The Business of Magazines

[surrealseven]

^ Lol, did you post in the wrong thread?

 

[nyc_art_style]

simply spent too little time in the office and too much money on shoots.

what's so bad about this? they should see it as money well spent or an investment!

ugh, it always comes down to money.

 

[tigerrouge]

Moving away from Mr Baron for a moment, today in the Independent (a UK newspaper) there was an interview with Alexandra Shulman...

Life in Vogue: The fashionable world of Alexandra Shulman

As editor of Vogue, Alexandra Shulman is one of the most important people in fashion. But how does she feel about the luxury-goods business now that recession is biting?

By Deborah Orr
Saturday, 31 January 2009

Alexandra Shulman is riled. Fashion, she passionately believes, gets a rough ride: "Scarcely a day goes by without me reading in some newspaper or other about some unethical aspect of the industry that they've uncovered. Fashion is blamed for paedophilia, landfill, drug addiction, animal rights ... Every kind of goody-goody projects on to fashion as the epicentre of all that is wrong with the Western world and I do get irritated about it, because you just think: 'Why?' "

Blimey. And Shulman – editor of Vogue for 16 years now and well established as one of the most powerful people in British fashion – hasn't even mentioned eating disorders, the obsession with looking youthful unto death, the generation of a consumer debt unequalled by any other country on the planet, or regular exposés of sweatshop working practices. I've mentioned some of this though, and it has not gone down terribly well. The article I'm intending to write, Shulman asserts rather witheringly, is just going to be like all those reams of other anti-fashion articles that make her so annoyed.

I'm not, I assure her, "anti-fashion". All I'm trying to suggest is that the huge growth in demand for more and more new clothes, has played a significant part in fuelling the boom that has now been so clearly revealed as a hypertropic, transient bubble.

I agree with Shulman that it isn't, and wasn't, Vogue's job to report on the iniquities of store-card APRs, or to carry long editorials questioning the wisdom of aggressive, globalised consumerism. Neither the 220,000 people who buy the venerable and expensive magazine each month, nor the companies that buy its advertising space and contribute to its status as Britain's most profitable glossy, do so in the hope that Vogue will tell them that their paradise might be a foolish one. But surely Shulman cannot be entirely impervious to the idea that things may have got just a little bit crazy?

Shulman insists that fashion is about design, while I'm talking about retailing. Yet Shulman's own belief in "fashion values", she freely admits, involves strong identification with the fashion consumer. In fact, Shulman's embrace of the fashion mainstream is part of what has made her editorship of the magazine distinctive. The editor of French Vogue, Carine Roitfeld, covers fashion as an esoteric art form. The editor of US Vogue, Anna Wintour, counts her understanding of the corporate aspects of fashion as part of the formula that has made her two-decade tenure such a success. But Shulman has always taken a more democratic approach, and the editor of British Vogue lauds Primark with as much enthusiasm as she does Prada.

"I really do like buying things and spending money," she says. "It gives me a lift. I'm a real sucker for that feeling that your world will change because of something you've bought. I know that it won't, really. But I totally buy into that idea that for a brief moment everything seems better, when you've got a new dress that you look good in. I've always felt that. So I'm not a great fashion person in terms of a huge knowledge or body of work within pure fashion design, but I love clothes and the whole thing of looking at them and shopping and all of that stuff."

As hobbies go, shopping is hardly an unusual one. But it is quite unusual for a Vogue editor to boast that she's "not a great fashion person". Shulman's appointment in 1992, when she was 34, was greeted as a controversial one, precisely because she was considered not to be "a great fashion person" – and she's gone quietly along with this myth ever since.
Actually though, virtually everyone in Shulman's immediate family has been involved in journalism or high-end fashion glossies, at some time or another. Her father was the theatre critic Milton Shulman; her mother, Drusilla Beyfus, was for a time a Vogue features editor; her brother, the artist Jason Shulman, was once the highly respected art director of Tatler; and her sister, the writer Nicola Shulman, was for a long time a contributor to Harpers and Queen. Shulman herself, divorced from the journalist Paul Spike – with whom she has a son, Sam, born in 1995 – now lives in north-west London and is in a relationship with the writer and magazine editor David Jenkins. With all this in mind, her successful career at Vogue publisher Condé Nast can't have come as that much of a surprise.

Anyway, after stints on Over 21, Tatler and the Sunday Telegraph, Shulman herself served as Vogue's features editor under Liz Tilberis, the editor she was to replace, and was moved into the top job from her editorship of another Condé Nast flagship title, the men's fashion glossy, GQ. Certainly, Shulman was hired at Vogue with a brief that involved recapturing an "intellectual range" that it was felt had been "slightly jettisoned" during the 1980s. But under Shulman's editorship the magazine has increased circulation by diversifying its coverage while maintaining a tight focus on fashion as its defining subject. Which was exactly what she was hired to do.

