Approximately two months ago, I was reading the last pages of a book that had changed the direction of my life.

The way I was holding on to that book... I did not want to let go of it.

It felt as if I did not even want to finish it, and was desperately trying to leave a few more pages to read, to keep the experience going a little longer.

The book had become a friend.

You know how we live — we wake up, we scroll, we do all monotonous things daily life is requiring us to do — and at a certain point we do not realize how much we have disconnected from ourselves.

We lose our core identities, sometimes we forget what drives us in this journey called life, and only when we have reached the bottom, do we somehow want to remember what made us look up to the sky for a moment and happily say that you love your life.

This happened to me, too. But I began reading Amy Odell’s biography of Anna Wintour in May at a moment when I was trying to find my way back to journalism.

At the time when I was reading it, I thought I was reinventing, but later I discovered that I was actually returning.

The journalist I thought I had lost

I started out as a television journalist at nineteen.

After getting accepted into an internship program at one of the largest television companies in Bulgaria, I spent a year and a half working there and learning the profession. I became a reporter, wrote for the lifestyle website of the media company, and hosted of my video podcast there.

I interviewed celebrities, did stories for the television programmes and I felt fulfilled. I knew that every day I was waking up to a day full of opportunities and I especially enjoyed the unpredictability of the work.

Every day contained the possibility of something I could not have planned. I felt very much alive.

What persisted during all of that time, however, was the fact that I was never hired on a contract, and I was not making any money from what I was doing.

In September, 2022, I quit.

I had just returned to television after a short media program in Istanbul, and I knew I wanted more. I returned with a pocketful of ideas and I immediately started working again.

However, I returned to a lot of editorial changes within the infrastructure of the company, disagreements and the same unresolved question of my employment. I was also preparing the new season of my podcast, and somehow I was still not working on a contract.

The head of the news department invited me to visit his office so we can properly discuss the situation. And he told me not to wait at the door, but to come straight in.

I did.

Numerous times.

He was always talking on the phone and I do not blame him for being busy. After a week of attempting to find the right moment though, I still had no answer.

On what became my last day in television, I had an argument with one of the news anchors, who humiliated me publicly in the newsroom over something as ridiculous as the fact that I had greeted her twice that day.

My ego was hurt and I decided to speak to the head of news one last time.

I went to his office. Knocked. Entered.

He was talking on the phone again and made that gesture, implying that we would speak later.

I took my bag, descended the staircase one last time, and decided that this was my last day in television.

On the way out, I saw that news anchor I had argued with earlier, greeted her thrice, and left.

Then I went to the hairdresser.

Over the course of the following days, I was contemplating the decision to return and continue working like that. After all, I was still a student, living with my family, so what would I need money for either way.

Silly me.

I decided to wait a little, so my thoughts could settle. No one called.

Only the future editor-in-chief of the television’s lifestyle website asked me to write a piece about the jewellery Kate Middleton might inherit after the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.

I was deeply interested in the Royal Family so I decided to write the story. That was my final piece for television.

Nobody called me to ask what was happening with the podcast. I cancelled the interviews I had arranged, explained to the guests that there were some changes, and told them we would keep in touch.

And time stood still.

What was going to happen? Where was the newsroom? The studio? My guests?

Television had become the infrastructure of my life, so without it, I felt lost.

Writing without a newsroom

I began writing about celebrities on Medium in English.

I remember thinking I would build an international portfolio, reach readers abroad and eventually use the work to find opportunities outside Bulgaria.

Some of the articles were very successful, reaching celebrities’ publicists, producers, some of the articles even appeared prominently in Google search results.

The absence of television’s scaffolding was unfortunately obvious despite the progress I was making.

I did not have deadlines, nor editors waiting for a story. I was working for myself, and the most painful thing was that I stopped doing interviews.

I had stopped believing anyone would agree to speak with me now that I was no longer working in television.

I stopped believing I was a journalist.

And continued writing.

At the same time, my mother was continuously making me find a job, so in order to save myself from working in Starbucks, for instance, I decided to begin offering private English and Hebrew lessons.

I would work from home, teach online, make money, and continue writing, I thought.

Finding students turned out to be far from easy, but gradually, they came. Sadly, my writing was suffering from that tremendously. In order to adjust to my students’ needs I scattered lessons at deadly time blocks, which made my writing blocks quite disorganized.

Family responsibilities and health problems added further interruptions. Time was passing, I was still in Bulgaria, teaching, writing in whatever time and emotional space was left, feeling unhappy and dissatisfied.

I was still writing occasionally, but I was no longer building the professional life I had imagined.

And I wanted to leave Bulgaria.

A different life in Istanbul

I came to Istanbul in September 2024 to look for apartments. The market was hectic and I could not find a house, but I found my first boyfriend instead.

