Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2025 i Dazed & Confused

It’s a new year, and we’re already halfway through a decade born out of turbulence. The nostalgia gap is closing in on us as we struggle to face an uncertain future and instead cling to the definitive past. But as we cycle through eras at lightspeed, we’re slowly, but surely, exhausting what was. When the time comes, the burning question on everyone’s lips will undoubtedly be: What’s next? Across these pages, we’ve done our best to answer that question. Dedicated to a new wave of young, talented and hopeful individuals, the New Gen issue is full of stories that speak to the urgency of the current moment. At a time when people’s rights are being undermined and taken away, how can youth culture respond? For the issue, I challenged the…

Meet the Bakutytė sisters: Aistė (27), Algė (25) and Adelė (19). “We’re like the Kardashians,” says Aistė of their alliterative names, for which we have to thank parents Asta and Algis. Like any Lithuanian siblings, they bond via TikTok and on mushroom foraging trips, a national pastime that emphasises closeness to nature. Aistė and Algė have sorely missed that access to the outdoors since moving to London, part of a major wave of migration out of Lithuania since the country joined the EU in 2004. Aistė and Algė also share a new year’s resolution for 2025: to leave the UK for good and return home to Lithuania. “Honestly, life here sucks,” says Aistė of London, Algė nodding in agreement. The sisters are visiting their parents’ home in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest…

Usually, it’s his fault. Maybe he talked about his pet rat for 20 minutes too long, or bragged about his GCSE results more than a decade after leaving school. Perhaps the red flag showed itself in his political leanings, the way he slagged off his ex, or talked about his mother. Often, his crime is a classic (lies, ghosting, bad kisser); sometimes, it’s amusingly novel (stopping mid-conversation to piss up a stranger’s door). Worst-case scenario? He’s a genuine, biockon-all-platforms creep, the kind of guy that reminds you why ‘Ask for Angela’ is a thing. My best friends’ dispatches from the dating world, shared every month over a bottle of Kylie’s finest rosé, paint a vivid picture - one that’s a near-perfect reflection of the popular opinion online. Behold, modern man:…

Dialling in from New Orleans the morning after Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl half-time show, Doechii is in high spirits. Last night was, of course, a movie, and she has the photos – head-to-toe in Miu Miu – to prove it. She grins, clutching a copy of Jennifer Clement’s Widow Basquiat: A Memoir, as she struts out of her hotel. She blows kisses to the camera while hanging out the door of her Suburban SUV. She takes selfies and throws up matching peace signs with a rather sombre-styled Lady Gaga. “Oh my God,” she moans. “It was incredible meeting her. I’m the biggest, the hugest Gaga fan. I’ve watched every performance and every interview, so seeing her passion in person was cool.” She ended the party on a private jet, sprawled…

When I speak to Golloria George, who is calling from the back seat of the car that’s just picked her up from Chicago airport, it’s been just over a week since TikTok was banned from phones across America -for about 12 hours, that is, after which President Trump put the ban on pause as part of his executive order spree. As someone who has built her career on the social media app, testing out the darkest shades of beauty products and amassing more than 3 million followers online, George was faced with the real possibility of losing, if not everything, then a substantial portion of her platform. “It felt like a very strange, dystopian thing to be happening, like they were taking away our freedom of speech and freedom to…

Nettspend is about to introduce his son. The 17-year-old rapper’s A&R tells me to wait around the corner – he’s just “being prepared”. When he finally arrives, everyone here – the A&R, three of Nettspend’s homies – cheers. Everyone except Nettspend, who wears the same half-glum, half-asleep look as his son, who he calls Elijah. Elijah is no larger than a bottle of ketchup, his little ear around the same size as one of Nettspend’s bitten-down nails, his hand the size of the heart-o-gram tattoo on Nett’s thumb. His eyelashes flutter and his dark hair stands patchy on his head. He is swaddled up in his father’s arms, a white towel over his haunch. Elijah is a monkey. A tiny baby monkey that Nettspend, who now has access to everything…