Shulman took her place in the editor's chair just as Britain was coming out of another notable recession. The 1980s had been dubbed the "designer decade", and characterised as the period when Britain – and Vogue – took to its heart the concept of conspicuous mass consumption. But at the start of the 1990s, there was some speculation that the last decade of the millennium would mark a return to wider, more inclusive values. Green politics, it was suggested, might start to dominate. People would start asking whether money was really everything. Society would become more gentle, more caring. Shulman's appointment was no doubt made in part in anticipation of such a shift. It didn't work out that way.

Shulman remembers that period well. "I'm not sure if it was actually classed as a recession, or just a downturn, but I remember all the 'For Sale' signs ranked in rows on terraced houses and everything. Certainly we'd lost a lot of ad pages in the previous year, and business for Vogue was a lot tougher than it had been in the 1980s.

"But at that time a whole slew of new designers bubbled up – like McQueen, Stella McCartney, Hussein Chayalan Clements Ribeiro. A new generation came up through that period ... actually the whole Brit Art thing bubbled up then. I'm not sure whether it encourages creativity, whether it's because people are looking for alternatives to what's fed to them on a mass scale, whether they are more interested in what's happening on the underground, or what it is, but you do get new names, new businesses, during recessions. Things happen. It can be quite an exciting time creatively. And old names often die."

Shulman is far too much the diplomatic businesswomen to be tempted to speculate on which of the old names will die, although she is pretty sure that Vogue won't be one of them: "We had, up until the end of last year, as good a year as the one before, and that was a record year. That's in ads. Circulation, I think we're going to be 1 per cent down on the newsstand, which compares to other people being 20 per cent down. So we've been really lucky. The first issue we've lost some ads is February. And I'm still waiting to hear about March which is a big fashion special. Nobody thinks it's going to be as good next year as last year, but it's a question of: 'How bad?' "

But she will go as far as to admit that while Vogue has experienced only advantage during the boom, the recent, seemingly insatiable, demand for product has not always been unequivocably welcomed by the designers whose work the magazine primarily exists to analyse and assess. "I talk to Matthew Williamson or Alber Elbaz at Lanvin or Alexander McQueen," she says. "They will all say that they are being pressurised into designing more and more lines and merchandise by department stores. Because up until now there have been people coming in with a lot of money and wanting more different things to go in, to look at, and to buy.

"During this worldwide recession there are going to be far fewer of those people able to walk in and buy a new handbag every week, or three a week, or whatever – whether they were right or wrong to do it, I'm not making that point.

"And I'd never say: 'Debt-fuelled consumerism has damaged Karl Lagerfeld's creativity'."

 

[tigerrouge]

Cont...

This is just as well. Few people would find it easy to accept that fashion designers have been the helpless victims in the fashion boom, reluctantly labouring away at filling the shops with new stuff, and unable to protest because the gold that has been stuffed into their mouths has rendered them dumb.

Yet while Shulman is comfortable discussing the less beneficial effects of the demand for novelty on designers, she is loath to say anything critical about decadent buying patterns that have driven this market, or the fashion market more generally. She is keen to get across that there's a difference between high-street fashion and designer fashion. But she admits that the retail model for both has been for a long time driven by novelty and volume. "Topshop for instance. I'm a huge fan of Topshop, I think it's great, I think their designs are fantastic; they have a huge range now, they have an endless amount of new merchandise coming in, and that's a totally different model.

"There's no department store saying we need more Topshop, it's totally Topshop saying: 'We need new things.' That is again because they've got people coming in every week wanting to see something new to buy – shopping as a leisure activity and so on. And people just aren't going to be able to buy like they did. There is going to be an organic change. So, yes, maybe things have gone too far, and there is going to have to be a readjustment."

What, exactly, has "gone too far" though? Shulman herself experiences the act of purchasing as "a lift" or "a hit", and one that fades quickly, leaving the purchaser dissatisfied and disappointed. Even though this spiral of need is the same as that described by a smack addict, Shulman firmly denies that there may be anything dysfunctional about questing relentlessly for that perfect new top that will make everything wonderful.

Yet isn't the creation of want the very thing that may have "gone too far"? And isn't that most obvious in fashion because – unlike technology, say – the industry is often striving to sell the illusion of novelty, rather than the benefits of actual innovation? If even those who are involved in fashion as an art form, rather than fashion as a retail opportunity, are complaining of the insatiable demand for "new things", isn't something awry?

