With The New Disorder, DSCENE examines a present defined by instability, overstated systems, and identities formed through repetition, performance, and deliberate construction. The issue approaches disorder as a sustained condition rather than a moment of rupture, one where control, excess, and persistence coexist. This framework comes into sharp focus on the new cover, photographed by Martin Gatti and featuring Amanda Lepore alongside CT Hedden.
PRE-ORDER IN PRINT AND DIGITAL
Amanda Lepore has spent decades perfecting a version of herself that exists outside the usual cycles of fashion and fame. Model, singer, performance artist, and cultural myth, she doesn’t adapt to the moment so much as let the moment catch up to her. Emerging from New Jersey nightlife and the Club Kids era, Lepore built an image that treats artifice as truth and repetition as devotion. Every contour, every gesture, every surface feels deliberate, less a transformation than a commitment carried through time.
In the context of The New Disorder, Lepore reads as a system in motion. Her body becomes architecture: engineered, refined, and resistant to collapse. In a culture obsessed with exposure and confession, she offers something sharper. Construction can be honest. Control can be expressive. Excess can be clarity. Disorder, here, is not mess, it’s mastery.
Alongside her, CT Hedden brings a different but equally relentless energy. A New York drag artist whose performance begins long before stepping onstage, Hedden treats visibility as a continuous act. Identity is not something revealed; it is something built, styled, maintained. His presence collapses the distance between life and performance, reinforcing the idea that selfhood is an ongoing production rather than a fixed state.
Together, Lepore and Hedden form an image that doesn’t explain itself. There is no backstory offered, no resolution promised. The cover holds its tension, asking the viewer to sit with surface, posture, and intent. It reflects a world where identity is engineered under pressure, where order and excess coexist, and where survival itself becomes a kind of design practice.
This is The New Disorder as DSCENE sees it: not a breakdown, but a recalibration. A space where figures who have learned to live inside instability show us how it can be worn, controlled, and claimed.
The New Disorder issue is coming soon!
Photographer MARTIN GATTI
Talents AMANDA LEPORE and CT HEDDEN
Producer: JANELLI GONZALES SAAVEDRA
Set Design: COLIN PHELAN
Props: MOMMY DADDY PROPS
