Bust Magazine
Overview
Bust Magazine, styled BUST, is a New York City-based women's lifestyle magazine founded in 1993, published quarterly, covering music, news, crafts, art, sex and fashion from an independent, third-wave feminist perspective. Its slogan is For Women With Something to Get Off Their Chest. Bust began as a self-produced zine photocopied and stapled by its founders, grew into a nationally distributed magazine, survived the collapse of its owner after September 11, 2001, and endures as one of the longest-running feminist magazines of its generation. It is currently published by Street Media, LLC.
Bust is credited, along with its founders, with helping define girlie feminism — a strand of third-wave feminism that reclaimed traditionally feminine activities such as knitting, crafts and domestic arts that some second-wave feminists had rejected, treating them as sources of pleasure and power rather than oppression.
Founding as a Zine in 1993
Bust was founded in New York City in 1993 by Debbie Stoller and Marcelle Karp, with Laurie Henzel joining as a partner in 1994. The founders had met while working at the children's television network Nickelodeon. Stoller, who held a master's degree in psychobiology and a doctorate in the psychology of women from Yale University, had studied how popular culture shaped women's self-image; rather than only teaching about it, she set out to make better popular culture. Stoller used the alias Celina Hex and Karp the alias Betty Boob in the early zine years.
The intention, as Stoller described it, was to create a real alternative to Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle and Glamour — magazines she believed left women she knew feeling bad about themselves and promoted stereotypical ideas about women. Bust would be as fierce, funny and pro-female as the women themselves. For its first seven years it remained a self-funded, part-time project: the founders photocopied, stapled and distributed issues themselves after work and on weekends, learning subscriptions, printing and distribution by trial and error while keeping their day jobs.
Editorial Content and Recurring Features
Bust covers popular culture from an explicitly feminist viewpoint, mixing entertainment with substance. Scholarship on the magazine, including Miranda Campbell's entry in Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia, identifies its consistent features: Real Life sections on crafts, cooking and home life that encourage readers to make things themselves; Fashion and Booty, suggesting clothing, accessories and novelty items; practical articles such as car maintenance advice from auto technician Lucille Treganowan; and candid coverage of sex, including an erotic short story in each issue, encouraging women to embrace their sexuality.
That combination — consumer suggestions balanced against do-it-yourself independence from consumerism — is the editorial signature. Bust interviews and covers mainstream and independent actors, directors, comedians and musicians who fit its sensibility, and reviews books, music and film through a feminist lens without treating feminism as a separate, solemn section of the magazine.
Growth, Sale and Recovery
In 1999 Stoller and Karp co-edited The BUST Guide to the New Girl Order, a compilation of the magazine's best writing to that point, which carried the zine's voice to a book audience. In 2000 Bust was sold to RSub, enabling Stoller to work on the magazine full time. The arrangement collapsed in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when the magazine temporarily went out of business; the funds to recover and buy back the business were raised with the help of the magazine's supporters — an early demonstration of the reader loyalty that has repeatedly sustained independent feminist media.
Publication resumed and stabilized at four issues a year. By its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2018, Bust reported a subscriber base of about 12,000, supplemented by newsstand sales and digital readership — modest numbers by glossy standards, but sufficient, with events and diversified revenue, to outlive many mainstream titles with far larger budgets.
Debbie Stoller, Stitch 'n Bitch and Craft Culture
Bust's cultural influence extends well beyond its own pages through Stoller's work. In 1999 she formed a Stitch 'n Bitch knitting group in New York's East Village and wrote about it in Bust, then authored Stitch 'N Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook in 2003, the first of a best-selling series that included Stitch 'n Bitch Nation, Stitch 'n Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker and Son of Stitch 'n Bitch, several reaching the New York Times Best Seller list. A Stitch Nation yarn line with Red Heart followed in 2010.
The knitting revival those books led is a concrete example of Bust's editorial philosophy changing behavior at scale: a dismissed feminine craft, reframed in the magazine as social, skilled and feminist, became a mass movement with local groups forming in cities across the country. Few lifestyle magazines can point to a comparable, traceable cultural effect.
Events and Community
Events became a pillar of Bust's business and community. The Bust Craftacular, a juried craft fair showcasing independent makers, ran for more than a decade — in its thirteenth year by 2018 — alongside lectures, classes and live events. Stoller attributed the magazine's survival in part to this investment in gatherings, which generated revenue less dependent on print advertising and turned readers into participants.
The events also closed a loop in the magazine's philosophy: a publication that taught making hosted marketplaces for makers, many of them women running small businesses, aligning its commerce with its editorial advocacy for women's economic independence and craft skill.
Digital Presence
Bust publishes online at bust.com, extending the magazine's coverage of news, entertainment, crafts and feminist commentary to a daily rhythm, alongside social media channels that distribute articles and event information. Digital publishing broadened its reach beyond the print subscriber base and allowed rapid response to news affecting women, while the quarterly print magazine remained the curated, collectible expression of the brand under editor-in-chief Tara Finley and publisher Erin Domash in recent mastheads.
Like other independent titles, Bust used its website and newsletters to sustain subscriptions and event attendance — the revenue streams its history showed to be more reliable than advertising alone.
Place in Third-Wave Feminism
Bust, alongside peers such as Bitch magazine, is a primary document of third-wave feminism in American print. Where second-wave publications often treated popular culture with suspicion, Bust engaged it directly — reviewing it, remaking it and insisting that feminists could love fashion, crafts and pop music without contradiction. Academic work on girl culture and feminist media cites Bust extensively for that reason.
Stoller's own framing — that if a certain men's magazine was entertainment for men, Bust would be entertainment for feminists, giving feminism better public relations — captures the strategy. By 2018, Stoller observed that mainstream culture had largely caught up with positions Bust had argued since 1993, a measure of the magazine's early influence on conversations about representation, body image and women's pleasure.
Audience and Longevity
Bust's audience is smaller than a mass-market women's magazine's but unusually loyal, as the post-2001 rescue demonstrated and as decades of subscriptions confirm. Readers span the original Generation X audience that grew up with the zine and younger readers discovering feminist media online. Surviving the decline of print, the loss of its owner and repeated industry contractions, Bust outlived mainstream competitors with deeper pockets — an outcome its founder attributes to being, in her word, scrappy, and to revenue built on readers and events rather than solely on advertisers.
Significance and Legacy
Founded in 1993 as a photocopied zine made at night by three women who had met at Nickelodeon, Bust Magazine became a durable institution of American feminist culture. It codified girlie feminism, launched the Stitch 'n Bitch craft revival, built the Craftacular events business and maintained a quarterly print magazine into its fourth decade under Street Media. Its legacy is proof of concept: that an unapologetically feminist magazine, made to entertain as well as argue, could find readers, survive catastrophe and help move the mainstream toward it.