"Fashion designers are between a rock and a hard place. If they don't supply something new – one season it's skinny-leg trousers, the next season it's peg-top high-waisted trousers – then fashion critics will say: 'Oh, so-and-so has no new ideas, there's nothing new on the catwalk.'

"I don't think that is right. We don't say it here at Vogue, and I'd never say that personally. But designers do quite often get hammered by the press. So I think fashion journalists play a part in that desire for something new."

Shulman warms to her theme, gets up from her white table in her white office, and picks up some sort of unguent. "This? Right! A bottle with a liquid in it. You've got to make this bottle in some way stand out from another 3,000 other bottles that aren't that dissimilar. I think a lot of people who are engaged in this process, in this fevered, febrile thing ... including me, probably ... develop a disengagement with what's happening at the other end."

Yet "disengagement" is – in a broader sense, across the economy – exactly what has got us into the mess we are now in. The classic example is that bright sparks in finance decided it was a good idea for the people granting mortgages to become "disengaged" from those recovering the capital that had been lent. But strange, dangerous firewalls have developed in all kinds of industries.

Shulman has great sympathy with designers, the people she talks to, when they say that vast demand has its downside. But when other critics point to the difficulties created in other parts of the industry by the same thing, she suspects they are "anti-fashion". Shulman is personally attractive for a number of reasons. One of them is that she is not herself a super-thin, over-groomed, clothes-horse. Another is that she is not afraid to say: "I don't know".

She admits she does not know much about the working conditions of those involved in the mass manufacture of clothes, or about the glut of discarded cheap clothing that has become so great that only a small fraction of it can be recycled in any form. Narrowly, she is right to say that these are not the concerns of Vogue. But the problem is that the Big Picture has become the concern of no one. The fashion industry, like so many other areas of commerce, has been atomised, and while Shulman is reluctant to address this, she does, even in her defence of shopping, concede that context is crucial.

"I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with liking shopping and liking clothes," she says. "The problem comes when you don't want anything else. If you're not reading any poetry, or interested in discovering new films ..." But Shulman also asserts that, "it's a very elitist view, to say that it's all right to buy a new book every week, or see a new film, but not to buy a new T-shirt."

While we are on the subject of books, I bring up the subject of Susan Irvine's recently published first novel, Muse. Irvine is the long-term partner of Shulman's brother, Jason, and straddles nicely the parental preoccupations of her boyfriend's parents by combining fashion writing with theatre criticism.
Irvine's book combined these preoccupations as well, and offers a theatrical and vivid portrayal of a young woman trying to make it in the fashion media, and becoming unhinged as she does so. At one point her only regular income comes from a freelance contract which obliges her to supply copy for a magazine's "This Week's Must-Have" spot. What did Shulman make of this?

"I liked the book very much, it's a very good novel. But it was about a small area of the fashion business, an obsessive area. There's an obsessive quality about all – I don't want to sound wanky here – but about all those creative areas, if you work in the music industry, if you work in the art world. When you're dealing with things that are intangibles. Fashion is smoke and mirrors – a lot of it. We create images, we create a world of stuff, yes, ultimately to make people want to have it. Yes, most people in the Western world don't need another expensive coat. They probably don't need another white T-shirt either. They don't need it. What we're trying to do is make people want it. There is an argument to say that is evil. But obviously I don't believe that."

Perhaps some people do believe that the creation of want is evil. For most people though, there is only a problem when want is created without attention to anything but the price on the tag.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...nable-world-of-alexandra-shulman-1518886.html

 

[Miss Dalloway]

She usually does interviews for March issues, but this was a good and relevant article.I like how she is very honest, and isnt afraid to say, i dont know.

Thanks for posting.

 

[helmut.newton]

DARN! Interview is going to basically suck after Baron exits. So what if M / M are coming aboard?! I don't care how talented they are - no amount of artistic development will make up for the celebrities they're going to go back to using.

And it makes sense to be honest. Baron doesn't want to make budget cuts and he doesn't want to compromise his vision - therefore he left. He obviously doesn't want to work with celebrities and the politics of PR, self-promotion and the general Hollywood machine. Good for him!

I expect they'll stop working with the expensive photographers and lucrative models and they'll go back to using celebrities to sell issues like before Baron came aboard! I also predict there will be less of a fashion focus.

Oh well, it was good while it lasted. And as they say; all good things must come to an end

 

[tigerrouge]

Though to argue the other side of things, it's usually better if an editor does try to spend some time in the office, or with the staff, rather than throw money around to compensate for other things - production values are all very well, but money isn't everything, when it comes to putting together a magazine; a product that's supposed to communicate more things to readers than the size of the publisher's bank account.

