WORLD-BUILDING AS EDITORIAL PRACTICE: A Look Inside Dreamworldgirl Zine, Where Girlhood is Loud and Taken Seriously 

Words by Marie Anne Arreola  |  February 2026

Dreamworldgirl Zine does not arrive quietly. It spills, glitches, overflows. It feels like opening a browser with twenty-seven tabs running at once: a pink-hued desktop crowded with pop-ups, fan-fiction drafts, JPEGs pulled from forgotten corners of the Y2K internet, and a group chat pinging faster than you can respond. To call it a multimedia zine is accurate but insufficient. Dreamworldgirl is closer to a living archive of contemporary girlhood, one that understands girlhood not as an aesthetic frozen in soft focus, but as a volatile, political, and editorial force.

At the center of this operation are Daphne Bryant and Isabelle Galgano, Editor in Chief and Co-Editor in Chief respectively, whose collaboration stretches between Los Angeles and Boston, print and digital, intimacy and infrastructure. Together, they run Dreamworldgirl Zine not simply as a publication, but as a world—one that insists softness can coexist with rigor, that chaos can be curated, and that care itself can function as editorial authority.

Their timing is not incidental. The project emerged in the wake of a broader media contraction: legacy youth publications folded, absorbed, or hollowed out by consolidation; cultural coverage flattened into influencer content; platforms optimized for virality rather than depth. What once existed in magazines like Teen Vogue, a belief that young readers could hold pleasure and politics at once, has become increasingly rare. In its place, Dreamworldgirl Zine offers something both older and newly urgent: independent publishing as cultural infrastructure, and girlhood as a lens through which power, identity, and belonging are negotiated in real time.

This is the story Dreamworldgirl Zine is telling—and the problem it quietly solves. In a media ecosystem that either commodifies girlhood or trivializes it, Bryant and Galgano are building a publication that treats it as editorially serious without sanding down its messiness.

Noise, Nostalgia, and the Refusal to Be Soft

Dreamworldgirl Zine is often described as dreamy, pastel, nostalgic. Bryant doesn't entirely disagree, but she does resist the implication. "I'd actually like to push back against the idea that our branding is soft," she says. "So much of what we do is loud, whimsical, chaotic and maximalist… our brain-vomit approach fits really well with our girlhood theme."

The phrase, brain vomit, is revealing. It reframes what mainstream editorial culture might dismiss as excess into a method. Dreamworldgirl's visual language borrows freely from Y2K aesthetics, early internet ephemera, and fandom culture, but it does so not as retro fetishism. Instead, it treats those references as a shared grammar for a generation raised online, fluent in irony and sincerity at once.

Bryant started the zine while still in college, initially as a creative outlet that could hold everything she loved but rarely saw legitimized together: fashion editorials alongside deeply personal essays, internet culture alongside political consciousness. Her background in marketing helped her refine the zine's visual coherence, but the impulse predates strategy. It is instinctual, personal, embodied.

Girlhood, as Dreamworldgirl defines it, is not aspirational in the Sofia Coppola sense (gauzy, distant, rarefied) but expansive and plural. "Girlhood is such a beautiful, universal thing," Bryant says, "but it doesn't always look like a Sofia Coppola movie." The zine opens that category wide enough to hold queer and trans identities, girls of color, girls who are obsessive, angry and awkward.

Galgano, who first encountered Dreamworldgirl as a reader before joining its editorial leadership, describes that openness as the publication's connective tissue. "Everyone wants to feel seen and everyone wants to feel understood," she says. Nostalgia, for her, is not about regression but recognition—the shared internet histories, fandoms, and cultural touchstones that defined a generation coming of age online. In Dreamworldgirl Zine, those references become a common language, one that allows intimacy to bloom between strangers.

The demand is tangible. Recent open calls have drawn well over a hundred submissions per issue, far more than the zine can publish, and its print runs (modest by corporate standards but ambitious for an independent operation) regularly sell out through direct sales and launch events. That appetite suggests something deeper than trend: a hunger for editorial spaces that feel both specific and generous, personal without being insular.

