ABOUT the zine

Black Girl Living Magazine was created by 22-year-old Adryona Gaston. While she’s always loved fashion, interior design, and styling; her formal education resides in music, dance, and Women’s studies. It was her inner-body experiences via dance and her out-of-body experiences through Women’s studies that brought her to the realization that her true passion was the appreciation for underrepresented feminine life. 

She saw how all women have backgrounds of being unheard, unseen, or ejected from a setting. She wanted to impact that. 

After coming up with a plethora of large-scale ideas, Gaston thought it’d be best to start medium. She started a separate Instagram dedicated to making empowering and insightful content for black women who might not fit the traditional mold.  The experience she had filming her life gave her the confidence to turn her mission for her Instagram feed into a tangible magazine for other black women to contribute. 

Her inspiration for magazine creation came from the bratz and their teen magazine, along with Khadija’s “fLAVOR mAGAZINE” FROM THE 90S tv show living single.

The mission of Black Girl Living is to showcase stories and experiences of black women of all walks of life, ages, and sizes. BGL believes self-insertion is one of the most vital tools to believe in oneself and follow after one’s dreams. All of this with the goal of no ads, accessibility, affordability, and reality ( no, really…like a realistic POV!) 

Our founder hopes for the BGL website to be a virtual safe space for black women to always return to when other platforms might be too much to balance. 

Thank you so much for visiting the Black Girl Living landing page. It is our hope that this magazine and our content become a home away from home for black women everywhere. We hope to hear your feedback and are excited to potentially work with you in the future!