Attention to detail, imagination, dedication, personal touches, spending time as well as money - they're also important. If Baron couldn't or wouldn't devote himself to the magazine as much as others thought was necessary, what amount of "vision" was the magazine really getting from him, other than a design template (a variant on his usual)?

I am sad to hear of his departure, but I would say, if someone decides to spend a lot of money on shoots, it doesn't automatically equate to them having a great artistic eye and superior approach to editing - an approach that is being cruelly curtailed by evil accountants for no understandable reason.

The sign of a great editor is being able to work with what you've got to produce a superior product, especially in hard times. It would be a truly uninspired person who couldn't come up with great stuff if they had lots of money to spend on a shoot, hiring other people to do the work they aren't doing because they're not there.

That's just looking at it from a different angle, who knows what really went on?

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | The New York Times | Sunday, February 1st | By David Carr

When Even Condé Nast Is in Retreat

“The September Issue,” a documentary about how the staff of Vogue puts together that curio of profligacy, the magazine’s fall preview, was a big hit at the recent Sundance Film Festival. Part of the reason attendees found it so mesmerizing has to do with Anna Wintour, who always begets staring.

But much of its appeal has to do with the fact that any peek inside the Death Star, as the headquarters of Vogue’s publisher, Condé Nast is affectionately known, is going to be met with prurient interest.

Home to magazines like Vogue, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and the gossamer creatures who produce them, the building is surrounded by a phalanx of idling black cars and decorated with fables about discarded six-figure photo shoots and editors who FedEx-ed their luggage ahead of them so as not be burdened on the commute.

But in a week when the news came that the gross domestic product shrank 3.8 percent in the fourth quarter, even the Death Star feels the pull of economic gravity. Domino, a shelter magazine for smart young things that was first published in 2005, was closed just two weeks after the company put Bill Wackerman, one of its most prized executives, in charge of turning it around.

Company executives, none of whom wanted to be quoted, said that the complete implosion of ads made it impossible to continue, although it doubled its estimate of Domino readers to 850,000 and was generally well received.

The loss of a single magazine would seem like small beer, but when the belt being tightened is Chanel, it seems all the scarier. If those people are under the gun, what is to become of everybody else in the media business?

Historically, Si Newhouse, the company chairman, had demonstrated legendary patience in bringing along its magazines. The New Yorker lost money for almost 18 years at Condé Nast — the burn rate was ferocious as Tina Brown sought to reinvent the fustian title — but it eventually went into the black and created a lustrous editorial asset for the company.

But when the current editor, David Remnick, ordered up a bunch of articles for the magazine’s formidable presidential inauguration issue, some of the reporters drove to Washington and stayed at friends’ houses. Mr. Remnick, who was among those who bunked with a friend in Washington, declined comment, beyond suggesting it was just common sense to preserve assets for other articles. “Steve Coll can’t stay at a friend’s house in Afghanistan,” he said.

In just the last few years, the company has started and then closed Vitals, Cargo, Men’s Vogue and Domino. And two longer-running titles, Jane and House & Garden, were also shuttered. Only Cookie, a parenting magazine, and Portfolio, a business magazine, are among the start-ups that survived.

Condé Nast seems committed to Portfolio in spite of a troubled editorial start and difficulty overcoming a cluttered, impaired business market. But other once unthinkable cuts could come into play.

The company has two food magazines, Gourmet and Bon Appétit, two men’s fashion magazines, GQ and Details, and a raft of magazines that take women’s fashion and cosmetics as a central concern, including Vogue, Teen Vogue, W, Allure and Lucky. That kind of capacity is great when there is all kinds of money floating around, but when advertisers measure twice and cut once, Condé Nast may not be able to keep all 23 of its magazines in business.

The company has some advantages. In general, the luxury category resisted the downturn longer than other categories of advertising spending. Condé Nast, which is part of Advance Publications, is privately held, without the huge collar of debt troubling so many other media enterprises, and about half its revenues come from international businesses, many of which are extensions of the company’s robust American brands like Vogue and Vanity Fair.

The pockets of the owners of Advance Publications, which also includes newspapers and cable, are not at issue. Donald Newhouse, 78, who oversees the newspapers, and Si Newhouse, 80, who runs the magazines, each have been appraised at $8 billion by Forbes. But people who know the pair say that given their age, they are concerned about making sure they hand over a company that is healthy and profitable.

The company has traditionally used its newspapers to mint money that was then lavished on the magazines — “Don makes it and Si spends it,” as the saying went — but the Newhouse group, which has newspapers in dozens of small and medium-size markets, has been decimated by the loss of classified ads, along with the collapse of the auto and housing industries.

