A Note on Holding Things Again

The problem with the internet is that it does not smell like ink.

It does not smudge, or dog-ear, or live at the bottom of your bag under a lipstick cap and three receipts from Altro Paradiso. It does not sit on a café table between your coffee and someone else’s phone, waiting to be picked up. It appears, it scrolls, it disappears. You double-tap, and then you forget.

During Vogue’s Met weekend takeover at Altro Paradiso, we decided to do something slightly unreasonable in 2026: we printed a zine.

Not a “PDF you could print at home if you felt like it.” An actual object. Paper that folds. Staples that catch the light. Pages that can warp a little if you read them with wet hair after a shower. A thing you have to hold.

The zine is called “A Note on Connection”. It began the way most Don’t Let Disco pieces begin: with a bead, a feeling, and a question about what it means to carry something close to the body. It’s our archaeology-of-adornment brain in print form —part essay, part archive, part conversation, part instruction manual for people who believe jewelry is a language, not just a category on a website.

Inside, you’ll find:

• An exploration of beads as some of the earliest tools of memory and communication, long before we had group chats and Google Docs.

• Object studies from the Don’t Let Disco archive: pieces that remember more than they reveal, laid out like artifacts pulled from a drawer in a museum that hasn’t opened yet.

• A conversation between me and designer Yamil Arbaje on shows, scale, and building your own system instead of obediently orbiting the fashion calendar.

• Notes on keeping, on what we say yes to, and on the very specific chaos of being a small brand trying to make considered work in a world that prefers velocity over attention.

It’s not a catalogue. There are no “shop now” buttons. It’s closer to a field guide for people who suspect that what they put on in the morning is their first sentence of the day.

Publishing it during Vogue Café felt right: a space where everything was moving fast —guests in and out, conversations layered over coffee and croissants, the Met Gala humming in the near distance and then, in the middle of it, this quiet little stack of printed thought. While the screens narrated the weekend in real time, the zine did something slower. It asked you to sit with a page for longer than a story frame allows.

If you picked up a copy at Altro Paradiso: thank you. You carried home a piece of our brain.

If you didn’t: you still can.

We have a limited number of copies available through the studio. If you’d like one, you can:

• Email info@dontletdisco.com with the subject line “A Note on Connection” and we’ll share how to get your copy, or

• Ask for it the next time you visit us in Dumbo or stop by a trunk show; it will be there, somewhere between the beads and the coffee.

This zine is the first in an ongoing series. The next issue is already in motion — more interviews, more object studies, more attempts to put language around the feeling of fastening something at your neck and suddenly recognizing yourself a little more clearly.

We’re not trying to replace the internet. We’re just testing what happens when you give people something they can read without a battery. Something that can live on a nightstand, then on a friend’s kitchen table, then inside a tote bag on the subway. Something that can be underlined, spilled on, left open to your favorite page.

Jewelry is, at its core, a way of saying “this matters” without having to explain why.

The zine is our way of doing the same.

If you’d like to hold a copy, let us know. Another one is on the way.