DosViolines
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source: nytimes.com
April 2, 2006
O.K., Fellas, Let's Shop. Fellas? Fellas?
By ERIC WILSON
THE lesson to be learned from the death of Cargo is not that guys don't like to shop, spend money or moisturize; or that Cargo was too gay or too straight; or that the cultural phenomenon of the metrosexual never really existed. The real culprit behind the decision last week to close Cargo, the men's shopping magazine, would have to be the stickers.
Men don't like stickers. In each issue for two years Cargo included a page of peel-off tabs marked Buy or Save, so readers could neatly note their potential purchases while thumbing through features on cellphones, flat-screen televisions and dark-wash jeans.
Across the publishing landscape, as pundits search for a deep meaning behind the abrupt end of a magazine that was held up as symbolic of shifts in consumerism, sexual identity and the deterioration of journalism, maybe they need look no further than the stickers.
"I love shopping," said Bart Ianantuoni, a Manhattan personnel executive who gave up on Cargo after reading a few issues because he was offended by the presentation. "Stickers? They're treating men like teenage girls. I'm a guy. If I want something in a magazine and think I can't remember it, I'm going to tear the page out."
At last count Cargo had 373,727 subscribers, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which does not break down numbers on how many are metrosexuals. Introduced by Condé Nast in March 2004 as the men's equivalent of Lucky, Cargo seemed to be an instant hit with consumers. It was a ready source of validation for any number of articles about trends in men's grooming and luxury products.
"More guys flash jewelry," wrote The Denver Post, citing Cargo. "Shaving pits latest trend for today's manly men," trumpeted The Kamloops Daily News in British Columbia, also invoking the magazine. Articles about the "return of the dandy" in The San Antonio Express-News and about how "men enjoy pampering too" in The Triangle Business Journal of Raleigh, N.C., relied on the magazine. And last week an article by this reporter in The New York Times about men with beards cited as evidence two editors of Cargo.
The existence of the magazine seemed to explain all the mysteries of manhood.
Then on Monday, Charles Townsend, the president of Condé Nast, said, "We now believe the market will not support our business expectations." And Cargo was closed. It burst a lot of balloons.
Ariel Foxman, the editor in chief from the beginning, has a binder of press clippings the size of the yellow pages. On Thursday, his next to last day of employment, he was reviewing everything that had been written about Cargo in search of answers. But he was at a loss to explain the decision to close the magazine, he said.
He did have a theory of why Cargo seemed to draw constant brickbats, the most hurtful of which was from The Washington Post, which indicted Cargo for "foppery, frippery, metrosexuality, the commercialization of everything and the wimpification of America." Mr. Foxman said, "There are things that pop up repeatedly in these stories, tropes as I like to call them, that were about much larger cultural signifiers that didn't have anything to do with Cargo magazine."
He cited a litany of deconstructions of the magazine linking it to excess materialism, superficiality, vagueness in sexuality and the blurring of gender identities. Were they wrong? Mr. Foxman was most befuddled by the critics who saw in shopping magazines a threat to serious journalism elsewhere.
"There was the idea if you bought a Cargo magazine somewhere else a New Yorker died," Mr. Foxman said.
"We became a lightning rod," he added. "Why was the magazine so threatening? Its only mission was to help you and entertain you. We weren't making a political statement on gays or straights, foppery or frippery."
But it was Cargo's own vagueness — its merry lack of ambition — that left it open to such attacks. Jimmy Jellinek, editor in chief of Stuff, the schoolyard bully of shopping magazines, says shopping for men is about asserting status, but Cargo was lost in its enthusiasm to bring style to everyman. "They failed to realize how men shop," Mr. Jellinek said. "You don't buy a cellphone based on what it does for you as much as it matches your sneakers. Shopping is about using possessions as a means to augment your power."
Cargo covered cars and technology with the same zeal as styling paste and printed underwear, and this, Mr. Foxman believes, made some people uncomfortable.
"It really irked people in the media that they couldn't put a label on Cargo," he said, "as if all technology or geeky magazines had to be straight and all fashion magazines had to be gay, which is a preposterous way for media to look at other media."
Yet Cargo, more than Details and GQ, at times seemed to be provoking just that sort of scrutiny. The cover of the April issue, now on newsstands, tells readers how to "Turn her on!" It also reports there are 317 brand new products that are "better than sex!" So what's the point of turning her on?
Likewise, Cargo waffled between serving the affluent and those with aspirations, between street styles and suits, so that it seemed necessary to have at least six different lifestyles to keep up. Cargo was accessible and convenient, which is not to say that its staff found it easy to pull together.
"We did the jobs of 10 Vogue girls," said Mike Albo, a performance artist and writer who worked on Cargo for its first year. He recalled late nights trying to come up with the perfect headline for a story on khaki pants. His favorite effort was for a piece about laptop bags. The headline: Laptopia.
"I learned a lot about fashion," Mr. Albo said. "But I am as confused as ever about men in America."
Vitals, another men's shopping magazine that Condé Nast started at the same time, embraced only luxury products. It was closed last September.
"I don't think the idea of a shopping magazine for men is wrong," said Joe Zee, its former editor, who now works on special projects for the company. "It all just happened too much too fast. The idea of metrosexuals was something created by Madison Avenue for advertising reasons. It was such a gimmick that, of course, it was going to fall flat at some point."
Mr. Foxman suggested Cargo's failure would make a nice bow to tie around stories about the end of that trend. "It's not 'in' anymore," he said. "The media's tired of it." But he still believes in the stickers.