Colors Magazine is, in its own words, “a magazine about the rest of the world”. Colors Football / Calcio Magazine (issue 90), a special issue dedicated to, you guessed it, football, and the approaching World Cup.
From their excellent website:
Created by photographer Oliviero Toscani and art director Tibor Kalman in 1991 to show the world to the world. The message has remained the same: diversity is good.
The first issue got straight to the point. With a vernix-coated baby seconds after birth still attached to its umbilical cord, the issue’s editorial discussed whether it was right to have “cut down 6,000 trees” to produce the magazine and how what mattered was “that your culture (whoever you are) is as important as our culture (whoever we are)”.
The magazine looks at social issues by following them around the world and treating everything with the same naivety to give a glimpse of what’s going on through first-person interviews and photography. The magazine has been translated into over 15 languages including Korean, Russian and Greek.
The special World Cup issue of can be purchased here. We think its well worth checking out.
“Thirty-two teams. One golden trophy. This summer, an elite selection of extraordinary footballers finally comes together to play the most beautiful game on earth in COLORS #90 – Football. In this issue, a mechanical striker winds up to score at the 2014 RoboCup, a Saudi goalie dives for the save on a top secret pitch for women, and players from the streets of Sao Paulo to the fields of Dharamsala break out their bicycle kicks. For the 226 million footballers who play on streets, at school, at work, in jail and everywhere other than under the spotlight, COLORS presents the world’s most popular game as FIFA has never dared show it.
COLORS’ starting lineup also stars indigenous-only teams from the Amazon forest and Andean heights, a Danish squad of elderly gentlemen, the Czech Republic’s blind Avoy MU club, a team of South African lesbians taking the field to fight homophobia, Tanzania’s Albinos United playing against persecution, Italian priests, Egyptian ultras, and a group of match-fixing imposters from Togo. Each team appears with its own stats, flags, footnotes and crests.
In football’s long tradition of sticker albums, every issue of COLORS 90 – Football comes with a pack of player stickers. Swap with friends to collect the anonymous revolutionary Mexican striker; the Dharamsala sweater salesman Tenzin Kachoe, aka star midfielder for the Tibetan National Team; or a hologram of the trophy that one team is bound to win. Plus stories and strategies from the game itself: illustrated diagrams demonstrate how to scout a child champion, listen for the ball, and play in a bubble, on a skateboard, against Situationist philosophers or with a flaming coconut. In the back, a mini-book of yellow cards recounts the world’s most unusual on-field offenses, to stick in your pocket on the way to the pitch.”
