Culture
Letter from the Editor: Long Live Preview!
For Preview Vol. 1, a special commemorative book celebrating the brand's 30th anniversary, EIC Marj Ramos-Clemente pens a letter that honors the magazine's roots and embraces its next chapter.
Published on Sep 5, 2025
*This letter from the editor was originally published in the book Preview Volume 1, a special commemorative print edition by Summit Books, celebrating three decades of the legacy publication.
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Preview Volume 1
Letter from the Editor
I've never taken on a more impossible task than being Preview's Editor-in-Chief. After all, in pop culture, the role has been immortalized as "the job a million girls would kill for." Helming a 30-year-old legacy brand is a tall order in itself, but to do so in its digital era? I once quipped and found myself thinking, "Ha! This career path might literally be the death of me."
There's always been this invisible yet insane pressure to live up to my predecessors from the golden age of print. They revolutionized the fashion industry and served fantasy on a glossy platter for a loyal set of audience that devoured every spread like gospel. I skipped meals and saved up my high school allowance to buy monthly issues. I scribbled on my college notebook endless essays and silently wished they would land on its precious pages. To myself and the people who worshipped it, Preview was a bible—to change it in any way would be blasphemy. How dare I even try?
Yet here we are. Today, we find ourselves in a different world.
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Preview Editor-in-Chief Marj Ramos-Clemente. PHOTO by Josh Tolentino.
In this high-speed, hyper-saturated space, Preview lives on to grow with its audience. Readers have evolved from flipping through pages to clicking and scrolling. Editors and publishers have transitioned from printing issues to counting pageviews and navigating the algorithm. Our covers went from magazine newsstands to LED billboards.
But at its core, Preview remains the same: It continues to move with culture, challenge the status quo, and champion Filipino creativity with conviction. Beyond the borders of fashion, it offers a fearless point of view, never shying away from the necessary albeit difficult discussions such as marriage equality, verbal abuse, queer representation, and other issues that demand attention. It continues to ask, “What are we adding to the conversation?”
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Preview Volume 1, available in print soon. Cover featuring Anne Curtis, photographed by BJ Pascual..
Preview Volume 1 is a gift to anyone who's ever loved Preview at any point of its existence—whether you were a loyal magazine reader or a devoted homepage visitor. (I earnestly hope it's both!) More importantly, this book is a tangible proof that there has only been one Preview then and now—created by the print editors before us and continuously honored by the digital editors of my generation.
We carry with us the values they've instilled, and the best way to honor those values is to translate them into what makes sense for Preview today.
Preview has changed. And yet, it hasn't changed at all.
Marj is the Editor-in-Chief of Preview. A former economics major, she dove headfirst into fashion publishing and hasn’t looked back since.