Toronto-based Worn Fashion Journal is launching its ninth issue this Saturday with a Slow Dance of the Living Dead. Publisher and editor in chief Serah-Marie McMahon says she likes to launch each issue with a fun event and since the book is going out in November, Halloween seemed a perfect fit. “We’ve had slow dance launch events before in Montreal and Toronto but we wanted to up the game,” she says. “A Halloween Slow Dance of the Living Dead is so perfect. It is a little scary because of the amount of Halloween events in Toronto but it is going pretty well.”

McMahon launched the magazine as a side project while she was completing an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal and decide to make it her full-time job when she graduated. The 48-page book moved to Toronto about a year ago and is now published twice a year.

Not based on an advertising model and run by a staff of volunteers, Worn likes to keep ads to below 10 percent in each issue. The advertisers it does have are independent businesses as well, mainly people who make clothing and accessories.

McMahon says Worn Fashion Journal, which was nominated for its first National Magazine Award this year, currently has about 600 subscribers and a non-traditional circulation of 4,000. “We are not news related at all so we can keep selling the old copies until they are gone,” she says. “We eventually sell 100 percent of what we print. That is our big selling point.”

Subscriptions to the magazine are sold on their website at Wornjournal.com as well as on Etsy, where she says they make the majority of its income. The self-distributed book is also sold in stores mainly in Toronto and Montreal but also around the world in London, Japan and major U.S. cities. Its international presence is something McMahon hopes to build with this issue.

The Worn Fashion Journal ninth-issue launch party, Slow Dance of the Living Dead is this Saturday, Oct. 31 at the Dovercourt House in Toronto. More information is available at Wornjournal.com.