London shifts direction like the wind. On a seemingly weekly basis, high streets change, music venues shutter and independent businesses cling on for dear life against endless apartment-block constructions. As inequality continues to rise in tandem with soaring living costs, prospects feel increasingly bleak, leaving many young people questioning what we have to look forward to. Perhaps we can take heart from the fact that Britain has always created innovative art in spite of – and often in response to – its precarious socioeconomic circumstances. Lover’s rock was the soundtrack to the Caribbean community making a home for themselves in the UK in the 1970s. In the early 90s, jungle underscored a generation disillusioned by years of Thatcherite cuts to government spending. Grime was the defiant spirit of the city’s…

“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female,” Donald Trump declared during his inaugural address in January. Before going to bed that night, the newly re-elected American president put those words into action, signing an executive order that would halt the further issuance of gender-corrected passports, put incarcerated trans women at an elevated risk for physical and sexual violence by housing them with men, and withhold any federal funding being used to “promote gender ideology”, among other measures. In subsequent weeks, he signed three additional orders, including one that restricts young people’s access to gender-affirming healthcare, and another that bans trans women and girls from playing women’s sports. With Canada threatening to shut off…

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On April 27, 2025, Carlo Acutis will be granted the holy grail of Catholicism: sainthood. But if being made a person of exceptional holiness, a literal miracle performer and a genuine icon wasn’t enough, Acutis is laying claim to another milestone – he will be the first ever millennial saint. The late British-born, Italian teenager is also one of the fastest canonised saints in history: he died just 19 years ago from leukaemia, in 2006, at the age of 15. For context, the current most-recently-deceased saint from the 942 canonised by Pope Francis died almost a century ago, in 1926. It usually takes hundreds, if not thousands, of years for such a figure to climb up the canonical ladder. But Acutis’s advocates didn’t need such saintly patience; he was fast-tracked…

When I think back to schoolteachers in my day – I’m a 30-year-old young millennial, meaning the cohort currently between the ages of 29 and 44 – I think mostly of stern, exasperated old fogeys or middle-aged women with weird-aunt energy, incapable of getting the projector to work. I distinctly remember the coffee breath. Sure, coffee breath is likely still a problem, but what’s different now is that the current generation of school kids are being taught by a generation that’s more similar to them than ever before. Older Gen Zs (born 1997-2012, currently between the ages of 13 and 28) are now in the workforce teaching children in their very own generation and the one directly below, Generation Alpha, born 2013-2024. This means that – unlike when millennials were…

“On a connu la hess,” raps Guizmo in “Attendez-moi”. The line is challenging to understand if your only exposure to French comes from the classroom. It’s a lyric at the crossroads of France’s colonial excursions: Guizmo is of Senegalese and Malian descent, but hess comes from the north African dialect of Arabic – the phrase can be translated as “we’ve known hardship”. A resident of Rabat, Algiers or Tunis may struggle to grasp what Guizmo’s getting at, but any Gen-Z Parisian would understand. Lina Djoudi, a 22-year-old student who grew up in the melting pot of Marseille, has got a dictionary’s worth of this slang at her fingertips. There’s belek, which means ‘watch out’ – as in “Fais belek, ya les gendarmes” (“Watch out, there’s police”) in “Bande organisée”, a…

“It was a dating website – ‘mytransgenderdate.com’, or something,” says 39-year-old Ratiwat NoNie Wachirakanok, a Thai trans woman. That’s where she met Gilles Baderspach, 43, a gay man from France. Three months in, he’d flown down to Thailand, where the pair had spent two weeks together. Within a week of returning home, Baderspach proposed. Maybe the U-Haul syndrome wasn’t exclusive to lesbians after all. “I’ve been waiting for this!” NoNie told him and, within six months, they’d married twice – first, in a religious ceremony in Thailand, and later, through an official marriage registration with the French government. Today, the couple live in Montreux, Switzerland, and there’s talk of getting married for a third time. On January 23, 2025, Thailand became the first country in south-east Asia to legalise same-sex…