Condé Nast is a tremendous asset for Advance Publications. Bought for $5 million in 1959, it now generates about $5 billion in revenue. And executives there are quick to emphasize that they are in the grips of a cyclical downturn and do not face the daunting change in reader and advertising habits that newspapers do. But in a sense, their exposure is deep and wide. The company’s cable business continues to churn a profit, but it has stopped growing.

With trouble in its newspaper division that is bound only to grow, the magazine division’s profitability, generally thought to be in the high single digits, will become increasingly important. But it may be a smaller company, with fewer publications, at the end of a long and deep recession.

The company has already cut the corners it is willing to, consolidating back-office operations and its Web businesses. The rest of it won’t be on the cheap. Having watched the company for almost a decade, I know that it would much rather cut a title loose than start nickel-and-diming the magazines that it has. When an important part of your business is advertising a couple of ounces of fragrant water that costs hundreds of dollars, you can’t afford to let the magic fade.

If there will always be such things as magazines — the Web has yet to match the ability of a glossy display ad to build brand image — Condé Nast will no doubt publish some of them. But if I spot Anna Wintour taking the subway, I’m immediately heading into the bunker with lots of water and canned food.

 

[MissMagAddict]

source | wwd.com

Greig Quits Tatler for London's Evening Standard
by Samantha Conti
Posted Monday February 02, 2009
From WWD.COM

LONDON — Tatler’s Geordie Greig has been named editor of London’s Evening Standard newspaper, confirming a report last month in WWD. He resigned his post as editor in chief of Tatler, according to a Condé Nast spokeswoman.

The Evening Standard newspaper confirmed Greig’s appointment in a statement. Greig is close friends with the paper’s new owner, the Russian billionaire and former KGB agent Aleksandr Lebedev, who purchased the Standard for a nominal sum last month.

The Condé Nast spokeswoman said a new Tatler editor would be named “within a week,” and chosen from a shortlist of seven candidates. Greig had edited the glossy society, fashion and lifestyle title for a decade.

 

[Manuva]

A Russian billionaire buys a failing London newspaper and Tatler's editor resigns from a post they'd held for ten years? That's a sad state of affairs.

 

[TREVOFASHIONISTO]

Off the (Magazine) Rack In 'Weird Beauty,' Fashion Puts a Familiar Face Forward

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 1, 2009; Page M06

NEW YORK -- "Fearless" seems a likely word for the photographers, stylists and designers who put together today's fashion spreads: They're not afraid to stuff a buff young man into a strappy girdle, stick football pads on tutu-wearing wraiths or get underclad young women to play a nurse and her paraplegic patient. Judging from "Weird Beauty," an important fashion-photo survey now at the International Center of Photography in New York, there's only one thing those fashionistas are afraid of: reality.

They almost never focus on the garments themselves and how they're actually worn. It seems that coming to terms with the real world of clothes would be too weird and radical for almost any fashion magazine; such realities, in all their stunning complexity, have instead become the subject of advanced contemporary art.
It's not that I imagine that the leading edge of fashion, or of fashion photography, needs to have some tie to the practical, the flattering or the all-around normal. As an art critic, my dial's permanently tuned to "strange." That's why I left this exhibition puzzled. I'd had hopes of being startled, or at least impressed, by a whole new range of fashion shots. (Way back in the early 1980s, I trained as a fashion photographer, but I've barely kept up with the field.) Instead, I found a weirdness that's about the same as weirdnesses from years ago.
One photographer in "Weird Beauty," which runs through May 3, puts a nightmarish mask onto his attractive model. That's the kind of surrealist move that's been in play at least since the 1920s. You could already see its cousin in a 1926 fashion shoot by Edward Steichen, the great American photographer who is featured in another of the quartet of fashion-themed shows now filling the ICP. (The museum has declared 2009 its "Year of Fashion," with Richard Avedon up next in May, followed in the fall by a clothing-centered photo triennial.) Given the dream state of so many pictures in "Weird Beauty," it looks as though 80-year-old surrealism has managed to become the default for today's fashion photography.