But that is another story of coming out, heartbreak, relocation, and other encounters which deserve their own attention.

I liked Istanbul. I felt liberated and alive, and nothing could stop me from moving here, so the safest possible route to stay permanently in Turkey was to become a student. I applied to university, received a scholarship, and found a way to remain here.

I found an apartment that I named The Museum of Meltdowns later. Only the four walls of my studio apartment know how many tears have been shed between them.

I was studying, teaching to pay my rent, navigating heartbreak and trying to establish a life of my own. Family arguments continued, and the emotional space available for writing became smaller and smaller.

Do you notice what is missing?

Journalism.

I kept blaming my heavy schedule for the fact that I had no time to write, that I had to continue teaching to earn money, so I could pay my rent, that I had to study.

And the desire to write was still there. But the actual writing was not happening. Interviews were not happening either.

There were always other things demanding immediate attention.

Finding my way back

What changed that outcome, however, was starting therapy in February this year. I had just gone through another cycle of family arguments, caused by a situationship with a friend of mine. Not only was I suffering from the fact that he left Istanbul for an undefined period of time, but I also had to defend my decisions to my family.

I knew I could no longer continue like that so I booked my first therapy appointment with one of my role models in journalism. I am so thrilled that my therapist is a renowned journalist and a psychologist. She just understands me in ways no one else does.

My therapist always tells me I learn very fast and apply that knowledge to my life very fast as well. Once we defined what the actual problems were and gave myself enough space in which I could breathe and exist, I found I needed to start again.

So I published a new article on Medium. Then the next week another one. They were both personal - the first was the story behind the last situationship and the second was a restart of a series dedicated to Sex and the City.

Then I decided, I needed to start writing about celebrities and wrote about Christina Aguilera.

Somehow, I started returning to my core identity of a journalist that was buried under years of trauma, heartbreak, survival mode, and teaching.

Around that time, I went to Bulgaria for a few days where I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 at the cinema, and there is a scene in which Miranda Priestly turns to Andy and says:

“God, I love working.”

And something in me clicked.

I love working, too.

I missed journalism so much, I missed the creative world tremendously, missed interviewing people, missed telling stories, working with images, ideas.

I could not wait to return to Istanbul and find a way to make more room for it.

“Of course she was wearing the sunglasses”

A few days later, I was back, and one day in May, I was sitting in the library at AKM, , the Atatürk Cultural Center, which currently functions as The Wonder Mag’s headquarters.

I knew Miranda Priestly’s character is partly built on Anna Wintour, I knew Anna was the editor-in-chief of Vogue until last year, so I opened Vogue’s website and subscribed for a year.

Then I searched the library catalogue for Vogue, looking for archival issues or books about Vogue that might help me understand how a magazine has survived over a century, continues to be innovative, and challenges the status quo.

However, while I was scrolling through the results, I found something much more interesting.

Anna Wintour was staring at me from the cover of Amy Odell’s biography, wearing her iconic Chanel sunglasses.

I took the call number and started browsing the shelves. I found Anna on the third floor and took the book. When I opened it, the first sentence I read in the introduction was:

“Of course she was wearing the sunglasses.”

So was I.

I always wear mine.

I began reading the description of what happens to be the day following Donald Trump’s first election as president, and the reactions it had caused within Vogue’s ranks and the all-staff meeting that followed.

What got my attention, however, was:

“Anna started the day as usual. She rose by 5:00 a.m., exercised at 5:30 or 6:00 (depending on whether she played her twice weekly tennis or worked out with her trainer), sat for thirty minutes for professional hair and makeup, and was then chauffered to her office at 1 World Trade Center, where her three assistants and her usual breakfast — a whole-milk latte and a blueberry muffin from Starbucks, which would mostly go uneaten — were waiting for her.”

What really got my attention was how much structure there was in Anna’s days and I felt tempted to test that out, too.

The morning after

The following morning, I rose at 5 a.m. It was a shock to my body, but I knew I wanted to test whether a more deliberate routine could give me the space I had been missing. I proceeded with day, and returned to “Anna”.

I began building my own 5 a.m. morning routine, consisting of doing yoga after waking up, having breakfast while listening to Mel Robbins’ podcast or The Run-Through with Vogue, going to AKM, studying Turkish, reading Vogue, reading “Anna”.

There was a desk, a book, and a plan for each day.

A book suddenly turned into my companion, my friend, a safe place I returned to daily.

Anna’s routine, her decisiveness, her sharp thinking and way of communicating her ideas (she’ll probably faint if she sees the length of this essay) all forced me to start fighting for what I believe in. To find a purpose, to define it, to continue performing.

