves through them.

We will revisit the work and legacy of WHITNEY HOUSTON around her heavenly birthday, as I introduce you to an interview from my archives, looking again at her extraordinary achievements and at why certain artists never stay in the past, but continue to inspire.

On MADONNA’S BIRTHDAY, we will look at the woman who continues to redefine pop music and has turned reinvention into a work of art.

This issue will also include a major international interview with songwriter and artist MAURICE FONSON, one of the writers of “School” on Madonna’s new album Confessions II. We spoke about his extraordinary career, songwriting, ambition, his forthcoming EP “Fun” set to be released on August 28, and the person behind the professional credits.

Later in the month, EVAN HOLOVATSKYI, an international coach specialising in voice design, public speaking, and personal image, will speak about one of the most intimate forms of reinvention - changing the way the world hears us. Our voices reveal age, confidence—or the lack of it—and authority before we have finished the sentence. Is it possible for a person to reinvent their voice without pretending to be someone else? And can learning to sound more powerful change the way we perceive ourselves?

There will also be a new essay about ARIANA GRANDE, public scrutiny and the strange entitlement audiences feel towards women’s bodies, health and visibility. Here, the question is no longer simply how a famous woman reinvents herself, but whether disappearing from view may become the most radical reinvention on the table.

And finally, the month will conclude with an essay about Amy Odell’s beautifully written biography of ANNA WINTOUR, which accompanied me through my own period of rebuilding and reclaiming.

All of these stories ask different versions of the same question:

What happens when the identity that brought us here can no longer carry us forward?

We can never know what tomorrow will bring, but maybe, just maybe, reinvention does not require complete certainty.

Perhaps it requires us to enter the uncomfortable space between what has ended and what has not begun yet — and to start creating from there.

Welcome to The Summer of Reinvention!

Ivan Ssavsski
Founder and Editor-in-Chief
The Wonder Mag

On a warm, sun-lit Istanbul morning, I boarded the first ferry to the Princes’ Islands with Madonna’s Confessions II in my headphones.

The city was slowly pulling away, the dance music was like coffee to my slightly frantic, under-slept soul - always running toward the next deadline - and the sea was doing what it usually does - looking calmer than any of us passengers.

Following the music's rhythm, movement, and release, we were approaching the first of the islands, and the album did something I was not prepared for.

It made me cry.

The music is not exactly sad, even though you can feel Madonna reflecting on themes that run through all our lives, but one track in particular - Fragile, a song she recorded while grieving the loss of her brother - made me remember my late father. I had not expected that, on a ferry, at 7.30 in the morning.

And Fragile made me remember something I return to every time I write about pop icons - the public image is never the whole story. Sometimes the most glittering surface is the threshold to something much more private.

That is where July begins for The Wonder Mag.

This month, the month we often proudly show off our perfectly-sculpted bodies on the beaches, The Wonder Mag is looking at the body, the image, and the icon, as the ways people become visible to the world, and the ways they remain unknowable even when everyone thinks they are looking directly at them.

The question first appeared when I was writing about Kylie Minogue and what happens when someone is loved as an image before they are understood as a person, but then this same question continued following me in each topic I was exploring this month.

It followed me into my interview with Bulgarian supermodel Ivelina Choeva, who over the years has appeared on the cover of Vogue Ukraine, graced the pages of major fashion publications, and worked with high-end brands like Fendi. Now expecting her first child, we talked pregnancy, the transformation of the body, the rhythm, and the self.

It followed me into fashion, where Bulgarian designer Stoyan Dimitrov spoke about corsets, beauty, and the invisible structures that still discipline the body. His point - that the modern corset is not always tied with ribbons anymore, but is made of filters, algorithms, and comparison - has stayed with me since.

It followed me into the second episode of Sex and the City, which revolves around “modelizers” - men who do not simply desire beautiful women, but collect the labels “model” and “beauty” as proof of their own importance.

It followed me into Madonna’s Confessions II, where the body is not neutral, but a symbol of scandal, power, weapon, and confession.

It followed me into Jennifer Lopez, and the impossible discipline of becoming J.Lo.

It followed me into women in media, and how they are praised for their brilliance until that brilliance becomes too inconvenient, and how they are invited into the frame until they start taking up too much of it.

So July is not just about beauty, but what beauty does once it enters the world.

How it is used, how it is sold, how it sells, how it protects, how it turns into careers, power, inheritance. It is about bodies as homes and histories, icons as people whose images have been loved, misunderstood, and projected onto by the rest of us.

Even nostalgia belongs here - the childhood shows we return to when what we want to feel is home, safety, and the memory of playing in our grandparents’ apartment where the air carries the smell of your favorite cake only your grandmother knew how to make.

We keep returning to images because they hold feeling - old clips we still watch online, fictional women we quote as if they raised us, imaginary companions we now build through technology. We keep looking because part of us still believe the surface will lead somewhere deeper.

That is why The Wonder Mag exists under its new name and new home. June did not go exactly as planned, as there was a migration of articles worth carrying into this new home, and too many pieces were left waiting in drafts.

This is where July begins.

From the ferry, from The Wonder Mag Island Bureau, from the music that was supposed to make me dance, but made me cry, from the new name, and from the old questions that refuse to leave -

To who gets seen. Who gets reduced. Who gets desired. Who gets to change. To age. To speak. To own the story.

Welcome to the first month of The Wonder Mag in its new home.

This month, we look again.