Another of the show's artists shoots women under striped and spotted beams of light, so the models are turned into abstract art. That's another device that has its roots in the 1920s, this time in Bauhaus modernism. Steichen mined that movement, too.
As for the shots in "Weird Beauty" that show elegant bodies taffy-pulled until they look like Henry Moores or Giacomettis, those tricks were being played by classic art photographers such as Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham -- not to mention fashion pioneers Richard Avedon and Irving Penn -- from the 1930s at least through the '60s.
Some of the stylings in "Weird Beauty" are self-consciously retro. That doesn't make them any less derivative.
Even this show's scenes of casual debauchery and stagy, flash-lit violence are only slightly less vintage. Such "crime-scene" fashion shoots took off in the 1970s, in the landmark work of Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton.
I think I see what's going on here. Fashion is an art, equal to any other form of creativity. Fashion photography wants to signal that fact -- and declare itself an art form, too -- so it does its very best to look arty. And that's the problem: Anything that looks evidently arty cannot also be substantial art, because artiness is all about cliches of what art should be and how it should look. Artiness is built around surrealist cliches, or modernist ones, or, in the case of "Weird Beauty," even stagy ones born right inside the art of older fashion shoots.
What's the way out of this bind? Make images that absolutely don't look like fancy art -- that look, for instance, more like unfancy reality, or at least that derive directly from it. Cindy Sherman, one of the most important fine artists of the past 30 years, does just that in her commissioned fashion images included in "Weird Beauty." In several of her trademark "self-portraits," done for a recent spread in the Paris edition of Vogue, Sherman dresses herself up to look like different iterations of the worst of fashion's victims -- runway doyennes hidden behind Chanel glasses and a MAC store's worth of makeup, or wine-bar babes with more money than sense. Sherman, as an art star, is almost the only photographer in this whole show who's really allowed to pick at fashion's scabs.
Some of the show's other photographers also play at crossbreeding fashion and the real. They take pictures of fancy models but show them inside crummy frame houses. Or they shoot well-dressed celebrities but portray them surrounded by the mess and dysfunctions of their "real" lives. (This hybridizing is a major trend that's underrepresented in this show.) The results, however, almost always feel more like a knowing, token nod toward reality than like a real embrace of its particularities. In fact, they take us back into the past again, to the 1930s images of Martin Munkacsi -- another great fashion photographer who's now got a show at the ICP, sampled from its new archive of his negatives.
Munkacsi was the man who brought fashion photography out of the studio, where trained models had stood stiff as mannequins, and into a world of actual people, outdoors and in action. One of Munkacsi's classic photos shows a little airplane on the tarmac, with Katharine Hepburn climbing up to launch herself into the air in it. We never doubt this is a staged fashion shot -- the original caption told readers to admire Hepburn's "gray gabardine trousers, gray flannel coat, white wool scarf" -- but it still lets us watch as a star's beauty comes in contact with our daily world. That's about as close to reality as even the more "realistic" photos in "Weird Beauty" come.
The last and best, if smallest, of the ICP's four shows, the wonderful "This Is Not a Fashion Photograph," suggests that they could have come closer. It features shots by famous documentarians such as Walker Evans, Weegee and Lisette Model as well as their more recent colleagues such as Tina Barney. Their photos simply show real people in their clothes, and touch on all the complex meanings that arise when humans dress. This is the kind of direct encounter with reality that fine art seems to value most these days: Malick Sidibé, a photographer from Mali whose document of local dancers is in "Not a Fashion Photograph," won a lifetime achievement award -- as a fine artist -- at the most recent Venice Biennale. The same impulse is on view right now at the D.C. Arts Center, where Richmond-born artist David Hartwell is examining his youth through deliberately flat-footed snapshots of his birthplace as it looks now, installed with the junk that he picked up as he was taking them. As another local artist put it to me: "The real world is just a lot more interesting than anyone's imagination."
It might even make an interesting subject for a fashion spread.

washingtonpost

 

[TREVOFASHIONISTO]