I did not want to become Anna Wintour. I wanted to understand what it might mean to take my own work seriously enough to build a life around it.

From Medium to The Wonder Mag

One of the decisions that followed was to move my writing from Medium to Substack.

I did not enjoy Medium’s architecture anymore, and I desired to have something more branded, more me. I knew about Substack, I was seeing it everywhere more often, and I eventually decided to migrate. I needed to build something more capable of holding the different subjects and formats I wanted to explore.

That is how The Wonder Mag was born.

The more important change, however, was that I was even thinking about myself in a different way.

While reading Anna Wintour’s biography, I realized I did not want to write occasional articles anymore. I wanted to build a magazine. I wanted interviews, features, essays, video, recognizable point of view.

I wanted the work to have a structure that could support it and I wanted to stop waiting for somebody else to give me permission to be a journalist.

When I began considering interviewing again, I was frightened, and my decision to actually start doing it again, I largely attribute to my therapist. Only the two of us know how insecure I was.

“Who would agree?” - I asked my therapist.

“You are an international media, Ivan. You have actual television experience, you know languages, you have an editorial vision. Of course they would agree.” - she calmly reminded me.

And yet, I was spiralling…

Sending the first interview pitch to somebody was terrifying. What do I say to them, how do I present myself, where am I publishing them? The Wonder Mag?

I created English and Bulgarian YouTube channels to accompany the publication and started approaching potential guests with concrete ideas.

I was surprised to see that when I presented myself calmly, as a journalist, as a writer, as someone with actual experience, and a current appealing idea, people began saying yes.

Some declined for practical reasons. Others remained in contact. Some agreed to interviews that have since become part of The Wonder Mag.

The newsroom began to exist, but this time, I was building it by myself.

Returning, not reversing

Once I started producing and The Wonder Mag began to take shape, I felt as if I was reinventing my journalistic identity.

I was changing my routines, building a publication, returning to interviews and trying to create a different professional life. I was still teaching, and I am still teaching, but there is balance. There are priorities.

In August, I began writing this piece in the theme of The Summer of Reinvention, but in the light of the events that were taking place in my life, I realized I was not reinventing, but returning.

For me, the key difference was that I was not merely reinventing myself as a journalist, I was bringing the intervening years with me, while returning to my actual calling.

The teaching. The migration. The relationships. The disappointments. The experience of trying to build a life without the professional infrastructure I had once depended on.

None of it had made me the same person I was at nineteen.

Even one of my interviewees for The Summer of Reinvention, who is a therapist and voice image coach, made a remark on the fact that my gaze seemed different now.

He knew me from my days in television. He remembered my eyes wandering a lot, chasing every beautiful thing around me.

Today, he said, the curiosity is still there, but there was more certainty in the way I looked — as though I knew what I was looking for.

What he said, embodies the return. It is a return to my roots, to my identity. Even to my mother tongue, as I am doing a lot of the interviews in Bulgarian.

I am returning to journalism as the person I have become.

The last pages

When I finished Anna in July, I cried. The ugly cry.

I could not believe that the book carried me through my own return to journalism, helped me believe in myself and become more confident.

While reading, I rebuilt my routines, and by the time I finished the book, The Wonder Mag existed.

The book had not done all of that for me.

My therapist is beside me each week and she initially helped me create space for change.

Other people had encouraged me, supported me and agreed to become part of the publication.

But Anna arrived at the exact moment when I needed a model of what an editorial life could look and feel like. It helped me understand that structure was of utmost importance and it reminded me I had not lost the part of myself that loved journalism.

So thank you, Amy Odell, for writing the book.

Thank you, Anna Wintour, for the example and for continuing to create the most special and vivid moments in fashion, for preserving fashion and the legacy of designers.

Thank you, Miranda Priestly, for reminding me that I love our creative world.

And thank you to my therapist, who helped me begin making the decisions that allowed the work to return.

And I am thankful to myself for letting myself believe I have so much more to say.

I am still teaching. Still building.

The Wonder Mag is still very young, still becoming, but it is already a real editorial home.

But I know what I am returning to. And I know that the person returning is not the same as the one who left.

He is sharper now. Clearer. Enriched. Bruised in some places.

But unmistakably Ivan.

Founder & Editor-in-Chief of The Wonder Mag.

Read next: THE RETURN | September’s Editor’s Letter:

One of my favorite things about September is the strength we have acquired to start again. The summer is over. Voyages have mostly stopped.

And we return.

But what do we return to? And who do we return as?

We have spent the summer collecting rays of light that have darkened our skins, the tan lines will continue reminding us of the days by the sea. We have had encounters with people and places that have changed us more than we can imagine. We have had enough space to just unwind and enjoy the smaller things in life, and that has probably made us realize things about life that we had been too busy to locate.