The Labor Behind the Dream

If Dreamworldgirl feels unusually safe for an online space, that is not accidental. It is the result of deliberate editorial choices about tone, access, and power. Early on, Bryant and her collaborators asked themselves a foundational question: should the zine feel exclusive and intimidating, or friendly and porous?

They chose the latter. "A zine about girlhood shouldn't feel exclusive," Bryant says. "It should be a safe space where everyone who connects with that word can feel welcome." That philosophy shapes everything from contributor selection to event pricing to comment moderation. Dreamworldgirl exists across platforms (print issues, blog posts, book clubs, pop-ups) not as a content funnel, but as multiple entry points into the same community.

For Galgano, this intention was palpable long before she joined the editorial team. She recalls discovering Dreamworldgirl as a revelation: a space that celebrated everything she had been told was "unprofessional." Joining the zine allowed her to place her skills in service of something larger than herself, a move that underscores Dreamworldgirl's rejection of hyper-individualism in favor of collective authorship.

"Everything our staff and contributors create speaks to and reinforces our larger cause," Galgano explains. In this framework, editing becomes a form of care work: holding space, setting boundaries, and ensuring that creativity does not come at the expense of safety.

That care, however, comes with real costs. Running an independent publication requires not just vision but stamina, administrative labor, and constant negotiation with scarcity. Bryant has spoken candidly about early challenges—copyright questions, burnout, the pressure of sustaining momentum while still defining the zine's voice. These moments of friction rarely appear in the glossy output, but they shape the leadership behind it.

Geography adds another layer. With Bryant based in Los Angeles and Galgano anchoring Boston, Dreamworldgirl operates bicoastally, extending its reach through events in cities like New York and San Diego. "Opening the LA branch was one of the smartest things I ever did," Bryant says, pointing to the infusion of queer energy and West Coast edge that followed. Galgano, meanwhile, describes Boston as a city where creativity can feel constrained by professionalism, a tension Dreamworldgirl actively resists.

Their collaboration challenges the assumption that cultural production must be centralized. Dreamworldgirl is not rooted in a single scene; it is networked, relational, sustained by contributors who may never meet in person but share an editorial vision across time zones.

Why Print Still Matters, and What Comes Next

In an age of infinite scroll, Dreamworldgirl remains committed to print. The choice is neither nostalgic nor naïve. "If we lived in a world where you could only view creative things through your phone," Galgano says, "then we lose the value of art."

Each issue is designed as an experience: a journey through texture, pacing, and physical presence. Print also creates community in ways digital platforms rarely do. At a recent launch party in Quincy, Massachusetts, strangers lingered over pages, talked to contributors, and stayed long after the event ended. The magazine became not just an object, but a gathering point.

Historically, zines have functioned as tools of resistance—circulating ideas outside institutional gatekeeping, fostering subcultures, and amplifying marginalized voices. Dreamworldgirl situates itself within that lineage even as it speaks fluently in the language of memes, TikTok comment sections, and internet vernacular. It is both contemporary and archival, ephemeral and deliberate.

In 2025, Dreamworldgirl received a ChillSubs Incubator Project Grant, a milestone Bryant describes with characteristic intensity. "I literally screamed and cried," she says. Beyond the financial support, the grant offered validation: proof that independent publishing is worth investing in. Both editors are outspoken about the precarity of creative labor. Passion does not pay rent. Grants, they argue, are not bonuses but lifelines, mechanisms that allow artists to sustain their work without burning out. As Galgano puts it, bluntly: "Let's get these dreamworldgirls paid."

Looking ahead, the ambitions are expansive: an NYC branch, a dedicated studio, paid staff, larger events, deeper reach. Bryant jokes about "world domination," but beneath the humor is a serious question familiar to many independent publications: how to scale without losing intimacy. Dreamworldgirl Zine is not a utopia. It is a loud, obsessive, and deeply intentional practice. In a media landscape that often rewards detachment, Daphne Bryant and Isabelle Galgano are betting on care, community, and the conviction that girlhood, in all its unruly forms, deserves editorial seriousness. 

For now, the experiment is working. And in a moment when youth voices are often reduced to trends or data points, Dreamworldgirl offers something increasingly rare: a place where being seen is not the end goal, but the beginning.