Society Is Sold on Whatever Fashion Is Selling

By Robin Givhan
Sunday, February 1, 2009; Page M01

For those who feel that the fashion industry is out to make a mockery of them, a new exhibition at New York's International Center of Photography will do little to convince them that their fears are unfounded.
The photographs, in the form of tear sheets, are clustered on the walls of the gallery, simulating the kind of visual cacophony that might assault a customer at a particularly artsy newsstand. Each photograph strains hard to lure the viewer's gaze through provocation, shock and pure weirdness. And many of them are successful. A lot of these aggravating, confounding, intimidating and rude photographs are incredibly compelling.
But as marketing tools, the images in "Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now" have nothing to do with selling clothes. At least, not in a linear, I-have-a-business-plan sort of way. It's true, what you've always suspected: The fashion industry is trying to mess with your head.
Consider the images of a childlike Dakota Fanning photographed by Juergen Teller. She wears pieces from the Marc Jacobs women's collection. And while consumers are accustomed to seeing women's clothes modeled by aberrantly tall and lithe teenagers, these photographs strain that conceit until it snaps. To call the Fanning pictures kiddie p*rn might be an overreaction. But the flat lighting and blank backdrop give them the look of a voyeuristic snapshot uploaded to the kind of Web sites whose visitors are one bad click away from a "Dateline" special.
The photographs are fascinating and insidious in the way they discount womanhood and hawk childhood. They are fodder for dissertations and NOW e-mail blasts. Debate them. Discuss them with a therapist. Explore them as cultural signposts. But what do they have to do with selling clothes? Are viewers to think that Jacobs is cool because he's willing to have such an unlikely figure model his clothes, and thus if a consumer buys those clothes she will be cool in the eyes of everyone who saw that photograph? What a circuitous and exhausting route to a simple point: Nice dress; buy it, please.
In a photo story called "Size Hero," shot by Steven Klein, a model is shown in various poses -- sometimes stretched out and at other times sitting upright in what appears to be a bus. She is fat, a fact that is emphasized by her posture and the scantiness of her attire. The clothes are not meant to flatter her physique but rather to emphasize its size. Is she heroic because she is willing to be seen in such a revealing manner? Because she is proud of her size in fashion's size 0 world? Or because she's willing to endure the lurid and rather demeaning gaze of the photographer?
The image demands attention, but it is not pretty. The nagging question, though, is whether the image is unattractive because of society's preconceived beliefs about slimness being a prerequisite for beauty -- or is this just an objectively ugly picture? It's a question worth considering, but what about the clothes? They go unnoticed. The focus of the image, the sales pitch, is all about flesh.
Fashion editorials long ago stopped being about enviably pretty models posing in attractive clothes in order to entice someone into spending money. For that kind of direct marketing of glossy fantasy, one can visit the basement gallery of ICP, where Edward Steichen's work from 1923 to 1937 is on view. It recalls the era when fashion photography was glamorous and obviously posed. Back then, the fantasy consisted of white women who embodied a certain socially acceptable upper-crust classiness posing in tasteful clothes.
Fashion at its most rarefied level -- which is the focus of this exhibition -- is now a club that revels in its secret language of ennui, titillation and oddball references. For instance, the French edition of Vogue played to society's strange fascination with Anna Nicole Smith and her 2,000-year-old husband with images of a blond bombshell leaning over an elderly wheelchair-bound love interest.
Modern fashion photography strives to look like photojournalism, fine art, amateur photography or p*rn. It aims to look like anything but what it actually is. Photographers are dispatched to some faraway country or a nearby street corner to absorb local color or to find disaffected youth to serve as lively extras.
It's reassuring to be told that fashion doesn't have to be so pretty and so perfect as it was back in Steichen's day. But of course, that makes one wonder why it's necessary to spend so much money on something that is neither attractive nor pristine. Shouldn't imperfection be a bargain?
The fashion industry sees itself as reflecting the breadth of popular culture. But it remains nearly as ethnically homogenous as it was back when it was remote and rarefied. One of the few nonwhite stars of "Weird Beauty," either in front of or behind the camera, is model Naomi Campbell. She was photographed by Steven Meisel for the July 2008 issue of Vogue Italia -- the issue that was devoted to black women. The photo story is called "There's Only One Naomi" and one gets an eyeful of her naked torso about as often as one glimpses her fully clothed in designer merchandise. Campbell -- her body -- is far more memorable than anything she wears.
Despite its pretense and posturing, its obliqueness and occasional greatness, fashion photography remains fundamentally a sales pitch. It may no longer be selling clothes. But it agitates and captivates more than ever because something more valuable -- vulnerability, sexuality, power, dignity -- is always on the block.

washingtonpost

 

[helmut.newton]

More news on why Baron left Interview at theimagist. Looks like we were right!

SCOOP DU JOUR: BEHIND THE MELTDOWN AT INTERVIEW


To say it was unexpected is beyond understatement but the sudden decision of Fabien Baron and Karl Templer to depart the freshly revamped Interview mag, certainly had The Hiss Squad hissing overtime this weekend.
At dinner on Saturday night TI was able to decipher that in the face of dwindling advertising, pressure from Brant Publications to take the magazine more mainstream, popular and Hollywood created tension in recent months. That and being pushed to cut costs created the no-win impasse. Our sources assured us that Baron and Templer tried to come to terms and were very disappointed at having to leave ...but doing glossy and fabulous on a budget? Not their style. Will it be M/M Paris' ? TI waits with bated breath.

 

[Alien Sex Friend]

maybe we can expect Fabien returns in Vogue Paris? VP is really missing him...