And we are not the same.

But we still return.

We return to the cities where we live, to our homes, to our rituals and regimes, to our jobs, to our goals, to the ordinary parts of our lives we kept tucked under a beach towel.

Eventually, we realize that September has always felt more like a beginning of something than the end of a summer.

Psychologists describe the power of such moments as temporal landmarks. This is a distinct moment that evolves around particular dates - New Year’s Day, the first of the month, Mondays, or national holidays — they divide one period of our life from another and make a fresh start possible.

September, however, has always been associated with the beginning of school, and perhaps, it will continue to remind us of new beginnings. Add the first gusts of wind and cold air, the return of routines, the reopening of wardrobes and offices after August, and we have a sense that life is starting again.

The more I thought about The Return, the more I realized that returning is not as simple as going back.

It is impossible, time has already left its marks on us.

We have acquired new visions of life, while everything around us has continued without our presence - our office desk is still there, the emails are still knocking on our screens, begging to be let in and answered, the body we try to reconnect with has lived through everything that happened in between.

And when we return, we discover that we want an upgrade.

We want to know what to keep, what to leave behind, we want to define what happens when other people still expect the person we used to be, we need to decide what to leave behind.

All those questions began appearing as this issue was being built.

That is where September begins for The Wonder Mag.

Iglika Zhivkova’s life and work seem to revolve around the idea of putting things back in order. Our conversation asks why September makes so many of us want to reset our lives, and where is the line between care and control. And she clearly has the expertise to talk about that — through yoga, food, home, routine, lots of humour and eighteen years spent managing an entire apartment building, we are bringing stories that will help us realize the importance of discipline, solid regime, and what power cleanliness holds.

I will also speak with Yoga with Tanya, who also returned to a more visible public presence. There, we will have a different conversation — what makes us withdraw, what makes us come back, and how movement, spirituality and the body can become ways of returning to ourselves.

There is a more personal return in this issue, too.

I deliberately brought a piece from August to September - a personal essay on Amy Odell’s biography of Anna Wintour. This book accompanied me through my own return to journalism, so even though I returned to journalism reinvented, it is an actual return. I am not the journalist I was at 19, and returning to the career I was missing for so long, was not simply something that continued from where it had stopped. And I had to define the shape journalism would take in this new chapter of my life.

In the issue, The Return will move through Istanbul.

We are developing a feature around one of the most remarkable places of hospitality — Pera Palace — which has stood tall for over a century and holds stories from the past and remarkable public figures we keep returning to. As contemporary visitors, we are wondering: what are we actually looking for when we step into a hotel so vividly saturated with the memory of old Istanbul, the Orient Express and the people who passed through it before us.

Fashion is full of returns, too.

John Galliano begins a new chapter of his career with Zara and we will look beyond the collection itself. We will examine the archival pieces of Zara clothing that Galliano is expected to have transformed through his own unique vision — but in the light of recent events and the cancellation of his exhibition at the MET, we will also ask a difficult, but significant question. Who gets to return in fashion, and who decides when a comeback becomes rehabilitation, redemption or simply commerce?

Technology has created its own strange kinds of return.

In one story, we will look at how AI is being used to bring historical figures and old worlds back into the present. In another, we will ask what happens when fans can conjure the comeback of a pop star for themselves and create new music in the voice of an artist who is no longer actively under the spotlight.

Pop culture returns in its own literal ways, too.

Later in the month, we will discuss Madonna’s new era through the VMAs, where she is nominated in eleven categories. For an artist whose career now stretches beyond four decades, there is something compelling about returning to one of the stages on which her star was born. What does it mean to come back to the place where the world once watched you become a global star?

And considering September is also fashion’s symbolic beginning, I will finally sit to watch The September Issue, as I am building my own — a small act of editorial masochism, if ever there was one.

And, because no September issue should reveal everything on page one, a number of surprise interviews and major-name conversations will arrive throughout the month.

While our August issue was about reinvention, this is The Return.

It is not just about “going back”.

I wanted it to sit at the intersection of where past and present meet each other.

We do not necessarily have to resume all habits, relationships, or versions of ourselves, because it is familiar and we have come back.

This is the time we get to choose, select, return to what deserves us. We can walk back into an old room without agreeing to become the person who used to live there.

And sometimes we can reach the discovery that the most important part of returning is that we no longer want to stay.

So we change.

In September, The Wonder Mag returns to history, bodies, rituals, public lives, forgotten ambitions, places that preserve the past, and people confronting what the past still asks of them.

Sometimes the only way to understand how far we have come is to look again at where we started.

And then decide what, if anything, we would like to bring with us.

Welcome to The Return.

Ivan Ssavsski,
Founder & Editor-in-Chief of The Wonder Mag

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.