No Ordinary Joe
By ARMAND LIMNANDER
Published: August 26, 2007
Flick through any fashion publication from the mid-1990s, and it’s likely to feel about as relevant as an episode of “Sex and the City.” But anyone lucky enough to get their hands on an issue of Joe’s magazine will have a hard time figuring out when it was published. At first glance, its oversize pages look undoubtedly contemporary — there is a long interview with Miuccia Prada, and photo shoots by David Sims, Mario Sorrenti, Craig McDean and Steven Klein. Only after careful inspection is it apparent that the Bruce Weber images of a nude, nubile Kate Moss are pre-rehab; on another page, Naomi Campbell is gently holding a baby rather than clutching a Swarovski-encrusted BlackBerry.
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Magazine photograph by Jens Mortensen
The cover of Issue 1 was as unconventional as its content.
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Bruce Weber
Joe McKenna on location.
The first issue of Joe’s, the brainchild of the stylist Joe McKenna, was published in 1992, and the second in 1998. They have stood the test of time because, unlike the barrage of new magazines that have followed, Joe’s paid little attention to celebrities, and even less to advertiser demands. At the height of the supermodel era, McKenna gave his first cover to the most divine woman of all time — the Virgin Mary, who was depicted looking upward and serenely exhaling a cloud of smoke, presumably from a heavenly roll-up. What publication today would include in its debut a feature on the early-’70s model Wallis Franken (wearing, in one instance, only a couple of strategically placed Band-Aids), a tribute to the actor Dirk Bogarde, a lengthy piece on
Tennessee Williams and a conversation with the painter Paul Cadmus?
Only a few thousand copies of each issue were printed, and they rapidly became collectible — on the Internet, a well-thumbed number can currently fetch more than $200. Not bad, considering that McKenna essentially produced the magazine on a whim. “All the photographers I knew wanted to have a space where they would have no restrictions,” he says over runny scrambled eggs at a West Village diner. “It was very easy back then — I just rung up a lot of the designers I knew and asked if they would support the project with an ad. Everyone did, no questions asked.”
Budding publishers should note that this process is usually not as simple. McKenna is not a household name, but he is the quintessential insider, with direct access to some of the biggest names in fashion.
He’s often seen shuffling around in black Levi’s, New Balance sneakers and moth-holed sweaters; but his knowledge of style is encyclopedic,
and though he’s self-deprecating, he is a much-sought-after consultant. Through the years, he has helped define the visual identity of clients like
Calvin Klein, Versace, Banana Republic and Jil Sander.
McKenna was raised in Glasgow and the nearby town of Kirkintilloch — not quite the epicenters of glamour — but he identified his passions early on. “I was thinking seriously about clothes when I was 9 or 10,” he says. “I have no idea where that came from — my father was a bookie and my mother a housewife. Whenever I saw a coat in a window, I would start planning what to wear with it.”
A few years later, he began trawling through yard sales with his best friend, who became an early muse. “She was obsessed with magazines that had titles like 19 and Honey,” he says. “We’d go thrift shopping, and I’d try to interpret the looks we had seen for her. Well, sometimes I’d sort of interpret them for myself, too.”
After some success as a child actor (he appeared in the hit British series “Coronation Street”), McKenna headed for London when he was 16, landing small roles in films like “Absolute Beginners.” “Then acting gave me up,” he says simply. He explored a brief musical career, even releasing a record under the name A Cha-Cha at the Opera: “The band was me plus three models pretending to be backup singers.
It was very Euro-disco.” Soon after, he began styling for the Face and writing short fashion articles — in an early piece for the London Times, he described the late Isabella Blow, who was a young fashion-hound-about-town at the time, as “she of the bosom, the bustier, the beet-root-red lips and the braying laugh.”
McKenna moved to New York in 1986, working at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, but soon went freelance. His collaborations with Calvin Klein and Bruce Weber, whose sexed-up naturalism had a strong influence on McKenna, yielded some of the most daring images of the time. “I was completely dumbfounded when I first saw Bruce’s pictures,” he remembers. “The people in them were doing athletic activities, which I had assumed models couldn’t do, but they were far too good-looking to be athletes. It was extremely intriguing for me.”
When Joe’s first appeared, it served as a calling card for McKenna, neatly encapsulating his aesthetic. More important, it offered a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the fashion world that other magazines approached with predictable slavishness. In a long discussion between models and editors about the revered Tunisian designer Azzedine Alaïa, Veronica Webb and others revealed how he enjoyed torturing friends with elaborate pranks. Mario Testino captured the inner sanctum of the Vogue editor Anna Wintour, and Jean-Paul Goude accompanied Paolo Roversi’s images of Vanessa Paradis with his impressions of the French singer: “I told her how much she looked like Tweety bird, and she said, ‘You’re not the first one who’s told me but please don’t tell too many people, it could be dangerous!’ ”
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part 1