 

[MissMagAddict]

source | wwd.com

MOVING DAY: So much for all that speculation about Details. Condé Nast executives gave the magazine a vote of confidence Tuesday when staffers were informed they would move into new digs at 4 Times Square. Though plans have not been finalized, Details is expected to vacate its 750 Third Avenue offices (also home to WWD) to move into Domino’s old space by the beginning of March. The Golf Digest Group is also leaving the East Side Condé offices to move into 4 Times Square, expected to take over Men’s Vogue’s former space.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | NY Post via Fashion Week Daily

THE tough times for the magazine industry are about to get worse. On the heels of Conde Nast closing Domino, insiders say Si Newhouse is thinking of shuttering Allure. "It's a shame," the insider said. "Allure is great and isn't a succubus on the budget like Portfolio. But Si's ego is tied up in Portfolio." Meanwhile, we hear Richard Desmond's OK! might close in six months. "[Former general manager] Kent Brownridge really did a number on that magazine while he was there," said another spy. "The losses were so substantial that Desmond is bringing in a bunch of Brits to see it through the summer, but now that the British pound isn't as strong, he's losing money hand over fist and isn't going to put up with it for long. OK! is doomed." Reps for Allure and OK! denied their bad prospects.

I picked up the latest issue of Allure today & was thinking about subscribing... I guess not

 

[Miss Dalloway]

Oh My God.

That is SERIOUSLY shocking to me, even as a rumor, i thought Allure is such a strong magazine, going for over a decade now.And honestly it is the best beauty magazine out there, if it folds....it truly will be a shame, and goes to show how tough publishing industry has it in this recession.

 

[cesarcmma]

I'm soo happy for Details, I hope it don't suffer too much with this recession...but the news of Allure are very sad...when this recession will ends

 

[Cosabella]

Let's hope the rumours about Allure is not true. I wouldn't care if the gossip rag that is OK! tumbles into oblivion, but Allure has its own uniqueness that it differs from so many other beauty magazines.

As for Details, I've never taken a liking to it. It's aimless and tedious and the edits and articles are a bore. It tries to be cool but ends up blas [FONT=&quot]é[/FONT]. It's like the ugly step-cousin of GQ.

 

[MissMagAddict]

source | foliomag

US Anderson News to Shut Down Wholesale Operations

Two weeks after threatening publishers with separate 7-cents-per-copy price hikes, a pair of major magazine wholesalers, Anderson News and Source Interlink, have decided to cease operations, according to a source at Comag.

When contacted by FOLIO:, a Source Interlink spokesperson declined to comment “on rumors." Anderson could not be reached for comment.

Last month, a week after Anderson News announced it would increase its price by 7 cents per copy, Source Interlink said it will be raising its own per-copy distribution rates by 7 cents.

Combined, the pair account for about 50 percent of the magazine market.

Both companies gave publishers the deadline of February 1 to comply with the price hike.

Publishers and distributors balked at the idea. Time Inc. and national distributor Curtis Circulation said its publisher clients will not comply with the Anderson's 7-cent price increase. Comag, however, extended its contracts with both Anderson and Source Interlink—without the price increase.

Now, all four national distributors have stopped shipping their magazines to Anderson and Source, including Comag.

What's Next?
Magazines with on-sale dates of the week of February 2 will still be distributed. Comag is asking clients to not ship magazines with on-sale dates after that week until further notice.

According to distribution sources, Hudson News and News Group—two other major magazine wholesalers—have been working behind the scenes to pick up the business left on the table by Anderson and Source. Most of the major retailers, the sources said, are negotiating contracts.

According to these sources, Hudson News will expand into Southern California and its East Coast operations into the mid-Atlantic. Newsgroup will expand into the southeast and Chicago.

Two hours ago, retailers signed over business from Anderson to Newsgroup, including Wal-Mart, according one source.

'It's Going to Be a Mess'
But most are not expecting a smooth transition. “It’s going to be a mess for a couple of weeks,” said one major consumer publisher.

“Fifty percent of the distribution market has just evaporated,” said John Loughlin, executive vice president and general manager at Hearst magazines.

“The thing I worry about is the law of unintended consequences,” he added. “You can debate who precipitated this, but I'm a believer in free-market competition.”

Loughlin said it is going to be “very difficult to smoothly transition that tonnage of magazines to the market using alternative methods.”

He added: “I guess I'm glad I'm not publishing weeklies."

According to another source: “This is going to hit some regional magazines 100 percent. It will put many out of business, to the extent they rely on newsstand."

“Weeklies would be hit the hardest while others will have more time to come up with another plan," John Harrington, publisher of the New Single Copy newsletter, told FOLIO:. "There will be lost sales for some issues.”

There were some publishers who felt Anderson and Source would back down from their initial demands. It appears now they were not bluffing.

“The business has not been profitable and has not been for a very long time,” CEO Charlie Anderson said in a January conference call. “What we are trying to do is give some stability to the channel. Short of that, there will be an implosion in the business."