guardian.co.uk
By Elizabeth Day
The Observer, Sunday 17 January 2010
Jefferson Hack: is he the coolest man in Britain?
With his hipster bible Dazed & Confused, Jefferson Hack reinvents what it means to be cool on a monthly basis. But, he insists, he's just that publishing nerd who lived with Kate Moss. Elizabeth Day meets the man from Ramsgate
Jefferson Hack is doing his best to persuade me that he is a geek. It is not working. "I was never cool," he says, sipping an espresso in the basement kitchen of his north London Georgian townhouse. It is a drizzly Sunday afternoon and we are sitting at a corner table, surrounded by original pieces of contemporary artwork propped nonchalantly against the walls. Many of them have personal messages, such as: "For Jefferson. Thanks for all the support!" Hack leans back in his chair and accidentally skims a murky black-and-white photograph. "Whoops, that's my Juergen Teller," he says, casually putting it back into place.
He wears skinny grey jeans and smokes Marlboro Lights, flicking the ash into an ashtray from the uber-cool Café de Flore in Paris. Did he steal it? "No," he says, blushing lightly. "They sell them." As we are talking, Hack's girlfriend, Belgian supermodel Anouck Lepère, stalks past to get a drink from the fridge. He barely reacts.
And yet, the 38-year-old Hack claims that he is very normal and not at all trendy. "I'm the ultimate magazine and editorial nerd," he insists, passing me a candle made especially for him that smells of fresh magazine print as it burns.
In 1992, at 19, Hack co-founded Dazed & Confused magazine with the photographer Rankin while they were both students at the London College of Printing. The duo's eye for design and emerging talent (Sam Taylor-Wood and Alexander McQueen were early contributors; Jake and Dinos Chapman made their name in its pages) ensured that the magazine's reputation went far beyond its shoestring budget. "The charm of Dazed was our arrogance and our naivety," says Hack. "We grew up in public, making all the mistakes live, but… it gave us an energy and discord that set the template for a lot of magazines since then."
It was as editor of Dazed & Confused that Hack interviewed Kate Moss, who was later to become his girlfriend (legend has it that his first words to her were: "You smell of pee."). "My relationship with Kate was very well documented, as it would be," he says. How did he find the constant press attention? "You know, I'm not a performer… it was never a way to communicate or create an identity. There was a lot of annoying hassle that gets in the way of the reality of what was going on, but I always felt very grounded by the magazine… If I hadn't had that, things might have turned out very differently for me."
Moss and Hack had a daughter, Lila Grace, in 2002 before splitting two years later. Now they share custody: seven-year-old Lila has her own room at Hack's house and has been allowed to decorate it herself. "She's got a bunkbed, which she's very excited about." Perhaps bruised by the overexposure of his relationship with Moss, Hack remains guarded about his private life. At one point, when asked a perfectly innocuous question on the changing nature of celebrity, he starts to answer and then breaks off mid-sentence. Later, when I ask if he wants more children, he insists on telling me off the record.
For the time being he seems engrossed with AnOther Magazine, the luxury biannual helaunched in 2001 . Karl Lagerfeld is a fan. I know this because Hack tells me so in an anecdote that kicks off with the words: "I was in Karl's atelier…" he stops himself. "That sounds bad, doesn't it?"
Lest we think Hack is all about Café de Flore ashtrays and intimate chats with top designers, he is keen to show he has a social conscience, too. AnOther Magazine is about to publish a book of photographic portraits in collaboration with (RED), the global-product brand launched by U2's Bono to raise money for the fight against Aids in Africa. So will he be taking a leaf out of Bono's style manual and wearing wraparound red-tinted shades from now on? "I think we can put them in the 'uncool' box," he says. So what sunglasses should the discerning 38-year-old man be wearing this season? "Aviators," he replies without pause. Hack lists his style icons as Steve McQueen, David Bowie, William Burroughs and Jim Jarmusch.
Hack's parents, Douglas and Teresa, live in Ramsgate, Kent and remain bemused by their son's evolution from bespectacled schoolboy to shaper of the cultural zeitgeist. "They didn't understand Dazed & Confused in the beginning but they're incredibly proud, and supportive. Mum goes into a newsagent and sees Dazed & Confused covered by other magazines, she puts it out in front. "
Hack was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, where his father was working as a cigarette salesman. The family spent time in South America, Singapore and Belgium before coming back to settle in the UK when Hack was nine. Did he feel like an outsider? "Not really. I was still pretty young. My parents had very little art or culture in their house. I looked obsessively at Interview magazine and National Geographic. I remember seeing a Godard movie when I was 11 and thinking: 'Wow, I need to know more about that', and I went to the library and found out all about French New Wave."
He is also extremely tidy. When I walk through his front door and wipe my feet, leaving a leaf on the doormat, he hurriedly bends down to brush it away. There is something endearing about this old-fashioned fussiness. Hack is still just about youthful enough to get away with wearing a distressed V-neck T-shirt and pointy Vivienne Westwood shoes, but will he, I wonder, still be wearing skinny jeans at the age of 76? "I've no idea," he says, clearly tickled by the idea. "Yeah, it's going to be tough doing Dazed & Confused when I'm 76… I hope they will find an honorary position for me.
"The really great thing is that when you get to a certain age, you can really define your look. You don't have to think; you just have 10 pieces of each item…" he drifts off. "That's when you become iconic. It could be very cool. I'm not there yet."
Still, he's not doing too badly, what with his supermodel girlfriends, his espresso machine and his portfolio of edgy magazines. He might not believe he's cool, but Jefferson Hack does an excellent job of pretending to be.
