Penny Martin, editor in chief of The Gentlewoman, describes life in her three favourite buildings
The guest on this episode of our podcast is the Glaswegian wordsmith Penny Martin. She is perhaps best known for leading The Gentlewoman’s masthead, but Penny’s past accolades are also noteworthy, as both editor in chief of SHOWstudio and chair of fashion imagery at London College of Fashion. Dialing in from her home in Fife, Scotland, where she overlooks the sea, Penny shares her career climb and top living spaces with our host, Matt Gibberd.
Penny was born in Glasgow and raised in the suburbs of St Andrews by her mother, an art teacher, and father, a musician. It was a creative household, but fashion – the industry that Penny has been shaping for more than 20 years – was not so much part of the conversation. That was until, later as a young adult, she received a phone call from photographer Nick Knight, inviting her to join his team at fashion film platform SHOWstudio. What made Penny, then a curator, catch his eye? The answer lay in her willingness to ask elite aesthetes the questions that others shied away from.
She later received another intriguing invitation, this time from Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom, the founders of Fantastic Man, to helm their forthcoming women’s publication, The Gentlewoman. A substantial read and source of visual pleasure, as Penny describes it, it was created as the antithesis of the glossy gossip magazines of the time. Since its 2010 launch, it has been lauded for its wonderfully diverse cover stars: Angela Lansbury, Little Sims, Cindy Sherman, Zadie Smith, to name a few. But alongside world-renowned faces, its pages are jam-packed with the fascinating stories of women doing things differently. In its spring/summer 2022 issue, for instance, a five-double-page spread saw Penny profile a female undertaker. It’s little wonder, then, that despite the decline of print, The Gentlewoman continues to resonate with its community of readers.
As we learn from listening in this episode, Penny is as good at telling stories out loud as she is penning them. Tune in as she takes us on an audio tour of her three favourite buildings in the world – from her former London flat within a modernist estate to a 14th-century Scottish castle where she got married. Plus, she makes a case for parks over balconies, shares some of her earliest conversations with Knight and fondly reflects on her stint as a guide at the Glasgow School of Art. And if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. Happy listening.
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